In Review

Scholarship The Power of Puppets Professor Kenneth Gross explores the theatrical power or “puppet ruler.” But such contempt often pushes away a strange power that people of puppets to “bring a part of us back to play.” feel in the puppet.

Interview by Husna Haq theater, a remnant of the Communist era. You introduce a sense of morbidity to pup- It was like returning to a small piece of the petry, writing that puppets are “the clos- Puppetry isn’t simply child’s play. former East Germany. This was in a grim est thing we have in the ordinary human While American audiences may be more and bereft part of the city, a very small the- world to the transmigration of the soul.” familiar with hyperactive Sesame Street ater space, and I remember seeing things In some cultures, for instance in Bali, pup- characters and a “Disneyfied” version of that ranged from creepy children’s shows pets spring from death, revivifying depart- Pinocchio, the puppet in societies across to a remarkable version of King Lear—a ed souls, ancient heroes as well as gods and the world has played the role of provo- solitary human actor as the king among a clowns. In a sense, they mediate between cateur, historian, clairvoyant, and keeper world of puppets—with a mixed audience the living and the dead. Puppets were of- of the faith, says Kenneth Gross in a new of young artists, children, and old inhab- ten used as a means of communication with book, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life itants of East Berlin. When a show start- the dead. They could bring the dead back to (University of Chicago Press, 2011). From ed, you felt suddenly removed from this life, give form to spirits or ghosts. They be- re-enacting sacred texts in Balinese shadow strange space of the city, caught up in the long to a kind of being that’s neither quite puppetry to mocking authority in England’s show. What I remember as much as par- living nor quite dead. They’re like spirits raucous Punch and Judy shows, puppets ticular plays is that experience of being themselves. are masters of metamorphosis and often, completely removed, transported from the mirrors of ourselves. As objects whose “words or actions are “They are what we project onto them,” more able to slip under the radar of offi- says Gross, professor of English at the Uni- “Puppet” comes cial censorship,” are puppets also a means versity and an admired scholar of Shake- from the Latin pupa, of protest, or satire, even subversion? spearean and Renaissance literature. “They They have a sort of natural gift for comedy, also project onto us.” for little girl or doll . . . satire, mockery–it’s a talent that puppets During a year abroad in 2007–08, Gross For me, it’s such an have. Often they’re amazingly poignant and traveled to Italy, Germany, Switzerland, serious, as in that version of King Lear, but France, Israel, and Bali in order to study odd-sounding word, there is a certain bent toward the grotesque puppet theater. He talked with a wide range like a child’s word. or satirical. It’s part of the uncanniness of of artists, traditional and experimental, ex- puppets. Remember that in the original ploring literary incarnations of the puppet environment by the show. Something simi- book from 1881, Pinocchio smashed that from Plato to Kafka. The result is an ele- lar happened in watching shadow plays in moralizing cricket with a cobbler’s mallet. gant, poetic meditation on the inanimate rural Bali, performed at night on a cinema- There is also a tradition of overtly politi- objects that we invest with life and mean- like screen, but here the larger environ- cal puppet theater, exemplified by a com- ing, in an attempt, muses Gross, to tap into ment never disappeared. I stayed intensely pany that’s been running since the ’60s, buried pieces of ourselves. conscious of the exotic place, the tropical the Bread and Puppet Theater, now based air, the sounds, the gamelan music, people in Vermont. They did amazing grotesque How did this book come about? coming and going during the show. morality plays using oversize puppets and I love writing about all kinds of theater, masks as part of Vietnam War protests, and and there’s something very elemental What insights does the etymology of the they recently did a show in New York on about theater that puppets are able to show; word offer on puppetry and its history? behalf of Occupy Wall Street. there’s something very raw and immediate “Puppet” comes from the Latin pupa, for in watching their movements, gestures, and little girl or doll—that says something. You write, “To find life in objects returns artificial life on stage, a life both assertive The Latin term is still used in entomology us to life.” What do you mean? and secretive. I also liked the effect of writ- to describe the middle stage of an insect’s That part of us that finds life in objects is ing about it, what it did to my language. I metamorphosis. For me, it’s such an odd- an aspect of the child’s imagination and in- found that in order to do justice to this kind sounding word, like a child’s word. The stinct that is later hidden or sometimes let of theater, I had to simplify and loosen up, word was used in Renaissance England as go of in adulthood. It’s something children make my own writing more poetic or ex- a term of abuse for prostitutes or courte- are indeed more adept at, finding life and pressive. I had to think more like an essayist. sans. Iconoclastic Protestants would call voice in objects. Puppets awaken that part Catholic statues of saints “puppets.” There of us. They bring a part of us back to play.r Were there memorable performances? is sometimes an element in the word of There was one theater in Berlin I used to go something trivial or unserious, or that car- Husna Haq is a Rochester-based freelance to a lot. It was the former GDR state puppet ries contempt—as in “puppet government” writer.

14 ROCHESTER REVIEW May–June 2012 Zentrum Paul Klee

3_RochRev_May_2012_Review.indd 14 4/27/12 3:13 PM In Review

UNCANNY LIVES: “They are what we project onto them; they also project onto us,” says Gross, whose new book explores the roles that puppets—like these by artist Paul Klee—play in human imagination.

May–June 2012 ROCHESTER REVIEW 15

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