The Walker
Page 10
Bourne could not have been an imposter, it seemed, because he ‘had total amnesia for the period of Albert Brown’s existence’, as Kenny has confirmed.27 The man had alternately inhabited two distinct, apparently incommensurable selves. In sum, he had both a Bourne identity and a Brown identity. (The title of The Bourne Identity [1980], Robert Ludlum’s novel about an amnesiac special agent attempting to reconstruct his identity, subsequently made into a celebrated series of films, is evidently a deliberate, albeit obscure, allusion to the case of Ansel Bourne.)
In contrast to the representatives of the religious community that shaped the terms in which Bourne’s collapse was interpreted in the late 1850s, the self-appointed experts who pronounced on him in the late 1880s were in no doubt that he was suffering from a medical rather than a spiritual condition. ‘In the last years of the century,’ Jessica Lieberman has observed, ‘the pious imagination of New England Protestantism was insufficient to explain his amnestic transformation.’28 As Hodgson’s article suggests, an emergent post-Darwinian psychology instead explored the case as an instance of double consciousness. Bourne was apparently afflicted by a divided self.
The most prominent professional psychologist to take an interest in the case was William James, then in the process of completing The Principles of Psychology (1890). In his chapter on ‘The Consciousness of Self’, where he cautiously classed this case ‘as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting for two months’, James described hypnotizing Bourne in order to reconstruct his experiences as Brown.29 Under a trance, according to James, Bourne readily reverted to being Brown; but in this state, conversely, he registered no knowledge of the life of Bourne.
Adopting a slightly disappointed tone, James recorded that ‘the whole thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown-personality seems to be nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesiac extract of Mr Bourne himself’. ‘I had hoped by suggestion, etc.,’ he concluded, ‘to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous, but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr Bourne’s skull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves.’30 Here, then, is what Bellamy called a ‘Jekyll–Hyde existence’.
Across the Atlantic, at almost exactly the same time as Bourne’s enigmatic peregrination, a number of analogous cases characterized by dissociated identities, all of them entailing arbitrary if oddly purposeful journeys, most of them on foot, were being examined by French psychologists. Philippe Tissié documented the first of these, which also coincidentally came to light in 1887, in a medical thesis entitled Les aliénés voyageurs. It concerned a young working-class man from Bordeaux, Albert Dadas, who travelled compulsively, in an apparently amnesiac state, sometimes reaching locations as distant as Constantinople and Moscow. Another Albert, then, but one who was born ‘Albert’, so to speak, unlike Bourne, who became Albert, or had the name Albert thrust upon him.31
Dadas ‘traveled obsessively,’ writes Ian Hacking in Mad Travelers, ‘bewitched, often without identity papers and sometimes without identity, not knowing who he was or why he traveled, and knowing only where he was going next.’32 So he too laboured under what might be called a Bourne identity, a condition which can be summarized in terms of dissociative or psychogenic fugue.
The comments on his condition in the late 1880s – most influentially, those of the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who referred to it in a lecture of January 1888 as a case of automatisme ambulatoire – initiated what Hacking has forcefully described as ‘the fugue epidemic of the 1890s’.33 This epidemic emanated from France into Italy, Germany and Russia, where it was analysed under various names, including determinismo ambulatorio, Wandertrieb and ‘dromomania’. Some psychologists argued that fugue was a hysterical condition, others that it was an epileptic one; Charcot, for his part, sometimes spoke of ‘hystero-epilepsy’.34
In explaining the social conditions in which fugue emerged, Hacking points out that the late nineteenth century is the epoch in which mass tourism, as pioneered by the travel company Thomas Cook and Son, first made its appearance. ‘Popular tourism,’ he argues, ‘was one part of the ecological niche in which a new type of mental disorder, and behavior, was able to locate itself.’ Fugue, according to this intriguing argument, was a pathological symptom of the compulsion to travel that characterized the fin de siècle. Recapitulating the point, Hacking claims that fugue is thus ‘a mirror of tourism’.35
It might equally be asserted that, in the late nineteenth century, fugue is a mirror of utopianism (itself perhaps a mirror of tourism at this time, as the example of Jules Verne implies); or, more accurately, that utopian literature, at the height of its popularity as a mass form, mirrors the logic of fugue. Utopianism, it could be said, is the temporal equivalent of ambulatory automatism.
In late nineteenth-century utopian literature, the protagonist disappears from one life and reappears in another, like a fugueur. He is an aliéné voyageur. But if fugue involves the patient’s displacement in space, utopia involves the protagonist’s displacement in time. He slips from the present into the future, crossing an ontological as well as an existential border. He is not simply an alienated traveller, he is an alien traveller, a time traveller; in short, he is an alien, albeit one from inner space rather than outer space. ‘I should expect fugueurs to occur in the ephemeral popular writing of the 1890s,’ Hacking has written, ‘but I do not know of any.’36 It is in utopian fiction that they materialize, in half-disguised form.
Utopian consciousness, divided between the present and the future, ostensibly describes a political as opposed to a pathological dissociation. In both contexts, however, those of political and psychological flight, the crucial event, to formulate it in Lynch’s terms, is the moment when the individual wakes up one day and discovers that he or she is another person. This is the narrative constitutive of utopian fiction.
Take W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887). In this novel, contemporaneous with Looking Backward, the narrator falls from a rock on a botanical expedition into a ravine and on regaining consciousness discovers that he is in a strangely wild landscape populated by beautiful, androgynous human beings. Or, take Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889). The narrator, in this example, falls asleep in her study as she is fantasizing about Annie Besant’s first speech as prime minister, and wakes up to find she is standing in a beautiful garden, in a feminist arcadia, beside a distinctly decadent young man who can recall only that, before being transported into the future, he had been smoking hashish in Soho.37
In the context both of time travelling and mad travelling, the subject is structured by a ‘Jekyll–Hyde existence’. ‘Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde,’ Jekyll states in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stevenson’s celebrated novel about an individual with a skull that covers two distinct personal selves.38 Like the fugueur, as I have suggested, the utopian protagonist disappears from one life and reappears in another.
Sometimes, as in Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890–91), he returns to his former life, uncomfortably enough, and attempts to piece together the experiences he has had in a dream state. After coming to consciousness in his bed in ‘dingy Hammersmith’ at the end of the narrative, Morris’s protagonist William Guest reflects that ‘all along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business among them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen’s last mournful look seemed to say, “No, it will not do; you cannot be of us …”.’39
At other times, as in Looking Backward, the utopian protagonist vanishes and is never seen again. Julian West also recalls one of the ‘mad travellers’ investigated by Charcot, a man called Mén, whose first fugue was in May 1887, but who disappeared completely in June 1890, ‘despite vigorous inquiries by the police’.40 For Julian’s journey into the future is a fugue from which he doesn’t return. The same might be said of the Time Traveller in Wells’s novel, at the conclusion of which the narrator admits that he
might have to ‘wait a lifetime’ for him to return: ‘The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.’41
The chronological coincidence of the emergence of fugue and the resurgence of the utopian imagination – of compulsive wandering and compulsive wondering, so to speak – is certainly striking. As I have emphasized, Bellamy’s book was completed in the year both that Ansel Bourne disappeared and the case of Albert Dadas came to be documented. And if the 1890s was, as Hacking puts it, ‘the golden decade for fugue’, then the same can be said of utopian fiction.42 For although a utopian consciousness, or structure of feeling, is broadly characteristic of the final three decades of the nineteenth century – the period shaped by the Long Depression – it is during the late 1880s and early 1890s in particular that the publication of most utopian fiction is concentrated.43
If Bourne’s first physiological collapse in 1857 was precipitated in part by social disturbance, and the ‘widespread apprehension about what the future would hold’ that accompanied it, as Kenny suggests, then similar conditions lie behind what I am diagnosing as West’s fugue in 1887 (it just so happens that Bellamy’s protagonist was born in 1857, as he announces in the book’s opening sentence). Boston in 1887 is racked by ‘disturbances of industry’, according to West (9); and because his forthcoming marriage is contingent on moving into a house that, as a consequence of ‘a series of strikes’, is only half-built, he is particularly susceptible to what he calls ‘the nervous tension of the public mind’ (11).44
It is to this socially divided city that West doubles back in the dream he describes in Chapter 28, the dystopian dream that he erroneously interprets as reality, and hence as proof that the socialist society he thought he inhabited was actually a utopian dream. This chapter effectively documents another fugue; or, more precisely perhaps, the experience of a fugueur who suddenly finds himself among the scenes of his former life again. West’s initial impulse, on finding himself in late nineteenth-century Boston once more, as he assumes, is to leave his house and desperately pound the streets: ‘A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop and pull myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston of the future to make the real Boston strange’ (182).
It is an episode of ambulatory automatism. Shocked that he has ‘so suddenly become a stranger in [his] own city’, he stands at the ‘busiest point’ in Washington Street and laughs aloud, ‘to the scandal of the passers-by’ (183). He then drifts about the city in an increasingly febrile state, convinced that the people he encounters are ‘all quite dead’, their bodies ‘so many living sepulchres’ (189). At nightfall, staring in the street at the faces of the inhabitants of the poorest district of nineteenth-century Boston, he is ‘affected by a singular hallucination’: ‘Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed on each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived’ (189). West’s fugue state momentarily merges with his non-fugue state, the utopian vision coalescing with the dystopian one.
But if this revelation almost succeeds in running his dissociated identities into one, to use James’s formulation, he subsequently suffers an attack of amnesia. He has ‘no clear recollection of anything’, in fact, until he finds his feet ‘obeying some unconscious impulse’ and leading him to his nineteenth-century fiancée’s family home (190). There, he interrupts a dinner party, denouncing the guests’ plutocratic lifestyle, and sermonizing about his social dreams, in the voice of a prophet:
With fervency I spoke of that new world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by brotherly kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed, but which might so easily be made real. But when I had expected now surely the faces around me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt. ‘Madman!’ ‘Pestilent fellow!’ ‘Fanatic!’ ‘Enemy of Society!’ were some of their cries … (192)
Finally, he is physically ejected: ‘“Put the fellow out!” exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at the signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me’ (192). Rather than feeling enmity for his accusers, though, West is overcome by violent, uncontrollable compassion for them, which makes him seem even less socially acceptable, even less sane.
Indeed, he suffers something that closely resembles a nervous breakdown. ‘Tears poured from my eyes,’ West recounts. ‘In my vehemence I became inarticulate’ (193). It is at this point, in an abrupt transition, that he realizes he has dreamed the entire episode while asleep in the Leetes’ house in utopian Boston: ‘I panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myself sitting upright in my bed in my room in Dr. Leete’s house’ (193). His secondary fugue – it might be understood as a fugue within a fugue – is thus concluded.
In the end, the connections between fugue and the utopian imagination are not simply a matter of coincidence; nor of the structural analogies between these two kinds of flight, the one spatial, the other temporal. I have already alluded to the fact that, in the novels and short stories that Bellamy published before Looking Backward, he demonstrated a persistent interest in abnormal psychological states.
A compelling example of this is ‘The Blindman’s World’, first printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1886. In this tale, a professor of astronomy realizes to his astonishment that, during a fit of somnambulism, he has produced a description of a trip to Mars, one that he apparently made in a mysterious cataleptic state from which he has been recuperating, though he has no recollection of it. The sheets of paper that he subsequently finds on his desk ‘contained the longed-for but despaired-of record of those hours when I was absent from the body,’ he states: ‘They were the lost chapter of my life.’45 So Bellamy manifestly had an interest in something like ambulatory automatism before 1887.
But it is also possible to speculate, more specifically, that he became conscious of the case of Ansel Bourne, since it transpires that, among the plot outlines contained in his unpublished notebooks, there is one that centres on what is in effect a psychogenic fugue. This tale, which was presumably never written, is entitled ‘A Mysterious Disappearance’:
A Mysterious Disappearance: Let story be narrated in first person at Franksville. Have friend, a fine fellow [called Noakes], who is sick and married, with a pretty baby, prosperous, ordinary sort of fellow. I meet him and know him for a year. I see some curious epileptic symptoms about him that is all. I leave him and go to Indianapolis. I then get board in an interesting family of a ‘grass widow’ [a woman separated from her husband]. Her husband mysteriously disappeared some years previous. Left her with these children. Supposed to be drowned. I go away. A newspaper account of return of her husband. Afterwards go back to see grass widow, find my friend Noakes installed as her husband. He does not know me from Adam. I ask him questions about Franksville. He evidently knows nothing about it. I guess the truth. What shall I do? I go back and tell his wife the truth. She overwhelmed. Long after he comes back to her but she will not live with him. Would it be wrong? They are different persons.
I take Noakes back to his legal wife. He does not know her but accepts my word that he is her husband, and there reposed him with her, a broken-hearted man.46
This outline is obviously prompted by contemporaneous debates about double consciousness. Like James and his associates, including Hodgson, who hinted that, during his time in Norristown, Bourne probably suffered from ‘post-epileptic partial loss of memory’, Bellamy notes that Noakes had ‘some curious epileptic symptoms about him’.47 Noakes consists of ‘different persons’, each one living a separate life with a separate wife. In James’s formulation, Noakes’s skull ‘covers two distinct personal selves’. Like Noakes, West consists of ‘different persons’, though these are shaped not by geographical but historical displacements. L
ooking Backward thus also recounts a mysterious disappearance.
Bellamy’s troubled protagonist even exchanges one girlfriend for another, replacing Edith Bartlett, his fiancée in 1887, with Edith Leete, his lover in 2000. In fact, fortuitously, albeit a little uncomfortably for the reader, it transpires that the latter is the former’s great-granddaughter; and it is therefore tempting to imagine that the novel’s central female characters are susceptible to the logic of a fugue-like doubling too. When West and Edith Leete declare their love to one another in the penultimate chapter, he describes it as ‘a double miracle’, because his old love, Edith Bartlett, has been ‘reëmbodied for [his] consolation’ (177).
Here, certainly, is what West, with some understatement, calls a ‘confusion of identities’ (177). For, if West feels his identity has been split and doubled by the historical displacement he experienced in time-travelling to the future, then so too does Edith Leete. Even more peculiarly, perhaps, since she is positively haunted by her lover’s relationship with her antecedent. ‘What if I were to tell you that I have sometimes thought that her spirit lives in me, – that Edith Bartlett, not Edith Leete, is my real name’, she admits to him, in slightly plaintive tones. ‘I cannot know it; of course none of us can know who we really are; but I can feel it’ (177). Edith is an individual with two identities, two surnames, ‘Leete’ echoing and elongating the ‘lett’ in ‘Bartlett’, just as ‘Brown’ had reconfigured ‘Bourne’.