Conducted 18 December 1981
From the transcript supplied and dated by Canadian filmmaker Marty Gross. His first feature film was The Lovers’ Exile, an adaptation of the classic Japanese drama by Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1673-1724) originally known in English as The Courier for Hell. The story concerns a penniless courier-shop worker, Chubei, who is in love with the prostitute Umegawa and steals money to buy her freedom; the lovers are forced to flee. In the traditional art of Bunraku from Osaka, the story and dialogue are chanted by a narrator to the music of a samisen player, while the story is acted out by life-sized puppets manipulated by three men each, one fully visible and two cloaked head to foot in black. The work was filmed in Japan with English subtitles; it was shown in Japan in 1980 and later was screened for the Fryes. Frye, asked for a statement, suggested instead an interview, which was arranged with the additional participation of critic Robert Fulford. The film is available on DVD.
GROSS: Was this your first encounter with Bunraku?
FRYE: No. I had visited Japan and was taken to Osaka and had seen a performance of a Chikamatsu play—or half of it; I was exhausted by the end of the first half. So I knew something about what the whole ensemble was. When I saw Marty Gross’s film I realized chiefly what an extraordinary synchronizing job he had managed to make of the total impression of the original.
FULFORD: What happens in the theatre? I still have never experienced it. How does the experience of the theatre differ from the film experience?
FRYE: Well, in the first place the puppets are being manipulated by puppeteers. You’re often told that as time goes on you forget about the puppeteers and just concentrate on the puppets. To some extent that happens, but what really happens is that the puppeteers get absorbed into your impression of the play, so that you get the feeling of human characters being watched and manipulated by other forces.
FULFORD: The material I’ve read about Bunraku sometimes emphasizes Bertolt Brecht’s interest in it and how he drew from it. It seems to me that that’s one basis for the whole alienation effect.
FRYE: Yes, I suppose the puppet theatre is really the centre of a conception of alienation. But your ultimate reaction is not one of alienation: it’s not thinking that, after all, we are not puppets, it’s more the thought of, my God, maybe we are puppets.
FULFORD: What about the idea that Brecht obviously seized, that when you see this, you can imagine a theatre in which the audience looks with its thoughts—that is to say, looks with its mind rather than its feelings. I think it never happened either in Germany or in his English translations. Does it work at all? Do we logically think about these things? Do we step further back than we would in ordinary theatre?
FRYE: Perhaps initially at any rate. But I think the attempt to suppress the involvement of feelings doesn’t work in any form of drama. As you say, it doesn’t work in Brecht either. You can be as deeply moved when you are at a distance. It is partly a matter of perspective. It’s rather like the difference between a realistic play about a promiscuous lover such as Don Juan and the Mozart opera: with the music you feel more distanced from the action, but you aren’t less deeply moved.
GROSS: One reaction I’ve had to the film from people not familiar with Bunraku has been that they try to separate and intellectualize the various elements of the theatrical construct, but find themselves unable to sustain this, except for brief moments. * * *
FRYE: I think the thing Brecht was really getting at was the contrast between a passive involvement of feelings—where you’re acted on by the action—and an involvement which is active. That seems to me to be what Bunraku is admirably designed to do.
FULFORD: Would you say that’s one way this differs from a typical, old-fashioned, sentimental Western play? That is, in outline this play is very much like a Victorian melodrama, yet it has a very different effect. At least, on us—I want to ask Marty about the effect he sees in Japan itself. But would you see that as a difference between our traditional theatre and Bunraku?
FRYE: It certainly is a difference between the plots of Chikamatsu and what we would call melodrama. I think that melodrama prefabricates the audience’s feelings. It sets up the standards and values that the audience brings into the theatre with them. Consequently, you may be moved to tears by the seduction of a Victorian heroine in a way you would not be in a story like this Lovers’ Exile. But the feelings are just as intense. It is just a matter of not responding passively to a stimulus from the action.
FULFORD: In other words, you get more involved. But in this case you don’t think much about it, do you? If I can mention Brecht once more, he imagined the audiences for his new epic theatre thinking about the social questions he presented. Nothing like that happens here, does it? I don’t look at this and then say, “Now I understand something about post-medieval Japan that I didn’t understand before.”
FRYE: Of course, my background is more Shakespeare than Brecht. To me, Shakespeare is a dramatist who consistently says, “You’re to look and you’re to listen, and the more intently the better. But for God’s sake, don’t try to think; leave the thinking to Shakespearean scholars, who don’t read anybody but each other, and experience the play.”
FULFORD: How would you compare that with The Lovers’ Exile?
FRYE: The Lovers’ Exile is not unlike certain types of Shakespearean comedy, Measure for Measure for example—well, it’s not a comedy, of course. I think that what my experience of the Bunraku play did for me was to revolutionize my whole feeling about Shakespearean romance—the plays of his last stage, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. It didn’t really change my views of those plays but it consolidated them, because I’d always realized that in the romances the characters are scaled down. They are not titanic characters like Hamlet or Othello; they’re looked at from a distance. Very often there’s someone like Prospero setting up the action, so that the other characters seem like his puppets. In Pericles and Cymbeline there are gods, Diana and Jupiter, who seem to be manipulating things off stage.
FULFORD: How do you relate that to Chikamatsu?
FRYE: In Chikamatsu the same thing is true. The characters are being controlled by forces outside themselves. After sitting for four hours in that hot stuffy theatre in Osaka, my mind did a sort of hysterical backflip. I began to get the illusion—a very powerful illusion—that these puppets were under the impression that they were making all these sounds and movements themselves.
FULFORD: They do seem to be dragging the men around after them after a while, don’t they?
FRYE: One could write a very good ghost story about a puppet that gets loose from these men.
[Fulford and Gross discuss the degree of understanding and expertise of the audience and performers. The apprentice puppeteers themselves are usually not highly educated or analytical, but learn their craft as a ritual, Fulford offering the analogy of some people’s participation in the Catholic Mass. The narrators learn their part by rote but have a more theoretical understanding of what is going on.]
FULFORD: Perhaps the people who performed in Sophocles’ time didn’t understand it any better than the Bunraku people.
GROSS: Dr. Frye was saying that the dolls are dragging the men around, and I would also maintain that there is some kind of tradition that is pulling everybody through this. When the narrator utters three sounds, everybody moves.
FRYE: Just before I attended the theatre, I attended a tea ceremony. I couldn’t get anything out of that and was quite disappointed. I realized later that it was probably the conditioning of my Christian background: that I simply could not take in the notion of an aesthetic ritual. I think your analogy to the Mass is very close. But I think what is going on in the puppet theatre is really a Mass for people who have suspended belief as well as disbelief. That is, they’re entering into something but not responding passively to it. Or at least, the source of activity carries along the puppets with the puppeteers, as you say. It also tends to carry the audience as well, even though that particular audience remained, from all observation, quite detached—they just went on meditatively eating their lunch. Still, they know they were a part of it.
GROSS: They know when to put down their lunch, too. Performances tend to be long but quite rhythmic with various parts of a work requiring closer attention. The audience knows that Bunraku is a stronghold of a particular Japanese world view. The same conflicts continually recur: questions of love, money, and honour. In particular the conflict between obligations and one’s instincts or one’s dreams for oneself, known in Japanese as “giri” and “ninjo”
[Gross and Fulford discuss the audience for Bunraku, which is still quite limited; the theatre is subsidized by the government and “a lot of school children are dragged in and out.”]
FULFORD: I remember reading some notes you did, Professor Frye, on puppets on television.1 I think you referred to the fact that the children watching Sesame Street are watching masks, in which there is essentially no expression compared to a human face, although they will twist the faces a bit. I wonder if you see any relationships between that kind of ritualization and the puppet theatre we’re talking about?
FRYE: I think the ritualization is there, and also the distancing that goes with it. The great pioneer of that in the movies is Charlie Chaplin, who realized that the central figure in his kind of movie had to be a puppet figure.
FULFORD: Even walk like a puppet.
FRYE: The things that happen to Chaplin in the movies are profoundly moving things. But the action is distanced to that degree. It’s something I think children respond to without worrying about the kind of cultural conditioning that adults are apt to have.
FULFORD: How would that relate to The Lovers’ Exile and that kind of ritual?
FRYE: I think that children would have much less difficulty with the conventions of the public theatre. In Dickens’s England, for example, when a Punch and Judy show was shown, it was very largely to a child audience, and the same thing is true here. If Bunraku is, as Mr. Gross says, dying in Japan, it’s partly because of its being too much of an adult cultural experience. If they’re sending in school children, that’s a good idea.
FULFORD: The puppets here have been taken over almost completely by children’s culture. I suppose if a puppet theatre was advertised as an adult show, it would be a great surprise to everyone.
GROSS: Part of the success of Bunraku is the continual surprise. So many aspects of what we see are contrary to our notions of puppetry. The men are more puppets than the puppets are. Looking for some sign of life, we see it only in the inanimate.
FRYE: That’s the reason for the backflip that I mentioned.
GROSS: First there’s this extremely stylized chanting. Off to the side men are declaiming every manner of emotion and every manner of thought. When I first approached Bunraku I found it a very modern phenomenon because of the matter-of-fact artifice combined with extreme interest in surfaces. The relationship between the cadence of the voices and the visual movement is as important as what’s being told.
FULFORD: In Western literature, there is this long tradition, or counter-tradition, of self-reference in the novel or the play: at a certain point the eighteenth-century novelist addresses you and says, “Dear reader,” or in a play you may suddenly have the chorus speak to you. But what is interesting here is the constant reminder that this is only a show. There is never a moment when you can think that that creature or puppet is a living thing.
GROSS: But you said that you did forget, Dr. Frye.
FRYE: I forgot that. I think what you are never allowed to forget is that the audience is an audience. You don’t get that individualizing quality that you get in cultures like Victorian England. You get developments of drama and music in cultures where there is a strong feeling of the group as an entity.
GROSS: The audience group as an entity?
FRYE: Yes. I never feel that Shakespeare, for example, is talking to me over the heads of the audience. That’s very rare in drama. You can get individualized responses in certain types of plays, but it certainly wouldn’t happen in anything as stylized as Bunraku.
FULFORD: You would never weep at Bunraku, would you?
GROSS: People certainly do, but I believe it’s a ritual weeping, not really an individual emotional response. The play triggers certain buttons standing by to be pushed. In Western culture, too, you’ll hear someone say, “I’ve read The Old Curiosity Shop ten times and I always weep when little Nell dies.”
FRYE: I suspect that, as Marty says, that is ritualized, too.
GROSS: I had an interesting experience seeing Gone with the Wind at the University of Hawaii—a huge hall and it was packed. There was all this mumbling going on and I couldn’t understand why everyone was talking. It was so aggravating. Sure enough, they were mouthing the lines.
[Fulford discusses the human need for ritual, as seen for instance in the intense emotion of the audience at a Beatles concert where the music could not be heard above the audience’s screams.]
FRYE: You need different kinds of rituals at different times. There is something in the pantomime, where you don’t hear words, that has a very direct childlike appeal. So it didn’t matter whether you heard the Beatles, as long as you saw them. The response to the aural stimulus is something that develops much more gradually.
GROSS: In the Bunraku theatre, it is quite difficult to determine where the literary understanding is supplanted by the emotional absorption in the act and the power of the music. When I have shown the film in Japan, many people have commented that Bunraku was somehow clarified by virtue of the English subtitles.
FULFORD: These were Japanese who could read English. They saw your subtitles, which were an edited version—the film is a cut-down version of Bunraku—and they said, that’s what it’s all about.
FRYE: I was told by a Japanese scholar that the Japanese themselves often use the Arthur Waley translation of The Tale of Genji as a kind of crib to the original. 2
[Fulford and Gross discuss the technique, which was to shoot frontally in an empty theatre. Gross also tried to link each movement or image with a subtitle; the film “needed to be shot and cadenced according to the phrasing of the narrative.”]
GROSS: I wasn’t really trying to make it equivalent to the theatrical experience, I was trying to crystallize the artifice. Showing an audience would undermine all this. The audience would particularize the moment, by suggesting a particular setting of time and place: there someone is smiling, here someone watching attentively, etc.
FRYE: Very glad you left that out.
GROSS: I am very curious to know if this design or concept of the film, as I explain it, has any relationship to what you saw?
FRYE: That was what impressed me: it did. I was certainly aware, all through my own experience of it, of this direct frontal view. As I say, the audience was reasonably detached about the action, but you were always part of the audience. I didn’t know a word of Japanese, but a lot of the Japanese perhaps didn’t know clearly what was going on either, so you just didn’t worry about that. All you had to do was face forward and look and listen. I thought your synchronizing of that was admirable. * * *
FULFORD: The film after a while seemed to me to be erotic. I can’t remember ever feeling any sort of erotic atmosphere in a puppet show before and I wanted to know if you had the same feeling?
FRYE: There was a certain something in the theme that had that. I didn’t feel it myself. I understand the film was banned someplace.
GROSS: Nova Scotia. 3
FRYE: My secretary [said], we saw an obscene movie and didn’t even notice.
FULFORD: I think in my case it was a combination of the androgynous quality of the man reading the woman’s part plus the intensity of the music and the intensity of the speaking. And the theme of course.
GROSS: The interaction between Umegawa and her puppeteer is fascinating. He plays up to her a bit—perhaps more than he ought to.
FRYE: I think that any kind of sustained intensity is going to have a connection with the erotic sooner or later—the feel of listening to the St. Matthew Passion.
GROSS: May I ask your opinion of the attractions for the modern artist and thinker of Bunraku as an art form?
FRYE: I can certainly understand that, because the tendency in theatre in the last thirty or forty years has been to increase stylization. I think of the man in Yeats’s autobiography who was going to write a play for actors with masks. But they wouldn’t wear the masks, they would just carry them in their hands. It would express his contempt for reality if they actually wore them. I think it is that attempt to ritualize the theatrical experience which was very prevalent in Yeats’s time, and still is to a very considerable degree. I think that’s brought Bunraku into the centre of our dramatic experience in somewhat the same way as Hokusai and Hiroshige became central in the Impressionist period. 4
GROSS: Do you think it is a drive to strengthen and crystallize feeling, or is it a drive to look at the mechanics of the thing?
FRYE: I think it’s a drive to intensify concentration. In the early part of the twentieth century, we were living through a period of broken and divided attention. And the attempt to overcome that with the sense of focus again, the sense of the audience being continuously present as an audience, is part of the reaction against the disappearance of the audience in things like television. I think there is always a movement in culture which is counter to what the general environment is producing.
GROSS: When I started this production I placed on the front of my notebook a quote from Borges: “It prevents the spectators from forgetting unreality, which is a necessary condition of art.”5 Would you agree?
FRYE: Yes, I’d put it in a slightly different way. The distinction between reality and illusion, which we come in to the theatre with, gets reversed in the theatre, where the illusion is the reality. In a play like The Tempest, for example, there is a very strong sense that, as T.S. Eliot says, human-kind cannot bear very much reality.6 I think that what the romances of Shakespeare are saying is that humankind can’t bear any at all, except in the form of an illusion.
GROSS: We go with the idea of losing ourselves somehow, but we are not allowed to lose ourselves.
FRYE: No. We are presented with an illusion which we always have to remember is an illusion. But it is also as close to reality as we are ever going to get.
GROSS: So that in order to see something as real we need to have it presented to us as a fiction.
FRYE: As a fiction and also as conventionalized, as a ritual.
GROSS: Maybe that’s why Bunraku is so important. Performers present a fiction not only by putting on the persona themselves but by putting on an enactment of the fiction. I’m not sure that I see it as ritualized quite as you do.
FRYE: Well, I don’t know, except that I think that the word “ritualized” could be misleading. In one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, he is speaking of their local people putting on a St. George and the Dragon play and he remarks, “You can always tell the authentic folk ritual by the fact that it bores the hell out of everyone connected with it.”7 But that is because it isn’t a skill. You don’t have to apprentice for twenty years to be the hobbyhorse in a St. George play. When it takes as much skill and as much practice as Bunraku does, the performance is an act of faith, as well as an act of vision.