November 11, 2022
Last year, 2021, was the celebration of the 700th birthday of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I am, admittedly, a bit late to the party—ironically, as I have been teaching the commedia longer than any other major work of literature, almost 40 years. However, it is not the Divine Comedy itself that is the subject of this newsletter but rather the incarnation of its major characters by eminent Argentinian-Canadian writer Alberto Manguel—in the form of puppets. Yes, puppets. One of the most revered of the “classics” incarnated in a form of art sometimes regarded as naïve popular entertainment, mostly for children. The dramatis personae of the Divine Comedy is vast: dozens upon dozens of characters from mythology, literature, history, and Dante’s own life, and Manguel seems intent on representing many if not most of them with an individual puppet: the catalogue of an exhibition of them last year lists their current number as 89.
That exhibition displayed the puppets in three glass cases, dividing them into the characters of the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, filling a huge room. Even in photos, the effect is extraordinary.
This is the latest in a seemingly endless series of accomplishments by someone whose remarkable journey began when he was hired at the age of 17 to be a reader for the blind Argentinian genius Jorge Luis Borges. Manguel went on to edit anthologies, to write novels and volumes of creative nonfiction, including the celebrated A History of Reading, to become the head of the National Library of Argentina, and to build a personal library of some 40,000 volumes, which I featured in my newsletter of January 21, 2022. In recent years, Manguel, along with his partner Craig Stephenson, reinvented his life, moving to Portugal, bequeathing his library to the city of Lisbon, and become the director there of a Center for the History of Reading, now named Espaço Atlântida, literally the “space of Atlantis."
Atlantis was described in two of Plato’s dialogues, the Critias and the Timaeus, as being located beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the modern-day Straits of Gibraltar, the passage between the known world of the Mediterranean and the unknown world of the Atlantic Ocean. In other words, it was not very far from Lisbon, where the Espaço resides. Perhaps 9000 years ago, it was a utopia far more advanced than the historical civilizations that came after it, but it became corrupt and was eventually destroyed by earthquakes, sinking in the Atlantic. In later centuries, Atlantis was identified with the New World, which is where Sir Thomas More located his Utopia, but there is also an indirect connection with Dante. In canto 26 of the Inferno, the famous “Ulysses canto,” Ulysses, far advanced in years but still indomitable, exhorts his equally aged crew to sail through the Pillars of Hercules into the unknown Atlantic—for which he is damned in that area of the 8th circle of hell reserved for liars and givers of bad advice, for Ulysses makes clear that his quest is for knowledge—forbidden knowledge motivated by pride, and not Dante’s own authorized quest for knowledge. Ulysses comes upon an island in the unexplored Atlantic, but his ship capsizes and he and his crew drown. The island is the location of the mountain of Purgatory. Dante does not identify it with Atlantis, but the Purgatorio is full of examples of the role of the arts in helping to educate and inspire people in their spiritual quest, a role that Dante clearly hoped would be played by his own poem. The climbing of the “seven story mountain” of Purgatory is thus in a very real sense an allegory of the educational process, and matches Milton’s definition of education as the attempt to repair the ruin of our first parents by coming to know God aright. As a Center for the Study of the History of Reading, the Espaço could not be more perfectly named. Manguel cites the characterization of Atlantis by Sir Francis Bacon as a “perfectible utopia.” The ironic parody of Dante’s climb up the mountain of learning is Goethe’s Faust—Faust being another quester after forbidden knowledge, and one who began in the Middle Ages as a character in a series of puppet plays. At the end of Goethe’s epic, Faust, like Ulysses a very old man, is directing an engineering project reclaiming land from the sea to build some kind of utopia, trying to raise some kind of Atlantis in a literalizing way, getting it wrong, as he always does.
But why puppets as a vehicle for Dante’s quest? I admit I have never really thought much about where puppetry fits in the total scheme of the arts. It seems at first glance one of the minor arts, relegated to the role of children’s entertainment. But let us not put away childish things too quickly in our attempt to acquire the dignity of wise adults. In the first place, the imaginative experiences of childhood are at least as formative as the erotic. In the second place, Jesus must have meant something, if we could only figure out what, when he said we have to become as little children again to enter the kingdom of heaven. I was already 18 when Jim Henson’s Muppets began appearing on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, but they became in their time an American institution. We older folk had grown up watching the children’s show Howdy Doody with Buffalo Bob, a ventriloquist, and his dummy Howdy Doody, a show that ran on early television from 1947 to 1960. Shari Lewis with her sock puppet Lamb Chop, appearing on Captain Kangaroo and later in her own series, was another gifted ventriloquist of that era. Older still, pre-TV, is the British tradition of Punch and Judy, derived from the even-yet-older tradition of the commedia del’arte, Mr. Punch being a development of the character Pulcinella. Mr. Punch is a Trickster, and much of the humor of the Punch and Judy plays was slapstick, a far cry from the cuteness derided by those who do not like Sesame Street. Definitely not sentimental and definitely not for children was the British television comedy Family Tree, in which Christopher Guest briefly (only 8 episodes) in 2013-2014 adapted the mockumentary style of his films, such as For Your Consideration and A Mighty Wind, to a comedy show featuring the ventriloquist Nina Conti, who played a character called Bea, who, as Wikipedia puts it, “uses a hand puppet named ‘Monk’ to communicate her feelings after an embarrassing incident with a puffin in her childhood.” Monk or Monkey “tends to blurt out sentiments best left unspoken.” I thank my English relationship Sandral Goodings for this reference.
What seems primary for Manguel is the fashioning of the puppets: the designing, the carving of head and hands, the creation of costumes. His puppets are hand puppets, and creating them is a literally hands-on experience. So far as I know, operating them or orchestrating them in a dramatic production is secondary to him. To make a puppet is to imitate the fashioning of the human race by the powers above. In the Book of Genesis, God fashioned Adam from the adamah, the red clay of the Garden: this task was delegated, or perhaps relegated, to Prometheus in Greek mythology. In Goethe’s poem “Prometheus,” Prometheus says, “Here I sit, / Fashioning mortals / In my own image,” also out of clay. To operate a puppet is to imitate the power of bringing the inanimate form to life in a miraculous-seeming way. It lies there, limp—until suddenly we can make it live by directly manipulating it with our own body, make it speak words that really come out of our own mouth. I assume that something similar goes on when girls play with dolls. I grew up before superhero action figures existed to collect, but I created my own superheroes out of toy soldiers and plastic army men. It was simple and crude, but I spent hours upon hours playing out dramas among them on the table my dad had constructed in the basement for my electric train. We create an imago and then bring it to life by projecting into it something of ourselves. Fiction writers—or epic poets—do this too, but puppetry is more sensory and direct. I bring a character to life who is consubstantial with me—who is visibly an extension of me, operated by my hands, speaking with my voice, and yet an alter ego with whom I have dialogues and arguments.
Are we then the puppets of the gods or of God? Puppets symbolize our suspicion that indeed we are. I am anything but an authority on puppetry, but for my purposes puppets fall into two types, marionettes like Pinocchio, operated by wires from above, and hand puppets operated by hands inserted into their bodies from behind or below. Hand puppets may be operated by one, two, or multiple hands, and by one, two, or three puppeteers. Yoda in Star Wars, for example, was created and originally voiced by Frank Oz, a protegé of Jim Henson of The Muppets, but operated with the assistance of a couple of additional puppeteers. It may seem over-ingenious, but I think this distinction between puppets controlled from above or from below is analogous to the two ways that mythology symbolizes control of human beings by greater powers. We may be “puppeteered” from above, feeling that there is someone pulling the strings, or we may be possessed from within and below, feeling that we are being “manipulated.”
The idea that puppets are a metaphor for a humanity controlled by external agents is not mine alone. Mircea Eliade treats them as such in his essay “Ropes and Puppets,” cited in the newsletter for September 30, 2022. In the last decade of his life, Northrop Frye became interested in the Japanese traditional art of Bunraku, dating back to the 17th century, in which puppetry becomes high art. He had seen a performance while visiting Japan, and in 1981participated in a group interview, “The Art of Bunraku,” with journalist-critic Robert Fulford and Canadian filmmaker Marty Gross, who had filmed Bunraku performance. In Bunraku, story and dialogue are supplied by a narrator, accompanied by music. Each of the very large puppets is handled by three puppeteers, one visible and the other two dressed in black. In the interview, Frye comments that “You’re often told that as time goes on you forget about the puppeteers and just concentrate on the puppets. To some extent that happens, but what really happens is that the puppeteers get absorbed into your impression of the play, so that you get the feeling of human characters being watched and manipulated by other forces” (537). Robert Fulford replies that Bertolt Brecht had been interested in Bunraku, which influenced his theory of “alienation,” of deliberately breaking the realistic illusion in drama. Frye responds, “But your ultimate reaction is not one of alienation: it’s not thinking that after all, we are not puppets, it’s more the thought of, my God, maybe we are puppets” (537).
Frye says that the plays of Chikamatsu, the most famous Bunraku dramatist, resemble the kind of Shakespearean social “problem comedy” represented by a play like Measure for Measure. Then he adds:
I think that what my whole experience of the Bunraku play did for me was to revolutionize my whole feeling about Shakespearean romance—the plays of his last stage, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest….I’d always realized that in the romances the characters are scaled down. They are not titanic characters like Hamlet or Othello; they’re looked at from a distance. Very often there’s someone like Prospero setting up the action, so that the other characters seem like his puppets. In Pericles and Cymbeline there are gods, Diana and Jupiter, who seem to be manipulating things off stage. (538)
He ends by saying, “After sitting for four hours in that hot stuffy theatre in Osaka, my mind did a sort of hysterical backflip. I began to get the illusion—a very powerful illusion—that these puppets were under the impression that they were making all these sounds and movements themselves” (539).
Recreating the Divine Comedy as a cosmic puppet show illustrates strikingly the central theological dilemma of the epic, that of predestination. Dante is usually content to sign on the dotted line for most issues of the theological orthodoxy of his time, even when he finds the outcome painful. He has a poignant reunion with his beloved teacher Brunetto Latini in canto 15 of the Inferno, of a type that any teacher would be moved by. Latini cares for Dante as his most gifted student, even as he is still terribly concerned, even in hell, about the fate of his own scholarly masterwork. Yet Latini is damned for homosexuality, a “sin against nature,” and Dante does not question it. However, Dante does question the fate of the virtuous pagans in Limbo in canto 4, a group that includes Virgil himself. These good people are damned because they were not baptized and “Without baptism, no salvation,” as the Church had it at the time. But Virgil died in 19 BCE—Christian baptism did not yet exist. And yet the famous sign over the gates of hell asserts that Justice established this place.
Dante is still troubled by this issue when he arrives in the sphere of Justice: the sphere of Jupiter in the 19th and 20th cantos of the Paradiso. There, he is spoken to by a giant eagle shape formed by the bodies of the blessed, who speak with a single voice—a kind of collective puppet, really. The eagle not only does not resolve Dante’s difficulties but makes them worse by pointing out that the fate of the virtuous pagans is only one example of the larger issue of predestination. Every single person is predestined by God, even before birth, for salvation or damnation. This is not a fabrication of the Church: it is in Paul, in Romans 8-9. We are not saved by our own efforts, but only by God’s grace; we cannot even want to be saved unless God grants grace that allows us to repent. However, God bestows his grace on some and denies it to others. Why? The eagle warns Dante: the last person to question this was Lucifer, and we know how that ended. Even the angels do not know why God chooses to save some and damn others. Yes, orthodoxy demands that we affirm that human beings do have free will. But the affirmation is paradoxical: in reality, we are utterly puppeteered by an inscrutable God. One of Manguel’s puppets is the eagle, with many tiny figures embedded in it.
It may seem a curious choice for a puppet, but Manguel clearly recognizes how central a figure the eagle is.
There are two other aspects of puppets relevant to Manguel’s project. First, puppets are stylized rather than realistic. They are in fact stylized in the way that comics usually are, which is to say that they are simplified down to essential defining features. Featured in the exhibit of the puppets was Manguel’s notebook in which he first designed a puppet by drawing it.
I love some of the drawings nearly as much as the puppets, and the drawings are akin to the comics I have loved all my life. The great book on comics as an art form is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is itself cast in graphic novel form. In it, McCloud asks, “Why would anyone, young or old, respond to a cartoon as much or more than a realistic image? Why is our culture so in thrall to the simplified reality of the cartoon?” (30). He answers his own question with a theory of what he calls “amplification through simplification”:
When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t. (30)
His example is a face from which realistic details are progressively subtracted until it is no more than a circle with two dots for eyes and a horizontal line for a mouth. At first, the stylized simplification of Manguel’s puppets might seem in tension with Dante’s extraordinary realism. While the Divine Comedy has its share of supernatural and mythological characters, it is dominated by vivid character sketches more realistic than in any other epic I can think of. It would have been far easier to make puppets of the characters in Spenser’s Faerie Queene because they are already stylized—they are in fact types, sometimes allegorical, sometimes archetypal, sometimes both. When I was a student at Baldwin Wallace University, the most gifted theatre student was a woman named Ann Lingel. She mounted a production of three of William Butler Yeats’s verse dramas, which are modeled on Japanese Noh plays, which are not puppet plays but are nevertheless intensely stylized and non-realistic. One of Ann’s dreams was to perform William Blake’s poems, in which he created, and illuminated, his own mythological characters— as a puppet play. So far as I know she never realized her dream, which I regret. When Manguel renders one of Dante’s characters as a puppet, the stylization brings out the archetypal basis of the character that in the original is partly “displaced,” to use Frye’s term, by a realistic surface. It is a way of re-visioning the characters by decreating their surface to reveal their symbolic core.
The other salient aspect of puppetry is miniaturization. We associate miniaturization with cuteness, hence again with children’s entertainment. The diminutive fairies of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with their cute names like Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, would fit right in on Sesame Street. Structuralist anthropologist and theorist of myth Claude Lévi-Strauss makes a series of interesting remarks on art and miniaturization in his book The Savage Mind, saying that “the question arises whether the small-scale model or miniature…may not be the universal type of the work of art. All miniatures seem to have intrinsic aesthetic quality…and conversely the vast majority of works of art are small-scale” (23). I do think that, in the effort to arrive at a universal theory, he pushes his insight too far. What of the gigantic frescoes of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel? What of the Egyptian Sphinx? What of Mount Rushmore? Lévi-Strauss’s answer is that “The paintings of the Sistine Chapel are a small-scale model in spite of their imposing dimensions, since the theme which they depict is the End of Time. The same is true of the cosmic symbolism of religious monuments” (23). This is winning by verbal quibble, like the Monty Python skit in which a customer who complains that he has been sold a dead parrot is told, “He ain’t dead, he’s sleeping.” Yes, they’re huge, but they’re still miniatures because the universe is huger.
A more useful answer might be that monumental art is associated with traditional mythologies in which the gods are projected. Miniaturization moves towards internalization: it deliteralizes the images, making them flash upon the inward eye. Details that are unmistakably drawn from the Divine Comedy show up in Michelangelo’s enormous rendition of the Last Judgment on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel: Charon is there, for instance, with his ferryboat, taking the dead souls over the water into hell. But Dante has attracted many visual artists, perhaps because of what T.S. Eliot called the “clear visual images” of his style, and most of them have been small scale. Blake himself was midway in a series of watercolors of the Divine Comedy while on his deathbed. I suppose art critics regard them as kitsch, but I loved the Gustave Doré engravings of Dante from the time I was a child. They were, unaccountably, in the elementary school library, along with Dürer’s woodcuts of the Apocalypse, which I loved even more. The small scale makes the images more intimate, and therefore objects of private meditation rather than the focus of public ritual, more like medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Such is true of Manguel’s puppets, which do not seem to have been created with public performance in mind, so far as I am aware. As they sit in their glass cases in the exhibition, they seem more icons than a cast of characters waiting backstage for their moment to go on. The stage on which they perform is a stage within the mind. Romantic and post-Romantic artists have surprisingly often been possessed of a quixotic urge to produce “poetic drama,” to revive the Shakespearean era in which poetry could be a popular art, a class-uniting focus of community entertaining the uneducated while providing high art for the more sophisticated members of the audience. The list of failed, or, at best, extremely minor poetic or literary dramatists nearly coincides with a list of the major poets. I blushingly confess that I was a latter-day member of the crowd, the ragged tail end of a long kite. I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate acting minor parts in plays, taking theatre courses, trying and failing to write verse drama when I didn’t know how to write conventional drama. What the Romantic line produced, however, were chamber dramas in which the chamber was behind the eyes. The progenitor of these attempts was Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was actually sketched out as a tragic drama in a notebook in Milton’s earlier life, and which possesses enormous dramatic power while retaining the wider perspective of epic. Milton wrote an actual poetic drama, Samson Agonistes, whose introduction says expressly that it was never intended for the stage. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Byron’s Manfred, Goethe’s Faust—all these have been staged with considerable ingenuity, but even film, with its increasingly miraculous repertoire of special effects, could not do them justice. More congenial to Romantic visionary inwardness is the play for voices, such as Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which I have performed with an amateur cast about every ten years of my life (probably about time to begin thinking about it once again). T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land was originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices and probably comes closer to Eliot’s ideal of poetic drama, according to Frye, than Eliot’s rather tepid stage plays.
To me, Alberto Manguel’s puppets are a form of what Jung called “active imagination.” Jung himself produced The Red Book, an elaborately self-illustrated book of the visionary dramatic dialogues he conducted with characters out of his own unconscious. At his place of meditation, Bollingen, built partly with his own hands, Jung also carved archetypal images in stone. Manguel’s partner Craig Stephenson, a Jungian analyst, has explored the possibilities of psychodrama, a therapeutic technique developed by Jacob L. Moreno and Zerka Toeman Moreno, a form of group therapy involving spontaneous dramatization and role playing. Manguel seems to have developed his own form of active imagination involving a series of stages. To begin with, he says that he treated Dante as some people treat the Bible, reading some of the Divine Comedy every day for twenty years. Then he conceived the characters as they were recreated by his own imagination, recording them in a series of drawings. Finally, there was the fashioning of the puppets themselves. The three stages form a single meditative ritual.
Perhaps the most famous essay ever written about puppets is “On the Marionette Theatre” by the Romantic Heinrich von Kleist. In it, Kleist strikes up a conversation with a dancer, who tells him that, as a dancer, he envies the puppets, which can dance more perfectly than any human dancer because they are not afflicted with human self-consciousness: “He said that it would be impossible for man to come anywhere near the puppet. Only a god could equal inanimate matter in this respect” (241). Kleist goes on to say, “I told him that I was well aware of how consciousness could disturb the natural grace of man” (242). The dancer has said to him that “Paradise is locked and the cherubim behind us; we have to travel around the world to see if it is perhaps open again somewhere at the back” (241), and at the end of the essay he adds that “grace returns when knowledge has gone through an infinity” (244). The dialogue concludes with the last lines of the essay:
“Therefore,” I said, somewhat bewildered, “we would have to eat again from the Tree of Knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?”
“Quite right,” he answered. “And that’s the last chapter in the history of the world.”
We are hunting for the back door to Paradise, but the way around is infinite. We exercise our godlike control over the puppets, but, as a matter of fact, we really envy them.
Photographs are from the exhibition ‘Marionetas da Comédia de Dante – Folhas que o vento colhe’ held at Casa Fernando Pessoa (CFP), Lisbon, November 2021 to May 2022. Used with permission.
A warm thanks to Stacey Clemence for technical assistance with the photos in this newsletter, and for her help and moral support with Expanding Eyes, both newsletter and podcast.
Note: Short videos of Bunraku performance abound on YouTube.
References
Frye, Northrop. “The Art of Bunraku.” In Interviews with Northrop Frye, edited by Jean O’Grady. Volume 24 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press, 2008. 536-45.
Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre.” Translated by Christian-Albrecht Gollub. In German Romantic Criticism. Edited by A. Leslie Willson. Continuum, 1982. 238-44.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press, 1966.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1993.