Fox by Karen Chamisso

 

Fox shall go down to the netherworld

sez our Ur-test, written before the flood

in the palpable materials of paradise

all clay and reeds.

 

There, he shall not eat the bread.

There, he will not drink the water.

There, he will throw the salt

behind is shoulder, to the left.

 

Will Fox burn his mask

after he emerges, root-torn

to the buzz of the indifferent gods

and the screams of the fly-stung priests?

Foucault - Sade - the philosopher villain: from transgression to neo-liberalism

 

1

 

There is a distinct streak of philistinism in Foucault.

In  the 1960s, he was truly interested and sometimes brilliant about figures in the aesthetic sphere, and saw it in many ways as a distinct sphere. But as he grew older and more professional, in the seventies, this sensitivity was submerged, or mostly submerged, under the sense that the seriousness of life was elsewhere. I’ve seen this syndrome in dozens of academics, for instance in philosophy. Perhaps it is especially disappointing in philosophy as many of the high hat philosophers evidently take science seriously and aesthetics lightly, a sort of side-effect of living. Men ceasing to read novels- we know that score.

In a 1973 interview with S. Hasumi, Foucault was asked about literature and, after dragging out his totem pole (Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski), he said: “On the other hand, I am more blocked [gêné], or in any case much less impressed by writers, even great writers as for instance Flaubert or Proust. Sometimes I entertain myself by saying things like this about Flaubert, who you know a million times better than me…”

That Hasumi knows Flaubert “a million times better” than Foucault is a very backhanded compliment. Anecdotally: it is said that Foucault showed no enthusiasm for offering a position at the College de France to Barthes was because he considered Barthes not quite a first ranker- Barthes was just the type of person who know Flaubert a million times better than Foucault.

Eric Marty has written a book with a terrific title: Why did the 20^th century take Sade seriously? By the 20^th century, he doesn’t mean the publishers and the ordinary reader – he means the pantheon of guys. And I do mean guys – he does not even write about Simone de Beauvoir, much less treat the most known Sade scholar, Annie Le Brun.

But with this reservation, I have found the book reaching a spot in me. I too wonder why Sade was “rediscovered” in the 20^th century. One of the chapters in Marty’s book is, naturally, on Foucault, and I think that is where the book plumbs the question it asks. For it is a question that presumes that Sade was a twentieth century thing, and went out of fashion under neoliberalism. Since Foucault is the thinker most clearly identified with the movement from New Left radicalism of a kind to neoliberalism of a kind, the reference to Sade can be thought of as a kind of marker.  In the sixties, as Marty remarks, Sade was clearly important to Foucault – the mythic Sade, the alien, mentioned in The History of Madness in the series with Nietzsche and Artaud. Foucault also (a fact I didn’t know!) gave a series of lectures on Sade at the University of Buffalo in the sixties.

But this Sade gave way to a new image of Sade in the seventies. In one of his interviews, before the publication of his first book on the History of Sexuality, Sade becomes somebody else, somebody not mad, somebody who  is part of the great turn towards confessing desire endlessly – and disguising that fact with the myth of repression. Sade, Foucault says, is a “drill sargeant of sex”, making us go through our routines again and again. Sex here loses its transgressive aura to become a discipline, like any other.

Marty puts the reversal on Sade well: “This time we retrjain nothing of Sade, and Foucault seems rejoin a path which he has made his own, the analysis proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom the deep horizon of Sadean thought is genocide. But while the German philosophers inscribe Sade in Kant and Kant in Sade, Foucault proposes the reverse operation. After having believed in the cousinship of Kant and Sade, Foucault returns to a Kant without Sade, a totally Foucaultian Kant.

Marty, who edited Barthes work, has written about Barthes a lot: but he doesn’t quite answer the question as to why Barthes took Sade seriously in the section on Barthes. The book does take up a theme that I think is a tremendous find, with the find being one of those things that stare us in the face but, in all their evidence, like the purloined letter in Poe’s story, aren’t really seen until they are seen. But, oddly, the book loses sight of Sade as the writer – which one would expect from a Barthes scholar. Sade, after all, wrote novels and stories, and contributed significantly, as Mario Praz (who isn’t mentioned) pointed out, to the Gothic as a genre. It is the thinker and not the writer in Sade who dominates. Yet there are differences that are overlooked. Sade, one imagines – from his letters, if nothing else – jerked off to the New Justine as he wrote it. One can’t imagine Kant, on the other hand, masturbating to the Critique of Pure Reason. It is in the aesthetic realm that Sade really made his mark, so to speak. The mark of the wanker prophet.

Look around you at popular culture. Sade is still here.

2.

Klossowski, in the essay on the “philosopher-villain” that begins Sade, my neighbor, uses Sade’s own mocking division between the philosophers in his “own” works, who are decent people, and the philosophers in Justine, where, in an ‘inexcusable clumsiness that was bound to set the author at loggerheads with wise men and fools alike,” “all the philosophical characters in this novel are villains to the core.”

In a sense, what Sade is doing is employing the Russellian distinction between type and token, here – the philosopher-villains exist in quoted space. In one’s own work, where the citational melts away, the philosophers are decent – as decent as any lab worker who operates on the human product, as they used to say at the AEC when feeding selected American detritus – the poor, the non-white – bits of plutonium.

Claudio Magris in the 80s struck back at the elevation of transgression in the 60s: Magris’s image of transgression is not the rioter at Stonewall bu the Nazi bureaucrat and the leader. I take this as a standard argument against Bataille’s notion of transgression. Magris, here, aligns himself with Foucault’s distancing from the Bataille line in the 70s. The argument that is mounted against Bataille ignores the opposition to power encoded in it, or claims that the opposition, being circumstantial, depends on who, at any moment, is in power. Not all opposition is virtuously transgressive. This, as it happens, is certainly something Bataille is aware of. He lived in a France in which a radically anti-semitic opposition, spawned by the anti-Dreyfusard, had its own newspapers and system of writers. And after all,  if one supposes that all ideas and systems strive for power - and didn't Bataille claim not only to be a Nietzschian critic, but, in a sense, to be Nietzsche - than even a righteous opposition to all the forms of servitude that constitute the established power is at heart a hypocritical stratagem, thrown away when the transgressor gains power and can do as he wants. Otherwise, it would seem, we are talking about organized futility – as we approach sovereignty, the institutional bonds all dissolve that give sovereignty meaning.

Foucault, whose essay on the experience-limit touched that logic, began to backtrack in the seventies, for Magris like reasons – in fact, by becoming popular, transgression was actually lowering the real level of transgression in society.

I like Klossowski’s explanation of the Sadeian strategy, which is based on counter-generality. I like it because it goes so nicely with how the human limit – the traditional limits on the human right to the earth itself, the traditional perspective of humans as not, in fact, the subject of all history – has been erased. This erasure, on the theoretical level, by universal-making – making, for instance, universal history. Making universal emotions. Making universal subjects. Making a universal system of production in which universalized labor leads to infinite substitutability among the workers.

Sade, according to Klossowski, saw how he could game this enlightenment program:

“The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his art of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition: in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals…

With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade sets out to establish a countergenerality that would obtain for the specificity of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible. These, in the existing normative generality, are defined by the absense of logical structure. Thus is conceived Sade’s notion of integral monstrosity. Sade takes this countergenerality, valid for the specificity of perversion, to be already implicit in the existing generality. For he thinks that the atheism proclaimed by normative reason, in the name of man’s freedom and sovereignty, is destined to reverse the existing generality into this countergenerality. Atheism, the supreme act of normative reason, is thus destined to establish the reign of the total absence of norms.” [Sade, my neighbor, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, 14-15]

Sade, then, is rejecting – or perhaps I should say, creating an antithesis - to one of the fundamental enlightenment discoveries – Bayle’s notion that the society of atheists would be every bit as moral as the society of believers. That is, Bayle took it to be a truth about human beings that belief and action are, in practice, forever divided. To believe we should love our neighbor as ourself, and to roust out our neighbor from her house and roast her, as a witch, on the nearest tarred pole, were not anthropologically contradictory things. To believe that the universe came together at random, and to denounce witch burning, were also not anthropologically contradictory things. By which I mean that Bayle did not come to this conclusion by going outward from a logical analysis of belief, but by suspending any analysis of belief and looking at what people said and did.

The image of the moral society of atheists was an immense shock in a culture that had sacralized belief. It runs through the enlightenment like pain ran through the princess after she’d spent the night sleeping on the pea. Tolerance, Mandeville’s cynicism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, they all come out of the methodological imperative of beginning first with what people did and said, and suspending belief. But, until one gets used to it, this is a highly unnatural stance to take. It seemed to eat away at any belief, since after all, what function did it have?

On the one hand, the space opened up by tolerance made possible the social notion of happiness – for it was intolerance of belief, more than anything else, that had acted the role of nemesis in European culture and in the global conquests of that Europe. On the other hand, it was felt as a sort of numbing of a once vital organ.

Ps – in some ways, the gothic horrors of Sade are too infernal, too brightly lit by the Christianity that follows his every step like a shadow. One could extract another logical line, from the dissolution of all norms to poshlost’ – the world of banality. Magris, in a sense, goes wrong by not putting in this vital step. Contra Hannah Arendt, Eichman’s evil is not something that accidentally arises from banality – banality is the original and primal form of evil in the world. We follow Gogol here, per Merezhovsky. Instead of Juliette, we reference Sologub’s The Petty Demon. From which I take this wonderful extract – Peredonov, the “hero”, a schoolteacher, has just come home to his mistress, Varvara, who he calls his cousin. He’s promised to marry her, but is suspicious that she won’t come through on her end of the bargain, which is to make him an inspector. Besides, Peredenov is suspicious that she is poisoning him. He is also suspicious, every time he hears someone laugh in front of him, that they are laughing at him. And, to finish up this summary of his qualities, he prefers not to think, but believes anything he is told. So Peredenov naturally decides to torment Varvara by making her believe he has been over at the next-door neighbours, paying court to their daughter, Marta:

She's covered with freckles," said Varvara, spitefully.
" And she's got a mouth that stretches from ear to ear. You might as well sew up her mouth, like a frog's."
"Anyway, she's handsomer than you," said Peredonov."I think I'll take her and marry her."
" You dare marry her," shouted Varvara, reddening and trembling with rage, "and I'll burn her eyes out with vitriol !"
"I'd like to spit on you," said Peredonov, quite calmly.
"Just try it !" said Varvara.
"Well, I will," answered Peredonov.
He rose, and with a sluggish and indifferent expression, spat in her face.
"Pig !"said Varvara, as quietly as if his spitting on her had refreshed her. And she began to wipe her facewith a table napkin. Peredonov was silent. Latterly he had been more brusque with her than usual. And even in the beginning he had never been particularly gentle with her. Encouraged by his silence, she repeated more loudly :
"Pig ! You are a pig !"

This joyful scene is interrupted by the entrance of a friend, Volodin. Drinks and jam tarts are served. And then:

“Suddenly Peredonov splashed the dregs of his coffee cup on the wall-paper. Volodin goggled his sheepish eyes, and gazed in astonishment. The wall-paper was soiled and torn. Volodin asked:
" What are you doing to your wall-paper ?"
Peredonov and Varvara laughed.
"It's to spite the landlady," said Varvara. " We're leaving soon. Only don't you chatter."
"Splendid !' shouted Volodin, and joined in the laughter.
Peredonov walked up to the wall and began to wipe the soles of his boots on it. Volodin followed his example.
Peredonov said :
" We always dirty the walls after every meal, so that they'll remember us when we've gone !"
" What a mess you've made !' exclaimed Volodin,delightedly.
" Won't Irishka be surprised," said Varvara, with a dry, malicious laugh.
And all three, standing before the wall, began to spit at it, to tear the paper, and to smear it with their boots. Afterwards, tired but pleased, they ceased.

Peredonov bent down and picked up the cat, a fat, white, ugly beast. He began to torment the animal, pulling its ears, and tail, and then shook it by the neck. Volodin laughed gleefully and suggested other methods of tormenting the animal.
"Ardalyon Borisitch, blow into his eyes ! Brush his fur backwards !"
The cat snarled, and tried to get away, but dared not show its claws. It was always thrashed for scratching. At last this amusement palled on Peredonov and he let the cat go.”

No opinion

 

I believe that if you gave a pollster a gun, and that pollster shot the polled in the leg and asked them if they approved or did not approve of being shot in the leg, a good fifteen percent would have no opinion.

In poll after poll, this year, when asked about various sick things Trump has done, a redoubt of “no opinion” or “don’t know” shows up at 10 to 15 percent every time. The 10 or 15 percent don’t know what they think about tariffs. They don’t know what they think about legal or illegal immigration. Inflation? They don’t know. Support for Palestine? They have no opinion. And so on through the litany of hot button issues. Or even soft button ones: for instance, do you like Taylor Swift?

Me, I am made for opinion, body and soul. Alas. If you shoot me in the leg, I would immediately register a strong against. But I dream of the don’t knows, the no opinions. I see them as a heavenly choir, a throng of Zen like illuminati, going through massacre and storm with the detachment of veteran boddhisatvis.

I have not checked the Amazon rankings, but I suspect this category in the polls are avid readers of Sextus Empiricus. And return, daily, to the Chrysippus section of Diogenes Laertes.

“And in the second book of his On the Means of Livelihood, where he professes to be considering a priori how the wise man is to get his living, occur the words : " And yet what reason is there that he should provide a living ? For if it be to support life, life itself is after all a thing indifferent. If it be for pleasure, pleasure too is a thing indifferent. While if it be for virtue, virtue in itself is sufficient to constitute happiness. The modes of getting a livelihood arc also ludicrous, as e.g. maintenance by a king ; for he will have to be humoured : or by friends ; for friendship will then be purchasable for money : or living by wisdom ; for so wisdom will become mercenary.''

I want to have this serenity – the serenity of air on a nice spring day, in the countryside. Air, not bothering anything, air, which if it comes at the picnicker as a breeze is the pleasantest and most inoffensive of breezes.  That at least 15 percent of the American population can remain in Pyrrhonic contemplation of being and nothingness I find astonishing – and heartening. This is what Diogenes Laertes said about our man Pyrrho:

“And so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that. He led a life consistent with this doctrine, going out of his way for nothing, taking no precaution, but fa­cing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not, and, generally, leaving nothing to the arbitrament of the senses; but he was kept out of harm's way by his friends who, as Antigonus of Carystus tells us, used to follow close after him. But Aenesidemus says that it was only his philosophy that was based upon suspension of judgement, and that he did not lack foresight in his everyday acts. He lived to be nearly ninety.”

It is certainly in Pyrrho’s spirit that the facts of his life are construed in this account one way by one and in a completely opposite way by another. Diogenes Laertes himself gives no opinion. My opinion, which wraps around me the way a smelly neckerchief wraps around the neck of a homeless man out on his night rounds, is that Pyrrho was right – ignore dogs, precipices and speeding cars and go on your way. Just go. But I can’t follow the better, Pyrrhonic angels of my nature. I just can’t.

 

"Everything is fucked up I'm dying of the pox"

 Theophile de Viau

In 1619, a collection of poems by different authors was published in Paris under the title: Parnasse satyrique. The star poet in the group was Théophile de Viau. The poem he published went like this:

Par le sieur Theophille

Philis tout est f…tu je meurs de la verolle

Elle exerce sur moi sa dernière rigueur :

Mon V. baisse la teste et n'a point de vigueur

un ulcére puant a gasté ma parole.

J'ai sué trante jours, j'ai vomi de la colle

Jamais de si grand maux n'eurent tant de longueur

L'esprit le plus constant fut mort à ma langueur,

Et mon afficlition n'a rien qui la console.

Mes amis plus secrets ne m'osent approcher,

Moi-même cet estat je ne m'ose toucher

Philis le mal me vient de vous avoir foutue.

Mon dieu je me repans d'avoir si mal vescu :

Et si vostre couroux a ce coup ne me tuë

Je ne fais vuex désormais de ne …tre qu'en cul.

The translation goes like this:

“Philis, everything is f..ed up; I’m dying of the pox

which has me strictly bound in the last throes;

My D..k hangs its head, is on the rocks

and a stinking sore spoils my attempts at prose.

For thirty days I’ve sweated, vomited up bowls

I’ve never seen a sickness last like this!

my exhaustion would have killed firmer souls

and my affliction brings me no consoling bliss.

My most secret friends dare not approach me.

I don’t even dare to touch myself in this stew –

And all this Philis, comes from ..cking you.

My god, I repent of having lived so badly!

And if your anger doesn’t kill me with this blast

I swear that now I’ll only ..ck in the ass.”

(Sorry for my distortions – wanted to see if I could find a few appropriate rhymes, though of course my rough draft scans like a hog in heat).

Théophile was one of the early freethinkers who are separated by a degree or two from Gassendi. He is also, famously, one of the regrets of French literature – what if the French baroque had been allowed to flower, much as the English Jacobin writers were? There is a view, first expressed I believe by the romantics, that the imposition of rules of literary bienseance emptied French poetry of what Theophile called the “natural”. And that old fight isn’t worth fighting.

More interesting is that Théophile was put on trial for this poem, and nearly had the same fate doled out to him as to the Protestant printer, Etienne Dolet - who is, or should be, to translators what the skull is to the contemplating monk – for Dolet, poor guy, trying to convey a bit of Plato in French, translated a line in the Apology Apres le mort tu ne seras plus rien de tout, instead of tu ne seras plus, and so – for that rien - was burned at the stake. That is one way to ensure literalism!

There’s an amusing gloss on the enterprising use of ellipses and acronyms in obscene poems in Joan E. DeJean’s The Reinvention of Obscenity, who claims that the startling thing about Theophile’s poem was the ‘cul’ – a vite as a V. or a foutre as a …tre was, in a sense, a bow to the common dignity, but that ass, stuck at the very end of the poem, it was practically mooning the authorities. I love these discussions that are close readings of readings – the third life’s life. They are so Nabokovian. DeJean introduces the topic like this:

“These four-letter words, primary obscenities, stand out as the principle mark of this basdy poetry’s sexual transgressiveness. With one exception, cul (ass), which was to become key in Theophile’s case, they are never written out. Instead, in an act of self censorship that initially may have helped save the volumes from official prosecution, the words were abbreviated in various ways, and different types of punctuation were inserted to stand as a visual mark representing the suppressed content. This punctuation is the typographical equivalent of the fig leaves that began appearing in Renaissance engravings to veil male and female genitalia without fully hiding the contours.

The typographical fig leaves are, however, less efficient than their visual counterparts. A leaf painted on a representation of a human body means that the viewer, even though he or she obviously knows what presumably is there behyind the cover-up, is nevertheless denied the right to see the offending sexual characteristics. In the case of a text, however, a reader – and there is no reason to imagine that seventeenth century readers were any more conscious of these textual barriers than are their counterparts today – simply replaces the missing letters without a thought, so much so that he or she is immediately unaware that anything has been left out. This is truly the zero degree of censorship.

Somnambules: a zigzag history

 This long piece is going to be part of the Zigzag Lives, Zigzag histories section of the book of pieces - fictions and essays - that I'm in the process of putting together. 

Somnambules

Baudelaire: - « singulier comme les somnambules »

‘Everyone has his sympathies, his weaknesses, his hobbyhorses; mine are: well preserved old coins and badly preserved young somnambulists.” – Dr. W. Schlesinger, Neue Freie Press, March 3, 1874

 

1.

 

In 1786,  a “philosophical” tale, Le Somnambule, was published by Fanny de Beauharnais. It begins like this: “A man celebrated in the art of animal magnetism, walking down the Champs Elysées in the first week of June, 1758, amused himself by magnetizing a tree. A dear friend, author of the following text, was, a couple of days later, also walking down the Champs Elysées and by chance chose to sit down under that same marvellous tree. My friend found himself in an unparalleled state of content… Since that moment he sees through all bodies and penetrates the most secret thoughts.”

For those with the eyes to see it, we have, in the person of the somnambule, the lucid sleepwalker, a metamorphosis of the tale of the ring of Gyges.

Fanny de Beauharnais is best known, to posterity, as the aunt by marriage of Josephine de Beauharnais, who eventually married Napoleon.  In the 1780s, however, she bore the distinction of hostessing a very free thinking and celebrated salon, known for going on late in the night. She wrote verse. She also applied cosmetics liberally. A poet produced the very malicious verses that combined the two things: “it was her face that she made/while someone else made her verses.” Did she laugh? She did appreciate malicious wit. Buffon was one of her guests. Mercier was one of her guests. Cazotte, the author of Le Diable amoureux, was one of her guests.

Years passed. The Revolution came. Everybody went to prison at one point or another. Among the nobles who had attended Mesmer’s sessions a rumor was passed around from cell to cell. It was about Cazotte. Later, after Napoleon had drawn the curtain on the Revolution, a man named Laharpe wrote it all down.

At a party that was like the ones given by Fanny de Beauharnais, in 1786, Laharpe claimed, everybody was either quipping away like Enlightenment rationalists or telling dirty stories. In the midst of this merriment, Cazotte stood up. He called for everyone’s attention. He said, as you all know, I have the gift of prophetic visions. And he had one at this party. He predicted that there would be a Revolution (which provoked laughter – who did not know that there was going to be a Revolution?) and then pointed to members of the company. To Condorcet he said, you will die in the Revolution swallowing poison to avoid being taken away to prison and being executed. To Chamfort he said, I see you cutting yourself 24 times to open enough veins and arteries to bleed yourself to death in order to avoid execution. He told the famous Malherbes, the man who eventually ended up defending Louis XVI, you will be executed. And then he named four others in the room who would be executed. Then he said the company expected happiness to flow from a Revolution that would institute the order of Reason, but that all of you will be executed by people who are moved precisely by Reason, by philosophers who will employ the same rhetoric that you employ, and would repeat the same maxims of Voltaire and Diderot as they ordered the executions.

This became a part of reactionary legend. It is the type of scene, half orgy, half apocalypse, that would be picked up and repeated by the flunkies in Dostoevsky novels.

 

2.

On March 2, 1849, Theophile Gautier brought the famous somnambulist, Madame Rogers, to a meeting of the Haschichin club at the Hotel Pimodan, which is now the Hotel Lauzan. I walk past that place often. My friend M. used to have an office space there, sponsored by the L'Institut d'études avancées de Paris. The meeting of the club was attended by, among others, Nadar and Delacroix, who noted in his journal: “she has a charming and graceful head: she played the role of going to sleep, with all the gestures, marvelously. Her poses, her turns, too, are charming, and made for the painter.” And indeed, from Delacroix’s time to the time of the Surrealists, there is a tradition of a sort of voyeurism for the woman in a trance. In the Revolution surrealist there is a famous series of photos of Augustine, a hysteric in Salpétrière, who was photographed, under the supervision of Dr. Charcot, by the institute’s photographer, Régnard.

 

Gautier had an extensive acquaintance among the somnambules. His attention was drawn to the subject, perhaps, by Victor Hugo. In 1847 Hugo was interested in the possessed women of Loudon – an incident from the 17^th century that latter fascinated Aldous Huxley, who wrote a book about it, and Ken Russell, who made the movie “The Devils” (1971) partly from that book. It also fascinated Michelet, whose book La Sorcière has a long sequence about the case. Hugo decided he needed to understand possession, and so consulted a very famous somnambule of the time: Alexis Didier. Didier and his magnetiseur, Jean-Bon Marcillet. At around this time Hugo met Madame de Girardin, who initiated him into “spiritism” – channelling the soul of his dead daughter.

Gautier was also one of Madame de Girardin’s friends, according to the interesting article on Gautier’s “metaphysical” friendships by Anne-Marie Lefebvre in the 1993 Bulletin de Societé de  Théophile  Gautier. Of interest to the psychogeographer of Paris (“Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves”) is the fact that Gautier, in 1853, moved to 24 Rue de Grange Batelière in the 9^th arrondissement – a move that put him smack between Alexis Didier, on 42 Rue Richet, and a certain Madame Plainemaison, who held court with Alan Kardec, a voyant whose book on Spiritism had enormous repercussions among  esotericists and especially in Brazil, where he has been commemorated with a postage stamp. Madame Roger herself, along with her magnetiseur, Fortier, lived not far away, on Boulevard du Faubourg Montmartre. The Comte d’Ourches, who lived nearby,  was apparently a family acquaintance – an old Mesmerist who, according to the Figaro, surrounded himself with “pretty” servants to whom he would issue mental orders. Other accounts show him to be a devotee of the fad for talking tables and dancing furniture, the kind of things that announced the “spirits” were in the room. Gautier took notes. Material for novels and stories.  It all becomes material. Spirit into matter.

3.

On August 25, 1852, the Paris police went around and cited nine somnambule and one magnetizer for violating the civil code article 479, which forbade making a metier out of “divining, prognosticating, or explaining dreams.” All of the cited somnambules, including Alexis Didier, the most famous of the lot, had put up advertising promising to “divine, prognosticate, and explain dreams” – although on the last head, it was more like they dreamed, lucidly dreamed, themselves.

The case against Alexis in particular was simple. A Spanish duchess lost a bracelet. She came to Alexis, whose magnetiseur, M. Marcillet, put him under, and handed him the Duchesses gloves. Through sympathetic magic or animal magnetism, Alexis saw, eyes closed, the thief. Saw that he had escaped into Germany. Saw that before he escaped, he had pawned the bracelet. Saw the pawn shop. And lo, the bracelet was found in a pawn shop.

The authorities, of course, had witnessed this. They also denigrated the vision – of course, a jewel thief would pawn the jewels!

And now here he stood, as did Marcillet. With a defender, the lawyer Jules Favre, who took up the knotty question of article 479. In a brief overview, he acknowledged the necessity of such a law in the barbaric era of witches and wizards, who gulled and bullied the populace with superstition and hocus pocus.

But what of our more enlightened time, under the Emperor Napoleon III? Here Favre alluded to the immense scientific literature proving animal magnetism. Here we have a case of actual science, in the person of Alexis.

The judge, acknowledging the power of Favre’s oratory, still fined the 9 somnambules and M. Marcillet ten francs and five days in jail.

But this was not the end of the case. Appeals were made. Reports surfaced in the papers. And finally, in December, the judge decided in favor of Alexis and M. Marcillet. Were strings pulled? In the case of the other members of the sleepwalking tribe, the sentence still stood.

4.

 

Queen Hortense was in the direct matrilineal line from the Beauharnais – Josephine was her mother. Hortense was the mother of a boy who just couldn’t seem to find himself in the Restoration world that Stendhal depicts in Lucien Leuwen. Was he a St. Simonian? Was he a politician? His name was Louis, Louis Napoleon. Hortense, her friends said, was the kind of woman to “consult the village somnambule”. Was her mother? Josephine, as is well known, retained certain beliefs from her girlhood in Martinique. A handreader and prophetess, Marie-Anne Lenormand, was her advisor. When Josephine was thinking of divorcing Napoleon – the voyage to Egypt, the days alone in Paris – Lenormand read her hand and advised her not to.  Napoleon himself, a soldier and thus abnormally sensitive to chance and ballistics, consulted was rumored to have consulted Lenormand, who read his cards and interpreted his dreams – although when he was emperor, he disliked Lenormand’s presence and discouraged Josephine from seeing her.

In 1834, Queen Hortense was living in Rome. “One day, a famous magnetiseur was called in by her, and put into the presence of a Negress somnambule, who had already produced remarkable phenomena. The somnambule was quickly put to sleep. Queen Hortense had one fixed thought, and that thought came from her heart. She believed her son Louis Napoleon was destined to grasp the sceptre and the sword,  fallen from the hands of the hero in the hour of his defeat. Thus she multiplied inquiries to penetrate into the future. At last, the somnambule cried out, as though inspired: ah, I see him happy and triumphant! A great nation will take him as their leader – an emperor, surely? Cried the mother, excited and breathless. “An emperor?” replied the somnambule. “Never!” – from a biography of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte by M.A. LaGuerronière, 1852.

 

5.

The Dreyfus case featured many subset dramas.

In the 1890s, the somnambule was well on its way to turning into a hysteric, and magnetising was becoming hypnosis. But the somnambules were not going away. They have never gone away.

 

For instance,   Léonie.  Léonie  Leboulanger, a farmgirl from Normandy. Worked as a maid.  Worked as a governess. In the villages, she was known for her ability, while in a state of lucid dreaming, to see lost objects and predict the future. These things happened. Someone magnetized her. She helped find a “treasure” in the chateau de Crèvecoeur near Caen. She attracted the notice of the young Dr. Janet, latter one of France’s most celebrated psychologists. He studied her in her trance states. Janet’s Léonie was a victim of multiple personality. Léonie I was the stereotypical peasant. Under hypnosis, Léonie II broke out: she was gay, ironic, biting.

Yet.

There’s a photograph of her being hypnotised by Dr. Richet, another famous psychologist of the time, in the Musee Bretagne. The photograph is all in sepia, Dr. Richet has his back half turned to the camera, he is making a gesture, his arm out, his hands extended as though in salute, or as though to pet the magnetic rays that charge the room,  towards a woman seated, alone, in a chair that looks like it was taken from some bourgeois salon, a comfortable chair upholstered in a flowery print. The woman has a voluminous black dress, and wears a kind of maid’s cap on her head. The traditional Normand woman. Her face is a little heavy, her eyes are closed, her mouth is unsmiling, yet she exudes a calm air. Over to the side, in the photograph, is an inexplicable object, which looks like a rock covered by a sheet. One wonders what room is this. One wonders what the man in the foreground thinks he is doing.  One wonders if the woman in the chair was traveling the ether, seeing horrors, seeing joys.

 

I take my bearings regarding Léonie  Leboulanger from an article by Jacqueline Carroy.

This is a story that begins with doctors. This is a story of the end of the nineteenth century. The magnetiseur, the somnambule, have been driven from the ranks of respectable science. In their place, we now have hypnosis. We now have an etiology of mental illnesses. We now have hysteria.

In the town of Havre lived a certain Dr. Joseph Gibert. Dr. Gibert knew Janet. He had a practice among important people. The president of France, Félix Faure. He had his doubts about the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus had been convicted in 1895. He consulted with Léonie. He wrote to Mathieu Dreyfus. Dreyfus came to Havre.

It just so happened that Mathieu Dreyfus was an amateur hypnotist. Mathieu happened to be a rich Alsatian cotton cloth manufacturer as well. And he was the brother of Alfred Dreyfus.

Mathieu Dreyfus magnetized Léonie. Léonie saw something. She saw the prosecution hiding certain evidence. She called out, this isn’t right! She was awakened. Mathieu was impressed. He hired Léonie to be one of the governesses in his household. In Paris. He had two kids. The boy died in World War I, fighting in the French army. Léonie went to Paris. A long piece. Bredin, from L’affair: “He installed her firstly in an apartment on rue de l’Arcade, with his sister, Mme Cahn. Then he took Léonie in himself, where she would soon be living. Dr. Gibert patiently instructed his pupil [Mathieu] how to put Léonie in a hypnotic state. Soon Mathieu put her to sleep for several hours, sometimes for days. And he gave himself over, with the somnambule Léonie, to multiple experiments which confirmed him in his belief concerning her extraordinary talents. Léonie took more and more of a place in the life of the Dreyfus family. Sometimes she is lucid. Sometimes she is not. Mathieu asked her to “follow psychically” certain officers. “Often, solely by contacting for a certain length of time my hand in hers, she perceived my physical state, my moral state (if I was in a good or bad mood), sometimes my thoughts, which were not always about the affair.” Mathieu persuaded himself that he possessed the power of suggestion. He tried experiments on Léonie at long distance.”

And what did Mathieu’s wife think of all this?

In the meantime, Dr. Gibert was active. He wrote Faure a letter about the hidden evidence Léonie had seen. Was it true? Faure, Gibert told people, admitted it. When Gibert died, all of this was in his papers. On March 24, 1899, the historian Gabriel Monod, his friend, published an account of the somnambule, Gibert, Gibert’s talk with Faure, Faure admitting it. Faure immediately denied to the papers that he had admitted it. The anti-Dreyfusards immediately jumped on the somnambule aspect of the story. The pythoness, they called Leonie.

Mathieu Dreyfus wrote about the sessions with  Léonie  in his journal, which was not published until 1979. It was all there: the session, the somnambule’s vision, her calling out: “what are those pieces that they are secretly showing to the judges, don’t do that.”

The anti-dreyfusards mocked, but they had been mocked. Zola’s article in L’Aurore had noted the low level of Dreyfus’s accusers: From the point of view of truth, Du Paty de Clam, who had led the first interrogations of Dreyfus in 1894, appeared like the ideal target and it is in part why, doubtless, his part in the affair was overvalued by Zola as well as Jaurès. Concerning Du Paty de Clam, Zola wrote : : « Le commandant Du Paty de Clam led them all, hypnotised them, for he was interested in spiritism as well, and occultism, he conversed with spirits.” The Dreyfus side presented itself as dry, scientific, factual.

Léonie crossed these wires. Who was talking to spirits now?

 The record of her life is a very one-sided thing: it consists of her trances with Janet and with Dr. Gibert and with Mathieu Dreyfus. Those hours, those days, those psychic stalkings, those handholdings. She was a somnambule infrequently, this was not a gift she took lightly, this was not a vector into celebrity. When did she die?

6.

In the same year that the Normand somnambule was seeing in a dream the corrupt framing of Alfred Dreyfus, another story with somnambules was being followed on the front pages of the German papers.

7.

When we last see him, it September 5, 1930. He is in Warsaw. Cops bust into the apartment of a leader of a “sex cult” – narcotics – blasphemous and pornographic texts – testimonies from nubile young men and women – suicides. The raid kicked off a Satanic panic in Poland. In a Hamburg paper, on September 17, under the headline, “Devil Worshippers of Warsaw”, there is a long and lurid description of the cults practices. The use of narcotics and long warm baths to weaken the will. The Black Mass. “Wearing only black robes over their naked bodies, and donning black masks, the groups gathered in the refectory. On the wall hung a picture of the devil as a goat bestride the globe. … Three naked women, wearing only masks, lay down under the picture and formed a triangle.” The high priests Czynski, Czaplin and Nowakowski would appear suddenly in the room, and then an orgy would ignite.  

Czeslaw Czynski. 85 years old. The incident jogs memories. In the Posen Tageblatt, we read an account by a woman of an incident that happened forty some years before in the town of Ostrowo, when she was young. Like a draft of Mario and the Magician, this story.

 A small town, Ostrowo, 12,000 inhabitants, then part of the German Reich. A cloth industry of household weavers – a Catholic highschool. The nationalists in their secret groups, the businessmen growing paunches, the bourgeois wives and daughters, the side of town where you can find a woman to read your palm, your tealeaves, your cards. One day, remembers the Posen Tageblatt correspondent, she joins up with a group of wives of the officers of the German army garrison, and they walk as the evening comes down, to the Ostrowo Lyceum to hear a talk on “suggestion”. They were all excited. Something new! They read about the outside world, they feel bored and stuck. Something new, though, to think about and talk about. They promised to wake each other up in the case that one or the other of them gave way to hypnosis. They pinch each other. They laugh. Given the lack of sensations in the town, everybody was there. Even the police. Czynski appeared – a rather handsome man with striking eyes – and proceeded to give a long and dull talk. At the end of it, he went to what he called the experimental part of the eventing. He passed out some tickets, and they were passed around in the crowd. He said the he would put those who received the tickets under a hypnotic sleep. Soon many of the audience, even some who had not received tickets, were asleep. He suggested to one very hypnotized boy named Blümel that he would do meet Czynski the next day at his, Czynski’s, hotel, at 10 o’clock, and would overcome all obstacles put up to this goal by his way by his parents. Well, it happened! The parents blocked the doors and forbade their son to leave, but Blümel threw himself out of his bedroom window and ran to his appointment the next day, arriving at the hotel at 10. “I know that my friends and I refused to return to the auditorium after the break, and that the next day, they refused to let the “experimenter” give another talk… Czynski went from there to Dresden…”

8.

After the trial was over, the Russian paper, Nowosti, investigated Czeslaw Czynski and added many facts, or at least legends, about the magnitiseur who appeared at Ostrow and astonished Europe in his trial in Munich.

Czeslaw Liubtsch Czynski had lived a spendthrift life as a gambler, supporting himself, at first, by holding seances, aided by a woman named Eli R., who he had promoted from maid to medium. Then he married a rich “Jewess”, robbed her of her property of 15,000 rubels, and took off, stage right. In Berlin he met Justine Marger. The two became lovers, had a child, held seances and healings in Krakow, Warsaw, Posen, and performed small miracles, or swindles.  The Prussian cops eventually started pulling him in – then expelled him from Prussia. So the two took the train for Dresden in Saxony.

Prester Lloyd, a German language paper in Budapest, approached Baroness B., who was mentioned as one of Czinski’s victims by the Nowosti. Would she talk?

She did.  

Her story is as follows: it all began with one of those little Baroness problems – her pearl earrings went missing. A friend had told her that there was a somnambule in town who could help.

Somnambules were well known to be finders of lost objects. And even though they were not always the most clean or honest looking agents, they were not, somehow, lowering, as it is lowering to have a policeman sniffing into one’s affairs.

In 1893, when Baroness B. came to see the little nervous man with long hair in his eyes, he had not explained his theory to the world, partly because at this point he was still the magnitiseur, and not the magnetisée. The latter role was played, in the clinic on R. strasse, by a woman (a stout woman, Baroness B. called her), Wiecinska, who came with Czynski to Dresden from Poland. This woman was none other than Justine Marger.   

Baroness B. only knew that the Professor Czynski had piercing eyes and pictures of saints and photos of hysterics on his office wall. In the waiting room, the company was distinguished. Even some Americans were there.  On that first day, she explained her situation to the Professor. The missing earrings – her earrings – an inheritance from her dear mother!

She explained that the earrings went missing after she had had a massage session – her legs, she suffered pains, it seems. Did the masseuse take them? But how could she, the pearls were in another room.

The piercing eyes, the long hair, leant over the desk, hands clasped, and listened. He began to question her in broken German. He was, he charmingly explained, not fluent in the language. She responded in French. He spoke French! In fact, he had taught French in Poland. In his travels. He had studied in Paris. Soon it developed that the loss of the earrings was a subordinate distress. There was the pangs in her legs. There was her sense of listlessness. There were her dreams.

A number of sessions later, Czynski  literally threw himself at her feet. Soon he was begging her to participate in a “two day hypnosis experiment.” For science! To seal the pact between them, he gave her a ring.

Thus began the Baroness’s adventures. At one point, she heard Czynski’s voice, in her head, ordering her to go visit Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth. Baroness B. went to Bayreuth, visited the round of Wagner houses, and came back to the clinic in Dresden. None of the Wagners, it turned out, were home. After having shown herself so obedient, naturally Czynski felt that more hypnosis was needed. Hypnosis, money, hypnosis, diamonds, hypnosis, intimacy. Baroness B.  “did the most crazy things and felt she was being dissected alive and all the nerves in her body were quivering.”

This went on until Baroness B. was checked, by her father, into a mental institute. Her father threatened. Diamonds were given back. But by this time Czynski had found another Baroness – Baroness Z.

 

9.

The baroness was highly connected – wasn’t she a relation of some sort to the Kaiser? At least, she came from a high aristocratic family. Von Zedlitz und Neukirch. It was her brother that pushed for the arrest, the trial. Clemens. Very worried he was about Hedwig’s flightiness. Hedwig’s property. The castle she inherited at Luga.  And not so happy, presumably,  that his own marriage, to Cornelia Roosevelt in 1889, had provoked a lot of press coverage of their ante-nuptial contract: as if he were, of all things, marrying an American heiress for her money! Thus, in this psychodrama, a man who had been written about as though he were after the property of his wife faces a man who was also written about as if he were after the property of his bride. Although, in the second case, bride is in quotation marks. Not really his bride. Not really.

And you had to admit, Czynski was a man that a flighty woman, an unmarried woman in her thirties, a woman whose father had introduced her to the transcendental world of spiritist seances, might fall for.

‘His exterior helped him: dark hair, fascinating eyes, a well kept beard, a spotless, almost foppish, mostly black wardrobe, thus taking on the aspect of a man of the world, the passonate temperament of one of Polish blood, a baritone voice and the curious charm of his foreign accent and spotty German!” – From: the Sex Life of Hysterics.

It was in Munich where they held the trial. A jury trial. The jurors, of course, all men. According to German law, four “laymen” and three “experts”. In this case, the experts were psychologists.  A unique case, and an irresistible one for the newspaper reader. It had nobility, it had seduction, it had mind control, it had those experts on psychology and those experts on what was not yet called para-psychology. After it was over, all the experts wrote about it, as though compelled. Something about the interface between sex and the fantasy of being overwhelmed by a mental, a spiritual force outside oneself. Something about this swindler – as he was called by the psychiatrists, who gave no credence to his version of things – set all the nerves in the fin-de-siecle Zeitgeit quivering.

Czynski had incautiously written to Dr. Du Prel in Switzerland, sending him a pamphlet and a letter. In the letter he had written: “For many years I have tried, in vain, to persuade people that the hypnotiser has the power to complete dominate an other person’s mental life [ein fremdes Seelenleben]”. Du Prel had casually buried the pamphlet and the letter with other correspondence and papers and forgotten about it until he received another letter, this one a wedding announcement from Czeslaw Czynski and Baroness von Zedlitz. He, as it happened, knew the Baroness.

He wrote an account of the case for Der Zukunft. And later included another account in tome 3 of his, Wanidis, Der Triumph der Wahns, the one on Arian Sex Religions.  He compared Czynski to Jeronimo Scotto, a sixteenth century magician who put the wife of Herzog Johann Kasimir von Koburg “under a spell” in the year 1592.  

Du Prel had a great interest in the occult, in spiritualism, as well as in the latest findings from Charcot and the French psychologists.  

Albert von Schrenk-Notzing, famous for his scientific explorations of parapsychology, with a special study of ectoplasmic materialization,  also testified at the trial, and also wrote about the case, in a pamphlet in which Hubert Grashey, another expert at the trial, jotted down his conclusions about  the possibility of the criminal use of hypnosis given the strength of the individual’s free will. The trial was a most gratifying opportunity to air certain theories. Dr. Hirt, from Breslau, testified. So did Dr. Preyer, who was much impressed by the hypothesis of occult powers. So did Dr. Fuchs, who dismissed all of it as hocus pocus. Secular trickery would, for him, do – the subtext being that the Baroness fell in love with a swindler, what is the big deal? – in this as in so many other cases.   Czynski, though not at all happy to be imprisoned, to have his name impugned in this manner, must have been pleased that his theories were finally being discussed by serious men. Where had  Czynski learned his hypnotic technique? At the university in Poland where he took a degree in philosophy? Or did he attended seminars with Dr. Charcot?  What about the document attesting to his medical studies by one Gérard Anaclet Vincent Encausse, aka Papus? Well, Papus was an occultist, and no right psychologist, according to the Court’s experts. On the other hand, every village had its somnambule. Suggestion was in the air. He could have apprenticed to a strolling magnetiseur, much like he himself.

Suggestion was so much in the air that the prosecution asked for Czynski not to be present in the courtroom when  Baroness von Zedlitz entered and  testified, as his power over her, she feared, would make her confused. As she walked to the front of the court to give her testimony, she wore a veil. When she testified, she raised it up. She testified in a “clear and precise voice.” The defence disagreed with taking Czynski from the courtroom, as wasn’t this a concession to what the court was to decide, viz., his psychic power over her? but finally agreed that the first half of her testimony would be in a Czynski-free courtroom, and that he would reappear after she had testified about the facts in the case.  

Everything was complicated by the idea that, by post-hypnotic suggestion, the subject’s memory of the suggestion, or memory connected with what was suggested, could be erased. How could the witness testify to what, if she was speaking the truth, could only be revealed if she was hypnotised again, to forget the command to forget?

As well, a posteriori, Baroness von Zedlitz was credited with a modesty and religious sense that was felt to be natural to a single woman of high rank in her thirties. Late 30s. 39. Was the word, “spinster”?  And perhaps she was the woman she was presented as. Or perhaps her confession that she had been “intimate” with Czynski was not inconsistent with the sex life she wanted to live. There are so many levels of assumption, here. There is a struggle that one has to be blind not to see is a very male, a very patriarchal struggle, and that very struggle was under stress from the paranormal edges. As Czynski pointed out: “The whole accusation, could be traced back to the dishonorable and base denunciation of Freiherr Clemens von Zedlitz, who wanted, in conjunction with her father, to get their hands on his sister and through his [Czynski’s] incarceration to seize her properties through threats and intimidation. The jail for me, the crazy-bin for the daughter…”

This was not a completely unreasonable argument.

10.

In fact, this is what must have happened. Hedwig von Zedlitz suffered from headaches and stomach aches. On  the 12 of August, 1893, she was living in Dresden and suffering even more, with it being so hot that summer, than usual. Could she find no relief? She had seen a report in the Dresden newspaper about a healer who had founded a clinic on R. Strasse, based on all the spiritually fashionable principles: massage, homeopathy, electricity and magnetisation. The power of suggestion.

She went to the clinic. She was treated, according to the trial, at the clinic, at a hotel, and even at her baronial estate in Lubau.

It was all a matter of transference. Wiecinska would be magnetised. She would hold Baroness Hedwig’s hand. The Baroness would be magnetised. The pains would be transferred to the somnambule. It was unclear whether the sessions involved undressing the Baroness, or whose hands were placed on her stomach to remove the pains. Czynski claimed he did not touch the Baroness. The Baroness testified to a “pressure” on her eyelids, she could barely open her eyes.

All of the papers spoke of an “intimate relationship”.

It was in October 1893 that Czynski confessed to the Baroness: he was in love! He, a poor man, burdened with an unfaithful wife. The Baroness, who assumed that the doctor was having an “intimate relationship” with his medium, was surprised. Did the Baroness love him? Or was this feeling in her the result of post-hypnotic suggestion? He was a poor man, a hypnotist, little better than a fair ground barker – but he assured her he was a fallen member of a noble family. Lithuanian nobility, if you will. Hard to look up, not in the usual registers of the nobility.

She felt for him a certain pity. So she testified. Was she hypnotized, was she under the “Dusel”? This is the name Czynski and she gave to her half sleep. A sort of twilight consciousness, pleasant, uninfected with pain. In this state, she decided to marry Czynski, who on his part said that first he would convert to Protestantism, then finish divorcing his wife, then marry the Baroness.

‘The question of whether they had “intimate relations” was affirmed by the Baroness, who was also asked whether this happened in her half-sleep state.” She said that this happened because she felt overwhelmed by Czynski – but she did not feel she did this because of a hypnotic suggestion. In her view, it was simply a humane gesture.

Czynski then made a few mistakes. In January, the Baroness and Czynski went to Switzerland. As a couple. They sent out wedding announcements. Thus, many of the Baroness’s friends and family were alerted to the marriage for the very first time.

Then Czynski went to Vienna. There, he met a man named Stanislaus Wartalski, at the Café Central. This Wartalski was a traveling pastor of some type. A street corner preacher from Warsaw. Czynski knew people.  Wartalski agreed to find a pastor for the nuptials, or, if that did not work, do it himself. In the event, Wartalski, who presented himself as a regular pastor named Simon Werthmann at the hotel Europäischer Hof on February 8, 1894, performed the marriage ceremony – a pseudo-marriage, the papers called it.  A pre-nuptial contract was made – at Czynski’s insistence – which did not exactly shower Czynski with riches.  Czynski specifically objected to a line in the contract that gave him 6000 marks per year in the event of the Baroness’s death. A wedding licence – a pseudo-licence - was signed, the guests toasted, the couple went off to renew their “intimate relations” in a hotel room.

On February 18, Czynski was arrested. The Baroness was taken in hand by her father and brother. Was this a matter of protecting Hedwig from a swindler – or keeping Hedwig’s property for themselves? When Czynski’s attorney asked the question, Clemens at first refused to answer such impertinence. Urged by the court, he answered that he only acted out of love for the family.

10.

The jury in the event decided that Czynski did not force Hedwig to marry him, but he did marry her under false pretences. 3 years in jail was the sentence.

11.

The theologian Schleiermacher took a somnambule into his household, Karoline Fischer, who began to rule the household with an iron hand.

There is a long line of Swiss Somambules. For instance, Jenny Azaela, Mme Schmidt. She had the whole portfolio: ecstasy, telepathy, clairvoyance, blind vision, the ability to read using different parts of her body – for instance, her elbow and her navel. The pastor who magnetized her married her. She had to be magnetized once a day. Died at the age of seventy.

The Jouve couple, in Lyon. The wife was the somnambule, the husband the magnetiseur. Standard arrangement. They were in court once due to the fact that their dear friend, Mme Gundrand, left them her fortune when she died. Question: was she under the suggestion of the magnetiseur?

Freud’s disciple, Ferenczi, met a certain Mme Jelenik, in Budapest. Unfortunately, to consult her he had to depend on her “violent looking husband”, her magnitiseur. Ferenczi’s second session with her was in her bedroom: “a room with windows on the alley and very shabby furniture and an oppressively unpleasant smell.” What happened when he husband came in and magnetised her was not very earthshaking. However, she did tell Ferenczi that while he depended on his master, Freud, Freud also depended on Ferenczi. Ferenczi invited Freud to meet Mme Jelenik. Freud did not respond to his invitation.

In Paris, according to an old feuilleton, one used to go to the Rue de la Michodière to find a somnambule. A magnetic salon, on 13 Rue de la Michodière, was ruled over, in the 1850s, by the wife of philosopher Charles Renovier. In George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, the narrator ends up in the clutches of a magnetiseur while staying in a hotel on Rue de la Michodière.

I recently went to that street. I went to, as it were, catch some glimpse in the ether. The street is now camped on by a theatre, a big BNL office (under construction) and several Asian restaurants.  There is no longer a sign of somnambulism. There is no longer a sign, even, of Madam Renovier or her husband. I went around the corner to a restaurant on Rue de 4 Septembre, ordered a wine, and took out a notebook and waited. But nothing came.

The heart was pumping. I was registering no pain in the old sensorium.  If I looked to my right, I could see a three people, smiling, drinking beer, talking. If I looked ahead of me, in the café, I could see two waiters standing by the cash register, and a woman behind it. The world of work, the world of sociability, the city, the September sky. Wasn’t this the Sunday of Life? And yet somehow nothing occurred to me. The charm of the common, the wealth of the common, the commonwealth, in its ordinary aura, and none of it was reaching me.

I had planned to end this zigzag through the somnambules on Rue de la Michodière. I was going to include some bit about the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Some shoutout to Cesare. The wig and makeup for Caligari, I had read somewhere, was vaguely modelled on a photograph of Schopenhauer. And I thought that could bring this thing to the source of my inspiration, originally, as it was in reading Schopenhauer’s essay on the “apparent intentionality in the fate of the individual” that I had read his proof via somnambule of fate and the absolute determination of the future and thought that would be a good ending, a portent, an intersigne.

But nothing was occurring to me. I could not tie this together.

So I stared at my notebook.

From where I was sitting, I could walk around seven, ten blocks and hit 15 Rue Vivienne. The first recorded residence of Isadore Ducasse, aka Lautréamont,  in Paris. In the psychogeographical field formed by the old Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bourse. Is there a somnambule in Les Chants de Maldoror? Write that down. Surely. The anti-encyclopedia, the anti-epic. I thought of a recent article I read about a supposed photograph of Isadore Ducasse, first published in 1998. It was discovered in the collection of old books and paintings of a bookstore owner and collector, an Armenian, who had lived in Paris for decades and then one day simply not showed up at his bookstore. So some interested party, an employee, a friend, went to check him out and found him in his apartment, his head in a noose tied to a radiator, his face unrecognizable from the beating he had received, and paintings of great value – Picasso, Picabia – on the wall, untouched. Nothing stolen. He must have had heirs of some kind, they go through his stuff, they get experts, one of them finds the photograph.

It came from the atelier of A. Ken, who happened to live just a block from Isadore Ducasse at his last address on Boulevard Montmartre. The photograph shows a sallow young man, whose glance is downward and not quite towards the camera. His elbow is on a piece of furniture, one of those chests of drawers with a mirror behind it that you would always find in the apartments of young bachelors in Paris in the Second Empire.

Two things stand out. The first his ultra silly haircut, a sort of modified Prince Valient without the flip curl at the end. Black hair, greased down. And the second thing was the huge overcoat he wore over a jacket and an enormous scarf-like tie. A ludicrous combination. He holds, as well, an enormous top hat. Surely if this is Isadore Ducasse, the entire ensemble is worn with the utmost irony.

However, the article I read proves conclusively that this is not Isadore Ducasse. It is a picture of a minor literatus of the late nineteenth century. Not of the inventor of the end-of-literature literature that begins with the Chants de Maldoror and is still with us.

 

Nothing occurs to me to connect this photo, which was in the room the evening its owner was clubbed to death, with my rather ridiculous theme. Nothing connects. Nothing connects. I’ve run out of things to say about somnambules. I want simply to quote Dr. Caligari, in the last scene of the film, when the mad patient is carried out of his office screaming and the doctor says to himself: At last I understand his delusion… Now I know exactly how to cure him!

I’ve always thought that was a most sinister line. I’ve never trusted Dr. Caligari.