Afternoon and welcome to Torch Online. And to our first look at lunchtime event for this academic year,
a discussion of iconoclasm as child's play written by Joe Machines school book at lunchtime is Torture's flagship event series,
taking the form of pretty much weekly bite sized discussions of books authored by colleagues in the humanities here
in Oxford with a range of commentators and questions from especially in these strange times all over the world.
Please do take a look at our Web site and newsletter for the full programme for the coming term.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm the new director here at Torch.
Also on our very distinguished panel today are Alexander Walsham, Kenneth Gross, Matthew Beavis and Lorna Hudson.
Our chair today. In a moment, I'll hand over to Lorna, who will introduce the book and the other members of the panel.
This will be followed by a brief reading by Joe of elements of the book.
Afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts on Joe's work coming at it from their particular disciplines.
Will then give him the chance to respond to some of the points raised before entering into what promises to be a fascinating discussion.
The event will conclude the last 10 minutes or so with question from you, the audience,
which I hope you will send in in the Q and A checkbox as soon as they occur to you, and I will help to moderate them towards the end.
All that's left then for me to do now is to thank you all for coming and to introduce our chair.
Lorna Hutson is the Merton Professor of English Literature and the director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies here in Oxford.
She was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh and Oxford and has more or less repeated that itinerary in her career,
having taught at Berkeley, St. Andrews and now Oxford, where she's a professor of English literature.
As I say, she's also a fellow of the British Academy and works on English Renaissance literature.
She's written on usery and literature, on women's writing and representation, on poetics and forensic rhetoric,
and most recently on the geopolitics of England's, quote, insular imagining in the 16th century.
I'll hand over to, you know, Lorna and disappear from your screens for a while.
Thank you very much, Wes. Hello, everybody. I feel really privileged to be included in this distinguished interdisciplinary
panel gathered to discuss Joe Machans because iconoclasm as child's play.
The debate about the relationship of religious iconoclasm to the emergence of the autonomous artwork rages on.
But Joe's book really transforms this debate by introducing the anarchic figure of the playing child, the anarchic and opaque figure.
To discuss this stimulating proposition, we have the perfect panel.
I think we have an expert in the effective forms of the English Reformation,
an expert in literature and puppet theatre and an expert in playful literary forms, comedy and nonsense.
So I'm going to introduce our to Joe first and then our panel.
And Joe will then, as we said, give a brief, brief reading and comments from his book and then I'll ask a question.
And members of the panel will ask questions and give their comments.
So our author, Dr. Joe Moshinsky, is associate professor at Tutorial Fellow at University College here at Oxford.
Joe grew up in Brighton and read English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
He then went to Princeton initially as a visiting fellow, but stayed there to complete his P.H. deed.
After a spell at Trinity College, Cambridge, Joe joined the English faculty at Oxford in 2018,
where I had the pleasure of teaching with him on their Masters course.
Joe is the author of Feeling Pleasures An Oxford 2014 and a Stain in the Blood on the Life of Sir Canon Digby 2017.
And in 2019, Joe was awarded the Philip Libby Hume Prise.
He's currently working on a book on Milton.
Now our first commentator is Professor Matthew Bavis, who's professor of English literature at a tutorial fellow at Keibel College, Oxford.
Books include The Art of Eloquence, Byron Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce and Comedy.
A very short introduction which explores comedy both as literary genre and what not cause funny business.
He has written a book rather unexpectedly on comedy and Wordsworth entitled Word with Fun,
and he is currently writing about the author we perhaps most associate with Child's Play a Nonsense.
Edward Lear. Mat's forthcoming book, Knowing Edward Lear, has evolved him in a lot of fun sounding,
collaboration's with the BBC, the Natural History Museum and the Ashmolean.
Our second commentator is Professor Alexandra Walsham.
Alexander Washam is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. She studied at the University of Melbourne before coming to Cambridge for HD.
And she's taught at the University of Exeter and Cambridge.
Amongst her many marvellous books, I'd like to draw your attention to her magisterial The Reformation of the Landscape,
Religion, Identity and Memory in early modern England, which I feel is particularly pertinent to this discussion.
This book one no less than three Prises, The Wolfson Prise, an American Historical Association PRISE and the role Baynton Prise.
Professor Walsham was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
In 2013, she was appointed CBE for Services to History in the Queen's Honours.
2017. We were also really delighted and privileged to have with us Professor Kenneth Gross,
who's professor and director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Rochester.
Kenneth, brochure's work ranges from Renaissance literature to romantic and modern poetry.
In addition to the very pertinent spent Syrian poetics, idolatry, iconoclasm and magic from nineteen eighty five, it's written on Shakespeare,
numerous essays on lyric poetry, on the relation of literature and the visual arts, on metamorphoses and animation and literature.
And again, very pertinently, for this discussion on the strange shapes of puppet theatre, traditional and experimental.
So there you have it. Our panels of experts on icons, iconoclasm and funny business.
And I will now turn to Joe to ask him to read from his book and to make a few observations about it.
Joe. Thank you very much, Lorna, for the introduction.
And I'll try and read relatively briefly from the book, I want to hear from this wonderful panel,
but I also wanna take a bit of extra time just to thank them.
Thank you all for fudge for being part of this event.
I think we all sort of agree that one of the very few positives to come out of this dreadful, wider situation,
which we find ourselves, is that we can sort of put together gatherings like this in ways that don't rely on us.
All things gather in person. If this couldn't have really happened otherwise and without sort of consciously putting it in this way,
I realised thinking about the panel today that there's a sort of archaeology off
of the book could have my sort of trajectory writing it represented in the panel.
I started working on it in Cambridge,
where Alex and I were had the strange experience of being elected as fellows at Trinity College on the same evenings.
I feel like our destinies, a sort of strangely intertwined by having gone through this surreal rite of passage.
And she was a wonderful colleague to have while I was doing the early work on it.
And then to finish it with Martin, Lorna's colleagues has been just incredibly fortunate.
And then this is the first time I've actually interacted with Karen face to face.
And so it's lovely how these things become possible under the fact that his work,
as Lorna said, to sort of trace this arc from Spencer in his early writings to toys.
And the more recent ones made me feel like I was onto something and wasn't just sort of sort of spiralling off in some strange direction.
What I thought I'd do today is just read a little bit from the book, which I thought summed up some of what I was trying to do in it.
But it particularly is the bit where I thoroughly discussed the image on the cover, which I've had quite a lot of questions about.
And so I thought it might be a nice bit to read part because it sort of moves from thinking
about an early modern objects in the ways that we might respond to in any modern object,
an actual object that seems to have survived an iconoclastic act towards thinking about a much more contemporary object or image of an object.
So this is this is the very end of the chapter in the book, which is called Dull.
And all the chapters in it have single word titles that the Jacksons will think through and around.
This chapter starts with a with a with a with a moment from Cologne in the 16th century where a man was was
accused of having snapped the arms from a crucifix and given it to the broken object to his children as a toy.
And it sort of plays around with the fact that in the 16th century,
be the word idol was sometimes spelled idee o double L and sets of attempting to see the word doll lodged for the Night-Time side.
Doctor, that sort of relevant for the context. So I'm so I'm good, I'm talking at the start of this about Panopto.
I'm actually the ongoing thing of showing you a picture with a camera. I apologise for this graphic grainy, but this is it.
This is the object. I'll be discussing it. It's a broken crucifix, an almost crucifix.
Notice the fiddles with a crucifix because it was discovered in the derelict great hall of fiddles with modern Dorsets in 1952.
It's a modest object to more than six inches high. It's light and fragile, constructed of sparsely decorated plaster of Paris.
And it will take no great effort to break off the arms. And since the substance of which it was made is almost worthless.
They could not be melted down or sold for gain. The object probably dates from the late 50s through early 16th century,
and there's no way of knowing why it survived but what sort of life it lived in the centuries before it was rediscovered.
And although there's no evidence that it became a plaything,
when I picture the children in Cologne, I just mentioned being given the damaged crucifix.
This is the object that I imagined as that toy.
It's an object that captures the ambiguous being of the idol with two ls that the object of iconoclastic
child's play becomes as we contemplate this object in the broken form in which it survived.
Two modes of response suggests themselves that they oscillate unstable rather than one dominating and deleting the other.
The broken make a crucifix is a forlorn object. It could easily seem faintly ludicrous.
A trifle. It's missing arms of abolished its symbolic silhouette and it now looks like an implement to be handled rather than revered.
From a distance, Christ's torso and legs looking outline almost like the handle and blade of a simple toy knife.
It's easy to imagine the forms of ordinary play that that a defaced and lowly object of this sort might inspire.
The range of games into which it might be incorporated as it became a dull.
Yet viewed from another perspective, the snapping off of the arms seems less like the sort of casual cruelty that might be directed at an alternately
loved and reviled toy and more like the latest act of violence directed at the body of the suffering Christ himself.
The gaunt abdomen, with its puncture wounds rendered more meticulously than the rather rudimentary daubing of the beard and mouth and the
resilient downward gaze seemed to withstand the force of and patiently to endure this latest act of iconoclastic brutality.
What is one more wound to a body already so lacerated?
While iconoclastic actions directed against rejected dieties from all religions have a paradoxical dimension
in that they seem to express expressed belief in and fear of the very gods that they claim to deride.
The strangest of these acts becomes particularly apparent when are directed against the already suffering and forlorn Christ as Brunetto Toure asks,
How could you destroy an image that is already this much destroyed?
And then I complete the chapter then by moving from the Fiddlehead crucifix and leaping into the modern world.
In 2001, the California artists Shelley and Pamela Jackson launched a hypertext project titled The Bowl Games,
in which they combined images of their childhood dolls and the objects associated with them,
placed in various poses and surrounded by various schemes of text.
The tone of their words lurches between the obviously tongue in cheek and the seemingly sincere.
But the whole project seems calculated to trouble the very distinction between seriousness and play.
It also seems designed to anticipate and nullify an advance any attempt to scholarly analysis,
since the project is framed with an introduction supposedly supposedly written by Jeff Bellweather APHC,
which is actually intermittently insightful but clearly a pastiche written by the sisters themselves.
But what? The site's one of his own publications, which appears in the journal Postmodern Culture Vol. mdx i x v i x.
What distinguishes the project for me is its unusually acute grasp that what the Jacksons are investigating is in a sense,
not that childhood games at all, but that they are impossible adult imagining of their own childhood imaginations.
As Pamela Jackson writes, what is a doll game is important. What is a doll?
What are two kids playing in the project? We are archaeologists, voyeurs, utopians of doll games.
Sometimes we're embarrassed.
The doll games are inaccessible in lots of ways, fundamentally baffling, no matter how much we scour our memories and pore over the doll box.
But it still seems possible as we assemble the fragments that we might be able to recover them somehow or even bring them to some new life.
We're curious what that new life would be. And I take a sort of moral fierceness of the status of the rediscovered childhood toys.
They frame it very, very, very seriously. But what's particular germane to my interests are the miniature character
sketches which the sisters provide alongside pictures of many of their dolls.
They're a great read. I really suggest you go and look at the website. It's just hilarious and an interesting one.
Felix is a willowy, gentle preteen, but perhaps lacking in depth.
And another Harvey originally a little red riding doll.
I'm known Mike was at once tenderly lyrical and crudely predatory, both a hapless romantic with perfumed hair on a boat lout.
But the figure to interested me most is the one who appears on the cover.
I think the bowl games embody the mixture of triviality and depth of integrity and dissolution of humanity and inhumanity of pleasure and anxiety.
But as the structure and the whole book, in a way, I argue, is integral to the object that emerges in iconoclastic child's play, the Idol.
And they seem to be sure to the version of what I'm arguing when they suspended one of their characters,
the splendidly named Josh McPeake, who adorns the cover of the book between the Sacred and the risible.
Josh is the Josh, they say is the doll is the doll games archetypal manly man.
But he had a vulnerable quality.
His legs tangled weakly from his loosely jointed hips and later began to loosen and fall off after his hands and even eventually his left foot,
making him a source of comedy, especially in the late falses.
This is all there was still, but also transforming him in the end into what we can only see as the doll games.
Sorrowful, suffering Christ, not so much suspended between the sacred and the ludicrous,
perhaps as an embodiment of the sacred image of the sacred emerging amid the ludicrus, the sacred as ludicrous.
Thank you. So that's all I will read. I know I am eager to hear from from others.
Thank you very much, Joe. What you've just read, Drew,
on on the very salient insights from Townsing that you mentioned at the beginning of the defacement
of objects sort of creating new forms of affect and sacredness rather than dissipating them.
If I might ask a question before I ask the others, too, I just wanted to ask about gender.
You you move in the argument from doll to puppet and you talk about doll as not being not a small humanoid that we play with,
but the dullness is the inherent the capacity to be animated.
And you link that to the words the interchangeability of the words for girl and doll in many languages.
And then in the next chapter, you go on to puppet.
And there it's really not the inherent animation, but the kind of constitutive brokenness and capacity to sort of have violence done to it.
And that's just come out in your judgement, big. And you say in that chapter, if the human were a part that we might say she's in,
apparently one possessed of some agency, the ability to grab the puppet strings.
And I was just struck by your use of the feminine pronoun in that sentence about the human generally.
And I just wondered because I think feminists of the 90s might have thought the interchangeability of the words dolen girl
say something about the tendency of of women to be objectified rather than thinking that it's about the inherent animation.
So I just wondered if you could say something about. I know there are male dolls, but about the fact that we tend to identify girl and doll.
Yeah. Thank you for that. It's a really, really interesting, important question. I think I think I was.
I tried in the book to engage that there's been a lot of really good work done on dolls in various historical and cultural
contexts and the inculcation of of of gender norms and especially the sort of provision of dolls to girls to sort of.
As part of their a crucial part of this sort of supposedly teleological process towards becoming a sort of adult woman.
And I suppose. Yes, it is. I cycle this in.
But there's a particular good article and a reading by a classicist called Funny Dolinsky or Wolanski about this in Roman culture,
which was hugely informative.
But one thing, I suppose one of things I was I was struck by doing this work was that the because I suppose a lot of what's survived,
a lot of the disorder material traces we can reconstruct to the dolls that were actually played with that very often in one way or another,
elite objects by their nature. You know, the things that have been made, constructed,
built out of durable materials and that they're the ones that tend to do actually more closely represent or resemble humans.
And so one thing I was sort of interested in in questioning throughout the book was how?
I mean, you know, I'm sort of interested in that idea of play as a as a as a linear as a part of a sort of linear development of a child.
The idea that you can that, you know, there's a sort of tellefson of an a smooth and unbroken path towards it.
But in a sense, I, I, I was interested these things that was much harder to reconstruct.
That had to be partly a match, but he's much more sort of rough and ready objects that sort of passed in and out of the of the realm of play.
And I felt precisely because of their more improvised nature, were less suitable in a sense for linear narratives of development,
including those gendered narratives where play is supposed, you know,
playing with the with the female doll is supposed to sort of make the female woman.
And I wanted to spend just a final thought on this is that I mean, one thing. That's one thing.
Reason I was struck by that is actually going back to the book starts with a scene from a preacher who wrote Edgeworth,
which which Alex originally helped put me on to and was became they actually kind of censor off the book.
And one thing that really struck me about it. So that's the thing that actually describes this scene of iconoclastic child's play in the household,
is that it seemed, for reasons I don't think I ever fully was able to unpack,
but it was struck by it very deliberately seemed to involve the whole family and to actually have to play, being directed at interest.
The across gender lines. It seems to be a father talking to a daughter and a mother talking to a son.
I'm not. Again, I'm not sure I have a fully scrapped what I wanted to do with violence.
But it felt interesting to me at least, that this scene is more improvised. Open-Ended uncertain play.
It seemed to seem to have a gender dimension that was not perhaps as as as clear as those sorts of idealised narratives that you're describing.
I think it's a really important question. Thanks very much. I'd like to invite Matt to and respond to.
Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, T.J., for inviting me.
Last December, my five year old daughter Rosa turned to me in a swimming pool and apropos of absolutely nothing, said Daddy.
Let's pretend you make inventions, then let's pretend they're useless so I can have them as toys.
Later that day, I emailed Joe and asked him whether this is an update or a new twist on iconoclasm and play.
And I begin here because I just want to in expressing my gratitude and admiration for Joe's book,
I just want to stress something about the way that the book lived with me after I'd finished reading it.
I think in Joe's book, meaning is is always tied up in some sense with motion.
Child's play becomes, amongst other things, a means of revaluing or devaluing an object he believes very encourages,
I think, to be alert to the uses and the reuses of play things and all things.
But for me, crucially, he really wants us to resist merely functional conceptions of play.
The book, I think, is really wonderfully alive to how, in fact we might confiscate play through the very act of interpreting it or instrumentalise it.
So for me, it's already questing, questioning book.
One of the best things about it for me, in fact, is the peculiar particular timing of Joe's questions.
Just one page. Seventy seven is.
Was it any more absurd to try and capture God in the wooden body of a puppet than in the flashily or would imperfect body of a human?
Think the resonance of something like that.
The way Joe constantly in this book sort of gives you a sense of an idea being broached, but not necessarily laboured or exhausted.
This is one of them is one of the many strengths of the book. It's not afraid to give to give us space to let us read or have thoughts on one thought.
For me, I think that really emerged as an as I think an implication of Joe's work is that whenever we're watching another person at play,
perhaps especially a child, part of what we might be doing is actually relishing the primacy of their need to play.
In other words, warming to a vision of the activity as a non divulge secret or mystery.
A secret perhaps to its participant as well as its observer players are always becoming the play things
in some way of their unconscious than ever wholly in the know about what it is that they're playing.
At one point, Joe draws on. I mean, the book is richly sort of intellectually capacious.
But there's one more where he draws on.
Walter Benjamin's awareness of adaptive developmental accounts of play often say, as a form of repetition, as my me says, for example.
But he also stresses how repetition creates a new kind of strangeness.
It reminded me of this another bit in Benyamin where he observes that fit for a child.
He says repetition is the soul of play and nothing gives a child greater pleasure than to say do it again.
But then Benjamin adds the following, he says.
And in fact, every profound experience longs to be insatiable, longs for return and repetition until the end of time.
When a modern poet says that everyone has a picture for which he would be willing to give the whole world,
how many people would not look for it in an old box of toys?
I think for me is this idea of repetition, in fact, as a kind of incompletion?
Of an experience which itself longs to be insatiable of repetition, in fact,
as a normed working through with something that strikes me as particularly suggestive is that it runs as a kind of subterranean thread in this book.
For me, the book really comes together without, as it were,
coming together to march in Joe's superb readings of Broils painting of children at play and then the Dragon in spences for Mary Queen.
And I'll just end by glancing here at the latter because of time constraints.
But I think what Joe's reading allows us to see is that the Dragon is is a complication of the allegory that's been set up via the Dragons,
very sense of pleasure in its own allegorical function.
I thought that was just an amazing moment to jump.
Joe talks about the Dragons doggie's delight at the arrival of the Knight as though it were saying,
You're here at last after quite a wait for both of us. And then on the law is on the last page of the book,
I think comes my my own my personal favourite set of questions in Joe's book, which I will just read.
How does the dragon feel about being a vast, malevolent allegory?
How was it passing the time as it waited for Red Cross on this sunny hillside before leaping up and practically wagging its vast, terrifying tale?
Did they get bored? Did it play its own dragon games?
Joe then adds. What does it say about me as a reader that I can find myself asking such bizarre questions?
I think they're just great questions. I think they're in tune with the book's emphasis throughout on the inscrutability of play,
on the value and the threat and the thrill of that inscrutability.
In answer to that last question, no, I feel sure or almost sure that the dragon really did play its own dragon games.
Thank you. Thank you, Matt. I'd like to call on Alex Walsham to respond.
Now. Thank you very much. Well,
it's particular pleasure to be invited to participate in this discussion of Joe's remarkable book for the
reasons that he explained that it began its life in Cambridge and it's come to fruition here in Oxford.
But I very much recall such stimulating discussions that Joe and I had as he was working on this in its early phases.
And I'm completely dazzled by what has emerged. It's a work of extraordinary erudition that moves effortlessly across the disciplines,
and it's filled with very penetrating insights about the nexus between play childhood and sacred violence through the ages.
He's already alluded to that extraordinary passage from Roger Edgeworth sermon, which has long intrigued and puzzled me, too.
And what it opens a window into is a world in the midst of immense and revolutionary change when objects that are hallowed by
tradition and preserved in monasteries float free of their ecclesiastical mornings and end up in the irreverent hands of children.
And that domestic scene is an intimate one in which parents and children, as he's already said,
collude in a game that didn't use religious materiality of its power by reducing it to a mere placing.
Now, what Joe's book seems to me to do is to compel us to recognise the fundamental ambivalence of those kinds of transactions.
It illuminates them and also at the same time renders them even more strange and unsettling, subversive and generative than they initially seem.
It also and I'm drawn to this as a historian. It engages with and questions a whole series of inherited paradigms associated with the Reformation,
paradigms of disenchantment of the alleged antipathy of Protestantism towards play of what Peter Book once
called the Triumph of Lent over Carnival and of iconoclasm as a midwife to the birth of the category of art.
So there's a huge amount that I'd like to discuss and I am going to have to constrain what I say.
But so I'm going to say four broad things that I hope there'll be a little time.
But, Joe, for you to respond to the first is that I'm really fascinated by the insight that piety and play are not opposites,
but dynamically intertwined in both the pre reformation period and the post reformation period.
Your observation that the kind of rough and irreverent handling of holy objects was a feature of mediaeval
religion as well as a mode of repudiating it in the post Reformation era is is really compelling,
as is the question that you ask about how truly transformative was it to place them in a child's hand in that context,
given their similarity of these actions with the power liturgical play of the Middle Ages?
I'm also as a bit of an iconoclast myself, of these paradigms drawn to your questioning of these grand narratives that present play as a casualty
of Protestantism and of modernity and your emphasis on the coexistence of those of those impulses.
But I do confess that as a historian, I'm compelled to ask the boring historians question about change over time.
What, if anything, did change as a result of the Reformation? And how significant in particular was Protestantism?
Profound theological assault on my ontological status of sacred objects.
So it's its rejection of their capacity to operate as containers and conduits of divine power and grace.
And just as an aside, thinking about reflecting on the book,
I found myself thinking that the word idolatry was more absent or at least less visible than I expected it to be.
The second thing I'd like to say is about the phrase that you alluded to in your earlier introduction to it,
about the sacred as ludicrous that really caught my eye.
The word ludicrous is another curious word that has a relevant etymological root whose mutations and migration's in meaning are seen,
I think, to be just as illuminating as toy Poppit trifle fetish and dull.
It's a word that captures both a sense of jest, but also incredulity.
And if you look at the OED, what that reveals is a very interesting drifting its significance from something that pertains to play or
sport and is witty or humorous to something that is suited to derisive laughter is ridiculous and is absurd.
So where does that shift fit in your story? One might also say that the word pastime has an interesting migration in meaning to.
It starts as something that describes the elapse and passage of time and it ends up coming to denote the activity of play,
a pleasurable hobby, a sport, a recreation itself.
So what's the significance of those shifts in your story?
Thirdly, and much more briefly, I was also perhaps a little surprised that you didn't do more with the idea of play and stage playing,
how those two things connect to each other. Ludus and Ludi Crume that, you know, this is a common root.
And how does that work out in in the context of the story you tell?
The final thing I wanted to say was you describe your book as a study of the adults imagination of a child's imaginative play.
And the adult imagination of the child as a cultural process.
You're rightly cautious about the very possibility of entering the imagination of the playing child, him or herself.
The child, therefore, remains ultimately, as has already been alluded to, elusive in the story.
And this story is one that explores the adult prism through which such actions then as now were viewed.
So are we doomed to be unable to study. Child's play through the prism?
We're always going to view it through the prism of the adult, whether as the spectator or the orchestrator of that action or perhaps as the
actor looking back on events that happened in an earlier phase of their life.
And so what's lost to us as a consequence of that methodological obstacle?
So that's where I'm going to finish. Thank you very much, Alex.
I'd just like to quote an all final panellist, Kenneth Gross. Thank you.
Thank you. It's really lovely to be here. I'm not sure if I have much to add to what people have said.
I was I was thinking about the experience of reading the book.
It's it's very intricately worked out and a beautifully organised around single words.
But the weaving of theoretical reflection and story and anecdote is very is part of its pleasure.
I think when I when other occasions when I've talked to people about puppets or dolls,
I always ask people in the audience to say something about their experience of a dollar, a puppet.
It's almost always something very strange and disturbing and unsettling sometimes in adults.
It's something good, sometimes going back to childhood.
And one of the things that I valued in the book was the time you take over these very fragmentary
and elusive anecdotes like the one about the child being given that it was Edgeworth.
Yes. The sermon where the child is the horror of the family where the child was given the doll to play with or where somebody snaps,
breaks a crucifix and gives it for a child to play with.
You just let those stories play in your own imagination and you ask questions you ask about what we didn't know.
And there was something in the language, even as in the passage you read from, you know, what life does this broken crucifix live?
What life did it live in the centuries when it wasn't known?
That's already bringing your own sort of figurative language and storytelling into the analysis.
The. And so that that into those particular anecdotes and stories which which should have resonated
outwardly and your general recurrent gesture in the book to simply refuse hard and fast distinctions,
to refuse the effort to put things, to divide things, to box them, to categorise them, and not in a trivial sort of way.
And I say trivial part, which is probably the charge word, because the other thing about the book that's very valuable is its continual meditation on.
What is and isn't trifling, what is and isn't important. The words of each chapter tend to be words which often apply to.
Childish or silly or irrelevant things, a toy, a puppet, a doll,
or they're they're used as terms of disdain and abuse as contempt and the wandering between the trifling,
the urgent and the contemporary, contemptuous or contemptible is part of it.
Just as people were talking.
I realised that another continual fascination in the book is something you talk about specifically, but it sort of wanders.
Is that the same power? Is that you attribute to dolls or idols?
Their opacity, their alienists, their volatility, their their violence, their scandalous ness, their demonic powers,
their their infectiousness, which are things you see as proper to them and things which others attribute to them.
All of those adjectives are also applied to the children, playing to the children, using those objects.
And there's this continual sort of weird crossing between the life of the child and the life of the
object that the child plays with and that adults who watch and interpret the child playing with.
That's part of the energy of the book. If I had only one question, it would be.
I'm curious. You won't have time to answer this on screen.
I know the analysis of the great candidate of the last dragon in book, one of the fairy queen.
I was thinking about the other last monster in the fairy queen proper.
At the end of Book six, there's an even more frightening monster who is a monster of iconoclasm.
The blatant beast, too,
is like sort of overgrown bully child and who is shown breaking into the monasteries and destroying and defiling sacred and holy things.
What's that particular account of the paradoxes of iconoclasm has always haunted me because on the one hand,
it's seen as profane, as destructive as as doing violence to the sacred.
And yet, Spencer says the monitoring is full of infected, disgusted, properly base forms of religion.
It's both. So the blatant beast is both doing a proper work of unfolding so infected sacred work and yet seen as profaning something truly sacred.
So that was all. Thank you. Thank you.
And thank you, everyone. Joe, I am, too. And the problem with looking at lunchtime is that lunchtime is too short.
And I think this is not a very long time for you to respond. Please respond.
And in five minutes, I'll call and say something just brief in response to each of those.
Thank you so much to each of you for those wonderfully generous and also thought provoking and searching remarks.
I'll try to be brief and then so with Fred open for questions, but I'm so just I'll I'll go in the order that you spoke.
Thanks. Thank you for your drawing out the strong about repetition. I think that's really.
Yeah. It's one of the things that I don't I don't very often in the book sort of make it the focus.
But it's constantly at stake and something I continue to think about it.
It strikes me that it's not something or perhaps it's something that we're better in academic
right to get talking about in the abstract than actually thinking about the experience.
And so in the way that so much about reading a poem is actually about repeat reading and changing
encounters with its end and not something that sense that somehow there isn't space for that in,
you know, very often. And what in what we sort of think of as a as a reading.
So but it just makes you think also of a wonderful book I read in the last few months.
This is on the recommendation of Jeff Dalven and I think was hoping to join the cold.
I don't know if these ideas I'm cold on repeat this book by musicologist about about the extremes,
repetition full of amazing stuff by your scientific interest or actually what happens to our brain.
And a bit of stood out for me and maybe think back to the book is this amazing psychological experiment.
She writes that she can go and do online, which is basically I think she's with Diana Deutsch, the woman who did it.
It's some it's a it's a spoken phrase that I won't say too much,
but you shouldn't try to say it's a spoken phrase that you hear it and then you hear repetition and another repetition,
unproper, 85, 90 percent of people, you suddenly start to hear part of the phrase as music.
It sort of turns into music. So it hasn't changed. It's just the experience of being repeated.
Your brain music realises it. And it's the most extraordinary thing.
I did it. We that no one wants to hear it all to play it to everybody. I played it to my son's primary school class so they could all hear it.
They all love that. And so that sense, that music that that that the repetition on the one hand can deaden,
but repetition can literally make language sort of burst into song to seem like a sort of wonderful metaphor for how we can
think about the different things that are different things it can do is I want to thank you for pulling us out very much.
Alex, I won't be able to answer all your questions at all. I just wanna say one thing, which, um, because I think, um,
I guess what I'd like to focus on is that is the question about how you can account for change over time.
I think that's really important because I definitely am aware of that risk that that there's a you know,
that that if you're tempted to start stressing continuity over, change it.
Which I think is on one of the porters do we could easily fall into a way of being like, well, it was all terribly complicated.
I mean, you know, you haven't really accounted for. For what in fact, happened. I'm trying to think we've answered this.
It isn't sort of terribly sweeping and I won't regret. But I was thinking also about you allude to this.
I think the way one thing one of the things about this topic that interests me is the way which.
So the developmental narratives of human life, the moved from childhood to adulthood,
has often been used to think about historical changes were moved from a childhood of civilisation,
whether that's sort of idealised or also the derogated. And I wondered, as I was thinking about your question, I wondered if perhaps why I say.
I mean, you know, there clearly are there are huge changes on underfoot in the Reformation to do with the catchphrase
of materiality and the way in which you can effectively relate to that materiality or not.
So I guess I wouldn't deny that there is a sort of that there is that they get that there is probably overall less of, you know,
if it is helpful to think of these terms, you know,
less of an of an emphasis on these forms of effectively charged material engagement as a basis for the piety.
But why? What interests me is that a bit like narratives of each of human development.
What I understand is that as a as a process, that is that is that, yes.
Leads to a change of emphasis. But like, you know, when I try to say we're tempted when we think about human development,
to want to see it as a linear progressive process in which things get left behind and moved on.
And so if you have forgotten that X date,
actually we're constantly living with the remnants of things that we haven't fully overcome, but tell ourselves that we have.
And I'd say something similar about the Reformation. It's a process.
It's a huge change of emphasis, which people are trying to convince themselves and others is an absolute change of substance.
So it's so there that so there is change, but there's it is that there's change that has to deny the forms.
It is often tempted to deny the forms of underlying continuity that actually exist.
And so that's where for me it's beebees works to get us to see what it's like to live with the ambivalence
of this is imperfect or incomplete disavowal or convince yourself that something's been fully overcome.
That hasn't stopped. That for me is where the interests lie. So there is still there.
I think and acknowledgement of of of change.
But the change that's happening and the change that's supposed to be happening are not necessarily the same, the same.
And it's that gap that interests me and that this phenomenon takes us today.
But I think it's a really I don't know if that's a by final answer, as it were.
I think that it's some. But thank you for the questions and cannot be very I'll be very brief.
Thank you for asking. Spencer. I mean, the place and place is wonderful.
And I'm I suppose for those who have read the very great I mean, it's you know, it's it's a bit to read.
It's completely, completely wild at the end of this poem that it's sort of I mean,
the I guess what I would say is that it was important to me that that the that the poem in its sixth book
form ends its sixth book ends with a monster who was threatening in all the ways that you've described.
And it's not finally contained. Right. I mean, it seems very important that the attempt to find and restrict it fails.
And the part ends with it's still sort of on the loose. And so I think.
I guess. I thought he wasn't consciously doing this, but I think in a way,
in a way that does sort of that seemed to me to sort of retrospectively authorise my interest in
the drag that Spencer wants us to think that these monsters are things that don't get dealt with,
that don't you know, they're not you know,
that that so killing something and going on to the next adventure doesn't mean you've solved the problem that it represents.
And so it's a little bit linked to my answer to Alex, actually, that I think it's about.
A rhetoric of overcoming and leaving behind versus a that sort of continued need to reckon with what lingers and what doesn't get Woodforde.
Thank you. Thank you, Joe.
I mean, I think we're sort of about to, if that's okay with sort of about the time now to welcome Westpac to chair questions from the wider audience.
If people could put questions into the queue in a box, that would be great.
Thank you. Yeah, we have one already from Jeff Tovan, who says, Matt Ray's repetition.
Joe, I know you're interested in rhythm. Iconoclasm is surely partly a breaking of rhythm, lost regularities of liturgy and so on.
So is there a rhythm to play? Or I guess to paraphrase him, is play always in some sense, disruptive?
I think some. Yes, I mean, I think I think I've found it.
I think you kind of see my interest in rhythm in my oldest works beginning to emerge.
And so I think this is I look back at the book as wanting to find yourself big interest in things you don't fully remember.
I think I think there is. But I think the interest to me and rhythm is precisely that.
It is that it it encapsulates a range of more or less regular and predictable forms.
That there has to be a certain rhythm to be recognisable as rhythm has to be somewhere within
a spectrum of total difference of one end and total sameness at the end of the other.
So I think. I think. Yes, I think play for me is a way of thinking about.
The rhythms of experience in so far as. It's it's it's it's sort of embody is it to sort of embody the different possibilities of what rhythm can be?
There's always there's sort of either the temptation or the nightmare to imagine a form of play, which is kind of always, always and never the same.
But it also contains the possibility of rhythms as things that change and very, very to keep us interested and and for their own reasons.
So I think it for me is a useful way of thinking about the possibilities that pull
at that plate and contain rather than there being a sort of single defining rhythm.
Thank you, Joe. Does anybody else want to come in there?
If not, I have another question, which is actually one of my own, if I may put one in and that's who's listening to you all variously speak.
I had a sort of Metcher question which comes out of your wrist. Your last response.
Yeah. Which is about thinking the Reformation as a change of emphasis, which some people think of as a change of substance.
And I wanted to sort of turn that back on the ways in which you work with literature.
In other words, is the kind of work that you're doing effecting a kind of change of substance,
of the literary experience through this, drawing attention to things beyond that.
Shall we say? Or would you think this more as a kind of change of emphasis where all the other stuff still lingers?
I'm just I'm really intrigued by this kind of lingering that's going on in your discussion.
Are you talking about methodology? I am talking about methodology effectively.
How how does your kind of bringing of a whole range of different methodological insights and procedures change the actual the toy,
the dole, the the the fetish. That is the text.
I think he has a weaker question and. And again, other panellist, please do jump in at point, I don't want to just just talk.
Talk to her herself. But some interesting I mean, the that the, um, the first detailed review that the book got by Rachel Isaam Draught is going to
be talking about the book was later in the term was sort of picks up on that,
what she described as a sort of theoretical brick collage in the book and was slightly sort of unsure about that as a as a move which I
which I can understand and I think is very interesting criticism that it felt like a bit of a sort of theoretical free for all in some way.
And and I'm sort of okay with that up to a point. I think for me.
I don't talk about this directly in the book. But he felt it was it was partly interesting to engage with theories of play because so many.
Because it actually turned out to be a sort of common ground between lots of theoretical approaches or interesting.
Not not common ground. What they said, but lots of them set tended to either make you solve or actually argue for a version of play as
a as a model for critical practise or is actually something being there was up for discussion.
And so I felt like, in a way, in the book, it sort of freed me up.
But I think I just sort of I did allow myself to kind of avail myself of certain things.
But, for example, it goes back a little bit, too, to Ken's comment as well, actually,
that I felt resentful that by starting this the book with this Roger Edgerton,
it ties in with this particular scene from from a sermon that it felt kind of in sort of indebted in some larger way to the sort
of new historicist tactic of the arresting opening anecdote that was going to be of unfolded like a present or like a pass.
The parcel was how many layers of presence and every layer.
But I was interested to sort of not to sort of stay with with it and sort of not move on to the chapter,
to the real event being had reading of Spencer.
So I felt like it was always tempting to then sort of present what I'm doing as some kind of critical play.
But again, I was I was sort of funny.
Everyone was doing that, but never but not really articulating the idea of the absurdity did play they were assuming in the process.
So. So it felt like at times like I was.
But what was one most about doing that was it felt like there's a temptation to argue against a critical position because I
felt like I was actually able to take certain things like the anger and actually do and try and change it into something.
I'm trying to effect transformation more in the what you describe rather than just rushing things off, as we're sometimes inclined to do.
Yeah, absolutely. I think, Matthew, you've got something to say here on that. Yeah, just well, partly just I was a fan of the brick, a large part.
There's a moment in your book where I think you talk about one thing that feels weirdly
a historical must be that all parents have said to all children throughout the ages,
play nicely. And I like the fact that your book doesn't play nicely.
So but the question does relate to method. I had a question that relates to this question about the way which play might linger.
When one thought one had surmounted it, when one has become allegedly mature, the book's general sceptical CISM about certain models of development.
And it perhaps relates to the thing you talked about.
Were you saying about the reader or the adult as a voyeur of doll games and the book's interest in the adults imagination of the child?
Yes, I got a sense as I was reading and maybe you do make this explicit at points, which is the sense that the child is the adult plaything.
And the versions of Achu interpretation before art.
I felt this very much in the in your interpretation of the Breugel was a form of plague,
as though as though the book was surreptitiously asking, how do you know when you're not playing?
I don't know if that makes any sense. I can see the danger just simply saying that you don't.
There's nothing more out of that. I'm a playful critic or whatever,
but just an actual thought about how adults themselves in in interpreting art objects are joining in with play when they think they might not be.
Thanks. That's great. Think it speaks to the methods of women? I exactly as you say, the kind of risk of it's much more interesting to me.
Thank you for putting it in a way that really helps me make clear something I don't think I fully thought through.
But exactly that, in a way, the minute you say I'm a playful critic,
you are again implicitly assuming a certain model of play that you know and a fully able to carry out.
Only in the conscious ways that you intend to and want to. Whereas the sense that.
Which I try. I sort of bring through that more. I think in the book, in relation to artworks or literary works,
that we might be playing with them without realising what that is, but that there's a broader thought.
You know, am I playing without realising? Is it really. That's that's that's wonderful.
Thank you. If I could come in here.
I'm aware that we're nearly up to two o'clock. But let's carry on for a little while longer if we can.
I know that Alex in particular needs to go off to. We've saved him from some of the committee meeting, but she has to go off to another one.
But there are some more questions. So if people are happy to carry on for five, ten more minutes, then then let's do so.
But I should thank Alex for being here before she has to run off.
And anyway, so you can you can pop in. But there's a question here.
I'm gonna take the second one first. Where? Which follows on from the impulses of Alex, in fact,
where the court the toys we've been talking about are material dolls, sometimes fantastical and so on.
What about those instance where people become toys, where humans are mocked?
Played within a trifling way. An example they're given is Malvolio. Who should represent a kind of Puritan iconoclasm.
But he's actually turned into a toy for his puritanism and for his kind of reformation identity.
So again, it is asking the question about the inhuman and the human that the borderline there, as well as the sort of agency question that the.
Alex. I want to. Have you got time to think about that or do you want to add to that?
No worry. That's really. And again, I think this does sort of pick up on things that both Alex and Ken said indifferently,
like Alex's question about stage play fields germane here and Ken's point about the sorts
of the sorts of uncertainty about where where the subject ends and the object begins.
It is interesting to think about Malvolio as a puppet.
I'd never actually think of the daughter offering as some sort of stringing string him or something.
And and and especially because, as I talk about in the book and as tennis was written about as well,
because puppets because puppetry in particular is such a tempting metaphor for the way in
which we might be controlled by higher forces above us all the way back to Plato and so on.
So I guess what I would say is I think I pretty would fall back on the sense of part of what play.
I think part of the play does and it was an honour sort of too much about this before.
But I think he had some similar was facing similar issues in his work on Wordsworth. It's a great challenge to write about play without idealising.
And one of things I want to and also sentimentalise again. And that was a risk I was concerned.
Thank you so much, Alex. Thank you. That was a risk I was sort of constantly trying to be aware of.
And and so this day, this sense, I think, came through in all the remarks about my interest in the book.
And I kind of play as a space of quite, quite genuine and potentially violent uncertainty means that means,
you know, that that is a space for where subjects and objects get.
And this is also a space where caring for something and and being cruel and violence is something kind of gets kind of gets confused.
And so it's I think is actually quite important to keep that sense of it as a
as a space of potential cruelty and and to to think what was done to my body.
But I think it's still belonging in the realm of play. I think it really is really ethically important for that reason.
So I was saying goodbye, but I realise maybe you're putting a hand up to speak. I'm sorry.
Okay. I was actually wanting to say sumptuary.
Sorry. And that was that's actually just I was just very quickly looking at your index and checking that one
really fascinating set piece on this whole issue is Ben Johnson's Bartholemew Fair Zeil of the Land.
Busi is exactly made into the pockets that he denounces and that, you know,
there's another whole story there behind that that could be worth thinking about.
Thank you. That's a really good point. I don't have a good answer to that question about states.
I mean, I might my my first book, the one about touch, I sort of say at one point I'm not going to write about drama, but I a while to do this.
Like, I love drama. I love teaching drama, thinking about drama.
But I keep sort of leaving it have to be it just feels like it's such a complicated thing.
But I think the Johnson example is actually fantastic. I guess also with the puppets, partly because of having the example of, you know,
because Ken does so much on it in his book on the subject, the portrait.
In a way, my puppet chapter is not that much about the literal puppets.
So all seen what we've how we encounter religious objects in the context of these of these interesting puppetry.
But but but yet. But the Johnson and Johnson thinks about the gender and sexuality of puppets and such interesting ways and so on.
So there's lots to say that. But some like that reminder. The one thing I thought about earlier is that the people playing with another will end up
realising that their play gets out of hand and they have to they they can't control the response.
And the other manipulators like the Fool are playing games that aren't the games of.
Sir Toby Belch and Mariah said that there are multiple attempts to control him, none of which can quite exhaust the cost of the play.
So they also have become, if I may, they also become aware of their own capacity for cruelty, I think.
But I seeing other people play with Malvolio.
So, I mean, it's a sort of I think that's part of what's happening in that moment, if if I'm understanding you.
Right. You know, the cruelty this is I remember I met years ago a young German puppeteer who said she
really never knew how to use her puppets until she destroyed them and remade them.
That there is something very unsettling and beautiful about that. Mm hmm.
We have a couple more questions. One is goes from Gordon testee of you.
I think you can see the questions as we're going along. And that's about, again, the choice he evokes the motive, Benyamin.
Her leaving the taxi filled with choice. And it's a more general question.
Are the toys happy or sad? Do you have a response to that, Joe?
Thank you, Gordon. Are his toys at recess?
I think. I think I think I'm going to say beyond happiness and sadness, I don't I don't.
I'm not sure I have a good answer to that. But I basically think of. I do mention it briefly in the in the book.
What makes me think of Kafka's Kafka's ultra dark, mysterious, spindly, barely human figure.
Which which. Which. Well, again, it feels like it goes a little bit back to my original answer to Lorna's question,
which is that the objects of interest to me in this book are the ones to whom it seems very strange to even try and attributes an emotional range.
But but it nonetheless happens, right? I mean, this kind of is the sort of the sort of exorbitant of that attempt in the face of
something that's so meagre and so and provides so few sort of hooks or affordance.
It's for us to do that. So that's a that's a slight dodge of Gordon's question this century.
Well, it raises I mean, 308, you're raising the question of. In a sense of assigning agency or humanity or some kind of affect to go right
back to where Lorna started to something that may or may not be just as it were,
just an object. And in a way, that's what's in the last question that we have from this president, which is to do with personification,
deep personification and the symbolisation as a kind of essential part of iconoclasm.
I'll give you a moment to read it. I'm obviously excited because it's about monsters, because monsters, but it's more complex.
Goodbye, Alex. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alex.
And friends, the ones in the category of the monstrous. And how things at.
Tended to be terrible. Come to seem lovable. Interesting.
This relates to the. Is this right, perhaps to the Dragon said. Yes.
The dog. Oh, joke. The dog dragon. It's it's Amstutz.
And I think I'll say that again.
I'm sorry. I can't. I think a lot of this film comes with quite a bit more historical detail on on Dragons and in Spences, England.
I think some of which some of which may have stayed in. But I kept coming across these sorts of that.
They're very funny things about the way which resample dragons.
Well, you know, when all that sort of St George projects and things are getting abolished, what often happens is St George goes quite early.
But the dragon actually comes around for several decades. This is great.
I think the one in Norwich is called Old SNOP. What kind of some description?
I just love this somehow comes to mind. Let's for ages reading this question, I imagine this guy in a Dragon Trust, Juban,
in late 16th century Norwich was sitting on a stone outside the cathedral's and waiting for someone else to come out and play with him again.
And so there is there is something interesting about the kind of the sort of
rendering loveable of the of the seemingly terrible what it eventually crushes,
although it raises the bigger question of how how we readers fear historically.
Right. And not fear in the grand. In the grand, you know, pity and fear sense, but sort of being spooked by things.
Yeah. And I guess it plays back in my mind to sort of, you know, sort of Keith Thomas's work on magic and that kind of thing.
And just and just the sort of one of the challenges about always being about what's about trying to understand the sort
of routine mindset in which there might be these kind of superhuman forces kind of at play in the world in certain ways.
And again, I think when I was first studying English for this period, I was you know,
I read those things that sort of encouraged me to think about the English,
English literary world in terms of things like dispair, you know, Calvinist despair as manifested.
You know, I spent so I spent a Donlan blow up. But actually, I wonder about this sort of lower level of just things being a bit a bit creepy,
a bit and a bit canny and a bit and sort of perhaps lovable as well.
And something about the questions that takes us into that. Again, it goes back to Ted's comments on my use of my imagination in the book.
But this sort of attempt to inhabit these these sorts of affective, smaller affective worlds that I had that are sort of harder to access,
but perhaps to me they seem to sort of matter all the more for that reason.
Thank you. I think we ought to draw things to a close.
There is, as Lorna said right at the beginning, there's never enough time for these, really.
But nonetheless, we've we've managed to discuss a pretty wide range of exciting stuff in the book.
And I'd like to thank one last time Joe and also Lorna and the other brilliant interlocutors today who have given us at least
a taste of what's going on in this book and urge everybody to go and reread it and repeat reading it and put it on repeat.
Thank you all for coming and thank you for your questions as well.
All that remains for me to do is to say, please do come back next week.
Next week. Same time for our next book at lunchtime event, which is Commemorative Modern Isms,
Women Writers Death and the First World War, written by Alice Kelly.
Cheque the torch Web site to register for next week's event. If you'd like to come.
Thank you all again. One last time. And goodbye.