In the broadest outlines of the story, Tom kills the man whose identity he assumes, Dickie Greenleaf, so that he can inherit his enormous wealth. The false Dickie—Tom—then disappears, leaving a “suicide” note that praises Tom for his valor and self-righteousness. From that point on, Tom haunts the novel with a most ghostly presence: People discuss his character, wonder about his whereabouts, and attempt to make contact with him. But he is essentially gone—sort of.
And then, like any good revenant, Tom reappears, having left Italy for some undisclosed location, somewhere in Greece. Highsmith gives us two Toms—Tom as Tom and Tom as Dickie—just as Twain gives us two Hucks—Huck as Huck and Huck as any number of other personalities, even a young girl. Huck leaves a similar suicide note at the very outset of the novel, only to resurface toward the end of the story as the real live Huckleberry Finn. In Mr. Ripley, Tom holds a powerful but unspoken sexual fascination for Dickie; in the film, they look slightly alike and exchange provocative glances. At any rate, Highsmith clearly wants the reader to see the two young men as doubles, with Tom of course as the darker side willing to kill for what he wants.
Like someone taking off a jacket and having the sleeves turn inside out, the demimonde of the nineteenth century, like Tom, has come to the surface of our period and threatens to dominate it. I think this is the current fascination with the thug and gangster aesthetic—prison clothing, tough-guy talk in music, tough-guy assassinations, prison haircuts, song lyrics, and on and on. I put those things in the same category as bodybuilding, tattoos, and steroids, attempts to take up more space, to “live large and in charge.” They constitute attempts to come alive; they make obvious the problem at a visceral level—people wanting to be fully alive. And one gets little instruction on how to plunge safely into life. (I do not count Doctor Phil as an instructor here.)
In the context of a culture dominated by the programmatic rule of either /or, I find the most promising examples in people allowing themselves to break out of that binary bind by overthrowing the categories of gender. Movements that remove people from easy categorization—gender being the prime example—have supplanted the protest and liberation movements of the fifties and sixties. Identity politics, including the switching of gender roles, cross-dressing, the transition into something called transgender identification, and many other permutations—represent today’s attempt, on one very powerful level, for some people who are trying to maintain their basic essence and humanity. I refer here to people trying to discover who they really are. Of course, this appeals to only a small part of the population. The great majority of people must find their own way. But those who think of themselves in this new sexual revolution may serve as a model. After several centuries of moving toward essentialism, this can truly be called antiessentialist; and that is a good part of its power and appeal.
These movements toward gender liberation resemble the permutations of the self of the Internet, but with this difference: Those identities arise from deep inside the fleshy and sensual body. What we see in contemporary gender politics is a definite move toward embodiment and a curious kind of ownership. A bumper sticker reads, KEEP THE US OUT OF MY UTERUS. Pro-choice offers a chance at this kind of ambiguity if only because it demands that the person make a choice, and the choice is not always easy—not always, as they say, so black and white. What takes place here is a different enfleshing impulse, it seems to me, from bodybuilding and anabolic steroids. People here do not wish to merely take up space or to look powerful or even scary. Instead, they prefer to be enfleshed, to be alive, to feel alive.
The literary critic Marjorie B. Garber published a crucial book, in 1991, entitled Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, in which she makes the offhand comment that the transvestite has the power “to unsettle assumptions, structures and hierarchies.” Commenting on her book, Adam Phillips notes that the “transvestites’ power to unsettle is proof, if we needed it, of how precarious our categories are, and how uncertain we are as the makers of categories . . . dressing up and cross-dressing reveal something of the bizarre logic of our senses of identity; and how a world of entitlement—of privileged positions and secure identities—conceals an underworld of (sometimes desperate) improvisation.”13
We can only thrive in the midst of confusion and ambiguity if we have our shadows returned to us—which is to say that we need to embrace the darkest sides of our personality. We must refuse to be defined in one way only. We must refuse the desire to have the sun shining brightly, directly overhead, as the transhuman movement so desperately seems to want. In “The Man Who Could Work Miracles,” and in The Time Machine, H. G. Wells plays with time, moving clocks forward and moving them backward. And once again, as with so much other literature in the period, the experiments backfire and fall apart into rank disasters.
In one of the supreme reversals of literary history, those horrible monsters of the nineteenth century that frighten us and give us chills—Dracula, Frankenstein’s creation, Mister Hyde, Raskolnikov, ghosts and ghouls in general—may really hold the answer to our own contemporary existence. Every one of those creatures from the nineteenth century derives its power and strength from its ambiguity. Each one of them can comfortably occupy two definitions at once. Indeed, none of them can stand to occupy a discrete category. The idea of the double is buried deep in the name Raskolnikov: raskol, Russian for “splitting” or “schism.” Even the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as we have seen, invokes not just Prometheus but by association also his twin, Epimetheus—in a powerful mythological doubling, an amalgam of what those two fallen gods stand for: foresight and hindsight.
One of those doubles is the zombie, who on close inspection looks very much like Schlemihl, but instead of buying a shadow, a magician has stolen the zombie’s soul. As the writer Marina Warner points out,Unlike phantoms, who have a soul but no body, zombies and vampires are all body—but unlike the vampire who has will and desire and an appetite for life (literally), a zombie is a body which has been hollowed out, emptied of selfhood. The word ‘zombie’ derives from ‘jumbie,’ one of the most common words for ‘spirit’ in the Caribbean, appearing frequently in ghost stories, folk-tales, and documentary accounts of the archipelago throughout the last century.14
But buried in the story of the zombie is a potent reversal. The word first comes into the English language with the poet Robert Southey in his History of Brazil (1810), where Southey gives the name to a revolutionary hero who led an uprising against Portuguese rule in Brazil. According to Southey: “Zombi, the title whereby he [chief of Brazilian natives] was called, is the name for the Deity, in the Angolan tongue. . . . NZambi is the word for Deity.” (Compare the name of the African nation Zambia.) Zombi, who stands at the opposite end of Schlemihl, would rather die than live as a slave.
But then the zombie falls from its lofty position. Because of the abolition of slavery and then its reinstatement, the so-called zombies came to be associated not with those who had achieved liberation, but with those who found themselves, once again, enslaved and “hollowed out,” with those who found themselves forced to live without a sense of the self. That’s when the zombie took on the character, as all slaves ultimately do, of the walking dead.
Marina Warner insists that “[z]ombies embody the principal ghostly condition of our time . . . Soul-theft is a master plot that readers began to recognize in the nineteenth century.” We must keep in mind, however, the zombie’s potential, what it once had been, and what it can become. Odd as it may seem, such a bizarre creation may hold key lessons for us today. It may be time for us to learn from the so-called darker creatures of the nineteenth century, those who traditionally give people the creeps. For one of the great painters of the late nineteenth century, Gustav Klimt, boundaries and categories dissolve allowing creatures to melt and fall away and come back together again. Carl E. Schorske, musing on Klimt, offers the following: “The snake, amphibious creature, phallic symbol with bisexual associations, is the g
reat dissolver of boundaries: between land and sea, man and woman, life and death. This character accords well with the concern with androgyny and the homosexual reawakening of the fin-de-siècle.”15
It may be time to see all those nineteenth-century dream monsters for what they are, creations from fantastical writers and artists who push their characters and images in one way or another to shed the stultifying world of category and definition and to find, once more, the true sense of self and thus of life.
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION | Pictures at a Deposition
1 Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), page 4.
2 Tony Judt, “Goodbye to All That?” The New York Review of Books, September 21, 2006.
3 Cited in Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Da Capo, 2004).
4 Silverman, Lightning Man.
5 Cited in Paul Hill, “Natural Magic and Moonlight,” June 2008, in Henry Iddon, Spots of Time: The Lake District Photographed by Night (London: Wordsworth Trust, 2008), foreword.
6 Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue (Paris: Les Éditions Galilée, 2005).
ONE | What Is Life?
1 Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds. (New York: Sage Publications, 1998), passim.
2 The Lumière Brothers’ First Films, dir. Bernard Tavernier.
3 Carmine Di Biase, “New Kid off the Old Block,” TLS (March 21, 2008), page 22.
4 Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pages 22-23.
5 Ibid., page 69.
6 Cited on www.general-anaesthesia.com/images/Robert-southey.html.
7 Henry Smith Williams, A History of Science, Volume 4 (South Carolina: Bibliobazaar, 2007).
8 Quoted in Laurence K. Altman, “When the Doctors Are Their Own Best Guinea Pigs,” The New York Times, October 9, 2005.
9 From www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/n20/n20c.htm.
10 Colin Evans, The Father of Forensics: The Groundbreaking Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2006).
11 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), passim.
12 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
13 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
14 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: HarperCollins, 1978).
15 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pages 8-9.
16 Karl Marx, speech at the anniversary of the People’s Paper, 1856.
17 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), page 19.
18 Cited in Charles S. Whitney, Bridges: Their Art, Science and Evolution (New York: Greenwich House, 1983).
TWO | When Death Died
1 Quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), page 58. I am indebted to Faust for information for this chapter.
2 James M. McPherson, “Dark Victories,” The New York Review of Books, April 17, 2008.
3 From Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York, New-York Historical Society exhibition, June 2008.
4 Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), page 13.
5 “Brady’s Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam,” The New York Times, October 20, 1862.
6 Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edition (1910-1911).
7 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, page 69.
8 See McPherson, “Dark Victories.”
9 Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
10 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, page 57.
11 Ibid., page 57.
12 Ibid., page 57.
13 Ibid., pages 66-67.
14 See Adam Gopnik, “In the Mourning Store,” The New Yorker, January 21, 2008.
15 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, page 93.
16 Ibid., page 87.
17 Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (New York: Diane, 2004), page 221.
18 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, page 57.
19 Ibid., page 66.
20 Ibid., page 57.
21 Ibid., page 10.
22 Ibid., page 55.
23 Ibid., page 59.
24 Russell Baker, “The Entertainer,” The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2005.
25 Ibid., page 39.
26 Human Rights Watch, “Torture in Iraq,” The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2005.
27 Ivan Illich, “Death Undefeated,” privately circulated.
THREE | A Couple of Sarahs Later
1 John Strausbaugh, “When Barnum Took Manhattan,” The New York Times, November 9, 2007.
2 Ibid.
3 Quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” in The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), page 294.
4 Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pages 201-203.
5 Source for newspaper and Morton accounts is Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” page 294.
6 Robert W. Rydell, “‘Darkest Africa’: African Shows at America’s World Fairs, 1893-1940,” in Bernth Lindfors, ed., Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), page 145.
7 Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” page 293.
8 The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, dir. Zola Maseko, 1998.
9 Ibid.
10 Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” page 292.
11 Ibid., pages 298-299.
12 Letter from Sigmund Freud to Martha Bernays, November 8, 1885, (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
13 Ibid.
14 Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold, The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), page 221.
15 Ibid., page 220.
16 Quoted in Edward Rothstein, “Celebrity So Extraordinaire She Rivaled the Eiffel Tower,” The New York Times, December 2, 2005.
17 Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), page 27.
18 Ibid., page 207.
19 Ibid., page 207.
20 Fizdale and Gold, The Divine Sarah, page 200.
21 Ibid., page 201.
22 Bentley, Sisters of Salome, page 36.
23 Ibid., page 31.
24 Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Anchor Press, 1964), page 208.
25 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, page 109.
26 Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” page 298.
27 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), page 92.
FOUR | No One’s Dead
1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Norton, 1995), Introduction.
2 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003), page 23.
3 Ibid., page 31.
4 Ibid., page 41.
5 Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin, 2004), page 183.
6 Quoted in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), page 407.
7 Quoted in Geoffrey Wolff, “‘Mark Twain’: Voice of America,” The New York Times, October 2, 2005.
8 Quoted in Mark B. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princet
on and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), page 21.
9 Quoted in Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), page 53.
10 Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), page 11.
11 Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey, Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer (New York and Tokyo: Kodanska International, 1995), page 21.
12 Joyce Carol Oates, “‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness,’” The New York Review of Books, March 24, 1994.
13 Ibid.
14 Joel Norris, Serial Killers: The Growing Menace (New York: Bantam, 1988), page 53.
15 MacDonald, Human Remains, page 17.
16 Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), page 22.
17 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), for an extended discussion of this phrase.
18 Solnit, River of Shadows, page 11.
19 Ibid., page 18.
20 Solnit, River of Shadows, page 18.
21 Ibid., page 22.
22 Ibid., pages 41-42.
23 Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993).
FIVE | There Is Only Life
1 Quoted in Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (New York: Vintage, 2007), page 302.
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