Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  The Nobel Committee awarded Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway was a blazingly important writer not just in this country, but also around the world. His publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons—after editing and reediting and vetting The Sun Also Rises—published it, in 1926, with a mistake. How refreshing! How wonderful! The printer’s devil beat the printing press. It’s not unlike the example of a Japanese pottery master, who makes the perfect vase and then at the end intentionally dings it to let the world know that the pot was crafted by a human being. Machines make perfect objects, perhaps, but not human beings. Human beings fall far short of perfection. Human essence made itself known and felt through the one thing that society and authority ask us to avoid at all costs—mistakes.

  Incredible: What McMurtry chooses to remember—and I would argue here that remember must be taken in its literal sense of “membering,” of putting limbs back together, the reassembling of his soul—is a significant word that does more than reflect his condition. It is his condition. He got stopped; he stopped himself; his heart stopped. However one phrases it, McMurtry had become, for a time, a mechanical creature of sorts. Off the machine, his heart back in his body—should we consider him dead here, or simply suspended? Newly resouled, as it were? He certainly had to settle back into himself, where only reading and writing—those two activities out of which he had fashioned his entire life—could project him back into the world. But he could not do it. He could not write anymore, or read anymore. The rhythm of his life had fallen out of sync with all those old sentences.

  What makes Larry McMurtry remember? What stirs him to reach for that specific passage in Hemingway? Who knows? Maybe he never forgot it. Maybe he only lived over it—and went on with his life, which seems imminently reasonable. We might find a clue to his peculiar kind of return in another text, Raymond Williams’s marvelous book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. In it, under the entry for humanity, Williams points out the need to add a note about the word human: “It is . . . commonly used to indicate warmth and congeniality (‘a very human person’). But there is also a significant use to indicate what might be called condoned fallibility (‘human error,’ ‘natural human error’) and this is extended, in some uses, to indicate something more than this relatively neutral observation.”

  In the end, a misspelling, a keyword, stoppped, with an extra, terrifically upsetting letter, a single p—came to slap him on the shoulder. A mistake brought McMurtry back to his senses; a mistake brought home to him the nature of being human. For that’s at least one good measure of being human, McMurtry realizes, the seemingly infinite capacity of the human being to make mistakes.

  McMurtry is so much built out of books that death temporarily erases the pages of his interiorized texts—the pages on which his memories, his experiences, his lives, are written. When he returns to his craft, he comes back with his writing style—or reading style—severely altered. He craves different sentences and different rhythms. Having caught a second wind, he finds his breathing has drastically changed. The result of Larry McMurtry’s return from death, or however we can describe the man who for a time had no heart, is a new and slow-paced, drawn-out series of sentences, to which he confesses by heaping praise on two writers who match his new sluglike style: I’d rather read biographies of writers than read their works. Proust and Virginia Woolf are two exceptions, perhaps because their works are not only rivers of language, they’re rivers of gossip, too. My time with these two masterpieces—[Remembrance of Things Past and Woolf’s diaries]—I owe to the heart surgery because, without it, I might never have been open to them so profoundly. This is a bonus that goes far toward overshadowing the trauma. My self has more or less knitted itself together again, the trauma has faded, but the grandeur of those books, the White Nile of Proust, the Blue Nile of Virginia Woolf, will be with me all my life.

  If we do not know where we can locate our dying, we do not know, then, how or where to locate our living. One can only wonder, now—and the phrasing does indeed sound weird—if it is even possible to die. When does that moment of death actually occur? Which is to say, when does the moment of life take place—if it ever does—or can we, with any intelligence, even phrase such a question anymore?

  Since this chapter has settled into literature, I want to end it with a quotation from literature, from one of America’s smartest contemporary authors, Don DeLillo, from his novel White Noise. DeLillo explores here the quality of living in a postmodern world, which is to say that he also explores the strange ways we have these days of having our life drain away. A key experience that people used to describe with some assurance has now turned into a murky and confused series of moments:You are said to be dying, and yet are separate from the dying, can ponder it at your leisure, literally see on an x-ray photograph or computer screen the horrible alien logic of it all. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.

  We might even call this a virtual death, a simulacrum of the real thing. To watch one’s own dying on a screen makes it seem as if some critic should review it as a performance of sorts, and give it one or two thumbs up.

  How can we feel like a stranger in our own dying? Is such a condition even possible? Is that the one moment when we should feel totally engaged with our fate—or is it absolutely natural to feel like a stranger? Do we first have to feel tightly intimate with our living before we can eradicate the feeling of being a stranger in our dying? Ivan Illich, the radical social critic, says that “the ability to die one’s own death depends on the depth of one’s embodiment.” He calls ours an “amortal society,” and writes, “There are no dead around; only the memory of lives that are not there. The ordinary person suffers from the inability to die.” DeLillo hints at that same terrifying state of affairs. To be a stranger to one’s own dying certainly has to stand as one basic and crucial form of dissociation from life.

  That feeling of confusion makes up a huge part of our legacy from the nineteenth century, and in that legacy death becomes a commodity, an engineered and ordered fact of our engineered lives. Disembodied, “unfleshed,” disoriented—such words describe the human condition in the twenty-first century. We got here because of the sweep of the past, specifically of the nineteenth century—and in particular the way the Civil War congealed the many and various and contrary themes of death and life.

  But matters will grow worse. People will move beyond a mere withdrawal or alienation from death. In the late twentieth century, as we shall see, they tire of death and come to see it as a failure of that key system known as our living and breathing selves. Some people will come to view death as a flaw in our design that can and must be corrected. Without that nasty interruption that goes by the name of death, we might just live forever, just as Count Dracula promised we might.

  THREE | A Couple of Sarahs Later

  MANY THEMES—self and naming; personality and monomania; stardom and fame; unveiling and the revelation of truth; the necessity, against a proliferating number of ghosts, for finding a definition of human essence; and a closely related issue, the belief in the inferiority of all African peoples—come together in the lives of two nineteenth-century women. They could not be more opposite from each other. One of them passed through the world totally devoid of a sense of herself; the other embodied a heightened sense of self-awareness. I choose women because they still represent “the other” in the nineteenth century. A good indication, for me, of the health of a society is how it treats its outsiders—its mavericks, minorities, and citizens who live out on the margins.

  While one of the women I take up is Caucasian, and the other African, the difference in the way society treated them is a matter of kind, not of degree. They both dominated the news and commanded worldwide attention, but for radically di
fferent reasons. White people had a most certain means of ratifying their own identity, which they did, in a decidedly offensive way, by making themselves as distinct as possible from black people. We cannot in the nineteenth century separate white identity from black inferiority. White people may have been struggling to find the proper category for themselves in the nineteenth century, but social scientists had already consigned blacks to their own category, and it was not, in any stretch of the imagination, a winning or favorable one. In this period, at least, in a most bizarre way, whites desperately needed blacks to assure a sense of their own well-being.

  The two women I have chosen narrate absolutely disparate stories about sex, about the relationship between sex and power, and perhaps about the thinnest of lines that separate being critically examined and judged (becoming an object) from being greatly admired and appreciated (becoming a subject). In an age of photographs and motion pictures, of people glancing out of a train window at the landscape rushing by or watching reality moving past on a screen, we can ask, What does it mean to gaze, to ponder, to observe? People in the nineteenth century grew accustomed to seeing the natural world for an instant only. They simply had less and less time to concentrate on detail. In great part, this emphasis on continuous movement caused people to lose a grip on their own lives.

  The haptic, material life was fast coming to an end, the surface of things assuming importance over their depth, the image over the real. Such emphasis quite naturally reinforced the idea of racism, which gains its meaning and import from a surface reading, from a refusal to face the complications of reality in favor of delving only skin deep—to paraphrase Martin Luther King, it is cover over content, color over character. In the new century, substance fell away, reduced to something of secondary or tertiary importance.

  More and more, people found themselves as members of one audience or another—spectators rather than actors at an event. They looked, they gaped, they stared, they gazed. But even more unsettling, technology came to define for them just what constituted an event. Newspapers, magazines, and motion pictures increasingly shaped their reality, dictating to them what to think and how to feel. Professionals replaced amateurs: Undertakers became morticians, doctors became physicians, midwives became nurses, cops became law enforcement, and teachers turned into professors. Extended, tedious, and repetitive acts marked the workweek, which could stretch from six to six and a half and even seven days. The randomness of life gave way to the regularity of the clock. For working stiffs, time did not fly; it crept at a petty pace. People desperately wanted, they needed, what the French call divertissement—entertainment, spectacle, events that were grouped under the apt name of “pastimes.” Hordes of ordinary, working men and women made the cinema immediately and incredibly popular. Others traveled great distances to observe so-called rarities of the human race, or something akin to the human race, from around the world—oddities that rewarded the curious and the depraved.

  One of the women I have chosen belongs in that most destructive category of rarities. At best a reluctant performer, she shied away from any notion of the limelight, but got thrown into its bright center nonetheless, and received a great deal of worldwide fame and notoriety. (Stage technicians invented a new concoction, “limelight,” in the nineteenth century, by heating pieces of lime in an oxyhydrogen flame. Such intensity of illumination corresponded well with the new idea of heavenly stardom.) The object of hundreds of thousands of people’s piercing gaze, she turned into a freakish kind of spectacle, a puzzling link in the Great Chain for men and women to ponder. She stood out as an example of self-abnegation, or worse yet, of a person denied any chance of developing a sense of self.

  The other woman went after stardom with a vengeance, pursued it deliberately and passionately, and got exactly what she wanted, worldwide fame. She, too, became the object of fascination, but for altogether different reasons. For a great many people in this country, as well as in Europe, she served as an exemplar of self-reliance, or better yet, of self-cultivation. The press dubbed her “The Incomparable One.” Historians associate both of these women with a strong, a terribly strong, sexual presence.

  Both women carried the same biblically charged name, Sarah; and both shared the same initials, S. B. The first woman, Sarah Baartman, was born in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in 1789. History does not record her tribal name. Her Dutch captors baptized her Saartjie Baartman, or “Little Sarah,” in Afrikaans. Standing only four feet, six inches tall, she faced a doomed, painful, and violently shortened life—but not because of the hardships endured in her native country or out of her own doing. Just after her twenty-first birthday, in 1810, a Dutch physician brought her life as a member of the Khoikhoi tribe to an abrupt and brutal end.

  In the early nineteenth century, Dutch farmers, greedy for more land, launched a brutal campaign against the Khoikhoi, an ancient and essentially pacific nomadic, cattle-raising people, slaughtering thousands and thousands of them. One of those Dutch farmers, a man named Peter Cezar, captured Sarah during one of the raids and enslaved her on his farm. Peter’s brother, Henrik, a surgeon, examined Sarah during one of his visits from England and prepared a detailed description of her, from her head to her feet, in his diary, a level of description he could get only from the most invasive and humiliating of inspections. In her enormous buttocks and enlarged labia, he wrote, he found a confirmation of the world’s general belief in black female sexual depravity. (Anthropologists call the accumulation of fat in the buttocks steatopygia). He decided that by removing her to London and putting her on display, he could offer the world a living and quite graphic answer to the question, as he put it in his diary, “Are African people human?” According to some accounts, Henrik also promised Sarah vast amounts of money.

  Cezar was suggesting nothing new. The practice of exhibiting people of color in the West had existed since the earliest encounters between Europeans and indigenous populations in the New World and Africa. On his return to Spain after his first voyage to the New World in 1492, for instance, Columbus brought several Arawaks to Queen Isabella’s court, where one of them remained on display for two years. But the exhibition of exotic people of color reached its height in the nineteenth century, in both Europe and America, when freak shows and gunpowder entertainment became fairly common and incredibly popular family fare.

  Promoters displayed so-called savages from what was then known as the Dark Continent, along with the most vicious Native American aggressors, in circuses, zoos, and museums, turning them into popular attractions in England and America. In America, in particular, millions of people came to see traveling extravaganzas like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which began its run in 1883, and the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which threw up its big top five years later, in 1888. (Even Wild Bill Hickock took to the stage for a brief time.) Newspapers carried word of a breakthrough in good times, which went by the name “mass entertainment.”

  In a time of shifting personalities, of ordinary folks rising to super-stardom, people shed old names and took new ones, as easily as they changed their clothes—Friedrich Wilhelm Mueller became Eugen Sandow, Henriette-Rosine Bernard became Sarah Bernhardt, Erich Weiss turned into Harry Houdini—and, of course, William F. Cody, frontiersman, transformed himself into a huge fictional hero, Buffalo Bill, performing his Wild West taming of the Indians twice a day on the stage. As con men on the streets and mountebanks on the stage, the most ordinary of citizens also took on new identities. And it is in this context of personality shifting that we might want to place a work of literature like John William Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre,” published in 1819, about a person who, under the right conditions, changes from a civilized, titled man into a wild beast. Buffalo Bill has a touch of this, as he hoped his partly animal name might suggest.

  In a review of Louis S. Warren’s book on Cody, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, the reviewer Russell Baker, quoting from Warren, notes:It was an age when Americans believed that �
��progress, the rise of technology over nature and of settlement over the wild, seemed inevitable.” The Buffalo Bill show made Americans feel good about themselves by encouraging them to believe “that western industrialized society was the apogee of human development, the beginnings of a more peaceful, humane world, and even to fantasize that one person could embody its promise.”

  In the midst of that euphoria about the world in general and about America in particular, a person could pay a penny to see various kinds of bush people on display, offering eager white audiences one more way of feeling more assured, in a most bizarre and inhumane way, about their world. In 1835 one of the greatest showmen of the period, P. T. Barnum, brought to Manhattan an elderly, infirm African American named Joice Heth, and billed her as the 160-year-old nurse of “Little George” Washington. Barnum exhibited her in a makeshift location near Broadway and Prince Streets, promoting her appearance with handbills, posters, and newspaper articles, all of which he wrote himself. When she died the following year, knowing the period’s fascination with death and decay, he sold tickets to her autopsy, at which the coroner estimated her age at sixty-five or seventy years of age, considerably less than what Barnum advertised.

  Barnum puffed up so many mediocre attractions into headline events that the popular press came to call that kind of showmanship “Barnumizing.” Everyone knew that P. T. Barnum had no particular love for the facts; the newspapers often quoted him as saying, “the people like to be hum-bugged.” 1 In 1841, Barnum opened his American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street and, according to John Strausbaugh, filled the five stories witha stupefying surfeit of exhibits and activities: dioramas, panoramas, “cosmoramas,” scientific instruments, modern appliances, a flea circus, a loom run by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which Jesus’ disciples sat, a hat worn by Ulysses S. Grant, an oyster bar, a rifle range, waxworks, glass blowers, taxidermists, phrenologists, pretty-baby contests, Ned the learned seal, the Feejee Mermaid (a mummified monkey’s torso with a fish’s tail), a menagerie of exotic animals that included beluga whales in an aquarium, giants, midgets, Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, Grizzly Adams’s trained bears and performances ranging from magicians, ventriloquists and blackface minstrels to adaptations of biblical tales and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Some 38 million customers paid the 25 cents admission to attend the museum between 1841 and 1865. The total population of the United States in 1860 was under 32 million.2