Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  So Cuvier went right to the genitals, explaining to his assembled colleagues at the Académie Royale de Médecine, in the most shocking of terms, that “there is nothing more famous in natural history than the tablier [the French rendering of sinus pudoris] of Hottentots, and, at the same time, no feature has been the object of so many arguments.”26 The arguments to which Cuvier referred revolved around the true nature of the veil. Did it really exist? Was it actually outsized, as Western scientists had claimed? Could one actually see through it? Cuvier asked fundamental questions about Sarah Baartman that no other scientist would ever conceive of asking about white women. When Cuvier presented Sarah’s genitalia to the Académie, he held them aloft as a kind of trophy, declaring: “I have the honor to present to the Académie the genital organs of this woman prepared in a manner that leaves no doubt about the nature of her tablier.” His distinguished audience now had the scientific evidence—a thin membrane, a veil—that they claimed they so badly needed to convince the world of the bestial sexuality of African women.

  In the end, in fact, nothing was left of Sarah Baartman but that kind of degraded sexuality that Cuvier and others had constructed around her. She was taken apart, bit by bit, by lurid spectators while she lived, and dissected afterward by Cuvier’s clan. In the end, no real person, no Sarah Baartman of South Africa, no vibrant Khoisan tribal member, existed. She lived out her days as a cipher, silent and unheard, in the strangest sort of intimacy with those who exploited her. No one in that white world, it appeared, ever heard her continual cry of anguish. She resembled the horrific quiet—pain as no more than a ghostly presence—that Edvard Munch rendered in his painting The Scream in 1893. White men in white smocks measured and described in elaborate detail every part of her anatomy, even, as we have seen, the most private of those parts.

  At the conclusion of Sarah Bernhardt’s dance of the seven veils, also, nothing remained. The stage went dark, leaving the audience on their own to wonder and imagine. No magnificent, larger-than-life superstar stared down at them from that most elevated stage. And while she may have vanished, she momentarily gave audience members back their feelings, for, as with a thrill ride at an amusement park, what lingered were titillation, excitement, and the magic of the moment. Most important, Sarah Bernhardt gave the audience a chance to think about what they had just seen. After a brief pause, gaffers would bring the lights back up on a stage empty save for an array of seven veils of seven different colors. For all anybody knew, Sarah Bernhardt might have died. (She in fact loved to feign her own death. Photographs of her asleep in an open coffin sold by the thousands around the world. Early on, her publicists offered the photographs as proof of her sudden demise. Then she would suddenly appear in some out-of-the-way city, with great fanfare, having bounced back, mysteriously, to life: the actress playing the role of the queen of the undead.) But of course the audience knew better. Every last one of them had been thoroughly entertained—taken in—by the mistress of illusion. She had not died; she had disappeared. And audiences ate it up.

  For those who observed the other Sarah, Sarah Baartman, all that remained were repulsion and repugnance—and, of utmost importance, the knowledge that they, the white audience, inhabited different and more elegantly designed bodies. Which is to say that they belonged to a separate and superior species. In a key sense, white people were bearing witness, they had come to believe, to a graphic representation of the awful but all too evident truths of polygenesis, two races forever separated, one inferior to the other and, in some strange ways, each defining its existence by the other. Racism and beauty share at least one salient point—they are both only skin deep.

  And so, before the very startled eyes of thousands of onlookers, both Sarahs vanished on the stage: The audience found nothing more to observe but a congeries of thoughts and expectations, a swirling of desires. The dance of the seven veils and the striptease—the “hootchy-kootchy”—represented in quite dramatic fashion one of the major struggles in the period: the attempt by scientists and philosophers to find the essence, the ground, of human existence by dissecting reality into its constituent parts. Science provided but a glimpse at some truth, offering a theory that quickly got supplanted by yet another, more reasonable-sounding theory. And still the period persisted in trying to find that one essential answer to existence. Ironically, it may have been there all along, right before their very eyes. The essential ingredient may have been the paradoxical nature of their own act of looking: the grand expectations and the inevitable letdown. The process and not the product provided the actual meaning. The searching, the curiosity, kept them going. The secret of life lay in the living itself, the lesson seemed to be, not in the outcome, and certainly not in the allure of fame or fortune.

  Social and political conditions in the nineteenth century made the times ripe for the emergence of the striptease and its wholesale embrace by bourgeois French society. It appealed for obvious sensual and sexual reasons. It made nightlife exciting, provocative, and allowed clubgoers to feel safely like outlaws. For a brief few hours, Oscar Wilde and his crew had nothing on them. But deeper social reasons also contributed to its spectacular popularity. Though very few people stopped to think about it, the striptease carried powerful metaphoric meaning in its ritual of removing layer upon layer, revealing—maybe something, but most often absolutely nothing. To paraphrase King Lear’s fool, “Nothing will come of nothing, my lord.” The fool reveals the shape of reality. For he describes precisely how people do in fact negotiate reality—we all construct meaning out of our own perceptions. We typically make something out of nothing.

  The fool, one of the most wickedly intelligent persons in the kingdom—speaking his enigmatic sentences that point to nothingness—strips Lear of his rhetorical excesses and reduces him to his most basic human essence. At the climax of the play, he stands beside his lord in the middle of a raging storm, as Lear peels off his robes, divesting himself of royal authority: He stands stark naked before raw nature, a Renaissance embodiment of Ishtar. Still holding on to the title of king, Lear gives himself over to the elements, declaring that he is nothing more than a “poor, bare, forked animal.” The howling storm, the howling Lear—it is a moment of overwhelming terror for the battered old man. Shakespeare’s vision is dark here, as dark as the storm. But, as so often happens in nature (and tragedy), a bolt of lightning punctuates the dark with a momentary brilliance.

  In one of those brief flashes, Lear turns to the fool and, for the first time in his rather long and painful life, offers another person refuge inside his meager cave. As the play suggests and the nineteenth century makes apparent, in the end one has only the basics: faith and friendship and love—the highly invisible, bedrock ideas on which we try so hard to build our lives. The king, the man whose rank suggests worldly wisdom, is only just learning this simple but profound lesson. A fool is his teacher; nature provides the classroom. And we, the audience members, are learning that basic lesson along with him.

  Such basic truths come to us thinly veiled. To hear it from Nietzsche, truth can only come to us opaque. We see as through a glass darkly. Indeed, once the light shines brightly, truth falls away: “One should not,” Nietzsche says, “believe that truth remains truth when you remove its veil.”27 Truth comes, then, as an approximation, in that liminal space as we cross the threshold from darkened theater and move slowly into the fading, outside light. In that transition, like Lear, we get thrown back on ourselves. We turn elemental, basic, essential. In a sense, the move into daylight from the theater is a move into a radically different light—hopefully, into insight. We change from spectator to seer. That radical shift can happen when we leave Sarah Baartman’s cage, or Sarah Bernhardt’s stage.

  We must remember, there is always the chance that the sunlight will blind. Thus Plato cautions us in the parable of the cave. Maybe shadow puppets should suffice. In the end, we are the projectors—projecting light onto the shadows, and projecting meaning onto those puppets. We make them mo
ve. When is it that we actually see into the deepest heart of things? Does it ever really happen? Perhaps not. But we persist. We doggedly persist. That’s what it means in great part to be alive.

  Shakespeare equates nakedness with the unadorned truth. As I have argued in this chapter, the two Sarahs participate in different kinds of nakedness that posit different sorts of truths. We can seize on nakedness ourselves, like Lear; or have it imposed on us, like Sarah Baartman; or manipulate others with it, like Sarah Bernhardt. Lear learns from his experience, and comes to see that his very own kingdom is filled with scores of people, just like him at the moment, who face the elements without protection. They live their lives as “poor naked wretches.” With that insight, he heads back into the cave; but first he asks the fool to enter before him—a small gesture that reveals a change in Lear’s attitude toward the world around him.

  So that’s what Lear ultimately sees—and that’s what, in the end, redeems him. But, like the sun, lightning can also blind. Keep Plato in mind here: It’s possible to learn not a single thing—nothing may indeed come of nothing. To guard against coming up morally short, we just need to lean a little closer to Lear: We need to pay more attention to the suffering. Wilde and his crowd may be right—the fools and the outliers do bring us the news. Those are real people in the kingdom. They need shelter from the storm. We just need to heed their existence. We must pay attention to their needs.

  Lear is a play. People paid admission to see it. Two hundred years later, they also paid to see the two Sarahs. As far as audiences were concerned, they viewed both women as theatrical attractions. We certainly need the recreation of the world through art and entertainment, but diversions intrigue us more when we carry their lessons back into the harsh realities of life. To use an example from the most popular form of mass entertainment in the period: An early, obscure piece of film footage from the turn of the century shows Sigmund Freud, the avatar of high seriousness, making his dignified way through Steeplechase Park at Coney Island. At some point, although the film does not record the transaction, the great Sigmund Freud will have to say “so long” to Coney, hop on the subway, and walk the streets of Brooklyn once again.

  What would the tenement buildings look like to him then? What would the plain speech of the butchers and waiters and fishmongers sound like to him then? Would new theories, of pleasure and pain, work their way into his consciousness that summer Sunday afternoon? Did he welcome the fear growing in the pit of his stomach as the Loop-the-Loop, an early roller coaster at Coney built in the form of several graceful ovals, turned Doctor Freud upside down as it made its circuits high in the air? Or did he just put the damper on his emotions?

  FOUR | No One’s Dead

  O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.

  —HAMLET

  “WE WILL EACH of us write a ghost story.”1 That’s the challenge Lord Byron gave to his friends the evening of June 16, 1816, as they huddled around his fireplace at the Villa Diodati. In past years, standing on his balcony, Byron could see to the far side of Lake Geneva. But that particular summer was strangely and wildly different, as if some preternatural force had descended over the Swiss Alps. Each day passed without relief, unbearably hot and humid with overcast skies. When evening came, the temperature dropped dramatically, bringing severe rainstorms and electrical shows in a night sky so clouded over that for weeks no one had seen even a trace of the moon. The weather drove tourists indoors both day and night. So strange were those three months that newspapers took to calling 1816 “The Year Without a Summer.”

  That night Byron offered refuge to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s soon-to-be wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary’s step-sister, Jane (Claire) Clairmont, at the Villa Diodati. Shelley was twenty-four years old, Mary eighteen. George Gordon, Lord Byron, twenty-eight and a full-fledged hypochondriac, traveled nowhere without his personal physician, John William Polidori, twenty years old and a loner of a man with a knack for alienating virtually every person he met. After some cajoling, Polidori consented to join the others that night.

  Before his friends arrived in Switzerland, Byron had been spending his leisure time reading contemporary ghost stories translated from the German, in a volume eerily titled Tales of the Dead, stories truly ghostwritten. From childhood on, Byron had had a fascination with ghosts. And so, on that evening of June 16, he decided on a little parlor competition to further his own interest: Each of his friends would make up a ghost story and tell it to the group. Byron permitted none of his guests to retire until they had come up with the general outline of some enticing, wildly imaginative haunting. They did not disappoint their host.

  What started out as a lark ended as a landmark event. Those four friends had transformed the ghost story, or the spectral story, for English audiences—tales that mined the extraordinary in everyday life. Byron’s friends coaxed the horrific and the terrible out into the open, and turned the evening into a literary success beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. The young Mary Godwin launched her serious literary career with the opening gambit for the gothic romance Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which she published in 1818. Shelley started work on “Mont Blanc,” a poem about the pursuit of power in a world bereft of God. And Doctor Polidori, having recently read the French version of Tales of the Dead, titled Fantasmagoriana, found to his own surprise that he, too, had inside of him the germ of a story. Polidori’s tale eventuated in the enormously successful piece “The Vampyre,” which he published in 1819.

  Only Byron, the master of ceremonies himself, claimed to have trouble conjuring a ghost story, and decided instead to continue writing his tragedy Manfred. To be fair, Byron had already turned his attention to Jane Clairmont, who had just turned eighteen, and who fell in line, under the beguiling and oftentimes crushing charm of Lord Byron, as the next of his many mistresses.

  Of course, Byron’s small coterie of friends had enormous talent, but a good deal of their success came from tapping into a deeper, more general and more widespread interest in ghosts and spirits. While Byron’s guests had all made up stories about ghosts, about the supernatural, their tales also mirrored that important cultural change: the disappearance of human beings. More and more, ordinary people in the nineteenth century had come to feel an undertow, an erosion of their sensibilities. On this deeper, more metaphysical level, ghost stories revealed basic truths about their own lives, and the general public simply could not get their fill. Following the publication of Frankenstein and “The Vampyre,” both British and American readers devoured all kinds of literature about ghosts, and their appetite for the spectral continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century.

  This interest in ghosts reached a literary climax, of sorts, in England with the publication, in 1848, of a book titled The Night Side of Nature. Written by an author of children’s books, the rather slim volume turned its creator, Catherine Crowe, into an immediate celebrity. Borrowing her strategy from Byron and his friends, Crowe gathered hundreds of ghost stories from friends and relatives. Not only could Crowe tell a story well—after all, she had been successful with youngsters for many years—she also invented new words, like poltergeist, that entered the popular vocabulary and imagination. But beyond merely wanting to entertain with her anthology of ghost stories, she demanded action: “I wish to engage the attention of my readers, because I am satisfied that the opinions I am about to advocate, seriously entertained, would produce very beneficial results.” She never reveals, however, just what those beautiful results might include. The Night Side, as it came to be affectionately called, stayed in print for more than fifty years and helped to fuel the movement for serious psychic investigations.

  After Crowe, almost every well-established and sophisticated writer, from H. G. Wells to Oscar Wilde, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, conjured ghosts on the page. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wrote several tales about ghosts: “The Ghost in the Mill” and “The Ghost in the Cap’
n Brown House.” The Cyclopaedia of Ghost Story Writers, an online inventory for the Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian periods, lists over one hundred writers of ghost stories.

  Oscar Wilde was well steeped in the supernatural and he embraced it wholeheartedly, having his chart done and his palm read with regularity by a well-known clairvoyant who went by the name of Mrs. Robinson. And he certainly took a lighthearted and comic attitude toward the spiritual world. In “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” people mistake chiromancers for chiropodists and have their palms read to discover, much to their chagrin, that they have been involved in some undisclosed murder. It’s all great drawing-room fun and disruption of high-society manners.

  In his second story, “The Canterville Ghost,” which he calls “A Hylo-Idealistic Romance”—which is to say an unclassified tale—he sets about to parody the Gothic world. The story takes place in a haunted house and features an upper-crust spirit named Sir Simon. Along the way, no less a dignitary than the United States ambassador to the Court of Saint James learns to take seriously the power of ghosts and specters. Jules Dassin turned the story into a film, in 1944, starring Charles Laughton—the heavy, substantial Charles Laughton—as Sir Simon the ghost of the House of Canterville.