The Puppet Immortals of Children's Literature

An art form without a muse, puppetry, not unlike the Greek drama, is rooted in the religious tradition and folk literature of western and eastern cultures. From the medieval miracle plays to the English Punch and Judy show, to the other side of the globe and the epic tales of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, puppet characters have portrayed man's anthropomorphic struggle with the restive questions of death, resurrection, and immortality. In this respect puppetry is like the great body of folk literature that we customarily classify as children's literature. But puppetry has the distinction of vividly enacting those curiously significant stories.

Puppetry in children's literature is of two types: (1) literature written about, or containing a puppet character or characters; and (2) literature written, or in the oral tradition, performed by puppets. In the former category there is only one classic of its kind, namely Pinocchio, while in the later category there are numerous examples. I shall restrict myself to a brief discussion of the significance of the puppet portrayal in the first, and in the second to a discussion of the religious overtones and philosophical implications of puppetry and children's literature.

While today in America puppetry is relegated to the category of mere children's entertainment, the puppet dramas of the past were an instructive and entertaining form of art, with religious and philosophical ideas conveyed through the symbolic stylizations of hand, rod, shadow, and string puppets. In fact, in at least India, Java, and Japan, these dramas antedated the theater of actors and actually determined the style of production in the later human theater. For example, the Japanese puppet theater, "ningyo shibai" (doll theater), or "ayatsuri shibai" (manipulation theater), today referred to as Bunraku, after the nineteenth-century puppeteer Bunrakuen, were responsible for the growth of the Kabuki "song-dance-skill" theater of people.¹ Human actors learned and improved their art from the puppet actors they imitated. Why the puppet theater preceded the human theater will be discussed later with respect to the shadow puppet dramas.

The puppeteer, too, like the plays and puppets, has been associated with the religious drama—with the early Greek priests and their automatic mechanisms to inspire wonder, no less than with the dalangs of Java, who are initiated into their vocation by a priest "who writes the mystic syllable 'Ongg' on the dalang's tongue with the stem of a flower dipped in honey."² Whether they are accorded as illustrious a birth as the first puppeteer of India, Adi Nat, who sprang from the lips of Brahma the Creator, or whether theirs is a more humble beginning among a troupe of itinerant Italian performers of the Commedia dell' arte, puppeteers have entertained in the sacred tradition of their art, inspiring laughter, tears, and awe. Theirs was, and still is, not just a miniature theater for children. The motto printed on the proscenium of the nineteenth-century toy theater of Benjamin West then read Quibus minus facimus multum ("We make much out of less").³

The industrial revolution produced a diminished interest in the puppet, and substituted for it the automated figure, or robot, and subsequently the refined figures of the Disney audio-animatronics. What was once a popular theater of the people has, generally speaking, been trounced by technology and forced to stare into the corner as an immature form of "children's theater," usually with insipid scripts, shoddy or unimaginative staging, and less than expert manipulation. However, where there is still a tradition of the art, puppetry remains and grows despite condescension; that is reason enough for speculation and experimentation, and for puppetry to define its own artistic veracities, names, "abstraction, motion, and synthesis."⁴

Carl Jung's description of the term individuation might well serve to explain the vicissitudes and vacillations of character and attitude that lead to the transformation of the puppet Pinocchio into a boy after his initiation from dream into the reality of life. "Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as individuality embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies...