Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (42 page)

A scandal erupted, and, as sometimes happens in the history of psychical research, if a skeptical body does not like the conclusions of one study, it simply organizes another, avoids research altogether, or just lies about the facts.
²⁹
Hence the next commission was directed by Dubois d'Amiens, who, not accidentally, also happened to be the major figure in the anti-magnetist crusade. A certain Doctor Burdin, who was a member of this second skeptical commission, offered three thousand francs to anyone who could perform a traditional magnetic feat, that is, read a text through some opaque obstacle (often a blindfold, but envelopes, buried pages further down in a book, and other strategies were also used). A young girl named Léonide Pigeaire stepped forward. She appeared to be able to do exactly
this,
that is, read with her eyes laboriously sealed by a veritable shroud (a photo of which appeared in the newspapers and is reproduced on the cover of the first volume of
Somnambulisme
). The intellectual and cultural environments would not be swayed, however. The two camps went to war over experimental protocol, the experiments were not able to take place, and, as Méheust puts it, “magnetism was vanquished by forfeit.”
³⁰

After the negative Dubois Commission report and the retraction of the Burdin prize in 1842, the magnetist movement essentially lost whatever status it had in the professional medical community. It hardly disappeared, however. Indeed, numerous major literary figures, philosophers, intellectuals, and anthropologists saw very clearly what was at stake, that is, what the magnetic phenomena suggested about human nature and its latent capacities, and pursued these with passion and dedication. This latter humanist defiance held for another century as the movement hopped the pond to the U.S. and the channel to England, where it merged with the later movements of Spiritualism and the psychical research tradition of the S.P.R.

Méheust's
Somnambulisme et médiumnité
is the story of that initial efflorescence and subsequent disciplined suppression and forgetting. I have listed a few representative moments in the introduction, so I will not repeat them here. It is worth citing Méheust's final thoughts on this long forgetting, however. Toward the very end of the two volumes, Méheust puts the matter as starkly as he can. If we were to reproduce in France in the second half of the twentieth century what was happening intellectually in the nineteenth century, or even in the first three decades of the twentieth, he points out, we would see names like Barthes, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Morin, Ricoeur, and Sartre debating the existence of psychical abilities in places like
L'Homme
,
La Revue de métaphysique et de morale
,
Diogéne
, and so on (SM 2:501). Such a thing, of course, can hardly be imagined. We have forgotten that much. We have rendered what was once possible completely impossible.

2. Guardians of the Threshold
. Historians of psychology generally acknowledge Puységur's role in “the discovery of the unconscious,” but they usually relegate this role to a subordinate one, to that of a catalyst, as Henri Ellenberger put it in his famous study.
³¹
For Méheust, this is an inappropriate reading-backwards, an illegitimate adoption of a later ideology that is then anachronistically imposed on an earlier system that did not subscribe to the rules and limitations of the later ideology. And indeed, Puységur's magnetic sleep, much like Myers's subliminal Self, was no Freudian unconscious. This was a form of mind of immense metaphysical proportions
and
astonishing psychical abilities. Accordingly, authors like Méheust and Adam Crabtree reject the notion that Puységur's magnetic sleep was somehow an ill-formed or incomplete version of a later Freudian psychoanalysis.
³²
Rather, Méheust argues, Freud's psychoanalysis acted in effect as a “Guardian of the threshold” (SM 2:441), a compromise-formation that, by incorporating, refashioning, and domesticating select aspects of these new models of the psyche, rendered them relatively harmless to the reigning materialism and scientism of the day. In one of Méheust's most striking images, psychoanalysis was a kind of “back fire” (
contre-feu
) set in the hills to stop the spread of an approaching metaphysical blaze (SM 2:213). The image is nearly perfect, as it suggests, correctly in my opinion, that psychoanalytic theory participated in the same fiery nature of that which it battled and finally stopped.

Méheust also points out, again correctly in my opinion, that an epistemological system like that of psychoanalysis grants very particular insights that the earlier mesmeric and magnetic models simply could not (e.g., oedipal and libidinal dynamics), even as the earlier models granted very particular insights that psychoanalysis could not (e.g., telepathy and the subliminal Self). Freud thus opened the Western world up to a “new continent” of the psyche with features ignored by the earlier models and now intricately described with what Méheust calls a kind of hallucinatory precision: enter the domains of the primary processes, the archaic, and the infantile. One of the results of Freud's stunning success, however, was that the earlier discoveries of the magnetists and psychical researchers were effectively overshadowed. Eventually, they more or less disappeared (SM 2:415). There is no “free lunch” for Méheust, then, no perfect system. Every system,
any
system, conceals as it reveals and reveals as it conceals. As Fort once put it so precisely, to “save” one class of data is inevitably to “damn” another: “To have any opinion, one must overlook something.”

This, then, is a story of more than a forgetting, more than a simple suppression. For, as we see here with psychoanalysis, Méheust argues that major twentieth-century intellectual movements incorporated aspects of psychical research, but primarily as a strategy to resist them, to stop them in their tracks, as it were. In this way, these movements functioned like those immense padded stops at the end of a train line that are designed to stop the momentum of a moving locomotive in an emergency. Méheust defines these “stop concepts” (
concepts butoirs
) as “notions which, no doubt possessing an incontestable heuristic power, have at the same time a strategic function, that of limiting, by tacit convention, an obscure domain of experience, thus stopping the flight of thought into the unknown” (SM
2:208).
In effect, such concepts function on a cultural level as means to stop a moving “train of thought.” They are defense mechanisms invoked by the internal logic of a social system in a cognitive or metaphysical emergency.

By far, Méheust's most extensive and analyzed example here is again psychoanalysis, particularly in its notion of the unconscious and its methods of dream interpretation. Personally speaking now, I find this view of psychoanalysis as a kind of
cultural shock zone before a psychical challenge
especially convincing, as it helps me to relate what are essentially two opposite and seemingly exclusive views of psychoanalysis: one, about which I have written a great deal, as a kind of secular mysticism that is uniquely suited to the interpretation of mystical literature (especially erotic mystical literature); the other, by far the more orthodox reading, as a purely materialist and reductionistic method that has no place in its worldview for the mystical or the paranormal. What Méheust does, for me anyway, is show how
both
of these positions are true, how psychoanalysis, in effect, comes to be
between
the two competing worldviews, acting as a buffer or stop zone between them. This seems exactly right to me.

But it is not just psychoanalysis that protects Western culture from the moving train of the psychical. Méheust also treats, among many other figures: Arthur Schopenhauer, who, Méheust suggests, understood the super-conscious state of magnetic lucidity to correspond to a direct experience of the life-force in which the World is perceived, in his famous titled phrase, as Will and as Representation (SM 1:314); André Breton's surrealism and its “occult background” (SM 2:322–32); Emile Durkheim's sociology and its valorization of highly individualized forms of ecstatic consciousness made possible, paradoxically, by the fusion of collective enthusiasms (SM 2:260–61); psychofolkorist Andrew Lang's anthropology of the soul and its constant evocation of “region X” (SM 2:276, 293); Mircea Eliade's history of religions, with its constant references to mysticism, occultism, and the fantastic (SM 2:277–78, 294–95); and any number of literary oeuvres, including and especially those of Arthur Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo.

3. To Describe Is to Construct
. Méheust's grand historical thesis about “the forgetting of magnetism” carries with it a second major thesis about the inner workings of consciousness and culture, which is also a kind of insight into the metaphysical consequences of history. This is the striking notion that human intellectual and social practices, particularly in their naming and institution-creating functions, somehow circumscribe reality, somehow create the real for a particular place and time. In a single phrase,
to describe is to construct
. Méheust captures this idea in his French hyphenated expression,
décrire-construire
, which appears consistently throughout both
volumes.
We might gloss this Méheustian gnomon this way: “to acknowledge openly and to describe authoritatively some aspect of the real is to make possible a psychological experience of the same.” Méheust himself comes very close to this gloss when he broaches what he calls “an historical and epistemological enigma,” namely, the manner in which
décrire-construire
functions as “the actualization and/or the inhibition of potentialities.” To describe-construct, in other words, is also to describe-select (
décrire-selectionner
) and to describe-point (
décrire-aiguiller
) (SM 2:116). It is as if our intellectual and social practices “switch on” and “switch off” a set of latent universal human potentials.

In order to get a proper handle on what Méheust is arguing here, it is perhaps helpful to get a handle first on what he is not arguing. As a personalized, psychological truth, after all, Méheust's sound bite seems to reflect rather closely one of the central ideas of the American metaphysical tradition, from the nineteenth-century Mind Cure and New Thought movements, through Norman Vincent Peale's
The Power of Positive Thinking
, to the human potential movement and the contemporary New Age. In its most exaggerated and radical forms, this idea boils down to the notion that a single individual can create his or her own reality through acts of intention and affirmation. This, essentially magical, idea is evident in a whole variety of modern mystical texts, from the channeled classic
A Course in Miracles
to the most recent breezy bestseller
The Secret
.

There are certainly links between the modern metaphysical literature and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century magnetic and psychical literature. But this is not exactly what Méheust is arguing in these two volumes. His thought is much more sociological, although it never ceases to be psychological as well. That is to say, he is much more interested in the broad social processes and institutional structures, not to mention the outright cultural wars, that produce a sense of the real in any given place and time. He is interested in things like government commissions, published essays and books, and medical and scholarly careers won and lost over ideas. More technically, he is interested in how our methods of inquiry end up constituting both the subject that seeks to know and the object that is finally known. Which is all to say that Bertrand Méheust is much closer to Michel Foucault than to
A Course in Miracles
.

Which is not to say that Méheust is arguing exactly what Foucault argued, or that he would disagree completely with the fundamental premises of a text like
A Course in Miracles
. Framed in my own terms now, Méheust's thought appears rather as an elaborate attempt to relate consciousness to culture and culture to consciousness, and to demonstrate, in the process,
how
these two dimensions of human experience effectively constitute each other in a never-ending cycle of dialectic and debate. Méheust, then, would likely not accept that a single psyche can somehow create a new reality from whole cloth. But neither would he deny the possibility that an individual psyche, temporarily freed from its cultural constraints (which include the personal ego), might demonstrate “impossible” powers and capacities. That which is possible, after all, is relative. He would thus insist that a culture's sense of reality—what is possible, what is impossible—is largely circumscribed or “set up” by social practices, historical institutions, and previous cultural battles by which the lines were drawn and the real circumscribed. Essentially, we write ourselves, but as social groups now, not generally as single lone individuals.
³³
Which implies, of course, that we can, singly or together, unwrite and author ourselves anew.

What I personally find so remarkable about all of this is what it implies about what we might call the metaphysics of history. What we seem to have here, after all, is a basic sense that, although there is a fundamental base to what human beings experience as reality, this reality behaves differently in different historical periods and linguistic registers. Things that are possible in one place and time are impossible in another, and vice versa. Put a bit differently, we think, feel, and experience today according to the battles of yesterday, but had these battles come out differently, we would be thinking, feeling, and experiencing quite differently now. The world can be otherwise. The impossible is possible. Fort had it exactly right again then: “Or that the knack that tips a table may tilt an epoch.”