Frighteningly literate and well-informed, Marina Warner is the poet-scholar we read murmuring ‘Yes… Yes… But… And?’ in perpetual delight at the intelligence on display.
A companion to Warner’s earlier books on fairy-stories and the complex of ideas which surrounds them, ‘Phantasmagoria’ is a meditation on what we mean by the soul in a secular age, and on the various technologies that seem to steal or imitate the spirit, so as to create an appearance of life. We live in mirrors and on videotape, and we are summed up in models of our DNA; we watch things on film that never could be, massacres of Orcs and elves made more real than the deaths in the news. For earlier ages, there were mirages and mirrors, spirit messages and the slime of ectoplasm; at the edges of our culture there are lurching zombies and the garish dreams of Christian millennialists. Warner knows more than any of us about these things as a whole, and draws out connections thin but strong as spidersilk.
She is more at home with the Bible and Renaissance art and the weird tales of German Romantics than with contemporary popular culture, but she gives the new and the commercial full attention when it strikes her as relevant. For someone who did not grow up with the works of Philip K Dick at her fingertips, she has a clear sense of what he considered important. Often, too, her grasp of the popular stops her being pompous – a discussion of zombies which might otherwise be all ‘Jane Eyre’ and cognitive philosophy is anchored in the accessible by references to ‘Night of the Living Dead’.
