Unsuspecting Souls Page 34

  Once human beings are emptied of substance, any professional—from the advertiser on Madison Avenue to George C. Tilyou on Coney Island—can fill them back up with whatever gadgets or innovations they are told they need and thus come to believe they actually want. Nowadays, someone or some agency continually has the public’s ear and eye and appetite, telling each and every person what to think and whom to hate and how to react. Fear works so effectively these days because it freezes people in place, preventing them from thinking critically about any issue or problem. It’s impossible, of course, to refuse or refute anything once thinking has been shut off. But we need a more substantive, more basic solution to this problem of human disappearance.

  And now, now we have a new bestseller listing in The New York Times, one that charts the sales of self-help books. The word self-help enters the language in 1831, with Thomas Carlyle, who uses it in Sartor Resartus to refer to Ishmael: “In the destitution of the wild desert does our young Ishmael acquire for himself the highest of all possessions, that of self-help.” Self-help for Carlyle is already a “possession,” something to strive for and acquire—a laudable goal. Indeed, it is one of the highest of all goals.

  Our contemporary articulation of self-help continues that same idea, situating the “help” in some outside agency or person as instruction or, more than likely, in some bracing reprimand to invigorate the “self.” For example, one such book on “tough love” carries the title You’re Fat! Now Lose It! Like the concept “life,” the self is an entity to be molded and shaped and directed. These are books not about the help from which a person might benefit, but the help a person will require to become more productive at work, more successful with love, and, most important of all, happier with him- or herself. Self-help books resemble repair manuals: The system is down and in need of fixing.

  Like any other enterprise, some of those books probably do help a few people, while a great many others of them merely cash in on people’s despondency, asking their reader-clients to pay attention to what they are doing, how they are acting, and what they are feeling. All of them try to provide a level of therapy between hard covers. Some work, some do not, but the hope remains that maybe the next ones will pull off the miracle cure—and that keeps sales vital.

  A 2008 Christian Science Monitor article points out that, while overall book sales have fallen, sales of self-help books continue to increase dramatically: “Almost half of Americans purchase at least one self-help book in their lifetimes. The genre accounted for $581 million in sales in 1998, but today that number has quadrupled to more than $2 billion.”17

  A phrase made popular by the TV series Sex and the City, “He’s not that into you,” became the title of a successful self-help book, which, in turn, became a movie. What a perfect alignment: pop psychology and mass entertainment, Freud and Disneyland joining forces. The ground for such a collusion was ably prepared by Doctor Phil, a self-help guru created by the staggering popularity of The Oprah Winfrey Show, itself a kind of performance in self-help. Doctor Phil’s outspoken and recurring command to audience members (suggesting he is possessed of a self) serves as a counter to our ghostly existence: “Get real!”

  SEVEN | The Draculated Cat

  “When I had my Defiance given, The Sun stood trembling in heaven;”

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, 1800

  IN 1814, A GERMAN BOTANIST and poet named Adelbert von Chamisso published what he called a children’s tale titled Peter Schlemihl’s Remarkable Story. Like a good many stories for children, this one clearly went beyond children and carried profound meaning for adults, especially for those who had hope of understanding the period. Chamisso recounted the adventures of penniless little Peter, who wanders aimlessly and glumly around the German countryside. Head down and depressed, Peter stumbles into an unknown magician who tells Peter how much he loves his “beautiful shadow in the sun, which, with a certain noble contempt, and perhaps without being aware of it, you threw off from your feet.”

  The magician offers to buy Peter’s shadow in exchange for a magical purse. No matter how many coins Peter might manage to withdraw from it, the purse will immediately fill back up, leaving Peter to live out his days forever wealthy, which means that he can finally stop worrying. Hungry for wealth and even hungrier for fame, Peter agrees to part with his lifelong and intimate friend, the shadow: “[W]ith wonderful dexterity, I perceived him loosening my shadow from the ground from head to foot; he lifted it up, he rolled it together and folded it, and at last put it into his pocket.”

  Happy at long last, Peter returns to wandering the countryside, this time as a wealthy and seemingly content little man. But, much to his shock, he slowly discovers that no one wants to talk to him and, worse yet, nobody wants to be with him. Most distressing of all, the woman he has for so long adored shuns him; this baffles Peter. For if anything, Peter realizes, he is a better, wealthier person than in the recent past.

  But the lesson of the story shines clearly through: Love finds its vitality in the light, but does not shy away from the shadow. The negative emanation, to which very few if any people pay attention, is as important to the whole person as the bright and attractive side. It is the psychological equivalent of Freud’s incidental gesture, a twitch or tic that speaks whole novels in a simple toss of the head or turn of a phrase. In a most significant way, a shadow is an imprint from which the loved one derives great enjoyment, meaning, and understanding. For the loved one, the shadow is the silhouette of the soul.

  In the nineteenth-century drive toward essentialism, adepts in the period believed that our shadows offered observers the opportunity to see the distillation of our inner beings—a chance to examine the revelations of our deepest character. We can find this idea most wonderfully presented in the nineteenth-century fascination—practically a cult—for the silhouette. (The word silhouette comes from Étienne de Silhouette, a French author and politician, and enters the English language in 1798.) The place the making of silhouettes occupies is a popular precursor to photography. It is a photograph without any of the technology.

  Drawing silhouettes, like the casting of shadows, offered a way to glimpse a person’s soul. Both involved the casting of a negative; both involved free-floating interpretation. It makes sense, then, that silhouettes should appeal to one of the most well-known phrenologists of the period, Johann Kaspar Lavater. In 1820, Lavater began analyzing subjects through a backlit screen that revealed nothing but their outlines. By concentrating on those outlines that had no confusing details, Lavater felt enabled to make bold assertions about the subject’s personality and character. The outline, he argued, eliminated everything extraneous, leaving, for Lavater, only the barest outlines of personality. Think of the shadow or the silhouette, then, as a negative from which we begin to make a positive impression slowly emerge.

  Kara Walker, the contemporary African American artist, creates silhouettes of slave scenes. What motivates her art is the belief, in part, that too much has been written about slavery in this country over the past one hundred fifty years or so, while African Americans have made scant progress over that same period of time. Walker offers silhouettes—outlines of real people—which is the way most people saw African Americans in the nineteenth century, and the way most Americans perceive blacks today, and that is exactly what she is creating—“blacks.” She asks us to realize that we still see African Americans in outline only, and begs her viewers to fill in the details. She believes we all know enough at this point to do just that. Out of all the millions of pages written about slavery and all the films and testimonials about black liberation, we can only “get it,” finally, by filling in the details ourselves—that is, by completing the picture ourselves.

  On another level, once we do fill in the details—in some sense, project ourselves into the scene—we enter into a complicity with, and a historical responsibility for, the over two hundred years of slavery in this country. All of this in art without color—and the phrase “without color” should
reverberate for us—and without fine detail and description, in the strictest contrast of black and white. And isn’t that the nineteenth century in America, a startling contrast of black and white? Keep in mind that in 1850 plantation slaves constituted America’s largest workforce, even though fewer than 1,500 plantations owned more than one hundred slaves, only nine had more than five hundred, and only two had more than a thousand.1

  Shadows, the negative cast by sunlight, always brings Plato’s parable of the cave to life, except with a powerful psychological thrust, for my shadow is not just a mere reflection of reality in the nineteenth century—a phantasm—but reality and even much more—my inner reality. Who I am in the full blaze of the sun, in the clearest light of day, leaves a faint trace, which you can discover in my shadow. As the sun sets—as I grow older—I reveal more and more of myself. I am substantial and insubstantial at one and the same time. I move through the world as both positive and negative. One of the most forceful ambiguities of the period is one that sees in absence the possibility of a most powerful presence. Digital photography destroys the metaphor of photography as a way the psyche makes itself apparent. Digital photography does away with film—and negatives—just as word processing does away with paper and rough drafts.

  Photographic printing techniques improved over the course of the nineteenth century. The blacks went through a process of fine gradation, making detail, especially in faces, much more finely delineated. Marina Warner goes so far as to say that the new techniques “could bestow lifelikeness on the inanimate, often to an uncanny degree.” Innovations proliferated: Calotypes, salted paper prints, as well as platinum prints, in particular, allowed the lines to sink into the paper, giving the image an extraordinary depth. Warner also points to the range of nuanced color that started to emerge in the shadows—“indigo, maroon, saffron, and smoky grey.” Like a silhouette, nineteenth-century photography drained reality of all color, distilling every object and detail into stark black and white. William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the once-familiar negative in 1841, characterized photography in a phrase that tried to capture that rendering of full-color experience into a redaction of white and black, calling it, quite appropriately, the “pencil of nature.”

  The successor to the silhouette was a popular and innovative parlor game called the inkblot, in which people would try to find various animals, creatures, devils, and monsters in a simple blot of ink. It’s the last gasp at enjoying messiness and fuzzy borders. It makes a virtue out of mistakes. A German physician and poet, Justinus Koerner, really instigated the pastime. He began by “transforming smudges and blots on his letters to friends by doodling figures he divined in the shapes; later, he spattered ink on to paper on purpose, and then took the further step of folding it to produce a symmetrical image. He enhanced his fantasia by adding brushmarks—of eyes and other features. Skeletons, ghosts, imps, bats, and moths predominated, and he wrote whimsical verses to accompany them. Koerner suffered from very poor eyesight, so this was his way of transforming incapacitating blurs into aesthetic ‘creatures of chance.’”2

  Notice the phrase, “creatures of chance,” a perfect Freudian line. Nothing is accidental, of course, for Freud. The smallest detail reveals all. And so, Justinus Koerner’s simple parlor game, like Lavater’s shadow and silhouette experiments, led to the very serious and elaborate Rorschach test that the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach, in 1921, made into an integral part of his clinical psychiatric practice, and which later became a standard and familiar tool of diagnosis. In his clinical practice, Rorschach would present a series of inkblots to patients who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, asking them to describe, with precise detail, what and whom they saw in each blot. Through their interpretations, Rorschach believed, he could put together a coherent narrative of his patients’ problems.

  By this strange and circuitous route, the common, everyday shadow moved into the scrubbed, antiseptic clinic. Schlemihl’s magician may have been a doctor, then, nabbing his shadow for laboratory analysis. Working in just the opposite way, Freud attempted to take those mysterious shadows out of the bedrooms of his patients and make them disappear in the clear light of day. He wanted to shine a light on all the dark corners of the psyche. By this same psychological form of reasoning, we have to conclude that our shadows—in whatever way, in whatever system—carry great importance. We cannot hide our shadows, and we certainly cannot get rid of them, for in very significant ways, the shadow is the person. Without his shadow, Peter Schlemihl is simply not a person anymore.

  On the most obvious psychological level, Peter’s shadow represents his dark side, the shadow self that Jung described. Without acknowledging that darker side, Peter can never become a whole person; in turn, no one can love him because he cannot really embrace himself. He can only achieve psychic well-being by integrating his two sides, the two halves of his being. This theme, as we have seen, runs through a great deal of literature in the nineteenth century, from the obvious example of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde to the secret sharer and the shape-shifting transformations of the wolf man.

  On a psychoanalytic level, we must say that Peter Schlemihl finds himself stuck. Patients come to psychoanalysis when they keep repeating the same behavior, when they tell themselves the same stories, over and over again, about their lives. “This unconscious limiting or coercion of the repertoire of life-stories,” according to Adam Phillips, “creates the illusion of time having stopped (or rather, people believe—behave as if—they have stopped time). In our repetitions we seem to be staying away from the future, keeping it at bay.”3 Freud called this particular symptom a failed attempt at doing ourselves in, a passing attraction with our own death, and concluded that such conspicuous repetitions resulted from the person’s unwillingness to remember. In Freudian terms, we cannot make the sun move again except through the painful act of remembering those acts from childhood that have blocked us. Otherwise, we face a death in life.

  And Schlemihl has, indeed, entered into a kind of death, where everything—not just the sun—has stopped for him. (I realize that it is the Earth that must stop and not the sun, but I adhere to linguistic conventions here: for example, “sunrise” and “sunset.”) He has moved into a state where he would rather not remember much of anything. Chamisso has given us a parable about Peter’s essence, and the state of the collective soul in the nineteenth century. It is not Peter’s shadow that has disappeared, but, in effect, Peter himself. Take away the shadow and you take away life itself.

  In 1841, the novelist Honoré de Balzac made the following, very convoluted declaration about human essence, couched in terms of a period becoming quickly dominated by the technology of the camera. That’s why he made this particular declaration to the photographer Nadar, who had the great distinction of many times photographing Sarah Bernhardt. Balzac perceived that presently “each body in nature consists of a series of ghosts, in an infinity of superimposed layers, foliated in infinitesimal films, in all the directions in which optics perceive this body.” He went on to apply his extended image specifically to the daguerreotype, which he believed “was going to surprise, detach and retain one of the layers of the body on which it focused . . . from then onwards, and every time the operation was repeated, the object in question evidently suffered the loss of one of its ghosts, that is to say, the very essence of which it was composed.”4

  Balzac gives new meaning to the phrase “Let me take your picture,” which, in the context he provides, we might want to recast as “Let me take your image”—for each time I “shoot” you, in his terms, I remove one more layer of your being. Not only had human beings been reduced to ghosts, as far as Balzac could see, but now technology had begun stripping away even those ghosts, making the human being totally disappear, and leaving behind absolutely nothing.

  Balzac was not alone in his fear of the great erasure of the human being. Emerson, too, compared the taking of a person’s photograph with the ultimate taking—death. Caleb Crain, in a re
view of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., called The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978, quotes Emerson on the subject of sitting for a portrait in the studio of a photographer. Crain observes, about the process of photography in the 1840s, that “no chemical preparation was then sensitive enough to record a person unwilling or unable to keep still. ‘Were you ever daguerreotyped, O immortal man?’ Emerson asked in his journal in 1841.” A question on which Emerson then elaborated: “And in your zeal not to blur the image, did you keep every finger in its place with such energy that your hands became clenched as for fight or despair . . . and the eyes fixed as they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death?”5 Did you put a hold on your life, Emerson wants to know, and play possum to the world? Interestingly enough, the term rigor mortis enters the language just a few years after Emerson’s journal entry, in 1847, to describe the stiffening of the body following death.

  In the nineteenth century, at least, we simply cannot separate the idea of death from the click of a camera—“shooting” holds them together. Since each photograph consists of one more ghostly version of the person, contemporary critics found the camera guilty of removing the person layer by layer, just as Balzac had insisted. Peter’s shadow serves as a photograph of Peter himself, his veil or film, if you will; his loss of that shadow is, in very key ways, Balzac’s statement, or Emerson’s insights, recast as a contemporary children’s story. It, too, casts its own shadow—in the form of a deeper meaning, of a warning to the age.

  And so, on another, perhaps more important level, the story of Peter Schlemihl carries a message about the sun. Schlemihl is a schlemiel because what he really craves is a kind of Mephistophelean power: Peter wants to master time. We cast no shadow only when the sun shines directly over our heads. For Peter to live without a shadow the sun must remain forever at high noon. In Goethe’s rendering of the Faust legend, Faust practically explodes with joy at one of the devil’s tricks and declares that he loves it so much he never wants the moment to end: “Shall I say to the moment/‘Stay a while! You are so beautiful!’” Peter could be sitting for one of those daguerreotypes that Emerson describes, sitting still forever, alive but looking very much dead. 6