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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Theory

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puppets and I go way back. I want to say that the Muppets and Sid and Marty Kroft shows (HR Pufnstuf, Far Out Space Nuts), though the latter was more costumed humans than puppets, I admit, introduced me to bodies animated by unseen humans. But, outside of television (and that P movie by that D company), I quite fondly recall my mother making little puppets out of felt and doing little puppet shows for me. She was a drama-girl all the way. Furthermore, I remember seeing street puppets when I lived in Italy as a boy and at least one Punch & Judy show in Brighton, England, when I lived in the UK as a teenager.

But it was later in life that I learned to appreciate the uncanny nature of puppets. In the early 90s I discovered the movies of Jan Svankmajer, which sometimes featured marionettes, then, in the early 2000s, I discovered the stop motion films of The Brothers Quay, which have become an obsession of mine. Back in 2003, I believe it was, I saw another Punch and Judy show (this one in Minneapolis, of all places), I took my kids to a live puppet show (with puppets more reminiscent of Frank Oz's early creations, than anything else) not many years after. Then, in 2019, while on vacation in Europe, my wife and I visited Salzburg, Austria and attended the Salzburg Marionetten Theatre. And just tonight, I signed up for a Domestika course on making wooden marionettes.

I think I'm becoming a little obsessed. Maybe I was obsessed all along and am just now admitting it.

Back in 2021 (it feels strange to say that - has it really been that long?), I read and reviewed Victoria Nelson's outstanding book The Secret Life of Puppets, which I had stumbled on at Goodreads, if I remember correctly. Then, my favorite podcast, Weird Studies, did an episode on this same book in November of 2022. They followed this with an episode about the movie Evil Dead II, which also dipped into the uncanny nature of puppets. This is where I first saw reference to the book being reviewed presently.

It is this uncanny aspect of puppets that Kenneth Gross examines in Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. All the while I was reading, I felt as if I had the voice of Mark Fischer whispering in my ear. His book/essay on The Weird and the Eerie could have formed the skeleton for Gross's essay, though Gross's work preceded Fisher's by five years. So, perhaps it is the other way around? However, I find no reference to Gross's work in Fischer's bibliography. Maybe this is just another magical synergy that seems to happen so often with these sorts of confluences.

The movement and intelligence that are apparent in a puppet is "weird" (in Fisher's sense) because there should be no movement or intelligence or intention in unliving material, yet that intent seems to come through the unliving (perhaps undead?) material of the puppet. There is movement in what there ought not to be. This offends our logic while simultaneously spiking our curiosity, a morbid curiosity for that which is incapable of morbidity, strangely enough.

It feels quite natural for humans to view these artificial beings as artifacts with some connection to the past. I've seen countless cast off dolls in the mud, for example, and it piques my sense of wonder. How did this get here? Who lost it? Is there some latent connection with a past owner? This begs the further question: Are puppets, dolls, and marionettes some sort of mana batteries, storing energy from some past life force? Perhaps the mystery of these unseen lives that live behind the figures is what we hope to see through to, with the "little people" serving as scrying devices into past lives, their joys, and tragedies. But are our visions clouded and warped by looking through these anthropomorphic lenses? Could some malevolent spirit twist or visions of the past if we are not careful? Do we dare look into their eyes?

Puppets and the stages on which they come "alive" ae not like us. They are exaggerated and often missing many of the subtle and not-s0-subtle things that make up life. This creates what Fisher termed "the eerie". Much that should be "there" is not, yet some law of puppetry seems to govern their universe, laws that do not apply in the same way to us. Nor do our laws apply to them. So which reality is real? Which laws actually inhere?

Just as the paradox of life seemingly manifest in dead things causes unease and fascination, the utter unknowability of what it feels, tastes, smells, or sounds like to be a dead thing that was once living simultaneously terrifies us and fills us with curiosity, longing, even, to know and, with much fear and uncertainty, to experience what the dead experience. It is the age old push and pull of existential dread, brought to life(?) by the infusion of seeming intent into dead matter. The puppeteer possesses the puppet with life-force, animating it, the living possessing the dead in a reverse-seance. Who is the medium here?

Puppeteers I have met indeed often speak of waiting for some impulse from the puppet they hold, a gesture or form of motion that they can then develop often being shocked by what emerges.

The act of puppeteering blurs the line between tool and wielder. yes, the human informs the dead material, but the dead material imposes its own limitations, resisting, even fighting back!

The unliving puppet is, of course, innocent, as it can only react to others' manipulations. Yet many puppet shows are transgressive and anything but innocent (go watch a Punch and Judy show, if you don't believe me). Here the inherent innocence of the puppet allows for a buffer to the audience. Hence the shocking nature of the horror trope of puppets and other artificially animated human stand-ins possessed of self-realized inimical animation.

Remember, though, that's it not always the humans facing the puppet that have need to fear that strange intersection of life and death, of immaterial energy and material existence. As Gross implies, this liminal zone is fraught with danger for all:

Then there was the marionette of Antigone who had hung herself with the very strings that had earlier given her life. That had its own kind of truth.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a strange book, one that almost resists reading because it is so strange. It comes with some of the best blurbs I've ever seen. Rikki Ducornet: "You have in your hands a uniquely beautiful book... My copy burns brightly on my favorite shelf, beside The Poetics of Space, Eccentric Spaces and In Praise of Shadows." Richard Howard (surely the doyen of handcrafted blurbs): "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…"

Puppet lives up to its praise. It doesn't simply discuss the uncanny as typified by the peculiar world of puppets, it instantiates it. At times it seems to be a kind of private diary of Gross's favorite puppeteers and performances. There are divagations that hover at the edge of distraction and tedium, but then the discussion morphs into something truly mysterious.

You feel the world take the form of a gathering of gestures and acts, faces, limbs, bodies, cries, fragments of stories, objects of ears and eyes, mechanisms and animals. You see it in a patch of color or darkness, a line that makes a pattern in the void, a separate world that is both our world and something else, taking shape for a moment in some piece of painting or music, doubled by the landscape, the weather, the text of torn clouds colored by sunlight and shadow. One small piece of this is enough to open up a world. It is enough for a lifetime of commentary.

Howard is right: you have to read this book as curiously as you would a poem by Louise Glück or Wislawa Szymborska or one of Kafka's parables. It's a fit companion to Victoria Nelson's A Secret Life of Puppets or those almost perfect anomalous books by Harbison and Bachelard.

[Madly Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

REREADING

[Ygraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

for me, this wasn't as much like the poetics of space as other readers have found it -- in my opinion, it didn't have bachelard's grace & agility of thought, or quite the same precise, beautiful newness in its images and descriptions and Things Brought Together ?

but it is a mostly interesting & occasionally striking overview of puppetry as an art, and of the shapes puppets & their puppeteers can take.

i really liked the section on mnemonic:

“it begins when the actors take up a chair that has been onstage throughout many previous scenes [...] this carefully engineered prop collapses into a hinged clump of boards; these in turn become, in the hands of the actors, the torso and limbs of a crude, skeletal, if still chair-like manikin [...] the jointed figure is held by four members of the cast, supported visibly like a frail body, while a fifth holds a gathered clump of clothes above its shoulders to represent a head. slowly, most slowly, with stunning care and an arcane kind of sympathy, as the illumination dims and the lighting creates an impression of storm, the five actors collaboratively animate the pieces of wood and cloth. they blankly give themselves to the puppet and, like the manipulators in bunraku, show no expression, becoming indeed almost invisible. they show us the iceman’s last moments of wandering, his collapse to the ground, his last breaths, his falling into sleep and death, into the silence, stillness, but also duration of ice, into blackness. the chair is animated most powerfully in showing us an ancient, solitary, unknown, and forgotten death, the play’s strangest version of the work of memory. i rarely have seen a puppet that feels so alive, that so animates thought and feeling. the object is left onstage at the close, and as the audience files past it we become mourners, not just for the dead iceman but for the abandoned puppet and even the chair of which it is composed.”

and the one on the hand puppets paul klee made for his son:

“the exhibition of all of klee’s puppets is a rare event, for ordinarily only a few are on display at a given moment. the majority of them are kept in storage, carefully wrapped, for they are fragile things, a curator’s nightmare, made quickly to entertain a child (or the artist himself), with heads of plaster, mostly, or glued bits of wood, scraps of old clothing, leather, and fur, matchboxes, even electrical sockets, and then further painted or drawn on to form a feature or an expression. unlike the elaborately stylized, machine- or manikin-like costumes which klee’s bauhaus colleague oskar schlemmer created for his triadic ballet—clown-like in ways, but unnervingly impersonal, even armor-like—these puppets are intimate, homemade. none of these figures was ever part of the careful catalog of works that klee kept from his earliest years as a working artist, and so the puppets form a curious, private space within his oeuvre.

[...] klee has formed the simple bodies of these puppets—handless shapes, mostly sewn of old cloth remnants, sometimes painted—so that almost all of them have their arms thrown out and up in what looks like an ecstatic sign of greeting.

[...] the puppets in their ecstasy seem to invite the viewer to join in a dance, to take them into a play. they are astonished to find themselves as puppets, and throw up their handless hands to catch our attention, holding nothing.”

and the one on ilka schönbein's chair de ma chair:

“the puppets in ilka schönbein’s chair de ma chair (my own flesh and blood) were less separate creatures, things with bodies and heads of their own, and more parts of bodies, worn, stressed, starved, and exhausted remnants. many were hollow masks of faces, broken or split. others were supplemental limbs, perverse prostheses, an arm and a shoulder, a partial torso, a leg with a cane as if thrust through it, or reaching arms attached to the spokes of a bicycle wheel. these puppets seemed as close to ruin as possible. moving them with both delicacy and eerie devotion, the puppeteer held these masks, limbs, and torsos by turns close and apart from her own body, using now her hand, now her own head, even her feet. she was always present onstage, a body stained, worn, almost starved. her own face was often visible below the masks she wore—the margin between face and mask was at times like a scar. it was a face that took on expressions by turns grim and clownish, darkened with gray-brown makeup that also covered her limbs, with her hands painted a deep, sudden red. the story she performed, in a series of linked fragmentary scenes, increasingly unsettling, was a kind of memory or dream book, the history of a daughter and a mother, the story of how each feeds and feeds on the other, creates and deforms the other, cares for and survives the other.

[...] it often seemed as if schönbein was at once starved and fed by the puppet she moved; often it was the puppet that seemed more alive than she was. the idea of the puppet’s feeding her life was given explicit shape at a moment when, holding up the child mask at arm’s length in front of her, and taking out a metal spoon, with a gleeful smile, and with the clown’s wink of complicity to her audience, the puppeteer avidly consumed some imaginary substance in the air which lay within or behind the child mask. she was eating its spirit or its thoughts or its memories, as well as eating her own.”

[Asif Ghazanfar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend of mine recommended this book to me. He's never been wrong, and with this book, he continues his winning streak with me. I came to this book with zero interest in puppets but was intrigued by the possibility of learning in a domain wholly different from my usual concerns.

This book is a journey into the world of theatre, politics, innocence, philosophy, death, the life of objects and our relation to them. It illustrates the power of our imaginations, the power of what we create. It's all there in the history and artistry of puppets and puppeteers.

I certainly see the world a bit differently now.

[H. Givens · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that explores not only the feeling of a puppet, but other things that give us that feeling or those feelings. "Puppetlike objects," on the stage and in other media. And he's comfortable talking about other puppet traditions besides the European ones. I appreciate someone giving words to these very specific and enrapturing feelings that seem to be common among puppet-watchers, but that said, it is mostly just a lot of feelings. Recommended for a puppet enthusiast's reading pleasure, or to our friends and family who may not understand what we see in the puppets, but not a must-read.

[Joseph M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An awesomely poetic book and also a nice sampler plate of puppetry traditions from around the world - from Punch and Judy shows, Pinocchio, to Balinese wayang kulit (shadow puppetry).

I've been interested in puppetry for a long time now, and Gross has put to words a lot of where that fascination comes from for me. Puppets are the strange mediators between the living, "human" world and the material world. They are ways of organizing dramas that contain feelings too obscure, too small for human actors to do justice to. Gross gives the example of a dinner table come to life, with forks and crumbs becoming actors.

Though puppetry traditions differ throughout the world almost as much as musical traditions differ throughout the world, Gross sees a beauty in this idea of a puppet as a force simultaneously larger and smaller than life. Puppets are sometimes grotesque, sometimes sacred and sometimes both. Puppets like Pinocchio and Punch embody the grotesque, carnivalesque irreverence that puppets can come to embody, while the shadow puppetry of Southeast Asia, for example, can come to embody sacred and beautiful twilit dramas.

These twilight objects are pieces of a magical memory, something passed down from generation to generation. They play at invisible, magical, and sometimes obscurely traumatic memories of the body that can't be enacted with the body itself. They become like a second body for the puppeteers. However, in Gross's analysis, these little puppet dramas, far from being fragilely strung together, are strong and beautiful.

Highly recommend this book!

[Jason Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative and artfully described academic but accessible book about the history, artistry, and metaphysical implications of puppetry. I read this recently after publishing Master of Rods and Strings, but I must say there were . . . to borrow from Gross's title "uncanny" sentences in this nonfiction book that resonated with some of the renditions of puppetry that I included in my work of fiction, and Gross is a quite attuned to the craft. His close attention to the words of puppeteers and their art as well as the range of types of puppets and the contextual history is quite excellent. An excellent synthesis and analysis. Also thoughtful literary examinations with psychological dimensions. A lyrical and profound must-read for puppet enthusiasts of the stage, screen, and page.

[Rupert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I’ve read in a while. Not just a well written overview of the history of puppets and the various forms of puppet theater, but also on comparative mythologies and a philosophical meditation on consciousness itself. Reminded me of the writing of Gaston Bachelard, who the author references at the beginning of his book.

[Dean Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I grew up loving puppets, making puppets and performing (badly) puppet shows. I've always been fascinated by the art of puppetry and have also loved the myths and lore surrounding puppets. For the enthusiast, a thoroughly enjoyable and loved read. I will own this.

[Howard Mansfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

In almost every sentence Kenneth Gross spins in paradox: The puppet is not human and is human; the puppet is more alive and yet dead; the puppet lives with the hand, dances with it, and both magnifies and reduces the hand. This is a playful, thoughtful book about serious play.

[Hillary · Rating 5 out of 5]

my new obsession

[Anna Grace Wenger · Rating 4 out of 5]

big ken fan! he writes like a poet, absolutely beautiful.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful little book was unexpected and surprising, charming and strange, resonate and soulful, thoughtful and diaphanous.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can’t recommend enough wow

[Colette Bender · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mhm yup exactly

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gorgeously written, but often tedious. He is best when speaking about the lives of objects. I grew quickly tired of the elaborate, detailed descriptions of puppet shows.

His exploration of table settings in Chapter 2 was one of the most beautiful and inspirational things I have ever read.

[jennifer]

anna - winter 2011

[Susannah Strong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing style reminds me of The Poetics of Space, but rewritten as an extended study on puppetry. Wonderful. Can't say enough good things about this one.

[Kate Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved the first five chapters, but found that it grew repetitive.

[Kodiaksm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rating is -1
This book was extremely disappointing!