Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
themselves, with a directness that startles, the decadents. These new aesthetes cultivated un esprit décadent, reflected in their profound distaste for bourgeois society and much of mass culture, and in their sympathetic embrace of the disreputable. Preferring to spend their leisure time in working-class hangouts, like music halls, theaters, and pubs—un mauvais lieu, as the poet Baudelaire put it—the decadents painted and wrote about the nefarious life that started up well after the sun went down. The decadents cozied up to thieves, ladies of the streets, and addicts of all kinds, and perhaps explored the most forbidden territory of all—homosexual love. Liberal psychologists in the period termed such lovers “inverts,” since their love tended to invert the normal and accepted order of society.
One can trace a fairly straight line from the decadents and underworld deviants of the nineteenth century to the thug and gangster aesthetic of the twenty-first century. If society declares certain people undesirable, not really fit for humanity, then outcasts can defuse the category by appropriating the term and using it for their own advantage. As a case in point, some black artists, kept out of white society for several centuries, turned the categories “outcast” and “criminal” and “loser” back on themselves, exploiting all the power and fear that the rest of the population found in those names. You call us thugs? Well, then, we will dress and act and talk like thugs, and with intensity. We will capitalize on the fear that you find in us; that way we can materialize, feel that we have some substance and meaning. Even our musical groups, with names like Niggaz With Attitude, they announced, will shock and disgust. We’ll even call our recording company Death Row Records.
The decadents’ outlandish, offensive behavior, some of it perhaps not even at a fully conscious level, formed part of an important nineteenth-century strategy of psychic survival. For example, Nietzsche declared that people could best develop their own potential by tapping into “the powers of the underground.” Not in the garden of earthly delights, but deep in the root cellar of humanity do people find the strength to move beyond all the accepted boundaries, categories, and definitions. No one wants to pass through life as one of the Lumières’ sausage people. By diving deep underground, ordinary people could transform, like mythological figures, into unpredictable human beings. Such wild strategies led Nietzsche to broadcast his own declaration of independence, in the name of the Übermensch, or the superman.
The new aesthetes did for art what Darwin and the demise of the Chain of Being did for the human psyche. They cracked wide open the old definitions of what was normal and abnormal, moral and immoral. They pushed the boundaries of gender, confounded the notion of correct and acceptable subjects for art, and refused all standard definitions and categories. No one would dictate to them where art stopped and music began, or where music stopped and dance began. They paved the way, in our own times, for the mixed-up objects that Robert Rauschenberg called his Combines, constructions that blasted apart finicky fifties definitions by combining sculpture and art, or art and dance, and so on. They granted Rauschenberg the liberty of gluing bits of newspaper cartoons, old advertising clips, and sections of menus onto large canvases. The new aesthetic made possible Cornell’s boxes, Picasso’s cubes, and contemporary mashups of all sorts.
The decadents wore funny clothes and smoked weird drugs. The fanciest dressers among them went by the name dandies. Only the beats or the hippies or the yippies could match them in their disruptive exuberance. Ginsberg owes his poetic life to that nineteenth-century soul force—Walt Whitman, yes, but with a nod, certainly, to Oscar Wilde as well. And like the free spirits of the late fifties and sixties, many nineteenth-century aesthetes, Wilde chief among them, spent time in jail or prison for their offbeat, deep-seated beliefs. Modern politics of conviction starts in earnest with Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol and ranges to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. You shall know us by our acts of disobedience. We shall find ourselves through such acts. Can it work? Can placing one’s body in front of the great inexorable machine accomplish anything serious and important and long lasting? Can it make a single person step out of line and confront what it means to be a thinking, fully alive human being? Well, just ask that other outspoken and feisty nineteenth-century jailbird, Henry David Thoreau.
Both the artist and the criminal stood outside society—today we would use the phrase alienated from society—that hung on for dear life to an old and tired set of values. And so they both, criminal and artist, aimed at blowing apart the status quo. Professionals in the nineteenth century, in their passion for categorizing everything in creation, saddled both the avant-garde artist and the petty thief with a new name, the deviant. In England, an emerging capitalist society led to the passage of new laws, covering a broad range of punishable offenses, most of which had to do with new bourgeois concepts of property. Authorities came to define a wider range of criminality within the growing class struggle, requiring a new penal system that carried with it longer and harsher sentences. This new social arrangement prompted British authorities to build many more prisons and asylums.
Prison, as many reformers argue, produces a criminal class. Recidivism rates in the United States today hover around seventy-eight percent. This idea of the repeat offender developed in Paris around 1870; by the nineteenth century’s end almost fifty percent of all trials in France involved repeat offenders. And so the demand to identify every convict, behind bars and free, got folded into the century’s own drive for finding humanity’s basic identity. The phrase “Round up the usual suspects” comes from this period, which means, in effect, “Bring in the poor people, the people of color, the out of work, the feeble and insane. Bring me those who have had to resort to petty theft in order to survive.” Taking the idea of identification several steps further, authorities wanted to finger the criminal type before he or she ever conceived of committing a crime. That’s the idea, expressed more than a century later, at the heart of the 2002 film Minority Report.
HAVELOCK ELLIS, the respected and well-known psychologist, wrote a nontechnical study in 1890, titled The Criminal, in which he derides thugs and artists as nothing more than petulant adolescents. While Ellis articulates the general attitude in the nineteenth century toward anyone or anything that appeared to defy its natural category, his prose reveals, at the same time, a bit of envy or jealousy for the criminal’s wholesale freedom to engage with life. One can sense a struggle within Ellis, even in this brief passage, with what it means to be fully alive. Abnormal may not be so off-putting as Ellis makes it out to be. Notice the way Ellis compares criminals with artists:
The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and an emotional fact. It witnesses at once to their false estimate of life and of themselves, and to their egotistic delight in admiration. They share this character with a large proportion of artists and literary men, though, as Lombroso remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect. The vanity of the artist and literary man marks the abnormal elements, the tendency in them to degeneration. It reveals in them the weak point of mental organization, which at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist in the well-developed man, but it is unobtrusive; in its extreme forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organisation, artist or criminal.
Later in this chapter I will come back to the criminal and to Cesare Lombroso, an important figure in confining the deviant to a very narrow and stifling category.
Not only the criminal and the artist, but the deranged, as well, rose to the level of seer in the nineteenth century. The madman and the fool took their solid place, in art and literature, as the embodiment of wisdom and insight. On the other side, in a desire to lock up so-called crazies and get them out of the way, the British Parliament passed its first act establishing public lunatic asylums in 1808. At the beginning of the century, England could count no more than a few thousand lunatics confined in its various institutions; by century’s end, that number had exploded to about 100,000. Authorities defined that troubling category, insane, more and more broadly, slipping it like a noose around the necks of more and more unsuspecting British citizens.
But the increase in numbers only added to the lure of the lurid. Whatever festered away, sometimes hidden from the direct line of sight—the criminal, the crazy, and the beggar—artists