Grotesque Entertainment: The Pillowman as Puppet Theatre

Ondřej Pilný

The ‘Irish’ plays of Martin McDonagh were all dark, violent comedies, irreverent and hilarious. All of them were extremely skilfully plotted and included some exquisite dialogue. The Leenane Trilogy, The Cripple of Inishmaan, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore also productively engaged in an ironic manner with the conventions of canonical Irish drama. They may moreover be viewed as an ironic send-up of the entire discourse of Irish identity and all those who are still seriously concerned, in the post-nationalist context, with coining and/or maintaining a firm definition of Irishness.⁵¹² The Pillowman,⁵¹³ McDonagh’s first ‘non-Irish’ play, raised high expectations not only due to the enormous success of the playwright’s earlier work: quite a portion of the playwright’s audiences were beginning to feel that it was high time for a talent of McDonagh’s calibre to change the subject and prove his worth by going now for ‘something completely different’.

Set in a fictitious totalitarian state, probably some time in the mid-twentieth century, The Pillowman concerns a writer who has been arrested for the content of his stories. It is again a black comedy which features graphic violence, frequent vulgarities, and moments of irresistible humour. As with McDonagh’s previous plays, much of its effect is based on sudden, unexpected twists, while significant aspects of the plot are conceived basically as ‘a puzzle without a solution’ (17) – in the end, you will never know, for instance, whether Katurian’s mentally handicapped brother Michal really killed the little girl and the little boy, an act for which he ended up murdered by Katurian.

Moreover, McDonagh once more utilizes elements of naturalist theatre within a grotesque framework in order to play with audience expectations. The opening scene initially seems fairly realistic: a writer suffers politically motivated violence from a couple of plain-clothes policemen. Nonetheless, the interaction grows gradually clichéd to the point of hyperbole. The linguistic mélange of names only underscores the fictitious nature of the setting: the writer’s name appears to be Armenian in overdose (‘Katurian Katurian Katurian;’ 8); his hometown is called Kamenice which is Czech, but features a Jewish quarter with the non-Czech name of Lamenec (besides, Jewish quarters vanished from Czech towns after the Holocaust). The brother is called Michal – Czech, Slovak, or Polish; the victims are Andrea Jovanovic – Serb, Croat, or Slovene, and Aaron Goldberg – a credible Germanic/Jewish name for the Central European region. The detectives’ names, Tupolski and Ariel, blend Polish with Shakespeare. Finally, Katurian’s address of ‘Kamenice 4443’ lacks a street name (the town is too large for the streets not to be identified) and sounds more like a linguistic joke which concerns the writer’s name: the four which echoes in his appellation, three times. Is the play supposed to be an allegory or a travesty, one is made to ask?

Despite this uncertainty, the violence in The Pillowman is always offered in a gruesome, naturalist fashion which tends to regularly disrupt any hyperbolical pattern. To blur things even further, there are scenes which seem to bring in symbolical elements, most remarkably the re-enactment of the story of the writer and his brother staged in a ‘child’s room, next door to which there is another identical room, perhaps made of glass, but padlocked and totally dark’ (31), a scenery symbolically suggestive of the writer’s unacknowledged secrets, or perhaps his unconscious. The dialogue oscillates throughout in the same manner between realistic conversations, captivating storytelling, and stand-up comedy routine (Katurian: ‘Yeah, like I bet you gave my brother his rights too.’ Ariel: ‘I gave him his rights alright.’ Katurian: ‘I bet you did. I bet you fucking did.’ […] Ariel: ‘No, I bet I fucking did.’ Katurian: ‘Yeah, I bet you fucking did.’ Ariel: ‘No, I bet I fucking did!’ etc. [27-8]).

Apart from the blending of genres, The Pillowman is characterized by an incessant switching of themes. The initial motif of the totalitarian oppression of artists gets swiftly modified as it transpires that the problem with Katurian’s writing has nothing to do with politics, and the interrogation turns out to be a murder inquiry. At the same time, the grave issue of authorial responsibility is raised: if an author writes stories which feature vivid descriptions of violence and slaughter, is he/she to blame when people take them up as a set of instructions and proceed to actual murder? The question remains unanswered though, while the play swerves to focus on Katurian’s brother Michal, the story of the brothers’ childhood and the writer’s sadistic Muse (i.e., his parents and their revolting experiment). Yet another theme surfaces through Katurian’s story ‘The Pillowman,’ one of ‘nipping some young doom in the bud’; but this theme gets quickly forgotten as well due to Michal’s confession to the killings of the children. Finally perhaps the play seems to start focusing on Katurian as an instance of a writer who values his work more than human life, including his own and his brother’s. However, even this important issue gets qualified by a series of final shifts in the plot, and ultimately by Katurian’s triumphant resurrection from the dead, an uncanny moment which indicates that the whole story of Katurian’s interrogation may have been sheer fiction from the start. Indeed, as a reviewer has noted, the play may appear to deal with some grave matters of ethics and authorship but in fact backs out of any such considerations almost as soon as they emerge.⁵¹⁴

If there is no consistency of genre and theme in The Pillowman, while the characters appear to be as shifty as the play itself (particularly the supposedly ‘retarded’ and infantile Michal, who at times exhibits rather surprising skills as a speaker and thinker), and the plot abounds in digressions, what is it that holds the play together? Clearly, it is the mere power of the story. The play features numerous absurd turns and unabashed lies; every time the audience gets close to piecing the plot together and being able to predict what may follow, the play leaves everyone baffled again. Paradoxes are plenty, including a striking example at the heart of the eponymous tale of ‘The Pillowman’: the Pillowman is said to be a creature who comes to tell adults to kill themselves when they were children because their ensuing suffering in this world is not worth living for (43-47). This story cannot be dismissed simply as a bizarre yarn, as its peculiar treatment of time has in fact a well-known parallel in mythical narratives of primitive societies; the existence of the precedent indicates that the story might also be viewed as a mock-mythical tale explaining away child suicides. Due to such feats of dark narrative magic, and despite all the wild turning points, one remains captivated by what he/she is told to believe. It is indeed as if the play were an extended illustration of Katurian’s (and McDonagh’s)⁵¹⁵ borrowed thesis that ‘The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story’, and to tell it well (7).

The Pillowman invites – not merely by its title – an interesting analogy with the famous story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’.⁵¹⁶ For the start, there are a number of similarities in detail, in particular between the fantastic bogey-like characters of the Sandman and the Pillowman and the fatal consequences of encountering them, or professor Spalanzani’s daughter, Olympia, being kept locked in a room behind a glass door like Michal in McDonagh’s play. What is of more consequence though is that Hoffmann’s tale is also one of a writer, Nathaniel, who tells a story of the Sandman; at the same time, those around Nathaniel claim that the horrific Sandman is really a product of the darker side of Nathaniel’s mind. Despite the fact, the power of the fantasy is such that it eventually produces lethal effects in reality: because of the metonymic telescope given to him by the Sandman/the optician Coppola, Nathaniel first falls in love with Olympia, who is a mechanical puppet, and then is driven to suicide. Similarly, the fantastic tale of the Pillowman is transferred into reality by Katurian’s suffocating of his brother with a pillow and thus acting out the role of the phantom produced by his own sinister mind.

The very core of the analogy lies however in the way ‘The Sandman’ and The Pillowman make use of the uncanny and our eerie fascination with it. Nicholas Royle claims that the uncanny

is concerned with the strange, weird and mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural. The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced…. It can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or of something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context.⁵¹⁷

The uncanny is the innermost focus of Hoffmann’s tale: indeed, he comes to introduce an authorial narrator in the middle of his story in order to do justice to the extraordinary power the uncanny has over Nathaniel. The authorial narrator opens by stating that his task is to persuade the reader about the actual existence of the un-canny as this is the only way of gaining credibility for Nathaniel’s fate. In order to do that, he says, the story must be told in a manner as inspiring, original, and striking as it is possible. Hence, ‘The Sandman’ is revealed to be really an exercise in telling uncanny tales, by different narrators, in the most persuasive and effective way.

The similarity of this fundamental aspect of Hoffmann’s tale to the concerns of The Pillowman is remarkable. McDonagh employs all his skills to make the uncanny palpable, giving control over the plot to different characters in turn and excelling in the persuasiveness of their tales and perspectives. As in ‘The Sandman’, the blurring of the borderline between reality and fiction is an essential device: in the words of Sigmund Freud, ‘an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced’.⁵¹⁸ As indicated above, the audience of The Pillowman can hardly ever be sure about the status of what they are told – but fact or fiction, they still find themselves deep in the tenets of the tale which unravels in front of them, as the lure of the uncanny is enormous and we essentially want to believe in it.

Royle shows in his comprehensive study of the subject that the uncanny can often ‘be felt in response to dolls and other lifelike or mechanical objects’.⁵¹⁹ This brings me to my central thesis: I wish to suggest that The Pillowman is best viewed as a particular kind of puppet theatre. Jan Švankmajer, Czech artist, puppeteer, and filmmaker has stressed that puppet theatre is primarily characterized by the puppeteer’s scot-free manipulation, while the puppeteer’s actions are in fact very much childlike. He claims that: ‘The child-puppeteer is then really a shaman, god and creator, the Great Mover, but also a judge who decides on the fate of the characters manipulated by him. And at the same time, his actions are not liable to judgement, being absolute’.⁵²⁰

Manipulation is an overall defining feature of The Pillowman. Despite the fact that Katurian is introduced as someone who is being victimized, already Scene 2 – the re-enactment of the story of the writer and his brother – shows him to be pulling the strings of the other characters in the story (a fact comically stressed also by the child’s corpse sitting ‘bolt upright in bed’ [34]). A similar situation occurs in act Scene 2 (the drastic re-enactment of ‘The Little Jesus’), and ultimately at the very end of the play which, in a feat of unabashed authorial ventriloquism, unravels Katurian the puppeteer to be merely a puppet himself as his corpse with a ‘bloody, bullet-shattered head’ stands up and delivers the denouement (102). The finale demonstrates in this way what one should have really suspected all along: the point is that all the characters in the play are puppets, swung around by their manipulative creator, while the ultimate aim seems to be to shunt the audience to and fro in a similar way without losing a firm grip over it. Or in Tupolski’s words, the objective is to ‘Disconcert and destabilize the prisoner’ (82). In this context, then, it is obviously no problem that characters lack consistency, get killed and resurrected freely, and that the play features any kind of improbable turning points.

Heinrich von Kleist’s masterful ironic sketch ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ presents a bold proposition: puppets are more graceful than live dancers. The self-consciousness of humans and the fact that they are subject to the laws of nature (as represented by gravity in Kleist’s essay) prevents human dancers from executing a truly graceful dance. This is why Kleist’s interlocutor concludes that ‘Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god’ (12).

Paul de Man has pointed out that in ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ Kleist targets Schiller’s idealistic aesthetic, in particular the latter’s notion of the aesthetic state.⁵²¹ Schiller has likened the perfect aesthetic society to ‘a well executed English dance, composed of many complicated figures and turns’ featuring ‘an infinite variety of criss-crossing motions which keep decisively but arbitrarily changing directions without ever colliding with each other.’⁵²² Kleist’s essay replaces this image of a graceful dance with the dance of puppets, in order to demonstrate the mechanistic, formulaic and essentially dehumanized nature of Schiller’s ideal. The interlocutor in ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ first provides the narrator with a detailed mock-scientific explanation of the puppets’ movements. He then admits that in spite of the geometrical precision of movement, residual traces of human volition still appear in the puppet dance, those represented by the puppeteer. If these were removed, the whole spectacle could in fact be produced by ‘turning a handle’ as if it were a barrel organ (2-4).

Although the context of Kleist’s essay has to do with the dangerous political implications of a specific aesthetic ideology,⁵²³ de Man has demonstrated that Kleist’s strategy may indeed be plausibly used against any kind of ‘aesthetic formalization’ (de Man’s term),⁵²⁴ i.e., against any kind of aesthetic which may be reduced to a series of formulae (and potentially peopled with puppets). On this note I would like to return to The Pillowman.

The Pillowman really exemplifies the recent genre of what I would term grotesque entertainment. Apart from the puppet-like nature of its characters and action, the play builds on a number of formulae which it shares with many other contemporary plays and films – a lot of ‘in-yer-face theatre’, American plays such as Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe, most films of Quentin Tarantino and his epigones, a number of recent gangster movies, and to an extent also McDonagh’s own earlier plays. The formulae of the grotesque entertainment include – to repeat my earlier list – the staging of graphic, often gratuitous violence, offensive language, ubiquitous black humour (including rather cheap laughs at the expense of, let’s say, mentally deficient characters). To this should be added the lack of depth of character psychology, and – in accordance with the traditional notion of the grotesque – the mixing of disparate genre and thematic elements.

Grotesque entertainment also features strategic deployment of the uncanny as its central device. The violent aspect of the plays and films is not merely about the buckets of blood and the severed body parts (although these of course tend to be profusely in evidence); what is more important is the exploitation of what Victoria Nelson has called the audiences’ ‘unconscious desire’ to believe in the supernatural.⁵²⁵ Hence, inexplicable interventions from outside the presented reality abound, fantastic tales produce fatal effects, characters miraculously survive what seem to be mortal wounds or diseases in order to unexpectedly reappear, and even the dead get occasionally resurrected.

Finally, grotesque entertainment often raises seminal questions of ethics, justice, and artistic responsibility but as a rule, these issues get swiftly – for some viewers, cynically – swept aside by the outrageous shenanigans of the particular piece. Moral, political and artistic dilemmas indeed seem to be introduced merely for the sake of being deemed, sooner or later, irrelevant.

The aesthetic similarity of all such works is striking, and turns one back to Kleist’s image of the puppets: what we are watching is in fact a clattering puppet dance, distinctly manipulative and largely dehumanized. To be sure, it may be quite hilarious at the same time: as the interlocutor in ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ puts it, ‘Often, shaken in a purely haphazard way, the puppet falls into a kind of rhythmic movement which resembles dance’ (2) – and we laugh. However, the general repetitiveness of the pattern only stresses its fundamental emptiness. We should be grateful on the whole for the remaining ‘traces of human volition’ on the part of the puppeteers, that is authors like McDonagh whose skilful plotting makes yet another piece still watchable, even though the handle of the same old barrel-organ is clearly being turned again.

There is no need for general statements regarding what the immense popularity of such grotesque spectacle says about the condition of the contemporary Western society: more alarming social and cultural tendencies are surely to be addressed by those who see themselves qualified. What I can offer instead is a mere aphoristic postscript:

— Kleist’s ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ shows that the ‘graceful dance’ of a formulaic aesthetic will always be executed by puppets and idols only, as such grace ‘appears most purely […] in the puppet or in the god.’ (12) Kleist’s sardonic observation clearly comments on worship: unless the dancers be gods, the fanciers of the formulaic dance worship puppets.

— Nathaniel, the romantic hero of Hoffmann’s tale of the Sandman, falls in love with the puppet Olympia while dancing with her. His infatuation with the creature whose eyes only mirror his desire nearly deprives him of his wits.

— The Sandman throws sand into children’s eyes, taking away their sleep, and eventually pokes their eyes out. But, like the Pillowman, he is an uncanny work of morbid imagination. Isn’t he?

Extract From: The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: ‘A World of Savage Stories’, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan

Cross Reference: Garry Hynes, Druid Theatre

See Also: Because we are poor: Irish theatre in the 1990s, by Victor Merriman and Peter Muller’s essay on The Pillowman in Literary and Cultural Relations: Ireland, Hungary, and Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mária Kurdi