Pinocchio's Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama (review)

Pinocchio's Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama. By Harold B. Segel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; 372 pp.; $16.95 paper.

In Pinocchio's Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama, Harold B. Segel examines the modernist fascination with the world of the child as well as with "indigenous" forms of popular culture, such as traditional puppet shows. He carefully describes innovative literature--primarily drama, but also fiction and poetry--that features inanimate actors. But rather than spending some time examining the puppet's "indigenous," bawdy, unscripted performances--the "low culture" of the fairground and street that modernist artists often appropriated and co-opted--Segel focuses entirely on the unprecedented number of European "modernist and avant-garde" (5) texts written between the 1880s and the early 1920s that incorporate the puppet figure as a performance object (usually alongside human actors) or, quite often, merely as a metaphor.

Segel calls his study Pinocchio's Progeny because he believes that Carlo Collodi's 1883 The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, "a tale for adults as much as for children" (35) is the pivotal "modernist" text utilizing the puppet figure. Collodi's well-known work introduces the rebellious puppet who wants to become a real person, who disdains bourgeois mores, and who epitomizes "childhood," folk, and popular culture--all defining elements of the literary subgenre that Segel's book seeks to describe. The subsequent (primarily dramatic) works Segel discusses--by such writers as Michel de Ghelderode, Alfred Jarry, Paul Claudel, the Brothers apek (Karel and Josef), F.T. Marinetti, and numerous others--sometimes feature puppet characters like Pinocchio who dream of, and even achieve, "freedom." At other times, human characters cannot avoid becoming "puppets."

As Segel repeatedly shows, "puppets" in modernist drama often do not fit preconceived notions of hand puppets or marionettes. One example is Bruno Jasienski's The Mannequins' Ball (1931). Clearly influenced by futurism, The Mannequins' Ball features headless tailors' dummies that come together for their annual secret dance in a Paris fashion house. A human, however, remains enamored of a female mannequin and pursues her all the way to the dance. Since the dance must remain secret, the mannequins cannot let the human--Paul Ribandel, a high-ranking union leader on his way to an industrialists' ball--leave. So they decapitate him, and one of the mannequins puts Ribandel's head on his "body" and attends the industrialists' ball as Ribandel. A great deal of comedy based on mistaken identity ensues as the mannequin takes bribes (including both money and women) while abetting the cause of the workers, whom he tells to go on strike and double their demands. Segel describes several other plays where puppets outwit humans, including their masters. In Jacinto Grau's El Señor de Pigmalion (1921), for example, the puppets rebel against the puppeteer Pigmalion, their master and creator. The puppet ringleader pulls out a concealed shotgun, shoots his human master at point-blank range, and the puppets exit shouting, "Freedom, freedom!"

In Collodi's story, Pinocchio also rebels against his creator, Geppetto, by fleeing from him and refusing to do as he is told. His refusal to work, obey authority, or go to school enables Pinocchio, at times, to achieve greater pleasure than his human counterparts. But towards the end of the story, the formerly errant puppet finally takes a job, getting up before dawn to hoist from a well with the aid of a manually operated machine (a "puppet" of production) 100 buckets of water per day in exchange for a glass of milk for his sickly "daddy." In his "spare time," Pinocchio learns how to weave baskets, which he sells for a profit. And, in the evening, he practices reading and writing so that he can eventually become a "professional...