The Secret Life of Puppets

by Nelson, Victoria

• ISBN13: 9780674012448
• ISBN10: 0674012445
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

Author Biography

Victoria Nelson is an independent scholar living in California. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Hawaii

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
ONE Grotto, An Opening	1	(24)
TWO Early Adventures of the Earthly Gods	25	(22)
THREE The Puppet Tractates	47	(28)
FOUR The Strange History of the American Fantastic	75	(26)
FIVE H.P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies	101	(38)
SIX Symures Hole, or the South Polar Grotto	139	(24)
SEVEN Is This Real or Am I Crazy?	163	(26)
EIGHT Two Old Birds and Their New Feathers	189	(24)
NINE The New Expressionists	213	(22)
TEN The Hermeticon of Umbertus E.	235	(14)
ELEVEN The Great Twentieth-Century Puppet Upgrade	249	(24)
TWELVE The Door in the Sky	273	(20)
Notes	293	(44)
Acknowledgments	337	(4)
Index	341