Shadows
Theme Presentation
For whoever wants to explore the theme of «shadows», a good start can be to read the entry «Ombra» in the Dizionario dei temi letterari, by R. Ceserani, M. Domenichelli and P. Fasano (Turin, UTET, 2007-2008). The entry, signed by Maria Cristina Maugeri, gives a definition of the theme, a number of literary examples, a bibliography, and suggestions for further research. It was, for professor Maugeri, an extremely difficult task, for the words that in the various languages belong to this semantic field (şēl or tsel in ancient Hebrew, skiá in Greek, umbra in Latin, ombra, ombre, sombra etc. in the Romance languages, Schatten in German, shade and shadow in English) tend to have multiple meanings. It is extremely difficult to distinguish between the various concrete and metaphorical meanings attached to those words, to follow the numerous and differentiated applications of the theme in the literary, pictorial, and mediatic imaginary of different historical times, and to reconstruct the cultural backgrounds that lay behind those meanings and those products of human imagination. It is to be hoped that the week-long explorations and discussions at Synapsis will better define, correct, and enrich the Dictionary’s entry on shadows, and offer suggestion for a possible second edition.
The phenomenology of the shadow is indeed very complex: it has astronomic, geometric, experimental, epistemological, and philosophical implications, but it is especially in its metaphorical applications that the various human cultures have exploited the phenomenon of shadow in the most different ways.
From a semiotic point of view, it is important to recall the theory of the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. He developed a triadic theory of signs (as opposed to the dyadic theory of Sausurre and others). According to Pierce there are three different ways in which signs refer to the objects they represent: one is the symbol, which is related to its object by a general convention (examples: a medal, the colors of the traffic lights, human language); the second one is the icon, which is related to its object by resemblance and arbitrary connection (examples: a landscape painting, a portrait, a diagram, a metaphor); the third one is the index, which is related to its object by physical contiguity. It is the case, for instance, of the smoke (index of a fire), a scar (mark of a wound), the footprint (mark of footsteps), the dust (deposited by time), the weather-cock (that tells the direction of the wind), etc. It is also the case of the shadow, which is always the index of a presence. This is particularly interesting, for so often the shadow is connected with appearances, or disappearances, weak reflections of existing things, or bodies. In spite of all the platonic representation of the vagueness and elusiveness of shadows, they always are indexes of a presence, or a belief or a desire of a presence, and this make them often uncanny.
As to the historical background, it seems necessary to distinguish sharply between the Hebrew and Old Testament conception of shadows and the subsequent Greek, Roman and Christian conception. In the barren, desert and sunny landscape where the Patriarchs and writers of the old books of the Bible lived, the word şēl tended to have a positive connotation. It could plainly refer to the shadow projected on the ground by a human body, or to the pleasant shelter offered by a rare tree or a hill, but it could also, metaphorically, refer to the presence and the protection of Jahveh, of his invisible wings, or his invisible hand. It could even refer to the sweet and protecting presence of a loved one (Songs of Songs, 2.3). With a slightly less positive meaning it could refer to the fleeting, elusive presence of the human beings on the earth, to the transitoriness of human life (Job, 8.9: «For we are of yesterday, and are ignorant that our days upon earth are but a shadow»). The word şēl does not refer, normally, to what is left, of a human body, after his death. The idea of an afterworld, or a subterranean abode for the souls of the deceased, had a scarce presence in the imaginary of ancient Hebrews: when it came to imagine the world inhabited by the dead, they took some ideas from the mythology of the peoples around them (the Egyptians, the Sumeric peoples) and also from some more archaic conception of a nature that receives new living energy from the dead. It was only later, through the contact with the Greek world, that the new meanings (the Platonic duality of body and soul, substance and appearance) became common, with the Greek and Roman use of the words skiá and umbra in reference to death and the world of the dead: skiá thanatou in the Greek translation of the Bible and the Gospels, umbra mortis in the Vulgate.
It is from this complex situation, in which a central role was plaid by the Platonic myth of the cave and not a second one by the idea that somewhere exists a world inhabited by shadows (the world of ideas, or Hyper uranium, whose weak reflections appear in human life on the earth, the subterranean world where the souls of the departed ones have their abode), that the modern imaginary of shadows has taken form. The Greek, Latin and Germanic words (all connected with Indo-European roots, although with not clearly defined etymological derivations) have taken their place beside a number of other words and ideas: the eidola or simulacra («images of things, a sort of outer skin perpetually peeled off the surface of objects and flying about this way and that through the air»: Lucretius), the eikones and phantasmata (images which tend to be deceitful), the reflected images, the doubles, the spectra (or ghosts, or apparitions, especially of the dead that have not been properly buried) etc.
In the tradition of Classical and Modern cultures and literatures the theme of the shadow has taken different forms and meanings, of many of which the entry Ombra by Mauceri gives a number of examples. Here is a partial list:
In a more or less literary sense:
1) the image projected by an object or a body interposed between a source of light and the earth.
2) a reflection, an appearance, an image without consistency or solidity (shadow vs. substance)
3) a shady place.
In a metaphoric sense:
4) a shelter, a protection (a meaning that goes back to the Bible, present in expression such as «à l’ombre de la Tour Eiffel», «all’ombra della Madonnina») and applied also to persons that live in the shadow of other, more powerful ones.
5) An uninvited guest that shows up at a dinner in the shadow of one who is invited (Latin umbra).
6) A spy, a detective.
7) In some team games, a player who incessantly follows («marks») an adversary player.
8) A fleeting experience.
9) A spectre, a ghost, the souls of the dead.
10) A person who has lost power, is a shadow of what he used to be (Schiller, William Tell, 2,1:
«I am only the shadow of myself, almost nothing more that my name»).
11) A person who is particularly thin, emaciated.
12) An imitation, a copy, a counterpart, an alternate reality (for instance: shadow cabinet, bandiera ombra = flag of convenience).
13) A suspicion, a shady situation (vs. a clear, transparent one).
14) A small quantity («non aver l’ombra di un quattrino»).
The word shadow (umbra, Schatten) has a special meaning in Junghian psychoanalysis, where it refers to the dark and unconscious side of a person, to the negative aspects of his character that he feels obliged to repress, and also to an aspect of the collective unconscious, where evil is accumulated.
In painting and the theories of painting, shadows play an important role. In some practices they are linked with the drawing of silhouettes. In the practice of the theatre from China have come the so-called «Chinese shadow theatre» or «Chinese shadow puppetry».
In all languages and cultures there are numerous expressions that apply the idea of shadow to different situations. A very common expression, that can be found already in a Greek proverb quoted by Plato, is the one that defines a very shy and timorous character as «a person who is afraid of his own shadow». But there are many others («dar corpo alle ombre», «fazer sombra a alguèm», etc). Of special interest is an expression that has had a long presence in the German language and refers to a paradoxical, logically impossible situation (somewhat similar to that of the Baron of Münchhausen when he escaped from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair): «über seinen eigenen Schatten springen» («to jump on one’s own shadow»). One finds references to this expression in Lessing, Goethe, and others. The philosopher Heidegger has given it a positive twist by saying that that is exactly what an original mind should be able to do.
It appears that the Northern cultures, including the German one, have exploited in a more creative manner the imagery of shadows (are they to be considered «countries of the long shadows»?). To the texts mentioned by Maugeri that have developed and creatively renewed the old legend of the person who sold his shadow to the devil and was compelled to travel the world without leaving a shadow behind himself (Adalbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemhils Wundersame Geschichte; Hans Christian Andersen: The Shadow; Oscar Wilde: The Fisherman and his soul; J. M. Barrie: Peter Pan), we should add at least the parody of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Abenteuer der Sylvester-Nacht and the visitation by a writer that does not come from the countries of long shadows: Antonio Tabucchi’s I treni che vanno a Madras.
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Essential Bibliography
Bächtold-Stäubli, H., Ed. (1927-1942). Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, Berlin-Leipzig.
Baxandall, M. (1995). Shadow and Enlightenment. New Haven - London, Yale University Press.
Casati, R. (2000). La scoperta dell’ombra: da Platone a Galileo. Storia di un enigma. Milano, Mondolibri.
Domenichelli, M. (1994). Il limite dell'ombra: le figure della soglia nel teatro inglese fra Cinque e Seicento. Milano, Franco Angeli.
Frazer, J. (1890-1915). Chapter 18: «The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection», in The Golden Bough. London, Macmillan.
Fusillo, M. (1998). L’altro e lo stesso: teoria e storia del doppio. Firenze, La Nuova Italia.
Gilchrist, Alan. (2006). Seeing black and white. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Gombrich, E. H. (1995). Shadows: the depiction of cast shadows in Western art. London, National Gallery Publications.
Hildenbrock, A. (1986). «Der Schatten als Doppelgänger», in Das andere Ich. Künstlicher Mensch und Doppelgänger in deutschen and englischsprachingen Literatur. Tübingen, Stauffenberg.
Mauceri, M. C. (1994). «La figura dell’ombra nella narrativa di Pirandello: suggestioni romantiche e innovazioni pirandelliane». Rivista di studi pirandelliani 12-13: 29-47.
Moraldo, S. M. (1996). Wandlungen des Doppelgängers: Shakespeare, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Pirandello: von der Zwillingskomödie (The comedy of errors) zur Identitätsgefährdung (Prinzessin Brambilla, Il fu Mattia Pascal). Frankfurt am Main - New York, P. Lang.
Ordine, N. (2003). La soglia dell’ombra: letteratura, filosofia e pittura in Giordano Bruno. Venezia, Marsilio.
Rank, O. (1993 [1914]). Der Doppelgänger: eine psychoanalytische Studie. Wien, Turia & Kant.
Sinisi, S., ed. (1982). Le figure dell’ombra. Roma, Officina.
Sorensen, Roy. (2008). Seeing Dark Things. The Philosophy of Shadows. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Stoichiță, V. I. (1997). A short history of the shadow. London, Reaktion.
Stoichiță, V. I. (2008). L'effet Pygmalion: pour une anthropologie historique des simulacres. Genève, Droz.
Trevi, M. and A. Romano (1975). Studi sull’ombra. Venezia, Marsilio.
Vision, Gerald. (1997) Problems with vision. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Warner, Marina. (2006). Phantasmagoria. Spirit Vision, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Wilpert, G. v. (1978). Der verlorene Schatten: Varianten eines literarischen Motivs. Stuttgart, Kröner.