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American Phantasmagoria American phantasmagoria The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Sollors, Werner. 2017. American phantasmagoria. In American Phantasmagoria : Modes of Representation in US Culture, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Simone Francescato. Venezia Lido: Supernova, 2017. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:34401514 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP American phantasmagoria* Werner Sollors Per Alide I. A difficult task for American college applicants is writing a personal essay that defines them, expresses their individuality, and also makes them admissible at the school of their choice. It is, in fact, such a difficult task that more and more high school students seek help in composing these supposedly revelatory words, thus creating job opportunities for talented writers around the world who offer online assistance and even write complete essays, for a fee. This situation forces admissions officers to screen essays carefully for “suspicious language.” That is done with the help of “red-flag” word lists, one of which claimed, in academic year 2016-17, that “if the words ‘labour,’ ‘parlour,’ or ‘phantasmagoric’ show up anywhere in an essay, we know we’re dealing with some out-of-work teacher from Blackpool who just got clocked by Brexit.”1 I shall here not be concerned with the British spellings that Webster altered for American usage, but with “phantasmagoric” and “phantasmagoria.” Are they really red-flag giveaways of a writer’s Britishness? To that question, there is a quick answer: according to GoogleNgrams, “phantasmagoric” and “phantasmagoria” appear just about as often in British as in American usage, at least as far as printed books are concerned.2 But what exactly does the word mean? “Phantasmagoria” is often used in its metaphorical sense of “(vision of) a rapidly transforming collection or series of imaginary (and usually fantastic) forms, such as may be experienced in a dream or fevered state, or evoked by literary description.”3 In its original meaning, however, it goes back to the French word fantasmagorie, naming a contraption that helped to produce such illusionary forms, especially in theatrical productions and other performances and spectacles. Fantasmagorie “grew out of optical experiments made by its Belgian inventor Étienne-Gaspard Robertson during the 1780s. It was first * For American Phantasmagoria: Modes of Representation in US Culture, in Honor of Alide Cagidemetrio, eds. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Simone Francescato (Venice: Supernova, 2017) presented in Paris in 1798 and later exhibited in London by Paul de Philipsthal in late 1801 and 1802.”4 Alide Cagidemetrio has analyzed this invention as a modern technological means of imagining and representing the past. It was employed, for example, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was concerned in his historical fiction “with the blurring of the boundaries between illusion and reality.”5 She shows that in The House of the Seven Gables “the constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures” in Maule’s Well strongly affects Clifford, that, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s memories of the past appear as “an exhibition of phantasmagoric forms,” whereas Pearl’s fancy works with a “preternatural activity” and a “wild energy” that resembles “nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights,” and that, in his Grimshawe, Hawthorne offered a retrospective definition as he was aiming toward making a scene “very dreamlike and feverish.” Hawthorne writes: “Scenes and events that have once stained themselves, in deep colours, on the curtain that Time hangs around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more strongly than they.”6 Robertson and Philipsthal (who also worked under the name “Philidor”) used a laterna magica that was hidden from the audience as it projected images on glass slides from behind the stage onto a screen of transparent fabric or onto a literal “smoke screen.” The Berlin panorama painter and optician Johann Carl Enslen and his son Klaus Georg used lit physical objects and living persons whose images could be projected through lenses or mirrors onto the stage. There they could appear life- sized, enlarged, or reduced—whatever the theatrical need might be. Cagidemetrio carefully examines the optical device itself that produces effects that are visible only to the audience, not to the other actors: By making the theatrical space a “camera obscura”, or a “magic box”, phantasmagoria could project a “totality of effects” on onlookers. At the same time the performance was the result of a concurrence of different means, mirrors, slides of laterna magica, live actors and sounds. All these would be invisible to the audience, while the actors in the pit would not see the effects produced by their bodies and movements reflected by the concealed mirrors and projected upon the 2 stage. Their know-how about the workings of the optical instruments was the substitute for their lack of an actual vision of the stage.7 The new term and the invention that it named must have hit a cultural nerve in the wake of the French Revolution. Robertson produced scenes from the Reign of Terror in an abandoned Parisian Capuchin convent as well as performances with “bleeding nuns,” Death with a scythe, and the three witches as well as Banquo’s ghost from Macbeth.8 A French collection of German ghost stories was published in 1812 under the title Fantasmagoriana. It gave strong impulses to Gothic fiction, as it was read in a group session in Switzerland by Mary Shelley, inspiring her to write Frankenstein (1818), and by John William Polidori, whose creative response was the story “The Vampyre” (1819). Also present at that Fantasmagoriana reading was Lord Byron, who, as Paul Martin suggested, afterwards came to see drama “in the phantasmagorical light shed by the modern stage and its association.”9 Goethe was fascinated by the new technological medium and the effects it could create in the theater, most especially for productions of his Faust. As Marina Warner showed, Goethe wanted the Earth Spirit in Faust’s study to appear in the form of the pentagram, as represented in Rembrandt’s engraving, A Scholar in His Study (“Faust”). For an 1829 production of Faust, Goethe wished to use the technique of a laterna magica rear projection upon a screen in the back of the stage, on which an illuminated head could appear in gradually increasing size, creating the illusion of coming closer to the audience in the darkened theater. Goethe wondered how to obtain such a mechanism and two-way mirrors through which the vision of Helen of Troy or the first appearance of Mephistopheles as a poodle could be created, and he asked a correspondent: “Could you please find out, as soon as possible, who constructs such an apparatus, how could we obtain it, and what preparations must be made for it?”10 Edgar Allan Poe appears to have known the answer to Goethe’s question. As Cagidemetrio notes, Poe recommended that Americans should follow Enslen’s production techniques of Macbeth in making a “shadowy figure” appear in Macbeth’s chair. In the play’s banquet scene when Macbeth proclaims, startled to see the ghost of Banquo, whose murder he had ordered, seated in his chair: “Thou canst not say I 3 did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me.” “Speaking of the usual representation of the banquet-scene in Macbeth,” Poe writes that Friedrich von Raumer, “the German historian, mentions a shadowy figure thrown by optical means into the chair of Banquo, and producing intense effect upon the audience. Enslen, a German optician, conceived this idea, and accomplished it without difficulty.”11 Martin calls particular attention to the contrast, in producing Macbeth, between an actor’s body playing Banquo and the apparition of Banquo’s ghost, for “the excitement of Philipsthal’s Phantasmagoria, no doubt heightened by its technical crudity and lack of focus, . allowed [audiences], albeit momentarily, to forget that these images too were the result of conscious and workmanlike contrivance. Philipsthal demonstrated, in a most spectacular way, that such excitements could be standardized” and his “exhibition offered Gothic thrills as a commodity, and, by presenting spectre-raising as a novel entertainment worth paying for in itself, the Phantasmagoria made the exhilaration of the fantastic a mechanical wonder.”12 It was a mechanical wonder that also anticipated some of the effects of cinema. Summoning further examples from De Quincey and Carlyle and highlighting the parallel transformation of the panorama from a new invention into a metaphor, Cagidemetrio invokes Walter Benjamin’s view of the flâneur who abandons himself in the phantasmagorias of the marketplace and who sees Haussmann’s transformations of Paris as emblem of the phantasmagoria of civilization itself.13 In that passage Benjamin was alluding to the “commodity fetishism” section of Karl Marx’s Capital, in which Marx described the exchange value of objects that, as they enter the marketplace in capitalism, replaces their original use value and transforms physical objects and human relations into commodities that have little to do with the
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