Spaces of Puppets in Popular Culture

Grotesque Geographies of the Borderscape

Janet Banfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032103419
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000592504
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

This first book-length exploration of geographical engagement with puppets examines constructions of puppets in contemporary popular British culture and considers the various ways in which puppets and humans (not just puppeteers) are unified in diverse cultural media.

Organised around themes of metaphorical, performative and transformational puppets, the work draws out how puppets are used in diverse cultural media (fiction, music, television, film and theatre), how they are constructed through those uses, and to what effect. Both puppets as generalised forms (bodily, relational or ideational) and specific puppet characters (Mr Punch, Pinocchio) are explored. Building upon existing associations between puppets and the grotesque, the volume extends understandings of the puppet by elaborating borderscaping strategies through which puppets are constructed and an alternative perspective on the uncanniness of puppets. Geographically, it unearths distinct puppet spatialities, identifies the socially critical potential of puppets, rescales geo/bio-politics at the interpersonal level, and highlights the potential of puppets within posthuman debates about the status of the human.

This work will be of interest to anyone fascinated by puppets, as well as those in fields such as geography, anthropology, cultural and media studies, and those interested in the grotesque, posthumanism and/or non-representational scholarship.

Part 1 Metaphorical puppets

Introduction to Part 1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214861-3

The question guiding this first part is – at first glance – a simple one: What is a puppet? However, it will swiftly become clear that this question is not so simple, after all. Indeed, it will not be answered comprehensively in this first part, which provides only a starting point for a much fuller response that will be formulated through the rest of the volume. My intention in this first part is to establish an everyday, naïve understanding of what a puppet is, which will subsequently be expanded and deepened. This understanding will be everyday in the sense that it is commonly held and accepted, such that if someone uses the term puppet to describe somebody or something, the meaning of such a description is comprehensible and assumed to be comprehended in the manner intended. It is naïve in the sense that it is both understood and reproduced by non-specialists, by people not associated with or engaged in the practice or community of puppetry. This distinction immediately indicates at least two different perspectives on what a puppet is, which I describe here as ‘popular’ and ‘practitioner’, and while my analytical focus is on the former, the analysis also draws out aspects of the latter. To scope this naïve, everyday understanding of the puppet, I focus my analysis on the metaphorical use of puppets in adult fiction and do not seek to forge rigorous links with either disciplinary concepts and concerns or puppetry practices and theories, although disciplinary links do emerge and my initial focus on metaphorical puppets recognises that puppet theatre has been a source of metaphors since ancient times (Jurkowski, 2013). Thus, the focus is on identifying how puppets are represented in fictional metaphors as a route into scoping this quotidian understanding of what a puppet is.

Chapter summary

Chapter 1 attends to passing metaphorical references to puppets in works of literature that are not nominally about puppets but which use the idea of the puppet to portray aspects of a character or the specific circumstances in which a character finds themselves. The analysis in this chapter is revealing with regard to common representations of different types of puppets and how these make up a fictional puppet appearance and determine the mobility capacities of the puppetised character. It also gives rise to a specific formulation of a relationship of control between the puppetised character and their puppet master that is focused on the body of the puppetised character. In doing so, it draws out an emphasis on the merging and switching of bodily materiality between wooden puppet and fleshy human to generate graphic and affective impacts on the reader, while simultaneously identifying the eviction of individuality or subjectivity from the puppetised character as a psychological supplement to that corporeal emphasis. The treatment of the border either between puppet and human or between puppet and puppet-master is found to generate four different spatialities, which are distinct yet also overlap in certain ways due to their unique configurations of – for example – bodily versus psychological aspect and materiality versus subjectivity focus.

Chapter 2 progresses to examine narrative metaphorical uses of puppets in works of literature that employ the word ‘puppet’ in the title but do not feature puppets as material entities in the plot, thereby employing the idea of the puppet as a key narrative device but in metaphorical terms. The analysis in this chapter generates findings that are broadly consistent with those in Chapter 1, for example, in relation to the significance of control and the unsettling of clear borders between puppet and puppet master, but it also diverges in some ways and provides much more detail in others. In terms of divergence, the appearance of specific puppet types does not feature, there is no meaningful engagement with the merging or switching of bodily materials between wooden puppet and fleshy human, and the means of control is predominantly psycho-social rather than bodily. However, in terms of providing more detail, the way in which both the relationship between the puppet and the puppet master is established and the control is exerted are found to be addressed more thoroughly and expressed with greater nuance. Whereas the passing metaphorical uses of puppets emphasised the material interchangeability of puppet and human, the narrative uses of puppets set the relationship of control within a broader social context, facilitating social commentary that is found to link the pathological exercise of control at the level of the individual to the ideological exercise of control at the level of society. This narrative metaphorical use of puppets is also found to engage more rigorously with different ways in which the subjectivity of the puppetised character is evicted, thereby building on the findings of the analysis in Chapter 1, and to reveal various strategies employed by the puppet masters to establish and maintain their control. Three different sets of puppet spatialities – or spatialising processes – are identified in Chapter 2, with one set associated with different strategies of control, another set linked to diverse attitudes adopted by puppet masters to the puppetised characters and the third identified through the consideration of genre influences. Chapter 2, then, reinforces, questions, deepens and diversifies the findings in Chapter 1.

While in this part I engage with geographical literatures with only a light touch, I draw more substantively on the notion of the grotesque, as established in the introduction, due to the affinities between puppets and the grotesque. Puppets are a common theme in the grotesque, but I use this concept as an analytical lens through which to engage with puppets, their bodies and their spaces, which – in turn – generates puppet-informed conceptual contributions to the grotesque. One core feature of the grotesque is the foundational nature of contradictory conceptual categories in the construction of a grotesque form and while such contradictoriness is clearly in evidence in the constructions of puppets explored in Chapters 1 and 2, one of the most telling is the apparent chasm that emerges between these popular cultural constructions of puppets and the understandings of puppets articulated by puppetry practitioners, suggesting that the puppet is not only fundamentally and uniquely grotesque in the forms that it takes but also in the ways in which it is understood, which brings with it implications for what we consider the grotesque to be and how we might work creatively with it.

Conclusion

The Conclusion to Part 1 summarises and refines the headline outcomes of the first two chapters before elaborating further on the relationship between puppets and the grotesque to consolidate the conceptual contribution of this analysis in developing our understanding of the grotesque. It then specifies the diverse puppet geographies emergent from these analyses and the human–puppet border crossings on which they are predicated and outlines the relevance of these analyses to disciplinary themes and interests, with a focus on the confluence of biopolitics and geopolitics at the level of the individual. Part 1, then, establishes an everyday understanding of what a puppet is as the quotidian baseline for the later analyses, which examine more substantive uses of puppets, for example, as protagonists or actors, and which broaden in focus to other cultural forms, including film and television, music and theatre. At the same time, my disciplinary engagement both builds and deepens as the significance of puppet–human borders and border crossings becomes increasingly clear.

Reference

• Jurkowski, H. (2013) Aspects of puppet theatre, 2nd Edition. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.

1 Puppets in passing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214861-4

In this first substantive chapter, I engage with everyday representations of puppets in popular culture to establish a commonplace understanding of what makes a puppet a puppet. While puppets come in a variety of shapes and sizes, we hold an everyday or naïve understanding of what we mean by the term ‘puppet’ regardless of the specific form that it may take from one instance to another. Whether we are dealing with a glove or sleeve puppet (operated directly by the hand inside it), a rod puppet (operated using sticks from below), a marionette (operated by strings from above) or any other type of puppet, and whether operated by a single puppeteer or a team of people, there are certain features that we consider to be characteristic of being a puppet. It is these features that constitute the naïve or everyday understanding of what a puppet is, in terms of its appearance, materiality, capacities and relations. Throughout this book, I attend to different ways in which puppets are represented, constructed and used in diverse cultural forms (e.g., fiction, film, music and theatre) and the ways in which these generate their own unique puppet spatialities. Part 1 adopts a principal focus on literary (fictional) representations in works that use puppets metaphorically. Along the way, and further elaborated in the next chapter, I identify a variety of borders – bodily and subjective – emerging from this naïve, everyday understanding of a puppet that contribute to the construction of the puppet in relation to its human counterparts and the generation of their unique spatialities. These various borders and border crossings both provide an immediate link with ideas of the grotesque, as outlined in the Introduction, and will become increasingly focal to the analysis and argument as Parts 2 and 3 unfold.

As a starting point, this chapter explores occasional or passing metaphorical references to puppets in a range of adult fiction, film and television to establish quotidian or everyday assumptions about puppets. While film and television references are included in the analysis, this chapter focuses strongly on passing metaphorical references to puppets in adult fiction, as this is the dominant source of metaphorical references. None of these works was explicitly about puppets but made metaphorical use of the idea of the puppet to convey either features of the characters involved or the situations in which they found themselves. Approximately 85 passing metaphorical references emerging from 50 works of adult fiction were sourced between 2016 and 2020 for the analysis in this chapter, alongside another 18 from film and television programmes. The full list of these works is presented in Table 1.1 and all works are identified by title irrespective of whether they are literary or filmic in nature. This is done both in the interes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Metaphorical puppets
• Part 2 Performative puppets
• Part 3 Transformational puppets
• Conclusion
• Index