Martin Puchner
Puppets require not only that we return to our earliest childhood experiences; they also demand a more global approach to modernism since many modernists were particularly intrigued by non-European puppets. But puppets are a particularly strange form of exoticism because puppet makers and users knew that puppets, dolls, and marionettes were not simply an import from the East. What was so thrilling about them, in the minds of many of their most loyal adherents, was that they were at home in Europe as well, although relegated to nurseries and folklore.
Why should we bother with puppets when it comes to modernism? As everyone knows, puppets are for children; they belong to the elaborate toy theaters favored by the Victorian bourgeoisie rather than to the provocative arts of the avant-gardes. Or they derive from the rude folklore of Punch and Judy shows, at home at fairs and roadside spectacles, rather than from the recherché performances in the coterie theaters of Europe’s capitals. Finally, puppets and their relatives such as idols evoke faraway cults and cultures rather than the high arts favored by connoisseurs within advanced capitalist societies. But these three origins—children’s games, street theater, and cult—are also the very reasons why puppets can point us to a crucial undercurrent within modernism.
Looking at modernism through the eyes of puppets also requires that we expand our notion of modernism both geographically and temporally. Puppets require not only that we return to our earliest childhood experiences; they also demand a more global approach to modernism since many modernists were particularly intrigued by non-European puppets. But puppets are a particularly strange form of exoticism because puppet makers and users knew that puppets, dolls, and marionettes were not simply an import from the East. What was so thrilling about them, in the minds of many of their most loyal adherents, was that they were at home in Europe as well, although relegated to nurseries and folklore. Inspired by global puppets, European modernists went to work excavating these nonhuman residues at the heart of Europe, finding there another version of the East. Even as puppets work as reminders of forgotten pasts, they were also integrated into the most futuristic scenarios in the form of robots and mechanized actors, adapting to the art of the first machine age. Identifying these various strands will require a reflection on children’s puppets, modernist puppets in the theater, mechanized puppets, and global puppets. Puppets, it turns out, not only capture several crucial strands within modernism. They still exert a considerable influence on art, especially the theatrical arts, and thus have managed to extend modernist estrangement into the present.
Child’s Play
One could do worse than to start with Charles Baudelaire, whose eyes tended to catch phenomena outside the main currents of culture. In a short piece of prose, the narrator describes an encounter with a poverty-stricken child, whose only doll is a live rat: “In order to save money, the parents had torn the puppet directly from life [tiré le joujou de la vie elle-même]” (“Morale du Joujou,” 585). The living rat is a perversion of the traditional puppet, which is only supposed to simulate a living person without itself being alive.
A similar short-circuit, Baudelaire continues, is at play in the well-known desire of children to tear open puppets. This desire is not simply one of destruction but also a form of curiosity, a metaphysical drive to peek inside the puppet and search for its animating force. This curiosity leads to an explosion of violence. Baudelaire writes:
The child twists the limbs of the puppet, scratches and shakes it, smashes it against the wall, throws it on the ground. . . . Its wondrous life comes to an end. Like the troupes assaulting the Tuileries, the child undertakes one more effort: it breaks open the puppet, since it is the stronger of the two. But where is its soul? This is the beginning of melancholia and depression.
(587; translation is mine)
The comparison with the revolutionary masses is perhaps somewhat melodramatic, but it speaks to the force behind this destructive drive. A quasi-revolutionary orgy of violence aims at the seat of the puppet’s “wondrous life,” its soul.
Baudelaire’s story, culminating as it does in “melancholia” and “depression,” points us not so much to modernist art as to modernist theory, that is, to psychoanalysis and in particular to Freud’s essay on the uncanny (1919). This essay begins with the traditional definition of that term, namely that the uncanny points to the zone between living organism and lifeless object. Even though Freud goes on to reject that definition, replacing it with his own Oedipal theory, other theorists have taken it up, including Donald Woods Winnicott, with his notion of the “transitional object.” Among the typical transitional objects he names are security blankets, teddy bears, dolls, and puppets, those early objects through which the infant learns to establish a proper subject-object relation. Winnicott found that the process through which such a relation is established invariably includes the destruction of the transitional object. Ultimately, transitional objects are themselves substitutes for the breast and can be seen as a link between the breast and proper objects. When seen from this perspective, dismembered puppets and dolls resonate with the violent process through which a subject-object relation had been established in early childhood. Like Freud, Winnicott takes us back into an early and rarely remembered childhood, but instead of an Oedipal drama, Winnicott presents us with a drama of objects, of the gradual constitution of objects and, by extension, of subjects.
It is perhaps not surprising that this use—or abuse—of puppets turned out to be crucial for a number of modernist artists, for whom the work of Hans Bellmer can serve as a convenient stand-in. Bellmer’s wooden puppets, presented for the most part in photographs, originate in bourgeois nurseries, but they have developed a twisted sexuality. Mature sexual organs are shamelessly exposed through ruffled lingerie; torsos sprout too many legs, often partially amputated but nevertheless arranged in inviting poses; series of breasts and folds are presented for inspection and use. Puppets are treated at once as objects of perverse desire and as wooden mechanisms that can be rearranged, making every joint an invitation for creative twists and turns, an opportunity to exchange a bone for a piece of wood or to add this or that prosthetic limb to a distorted torso.
Do these puppets and, for that matter, all puppets seek to imitate humans? This question of mimesis turned out to be crucial for modernists intrigued by these silent creatures. It is true that puppets usually take their cues from the human physiognomy: head, complete with eyes, nose, and hair; a torso and two arms adorned with some sort of garment. Hesitantly, puppets bow and greet and go through other forms of human interaction; marionettes are even more agile, with their limbs slowly, if never surely, setting one foot before the next. Even dolls, though less mobile, can be enticed to move. There is no doubt that there exists some sort of family resemblance between puppets and humans.
But is this resemblance really captured by the doctrine of mimesis? When seen through that lens, puppets and marionettes are at best awkward creatures. In truth, they have their own distinct ways of moving, of behaving, their own distinct ways of being. They point as much away from the human as toward it. Hence the recurrent effect of the uncanny they evoke.
Puppets and Actors
The modernist art for which puppets turned out to be crucial was not photography but theater. To the extent that modernism can be understood as an attack on mimesis it was particularly difficult to implement in the theater, an art form at whose center stands the live human actor seeking to imitate another human. In the widely quoted opening sentences from The Empty Space, Peter Brook writes: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged” (9). If theater wanted to become truly modernist, it needed to do away with the human actor. The actor posed a number of problems for which the puppet offered itself as a solution.
One way this solution was articulated was in the language of control. The fact that theater is a collaborative art had long been a thorn in the side of those hoping to turn it into a high art form. The resurgence of puppet theater was therefore closely related to the control over the actor, and thus to the violence against the actor, especially since the emergence of the director’s theater in the second half of the nineteenth century. This new type of director saw the actor as mere material from which the theatrical work of art had to be forged. The human actor has been dying a slow death ever since. Edward Gordon Craig compared the director explicitly with the puppeteer. In his manifesto “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908), he critiques all collaborative theater and advances the thesis that theater can become a true art form only if all artistic decisions are unified in the figure of the all-powerful director. Collaboration is associated with the inchoate collision of divergent wills that makes any formal order, on which Craig’s notion of the artwork is premised, impossible. And the larger the number of meddling participants, the greater the danger that accidents enter the artwork, spelling the end of art. Hence Craig’s sharp polemic against collaboration and his urgent call to consider the actor as a marionette that must execute everything according to the skillful commands of the puppeteer.
Such fantasies of total control via the figure of the puppet infiltrated actual theater practice. William Butler Yeats forced actors into barrels on castors, which he moved around on stage by means of a stick (Explorations, 86ff.). Samuel Beckett even considered this reduced presence of actors too much and immobilized his actors in barrels, ashbins, urns, and mounds. Or else he turned them into test creatures, as he did in “Act Without Words I,” subjecting them to the most cruel experiments. By the same token, many of the leading dramatists of the turn of the century, including Maurice Maeterlinck, Alfred Jarry, and Garcia Lorca, wrote their most important plays explicitly for puppet or marionette theater, even if those pieces are now mostly performed with live, human actors (see also Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny).
Before the background of this puppet-inspired perspective on modernism, one might remember the most famous play to bear a synonym for that word in its title: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House. Ibsen did not envision a Craig-like master director, nor did he wish to confine his actors to barrels. Yet it must be significant that his succès de scandale revolves around a puppet—or doll—metaphor, by which the infantilization of Nora Torvald is signified.
It took a postmodern theater company, the New York–based Mabou Mines, to tease out the puppet-modernism hinted at in this play. In this production, called Mabou Mines DollHouse, which premiered in 2003 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, the most important feature was size. Notoriously, all male characters in this production were played by actors approximately four feet tall. The casting in DollHouse was but one component of an elaborate scheme to get at Ibsen’s obsession with size, with everyone becoming a doll to everyone else, across size boundaries. The small men were, of course, sometimes used as dolls. This happened for example when Torvald flew through the air, carried by a stagehand as if he were a puppet or doll. Since Nora could not handle Torvald despite his small size, she had to carry her own Nora doll. Early on in the first scene, Nora seized the blond hair of a doll, made up to look like herself, and ripped open its head. It was a sudden gesture that encapsulated the violence of which Freud, Winnicott, and Baudelaire speak with respect to the search for the puppet’s soul. In this case, what Nora found inside the skull was a macaroon, which she kept hidden in willful defiance of her husband’s prohibition. In a remarkable performance by Maud Mitchell, Nora also moved and spoke like a manic puppet, her fast-talking baby voice amplified by an extraordinary sound system and design. The entire production took place on a miniature set, with toy chairs, toy beds, toy doors, toy pianos, toy everything, forcing the life-sized actors into the world of dead and animated puppets.
Nora’s two children were made up to resemble dolls and are treated like dolls as well. However, the child actors seemed out of place in this uncanny toy world not because they weren’t good but because they belonged to the toy world in the first place. They were its natural inhabitants and therefore could not contribute to the terror that results when adults, no matter what size, start playing at dolls.
I have been speaking of puppets and marionettes indiscriminately, but it is important to distinguish between them. Marionettes barely keep their feet on the ground since they are forever pulled upward; despite their grace, they are bad at walking, a motion that is essentially a controlled form of falling and hence dependent on gravity. Puppets and dolls, by contrast, collapse onto themselves unless human hands prop them up. The most important theorist of this distinction was a premodernist, Heinrich von Kleist. In an essay that has become rightly famous, “On the Marionette Theatre,” Kleist, or, rather, his narrator, develops a theory of marionettes being “antigravitational” and sets the stage for the modernist polemic against actors by preferring marionettes to human performers. Kleist was not alone. Giacomo Leopardi and E. T. A. Hofmann likewise construct uncanny fables of life and death revolving around the animating principle of puppets, ghosts, dolls, and other creatures.
While marionettes are thus elegant and light, puppets are heavy, bulky, and barely budge. Yet some of the same artists invested in marionettes were drawn to puppets as well, including Garcia Lorca, who liked their popular, folkloristic provenance, and Luigi Pirandello, whose native Sicily is famous for puppetry. Indeed, in addition to demanding that his plays be performed by marionettes, Lorca also wrote several puppet plays, some for children and some for adults, in the crude style of Punch and Judy. It is in this return to folklore that we can see modernists reaching back into the past, tracing forgotten or marginalized practices in their own cultures, drawing on puppets as a resource for estrangement from within. This folkloristic interest set the stage for another orientation, namely that toward the East.
First prize for the crudeness associated with Punch and Judy–style folklore, however, goes to Alfred Jarry, who turned the actor performing Ubu Roi into a kind of puppet by confining him in a full-body costume. The origin of this figure lies in schoolday pranks, and the aesthetics of the play draws on the kind of violence common in puppet theater, a trace, probably, of the kind of violence with respect to puppets noted by Freud, Winnicott, and others working in psychoanalysis and recorded in Bellmer’s photographs.
Machine Puppets
In the twentieth century, the marionette also becomes a matter of technology. In some sense the theater has always been a machine for creating illusions. The crane through which a god was hoisted onto the scene in Greek theater is an early example of this technology-driven nature of theater. Trapdoors and all kinds of flying machines followed, and the revolving stage, developed in the middle of the nineteenth century, created even more possibilities for stage effects. In the early twentieth century, Walter Gropius’s model for a total theater (Totaltheater) constituted a first culmination of this mechanization and technologization of the theater apparatus.
This mechanization of the theater had profound effects on the live actor. More and more, the actor’s body was treated as a mere instrument, as a question of mechanics. A landmark text in this regard is Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien (1777), which understands successful acting to be a matter of cold calculation through which actors evoke passions by quasi-mechanical means. As Joseph Roach has shown in his study The Player’s Passion (1993), the history of acting can be seen as a battle between mechanical and organic approaches, a battle in which the mechanical theory of acting usually wins.
The first machine age promised to deal with recalcitrant actors by turning them into machines. Mechanistic metaphors were turned into reality by industrialization and the mechanical revolution. One culmination of this development was without doubt Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics, which was described in the early years of the Soviet Republic as a veritable “Taylorization of the theater” (Korenev, “Principles of Biomechanics,” 138). In his landmark book Principles of Scientific Management (1911), F. W. Taylor had argued that the energy expenditure of workers could be minimized through a scientific analysis of their motions. More generally, the mechanization and economization of motion meant that workers were now assimilated to the rhythms of machines, a principle exemplified in the assembly-belt production system instituted by Henry Ford. It was this combination of slow-motion analysis and the mechanization of workers that Meyerhold turned into a model for the modern, working actor (see also Rabinbach, The Human Motor).
Contemporary theater practitioners considered the Taylorization of the theater with a combination of fascination and repulsion. German and American expressionism invented veritable horror scenarios of the increasing mechanization of actors, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, and Georg Kaiser’s Gas. Many films also consider mechanization a threat, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. But in the theater the fear of mechanization is particularly existential. Film, after all, knows that it is itself a mechanical medium and therefore not in a position to attack mechanization tout court. Karel Capek’s play R. U.R. (1921), of course, invented the term robot, the puppet of the first machine age. In this play, an engineer creates a company, Rossum’s Universal Robots, which supplies the world with mass-produced robots. In the end, the creatures, the so-called universal robots, rebel against their creator, conquer the world, and learn how to reproduce themselves. The most extreme vision of a mechanized theater came, not surprisingly, from Marinetti and the futurists, who created theaters consisting only of machines or machine puppets. At the same time, the Bauhaus member Heinz Loew constructed the so-called mechanical stage, in which living actors would become appendices to machines. The living actor was barely tolerated or even banished from the stage entirely. What was once called a “lively art” threatened to be deprived of life (also see Auslander, Liveness).
The most popular treatment of a director turning an actor into a marionette, as Craig had demanded, or even an appendix to machines, as envisioned by Loew, is George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914) and its musical version My Fair Lady. The title refers to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the story of the statue Galatea, which is brought to life by the gods, who take pity on Pygmalion’s hopeless love for his creation (also see Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue). Shaw turns this story of animating an inanimate figure into one that revolves around the training and transformation of the flower girl Eliza Doolittle. The theatrical implications are quite clear. In the preface, he writes:
I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower-girl is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Théâtre Français is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. . . . But the thing has to be done scientifically.
(9)
Eliza Doolittle is the prototypical actor, and Henry Higgins, her acting coach and director.
Like a director of Craig’s ilk, Higgins will use his creature as a mere marionette, as raw material that must be variously animated and built up from scratch. His rigorous training program goes from posture to pronunciation in order to create Doolittle anew. All too soon, the creature rebels: Eliza Doolittle no longer wants to be a mere marionette and threatens to leave. Shaw could never quite make up his mind about the ending of the play. In the play version, Eliza elopes with Freddy, a hapless but well-intentioned society boy who is head-over-heels in love with her. Not content with this ending, Shaw wrote a narrative postscript in which he summarizes the further doings of his characters. Eliza and Freddy open an elegant flower shop but secretly rely on Higgins’s old friend Colonel Pickering for support. No matter which of these endings one considers, the relation between Eliza and her erstwhile creator remains difficult. Al Hirschfeld captured this relation between Higgins and Eliza in his sketch for the playbill of both the original play and its musical version and pushes it one step further: Shaw is up in the clouds and pulls the strings of his marionette Higgins, who in turn controls his marionette Eliza (see also Shershow, Puppets and “Popular” Culture).
Shaw’s play is not only a good example of the convergence of directorial control and marionette theater; Pygmalion also testifies to the convergence of marionette theater and machine theater. Even though his Pygmalion story does not feature robots, the training of Eliza, and thus the creation of this modern-day Galatea, depends to a great extent on technology, taking place in a laboratory equipped with the latest machines and devices. Higgins is reminiscent of mad, romantic scientists such as Dr. Frankenstein, but it is also clear that we are dealing not with invented machines and fanciful science but with an actual laboratory and existing apparatuses:
In this corner stands a flat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.
(33)
This laboratory includes an odd combination of devices, such as medical implements (laryngoscope, cross-section of a human head), chemical equipment (burners, tubes), musical instruments (tuning fork, organ pipes), and ordinary writing utensils. In addition, we find the latest invention: a phonograph with wax cylinders. The reason for this assembly of instruments is that Higgins wants to build his new Galatea by means of a new, interdisciplinary science called phonetics; the crucial element of the refurbishing of Eliza Doolittle, after all, is language. Even Colonel Pickering, himself a linguist and expert in South Asian dialects, is impressed by Higgins’s laboratory. “Higgins: Well, I think thats the whole show. Pickering: It’s really amazing. I havnt taken half of it in, you know. Higgins: Would you like to go over any of it again. Pickering: No, thank you, not now. I’m quite done up for this morning” (34). Pickering is simply overwhelmed by the technology assembled by this modern-day Pygmalion.
Eliza Doolittle has no choice but to give herself over to the laboratory where she is being refurbished, a marionette in the age of mechanical reproduction: “you can turn her on as often as you like,” Higgins boasts about the phonograph. And this is precisely what happens at the end of the play. In the last confrontation between the two, Eliza answers Higgins’s melancholic musings, “I shall miss you, Eliza. . . . And I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance,” by saying: “Well, you have both of them on your gramophone and in your book of photographs. When you feel lonely without me, you can turn the machine on” (127). Earlier, Higgins had bragged: “I can turn your soul on.” But in the end, all that Higgins has left is the mechanically reproduced voice. The living creature has left him (and the theater). Pygmalion threatens to become something like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, a play in which the tape recorder takes center stage and the human actor becomes merely its operator, the one who pushes the buttons.
Puppets of the East
Puppets are a means of displacing the actor from the center of theater, ushering in an estranged or uncanny theater that is in accordance with the antimimetic instincts of modernism. At the same time, they represented a folkloristic residue in the eyes of modernists hoping to estrange their own culture from within. But puppets allow for estrangement in another sense as well: geography. The uncanniness of puppets has often led to their being associated with the religious origins of theater (also see Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets; Bell, American Puppet Modernism). Indeed, many of the theater makers who turned to puppets for control were intrigued by their worldwide cousins. These include Craig and Yeats but also Artaud and Brecht, among others. For them, puppets were not just antimimetic devices; they also opened Western theater to the world.
There has been much debate about this episode of Western theater makers turning to Asian theater practices. Without doubt this is a variety of Orientalism to the extent that these dramatists and directors sought solutions to their own problems in the East and thus very much looked at the East through the lens of those problems (also see Hayot, Chinese Dreams). And the way in which Artaud encountered Balinese theater, namely at a colonial exhibition, and Ernest Fenollosa got his hands on No theater were bound up with early twentieth-century globalization, the vestiges of Western imperialism. At the same time, this form of Orientalism, if we want to hold on to this term, has also been crucial for the establishment of theater studies as a discipline in the first decade of the twentieth century. Both the Brander Matthews Theater Collection at Columbia University and the Harvard Theater Collection boast various forms of Asian puppets, forming the scholarly equivalent to modernist theater practice.
The theatrical Orientalism of the first half of the twentieth century was only the opening act. In the postwar period, it was followed by what is usually called “intercultural” theater, a period of the deliberate mingling of theatrical styles. Peter Brook is perhaps the obvious person to identify as a crucial figure in this respect, and his Mahabharata, begun in the mid-1970s and first performed in 1985, spans the high time of this era. Brook’s signature technique was that of mixing theatrical styles—and not just styles but also performers trained in different theatrical traditions. Tadashi Suzuki might be seen as a somewhat later example of the phase of intercultural theater as well. Something similar happened in scholarship. The best example here is the cooperation between Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, which inaugurated a new phase in the relation between anthropology and theater studies. Indeed, the intercultural paradigm is premised on producing cultural amalgamation, the merry mixture of cultural hybridity, or of analyzing such phenomena, often by using an anthropological paradigm. For the perspective I am offering here, one might describe it as a scholarly mixture of cultures, with Richard Schechner now incorporating all kinds of performance practices, again primarily from South Asia but also East Asia, into theater studies and performance studies. Puppets were part of these developments.
A new phase of world theater has emerged in the post-1989 or post-9/11 world of global capitalism. It raises a somewhat different set of questions, many economic: how has theater, including intercultural theater, become a commodity that circulates globally? The most paradigmatic troupe to capture our current moment is the South African Handspring Puppet Theater, which has been doing the international circuit for over a decade. Using a large repertoire of puppets from crude Punches and Judys to awe-inspiring oversized creatures, Handspring draws on the puppets of Western modernism but confronts them with their global cousins, often to stunning effect. It is perhaps not surprising that the breakthrough success of this troupe was none other than a puppet-theater version of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, the central theatrical event of modernist theater.
More recently, however, Handspring has discovered Broadway, Hollywood, and the international theater circuit, using War Horse as its vehicle. A touching story of a horse and a boy during World War I, with a satisfying happy ending, War Horse couldn’t be further from modernism and its puppets, yet even here, in a show that was always destined for Hollywood, the puppet horse moves so beautifully and strangely that it almost redeems the show’s pat storyline. This, no doubt, testifies to the peculiar effect of puppets and their modernist legacy: even when they are apparently used to imitate our world, they introduce an element of estrangement.
In this manner puppets have managed to preserve a modernist estrangement effect and carry it into our own era. The source of this effect is derived from the exotic origins of puppets, whether they are located in our own childhood, in folkloristic practices, or in the East. But in the end, this exotic provenance is only a secondary feature, for what makes puppets so strange is the fact that they don’t belong to the world of the living. As objects demanding to be animated, they keep popping up, bringing something into our midst that we can never fully assimilate.
Works Cited
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