Antoine's Alphabet by Jed Perl

Antoine's Alphabet by Jed Perl

Author:Jed Perl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307270450
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-08T16:00:00+00:00


Print after a drawing by Watteau

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Kleist. One beautiful winter evening in 1801, when the weather was so crisp and clarifying and strangely mild that it felt pleasant to sit for half an hour on a park bench, a writer fell into conversation with a dancer in the public garden of a German town. The writer explained to the dancer how surprised he had been to see the dancer repeatedly watching the puppet theater in the marketplace, a rather crude performance, so the writer believed, with little mock heroic dramas, interspersed with songs and dances. Why, the writer asked, would a man whose performances were already being widely praised for their sophistication take an interest in the unabashedly artificial movements of these marionettes? And in response to this question, the dancer, a man more or less alone in the little town, responded with great volubility, glad to have found somebody who was willing to engage him in a substantial conversation. The dancer hastened to explain that it was precisely the artifice of the marionettes that made them so fascinating, so compelling. He pointed out that there was an extraordinary grace about the movements of these puppets. And this grace, strangely enough, derived from the mechanics of the puppetry, from the extent to which the puppeteer, by holding and moving the strings, gave the dancing wooden limbs a powerful inevitability—a center of gravity, a geometric elegance. Somehow, the artificiality of the marionette’s movements, entirely controlled by a few strings, mostly in fact by one central string, suggested a dance stripped of all the self-consciousness and egotism that absorbed the human dancer. And the result was that the marionette embodied a spiritual power, a kind of purity, which only the greatest dancers ever achieved. The central string by which the puppeteer controlled the marionette was, so the dancer explained, “nothing less than the path of the dancer’s soul.”

This striking exchange forms the crux of a brief text written by Heinrich von Kleist in 1811, “On the Puppet Theater,” which is little more than a meandering conversation, one of those curiously carpentered prose pieces that are characteristic of the Romantic period. I’m not sure whether to call this composition a story or an essay, but however one wants to define it, it has a power that confounds its modest size. Self-consciousness, the dancer is saying, is the enemy of grace, and this explains why grace appears “most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either the puppet or the god.” This is a paradox, and a stark one at that. At first, the dancer’s rather ferocious metaphysics may stop readers in their tracks. But of course it is perfectly logical that a dancer, the product of a strict training, would believe that it is only by forcing your mind and your muscles to obey some superior logic that you can become most fully yourself. The same can be said about the



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