The Übermarionette

The elimination of the actor in an early modern theatrical text

A marionette theater in Torino, Italy (2012)

I. Heinrich von Kleist and the Marionette Theater

He went on: these puppets possess the virtue of being immune to gravity's force. They know nothing of the inertia of matter, that quality which above all is diametrically opposed to the dance, because the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the one that binds them to the earth. What wouldn't our good G. [a dancer] give to be sixty pounds lighter, or to use a force of this weight to assist her with her entrechats and pirouettes? Like elves, the puppets need only to touch upon the ground, and the soaring of their limbs is newly animated through this momentary hesitation; we dancers need the ground to rest upon and recover from the exertion of the dance; a moment that is certainly no kind of dance in itself and with which nothing further can be done except to at least make it seem to not exist.

I replied that although he handled his paradoxes with skill, he would never convince me that in a mechanical figure there could be more grace than in the structure of the human body. He replied that it would be almost impossible for a man to attain even an approximation of a mechanical being. In such a realm only a God could measure up to this matter, and this is the point where both ends of the circular world would join one another.

So recounts Heinrich von Kleist in his “On the Marionette Theater” (1810), perhaps the most enigmatic work of philosophical literature from all of German romanticism. In it, a dancer encounters a puppeteer who argues that marionettes have more elegance than any human in their dancing, which then turns into a dialogue about how human consciousness can interfere with divine grace. (By the way, if you haven’t read this, I would go ahead and suggest you read it instead of my essay here. There are a few available translations, and it’s mercifully short). What makes the work so fascinating is its resistance to easy analysis. On the one hand, it touches upon theological questions pertaining to salvation and kenosis, but on the other hand, the examples that occur throughout the dialogue grow increasingly absurd, culminating in an anecdote about an impressive fencer who loses in a match to a bear chained up in a nobleman’s lumber yard.

The puppeteer’s simple, exoteric message is that humans, lying somewhere between God and all other beings without consciousness, are impeded in attaining full grace and elegance. If they somehow either lost their consciousness or achieved God-like sentience, only then could they solve the problem. Then, history would end and the eschaton would be reached.

Because it’s a rather short dialogue, one doesn’t quite know what to make of the puppeteer’s idea. He doesn’t even say “consciousness,” the dancer does, and what does Kleist even mean by it? Consciousness of the self, or others, or both? Moreover, this text is a product of romanticism, and it doesn’t seem too romantic. What kind of romantic, after all, would elevate the mechanical above the organic? Recall René Descartes’s obsession with automatons and just how thoroughly people had rejected his philosophy in the early 19th century.

For these reasons and others, opinions on the dialogue range all over the place. Some take it quite seriously as an allegorical religious injunction, others see it as elaborate satire against a literary rival, and others see it as a literal appraisal of puppet theater. But its opacity is precisely what makes it so enjoyable. Spend time with it, and you will find its reasoning creep into your thoughts at unexpected moments. A friend of mine told me that he thinks of the dialogue whenever he watches children run around and chase after leaves being blown hither and thither by a gust of wind on an autumn afternoon, moving clumsily around in the futile effort to catch what moves so gracefully and seamlessly — joyously placing themselves as nature’s subordinates. The children would seem to understand intuitively what’s at stake in Kleist’s writing.

II. Edward Gordon Craig: The Mask

Kleist’s influence outside of Germany was limited, particularly to the Anglophone world, but there is at least one exception, which will form the subject of this discussion. 100 years later after Kleist’s work, a similar endorsement of marionettes at the expense of man was written, this time by an English-born representative of modernist theater, Edward Gordon Craig. It’s an article called “The Actor and the Übermarionette” from his very own theater journal The Mask. Throughout his career, Craig drew from Kleist’s ideas. In fact, he reproduced Kleist’s work some years later in another journal of his called The Marionette, exposing it to a whole new Anglophone audience, but it is likely that he knew of Kleist even when writing “Übermarionette,” since he had spent much time in Germany and was an acquaintance with at least one person who had written extensively about him. Kleist’s cultural importance couldn’t have escaped Craig.

Craig was a bizarre fellow. His journal The Mask was written pretty much entirely by him, and he adopted at least 65 pseudonyms to create the illusion of it being a large-scale effort. He even wrote the letters page.

All of these contributors are in fact just one guy: Edward Gordon Craig

To put it bluntly, he was a complete control freak, and much of his journal writing was dedicated to experimental ideas on how the theater ought to be. But because he was such a control freak, few wanted to work with him, and almost nothing he came up with actually made it to the stage. The Mask was essentially his journal where he could conceptually construct guidelines for the type of theater he’d want to see in a more accommodating world. Probably much of the reason he isn’t so well known is that he was writing during the time of modernism, in which people really wanted bold ideas to be put into practice. His various shortcomings did not stop him from making some interesting friendships, though. Later on, he managed to collaborate with W.B. Yeats as well as the Italian Futurists, the latter of whom got some of their ideas on theater from him, although as I’ll show, they weren’t quite getting his intended message.¹

III. The Rejection of Acting

While Craig’s “Übermarionette” was in one sense an effort to reproduce Kleist’s ideas, they still differ in some key aspects. For one thing, Craig is trying to show the value of the marionette for the entire theater rather than just dance, and in doing so, he feels compelled to explain that all human actors are inadequate. He does this by denying that they’re real artists, and his reason is that they must rely on emotions to achieve their desired effect. Essentially, all artists must have absolute control over their artistry, but when an actor gets into a role, he deliberately surrenders himself to the emotional state of whomever he’s acting as; he tries to “get under the skin” of his subject when he ought remove himself from it altogether. A state of emotional intensity always implies a loss of control, and so this loss of control, however deliberate it may have been during its incipient moments, nonetheless suggests that no artistry is in fact taking place.

He even constructs a dialogue between an imaginary painter, musician, and actor to prove his point. I’ll quote some of it, trying my best to reproduce its unusual formatting.

“Tell us," asks the painter, “is it true that before you can act a part properly you must feel the emotions of the character you are representing?” ~ “Oh well, yes and no, it depends what you mean,” answers the actor. “We have first to be able to feel and sympathise and also criticise the emotions of a character; we look at it from a distance before we close with it; we gather as much as we can from the text and we call to mind all the emotions to mind suitable for this character to exhibit. After having many times rearranged and selected those emotions which we consider of importance we then practice to reproduce them before the audience; and to do so we must feel as little as is necessary; in fact the less we feel, the firmer will our hold be upon our facial and bodily expression.” ~ With a gesture of genial impatience, the artist rises to his feet and paces to and fro. He had expected his friend to say it had nothing whatever to do with emotions, and that he could control his face, features, voice and all, just as if his body were an instrument. The musician sinks deeper into his chair. “But has there never been an actor,” asks the artist, “who has so trained his body from head to foot that it would answer to the workings of his mind without permitting the emotions so much as to awaken? Surely there must have been one actor, say one out of ten million, who has done this?” ~ “No,” says the actor emphatically, “Never, never; there has never been an actor who reached such a state of mechanical perfection that his body was absolutely the slave of the mind.”

Now, at this point, one might suspect that Edward Gordon Craig is truly a strong modernist, maybe even a futurist himself. After all, here he is, taking all the richness and ambiguity of Kleist’s original work and turning it into a straightforward polemic against actors, comparing them unfavorably to the perfection of the machine. Compare, for instance, his hostility toward the expression of emotion in art with T.S. Eliot’s view that the true poet doesn’t simply regurgitate his emotions onto the page, but instead must suppress and dominate them before he renders his ideas into verse. So, surely, Craig is a modernist, he worships the machine — he would be absolutely thrilled by the arrival of A.I.-produced C.G.I. replacing the paid jobs of actors. Yes?

No! If one were to think this, one would be mistaking Craig’s intentions, because his views were quite the opposite. What underscored Craig’s thinking was in fact a strong technophobia, perhaps a kind so strong that it manages superficially to represent its opposite stance. What really animated his thinking was the question of what artists can do that machines can’t. For instance, here he is in the same essay explaining how art cannot be a mere facsimile:

The actor looks upon life as a photo-machine looks upon life; and he attempts to make a picture to rival a photograph. He never dreams of his art being an art such for instance as music. He tries to reproduce nature; he seldom thinks to invent with the aid of nature, and he never dreams of creating. As I have said, the best he can do when he wants to catch and convey the poetry of a kiss, the heat of a fight, or the calm of death, is to copy slavishly, photographically… he kisses… he fights… he lies back and mimics death… and when you think of it, is not all this dreadfully stupid? Is it not a poor art and poor cleverness, which cannot convey the spirit and essence of an idea to an audience, but can only show an artless copy, a facsimile of the thing itself.

This might seem like an altogether different sentiment from the one shown above, namely that actor’s aren’t artists because they surrender themselves to their emotions. But when Craig finally reconciles these two points, his argument makes clear that it’s precisely the need to be like a machine that causes the actor to fall into the primordial soup of uncontrolled emotions in the first place. The affinity with machines, in other words, is what prompts him to surrender his control, allowing irrationality to take over. This is why later on in the dialogue between the painter and actor, the painter tells him, “I am not sure I do not wish that photography had been discovered before painting, so that we of this generation might have had the intense joy of advancing, showing that photography was pretty well in its way, but there was something better!” For Edward Gordon Craig, photography is the primitive and backward thing, not painting. And the most advanced kind of painting is not photorealistic at all, but rather the kind that goes beyond mere mimicry. The most rational, controlled painters will aim to convey ideas associated with the subject that aren’t visible to the naked eye.

Like many of the early modernists, Craig was responding to the crisis of electronic technology by looking backwards to traditional art forms, and so his solution to the problem of the photograph was in a kind of visual artistry that was common in the ancient world. Last week, I wrote about Joséphin Péladan and his endorsement of Chaldean artwork because it visually represents concepts rather than aims for direct imitation of visible nature. Edward Gordon Craig, too, was a strong advocate of ancient artworks such as those of the Babylonians. And his solution to acting is just as radically traditional.

IV. The Übermarionette

After making his case against actors, Craig finally gives us his solution: the arrival of the Übermarionette. Now, what this actually is, no one has any clue up to this day. Craig never developed the idea, nor did he ever realize it on the stage. But his ideas on what it means conceptually are worth discussing.

For Craig, the marionette is a degeneration of ancient mythemes, and its exclusive use in comedy performances is the shameful product of its fall from a once-revered former position. Marionettes resemble the gradual disfigurement of the Great Sphinx of Giza, their original forebear. As he says, puppets

are the descendants of a great and noble family of images, images which were made in the likeness of God; and … many centuries ago, these figures had a rhythmical movement and not a jerky one; had no need for wires to support them, nor did they speak through the nose of a hidden manipulator. ~ (Poor Punch, I mean no slight to you! You stand alone, dignified in your despair, as you look back across the centuries with painted tears still wet upon your ancient cheeks, and you seem to cry out appealingly to your dog, “Sister Anne, sister Anne, is nobody coming?” ~ And then with that superb bravado of yours, you turn the force of our laughter (and my tears) upon yourself with the heartrending shriek of, “Oh, my nose! Oh, my nose!”)

You’ll have to excuse my decision to leave in that apostrophe to Punch from the Punch and Judy puppet shows, but I think it’s necessary to understand that even in the most lowbrow fairground comedy act, Craig sees the remnants of a more vital, powerful tradition that could potentially come alive once more, and he has no problems straddling the line between sincerity and the absurd to show it. Though he never actually worked on an Übermarionette, so we have no idea as to how it would actually work on stage, we at least recognize that it was his attempt to restore the puppet to its lost position of greatness.

The puppet, for Edward Gordon Craig, is a kind of depersonalized archetype, a psychopomp that goes between the realms of life and death. The ideal puppet performance isn’t trying to imitate life but rather to go beyond it, into something realer and more powerful. It doesn’t aim for “the flesh and blood but rather the body in Trance,” and it aims to “clothe itself with a death-like Beauty while exhaling a living spirit.” What he sees in these puppets, he also recognizes in the masks and ritual dances of ancient theater. It should come as no surprise, then, that Craig was quite cosmopolitan in his fascination with ancient theatrical forms, even though he was also an early supporter of Mussolini and saw in fascism a potential way for him to realize his artistic vision, just like Ezra Pound. He talks of Greece and Egypt in this essay, but he also was interested in the far East — and indeed, he was just as excited as Pound was about Arthur Waley’s edition of Japanese Noh plays. And he remained fascinated by these things throughout his life, up to the very end. You can find a lengthy audio clip of him in his later years discussing the use of masks in ancient theater here.

Despite his affinities with Pound and Marinetti, though, do not be fooled: Craig’s solution to the problem of acting lays bare the prominent streak of romanticism that resided within him for all to see. While his attacks on the individual actor and the importance of control appear quite modern, and indeed are in their execution, he ultimately takes what’s essentially romantic from Kleist, such as his quasi-pagan religiosity and respect for folk art forms, and preserves it in his thought. Though the Italian futurists genuinely loved modernity and technological progress, and thus could never be accused of romanticism, their use of marionettes and other remnants of folk art in Futurist theater comes nonetheless from Craig’s influence. The scholar Olga Taxidou sums it up well when she says, “Had his essay been written almost a century earlier, as was its predecessor, it would have been received as an instance of excessive Romanticism in the Idealist German tradition.”

V. Later Rejections of “Acting”

So why am I going on about Edward Gordon Craig? Well, for a few reasons. First, he demonstrates a holdover from the romantic tradition that I think A.I.-generated artwork stands a good chance of reviving. His point that the precise imitation of human psychology resembles photography rather than painting will grow all the more prescient as machines start to resemble real human beings, yet fail to resemble timeless, primordial symbols and archetypes that feel even realer than what we encounter in waking life.

Secondly, I believe that the rejection of acting for its attempt at realism recurs from time to time whenever a theater director or filmmaker aims to make a more holistic, unified, total art form, and this striving for a total art form is once again growing increasingly imperative. A half-century after Edward Gordon Craig’s work on this subject, Robert Bresson echoed many of the same sentiments, though he actually produced some films to show for his ideas. As Tony Pipolo in his book Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film (2009) explains it:

Bresson opposed not just professional actors, but acting itself. He thought it generated a false effect at odds with the medium. Acting interfered with the execution of the filmic text — an ensemble of image, sound, and the relation between shots — by disrupting the rhythm and tone that made it work. If cinema was a matter of rapports, nothing should stand out at the expense of anything else. In traditional movies, the actor unavoidably disrupts this rapport; he or she does not just occupy the image, but dominates it, often rendering other features irrelevant or invisible. By definition, the professional actor draws attention to personality and invites the viewer, according to Bresson, “to search for talent on his or her face” rather than look at the film as a whole.

Bresson alone is worth an entirely separate discussion, so I won't go too deep into him, but I’m trying to show how even though he likely took no influence from either Craig (or the Italian Futurists, for that matter), Bresson was still behaving as Craig might have predicted: he was a pure artist trying to free his films from the cluttered pseudo-artistry of actors trying to imitate nature. And, as the filmmaker and critic Paul Schrader has argued, there was indeed something spiritually transcendent and trans-culturally traditional to his films.

Even today, I’ll occasionally come upon good, solid criticisms of overly contrived acting jobs and the lengths actors go to execute them. A post on Reddit (of all places) that warmed my heart attacks the use of “method acting” for its obvious gimmickry and phoniness.

It seems to me that "Method" acting is being cynically and erroneously used as a method […] to drum up mystique and drama around a performance as opposed to actually letting the performance speak for itself. We saw this with Jared Leto harassing his Suicide Squad costars because he was just being so "Method", he couldn't help but be the Joker behind the scenes as well. Obviously, that massively backfired as the film and his performance was widely panned and ultimately disregarded. […] That this idea of going "Method", in and of itself, is proving how dedicated you are to your craft that you're willing to destroy yourself and the people around you. I feel like this behavior is rewarded because audiences do tend to have this morbid and perverse affinity for people that suffer for their art. While tangentially related to Method acting, I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar win for The Revenant also plays into this. The entire story surrounding that film was about how miserable the filming was. About how DiCaprio was rolling around naked in the snow, he had to eat raw animal meat, etc. There were jokes about how he literally needed to be attacked by a bear in order to win an Oscar. The director and Leo both leaned into this heavily and he ended up winning. Whereas, I highly doubt Scorsese supplied Leo with a near infinite amount of cocaine and quaaludes to get his Wolf of Wall Street performance. Which, in my opinion, was an infinitely better performance.

This post is a bit tepid in its criticism — the poster should have gone after all the psychoanalytic nonsense in its entirety that underlies method acting theory rather than excusing it and reserving criticism only for the supposedly false kind. But in its way, it cautiously gets at the same points that Edward Gordon Craig was making a century beforehand: the surrendering of one’s own mental sovereignty, even taken to such a self-directed extreme, might make for some entertaining stories about working on set, but there’s no evidence that it does anything to heighten the artistry of performance.

Despite its timidity, the comment from Reddit is particularly valuable because it amounts to further evidence of a shift I think we’re undergoing in which we perceive authenticity differently than how we did before. Whereas a century ago, being authentically yourself meant being a purely unique individual, it now means the effortlessness with which one approximates a “type” of person — a cliché, a stereotype, or even an archetype if it’s universal enough in execution. And in the world of theater and video, we may be ready for the return of archetypes at the expense of what we erroneously call “complexity.” Acting, in sum, doesn’t require pointlessly ruining your own life and alienating everyone around you to just to “transform” into an altogether different person with his or her own set of annoying idiosyncrasies. So we now may find more people with the willingness to challenge many of the relics and hangovers of an excessively individualized culture, theater and film being prominent art forms to house them. The world of masks, marionettes, and dance could return.

But as with all moments of transition, things can get better, or get worse. An idea always stands an equal chance of being realized in bono as it does in malo. As Kleist points out, attaining the elegance of the marionette means something akin to a surrendering of consciousness. And people now have the choice of trying to accomplish this, in theater and in life, by lowering themselves down to animals or alternatively raising themselves up to Demigods. No one will reach the ideal, but the path one chooses will absolutely leave an impact.

Speaking of Kleist, I’ll let him have the last word.

Now, my excellent friend, said Herr C., you are in possession of ever that is necessary to comprehend what I am saying. We can see the degree to which contemplation becomes darker and weaker in the organic world, so that the grace that is there emerges all the more shining and triumphant. Just as the intersection of two lines from the same side of a point after passing through the infinite suddenly finds itself again on the other side — or as the image from a concave mirror, after having gone off into the infinite, suddenly appears before us again — so grace returns after knowledge has gone through the world of the infinite, in that it appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all — or has infinite consciousness — that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God.

Therefore, I replied, somewhat at loose ends, we would have to eat again from the tree of knowledge to fall back again into a state of innocence?

Most certainly, he replied: That is the last chapter of the history.

1. Most of my information on Edward Gordon Craig is coming from Olga Taxidou’s highly informative “A New ‘Art of the Theatre’: Gordon Craig’s The Mask (1908–29) and The Marionette (1918–19),” which can be found in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol 1 (2009).