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.
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