Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  At her Jubilee procession, in 1897, Queen Victoria sent a message around the world, carried through the cables that Britain had laid to reach all its outposts. In every British colony, from Asia to India to Africa, millions and millions of loyal subjects and colonial subjects heard the queen intone her royal words, intended to uplift and sanctify: “From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them.” It was an extraordinary historical moment, an accomplishment in which the queen’s words took but two minutes, according to reports at the time, to reach a location as exotic as Tehran.12

  Nikola Tesla, born in Croatia, also contributed to this new drive toward entertainment. In 1895, Tesla began sending radio signals over a distance of fifty miles. Two years later, in 1897, Tesla received a patent for perhaps the ultimate instrument to disembody the human voice, the radio, beating out his rival, Guglielmo Marconi. The idea of the radio was not to supply mere snippets of conversations of the sort Edison provided on the phonograph, but whole speeches and long conversations. The radio would prove to be, of course, along with the phonograph, one of the key appliances for providing entertainment in the early years of the twentieth century. While people now spend more time watching television than they do to listening to radio, television still has not dislodged the radio from homes. And we know how important it is in automobiles.

  Even the automobile, perhaps the ultimate “vehicle” of entertainment, managed to slip in under the wire of the end of the century, when Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, in Germany, in 1889, built the first automobile powered by a gasoline engine. Developing 1.5 horsepower out of its tiny two-cylinder engine, this crude automobile went humming along the countryside at a top speed of ten miles per hour. Its four-speed transmission made it able to climb hills and even pull a small load. The century’s frenzy over technological invention and innovation prompted an apocryphal line from Charles H. Duell, commissioner of patents, who was said to argue, in 1889, that the government ought to close the Patent Office permanently on the grounds that “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

  On top of all the changes brought about by technology, museums and zoos opened all across this country and in Europe, so that entire families could now observe art objects and wild, exotic animals up close but decidedly out of hand’s reach. The nation’s first botanical garden opened in 1820 in the Washington, D.C. The haptic life seemed to be receding at a fast clip, just out of everyone’s grasp. More and more experiences came to be truly disembodied ones in the period, one of the powerful legacies the nineteenth century handed down to our own century. In our own time, it is hard to imagine a more disembodied and decidedly bizarre use for Edison’s telephone than the purportedly erotic pastime called “phone sex.” Nicholson Baker wrote an entire novel, Vox, formulated around the conversations of two people who call a 976 party line at the same time, engaging in what can only be called “social intercourse,” telephone to long-distance telephone sexual intimacies, or what one reviewer of Baker’s novel calls “aural sex.”13

  As more and more people moved off the farm and into the city, time—both with the regular clock and the time clock—controlled more and more aspects of their lives. Imagine Edison’s clock yelling at people to get out of bed and get to work, get to dinner, get to church. If they worked in factories, people’s tasks turned blindingly repetitive, their every movement—and quarter-movement—measured by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s new time and motion studies and his ubiquitous stopwatch. People felt more regulated, their lives more robotic. At the same time, machines seemed to take on more human qualities. The period from 1860 to the end of the century is known as the Golden Age of the Automaton. What a confusion! What a grand confusion! Working people—especially Americans, living in the heart of the growing and grinding Industrial Revolution—needed to have a serious (or more accurately, a frivolous) break, a regular break, it turns out, oddly enough, from all that pounding and dampening routine. National holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries just would not do. There had to be more, and there had to be lots more of that more.

  Just when Edison brought out his phonograph, a new word, weekend, began to appear in dictionaries, defined as “the holiday period at the end of a week’s work, usually from Saturday noon or Friday night to Monday; especially this holiday when spent away from home.” The weekend provided that marvelously frivolous break, an officially designated time to forget. For those who couldn’t make the trek to Coney, alcohol added a way to drown the self, easing or even erasing the bitter memories of seemingly unending hours and hours and days and days of repetitive labor. And for most people, alcohol worked as effectively as the best analgesic. If there was a buck to be made, the American businessperson could always be counted on to respond, and thus entrepreneurs opened more taverns and bars per capita during the last two decades of the nineteenth century than at any other time in the nation’s history. Alcoholism, as a disease brought on by the abuse of alcohol, first appeared in medical journals mid-century. Just a decade later, local newspapers carried news of the new disease. The London Daily News, for example, on December 8, 1869, reported on “the deaths of two persons from alcoholism.”

  To enhance that feeling of a dreamy, ghostly oasis on the New York shore, Coney blazed with over one million electric bulbs (another of Edison’s inventions)—so much incandescence that Edison had to build a power plant in New Jersey just to accommodate the park’s enormous electrical needs. Lights adorned every building: Newspapers called it “the architecture of exhilaration.”14 Under that blinding canopy of light, for a penny or two, one could ride the world’s largest and longest roller coaster, the Thunderbolt; try to survive a precipitous fall on the parachute jump (“The Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn”); climb on the back of a metal horse and race the steeplechase; turn topsy-turvy on the Loop-the-Loop; or take a spin on Mister Ferris’s gigantic revolving hub, the Wonder Wheel, the first of which he had designed for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Sitting on top of a water slide called Shoot-The-Chutes, elephants (according to Blaine Harden’s 1999 New York Times article “An Incandescent Coney Island of the Mind”) came “thundering down, one by one, to smack the water as only falling elephants can, drenching and delighting paying customers at . . . Dreamland.”

  In the hands of advertisers, the Industrial Revolution had become a fanciful plaything. Coney put into action that nineteenth-century coining analgesic, the amusement park as pain reliever. God may have died, the general population may have lost faith, but people still knew how to have a good time; if they didn’t, Coney showed them the way. Surreal clowns the size of small buildings; two-headed women and dog-headed men; midgets and dwarves dressed in outlandish costumes: The unconscious had seemingly sprung to life. Families could even sleep inside an elephant, at the Elephant Hotel, in the shape of the animal itself. According to Harden, Coney drew ninety thousand people a day at the turn of the century, when baseball games did well to grab twenty thousand.

  Everywhere people walked at Coney, they could not help experiencing euphoria or vertigo—or both. Look, that’s your reflection in the hall of distorted mirrors—howl over your fat self, laugh at your worst nightmare—bent totally out of recognition. Grown men and women staggered off the Thunderbolt—itself a huge scaffolding, not unlike the Brooklyn Bridge—confessing, “I was scared to death but I felt totally alive.” Standing solidly on the ground again, they shouted their joyous sense of relief to the crowd. They had become, in the root sense of the word, exhilarated, “giddily hilarious.” In that new, nineteenth-century aesthetic where danger merged with fear—the art of flirting with certain death—they found themselves, during their brief three-minute thrill ride, transformed once again into human beings, high on an infusion of adrenaline.

  Promoters found other ways to scare people, while amusing them at the same time. For the first time, spectators saw mock death and destruction on the grandest of scales, played out on the most elaborately built sets. At Coney, as the evening grew dark, hundreds of pl
ayers reenacted battles from the Spanish-American War, the Civil War, the Boer War. Every several hours, Tilyou’s cast of characters staged the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Sparks showered the crowd. Bombs exploded. Sirens screamed. Men and women jumped from the windows of burning buildings to the ground, seven floors below; they got blown up on the battlefield and mowed down by a firing squad. Audiences could not get their fill; they clamored for more and more. In some newspaper accounts, these spectacles attracted greater crowds than any of the thrill rides.15

  In front of their very eyes, audiences saw performances of the kind of devestation that would later dominate video screens, on which countless numbers of human beings died virtual deaths. The first occurrence of the word virtual to mean a facsimile body actually comes in the nineteenth century, in 1883, and refers to the Calvinist doctrine of Christ’s virtual presence in the Eucharist. Virtual refers to a body not exactly present—totally in keeping with the nineteenth century’s sense of fading human beings dying fake deaths, or better yet, those virtual human beings parading across the movie screen.

  At precisely the same time, just as people could preserve their happy moments in photographs and erase their painful ones temporarily with alcohol or amusement, Sigmund Freud seized on the self and its close ally, memory (and consciousness), as the way to bring anxiety-ridden patients back to psychic health. And while the dreamlike atmosphere of Coney Island promised to alleviate all trace of the work-weary world, Freud opted for just the opposite effect—to help people remember. In the process, however, he too would rid them of their pain. People never forget anything, Freud maintained, they just bury their most painful memories through a process called repression. By interpreting the patient’s dreams with the patient, he could break into something even deeper than consciousness itself, into a subterranean, virtual layer he called the subconscious. The psychoanalyst acted as an archaeologist, digging into the patient’s subconscious to retrieve lost or neglected bits and pieces of experience.

  Freud would, of course, eventually map the tripartite structure that, for him, made human beings absolutely and unequivocally human, the unconscious. Like Lamarck, Mendeleev, Childe, and scores of others in the period, Freud undertook a taxonomy of that shadowy enterprise known as the mind, which he saw divided into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. He was absolutely certain that he had found the seat of consciousness; a good deal of the world slowly came to believe him, as well.

  Freudian analysis, however, brought with it several of its own major problems. For one, while Freud’s theories rested on the recovery of the self—memory required a self to activate it—the self lay hidden sometimes many layers below the level of ordinary consciousness. Excavation was a protracted, painstaking process. Analysis, the so-called talking cure, could take years and years, and Freud used several techniques. Through suggestions, the client might be prompted to remember certain childhood traumas. Since Freud thought that people revealed themselves in their most unguarded moments, he listened carefully to the jokes his patients told. But Freud believed that his patients could unlock their repressed memories most effectively by recounting their dreams. Again, Freud would listen for the castoff phrase, or the passed-over image, those unexamined gestures that we saw in a previous chapter that led to the solution of crimes, or the authentication of a particular painting.

  The second problem with Freud’s protracted talking cure followed on the first, but posed for many an insurmountable problem: Analysis was frighteningly expensive, which meant that only the really wealthy, those blessed with the luxury of enough “spare time” to sit in a doctor’s office for an hour or more a day, week after week, could afford what we call today therapy. It should not be surprising, then, that the bulk of Freud’s clients were wealthy Viennese women. Psychotherapy still remains expensive and out of reach for a great many people.

  Both Freud and Coney relied for their success on the last bastion in the fight for human essence, the self. Coney worked so well by having the self evaporate, drop away, attraction by attraction. Freud, on the other hand, hoped to retrieve the self and hold it up to the bright light of logic. For the overwhelming mass of the population, well, such things just did not matter. The self remained, for the great part, the concern of intellectuals—writers and artists and the new social scientists. Even if they believed in it, few people could afford therapy of any kind. In America, particularly, where entrepreneurs developed fun to such a high art, the general public rigorously pursued popular entertainment that they considered therapy, or at least therapeutic.

  Huge crowds made the weekly pilgrimage to Coney, while discovering, along the way, less elaborate forms of entertainment—drinking, dancing, attending the new burlesque houses, watching magic acts, visiting the new striptease, the Yiddish theater, and on and on. The more daring, and perhaps more desperate, could step beyond the standard anodynes, laudanum or absinthe, to a variety of new and immensely more powerful drugs, like morphine, heroin, and cocaine. And, on and off during the period, young people in particular flirted with nitrous oxide.

  A new world had opened in the nineteenth century, a world of high entertainment and supreme pleasure. If one could just make it through the week, the weekend beckoned and it promised wholesale relief. Whenever they could, New Yorkers would spend their free time—their weekend time, without some professional peering over their shoulder and measuring their every move—on the boardwalks of Coney Island. Great masses of city dwellers on a Saturday or Sunday boarded the subway for one nickel in Manhattan and got off at the Stillwell Avenue station, breathed a collective sigh of relief, and smiled broadly. They had arrived.

  Some newspaper reporters told a different story. They condemned Coney and its working-class crowd as a two-bit tawdry affair, dismissing the whole enterprise as nothing but one big fun zone—with the emphasis on fun. They condemned it by renaming Coney the new Sodom by the Sea.16 But the enormous crowds paid those stories little or no mind. They forgot the critics and the naysayers as they ordered their Nathan’s frankfurter, washed it down with a Nedick’s orange soda, and as a grand finale finished off their ten-cent meal with one version or another of an intense sugar spectacle—toffee apples, saltwater taffy, chocolate fudge, or towers of cotton candy in every pastel shade a young person could possibly imagine.

  But the true marvel of confectionery skill came as a gift from the gods, who showered good fortune on little boys and girls: a French quiescent dessert, perfected at a restaurant called Fouquet’s, on the Champs-Élysées, that had arrived in America in the nineteenth century. It was called ice cream. It made Freud’s theory of the pleasure principle into something startlingly alive and above all else tangible. In America, Emerson stands out as one of the most respected public intellectuals, commenting with startling insight on almost every issue and topic of the day—even ice cream. His comment on that miraculous dessert comes from “Man the Reformer,” a lecture he delivered to the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association in 1841, a fitting image in a lecture principally about the way essence has disappeared from every person, at every level of society, from aristocrat to worker: “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice-creams.” As amazing and witty as ice cream was already, Coney added a radical improvement by serving huge scoops of it, in a superabundance of flavors, in a pastry cone.

  Dessert had been liberated from the dining table. The main course had already been freed, with the five-cent frankfurter, or more commonly “hot dog,” on the boardwalk. And then came the dessert. Yes, there was taffy and saltwater taffy, but nothing to rival the ice cream. Families walked the boardwalk on warm summer evenings, each member with an ice cream cone in hand. At no other time did one hear parents urging and encouraging their children to finish up every last bit of that runny and drippy sugar—and to get it done fast! Eat, eat! Keep licking, keep on eating. And when anyone—child or adult—finished the cone, it made apparent the real miracle—for absolutely nothing was
left! No container, no utensil, no waste—everything totally and thoroughly gone. There was nothing to wash, nothing to dispose of, nothing, as we say these days, to recycle. A child could finally make “all gone.”

  No other dessert but the ice cream cone could serve as such a perfect nineteenth-century confection, the greatest vanishing act that ended up as a most ghostly experience. Yes, everything solid melts into air—especially, it seems, ice cream. Many years after the opening of Coney Island, the great American poet Wallace Stevens rolled Marx and Emerson into one tantalizing line in his dreamlike poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” which ends with the very mysterious line, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”

  WHERE WOULD IT all lead? Clearly, people seem to have opted, very heavily, for entertainment. It is a multibillion-dollar-a-year conglomerate of businesses, dominated now by electronic technology. The re-creation, say, of the Boer Wars pales in the immediacy of its impact in the face of even the lowest-level software from Nintendo or Sega. No one in the nineteenth century would have suspected that people would tote their telephones around in their hip pockets, let alone snap pictures with them. They could not conceive of sending email messages through the ether, or turning on images, like water, as if from an electronic tap, in the living room, with something called a television set. And listening to an iPod: Never! By mid-nineteenth century, however, the drive toward such innovation was firmly in place, in England and particularly in America. Entertainment, fun, electronic technology—all have had a long and successful run, one hundred years or more.