The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [41]
He remembered that Dobbin was associated with the aqueous pot at Todefright.
“I work with a potter,” Dobbin informed him. “I work with Benedict Fludd, the husband of that lady. I try to help, but he finds me inept. I believe in hand-crafts, but my talent isn’t—isn’t for working with clay. Mr. Fludd is not a patient man. I do believe he is a genius. I should like to encourage a community of artists—that is my dearest ambition—it would be easier if I were more skilful with my hands.”
His tone was a strange mixture of cheerful enthusiasm and stolid gloom. He squeezed Philip’s shoulder. Philip said
“I should like to see Mr. Fludd’s work. I saw the pot—back at the house—I saw it—I’ve never seen anything better—”
Dobbin squeezed again, and relaxed.
“Where do you go from here?”
“I dunno. They seem to be thinking about it.”
“I might be able to help.”
August Steyning came out of his house with a large drum, and beat a tattoo, proclaiming in his high, clear voice, that the show was about to begin.
When they were all indoors, and seated, he stood before the curtained box, and spoke to them.
They were about to see the Sternbild Marionettes, from Munich, perform E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. August wanted to offer a word or two about marionettes. Many of those present would know Punch and Judy. He himself had his own Punch and Judy. They, and their German cousin, Kasperl, were honest artists, with ancient traditions. They were glove puppets, and glove puppets were of the earth, earthy. They spring up from below, like underground beings, gnomes or dwarves, they belabour each other with cudgels and go back into the depths, of their booths, of our human consciousness. Marionettes, by contrast, are creatures of the upper air, like elves, like sylphs, who barely touch the ground. They dance in geometric perfection in a world more intense, less hobbledehoy, than our own. Heinrich von Kleist, in a suggestive and mysterious essay, claims daringly that these figures perform more perfectly than human actors. They exhibit the laws of movement; their limbs rise and fall in perfect arcs, according to the laws of physics. They have—unlike human actors—no need to charm, or to exact sympathy. Kleist goes so far as to say that the puppet and God are two points on a circle. The earliest shadow puppets were in fact gods, the presences of gods. “I found in Amsterdam some exemplars of the oriental shadow-figures, the Wayang Golek, whose movements were made by trained priests. Herr Stern and I have studied these marvellous beings, and introduced some refinements into his German figures.”
He bowed. His pale hair flipped over his face. He stepped behind the box.
• • •
An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth, composite whole. The world inside the box, a world made of silk, satin, china mouldings, wires, hinges, painted backcloths, moving lights and musical notes, must come alive with its own laws of movement, its own rules of story. And the watchers, wide-eyed and greedy, distracted and supercilious, preoccupied, uncomfortable, tense, must become one, as a shoal of fishes with huge eyes and flickering fins becomes one, wheeling this way and that in response to messages of hunger, fear or delight. August’s flute was heard, and some were ready to listen and some were not. The curtains opened on a child’s bedroom. He sat against his pillows. His nurse, in comfortable grey, bustled about him, and her shadow loomed over him on the white wall.
She told the small Nathanael about the Sandman. “He steals the eyes of naughty little children,” she said, comfortably, “and feeds them to his own children, who live in a nest on the moon, and open their beaks like owlets.”
There was a heavy tap-tap of slow feet ascending the stairs. The backcloth showed the shadow of the turning of the banister, and the rising head and shoulders of the shadow of the old man, hook-nosed, hump-backed, claw-handed, stump, stump, his coat-skirts swinging.
The puppet-child pulled