The Secret Life of Puppets
by Victoria Nelson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
I initially bought this book for my thesis (on the short puppet animations of the Brothers Quay), picking it up based on the title and nothing more. The Secret Life of Puppets? Too good to pass up, even if the pages were covered with nonsense. Luckily, they weren’t.
The title is slightly misleading, in that the book is less about puppets as such and more about the cultural history of religious iconography, the effects of the Enlightenment on religious structures and how those changing beliefs are manifested in fictional (both literature and film) representations of reality, meta-reality and simulacra.
I have to say, although the book didn’t turn out to be terribly useful for my thesis, it was useful to me in a general, personal sense. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Nelson’s writing style has a direct, but engaging quality that reminds me of Marina Warner. She doesn’t let the ideas get weighed down by rhetoric and tediously academic jargon. Since I read this after a string of philosophical texts from the likes of Adorno, Sartre and Baudrillard, Nelson’s book was a breath of fresh air. No pretensions. Just a comprehensive history mixed in with astute observations.
One thing that stood out was how well-researched this book is and the breadth of topics covered by it. Nelson details the evolution of representations of western spiritual beliefs from the grotto to the Golem to Lovecraft to what she terms New Expressionism to the implications of contemporary virtual worlds. The chapter on the New Expressionists was especially interesting. I’m not sure if she introduced the concept, but it’s so applicable to contemporary artistic movements that are seeking to move away from the trappings of the postmodernism of the previous generation.
She writes: “Consciously or (most often) unconsciously, the New Expressionism revives the system of a living cosmos in which all things in this world exist in a hierarchy of interconnections with one another and with a timeless, invisible otherworld.” (214)
Another point of hers that I agreed with concerned post-Enlightenment spirituality. She talks about how the move toward rationalism has largely either sanitized religion or removed it altogether, so that we categorically deny the supernatural simply because we cannot fit it into an explainable category. Except in a few surviving folk traditions, the possibility of transcendence has disappeared. The result of all this is that we have also removed (or subordinated) types of expression that cannot be consolidated with the rational. However, the latter half of the 20th century saw a surge in effort to reclaim this part of ourselves repressed by Enlightenment in such things as New Age spiritualism and new technologies. These have proven inadequate, but that doesn’t mean that the trend will not continue toward a satisfying spiritual expression that doesn’t regress to pre-Enlightenment religious structures. “Even as we see all too clearly the kitsch of much New Age religiosity and fear the rigidity of rising fundamentalism, we remain alarmingly blind to our own unconscious tendencies in this same direction.” (288) For myself, I see these tendencies manifested in my reactions to Die Große Stille, Landscape in the Mist, the films of Tarkovsky and the novels of Dostoevsky.
One more quote to top off the post:
“When the inner life of the psyche is allegorized so concretely, the outer world of objects becomes a perfect mirror in which to view the fragments of one’s projected soul.” (110)
