The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (43 page)

The huge establishment, which comprised three floors, smelt of coffee and rubber, machine oil and glue, wet paint and turpentine, and was permanently filled with the sounds of hammering, sawing, conversation, oaths and laughter. There were marionette strings of all gauges on the roll, arms and legs moulded in a wide variety of materials, thousands of puppets’ eyes, blanks for wooden heads, paints and brushes, ready-made costumes, sacks of wood wool, sheets of canvas in all sizes, black all-over bodysuits for puppeteers, ready-made ventriloquist’s puppets, cut-out silhouettes for shadow theatres, powdered magnesium for rubbing on hands, buckets of plaster, lumps
of
clay in damp cloths, stacks of slabs of plasticine, thunder sheets for sound effects technicians, ushers’ uniforms, reference books of all kinds, curtain material, preprinted posters – everything, in fact, that a stage artiste could require. Even boxes for sawing in half with girls inside and the saws to go with them.

The Uggly had strongly recommended the
Kraken’s Tentacle
to me on the grounds that its book section stocked the best and most comprehensive collection of technical literature on Puppetism. You could spend hours lounging around there, reading books on your feet without having to buy them. Also on offer – free of charge, what’s more – was fresh coffee, theatre folk’s principal form of sustenance. While rummaging among the books or leafing through them, I was able to observe many a notable incident, and overhear and make a note of dialogue that could be useful to my studies. I eavesdropped on puppeteers loudly arguing about how puppets should be operated, why marionettes were preferable to stick puppets (or vice versa) and what type of wood was essential for their manufacture. On the stairs between the floors there were heated debates over the content, style and stagecraft of current productions. Ventriloquists tried out new puppets among the shelves, vocalists and puppeteers practised their synchronous acts together. There was always something going on, even in the small hours. Two long-armed puppeteers almost came to blows over whether or not puppets’ joints should be lubricated. One of them said you shouldn’t inflict squeaks on the audience, whereas the other complained that oil made your hands slippery. Their altercation became so deafening, they were ejected from the premises and continued their argument in the street. All I heard after that was the sound of slaps being exchanged. Although I’m not in favour of physical violence, I must confess that this scene not only amused me but actually justified my studies. I had completely forgotten that it was possible to pursue a profession with such passion that it put one’s health in jeopardy. How far removed from that was my own elitist pen-pushing in Lindworm Castle!

The library of the
Kraken’s Tentacle
extended over two floors of the huge building and was really remarkably well stocked. It included not only modern technical literature but also a unique store of antiquarian books on subjects such as puppet-making, dramaturgy, lighting, stage technique, scene painting and many other theatrical arts ranging from make-up to sound effects and conjuring. Does that sound like fascinating reading? No. Was it an adventure in reading nonetheless? Definitely so! Why? Well, I was wholly uninterested in whether or not puppets’ joints should be lubricated with machine oil, or how to bake a puppet’s china head, or how to light a scene perfectly with candles and mirrors. I had no desire to become a puppeteer or a scene painter. But if one patiently assembled the history of Bookholmian Puppetism out of all those separate components, a saga of positively epic dimensions took shape: a magnificent mosaic composed of fascinating elements and scenes, with countless protagonists and myriad anecdotes. And a history of modern Bookholm into the bargain! In short, a read that was equal, if not vastly superior, to many a great novel. And I include my own in that statement!

I had found the material for my book! More than that, I had scratched a vein of gold, struck oil, opened a treasure chamber, broached an inexhaustible reservoir that was plain for all to see but had never been exploited by anyone as I proposed to exploit it. And for me, writing non-fiction was an entirely new departure. I would never have dreamt of trying to succeed at that genre, never! Non-fiction was really just for academics and experts on Old Zamonian sitting in dusty records offices, poring over ancient reference books, deciphering hieroglyphs and scanning papyri through magnifying glasses. I had never given such things a thought until now, but the history of Puppetism was turning out to be a combination of thriller, comedy, encyclopaedia, drama and art history – an immense surprise packet.

So I spent a lot of time at the
Kraken’s Tentacle
, fishing one book after another out of the shelves, more or less at random, and reading or dipping into it until it ceased to interest me any longer. I would then
move
on to the next, sometimes simply because it was the next in line on the shelf. It might be in the middle of a popular puppet-maker’s biography, or in the introduction to a book on the manufacture of miniature costumes, that I discovered the next fragment of my mosaic. A little chapter here, a footnote there, a woodcut there and a bibliographical reference elsewhere. My notebook was steadily filling up. Sometimes the whole of an appallingly boring book would contain just one single sentence that struck me as useful, but it, in its turn, could open up entirely new side caves in my treasure chamber. Reading other people’s books, a pastime I’d almost abandoned, being so preoccupied with my own work, was an adventure that now captivated me as much as it had in my earliest youth. Reading, reading, just reading and forgetting about one’s own miserable existence! I’d completely forgotten what a blissful state that could be. Fortunately, the
Kraken’s Tentacle
was always so busy that a cowled Lindworm standing around in the library and leafing through one book after another attracted no attention. Besides, I’d made it a habit at the end of each visit to buy a few of the books that seemed most useful to me and take them back to the hotel. If the staff noticed me at all, therefore, they thought of me at most as a regular paying customer.

What books did I read?
From Rag Doll to Micromechanical Marionette, Planar Puppetism Versus Three-Dimensionality in the Theatrical History of Bookholm, Adventures in Rubber-Moulding, Uggsistentialist Drama Before and After Beula Smeckett
– I doubt there could be any titles more off-putting to a normal readership, yet those were some of the books most in demand at the
Kraken’s Tentacle
, and I devoured them all.

From its beginnings in the makeshift puppet theatres beside the devastated city’s nightly campfires to the Puppetocircus Maximus and its many competitors in modern Bookholm, Puppetism had a colourful process of development behind it full of bold innovations, fanciful abstractions, artistic aberrations, creative ventures, and advances and backward steps of all kinds. It was, so to speak, a cultural history of Zamonia in miniature, all reduced to the confines of the city
and
the circle of Puppetist initiates. This additionally lent the subject a theatrical element, namely, a stage that was visible at a glance. The players? A few hundred theatre folk, a few thousand puppets and countless theatregoers. Magnificent material drawn from real life, my friends! So let me at least try to acquaint you with it in condensed form, just as I myself absorbed it: like an industrious but aimless bee that is tempted by this or that beautiful bloom and eventually bears its store of pollen home.

There were shelves full of instructions for the manufacture of puppets out of wood, paper, metal, glass, rubber, straw, or wire. These I was soon done with because I only skimmed them. There is hardly a material from which puppets cannot be made or with which they cannot be decorated, filled, or stabilised. Shells, paper, beads, paste, china, wood wool, shavings, wax, grass, sand, coal, gold, silver, even genuine diamonds – all have been used. Then I got out works on the manufacture of complicated eye mechanisms and articulated skeletons of wood and metal, books on clockwork puppets and the manufacture of giant marionettes. Indigestible fare, those purely technical instructions – I scarcely understood them, to be honest, but I did my level best, for those were arts in themselves. Many practitioners competed at them, each after his own manner and each with his own effect on Puppetism’s stylistic development – and, thus, on those who determined its content. All this was important, so I couldn’t skip anything for lack of interest or ignore it out of mental laziness, often though I was tempted to do so. I remember groaning so loudly while reading a book on glass-blown puppets that one of the sales assistants, a dwarf, asked me if I had heart trouble.

I was relieved, therefore, when I could finally turn to the art and history sections of the library in the
Kraken’s Tentacle
. At last! It contained some genuinely exciting stuff, and that was when I really began to browse. No matter how ingenious their exterior and intricate their mechanical innards, what use would puppets be if the scripts of the plays in which they performed were no good – if the content, the
ideas
, the dialogue, the artistic intentions were of no account? They would then be no more than expensive walking cadavers, good to look at but devoid of true animation. What mattered most to me was that part of Puppetism which originated in the heads of playwrights. Only when brilliant dialogue, plot and characterisation were combined with supreme achievements on the part of stage designers, puppeteers, musicians and costumiers – only when a puppet became
slengvo
, as the puppeteers called it – did they give birth to those masterpieces whose secrets I was endeavouring to fathom.

For a start, I learned that Puppetism must not be conceived of as a single, purposefully growing plant – not as a big tree or shrub with numerous branches, oh no, but as a whole, multifarious rain forest in which
everything
grew in different directions, and in which new growths were forever being promoted by mutual pollination and fertilisation – and, of course, by the never-ending fight for survival. All attempts by the authorities to curtail and tame it by means of laws, regulations or censorship had failed over the years. Experimental theatres had been banned and closed, only to reopen somewhere in the underground and attain cult status with the public. If you want a work of art to be a lasting success, you have only to get it strictly prohibited; that had always been the best method. Plays were placed on the black list, but they continued to be performed in secret and developed into modern classics. To flog the botanical metaphor a trifle harder: Puppetism reminded me of the neglected garden behind my godfather Dancelot’s house, which was always abandoned to the wind and weather. ‘One doesn’t go into a garden to work,’ Dancelot used to say, ‘but to enjoy it. For goodness’ sake don’t hoe it! There’s nothing more beautiful in the spring than weeds.’

Yes, like a garden whose gardener had died, Puppetism embraced a gallimaufry of styles in countless variations. Far from coexisting peacefully, however, they competed fiercely, at least in the early years, for this young art form certainly wasn’t a tame affair. On the contrary.

In order to understand the conflicts that smouldered inside Puppetism, one must first learn to distinguish between the champions of various styles and their motives. In the beginning there were only the
Marionettists
, who categorically condemned the practice of touching a puppet with the hands during a performance, and the exponents of
Manual Puppetism
, who joined with the
Stick Puppetists
in categorically rejecting the use of strings. That was the extent of the controversy in those days, but it sufficed to provoke lively arguments. The Marionettists declared that a puppet could be operated with little expenditure of effort by using gravity for one’s own purposes, whereas a Manual Puppetist had to fight the force of gravity, which constantly tugged at his arms. A Marionettist could perform for hours without growing tired, whereas Manual Puppetists had to rest after a few minutes. The Manual Puppetists argued that a marionette moved so unnaturally that it sometimes looked positively idiotic, bumping into scenery or getting its strings entangled. When walking it only floated along, waggling its legs. ‘A marionette moves like a mouse that’s been grabbed by the scruff of the neck and held in the air,’ one popular stick puppeteer remarked scornfully. ‘It’s undignified.’ The Marionettists retorted that hand puppets didn’t even have legs.

As if that were not enough of an issue, Puppetism continued to splinter more and more in the next few years. The first to join the three basic styles was
Planar Puppetism
, which refused to sanction any but two-dimensional puppets, and only in the non-colours black, white and grey. This style was soon opposed by the so-called
Expressionist Puppetists
, who made three-dimensional puppets on principle and painted them in gaudy colours. They spent most of the time onstage shouting at each other, weeping, or declaiming high-flown emotional speeches. What developed in opposition to this was
Naturalistic Puppetism
, which cherished a positively fanatical devotion to realism and accepted only ultra-realistic puppets that recited thoroughly prosaic dialogue. This meant that puppets had to conform
exactly
, in shape, colour and size, to the life forms they represented, a requirement that led for the first time to a perceptible increase in the size of the stages in Bookholm’s puppet theatres. In response to this, students at the Bookholm Academy of Art evolved
Abstract Puppetism
, which grotesquely exaggerated and caricatured puppets’ faces and anatomy, producing hunchbacked figures of fun with huge noses, crooked teeth and lips like bolsters. These amused the public immensely and drew big audiences. They, in turn, gave birth to the
Unreal Puppetists
, who ventured a few steps further. Their puppets and scenery almost defied description, because the ‘Uns’, as those radical artists were popularly known, rejected reality as such: trees grew out of the sky, buildings stood upside down, lamp-posts went walking. Their scripts were just as out of this world, and their first nights regularly ended in uproar and pandemonium. After the ‘Uns’ the dam broke, so to speak, and almost anything became possible.