97 DDossier Kurt Vanhoutte / Dieter Brusselaers Of fairies and skeletons: A dialectical encounter between the féerie and the phantasmagoria in Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk „Notre enquête se propose de montrer comment par suite [d’une] représentation chosiste de la civilisation, les formes de vie nouvelle et les nouvelles créations à base économique et technique que nous devons au siècle dernier entrent dans l’univers d’une fantasmagorie“, 1 Walter Benjamin writes in „Paris, Capitale du XIX e siècle“, the 1939 exposé prefacing his Passagen-Werk. Elsewhere in the same exposé, we read that „[l]e monde dominé par ses fantasmagories, c’est - pour nous servir de l’expression de Baudelaire - la modernité.“ 2 Benjamin even went as far as to consider the likeness between the cultural products from the nineteenth century and the phantasmagoria „non pas seulement de manière théorique, par une transposition idéologique, mais bien dans l’immédiateté de la présence sensible“: the objects of his study „se manifestent en tant que fantasmagories.“ 3 Clearly, the phantasmagoria is for Benjamin an important figure for thinking modernity. It has been observed by Margaret Cohen to be modernity’s most important „visual emblem“ 4 within the Passagen-Werk - and this observation is certainly true for the latest version of the Passagen-Werk known to us. However, this work made up from quotations interspersed with fragmentary commentaries by Benjamin himself, a project often perceived as a „sprawling histoire des mentalités“ 5 of nineteenth-century Paris, has undergone quite some changes since its first conception as a fifty-page essay. Benjamin had been working on the first drafts since 1927, expanding the scope of the project as he shifted its form to a „literarische Montage“ 6 of raw material, and has left it unfinished at his death in 1940. 7 Within that period, it had not always been the phantasmagoria that held the privileged position of modernity’s prime visual emblem. From a letter to Gershom Scholem, we know that the essay which became the Passagen-Werk initially was meant to bear the subtitle „Eine dialektische Feerie“; 8 and although Benjamin did not come up with an equivalent subtitle indicating the phantasmagoria’s overarching character, the sheer prominence of the latter concept within the work prompted the insight, most importantly in Cohen’s 1989 article, that he was simply replacing the imagery of one type of spectacular performance with that of another. 9 The question is, of course: why did he do so? Benjamin himself is rather vague on the matter. In a 1935 letter to Gretel Adorno, he writes that the perspectives offered in the first attempts at his essay on the passages only allowed for „un illicite traitement ,poétiqueʻ“, leading him to lose the subtitle „Eine dialektische Feerie“ in the second version of the project. 10 He does not, however, elaborate upon this general qualification, which leaves us in the dark about the real reasons to consider a 98 DDossier treatment involving the féerie more „illicite“ than one drawing on the phantasmagoria. Cohen believes that the abandonment of the féerie „derives perhaps from the term’s lack of sufficient resonance in the theoretical sphere.“ 11 In other words, she seems to suggest that Benjamin prefers to use „phantasmagoria“ because the word appears in the Marxist tradition, a view shared, for instance, by Rolf Tiedemann, editor of the Passagen-Werk. 12 Nevertheless, Cohen also acknowledges it is impossible to fully grasp Benjamin’s usage of „phantasmagoria“ without knowledge of the concrete visual technology. 13 Therefore, our objective here is not only to formulate a hypothesis explaining Benjamin’s eventual rejection of the féerie as a legitimate figure for thinking modernity, but also to ground this hypothesis in the visual origins of Benjamin’s work, detaching his „disruptive appropriation of existing visual technologies“ 14 from the purely (Marxist) theoretical sphere. Our methodology in doing so derives from Benjamin himself, and pursues the „literary montage“ that is at the very heart of the Passagen-Werk: we will make use of the „dialectical image“, Benjamin’s conjecturing of seemingly unrelated pieces of (visual or other) information in a new constellation meant to evoke a flash of insight. 15 Specifically, we propose to develop a dialectical tension between the spectacle of the phantasmagoria and that of the féerie in order to fully investigate the concrete assets that made both of them (un)fit to serve the purposes of the Passagen-Werk, seeking within these visual technologies what could have led Benjamin to abandon one of them and to adopt the other. The féerie and the phantasmagoria as spectacle A descriptive elaboration of the forms in which the féerie and the phantasmagoria appeared as visual spectacles hence is in place. It is important to note that both genres were (evidently, given the focus of the Passagen-Werk) spatiotemporally bound to nineteenth-century Paris. Outside their historical overlap, the féerie and the phantasmagoria had still other elements in common. Both the féerie and the phantasmagoria were a kind of popular entertainment that relied heavily on spectacle created through technical means. This display of visually splendid artifice coincided in both cases with a representation of the supernatural, yet each of both shows represented another kind of supernature, and each did so in a completely different setting. Roxane Martin considers it most adequate to situate the blossoming of féerie plays between 1791 and 1864, tying the genre historically to the legislation permitting the existence of privatized commercial theatres in France and adding that the genre became „fossilized“ after the demolition of the Boulevard du Temple in 1862. 16 Hélène Laplace-Claverie employs a similar temporal framework, placing „l’Âge d’Or de la féerie française“ between 1806 (the first performance of the popular piece Le pied de mouton) and 1870. 17 The féerie was in this period a popular theatrical genre, 18 closely associated with melodrama. 19 Roughly put, we could de- 99 DDossier fine the characteristic traits of this sort of performance as telling rather Manichaean storylines including supernatural subject matter, and using extensive stage machinery to create spectacular effects. 20 Notably changements à vue, in which one theatrical set turned into another before the eyes of the audience and transformations à vue, substitution tricks involving persons or objects to elicit the illusion of transformation, were very popular common elements of a féerie, which led Kristian Moen to argue that transformation is actually central to the féerie. 21 From the 1840s onwards, both humor and technological spectacular attractions increased in importance in the féerie, leading to the genre getting structured around these assets and therefore becoming more episodic. 22 The phantasmagoria, on the other hand, was a rather different kind of popular entertainment. It is best described as a gothic horror show revolving primarily around the optical illusion of summoning specters. 23 A typical phantasmagoria took on the guise of a scientific demonstration, inviting audiences to witness how the image of supernatural beings could be produced through technological means. The audience would be guided into a dark room, where they were to witness a preliminary show meant to fascinate with all sorts of scientific exhibits or optical tricks. Next, the phantasmagorian would proceed to the main part of the show, the conjuring of apparitions through the use of a magic lantern. This was a device that created projections on the basis of painted glass, often enhanced with special effects as to make the projected apparitions move, shift, give them volume, and so on: the phantasmagoria, too, depended on astounding its audience with spectacular transformations. The period in which these shows enjoyed popularity overlaps to some extent with that of the féerie. 24 Though the Belgian showman Etienne- Gaspard Robertson claimed to have performed the first phantasmagoria in Paris in 1798 (and came up with the word), entertainers had shown a renewed interest in magic lanterns at least from the 1770s onwards. 25 Phantasmagoria shows would remain closely associated with the practice of Parisian entertainers, even though some of these entertainers, such as Robertson or Philidor, toured throughout Europe with considerable success. At last, in the later decades of the nineteenth century, phantasmagorias disappeared from public venues as the magic lantern became appropriated as a fashionable toy for the bourgeoisie. 26 However, this short factual survey does not directly amount to our understanding of Benjamin trading the féerie for the phantasmagoria as a visual emblem. If the Passagen-Werk was indeed intended as a „sprawling histoire des mentalités“ of nineteenth-century Paris, the usage of the féerie as a figurehead seems much more in place than that of the phantasmagoria. Katherine Singer Kovács comments: „[T]o a remarkable extent, the pomp and splendor of féeries coincided with the tastes of the Second Empire. This was an extravagant epoch, when the emperor and empress gave lavish dances and masked balls, when ceremonies and parades were very much in style.“ 27 The phantasmagorias, on the other hand, played first and foremost on audiences’ fascination for the macabre and the morbid. We could very well argue that the age displayed a hunger for all kinds of grisly 100 DDossier sensations, leading, for instance, near the end of the nineteenth century to the popularity peeks that would befall public visits to the morgue and the Musée Grévin. 28 However, the Passagen-Werk has been noted to be „most persistent in [its] attack against the myth of automatic historical progress“, 29 which should lead us to expect it would highlight mostly the optimistic and rationalistic world-views in the „mentalités“ of the period. Why would Benjamin then prefer a visual emblem that had arguably less to do with the spirit of the age while writing a „histoire des mentalités“? The trick is that the Passagen-Werk is not at all a „histoire des mentalités“ - it is not simply such a descriptive work. What actually is at stake in the Passagen-Werk, as Benjamin indicates from the very first pages, is the perception of history itself. Benjamin seeks to show how the „chosiste“, teleological perception of history upheld by the nineteenth century as well as by his contemporaries has led to a culture which he considers manifestly phantasmagorical. To fully grasp this qualification, it is necessary first to come to terms with Benjamin’s dialectical thinking, more specifically in relation to his view on historicized temporalities. Conditioning time: allegories of history The analysis of the meaning of the dialectics between myth and history goes quite a considerable way towards demonstrating the ways in which féerie and phantasmagoria are interrelated, building an argument from their respective conditionings of modern time, and providing insight, moreover, into the reasons why Benjamin decided to opt for the latter genre to exemplify his thinking about modernity. Generally speaking, the cardinal idea of Benjamin’s notion of time is the rejection of the capitalist concept of history coming to us as a continuous line made of past and present events. As we have mentioned, the author of the Passagen-Werk concordantly intended to uncover the legitimating, ideological myth of history as a machine inevitably advancing towards its culmination in progress. Thus, Susan Buck- Morss, in her preface to The Dialectics of Seeing, calls Benjamin’s aim an attempt „to destroy the mythic immediacy of the present, [ ], by discovering that constellation of historical origins which has the power to explode history’s ,continuumʻ“. 30 This power particularly resided in the visual regime of modernity, in what Benjamin regarded as an economy of looking which had specific configurations at specific moments in history. Accordingly, images of the past contained strategic value, as they provided the possibility to make leaps of the imagination and make a dialectical dynamics re-enter the frame of time. Besides, it was Adorno who suggested that Benjamin’s work in general stands as a collection of images that portray the natural history of cultural constructions. Building a lesson on visual allegory himself, he once noted of Benjamin that „[t]he French word for still-life, nature morte, could be written above the portals of his philosophical dungeons“, adding the contention that his friend „was drawn to the petrified, frozen, or obsolete elements of civilization“. 31 Exactly this urge to search mythic images of natural history and to 101 DDossier subsequently turn these images into fossiles evidently marks Benjamin’s shift from féerie to phantasmagoria. As a visual spectacle the féerie seems to imply a similar kind of mythologizing stance on history. Martin, describing the Manicheist plots of early féerie plays, marks how these adhere to a recurrent scheme revolving around a protagonist’s conquest (meant to set free loved one with the aid of supernatural forces) against a tyrant. 32 Almost as if intuitively pointing out the affinities between this kind of narrative structure and the idea of history turned mythical, she adds a revealing comment about the emergent féerie’s expressiveness of historical temporality: La Révolution a amené la conscience du rôle que l’homme seul pouvait jouer sur le destin d’une nation; de cyclique et immuable, le temps se conçoit désormais dans une linéarité, et le siècle naissant se place sous la découverte de l’Histoire. La féerie, par l’intermédiaire de la quête, illustre cette temporalité; elle donne le spectacle d’un combat mené par un héros solitaire contre un tyran, et la structure qui en découle propose une succession de ,scènetableauxʻ par l’intermédiaire desquelles s’effectue l’intégration sociale des valeurs prônées par le genre. 33 The structure of the earliest féerie plays were thus designed to express the age’s general perception of history - the kind of historiography Benjamin reacted against, finding it unable to include the petrified, „cyclique et immuable“ face of history. Even though in later stages of its development, the narrative of the féerie became more fragmented and gradually yielded even more importance to the display of spectacular effects, the féerie never really lost its narrativeness, 34 and therefore remained bound to this initially conceived „linéarité“. Conversely, with the phantasmagoria as indicative image, Benjamin consciously placed himself in close proximity to an early work that would later prove to be a seminal piece of writing, namely his Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels. The author’s great achievement was to pinpoint an important crisis in the history of theatre, a crisis that announced modernity. Benjamin more specifically pushed aside prevalent ideas about the tragic that had been the norm since Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie. It is known that Nietzsche saw in the mythical, timeless essence of Greek tragedy a perpetual reconciliation between a protagonist that is always guilty and the cosmic order. Thus tragedy always integrated the theme of guilt and debt on a mythical level. Baroque mourning play (Trauerspiel), however, seemed to lack this transcendence in the first instance (or at least it started to doubt its veracity). Whereas tragedy ended up in catharsis and the eventual abolition of earthly history, „the German ,Trauerspielʻ is taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition“. 35 Earthly suffering was ever since distinct from salvation. With this viewpoint, the mindset, as it were, of German Baroque theatre was less driven by myth, the close connection between the earthly and the supernatural, than by history as it was actually experienced: an age of political tensions between the upper class and the rest and in which natural catastrophes extended the gap between disconsolate earthly existence and the promise of salvation. In short, Benjamin traced in Baroque scenic art the origins of an aesthetic that he be- 102 DDossier lieved translated the sensibility of an epoch that experienced the history of the world as a process of decay. He would later recognize similar tensions in modernity. Aligning Benjamin’s thoughts on Baroque theatre with the Passagen-Werk, then, one could argue that the mourning play is as relevant to tragedy as the phantasmagoria to féerie. In the Baroque mourning play the representation of the past par excellence was a ghostly death’s head. In the remainder of this essay, we will show how Benjamin’s adherence to gruesome Baroque images resurfaced throughout the Passagen-Werk, ultimately culminating in his preference for the phantasmagoria as a central trope. The preparedness to receive the past irrespective of the myth of progress more particularly seemed a chance for critical redemption. Iconography of the Immerwiedergleiche: the phantasmagorical ghost as revenant The dialectic we discern between the féerie’s mythologizing stance on historical experience and the phantasmagoria’s attention for the transient nature of history stretches further than merely the matter of (non-)narrative structuring; it also figures on the basic level of visual representation, and from that point stretches out to encompass the totality of both entertainment-forms. In the phantasmagoria, audiences were subjugated to a ‚split consciousness‘: they were being made aware of the fact that they were not watching real ghosts, but at the same time their senses registered the artificial ghosts as if they were. 36 The féerie functioned likewise, its primary delight consisting of something that Frank Kessler, borrowing a cinematic term from Metz, has labeled „invisible trucage“ - stagecraft that aims to hide its man-made engineering, and therefore to elicit audiences’ admiration on two separate yet intertwined levels: as real magic and as ‚trucage‘ sophisticated enough to appear as real magic. 37 In this sense, both the féerie and the phantasmagoria could be found dialectical in respect to their representation of the supernatural - both made it appear simultaneously present and absent, illusory and real. Nevertheless, the supernature that thus manifested itself was quite different in each of both popular shows. Contrary to possible suspicions aroused by its name, the féerie represented not merely fairies; instead, a great variety of supernatural beings took the stage in this kind of play. This becomes apparent when we look at particular texts: the „prototypical“ 38 Le pied de mouton demands in its dramatis personae „un Génie“, „un Magicien“, „l’Amour“, „Cyclopes“, „Démons, et Génies subalternes“, but no actual fairies; 39 Le nain jaune, ou la fée du désert (1804) featured, besides the two titular creatures, also a number of „amours“, three speaking magpies, and implicated in its stage directions some minor supernatural creatures; 40 additionally gnomes, witches, and even the Devil himself appeared abundantly within féeries. 41 Nonetheless, however prominent these enchanted beings were, mostly they were presented as forces that intervened in the lives of human protagonists. As we have 103 DDossier mentioned earlier, the féerie’s primary structure was Manichean, and the manifold supernatural presences brought on stage were meant to reflect the forces of good and evil. 42 In other words, the function itself of the supernature appearing in the féerie allowed for its integration in a mythologizing conception of history. The potential dialectical instability of the simultaneous illusoriness and reality of the magical is of little importance, given the fact that the magical is eventually recuperated as a metaphor anyhow. This metaphoric quality might explain why Benjamin would conjecture the féerie-subtitle to „un illicite traitement ,poétiqueʻ“ - as a metaphor, it rather expresses (poetically) than challenges (dialectically) commonplace views on mythologized progress. On the other hand, the dialectical potential of the phantasmagoria’s supernature consists in pointing directly to the substance of history, even at the level of representation. Phantasmagorical representation was not invariably populated by specters and apparitions: like the féerie displayed a wide array of fantastic characters, the phantasmagoria drew upon a more elaborate repertoire of ghastly creatures. 43 Nevertheless, due to its gothic subject matter, 44 the phantasmagoria had the potential to focus upon the ghosts of the deceased and literally summon the ghosts of the past. As becomes apparent in what probably is the most famous account of a phantasmagoria show up to date - an article from the French newspaper L’Ami des Lois included in the Mémoires of the showman Robertson -, phantasmagoria shows sometimes even included the summoning of historical characters (either semi-legendary heroes such as William Tell or persons more recently deceased such as Marat). 45 Cohen already conjectured this aspect of the phantasmagoria to the aims of Benjamin’s project, as the phantasmagoria’s own contribution to the shaping of „the phantasmagoria of cultural history“ here becomes apparent. 46 We would propose to develop this argument even one step further, and suggest to read in this kind of apparitions not only a mythologizing of history at the hands of the phantasmagorian, but also, simultaneously, an awareness of the recurrence of these mythic schemes: the phantasmagoria (literally) showed a present that was haunted by the past. Whereas the féerie replicated mythic narrative schemes, the phantasmagoria did more than just that: it replicated the past itself in a recognizable physical presence. In that sense, it provided modernity with the most acute iconography of „the syndrome of history, the Immerwiedergleiche as repetitive urge“ conceivable. 47 Phantasmagorical representation, then, does not simply present us the ghost - it presents us what we might identify as the revenant, a specific kind of ghost, „a corporeal creature, a substantial person acting like a human being because he or she is to all appearances a human being, though one returned from the Otherworld.“ 48 „En revenant de l’au-delà“, the phantasmagorical apparitions make visible the repetitive aspect of mythologized history through their own physicality, 49 the presence of which is not denied, but only highlighted by its dialectal instability - casting the light of irresistible transience upon its objects which refuse recuperation by a purely discursive device (such as the good-and-evil-metaphor in the féerie). 104 DDossier Conclusion: the (lack of) apotheosis and closure Precisely this refusal of the morbid critters of the phantasmagoria to yield their dialectical instability and to be reduced to discourse might have contributed to Benjamin’s choice to place his criticism of historiography under the figurehead of the phantasmagoria. The phantasmagoria knows no closure: it makes no attempt to dispel the ghosts invoked. In some cases, however, a short finale is enacted. Robertson registered in his Mémoires how he sometimes would conclude his phantasmagorias with a memento mori. Doing so, he displayed the skeleton of a young woman on a pedestal, saying that this was the only horror the audience should truly fear. 50 At this point, the phantasmagorical revenant, at once icon of eternal recurrence and of eternal transience, is transposed upon the audiences themselves - and, by extension, upon Parisian culture as a whole. Here, Benjamin’s purposes draw to a close and „les formes de vie nouvelle et les nouvelles créations à base économique et technique que nous devons au siècle dernier“ really are absorbed by the mortified nature from the Ursprung „bien dans l’immédiateté de la présence sensible.“ 51 The acuteness of these observations only become apparent when dialectically opposed to the fixed structural component that concluded the féerie: the apotheosis. The apotheosis was the final tableau expressing the happy end of the drama, 52 displaying the opulence of the féerie at its most full-fledged and at the same time functioning as a mise en abyme of precisely that opulence. 53 In the apotheosis, the stagecraft was so overtly present that it brought an element of metatheatricality to the féerie. 54 The metaphorical wires of the invisible ‚trucage‘ here became visible, and the theatrical magic lost the dialectic instability that animated it into real magic. Moen has argued that in the féerie and in the wide visual culture of the age „transformations were seen as a spectacular display of ongoing processes, an effect which tended to take away a sense of teleological aims or even of discrete events“, 55 and this argument seems to imply that the féerie, too, could be a worthy vessel of Benjamin’s criticism of history. However, the apotheosis recuperated on a visual level - as the metaphorics of good and evil had done on a linguistic level - transformation for the sake of teleology, assuring that the final transformation coincided with teleological definitiveness. While the revenance of the phantasmagoria thus pervaded its audience and showed itself „en train de se manifester“ continuously on the spectrum of history, the apotheosis had a stabilizing effect on the féerie - in spite of all its overwhelming assets, the féerie remained a thing of the stage adherent to a fixed mythical narrative. This does not only explain Benjamin’s own preference for the phantasmagoria; also, it allows us to see his choice of visual emblem as a performative action that fulfills his own historiographical aims: the abandonment of mythologized history. 105 DDossier Resümee: Kurt Vanhoutte / Dieter Brusselaers, Of fairies and skeletons: A dialectical encounter between the féerie and the phantasmagoria in Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk untersuchen die Phantasmagorie innerhalb von Benjamins Passagen-Werk als wichtigstes visuelles Emblem der Moderne. Indessen erschließt sich vom ursprünglich geplanten Titel für eine frühe Version der Arbeit, dass Benjamin das Paris des 19. Jahrhunderts zunächst eher als féerie denn als Phantasmagorie charakterisiert hatte. Der vorliegende Artikel verfolgt die Spuren dieser Ersetzung. Gestützt auf Benjamins eigenes Konzept vom dialektischen Bild werden jene zwei Formen des unterhaltenden Spektakels, die das 19. Jahrhundert prägen, in dialektischer Manier einander gegenübergestellt. Die Ausführungen gelangen zu der Einsicht, dass die Phantasmagorie Benjamins Analyse der Einstellung des 19. Jahrhunderts zu Zeit und Geschichte besser trifft als die féerie, und zwar sowohl in Bezug auf die theatrale Repräsentation als auch in formalstruktureller Hinsicht. 1 Walter Benjamin: Das Passagen-Werk, 2 vols., Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1982, I, 60. 2 Benjamin (1982), op. cit., I, 76. 3 Ibid., 60. 4 Margaret Cohen: „Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria“, in: New German Critique, 48, 1989, 87-107, 95. 5 Richard Sieburth: „Benjamin the Scrivener“, in: Assemblage, 6, 1988, 7-23, 8. 6 Benjamin (1982), op. cit., I, 574 [N1a,8]. 7 Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass. / London, MIT Press, 1989, 5. 8 Cf. Cohen (1898), art. cit., 105-106; on the original German title cf. Eiland Howard / Kevin McLaughlin: „Translators’ Foreword“, in: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin on the basis of the German edition by Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, Mass. / London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, ix-xiv, ix; for a French translation of the letter cf. Walter Benjamin: Correspondance, ed. Gershom Sholem, Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Guy Petitdemange, Paris, Aubier Montagne, 1979, I, 414. 9 Despite Benjamin’s abandonment of the féerie as a visual emblem, some entries on the subject are nonetheless preserved in the published version of the Passagen-Werk, notably in „Konvolut Y“. Cf. Benjamin (1982), op. cit., II, 825sq. [Y1,2], [Y1a,1], [Y1a,6], [Y2,1]; arguably, cf. Benjamin (1982), op. cit., II, 834 [Y5a,2]. 10 Benjamin (1979), op. cit., II, 185. 11 Margaret Cohen: Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London, University of California Press, 1993, 254. The monograph Profane Illumination contains a reworked and expanded version of Cohen’s original 1989 article in New German Critique. 12 It might be interesting to point out that Tiedemann sees Benjamin’s usage of the term phantasmagoria as a miscomprehension of Marxist theory. Cf. Rolf Tiedemann: „Einleitung des Herausgebers“, in: Benjamin (1982), op. cit., I, 11-41, 26sqq. 106 DDossier 13 Cohen (1993), op. cit., 231-232. Gyorgy Markus, too, believes Benjamin’s usage of „phantasmagoria“ irreconcilable with orthodox Marxist theory. Cf. Gyorgy Markus: „Walter Benjamin or the Commodity as Phantasmagoria“, in: New German Critique, 83, 2001, 3- 42, 25. 14 Cohen (1989), art. cit., 103. 15 Cf. Susan Buck-Morss: „The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering“, in: Beatrice Hanssen (ed.), Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, London / New York, Continuum, 2006, 34. 16 „fossilisé“ (Roxane Martin: La Féerie romantique sur les scènes Parisiennes 1791-1864, Paris, Champion, 2007, 19). 17 Hélène Laplace-Claverie: Modernes féeries: Le Théâtre français entre réenchantement et désenchantement, Paris, Champion, 2007, 35-45. 18 Considerable difficulties in determining the exact period in which féeries held the stage in France arise from the unclear usage of féerie as an indicator of genre, especially in the early period of the féerie. Cf. Martin, op. cit., 42sqq. On the other hand, Laplace-Claverie’s monograph Modernes féeries demonstrates the vivid theatrical afterlife of the féerie in the twentieth century. However, a list of „successful stage plays from midcentury“ quoted in the Passagen-Werk makes abundantly clear that Benjamin is actually thinking of the féerie at its apex when he uses the term. Cf. Benjamin (1982), op. cit., II, 826 [Y1a,6]. 19 Cf. Katherine Singer Kovács: „Georges Méliès and the Féerie“, in: Cinema Journal, 16, 1, 1976, 1-13, 1sq.; also cf. Laplace-Claverie, op. cit., 37. Some authors, such as McCormick, even consider the féerie „a form of the spectacular melodrama“. Cf. John McCormick: Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France, New York, Routledge, 1993, 148. Such qualification probably derives from a broad usage of the term melodrama, either to indicate a piece that made use of music or to point to „toute forme de création échappant aux critères classiques, et dont la féerie fait partie.“ For the two definitions, cf. respectively Emilio Sala: „Mélodrama: Définitions et métamorphoses d’un genre quasi-opératique“, in: Revue de musicologie, 84, 2, 1988, 235-246, 236; and Martin, op. cit., 46. 20 This is a (grossly simplified) synthesis of the recurrent characteristics of the féerie noted in Martin, op. cit.; Laplace-Claverie, op. cit.; McCormick, op. cit.; Kristian Moen: „,Never Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoriaʻ: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860-1889“, in: Comporative Critical Studies, 6, 3, 2009, 361-372; Singer Kovács, art. cit.; Frank Kessler: „A Trip to the Moon as féerie“, in: Matthew Solomon (ed.), Fantastic Voyages of the Imagination: Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2011, 115-128. These separate publications contain more elaborate definitions of the féerie. The first monograph that attempts to define the féerie is probably Paul Ginisty’s (La Féerie, Paris, Louis Michaud, 1910). 21 Moen, art. cit., 362sq. 22 Singer Kovács, art. cit., 4sqq.; Laplace-Claverie, op. cit., 37sq. Martin notes a more general tendency to episodic sequences on the French stage from the 1830s on. Cf. Martin, op. cit., 233. 23 Our description of the phantasmagoria is indebted to the excellent account provided by Castle; cf. Terry Castle: „Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie“, in: Critical Inquiry, 15, 1, 1988, 26-61. Additionally, our knowledge of the phantasmagoria draws on Laurent Mannoni: „The Phantasmagoria“, in: Film History, 8, 1996, 390-415; Françoise Levie: „Etienne-Gaspard Robertson et le spectale [sic] de 107 DDossier projection lumineuse“, in: Plateau, 19, 1998, 27-31; Thomas Weynants: „The Fantasmagoria: Virtual Reality Techniques during the French Revolution and the Early 19th Century“, in: Plateau, 19, 1998, 33-41. These publications contain more elaborate definitions of the phantasmagoria. For a contemporaneous account, cf. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson: Mémoires Scientifiques et Anecdotiques du Physicien-Aéronaute E. G. Robertson, 2 vols., Paris, chez l’auteur / Wurtz, 1831 / 1833. 24 The short historical overview provided is based upon Castle, art. cit., 31sqq. 25 Mannoni notes that „[a]s early as the 1780s, the phantasmagoria is in evidence in many publications“, strictly distinguishing between the phantasmagoria and other magic lantern shows on the basis of the movement of the image; cf. Mannoni, art. cit., 390sq. 26 Bollaert and van Praet situate its use in a domestic context between 1810 and 1890, but situate the loss of its magic appeal only around 1890; cf. Herman Bollaert / Marc van Praet: „De Laterna Magica Galantee Show“, in: Plateau, 19, 1998, 43-49, 45sqq. 27 Singer Kovács, art. cit., 7. 28 Extensive accounts of these practices are to be found in Vanessa R. Schwartz: Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London, University of California Press, 1998. 29 Buck-Morss (1989), op. cit., 79. 30 Ibid., x. 31 Theodor W. Adorno: „A Portrait of Walter Benjamin“, in: Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1967, 233. 32 Martin, op. cit., 58. 33 Ibid., 64, emphasis added. 34 Kessler, art. cit., 119. 35 Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London / New York, Verso, 1994, 81. 36 Castle, art. cit., 49sq. 37 Kessler, art. cit., 119sq. A féerie visitor’s reaction describing similar sentiments is described in Modernes féeries (Cf. Laplace-Claverie, op. cit., 47). 38 Moen, art. cit., 362; Singer Kovács, art. cit., 2. 39 Louis-François Ribié / Alphonse-Louis-Dieudonné Martainville: Le pied de mouton: mélodrame, féerie-comique, en trois actes, à grand spectacle, Paris, Masson, 1807, 2. 40 The text of Le nain jaune is reprinted in its entirety in Martin, op. cit., 73-99. 41 For instance, cf. Martin, op. cit., 27sqq., 30sqq.; also, cf. Singer Kovács, art. cit., 6. 42 Laplace-Claverie, op. cit., 37; Singer Kovács, art. cit., 1sqq.; and Martin, op. cit., 36sqq. 43 Evidence for this claim is found for instance in Robertson’s „petit repertoire fantasmagorique“; cf. Robertson, op. cit., I, 294sqq. For a more systematic approach to the creatures represented in the phantasmagoria, cf. Weynants, art. cit., 34. 44 Cf. Levie, art. cit., 29; also, cf. Weynants, art. cit., 34. 45 The article is found in Robertson, op. cit., I, 215sqq. Both Castle’s and Cohen’s account of phantasmagoria rely heavily on it. Levie points to a part of Robertson’s show called Évocations du Nécromancien, which consisted of a „resurrection à la carte“, in which audiences could request the apparition of deceased loved ones, and of the evocation of characters from history or actuality; cf. Levie, art. cit., 28sq. 46 Cohen (1993), op. cit., 234. 47 Lieven De Cauter: De dwerg in de schaakautomaat: Benjamin’s verborgen leer, Nijmegen, SUN, 1999, 372. 108 DDossier 48 David Buchan: „Tale Roles and Revenants: A Morphology of Ghosts“, in: Western Folklore, 45, 2, 143-158, 145. 49 It is important to notice that Benjamin in describing Blanqui’s text on the impossibility of progress uses the term fantasmagorie; cf. Benjamin (1982), op. cit., 76sq. 50 Robertson, op. cit., I: 284. Cohen points to the importance of this passage in Cohen (1993), op. cit., 237. 51 Benjamin (1982), op. cit., I, 60. 52 Laplace-Claverie, op. cit., 37. 53 Kessler, art. cit., 121. 54 Laplace-Claverie also points to the metatheatrical potential of the féerie; cf. Laplace- Claverie, op. cit., 38-39. 55 Moen, art. cit., 370.