Reviews for The Secret Life of Puppets

The average rating for The Secret Life of Puppets based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-26 00:00:00 Michael Harris Nelson is a Californian scholar who has bestowed upon the reading world here a work of relentless and restless intelligence. Conceived as a single tome after receiving avid encouragement in that direction subsequent to her completion of a handful of independent'but thematically linked'essays, The Secret Life of Puppets pursues the fortunes of the losing side of the Enlightenment duality conflict'the transcendent'and its relegation to the shadows of the grotesque grotto during the three hundred plus year reign of empirical materialism. Nelson believes that this outgrowth of Platonism has nevertheless endured in Western culture, resurfacing (often inherent within various simulacra) at a higher frequency'and one that has become more open and acceptable over the past two decades'than most reason-embracing citizens would be aware of. Nelson sets the stage for her argument by an engaging summation of early belief systems, with focus upon the Platonic and Gnostic. The former had its influential postulation of a divine realm of ideal and perfect forms that were mirrored in the material world in which man interacted with his mind'and human knowledge (reason, logos) and divine knowledge (intuition, nous) were interdependent, a combinatory mental and soul construct that would help man to achieve understanding of the true and the real. The Gnostics took from Plato's basic tenets and added their own twist in declaring that the Divine Ideal lay beyond the material universe, the latter being the creation of an evil or ignorant Demiurge and his Archons who created man in his current fallen form of a fleshy body imprisoning a divinity-sundered soul and conspired to keep him from knowledge of the true God. Such knowledge could be achieved through gnosis, the process of knowing, a spiritual intuition that would carry the believer beyond the demiurgical limitations of episteme, the state of knowing derived from reason alone. From here Nelson covers the merging of Platonic and Gnostic dogma with Christianity in the fourth century CE into Neoplatonism, in which the perfect Divine was separated from the imperfect world by a complex hierarchy of enjoined spheres (macrocosm to microcosm) in which the divinity flowed earthward in an increasingly diluted stream. Neoplatonic thought would dominate Christian theology for centuries, until the resurrection of a more materialist Aristotelianism in the late Middle Ages. The duel between Platonic and Aristotelian patterns of thinking would be initiated in the Renaissance, when previously lost (Neo)Platonic writings were discovered and championed by such intellectual fire-breathers as Giordano Bruno (Nelson's clear favorite), who crafted a fusion of Neoplatonic, Hermetic, Gnostic and Jewish Cabalistic doctrine into a potent blend of Pagan-Christian magical and occult ritual. Although Bruno's body was consumed by the flames, his powerful admixture continued to live on. This Platonic/Aristotelian conflict would eventually be decided in the Enlightenment'and Plato was banished as the episteme, reason-oriented scientific thought concerned solely with a natural world of phenomena, assumed pride of place. This change deeply affected Protestant Christianity, which purged itself of belief in divine intervention via miracles and in the existence of the Devil and supernatural spirits outside of allegory. As the Enlightenment gave way to an industrialized modernity, the works of Freud and Jung completed this ascendancy of episteme, in which any lingering traces of outside supernatural or transcendent intervention in human affairs were completely superseded by that of the newly discovered consciousness: the ego, the id, the unconscious, examined and explained through psychoanalysis. No longer was man afflicted by exterior supernatural agencies: all his troubles were found to be brewed up from the benighted depths of his own human mind. Yet the strains of the supernatural and the transcendent had existed for millennia, rooting themselves deeply in all aspects of life, and they were not condemned to disappear. Nelson explores how they were instead banished to existence in the grotesque grotto, the underground where they were continually plucked to invest and inhabit high-cultural art (on continental Europe) and low-cultural works and kitsch (in both Europe and North America), which Nelson hereafter refers to as the sub-zeitgeist. The divine could no longer be accepted (other than as delusion) in the realistic rationality that was coming to dominate the literary field'but it was acceptable in the fantastic, as exemplified by chap-books, detective and horror stories, fantasy tales and comic books, and pre-cinematic puppet shows. Nelson had shown how Neoplatonic philosophy had engendered a strong belief in the ability of simulacra (statuary, icons, dolls, etc.) to tap into the ideal divine; being constructed of earthly material that bore the holy imprint of God, and shaped like the imperfect forms that existed on Earth, they functioned as stand-ins for those perfect forms at the apex of the Great Chain of Being. This fervent acceptance of the divine potentiality of simulacra carried through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the twist that, amidst a rational society, the transcendent mutated into the grotesque, the demonic, the profane; simulacra were now firmly linked with negative consequences: hubris, pride, madness, evil, greed, and other such follies. Nelson pours through a wide variety of examples to buttress her arguments, tracing the development of low-cultural art by way of genre fiction and comics, puppet theatre and cinema, moving through the expanding realm of simulacra as puppets became robots, then androids, culminating in cyborgs which increasingly blur the line between the human aspect and the artificial. With the onset of the World Wide Web and its concomitant electronic genesis of virtual reality, which exerts a powerful attraction for both the desire for demiurgical creation and that of a mirror of the material world that tends more towards the perfection of the Ideal, there has been an influx of cinematic and literary works that explore the supernatural in milieus where it is neither explained away as delusional belief or imaginary suspension-of-belief, but as actually existing in the material world without any rationalizing strings attached at all; it merely is. Thus, Nelson perceives that the transcendent has begun its emergence into the open as an acceptable part of twenty-first century discourse. She deems this a desirable state, as she points out how mankind's greatest renaissance flowerings have coincided with a complementary rivalry between the empirical episteme and the spiritual transcendent; as long as this duality can manage not to claim mastery of ground where the other has right of place, there is no reason they cannot exist side-by-side in a complimentary fashion. If Christianity expelled the supernatural in an effort to achieve peaceful co-existence with a growingly secular society, perhaps there can be acceptance by the latter of certain aspects of existence that cannot be disproved by empirical reasoning'that perhaps the truth does lie in the centre between the spiritual and the material. If the above paragraphs seem to cover too much ground with too little detail, it's because Nelson examines such a thorough and broad swath of subjects that it proves almost impossible to summarize easily. Indeed, in some of the middle chapters'which, as noted at the outset, were culled together from previously written essays'the reader can occasionally sense Nelson beginning to diverge from her overarching theme, particularly in the chapter that covers several works by Umberto Eco. With such a disparity of exegesis performed, this is always a very real danger'nevertheless, such tangential forays are always arrested before stepping completely off of the baseline, an impressive feat in and of its own. For myself, the highlight of TSLOP is the chapter that compares the primary texts of three exemplary representatives of her underground transcendent hypothesis: the pulp-horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (low-cultural fantastic); the short fiction and essays of Bruno Schulz (high-cultural fantastic); and the memoir of Daniel Paul Schreber, an educated civil servant from turn-of-the-century Germany who suffered from schizophrenia (realistic delusion). Nelson points out the demiurgical streak in all three writers, the manner in which all three'knowingly in the case of Schreber, unknowingly in that of the other two'plumbed the unsettled contents of the unconscious in their writing and used psychotopography'the projection of interior unconsciousness upon exterior forms, whether existing in reality or merely in fictional milieus'in the crafting of their disturbing body of work. The fantastic and demiurgical makeup of their writing, along with the closely linked time period in which they wrote, are marvelously deconstructed and examined by Nelson's acute eye and sharp mind; these three serve as linking figures with the other chapters of The Secret Life of Puppets, bearers of tropes whose fruits will be discovered and discussed in the following chapters that pursue avenues of the transcendent in the mid- to late twentieth century. Nelson clearly set herself a formidable task. However, she argues her cases brilliantly and persuasively and manages to re-tie whatever loose ends were showing in a very tight and convincing final chapter. As she seeks support for her theme in a wide variety of high- and low-cultural settings'literature, theatre, cinema, philosophy'the sheer amount of evidentiary material seemingly required would appear to threaten to bog down a book less than three hundred pages in length; yet the examples she selects are surveyed with such skill that she has no problem whatsoever with both persuading the reader and keeping her wonderfully, wittily written text flowing at a brisk-but-informative pace. One of that exemplary breed of non-fiction that not only educates the reader by divulging new information but also casts that which is already known in a different and revelatory light. Highly recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-15 00:00:00 David Jankovsky I read the first 99 pages of this book when I bought it in 2001, then shelved it and forgot it. Recently I've been reading Puppet by Kenneth Gross, and decided to read it again. I'm glad I did: it's fascinating look at the emergence of the grotesque and the concomitant disappearance of the transcendent in Western consciousness, or more accurately, its displacement into the "fantastic" literature of Kleist, Poe and their successors as well as the mass-art media of horror-fantasy films, fiction, graphic novels and games. In broadest terms, Nelson investigates the evolution of the numinous from religion into art, the inner tensions of an unstable materialist worldview. The journey, fortunately, is far more interesting than my congested summary. Nelson's Secret Life is one of my favorite kinds of books - a history of Imagination; an eccentric, deeply intelligent meditation on the forms of art and consciousness, packed with specific examples and excurses, as well as sweeping statements such as "This drastic reinterpretation of reality [around, roughly, the Reformation] in which one's only transcendental link to God is internal marks the real dividing line in Western culture." It's the sort of book in which one enjoys the ruminating endnotes as much as the text itself. If you're the type of reader who enjoys the historical analyses of writers like Ioan Couliano; C S Lewis (literary criticism, not apologetics); Frances Yates; Owen Barfield; James Hillman; Roberto Calasso - you'd probably enjoy Nelson. She has a new book (Gothika) coming out this spring; I've already ordered it.