MDMD(11): Her Plainly Visible Phantom

[Dave Monroe]

"...her plainly visible Phantom attends Mason as if he
were a Commissioner of Unfinish'd Business,
representing Rebekah at her most vital and belov'd. 
Is this, like the Bread and Wine, a kindness of the
Almighty, sparing him a sight he could not have
abided?  What might that be, too merciless to bear?"
(M&D, Ch. 16, p. 172)

To continue from Terry Castle, "Spectral Politics:
Apparition Belief and the Romantic Imagination," The
Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the
Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995),
pp. 168-89 ...

"The irony here is that [Keith] Thomas's own
sociological argument itself depends on an
unacknowledged psychological assumption: ghosts are
really 'hallucinations.'  Mysterious 'mental and
perceptual processes' make people think they see
apparitions.  But where, one might ask, does the
modern conception of the hallucination come from?  And
how does it really differ, if at all, from the older
conecption of the supernatural agent?  It is precisely
the historian's own psychological language, intruding
quietly in the very passage in which he renounces
psychology, that requires some historical
investigation." (p. 170)

[again, Castle is here discussing Keith Thomas' great
Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York:
Scribner's, 1971), specifically, a passage from p. 595
thereof ...]

   "The belief that gosts and spectres are only
products of imagination--that they come from within
the mind itself--is, in fact, as I suggested in the
coda to 'Phantasmagoria,' a relatively recent notion,
one that has emerged in a definitive form in Western
Europe only over the past two hundred and fifty years.
 In earlier times popular thinking held that most
apparitions were supernatural in origin: messengers
from an invisible world of spirits--either angels or
demons in human guise, or, more frighteningly and
atavistically, the wandering souls of the dead.  After
1700, however, with the reakup of traditional
communities, the growing challenge to religious
orthodoxy, and the popularization of new scientific
attitudes, a more skeptical and mechanistic view
gradually came to prevail: that ghostly apparitions
were 'things of the mind'--figments or phantasmata,
produced by a disordered or overwrought brain." (p.
170)

Which is of course why the Enlightenment "Man of
Science," Mason, "abruptly certain that Dieter is a
Ghost as well" (why?), questions, "How wise would it
be, however, to share this Revelation with Maskelyne?"

(M&D, Ch. 16, p. 173).  Hm ... what IS the deal with
Dieter here, by the way?  Why, "'Pray, erase Diter
from your Min, and I shall be much oblig'd,'" "''Tis
Dieter who's in Peril here,'" "'I see his Sould
insulted in ways Souls do not bear readily,'" "'His
Fate has Consequences within my own,'" (ibid.) and so
forth?  But to continue ...

"Phantasmagoria" (as in, "the coda to") refers to ...

Castle, Terry.  "Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics
   of Modern Reverie."  Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15.
   No. 1 (Autumn, 1988): 26-61.

Also included as Ch. 9, pp. 140-167, of The Female
Thermometer.  Q. definitely v.  But, fortunately,
"Spectral Politics" conveniently
paraphrases/summarizes that as well, at least in
relation to the period immediately of concern here
(the earlier paper runs through the gothic,
Romanticism, theatrical and optical technologies up to
cinema, and Freudian psychology as well; and see also
her introduction to the recent Oxford World Classics
ed. of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, which
is in turn derived from the paper preceeding
"Phantasmagoria" in The Female Thermometer) so ...

   "Which isn't to say, I hasten to add, that men an
women in earlier periods either failed to recognize or
denied the delusion-making powers of the
imagination....  What is new in the eighteenth
century--and particularly the second half of the
eighteenth century--is the peculiar sense of urgency
that begins to attach itself to psychological
speculation.  Beacuse traditional beliefs in the
'Inviible World' no longer seemed plausible--the
ancient belief in spirits and demons, Enlightenment
rationalists like to argue, had been utterly
exploded--apparitions ahd to be reinterpreted as
coming from within.  We tend to take this relocation
of the spectral for granted.  Yet what I would like to
argue in what follows is that the act of
internalization--the uncanny absorption of ghosts and
apparitions into the world of thought--was actually a
momentous even in the history of Western
consciousness, with paradoxical consequences for the
modern theory of the imagination." (pp. 170-1)

"Christian divines ... warned--with considerable
prescience--that giving up the doctrine of spirits
would ultimately undermine other articles of faith,
including the belief in the Resurrection and the
immortality of the soul." (p. 171)

   "But at the same time that it challenged
superstition, the psychological paradigm also created
the possibility of a new and more insidious kind of
enslavement: to the haunting forms of the imagination
itself.  Once an apparition-producing faculty was
introduced into the human psyche, the psyche became
(potentially) a world of apparitions.  Human beings
continued to see ghosts, only the ghosts were now
inside, not outside.... here was now an alienating
force within subjectivity itself--a kind of
crypto-supernatural agency implicit in the very act of
thinking.  One could now be 'possessed' by the
phantoms of one's own thought--terrorized, enticed,
taken over by mental images--just as in earlier
centuries people had suffered the vistations of real
spirits and demons.
   "To prevent thoughts from turning into ghosts, the
act of thinking had to be regulated....  Too much
study, brooding over obscure intellectual problems,
reading into the night, excessive mourning, and,
especially, overindulgence in poetic or erotic
fantasies--all prompted the appearance of spectral
forms.... the dangers of reverie--the obsessional
solipsistic replay of mental images in 'the mind's
eye.'  The inward process of ghost-seeing all too
easily modulated into actual ghost-seeing, the
eruption of the hallucinatory.  The political metaphor
resurfaced, only in a new repressive context: the
imagination itself was now figured as a capricious
tyrant, always threatening to overthrow the frail
authority of reason." (pp. 174-5)

   "We might take Daniel Defoe's Essay on the History
and Reality of Apparitions (1727) as an interesting
transitional work ..." (p. 175)

   "For Defoe, some false apparitions are merely the
'Vapour of the Brain, a sick delirious fume of Smoke
in the Hypochondria; forming it self in such and such
Figure to the Eye-sight of the Mind ... which all
look'd upon with a calm Revision, would appear, as it
really is, nothing but a Nothing, a Skeleton of the
Brain, a Whymsy, and no more' ....  But other supposed
ghosts come about for more compelling reasons.  He
posits a hantom-producing faculty within the brain, a
psychic mechanism which (as Nietzsche would later) he
labels the 'Conscience.'" (p. 177)

   "The problem with displacing the supernatural
'back' into the realm of psychology, however, is that
it remains precisely that: only a displacement.  The
unearthliness, the charisma, the devastating noumenon
of the supernatural is conserved.  One cannot speak in
the end, it seems to me, of a 'decline of magic' in
post-Enlightenment Western culture, only perhaps
because of its relocation within the new empire of
subjectivity itself....  Until it is possible to speak
of the ghost inhabiting, as it were, the mind of
rationalism itself, this sense of being haunted is
likely to remain--far more than any nervous fear of
the police--the distinctive paranoia of modern life."
(p. 189)

And do note ...

"He tries to joke with himself.  Isn't this suppos'd
to be the Age of Reason?  To believe in the cold light
of this all-business world that Rebekah haunts him is
to slip, to stagger in a crowd, into the embrace of
the Painted Italian Whore herslf, and the ASir to fill
with suffocating incense, and the radiant Deity to go
dim forever.  But if Reason be also Permission to
believe in our Earthly Senses, then how can he not
concede to her some Resurrection?-- to dney her, how
cruel!" (M&D, Ch. 15, p. 164)

And I've mentioned before the anti-Catholicism
implicit-to-explicit in the gothic, which, like the
Jacobean revenge tragedy, often demonizes the
iconophilic, ritualistic, vestigially pagan Catholic
South ("the Painted Italian Whore") ...

Anyway, Pynchon's "magic realism" here, then ... but
I'm esp. curious about the more sinister imagery here,


"At times he believes he has almost seen black Fumes
welling from the Surface of her Apparition, heard her
Voice thickening to the timbres of the Beasts...the
serpents of Hell, real and swift, lying just the other
side of her Shadow...the smell of them in their long,
cold Waiting....  He gazes, at such moments, feeling
pleasurably helpless." (M&D, Ch. 16, p. 172)

Why "pleasurably helpless"?  Note also ...

"She bares her Teeth, and pales, and turns, drifting
away, evaporating before she is halfway across the
slain forest." (M&D, Ch. 16, p. 172)

And, earlier ...

"Here eyes have broken into white, and grown pointed
at the outer ends, her ears are back like a cat's."
(M&D, Ch. 15, p. 164)

Kree-pee ...

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