The simulacra are coming! These alien agents of simulation are winning the battle for hearts and minds. The mimetic arts are in full retreat, and our grip on reality is slipping. Those who find this distressing will find some reassurance in Victor Stoichita’s book The Pygmalion Effect. Stoichita shows that simulacra are not quite the alien threat some think they are. It turns out that we have been living with them all along, albeit without attending to them much.

As Ovid tells it, the sculptor Pygmalion, in love with his own creation, has his fantasy come true when the statue miraculously comes to life. The statue, not based on any model but entirely the product of the sculptor’s imagination, is for Stoichita the simulacrum, a sort of primal mother to all artifacts whose hyperreality masks the absence of a model. The “Pygmalion effect” begins with this miraculous transformation of ivory into flesh, and Stoichita traces the “career” of this effect from Ovid to Hitchcock. This is not the same as following the reception of the myth or the story of Pygmalion, although Stoichita does these also at times. He describes his story as “consciously selective, without necessarily being incomplete” (5). The word “necessarily” suggests an uncertainty on his part that is warranted. In the same paragraph he describes his story as a descent “into the meanders of an illusion,” an inquiry into the reverberations of a myth, a history of the Effect, a clarification of “the fluctuating connections linking aesthetics, magic, and technical skill,” and an attempt to bring “the career of the simulacrum out from the very recesses of the history of Western mimesis.” In the next paragraph he speaks of the “evolution” of the Effect, and concludes, “this book, deliberately, does not deal with the society of simulacra and its devices, but with its (and their) prehistory” (6). The framework of this book would not be so frustrating if the content were not so fascinating.

The Pygmalion Effect is a long, strange trip, and the first destination after Ovid is not for nearly thirteen centuries: Jean de Meun’s The Romance of the Rose. It must be said that at every stop the remarkable erudition of the author is evident. The works themselves—be they sculptures, paintings, poems, photographs, or film—receive insightful analysis that alone justifies the reader’s effort, and the illustrations are gorgeous. The originality and scope of Stoichita’s thought is sensed in seeming asides, such as his pointing out that later reaction to the Romance of the Rose is unthinkable without the earlier work of van Eyck, or in his comparison of the film Vertigo (1958) to both the multiples of Andy Warhol and the Barbie doll. Historically minded readers may wish for more attention to social and cultural context and for more evidence that earlier works made a difference to later ones, but it is always the relationship of the work to the theme(s) that comes first here. Between stops, however, the trip is a bit of blur. The author jumps from work to work as in a video game, soaring over the abyss on winds of attractive but amorphous concepts impossible to find footing in such as “creativity” and “desire.”

Stoichita’s second stop is a “variation” of the Effect: the story by Vasari of a sculptor’s assistant who is unable to distinguish between himself and the statue for which he is posing. This confusion of fiction and reality, though, is not a question of the simulacrum at all; so “variation” seems an odd term for what is an inversion of the myth (if indeed that is what was intended). When informed that the Pygmalion story received little attention in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, the reader may begin to wonder what kind of “evolution” this is. As Stoichita puts it, “the myth itself was fading, but its effects were multiplying and diversifying” (57). To fade, the myth had to be prominent before, and this is never quite established. One of these multiplying effects (in distinction presumably to the Effect) is “doubling”: for instance of Helen and Venus in Maerten van Heemskerck’s Panoramic Fantasy with the Abduction of Helen (1535). They are “doubled” in the sense that both woman and goddess statue are being carried, so that the question of whether one or the other is mobile does not arise. Stoichita explains that, “In principle there is, between a woman and a statue, and despite all the possible similitudo, an essential difference: one is mobile and alive; the other is immobile and lifeless. The arrangement proposed by Heemskerck leads one to assume that the painter was aware of this discrepancy” (95). This moment is as good as any to note that The Pygmalion Effect is a translation from the French. Words make ideas “come alive,” and unlike Galatea (at least at first), translations are often hard to love. The book’s language is correct but occasionally leaden—as in this ponderous handling of the distinction between a woman and a statue.

After stops at various eighteenth-century representations of Pygmalion’s story—including a fine treatment of Girodet’s Pygmalion in light of contemporary speculation on magnetism and electricity, as well as the fascinating photographic studies by Louis Bonnard of artist/statue/model—Stoichita arrives at his final stop and presumed destination: Hitchcock’s film Vertigo in which an actress imitates a woman imitating another woman imitating a woman in a painting. Stoichita’s thoughts on the Pygmalionian relationship here (especially between director and actress) are to the point, but it is disconcerting to find this culminating discussion described as merely “a borderline case of the Pygmalion Effect.” Now that we have reached the end, it seems that the Effect was mainly about the beginning.

The book concludes with “20 theses on the question of the simulacrum” under the rubric “In the Guise of a Conclusion.” The sight of integers 1 through 20 followed by short declarative sentences will doubtless raise the hopes of readers desirous of clarification. Those readers will be disappointed. What the theses make clear is that Stoichita’s story is a subtle but convoluted one, and that the reader already knew.

In psychology the term “Pygmalion effect” is used to describe the power of expectations on performance: people perform better (or worse) simply because they are expected to do so. Originality and subtlety are expected of Stoichita, and his efforts in The Pygmalion Effect do not disappoint. Whether the book as a whole will satisfy more traditionally historically minded readers is another matter.