The beginning of Blok’s A Puppet Show lays the foundation for Pierrot’s romanticism of Columbine, his supposed bride. The three mystics contribute to this dramatization, their back and forth dialogue of one-liners gives the reader, and more so the in-person viewer of the play, a sense of suspense before her ultimate appearance. The author’s interjections provide a brief sense of relief for the reader, but interestingly, these breaks are significantly shorter than build-up by the three mystics and Pierrot. While this gives us a sense of a break, its brief nature does not allow us to fully reset. Finally, the mystics proclaim Columbine arrives and Pierrot leads her to the center of the stage. The Chairman warns Pierrot that death has arrived, but Pierrot scoffs at the advice, minimizing the concern as fantasy. Even the author is in agreement, exclaiming that likening her braids to a scythe is defamation. Pierrot ironically says that he is either “an unfortunate madman”, or that he is “misunderstood”. It turns out he was in fact unfortunate, and the youthful Harlequin steals Columbine from him; Pierrot results to sulking.
What made the build-up to this climax significant was its avoidable nature. Pierrot was blinded by the prospect of uniting with Columbine, so infatuated with the idea of her that he refused to listen to others. He was self-aware of his controversial position, noting he was “alone” in his opinion. However, as everyone around him warned the hopeless romantic, he let his appearance distort the true reality.
I think Columbine’s portrayal as Death adds an interesting aspect to Pierrot’s blindness regarding her. Traditionally, Death is the ending and beginning of all things, something that living mortals obsess over and can never consciously understand. When one thinks of Columbine as death instead of an ordinary girl, Pierrot’s attitudes about her make more sense.
I would like to add to your analysis of Perriot, particularly in his relation to madness and foolishness. As you have already addressed, Pierrot’s dismissal of everyone’s opinions of Columbine contributed to his downfall in the end. When the mystics likened her to Death, he was taken aback and ignored their criticisms of his future bride. Moreover, his obliviousness to the advancements of Harlequin shows Pierrot to be disconnected between his reality and that of his romanticisms of Columbine’s love for him. Perriot’s poor sense of reality devastated him when he witnessed Harlequin and Columbine leave into the night. This scene is portrayed with the inclusion of other theatricalities, such as the three pairs of lovers who danced, which further emphasized the play’s themes of chaos, grief, and ridiculousness.
Building on this sense of being disconnected from reality, I wonder if that’s how Blok was trying to make the audience feel in order to put us in Pierrot’s place to better understand him. While we see how disconnected Pierrot is from our outside vantage points, much of the play was spent breaking its own internal continuity, such as when the author breaks the fourth wall or when the “window” is torn through to show that it wasn’t ever real. These occurrences cause a sort of disconnect between what’s real and what’s not, mirroring Pierrot’s experience within the show. To me, this is a more sound reason as to why the author is so involved rather than just as a way to deliver exposition or to provide relief for the reader.
Gabe, yes! This is a really effective way of connecting the discussion going on here in the blog with the major points of our class discussion yesterday.
Shandiin, great points here too! Interestingly, the Symbolists were very interested in madness as an altered state that led to spiritual insights not otherwise available to the rest of us humans. So the question remains in the play as to whose version of reality is “truer” to its essence: the one that says that all of this is just cardboard and puppets and cranberry juice, or the one that says that Pierrot’s romance is a profound one that concerns life and death and the deepest dreams of the soul?!
I think that Death plays an interesting role in the play helping to navigate the apparent contradiction between illusion and real life. As Columbine is portrayed as both a regular girl and death, she straddles the line between fantasy and reality. Columbine appears initially as death bearing a scythe then transforms as a girl dressed in white with blushed cheeks, signifying life and purity. Columbine’s dual roles play an important part in exploring both life and death in the play.
In class, we highlighted the artificiality of art as one of the themes of the symbolist movement and this text. As this post and most of the comments have already highlighted, Blok uses the duality of Columbine to depict the duplicitous nature of beautiful things and that striving to attain them will result in anguish. Though the mystics warn Pierrot that his bride is death personified he is fixated on her beauty. His inability to look beyond the exterior of his bride inevitably causes him to lose her. It is not until the end that he realizes she is ‘a cardboard bride’.
As we discussed in class, this play and the ballet use symbolism to display a mundane vs ethereal reality. I think that the contrasting colors contributes to the symbolism in the ballet. In the scenes of rooms, there are significant contrasting colors, such as orange and light blue or red and green. I also think that the setting of a room makes the play feel more like the characters are puppets. This contributes to the ending where the main character dies and is dragged off by the show master as a puppet. Then appears in the background as if he is not dead showing pain and agony.
Xander, this is a good point about the color symbolism. I know we mentioned this a little in class in regard to the colorful sets for the ballet, but you are right that it is also prominent in the play, in the colors of the clothing of the different pairs of lovers (pink/blue, red/black) and of course, in the white of Columbine’s dress, as Evy mentioned in her comment. These sorts of details are always laden with meaning for the Symbolists, and it would be worth thinking about what the symbolic meanings are of all the various colors. Nice catch!