Spirited Away

Marina Warner is one of our most erudite and morally serious writers, a historian of how forms and figures become the repositories of larger cultural values and meanings. In her earlier books she explored, among other things, how the Virgin Mary became "so satisfying a symbol"; how the female form became an allegory for desires and virtues that real women were thought to lack--justice, liberty, wisdom; and how the short career of Joan of Arc came to lodge "in the minds of people who heard her story" through the ages. Warner is interested in the ways that the really big furniture of our minds--religious as well as secular worldviews--came to be there.

Phantasmagoria is her most ambitious book, an intellectually dazzling struggle with how the modern world (beginning roughly in the Renaissance) has imagined the stuff of souls, the nature of the psyche, the "mysterious, elusive, and ethereal" thing that somehow distinguishes the truly dead from the living and makes us what we are. It is also her most challenging book, a wonderfully suggestive though not rigorously analytical work that often reaches further than it can grasp and admits as much. After all, the "enthralling borderland between animation and lifelessness" is not a well-lit terrain, however irresistibly it draws our attention.

In one sense the word "phantasmagoria" captures precisely what the book is about: how various technologies--wax figures at Madame Tussaud's, photographs, movies, digital images--became vehicles for imagining something that animates and gives life to what is lifeless. It is a late-eighteenth-century neologism that refers to both the optical illusion of a "phantom"--an apparition or spirit, an appearance that deceives--and the instrument first used in 1798 by Belgian inventor Étienne-Gaspard Robertson to generate these creatures. (In fact, Warner shows, the seventeenth-century polymath Jesuit Athanasius Kircher had already begun painting images of spirits on glass slides, one of several technologies for "producing and rendering the operations of fantasy.") But if the means by which we represent what we know to be unreal were all that interested Warner, her book would not be so compelling and so rich.

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