The Play World by Patricia Anne Simpson

Author:Patricia Anne Simpson [Simpson, Patricia Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Europe, Germany, Education, Modern, General, Social History
ISBN: 9780271087405
Google: 4pUFEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2021-03-09T01:01:14+00:00

Fig. 23 “The nutcracker in colorful clothes serves as their scapegoat. They throw spears at him—they crack their own nuts there.” From “Knecht Ruprecht in Kamerun,” attributed to A. Bahr, Münchener Bilderbogen, vol. 2, 2. Auflage (Munich: Braun & Schneider, 1892). Photo: author.

The next image raises the stakes of this gift-giving expedition even higher, with the iambic lines interpreting the act of “devouring” a picture book—not figuratively, but literally. Increasingly, Ruprecht’s worst fears are confirmed. Further in the background, his hands raised above his head, he watches as the youths drive their spears into the soldierly representation of a nutcracker, described as a victim. In this visual and verbal narrative, the male and female toys—the nutcracker and the doll—are dislodged from European realms of signification. With that rupture, the mimetic function of play inadvertently confers agency onto the children of Cameroon, who recode the toys to reveal their own quotidian practices.

The German literary and cultural tradition hosts a family story about the giddiness of destructive play. In Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, the poet recalls a tale, firmly inscribed in family and national lore, about his playing with crockery at the window while the Ochsenstein brothers observe the spectacle. As noted in chapter 3, from boredom with the domestic toys he begins a process of smashing the breakables to escalating approbation from the audience of his peers. Cruelty toward and abuse of inanimate objects or ostracized children is often at the core of critiques involving play. Middle-class practices advocate creative, not destructive, impulses in pedagogical play. In the depiction of Cameroonian cannibals, the spectacle repudiates any sense of glee in the inappropriate disposal of European toys. In the Bilderbogen, the nutcracker resembles the persecuted and executed Catholic iconography of Saint Sebastian. The cloying rhymes of the text characterize the object’s demise as a martyrdom. The religious impulse of benevolence, echoed in the language of “gifts” and “donations,” is itself cannibalized. The next sacrifice cinches the threads of catastrophe: “Den Menschenfressern scheint’s geraten, die Puppen erst am Spieß zu braten” (The cannibals, it appears, have first decided to roast the dolls on a skewer) (fig. 24).

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