No Need for Ghost

In 1813 Hoffmann wrote a short tale inspired on Mozart’s Don Juan, published in a German music journal, in which one recognizes a semi-essayistic structure, with historical, philosophical and cultural considerations and wide-ranging reflections on the aesthetics of music and theater. A tale of a strongly speculative nature, on the relationship between art and life.

If in Hoffmann’s tales the double track between the fantastic dimension and the phenomenal world, that is, between Romantic idealism and Enlightenment rationalism, is generally easy to grasp, in this one the plot moves on thornier ground: the protagonist has the impression of seeing a human body, of hearing the voice and smelling the scent of a person where that person cannot be, and of sensing her presence at the very instant she dies. The appearance is that of a phenomenon that reason alone cannot explain, but, as we shall see, there is no need to invoke the supernatural.

It is in fact a phenomenon that contemporary neuroscience more frankly calls Grief Hallucination (SED), which includes all those vivid, almost sensory experiences of the deceased in the immediate proximity of death: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or simply “feeling” the presence of the person who is no longer with us. They are more common than many are willing to admit, since they seem to have been recorded in more than half of bereavement experiences. A variant of this phenomenon is the so-called Shared Death Experience (SDE), in which a person reports having perceived, seen or heard the dying person, or having had the sensation of accompanying them in the otherworldly “transitus,” shortly before receiving news of the death.

Grief hallucinations, of course, are not necessarily considered pathological, nor do they require a supernatural justification: they are rather adaptive mechanisms of the brain, which help to maintain an emotional bond with the deceased while the loss is being processed. Needless to say, factors such as sleep deprivation, advanced age, a strong emotional attachment or (as in Hoffmann’s case) a particularly intense aesthetic experience can favor their onset.

The case depicted in the tale implies an element of synchronicity between the spectator’s hallucination, since he does not know the actress personally, and her crises followed by her passing: the man in effect experiences a crisis apparition, though he is totally a stranger to her life, and at the exact moment when the woman is dying somewhere else; since she is an actress whom the man has seen only once, on the stage, this may make the idea of a grief to be processed problematic. Of what grief are we speaking, if the two did not know each other beforehand?

This phenomenon too can be explained in a perfectly rational way: in this connection one speaks of embodied simulation, to describe what happens when we enter into deep empathy with someone and in our brain the same neural networks are activated that would be activated if we ourselves were performing those actions or feeling those sensations: it is not a conscious reasoning but a visceral and automatic motor resonance, the same mechanism that is held to underlie aesthetic experience, or that occurs in that state of exaltation and bewilderment known as Stendhal Syndrome. Art moves the emotions, amplifies emotional states, conditions the focus of attention, creating the condition for a profound empathy.

If the singer’s body, beyond the stage fiction, betrays signs of fatigue, pain and tension, the protagonist’s nervous system involuntarily reproduces them, and his perception of a suffering in her voice becomes the correlate of that simulation: a form of kinesthetic empathy or bodily resonance in which the spectator does not quite know why, but feels that pain, senses the discomfort and projects it into the real world, visualizing the woman in space, smelling her perfume, hearing her voice, feeling her breath on his neck. In a live performance this resonance is amplified by the rhythm shared between performer and audience (breathing, stage movements, pauses, music, text), a communion that is anything but mystical, arising from the relationship between bodies and minds in the physical world.

The actress, then, not only intentionally communicates what the score and the direction of the production require her to perform consciously, but also transmits a set of other messages independently of her will: facial expressions, changes in breathing, tremors or alterations in vocal timbre, which she cannot mask and which are not perceptible indiscriminately by anyone but only by someone who has entered a condition of deep empathy with her. The protagonist’s brain, plunged into a state of extreme concentration and strong emotional involvement, united and further amplified by the symbolic system of the representation, becomes hypersensitive to that type of signal; at the moment he receives news of her death, he sees it as an a posteriori confirmation of the sensations he had felt during the performance, or of the impression that remained with him after the curtain fell.

In all this the role played by the very theme of the spectacle is anything but secondary: the identification and the reciprocity of the relationship activated by the ritual apparatus of musical and theatrical performance singularly broadens the ground of philosophical speculation on the relationship between art and life, which is, after all, the crucial question for Hoffmann.