licence, some stylized parts in a work otherwise resembling the real form; this is, after all, what people love in art. The same is true of literary composition. While bearing resemblance to the original, it should have stylization; this makes it art, and is what delights men’s minds. …”[1]
In his puppet-plays Chikamatsu knew exactly how to keep within the slender margin between reality and unreality. In his most popular work, The Battles of Coxinga, there are scenes of horror which are tolerable to the audience only because of the stylization afforded by the puppets; if it were believed for one moment that these events were actually taking place in the theatre, only a person with a very strong stomach could bear them. On the other hand, Chikamatsu could induce a suspension of disbelief with the same means, thus producing an effect of reality within basic unreality. (The suspension of disbelief is, of course, nothing new to Western audiences.) For example, in The Battles of Coxinga there is a fight between the hero and a tiger. Such a scene is unconvincing in print, and would be ludicrous on the stage, where the spectator would be conscious of the two men inside the tiger skin, and could not take seriously the hero’s wrestlings with so ungainly a creature. Such a spectacle would be unreal without the admixture of the real that Chikamatsu insisted on. In the puppet theatre, however, the tiger is no less realistic than the hero, and there is no reason why a spectator who accepts the initial unreality of a puppet performing as a man should be unable to accept a puppet tiger as well. Thus, in the same play the puppets could bring unreality to a scene which would otherwise be too painful to watch, or reality to a scene which would otherwise merely be comical. In neither case is the effect achieved either reality or
- ↑ Quoted in Keene, pp. 95–6.
