'Constructing the National Mythology of Utopia: Development of the Russian Art in the Twentieth Century' ( Bimonthly Review 'Twentieth-First Century', issued by the Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, February 2014, Unit 'View on the World', page 92-106; Author: Yunnia Yang, Researcher, Art Critic and Curator on the Contemporary Art of Russia and Eastern Europe) 香港中文大學中國文化研究所出版的《二十一世紀》雙月刊2014年2月號(頁92-106): 《建構烏托邦的國家神話：二十世紀俄羅斯藝術發展》/楊衍畇著

瘋狂敘事‧建構神話－論達利以「偏執狂批判」創造之「晚禱神話」 Irrational Narration. Myth Making: On the ‘ Angelus myth’ created by Salvador Dalí with the concept ‘ Paranoiac-Criticism’

2010年世安美學論文獎  / 2010  S -An Aesthetics Award


瘋狂敘事‧建構神話－論達利以「偏執狂批判」創造之「晚禱神話」 
Irrational Narration. Myth Making:  On the ‘ Angelus myth’ created by Salvador Dalí with the concept  ‘ Paranoiac-Criticism’ 


作者: 楊衍畇(臺灣師範大學美術研究所博士)
          Yang Yen-Yun (Ph.D. in Arts, Taiwan National Normal University, Taiwan, R.O.C.)

摘 要

理性主義主宰著西方人文思維體系，致使與理性主義所牴觸的情感面向不斷地被遏止壓抑，過於單一化的價值判斷，使人類文明面臨窒礙難行的危機；法國革命的時代背景下應運而生的浪漫主義，代表著解放幾世紀以來所否定的情感、所不見容的多元意念。

異於常人思考或舉止怪異的藝術家、創作者，外界常以瘋狂的原罪加諸其上，而精神分析看待瘋狂並非是負面的，達利更假借瘋狂作為自身創作的核心意念，發展「偏執狂批判」方法，別於超現實主義團體的自動技法，全然以意識主導，一旦所見影像卻又受到情感的衝擊，就會扭曲實際的物像，以相應於「內在模式」。在意像創造的同時，達利著重於詮釋文本的書寫，企圖將其物像偏執聯想的過程合理化，這合理化的依據並非是理性邏輯，而是感性直覺。
筆者自達利生命史與創作表現觀察到，一九二九年達利提出的「偏執狂批判」方法，作為其創作觀念與實踐技法，達利終生創作一以貫之，其創作文本卻呈現超時空的豐富性。無論是影像的原創性與複製性、多重閱讀影像的可能性、大眾文化滲透潛意識，或是對陰性異質的推崇，玩味神聖與褻瀆的一體兩面，達利的「偏執狂批判」創作，不能再以二分思維判定現代性或後現代性，達利將其「力比多」不斷擴延，持續吸納各時代的哲思精華，直覺選擇生活中的影像，轉換並體現於跨領域創作中，造就達利無所不在的藝術成就。

關鍵詞：達利、超現實主義、偏執狂批判、精神分析、瘋狂。

全文請見世安美學基金會網站: 
http://www.sancf.org.tw/SANCF/arts_index.php?artsyear=2010 

從康丁斯基「騎士」形象見榮格英雄原型 Discovering the Hero Archetype of Carl Jung In the “Rider” Images created by Wassily Kandinsky

收錄於 「第一屆斯拉夫語言、文學暨文化國際學術研討會論文集」，政治大學斯拉夫語文學系出版) ' The First International Conference on Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures', 

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures,

National Chengchi University, 

Taipei(2008)

從康丁斯基「騎士」形象見榮格英雄原型

Discovering the Hero Archetype of Carl Jung In the “Rider” Images created by Wassily Kandinsky

楊衍畇 // 國立台灣師範大學美術研究所博士

Yang Yen-Yun // The Doctor of Western Art History, Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Normal University

摘要：
榮格（Carl Jung, 1875-1961）「分析心理學」的建立，撼動了以性與慾望為內涵的弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939）潛意識理論，儘管榮格學說導源於弗洛伊德理論，但榮格擺脫生理上的論點，將人類潛意識提升至精神層次，提出「集體潛意識」、「原型」、「阿尼瑪/ 阿尼姆斯」（Anima/Animus）等概念。視覺藝術中常見的母親、老人、英雄、惡靈等意象，就近似於榮格的「原型」，此種意象是一種「象徵」，筆者將透過與榮格當代的抽象繪畫先驅－康丁斯基（Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944）繪畫中的騎士形象，藉藝術家的美學實踐以瞭解榮格英雄原型的內涵。康丁斯基的騎士形象是亂世中的英雄，世人沉迷於紙醉金迷的奢華中，效法耶穌救世的精神，立志喚起他們的靈性，治癒他們的創傷，進而提升他們的心靈層次。康丁斯基所表現騎士形象的象徵並非完全無意識地指涉英雄原型，象徵意涵超越我們所看到的騎士表象，各時代的詮釋者會根據該文化脈絡解釋其意義，榮格的英雄原型是超乎時空，與永恆的人性相依共存。


關鍵詞：
康丁斯基、騎士、聖喬治、原型、象徵、集體潛意識

Abstract:
The foundation of Carl Jung (1875-1961)’s theory “Analytical Psychology” fiercely shook Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)’s theory of the unconscious mind, which contained the senses of sex and desire. Originated from Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung got rid of the physical point of view, elevating the human subconscious to the psychic level and advancing the concepts of the “Collective Unconscious”, “Archetypes”, “Anima/Animus”, and etc. The frequent images of Mother, Elder, Hero, and Demon in the visual arts are similar to Jungian “Archetypes”. Such images are a kind of symbols. With the rider images in Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)’s art, the author of this thesis tried to abstract the essence of the Hero archetype of Jung. Kandinsky’s rider images are the heroes of trouble times, taking Jesus Savior as a model to save human souls from the vanity. The symbols of the rider images created by Kandinsky do not refer to the Hero archetypes unconsciously at all. The meanings of these symbols go beyond the appearance of the riders, interpreted by the interpreters of the eras according to their contemporary cultural context. The Hero Archetype of Carl Jung is beyond temporal and spatial concerns, existing forever with eternal humanity.

Key words:
Kandinsky, Rider, St. George, Archetype, Symbol, Collective Subconscious.

本文

身處於後現代物質影像氾濫的洪流，我們對未來總帶有一些不確定性，受外物使役不知何去何從。同樣處於世紀交替、重視物質實證的年代，心理學家榮格（Carl Jung, 1875-1961）與畫家康丁斯基（Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944）有感於心靈世界為物質世界所壓抑、甚至取代，導致人心不安，負面的情緒籠罩在當時的社會，榮格在心理學上發展出「集體潛意識」，康丁斯基則在繪畫創作上提出「藝術的精神性」，希望能提振當代社會萎靡不振的風氣。
依循俄羅斯畫家康丁斯基的藝術發展軌跡，從早期受民間傳說、民俗木刻版畫影響的具象表現，到抽象的幾何、變形繪畫，筆者發現康丁斯基不斷以騎士形象作為尋找其藝術風格的基礎，不斷塑造著英雄戰勝巨龍的意象。康丁斯基欲以英雄形象表達何種意念，而這種個人潛意識是否具有普遍性，進一步發展成原型？

雙重信仰的世界觀

一八八九年，在莫斯科大學攻讀法律經濟的康丁斯基受自然科學、人類學及人智學學會（The Society for Natural Science, Ethnography and Anthropology）委託，前往俄羅斯沃洛格達省（Vologda）研究當地農民法及非基督教信仰的芬蘭齊林族人（Zyrians）的遺跡，接觸到多采多姿的農民文化，對藝術產生莫大興趣。自此之後，康丁斯基不斷從民間傳說、人類學、象徵主義中獲取養分，一八九六年離開給予他藝術養分的「莫斯科母親」（Moscow Mother），前往當時歐洲藝術新都—慕尼黑，分離畫派、新藝術在此地正在如火如荼的發展中，康丁斯基認為慕尼黑或許可以實踐他對藝術的理想。延續對人類學的熱情，他常駐足於慕尼黑人類學博物館，巴伐利亞的神話帶給他無限幻想，又常受到當時德國民俗年畫形象的影響，康丁斯基逐漸找到他的藝術形象—英雄。康丁斯基早在沃洛格達省進行田野調查期間，就對當地教堂中「聖喬治屠龍」的聖像畫特別感興趣 ，此為東正教廣為流傳的形象（圖1），聖喬治生前原是西元三世紀羅馬帝國的士兵，因違背羅馬皇帝戴克里先（Diocletianu, 244-311AD）下達屠殺基督徒的旨意，於西元三○三年殉道，而以聖喬治為主題的聖像畫多半以屠龍救美的英雄形象呈現，為聖喬治的形象增添幾許中世紀的浪漫色彩。
英雄救美的傳奇故事，康丁斯基畫筆之下所描繪並非歌詠中世紀的騎士精神、對愛情的渴望，而是富涵象徵性的意義，一九○一年的「微光」（圖2）是康丁斯基早期以騎士為題材的作品，畫中身著騎士勁裝、手持長矛的武士，披星戴月騎著白馬勇往向前，似乎正義的任務在召喚著他，要盡快解救受難者。畫面左下方有朵小白花，四周則圍繞著濃密的針葉樹林，齊林族傳說中的小白花，象徵著黑麥的靈魂，騎士與白花相遇，則象徵著基督教與異教交會接觸，呈現著過渡時期的雙重信仰現象 。康丁斯基本就主張雙重信仰，又深刻體會農民生活狀況，社會自覺更為敏感，想要為社會做些貢獻，因此騎士形象意指康丁斯基對社會的道德責任。康丁斯基曾在評論齊林文化的文章中表示，憂心基督教不斷在此一區域設立教堂，將會危及齊林異教信仰的存在 ，康丁斯基的憂慮非僅在於信仰的改變，而是新事物與新觀念在某一社會中出現並發酵，社會成員就會漸漸將一切的傳統拋棄，甚至是固有的美德一併揚棄。面對新世紀提出不斷的創新思想與積極發展科技的局勢，康丁斯基憂心原有的文化與信仰會被取代而遺忘，採取兼容並蓄的尊重態度，況且人類生活的面貌與累積的智慧皆是透過神話形式傳達給下一代，神話內容雖因時空而不同，但其本質與模式卻是相同的，就如同在亂世中會期待英雄的出現，以解救受苦難折磨的人民，或是智者以千變萬化的容貌測試英雄，必須要歷經多次的考驗，才能嚐到勝利之果。
神話學者坎培爾（Joseph Campbell）於著作「千面英雄」中強調，「因為神話英雄並非是成事的勝利者，而是歷經事件的贏家；他所屠殺之龍正是現狀的猛獸，即是緊抓過去不放的守舊者 」。言下之意，坎培爾讚揚英雄不斷以新的挑戰跨越自我的界限，每度過一次難關，自我就成長一次，這歷程是不會間斷或中止，猶如英雄在生命之旅中要成就自己，必先克服外在世界的洪水猛獸，坎培爾的英雄是你我每一個人，康丁斯基亦要求自己去完成生命中的任務，但他的任務似乎比坎培爾的英雄更超然，更具改善社會與悍衛正義的道德意識。康丁斯基主張雙重信仰的立場，或許可延伸到他對生命存在的看法：「如世界和宇宙一樣，人有內外兩種元素 。」生命的完滿是要使內外的世界達到交融狀態，刻意劃分界限或是抑制另一方的發展，無法和諧地調節內外所蘊含的能量，必然走到極端的境地。
「微光」這幅作品是康丁斯基於慕尼黑時期所作，受到青年風格的影響，傳遞出新藝術的美感，人物與景緻的描繪以平塗技法處理，符合裝飾性的特質，高度表達出象徵性，白色小花籠罩於一片叢林中，沐浴在日夜交替的黃昏夜色中，藍色夜光傳達出白花與騎士神秘奧妙的相遇。對康丁斯基而言，顏色具有象徵性的意涵，「藍色是典型的天堂色彩… 當它轉變成黑色，帶有一種超人類的哀愁語調，就像是一種無盡的自我吸納入深層的嚴肅狀態，永無止盡….深藍色是莊嚴、超凡間吸納的顏色… 邁向「超脫塵世」的途中有「世俗」。必定要經歷一切折磨與世間人生的疑問矛盾 。」康丁斯基推崇藍色的精神性，卻也透露出精神性是無法孤立於世俗之外，即便是英雄人物擁有崇高的品德情操，亂世中是絕對無法袖手旁觀，原本相信科學可以造福人類的康丁斯基，卻見證到「靈魂中，原子的頹廢與整個世界的腐敗一樣。突然間，最結實的牆倒塌了。萬事變得不確定、不穩定與柔弱。如果石頭在我面前融化成空氣而看不見，這並不會取悅我 。」 康丁斯基目睹著科學如何使當代人盲目地推崇物質主義與實證主義，麻痺了自己最真摯的情感，從此不斷透過騎士形象表達他想拯救現代人類的靈魂。

集體潛意識

基督教聖經故事中，騎士形象的體現是聖喬治屠龍的主題，而在異教神話中則是勇士伊葛里（Egori the Brave），他是「黃金王子」（The Golden Prince），更是「世界守護者」（The World-Watching Man），在基督教中化身為聖喬治、上帝的形象 。相似的英雄母題，亦可見於其他的古希臘羅馬神話、中世紀藝術、遠東傳說、當代原始部落中，甚至是你我的夢中。超越人類所存的時空，浮現共同的意象，榮格認為這是因為身體有其歷史，而存在於身體中的心靈不可能沒有其歷史；談到歷史，他指的是原始初民心靈中生物、史前和潛意識的發展，其心靈仍接近動物的心靈 。以歷史作為其學說的立基點，榮格由弗洛伊德的潛意識理論發展出更深奧的「集體潛意識」。不同於弗洛伊德強調以性慾和慾望為潛意識的論點，榮格表示：「這種個人潛意識依賴於更深一層，它並非來源於個體經驗，也不是從後天獲得，而是先天就存在的，它應定名為集體潛意識。選擇「集體」一詞，是因為這部份潛意識不是個別的，而是普遍的。它與個體心理相反，具備所有地方和所有人都有的、大體相似的內容和行為方式。由於它在所有人身上都是相同的，因此它組成一種超個體的共同心理基礎，並且普遍地存在於我們每個人身上 。
原型 是集體潛意識最重要的組成部分，又稱原始模型，與柏拉圖哲學中的「形式」同義，指集體潛意識中「無數確定形式的普遍存在」。它既是本能的潛意識形象，也是本能行為的模式 。榮格的先驗觀點顯得既玄祕又有許空泛，若從象徵與原型的關聯性說起則較容易理解，原型與象徵緊密相連，象徵是原型的外在顯現，唯有通過象徵才能表現自己，意即深藏於集體潛意識中的原型，唯有通過象徵、夢境、神話、藝術等分析與詮釋，才能認識原型。各種不同的騎士意象是一種象徵，為同一原型在這世界上的再現，是經驗中產生具體細緻的形象，帶有原型層面的意義和情感。德文中，象徵有感覺和意象之意，榮格認為象徵就是一種「有意義的意象」，是促使心理變化的工具。象徵不僅是符號，還是推動和促進心理發展的力量。榮格認為象徵再現一種渴望得到滿足、卻受挫的本能衝動，此與弗洛伊德對於「象徵是慾望的偽裝」解釋一致。榮格亦表示象徵是原始本能驅力的轉化（如性本能轉化到舞蹈中），榮格將負面能量透過藝術宗教等轉化成積極的創造力。象徵不僅限於把本能能量從其本來的對象中移置到替換性對象上，還代表某種超越性的東西 。但象徵不等同所代表的原型。原型是經驗的心理模式，象徵則是其各種表現。原型作為一種認知方式存在於所瞭解的生活之外，而象徵起源自生活，指向不為我們所理解的原型本身。本質上，象徵賦予我們人性，使我們能構想超出理解範圍之外的事物並超越意識 。
原型透過象徵潛意識地表現在日常生活中，然而人類會以說故事的方式來詮釋人類生活與其宇宙觀，這就是「神話」。神話在希臘文中是「說故事」之意，語言是思想與情感的溝通工具，透過神話似乎對任何一個族群世代皆能達到某種溝通的目的。榮格將原型稱為「神話母題」，用以表達原型的象徵，神話甚於原型，包含著原型的故事，原型是神話元素，因為其典型的本質，稱之為「母題」、「原始意象」、型態或是「原型」 。一個原型並不僅是神話中的一個母題，而是許多神話中的一個母題。榮格此一概念說明，東正教的聖喬治與齊林異教的聖伊葛里，或是基督教的耶穌、希臘神話中的普羅米修斯、亦或是佛教中的釋迦牟尼、回教的阿拉，他們的事蹟超越時空與宗教信仰，卻都指向同一種原型—捨身取義、拯救世人的英雄原型。榮格並宣稱神話是傳達潛意識的最佳媒介：「神話自然對這些心理過程是原始語言，沒有智慧構想能接近神話意象的豐富性與表現性 。」神話的潛意識特質與夢境相似，先人與原住民常以解夢作為他們詮釋過去、現在與未來的連結，榮格認為神話的力量是超越夢境的，它將幻想思維投射到世界上，亦將外在世界轉變成內在世界的延伸。神話思維不只是一種思考方式，也是一種經歷世界的方式：「我們進入幻想世界，不受事物外在性的影響，湧現形成一股內在泉源，產生一連串改變中的造型或幻想形式…凡是要擬人化或擬動物地去感知，以人或野獸的外觀…因此會出現完全從真實移除、卻準確相應於人類主觀幻想的宇宙圖像 。」坎培爾所稱的「千面英雄」，帶著不同時代、地區、族群、信仰所產生的形象面具，正反應著人類的世界觀與心靈圖像，每剝離一次面具時，預示著因應時空與意識形態的變遷，下一世代所相信的神話亦會改變，唯一不變的是跨越生命的藩籬、自我不斷的成長，以及與世界建立和諧的關係。

拯救的英雄意象

古往今來，聖經故事往往為西方藝術家所取材，如米開朗基羅以創世紀主題創造了西斯汀教堂的天頂壁畫，夏卡爾在耶路撒冷的彩色鑲嵌玻璃，此類題材在古代為教會服務外，也意謂聖經故事最能感動教化人心。俄國沃洛格達地方的傳說中，亦有類似諾亞方舟故事中世紀洪水的預言。一九○九年的「構成二號」（圖3）是康丁斯基慕尼黑時期畫幅最大、最重要的畫作，正是呈現世界洪水的預言景象，藝術家以炫麗的色彩、充滿動勢的筆觸表現暴風激流的威力，而這股威力是畫面中央的白色生物所招致的，牠是齊林傳說中的水中惡靈瓦沙（Vasa），將許多無辜的人溺死，也常常偷竊人類的馬匹 。背景的左方可以仔細發現有個雙臂張開的黃色小人，我們可以在民間祭毯畫上（圖4）見到這個坐在馬上的張臂人物，他是世界觀護者，張臂保護受害者以驅除惡靈；由於他身上所發散出的金色光芒，又稱他為金色王子，如同太陽般將溫暖送給大地、將黑暗驅走，具有善惡交戰的道德價值觀。太陽崇拜的信仰具有相當的普遍性，連聖喬治所持盾牌亦有太陽形象 ，逐漸等同基督教的聖喬治及齊林神話中的勇士伊葛里，神話中金色王子的守護角色，是否與聖經中的諾亞有異取同工之妙? 諾亞藉方舟拯救了動物，巧合的是王子有時並不乘駒，而改由兩個舵手陪同乘船而來，船的拯救意象亦常為康丁斯基用於創作中。
金色王子張開雙臂的形象，令人聯想到基督為世人犧牲釘在十字架上的意象，王子以尊貴之姿勇敢為世人守護，身為上帝之子的耶穌更是甘願為眾人受難，身為藝術家的康丁斯基效法北方文藝復興的杜勒，將自己在藝術作品的創造力量，視為如上帝或耶穌創造世界的能力，既然有此神力更要善用，世間質疑並遺忘上帝的力量，自尼采提出「上帝已死」觀點後，人類雖主觀地相信自己的意志，卻也迷失在紙醉金迷的花花世界中。由康丁斯基於一九一一年所作的玻璃畫「聖弗拉基米爾」（圖5）將拯救視為己任的意圖更為明顯，瓦西里王子於西元九八九年使俄羅斯受洗為基督教，後世封為聖弗拉基米爾，而康丁斯基的教名正是瓦西里，為弗拉基米爾的暱稱，此處的聖弗拉基米爾亦是展開雙臂，右手持著十字架，左手捧著俄羅斯式古教堂，仰望上天祈禱，圍繞著頭頂四周似光環又像是發出光芒的太陽，如同與太陽關聯的聖喬治意象，是否康丁斯基強調雙重信仰某種程度指涉人類對太陽崇拜？
前述康丁斯基有感於時人為物質所魅惑，逐漸隱藏內在的精神性，甚至走入精神性消失的悲劇，拯救世人的意念不斷於康丁斯基的創作中滋長。一九一一年十月，康丁斯基與弗蘭茲˙馬克（Franz Marc, 1880-1916）在慕尼黑創立了藍騎士團體（Der Blaue Reiter）；一九一二年出版的藍騎士年鑑，收錄了文字和插圖（圖6），用意則是確立一種以藝術為存在經驗的創作觀點。年鑑的概念如象徵性治療，甚至是驅邪、救贖的媒介，不僅在書名「藍騎士」反應這一點 ; 康丁斯基更解釋藍是天上的色彩，騎士則是聖喬治。編輯有意以巫師（Shaman）題材來呈現年畫，象徵對新興藝術的信念，就如文化治療和拯救世界的隱喻 。 康丁斯基對西伯利亞的巫師信仰並不陌生，家中擁有許多個人收藏，也熟知慕尼黑人類學博物館的館藏，他認知到巫師在原始社會中扮演與酋長或領導人同樣崇高的角色，無論是平日的生活作息、自然外界與社會群體的變化，作為人類與超自然間的溝通橋樑，洞悉天啟的神秘訊息，並為世人解碼以與萬靈和睦相處。儘管康丁斯基所創辦的「藍騎士」是現代藝術團體，他所引入民間信仰與藝術的元素，卻是長久以來古典藝術所摒棄的，過於強調表象的相似度，而忽略以象徵語彙表達形象內在的精神性，當原始藝術、民間藝術與現代藝術展開對話，不僅為現代藝術注入象徵性的意象，更將現代藝術的發展推向抽象的趨勢。
透過「藍騎士」具有治療特質的聯想，主張雙重信仰的康丁斯基賦予聖喬治有巫術般的神力，至一九一一年六月，他以聖喬治騎著花馬（最受巫師界喜愛的良駒）展現對西伯利亞巫術瞭解的程度，「聖喬治I」（圖7） 中的馬就是一匹帶有金色斑點的藍色寶馬。若寶馬為巫術界所乘，那麼聖喬治則變成了具有魔法的魔術師、巫師，西伯利亞的巫師實際上也是位騎士，受病魔纏身的人召喚醫治病痛;而藝術家的角色與巫師發揮治療的神力相近，巫師被形容為內在具有創造性的個體，而西伯利亞民族的藝術表現與巫教息息相關 。 這裡的聖喬治不只是戰勝邪惡的善良力量，也是人類和神力間調解的象徵，如同巫師聖喬治，康丁斯基認為藝術家亦有治療受物質迷惑而罹患心靈疾病的世人，藝術家的慧眼洞察先機，能創造出撫慰人心的藝術。

藝術的精神性

隨著「藍騎士」的成立，康丁斯基的繪畫就愈加抽象，一九一一年間曾與慕尼黑人類學博物館商借芬蘭西部拉匹（Lappi）與西伯利亞薩滿教的宗教圖像，研究巫師與聖喬治間的關係，「抒情」（圖8）即是當時的產物，此作構圖精簡明快，已不像「構圖II」因為強調敘事性而以全景表現構圖，色彩更是相當表現性地呈現，「抒情」中的主題焦點僅在於騎士從容赴義的瞬間，如攝影般捕捉住騎士勇往直前的風采。以「3」字型描繪騎士疾馳而需拱起背來，馬兒頸部與足步的線條流暢，傳達出加速前進的衝勁，越過群山峻嶺、急流險水，不管眼前困難多麼艱險，騎士清楚自己的目標大步邁進，畫面紅、綠、藍、紫、橙等色塊加上表意的線條，傳神表現出天候、風景、騎士與座騎的樣貌，色塊與線條經康丁斯基巧妙地安排，如音符發出美妙的旋律。康丁斯基於一九一一年著作《論藝術的精神性》表示：「美來自內在心靈的需要…色彩是鍵盤，眼睛是槌子，靈魂是一架有許多弦的鋼琴，藝術家是手，藉著摸著這個或那個鍵使靈魂振動…」 。將藝術家比喻成鋼琴家，康丁斯基深知藝術與音樂密切相關，而他對當代音樂尤其表示興趣，一九一一年聆聽荀伯格（Arnold Schönberg, 1874-1951）的音樂會後，開始與十二音列理論大師往來，或是由西伯利亞民族曼西人（Mansi）獵熊儀式中的音樂、舞蹈與面具元素得到靈感，創作出「黃色聲音」（The Yellow Sound）的歌劇。
英雄與巫師畢竟是人不是神，他們又如何與神溝通而善用神力幫助世人? 巫師所敲擊鼓樂之音能傳達到神的天聽，使巫師能離開肉身，神遊另一個世界。就如同回教的旋轉蘇菲舞蹈，巫師進入恍神狀態，鼓變成了木馬，飛翔於群山森林間，木馬視為神力的隱喻。神雖賦予巫師力量，仍會產生無法駕馭的問題，就如同天才型的藝術家才氣縱橫，但稍有不慎就會走火入魔。康丁斯基曾說：「馬兒有力而迅速地背負著騎士，然而是騎士帶領著馬兒。才華有力而迅速地將藝術家達到高處，但卻是藝術家引導才華 。」 康丁斯基將馬兒比喻成才華，藝術家應有駕馭才華的能力，不枉費神賦的能力，且能擔負起社會治療的責任，才能稱得上是好畫家。
對康丁斯基來說，鼓就如同藝術家的畫布，巫師藉由鼓這交通工具抵達神界，他會看到不同於世間的景象，而藝術家在創作時將所看到的奇象紀錄下來，這往往是藝術家的心靈狀態。眾多的民間傳說、深厚的人類學學養、及受通神學 的啟發，如巫師與鼓的關係，康丁斯基自一九一○年後的創作日漸走向抽象。巫術的經驗相似於藝術，可比喻為一種「重生」，或是「世界」的創造。康丁斯基說：「繪畫是不同世界極大的撞擊，藉由彼此的爭戰注定創造新世界，稱之為作品。每件作品技巧地創造如宇宙，透過最後形成的災難，出自混亂無章的工具，成為球體之音樂的交響樂。創造作品就是創造世界的 。」藝術家的作品是其內在世界，實際上，巫師鼓上的象形文字象徵著他的宇宙「地圖」，鼓本身則普遍詮釋為巫師的駿馬，鼓棒則作為他的「馬鞭」（圖9）。許多描繪在鼓面的聖像為宇宙樹、階梯、階梯樹、聖路、船、代表天堂的符號，及動物、鳥精靈等，這些圖像是作為巫師及諸神之間溝通的工具（圖10）。圖像本身具有簡化造型的象徵特質，心靈與巫術信仰趨近，康丁斯基的作品越來越趨向抽象。從社會學者米海洛夫斯基（Nikolai Mikhailovsky, 1842-1904）在一八九○年莫斯科所舉辦的第八屆考古學大會所發表的「原始藝術與繪畫文字作為人類學資料」（Primitive art and Pictography as Ethnographic Data）專題演講中深受啟發 ，將馬的造型簡化成鉤狀曲線，太陽則是放射出光線的圓圈，船則是帶有垂槳的船艙，山是三角形等。然而，康丁斯基的形式並非一成不變，稍後馬又轉換成圓圈，因為象徵馬的才華臻於完滿，才能表達出「圓圈的內在力量」（inner power of the circle），投射到巫術信仰的脈絡中，圓形的鼓亦相應於此一理念。
康丁斯基在一九一二年的「白色邊緣」素描（圖11）中騎士所成的馬，直接呈現為圓形，因為巫師的鼓是他的馬，將具有代表性的馬變成是圓形，帶有「內在可能性」的形。心理學上，圓是本我（self）的象徵，它從各方面表現心靈的整體性，涵融人類和整個自然界的關係。圓的象徵都指向生命最重要的一個向度－生命的終極圓滿 。一九二六年，康丁斯基曾針對其畫作「粉紅色的明亮」（圖12）寫道：「今天我愛圓形，正如我以前愛馬一般，或著更甚之，因為我在圓形裏找到更大的內在可能性 。」若說圓形是心靈的象徵，方形則是世俗事物、肉體與現實的象徵。對於外在經過善惡交戰的聖喬治，亦會投射到我等凡人的內在，平日所作所為在下決定前總要經過一翻天人交戰，那是因為潛意識的本我與有意識的自我（ego）互相拉扯，無法達成平衡狀態。所謂本我是集體潛意識的健全完美原型。自我與本我太疏離，就會自卑；太近則自大。榮格自各宗教中發現原型本我的象徵，意識到本我在心理上的表現就是對於神的親身體驗，同時想揭示出神的形象是如何存在於人的心靈，如何以神的方式表達自己。康丁斯基體會到各種英雄原型的本我表現，他心中所懷的道德感驅使他作神才能完成的任務。
除康丁斯基外，二十世紀的前衛藝術家如蒙得里安、克利及包浩斯的藝術家運用圓形、方形、三角形，創造出秩序般的理性抽象， 他們的成就得自受康丁斯基於一九二六年所出版「點線面」繪畫理論的影響。「論藝術的精神性」與「點線面」兩本藝術理論鉅作，皆是康丁斯基在包浩斯教學時期所書寫完成的，他特別強調書寫前者的使命感：「『論藝術的精神性』以及『藍騎士』之目的，在於喚醒於物質和抽象事物中的性靈經驗，這種能力未來絕對是需要的，使經驗可能變化無窮。引起不具有這種能力的人身上這種歡樂的能力，是這兩部版品的主要目的 。」猶如人類的精神導師，康丁斯基將繪畫中的線條與色彩化約成音樂中的音符，由此組構成一首動人的旋律。蘇格蘭史學家卡萊爾（Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881） 將人類對英雄崇拜的形式分為六大類：神祇、先知、詩人、牧師、學者、國王，康丁斯基必定屬於傳達音樂般思想的詩人，卡萊爾表示「音樂性，多麼倚賴它！音樂性思想是由穿透事物最核心的心靈所說出來的，察覺到事物對神秘的地方，意即隱藏其中的旋律；內在一致的和諧是靈魂的所在，有權處於這個世界中。一切最深處的事物可以說是具有旋律感，自然就產生於歌曲中，歌曲的意義深層發展。邏輯上，誰是能在我們身上表達音樂作用的人？一種難以言喻、深不可測的言語，使我們進入無盡邊緣，使我們凝視它許久 。」
一九三五年， 康丁斯基由「內視」感知擴展到「靈魂振動」的概念：「我們以無助之眼看到萬事萬物「隱藏靈魂」的經驗，稱之為「內視」。這種視線貫穿硬殼、『外在』形式至事物內部，使我們以所有感知感受到事物內在的『脈動』 。」「內視」概念可應用於藝術的創作理念與觀者看世界的方式，像是一種冥想過程，當身體知覺全然開放，內外觀照皆能兼顧，若是創作者與觀者雙方都能具備這種能力，觀者便能與藝術家靈魂產生共振合鳴的美妙聲響。康丁斯基表示「藝術作品包含內外兩種元素，內在元素為藝術家靈魂的情感，能夠引起觀者靈魂基本上相應的情緒。只要情感依附於肉體，它就只能接受透過感情所傳達的振動，感情也是一座從非物質到物質的橋樑 。」
如巫師的鼓音與神建立溝通的橋樑，音樂對康丁斯基不但有催化情感的作用，更能得到神啟的靈感。自一九○九年開始，藝術家的作品常取名為「即興」、「印象」與「構成」三類，他視之為逐步走向抽象的幾個階段。他越發相信自然與外在形體是提升人類精神路途上的障礙，必須要去除形體，以便精神可達完全解放的生命之流，而這生命之流不斷向想像力提供聲音與顏色 。然而，他不希望只是「繪畫音樂」（paint music），即藉由聆聽音樂而製作繪畫；真正的藝術作品要像樂器會「共鳴」，具有感知的觀者能感受其「振動」，不只能「看見」且能「聽到」繪畫 。「構成七號」中（圖14），康丁斯基企圖表述世紀洪水、復活、最後審判的聖經主題，在抽象的表象上，我們很難判定哪一部分是屬於某一主題。色彩對比強烈，各局部的色彩依顏色的高低彩發出不同的聲響，而色彩環繞中央的圓心自由的發散出去，外在的戲劇性與內在的和諧性呈現平衡狀態，因此我們能聽見交響樂的和諧。即使是悲劇性的題材，康丁斯基不受字面的約束，依其內在的需要真摯呈現，康丁斯基發自內心表白他所繪抽象繪畫的內涵：「或許我們帶著羨慕與一絲哀悼的同情聆聽莫札特的音樂，就如同在我們混亂的內在生活中一種歡迎的延長記號，如同安慰、希望，而我們聽它也像是從長久過去另一時代的某種回音，我們基本上是陌生的。色彩的衝突、我們所失去的平衡感、動搖的原則、無預期的攻擊、重大問題、似乎無用的努力、暴風雨、破碎的鍊子、對立與衝突，這些創造了我們的和諧 。」
外在世界的紛擾亦會潛意識地影響到內在心靈，與荀伯格在音樂上的交誼在一九二三年受到了考驗，任教於包浩斯的康丁斯基想要邀請荀伯格來此教學，卻因為音樂家猶太人的身分雙方產生誤會，荀伯格竟指控康丁斯基是反猶太主義者，兩人情誼就此告終，這對康丁斯基是莫大的打擊，他將悲傷情緒反應在當年所作的「黑色方塊」（圖15）作品中。畫作中可見白色的梯形塊面包裹在黑色方塊之中，白色塊面內以絕對幾何美感的線條與形狀呈現出騎士主題，多半以對角線與線性透視的概念形成構圖，一股活潑動力躍於畫面，白色梯形和黑色方塊雙方的邊線與色彩相互拉扯而產生張力，視覺上造成白色梯形懸浮於黑色方塊之上。前者好比康丁斯基內在強有力的生命律動，後者則是籠罩於與荀柏克關係決裂的悲痛狀態。他語重心長地以音樂概念表達他的心情，黑色就是「毫無任何可能性」，「澆息太陽熱力之後什麼都沒有…毫無未來希望的永恆沉默」，就是沉默「以最終、封閉的延長記號呈現於音樂中，其後則是繼續展開另一個世界，因為這個封閉的延長記號已永遠完成 。」
康丁斯基於一九二五年完成包浩斯時期的「黃、紅、藍」（圖16），賦予色彩象徵性的意義，藍色是月亮、黃色是太陽，紅色則是當日月交會之際的神秘光芒 。畫面右半是騎士在月黑風高的夜晚與惡龍大戰，從色塊互相交疊滲透的情況看來，激戰場面一片混沌，似乎仍分不清勝負高下。右半邊受到大型圓形所散發出的藍色月光影響呈暗色調子，似彩帶舞動的黑蛇，而騎士揮舞著三根平行黃色的鐮刀，他的座騎在此化約成直線的棍棒，像是巫師騎著神奇的掃帚在空中飛翔，彩色棋盤原是馬鞍毯子圖案，現在是呈現騎士移動的過程。迥異於右邊的混沌狀態，畫面左半邊散發一種神聖般的寧靜氛圍，長方形邊線內洋溢著金黃色的光芒，顯然是戰役結束，金色王子獲得勝利，世界也恢復秩序，康丁斯基在此純粹以幾何形狀與線條表示新秩序的誕生，相對於戰役中蛇形的曲線與騎士紫色不規則狀的騷動靈魂。儘管康丁斯基最喜愛也最富涵象徵意義的圓形，認為它是世界秩序的表徵，康丁斯基卻漸漸以不同角度看待它：「我近來時常使用的圓圈，有時僅被描述成浪漫的，降臨的浪漫主義確實深沉的、美麗的、有意義、愉悅的，它是內有火焰燃燒的一片冰。如果有人只感受到冰、卻無火焰，對他們來說是比一切都糟糕… 」 包浩斯時期的康丁斯基累積形式分析教學經驗與研究成果，完成「點線面」這部現代設計理論的經典之作，並非如數學家理性冷感分析繪畫的元素，以計量與公式的科學概念為準則，康丁斯基強調直覺的面向，所以絕對無法將藝術明確劃分幾何藝術或有機藝術，幾何形狀也是有溫度、有表情，它與週遭的顏色、形狀碰觸對應，就會產成情感變化，任何形式與顏色組成畫面的構圖，都有「內在需求」（inner necessity）的精神性。
「內在需求」是康丁斯基的創作信條，使得其繪畫更加反應他在各種時期不同的心境。康丁斯基以英雄原型發展其抽象繪畫之路，期間歷經俄國藝術圈同儕的質疑，但他的藝術是經得起考驗，來到德國受到肯定，一九二一年受邀至包浩斯學院教書，使得他的抽象繪畫理念得以落實，自此之後可說是平步青雲。直到法西斯在德國坐大，包浩斯被迫關閉，一九三三年至巴黎發展。雖然康丁斯基並不喜歡巴黎，他仍在此地創造以有機物為形體的變形繪畫。一九三四年的「無題」（圖18）中，騎士成了曲折有致的線形波浪，化為圓形的馬及三條平行線的矛伴隨著他，巴黎階段的抽象繪畫將騎士簡化到極致。若不了解康丁斯基的「巫術」美學，觀者恐難將曲線聯想成騎士、將圓形與馬連結在一起。無論康丁斯基身處海外何處，念舊的它總是不斷回憶起俄羅斯聖像畫對他精神性的召喚：「牆上的民俗版畫：一位英雄、一場戰役、一首彩繪民謠的象徵性再現。紅色角落完全覆以彩色印製的聖像畫，前面燃燒著一盞小油燈的火焰，如同神秘呢喃的謙卑又驕傲之星綻放光芒，識得自身，活出自我。當我終於進入房間，從一旁並未看到畫作，但我已受其感動、活在畫作中。以前相同的感覺曾潛伏在我體內，無意識地，當我曾在莫斯科的教堂中… 自旅途中歸來，我開始清楚意識到在俄羅斯教堂中的這份情感 。」
康丁斯基以拯救世人為職志，仍可見於一九四四年三月的臨終遺作「溫和的活力」（圖19），同時呈現聖喬治、生物型態的聖喬治/巫師、巫師長袍的形象，聖喬治騎士的意象出現在調色盤或是盾牌、鼓面上，由巫師聖者操持著，畫筆、長棍或是鼓棒也操之在手，畫面中間成斜對角線漂浮在空中的是棋盤狀的馬鞍座毯，另外與右側巫師聖者隔著毯子相對則是「死亡天使」（the angel of death）。薩滿教中守護人類靈魂的形象是鳥，人的靈魂往往以鳥的圖像呈現，這是祖先變身的表現，康丁斯基曾於一八八九年進行齊林文化田野調查時，認識到俄羅斯北方楚德族（Chud）陪葬品中的聖鳥圖像（圖20），置於死者頭部以期待重生，聖鳥雙掌緊抓著人類的靈魂，越過冥界的試煉，而康丁斯基終其一生都在為普世眾人保護純淨的心靈，聖鳥鼓動著翅膀輕盈地飛翔，對應著如「天方夜譚」的魔毯、拿著聖喬治形象的鼓面與鼓棒的巫師，悠然懸浮於這美好的世界上。即使生命將盡，康丁斯基明瞭到英雄必定經歷的生命歷程包括死亡，僅不過是自我由出生的原初無意識出發到成年的自我意識，再回歸到無意識，最終會自本我重生 ， 這才是生命的真諦。

結語

以藝術的精神性拯救世界，為康丁斯基在創作騎士形象不時流露的真摯情感。他畫騎士與馬，肯定藝術家的作品能使世人擺脫拜物慾望，治癒他們的創傷，進而提升他們的心靈層次。再者，康丁斯基主張雙重信仰，即基督教與異教神話的結合，意謂著藝術家從宗教中尋求心靈安定的力量及創作的動力，雖然宗教的教義會因人或時間有不同的詮釋，尋求真善美境界的理想卻是不變的，這或許是榮格的原型源自宗教、神話的基本精神；亦或許雙重信仰可擴充為多重信仰，宗教界限的消弭有助於接受任何良善的意念，世界呈現內在與外在圓滿的狀態，象徵宇宙的圓形於焉產生。康丁斯基在他那個年代絕對無法脫離文化脈絡，而他又是個人意識強烈的藝術家，所以他所表現騎士形象的象徵並非完全無意識地指涉英雄原型。象徵意涵超越我們所看到的騎士表象，詮釋者亦根據自己的文化脈絡解釋其意義，儘管詮釋的字面或方式不同，將潛意識中的自我與本我精鍊到超我，善戰勝惡的過程使人類體驗到神力，使生命完滿的目標卻是普遍的，榮格的英雄原型是與永恆的人性相依共存。

參考文獻

Hajo Düchting, Wassily Kandinsky : A Revolution in Painting, Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1991.
Igor Aronov, Kandinsky’s Quest: A Study in the Artist’s Personal Symbolism, 1866-1907. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of Abstract Style, Oxford: Clarendon Press.1980.
Robert A. Segal （ed.), Encountering Jung on Mythology, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Thomas Carlyle, Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Lincoln/ London: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.
榮格主編，龔卓軍譯，《人及其象徵：榮格思想精華的總結》。台北縣：立緒出版，1999年。
常若松著，《人類心靈的神話：榮格的分析心理學》。台北市：貓頭鷹出版，2000年。
Joseph Campbell著，朱侃如譯，《千面英雄》，台北縣：立緒出版，1997年。
Paola Rapelli著，陳靜文譯，《康丁斯基》，台北市：貓頭鷹出版，2001年。
Murray Stein著，朱侃如譯，《榮格心靈地圖》。台北縣：立緒出版，1999年。
康丁斯基著，呂澎譯，《論藝術裡的精神》，台北市：丹青出版，1989年。
康丁斯基著，吳瑪悧譯，《點線面》，台北市：藝術家出版，1996年。
Robert H. Hopcke 著，蔣韜譯，《導讀榮格》。台北縣：立緒出版，1997年。

論楊 • 斯凡克梅耶電影『愛麗絲夢遊仙境』中兒童想像力之虐戀特質 Uncovering Alice’s Cabin of Curiosities: on the Sadomasochism of Infantile Imagination in the film ‘Něco z Alenky’ of Jan Švankmajer

英國第六屆超現實主義國際研討會論文

The 6th International Symposium of Surrealism (UK)

論楊 • 斯凡克梅耶電影『愛麗絲夢遊仙境』中兒童想像力之虐戀特質

Uncovering Alice’s Cabin of Curiosities: on the Sadomasochism of Infantile Imagination in the film ‘Něco z Alenky’ of Jan Švankmajer


作者: 楊衍畇(臺灣師範大學美術研究所博士)

摘要

受英國維多利亞時期Lewis Carroll原著啟發，Švankmajer認為兒童並非如成人所想像純真無邪，反而具有極大的想像力，能夠「看見」大人已無法感知到的世界，大人卻亟欲保護孩童免受惡靈的侵犯與誘惑。實際上，「純真」(innocence)概念為維多利亞時期的政治宣傳訴求，正是英國工業革命與城市文化興起，使得兒童安身立命的生存環境遭到威脅，淪為童工的下場。Lewis Carroll 在這部作品中不斷以兔子的角色提醒時間的流逝，暗示作者對童年的眷顧，此作亦暗藏Carroll所擅長的數學符號與猜謎遊戲，作者藉此抒發保守當局對其兒童「裸」照抨擊的顛覆思維。筆者所指涉的兒童想像力是一體兩面的，從拉岡鏡像理論出發，兒童對自身認同是由局部到全面的完整性，從「純真」概念出發，僅有藝術家或創作者能保有兒童的想像力。捷克超現實藝術家Švankmajer的「愛麗絲」一作，以薩德式虐戀手法對待日常物件，食人主義式地殘暴吞噬著彼此，使得原本靜止的日常物件瞬間活了起來，威脅著愛麗絲，在此是Švankmajer想像力作用使然。童話故事亦非如表象寫給兒童閱讀的，許多這類著作暗藏著作者在當時政權所抵制的顛覆性言論，Švankmajer歷經1968年布拉格之春、捷克共產黨的統治、以及1989年的絲絨革命，藝術家不斷突破外在世界的禁錮，藉由隱喻方式發表所不能言，長期以木偶劇、黏土動畫來表彰其想法，1988年的「愛麗絲」為其首部劇情長片。之後，Švankmajer更加拍攝向薩德公爵致敬的作品「極樂同盟」(1996)與「瘋狂療養院」(2005)，本論文溯源到薩德施虐癖所發展出虐戀(Sadomasochism)，意圖探討自由思想遭到壓迫、言論受到抑制，想像力就會具有虐戀特質。

  Abstract

In the real world, the mind of a child always remains innocent as possible as we can. Nevertheless, children literature is full of fanciful creatures and composed of incredible scenarios. In observing the tendency of popular culture, the themes of animations related to fantasy literature are always best-selling. The audience are not necessarily children, even adults are obsessed with theses fantasies as well. This phenomenon might evoke the following questions. Are children absolutely innocent in their imagination? Why does fantasy literature attract adults so much for they are far away from the time of ‘innocence’? Is there any signification hidden in fantasy as a storytelling genre ?

Innocent Alice?

    In the history of literature, Alice in Wonderland (1865) written by Lewis Carroll[1] (1832-1898) might be a good example to explore the innocence of infantile imagination. First of all, we have to understand the definition of innocence for the further discussion. The word ‘innocence’ is derived from the Latin ‘in’ and ‘nocens’. Literally, it means ‘ not harmful’, to be free from guilt or sin, guiltless, pure. In actions it means “ without evil influence or effect, or not arising from evil intention.” According to Rollo May in Power and Innocence, there are two kinds of innocence. One is innocence as a quality of imagination, the innocence of the poet or artist. It is preservation of childlike clarity in adulthood. It is the preservation of childlike attitudes into maturity without sacrificing the realism of one’s perception of evil. Another kind of innocence is not leading to spirituality, but rather consists of blinders –Pseudoinnocence. Capitalizing on naïveté, it consists of a childhood that is never outgrowth, a kind of fixation on the past. This pseudoinnocence leads to utopianism; we do not then need to see the real dangers. With unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade ourselves that we have escaped it. It is this innocence that eventually becomes self-destructive. Those who possess the authentic innocence, are always condemned by the preachers of pseudoinnocence. No wonder that Arthur Miller said, ‘The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness’ .[2]

Born in the Victorian period, Lewis Carroll was censored because of his provocative photographs of infantile nude. As an artist, his innocence doesn’t be appreciated by the Victorian royalty at all. The photographic image of Alice Liddell, the little muse for Lewis Carroll, was criticized for being too sexual. Namely, she is the heroine of Alice in Wonderland. Under the severe censorship, Lewis Carroll creates a puzzle-like world in this literary work to defend himself against the ideological imprisonment of the imperial authorities. In 1988, Czech filmic artist Jan Švankmajer completed the film ‘ Neco z Alenky’, based on Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Does Švankmajer make this film without coincidence to reflect his confinement of creativity under the Czechoslovakian communist regime of that time? In Jan Švankmajer’s animations, the theme on childhood is always his continuous research on his alter-ego. He has never thought that children are innocent or ignorant, as adults take for granted. On the contrary, children possess the special ability to perceive what adult cannot feel. Švankmajer experienced this sensual ‘ vision’ in his childhood and consistently traced it back through his filmic works.

Czech Inspiration

   In ‘ Neco z Alenky’, Švankmajer adapts the literary narratives of Lewis Carroll to uncanny level. White Rabbit is the leading guide to attract Alice to this Wonderland. A rabbit hole is transformed into a weird space, where ‘live’ lots of inanimate objects. As if taking the elevator, Alice falls into this tunnel-like space and goes through three floors, viewing jars, puppets, exemplars of insects and animals, etc. With the help of the shabby space around these objects, Švankmajer creates the very space inspired by elements of Czech culture in his animation. Familiar with Rudolf II’s (1552-1612) Cabinet of Curiosities, Švankmajer talks about its influence on him, especially the art of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593):

Arcimboldo, with his anthropomorphic, cumulative methods, is one of the obsessions for which I am unable to find a satisfactory interpretation…Is it, perhaps, that profound mark of Prague Mannerism with which Rudolf II bewitched the capital, this new Hermes Trismegistos, as he was known by the initiated of that time and who is capable hundreds of years later of controlling kindred spirits? Or is it the sublimation of childhood masturbation as suggested by psychoanalysis, the passion for collecting which is so expressively manifested in the accumulation of things, animals and fruits in Arcimboldo’s methods? My weakness for Rudolfine Mannerism is well known : My relation to Prague, Rudolf II and the fateful impression of the Rudolfine era on every stone of this city and the enduring radiation of the magical atmosphere through the ages.[3]

As a modern alchemist in Prague, Švankmajer constructs another system of knowledge different from the logical laws, with human sensual abilities. Švankmajer denounces implicitly that modern people perceive and judge the nature in which we live, the everyday life we experience, only by means of visual ability. In parallel with  Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) revolutionary spirit of aesthetics, Švankmajer was influenced by Czech Surrealism simultaneously and spontaneously. Different from French Surrealism, Czech Surrealism was rooted from Karel Teige’s(1900-1951) Poetism, which referred to the Czech avant-garde movement Devěstil (means ‘Nine Forces’). Devěstil stated orientation toward “life” rather than “art”. Poetism was synthesized in Cubo-Futurism, Dadaism, and Constructivism as well. Teige expanded the Constructivist base, set in the everyday practical world, with a hedonistic Epicureanism intended to sweep aside accumulated pain, tragedy, and pessimism.[4] Nevertheless, Švankmajer developed his Poetism with dark, gothic humor, broadening object relationship with extraordinary imagination and anthropomorphic magic. In such object relations, the idea of consumption is repetitively represented in Švankmajer’s films. Here often can be seen the cannibalistic, sadomasochist scenes. As Marcel Duchamp said, ‘ Eros, c’est la vie!’ The meaning is metaphysical, psychological rather than physically sexual. In the Introduction of Counterpleasures, Karmen MacKendrick comments on the sadomasochism: ‘Sade and Masoch do not give us pornography in any usual sense; they make use of pornographic techniques to problematize pleasure and unfold startling possibilities of language and narrative structure.[5]

Anti-modernism

    

    Sexuality in infantile world for Victorian society was an issue of taboo to talk about. The situation must be tough for Lewis Carroll to suffer from the reproaches of the society against his creations with the implications of sexuality. The innocence of childhood was a political statement for the Victorian authorities to discard the social decadence and advance the moral spirit. As we mentioned above, this utopian mentality is pseudoinnocence. The innocence might be regarded as the reaction against modernity. In parallel with the progression of modern society, contemplation of the past can be reflected in the passion to reactivate the historical style in fashion, furniture, architecture, and so on. Such a retrospect has been practiced in the mentality of French Surrealists in a very different way. Experiencing the trauma of WWI, they didn’t observe merely the phenomenon of modernism in Paris, juxtaposing the historical sites and modern architecture, but also the deserted and dreadful ruins destroyed by armed forces. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) points out that ruins have been viewed as allegories for a long time, and endowed with many historical meanings. For Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and André Breton (1896-1966), such a place could evoke the uncanny and convulsive beauty. In Švankmajer’s animations, he favored old and shabby places, especially, which left some historical imprints. The same with ‘Něco z Alenky’, Švankmajer transforms an old apartment into the Wonderland with the impeccable treatment of image montage. This kind of place disturbs children’s mind more than modern architecture.

  

     Not only obsessed with historical ruins, Surrealists are Baudelaire’s flâneurs, wandering between fashionable commodities and outmoded daily objects as well. They prefer to collect the latter for inspiring their imagination and transforming Surrealist objects. These objects are magical-circumstantial, projecting artists’ erotic desire. With Freudian Fetishism, this object relationship can be examined as the substitute of mother penis, the disavowal of the castration. Inversely, with Marxist Fetishism, the commodity is overvalued owing to the seductive images of advertising, being anthropomorphized and mythicized. Freudian Fetishism and Marxist Fetishism both are in the psychoanalytical level, but the former derives more from the inner impulse and the latter is aroused by external imagery. Taking introspective attitude, the Surrealists discover the marvelous in the antiqued objects, found in the flee market, old attic, grandmother’s closet, and so on. This might give a nostalgic sense in their creations, but Surrealists are not necessarily anti-modernists. With the ‘paranoiac–criticism’, Salvador Dali imposes his own castration anxiety on the objects, unveiling his traumas; he also turns his fetish into large-scale practical design objects, like Wae West’s Lip sofa (1937). In Švankmajer’s case, we don’t see this contradictory development in his works, where he deploys the old things persistently. Švankmajer underscores the thingness with tactile frames to imply that they are used by human being and leave the traces of sentiments; sometimes they are more alive than human beings. More alive the objects are, more solitude the human being experience. After the industrialism, capitalism, militarism, totalitarianism and communism, Švankmajer might take pessimistic attitude to modern society and intend to abandon himself in his object microcosm.

Animate Puppetry

     Besides the historical ruins or destroyed buildings, Surrealists think the mannequins have the power to evoke uncanniness. As anxiety invades our psyche, the lifeless objects around us might be animated. With the similar form of human being, Švankmajer make puppets alive with some magical laws: they still retain the dispositions of puppets, such as their movement, their facial expression, but they can fulfill live persons cannot realize, such as being deformed, distorted, but still alive. In ‘ Neco z Alenky’, Alice shrinks or grows her own body continuously with the help of potions, tarts, and mushrooms. Švankmajer shows the transformation of Alice’ s body imageries among a live actress, a china doll and a huge puppet. The image of a china doll implies the impossible body that Alice becomes –smaller or bigger than her actual scale. Švankmajer knows how to employ puppet images extraordinarily as a signifier as the fulfillment of something unrepresentable, unspeakable. Jan Švankmajer has developed his creative career after the College of Applied Arts in Prague, and later the Department of Puppetry. Film-making for Laterna Magika Theatre (1960) allowed Švankmajer to become one of great animation directors by means of traditional puppetry, rather than with the help of the advanced three-dimensional technology. Since the eighteenth century, marionette theatres have been popular around the Czech territories. Behind this national icon might be hidden some subversive ideas. Švankmajer spoke frankly in the interview with Peter Hamas:

I wrote somewhere that puppets are firmly anchored in my mental morphology and so I keep going back to them in my work as if to something which signifies certainly for me in relation to the world around me. I create my golems to protect me from the pogroms of reality.[6] 

Both Lewis Carroll and Jan Švankmajer were suffered from the severe censorship of the authorities, they intend to find an exit for freedom of imagination and choose the theme of fantasy. Lewis created his fantasy literature, and Švankmajer puppet theatre in his animations. However, do children not recognize or question these strange expressions in it when they read or see their works?

No more pretend innocence!

   

    Psychologically, children are never what they should be as we adults assume. Although we’ve been children, we’ve lost not only the memory of infancy, but also the sensibilities of children to perceive what we cannot ‘see’. The power of imagination will be exerted to the extreme during the childhood. In the debut of ‘Něco z Alenky’, Švankmajer shows us an Alice with active expression. Alice cannot sit still with her sister reading by the river, and keeps on throwing stone onto water.  She bothers her sister’s reading and gets upset for being beaten in the hand by her sister. Alice always wants to disturb the silence and expects something unusual to be presented in front of her. She gives us a hint, ‘ you must close your eyes, otherwise you won’t see anything.’ The magic that Alice expects occurs in a small room full of ordinary objects, which may be crucial in this Wonderland: the drawing with the image of a rabbit and a dog on the wall, upside-down placed puppets, dolls, a stuffed rabbit in the exhibit box, etc. Alice gets bored with the dead silence, and throws stone into a teacup filled with tea, stirring liquid as she did at the debut scene. This might imply Alice’s sadist inclination onto the surface of object. Then she noticed something weird happens by ‘hearing’ the sound that the stuffed rabbit breaks through the glass box by pulling out the nail. Suddenly White Rabbit dresses up like a baroque chancellor, and worries about being late with a glimpse at his watch. In the text, White Rabbit always reminds himself of belatedness, implying that time waits for no man, but time doesn’t be experienced in the Wonderland as the reality. It means timelessness in the fantastic kingdom, in parallel with the Lacanian concept of the Real, where the desire accommodates. Oddly, the watch here functions only with butter: as White Rabbit opens his pocket watch, he has to lick the butter on the watch to remind himself what time it is; the Mad Hare lays a watch on butter during the Tea Party, and then Mad Hatter wears it on his chest. Švankmajer’s visionary expression of time is reminiscent of Dali’s soft watch, the image of melting cheese. Comparison of time to provisions refers to the time consuming mechanism of Wonderland. In the Wonderland, White Rabbit is the only one who has time consciousness in the Wonderland, and awakens Alice’s (although she is not anxious about losing time at all). The subject matter of time is so crucial in Lewis Carroll’s text to imply Carroll’s resistance against growing up. The character of ‘Alice’ is the projection of his alter-ego, and the creatures, the events Alice meets is the signifiers derived from Carroll’s preference for mathematics and puzzles. As the nineteenth-century literature researcher Harold Bloom comments:

Carroll evades both sadomasochism and the Romantic erotic quest by identifying himself with the seven-year-old Alice. Wonderland has only reality principle, which is that time has been murdered. Nothing needed be substituted for time, even though only madness can murder time.’ [7]

The scenario of the Mad Tea Party is arranged to show how to kill the time, execute the same activity repeatedly, like obsessive-compulsive disorder. Going mad here implies the lost of signification in the Symbolic, for the Real cannot be recognized by the Other in the Symbolic. As Žižek accounts, ‘fantasy always includes the ‘impossible gaze’ of the Other, which makes the subject assume that its ‘ substance’ has been there from time immemorial and it cannot resituate itself.’[8] However, the Symptom that Lacan later acclaimed is the solution of the Real that we cannot return to. The Symptom is a meaningless fragment of the Real, which appears in the most devaluated parts of our daily life. Inversely, Žižek suggests we isolate the symptom from the context by virtue of which it exerts its power of fascination, to force us to see it in its utter stupidity, as a meaningless fragment of the Real. Žižek cited from Lacan, ‘ change the precious gift into a piece of shit’ (Seminar XI) [9] In ‘ Dimension of Dialogues’, Švankmajer allows the audience to view such strange destruction of object relationship; in ‘Něco z Alenky’, he casts a spell on objects with ‘dark alchemy’, turning the ordinary to the extraordinary, the familiar to the uncanny. Švankmajer created Alice as a fearless child, following after White Rabbit, as if she has known White Rabbit will bring her to the Wonderland, which will satisfy her desire and do no harm to her. This fantasy is the Lacanian Real, where the pleasure principle goes beyond the reality principle. Therefore, the Wonderland becomes a consuming machine, equipped with weapons, such as desk drawers, ink liquid, tarts, mushrooms, etc. The scene of a drawer consuming the body of Alice, just like a snake swallowing an elephant, is incredible. The Pleasure principle drives away the pain, so Alice sneaks into the drawer without any hesitation to chase after White Rabbit. The rational mind won’t work here until Alice has been through a series of body exploration, when Alice refuses to eat anything after the battle with the army composed of Bosch-like creatures. During this journey of body exploration, Alice repeatedly transforms from normal to small size, to larger scale backwardly. Once Alice consumes the above-mentioned objects, she can overcome the difficulty she confronts. Alice is not a consuming machine, like the mechanism of Wonderland, but securing self-identity from the body transformation through sadomasochist trials.

Repression is the Impulse of Civilization

     The idea of sadomasochism originated from Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), whose thoughts were regarded the most subversive, most libertine in the time of Enlightenment. Even when Guillaume Apollinaire (1880- 1918) published a selection of Sade’s work in 1909, he proclaimed Sade as ‘the freest spirit that ever lived’[10]. For Sade’s erotic novels with the philosophical discourses against Catholic Church went beyond the reality principle, the authorities regarded Marquis as the most dangerous enemy to break up the belief what they construct according to the rationalism. Sexuality, violence, and criminality expressed with the most obscene words by Sade put him in jail for twenty-seven years. The philosophy of Sade is absolutely not inhuman, but subject to natural laws, including the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos).

Freud conceived the psychic apparatus as a homeostatic system invested with quantities of energy and regulated by the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, developing the theories: “the pleasure principle” and “the reality principle’. As for the former, the system seeks to release the tension of accumulated excitations and to promote equilibrium of psychic energies. Evacuation or constancy and stability of energy were taken to the basic aims of psychic life. Under “ the reality principle”, under the operation of which tensions might be tolerated for a time in order to be more satisfactorily discharged later on, qualified the functioning of the pleasure principle but in no way departed from its basic logic.[11] The death instinct shows the destruction of nature, which might be judged as the negative force (the evil) by the Catholic Church. Sade negates the idea that God creates this world, and the world will rotate itself on and on under the domain of God. Sade denounces that God blocks alternative discourses and condemns them as the curses of Satan. The pleasure principle was fully realized in Sadean literature: in ‘The Philosophy in the Bedroom’(1795), Sade acclaimed:

It is only by exploring and enlarging the sphere of his tastes and whims, it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses’ pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of Man, maybe able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life.[12]

Sade treats eroticism as poetic violence, liberating his imagination to live on. We can observe that in Jan Švankmajer’s creations he takes the same stand with Sade, making the film ‘ The Conspirators of Pleasure’ to make homage to him. As Švankmajer said, ‘I see erotic arousal as one of the basic needs of creative result.’ [13]

In the prominent article ‘ The force of imagination’ on Jan Švankmajer, František Dryje commented the Sadean influence on the artist:

Whether a film by Švankmajer contains black farce, blasphemy or tragedy, the erotic meaning is always shown in its negative aspect, which in psychological terms can most probably be read as unrecognized sadomasochistic aggression. The destructive obsession which permeates all Švankmajer’s films is now somewhat hesitatingly exposed: the destruction of the object of love and, at the same time, self-destruction as a defining dominant feature of the erotic relationship.[14]

Švankmajer’ favored Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland since his childhood, for along Alice’s journey his imagination was set free during the Communist censorship. The Czechoslovakian authorities at that time might not be familiar with the implicit signification of this Victorian literature, or intelligent enough to perceive the sadomasochism. They just despised it as the fairytale for children!

   In the article ‘The Liberating Potential of the Fantastic in Contemporary Fairy Tales for Children’, Jack Zipes contradicts the shallow judgment of the authorities :

On a psychological level, through the use of unfamiliar (unheimlich) symbols, the fairy tale liberates readers of different age groups to return to repressed ego disturbances; that is, to return to familiar (heimlich) primal moments in their lives, but the fairy tale cannot be liberating ultimately unless it projects on a conscious, literary, and philosophical level the objectification of home as real democracy under nonalienating conditions. This means not that the liberating fairy tale must have a moral, doctrinaire resolution, but that to be liberating it must reflect a process of struggle against all type of suppression and authoritarianism and posit various possibilities for the concrete realization of utopia. Otherwise, the words liberating and emancipatory have no aesthetical categorical substance.[15]

Resorting to a political statement –real democracy, liberation can exist only in such an utopia. In the Civilization and its discontents, Freud declared that human history is a history of being repressed. This means the impulse of civilization is repression. While people are benefited from civilization, they are exploited by civilization. The contradictory character of civilization makes the existence of human beings sadomasochistic. Marquis de Sade, Lewis Carroll, and Jan Švankmajer, they all confronted the extreme repression from their own authorities. Sade uses the most radical measure, obscene language, to curse the almighty Authority –the God. In the metaphysical level, this linguistic attack is much stronger than the French Revolution leaded by Napoleon. No jail could lock Sade’s free mind and his literature liberated the ‘enlightened’ Western world as well. In the name of God, sexuality is an unspeakable sin; Sade apprehends that sexuality is human nature, men are hedonists.

Sigmund Freud compares sexuality to consumption, ‘the fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a ‘sexual instinct,’ on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition, that is of hunger.’[16] This hunger might be grown out metaphysically by the unbearable solitude, which devours the self completely. If Sade is not so cannibalistic, so egoist, he might be the victim of Bastille Prison, suffered from the cannibalism of the Catholicism. As Maurice Blanchot comments, Sade’s philosophy is one of self-interest, of absolute egoism.  Each of us must do exactly as he pleases, each of us is bound by one law alone, that of his own pleasure. This mortality is based upon the primary fact of absolute solitude. Sade has stated it, and repeated it, in every conceivable form:

Nature wills that we be born alone, there is no real contact or relationship possible between one person and another. The only rule of conduct for me to follow, therefore, is to prefer whatever affects me pleasurably and, conversely, to hold as naught anything which, as a result of my preferences, may cause harm to others. The greatest pain inflicted on there is of less account than my own pleasure. Little do I care if the price I have to pay for my least delight is an awesome accumulation of atrocious crimes, for pleasure flatters me, it is within, while the effects of crime, being outside me, do not affect me. [17]

With such a subversive attitude, Sade rebels against the whole world, which must yield obedience to his imaginative violence. Violence is the expression of the Sadean power, since Sade insights that the violence is also part of Nature. In the Old Testament, the Church praises the Creation of World positively as the miracle of God, but never points out that the violence happens during this chaotic process of Creation. Sade exposes that Nature has destructive force as human being possesses the self-destructive inclination. Sade says, ‘ Since all men are equal in the eyes of Nature , I therefore have the right, because of this identity, not to sacrifice myself for the preservation of others, their ruin being indispensable to my happiness’  Sade discerned that power was a social category, that was part and parcel of the organization of society such as it existed both before and after the Revolution. But he also believes that power (like solitude) is not merely a state but a choice and a conquest, and that only he is powerful who by his own will and energy knows how to make himself so.[18] In the Reality Principe, human beings have suffered too much from the moral teachings of the Church and the ethic statements of the Royalty; the id recesses to the ego, which make balance between the id and the superego. For Sade, his own happiness is more important than anything since pain inflicted by the authorities is no way out and he has to liberate his thoughts with writings. The language is Sade’s weapon against the authorities. The authorities always repress people’s voice and teach what they should think and say; they cannot allow the power to be taken over by people. But Sade has the power to choose being his own Master, no matter how the authorities are powerful and restricted.

Although Sade understands the power of Nature can be destructive, he has great passion to embrace Nature. His embrace will eliminate the boundaries between the self and the other. The absolute egoist is he who is able to transform everything disagreeable into something likeable, everything repugnant into something attractive. Like the bedroom philosopher, he declares : “ I love everything, I enjoy everything, my desire is to commingle all kinds and contraries.” And this is why Sade, in his Les 120 Journées, has set himself the gigantic task of drawing up the complete inventory of anomalies and aberrations, listing very kind of human possibility. In order to be at the mercy of nothing, it was necessary for him to experience everything. Sade: ‘You shall know nothing if you have not known everything, and if you are timid enough to stop with what is nature, Nature will elude your grasp forever.’[19] For surviving, he has to ‘mise en scène’ destruction to others. Repetitively, massacre in large quantity  proves his power. For Sadean heroes, nothing should be shameful; nothing moral can bind them up. He condemns God as nothing, so that he can transgress everything interdictory. 

Accused of pornographic writer, Sade’s eroticism is a dream eroticism, since it expresses itself almost exclusively in fiction; but the more this eroticism is imagined, the more it requires a fiction from which dream is exclude, a fiction wherein debauchery can be enacted and lived), and although Sade does however, and in an exceptional sense, exalt the imaginary, it is because he is wonderfully well aware of the fact that basis for many an imperfect crime is some impossible crime that only the imagination can comprehend.[20] If Sade’s filthy thoughts were kept in private and release themselves for pleasure, Sade wouldn’t be retained in jail for most of his lifetime. Issued publicly, Sade discloses the darkest side of human consciousness, widening the horizon of the public onVice, renounced by the Church for several hundred years in the name of God. The rebellious child despises God totally, for he takes over the power of Nature. Sade is the ‘superman’ that Nietzsche called. This superman may be regarded as a tragic hero since his struggle ends with the Bastille prison. Actually, Sade never fails his ideological revolution, which influences the development of Western modern philosophy, literature, and history of art, inspiring Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Artaud, Freud, Lacan, Dali, and Švankmajer. As Man Ray (1890-1976) illustrated Sade as his own projected image of the Bastille Prison, such a representation means that Sade’s free spirit is released and even becomes the Bastille itself. Sade is not the victim of the history of being repressed, but the savior of the history of being repressed. As Michel Foucault points out, ‘ Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros, but a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination.’ [21]

S/M imagination

The ‘syndromes’ of sadism and masochism were coined by nineteenth- century German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) in his study Psychopathia Sexualis (1885). He drew from his definitions from the names of Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895). Sade’s work contains a phenomenal catalogue of acts of sexually motivated torture and cruelty, while Sacher-Masoch’s most famous work Venus in Furs (1869) is the story of a young man, Severin, desperate to be enslaved to a cold, domineering, cruel mistress. People might doubt how children could have sexual consciousness of their own bodies, and pose a question such as ‘ Is sexuality a transcendental experience?’ Based on Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’, Lacan developed his most important theory ‘ mirror stage’, in which he argued that an infant will bear an aggressive narcissism on his body, for an infant fantasizes its own body with the fragmented images in the Imaginary. He only can picture its whole body through the mirror, but recognizes this mirror image mistakenly as someone else. The infant keeps on making body dialectics between the fragmented image and the complete mirror image; later he recognizes the image in the mirror is namely his own. Before this identity process has been done, the infant takes aggressive attitude to imagine its body to be attacked. Lacan describes the degree of “aggressive disintegration” that torments the inchoate ego in “the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions”. For Lacan, aggression is a derivative of the death drive while aggressivity is the acting out of aggression through the Symbolic and Imaginary orders.[22] In ‘Něco z Alenky’, Švankmajer shows this concept that Alice is attacked by the Bosch-like creatures commanded by White Rabbit while she intrudes a toy house. Drinking liquid, she transforms again her body in large scale, which the toy house cannot accommodate. Alice crouches awkwardly her own body, viewing outside the window with an image of her head. She tries to stretch her hand out of the window to push the climbing White Rabbit off the ladder. She even talks to herself, ‘I hope I haven’t forgot how to kick’. These words may give a hint that she gets uncanny feeling about her body in large scale, moreover, which is pressed under this tiny roof. Finally, the stones White Rabbit throws onto her turn into tarts, so Alice can get away from the uncanny body after eating a tart.

    The idea of cannibalism is in parallels with the sadomasochist treatment to Alice’s body. Consciously or not, Alice follows after White Rabbit and takes a marvelous but cruel journey, filled with cannibalistic ceremony: being consumed by the desk drawer (masochism), taking potions, tarts, mushrooms to oscillate between body transformations (sadomasochism). Alice plays the magical game repeatedly and acquires pleasure. Freud’s repetition theory might explain this behavior. Inspired by ‘ fort-da’ game, an infant finds out that mother is absent and then gets uneasy, but for a moment she comes back, infant turns uneasiness into pleasure. When this condition occurs repeatedly, baby learns mother will be back. Baby just goes through small pain about mother’s absence; then baby will receive more pleasure than pain. Taking the two extremes (pleasure/pain , Eros/Thanatos, Sadism/Masochism) as a must for life, cannibalism is no more inhuman massacre, but the human sacrificial ceremony to continue the sustainable life for the world spinning around (as the belief in Aztec civilization).

    Švankmajer employs the idea of repetition in the structure of his fantastic like the eternal return. From the first scene in Alice’s cabin, which hints that Alice expects the Wonderland experience, she knows White Rabbit will escape from her, or attack her, but she still wants to follow him. Repetition happens in the scene with the Mad Tea Party. Mad Hatter and Mad March Hare keep on shouting ‘No room! No room!’ to Alice, but Alice still joins them to have some tea. (‘ No room’ means that Alice doesn’t belong to this world?) Mad Hatter demands a clean cup, so he keeps on changing the seat around the table. Mad Hare and Alice follow his movement to change another seat beside him. Made of wood, Mad Hatter flows out the tea he drinks. He never stops his drinking, for the tea is always leaking off. So does Mad March Hare: his left eye always looses, and his body functions by fixing the spring. The Hare puts butter on watch for functioning, and eats the butter pressed out of watch cover. This repetition calls the end till the Mad Hatter hangs seven watches on his body, and no more cleans cups to drink. Such repetition discloses the substance of our everyday life. From void to fullness, presence to absence, the impulse we acquire from the desire to overcome the lack. George Bataille (1897-1962) had deep insight in the Sadean philosophy, that human life has no absolute rupture from this life, different from the conventional idea about life and death. Metaphysically, life can be regarded as many small circles of life and death. Human beings experience the anxiety of castration complex, just like being released and return to the embrace of earth. After this little death, he will regain the energy of life and launch another circle of life and death. Repetition employed in art creation can evoke the infantile imagination through the sadomasochism of life instinct and death instinct.

The rule of repetition calls for the recovering power. As long as the creatures in the Wonderland get wounded or the Wonderland itself is intruded by Alice, Švankmajer cures the wounds by sewing with the needles and threads (the cuts in White Rabbit’s hand, the rupture on lizard-like Bill’s body, or the closed eye of the sleeping Caterpillar), or by filming with stop-motions (Alice breaks out the bucket, falling into another space). This recovering power is as magical as the transforming power on the body scale of Alice. These two powers belong to the Real, to the fantasy that the viewers cannot live in, but desire for. The image of sewing wounds is imposed on the puppet, not so shocking as the famous image of slicing the eye in the surrealist film ‘ Chien Andalou’, for the latter is presented the eye of a girl, which montages with a cow’s instead. The eyes of viewers are masochistically wounded by this violent image; inversely, Švankmajer arouses sadistically the viewers’ imagination to make them believe the magical curing power.

The sadomasochism of Alice’s body allows the viewers to have a marvelous visionary journey, but not take pity for Alice’s sufferance. The viewers understand well that this is a fantasy created by Švankmajer’s deployment of a live actress, a  china doll and a huge paper puppet. For Carroll’s readers, the story about Alice’s body transformation parallels the imagination of Lewis Carroll and Alice. Alice is the incarnation of Lewis Carroll in the fantasy literature, going beyond the Pleasure principle. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek explained that fantasy is a solution for artists to deal with hot-potato questions:

Fantasy functions as a construction, as an imaginary scenario filling out of void, the opening of the desire of the Other: by giving us a definite answer to the question: “ What does the Other want? ,” it enables us to evade the unbearable deadlock in which the Other wants something from us, but we are at the same time incapable of translating this desire of the Other into a positive interpellation, into a mandate with which to identify.[23]

On one hand, Lewis Carroll resists against time and wants to enjoy the childhood pleasure through the avatar of ‘Alice’; on the other hand, he confronts the prudery moral enhancement of returning to innocence by the Victorian authorities and hides his subversive idea from criticism.

With the expertise of mathematics and psychics, Carroll codifies his characters and the events; his readers may not notice it and even decode it. When Švankmajer adapts Carroll’s text, the decodification is not his task. What matters to a creator is the inner spirituality. For Švankmajer, the fantastic is a way to discover the profound human nature under the rationalist repression and unleash his subversive ideas behind the uncanny scenarios. As Švankmajer mentioned that creative force is an erotic arousal, this idea might give him great influence on how he expresses his thoughts in his animations. As Švankmajer has the sadomasochism mise en scène, he rehearsals his own violence implicitly with the marionettes, objects around a live actor/ actress, like a child alone in a room, talking to his inanimate playmates (toy, dolls, objects, etc.). Švankmajer’s solitude might not equal to this child’s, for he experienced the subjectivisation and intended to express his liberal, critical thoughts to attack the authorities he faced. The animate/ inanimate violence is the weapon that the artist can master. Švankmajer’s solitude is not to be understood as the ideological revolution, but as a trick for children. His ideas must be expressed in the democratic country, where his voice is no more silent, able to be heard without any misunderstanding.

Nevertheless, for Alice as a child, that everyone can have this growing experience, tries to build up relations with the other. The relations might be erotic, that child regards the other as a love object to imagine the oneness with it. In Death and Sexuality, Bataille wrote that eroticism results from the yearning to transcend the boundaries of the isolated individual by merging passionately into a predifferentiated oneness. [24] The sense of oneness originates from the prenatal experience that an embryo in maternal body enjoys the ocean-like jubilance. The embryo with mother has no sense of subjectivity. Even a baby born out of maternal body holds the trauma of birth, refusing to cut the umbilical cord of mother. He doesn’t want to be alone in the world. The solitude might be uncanny, so that the impulse to go back to his prenatal home (mother’s womb) will be his desire for all his life. Being oneness, a child will free his imagination to animate the inanimate objects around him. This might be uncanny for an adult, but psychologically necessary for a child. The secondary narcissism projects the self onto these objects, bursting out many ‘I’. ‘I’ may become the opposite self, not-‘I’. Object relations theorists argue that the character of one’s first contact with others in childhood plays a formative role in fostering sadomasochistic propensities. In contrast to Freud, who stressed sexual and aggressive drives and instincts and linked sadomasochism to conflicts deriving from the oedipal stages of development, object relations theorists conceptualized the pre-oedipal period as most central to the development of later sadomasochistic tendencies.[25] After the repetitive dialectics, ‘I’ and not-‘I’ must reach to a consensus that ‘I’ and not-‘I’ both belong to the subject, and none can be negated the value of its existence. Without someone else legitimizing my existence by recognizing and acknowledging me, the unimaginable would occur: “ I” as a separate person would have no meaning and would feel alone terrifyingly alone. I might experience emptiness so profound as to feel as though I no longer exist. In order to be, properly speaking. Alive, an individual must thus relate and feel connected to others and consequently to the social world) in such a way that brings recognition of the self and the not-self, “ me” and those who are “not-me”. This connection is by no means of casual import: literally as well as figuratively, it may be experienced as a life-and-death matter. [26]

Rather than the psychoanalytical point of view, Michel Foucault thinks about sadomasochism in a more political way:

One can say that sadomasochism is the eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations. What strikes me with regard to S/M is how it differs from social power. What characterized power is the fact that it is a strategic relation that has been stabilized through institutions. So the mobility in power relations has been limited, and there are strongholds that are very, very difficult to suppress because they have been institutionalized and are now very pervasive…All that means that the strategic relations of power are made rigid. On this point, the sadomasochism game is very interesting because they it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid.[27]

So the sadomasochistic imagination was inaugurated as a strategy –one perhaps derious of and/ or compelled to work through, subjectivity subjected to increasing microtechnologies of surveillance, control and coercion. [28] Dealing with the violence of sadomasochism, John Noyes observes social relations as a ritual or performance and proposes that sadomasochism is not an expression of violence, it is socially determined strategy for dealing with violence, a set of codified performances and rituals. These rituals play on the violence inherent in the social codification of subjectivity, dramatizing the moments when this violence becomes visible. If we are to understand sadomasochistic performances, we have to map them onto the landscape of social conventions they are intended to negotiate. [29]

Be your own Master! 

    In the journey of exploring the world, infant possesses the instinct to touch with hand, and to consume with mouth. In ‘Něco z Alenky’, Alice has a great battle with those weird creatures; while White Rabbit intends to trap Alice in the pot full of milk, she appears suddenly within a huge puppet, and Alice breaks through the paper puppet as if butterfly rushed out of cocoon. The relations between the ‘real’ body and its primitive synthetic creation in the guise of a puppet or marionette demonstrate the body’s resistance to become automata. Playing out tensions between functions and performance, Svankmajer reveals how utilitarian notions of control could be subverted by the spontaneous art of performance, using the live action “ body” to reject the rigidity and limits of its representation as automata.  She told herself in mind, ‘ No more cake this time’. Since then, she has the free will to decide what she should do. This change can also be seen in the following scene: Caterpillar discloses Alice the secret of mushroom, ‘ one side can make you grow, the other side will make you shrink’. Alice chooses to consume a mushroom to examine Caterpillar’s indication, but not to touch it or in other sensual behavior. When she eats it, the transformation doesn’t work anymore on herself, but the tree in front of her. Alice is no more an object, but forms the subject’s consciousness gradually. Alice uses her imagination to launch the sadomasochist relations with objects in the Wonderland; the strategic relations that Foucault accounts function here. Alice shifted the passive role of White Rabbit’s follower to active position of manipulating objects. Alice engages sadistically the external world with mushroom to manipulate the scale of trees and toy house, instead of transforming her body masochistically.

The theme of consuming is much more important in Švankmajer’s ‘ Něco z Alenky’ than in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Švankmajer’s Alice might explore this Wonderland by the instinct of consuming, but absolutely not for nutrition, rather than escape from her current situation. This magical land seduces Alice continuously with edibles: potion, tart appears suddenly in the desk drawer; the stones with which White Rabbit attacks Alice turn into tarts. Whenever Alice meets the difficulties, she consumes the food the Wonderland brings about and solves the problem of physical impossibility. A child intends to grow up like an adult, who can do anything as he wishes, but only a tiny child can break in such a fanciful world. Alice becomes a china doll in small size, equal to the scale of the creatures in the Wonderland. Nevertheless, White Rabbit mistakes Alice as his servant Mary Ann; Alice is menaced by the violent attacks of the weird creatures. It seems that Alice allows the magical power of the Wonderland on her own body willingly. The power makes Alice to play the role of servant, but Alice denies White Rabbit’s calling. The self-identity of Alice is awakened at this moment. Taking a role of master instead, Alice shows her active attitude to the forthcoming events in the Wonderland.

The idea of the double is obvious shown in Švankmajer’s ‘ Něco z Alenky’. The director employs a china doll, a live actress, and a huge puppet to present the image of Alice. When Alice shifts beingness among them, she tries to search for her own ideal-ego. Alice denied that beingness as long as she can’t overcome the difficulties. Through repetitive denials, Alice found self-identity to satisfy who she is. The double she beats is the shadow she wants to get rid of. Although Švankmajer presents a scene in the debut with Alice sitting by the river, he has no intention to correspond literally to Lacan’s ‘ Mirror Stage’ theory, showing the narcissistic reflection of Alice on river. Lacan’s infant doesn’t recognize the image of the self, but the image of the other instead. In a fairytale, a hero usually gets into a fantasyland through a mirror, or the enclosed closet. Švankmajer arranges the common cabin where Alice lives to emphasize the idea that the canniest thing happens in our daily life, explored by the untamed eyes. Using imagination, Alice confronts her own double and the creature she makes up.

Challenge Authority

In the Wonderland, White Rabbit always says, ‘ I shall be late !’ What is he worried about? In the end, we find out that he serves the court of the magical kingdom and worries about being late for the Queen’s Party. No matter White Rabbit does harm to Alice, she still goes after him and says ‘ Sir, please’. White Rabbit represents the signifier of the lack in the Real, seducing Alice to meet her desire –knowledge, to build up her own relationship with external world. Formally, Alice receives the wordless invitation to Queen’s party, and then she views the cruel and unreasonable scene of the court life – dual or killing. As Queen gets unpleased, she commands ‘ Off with their heads!’ all the time. White Rabbit executed those named by Queen with his big scissor as Queen’s slaughterman. Švankmajer creates the images of court members by poker cards: Queen, King, Knights, etc. Queen asks Alice to play croquet with her. Alice holds the card image of flamingo as a croquet pole to play with sewing-kit ball, but later turning into a hedgehog, and flamingo-pole into a live chicken. Then Alice is accused of eating the tarts by Queen and King, and is forced to respond all the questions according to the text that White Rabbit gave her. Alice cannot have her own voice in this court, and all the judge members composed of the puppets (Mad Hatter, Mad March Hare, etc.). With puppet images, Švankmajer implies the meaning of manipulation and blindness under the threat of the authorities, that they agree with Queen’s paranoiac decision ‘ off with their heads!’. Nevertheless, Alice denies what Queen and King accuse of – eating Queen’s tarts. First of all, Alice refuses to respond their inquiry according to the textbook White Rabbit gave her. She doesn’t want to make any apology, because she thinks nothing wrong she did. Queen and King are furious at her negation, and still sentence her to death. So the castration complex arouses as Alice enters the royal palace to meet Queen and King. Once she meets the Symbolic, the behavior she did might not be regarded reasonable. Since then, she feels the power of transgression to negate all the authorities accuses of. Keeping on shaking her head, Alice is finally awakened from her dream. In the end, Alice only can find White Rabbit’s scissor in the glass box, and reminds us, ‘ He is late as usual. I think I’ll cut his head off’. She becomes the heroine to terminate the Medusa’s head, overcoming her castration complex. Alice is not anymore that innocent girl before meeting the Wonderland, she is a conqueror over her fantasy.

The Absence of ‘Cheshire Cat’

In ‘Něco z Alenky’, there is no character of ‘ Cheshire Cat’, which plays a very important role in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, unpleasant to many inhabitants of Wonderland. With a grin smile, Cheshire Cat is the only companion friendly to Alice and always gives advices to her the direction in the Wonderland through nonsensical dialogues. Cheshire Cat reminds Alice of her own cat Dinah, comforting her solitude. Jan Švankmajer intends to enforce Alice’s lonely battle against self-destruction before forming self-identity. In addition, he may consider Czech children might not recognize British cultural meaning for such a cat.  Harold Bloom states, ‘ That ontological grin is the emblem of the Cheshire Cat’s madness, and is the prelude to the Mad Tea Party of the next chapter, which in turns is emblematical of the Alice books, since they can be described, quite accurately, as a mad tea party, rather than a nonsensical tea party.’ Lionel Trilling spoke of ‘ the world of nonsense, the curious invention of the English of the nineteenth century, of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear,’ and confessed that, critically, nonsense seemed to him inexplicable: ‘ One of the mysteries of art, perhaps as impenetrable as why tragedy gives pleasure, is why nonsense commands so fascinated an attention, and why, when it succeeds, it makes more than sense.’ [30] Rather than nonsense, Jan Švankmajer created the mad Wonderland into which infuses his own sarcasm, the projection of his living world. Without right to give voice, such a world is inhuman but full of absurdness.

And, perhaps most significant for the Alice books, Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization, argues that the nineteenth-century conception of a person judged insane appropriated the unfortunate individual to the status of childhood. Madness came to be regarded as a corollary of failed development, rather than a condition of animality, as it had been in the eighteenth century. This was yet another way of equating the child and the adult in the period; it meant no special protection, no in loco parentis, on the part of institutions.[31] For children, equal treatment to adults means unequal condition. They are forced to adapt to adulthood earlier, without any shelter to take care of, probably exploited by this capitalist world. In consequence, children lose their precious imagination, exhausted with the struggle from the miserable world. It is understandable why the Victorian authorities preached society with the idea of innocence, although children’s imagination is not taken into their political consideration. The absence of ‘ Cheshire Cat’ is the presence of the problem that Jan Švankmajer cares about children’s imagination. With the description of Lewis Carroll, Cheshire Cat supposes to accompany Alice in the woods, finding the direction to the Tea Party, or to show up as the illusion of floating cat head above the air while confronting Queen’s unreasonable demand ‘ Off with the head!’ Jan Švankmajer decapitated ‘ Cheshire Cat’ as a humane sadist in his adaptation to Carroll’s literature to highlight the crisis of the lack – infantile imagination in his century.

Who is this Alice?

   Jan Švankmajer beloved Lewis Carroll’s fantasy literature since his childhood. This character ‘Alice’ and what she meets later on will thrill audience on the threshold to the mentality of subversion. Talking about the sadomasochism of infantile imagination in Švankmajer’s animation ‘Něco z Alenky’, we must get clear this infantile imagination in this film belongs to Švankmajer, even he adapted from Lewis Carroll’ masterpiece, written in the Victorian period. For Carroll, nostalgia for childhood is “ a means of detachment and retreat from the adult world” in the poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass.[32] This nostalgia derives from the impulse of returning back to mother’s womb, for Carroll senses that this adult world he lives in without any innocence that the Victorian Authorities advocates. With the help of the role of ‘Alice’ and Alice Liddell, Carroll fled to a child world to compensate his nostalgia. ‘Victorian Child Cult’ is a prevailing phenomenon at his time, so a child nude with the image of cupid or angel can be viewed in the Victorian Christmas cards as a representation of innocence. So it is unfair to criticize Lewis as a paedophile for his child nude photography, absolutely detached from the historical context. Owing to the physical defect (stammer, asymmetrical physical form, etc.), he might have psychological obstacles to enter adult society. Giving lectures at school, he rather remains himself in a child world, not suffering the harsh judgment of the society.

As ‘Něco z Alenky’ was completed in 1988, the first opposition demonstration was permitted to take place in Prague, foretelling the forthcoming ‘Velvet Revolution’. Švankmajer created ‘Něco z Alenky’ to express his inner necessity, the will to create. On the contrary, Švankmajer doesn’t believe the innocence remains in children world; children have ability to sense the uncanny in our everyday life. What Švankmajer believes is necessary to replay children game, escaping from the censorship and recalling the trauma of spiritual imprisonment he experienced during his artistic career. Not only ‘Neco z Alenky’, ‘ Jabberwokcy’ and ‘ Down to the cellar’ are also referred to Švankmajer’s childhood experiences. Reality, dream, and memory fuse together here. Children’s world is full of toys, and their excessive energy needs to be discharged in fictional plays. As Freud notes, the uncanniness of the inanimate objects is often deflected in children’s tales through explicitly fantasy scenarios or through humor.[33] Living in such a suffocating political atmosphere, Švankmajer has to learn how to humor himself, to desublimate everything irrational to achieve the sublime. In the fantastic, Švankmajer wants to create the dystopia to mock the absurd existence and violent crime of totalitarian regime. If Lewis Carroll intends to build his utopia of innocence, Švankmajer is more radical to see through the fact of this unrepresentable ideal. As Harold Bloom pointed out, ‘ Wonderland is clearly no utopia, as a number of critics have insisted, but rather quickly assumes the same illogical and estrangement as the realm in which most human exist.’ [34] Carroll and Švankmajer both give the fluid representation of Wonderland with their own imagination: Carroll describes it with rhetoric, alternating literal nonsense. In visual representation, Švankmajer employs his will to create to treat the characters of Carroll’s text sadomasochistically , so that he can make the id beyond the Pleasure Principle to accentuate the very importance of White Rabbit in Švankmajer’s interpretation, to delete the role of Cheshire Cat, and neglect the implication of the flamingo’s name ‘Dodo’ to Charles Lutwidge Dodgon. Švankmajer shows no interests in nonsense as well, influenced by the mime performing style of the marionette theatre. The fluidity of metamorphose he creates is the achievement of the montage technique, transitions of shots, and artistic integration of collage/decollage.

Švankmajer talked about the inspiration from writers (such as Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe):

My relationship to these authors has always been based on memories of my personal experiences from ‘meeting them’. My memory in this respect is very selective. Therefore seemingly secondary, insubstantial circumstances play a considerable part in my interpretations of their works. Instead of objective, reverent adaptations I create subjective testimonies where the original author plays the role of some kind of detonator for a personal explosion. Despite this, I think that, with their inner sense, my subjective interpretations of Poe or Carroll swim in the same subterranean waters. For it is a question of capturing an identical world, its horror, dreams and infantilism.[35] 

The relationship between the animated images and the original text is quite close in spirit, but distant in aesthetics (uncanny for Švankmajer, classical for Carroll). Švankmajer actually found her heroine Kristýna Kohoutová extremely similar to Alice Lidell’s appearance and disposition, with blond hair instead. Švankmajer framed the mouth of ‘Alice’ as voice over, with the sense of ‘reading my lips’. In the style of postmodern cinema, Švankmajer employed montage to differentiate the filmic narrative and the meta-narrative. The former is how Švankmajer subjectively adapted Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’; the latter is the dialogue of the roles in this fantasy, represented only with the image of Alice’s moving mouth. This mouth could be of Lewis Carroll, also probably be of Švankmajer, or of any reader. As Lewis Carroll created the role ‘Alice’ in model of Alice Lidell, his creativity was set free through the paragraphs of the text. By means of Alice’s mouth, he said what he could not say. The authorities thought it’s for children, doing no harm. So did Švankmajer, moreover, he found puppetry as a form of shelter, a familiar cultural heritage for Czech people. Frame by frame, he disrupt the continuation of images by stop-motions, rapid editing, close-up. Švankmajer accentuates objects with the idea of ‘thing-in-itself’, showing abstract patterns of decay and strong tactile qualities. Combing the virtuous artistry of film and theater, Švankmajer uses montage technique and the stage-like setting to extend the viewers’ spatial imagination:

All my adaptations of classical literary works are not adaptations in the real sense of the word but purely an author’s interpretation (interpretation as a creative activity). This also applies for Poe, Alice and Faust. I do not follow the objective of the author but I follow my own. I am not interested in “ what the author wanted to say by this” but purely in how far a particular motif relates been part of my life, without regard to the fact that someone else thought them up. [36]

In ‘Něco z Alenky’, Švankmajer brings his imagination in full play, especially on these aggressive activities: the birds pecking Alice’s head, two birds uphold a bed as if the bed with wings is flying above the air, or White Rabbit prepares a huge pot with milk as a trap for Alice; as Alice turns into a huge puppet, the weird animals riding chariot drag her on the floor as the torture of dismembered alive. Out of his incredible imagination, Švankmajer creates the fanciful scene of a mouse cooking on Alice’s head just like an islet and cutting Alice’s hair as grass burnt for cooking. Like Dali’s paranoiac-criticism, Švankmajer takes the object lesson of metamorphoses subjectively: the bread with nails, baby monsters out of eggs, live worms out of a can, meat walking out from the pot, or key within a can; sewing kits turning into hedgehog. Entering a room full of holes on the floor, Alice takes a curious look at a hole as a voyeur to see if a socking dwells inside as a worm. When a moving sock is stepped carelessly by Alice, she breathes air into it and it comes into life instantly. After one of worms takes out a set of false teeth and false eyes, it turns into the Caterpillar.

No matter how different the author of the original and the film adaptor show in the formal expression, their work of art has the projection of the self. Carroll’s Alice continuously asks ‘who am I?’ to remind herself of not losing her own identity. Such an inquiry is so literal, no such proposition happens in Švankmajer’s animation to interfere the perceptions of viewers. This intention is also obvious in the scenario with Alice’s consumption, indicating ‘Drink me,’ or ‘Eat me’ in Carroll’s text, but not in Švankmajer’s work. Questioning self-identity, Carroll might be bothered by the Other’s assailing on his sexual child nudity. Independent upon the Other’s expectation, Carroll is faithful to his favorite subject matter – children. Flight into his rabbit-hole fantasy, Carroll enjoys the pleasure of the Real without the secular worries, but still hiding the codes and showing his castration complex when meeting Queen of Heart.

In the case of Carroll, the journey in the Wonderland is a dream work that he has something to tell to the authorities, to the public, but Queen of Heart ends only with “Off with their head”. The creation of artistic products, according to Freud, is a ‘phantasizing’ activity which provides man with compensation fro having renounced instinctive gratification .[37] In Švankmajer’s animation, the repetitive line the Queen of Heart recites is “Off with the head”. With more absurd sense, Švankmajer doesn’t create his animations in the mechanism of dreamwork, but in the reflection of his everyday life. Švankmajer takes the aggressive attitude, but latent expression to the Communist regime and totalitarianism. His Alice transforms into his shield to protect himself from the threat, and gives a portrayal of the director’s life experience – even body bound by the restricted space, but the subversive spirituality is as free as a bird. This apprehension should go through the dialectic process of the life instinct and the death instinct. The sexual instinct enjoys the power to master, so inflicting pain on the other brought the energy to live; the death instinct desires to be manipulated by the other, which inflict pain on the self, as a great pleasure. The sadomasochist pleasure is mutual, but cold and absurd. As Švankmajer’s Alice acts as a faceless doll, or kinetic automata, she takes all the external menaces, as it should be. Alice is obsessed with disclosing everything she can for she is afraid of something hidden. White Rabbit seduces her to launch this journey, which puts her in uncertain situation. Resigning herself to adversity, Alice is willing to try anything to go on this journey, so she consumes magical potion, tarts to treat her body sadomasochistically. In fact, Alice is a double child: sometime herself, sometime incarnated under the traits of Alice Liddell, in the narrative of Lewis Carroll, or the Alice of Kristina Kohoutova with Švankmajer. Švankmajer’s viewers cannot tell the boundaries of the character, mingled together into the image, which makes them feedback with their secondary creation in their mind. The childhood memory of viewers will be recalled by Švankmajer’s ‘Něco z Alenky’, enduring the uncanny trauma of sadomasochist imagination.

Uncovering Alice’s Cabin of Curiosity

 In ‘Něco z Alenky’, the cabin Alice lives in is not a sweet home with cozy air, but a home unlike a home. It shows the features of encasement of Švankmajer’s marionette theatre, and of estrangement of closet of curiosities. Just as Freudian concept of ‘The Uncanny’, literally in German, the word ‘Unheimlich’ means ‘unhomely’, the uncanny feeling gives viewers unlike at home even living in his familiar house. In Das Unheimliche (1914), Freud concludes: ‘ … an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.’ [38] The anxiety catalyzes this uncanny feeling. With the inner vision, viewers can see something hidden behind the common things. We can observe a child used to open drawers to make sure of nothing hiding inside, scared of being consumed by the closet. Freud compares the human body as a closet, a home, containing our unconscious, so Salvador Dali makes ‘ Venus de Milo with Drawers’ (1936), originated from the wrong interpretation of Edward James’ chest of drawers. For 1939 World’s Fair in New York , Dali designed the Surrealist Funhouse ‘ Dream of Venus’ in the organic form of female body. A womb-like curving space is dark, gloomy and wet, embodying Surrealist point of view in the unconscious as female body, giving viewers erotic associations, evoking the prenatal experience, similar to the unconscious. This kind of female spatial impression and concept can be given successfully in Švankmajer’s Wonderland.

Švankmajer employed the collage method in mélange of external space and internal space. The initial scenario happens at outdoors when Alice sits with her elder sister reading by the river; afterwards the frame comes out with the image of Alice’s mouth declaring the story starts now. The main scene is processing in the cabin of Alice, the shot is taken suddenly outside, showing the desk White Rabbit run towards under the bright sky. The sense of spatial ambiguity might be evoked since then. Being consumed by the desk drawer as White Rabbit penetrates it. Instead of rabbit hole, Alice falls into a tunnel-like, or intestines-like enclosed space. The falling process accelerates and Alice breaks into another dimensional space. She starts to experience the body transformation journey as long as she wants to disclose what is behind the door. The large door contains another tiny door for the scale of creatures in the Wonderland. Alice views White Rabbit rowing a boat, under the background sound of sea waves. Švankmajer intends to create the outside scene in the cabin, as he did for marionette theatre. Unlimited by the natural laws, time and space can be manipulated freely as the director manages to. Therefore, the setting-like screen with the image of seascape the can be installed outside at will. When Alice enters the scene (physically break through the scene), she bursts into another inner space. With the deployment of frames, each viewer constructs his own imagination about the ambiguous space of Wonderland itself.

Extending Alice’s fantasy journey, obviously showing the fragmented body when she is trapped in a cage-like dollhouse. The body is too big for the room, yet is compassed as if a foetus in a womb; after drinking potion her body is as if exploded out of house. The images of fragmented body also presented as a narrative form of animation. Švankmajer frames the image of Alice’s mouth narrating the scenario to montage into the animation. This kind of treatment disturbs the fluid development of the scenario, but highlights the conceptual part of the director. Švankmajer subtracts the essential messages from Lewis Carroll, which clearly shows Alice’s inner thoughts with language. Inserting these fragmented images, Švankmajer fraps the vision of viewers to make them sense the awkwardness of an infant confronting the rupture among the Imaginary (visionary), the Real (somatic), the Symbolic (linguistic). However, the fragmented body cannot be misunderstood as Hans Bellmer’s mutilated dolls, or misogyny from the feminist point of view. In the case of Carroll or Švankmajer taking a female infant as heroin is not the a gender issue, as sadomasochism is not a pornographic scenario.

The actress Kristina narrates the words without any emotion as the neutral narrator. Rare expressions are shown on Alice’s face, and even on her body movement, similar to a china doll, or automata. As she is indulged in the flood caused by her tears, it seems that she pretend to cry and show no panic in the flood. In another condition, Alice laughs out covering the hands, she looks like acting. Švankmajer’s Alice falls into the traumatic land, being cold or pretentious for self-protection. In praise of Surrealist uncanny aesthetics, Švankmajer arranges sound effects made by objects in everyday life: kitchen utensils, furniture, nutrition, etc. Unlike the melodious background music of Disney version, the sound effects here are extremely harsh to the ear. This shows another type of attacking Alice, to the viewers. Agreeable melodies made by human being, but uncanny kinetic sounds caused by inanimate objects. Švankmajer attacks his audience both visually and auditorily.

Losing body autonomy, Alice’s human body becomes a ‘thing’, an object which shrinks, extends, transforms from one dimension to another. Alice longs for a fixed shape: her quest is to return to her original ‘known’ self, for she is divorced from her body, protected from time and from social relations, terrified of change. Empson sees this as a fear of sexuality and of death: the consequences of accepting the ‘body’ as self [39] The aggressive activity is to attack viewers with disrupted images, unpleased sound effects; or the aggressive objects to hurt Alice like scissors; for White Rabbit scissors are important, they show up repetitively in the Wonderland. This is the Oedipus complex Alice reveals; she tries to fight against the castration. Eventually, when Alice wakes up, she finds White Rabbit’s scissors leave in her reality and cannot threat her any more.

    The most subversive ideas should be borne whenever or wherever the violence exists. Tracing back to childhood memories, Jan Švankmajer believes that cruelty comes to an infant’s mind as in nature. In vain, protecting children from the evil, the authorities exercise the power to restraint sexual seductions; they don’t get any clue that erotic arousal roots in every artist’s imagination. With making believe technique, Švankmajer plays children games ritually in his ‘fantastic documentaries’. ‘Něco z Alenky’ coagulates Švankmajer’s infantile imagination to express his subversive ideas against the authorities, which intends to control human thoughts according to the moral and ethical principles. During Czechoslovakian Communism, the repression Švankmajer went through drives him towards the fantasy of marionette theatre, with the alchemy inspired by Mannerist Prague. The sadomasochist treatments are ubiquitous in his animations: object relations, camera work, sound effect, and montage technique, etc. The fantasy is that the Other in the Symbolic cannot penetrate. Belonging to the Real, the fantasy can recall the trauma of the subject, and allow the subject to conquer over the Other. The power is presented here in the form of violence. Similar to Sadean literature, this violence is poetic and erotic in Švankmajer, but with more grotesque sense for this happens ritually in our everyday life. As a theatre director, Švankmajer has this violence mise en scène, making viewers to think about the sadomasochism not in an ethic point of view, but to recognize it is the nature of the object relations, the essential feature of imaginative force. Uncovering Alice’s cabin of curiosities, Švankmajer leads viewers to create the self with this violence; in the viewers’ imagination might wander the omnipotence of erotic arousal, the alienated body will break from socio-cultural codification of the Other, the self identify will comes out to the light of freedom.

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[1] Charels Lutwidge Dodgson , the author of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (usually shortened Alice in Wonderland), has been well known by the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll.

[2] Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search of Violence (New York : Norton, 1972), pp. 48-50.

[3] Peter Hames, ‘ Interview with Jan Švankmajer’, in Dark alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995), p.108.

[4] Karel Srp, ‘Optical Words (Picture Poems and Poetism)’, in Czech Photographic Avant-Garde, 1918-1948 (The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 57, 59.

[5] Karmen MacKendrick, Counterpleasures (State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 14.

[6] Peter Hames, ‘ Interview with Jan Švankmajer’, in Dark alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995), p. 107.

[7] Harold Bloom(ed.), Lewis Carroll (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 5.

[8] Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (ed.),‘Fantasy as a political Category: A Lacanian Approach’, in The Žižek Reader (Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 87.

[9] Ibid., ‘ The Undergrowth of Enjoyment’ in The Žižek Reader, p.17.

[10] Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings ( New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. xix.

[11] Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (London : Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1996), v. 1, p. 2.

[12] Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings ( New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 185.

[13] František Dryje, ‘ The force of imagination’, in Dark alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995), p.147. 

[14] Ibid.

[15] Jack Zipes, ‘The Liberating Potential of the Fantastic in Contemporary Fairy Tales for Children’ in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (Routledeg, 2006), p.177 .

[16] Sigmund Freud, The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (v.7) (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1996), p. 135.

[17] Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings ( New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 40.

[18] Ibid., p. 42

[19] Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings ( New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 50

[20] Ibid., p. 57

[21] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 210.

[22] Jon Mills, ‘Lacan on paranoiac knowledge’, in Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol 20(1), Win 2003.

[23] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York:Verso, 1998), pp. 114-115.

[24] Lynn S. Chancer , Sadomasochism in everyday life : the dynamics of power and powerlessness. (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 70.

[25] Lynn S. Chancer , Sadomasochism in everyday life : the dynamics of power and powerlessness(New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 75.

[26] Ibid., pp. 70-71.

[27] Michel Foucault, “ Sexual choice, sexual act”, in Foucault live: Collected Interviews, 1961—1984

(New York: Semiotext, 1989), p. 331.

[28] Viv Burr & Jeff Hearn(ed.), Sex, Violence and the Body: the Erotics of Wounding. (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 132.

[29] John Noyes, ‘S/M in SA: Sexual violence, simulated sex and psychoanalytic theory’, in American Imago (March 1998 ), 55(1), p. 146. 

[30] Harold Bloom (ed.), Lewis Carroll (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p.4.

[31] Ibid. p.20.

[32] The Image of Childhood, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 241, 247.

[33] James Donald (ed.), Fantasy and the Cinema (London : BFI Pub., 1989), p. 260.

[34] Jan B. Gordon, ‘ The Alice Books and the Metaphors of Victorian Childhood’, in Lewis Carroll (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 21.

[35] Peter Hames, ‘ Interview with Jan Švankmajer’, in Dark alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995), p.108.

[36] Ibid., p.113.

[37] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the literature of subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), p.174.

[38] Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (London : Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1996), v. 17, p. 249.

[39] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the literature of subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), p.144.