Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  H. G. Wells figures more prominently in the Cyclopaedia, perhaps because he took his haunting more seriously. He published one of his most famous and well-known stories, “The Invisible Man,” in 1897. As with so many other narratives in the nineteenth century, this story turns on a scientific experiment gone completely and tragically wrong. In “The Invisible Man,” the main character, Doctor Griffin, of University College, develops a potion to turn himself invisible—but, to his horror, he cannot, even with all his scientific knowledge and academic training, reverse course to attain fleshiness again. This, even though he thought he would prefer total invisibility to his normal state. Doomed to his strange new life, Griffin moves from one place to the next as an unwilling and slightly confused specter. Like Victor Frankenstein, he has uncovered one of the secrets to life, and, again as with Victor, the experiment turns nasty.

  The master of the genre was Henry James, who published three ghost stories over a thirty-year period: “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), “Sir Edmund Orme” (1892), and his most popular ghost tale (and one of the most well-known ghost stories of all time), the amazingly enigmatic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). Henry James’s fascination with ghosts and the unanswerable would slowly rub off on his younger brother, the renowned psychologist William James, who became one of the staunchest, most vocal, and most respected advocates of the paranormal.

  Henry James drew the title for his last ghost story from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Lady Macbeth, demanding nothing less from her husband than the murder of King Duncan, throws a shocking command at her frightened and cowering partner in crime: “But screw your courage to the sticking-place.” Have courage, take heart, particularly in the face of terror and the unknown. A person cannot tighten the screws and still feel feeble and ghostly; murder requires strength and deliberateness—an act of will. Or so Lady Macbeth hopes. How appropriate for the nineteenth century, how mechanical, to “screw” one’s courage until it sticks tightly. I can only wonder if James meant that stiff industrial meaning and was thereby sending a sly warning to his Victorian audience: We are not machines; we possess powerful souls and spirit. It would have been an absolutely appropriate message, as the machine exerted more and more control over people’s lives, and human beings lost more and more of their humanity, until they began to feel invisible.

  As with the ghost-telling sessions sponsored by Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati, James got the idea for The Turn of the Screw from a storytelling session. But this one had an odd source: no one other than Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. While a student at Cambridge, Benson had started what he called a “ghost society” and made no secret of visiting local mediums and attending séances. On the coldest of the London winter evenings—and one encountered many such evenings—Benson would host what he called “ghost evenings” at his home. He and his friends would gather in his library, around a hearty fire and even heartier brandy, and try to top each other with tales of some local character who had recently encountered a friendly or, better yet, unruly and demanding specter. To the query, Did that really happen?, the storyteller always responded, My informant swears to it! An odd pursuit, his critics charged, for a man of the cloth. But Benson strongly disagreed. The invisible world held a variety of spirits. Wasn’t the Holy Ghost invisible to us all, and did not that specter exert great influence on our daily lives? Did not Christ live in this world and in the invisible one, as well? Won’t we all at some point turn spectral?

  We should not think of the archbishop as an oddball. The idea of invisibility attracted a huge portion of the population. The theme of disappearance infected everything—science, literature, technology, and virtually all forms of popular entertainment. Even children became conjurers. Victorian boys and girls took great delight in popular toys designed to project pictures of ghosts against a wall, smaller and simpler versions of the more sophisticated ghost-producing machines that would eventually dominate the London stage. Inventors received general patents for the first of these machines, called phantasmagoria, early on in the century, in 1802. Very quickly, they became enormously popular. By the 1830s, ghosts not only took their place on the London stage but, thanks to the more complicated phantasmagoria, also began to assume major roles.

  One director in particular, Dion Boucicault, used a phantasmagoria in combination with an elaborate series of trapdoors in an 1852 production of The Corsican Brothers, which he adapted from the Alexandre Dumas novel of the same name. Boucicault’s gliding trapdoors for the conveyance of ghosts became known in the history of drama as the Corsican traps and enjoyed widespread use for many years in London theaters. By all contemporary accounts, the traps produced the most frighteningly real effects. In the Dumas play, for example, a ghost suddenly appeared “moving in an indistinct, surreal manner: standing still, gliding silently across the stage, and ascending at the same time.”2 Not only was the play an incredible success, but historians of the stage still refer to the appearance of Boucicault’s ghost as one of the most fabulous and startling entrances in all of British theater. That same year, 1852, in homage to John Polidori, Dion Boucicault staged an adaptation of “The Vampyre” and played the leading vampire role himself.

  Where did the ghost come from? Only Boucicault knew the secret, and he refused to reveal anything. The Victorian toy, he allowed, along with the phantasmagoria, had served as crude models. But he couldn’t keep his secret long. Soon enough, inventors figured out Boucicault’s mechanical marvel and rushed to create even more realistic specters. A civil engineer and ardent playgoer named Henry Dircks made a few complicated improvements to the phantasmagoria and conjured his own eerie ghosts on Christmas Eve—the traditional start of the English theater season—in 1862, at the well-respected Royal Polytechnic Institution, home of a continuing science fair in the heart of London. There, Dircks knew, he would encounter a most skeptical audience of highbrow scientists. If he could win them over, he reasoned, he could find wild success and universal acceptance anywhere he desired.

  At the Institution, Dircks manufactured the ghosts for one of Charles Dickens’s most popular holiday stories, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, and, to the astonishment of a good many critics, managed to wow the skeptics. Contemporary descriptions of Dircks’s handiwork make the stage sound truly haunted. In one climactic scene, the audience watched as “a student rose from his chair and seemed to leave his own glowing, transparent soul behind, still seated and watching the action.” As if that were not thrilling enough, at the play’s conclusion, having vanquished a second ghost that had threatened him, the actor eluded the specter “by seeming to walk through the walls and disappearing.” The audience went totally wild.3

  When the newspapers printed their reviews of that evening’s performance, Londoners wanted to see Dircks’s ghosts firsthand. The demand grew so insistent, so quickly, that the Polytechnic Institution decided to put on The Haunted Man every night for an unheard-of fifteen months in a row. Dircks packed the house every evening. An estimated total of over 250,000 people came not so much to see the play, for audiences knew the story only too well, but to observe the Dircksian phantasmagoria producing its ghostly effects and to try to figure out how the director managed to fool them. Producers everywhere clamored for Dircks the impresario and his fabulous machine. Drury Lane appropriated Dircks’s phantasmagoria to produce an array of ghosts for a production of the three-act choral tragedy Manfred, the very play that Lord Byron had been working on that haunted evening of June 16, 1816, at the Villa Diodati.

  In other countries, audiences demanded their own ghosts. Responding to overseas producers, Dircks brought his magic machine to the American stage in 1863, first to Wallack’s Theater in Manhattan and then to other venues. In Paris, a magician named Henri Robin raised families of ghosts at the Theatre Chatelet, adding excitement to his ghost performances by giving his machine a more provocative name, the Living Phantasmagoria. By projecting his lantern images onto diaphanous curtains or o
nto smoke, Robin could now produce even more startling effects. Reviews described the images as not just dramatic but also strikingly magical: “One terrifying scene portrayed a cemetery. As a man walked among the gravestones, a vision of his fiancée, as a spirit bride, materialized. He reached to embrace the glowing bride, but his arms passed through her. Slowly, she disappeared, leaving him desolate.”4

  Some newspaper articles called Dircks a genius; others described him as nothing more than a trickster, a low-level magician, or, worse yet, a crude technician. What did his critics want—“real” ghosts? One can only suppose so. But every magician harbors the not-so-secret desire to create the wildest, most fabulous illusions ever witnessed. And Dircks was no exception. He thought of himself as a master illusionist, except that he knew how to take his tricks to a remarkably higher level by exploiting the very thing responsible for turning people into ghosts in the first place—technology itself.

  But he had his limits. Dircks could astound audiences by making ghosts float and hover, but he could not figure out how to project a believable image of an animated human being and in particular the illusion of the human gait. That was the truly great trick. And while it baffled many inventors, the breakthrough happened sooner than one might have expected—and it happened, like the illusion of movement itself, in discrete stages.

  Just about this same time, in the early 1870s, the English-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge refined the technology for photographing motion in general. In San Francisco, while working for the city’s most prominent photographer, Muybridge hit on the idea of making still photographs move. He accomplished this by running in rapid succession his photos of horses in a machine he called the Zoopraxiscope, creating the illusion of actual movement, though not in any fluid way. He transformed one meaning of still, “quiet and without movement,” into its other meaning, “continuous movement.” Rather than the feel of contemporary movies, the result resembled the herky-jerky look of early Disney cartoons. Though the technology remained fairly crude, the invention assumed monumental proportions, for Muybridge had taken the first step in turning people’s attention away from the real to the image of the real.

  In 1877, Leland Stanford, who owned some fifty thousand acres in northern California, also owned thoroughbred racehorses and his own racetrack. One question continually plagued him: Does a horse galloping at full speed ever leave the ground with all four hooves at the same moment? If he knew the answer, he believed, he could then train his horses accordingly. And so he hired one of the most experimental photographers of the period, Muybridge, to photograph his favorite horse, Occident, in full stride. The historian of photography Rebecca Solnit points out that “understanding the gaits of a horse in a mechanical way enhanced the possibility of tinkering with it, through breeding, training, and other forms of management. For Stanford, the experiment would allow him to further shift the essence of the horse from the mysteries of nature to the manageable mechanics of industrialism.”5 On top of his love of horses, as president of the Central Pacific Railroad, Stanford had the railroad magnate’s maniacal desire to stop time, a topic that I take up in the last chapter.

  Muybridge managed to find the answer for Stanford, but only with great effort. First, he developed an incredibly fast shutter, which aligned the speed of the camera almost exactly with the speed of a galloping horse. The next year, 1878, he placed a series of twenty-four cameras around the racetrack, each shutter triggered by a tripwire and set off by the hooves of the running horse or the wheels of a sulky. The series of photographs, which Stanford later published—without acknowledging Muybridge—as The Horse in Motion, indeed show Occident with all four hooves off the ground at once.

  Having stopped Occident dead in his tracks, Muybridge then proceeded to revive the horse and make him move once again in 1879, when he unveiled his invention, the Zoopraxiscope, a round metal container fitted with a rotating glass cylinder inside its circumference. On that glass Muybridge painted a series of pictures of the horse and sulky in incremental positions of movement. When a viewer looked through a slit in the side of the machine, the revolving cylinder created the illusion of motion. So impressive was the Zoopraxiscope that it prompted Edison to pursue his own development of a motion picture system, which he first discussed in 1888, and which he called the kinetoscope.

  People’s current fascination with the simulacrum begins here, with moving images. No one, of course, has to comment on the consuming appeal of motion pictures on both young and old people across the globe. Movement on the screen fascinated viewers then; movement on the big screen with big stars quite obviously fascinates hordes of people today. In nature, people in the nineteenth century accepted motion as something expected and natural and normal. On the screen, those same people viewed images in motion as spectacular and miraculous. We still do, even sometimes preferring the reproduction over the real thing. In the late nineteenth century, people’s attention slowly turned from nature to the nature of the machine; from how things looked to how things worked. It led people to a series of questions in the period about themselves: How do we work? Who are we? What does it mean to be alive? What is the soul, and where does it reside?

  Muybridge straddled the line between science and entertainment, winning bets, for instance, with animal trainers about the way horses actually ran. But his appeal extended far beyond the scientists who might have found satisfaction in his experiments because of the physics of motion. Hordes of ordinary people crowded into small spaces, taking turns to peer through his revolving magic machine. They traveled great distances to watch, say, Muybridge’s array of photographs of a nude man in various still positions turn into a strangely accurate, and quite magical, rendering of a nude man running, continually running, like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian Urn.

  Muybridge based his own viewing device on an earlier and simpler machine called the zoetrope, fabricated, in 1834, by an English inventor named William George Horner. While both men created the semblance of actual movement, we owe that cliché phrase “the magic of the theater” to those two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière. Without doubt, the Lumières developed the most sophisticated ghost-making machine. All modern projection machines follow closely on their initial design. By 1890, just two short decades after Muybridge, the Lumières had pushed technology to the point that people moved on the screen with a convincing human grace, and in 1895, they received a patent for their new projection machine, which they called the Cinématographe, which projected still photographs at the rate of twenty-four frames a second. The following year Thomas Edison patented a similar projecting machine, which he named, ironically, the Vitascope. Using the technology he had developed in his phonograph, Edison had managed to outdo the Lumières by producing a crude soundtrack, but he still could not beat them for veracity of images.

  Motion pictures caught on so fast, particularly with the masses, that moviegoing went well beyond making graphic the growing, shadowy nature of human essence. Ghost stories could accomplish that. Cinema did that and much more: Cinema helped shape perception itself. Pictures in motion influenced the way people experienced reality, and, without their being conscious of it, encouraged them to prefer the image over the actual—to derive pleasure from the miraculous way technology replicated reality. One simply cannot overestimate the importance of that one invention, the motion picture camera. A great many young people today can talk with more sophistication about film than they can about their own experiences. They know literature, understand history, and encounter psychology, all mainly through movies. Film is firsthand these days; experience takes place at two or three removes.

  Those two French brothers rose to the top of the world of legerdemain, reigning supreme as the century’s ultimate magicians. As conjurers, they had, in an odd way, tapped into what the scientists could not, the secret of life—into that dark corner that Victor Frankenstein so frantically and so desperately explored; into animation itself. (How curious that that word animation, in film, came
to refer to something so robotlike, so herky-jerky.) Yes, the cinema did make stills move, but it did not actually animate life—it did just the opposite.

  The motion picture camera sucked the life out of what were once fleshy human beings, and the projector filled the screen with their ghostlike images. The playwright Kevin Kerr gave his recent play about Muybridge the title Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge as a way of capturing the photographer’s close connection with ghosts. Some critics argue that film offers more than hauntings; after all, we can run a movie as many times as we like and the same images keep reappearing. Such an experience sounds closer to permanence than evanescence.

  As a rebuttal, we have Maxim Gorky’s famous comment on first seeing the Lumières’ film The Arrival of a Train at the Station in St. Petersburg in the late nineteenth century. The experience terrified Gorky, who remarked that by stepping into the theater he had entered “a kingdom of shadows”: “This is not life but the shadow of life and this is not movement but the soundless shadow of movement.”6 Gorky found himself less struck with the medium’s power to create magical images that pretended to approximate and fix life, and more taken with its ability to generate in viewers the feeling of substantial loss, to leave them with the general sense of death in life, or, more poignantly, with their own death in life. In the theater, audiences surrendered the majority of their senses—smell, touch, taste—making film a great disappearing act. In a curious way, both actors and audience members undergo the same operation: They both turn evanescent. If anything, theater is all sight and sound: son et lumière.