The Phantasmagoria
Shortly after Verdi’s Aïda
opened in Naples in 1872, Carlo Caputo, a correspondent for the Venetian
newspaper La Scena reported to his
readers:
For the last few days we have
been living a life which has long since seemed a thing of the past in
Naples. It was a delight, an ecstasy,
something like a scene from the Arabian Nights, an emanation, an intoxicating
harmony, which, issuing from the throats of singers, from the depths of the
orchestra, from the scenery and decoration, from the perfection of the ensemble, and above all from the
gigantic work of the composer, found an echo of their notes in each fibre of
thousands of spectators, and from thousands of others who crowded round the
entrances of the theatre, in which they could not find room, and which spread
like electricity, even giving rise at least to that phantasmagoric
demonstration,. By means of which they wished to honour Verdi. From the doors
of San Carlo to that of his residence at the Hotel Crocelle.[1]
And on and on goes Caputo’s description of the vast throng and its
enthusiasm. This is a wonderful account
of nineteenth-century Neopolitan love of music, especially of opera. It reminds me of the times when as a boy in
Brooklyn in the late 1940s my mother told me to take in or pick up shoes from
the Italian cobbler around the corner, and whose little dark shop was filled
with music, especially of grand opera—Verdi, Rossini, Puccini… I would
listen and the shoemaker would sometimes explain or more usually just
express his wonder and admiration of the music, the singers, and the
performances he imagined in his mind, whether from memory or not.
But everything in this description from 1872 culminates in that one word
phantasmagoric so out of tune with
our own world that my computer’s spell-check keeps warning me in red highlight
that it must be wrong. The machine is a
little happier with an f rather than a ph, but only because I have used the
word so often in my books about Alfred Dreyfus and the way he and his wife felt
that their suffering and frustration made them seem to be living in a phantasmagoria (in French fantasmagorie).
But this is a strange word for us today, and even if we tried to compare
what happened in Naples in the aftermath of the first performances of Aïda with the razzle-dazzle, pyrotechnic
electronic son et lumière shows that
pass for rock concerts these days (so I am told and occasionally glimpsed on
the television news), phantasmagoria
is too old a word to be appropriate either for the spectacle itself or the
reactions of the crowds. For Caputo,
too, the reactions of the people on the street seemed unusual, a thing of the
past, a recrudescence of something her had heard of from his parents or
grandparents, the joy of l’ancienne
régime, its total giving of itself to music and the other arts of the
theatre.
If we use the word at all these days—sometimes I think I am the only who
does, and I search for tis usage in everything I read—it is basically a
metaphor, more dead than alive, meant to convey something that is slightly
grotesque and frightening, a hodgepodge of colours, sounds, and
crowd-feeling. At its etymological core,
naturally, lies the phantasm, the fantastic, the phantom and the fantasy (or fantasia). Since we have dropped the old distinction
between fancy and wit, or fantasy and imagination, it is hard to catch the
archaic senses of the root: the glowing, glowering, glaring light from another
realm, the ghostly, ghastly shadow world beyond or below this one, the unreal
which seems more real than the tangible, logical, natural experiences of our
normal lives. There is therefore
something sentimental and comic in its use, as in The Phantom of the Opera, which is definitely not what Verdi or his
audiences were concerned about. Though the moans and groans of the fated,
dying, soon-to-be spectral lovers buried in the tomb in the fourth act of Aïda will soon be.
As a technical term, phantasmagoria
refers to a kind of late eighteenth-century performance involving sound and
light, darkened spaces, eerie atmosphere, images of dead persons from history
projected from a magic lantern on smoky clouds in crowded spaces. Combining many sensations, the phenomenon seems
to lead right up to the grand’eloquence
and pomposity of Wagnerian productions at Bayreuth, and to the idealized Gesammeltkunstwerk of the Middle
European styles at the opening of the twentieth century, or its nightmarish
realization in the torch-lit processions and rallies of the Nazi regime in the
1930s.[2]
How do we deal with these kind of spectacular, mythical events that
happen, not so much in the fiction or the imagination of great authors, but in
the world of historical reality—as manifestation of collective trance-like
projections from deep inside the shared unconsciousness of peoples? By using texts that are already old-fashioned
or antique, that is, where the language, points of references, tones and objects
described have passed into the unfamiliar—but not so far back as to be lost in
the mists of time and can only be approached as rhetorical exercises—we start
to find ourselves almost grasping our own ways of seeing, thinking, remembering
and imagining from outside of ourselves.
Take the figure that Balzac uses of “the mental lorgnette” Le Peau de Chagrin (1831), somewhat
awkwardly translated as The Wild Ass’s
Skin in 1906. A lorgnette is not a
common word nor a familiar object, though its usual referent is still around as
a pair of “opera glasses” held on a single stem. The name derives from the old French term for
squinting or peering intently. The
character in the novel who uses the term means to describe a fashionable
experience among those who attend public spectacles:
This way of using the mental
lorgnette is the secret of conversation nowadays, and the whole art of the
complete courtier.[3]
The purpose of such a metaphorical instrument is to quickly size-up the
company you are in, interpret their words and gestures accordingly, and react
with an advantageous word and deed of your own.
Conversation is the oil that allows society to roll along smoothly. The “secret,” however, is to be smarter and
more perceptive than others, so as to catch their motivations and unconscious
purposes. While we still have
“conversations” these days, they are more apt to be something other than polite
negotiations between refined people—courtiers, whether they are actually
members of an aristocratic or royal society or not; but rather something far
more vague that has replaced the familiar terms of barely a generation ago,
such as discussion, argument, debate or discourse. Somehow, too, “conversation” has become a
near synonym of “narrative”, which has leaped from being a way of telling a
story through a sequence of events that are arranged from cause to effect, into
being an agenda or secret agenda, a propagandistic rationale for some
outrageous political claim. Moreover,
since we are pointing out the way once simple, ordinary expressions have turned
archaic or passed over into strange modern locutions, note how “complete” in
Balzac’s passage means “perfect” and “typical”.
As for “mental,” that takes another leap into the darkness of our own
abysmal distinction from the near-past of the early nineteenth-century, a time
before modern psychology and psychoanalysis, when “unconscious” meant either a
straightforward loss of waking awareness or a distracted wandering of
attention: certainly not a virtually autonomous alternative to the conscious
ego awareness where we know ourselves—and know this self only as the tip of an
iceberg of repressed and suppressed thoughts and feelings. Like “moral,” “mental” has less to do with
the workings of the mind or the brain, than with the psychology we call—or once
was called—“depth psychology.”
Yet in the early nineteenth century when Balzac was writing, there was
already a deep stirring of interest in—and awareness of—parts of our mind that
did not belong to consciousness, not under the control of our will, and yet somehow
essentially if not definitively part of our real self. Hence, a little earlier in The Wild Ass’s Skin, the narrator
reports the following:
I looked around, and saw the
countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the first tier. My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at
once with incredible clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect
above its flower. How had my senses
received this warning? There is
something in these inward tremors that shallow people find astonishing, but the
phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced as simple as those of
external vision; so I was not surprised, but much vexed. My studies of our mental faculties, so little
understood, helped me at any rate to find in my own excitement some living proofs
of my theories.[4]
The young man, engaged in composing a treatise on the power of the
will—so typical of the post-Revolutionary period—comes close to framing his
ideas in terms we can understand. The
setting in a playhouse, with its artificial lights focused on the stage, its
tiers of boxes where the elite sit and observe the play and each other, is also
the traditional rhetorical figure of “all the world’s a stage,” a theatre of
moral observation. The narrator’s “look”
becomes both what his ordinary senses perceive through “external vision” and at
the same time what his trained sensitivity or sensibility can register from
“the phenomena of our inner consciousness.”
On the one hand, what Balzac describes in his novel is not an experience
we are unfamiliar with—men and women in a theatre jockeying for positions of
influence over one another, trying to read the intentions that are manifest in
their gestures and tones of voice, just as an audience they try to interpret
the play as more than just the playwright’s words spoken on stage; so that the
whole performance at the theatre, mixing in the play as a dramatic fiction and
the social intercourse among the spectators, creates a lively and multi-layered
historical event—the kind that can spill out of the theatre and into the
streets, as we see in how Neapolitans get caught up in the festival celebration
of Verdi’s opera and find their enthusiasm mutually rewarding, bonding their
sense of national identity, at the very time when in Italy a national state is
being consolidated out of so many small city-states, colonial enclaves, and
ancient conglomerations. On the other
hand, the theatre of the mind and the social world depicted in The Wild Ass’s Skin seethes with new
individuality, self-consciousness and insecure boundaries between individual
and individual, individual and increasingly porous class-relationships, and
individual and the various aspects of self that once were clear, traditional
and legal—the public displays of act and word, the private disguising and manœuvering
for sexual and financial advantage, the promptings of physical anxieties,
desires, fears and indeterminate longings.
If we were asked to describe an analogous situation and collection of
people on the make, could we, in the first instance, imagine such an event? It would take a lot of special pleading to
realize the diverse class, race, age, gender and other constituent elements coming
into close proximity and then trying to interact in such ways as to protect,
enhance, neutralize, and influence one another.
Mostly, we no longer think of ourselves as equal to the performances we
play in public or in more intimate scenes: even putting aside the absence in
the very near past of all the instantaneous digital means of communication that
have replaced the games that once were the essence of social interactions, the
charades, the posturing, the ingratiating and threatening signals sent out, and
the hence the need to constantly be on the alert of danger and
opportunity.
For us, an “anecdotic history” falls flat in its superficiality, and we
find the passions depicted on the stage of opera almost inscrutable because of
its sentimentality, grandiose declamations, seemingly insincere and impossible
idealism, though we may still—or some of us, at least, in some kind of way that
would have shocked the men and women prancing through the streets of Naples in
1872 or jostled one another in the overheated stalls and boxes of Balzac’s
fictionalized Parisian theatre in 1831.
These experiences to us seem like a phantasmagoria—all smoke and
mirrors, noise and confusion, make-believe scariness and the madness of our own
souls set adrift from the jargon-ridden superficialities of modern life.
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