Sunday (Meditations on) Style

In which I foist another old (and luckily, short) paper on you in lieu of writing a new post. Because I can. And because I have lots of them hanging around.

I'm dredging up this one because I've been thinking a lot over the past few days about the ethical implications and possibilities of style. And about the sensuous, intoxicating, dangerous potential of language. Asking myself where my responsibilities lie.

Here's some purely old-fashioned, texual criticism of Samuel Beckett's Endgame that also begins to suggest larger questions about our complicity as pleasure-seeking readers. If I were writing this paper now, instead of in my first semester of graduate school, I'd certainly have thrown in some reference to Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text.

And yes, I know in this essay I'm grouping all readers under the umbrella of an unindividualized, universalizing "we." I'm sure the upcoming weeks of reader-response theory will rid me of any such tendencies. I'm letting the paper stand in all its gaps and inadequacies.

(For the record, I'm also sort of involved in a project of looking back on where my proclivities and inclinations have led me so far in grad school as I attempt to make a big move forward. Trying to return to myself as a thinker, ground myself in a way, as I have a strange feeling that certain doors are soon to be burst wide open.)

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Words and Pleasure in Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Although I am certainly not unique in my approach, there is not an overwhelming amount of commentary on the nature and function of language in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. This perhaps could be attributed to some of the popular critical notions about Beckett's relationship to language. In her essay "Words About Words: Beckett and Language," Dina Sherzer outlines common approaches to the subject, including "that Beckett distrusts language, that he thinks that language is inadequate, and that in his works he demonstrates the bankruptcy and the nullity of language." And indeed, Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, has pointed to this mistrust of language as a defining aesthetic factor for Beckett and his contemporaries: the poetic image which is physicalized on the stage; the intuitive, rather than discursive, vision of reality which the absurdist playwrights attempt to communicate is for Esslin a result of their belief that language can no longer express anything about the human condition. As Sherzer explains, this attitude is indeed partly true for Beckett and she posits a possible influence of the German philosopher Fritz Mauthner, "who repeatedly discussed the vanity of words and the impossibility of knowledge through language."

And if we look within Endgame, we can certainly find an apt example of this viewpoint in Clov's final monologue: "I ask the words that remain -- sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say." Or earlier on: "I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent." It's also significant that Beckett is an Irish, English-speaking author who began to write in French precisely because he perceived that in the French language he had no style. Among other things, this seems to indicate a suspicion of language, as if one's style, the way one wears language, has the potential to obscure or obfuscate the thing that needs to be said.

But, as Sherzer also points out -- and what I think we can find from looking closely at some examples from Endgame -- Beckett's relationship to language is not quite that one-sided. And indeed, when approaching the work of a writer who began -- and continued -- as a novelist, who spent years teaching language and literature, and who was the protégé and friend of no less that James Joyce -- that dizzying inventor of words -- it does seem hard to believe that such a relationship would be very easy to categorize as one thing or another, or so seemingly dismissive as some critics have suggested. Within Endgame itself, there appears a remarkable amount of linguistic play, poetry, and discourse on language. In this paper I propose to touch upon a very small corner of the play's textual landscape, exploring a few landmarks that have emerged abruptly and stunningly in my reading of the play -- expressions and, more specifically, single words that seem to me to rise up from the flatness like plateaus, and from which I think we might gain access to potentially new vistas.

Paul Lawley, in his essay "Symbolic Structure and Creative Obligation in Endgame" describes the textual landscape of the play as "grey." But he finds that when the characters are describing worlds beyond their own, worlds from the past or worlds of a wishful, imaginative elsewhere, they use single words of description (like "Ardennes", "the road to Sedan", "Lake Como" -- or in Hamm's case "Flora! Pomona! Ceres!"), which, like tiny bulbs or candles, light the text with a "mytho-poetic" glow. I propose that a similar effect is taking place in certain instances when Hamm and Clov make reference to their births, or their beginnings (which could also be considered a foreign territory in this land of endings). There is a slight shift we feel in the use of certain words, a strangeness, a very precise and subtle difference in the air, which has some profound effects.

The first instance I'll mention is Hamm's line: "Something dripping in my head, ever since the fontanelles." Hamm is speaking of the duration of the dripping of what he calls the heart (also at one point a vein, or a little artery) in his head, which he has experienced, ostensibly, since he was an infant. There seems to be a Formalist objective to Beckett's use of the word "fontanelles": it's a surprise, a tiny little shock that jolts us slightly. Beckett could very easily have written "ever since I was a baby," "or ever since I was young," and have kept very much in the "style-less" tone of the dialogue. But he uses instead this evocative and strange (and yet, achingly specific) word which appears to come out of nowhere.

Fontanelles, of course, are the fibrous membranes that connect the bones of the skull in a small infant. During childbirth, the fontanelles allow the bones of the head to overlap their edges so it can pass through the birth canal without compressing and damaging the baby's brain. These bones ultimately fuse together once a child reaches between a year and a year and a half of age. Beckett's word choice here is rich and suggestive and avoids the cliché, "ever since I was young," which would barely register to an English-speaking audience, using instead a word from which immediately blooms images of fragility, vulnerability, tenuousness, smallness. Who hasn't been warned as a child, when holding, or playing, with a baby, to be careful of the "soft-spot:" the tiny, pulsing, downy indentation that seems to mark a being not yet fully-formed, a mind not yet sealed and determined and all the more vulnerable for it. It is a word firmly connected to the body, to birth, to growth. My illustrated Oxford English Dictionary includes with the definition of "fontanel" a diagram of a baby's skull, the bones and the membranes labeled; it's a tiny, peaceful-looking, semi-transparent head floating unattached to any body.

(And there are a number of critics who have read Endgame as happening inside a skull, perhaps inside the head of Hamm: the set design, with its two small windows placed up high (two eye sockets), is seen to support this reading. The play thus becomes the internal drama of a man who is dying, ending. "Fontanelles," then, could be read as a time before the skull had closed, before Hamm had become trapped within his own mind.)

Lawley speaks of an "echo principle" in Engame, a concept which he derives from Beckett's own comments on the play: "There are no accidents in Fin de partie. Everything is based on analogy and repetition." Hamm's "ever since the fontanelles" is a kind of echo of a line Clov speaks earlier in the play. In that scene, Hamm tells him "I thought I told you to be off," and Clov responds, "I'm trying." The stage directions indicate that Clov then goes to the door and halts, and says, "Ever since I was whelped."

In this instance, the expected "Ever since I was born" (Clov has been trying to leave Hamm every since he [Clov] was born) is replaced by something stranger, unanticipated, and again, highly evocative. It is dogs that are whelped: tiny, squirming puppies emerging bloody and squealing. When used to describe the birth of a human being, it has highly derogative connotations emphasizing the bestial aspects of procreation. This word prefigures Hamm's "fontanelles" in its specificity and its evocation of a kind of beginning, of birth. And in its specificity, it lies in stark contrast to other lines spoken by Hamm and Clov. For example, Hamm implores Clov "What's happening?" and Clov replies "Something is taking its course." This line is ominous, almost chilling in its vagueness. Or Hamm, struggling to describe to Clov what has gone on for too long: "This…this…thing." The characters thus seem to be able to use words quite pointedly at certain times, to describe specific events; at others, words utterly fail them as they attempt to grasp the mysterious and the immense.

Hamm, I think it is useful to point out, is an author as well as an actor. As he tells his story, and the story of the vassal who comes to him imploring for shelter for himself and his son, Hamm frequently edits. For example: "You prayed -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) You CRIED for night; it comes -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) It FALLS: now cry in darkness." He also takes much pleasure in the well-placed word, the finely-turned phrase: "You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness. (Pause.) Nicely put, that." In a similar way, I'd like to suggest that in the pauses after the phrases "…ever since the fontanelles" or "Ever since I was whelped," in the way Beckett frames them within the text, there is the sense that we can almost hear Beckett's own, reflexive, "Nicely put, that." These words certainly give us a sense of pleasure in their strangeness and aptness, a pleasure of which it is highly doubtful Beckett was unaware, or to which immune.

But there is another side to this pleasure in the well-chosen word. Take the exchange between Hamm and Clov as Hamm searches for the right word to describe the landscape outside:

HAMM: Nothing stirs. All is --
CLOV: Zer--
HAMM: (violently) Wait till you're spoken to!
(Normal voice.)
All is…all is…all is what?
(Violently.)
All is what?
CLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what your want to know? Just a moment.
(He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope turns toward Hamm.)
Corpsed.
(Pause.)
Well? Content?

There is pleasure, contentment, that Clov, perhaps Hamm, and of course, we -- the audience or the reader -- get from this utterly specific, redolent, and strange word. Beckett gives us a full pause so that it can be fully absorbed. It seems to convey everything we know of misery, waste, loss, and decay within the single heart-beat of its one elegant syllable. But should we be taking pleasure in such a finely-wrought description? Are we not acting in the same manner as Hamm, who in telling his pitiful story of cruelty and degradation is above all finding pleasure in the way it is told? Lawley points out in his essay that Hamm's values are "aesthetic rather than ethical." I think we can see Beckett using words within Endgame to subtly challenge us to face our (and perhaps his) complicity with Hamm. What does it mean to enjoy the perfectly-formed description of something wretched and debased? And what does it mean to author it?

The birth of a dying star

Bad Astronomy has a great, informative post on the first observation of a supernova in real time. Of course, "real time" to astronomers in this case means an event that happened about 84 million years ago.

I'd like to be able to say something profound about this discovery. In my twenties, I labored an entire summer to write a play that used the death of stars as a metaphor for the human condition. Now in my thirties, lazier and more humble, I am content to say:

Wow.

(I also recently spent an entire summer following the show Rockstar Supernova, so that gives you another idea of how I've matured.)

Only the Russians can comfort me

There's a lovely translation of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko up at Languor Management. I'm copying it here because it was the best thing about my bread factory Sunday.

Waiting

My love will come,
Will throw open her arms and fold me within them,
Will understand my fears, note my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
Without stopping to slam the taxi door
She’ll run upstairs, across the rotting porch,
Burning with love and love’s happiness,
She’ll run dripping upstairs, she won’t knock,
Will take my head in her hands,
And when she flings her coat on a chair,
It will slip to the floor in a blue heap.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (translated by Kevin Kinsella)

A post with endnotes

The promised (threatened?) long post on puppets. Specifically, a paper I presented at last summer's Association for Theater in Higher Education Annual Conference.

Largely a production review, it's also about looking at puppet bodies and how the materiality of those bodies can effect the viewer. I obviously have a lot more thinking on the subject to look forward to, but this paper is a working out of some initial ideas and functions somewhat as a companion piece to my post on Bread and Puppet last year.

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Hiroshima Maiden: Looking at War, Through the Lens of Puppetry

A few years ago, an exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York included images of the bodies of survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Walking through the gallery, one photograph struck me with particular force: a close-up in black and white of the hardened scars covering an elderly man's back, formed exactly in the pattern of a leaf. He was facing away from the camera, his wife in the background tenderly bathing his skin. The photograph was beautiful, breathtaking. As I was looking at this image I remembered a quote of James Baldwin's from The Evidence of Things Not Seen: "From afar, one may imagine that one perceives that pattern. And one may. But, as one is not challenged -- or, more precisely, menaced -- by the details, the pattern may be nothing more than something one imagines oneself to be able to remember." Baldwin used these lines to describe his attempt to understand and write about the Atlanta child murders, and his feeling that it would be necessary to physically travel back to the United States from his home in France in order to do so. They had nothing to do with Hiroshima; nevertheless, his words seemed so appropriate to the image I was seeing.

After coming home from the exhibition and wrestling with my response to the photograph, I was moved almost inexplicably to write a poem in which I imagined I was the elderly man's wife. I was trying hard to envision what it would be like to get up close to that pain, to sleep in bed with those scars next to me -- not just to see, but to touch, the pattern. To be menaced by the sensory details. In the poem, I imagined that the man's wife has a dream in which she is suddenly very small and walking along the man's back, through a landscape of hills and valleys that is comprised of his knotted flesh. She becomes frightened because she can't find her way -- this world is foreign to her and too vast to comprehend in full.

I recount the story of writing the poem only because I think it points to what is most important and compelling about Dan Hurlin's Hiroshima Maiden, a puppet play about the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and its victims. The play is in large part a meditation on the act of looking and its consequences, as well as the difficulty of imagining another's perspective. Through the use of puppets and performing objects (and the attendant ability to play with size and scale), Hurlin helps the audience to grapple with issues of modern warfare and gives it the ability to look at war's effect on the body in a distanced and thoughtful way, overcoming fear or repugnance and creating room for genuine empathy and emotion. Although it might seem paradoxical, Hiroshima Maiden's performing objects also create a physical landscape that allows the audience to get up close and see the details it might otherwise be too far away -- or too rooted in its own perspective -- to perceive.

Historical Background

The "Hiroshima Maidens" were 25 young women who had been severely burned and disfigured by the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and were brought to the United States ten years later to undergo reconstructive plastic surgery. It was a project conceived by the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister living in Hiroshima during the seven-year U.S. occupation of Japan that followed the end of WWII. He had witnessed first-hand the extreme suffering of these women, who were hidden from public view by their families. Historian David Serlin writes in the Hiroshima Maiden program:

according to Buddhist and Shinto beliefs, their scars were thought to be the result of some crime committed by the family's ancestors, rather than understood as the effects of atomic warfare. The young women became know locally as Tanimoto's 'Keloid Girls,' an awkward term of endearment that referred to the hard pieces of scar tissue that formed on their bodies after their radiation burns.(1)

While the women themselves were hidden from sight in Japan, images of the wounded survivors -- called hibakusha, or "bomb-effected" -- were suppressed in the United States. Serlin explains that until the mid-1950s, the "U.S. State Department made sure that all images of atomic survivors were immaculately scrubbed from the popular media."(2) The fear was that these images would incite anti-nuclear protests at home, compromising the United States' ability to proliferate nuclear weapons and thus jeopardizing its response to the Cold War Communist threat. Amazingly, once in the United States, Reverend Tanimoto and two of the young women appeared on the popular television show This is Your Life, in an episode that also featured Captain Robert Lewis, one of the pilots of the Enola Gay. Tanimoto came face to face with Lewis, but the women remained hidden behind a screen; this was done, said the host, in order "to avoid them any embarrassment."(3) According to an interview with Dan Hurlin in the New York Times, it was this show that inspired Hiroshima Maiden. "I started to think about cultural reconciliation. It was never really clear to me how countries -- Germany, for instance -- can collectively face their past."(4)

The highly-publicized presence in the United States of victims of the nuclear attack did little to force Americans to confront the results of their government's actions. As Serlin notes, the women came to an America that was just beginning to latch on to the idea of surgery for beautification, and "as more and more Americans saw the Maidens' injuries as physical features that could be fixed, this deflected attention away from the political context in which their injuries first appeared."(5) Because the public made little distinction between reconstructive surgery undergone to lessen suffering and plastic surgery elected to heighten beauty, the root cause of the women's scars was obscured. The trip came to be regarded as an opportunity for the "Disfigured Jap Girls to Get Facelifting" and to see "what America is really like."(6) As Susan Sontag remarked almost fifty years later in Regarding the Pain of Others, the public still has yet to look squarely at the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She asks:

Which atrocities from the past do we think we are obliged to revisit? Probably, if we are Americans, we think that it would be morbid to go out of our way to look at pictures of burnt victims of atomic bombing. The acknowledgment of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in violation of one of the cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project. A museum devoted to the history of America's wars that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanese cities, with photographic evidence that showed what those weapons did, would be regarded -- now more than ever -- as a most unpatriotic enterprise.(7)

Sontag's book, exemplary in its examination of how we look at photographs of war and war's victims, informs much of my thinking on the production.

Hiroshima and Puppets

Hurlin's production focuses on the experience of only one of the Maidens who came to the United States for treatment -- Michiko -- and tells her story with performing objects and bunraku-inspired puppets: realistic, three-foot tall figures with large, detailed faces, each manipulated by two to three black-clad puppet operators. The cast of puppeteers is comprised of both westerners and non-westerners (two of the puppeteers are originally from Japan), and live musicians provide an accompaniment to the action, as in the bunraku tradition -- choices that seem to acknowledge the tremendous influence of the revered Japanese art on contemporary Western puppetry.(8) It is through the performing objects that Hurlin is able to provoke the deepest exploration of how we look at the suffering of others.

The play opens with a shadow image of a young boy, kneeling beside an anthill with a magnifying glass. The audience is shown a close-up of what the boy sees: ants. The glass, amplifying the rays of the sun, begins to scorch the earth and a delicate plume of smoke rises. It is a humorous moment at first, conveying the precocious curiosity of a young boy as well as the ruthlessness of his youthful scientific pursuits.

A moment later the audience sees a pilot, a puppet in the bunraku style, kneeling to pray and watching the clock. He notices something on the floor, and through another close-up, it is revealed to be a tiny puppet ant. A toy plane on a stick flies amid rows of blue fabric (their laundry-like appearance evoking a comforting everydayness that belies the event to come) and hovers over an elaborately framed image of the Japanese islands. It slowly drops a black, pea-sized object, almost too minuscule for the audience to make out. Suddenly, the islands break into pieces, and tiny dots spill out. Another close-up, and this time the screen gives us an image of the ground, revealing first the bodies of ants, and then, ant-sized human forms -- tiny people all lying folded in various poses of collapse. One of those "ants," we discover, is a young woman in a red dress -- Michiko -- who has managed to survive the atomic blast and now, after emerging from behind the screen, is frantically running for her life. The puppets and performing objects allow a filmic manipulation of size and scale; Michiko's appearance from behind the close up of bodies brings our understanding of the effect of the bomb from the general and the distanced (the tiny ants), to the particular and the detailed: a single bunraku puppet. Later we will see her face break into pieces, mirroring the previous image of the islands falling apart.

After Michiko's appearance, the action cuts to an actor (Dawn Akemi Saito) who begins to speak. Here, Hurlin is utilizing another convention of bunraku: the tayu, or narrator, who in this production, rather than providing voices for the puppets on the stage, works in counterpoint to the main action. The tayu describes the thoughts of a young American boy, Michiko's contemporary. The boy spends a lot of time watching TV and deploring the embarrassing antics of Lucy Ricardo, and he suffers paroxysms of shame when he accidentally wets his pants during the rehearsal of a school play. Hurlin's inclusion of the boy's story points to the struggle with perspective and scale that is at center of Hiroshima Maiden.

Michiko's muteness, in contrast to the verbosity of the young American boy (in the St. Ann's Warehouse production the tayu was a woman of Asian descent) was criticized in at least one review of the production as a regrettable manifestation of Orientalism.(9) While this is an important issue to address in greater depth, I think that Hurlin's incorporation of the tayu is ultimately meant to problematize the issue of identification, helping American audience members to become aware of their positions as Western spectators. The tayu as used in Hiroshima Maiden both elides and separates the experience of East and West: while it achieves a merging of the young American boy's voice with the Japanese tradition, the voice remains separate from the action of the puppets and objects, which are visually and materially articulate in their own right. Further, while listening to the tayu, the audience must evaluate what it hears against what it sees. It is asked to compare the boy's disaster of wetting his pants to the disaster of an atomic attack. Can the boy's shame at his accident teach him something about Michiko's experience? Can one who has not experienced the devastation of an event comparable to Hiroshima see it, or understand it, in the same way as one who has? Hurlin's spoken text attempts to makes connections between Michiko's experience and that of the young American boy, but in the presentation of their stories Michiko and the boy remain distinctly opposed.

Throughout the production, Hurlin repeatedly brings the audience's attention to its own act of looking. The audience must strain to see something small on stage, then it is shown close up. Performers carry long sticks with arrows that direct the audience's gaze from one character to another, often times competing for attention in a scramble and then gracefully floating off course. Frames are brought on stage, a bulb flashes, and instantly a moment becomes an image, one that could appear on the cover of a magazine. In a particularly skillful and thrilling scene, a physical confrontation between a government official concerned with censoring images of the Maidens and an American photographer is tilted so that the audience seems to be viewing it from above -- as they both struggle to grasp hold of a camera, it flies up into the air in slow motion, capturing a picture of the audience in mid-flight.

Hurlin uses performing objects to make the act of seeing material and observable. At one point the young American boy remarks on the slipperiness of looking, how difficult the movement of sight is to pin down. "A glance happens in the air," he says. But through the use of spring-y cords resembling dotted lines that are stretched from one puppet to another, Hurlin seeks to chart the trajectory of a look, allowing the audience to explicitly see the transaction between characters. Hiroshima Maiden makes glances material, letting us observe sight.

One of the most effective devices in Hiroshima Maiden is the reoccurring screen labeled "Area of Detail" that repeatedly provides the audience with a close-up of small objects seen from the puppet's perspective. With this screen, Hurlin creates stunning moments. The ants scorched by the boy in the first scene are later mirrored by the "ants" killed by the atomic bomb. Tiny mushrooms Michiko sees sprouting on her floor when enlarged bear an uncanny resemblance to mushroom clouds. The screen also sets up a connection between seeing and identification: the audience stops looking at the puppet characters for a moment to look with them at small details of their environment instead, literally seeing things through their eyes.

In perhaps the most lyrical and moving scene in Hiroshima Maiden, a single puppeteer comes onstage with a box, from which he pulls a blue, puppet-sized kimono and a small gold fan. The kimono is hung across his arm, becoming a body, and another puppeteer brings him a large, white, wooden egg, which becomes a head. The puppeteer begins to dance and four more soon join him. Moving in unison, fans fluttering, kimonos flowing from their arms, and the graceful wooden heads positioned above. Almost imperceptibly, another black-clad puppeteer enters and switches the smooth, intact head of one of the "puppets" for a cracked one. Each of the other heads is eventually replaced by broken ones. The puppets continue their dance with destroyed heads. This macabre moment highlights the ability to create a kind of "poetry of space" with objects, which in this case reflects back on the fragility of our bodies and the destructiveness of war. The puppet becomes a physicalized metaphor, its head cracking like an egg.

A head is not an egg, though, and the thought of a real head shattering like one is gruesome and terrible. And a keloid scar, for that matter -- hard, twisted, and disfiguring -- would not look like the delicate red stain on the puppet Michiko’s face. But while this aestheticization of human injuries could be seen as problematic and distasteful, the very fact that the puppets are material helps to counteract the tendency to get fully lost or take unexamined pleasure in the images represented.

For example, in another scene Michiko, trying to hide her face, makes a frantic movement across the stage, and the sound of her body against the floor demonstrates that she is clearly made of wood, not flesh. For all their realistic and expressive capabilities, the puppets remind the audience at the same time that they are not real. The realization of the puppet's materiality sets up a distinction between puppet and flesh, similar to what one critic of traditional bunraku described as the "contrast between the living flesh of the head puppeteer's face and the lifeless wooden face of the puppet."(10)

The audience is again reminded of the materiality of the puppets in a scene where Michiko witnesses the rebuilding of a section of Hiroshima. Wooden houses are placed side by side, filling up a flattened street. Soon, a prosthetic foot joins the landscape; then a wooden arm with a hook, then a hand, then a leg. Finally, Michiko is shown a box of prosthetic wooden eyeballs, which roll eerily about. Of course, these are all materials that could be used to build and repair a puppet, but could never truly replace the loss of limbs, flesh, or blood. The puppet bodies seem to bring into relief the precious and irreplaceable nature of real bodies, and the permanent damage war does to them.

Hurlin said in an interview around the time of the play's premier:

I actually think puppets are more human that humans when they're onstage. Because if you see an actor rub his nose you don't think anything about it, you just think "Oh well, you know, he had an itch." But if you see a puppet rub its nose, immediately your mind goes, "Oh, I know what that is; I've done that before." And so, in some ways, puppets are really... they're like magnified mirrors: they show us ourselves, I think, more clearly.(11)

A Formalist distancing is at work in Hiroshima Maiden, which can also be likened to Brecht's verfremdungseffekt in that it turns "an object from something ordinary and immediately accessible" -- i.e. the human body on stage -- "into something peculiar, striking, and unexpected"(12) -- the formalized, stylized puppet body. Because of the "strangeness" of what is presented onstage, the audience is jolted out of complacency and the act of looking is infused with a new energy. The puppet body is striking precisely because it is not real flesh, and at the same time it reflects our fleshly bodies back to us with greater force and clarity.

The final scene of Hiroshima Maiden was imagined by Hurlin: Captain Robert Lewis and Michiko come face to face. While this never happened in real life, it seems fitting that it happens in the puppet world. The puppeteers hold up a taut length of cord that stretches from Michiko's eyes to the pilot's eyes, in effect locking them, and the puppets circle one another as if bound by a centrifugal force. Sontag writes that, "the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees."(13) At the end of Hiroshima Maiden, Lewis is given the opportunity, finally, of encountering one of the survivors of the bomb he dropped. But more importantly, the audience watches as Michiko looks back. *

Bibliography:

Anan, Nobuko. "Review of Hiroshima Maiden, written and directed by Dan Hurlin, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre, Los Angeles." Theatre Journal 58.4 (December 2006): 690-692.

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. London: Methuen, 1986. p. 143

Hurlin, Dan. "Hiroshima Maiden." Play: A Journal of Plays 2 (2004): 263-282.

Michelle, Karen. "'Hiroshima Maidens' and a Return to New York" (includes an interview with Dan Hurlin). Weekend Edition, NPR, January 17, 2004.

Rakoff, David. "Hiroshima Bomber and Victims: This is Your (Puppet's) Life." New York Times, January 11, 2004.

Staub, Nancy L. "Bunraku: A Contemporary Western Fascination." In The Language of the Puppet, edited by Laurence R. Kominz and Mark Levenson. Second Printing. Vancouver: Pacific Puppetry Center Press, 1998. 47-52.

Serlin, David. "Program Notes." Program to Hiroshima Maiden, dir. Dan Hurlin. Presented by Arts at St. Ann's, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York, January 14-February 1, 2004.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.

Ueno, Michiko. "An Introduction to the Art of Bunraku." In The Language of the Puppet, edited by Laurence R. Kominz and Mark Levenson. Second Printing. Vancouver: Pacific Puppetry Center Press, 1998. 53-55.


Notes:
1. Serlin, "Program Notes."
2. Ibid.
3. Michelle, "Hiroshima Maidens."
4. Rakoff, "Hiroshima Bomber and Victims."
5. Serlin, "Program Notes."
6. Ibid.
7. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 93-94.
8. See Staub, "Bunraku: A Contemporary Western Fascination," 47-52.
9. Anan, "Review of Hiroshima Maiden," 690-692. The reviewer saw a production at the CalArts Theatre in Los Angeles in which Hurlin himself took on the tayu's role.
10. Staub, "Bunraku: A Contemporary Western Fascination.," 51.
11. Michelle, "Hiroshima Maidens."
12. Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 143.
13. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 72.

Happy belated blogoversary to me...

My "blogoversary" (yes, I insist on calling it that!) passed and I didn't even celebrate. I've been fooling around at Gogolgirl for over a year now. I think it's time to go public. The blog could use a few more comments.

Besides, I have to admit: I'm pretty lonely out here on the West Coast. Last night, before falling asleep, I kept picturing the view from our apartment in New York, the dirty courtyard with its line of garbage bins framed by the cracked white paint of the window sill. The noise of the neighborhood kids outside. Dusk. Haze. The overripe smell of summertime Queens.

I felt as if my heart might break.

(But don't worry about me too much, dear reader. I'm mostly fixated on training my lazy self to get up early enough to read for an hour and a half before work. Every night I have the best of intentions and every morning... well, let's just say the warm pillows and blankets always, always win.)

I haven't written about my bread factory job either. I will.

In the meantime, I continue to devour literature in some crazy/futile attempt to figure out myself, my life:

Excerpts from Rivka Galchen's new book Atmospheric Disturbances are published at Nextbook. I'm hooked. Her style is reminiscent of Murakami and Ishiguro: funny, lucid, haunting.

Minna Proctor's essay about her divorce, her mother's death, and the birth of her child simply floored me.

Or I'll Forget

I have to jot these down somewhere:

Starting Out in the Evening -- Brian Morton

The Man Who Loved Children -- Christina Stead

It feels like I'm reading ever so slowly right now. I'm fighting against laziness, against dispiritedness. Lying in bed this morning, my day off, all sorts of juicy ideas and plans formed themselves in my head. For my papers, the blog. Then the reality of the day. Writing pains. Evasions and flagellations.

Yet, I've resolved to struggle with myself until my mind is bloody and sore. I'm writing about the religious performances of medieval monks, so it's all part of the mood.

I think it's about time for a long post on puppets.

And another episode of Deadwood.