Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  Alongside the invasion of privacy by that impolitic intruder, the Industrial Revolution, Sigmund Freud was busy taking people’s guarded secrets out of their innermost sanctum, the bedroom, and examining each one with the calculating eye of the scientist. In fact, Freud helped his patients confess all their secrets, no matter the content, in the bright light of day. Rooting about in the darkest recesses of life, Freud illuminated human behavior by making case studies, not out of the average, but out of the oddest and most bizarre individuals he could find. Just what are the boundaries of the human endeavor? What is the range of emotions that supposedly elevate us from animals to human beings? In his zeal to define human essence, Freud wrote about strange characters like the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. Like Oliver Sacks today, Freud took great delight and found great wisdom in all sorts of anomalies. He wrote about a man who dreamed of wolves hiding in trees and of another who spent his days and nights in sewers. We must look at the edges, he seemed to be saying, in order to find the rock-solid center.

  The general public, forever curious about its own kind, heartily agreed. The noun freak, to describe characters, say, who look like they came out of a Diane Arbus photograph, comes into the language in the nineteenth century in the phrase “a freak of nature.” More recently, we know freaks, perhaps, as longhaired, unkempt hippies (who even turned the word into a verb by “freaking out”), or those from that same period whom we remember as Jesus freaks. At P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, an extremely popular fixture of the middle to late decades of the century in downtown Manhattan, at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, more visitors filed into the sideshow, or the freak show, than into the big top for the main attraction. Barnum offered for public viewing bizarre creatures with names similar to Freud’s own cases: the Bearded Lady, the Lobster Boy, the Human Giant, and a host of other strange wonderments.

  All this attention on the fringe and the freak and the underground resulted in a shockingly new aesthetics. Standards of decorum in behavior and dress and actions turned bizarre, outlandish—at times even revolting. Perhaps one of the biggest secrets a society holds is its criminals, its deviants and aberrant castoffs, which it prefers to keep safely tucked away in the shadows—in cells, in darkened chambers—anywhere, away from public view. Those lowlifes, too, became not just the darlings of the emerging avant-garde of the nineteenth century, but at times even models of the most powerful, unrestrained behavior. Imagine, thieves and prostitutes helping to define the idea of what it means to be human. Darwin’s theory of natural selection presented problems for the idea of moral development; in fact, they seemed at odds. While we may find such ideas outlandish, we need only think of Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century tale of existential angst, Notes from Underground, whose antihero prefers to take aim at modern life from deep under the earth, in his dank dungeon. Thus, someone like Rudyard Kipling, who in a poem titled “The White Man’s Burden” harped about making good and morally upright citizens out of “your new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half devil and half child”—which should have been a snap for an imperial nation like Great Britain in the nineteenth century.

  America and England suddenly were introduced to a new player from the demimonde, the con artist. The con artist could pull off sleight-of-hand tricks with the deftness of the best magician; rather than performing onstage, he or she preferred working the streets. Melville paid homage to the type in his novel The Confidence-Man. When the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine shot his lover Arthur Rimbaud, in 1873, the press glorified Verlaine, particularly after he moved to England, calling him “the convict poet.” One century more and we get to Chris Burden, the American artist, shooting himself, not with a camera but with a rifle, in an art gallery, or, even more ghastly, having some random spectator shoot him. When we ask, “What is art?” we are also asking, “What are the limits of creativity, of human impulse?”

  In the 1880s, leading lights in the demimonde enthroned Oscar Wilde as the reigning figure in an outlier aesthetic movement of the marginal that held a view of culture every bit as pessimistic as the sociologists’. To reveal their own character with total clarity, they named themselves, with a directness that startles, the decadents. These new aesthetes cultivated un esprit décadent, reflected in their profound distaste for bourgeois society and much of mass culture, and in their sympathetic embrace of the disreputable. Preferring to spend their leisure time in working-class hangouts, like music halls, theaters, and pubs—un mauvais lieu, as the poet Baudelaire put it—the decadents painted and wrote about the nefarious life that started up well after the sun went down. The decadents cozied up to thieves, ladies of the streets, and addicts of all kinds, and perhaps explored the most forbidden territory of all—homosexual love. Liberal psychologists in the period termed such lovers “inverts,” since their love tended to invert the normal and accepted order of society.

  One can trace a fairly straight line from the decadents and underworld deviants of the nineteenth century to the thug and gangster aesthetic of the twenty-first century. If society declares certain people undesirable, not really fit for humanity, then outcasts can defuse the category by appropriating the term and using it for their own advantage. As a case in point, some black artists, kept out of white society for several centuries, turned the categories “outcast” and “criminal” and “loser” back on themselves, exploiting all the power and fear that the rest of the population found in those names. You call us thugs? Well, then, we will dress and act and talk like thugs, and with intensity. We will capitalize on the fear that you find in us; that way we can materialize, feel that we have some substance and meaning. Even our musical groups, with names like Niggaz With Attitude, they announced, will shock and disgust. We’ll even call our recording company Death Row Records.

  The decadents’ outlandish, offensive behavior, some of it perhaps not even at a fully conscious level, formed part of an important nineteenth-century strategy of psychic survival. For example, Nietzsche declared that people could best develop their own potential by tapping into “the powers of the underground.” Not in the garden of earthly delights, but deep in the root cellar of humanity do people find the strength to move beyond all the accepted boundaries, categories, and definitions. No one wants to pass through life as one of the Lumières’ sausage people. By diving deep underground, ordinary people could transform, like mythological figures, into unpredictable human beings. Such wild strategies led Nietzsche to broadcast his own declaration of independence, in the name of the Übermensch, or the superman.

  The new aesthetes did for art what Darwin and the demise of the Chain of Being did for the human psyche. They cracked wide open the old definitions of what was normal and abnormal, moral and immoral. They pushed the boundaries of gender, confounded the notion of correct and acceptable subjects for art, and refused all standard definitions and categories. No one would dictate to them where art stopped and music began, or where music stopped and dance began. They paved the way, in our own times, for the mixed-up objects that Robert Rauschenberg called his Combines, constructions that blasted apart finicky fifties definitions by combining sculpture and art, or art and dance, and so on. They granted Rauschenberg the liberty of gluing bits of newspaper cartoons, old advertising clips, and sections of menus onto large canvases. The new aesthetic made possible Cornell’s boxes, Picasso’s cubes, and contemporary mashups of all sorts.

  The decadents wore funny clothes and smoked weird drugs. The fanciest dressers among them went by the name dandies. Only the beats or the hippies or the yippies could match them in their disruptive exuberance. Ginsberg owes his poetic life to that nineteenth-century soul force—Walt Whitman, yes, but with a nod, certainly, to Oscar Wilde as well. And like the free spirits of the late fifties and sixties, many nineteenth-century aesthetes, Wilde chief among them, spent time in jail or prison for their offbeat, deep-seated beliefs. Modern politics of conviction starts in earnest with Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol and ranges to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Bir
mingham Jail” and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. You shall know us by our acts of disobedience. We shall find ourselves through such acts. Can it work? Can placing one’s body in front of the great inexorable machine accomplish anything serious and important and long lasting? Can it make a single person step out of line and confront what it means to be a thinking, fully alive human being? Well, just ask that other outspoken and feisty nineteenth-century jailbird, Henry David Thoreau.

  Both the artist and the criminal stood outside society—today we would use the phrase alienated from society—that hung on for dear life to an old and tired set of values. And so they both, criminal and artist, aimed at blowing apart the status quo. Professionals in the nineteenth century, in their passion for categorizing everything in creation, saddled both the avant-garde artist and the petty thief with a new name, the deviant. In England, an emerging capitalist society led to the passage of new laws, covering a broad range of punishable offenses, most of which had to do with new bourgeois concepts of property. Authorities came to define a wider range of criminality within the growing class struggle, requiring a new penal system that carried with it longer and harsher sentences. This new social arrangement prompted British authorities to build many more prisons and asylums.

  Prison, as many reformers argue, produces a criminal class. Recidivism rates in the United States today hover around seventy-eight percent. This idea of the repeat offender developed in Paris around 1870; by the nineteenth century’s end almost fifty percent of all trials in France involved repeat offenders. And so the demand to identify every convict, behind bars and free, got folded into the century’s own drive for finding humanity’s basic identity. The phrase “Round up the usual suspects” comes from this period, which means, in effect, “Bring in the poor people, the people of color, the out of work, the feeble and insane. Bring me those who have had to resort to petty theft in order to survive.” Taking the idea of identification several steps further, authorities wanted to finger the criminal type before he or she ever conceived of committing a crime. That’s the idea, expressed more than a century later, at the heart of the 2002 film Minority Report.

  HAVELOCK ELLIS, the respected and well-known psychologist, wrote a nontechnical study in 1890, titled The Criminal, in which he derides thugs and artists as nothing more than petulant adolescents. While Ellis articulates the general attitude in the nineteenth century toward anyone or anything that appeared to defy its natural category, his prose reveals, at the same time, a bit of envy or jealousy for the criminal’s wholesale freedom to engage with life. One can sense a struggle within Ellis, even in this brief passage, with what it means to be fully alive. Abnormal may not be so off-putting as Ellis makes it out to be. Notice the way Ellis compares criminals with artists:The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and an emotional fact. It witnesses at once to their false estimate of life and of themselves, and to their egotistic delight in admiration. They share this character with a large proportion of artists and literary men, though, as Lombroso remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect. The vanity of the artist and literary man marks the abnormal elements, the tendency in them to degeneration. It reveals in them the weak point of mental organization, which at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist in the well-developed man, but it is unobtrusive; in its extreme forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organisation, artist or criminal.

  Later in this chapter I will come back to the criminal and to Cesare Lombroso, an important figure in confining the deviant to a very narrow and stifling category.

  Not only the criminal and the artist, but the deranged, as well, rose to the level of seer in the nineteenth century. The madman and the fool took their solid place, in art and literature, as the embodiment of wisdom and insight. On the other side, in a desire to lock up so-called crazies and get them out of the way, the British Parliament passed its first act establishing public lunatic asylums in 1808. At the beginning of the century, England could count no more than a few thousand lunatics confined in its various institutions; by century’s end, that number had exploded to about 100,000. Authorities defined that troubling category, insane, more and more broadly, slipping it like a noose around the necks of more and more unsuspecting British citizens.

  But the increase in numbers only added to the lure of the lurid. Whatever festered away, sometimes hidden from the direct line of sight—the criminal, the crazy, and the beggar—artists and writers dragged into full view. Two archetypal narratives got played out in the period: Orpheus descending into the underworld and returning to the world of the heroic and the unexpected; and Alice dropping down the rabbit hole of possibility, only to return to the land of the normal and the expected.

  Both Orpheus and Alice descend beneath the earth, and return home radically altered. Both their stories prompted the same questions: Who are we? What does it mean to be a human being? Who is alive, or more alive? Who is really dead? Does the deviant live life more fully, know death more intimately, than so-called normal persons? Do things have meaning only when the Red Queen says they do? Many intellectuals confronted the century as such a bafflement. Henry David Thoreau gives us this account of an unsettling dream, mid-century, in Walden: “After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where?”

  In the context of the nineteenth-century search for deep meaning, Thoreau’s refusal to pay six years of delinquent poll tax in protest of the Mexican-American War and slavery takes him one more step in his journey to answer those nagging questions—what? when? how? where? In July 1846, a judge sentenced Thoreau to a night in jail as punishment for his actions. To refuse the tax, to “Say no in thunder!” in the words of Herman Melville, is to say yes to oneself. In the face of the machine bearing down, a person must resist at whatever level he or she finds.

  The question remains, “How can I maintain the autonomy of my own self?” For Thoreau, it meant refusing to pay a tax. It also meant publishing his ideas in an essay, in 1849, titled “Civil Disobedience.” By civil, he did not mean polite; he meant the private as opposed to the government. Theories of civil disobedience—the stirrings of one body against the machine of government—start here with Thoreau. Such resistance provides one way of maintaining the autonomy of the self. Thoreau offers a kind of self-controlled deviance.

  Scientists, philosophers, artists and even educators believed that they could only arrive at answers to Thoreau’s dreamy questions by finding the bedrock of human essence, but through means other than civil disobedience. For some, that meant finding deep meaning through experiments with drugs. For others, the secret lay in fingerprints, or genes, or in the words we use, or in the images we dream. No matter—whatever the defining characteristic a person might choose, the quest betrays a great irony. Human beings, undergoing vast changes in their own nature, were trying, at the same time, to define what was essential about themselves—something akin to a person attempting to draw a self-portrait while staring into a distorted mirror. No one could see things clearly. There was no foundation, no starting place, and certainly no solid ground on which people could stand to define that elusive creature, the human being.

  As a result, experts often conflated the process and the product. They substituted the search for the answer. So, for example, in their experiments with drugs, chemists confused feelings of euphoria with essential change. Instead of claiming that heroin, say, had altered perception, the alteration itself served as proof, for them, that they had finally found the secret of life. Scientists never discussed how heroin actually interacted with the brain. Chemical reactions did not matter. Alteration and change were all. Such experiments had the look of someone trying to throw a ball off the wrong foot: The whole enterprise lacked grace and accuracy, the trajectory off target by a wide margin. Worse yet, no one could get a clear bead on the target.

  The move to define human essence,
in a great many instances, took on a coarseness and grossness. The century did not interest itself in the meaning of life, but more in what it meant to be alive. It did not ask, What is life? Instead, it went after What is aliveness? Early in the nineteenth century, only drugs could deliver the philosopher’s stone—opium and morphine and heroin serving as the alchemical key to universal understanding. Scientists confined their questions to matters of control—could they induce feelings of euphoria, say, and then reduce them, suspend them? They framed their questions the only way they knew how, for theirs was fast becoming a material and mechanical age, or rather, an age falling more and more under the sway of one machine or another. If machines produced, people would have to consume. And consume they did. And while people did not want to think or act like machines, the process of mechanization moved at a rapid clip, and exerted too much power for anyone to stop its advance. People did not, in many cases, know it, but the machine was clearly getting under their skin. It altered their perception. It framed their thinking.

  As commerce raced rapidly forward and religion receded in people’s lives, science eroded faith, as well, by describing nature clicking away like some well-oiled engine. Consider Darwin’s theory of random, materialistic forces propelling life on its course. He even reduced human emotions and behavior to a series of chemical reactions in the brain. If chemists or psychologists could push a button or throw a switch, and with such an act activate the secret of life, that would have satisfied their urge. T. H. Huxley, the biologist, known in his day as “Darwin’s bulldog,” and who coined the word agnostic, described the new evolutionary world in this thoroughly mechanistic way: Man is “mere dust in the cosmic machinery, a bubble on the surface of the ocean of things both in magnitude and duration, a byproduct of cosmic chemistry. He fits more or less well into this machinery, or it would crush him, but the machinery has no more special reference to him than to other living beings.”