The Secret Life of Puppets

by Victoria Nelson

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674012445
• ISBN13: 9780674012448
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 2.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

High vs. Low Art

Overall Victoria Nelson has written a fine book. I was particularly interested in her Chapter on the American Fantastic Mode, and her excellent description of the difference, historically and currently, between European and American High Literature (Art). Where European high culture has embraced The Fantastic, in America the Genre has been delegated to comic books, murder mysteries, ghost stories, love-based romances, and recently, science fiction. Nelson points out that American literary icons such as Hawthorne or Fitzgerald only occasionally ventured into non-realism as "entertainments" leaving "fantasy" mostly for the pulp fiction mongers. She also seems to feel the "lower" form of fiction have been unjustly disparaged. Although the intent seems to be academic, Nelson's prose style renders THE SECRET LIFE OF PUPPETS more of a pleasure read than a textbook.

Great subject!

Nice way to connect wide range of topics. It has a typographical error or two, but it's a very good read.

Spins a common thread through esoteric interests

If you have bookshelves at home covering sci-fi/fantasy/horror, mythology, AI, psychology, alchemy, animation, and semiotics, and know them only as "things I'm interested in" without being aware of any other common thread, Victoria Nelson just might convince you that you are interested in those things for the same reason she is, and that people throughout history have been: you are mapping a geography of human imagination, taking a journey that you can't help but pursue. Although the book is structured as a history of ideas, there's an autobiography being told, too, about a precocious, sensitive kid fleeing grad school to Hawaii (just as I did) only to return years later "to finish the PhD thesis I never wrote". Along the way, you'd find many great books and films you may never have heard of.

Ground down

This is a book that at times reads a bit like a Ph.D. thesis, but's it really much better than that. If you've ever entertained the idea that popular films such as The Matrix, or TV shows (X-Files) might be saying something interesting about ideas in today's world at some deeper level, but you're not really sure what it is, this is the book to read. Nelson shows how Robocop, the Terminator and so on are just the latest puppets standing in for a certain way of thinking about the world, even a 'religious' way of thinking, that in fact is very ancient in Western society. It's been driven into eclipse by our modern, scientific, and materialistic society, but becomes strangely ascendant the moment we walk into a movie theatre, read a Stephen King novel, or listen to a conversation about an 'interesting' movie at the water cooler. Why? Well, buy Nelson's book.I could imagine this book being misread as an attack on conventional religion, but it really has nothing to do with that. I could also imagine that some readers, not accustomed to slogging their way through terms such as 'Platonism', 'demiurge,' and so on, might miss out on finer moments in Nelson's work, when she casts off the robes of the academic (which don't really suit her, anyway) and speaks in plain language about her ideas.In any case, this is a fine book well worth a careful reading in my opinion.

Demons, Fairies, and Truth Crushed to Earth will Rise Again

This book is amazing. The most fascinating book of nonfiction I have read in 10 years. It will definitely develop a strong cult audience, although the author/scholar maintains a truly balanced and studious examination of the phenomenon at the heart of the book. This is one of those books that will almost make the nonfiction bestseller list, if nobody in marketing pushes it. If they want to push it -- well, I can imagine all the die-hard realists who will foam at the mouth. But they are a pretty fuddy-duddy bunch of worn-out hasbeens anyhow, and you will see why when you sink your teeth into this one. This book answers a lot of serious and critical questions concerning the transcendental imagination and its underestimated and ignored role in our pragmatic culture. If you have often thought that the Academics who rule the roost (and the brain-washed editors who determine which novels will and will not be nominated for the Pulitzer) have lost their pathway to the great darkness which holds volumes of helpful and fairly eternal light, Victoria Nelson will put place your nearly correct, incomplete thoughts into a realm of rich and understandable meaning.This book is a well-thought out prophesy of the richer literature to come. Prepare to enter the unexplainable, miraculous, demonic realms of subject matter upheld as most significant by Platonic thinkers, who are by far more adventurous than that other bunch.