Phantasmagoria

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Paul Taylor
Paul Taylor is our Reviews Editors. Paul is a professional musician. When he is not on the road with various jazz and Latin bands, he is developing and promoting two of his own inventions: The Blowpipes Trombone Trio, and Trombone Poetry, a solo project.

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PhantasmagoriaPhantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century
by Marina Warner
Oxford University Press, £18.99, ISBN 978-0-19-929994-2

Marina Warner has produced an extremely corporeal book, nearly 500 pages long, exploring the intangible: our relationship to concepts of the soul and the ethereal, and the way that relationship has been expressed in metaphor (‘the symbolic imagination’), in the context of science, religion and art, from the Enlightenment to the present. She does so in an erudite and scholarly cultural history (perhaps too much so for the general but interested reader) that rummages through obscure byways to find associations between seemingly disparate manifestations of a vitalistic conception of human existence. By its nature, such a wideranging study has to rely heavily on other sources and some have been digested better than others. Warner is clearly on familiar territory for example when discussing Renaissance science, Roman Catholic arcana or photography, less so when tackling the complexities of cinema history or nineteenth- century psychical research (and this partial list itself gives an idea of her eclecticism). Whatever she turns her hand to always elicits interesting insights. Inevitably, however, where there is an emphasis on breadth, depth tends to suffer.
The language is at times elliptical and the prose dense and allusive. Links can be difficult to follow as she lays out topics in a bricolage, often leaving the reader desperate for connective tissue and more sense of an overarching thesis, rather than a juxtaposition of fascinating snippets with too little to synthesize them. The result is a sense of breathlessness giving rise to a frequent feeling of puzzlement over what seems a collection of arbitrary – if fascinating – ingredients stirred into the mix.
Where the book really comes alive is when Warner foregrounds her own experiences, such as an uncanny moment in the shrine of Santa Caterina de’ Vigri in Bologna, or weighing a sample of ‘ectoplasm’ at Cambridge. In the end perhaps she is a poet rather than a historian, yet her effort to clothe the immaterial has given us a rich pudding to pull apart and examine in further detail.

Tom Ruffles

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