Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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and they mouthed off—making their presence known with shouts and murmurs, screams and curious clatterings and bangings, from this side and from the beyond. Fictional characters, too, filled the pages as shape-shifters. Some characters made their presence known as invisible beings. Others walked the city in their sleep or in their half-awake state, while still others prowled under the influence of the full moon. They hovered, like Christ on the cross, off the ground, neither fully on earth nor yet in heaven, pulled between this world and the one beyond. Characters fell into comas and trances and drifted into a special nineteenth-century state called “suspended animation.” Real people succumbed to hypnotic suggestions; others fell into deep trances. And in the world of fiction, still others moved about as specters, poltergeists, zombies, shadows, and doppelgängers. They lived in coffins, loved in graveyards, and, most powerfully, took up residence in the popular imagination.
Edgar Allan Poe embraced every last weird creature—those barely half-alive, those trying to come to life, and those fully disembodied. For him, every house was haunted; every soul was tainted. Each of his stories seemed to explore with a kind of otherworldly delight some paranormal part of the age. Poe rose to worldwide prominence as the poet of death and the macabre. Only America, in the darkest part of the nineteenth century, could have produced such a writer.
To see his spirit up close, I mention only one story here, the satirical “The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign,” which Poe published in 1839. In it, he recounts the story of a rather stout military commander, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, who gets torn almost completely apart by battle. On meeting with the unnamed narrator, Smith reconstructs himself, part by part and limb by limb, ending with eyes, ears, toes, teeth, and tongue, until he stands before the narrator, Poe tells the reader with piercing irony, “whole.” (The general’s character resembles that ambulating machine from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., a creature so strange and so foreign that Čapek had to coin a new word to describe it, a robot.)
Poe published that story before he reached thirty years of age; but he was prescient. The traditional notion of the human being got used up. It was a thrilling, liberating idea—anything was possible—and, at the same time, a hopelessly depressing one. What would people finally become? Who were they? How could they be reconstituted? More important, what would finally become of each one of us, the heirs to that nineteenth-century seismic shift? Could we find someone to put all our Humpty Dumpty pieces back together again?
Virginia Woolf famously wrote, with her usual sense of assurance, that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.”1 Some literary historians have pointed to the publication, in 1914, of W. B. Yeats’s collection of poetry Responsibilities as a document that records, on the eve of the First World War, the radical change in human nature. One of the more familiar poems in that volume, “The Magi,” gets at the new sensibility through the theme of disappearance: “Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,/In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones/Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky.” As telling as these writers are, the dates, for me, come too late. For me, the change began as soon as the nineteenth century opened.
The disappearance of the “pale unsatisfied ones” continues to clog the imagination. The Bush administration brought to the world “ghost prisoners” in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. We hear of “the disappeared” in Latin America; the “ghosts of war” in Vietnam; and the “ghost fighters” in Lebanon. The CIA refers to its own clandestine operatives as “spooks.” We also periodically learn about those disappeared souls who have undergone extreme rendition, and who have been sent to who knows where, for who knows what kind of treatment. The Pentagon designated its prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib as “security detainees” or “unlawful combatants,” thus denying them prisoner of war status and allowing the United States to hold them indefinitely without judicial rights or privileges.
One of the images burned into the popular imagination shows a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, a pointed hood covering his head and a loose-fitting gown draping most of his body, his arms outstretched, electrical wires dangling from his arms, his whole being seeming to float on top of a box—a ghostly, spectral nineteenth-century icon from a twenty-first-century war. Even while film itself has disappeared, we have in the Iraq War the first digital images of horror.
How easy the United States military makes it for us to forget that the wired-up prisoner began the year as someone’s husband or brother or fiancé; that under the hood and gown one can find flesh and bone and blood. How gross that we need reminding that the outline we see is not something called a “security detainee”—whatever that might mean exactly—but a human being; not a stuffed mannequin but a live human being. How horrid that we have to remind the torturer—and us—that he is applying electrodes to one of his own kind.
Such atrocities do not just happen at our military prisons, but in our civilian prisons, and in our detention centers as well. The New York Times, in a May 6, 2008, editorial titled “Death by Detention,” detailed the horror of what the newspaper calls an “undocumented foreigner.” It seems that an immigrant from Guinea, Boubacar Bah, overstayed his tourist visa. Immigration authorities picked him up in 2007 and incarcerated him in the Elizabeth, New Jersey, detention center. As with most of our prisons in America, a private company runs the Elizabeth detention center. While incarcerated, Mr. Bah purportedly fell and fractured his skull and, although he was “gravely ill,” guards shackled and locked him in a “disciplinary cell.” As the Times reports: “He was left alone—unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth—for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.”
Those in charge of such facilities—prisons, detention centers, military brigs, and compounds—invest the word immigrant, in effect, with the same evil as the words prisoner or enemy combatant or suspected terrorist. As with prisoners at Guantánamo or Bagram or Abu Ghraib, immigrants in federal custody have no right to legal representation; most of them cannot defend themselves; many do not even speak English, and thus have no idea of the charges leveled against them.
Using the nineteenth century as its foundation, Unsuspecting Souls tries to figure out how we got to such a bizarre state of affairs—especially in this country—where the idea of immigrant went from marking the greatness of this country to becoming a stand-in term for freeloader and felon. The book explores what it means to be a modern human being, the assumptions on which that definition rests, and where those assumptions came from. The book also entertains ideas about where we may be heading. It shows how even the most ridiculed theories of the nineteenth century shaped our own interior lives, and created who we are today. Seen against the backdrop of the nineteenth century, key cultural artifacts that once seemed odd and complicated fall more neatly into place. For instance, only a radical alteration in attitude toward the human being could bring about something as revolutionary as nonrepresentational art, whose beginnings point to the late-nineteenth-century Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. Imagine: canvas after canvas without a single person, in a time when artists made their reputations painting the human figure. If people disappeared from the canvas, the loss of human essence helps explain, in great part, why they left—even if we do not know where they went. We might well ask, Have we all become unsuspecting victims in that great caper called disappearance? Are we all, in effect, nonrepresentational?
The erosion of human essence continues at a furious pace. If we hope for change in the world, we must regain our sense of being, our sentience. What does it mean to be alive, to be human, in this, the twenty-first century? Philosophers and artists, writers and teachers have always asked such questions. Nowadays, we also hear it from politicians and corporate executives, from advertising mavens and design engineers. But these latter types, who enjoy positions of authority and power, of course, have ulterior motives and hidden agendas. And their answers demean and simplify. They define our lives only in the narrowest of ways—as voracious consumers, fragile immune systems, frightened political subjects, and finally as cogs in a high-powered, relentless machine, over which the average person has utterly no control. We confuse the fact of their power and authority with outright intelligence. We believe that they know