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'Magic lantern' is a
pleasant name for a machine even though 'the lantern of fear' was often more
apt. As the device itself evolved its names became legion and the evocative
'diorama', 'panorama' and 'phantasmagoria' gave way in the later nineteenth
century to a cacophony of neologisms: 'mutascope', 'chromatrope',
'thaumatrope', 'kinetoscope', 'zoetrope', 'stroboscope', 'praxinoscope',
'phenakistiscope'. The images these devices projected were, more often than
not, equally devilish.
David J. Jones' study is in part an account of the development of the magic
lantern show into the early forms of cinema but by 'Gothic Machine' he
intends something considerably more complex than any actual apparatus.
'Gothic "retrieves" the archaic,' he argues; 'it does so because it can be
defined, in dialectical terms, as a machine and part of the function of this
machine is retrieval.' While the projectors themselves were in Jones' view
components of the Gothic machine 'the literature and drama of the uncanny'
were essential to its operation. The themes and motifs which the emerging
visual technologies took from
print culture were in turn taken up by print culture in 'recurrent coalescence'. We can
perhaps infer that the one thing the Gothic machine has always lacked is a
stop button.
I will return to Jones' thesis since it demands close attention but readers
will find much to enjoy in this book whether or not they have particular
interest in its theoretical aspect. As an historical survey it abounds in
curious inventions, anecdotes, beliefs and eccentricities. We see the first
magic lanterns at work in the mid-seventeenth century, showing danse macabres
and other conjurations of memento mori themes common in the preceding centuries and
popular among early printers. The Gothic machine is at once in retrieval mode
and projecting apparitional images of apparitions: the trope is already
deeply embedded. A century later we encounter Georg Schrpfer using his
lantern to convene 'magic assemblages [...] in the milieu of Freemasonry and
the coffee-house society of Leipzig.' Schiller will soon use 'optical
technology as the linchpin of' his novel The Ghost-Seer and the Marquis de Sade will
associate the 'new novels' such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk with the phantasmagoria, while
Etienne-Gaspard Robertson receives an eager public in his 'Fantasmagorie' in
post-Terror Paris. We are shown many magic lantern allusions in the novels
and stories of Sheridan Le Fanu and we glimpse farmers struggling through
hard times as part-time lanternists in outlying villages, dispelling any
notion that this was an exclusively urban phenomenon. The 'unstable and
fragmented' images created by the rapid succession of new projectors tumble
into the fragmented selves of the fin-de-siecle until 'only months into
cine-history, the Gothic machine encoded (and encoding) in diverse media
reasserted itself as a subset in cinematography.' In 1910 we meet 'the first
authentically frightening monster of film' in the Edison Studios' production
of Frankenstein.
In the film's closing sequence the creator looks in the mirror and sees the
after-image of his unhappy creation but 'under the effect of love and his
better nature, the monster's image fades and Frankenstein sees himself in his
rightful young manhood'. Jones remarks 'I cannot think of a more graphic
re-envisaging of the Gothic machine.'
I have selected a few details to suggest the scope of the book. I could
mention many more but will focus here on Jones' reconstruction of Robertson's
'Fantasmagorie' since it is in several respects the keystone of both his
survey and thesis. Using Robertson's own account Jones refutes Terry Castle's
influential claim that the spectacle took place 'in the crypt of an abandoned
Capuchine convent near the Place Vendme'; its actual site was 'in the milieu
of the convent cloisters' and through his identification of Franois
d'Orblay's floorplan Jones has established that 'the refectory was the only
cloister room to have the right dimensions for the salle de fantasmagorie.' Led through a preliminary
labyrinth of corridors replete with optical illusions and frightening sound
effects Robertson's visitors were persuaded they had descended underground;
in fact a single wall separated them from the street outside, in a
neighbourhood which as Jones reminds us was a mass grave for victims of the
Terror. Jones conducts us out of the labyrinth into Robertson's 'well-lit
laboratory' and then, with a glass harmonica ringing in our ears, through the
'Egyptian' door to the 'Mysteries of Isis', then again on to the dark
'chapel' where the 'phantasmagoria was a storm of conflicting signifiers,
some licit and others illicit, some ecclesiastical, some pagan, some
anticlerical and some necromantic'. We are given a taste of Robertson's
accompanying lecture; not the 'somber, incoherent speech on death,
immortality, and the unsettling power of superstition' which Castle describes
but 'a montage of literary and scientific sources' Ð Racine, Sterne,
Voltaire, Dupuis, Lavater, Rousseau, Schiller. All this before we are
rewarded with the magic lantern show in which among other wonders 'Robespierre
and Marat were "resurrected" nightly.'
Jones' recreation of the experience of visiting the 'Fantasmagorie' is
peculiarly vivid and the reader might feel she's spent an hour or more in the
same busy tomb herself. Reproductions of two stills from Howard Wood's
computer-generated walk-through film of the site are also evocative and I
would like to have seen more. An overall count of five illustrations in a
book so devoted to the visual seems an ungenerous allowance by the publisher.
The book's disagreements with Terry Castle's account extend considerably
further than her description of the 'Fantasmagorie' and they are intrinsic to
Jones' notion of the Gothic machine. In what frame of mind did visitors
approach Robertson's spectacle? Castle's thesis is that the
eighteenth-century enlightenment would have already undermined their belief
in the objective existence of the supernatural and they would view these
goings-on with a considerable degree of empiricist detachment. Jones is
surely right to dispute this. The Republican edicts against religion would
soon be rescinded and it seems less than likely that at so early a period
empiricist scepticism affected many except doctrinaire revolutionaries and
the philosophical elite. Religion's influence may have begun to wane but was
far from dead; indeed the next century would see the rise of a newfound
spiritualism coupled with a resurgence of occult investigation and practice
foreshadowed in Robertson's 'Mysteries' and emphasized by Jones in his
discussions of Gothic motifs in Baudelaire's poems and Huysmans' novels.
Robertson sought in any case to extend the 'supernatural' beyond the familiar
ghosts and ghouls; magnifying fleas to gigantic sizes, for example, showed
the audience what unseen, even monstrous, phenomena empiricism itself was
disclosing. The shifting borders between scientific speculation and science
fiction were ready-made components of the Gothic machine.
The implications of this disagreement are crucial. For Castle 'The
rationalists did not so much negate the traditional spirit world as displace
it into the realm of psychology. [...] The epistemologically unstable,
potentially fantastic metaphor of the phantasmagoria simply condensed the
historical paradox: by relocating the world of ghosts in the closed space of
the imagination, one ended up supernaturalizing the mind itself.' I can see
Jones frowning at the phrase 'the closed space of the imagination'; for him,
I suspect, the 'space of the imagination' is never closed and this is
precisely what the 'metaphor of the phantasmagoria' reveals. The
phantasmagoria projects and externalises Ð and by externalising it keeps
unending possibilities in play. It is therefore at once a metaphor for and a
working part of the Gothic machine. And the wheels Ð and reels Ð of the
Gothic machine go on turning regardless of the claims of a rationalised and
essentially materialist psychology.
In its own sphere Gothic Machine
should be regarded as essential reading for a long time to come. Perhaps an
enterprising scholar will reconsider the poems and plays of Thomas Lovell
Beddoes in terms of the Gothic machine, for it would be a corrective to the
notion that Beddoes was an isolated revivalist exhuming Jacobean corpses of
theme and diction. There has been some discussion of his borrowing from early
nineteenth-century opera but none, so far as I know, of a possible debt to
the phantasmagoria. Might we not read Beddoes' Dance of Death in the
cloisters (Death's Jest-Book V.4)
as a scenario for a magic lantern show very like the first spectacles
described by Jones? Commentary generally relates it to the mural tradition,
set in motion by Beddoes' fancy, but here as elsewhere the concept of the
Gothic machine offers a broader perspective. Certainly a lanternist would
have fewer problems than a stage director with the doubtful substantiality of
several of Death's Jest-Book's
characters.
I do regret that unless readers search Gothic Machine's acknowledgements
and endnotes some may not realise that David J. Jones is one and the same as
the poet
David Annwn. There are, of course, reasons for an author to separate his
scholarly from his creative work and this may seem an idle quibble. Nevertheless
the themes which wave through Gothic machine have energized Annwn's remarkable
poetry for many years and I hope appreciation of Jones will further the appreciation
of Annwn.
© Alan Halsey 2011
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