Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  Given the blows to the core of human sensibilities, both literature and science in the nineteenth century had taken on an enormous task—not just to criticize and analyze, but also to reconstitute what it meant to be wholly alive. That meant starting over from scratch. “Scratch” may in fact be the wrong word. Reconstruction had to be accomplished out of thin air. That’s what the phantasmagoria, the photograph, ghost stories, plays like Ibsen’s Ghosts and August Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, Henry James’s series of ghost stories, Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Body-Snatcher,” Vincenzo Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula, the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, motion picture technology, and the continual reports of various sorts of visitants by one clairvoyant or another were all really in the business of doing—trying to tap into the zeitgeist of the times, and trying, oh so desperately, to arrive at some answers.

  Such a monumental undertaking demanded that every profession, from science to art to popular entertainment—from Humphry Davy to Harry Houdini—set out to find the essence of human life as a starting point for that key project of incorporation. Some public figures, like Davy, were more deliberate and conscious of their task than others. Can we say that Houdini knew he was engaged in discovering the bedrock of anything so highfalutin as human essence? Probably not. But his tricks and illusions were of a piece with the times. Certain ideas, as we often say, are “in the air.” The age exerts its own unspoken, sometimes hidden, but decided influence.

  Another key question: Did it actually happen? Did any scientist really find the answer, or did any novel really manage to capture that elusive essence, or was the course of history just a record of more and more anxiety as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth, the twentieth wearily into the twenty-first? We will see. But it is important to think about the possible endings to this story.

  What does it mean to be alive? is a key question that haunted the twentieth century. It haunts us today. Periodically, that question moved powerfully and often times noisily to the foreground, for instance with existential philosophy, the beats, the civil rights movement, the hippies, the yippies, and the liberation movements of the eighties and nineties. In the new twenty-first century, people still ask the very same question, only now in the midst of vastly increased technological advances, like DNA and genome research, along with a proliferation of screens and a resurgence of Protestant evangelical movements. It may in fact be harder to find an answer today, since we are in the thrall of more and more simulacra and more and more ideologies.

  In 1869, William James published a famous essay, “The Perception of Reality.” While the piece first appeared in the journal Mind, James added it as a separate chapter in his famous and influential Principles of Psychology. In that essay he posed the following question, which he required the publisher to set in italics: “Under what circumstances do we think things real?” Why do some things in the world seem more real to us, he asked, than other things? James asked the question in the context of his deep and committed interest in the spiritual world, in his desire to show that our refusal to believe in the invisible world led to our own feelings of ghostliness. Part of the answer to why we believe in certain forms of reality and not others, James asserts, requires that a person take his or her sensory world seriously. That is, the observer must first feel fully alive before he or she can project that quality out into the world. By mid-century the philosophical and psychological discussions about the “realness” (James’s term) of things and people were in full swing. James turned to the pursuit of ghosts to fill out his own scope of the realness of the real.

  Interest in ghosts continues today, even in someone whom the academy takes so terribly seriously as the French social critic Jacques Derrida, the man who brought deconstruction to American universities. Derrida in fact coined a term specifically for the study of ghosts, hauntology, with a fairly obvious pun on ontology. Hauntology refers to the peculiarly paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor nonbeing, neither dead nor alive, neither corporal presences nor absent spaces. Such an ambiguous state intrigues Derrida because it so deliberately blows apart the binary system that contains so much of our lives today. Derrida refuses to talk about presence and absence, past and present, body and spirit, life and death. Every one of those elements for Derrida contains in its nature a trace of its opposite. And so, in his work Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Derrida laments the fact that “there has never been a scholar that really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts.” For Derrida, ghosts get at the very nature of aliveness itself. Ironically, it is ghosts and not flesh that force us to ask the right questions about the nature of existence.

  The most basic of those questions must be, especially against the continual erosion of our own solidity and substance, How do we know we are alive? We have fallen under the sway of the medical profession, media conglomerates, the food industry, and the political machine: Some professional constantly tells us who we are, what we need, and how we should feel. In addition, this has become a much harder question to answer in a world where the image, more and more, asserts authority over the actual. It makes it harder to answer the question: What is it that constitutes the bedrock of human existence? People find all kinds of ways to show that they really are made of flesh and blood, from participating in extreme sports to finding validation in so-called reality television shows, from getting tattooed to having various parts of their bodies pierced. Those last two, tattoos and piercings, so tremendously popular in the early twenty-first century, had their resurgence in the nineteenth century, when the search really got under way.

  Captain James Cook brought news of tattoos back from the South Seas Islands, and first mentioned them in his journals in 1769. He emphasized one aspect of the art, an important component for establishing the substantive reality of the body, and that was the level of pain exacted by tattooing certain parts of the body: “This method of tattooing I shall now describe. As this is a painful operation, especially the tattooing of their buttocks. It is performed but once in their lifetimes.” If the procedure elicited pain, it must mean that the person truly existed, that he or she had feelings, and finally that he or she stood out as a human being who was fully alive—an important point for anyone suffering from feelings of dissolution. Ghosts do not feel pain. Tattooing became a popular art form in the last part of the nineteenth century, in England and in America. At the Chicago World’s Fair, one of the best-attended displays consisted of a group of South Sea Islanders, their bodies almost entirely covered with needle art.

  The same life-affirming qualities that characterized tattooing also marked the various forms of body piercing that became essential viewing at sideshows. One of the most popular and graphic sideshow attractions featured a man who drove a nail into the side of his nose with a large hammer, or sometimes deep into the side of his head. Feelings of insubstantiality may also account for the huge following that Eugen Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding and a pioneer in the field of physical culture, enjoyed. While he began life in Prussia, as Friedrich Wilhelm Mueller, he made his debut in America on June 12, 1893, at the Casino Roof Garden in New York City, billed as nothing less than “The Perfect Man.” He had just turned twenty-six. Touted as the strongest man in the world, Sandow captivated audiences with his enormous feats of strength and his public displays of muscular development. If only every one of you would pay the same strict attention to becoming solid and assured, he seemed to be saying, your body might look like just like mine.

  In one dramatic climax to his act, Sandow made his body into an bridge, his chest upraised, his feet flat, and his hands arched back over his head, they, too, flat on the stage. Assistants placed a wooden platform on his shoulders, legs and chest. At that moment, the music grew louder, the house lights dimmed, the excitement rose. Three horses, which, according to the publicity posters, weighed a total of 2,600 pounds, stepped onto the platform and remained
stock still for roughly five seconds. But that feat paled in comparison with his most outlandish display of the limits of human strength: lifting a full-grown elephant—perhaps using Houdini’s own Jennie, and perhaps borrowing the master’s own illusion—from the stage floor to high over his head with just his bare hands. In a certain way, Sandow presented to his audiences an astonishing example of the anti-ghost, the man who refused to fade away. Like Houdini, he derived a good deal of his substance from his status as a celebrity and a star.

  Again, like Houdini, Sandow made a fortune just from performing prodigious acts of strength and showing off his well-developed physique. For a time, Sandow’s was the most famous and recognizable naked body—male or female—in the world. Ninety-seven-pound weaklings had Sandow’s poster pinned up on their bedroom walls. He paved the way for other strongmen—like Charles Atlas, whose advertisements would appear at the back of mid-twentieth-century comic books—and for the cult of bodybuilding. Nineteenth-century naturopaths, like Bernarr MacFadden, owe their popularity to Sandow. Recall that MacFadden introduced to America the idea of bodybuilding.

  From ghost to solid muscle: The move may sound like a shift from one extreme to the other, but in a sense because all three characters—Mac-Fadden, Sandow, and Houdini—developed that one dimension, strength, they in effect lost their substance. The complicated, quirky, elusive side of people that we know as their personalities had, in each of their cases, completely vanished. All three men, in their passion for being solidly there, had ironically managed to turn themselves into phantoms. Some people use the same ploys today—living large and in charge, building bulk and giving notice of colossal strength through working out, taking steroids, driving huge SUVs, playing car radios at full volume, wearing oversize clothes, and sometimes carrying and even using guns. They get covered with tattoos and have their flesh pierced. A clothing company named Metal Mulisha sponsors a crew of hard-edged, tough, tattooed motorcycle riders and eager fighters. They want to give the appearance that their too too solid flesh will not melt. They need to feel that way. But of course, and sadly so, it’s just not true. The thug life is life at a most essentialist level, at the level of power and strength and fear—of offering to the world an image of total intimidation.

  It is impossible to think about the social contract without that crucial agent called the human being. The elimination of such a basic and complicated entity, the human being, makes all sorts of inhuman treatment that we encounter with great frequency today absolutely possible—and even probable. Once people come to feel that they have lost their essence, their sense of being, they fall to the level of immediate victims. Life loses its value. Whoever has power feels free to subject those others to the most violent and inhuman assaults—murder, or perhaps even worse, prolonged and painful methods of torture that eventually lead to death.

  Extreme forms of torture do not constitute an exercise of the imagination. Such manipulations reveal a mind that refuses to see the other as a sentient human being. Once people begin to move around like ghosts, it is an easy step—or no step at all—for those in authority to eliminate them.

  For in a sense that kind of deep-seated disappearance creates the feeling that they—or, more accurately, we—no longer exist. No one can blame people for wanting to recapture that feeling of being fully alive. There’s no other feeling quite like it. But tattoos and studs will not do. There must be more.

  FIVE | There Is Only Life

  And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.

  —RANDALL JARRELL, “A GIRL IN A LIBRARY”

  GOD DID NOT CREATE LIFE—not on the sixth, or seventh, or any other day. Science created life. Slowly and deliberately, over the course of the nineteenth century, a collection of professionals—philosophers, scientists, and those in the natural sciences—in their failure to find the essence of humanness, helped to pave the way for an artificially created entity called “life,” or the even more alien, “a life.” Beginning in the 1870s, in this country—during what has come to be called the Gilded Age—the barons of wealth managed to crush in the lower classes whatever little bit of living still remained.

  Textile workers, for instance, spent fourteen hours a day in the factory, six days a week, and got paid $5 for the week. Workers included women, boys, and girls. And the numbers were getting worse: In 1875 twice as many children under twelve worked in Rhode Island as they did twenty years before, most of them in the mills. The New York Sun summarized the plight of workers thus: “There is, however, little danger of an outbreak among them. They live, as a rule, in tenements owned by the company employing them; and when they strike they are at once thrown out in the street. Then they are clubbed by policemen, arrested as vagrants, and sent to the county jail, to be released to take their choice of going to work at the old wages or starving.”1

  Politics, or what went by the name of politics, in the Gilded Age sounds grim indeed, and intent on destroying all life. Here is one historian’s quick summary of the situation:Representative government gave way to bought government. Politicians betrayed the public trust. Citizens sold their votes. Dreams faded. Ideals died of their impossibility. Cynicism poisoned hope. The United States in these years took on the lineaments of a Latin American party-state, an oligarchy ratified in rigged elections, girded by bayonets, and given a genial historical gloss by its raffish casting.

  Jay Gould was president. He never ran for office, he never lost office—he ruled. He wrote the laws. He interpreted the Constitution. He commanded the army. He staffed the government. He rented politicians, fattening his purse off their favor. He was John D. Rockefeller, James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, Tom Scott, and George Pullman; and this was his time—this was his country.2

  This description does not allow for very much living. Huge and overreaching corporate wealth had taken charge in this country. Of the seventy-three men who held cabinet posts between 1868 and 1896, forty-eight of them either served railroad clients, lobbied for the railroad, sat on railroad boards, or had railroad-connected relatives. They passed the baton of power to the coal and oil moguls of our day, to the Cheneys and the Bushes. What choices did people have in the nineteenth century to grab back their sense of being, their autonomy? If one were a Boston Brahmin like Henry David Thoreau the idea of civil disobedience might come to mind. On the absolute other end of the scale, a worker might strike (a word, by the way, that appears first in America, in the report of a strike from 1810; a “strike” is a blow against control and for freedom), but historically such actions resulted in small payoffs and huge recriminations. (Between 1870 and 1903, in this country, authorities called in the state militia, the National Guard, or federal troops more than five hundred times to put down labor strikes.)

  In the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, The New York Times referred on July 26 to those who refused to work, in a list of insults worthy of Falstaff, asroughs, hoodlums, rioters, a mob, suspicious-looking individuals, bad characters, thieves, blacklegs, looters, communists, rabble, labor-reform agitators, a dangerous class of people, gangs, tramps, drunken section-men, law-breakers, threatening crowd, bummers, ruffians, loafers, bullies, vagabonds, cowardly mob, bands of worthless fellows, incendiaries, enemies of society, reckless crowd, malcontents, wretched people, loud-mouthed orators, rapscallions, brigands, robbers, riffraff, terrible fellows, felons, and idiots.

  Such overreactions, both verbal and physical, might explain the appeal in nineteenth-century America of one strategy for confronting the expanding oppressive authority, and that is anarchy—the opportunity to govern one’s own living without a leader and through one’s own actions. Anarchy may stand at the exact opposite pole from the artificially fashioned and thoroughly controlled entity called “life.”

  We refer with ease to this new entity “life” as if it had always existed, as if it were a solid, a historical phenomenon, and as if any group of people would consider such an idea normal and acceptable. Today, we accept life without question; it seems absurd to question the no
tion. Life now occupies such a firm and familiar place in our imagination that we talk freely about pursuing various “lifestyles,” and making certain “life choices,” and even about hiring one of the newest professionals known as “life coaches” to help navigate the rough waters of, yes, an overextended and overly stressed “life.”

  After graduating from college, say, young people now suddenly discover that they have “a life”; and with that life the world expects them to make something of themselves—at least “to earn a living”—otherwise their friends will tell them to stop sponging off their parents and “get a life.” When murderers “take” someone’s life, the state feels justified, in turn, in taking theirs. To stay on the straight and narrow and lead a respectable and reasonable life may require one to occasionally enroll in a course in “anger management” and, when confronted with loss or death, perhaps even hand oneself over to the expertise of a professional “grief manager.” This continual attention to detail I call the managed life. Several universities offer advanced degrees in the science of life management.

  The managed life reveals its true nature most clearly in commerce, where every major corporation, to remain in compliance with the law, must have an office of human resources, along with a director, who carries the clinical-sounding title “HR Administrator.” The director instructs the company on what it can and cannot do to employees—the “workforce”—without violating their rights. Many colleges and universities offer programs for older, returning adults, many with similar-sounding names, like New Resources, as if the school were mining an aging cadre of students for some rare metal or precious petroleum. Such is the state of affairs when the human being has passed out of existence—people presenting themselves, unwittingly, as a fleshy kind of resource, “productive” until around age sixty-five or, if things go well, maybe seventy. We have no reason to think of such resources as necessarily alive—but rather that they have a life. (The New England Mutual Life Insurance Company began issuing policies in the 1840s. A person could actually begin to think of his or her life in terms of worth, in terms, certainly, of lost income.)