I thought I might share some thoughts on my new story “The Testament of a Puppeteer”, which I posted to my website yesterday. Today seems the perfect day to do so, as it is Edgar Allan Poe’s 215th birthday, and Poe’s spirit plays a small part in the story’s end. (It is also Dolly Parton’s 78th birthday, and I’m sure in some way her spirit infuses the story as well.)
Let’s begin with a quotation from Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Roads Round Pisa”, from her marvelous book Seven Gothic Tales:
At the end the witch appears again, and on being asked what is really the truth, answers: “The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy. What is important more than anything else in a marionette comedy, is keeping the ideas of the author clear. This is the real happiness of life, and now that I have at last come into a marionette play, I will never go out of it again. But you, my fellow actors, keep the ideas of the author clear. Aye, drive them to their utmost consequences.” This speech seemed to him suddenly to hold a lot of truth. Yes, he thought, if my life were only a marionette comedy in which I had my part and knew it well, then it might be very easy and sweet. The people of this country seemed, somehow, to be practicing this ideal. They were as immune to the terrors, the crimes and miracles of the life in which they took part as were the little actors upon the old player’s stage. To the people of the North the strong agitations of the soul come each time as a strange thing, and when they are in a state of excitement their speech comes by fits and starts. But these people spoke fluently under the wildest passions, as if life were, in any of her whims, a comedy which they had already rehearsed. If I have now at last, he thought, come into a marionette play, I will not go out of it again.
In 2006, I used that quotation as an epigraph for one of my columns for Strange Horizons, this one titled “A Conversation with a Puppeteer”. The piece was primarily inspired by my reading and wrestling with Heinrich von Kleist’s famous (and beguiling) essay “On the Marionette Theatre”, and you’ll especially see that influence in the structure of what I wrote, as well as in a few phrases (including the last sentence).
Even though I don’t especially like puppet shows, myself, or have any interest in actual puppetry, puppets and marionettes have long attracted me as a source of interesting metaphors. I spent a lot of the first half of my life as a viewer and creator of theatre in one way or another, so I have an inevitable interest in performance, but the virtue of puppetry for metaphor and fiction is that it adds strangeness to performance. It heightens artificiality while also encouraging greater imagination — every theatrical performance is artificial, but puppetry even more so, given that the actors are made from cloth or wood. Dolls and puppets are almost inherently uncanny.
It’s no surprise, then, that dolls and puppets are common elements of nightmares and horror stories. (Pinocchio is often thought of as a nice little children’s fable, but it’s actually got lots of elements of horror. What story of puppets or marionettes doesn’t?)
Puppets are important in the work of our greatest living writer of horror fiction, Thomas Ligotti (cf. Jason Marc Harris’s 2012 essay “Smiles of Oblivion: Demonic Clowns and Doomed Puppets as Fantastic Figures of Absurdity, Chaos, and Misanthropy in the Writings of Thomas Ligotti”) — so much so that Joe Pulver’s tribute anthology was titled The Grimscribe’s Puppets. Ligotti’s book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race begins with an epigraph from The Dhammapada (chapter 11, verse 147, translator unlisted):
Look at your body—
A painted puppet, a poor toy
Of jointed parts ready to collapse,
A diseased and suffering thing
With a head full of false imaginings.
Some traces of this passage from The Dhammapada and of Ligotti’s ideas are likely apparent in my story.
Which brings us to Poe and “Hop-Frog”, a nasty little story of revenge that I first read in third or fourth grade, and which made me love Poe forever. It was the first of his stories I really could make any sense of — Poe’s ornate language is hard for anybody these days, but especially challenging to an elementary schooler! — and it was the ending I loved, that great conflagration of murder, the lowly Hop-Frog getting his revenge on the awful royals. It’s an ending that fills me with joy and delight.
Thinking of the Dinesen quotation above and of “Hop-Frog”, I see my story as a comedy, even though the ending is full of gore, grotesquerie, and grimness. It’s a comedy in the sense that the good people win and the bad people are punished. They all suffer a lot in very unfunny ways, but still, there’s a sense, I hope, of lightness and liberation at the end.
For the title image, I adapted the cover for a late 19th century edition of the sheet music for Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette”. You may not recognize Gounod’s name or the title of the piece, but you likely know some of its notes, as it was used for the theme song for the tv show Alfred Hitchcock Presentsand became inextricably linked with Hitchcock. I don’t know when I learned of Gounod and the song, but it was not too long after I discovered “Hop-Frog”, because that was the same time that I discovered Hitchcock — not through his movies, very few of which were available at the local video store, but through the “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators” kids books, the various anthologies emblazoned with Hitchcock’s name, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which I sometimes was allowed to buy at the grocery store. This was also the time when a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents appeared on NBC for a season, and I watched it religiously. (Later seasons appeared on USA, but I didn’t see them.) Because of that, I was excited to rent a VHS tape one day of 3 original episodes: “Lamb to the Slaughter” (my favorite), “The Case of Mr. Pelham”, and “Banquo’s Chair”.
The theme song still takes me back to those childhood thrills. And it always makes me think of evil marionettes.
The story is also about what we expect art to do, what it is for. (Some of this is foreshadowed in my Strange Horizons column.) There’s a lot in my book About That Life that intersects with the story — questions of purpose and anonymity, of suffering and craft. Language, too. How does one speak without a tongue?
Sharp-eyed readers might notice what could be a flaw at the end of the story, where the narrator says the puppet troupe will not have names, but also says she will call herself Juanita. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, cutting the line about the name Juanita and then adding it back in, again and again. Both feel true to me, the troupe’s determined anonymity and her own identification as Juanita. Must the story have only one or the other? I’m not sure. Perhaps by the time I am able to reprint the story in a book, I will have decided. But for now it is both/and. Which feels appropriate.
My first title for the story was “The Art of Puppetry”, but then I worried it might be too easily confused with my old story “The Art of Comedy”. It’s not a bad association; the stories have a lot in common, though the earlier story is a work of surrealism, not horror. Still, I didn’t want them to get inadvertently confused, so I went with “The Testament of the Puppeteer”, which feels equally accurate. Who “the puppeteer” is … is for you to decide.
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Images: VHS tape via eBay; Arthur Rackham’s illustration for “Hop-Frog” via Wikimedia
