The Hole Truth

[Dave Monroe]

>From Toni Schlesinger, "The Hole Truth," Village Voice
Educational Supplement, Week of April 17 - 23, 2002
...

We descend to the darkened basement, below all else. I
feel a damp draft, a small, cold wind. As we reach the
bottom, there are six two-foot-tall 1930s bandleaders
staring at us, standing in their display cases with
smiles on their wooden faces—they belong to the
grandfather of master puppeteer Basil Twist—and
Victoria Nelson and I are in the Dorothy B. Williams
Theatre, named after Twist's grandmother in the depths
of the HERE performance space in downtown Manhattan.
As I look at the little men in their cutaway tuxedos,
I have this feeling they want to express themselves.
One even looks like he is going to tap his toe or
something. But nothing happens right off. Nelson and I
proceed to talk about her book, The Secret Life of
Puppets (Harvard), and the beginning of it all.

You begin the book in the mouth of an ogre—standing in
the ruins of Count Vicino Orsini's 16th-century
gardens, the Sacro Bosco, or sacred wood. There, on
the overgrown hillside, past the statues of the
"sleeping Psyche, the elephant crushing the Roman
soldier in its trunk . . . looms the enormous stone
face of the grotto of Orco . . . " 

The book starts there because for the last 300-plus
years, the supernatural in Western culture has been
found in the grotesque. To understand how the
supernatural is represented in modern secular culture,
we have to go back to the grotto and the origin of the
motif. 

This whole first chapter is a bit chilling, for you
warn us that we're going to be different once we
finish the book. "To go higher, you must first go
lower. . . . What comes out of the hole, the hole of
this book that you must crawl into, will not be the
same as what went in." You said you began the book, or
it began itself, about 15 years ago. In the 12
chapters, you take us on a wildly circuitous tour
through the history of human simulacra in Western
culture and the dark and shadowy worlds of H.P.
Lovecraft, Bruno Schulz, Kafka, Kleist, Poe, Philip K.
Dick, Thomas Burnet and his Polar Hole, as—let me take
a breath—you examine the role reversal of art and
religion over the last three centuries and how the
spiritual—you prefer the words "transcendental
impulses"—has been repressed, displaced since the
Protestant Reformation only to resurface in odd ways,
in magic and urban folklore and in the mass culture of
horror fantasy literature and film and . . . 

The question I was asking myself was, why is it that
the only way the supernatural is represented in
popular culture is in an overwhelmingly demonic
fashion? Why is it horror? Why isn't it something
else? This isn't really answered until almost the end
of the book because it is a very complicated
historical question and has very historical roots.
Those roots lie in the Reformation and scientific
revolution and the banishment of the supernatural from
any kind of intrusion into the daily world when
miracles were disallowed by Protestantism over the
course of the 17th century. 

[...]

As Victoria continues talking, I turn my attention to
the wooden men in their tuxedos. I realize that I have
been so busy listening to her speak about the
divinization of the computer and polar romance novels
and Lovecraft's syphilitic father and Papua New
Guineans who rioted in the 1970s because they thought
the dress mannequins in their first department store
were the souls of someone's ancestors being desecrated
that I had never asked her directly: What is the
secret life of puppets? 

So, what is the secret life of puppets? They are our
own secret life that we know so little about, our own
human secret life that we displaced in our machines.
It is our own magic coming back at us that we don't
recognize and it's our own souls and . . . 

Of course! Just then, the one who looks like Harry
James lifts up his little trombone and I hear him do a
nice rendition of "You made me love you, I didn't want
to do it. I didn't . . . " 

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0216/edschlesinger.php

Nelson, Victoria.  The Secret Life of Puppets.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/NELSEC.html

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