What Is Punch that They are Mindful of Him? Neil Gaiman, Ben Aaronovitch, and Russell Hoban

ABSTRACT

Neil Gaiman, Ben Aaronovitch, and Russell Hoban follow 18^th and 19^th century patterns of reappropriation by using Punch puppetry to frame 20^th and 21^st century problems, a puzzling choice given that current Punch performances modify the action and curb its violence lest it upset very small children. Gaiman uses Punch at the personal level to explore his focal figure’s traumatic memory involving violence within his family. Aaronovitch uses Punch at the political level to explores issues of empire and power; Punch figures both as victim and as an embodiment of imperial and economic power. The world in Hoban’s Riddley Walker, destroyed by nuclear war two millennia previously, uses puppets to present a combination of cultural myth and government propaganda, but Punch puppets enter as the new secular entertainment. Given Riddley Walker’s philosophical fascination with oneness and twoness, Punch and associated puppets admirably suit his moral explorations because the puppeteer has only two hands. The Punch story seems unconnected to our lives today, so having three intriguing and richly imaginative authors use him to frame current problems invites investigation (and promises enjoyment).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Between 1662 and 1828, our information about the Punch shows in England mostly consists of fragmentary references in letters and diaries because it was an oral tradition, worked out first with marionettes and then popularized and spread with hand puppet shows. In 1828, J. Payne Collier transcribed the dialogue of Giovanni Piccini’s version, and that has been the model for later versions, though puppet “professors” feel free to alter the action and add or subtract characters. Punch is descended from the Italian character Pulcinella, but while this character shares traits with various braggarts, cowards, buffoons, and tricksters from the past, he seems to have no single, clear prototype.

2. The devil and various other characters and scenes considered unfit for child audiences have been watered down or removed from modern versions, but Collier ends with Punch’s victory over the devil. Aaronovitch and Gaiman certainly, and Hoban probably, knew the Collier script.

3. Neil Gaiman’s The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch has no pagination, so like other commentators, I have written in page numbers starting with the first page of text.

4. Isaac Cates, David E. Goldweber, and Christopher D. Kilgore all analyze the parallels to Gaiman and McKean’s Violent Cases. Kilgore makes the interesting argument that Violent Cases shows Gaiman exploring male violence to males as part of a generational heritage and something he has to come to terms with even within his own family. Mr. Punch, in contrast, focuses on male violence directed at women, specifically to Judy and the Mermaid and even toward the boy’s paternal grandmother after his grandfather went mad.

5. While the grandfather as traveling salesman of supposedly fancy soap probably had no direct connection to such abortions, his product might have been so used. I owe this information to Prof. Don-John Dugas, who pointed to Mike Lee’s Vera Drake (2004) for its use in that fashion before noting that Jennifer Worth, the author of Call the Midwife, pronounced the method depicted in the film as lethal: Jennifer Worth, “A deadly trade,” The Guardian. 6 January 2005. I am grateful for our many e-mail exchanges on Gaiman’s book.

6. McKean’s drawing may be echoing the horror bursting from a man’s chest in the film Alien (1979), but the boyhood scenes take place in the late 1960s, so the boy himself is not reliving that scene in his dreams.

7. For the lyrics, see https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=puppet+on+a+string+lyrics.

8. Such is the deliberate obscurity of text and drawings that the identity of the man who beats the mermaid is not certain. Cates, Goldweber, Jennifer Cox, and Joe Sanders all assume that the grandfather beats her; they see that as leading to his crashing his car at some later date and going mad. My sense is that Morton (who tried to persuade or bully the mermaid to abort) is the one with the unsentimentally practical outlook and the cold determination to beat her while the grandfather is too much the romancer and weeps afterward in ways that suggest he did not want that outcome. We have also been given more hints at that point in the narrative that Morton is Punch-like – he is hunchbacked and is bitten on the nose by Toby, and it is Punch who beats Judy to death.

9. The Professor says that the cheap carbolic would rip the skin right off your face (63), so the miners themselves presumably suffered from the soap when they tried to remove the coal dust from their faces and hands.

10. Kilgore makes this point very clearly; the boys in Mr. Punch and Violent Cases are part of families whose men are in various ways violent, and the boys sense their own impulse to follow their pattern.

11. Goldweber notes interesting parallels between Punch in the Covent Garden Churchyard, his outstretched arms resembling those of Christ, and his vanquishing the devil also giving him a divine echo. His arms even suggest a blessing as the narrator leaves the churchyard.

12. Prof. Swatchell describes Punch facing a dragon in a mummers’ play, and while the Punch-face does not look the part of Saint George as heraldic figure, the mummer Saint George (who mostly fights braggart human soldiers) is a comic figure. Father Christmas, who also appears in some of the Saint George plays, also beats his wife to death, and pays the doctor to bring her back to life again. Other characters that were common in those plays include a hunchback (often Father Christmas), a doctor, and the Devil. For more on the mummers’ plays, see Jennifer C. Vaught and J. Stevens Cox.

13. The Absolute Sandman, vol. 4, 329-332. When published in installments, this scene takes place in “The Kindly Ones: Part Thirteen” (no. 69).

14. For detailed discussion of the ambiguities, see Cates and Kilgore.

15. London: Gollancz, 2011. Rivers of London is the name of the British edition; Midnight Riots is the American name. For the complete list of volumes mentioned, see the bibliography.

16. Some of the post-imperial problems explored by Aaronovitch are analyzed by Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun and Stefanie Lethbridge.

17. Lee Zimmerman emphasizes killing the baby; one of the myth-stories in Riddley’s culture tells of eating a child, and using atomic bombs kills both children and their future. See 103–11.

18. Scott Cutler Shershow argues that Punch has continuously been repurposed for new cultural forms and issues. He summarizes the theoretical material on low culture appropriating high and high culture appropriating popular. Jennifer Cox analyzes in some detail the cultural appropriation taking place as puppet play is transformed into graphic narrative.

19. Russell Hoban (1998 edn.) p. 163.

20. David Cowart explores Canterbury as the mythic center and axis mundi in Mircea Eliade’s terms (92). He also points out the doublings present in this novel of Riddley with Lissener and Goodparley in their multiple roles as sons and as performers (91–92).

21. Sarah France focuses on the toxic masculinity that Riddley must come to terms with and reject.

22. For definitions of myth that include deliberately constructed myth-like stories, see Kathryn Hume’s The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960.

23. Shershow, 543.

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Notes on contributors

Kathryn Hume

Kathryn Hume is Sparks Professor Emerita at The Pennsylvania State University. Her eight books range from “The Owl and the Nightingale,” to Fantasy in Western Literature, Pynchon, Calvino, two on various aspects of American fiction since 1960, and job hunting for Humanities PhDs. The most recent focuses on uses of mythology in contemporary fiction.