MDDM23: A Digestionary Process

[Dave Monroe]

"'The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,-- to be
remember'd only for having trespass'd so ingeniously
outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided his
Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result
could not be distinguish'd from that found in Nature.'
   "'A mechnaickal Duck that shits?  To whom can it
matter,' Mr. Whitpot, having remov'd his Wig, is
irritably kneading it like a small Loaf, '-- who
besides a farmer would even recognize Duck Waste,
however compulsively accurate?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 372)

And from Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of
the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber, 2002)
...

"The 18th century was the golden age of the
philosophical toy, and its reigning genius was Jacques
de Vaucanson. His magnificent creations were admired
by audiences all over Europe; they were praised by
kings and applauded by scientists. Voltaire labelled
him a 'new Prometheus'. Like the Greek Titan, he had
the power, it seemed, to create life, to fashion men
out of new materials....

[...]

"What is curious here is that all of Vaucanson's early
efforts as a mechanician were connected in some way to
religion....

[...] 

"... a mechanical duck. What was remarkable about
this duck was that it ate food out of the exhibitor's
hand, swallowed it, digested it, and excreted it, all
before an audience. It became Vaucanson's most famous
creation; without the shitting duck, Voltaire
commented wryly, there would be nothing to remind us
of the glory of France. It was made of gold-plated
copper, but it was the same size as a living duck. It
could drink, muddle the water with its beak, quack,
rise and settle back on its legs and, spectators were
amazed to see, it swallowed food with a quick,
realistic gulping action in its flexible neck. 

"Vaucanson gave details of the duck's insides: not
only was the grain, once swallowed, conducted via
tubes to the animal's stomach, but Vaucanson had also
had to install a 'chemical laboratory' to decompose
it. It passed from there into the 'bowels, then to the
anus, where there is a sphincter which permits it to
emerge'. The duck was beyond a machine, it was a
highly skilled joke. Had the duck been an artificial
defecating man, there would no doubt have been a more
complicated, less rapturous response. 

"Vaucanson, it must be said, was a man much
preoccupied by the state of his body. He was plagued
by an illness that had prevented him from eating. He
suffered from a fistula of the anus. The mechanician's
particular mention of the bowels, anus and sphincter
of the duck - parts audiences may have preferred to
imagine for themselves - might be seen as a reflection
of his own personal preoccupations...."

[...]

"Meanwhile Vaucanson's three automata passed from one
owner to another. The flute player left few traces,
but the duck appears to have risen now and then, like
a clockwork phoenix....
 
[...]

"... Georges Dietz, a theatrical impresario and
exhibitor of automata ... passed it on for repair to a
Swiss clockmaker, who spent three and a half years
working on the duck. Dietz took the duck to Paris in
1844 for the Exposition Universelle at the Palais
Royal, where a wing fell out of order. 

"Also on show at the exposition were the automata of a
celebrated magician, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (the
conjuror from whom Houdini took his name).
Robert-Houdin had made an automaton that could write
and sketch, and Dietz asked him to repair the duck's
broken wing. The magician, delighted to have his hands
on the famous creature, wrote about the occasion in
his memoir. 'To my great surprise,' he reported
gleefully of Vaucanson, 'I found that the illustrious
master had not been above resorting to a piece of
artifice I would happily have incorporated in a
conjuring trick.' Robert-Houdin discovered that the
digestion had been faked, and the emitted substance
was a premixed preparation of dyed green breadcrumbs,
'pumped out and collected with great care on to a
silver platter'. 

[...]

"Subsequent traces of the duck are scarce. In 1882,
someone wrote a letter to a German newspaper claiming
they had seen the duck in a private museum in Krakow
during the summer of 1879. But within days the museum
had burnt down. Amid the ashes, the writer of the
letter reported, he and his wife found a pair of
misshapen metal wheels, 'the pitiful remains of our
glorious bird'. 

"More recently, however, some mysterious photographs
have come to light in the archives of the
Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris
(situated on a street now called rue Vaucanson). They
show a crude, featherless bird, made of spring-like
windings of wire and perched on a huge wooden frame
that contains a mechanism resembling a watermill. They
are extraordinary views, reminiscent of the sorry
skeleton Goethe described. 

The provenance of the photos is still in question. The
present director of the museum does not believe the
bird in the pictures is the original duck; Doyon and
Liaigre believe it is. Either way, these photographs,
the last fragments of possible evidence, tell their
own story: Vaucanson's artificial being broke free
from its creator and developed an afterlife of its
own; stripped back and rebuilt, seen through and newly
admired - whether in truth or in legend - it
survives." 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,650977,00.html

For those photos, see p. 456 of ...

Beaune, Jean-Claude.  "The Classical Age of
   Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the
   Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century."  Fragments
   for a History of the Human Body: Vol. 1.  Ed.
   Michel Feher et al.  New York: Zone, 1989.
   431-80.

Or ...

http://www.nyu.edu/pages/linguistics/courses/v610051/gelmanr/cult_hist/text/p240.html

And see as well ...

http://shoko.calarts.edu/~sroberts/articles/DeVaucanson.duck.html

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/october24/riskinprofile-1024.html

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/vaucanson.html

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