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grubstlodger's review
3.0
I received a handful of Penguin Syrens, which are bitesized samples of longer works. Luckily I got them for free, as the original £2.99 price tag seems pretty hefty for a 40 page pamphlet. The first I read was ‘Essays on Dolls’, which could flippantly described as, ‘people read too much meaning into everyday things’ but there was some interesting points.
The first essay, ‘On Marionettes’ is by Heinrich Von Kleist and talks about how marionettes have a gracefulness as they have no self-consciousness about their movements. People on the other hand do, like the boy who discovered that a chance movement he made was as graceful as a statue and ruined his natural beauty by trying to recreate that gracefulness. A link is made between gracefulness and grace, it’s the fruit of self-knowledge from the Garden of Eden that detaches humans both from their natural gracefulness and the grace of God. It’s an interesting idea and there’s also a story in the essay about a man fencing with a bear, so that’s pretty fun.
The second essay, ‘The Philosophy of Toys’ by Charles Baudelaire is another interesting essay. He starts with a story from his childhood, where a woman led him into a room of toys and said he could take one. This starts him talking about toys in general and their importance for children where;
“Toys become actors in the great drama of life, scaled down inside the camera obscura of the childish brain.”
The best toys for this are those for poorer than richer children, as richer toys are too detailed and poorer toys need more imagination. Baudelaire had a strange, misogynistic double-standard though; it’s great when boys are using chairs to pretend they are in speeding carriages, or conduct imaginative war with soldiers made from odds and ends around the house but girls playing house is nothing more than copying their mothers and is an initiation into the ‘immortal future puerility’ that is a housewife’s lot.
He then talks about how much he hates those killjoy parents, who he usually imagines as protestants, who won’t give children toys because they think them a waste of useful time. I share this hatred and even met a parent who wouldn’t give her five-year-old child colouring pens because they were ‘babyish’. The other sort of mean parent are the ones who give children toys but won’t let them play with them in case they break them. Baudelaire says that children love to take toys apart to see how they work and to find their souls, though there are some who just like to break things. Overall, I found this essay pretty thought-provoking.
The last, and easily the worst essay is ‘Dolls: On the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel’ by Rainer Maria Rilke. It shares the same strange misogyny found in the Baudelaire essay, where a rocking horse is described as having an adventurous souls but dolls are evil.
Dolls are evil because they take affection from people but give nothing back, he describes them almost like vampires, sucking affection out of children. Whilst spectacles have ‘helpful’ souls and brushes ‘useful’ ones, dolls have almost no soul to speak of and won’t be going to thing heaven, or they might if they are hugged by a dying child and get a lift.
It sounds almost as if he has a grudge against dolls because as a child he talked to one and it didn’t talk back - in truth, he sounds like a complete weirdo.
I got a fair bit out of this tiny book and I look forward to sampling more of the Syrens series at another time.
The first essay, ‘On Marionettes’ is by Heinrich Von Kleist and talks about how marionettes have a gracefulness as they have no self-consciousness about their movements. People on the other hand do, like the boy who discovered that a chance movement he made was as graceful as a statue and ruined his natural beauty by trying to recreate that gracefulness. A link is made between gracefulness and grace, it’s the fruit of self-knowledge from the Garden of Eden that detaches humans both from their natural gracefulness and the grace of God. It’s an interesting idea and there’s also a story in the essay about a man fencing with a bear, so that’s pretty fun.
The second essay, ‘The Philosophy of Toys’ by Charles Baudelaire is another interesting essay. He starts with a story from his childhood, where a woman led him into a room of toys and said he could take one. This starts him talking about toys in general and their importance for children where;
“Toys become actors in the great drama of life, scaled down inside the camera obscura of the childish brain.”
The best toys for this are those for poorer than richer children, as richer toys are too detailed and poorer toys need more imagination. Baudelaire had a strange, misogynistic double-standard though; it’s great when boys are using chairs to pretend they are in speeding carriages, or conduct imaginative war with soldiers made from odds and ends around the house but girls playing house is nothing more than copying their mothers and is an initiation into the ‘immortal future puerility’ that is a housewife’s lot.
He then talks about how much he hates those killjoy parents, who he usually imagines as protestants, who won’t give children toys because they think them a waste of useful time. I share this hatred and even met a parent who wouldn’t give her five-year-old child colouring pens because they were ‘babyish’. The other sort of mean parent are the ones who give children toys but won’t let them play with them in case they break them. Baudelaire says that children love to take toys apart to see how they work and to find their souls, though there are some who just like to break things. Overall, I found this essay pretty thought-provoking.
The last, and easily the worst essay is ‘Dolls: On the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel’ by Rainer Maria Rilke. It shares the same strange misogyny found in the Baudelaire essay, where a rocking horse is described as having an adventurous souls but dolls are evil.
Dolls are evil because they take affection from people but give nothing back, he describes them almost like vampires, sucking affection out of children. Whilst spectacles have ‘helpful’ souls and brushes ‘useful’ ones, dolls have almost no soul to speak of and won’t be going to thing heaven, or they might if they are hugged by a dying child and get a lift.
It sounds almost as if he has a grudge against dolls because as a child he talked to one and it didn’t talk back - in truth, he sounds like a complete weirdo.
I got a fair bit out of this tiny book and I look forward to sampling more of the Syrens series at another time.
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