Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  Peter does not want the sun to move through the sky—that is, he does not want the Earth to move around the sun—which, translated, means that Peter wants to stay forever young. In effect, with that wish, Peter throws out all hope of learning, all need for experience, all desire for growing older and perhaps even wiser. And of course he throws out all possibility of pain. This is, of course, his undoing. Dorian Gray comes face to face with this very same lesson. No matter, this is what people in the period seem to crave—eternal life, eternal youth—just as people do today, as evidenced through Botox injections and cosmetic surgery of all sorts. But of course we cannot conquer time.

  I should reconsider that line, “we cannot conquer time.” For isn’t that the inevitability of technology, the annihilation of time and speed? And that is exactly what happens with the photograph—the moment frozen forever for our delight and enjoyment. It’s in the human context where things go haywire, where we lose control. Schlemihl deceives himself; he thinks that stopping time can happen. He thinks he can dispense with his shadow forever and live in the bright moment. But he gets it wrong: Our shadow sticks to us. Only in certain circumstances do we lose it, and only momentarily. In the ancient world, for example, when people cross to the other side they lose their shadow selves, their dark experiences, in the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. At the same time, Shades is another name for the realm of the underworld, the netherworld where the dead and the shadows reside—the place more commonly called Hades. In our own time, the groundhog comes out of his burrow on February 2—Candlemas—and if he sees his shadow, he must go back underground for another six weeks, when presumably it will be spring. In sidereal terms, the groundhog remains out in the open only when the sun shines directly over his head, making him lose his dreary shadow. This is the true definition of solstice—sol meaning “sun,” and stitium meaning “a stoppage.” The sun stands still twice a year—at each of the solstices, both summer and winter.

  Another way of saying all this is that, try as we might, we cannot occupy two places at once: A person cannot both remain young (this requires stopping the sun) and, at the same time, push his or her way through the world (that is, move through time). So many people, so many creatures, in this period, however, do occupy dual categories at once—from vampires and somnambulists to patients in comas and others in anesthetized or hypnotized states. The nineteenth century exploits a very special space, a psychic hovering; the nineteenth century loves a conundrum.

  Peter, however, wants nothing of ambiguity. He prefers to be all Doctor Jekyll; he wishes to rid himself of his Mister Hyde. In the very fundamental sense of the word, Peter demands clarity—a fully and continually bright-lit life. He refuses to change, to risk any experience, to jump into this life on this very Earth, which in the nineteenth century went by the name of the nether world in ancient times, the Shades. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll must kill his alter ego Hyde, he thinks, to survive. But Jekyll commits the murder in vain. Nothing much happens from his transgression except to generate for him tremendous amounts of guilt and punishment. Stevenson’s lesson seems to be not one of exclusion and elimination, but one of integration, acceptance, and embrace. Like Peter’s shedding of his shadow, the death of Hyde leads to the downfall of Jekyll.

  What can we conclude from all this? Can it be that we should see Count Dracula as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century, and as someone who provides a lesson for us today? Perhaps that’s so, for the Count absolutely refuses to be defined, corralled, or classified. He has a presence only as a creature both dead and alive simultaneously. As Falstaff says of Mistress Quickly, “a man knows not where to have her.” Doctor Frankenstein’s monster, too, hovers between two categories, moving across the German countryside, at one and the same time, as both human and nonhuman. These characters, like some thoroughly baffling Zen koan, can settle into their ambiguity without needing to reach resolution. They derive their very power from that confusion and ambiguity and total disregard of logic. Such characters put the lie to all those essentialists in the nineteenth century who attempted to find the one and only basic nature of the human being.

  Meanwhile, the nineteenth century was fast closing in on the goal of defining and categorizing everything in creation. Scientists and philosophers wanted to place every last thing in its right spot and category. They demanded that every part of the created universe must have its proper home. Taxonomies and periodic charts defined and ordered and registered every element, tree, rock, animal, and race of human being. Zoos and botanical gardens and museums helped to arrange and order the wide range of natural phenomena.

  In imitation of the scientists, bureaucrats collected statistics on everything from crime rates to birthrates, from the numbers of people who died in their homes to the numbers of people in asylums or living on the street. Two historians of science, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, note that “the gathering of state statistics on a large scale coincides historically with the French and American Revolutions and the concerted nation building of the first half of the nineteenth century, both of which redefined the categories of putative homogeneity and heterogeneity.”

  As science went about its task of placing the world under its giant thumb, those things that managed to defy definition seemed all the more strange and bizarre and out of the “ordinary,” where the ordo in ordinary refers to the Church’s liturgical calendar, to its fine-tuning and ordering of the entire year. Under these conditions, the definition of what constitutes normalcy takes on an especial clarity, and the criminal and the deviant seem, in contrast but with equal clarity, much more aberrant. The outcast lands far outside the norm.

  The narrowing of the definition of normalcy and normal behavior meant a radical and dramatic increase in the numbers of people in America, over the course of the nineteenth century, who found themselves consigned by some state agency to a mental institution or an asylum. Authorities decided who was crazy, and then coined a word, deviant, to describe them. Psychologists defined their behavior, and warned the public what to look out for. As the century wore on, the numbers of deviants increased dramatically. Not only did the population increase in gross terms, say, in the United States, but the per capita number of crazies increased, as well. Great Britain was the first nation to recognize the growing problem of insanity by passing an act, in 1808, establishing a public lunatic asylum. America quickly followed, and local authorities very quickly filled the beds.

  The statistics are shocking. According to Nancy Tomes and Lyn Gamwell’s book Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914, “the increasing number of hospitals [in the United States] that treated the insane, from 18 in 1800, to almost 140 in 1880, reflected not only population growth, but also a greater demand for the asylum’s services. The ratio of hospital beds for the insane to the adult population grew dramatically, from 1 for every 6,000 persons over age 15 in 1800, to 1 for every 750 persons in 1880.” In England, according to the historian of asylums Roy Porter, “around 1800, no more than a few thousand lunatics were confined in England in all kinds of institutions; by 1900, the total had skyrocketed to about 100,000.” During the period, Porter points out, the press referred to these institutions as “museums of madness.”7

  In both England and America, physicians consigned a good number of these people to asylums because they had been diagnosed with dual or split personalities, which nineteenth-century medicine chose to call a “dissociated personality”: “A pathological state of mind in which two or more distinct personalities exist in the same person.”8 We might add here that split personalities competed side by side with the double for attention. But while the doppelgänger might work well inside a story or a novel, acting that way on the streets would land a person in an asylum. The word paranoia first appears in English in 1857 and translates para, “beside,” and noia, “mind.” A paranoid experiences an acute doubling—literally standing beside his or h
er own being.

  This desire for incarceration did not let up in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as if each cell were a category and each person a defined villain. The focus merely shifted from the mental institution to the prison, from the insane to the criminal, from the people at the margin to the people of color. So, for instance, the United States, with only five percent of the world’s population, houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. This country can boast of the highest incarceration rate per one hundred thousand people of any other developed country in the world. The United States arrests adult male African Americans at a higher rate than did South Africa during the height of apartheid.

  Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the three growth industries included hotels and gambling, but what led, usually, was the prison industry. But though the focus changed, the definition remained the same: Criminals led dual lives, with one part of their personalities out in the bright light of day and the other operating in the dead of night. Authorities still describe the criminal, today, as dissociated.

  No entity in the nineteenth century relishes that definition of dissociation with more delight than a ghost. The French refer to a ghost as a revenant, derived from the word revenir, “to return,” and is cognate with revenue. The ghost, like money, circulates, picking up more and more interest as it courses through the world. For the French literary critic Jacques Derrida, as I have said, the revenant represents the spirit of capitalist striving: “the specter is the becoming fetish of the commodity,”9 a subject that Karl Marx takes up in his discussion of capital. Money haunts: Almost every person anticipates—expects and may even pray for—its continual appearance and reappearance. Buying a ticket in the state lottery is like attending a séance, in that the player tries to raise the ghost of wealth that lurks somewhere in the beyond, and against overwhelming odds tries and tries again. It’s a game thoroughly saturated with superstition and premonition, the player searching the universe for divine signs to the right combination of numbers for the Really Big Visitation.

  The revenant behaves like money in another crucial way, for some charter sects, notably the charismatic and Pentecostal traditions, instruct parishioners to give their money away—say goodbye to handfuls of tens and twenties—in the hopes that much more will come back in return. Christians call this strategy of multiplying one’s wealth by giving it away the concept of seed money. The infinite bounty of seed money gets represented in the Middle Ages by the pomegranate; while one seed will produce one only tree, each pomegranate contains thousands of seeds and there must exist in the world millions of pomegranate trees.

  We greet every ghost, in our own dissociative way, with a simultaneous goodbye and hello, since every one of them comes from the land of the dead where we have said our farewells to the departed—and yet there it is, standing in front of us, forcing us to acknowledge its arrival with a reluctant hello. Like the stroke of midnight at the last moment of the year, the ghost haunts the most invisible of lines where it is no longer last year and not yet the New Year: the exact stroke situating us neither here nor there. It is the most rare moment of the year, for it leaves us hanging in time, suspended and stretched. In the nineteenth century, the ghost is the ultimate border runner.

  One very radical and enormously influential scientist, Erwin Schroedinger, spent his formative years in the nineteenth century, where he absorbed the age’s compulsive drive toward order and conclusiveness. Schroedinger appears to have reacted sharply to that age’s stance. In the following century, Schroedinger helped found a branch of science called quantum mechanics that radically transformed the traditional way people conceived of physics. Schroedinger found the essence of all life in the cracks between categories; he went after that which could not be held within a tightly bound and logically predicated definition. He refused to accept most definitions. In his hands, physics would confirm the truth of the world that nineteenth-century literature had so desperately tried to dramatize. Erwin Schroedinger built a system of science on the idea of the defiance of categories, logic, definitions, and, perhaps most startling, common sense.

  Schroedinger postulated what he called the quantum theory of super-position, which says that an object may exist in several states at once, but when a person observes that very same object it always collapses into one state. Schroedinger annoyed those outside the scientific community by arguing, for example, that his cat could be both alive and dead at the same time, but that when he looked at it, the cat always collapsed into the one state—of total aliveness. Historians of science have taken to calling this phenomenon the observer’s paradox. And to name this situation that ran so counter to logic, Schroedinger paid homage to a fantastical work of nineteenth-century literature: He described the condition of his mystifying cat as Draculated. While a good many people either laughed at Schroedinger or ignored him, the Nobel Committee took him seriously enough to award him the prize in physics, in 1933, for his revolutionary and extraordinarily counterintuitive work.

  Schroedinger allowed us ordinary people to believe in either/or at the same moment. People always feel great sadness on leaving the old year behind, but that gets overlaid with an overwhelmingly great excitement in moving into the new, pristine year, where anything is possible because, for that one great reason and on that one great occasion, they have not yet made any mistakes. The New Year offers every person, just like the lottery, the chance for a new beginning, an opportunity to attempt the same thing all over again, to forgive oneself, and to watch the wheel of time turn wearily around again, but with no strikes against one. It is as close as we can possibly get to the idea of a clean slate.

  The guardian of the threshold into the New Year, the formidable, two-faced god Janus, is the god of either/or. He cries and laughs at the same time—the common denominator of intense crying and laughing, his tears. In Roman mythology, Janus stations himself in front of doorways, at gates, and at the entrances to bridges; he guards the threshold and sees it all and knows it all and yet, like a shadow, reveals absolutely nothing. He leaves every last bit of information to interpretation. Janus refuses to be classified, for at one and the same time, the great god says hello and he says goodbye. Classical busts depict him as two-faced but not splintered, for he is conjoined forever in marble in one dramatic head. Janus may look like he is about to split apart, but he hangs solidly together. He sharpens his gaze in particular at the beginning of every new millennium, for at those moments he must gaze into the deep past and peer into the distant future.

  And so both his crying and laughing—and ours, as well—grow louder and more intense at the turn of the millennium. As 1999 rolled over into 2000, the general sadness seemed profound; after all, the century was coming to a close. Most of us had used the phrase “the twentieth century” our entire lives. And soon whatever reality the twentieth century actually possessed would be gone—totally and utterly vanished. But, at the same time, the fireworks announcing the New Year, from all reports around the world, certainly went off in the night sky with more noise and more brilliance than any display that anyone had ever witnessed before. TV stations followed the turning of the heavens, moving from country to country as the night seemed to go on and on forever.

  There was, however, a rub. For that particular turn of the century, that particular passage into the millennium came freighted with an additional burden. Most of the world, it had become more and more clear, was riding into the future with the aid of computers. That New Year represented a new test for technology, and it represented a new test for the new human being—not the disembodied one, the disappeared one we have been discussing in this book, and not even the end of the nineteenth-century being that Balzac described, comprising layer upon layer of ghosts. Here was a new binary being, one made of bits and bytes, one seemingly composed totally out of an accumulation of data.

  One need not belabor the point that, as human beings, our lives have been shaped and directed by the so-called revolution in technol
ogy. The computer has by now gotten under the skin of the culture and seriously shaped people’s interior lives. We have now become so fastened to the image, to the simulacrum over the real, for instance, that the masters of the blogosphere—those who navigate the Internet a good portion of the day and who go by the techno-moniker “netizens”—band together as “cybervigilantes” to humiliate their victims on forums and chat rooms. This phenomenon started in China after the 2008 earthquake, when the cyber Klan rooted out those unsympathetic to the dead and dying. They use a strongly violent phrase when they spring into their electronic lynching mode: “Call out the human flesh search engines.” Which is to say, find the actual person, discover all we can about that person, and then proceed to humiliate him or her online, including posting the person’s birthday, cell phone number, and home address. Realize that in China such an onslaught can add up to 160 million so-called netizens.

  While it sounds like the mob equivalent of a contract on an enemy, and in this case bloggers have to make an emphatic point in order to talk about real humans and real flesh, they still cast the threat in electronic terms. They still have a hard time breaking out of the parameters of communication. Think of the absurdity: A search engine will hunt you down and tear you up! We have become locked inside the language of the computer, a new version of the ghost in the machine.

  What distinguishes this new phase of our disappearance lies in the fact that computer programs most decidedly cannot accept ambiguity. An electronic impulse cannot be both on and off at the same time. Computers run on a binary principle—on a system that is on one instant and off the next. The machine pulses with a series of ones and zeros—usually represented by 101, the same number that also happens to hang on the door to the Ministry of Love’s torture chamber, in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. In that room, Winston Smith will face his torturers—that is, the ministry will force him to face his own worst fears, rats. The computer cannot be on and off at the same time. Schroedinger could never describe a computer program as Draculated.