Unsuspecting Souls
Page 9
The British immediately delved deeply into their own country’s folk soul and found a rather distinctive and powerful one. Francis James Child, Britain’s first major folklorist—the British and American Folklore Societies have their beginnings in the nineteenth century—did for ballads what the Grimms, in their later careers, managed to do for fairy tales: He collected, described, and arranged them in the 1890s. And because he dated them as much earlier than most fairy tales, Child claimed ultimate cultural authority for his ballads, arguing, in fact, that he had caught more than English ballads in his net. He had far surpassed the Germans, he claimed, for he had found the folk soul of all the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Child lobbied all European countries to establish a national repository of their own earliest songs and tales.
In all these narrative expressions—language, myth, song, fairy tale, ballad, dream—social scientists tried to reduce the great and wild variety of creative production into its elemental parts. This kind of early anthropological study acquired the name, quite appropriately, of structuralism, since it attempted to disclose the scaffolding of society, the armature on which every artistic pursuit rested. As its name implies, structuralism purported to uncover essentials or elementals—the defining units of human interaction, across various cultures. The idea spread. Emerging scientists of human behavior, soon to be called social scientists, sifted every human activity and enterprise for its constituent parts, in the desire to reveal the blueprint of the human psyche.
Taking structuralism as a model, for instance, technological advances made it possible to shatter the illusion of activity itself by breaking movement into a series of stills. And one remarkable piece of nineteenth-century technology, cinematography, perfected by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895, exemplified what virtually every scientific invention and innovation attempted to accomplish during the period: to arrest the rush of history and analyze it in a single, understandable unit. Likewise, as experience tried to run away, the camera continually froze it in place. The fin de siècle knew this technological marvel initially in a machine called a stroboscope, part of the burgeoning science of chronophotography. (The Lumières had borrowed from the technology developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1830s for photo reproduction.)
What is myth, after all, but a series of events retold in a fabulous way? What is speaking but the uttering of discrete sounds, which the linguists of this period called phones and later phonemes—sounds that, in the right combination, the mind perceives as words? What is motion but a series of still frames? The century had prepared for such ideas, and the motion picture camera caught on quickly. In less than a year after its introduction, a number of dealers in various European cities began selling the Lumières’ new invention. In Vienna, one of those dealers staged the first public performance of moving pictures on March 22, 1896. Writers began to refer to something called “the age of the cinema” and “the new cult of the cinema.” The world now had something startlingly different—mass entertainment. The novelty not only refused to die out or disappear as nothing more than a fad, it increased in popularity and continues to this day, of course, to grab the imaginations of audiences.
At the end of the century, as philosophers and scientists exhausted their attempts to seize on essential definitions for a world that seemed to be fast slipping away, technology came to the rescue. The camera stanched the hemorrhaging of humanity by making at least one instant of experience permanent. But that technology had another, opposite side, for the photograph left its trace in nothing more substantial than ghostly images—the very same state, ironically, as the disappearing fleshy existence it hoped to record. With motion picture technology, perceiver and perceived came eerily together.
This new technique of reproducing amazingly exact, moving images of objects and people, as one historian of nineteenth-century Vienna puts it, “went hand in hand with a loss of the material, haptic and vital existence.”15 The haptic life—that is, a touching and feeling, fully alive existence—presented itself to people, for the very first time in history, as a choice. In an astonishing historical moment, screen images, only slightly fresher, brighter, and glossier than the original, began to compete with reality for people’s attention. Marx adapted his writing style to counter this draining away of feeling. In 1856, he asks, “the atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a 20,000 pound force, but do you feel it?”16 Are we really expected to? Is it possible for us to feel it? With enough wakefulness and awareness, can we really feel it? We are supposed to answer yes, I believe, for one of Marx’s major concerns was to wake people up to their feelings. According to the scholar Marshall Berman, Marx even tailored his writing style to this goal, expressing his ideas “in such intense and extravagant images—abysses, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, crushing gravitational force,”17 forcing people to read from their nerve endings out.
Over time, as their experience included less and less of the fleshy original, people would do more than just accommodate themselves to ghostly emanations. They pushed aside the real thing and went for the image. After all, the simulacrum was neater and less messy than the real thing. The U.S. Army made life-sized cardboard cutouts of soldiers serving in Iraq—made from photographs of the real person—to pass out to families, to keep them company while their sons or husbands did battle ten thousand miles away. The Marines could not fashion these so-called Flat Daddies fast enough to keep up with the demand. People in the nineteenth century, just like these contemporary families, were being asked, more and more, to situate themselves within the new world of flattened images, to place their faith in a technology that robbed them of their senses.
Indeed, faith—in its base, religious sense—became an issue, in some ways one of the grandest issues, in the nineteenth century. It started early in the century; we continue to debate its influence today. In the late summer of 1801, some twenty thousand people—young and old, men and women, overwhelmingly white but with a few blacks as well—gathered for what was billed as the largest revival meeting in all history, in Bourbon County, Kentucky. The event became known as the Cane Ridge Revival. Its interest and influence developed over the course of the century, emerging as a politically powerful evangelical wing of Protestantism. The publication of Darwin’s godless theories mid-century gave the movement just the boost it needed to ensure its success, causing it to spread throughout the South and West.
One can trace an almost uninterrupted history of religious fundamentalism from August 6, 1801, at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, to the present day. A reemergence of Darwin as a scapegoat for the alleged moral lassitude of the majority of Americans has helped recharge fundamentalism today. We still live, in large part, in a context shaped by the nineteenth century. School boards and legislators and clergy argue the case for evolution or creationism with great, if not greater, conviction and rancor than in the nineteenth century. And, repeating conditions in the nineteenth century, technology directs a larger and larger share of our lives, serving to intensify the debate. Intelligent design, creationism soft-pedaled, vies now with evolutionary theory for space in school curricula—a continuation, in other words and terms, of the old nineteenth-century struggle to understand how the world exactly works.
The Indo-European family of languages, the structural components of myths, the phonetic patterns of speech; other innovations of the period such as the Braille reading system, the gestures of sign language, and the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet; and, perhaps most important, the fundament of God’s creation—all these undertakings and endeavors left their trace, a distinct and basic pattern that, like footprints in the sand, one could read. The family tree of languages also described a distinct outline, a particular shape of human communication. Architecture provided perhaps the clearest outline, the most salient blueprint of order and arrangement. It also provided something more, a bonus for this period.
In both England and America, architecture meant out and out solidity. The Victorian critic and man of letters John Ruskin re
claimed the Gothic as the arke techne—the highest artistic pursuit—of the nineteenth century. Architecture in general, Ruskin argued, was not about design but about something much more fundamental, pure, and basic. Buildings rose in the air through a strict adherence to mathematical relationships. Those relationships revealed God’s imprint, His divine plan for the order of things, from the golden mean to the magic square.
If one wants to study the subject of education in the nineteenth century, or even in the Middle Ages, for that matter—when architecture predominated—one must look it up in any encyclopedia under the heading “edification.” Germans called a nineteenth-century novel of a young man or woman moving toward maturity a bildungsroman—a foundation book in which a young person begins to construct his or her own life, hopefully on a solid foundation. Within this context, to raise a child is to build a building. To edify is to build buildings, but it also refers, in the nineteenth century, to moral education, to the building of character.
In Europe and in America, in the nineteenth century, schools for teaching teachers were called normal schools, named after the seventeenth-century template, the norma, used for drafting perfect right angles. Being normal is about assuming right angles to the ground, a perfect ninety degrees so that one stands true and tall. Posture reflects attitude, a particular kind of leaning or inclination. In the nineteenth century, the idea of the normal expands to refer for the first time to human behavior. Such language conflates architecture, building, posture, and growing up, as if there were no inherent stability and solidity to the idea of education itself, and it needed to borrow the vocabulary of the most seriously engineered activity—architecture.
In the nineteenth century, as buildings rose higher and higher, architecture more and more appeared to defy gravity. Just at the end of the century, America erected the first skyscrapers in concrete, made possible by a contemporary British invention, around 1824, cement, which gave the requisite strength to concrete so that buildings could reach far into the sky. People could mimic those buildings—standing tall and powerfully straight by gaining bulk and mass and, above all, strength. Many people achieved such stature through weight training, what devotees today call “pumping iron.”
An American naturopath named Bernarr MacFadden developed a weight-training program during this period, employing a regimen of both nutrition and exercise for a population that he saw in desperate need of strength and solidity. Aiming his program at both the body and the mind—at physical as well as moral well-being—MacFadden redefined for the common person the idea of the normal. He took the metaphor of the body as edifice quite literally, and called his new movement, in an odd locution, as if everyone served as his or her own biological engineer, bodybuilding. His magazine, Physical Culture, carried the slogan “Weakness Is a Sin.” MacFadden made the normal person synonymous with the strong person. In times of moral and psychic uncertainty like the nineteenth century, as well as ours, it appears, people need to keep up their strength. To do otherwise, for MacFadden, was to deviate from a path of absolute righteousness. As everyone else began to disappear, he gave his disciples a way to solidly stand their ground. He offered them a way to attain substance and strength. He fortified them—with words and with nutritional supplements.
Nineteenth-century architecture made the idea of solidity starkly visible. It is hard to argue with a building’s presence. America, in particular, reached its architectural apogee in one particularly amazing structure. John A. Roebling, a structural engineer, completed the first successful suspension across any appreciable span—1,595 feet—in 1883, with the Brooklyn Bridge. The so-called stiffened suspension bridge—hovering high above the earth, levitating in midair—seemed to be fashioned out of solid metal, but poised in a powerful hypnotic trance. Seen from the side, it could even pass for a bony x-ray of a bridge. The suspension bridge, an image of architecture turned inside out—suspended, dependent—held aloft by . . . what? A few steel cables? Cement piers? Perhaps only faith.
If Gothic architecture characterizes the High Middle Ages, the suspension bridge characterizes the late nineteenth century. The master mason of medieval Britain, the architect, gave way to a new magus of the Industrial Revolution, the structural engineer. The suspension bridge shows itself off in underlying, basic elements—in tensile strength, coefficients of expansion, braided steel cables, the calculus. But what makes Roebling’s bridge defy gravity lies in his refinement of a seventeenth-century invention for the building of cathedrals—the cantilever—or as a nineteenth-century book on bridge building more accurately refers to it, “the flying lever.”18 The architectural exuberance of the Brooklyn Bridge hangs in space as a monument to the underlying philosophy of the period—the drive to uncover the essential in virtually everything in the natural world, and in the created world, as well.
But there was another world, too. The bridge also served as a potent symbol for the idea of crossing—in particular, the idea of crossing over to the other side. To find the secret of life, some explorers ventured to that other world where the dead were thought to congregate, and brought back news of eternal life. Séances provided them a bridge. As we shall see, the nineteenth century found other such bridges—out-of-body travel, trances, hypnotic states, and so on. In this sense, we can count all bridges as suspension bridges—suspended between the land of the living and the land of . . . well, no one knew for sure.
TWO | When Death Died
DEATH THREW ITS BLANKET of crepe over the country during the Civil War. America turned black—black with mourning, black with despair, black with the most ferocious slaughtering this country—or the world—had ever seen, and which went by that enticingly polite name, the Civil War. But the war proved to be anything but civil. As if the country were in the throes of some nuclear winter, unbelievable numbers of human beings and animals lost their lives. General Grant, not known for hyperbole, described the aftermath of one particular battle, at Shiloh, in an especially apocalyptic way: “I saw an open field . . . so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”1 Grant struggles to get the scene across, but it’s difficult given the enormity of what he has witnessed. In his description, Grant reveals that such a staggering amount of death has the power to render human life glaringly insignificant—turning real people into nothing more, in this case, than fleshy stepping stones.
So many men lost their lives that the subject of death overwhelmed most public conversations and news stories, not just during the height of the war but for decades after the war, as well, continuing well into our own times. I have been arguing in this book that attitudes toward death changed dramatically in the nineteenth century. People in the period began grappling with so much death that whatever meaning it had, whatever it fear it held, seemed to be fast fading away. This, just as they began grappling with its opposite, with the vibrancy of life losing its gusto.
James M. McPherson points out, in his review of books on the Civil War dead, that America of the mid-nineteenth century knew death well:“ Life expectancy at birth was forty years, largely because of an infant and child mortality rate nearly ten times as great as today. Most parents had buried at least one child; few young people reached adult-hood without the loss of siblings of cousins. Many husbands grieved for wives who had died in childbirth. . . . The scourge of ‘consumption’—tuberculosis—blighted the existence of many in middle age as well as those who had managed to live beyond it.”2
This country had already confronted an epidemic of death well before the Civil War, in 1832 to be specific, when cholera, with no known cause and no known cure, hit the city of New York. So terrifying had the invasion become that those with means fled the city entirely. Others, less well off, moved into Greenwich Village. Here’s the New York Evening Post’s description of the mass exodus from the city, on one particular sunny Sunday, in July of that eerie year; keep in mind that the automobile did not yet ex
ist, so this is an exodus by all available means necessary: “The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii fled when the red lava showered down upon their houses.” The Post describes but one day, and yet it gives the event grand historic significance—an entire city of some twenty thousand buried under ten feet of ash. New Yorkers experienced real terror.
The cholera outbreak killed 3,515 people in New York City, which at that point had a population of 250,000 people (in 2008 figures, with a population of eight million, over one hundred thousand New Yorkers would have to die, a shocking number considering it is more than thirty times greater than the deaths in the Twin Towers). Like the Great Plague that arrived in London in 1665-1666, cholera hit the lower classes hardest, since they lived in the most crowded conditions, which only spread illnesses easier and faster. And that made the poor and the destitute more of a scourge than they already were. A contemporary civic leader and wealthy merchant named John Pintard, the founder of the New-York Historical Society and the American Bible Society, wrote to his daughter, Eliza, about the attitude of the upper to the lower classes. He told her that the epidemic “is almost exclusively confined to the lower classes of intemperate dissolute and filthy people huddled together like swine in their polluted habitations.” In a second letter, Pintard seems to have grown even more angry, as if the poor had hatched the disease themselves as an insidious plot: “Those sickened must be cured or die off, and being chiefly of the very scum of the city, the quicker [their] dispatch the sooner the malady will cease.”3 Pintard saw these people as worthless before they took ill; he could care less if they died, or worse yet, if the authorities had to “dispatch” them.