Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

Kenneth Gross. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 224 + 4 color plates, 24 halftones. $25.00.

Toward the end of Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, Kenneth Gross evokes the unusual environment in which puppetry exists:

It is a space where unexpected forms of life emerge, assert a form, shift shape and then disappear, not a vast space, not a great wilderness or a grand palace, but like some rumored corner of an old house, or some neighborhood in a city that you stumble across by surprise, where people under the shadow of war or poverty engage in commerce of peculiar sorts, trading in strange goods and using odd currencies, feeding unaccountable and suspect appetites. (158--59)

In Puppet, Gross attempts to articulate the essence of the creatures that inhabit this space, their special nature, and our attraction to them. Each chapter is an encounter with a few particular examples of puppetry, sometimes from traditional forms, like Japanese bunraku or Sicilian rod puppets, and sometimes from innovative contemporary artists like Janie Geiser or Germany's Ilke Schönbein, who are exploring the boundaries of this world in new ways. Each chapter also provides a meditation on aspects of puppetry that captivate and puzzle us, leading to more profound consideration of the puppet's relationship to art and life. As Gross explains, "The puppet and the idea of the puppet move together here, the actual and imagined, or unknown, puppet, the visible and the invisible puppet" (4). Puppet is at once a book of personal reflections-based on Gross's own experiences with objects in performance, with literature that draws on the metaphor of the puppet, and with individual puppeteers-as well as an exposition on the nature of puppets, in all their variety, and how they work on the imagination.

Chapter 4, "The Fate of Hands," for example, begins by proposing the hand or glove puppet as the "extension and tool of our will" (51) because of the palpable presence of the human hand inside the puppet's body. The hand puppet transforms a part of the self into a separate, distinct entity even as it remains inseparable from the puppeteer. Furthermore, "The poetry of the connection between hand and puppet is so intense in part...