Puppet
An Essay on Uncanny Life
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.
Content
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
Reviews
"Kenneth Gross explains why puppets are so powerful and why puppetry is such a vital part of our culture both past and present. His book is the site of a constant flow of sharp observations and insights. It is part of the exciting exchange of ideas about objects in performance that is influencing the practitioners of contemporary theater in general and puppeteers in particular" – Basil Jones, Executive Producer, Handspring Puppet Company, member of the "War Horse" creative team
"After three readings, my enthusiasm must take the form of a warning, even of a prohibition: do not read Kenneth Gross's energetic, expert, and exhaustive essay as if it were merely – merely! – an ecstatic encomium; on the other hand (the puppeteer's constant cry), do not treat this learned and lyrical study as if it were no more than a reference book, though it has all the beneficent earmarks of that dread convenience. Read it as you always meant to read the Bible: by chapters, by pages, persistently by sentences, readily pausing to concur, to contend, to wonder... You will find the author has done that much for you, thereby achieving – by a labor of years as well as of love – the Sacred Book of an entire human undertaking, one which has ensorcelled us for all the recorded ages of what the author calls uncanny life" – Richard Howard, author of "Without Saying"
"You have in your hands a uniquely beautiful book, a book of uncommon brilliance and lucidity. It is as wondrous as the theaters of marvels it describes; its leaps and mutabilities provide a thrilling adventure in imaginative thinking. 'How are we devoured by the things we make?' it asks. 'And when might that devouring save us?' My copy burns brightly on my favorite shelf, beside 'The Poetics of Space', 'Eccentric Spaces', and 'In Praise of Shadows'... a treasure!" – Rikki Ducornet, author of "Netsuke" and "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition"
