The vibratorium electrified

Abstract

Towards the end of the famous passage in which his young narrator attends the theatre for the first time, Marcel Proust offers what looks like a peculiar account of the physical and emotional effects of real events on groups of people: It would appear that certain transcendent realities emit all around them a kind of radiation to which the crowd is sensitive. Thus it is that when any great event occurs, when on a distant frontier an army is in jeopardy, or defeated, or victorious, the vague and conflicting reports from which an educated man can derive little enlightenment stimulate in the crowd an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognises the popular perception of that "aura” which surrounds momentous happenings and which may be visible hundreds of miles away.1.