dexterity. In depriving the marionettes of their unreality, they forfeit every artistic possibility. As Yeats said, “all imaginative art keeps at a distance, and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world.” This is the secret of the Nō and the puppet theatre. By keeping us at a distance from the stage the Japanese dramatists admit us to their special domain of art. What the puppet theatre can mean to a sensitive Western observer, is revealed by this statement of the French poet Paul Claudel: “The living actor, whatever his talent may be, always bothers us by admixing a foreign element into the part that he is playing, something ephemeral and commonplace; he remains always a man in disguise. The marionette, on the other hand, has no other life or movement but that which it draws from the action. It comes to life with the story. It is like a shadow that one resuscitates by describing to it all it has done, which little by little from a memory becomes a presence. It is not an actor who is speaking; it is a word which acts. The creature made of wood is the embodiment of the words spoken for it. … By other means the jōruri arrives at the same result as the Nō.”[1]
It is not really to be wondered at, in view of the effect Claudel describes, that Chikamatsu preferred to write for the puppet theatre. It appears that he wanted first of all a dramatic form which would free him from the liberties taken with his texts by actors, who regarded their parts merely as vehicles for the exhibition of their special talents. His understanding of the potentialities of the puppet stage convinced him that he could better entrust his plays to dolls than to human beings. But Chikamatsu was well aware that the puppet theatre required a special type of writing. He said, “Jōruri differs from other forms of fiction in that, since it has primarily to do with puppets,
- ↑ Claudel, introduction to Contribution à l’Etude du Théâtre des Poupées, pp. xii–xiv. (Quoted in Keene, p. 93.)
