The Secret Life of Puppets

 

The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I haven't read a book with marking pencil in hand since graduate school. That was a long, long time ago. This book forced my pencil out of retirement and back into action. The difficult part was not marking nearly every page with something so profound that I wanted to memorize it.

I recently read Arthur Machen's Heiroglyphics and just last year I read Gary Lachman's Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, two incredible books about the need to temper "scientism," for lack of a better term (it's a term that Nelson uses, as well) and to expand the critical use of the Imagination. Nelson would use different terminology: Empiricism versus Transcendentalism, but she traces, essentially, the same lines of thought. Although rather than the artistic evaluation of Machen or the esotericism of Lachman, Nelson traces a socio-anthropological path through the maze of the past two millennia (and beyond), following an unbroken Ariadne's thread that begins and ends (an intellectual ourobos, if you will) with our individual and societal desire to reach for the transcendent, to at least want to believe that there is something beyond this pale existence.

The short version of the thesis is that the idea of an underworld (or, by extension, Plato's cave) was transformed during the Renaissance into the mundus subterraneous, a world beneath the crust of our earth, then to terra incognita, most notably in the form of the Arctic and Antarctic, and after these had all been explored and revealed, our desires turned to the outer worlds beyond earth and to the inner worlds of, among others, cyberspace. All of this exploration, Nelson convincingly argues, is born of a desire to know the unknowable, to transcend our meager lives, to be a part of something grand. She does not engage in psychological speculation on a societal scale as to what causes this drive, merely traces our desires by way of "low" literature, and . . . puppets.

One of the more interesting pieces of this exploration is seeing how man, in past ages, worshipped graven images - anthropomorphic statues imbued with some mystical aura of power, then turned that worship on its head to eventually become a fear of inanimate "men" (or women). We witness the transformation from Baal to Punch to Pinocchio to Maschinenmensch to Terminator to Chucky, with many branchings-off in-between. First, man worships the puppet, then they manipulate the puppet (fulfilling the theandric urge for some kind of false apotheosis), then they fear the manipulation of the puppets they have created.

While Nelson does avoid the psychological analysis of society as a whole, she does give examples of those whose individual psychosis reflect this push-me, pull-me dynamic of manipulating and being manipulated, particularly when it comes to the diaries of Daniel Paul Schreber and the woman who inspired the "false Maria" of Metropolis, a patient of Viktor Tausk, one of Freud's disciples. The analysis of psychosis and particularly schizophrenia in the context of The Secret Life of Puppets makes for a poignant reminder that real lives are affected in real ways by these perceptions.

But the book is largely about a deep dive into popular literature, cinema, etc., to see where we, as a society, long to discover the transcendental, long after "high" society has relegated such longing to the ghetto of ignorance (in their view). Nelson hits many favorites of mine throughout: The movies of Brothers Quay, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe, Lovecraft, The Matrix, the works of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, the German expressionist movies The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Der Golem - the list of personal touch-points goes on and on. And I was rewarded with learning of some new or previously un-seeen/un-read cinematic and literary works which I shall have to explore. I also made some of my own connections (as with Machen and Lachman, above) such as the connection between the earthly and celestial poles and another of my favorite problematic and uncategorizable books, Hamlet's Mill.

This will be reread, probably many times, but next time I'll know to have my marking pencil ready before I crack the cover.



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