Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross (review)

Kenneth Gross’s Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life is a refreshing and grounded response to the apparent mystery of puppet performance. In it we can see Gross, a scholar of Renaissance literature at the University of Rochester, forcing himself to come to terms with the challenges presented by puppets, and above all the particular nature of the object as the center of performance focus.

Modern Western scholarship has generally considered theatre history as equivalent to drama history—a record of literature interpreted onstage by actors. Performance Studies has radically redefined the scope and nature of the field (one need only consider the seismic shift from The Drama Review to TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies to see this in action), and yet the scholarly study of puppetry is still searching for a consistent and clear identity and a set of theoretical underpinnings.

Performances focused primarily on objects, with humans playing a secondary role (and text in a tertiary position, or not present at all) present particular conceptual challenges. In Western culture, puppetry is generally understood as the primeval roots that theatre happily outgrew on its way to modern drama. Consideration of puppetry in college theatre history textbooks has, until recently, generally been limited to two areas: the first chapter, where it is seen as essential to the primitive rituals of ür-drama; and next, a few paragraphs and many centuries later, in the chapter on Asian performance, which might seem to be presented primarily as a 20th-century inspiration for Artaud, Brecht, and other Western modernists.

The result of this intermittent inattention is that when puppets, masks, or performing objects do force us to focus on them (for example, because of the Broadway successes of War Horse or Avenue Q; the impressive presence of Royal de Luxe’s giant marionettes in the streets of European cities; the development of robotics; the persistence of masks, puppets, and objects in political demonstrations or community rituals; or the increasing presence of digital avatars onscreen) the theoretical means for understanding them are hard to find, and critical responses to object performances often treat them as mystifying, unprecedented surprises.

In Puppet Kenneth Gross reflects the traditional Western puzzlement with puppetry, but responds to that by fully engaging his fascination with the form in explorations of contemporary and historical instances of puppet performance, with a perspective fully informed by salient studies of puppet and object theatre produced in the West. This is no small feat, because Western analyses of puppetry are hardly cohesive, and instead mark fitful engagement with object theatre from the disciplinary perspectives of folklore, anthropology, phenomenology, semiotics, art history, area studies, and (a tiny bit) theatre history itself.

Gross commits himself to this project with inquisitive joy, and none of the crabbed umbrage that puppeteers often carry with them because of their perceived second-class status (which might be noticed in my piqued paragraphs above). Gross glories in the mystery of puppets as “uncanny,” and at the very outset of his book associates them with “madness.” But, while he accepts the common notion of puppets as unfathomably strange, he persists in attempting to get to the bottom of the puppet’s uncanny nature, doing so with elegance and insight. The “madness of the puppet,” Gross writes on his first page, “is perhaps better called an ecstasy. It lies in the hand’s power and pleasure in giving itself over to the demands of the object, our curious will to make the object into an actor, something capable of gesture and voice.” And he continues: “What strikes me here is the need for a made thing to tell a story, to become a vehicle for a voice, an impulse of character—something very old, and very early. The thing acquires a life” (1). In this initial passage Gross uses the apparent mystery of the puppet to propel his own poetic analysis, in ways that make sense from a puppeteer...