Free PDF The Secret Life of Puppets, by Victoria Nelson
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The Secret Life of Puppets, by Victoria Nelson
Free PDF The Secret Life of Puppets, by Victoria Nelson
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From Library Journal
This unusual work examines the roles of art and religion in relationship to each other from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Until the Renaissance, art was visibly influenced by religion. Yet in modern eras, states Nelson (On Writer's Block), the roles have been reversed, with art, entertainment, and literature responding to a universal human need for religious meaning and even influencing New Age and other spiritual approaches. Nelson studies many expansive facets of such provocative topics as the grotto as representative of the underworld; puppets and dolls in art and literature and their deeper contexts (e.g., as reflected in the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke and E.T.A. Hoffmann, among others); the macabre works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe and their subliminal reach into repressed religious impulses; and the symbolism of expressionistic film genres and sf. She draws upon varied examples and sets her findings against frameworks of scientific, artistic, and philosophical thought. This book will yield rewards to serious readers and is most suited to scholarly and academic collections. Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Review
Nelson plots an illuminating journey through a carnival funhouse...Unlike many similar, wide-ranging culture studies, Nelson's book arrives with no agenda, blaming no one; instead, she offers a learned, exciting ride through a phantasmagoric landscape filled with dark mysteries. (Publishers Weekly 2001-12-02)From Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, A. I., and X-Files, to the genre grotesqueries of Child's Play and The Puppet Master, so much of our popular storytelling concerns forces and phenomena our culture firmly insists aren't real and cannot exist...In a dizzying and fascinating alternate history scored with subterranean connections, Nelson presents alchemists, Platonists, Gnostics and magi in their own terms and contexts...In this rich work of erudite charms, Nelson convincingly argues that the cultural pendulum is swinging back to the platonic side. But because our rigid scientific materialism doesn't allow us to take any of this seriously, we are left with mostly unconscious expressions that overemphasize the sensational and horrific dark side, with a little sentimental New Age nod to the latent good. (William S. Kowinski San Francisco Chronicle 2002-01-26)In the opening chapter, Victoria Nelson issues a caveat that deliberately echoes the warnings that preface tales of horror. Do not expect to emerge unchanged. To read this book is akin to entering an ancient grotto, the ante-chamber of the otherworld. Since the Enlightenment, says Nelson,, Western culture has dismissed the supernatural as mere superstition and displaced these religious impulses into popular entertainments such as fantasy and science fiction. The emergence of new grottos such as cyberspace are signs that we are entering a new era of sensibility, in which the Platonic and Aristotelian world view can coexist. As a diagnosis of the role of the supernatural in modern secular society, this is a work of extraordinary originality, erudition and flair. Read it and be transformed. (Fiona Capp The Age 2002-03-16)Freud theorized that modern civilization (the one in which he lived, anyway) repressed our sexual instincts. In her provocative new book, The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson contends that modern civilization has repressed our spiritual instincts. And these, she argues, like all repressed instincts, have come back to surprise us in strange new forms. (Merle Rubin Christian Science Monitor 2002-03-14)Translating ancient thought systems into contemporary terms, finding equivalents of the old in the new, Nelson skillfully manages to thrust the sphere of academic research headlong into popular culture, making this both accessible and erudite...In a dizzying journey that opens with a Renaissance grotto and concludes with The Truman Show and virtual reality, we are taken on a rollercoaster ride through the underside of western mysticism. As Nelson herself warns the reader, when crawling out from the "hole of this book", whatever emerges "will not be the same as what went in." (Aura Satz Financial Times 2002-02-23)This is no ordinary work of intellectual history...This is New Age prophecy at its most verbally sexy and literarily savvy. It is fun, enticing, and chockfull of brilliance. (Laura Bass Washington Times 2002-04-14)Some books are fated and fêted for cult status. They have a particular feel and fervency about them. The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson, a writer on writing...seems like one of those uncanny, unclassifiable books that break the mould and promise to have a market appeal across disciplines and hobbies, among sober seekers after enlightenment as well as cranks...Nelson's breathtaking jaunt through the underground of Western culture is certainly illuminating and sometimes intoxicating...Expertly researched, forcefully written, magnificently produced, The Secret Life of Puppets is a haunting, highly charged book that leaves a strong after-image of worlds within worlds. (William Keenan Journal of Contemporary Religion 2003-01-01)The Secret Life of Puppets explores the hauntings, possessions, and other uncanny phenomena proliferating in literature and entertainment (and by no means only on the margins); she argues strongly, through vivid and original readings of H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe and many artifacts in a variety of media, for a new approach to the uses of fantasy and to the relationship between material and immaterial phenomena. (Marina Warner Times Literary Supplement 2002-12-06)In a remarkable scholarly book, The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson argues that our sense of the supernatural and yearning for immortality has been displaced from religion to such expressions of popular culture as superheroes, robots and cyborgs. (Francisco Goldman New York Times Magazine 2004-11-28)
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Product details
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (January 29, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780674006300
ISBN-13: 978-0674006300
ASIN: 0674006305
Product Dimensions:
6.2 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
11 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,205,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This may be one of the most profound books I've ever read since it reveals the metaphysics of the world of the imagination. I've read a lot of Jungian depth psychology in order to understand the psyche, but I've never gotten that deep into philosophy. This books serves as an excellent introduction to the metaphysics of the supernatural using both the pop culture and literary works which factor so heavily in my imagination. Therefore it is an ideal vehicle for these deep concepts. I only wish the author had been more familiar with Jungian psychology. She seems to consider the unconscious mind, the psyche, as just another pigeonhole for the rationalist to place the supernatural. This book also serves as an excellent resource for further exploration of everything uncanny in world culture, since she references a great many obscure novels, films, and scholarly works.
I stumbled upon this book in a library some ten or eleven years ago. I've re-read it cover to cover several times now, and some sections of it more than that. Her attentiveness to the hidden, underground streams within Western culture from ancient times to modern is truly remarkable. Nelson's book was greatly responsible for turning my attention to the Western Esoteric tradition, and introducing me to some of my favorite writers of fiction, Leonora Carrington and Bruno Schultz. It's certainly not a book for everyone, but if the phrase "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" is intriguing to you, you will not be disappointed. Some of the scholarship on Renaissance Hermeticism and its legacy is a bit out of date, relying as it does on what has come to be called the "Yates paradigm," so you may wish to supplement it with the writings of folks like Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff, but the overall vision presented by this work is absolutely without parallel.
Overall Victoria Nelson has written a fine book. I was particularly interested in her Chapter on the American Fantastic Mode, and her excellent description of the difference, historically and currently, between European and American High Literature (Art). Where European high culture has embraced The Fantastic, in America the Genre has been delegated to comic books, murder mysteries, ghost stories, love-based romances, and recently, science fiction. Nelson points out that American literary icons such as Hawthorne or Fitzgerald only occasionally ventured into non-realism as "entertainments" leaving "fantasy" mostly for the pulp fiction mongers. She also seems to feel the "lower" form of fiction have been unjustly disparaged. Although the intent seems to be academic, Nelson's prose style renders THE SECRET LIFE OF PUPPETS more of a pleasure read than a textbook.
I recommend this book for anyone curious with the trends in popular media in using facsimiles of ourselves in the form of robots, aliens, etc.Very interesting read. I like the discussion of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and the critical reactions to the book during her time. The strong reactions were more about tramping on religious' ideas of creation being limited to God rather than focusing on science getting out of control.The book briefly mentions the Soderberg movie remake of Solaris. A movie about an actual facsimile created by the planet Solaris. The terminator movies and nearly every other movie released today could be interpreted in light of the ideas discussed in the book.I never finished the book because I got caught up with other things. I'll go back and finish this one. Just need the time.
Do not be put off by the notion that this is an academic text. It is written with flair and flash, and it addresses the curious niche puppetry has carved out of the human psyche. I love this book. It is erudite, charming, and brilliantly written. It covers such things as why we love our puppets, (now as Avatars - our 21st century version of them,) today in gaming, as well as exploring the role puppets have played from the primeval past to today and why they still mystify and horrify us.
This is a book that at times reads a bit like a Ph.D. thesis, but's it really much better than that.If you've ever entertained the idea that popular films such as The Matrix, or TV shows (X-Files) might be saying something interesting about ideas in today's world at some deeper level, but you're not really sure what it is, this is the book to read. Nelson shows how Robocop, the Terminator and so on are just the latest puppets standing in for a certain way of thinking about the world, even a 'religious' way of thinking, that in fact is very ancient in Western society. It's been driven into eclipse by our modern, scientific, and materialistic society, but becomes strangely ascendant the moment we walk into a movie theatre, read a Stephen King novel, or listen to a conversation about an 'interesting' movie at the water cooler. Why? Well, buy Nelson's book.I could imagine this book being misread as an attack on conventional religion, but it really has nothing to do with that. I could also imagine that some readers, not accustomed to slogging their way through terms such as 'Platonism', 'demiurge,' and so on, might miss out on finer moments in Nelson's work, when she casts off the robes of the academic (which don't really suit her, anyway) and speaks in plain language about her ideas.In any case, this is a fine book well worth a careful reading in my opinion.
This is an amazing work, insightful and properly argued, giving an explanation of our imaginative lives and art through how our society represents and understands simulacra and automata. It's at once wild and profound. I loved it but it's so novel that I'll have to read it again.
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