Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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ripe for redefinition. It was a freeing time, an exhilarating time of prolonged experimentation and occasional moments of delight. The age promised power and pleasure, growth and the transformation of the self. But it also threatened to destroy everything people knew—more fundamentally, everything they were. It prompted Karl Marx, in his 1856 speech on the anniversary of the People’s Paper, to call for a new kind of human being: “[T]he newfangled forces of society . . . only want to be mastered by newfangled men.” Nietzsche, too, responded to the changes of the period by demanding a wholly new person, what he called “the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”
As Charles White had insisted, a static and fairly secure past would have to make way for a dynamic present—to say nothing of a wildly unpredictable future. The two towering intellects of the period, Marx and Nietzsche, held a fairly dim view of the fate of humankind. For, just as with our own technological revolution today, they both recognized the negative fallout from their own machine age. In fact, some historians argue that the discipline of sociology came into being in the nineteenth century through the efforts of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, because all three shared a general pessimism about the downward spiral of the social order, or as Simmel more succinctly described the times, “the tragic nature of social experience.”1 In his novel Fathers and Sons (1862), the Russian Ivan Turgenev described the philosophy of his radical hero Bazarov with a new word quickly co-opted by the philosophers: nihilism. Nietzsche expanded on the idea in his Will to Power (1885) and, a few years later, in 1888, in Ecce Homo, offered his ironically upbeat strategy for surviving the new modernism: “Nothing avails, one must go forward—step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern ‘progress’).”
When thinking about the mounting gloom in the nineteenth century, we should keep in mind that the term historians use to describe the century’s last years, fin de siècle, came from the title of a French play by F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard. First performed in Paris on April 17, 1888, Fin de Siècle chronicles the moral degradation that had been building in the century and which culminated around 1880. The playwrights intended the term to refer to the end: the end of human beings, as we know them, and the end of moral and spiritual progress. The play is a statement of anti-modernism, of despair and decadence, in which characters long for the good times of the past and deathly fear the horrors of the future.
Everything was up for grabs—which made the nineteenth century a period of tremendous uncertainty, or, more accurately, of indeterminacy. Lewis Carroll got it right—nobody, neither horses nor men, seemed able to put the world back together again. Even with all the prompting from Nietzsche and Marx, the future, perhaps for the first time in any significant way, began to collapse onto the present. The chasm separating now from then narrowed. No one knew what unsettling events lay ahead, what explosions might occur in traditionally familiar and stable areas, like travel, work, and recreation, but changes started coming at a faster and faster pace. The newly invented sweep-second hand kept unwinding the present until the future just seemed to disappear. The machine, without announcing itself or without, in many cases, being invited, bullied its way into the home and the office, and took charge. Nothing was off limits.
Near the end of the century, Louis and Auguste Lumière, pioneering brothers of the art form called cinema, produced a very short film titled La Charcuterie Mécanique. Louis described it this way: “We showed a sausage machine; a pig was put in at one end and the sausages came out at the other, and vice versa. My brother and I had great fun making the fictitious machine.”2 The film offers a potent allegory on mechanical production and technological innovation, the sausage machine perhaps even standing for motion picture cameras and projectors. But the brothers also joke about the way people get ground up and spit out at the whim of every new innovation and contraption. Surely, they also intended their viewers to think about the connection of swinishness with gross consumption—selfindulgence, gluttony, and materialism—and the numbing uniformity of the sausage links. Whatever the case, the Lumières do not present a very pretty or charming picture of the living and working conditions of the average person. Even with that most exuberant, most magical of all the new machines, the motion picture camera, the Lumières created what may be the first black comedy: a world of gloom and despair, in which individuals get reduced to their essence—to meat.
Alongside the invasion of privacy by that impolitic intruder, the Industrial Revolution, Sigmund Freud was busy taking people’s guarded secrets out of their innermost sanctum, the bedroom, and examining each one with the calculating eye of the scientist. In fact, Freud helped his patients confess all their secrets, no matter the content, in the bright light of day. Rooting about in the darkest recesses of life, Freud illuminated human behavior by making case studies, not out of the average, but out of the oddest and most bizarre individuals he could find. Just what are the boundaries of the human endeavor? What is the range of emotions that supposedly elevate us from animals to human beings? In his zeal to define human essence, Freud wrote about strange characters like the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. Like Oliver Sacks today, Freud took great delight and found great wisdom in all sorts of anomalies. He wrote about a man who dreamed of wolves hiding in trees and of another who spent his days and nights in sewers. We must look at the edges, he seemed to be saying, in order to find the rock-solid center.
The general public, forever curious about its own kind, heartily agreed. The noun freak, to describe characters, say, who look like they came out of a Diane Arbus photograph, comes into the language in the nineteenth century in the phrase “a freak of nature.” More recently, we know freaks, perhaps, as longhaired, unkempt hippies (who even turned the word into a verb by “freaking out”), or those from that same period whom we remember as Jesus freaks. At P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, an extremely popular fixture of the middle to late decades of the century in downtown Manhattan, at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, more visitors filed into the sideshow, or the freak show, than into the big top for the main attraction. Barnum offered for public viewing bizarre creatures with names similar to Freud’s own cases: the Bearded Lady, the Lobster Boy, the Human Giant, and a host of other strange wonderments.
All this attention on the fringe and the freak and the underground resulted in a shockingly new aesthetics. Standards of decorum in behavior and dress and actions turned bizarre, outlandish—at times even revolting. Perhaps one of the biggest secrets a society holds is its criminals, its deviants and aberrant castoffs, which it prefers to keep safely tucked away in the shadows—in cells, in darkened chambers—anywhere, away from public view. Those lowlifes, too, became not just the darlings of the emerging avant-garde of the nineteenth century, but at times even models of the most powerful, unrestrained behavior. Imagine, thieves and prostitutes helping to define the idea of what it means to be human. Darwin’s theory of natural selection presented problems for the idea of moral development; in fact, they seemed at odds. While we may find such ideas outlandish, we need only think of Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century tale of existential angst, Notes from Underground, whose antihero prefers to take aim at modern life from deep under the earth, in his dank dungeon. Thus, someone like Rudyard Kipling, who in a poem titled “The White Man’s Burden” harped about making good and morally upright citizens out of “your new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half devil and half child”—which should have been a snap for an imperial nation like Great Britain in the nineteenth century.
America and England suddenly were introduced to a new player from the demimonde, the con artist. The con artist could pull off sleight-of-hand tricks with the deftness of the best magician; rather than performing onstage, he or she preferred working the streets. Melville paid homage to the type in his novel The Confidence-Man. When the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine shot his lover Arthur Rimbaud, in 1873, the press glorified Verlaine, particularly after he moved to England, calling him “the convict poet.” One century more and we get to Chris Burden, the American artist, shooting himself, not with a camera but with a rifle, in an art gallery, or, even more ghastly, having some random spectator shoot him. When we ask, “What is art?” we are also asking, “What are the limits of creativity, of human impulse?”
In the 1880s, leading lights in the demimonde enthroned Oscar Wilde as the reigning figure in an outlier aesthetic movement of the marginal that held a view of culture every bit as pessimistic as