Not the mind, but the eye of the human cog has become the centre of lubrication. To keep fit for one’s job, one no longer reads, one merely sees. The ordinary newspaper with its histories of what happened, yields to the tabloid newspaper with its pictures of what is happening. Thus it would appear that the tabloid newspaper celebrates a climax in the orgiastic worship of the present tense of the verb To Be.
But the great supremacy of the tabloid newspaper will be better understood when we realize that its only contemporary rival is an even more familiar pictorial phenomenon with an even wider circulation—the dream. The dream, indeed, differs fundamentally from the tabloid newspaper only in age and pedigree. In aim, in format and in effect, the dream and the tabloid newspaper are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable. To be sure, as regards efficiency there is no comparison: the tabloid newspaper wins in a walk from the dream. A few years hence, given a very slight heightening of our lofty present-day standard of efficiency, we may see the dream completely supplanted by the tabloid newspaper. The human cog in the machine known as Big Business may very possibly find it obsolete to dream. The Big Business God will then be in his Big Business Heaven and psychoanalysts will cure their patients through a study of their patients’ tabloid newspapers.
Let nobody hereby take it for granted that we are attempting to disparage psychoanalysis. On the contrary. Be it known that we attribute to this science our understanding, not merely of the tabloid newspaper, but of the colossal civilization which the tabloid newspaper so triumphantly typifies. The very adjective “infantile” is a direct theft from psychoanalysis, which explains a variety of otherwise completely inexplicable occurrences by the concept of “infantile fixation.” The dream, we know, is a compromise, on the part of our socalled better nature, with repressed wishes of infantile origin—whence dream-distortion—and Dr. Freud himself long ago compared the dream censor to a newspaper censor. The most obvious characteristic of the dream, as of the tabloid newspaper, is its pictorial quality. In unconscious life, as manifested by the dream, “opposites” go hand in hand. The tabloid newspaper shows us, on one page, a delectable specimen of virginity in a one-piece bathing suit and, on the next, a man being sentenced to twenty years for rape. Indeed, the further we look, the more dreamlike the tabloid newspaper becomes. “Every issue an Oedipus complex” would be a first-rate slogan for the Daily News, the Daily Mirror and, more especially, for the superpaternal Mr. Bernarr Macfadden’s Daily Graphic.
We know, thanks to psychoanalysis, that the predominant quality of children is their all-prevading and illimitable egoism. This simple revelation is worth more, for an understanding of civilization in general and of the civilization of the almighty dollar in particular, than all the theories of all the economists, sociologists, efficiency experts, etc., who have ever lived. Thanks to this discovery of child-egoism, our eyes are opened for the first time to the true meaning of the age in which we move and have our being. We discover, to our astonishment, that what has really happened to America from the day of Plymouth Rock and the Bible to the day of Big Business and the tabloid newspaper is exactly the opposite of what the economists and their ilk would lead us to suppose. America has grown down, not up. From Pilgrim Fathers we have become Pilgrim Children. The United States, today, is nothing more nor less than a Great Big Egoistic Baby. When glancing about us, we perceive the whole world following this infantile nation of ours, let us remember the Bible of the Pilgrim Fathers, wherein it is written that “a little child shall lead them.” And let us admit that the Pilgrim Fathers, all things considered, may not have been so limited as we originally supposed.
At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.
From Vanity Fair, December 1926.
THE SECRET OF THE ZOO EXPOSED
Proving that our fear of wild animals is done with the aid of (Freudian) mirrors
No doubt most people accept that “scientific” theory that man is an ex-monkey which somehow or other developed at the expense of other animals. And no doubt these readers have visited a zoo, there to experience thrills which no theory, scientific or otherwise, could satisfactorily explain. But have they ever thought of the possibility that what we are accustomed to call “animals” are in reality living mirrors, reflecting otherwise unsuspected aspects of our own human character? Such an idea sounds absurd; but so do many ideas which are found to contain a surprising amount of truth. The zoo, with its mysteriously impressive and often positively unreal inhabitants, may be something entirely different from what we imagine. We may even discover, while investigating the zoo, something of great significance for the understanding of ourselves.
An astonishing fact confronts us at the very outset: nobody seems to know what the word “zoo” implies. This word, generally speaking, suggests little more than a highly odoriferous collection of interesting and unhappy animals. Whoever takes the trouble to look it up in a dictionary will find that “zoo” comes from the the Greek zoon, meaning “animal.” The misapprehension that zoos have to do with animals would appear to be universal. Actually, however, the syllable “zoo” originates in that most beautiful of all verbs, zoo, “I am alive”—hence a zoo, by its derivation, is not a collection of animals but a number of ways of being alive. As Hamlet might have put it: “to zoo or not to zoo, that is the question.”
We next observe that each and every zoo constitutes both a playground and a prison. For each and every zoo is founded on certain acres which have been captured by civilization, from civilization, on behalf of civilization and which acres are themselves the homes, and captors, of certain essentially non-civilized entities, commonly referred to as “animals.” From one point of view, the typical zoo means a virtual chaos, whereby human beings are enabled temporarily to forget the routine of city life; while, from another point of view, it means a real cosmos, possessed of its own consciousness, its own quarrels and even its own social register—which, as we shall soon see, is indirectly our own social register. These two aspects, “human” and “animal,” interact; with the result that the zoo, in comprising a mechanism for the exhibition of beasts, birds and reptiles, becomes a compound instrument for the investigation of mysterious humanity.
But what, precisely, do we mean by “interact”? We mean that the zoo’s permanent inhabitants, the so-called animals, are kinds of “aliveness” which we ourselves, the temporary inhabitants of the zoo, experience. To speak of “seeing the animals” is to treat this phenomenon with a shameful flippancy, with a clumsiness perfectly disgusting. Actually, such “creatures” as we “see” create in us a variety of emotions, ranging all the way from terror and pity to happiness and despair. Why? Not because the giraffe is effete, or because the elephant is enormous, but because we ourselves appear ridiculous and terrible in these amazing mirrors.
Now let us try to understand the zoo as a concatenation of differently functioning and variously labelled mirrors, all of which are alive. These living mirrors, mistakenly called “animals,” are for the most part grouped in systems or “houses,” like the “birdhouse” and the “monkey house,” and each house or system furnishes us with some particular verdict upon ourselves. In passing from house to house, from one system of mirrors to another system of mirrors, we discover totally unsuspected aspects of our own existence. At every turn we are amused, perplexed, horrified or dumbfounded. No mere spectacle of monsters, however extraordinary, could so move us. The truth is, not that we see monsters, but that we are monsters! What moves us is the revelation—couched in terms of things visible or outside us—of our true or invisible selves. This alone explains why our hearts pause with dread, why our eyes bulge with astonishment and why, when face to face with a peculiarly fabulous image, we have all we can do to keep from exclaiming, “Impossible! Such a phantom cannot really be alive: I must be dreaming!”—which conviction is well founded, for in a sense we are dreaming.
ELEPHANT. In gazing at any elephant in any zoo, we are, i
n reality, looking into a Freudian mirror of ourselves, a glass wherein we see revealed not only our powers, but our weaknesses, not only our docility but our cruelty and our will to crush.
Hereupon, the gentle reader will doubtless cry: “Enough! I have tolerated that absurd quibble as to the meaning of ‘zoo,’ I have endured that farfetched comparison between animals and mirrors, but I positively will not permit you to accuse me of dreaming when, with open eyes, I see real lions and tigers which would be only too glad to eat me alive if it weren’t for the iron bars between us.”
Perhaps. Nevertheless we must insist that going to the zoo is very like dreaming. Let us remember that the essence of dreams per se is, not that they seem unreal to us after we have awakened from them, but that they are profoundly and completely real to the dreamer. The lions and tigers of the dreams which you and I are dreaming possess quite as much reality as any tigers and lions (social or otherwise) which our open eyes have ever seen. Frequently, indeed, these dream monsters are even more real than their “real” counterparts. But between them and us there is something which saves our precious lives; just as, in the case of the zoo, there are iron bars between the panther which springs and the spectator who stares. Nor should we forget that the frightful monsters of dreams, if properly analyzed, lose their terror and become deceptive appearances, harmless symbols of our own hates and loves. For further enlightenment on this subject I can only refer you to the works of Dr. Freud and the other psychoanalysts. But why is it that our hates and loves are able to express themselves in these forms during sleep? Obviously, the phenomenon has previously occurred in consciousness and the leopard which seems so “real” to us at the zoo is only an embodiment of our own stealth and cruelty—a living mirror of our own power and cunning.
Such assertions as the foregoing cannot, of course, be mathematically proved. But suppose those individuals, who doubt our wisdom and who are too busy to visit the nearest zoo, consult the picture accompanying this article. We realize that the test is not a fair one. No matter how excellent . . . pictures may be, they are only pictures after all, and not living “animals.” When one looks at a cat or at a leopard or at a porcupine or at a snake or at monkeys directly, one sees (according to our theory) an image of oneself—an image necessarily different from that image of himself which the creator of this picture has seen and recorded. However, the principle involved is the same. A magic mirror is still a magic mirror. Let our skeptical readers, then, gaze upon this magically entitled, magically functioning mirror which we have provided for their personal use and find out what sort of ladies and gentlemen they—our readers—really are. We have a very small favour to ask: that, having looked and seen themselves, they will not pounce upon, strangle and tear us limb from limb, nor yet shoot any barbed quills in our direction!
One mightily significant mirror, labelled “Oracle, or, A Living Portrait of Civilization,” is absent. This oracle of Civilization, albeit a resident of the “birdhouse,” cannot be found among the Green Manucodes nor yet among the Twelve Wired Birds of Paradise. Astonishingly enough, gentle reader, it is only Poll Parrot—who perpetually unites the myriad meanings of existence in the supremely synthetic exclamation—“Hellogoodby!”
From Vanity Fair, March 1927: line drawing by the author.
FRENZIED FINANCE
An unskilled observer diagnoses some results of the fall of the French franc
We have heard a great deal, of late, concerning insults to foreigners—and more particularly, insults to Americans—in Paris. Not only have the New York dailies featured these insults, but practically all the newspapers from coast to coast have taken this opportunity to furnish their readers with a paucity of intelligent explanation and superfluity of picturesque detail. As a result, we find ourselves wondering how it should have come about that our noble country is violently hated and her citizens extensively razzed by that very race which, a short time ago, hailed America as the saviour of civilization and Americans as crusaders in a holy war waged against all things evil.
The provocation seems in no case exactly stupendous. Why, for instance, should a number of Yankees, caught in the extremely childish act of hurling whole loaves of bread to the historic carp at Fontainebleau, suffer a vigorous berating at the hands, or pens, of Parisian editors, on the extraordinarily dubious ground that such a deed constitutes an insult to la belle France? Why, moreover, should three overdressed, overintoxicated and otherwise overasinine “college boys” be selected for chastisement by a section of the Parisian populace—granted, that one member of the trio had pilfered (consciously, unconsciously or possibly fore-consciously) a spoon from Foyot’s magnificent restaurant? Finally, why should rubberneck wagons be held up and compelled to discharge their quaint and curious cargoes of sightseers upon the fevered streets of the outraged French capital? It all seems a bit odd, to say the least.
But oddity is most certainly in the air. Only the other day an odd thing happened. Mr. Blank, an American business man (and, incredibly enough, a personage of quite unimpeachable probity), returned to New York from Paris, where he had done business as usual with representatives of a number of important French firms. Weary with welldoing, down sat Mr. Blank in his New York office to enjoy a mild corona. At this moment, the director of a bank in Hartford, Connecticut, telephoned to say that a formidable sum had been mysteriously placed to Mr. Blank’s account by a certain Soandso. The garbled name of the donor did not immediately associate itself with anything in Mr. Blank’s mind; consequently Mr. Blank was nonplussed. But presently he began to sense a connection between the occult nomenclature and one of the Paris firms aforesaid. In a few minutes all was clear: a Frenchman, having made some money, was losing no time in sending it out of la belle France to be invested—by someone whom he trusted implicitly—in American securities.
Are these problems of foreigner-hating and of frenzied finance insoluble? One would think so, to judge by the utterances—either blatantly trivial or darkly ponderous—which they have provoked. But let us not be downhearted. Rather, taking the horns by the bull (so to speak) let us enjoy a brief but exhilarating dip in the not-too-distant past.
It will be remembered that after the socalled Great War was “won,” after the well-known Treaty of Versailles had “made the world safe for democracy,” the French Republic found itself in a horrid predicament. To obtain even a fraction of the vast sum which she demanded of her vanquished enemy, France was under the necessity of not only permitting, but encouraging, the prosperity of the German Republic. As will readily be seen, this predicament involved several rather annoying sacrifices on the part of the conqueror. It involved escorting the French people out of a simplified psychology of blood-and-thunder into a complicated psychology of peace-and-goodwill. It involved pricking a carefully manufactured bubble, wherein lurked the awful image of that unutterable monster: le boche. And from a moral standpoint, it involved being guilty of that rarest and most dangerous of international crimes: generosity.
To be sure, her material interests prompted France—victor in an “unselfish” struggle “for mankind”—to be generous in this particular case. But generosity involves, beyond everything else, daring; and daring implies exceptional strength. A bigger carp might have risen to so noble a loaf; but not la République française. La République française, it will be remembered, took the law into her own hands just as soon as Germany showed signs of definite economic improvement, tucked “martyred” Belgium under one arm for the sake of companionship and occupied the Ruhr. Thereby, as events have proved, la République française not only forfeited her chances of being paid by Germany, but lost the friendship of England and the admiration of America to boot.
Prior to this famous occupation of the Ruhr, a great many Anglo-Saxons had assumed that la République française was not getting a square deal. And no wonder; for rarely did a vanquished—let alone a victorious—nation indulge in more self-pity than did France after the treaty of Versailles. One would have thought that France
was the victim of a plot on the part of the nefarious Allies, that the Huns were masters of Europe, and that le Bon Dieu was not in His Heaven. Every time a French war monument was dedicated, for example, the orator of the occasion (invariably a hand-picked politician) bewailed France’s woes in terms calculated to convey the impression that no other country since the world began had ever experienced real misfortune. But with the occupation of the Ruhr, the song changed. From a mutilated martyr, a crucified cripple and everything utterly miserable or entirely hapless that the imagination of man could picture, la République française suddenly was transformed into a nation, armed to the teeth, which knew its rights and was going to get them—and Heaven help the rest of the world! Whereupon the rest of the world waggishly put its thumbs to its nose and the Ruhr occupation proved, despite everything claimed for it by the astute M. Poincaré, one vast substantial fizzle.
So much for not very ancient history. And now, taking the bull by the horns instead of vice versa, let us frankly ask ourselves: just what is all the anti-America outcry about? And how comes it that the French franc inhabits nether regions of finance? In other words, who made la République française what she is today?
The recent tumble of the franc appears to be the result of an effort, on the part of certain of the more ill-intentioned Frenchmen, to pay off France’s internal debt in debased currency, i.e. to make the proverbially thrifty French peasant foot the bills of the Great War for Humanity. Appearances may, perhaps, be deceptive, but one thing is sure: the leaky thesis that naughty foreigners are to blame for the fall of the franc has very little truth in it.
A Miscellany (Revised) Page 18