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Gross, Kenneth. Puppet. An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 206 pp. Cloth. ISBN 978-0-226-30958-3. $25.00.
Towards the end of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep!, Rick Deckard muses: "The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are," Puppets are not electric hut they are things. Or so it would seem, but Kenneth Gross's utterly fascinating Puppet. An Essay on Uncanny Life shows that there is much life in them and that their lives are anything hut paltry.
Fantastic imagination has always been populated with entities whose confused ontology locates them between the realm of the living and the domain of objects (and sometimes in both at the same time): robots, androids, and cyborgs; mechanical dolls and marionettes; manikins and automatons. Among them, the puppet seems most object-like and lifeless, but it has curiously evoked more interest than any other of these human effigies. Writers and artists that have used, invoked, or exercised (and, sometimes, exorcised) the puppet in their works include William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Cornell, Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Antonin Artaud, Russell Hoban, and Thomas Ligotti-and this is only a partial list. All of them have been, in one way or another, fascinated by what Gross calls "the madness of the puppet"(1), by "its ardent indecorums, its talent for metamorphosis, its dismemberings of language and transformations of scale, its materiality, its commitment to giving life to the unliving, its negotiations with death and survival, its love of secrecy and shadows, its literalness, its fundamental strangeness" (4). This may be a very poetic listing, but the author's agenda is far more ambitious than to indulge in impressionistic musings on Pinocchio's kin.
Tracing "curious genetic links, hidden bloodlines" (.5), Gross's free-flowing narrative sets out to demonstrate how essential and important a part the puppet theater as an institution and puppets as objects/not-objects have been in our culture-a term that for once does not denote merely Anglophone countries or the western hemisphere. (Japanese and Indonesian puppets receive almost as much attention here as their Italian or English counterparts.) This extended, global focus differentiates Puppet from Victoria Nelson's magisterial The Secret Life of Puppets (2001). Although Gross's structure of...