Essays. Catscan Columns

by Bruce Sterling

  SNEAKERS plays paranoia for slapstick laughs in the character of Dan Aykroyd, who utters a wide variety of the standard Space-Brother nutty notions, none of them with any practical implications whatsoever. This may be the worst and most discouraging aspect of the conspiratorial mindset — the way it simultaneously flatters one’s own importance and also makes one willing to do nothing practical and tangible. The conspiracy theorist has got it all figured, he’s got the inside angles, and yet he has the perfect excuse for utter cynical torpor.

  Let’s just consider the real-world implications of genuine conspiratorial convictions for a moment. Let’s assume, as many people do, that John Kennedy really was shot dead in a ‘silent coup’ by a US government cabal in 1963. If this is true, then we Americans clearly haven’t run our own national affairs for at least thirty years. Our executive, our Congress, our police and our bureaucracies have all been a fraud in the hands of elite and murderous secret masters. But if we’re not running our own affairs today, and haven’t for thirty years, then how the heck are we supposed to start now? Why even try? If the world’s fate is ineluctably in the hands of Illuminati, then what real reason do we have to meddle in public matters? Why make our thoughts and ideas heard? Why organize, why discuss public policy, why make budgets, why set priorities, why vote? We’ll just get gypped anyhow. We’d all be better off retired, in hiding, underground, in monasteries, in purdah, or dead.

  If the NSA’s tapping every phone line and reading every license-plate from orbit, then They are basically omniscient. They’re watching us every moment — but why do they bother? What quality, besides our own vanity, would make us important enough to be constantly watched by Secret Masters? After all, it’s not like we’re actually intending to accomplish anything.

  Conspiracy is for losers. As conspiracy freaks, by our very nature we’ll always live on the outside of where it’s Really Happening. That’s what justifies our existence and allows us to tell Ourselves apart from Them. Unlike people in the former Eastern Bloc, who actually were oppressed and monitored by a sinister power-elite, we ourselves will never become what’s Really Happening, despite our enormous relative advantages. Maybe we can speculate a little together, trade gossip, scare each other silly and swap outlandish bullshit. We can gather up our hacker scrapbooks from the office trash of the Important and Powerful. We can press our noses to the big mirrorglass windows. Maybe it we’re especially daring, we can fling a brick through a window late one night and run like hell. That’ll prove that we’re brave and that we really don’t like Them — though we’re not brave enough to replace Them, and we’re certainly not brave enough to become Them.

  And this would also prove that no sane person would ever trust us with a scintilla of real responsibility or power anyway, over ourselves or anyone else. Because we don’t deserve any such power, no matter from what angle of the political spectrum we happen to emerge. Because we’ve allowed ourselves the ugly luxury of wallowing in an enormous noisome heap of bullshit. And for being so stupid, we deserve whatever we get.

  CATSCAN 12 “Return to the Rue Jules Verne”

  These people are not my spiritual ancestors. I know my real spiritual ancestors — they were the Futurians and the Hydra Club. But although these people are a century and a half gone, and further distanced by language, culture and a mighty ocean, something about them — what they did, what they felt, what they were — takes me by the throat.

  It won’t let go. My first Catscan column, “Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne,” made much ado of this milieu, and of one of its members, Felix Tournachon (1820-1910). Tournachon, when known at all today, is best-known as “Nadar,” a pseudonym he first adopted for his Parisian newspaper work in the 1840s. Nadar was a close friend of the young Jules Verne, and he helped inspire Verne’s first blockbuster period techno-thriller, FIVE WEEKS IN A BALLOON.

  Nadar and Verne were contemporaries, both of them emigres to Paris with artistic ambitions, a taste for hard work, and a pronounced Bohemian bent. Nadar and Verne further shared an intense interest in geography, mapping, and aviation. Verne’s influence on Nadar was slim, but Nadar impressed Verne mightily. Nadar even featured as the hero of one of Verne’s best-known novels, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, as the thinly anagrammed “Michael Ardan.”

  Thanks to the efforts of my good friend Richard Dorsett (a rare book dealer by trade) I have come into possession of a book called simply NADAR, a collection of 359 of Monsieur Tournachon’s pioneering nineteenth-century photographs, assembled in 1976 by Nigel Gosling for Alfred A Knopf. I knew that Nadar had been a photographer, among his other pursuits as an aeronaut, journalist, caricaturist, author, man-about-Paris, and sometime inspiration for a prototypical science-fiction writer. But I never realized that Nadar was this good!

  Nadar’s photographic record of his Parisian contemporaries is the most potent and compelling act of social documentation that I’ve ever seen.

  Nadar, and his studio staff, photographed nineteenth-century Parisians by the hundreds, over many decades, first as a hobby, and later as as a highly successful commercial venture. But Nadar had a very special eye for the personalities of his friends — the notables of Paris, the literati, musicians, poets, critics, and political radicals.

  These are the people who invented “la vie de Boheme.” They invented the lifestyle of the urban middle-class dropout art-gypsy. They invented its terminology and its tactics. They brought us the “succes de scandale,” the now time-honored tactic of shocking one’s audience all the way to the bank. And the “succes d’estime,” the edgy and hazardous life of the critics’ darling. The doctrine of art for art’s sake was theirs too (thank you, Theophile Gautier). And the ever-helpful notion of epater les bourgeoisie, an act of consummately modern rebellion which is nevertheless impossible without a bourgeoisie to epater, an act which the bourgeoisie itself has lavishly financed for decades in our culture’s premiere example of Aldissian enantiodromia — the transformation of things into their opposites.

  The Paris Bohemians were the first genuine industrial-scale counterculture. This was the culture that created Jules Verne. It deserves a great deal of the credit or blame for origination of the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. It has a legitimate claim on our attention and our loyalties.

  Jules Verne enjoys a minor role in this book of Nadar’s photographs. Verne is on page 230.

  One good look at Verne’s perceptive portrait by Nadar is enough to make you understand why Jules became an Amiens city councilman, rather than drinking himself to death or dying of syphilis in approved period Bohemian fashion. Verne was a science fiction writer, and a great one. Anyone reading SF EYE possesses big juicy chunks of Verne’s memetics, whether you know it or not. But unlike many of Nadar’s other friends — people such as Proudhon (page 171) and Bakunin ( page 175) and Journet (page 127) — Jules Verne was not a driven maniac. Jules Verne was clearly quite a nice guy. He projects an air of well-nigh Asimovian polymathic jollity. He’s having a good time at the Nadar studio; he’s had to visit his barber, and he’s required to sit still quite a while in a stiff new suit, but you can tell that Verne trusts the man behind the camera, and that he’s cherishing a sense of humor about this experience.

  This is not a tormented soul, not a man to batter himself to death against brick walls. Jules Verne has the look of a man who has hit four or five brick walls in his past, and then bought a map and a compass and paid some sustained attention to them. He looks like someone you could trust with your car keys.

  The perfect complement to Nadar’s photography is Jerrold Seigel’s BOHEMIAN PARIS: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830-1930 (published in 1986). Almost every individual mentioned in Professor Seigel’s book had a portrait taken by Nadar. Seigel’s is a fine book which I have read several times; I consider it the single most useful book I have ever seen for denizens of a counterculture.

  Professor Seigel’s book has quite a bit to say about Nadar and his circle, and
about the theory and practice of Bohemianism generally. Professor Seigel’s book is especially useful for its thumbnail summary of what might be called the Ten Warning Signs of Bohemianism. According to Seigel, these are:

  1. Odd dress.

  2. Long hair.

  3. Living for the moment.

  4. Sexual freedom.

  5. Having no stable residence.

  6. Radical political enthusiasms.

  7. Drink.

  8. Drugs.

  9. Irregular work patterns.

  10. Addiction to nightlife.

  As Seigel eloquently demonstrates, these are old qualities. They often seem to be novel and faddish, and are often denounced as horrid, unprecedented and aberrant, but that’s because, for some bizarre and poorly explored reason, conventional people are simply unable to pay serious and sustained attention to this kind of behavior. Through some unacknowledged but obviously potent mechanism, industrial society has silently agreed that vast demographic segments of its population will be allowed to live in just this way, blatantly manifesting these highly objectionable attitudes. And yet this activity will never be officially recognized — it simply isn’t “serious.” There exists a societal denial-mechanism here, a kind of schism or filter or screen that, to my eye at least, is one of the most intriguing qualities that our society possesses.

  In reality, these Ten Warning Signs are every bit as old as industrial society. Slackers, punks, hippies, beatniks, hepcats, Dead End kids, flappers, jazz babies, fin-de-siecle aesthetes, pre-Raphaelites, Bohemians — this stuff is old. People were living a vividly countercultural life in Bohemian Paris when the house in which I’m writing these words was a stomping ground for enormous herds of bison.

  Two qualities about Bohemian Paris strike me very powerfully. First, the very aggressive, expansive and ambitious nature of this counterculture. With a few exceptions, the denizens of Bohemian Paris, though small in number, were not people hiding their light under a bushel. Some of them were obscure, and deservedly so, but there was nothing deliberately hermetic about them; much of their lives took place in very public arenas such as cafes, cabarets and theatres. They feuded loudly in the newspapers and journals, and to whatever extent they could, they deliberately manipulated critics, maitresses de salon and other public tastemakers. They bent every effort to make themselves public figures, and if they achieved fame they used it, to radical ends. Many of them declared themselves ready to take to the streets and literally seize power from the authorities. And thanks to the convulsive nature of 19th-century French politics, many of them actually had the opportunity to try this.

  The second remarkable quality about the vie de boheme was its high lethality. This was an era of high death-rates generally, but “living on the edge” before Pasteur was a shockingly risky enterprise. Promiscuous sex was particularly deadly. Bohemia’s foremost publicity-man, Henri Murger, died at thirty-eight, complaining weakly of the rotting stench in his room, so far gone from syphilitic paresis that he didn’t realize that the stench came from his own flesh. Bohemia’s most gifted poet, Charles Baudelaire, was rendered mute by paresis before succumbing at 46. Jules de Goncourt, art critic, journalist, novelist, and diarist succumbed to syphilitic dementia at 40. And then there was the White Plague, tuberculosis, reaping Rachel the great tragedienne as well as the fictional “Mimi,” the tragic soubrette of Puccini’s opera La Boheme, which was based on the Murger stories, themselves based firmly on Murger’s daily life.

  If Jerrold Seigel’s BOHEMIAN PARIS has a hero, it’s Henri Murger, also known as “Henry Murger,” who was the first to fictionally treat the Vie de Boheme — in a series of stories for a radical Paris newspaper marvellously titled Le Corsaire-Satan. Nadar also wrote for Le Corsaire-Satan, and Nadar photographed Murger in 1854. Murger appears on page 53 as a balding, pop-eyed, bearded and much put-upon chap dressed entirely in black. Besides the syphilis that eventually killed him, Murger also suffered from an odd disease known as purpura which turned his skin quite purple “every week at a regular day and hour.” The impact of Nadar’s sympathetic portrait is, if anything, intensified by the fact that the collodion surface of the photographic plate has cracked along the bottom, trapping the doomed Murger in a spiderweb of decay.

  Murger founded a Bohemian club called the Water-Drinkers. Jules Verne had his own circle, the Eleven Without Women. Victor Hugo led the Cenacle group, and Hugo’s disciple Theophile Gautier, a great wellspring of Bohemian attitude, led a successor group called the Petite Cenacle. The Goncourt brothers founded the Magny circle and attended the salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the premiere aristo bluestocking of the Second Empire. Baudelaire, Gautier and a vicious satirist named Alphonse Karr started the Club des Hashischiens, dabbling in opium and hash in the 1850s.

  Groups, clubs, salons and movements were the basic infrastructure of Bohemia. The bonds of counterculture were highly informal, highly personal, highly tribal. It was a tightly-knit society in which personality loomed large. It was almost possible to make an entire career merely through prolonged and determined hanging-out.

  Nadar manifested a positive genius for this sort of activity. In his early years in the 1840s, Nadar oscillated between the literary circles of Murger and Baudelaire. But by 1865, Nadar boasted, probably quite accurately, that he knew 10,000 Parisians personally. Nadar possessed enormous personal charisma; except for his own kin, he apparently never made an enemy, and everyone who ever met him remembered him very well.

  Nadar began his Parisian career as a newspaper caricaturist. His caricatures, collected in a whopping tome called NADAR DESSINS ET ECRITS (Paris 1979) show a certain inky liveliness and keen eye for the ludicrous, but he was no Daumier. His career in journalism was highly unstable. Most of the magazines Nadar wrote and cartooned for either collapsed in short order from public disinterest or were shut down by the government for radical sedition. This signally failed to discourage Nadar, however. Around 1850 he hatched a grand scheme to personally document every celebrity in Paris, in a monster project to be called “Pantheon Nadar.”

  Even with help, it was far beyond his ability to complete this “Pantheon,” and the project eventually foundered — but not before Nadar had met and sketched some 300 prominent literateurs, journalists, critics and tastemakers. He left knowing every last one of them by their first names.

  While trying to upgrade the art of caricature to an industrial scale, Nadar, in 1853, stumbled into the dawning world of photography. He originally saw photography as a means of swiftly documenting celebrities for later caricature by hand, but he swiftly realized that he could dump the tiresome ink-work entirely and go straight for real-life portraiture in a glamorous new medium.

  Nadar wrote fifteen books, including novels and memoirs, and was a prominent aviation pioneer, but photography proved to be the closest thing he had to a true metier. Though he did patent an artificial lighting system in 1861, Nadar was not a major technical pioneer in photography — not a Daguerre or a Fox-Talbot. He had contemporary commercial rivals, as well: Antony Adam-Solomon, Pierre Petit, Etienne Cajart, and others.

  Nadar’s genuine pioneer status lay in his appropriation of this new technology into unexpected contexts. He was the first to take a picture from the air, the first to take a picture underground, the first to take a picture by artificial light.

  And he was the first to appropriate this technical innovation and bend it to the purposes of the Bohemian art-world. This was an archetypal case of the Rue Jules Verne finding its own uses for things. Nadar stated his philosophy of photography in 1856, when he rudely sued his own younger brother for sole ownership of the (now thriving) Nadar photographic atelier trade-name.

  “The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour and the elements of practicing in a day…. What cannot be learnt is the sense of light, an artistic feeling…. What can be learnt even less is the moral grasp of the subject — that instant understanding which puts you in touch with the model, helps you to sum him up, guides
you to his habits, his ideas and his character and enables you to produce, not an indifferent reproduction, a matter of routine or accident such as any laboratory assistant could achieve, but a really convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimate portrait.”

  It’s pleasant to see how this rhetoric works. Theory means little, practice less. Successfully shifting the terms of debate from the technical to the artistic robs actual photographic experts of all their cultural authority. In an instant, the technology’s originators dwindle into the miserable nerdish status of the “laboratory assistant.”

  The crux of photography now becomes a matter of innate talent, a question of personal gifts. Inspiration knows no baud rate. As Nadar remarked later: “In photography as in everything else there are people who know how to see and others who don’t even know how to look.” This is a splendid kind of audacity, the sign of a subculture which is not beleaguered and defensive but confident, alert and aggressively omnivorous.

  It’s a mark of Nadar’s peculiar genius that he was able to devour photography and thrive while digesting it, rather than recoiling in future shock like his contemporary and close friend Baudelaire. In 1859 Baudelaire wrote a long screed against photography, in which he decried its threat to aesthetics and the avante-garde.

  “…(I)t is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy…. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude that is its natural ally.”

  Baudelaire nevertheless posed for Nadar’s camera. In fact Baudelaire admired Nadar very much, aptly describing Nadar as an “astounding example of vitality.” Baudelaire’s photo is on page 67 and Nadar’s portrait of the author of FLOWERS OF EVIL is without any doubt the single most remarkable image in the Nadar collection.