Kenneth Gross - The Dream of the Moving Statue

These things cannot happen: a statue cannot move or speak; it cannot open its eyes, nod, or call out, cannot tell a story, dance, or do work; it cannot turn on the viewer, or run away, banishing its solidity and repose, shedding its silence. A statue is almost by definition a thing that stands still, and what we call its movement is at best a resonant figure of speech. Yet these things happen; we imagine them happening. Our language requires that they happen. The fantasy of a statue that comes to life is as central a fable as we have. The idea of motion or speech in an inanimate stone is an inescapable possibility, a concept of a sort so basic that we can hardly call it a metaphor. Time and again, we find texts in which the statue that stands immobile in temple or square descends from its pedestal, or speaks out of its silence. Such fantasies are simply part of what we know about statues, and what statues can represent to us; they are part of the way that we stitch ourselves and statues into the world. They are also part of what we do not know about statues, or have yet to know.

The idea of the animated statue appears everywhere. One finds it in fairy tales and philosophy, in ancient magic and romantic novellas, in classical ballet and modern television commercials (for wine, perfume, coffee, soap, game shows, and body building, to name just a few). This book is an attempt to describe the often ambiguous sources of such fantasies, and to consider the parables they offer about things that are not statues. Among other things, fantasies about animated statues can suggest how the reciprocal ambitions of writing and

sculpture animate each other, and the paradoxical figures of life and voice their conflict can generate; they also point to the ambivalent crossings of fear and desire that continue to bind our fantasies and memories to the realm of unliving images and objects.

The pages that follow consider the place of fictive statues in the poetry of Ovid, Blake, Pushkin, Browning, Rilke, and Stevens, as well as contemporaries such as Irving Feldman and Richard Howard; in biblical and nineteenth-century narrative; in Shakespearean drama; in films by Charlie Chaplin, Franois Truffaut, and Peter Greenaway; in the psychoanalytic writings of Freud and the philosophical texts of Wittgenstein. I also discuss both legendary statues such as the colossus of Memnon and actual statues such as Michelangelo's Night and Donatello's Zuccone. The reader will encounter many variations on the idea of the animated statue here: oracular statues, bleeding statues, murderous statues, consoling statues; statues that can move and not speak, that can speak but not hear. There are also stories about human beings who have themselves turned into statues.

This book is not, however, an attempt at a systematic iconological history or structural taxonomy. It rather takes the form of a series of linked critical meditations, shifting frequently between broad theoretical speculation, exemplary anecdote, and close reading of individual texts. Some chapters revolve around particular thematic questionsfor example, the representation of living statues as objects or sources of violence, the depiction of living statues as objects of desire. Others dwell on more broadly generic mattershow the fantasy of animation plays a part in "ekphrastic" writing, literary texts that describe real or fictive works of art; or how that fantasy relates to our understanding of actual sculpture. But overall the argument unfolds in a rather disjunctive fashion, often circling back on itself, often making considerable leaps within the historical continuum. It is an approach that I hope will reveal, more effectively than any straightforward survey, the sources of the fantasy's complexity and power.