Skip to main content

The Marionette




The Secret Life of Puppets reminded me of Edwin Muir’s short novel: ‘The Marionette’ that can be read comfortably in an evening (and was yesterday). Muir was a great poet, a fine perceptive critic but, by his own estimation, a disappointed novelist. Re-reading this, his first, you feel that it was a road of great promise not travelled, diverted into the two later, more realistic, offerings that have their many merits but never cohere as a whole and do not, unlike here, show his poetic , imaginative gifts in their best light.



The central character of ‘The Marionette’ is Hans who is, in the language of the day, feeble-minded. His birth was attended by the death of his mother and his father has retreated from him both because of his disability and for the painful memories his presence and his wife’s absence entails. Hans grows up in his own world, touched only by the sufferance of a succession of nursemaids and the pragmatic, compassionate, if uncomprehending, help of housekeeper, Martha.


Until one day, on his teenage birthday, Martha presents Hans to his father, demanding the father’s acknowledgement.


What follows is the journey of both of them towards a place of reconciled understanding and the medium through which this is obtained is first Hans engagement with his dolls and subsequently with the much more alive reality of the marionettes of Salzburg’s famous puppet theatre.


Whereas the dolls could be seen, in Winnicott’s terms, as ‘transitional objects’ enabling Hans to negotiate a precarious sense of connectedness between his self and the outer world (often perceived by him as threatening), the marionettes open up a wholly new space of ‘imagined reality’ with its own dynamic and logic – another world enfolded in this one, with its own inherent draw towards wholeness – a draw that, however, necessitates suffering and illumination on both Hans and Martin, his father’s, part.


I am tempted to see this as a progression from Freud to Jung! One offers a perilous, ever-negotiated grasp on a reality that is at some deep level disappointing (or heroically stoical, depending on your point of view). The other offers a pattern of integration that is by no means cost free but which fundamentally sees the world as saturated with meaningful order into which we are invited to participate. The first might be a necessary disillusionment – Hans wants to be the master of his dolls and manipulate their world and they disappoint. The marionettes are their own imaginative world and even Hans startling attempt to break into their mystery by crucifixion (of his formerly beloved but fundamentally uncontrollable Gretchen marionette) cannot subdue. The imaginal can only be participated in on its own terms.


It is a beautifully realised fiction that has many of Muir’s signature elements – a paradise lost and regained in a deeper, more conscious appropriation achieved through journeying that is both interior and exterior; of the healing nature of dreams and that it is the imagination that is the faculty of both empathy with others and a faculty that can tease one out of thought with images of eternity. It is a faculty that connects you both with the world and beyond the world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beckoning Land that is within

In spite of the fact that all three of Rowena Farre's books were in a certain measure autobiographical, she remains a mystery. The place of her birth, her real name, and ancestry, whether her first book was an autobiography, in fact, or fiction? It is, on reading her last book, a matter on which, beyond a certain notional interest, I find myself wholly and happily agnostic. Whoever she was, she was a person out of sorts with the world she was born into and on, an ever more consciously realized, spiritual quest. In this way, the book leads on from her earlier one about her life with Roma and Traveller communities. There she was following a nomadic impulse that ran in parallel to 'ordinary life' whilst here she is following a nomadic life that enfolds and transforms 'ordinary' life.  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-hopes-realities-and-shadows-of-being.html In this her third book, she returns to places associated with her childhood, Hong Kong, Ceylon, a...
Post a Comment
Read more