Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

By Kenneth Gross

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life.

The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780226309606

Book preview

KENNETH GROSS teaches English at the University of Rochester and is the author, most recently, of Shylock Is Shakespeare (2006), also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2011 by Kenneth Gross

All rights reserved. Published 2011.

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30958-3 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-30958-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30960-6 (e-book)

An earlier version of parts of the prologue and parts of chapters 2, 3, and 4 appeared as The Madness of Puppets, Hopkins Review, n.s., 2, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 182–205; an earlier version of part of chapter 9 appeared as The Blackened Puppet, in Selected Subversions: Essays on the World at Large, special issue, Conjunctions: Bi-annual Volume of New Writing, no. 46 (2006): 313–27; an earlier version of chapter 10 appeared as Shadows, Yale Review 98, no. 3 (2010): 1–22; an earlier version of part of chapter 4 was included in Love among the Puppets, Raritan: A Quarterly Review 17, no. 1 (1997): 67–82.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gross, Kenneth.

Puppet : an essay on uncanny life / Kenneth Gross.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30958-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-30958-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Puppets in literature. 2. Puppet theater—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN1972.G766 2011

791.5′3—dc2

2010052565

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

PUPPET

An Essay on Uncanny Life

KENNETH GROSS

PUPPET

FOR LIZA

CONTENTS

Cover

Copyright

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PROLOGUE: The Madness of Puppets

1    A Conversation in Rome

2    Bad Manners

3    The Scale of the Puppet

4    The Fate of Hands

5    Wooden Acting

6    Fables for a Puppet Theater

7    Destroying the Puppet Show

8    Hunger

9    The Blackened Puppet

10    Shadows

11    A Test of Innocence

CODA: Everything Else

NOTES

READINGS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PHOTO CREDITS

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Paul Klee, Big-Eared Clown

Galleria Don Chisciotte, Rome

Italian marionettes

Dennis Silk

Puppets by Richard Teschner

Puppet by Maria Signorelli

Scenes from Sergei Obraztsov’s Attitude to a Lady

Hands of a Marionette Player

Bunraku rehearsal

Scene from Lear, Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel

Scene from Macbeth für Anfänger (Macbeth for beginners), Thalias Kompagnons

Scene from Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (The return of Ulysses to his homeland), Handspring Puppet Company

Puppet from the Opera dei Pupi

Puppets from the Opera dei Pupi

Wasserman, from Kinder der Bestie/Children of the Beast, Figurentheater Tübingen

Bunraku puppeteers

Wayang kulit performance

Scene from Evidence of Floods, Janie Geiser & Co.

Paul Klee, Ghost of a Scarecrow

Paul Klee, Absolute Fool

Paul Klee, Unfinished Angel

Scene from Chair de ma chair (My own flesh and blood), Ilka Schönbein

Giuseppina’s house, Rome

PROLOGUE

The Madness of Puppets

WHAT IS THIS thing that I recognize, that seems to know me, when I come upon it on a street corner, in a park, or in the shadows of a theater, moving up on that small stage? What is this creature that burrows out of shadows, into the light, a remnant of something, hardheaded, often squeaking and ugly, moving with such odd, unpredictable motion, or just lying still, folded up on itself, a little warm, patiently gathering strength for some new movement? I wonder about the world in which this creature lives. I wonder more what it knows about our world.

The madness of the puppet. It lies along a line or spectrum of things. It might be a very ordinary form of madness. The madness lies in the hidden movements of the hand, the curious impulse and skill by which a person’s hand can make itself into the animating impulse, the intelligence or soul, of an inanimate object—it is an extension of that more basic wonder by which we can let this one part of our body become a separate, articulate whole, capable of surprising its owner with its movements, the stories it tells. I call it madness, but it is perhaps better called an ecstasy. It lies in the hand’s power and pleasure in giving itself over to the demands of the object, our curious will to make the object into an actor, something capable of gesture and voice. What strikes me here is the need for a made thing to tell a story, to become a vehicle for a voice, an impulse of character—something very old, and very early. The thing acquires a life.

The madness will also have something to do with the made puppet itself, so often a crude and disproportioned thing, with its staring eye and leering teeth, its tiny hands, the impossible red or blue of its face, barely human in form, like a monster or mistake, a fetus or a corpse. The madness lies in the wild actions that come to belong to that object, that seem, indeed, proper to it: its rhythmic dance, its talent for trickery, its speed of attack, its delicate way with a stick or bit of paper, its skill in disappearance and reappearance. Characters human and inhuman, close to objects. In this theater, what looks like a wooden block or ball, a bundle of rags, a thin silhouette of perforated leather, assumes a voice and personality. In the right hands, a mere strip of paper moved by a string, yielded to accidents of air, can do it. All acquire intentions, what looks like will, even if this belongs to things we think can have no will. All acquire different souls and spirits, all have different stories to tell. They are able to enter into our histories, and reenact our histories.

Then there is the intense, often mysterious quality of the audience’s fascination with these wooden actors, and with the seen and unseen face of the puppet show. Fear there can be, also an unsettling delight, the trace of the intimacy we can achieve with alien things. The playwright Paul Claudel, in 1926, described a puppet show he saw in Japan, though it sounds as much like a performance of the French clown puppet Guignol: And behind—it’s so amusing to keep well hidden and make someone come to life; to create that little doll that goes in at the eyes of every spectator to strut and posture in his mind! In all those rows of motionless people only this little goblin moves, like the wild elfish soul of all of them. They gaze at him like children, and he sparkles like a little firecracker! There is something in the puppet that ties its dramatic life more to the shapes of dreams and fantasy, the poetry of the unconscious, than to any realistic drama of human life. That is part of its uncanniness, that its motions and shapes have the look of things we often turn away from or put off or bury. It picks out our madness, or what we fear is our madness. It creates an audience tied together by childlike if not childish things. It is amazing, the scream of children trying to warn Punch that there is a crocodile hiding behind him, a creature who disappears instantly below stage every time that Punch turns around to catch a glimpse of him. Keeping watch on the audience that watches a puppet show is often part of the fascination. François Truffaut’s 1959 film The 400 Blows, as an interlude in its picture of wounded childhood, contains a stunning few minutes of footage showing the faces of an audience of young French children watching a puppet show of Red Riding Hood, each face distinct yet part of a unified sea of wonder. They are wildly absorbed by what they see, crying out warnings (Le loup! Le loup!), elated even by their fear for the puppet heroine set upon by a puppet wolf.

Puppet theater has its ambivalences. It can produce less touching forms of fright, a sense of mere creepiness, not to mention a sense of its being something trivial or contemptible. One of Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams (1796) suggests a more violent response: I fell in love as a boy with a puppet show; / It attracted me for a long time until I destroyed it. That too is part of the madness I would describe. It is not quite the same as the act of putting away childish things. There’s something so loaded, so odd about the very word puppet in English that it can’t help but evoke divided responses in those who hear it, even those who are themselves involved in the art. The word derives from the Latin pupa, for little girl or doll, a word still used in entomology to describe the mysterious, more passive middle stage of an insect’s metamorphosis, as the larva is covered in a chrysalis, and awaits reemergence as a winged thing. Such an analogy has some resonance, and yet the word puppet, itself a diminutive, still sounds a little like a child’s word, as well as being a word for a child. Used metaphorically, it gets applied to a thing or person both insignificant and subjected to the power of others—not a word people will readily apply to themselves. In Shakespeare’s time, puppet—sometimes poppet—might be an endearment, but also a term used to derogate both actors and servile politicians, or to mark a woman as a painted seductress, even a prostitute. Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you! cries Helena to Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, thinking she has stolen her lover. English Protestant reformers employed the word to mock the Roman Catholic use of images and relics, the ceremony of the Mass, indeed, the whole architecture of Catholic ritual. The homemade dolls found in the possession of accused witches, allegedly used to inflict harm by magic, were also called puppets.

This book invites a double vision. The puppet and the idea of the puppet move together here, the actual and imagined, or unknown, puppet, the visible and invisible puppet. I want to trace the sources of the theatrical fascination of puppets, their peculiar powers and limits onstage, but also to touch on broader questions about artistic making. Hence it is that when I describe certain aspects of puppet theater—its ardent indecorums, its talent for metamorphosis, its dismemberings of language and transformations of scale, its materiality, its commitment to giving life to the unliving, its negotiations with death and survival, its love of secrecy and shadows, its literalness, its fundamental strangeness—I want also to convey how these find mirrors in other forms of poetry and fiction, as well as in dramatic art more generally. If the wooden actor holds up a stark mirror to actors of flesh and blood, it also offers a resonant image of our broader relation to the words we speak, their forms of life and death, our relation to material objects, as well as to our own bodies. This is why my descriptions of actual puppet shows are so often folded together here with thoughts about imaginary and figurative puppets, or puppetlike beings, that appear in writings by, among others, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Emily Dickinson, Carlo Collodi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Russell Hoban, Seamus Heaney, and Philip Roth, in the work of visual artists such as Joseph Cornell or Paul Klee, or in a film of Ingmar Bergman’s. In their works we glimpse the fictive puppet as quester, soldier, trickster, survivor, child, angel, animal, and ghost, even as puppeteer. All of these connections help me to take the measure of the puppet as a metaphor of human making, a form of life. A wooden head opens up strange worlds.

IN DESCRIBING THE puppet in performance, I have looked at a number of different styles of puppet theater, both Western and Asian. This includes work in established traditions, such as Japanese Bunraku, Indonesian shadow theater, and the Punch and Judy show, along with a range of ambitious, experimental work by contemporary artists. One can trace among puppets, however different their mechanisms and features, curious genetic links, hidden bloodlines, as between beetles and butterflies, dogs and dolphins. Some varieties are hardy and adaptable, of great antiquity, others rare or long extinct, flourishing only in specialized environments, among the rigors of a desert or the florid tropics. I want to evoke here both the shared lines of relation and the great variety of work being done in puppet theater—from low farce to epic drama, from delicate romance to avant-garde satire. But I have not tried to be encyclopedic or systematic. Rather, I’ve dwelt on a relatively limited number of performances, focusing as much as possible on works that I have seen myself, often in eclectic juxtaposition. I have left unmentioned many living traditions and artists, even ones I admire. Also, in pursuing my subject, I have touched only lightly on this theater’s long history, which is richer than readers may suspect.

In Europe, for instance, the written evidences of the puppet theater reach back thousands of years, to classical Greece, at least, where shows involving both cast shadows and marionettes offered ready metaphors to Plato. Ancient Chinese, Arabic, Indian, and Javanese texts offer glimpses of puppet theater from millennia past—shadow puppets, marionettes, and hand puppets, both sacred and popular. There are traditions in which the puppet is an almost magical, tabooed entity, at once vitalizing and dangerous. At times, the puppet shares with the mask a power to give form to gods and demons, to the spirits of the dead; it is a tool to convey the substance of ancient truths. In such cases the manipulator, even the puppet itself, can take on the guise of a priest or shaman. At moments in its history the theater of puppets has also competed openly with its larger rival, as in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, where wooden players might take up any drama that was performed by human actors, in addition to the puppets’ more traditional repertory of Nativity and Passion plays, saints’ tales, the stories of Faust and Don Juan, clown sketches, and burlesques. It was for the puppet theater that the seventeenth-century Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote his stark romantic tragedies, texts which opened up new opportunities for human actors.

Within modernist and avant-garde theater, too, puppets and the idea of the puppet—and versions of the manikin, the human doll, the automaton—played an important role for many playwrights, often by challenging traditional ideas of acting and dramatic realism, as Harold Segel has richly shown. Puppets crept into the imaginings of Georg Büchner, August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, Alfred Jarry, Arthur Schnitzler, Oskar Schlemmer, Karel Čapek, Fortunato Depero, Antonin Artaud, Michel de Ghelderode, and Federico García Lorca, to name only a few. Some developed work explicitly for puppet actors, others made plays for human actors whose character, movements, or mode of being might mirror those of puppets. You see this latter in de Ghelderode’s grotesque, clown-filled Passion plays—this playwright thought that puppets gave him a key to drama in its pure and savage state—or in Maeterlinck’s ghostly scenes, petites drames pour marionnettes, as he called some of them, plays which evoke a world of innocence and violence, peopled by creatures whose words and actions are compelled by forces that remain unseen. One extreme example of a human theater invaded by puppets is The Dead Class, staged in 1975 by the Polish director Tadeusz Kantor. Here, a cast of grotesque, aged figures—all human actors—circled rows of old wooden school benches with a compulsive, mechanical, and tormented motion, all carrying blank-faced, half-ruined manikins representing their dead childhood, objects held in ways variously tender, idle, desperate, and cruel. It is a theater in which dead things, even a kind of dead acting, are asked to reanimate the stage.

And yet for all of its importance at certain historical moments, at other times, or at the same times, puppet theater has led a more marginal existence. Peter Schumann, founder of the Bread and Puppet Theater—a troupe that has had its own long career and wide influence—archly observed that in general puppet theater is something whose history is easier researched in police records than in theater chronicles, an art, if not one of outright failure, that yet prefers its own secret and demeaning stature to any grander public notice. Indeed, for much of its history, if it has not been seen as something primarily for children, puppet theater has often been taken for a lower order of theater, part of a world of unliscensed street performers, mountebanks, charlatans, and circus sideshows, a theater form that is debased, unsophisticated, unliterary, ephemeral, though also crudely seductive. And yet such marginalization offers advantages. That secret and demeaning stature has made it possible for puppeteers, in some historical contexts, to take up a repertory of otherwise forbidden works—as when players in Tudor England performed with puppets those Medieval Passion plays that Protestant authorities had banned for human actors, or when nineteenth- or twentieth-century puppet troupes (Schumann’s among them) staged shows too politically raw for the commercial stage. At the close of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a show of tiny, raucous, farcical glove puppets, drawing its energies from a lowly popular theater, offers an ironic mirror of the larger world of human fixation and folly.

What such a range of incarnations reveals about this theater is also something I have tried to clarify here, though I have no final theories on the matter, or any overarching historical narrative of my own to propose.

THE HAND OF the manipulator travels from puppet to puppet, stuck inside one and now another form of cloth, or picking up and putting down the strings or rods of many different figures. It is the closest thing we have in the ordinary human world to the transmigration of the soul from one body to another, or from one creature to another. The puppet artist is likely to be himself or herself a wanderer. In many cases contemporary puppet theater remains, as it was in the nineteenth century, an itinerant art, with small companies moving their portable, homemade worlds from venue to venue, town to town, country to country. It fits then that this book began to be written wandering, during a period of travels and sojourns abroad that started in the autumn of 2007 and continued through much of 2008, predominantly in Italy and Germany, with briefer but crucial stays in Switzerland, France, Israel, and Bali. I remember sharply the changing views from the many desks where I sat and wrote—narrow city streets, suburban lawns, gardens, mountains, seacoasts, ancient walls, even a rice paddy. And I remember the many different theaters where I found myself watching puppet shows, or things not quite puppet shows, many brilliant and moving, many banal, some awful in their cuteness or, by contrast, in their pretense of radicalism. There were large theaters and small, some grandly fitted out, but just as often a little makeshift, stages fitted into other kinds of buildings and chambers, or playing spaces entirely temporary,

Reviews for Puppet

[susantahiti · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

pretentious.