Guignol

Guignol (pronounced guin-yholl)

(1) A puppet, especially a hand puppet.

(2) A puppet show.

(3) As Grand-Guignol, a theatrical production featuring melodramatic tension, horror, and shock.

(4) A French insult meaning one is an “oaf” or “buffoon”.

Early 1800s: A borrowing from Modern French, the origin (in this context) reputedly the name of a silk weaver of Lyon which was the central character of the puppet theatre which French puppeteer Laurent Mourguet installed there for the earliest performance (in 1795) of French puppet shows.  Because of the origin, the word is sometimes capitalized and some historians suggest there may be a link with guigner (to wink), nictation one of the puppet’s signature gestures.  Guignol is a noun, the noun plural is guignols.

Guignol’s creation was serendipitous and a matter of economic necessity.  The silk weaver Laurent Mourguet (1769–1844) from Lyon had been forced from his trade by the economic convulsions in the wake of the French Revolution (1789) and by 1797, after for some time scratching-out a living as an itinerant peddler, he took to the business of teeth pulling (the origins of dentistry), one of the attractions being one required little equipment other than a chair and several pairs of pliers.  It certainly required no qualifications but unlike today’s dentists, there were no fees and his income came from the sale of the potions and herbal preparations he sold a pain relievers, some apparently at least temporarily effective.  Seeking a marketing edge, as an advertising gimmick, he set up a puppet show in front of the chair on which he performed his gruesome procedures.

History doesn’t record how well regarded Monsieur Mourguet was for his dentistry but within a short time his puppetry had attracted such a following he gave up all things odontic and became a professional puppeteer, one who would these days be called a social realist because his performances focused on the cares and concerns of his working class audience, matters he knew well from his own humble background.  His following grew because of the topicality of his material which referenced the scandals and corruption then so often in the news.  In another modern touch (which would much appeal to later French deconstructionists), he created an ensemble cast of characters, the best known of which were the silk weaver Monsieur Guignol and his wife Madelon and while some things were constant (such as Guignol’s fondness for drink), there was fluidity about the roles the others would from time to time play and while they all were there to entertain, politics, poverty and the of the travails of the working class existence were always the underlying themes.  Despite that however, what characterized his work was the good humor and happy endings, the French use of “Guignol” as an insult meaning something like “oaf” or “buffoon” is something like the use of “muppet” in much of the English-speaking world; the muppet puppets weren’t stupid, they just looked as if they were.

The later performance genre was Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (The Theatre of the Great Puppet) and usually referred to as Grand-Guignol (pronounced gron guin-yholl).  Grand-Guignol was a Parisian theatre which specialized in grotesque horror shows in which the puppets sometimes dripped blood, accounting for the phrase “grand-guignol” being used of any film, book or other production packed with blood and gore.  The theatre proper existed between 1897-1962 and featured a succession of naturalistic horror shows which relied for their appeal on the sort of spectacle then not available in any other form of public performance.  Sometimes there we happy endings and sometimes not and really it mattered little, the point being the death toll and the gruesomeness of the mean of dispatch and it was a comment more on the audience attracted than the storylines that most seemed to find Grand-Guignol entertaining rather than shocking as initially it was intended to be.  The modern version of all this gratuitous violence is the “splatter movie” though that doesn't mean Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol can be blamed for I Know Who Killed Me (2007).

The blood soaked Grand-Guignol is notable for the graphic art its advertising spawned and these pieces influenced film studios around the world, their motifs still used today.

It was remarkable Grand-Guignol lasted as long as it did because the audience numbers had been in decline since the end of World War II (1939-1945) and it never came close to regaining the popularity the theatre enjoyed in the inter-war years.  Much has been made of the decline of interest being linked to the revelations of the horrors perpetrated during the holocaust, the argument being that whatever the puppets depicted (which once would have been thought unthinkable in modern, civilized Europe) could be as awful as the gas chambers and crematoria of the Third Reich’s death camps.  It was something in the vein of (the often misquoted) 1949 dictum of German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”.  However, it was during those years of declining interest that television reached critical mass and relaxations in censorship meant what was able to be shown in French cinemas could be more confronting than the sanitized stuff to which distributors were once restricted.  The competition for eyeballs had become fierce.

Not all puppets are so gruesome: Lindsay Lohan interviewed by Air New Zealand’s Rico the puppet for one of the airline’s infomercials, Los Angeles 2014.