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  • Tôzai !… Corps et cris des marionnettes d’Osaka by François Bizet
  • Allen S. Weiss (bio)
Tôzai !… Corps et cris des marionnettes d’Osaka. By François Bizet. Paris: Les Belles Lettres/Collection Japon, 2013; 192 pp. 25€ paper.

It would seem contradictory to speak of the screams and cries of marionettes, who—with the exception of some recent electronic versions—are all body and no voice. Their charm, mystery, and disquieting strangeness are in great part attributable to their muteness, and their ventriloquated voices are in themselves an art form. The Japanese bunraku theatre raises the art of the marionette to great heights of complexity, with the marionette controlled by three puppeteers, the narration and sound effects effected by the narrator-chanter (tayū), and music by shamisen players. The ontological complexity and existential paradoxes of such puppetry are brilliantly investigated by François Bizet, who explains, “The character in bunraku escapes definition, both in an optical sense and in speculative terms. Its real life is elsewhere: dispersed and dissipated, in perpetual recreation of the self […] multiplying epiphanies, places, and signs, rather than holding to a univocal revelation of presence”1 (53). Hence the pertinence of the book’s epigraph, the famed question from Hamlet: “Who is there?” The “who” is decentered, dehierarchized, destabilized, deracinated—with the marionette “subject” reborn at each moment in different configurations—suggesting the radical contemporaneity of bunraku. But the pleasure of Tozai!… stems in great part from the beauty of Bizet’s prose, which, while articulating art and theory, makes us see and hear these subtle effects, as when he describes how the puppet becomes “[…] an energumen, namely a depressional, decentered place, without gravity, traversed by gusts, an open tomb, undermined, dislocated, foundering from rhythmic phenomena, raised from the earth by a sound, floored by the intensification of sound, broken in the air, rattled again, crescendo, staccato, accelerando: all these conditions reunited, with the exception of flesh and blood, for the trance” (71). What is enlightened by contemporary theory is also nourished by the most ancient and mysterious procedures of ventriloquism, where the subject in trance doesn’t speak, but is spoken, whether by muse or ghost, demon or god.

In bunraku this marionette speech takes a special form, gidayū, a type of recitation to shamisen accompaniment named after Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1724), the inventor of the major style of chanted narration in bunraku theatre used to this day. Bizet attempts to explain its complexity: “It is impossible to respond to the oft-posed question: ‘What is gidayū?’ If I say that it is a technique of singing, the declamatory part is evacuated; if I suggest that it is the art of presenting an epic or a tale, I forget the theatrical dimension; if I pretend that it is theatre, the tale is lost; but, if the tayū is only a storyteller, where is the song?” (134). Just as gidayū, like the manipulation of the marionettes, is taught through oral transmission, Bizet’s descriptions give us a sense of this extraordinary exclamatory style, perhaps most closely paralleled by [End Page 175] Artaud’s call for a new form of theatrical incantation, an affective athleticism, in The Theater and Its Double ([1938] 1958). Writing of the vocalizations of the tayū, Bizet informs us, “[…] an enormous part of the character’s existence is henceforth displaced and accumulates in this new, extremely mobile and effervescent matter that is the frenzied, ecstatic voice: growls, clicks, creaks, shrill whistles” (43). Not only is such a virtuosic voice (in relation to occidental song we would speak of extended vocal techniques) in itself an extraordinary phenomenon, but it also affects the very ontology of bunraku puppetry: “The voice as an outgrowth of gesture. Voice doesn’t accompany gesture, but swells and germinates and overflows in an autonomous manner. Voice doesn’t illustrate gesture, having itself become gesture and recounting its very own tale” (44). Or, in a claim that would have us reread those passages of Maurice MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962) dealing with speech as gesture, Bizet cites Paul Claudel, who said it so succinctly: “It is not an actor that speaks, it is speech...

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