Boing Boing Feature

Nerval's Lobster

By Mark Dery

Part of a Series: "Self-Help for Surrealists."

“Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad!"

— Gérard de Nerval, when asked why he kept a lobster as a pet and walked it on a leash.

"Le rêve est une seconde vie," declared Gérard de Nerval.ⁱ The dream is a second life.

Before Rimbaud, before the Surrealists, there was Nerval (1808 - 1855), living his life as if it were a lucid dream. Of course, it didn't hurt that his mental skies flickered with the chain lightning of madness—bouts of insanity that condemned him to periodic stays in asylums and, ultimately, self-murder.

Mapping the psychogeography of Paris in all-night peregrinations that reconciled the flâneur with the somnambulist; indulging in the hashish-dream Orientalism expected of any self-respecting 19th-century bohemian by dressing up in Arab garb and drinking drug-laced Turkish coffee with Balzac, Baudelaire, and the rest of the Club des Hachichins; chronicling, in Voyage en Orient (1851), his travels in Turkey, the Holy Land, and Egypt, where he supposedly bought a slave girl in the bazaar, only to absent-mindedly leave her behind when he returned home; consorting with radical bohemians such as Petrus Borel, who perfumed his beard and went by the nickname "the lycanthrope," and Théophile Dondey, who wore spectacles to bed, the better to see his dreams;ⁱⁱ declaring God dead yet claiming adherence to 17 religions, many of them dead; seduced by the occult and firmly convinced that if we could only unriddle "the magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyphs" transmitted by antiquity, the doors of the "spirit world" would swing wide, Nerval died by his own hand at the age of 46—hanged from a window grate with an apron string that he believed to be the Queen of Sheba's garter. ⁱⁱⁱ

He was wretchedly poor. To make matters worse, the lunacy that had tormented him all his life was back, scrabbling at the basement door of his mind. The only photo we have of him, taken days before his death by the celebrated portrait photographer Nadar, captures a balding man with a careworn face, his mouth—what we can see of it, behind the overhang of his moustache—set in a rueful expression somewhere between resignation and defeat. Yet he regards us with intensity; in his fixed gaze we see the dying flicker of defiance and, if we insist, the glitter of madness. "Poor Gérard's face, said Nadar, was marked equally by the memory of lunatic asylums and the foreboding of his tragic death."^iv At long last, the Black Sun of Melancholia, as he put it in his poem "El Desdichado" ("The Disinherited," written in a "state of supernaturalist reverie"), had gone nova.^v "Don't wait up for me tonight," he wrote, in a cryptic note he left for his aunt, "for the night will be black and white."^vi

Setting the scene of Nerval's death, in A Century of French Verse (1895), William John Robertson gilded the lily just a little, one suspects: "One chill grey dawn in January…Gérard's body was found by a rag-gatherer, hanging in the gutter near the foot of a narrow staircase which led up from the squalid little rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, one of the filthiest courts of old Paris. The stones were sprinkled with snow, and on the steps a tame raven was hopping about."^vii (On loan from Poe, no doubt.) In The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman adds a too-perfect touch, claiming that the raven—someone's pet, apparently—kept repeating the only phrase it knew: "J'ai soif!" ("I'm thirsty!")^viii

T.S. Eliot sampled him in his modernist mash-up The Waste Land. Proust thought he was one of the most important French writers of the 19 ^th century. Yet Nerval lives on in the collective unconscious of the Google Age not as the visionary Romantic who wrote the hallucinatory sonnet sequence Les Chimères but as the eccentric's eccentric: the boulevardier who took his pet lobster for a walk, on a leash made of blue ribbon, in the jardins of the Palais-Royal. (Its name was Thibault, for those who are curious about such things.) News of his (calculatedly outrageous? certifiably cracked?) stunt made the rounds; what was it all about: inquiring minds wanted to know. Nerval's response, handed down to us by his friend Théophile Gautier, is funny and sweetly melancholy and strangely moving all at once, flickering irresolvably between Surrealist bon mot and philosophical feuilleton:

Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad!^ix

("Monadic," incidentally, derives from "monad," Goethe's term, borrowed from Leibnitz, for his conception of the soul as an irreducible, indestructible metaphysical atom.) Strolling in the park, Nerval stepped into history. His lobster walk has given rise to a thicket of theories about what happened and why, the art—historical equivalent of the Kennedy assassination's Grassy Knoll industry. Richard Sieburth, translator of the poet's Selected Writings, calls the anecdote a "piece of disinformation" concocted by Gautier, "a harmless hoax to épater le bourgeois," then hedges by adding, "I don't want to claim that Nerval's lobster is completely false: it has the truth that accrues to stereotypes, to clichés, to commonplaces, the truth of ideology or of repetition."^x

By contrast, Nerval scholar Richard Holmes finds Gautier's account credible in light of the poet's well-documented fascination with odd or exotic animals; they recur, as symbols, in his work and life. "Often, on his wanderings through Paris, he would leave messages for his friends in the form of animals," Holmes informs, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. On more than one occasion, unsuspecting writers were greeted, on returning home, by flustered concierges bearing lobsters or parrots—calling cards from Monsieur de Nerval. ^xi

Embroidered or not, the story invites close scrutiny, and not just Talmudic readings by literary critics but hard-eyed analysis by marine biologists: how long can a lobster survive out of its element? Could a decapod, stranded on dry land, really have kept pace with its master?

Among the scientists I spoke with, opinion was divided regarding the likelihood of Thibault's stroll. ^xii Bob Steneck, a professor at the University of Maine's School of Marine Sciences, was doubtful. "Lobsters out of water can walk a bit," he allowed, though it's "very tiring" for them. "They are more likely to get stressed and rapidly flip their tails" than traipse along amiably, taking the air. (Lobsters are designed for rapid backwards movement underwater, propelled by a flip of the tail.) And speaking of taking the air, "prolonged exposure to air will kill lobsters," said Steneck, since "unlike crabs, who have gills sealed within their [bodies], lobster gills are exposed." As a wry afterthought, he added, "I'm no expert, but I bet taking lobsters for a walk in the park is not the first un-truth uttered by a Romantic poet."

Jeffrey Shields, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William & Mary, flagged the problem of temperature. If the weather is congenial—say, 15 degrees Celsius or below, with "relatively high humidity" moistening their gills, enabling them to breathe—a lobster "might survive up to 30-40 minutes" in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, "maybe longer."

Diane Cowan, executive director and senior scientist at The Lobster Conservancy, elaborated on the locomotion problem: "On dry land, a lobster of the size humans typically eat simply can't walk with legs extended. Large lobsters crawl on their bellies on dry land, if they have the stamina." If you insist on following in Nerval's footsteps, she said, avoid hot days, since the blazing sun will "turn the lobster vibrant red, making it look cooked because it will be cooked." Cowan wasn't charmed by the Romantic whimsy of the thing: "Taking a lobster for a walk in the park is a cruel and sadistic idea. Please do not even think about it."

Brian Beal, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine at Machias, was more sanguine than his colleagues. Lobsters are closer kin to cockroaches than anyone who's ever worn a lobster bib likes to contemplate—both are members of the world's most populous family, Arthropoda —and can scuttle at insectlike speed, Beal insisted. Fishing off the coast of Maine, he's seen them escape, when hauled aboard, and "quickly walk into a dark corner of the stern and hide." (Jelle Atema, a professor of biology at Boston University, told me he's seen "unsupervised lobsters drag themselves off the dock back into the sea.")^xiii

Mindful of his colleagues' objections, Beal argued,

It is not too far-fetched to imagine that if de Nerval had methods [of keeping] a lobster in captivity (not an easy thing because it requires a large tank with relatively cool seawater and it would have needed some kind of aeration), then the lobster most likely would have [needed to be] taken out of its tank from time to time for cleaning [the tank]. What do you do with a lobster when it isn't in its tank? Take it for a short walk, if conditions permit. A short walk on a cool, damp day or at dusk? Sure. It wouldn't have walked a great distance, but as long as it was not out in the hot sun for any great length of time, I can see this happening. Certainly do-able, and why not? We should all extend the boundaries of what we think is possible, and lobsters as pets taken for short walks (with or without a leash) is a boundary we can step over!

A suitably Nervalian sentiment. So, if Nerval's lobster promenade did happen, was it a proto-Dada prank on the humorless, stuffed-shirt bourgeoisie, as Sieburth would have us believe?

A dissenting view, given credence by the discovery, circa 2008, of a letter to his childhood friend Laura LeBeau, holds that Nerval was an early animal-rights activist. Returning from a visit to the coastal town of La Rochelle on the Atlantic, Nerval recounts a droll dust-up with the locals: "And so, dear Laura, upon my regaining the town square I was accosted by the mayor who demanded that I should make a full and frank apology for stealing from the lobster nets. I will not bore you with the rest of the story, but suffice to say that reparations were made, and little Thibault is now here with me in the city…"^xiv On this evidence, some conjecture that Nerval intervened to save a peaceful, serious creature from Death by Lobster Pot and in so doing earned himself a hallowed place in the history of animal-rights activism, well over a century before lobster liberator Mary Tyler Moore.^xv

Let's not forget, however, that Nerval was a fervent scholar of the occult, steeped in classical myth, Egyptian magic, medieval fables, Teutonic tales of Lorelei, the Gnostic wisdom of the Druses of Lebanon, alchemy, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, the secret teachings of the Illuminati, "the strange legends and bizarre superstitions" of the Valois countryside outside Paris, where he grew up; his work is hermetic, rich in arcane allusions and hidden meanings.^xvi Holmes believes Gautier intended the lobster story as an example of Nerval's all-consuming affair with symbolism, a fixation that extended beyond the page, shadowing his daily life with obscure subtexts.

Holmes draws our attention to the Tarot card called The Moon (number 18 in the Major Arcana), which is associated, he notes, with "the Unconscious, the Irrational, the Feminine Mysteries, the Imagination"—perfect for an artist dedicated to blurring the line between dreaming sleep and waking reality, not to mention a man plagued by mental illness who couldn't always tell the difference between the two.

At the foot of this card lies a deep, mysterious pool, out of which a Crayfish or Lobster is attempting to crawl onto the dry land. A path leads up from the pool and twists like a ribbon towards the horizon. The path is guarded by two animals—in most Tarot packs, these are both Dogs, in others they are a Dog and a Wolf. … Above, a full moon hangs in the night sky. Drops of moisture like diamonds float in the air, as if being slowly drawn up from the Pool by the power of the Moon. The Lobster raises its claws from the water, and the Dog and Wolf lift their heads and bay at the Moon. ^xvii

In the classic Rider-Waite version of the Tarot deck, the Moon card tells an allegorical story about the imagination. According to Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the road, which winds between two towers, leads to what Waite rather redundantly calls "unknown mystery"—Unknown Unknowns, as Rumsfeld would say. The cold light of the moon is intellectual insight, a pale reflection of the more profound illumination yielded by the imagination, with its access to the unconscious and the irrational. As well, says Waite, the moonlight "illuminates our animal nature…the dog, the wolf, and that which comes up out of the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower even than the savage beast." ^xviii The lobster—Freud's id?—struggles toward enlightenment, clambering out of the black lagoon of our primordial selves, "but as a rule it sinks back whence it came" (Waite). The mind, in the person of the grave, contemplative Man in the Moon, gazes tranquilly "upon the unrest below, and the dew of thought falls. The message is: 'Peace, be still,' and it may be that there shall come a calm upon the animal nature, while the abyss beneath shall cease from giving up form.'"^xix

Some sources associate the Moon card with confusion, fear, anxiety, romanticism, sleep, and dreaming. Rather than succumb to a moon-maddened confusion of dream and daylit world, they advise, the seeker should strive to sublimate his turbulent psychic energies into creative expression. Holmes reads Nerval's turnaround, from the quest for illumination in exotic lands to an inner odyssey through memory and madness, as a parable about Romantic excess: "The imagination of the Hero had finally doubled back on itself, and the rivers and mountains, the visions and revolutions had become…those of a purely internal landscape, or moonscape, the world of dreams."^xx

At times, Holmes himself seems to teeter on the brink of a hermeneutic rabbit-hole, perilously close to the semiotic madness I've called the Casaubon Complex, after the scholar of occultism and conspiracy theories, in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, who, "wanting connections, …found connections—always, everywhere, and between everything," plunging him into a frenzy of intertextuality where "the world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…" ^xxi Holmes worries about getting lost in the "labyrinth that Nerval himself made of his life; a maze of fantasy and memory."^xxii

I…began to interpret Nerval's life almost entirely in terms of the magic world by which he himself was so fascinated. … Everything in Nerval's life came to have symbolic meaning, full of archetypes, alchemical processes, astrological signs, mystic correspondences and invisible harmonies. … I saw his whole life as a pilgrimage, or journey of initiation, intended to reunite the spiritual and material values of his generation. ^xxiii

Read through the magic glasses of occult symbolism, Nerval's life does indeed encourage overinterpretation. This, after all, was the man who said, "I like to arrange my life as if it were a novel"; the man whose first breakdown, brought on by the frenzied delirium of the Paris mardi gras in 1841, was marked by manic talk of numerology and astrology and "mystical systems" under his control (a condition his doctors diagnosed as "Theomania or Demonomania," he claimed).^xxiv Doesn't his description of the awakened consciousness that follows his mystical epiphany, in his novel Aurélia (1855), sound like a variation on Casaubon's theme? "The talk of my companions took on mysterious turns of meaning which I alone could understand, and formless, inanimate objects lent themselves to the calculations of my mind." ^xxv Hadn't Gautier noted, in his review of Nerval's magazine dispatches from Cairot, Beirut, and Constantinople, Scènes de la Vie Orientale (1846-7), the author's uncanny ability to penetrate "the profoundly mysterious spirit" of the myths and folklore of the East, "in which each object contains a symbol"?^xxvi

One could even say that he took from them certain occult meanings intended only for the neophyte, certain cabalistic formulae and overtones of theIlluminati, which made one believe, at times, that he was writing directly of his own personal initiation. ^xxvii

Was the lobster walk-initially dismissed as symptomatic of Nerval's nuttiness, more recently historicized as anti-bourgeois performance art—an occult transmission, broadcast to anyone with a working set of gnostic antennae? Is Nerval's famous quote a compressed meditation, informed by the Tarot, on the importance of balancing the rationalism of industrial modernity and the repression of bourgeois society with the creative energies of the unconscious? (Well over a half-century later, Andre Breton would take a page not only from Nerval's writings but from the book of his life, acknowledging his "supernaturalism" as Surrealism's antecedent.^xxviii Salvador Dali, never one to miss a marketable trick, would resurrect Nerval's totem in his Surrealist object Lobster Telephone (1936), cannily mystified with the usual Dalinian flapdoodle about phallic symbols and castration complexes.) Were Nerval's barking, ravening dogs the rough beasts of the id, familiar from the Moon card? Was his "peaceful, serious" lobster a Surrealist reconciliation (perhaps even an alchemical or Kabbalistic synthesis) of the Moon's ruminative intellect with "that which comes up out of the deeps," the unconscious? Are his "secrets of the sea" the Hidden Meanings of Things, accessible only through a meeting of our rational and irrational minds, a conjunction symbolized by the primordial lobster scrambling into the sunlight of reason? Is that why Thibault's leash was blue—blue for the marriage of Heaven and Earth; blue for the empyrean and the briny deep; blue for midnight blue, the color of the conscious day when it yields to the dreamworld of sleep; blue for "the real, or rather climate, of the unreal—or of the surreal," as The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols has it? "Blue stands still and resolves within itself those contradictions and alternations of fortune—day following night—which modulate human life," the Dictionary tells us. "Indifferent and unafraid, centred solely upon itself, blue is not of this world: it evokes the idea of eternity," or, for our purposes, surreality.^xxix When Nerval says, of the descent into dreams, "I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world without a sense of dread," is he also alluding to the twin towers guarding the Moon card's twisting, turning path, perhaps the "royal road to the unconscious" of Freudian dream analysis?^xxx

The Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva calls the Black Sun of Nerval's melancholia "a dazzling metaphor that suggests an insistence without presence, a light without representation…bright and black at the same time."^xxxi For Kristeva, the oxymoronic sun of Nerval's sonnet is that unnamable, unrepresentable "supreme good" of which the depressed narcissist believes he has been deprived. But given Nerval's mystical Surrealism (or, if you prefer, Surrealist mysticism), couldn't it also stand in for the gnostic mysteries that taunted him, a lowly lobster making his painful way along the road to Unknown Mysteries? Could that be why he hoped his last night would be black and white, bright and dark at the same time, closing the curtain on this world and parting the veil to reveal…something, some ineffable truth beyond the symbolic realm?

Then again, the proposition that Nerval expected any sort of posthumous payoff seems dubious in light of his black-humor homily, decades before Nietzsche, "God is dead! the heavens are empty… Weep! children, you have no father now!"^xxxii In Aurélia, published shortly after his suicide, he sends one last message, encrypted as always: "I said to myself: eternal night is upon us, and the darkness will be frightful. What will happen when they all realize there is no more sun?" ^xxxiii

Daily Meditation

God may be dead, but I can still amuse myself with extinct religions. At the same time, I must beware of staring too long into the Black Sun. My irrational mind and my animal nature are essential aspects of my best self; they should follow me wherever I go (though always on a leash). Each night, I will descend into the abyssal depths of the unconscious without fear, secure in the knowledge that seeking the secrets of the sea is its own reward, even if I don't remember them in the morning. Likewise, I will arrange my life as if it were a novel, even if no one will ever read it but me. As its author, I have the power to edit out people who gobble up my monadic privacy, making room for peaceful, serious types who remind me of arthropods.

About the Author

Mark Dery is a cultural critic who suffers from the Casaubon Complex. His books include The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. He edited the trailblazing anthology of digital-culture criticism, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, and popularized the culture jamming phenomenon through his widely reprinted monograph, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. His latest book is the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. He is at work on a biography of the author, illustrator, and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey (Little, Brown: 2014).

Architeuthis. Photo: Discovery Channel

Dosidicus Gigas

Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. Photo: British Antarctic Survey

Vampyroteuthis infernalis—the vampire squid from Hell

The Kraken

Ghost Babies

by Mark Dery

The traffic in dead babies is booming, on eBay.

There are daguerreotypes of dead babies, ambrotypes of dead babies, tintypes of dead babies, cartes de visite of dead babies, cabinet cards of dead babies; dead babies from the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the roaring '20s.

Here's a listing titled "POST MORTEM DEAD BABY CABINET PHOTO"; in the thumb-nailed image, a little girl in a lacy white burial gown lies propped on a pillow, crowned with a wreath of flowers. Click the ENLARGE button, and you can just make out a sliver of lusterless white peeping from one sunken, slitted eye. Another offering, this one for a daguerreotype of an "Exquisite Post-Mortem Girl," is accompanied by a description that strikes an uneasy balance between graveside elegy and auctioneer's patter: "The young girl is surrounded by blankets and quilts. Very dramatic poignant image. Excellent!"

"Poignant" is a pet word in the collectible postmortem photo category. As in: "POIGNANT POST MORTEM BABY," an antique photograph of an infant, asleep forever in her toy casket. Her arched eyebrows give her a fretful look, querulous but a little quizzical, too, as if she's startled to realize that death, unlike gas, doesn't pass. The chrysanthemum-sized bows on her bonnet ties look tragicomically big beside her little doll head.

"Heartbreaking postmortem photo," notes the item's description, conceding the obvious. Should we read this as a moment of silence--a brief halt in the hum of commerce, in recognition of the fact that this lugubrious curio was the last, precious glimpse someone had of her child, before the undertaker dropped the lid? Or is it a lucky charm against the charge that buyers and sellers of such artifacts are trafficking in tears? Or just more of the mawkish morbidness that characterizes the American Way of Death?

When Marx wrote, in The Communist Manifesto, that capitalism "has left remaining no other nexus between man and man" than the "naked self-interest" of the cash nexus, he never imagined the eBay listing whose description assures, "You are bidding on a cabinet card measuring 8 X 6 inches of a sweet baby in repose after death. He/she is laid out for viewing on a bed or table covered in lace, and dressed in a long white christening dress. This may have been the only photo taken of this precious child."

Browsing this obscure corner of eBay feels like wandering through an Orphanage of Ghost Babies, in which the Shirley Temple-esque moppet in the listing for a "POST MORTEM CDV DEAD LITTLE GIRL POIGNANT PORTRAIT!!" ("beautiful portrait of a little girl posed by an window, which bathes her in natural light") racks up multiple bids while the pitiable "POST MORTEM Dead Child with SUNKEN EYES in COFFIN" languishes unloved by any bidder. After all, who wants a used baby with sunken eyes? Even here, the beautiful command the highest bids while the unlovely dead go for bargain-basement prices.

Fittingly, some sellers court the goth bidder; eschewing Forest Lawn sentimentality, they accentuate the macabre: "Haunting Open Eyes Original Post Mortem Cabinet Card"; "EERIE POST MORTEM MAN Cabinet Card"; "1910s PHOTO! POST MORTEM DEAD WOMAN in GLOWING CASKET!"

Demand for postmortem images is sufficiently high that some sellers, fresh out of dead people, do their best to drum up business for dead-ish people, as in the unwittingly hilarious listing for a carte de visite of "CIVIL WAR ERA 2 WEIRD CADAVER-LOOKING MEN." Despite their baleful stares and unsmiling rigidity, the two men in the photo are victims of photographic technology in its infancy, nothing more: the long exposure times required by the cameras of the day compelled subjects to assume a rigor-mortis stiffness. At the time of this writing, the item, offered for the BUY IT NOW price of $30, remained unsold.

Still, the trade in darkroom apparitions of the antique dead, whether "poignant" and "heartbreaking" or "eerie" and "weird," is brisk, attracting eager, sometimes naive buyers and more than a few guileful sellers. As a public service, Jack Mord, an expert on "early postmortem and memorial photography" who maintains a collection of such images at his Thanatos Archive website, has posted a bogus listing for a "SAD and POIGNANT!" Civil War-era carte de visite. The photo, of two little boys in their Sunday best, is innocuous enough; what makes it postmortem is the stranger-than-fiction fact that it was taken by a dead man. "Although you cannot see him in this photo (because he is behind the camera), the photographer is dead and propped up with a stand," Mord deadpans, in his sales pitch for the item.

Then he steps out of character:

Yes, this is a joke. The lesson is this: NONE of the "standing postmortem" photos you see on eBay that show standing people being "propped up" or "supported" by a stand...are postmortem photos. Not a single one. [...] The stand seen behind these people is a posing stand, used by photographers of the time to keep the person still and on mark for the photograph. You can usually see the base of these stands between the person's feet.

The people you see on eBay who sell these "standing post mortem" photos are scam artists, banking on your ignorance to dupe you into paying them as much as possible for a 50-cent photo of a live person.

To dissuade gullible buyers from taking his instructive hoax seriously, Mord priced the item at a preposterous $500. Naturally, someone bid on it anyway.

In his seminal study, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, the anthropologist Jay Ruby notes that "the custom of photographing corpses, funerals, and mourners is as old as photography itself." A direct descendant of the posthumous portraits commissioned in earlier centuries by the well-to-do bereaved, the practice was widespread in 19th century America; "secure the shadow, ere the substance fade" was a popular tagline for photographic studios, exhorting customers to preserve lasting images of the near and dear, even if death had already claimed them. As early as 1846, an ad for the Boston photographers Southworth & Hawes proclaimed,

We make miniatures of children and adults instantly, and of Deceased Persons either at our rooms or at private residences. We take great pains to have Miniatures Of Deceased Persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural as to seem, even to Artists, in a deep sleep.

Death was a fact of life in the 19th century. Until 1885, childhood mortality took one out of every five children in her first year, two out of every five by their fifth; children were carried off by cholera, dysentery, diphtheria, typhoid, yellow fever, scarlet fever, or measles. Losing all of one's children to an epidemic, in a matter of days, was not uncommon. "From [baby] carriage to coffin was the fate of over 30 percent of 19th century children," writes Stanley Burns, M.D., in his pioneering study, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America.

In the 19th century, especially in rural America, families prepared their own dead for burial by laying the body on a board and washing and dressing it for the wake, traditionally held in the front parlor of the family home. Unlike residents of big cities, people who lived outside urban centers typically had no easy access to a photographer; thus, a postmortem photograph was often the only image kinfolk might have to remember a person by.

This was especially the case with children cut down too soon to have had a studio portrait taken. As evidence for the belief that "parents were often desperate to have one picture of their dying child," Ruby includes a copy of the carte de visite of a baby named Florence May Laser, noting, "An adult hand supports the child while on the back of the image someone has written, 'Taken while dying.'"

By the first decade of the 20th century, however, death was disappearing from everyday life, swept aside in the cultural housecleaning that would soon be called modernism. The Machine Age had arrived, banishing the lugubrious specter of Victorianism (or so it looked, in retrospect). In modernism's revisionist vision of the passing era, the late 19th century was the age of the hidebound bourgeois paterfamilias, snug and self-satisfied in his sense of entitlement, ruling his domestic castle in a Lilliputian parody of England ruling the waves. And nothing better served the modern caricature of Victoria's reign as a time of rigorlike social stiffness, stultifying class consciousness, and tight-lipped prudishness than the Victorian conception of stylish decor: rooms stuffed with hulking furniture and bric-a-brac and plunged into a sepulchral gloom by dark colors and heavy drapes.

Nothing, that is, except what James Stevens Curl, in his book of the same name, calls "the Victorian celebration of death." Death, for the Victorians, was a subject for polite conversation, and postmortem photographs were prominently displayed in the home. Mourning was a protracted agony, formalized into periods (a premonition of Kübler-Ross's famous stages of grieving?), each of which required its own expensive wardrobe, accessorized with memento mori in the form of brooches and lockets containing a lock of the deceased's hair or a photograph. For women of means, widowhood was a two-year sartorial death sentence and, in some cases, a lifestyle: think of the Widow of Windsor, Queen

Victoria herself, who after Prince Albert's death in 1861 retreated into melancholy seclusion for a decade; after emerging, she wore mourning costume for the rest of her life, inspiring punctilious Englishwomen to follow her example.

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All of which has fostered the inextirpable myth that postmortem photography died with the Victorians, a fiction encouraged by Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip. Woven from 19th-century newspaper clippings and photos, some postmortems among them, Lesy's poetic history of the aptly named Black River Falls mythologizes late Victorian America as a comic-gothic nightmare of morbidity and depravity. Darkly satirical in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Wisconsin Death Trip helped cement the popular perception of the Victorians as death cultists, a vision symbolized by the postmortem photograph. "Some of the most affecting [images] show dead infants in their coffins," writes the visual-culture critic Rick Poynor, in a Design Observer essay on the cultural impact of Lesy's book. "Such photographs were commonplace then, but many viewers, including me, saw them here for the first time." To be sure, formal postmortem photography did indeed disappear "in mainstream middle-class America" in the 1920s, as Burns points out. But as he also stresses, amateur postmortem photography persisted, most commonly among so-called ethnic groups, as it does to this day. Of course, given the prevailing view of postmortem mementos as morbid, "people who want to photograph their deceased loved ones do so surreptitiously." Wary of social taboos, families take covert photos at funerals, to be circulated among a trusted few to help heal what Ruby calls "the social wound of death." (In the flashbulb era, funeral directors often found spent flashbulbs in the wake of a wake.)

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In his discussion of the contemporary perception of postmortem or funeral photography as morbid, Ruby notes that "even the idea of collecting 19th-century examples of these images upsets some people and causes them to assume the collector has a morbid, unhealthy fascination with death."

Before we ask why people traffic in such images, let's consider the easier question: when did the subculture of collectors whose obscure passion is antique postmortem photography emerge?

The historian of photography Geoffrey Batchen speculated in an interview for this article that "the traffic in postmortem photographs probably picked up at roughly the same time that the trade in photographs as collectibles began to accelerate, sometime in the 1970s"--an uptick in collector activity that coincides with the publication of Wisconsin Death Trip in 1973. Batchen agrees that books like Levy's and, later, Burns's, "probably stimulated the market." Even so, he points out, "there have always been private collectors who specialize in such things. It may seem strange to non-collectors, but it's not nearly as strange as collecting, say, lynching photos, which some people also do."

Jack Mord believes that eBay played a pivotal role in ginning up interest in the genre. "In my 12 years as a member of eBay," he told me, "I have seen the number of postmortem photos for auction there--as well as their prices--skyrocket." Spiking collector interest in postmortem images has given rise, in turn, to niche obsessions, he says--"collectors who tend to collect only a certain type of postmortem image--a mother holding a baby, for example--and are willing to pay plenty for them."

As well, says Paul Frecker, "serious collectors" of "PMs" (postmortems) will pay top dollar for "anything out of the ordinary." A collector and seller of 19th century photography who maintains an extensive archive of postmortem photographs at PaulFrecker.com, he notes that postmortem photographs of children posed to look as if they're asleep are dime-a-dozen common. Many of the antique postmortems for sale on eBay are paper prints such as cartes de visite and cabinet cards, dating from the latter half of the 19th century, when the aesthetic of the day euphemized death as "eternal sleep." Deceased children were often posed with a favorite toy, as if they'd dozed off while playing; deceased adults were posed with open books on their laps. At the dawn of the daguerreotype era, by contrast, no attempt was made to conceal the cold, hard fact that the sitter was a cadaver. Its title notwithstanding, Sleeping Beauty includes ghastly images from the 1840s--shocking by today's standards--of corpses, neatly attired and ceremonially laid out, but with blood oozing from their noses that no one had bothered to wipe away before the photo was taken. "The terror of death was still taught by some religious sects," writes Burns, "and little attempt was made to beautify the image."

According to Frecker, "There are umpteen PMs available of children that have been posed to look as if there asleep. But a photograph of a dead child with a trickle of dried blood running out of the corner of its mouth would be in a different league altogether, not because it's grotesque but because it's so much more unusual and the photograph has a punctum, a hook that draws you in and establishes a personal relationship with the image and generates a bigger emotional response."

Frecker uses the term "punctum," Roland Barthes's coinage in Camera Lucida for that aspect of an image (often a seemingly incidental detail) that "pierces" the viewer emotionally, charging the photograph with a significance unique to that viewer. In so doing, he directs our attention to the deeper question: what is it about antique postmortem photographs that casts such an uncanny spell on collectors?

For Frecker, such images "resonate in a way that not many other genres do. These are photographs of dead people, yes, but someone loved them and wanted to commemorate their life--to have one last (or perhaps an only) portrait of them before putting them in the earth. One simply doesn't get that level of emotion in a view of Brighton pier. The message of any photographic portrait is 'I was here'; with a PM, that message becomes all the more poignant." In psychoanalytic terms, the image is cathected--charged with emotions so deeply felt they still reverberate in the viewer's mind, a century or more later.

Unsurprisingly, such photographs strike a responsive chord in viewers who've lost a child. "Sadness is definitely part of their appeal," says Jack Mord. "Many postmortem collectors are mothers who've lost children of their own. Their own sadness draws them to these photos, which in some way comfort them." Grieving mothers who take cold comfort in these images are close kin to the women who find some measure of consolation in the "memorial dolls" sculpted by Jennifer Stocks-Dearborn--commissioned reproductions of babies who died, disconcertingly photorealistic down to the last hair on their little clay heads. Like postmortem photos of dead children, Stocks-Dearborn's dolls flicker irresolvably between pathos and uncanniness, an unsettling ambiguity that seems to divide the minds of many--including the artist herself.

On her website, My Tangible Peace, Stocks-Dearborn (who lost her own infant daughter to SIDS) speaks earnestly of using her talent "to create portrait pieces for families who have lost children in pregnancy, birth, to SIDS, or other illness," one-of-a-kind simulacra "small enough to be tucked away in a drawer and kept private until an emotional collapse." In interviews, however, she swerves into dead-baby-joke territory, referring to her sculptures as "creepy, naked babies" and wisecracking that, because the final stage in her production process involves baking Mohair or Tibetan lamb's hair onto their heads, "I always have a baby in the oven."

Similarly, comments in an online discussion about her memorial dolls give voice to a wide range of reactions, from shudders of revulsion ("Burn the abominations") to heartsick tendresse ("I requested one of these 'creepy' babies in memory of my daughter who passed away at 23 days old. If you think that these dolls are creepy, [you] obviously haven't experienced the death of a child") to profound ambivalence ("This is very morbid. And disturbing. Not unlike the photobooks of the dead. Having had three miscarriages, however, I would have wanted to have had something-anything-like a baby, at least to bury").

Likewise, postmortem photographs, especially those of babies and children, inspire radically different reactions, inflected by the viewer's experiences with death. As Mord observes, such images may trigger sympathetic emotional vibrations in mothers who've lost children. But for palely loitering souls who wave their fascination with the macabre as a flag of transgression—codeword: goth, a demographic whose youth more or less ensures that it hasn't experienced death up close and personal—a postmortem photograph, prominently displayed, is subcultural shorthand for conscientious objection to Middle America, with its Julia Roberts smile and its power-of-positive-thinking homilies. The artist Edward Gorey, the unwitting granddaddy of goth, was fond of postmortem photos.

Then, too, postmortem photographs reverberate with uncanniness because their dead are doubly dead, --done in by disease or wrongful death, then killed again by the camera--trapped by the wink of a shutter in a moment that will last forever. (Not for nothing do they call it "shooting.")-- Yet the human subjects of such photographs, or for that matter of any photograph, are simultaneously undead, and therefore uncanny--phantoms materialized in darkrooms, on glass plates, and given ageless immortality as images, images that stare back at us across the gulf of time. Spectrum, spectacle, specter: the common root is instructive. Barthes called photography the flat death; Sontag called it the soft death; Derrida believed that film is "the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms." All photography is necromancy, raising the dead or, put another way, embalming the present. Barthes speaks, in Camera Lucida, of "that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead." No wonder, then, that he finds photographs of the corpses especially ghoulish: because photography, like formaldehyde, fixes life--that is to say, it preserves "the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment)"--yet the subject, in this instance, is dead. "If the photograph then becomes horrible," he reasons, "it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing."

Daguerreotypes of Victorians--who, with apologies to Baudrillard, seem in their photos to be Always Already dead--embody these qualities par excellence. Alejandro Amenábar's movie The Others, a ghost story with a Henry Jamesian plot twist, exploits this uncanniness to spooky effect. The scene in which the lady of the house discovers, by stumbling on a photo album of postmortem daguerreotypes, that her servants are ghosts, is a study in sepia-toned horror.

In the here and now, antique postmortem images are riveting because they emblematize the Authentic in an ever more mediated world. In a time when we interact, more and more, through Tweets, text messages, and Facebook pokes and likes, the black-and-white dead of the 19th Century condense raw emotions; at a moment when the here-and-now seems increasingly like a fading afterimage of our vivid imaginative lives on the other side of the screen, they confront us with the inescapable fact of embodiment, more corporeal for the dead weight of death, more real for the trickling blood, blood that dried 100 years ago but through the necromancy of photography looks blackly wet all over again, every time we look at it.

"The post mortem photograph is a relic of a past that has been erased by modernity," says Michael Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America. "And in that lost world, people had more direct and less mediated experiences of shit/sweat/blood/piss/grime/dust/phlegm/pus. And less mediated (less medicated) experiences of death, with a lot more suffering."

Postmortem photos force us to look death in the face, up close and personal. Irony of ironies, the 20th century--one of, if not the, bloodiest in history, when the Nazis applied the logic of Henry Ford's assembly line to genocide and the Americans brought their genius for push-button solutions to the vaporization of whole cities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki--bore witness to the medicalization of dying, the professionalization of funeral rituals, and the repression of death in everyday life. Death decamped to the hospital, and the ritualized leave-taking of the Loved One moved from its traditional domestic theater--the front parlor--to the funeral parlor, stage-managed not by the eerily named undertaker but by the more antiseptic-sounding funeral director. (This, by the way, is why the front parlor was transformed, by the emphatic decree of a Ladies' Home Journal editor in 1910, into a living room.)

As the cultural critic Mikita Brottman told me, "There's something fascinating about the juxtaposition of home and death" in postmortem photos. "Those things just don't go together any more. Home is the realm of shelter magazines and Sunday supplements, and death is the realm of sterile drips, hospital beds, heart monitors, health insurance. To see a corpse in the home is now a jolting juxtaposition."

Our plasma-screen TVs, videogame consoles, and multiplexes are awash in CGI gore, yet few in the so-called first world, where medical advances have made the science-fictional Right to Die movement a reality, have ever looked into eyes of a dead man, trying to meet the gaze that—in the memorable words of the hardboiled novelist Raymond Chandler—you can never quite meet.

Except in a photograph.

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Mark Dery (markdery.com) is a cultural critic. His byline has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Rolling Stone, Bookforum to Cabinet; his books include Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. In 2013, the University of Minnesota Press is bringing out his essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. He is currently at work on a biography of the artist, writer, and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey.

Images courtesy of The Jeffrey Kraus Collection and Shorpy archive. Typeface: Mike Allard

(Note: This essay is an extensively revised version of a piece previously published in the Australian magazine Photofile and subsequently reprinted in the technoculture webzine 21.c.Many thanks to Ashley Crawford, editor of both publications, for commissioning and editing the original version of "Ghost Babies.")

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

Worshippers of Morbid Anatomy: Just as I'm warming to my task, my time on the Boing Boing marquee is over. I'd hoped to squeeze in posts about the pornographic rapture of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (don't you love the sweetly sadistic smile playing at the corner of the cherub's lips as he hovers, poised to plunge the golden spear of holy desire into Theresa's "very entrails," leaving her "all on fire with a great love of God," moaning with the "surpassing... sweetness of this excessive pain"?) and about the hallucinogenically beautiful sculptures in the Borghese Gallery, carved from seemingly infinite varieties of marble: snow-white Carrara, perfect for modeling the soft swell of a breast, the curve of a flank, a chin-dimple; busts of cardinals made of pink marble mottled with white blobs, giving their heads the appearance of being sculpted out of, er, headcheese; marble the color of blood sausage, marble the color of raw salmon, marble green as mint jelly, purple as eggplant, marble flickering with blue and gray veins, Pentelic marble, Parian marble, and let's not forget Phrygian marble, a psychedelic rock that the Victorian writer Henry Hull described as "one of the most curious, as well as handsome varieties of marble with which I am acquainted," a mineral delirium of "banded layers of silicious limestone of various shades of green, verging on blue or gray, alternating with others of a pure white...contorted, waved, or foliated in a remarkable manner..."

If I'd had time, I would have walked you through the Museum of Pathological Anatomy in Florence and the taxidermic Eden of the Museum of Zoology in Bologna, its wall-eyed creatures leaking stuffing, unloved by anyone except the occasional devotee of what the postmodern theorist Steve Baker calls "botched taxidermy." Did I mention the bizarre, Ed Gein-ian anatomical preparations of the 18th century naturalist Girolamo Segato, in the anatomy museum at the Ospedale Carregi in Florence? (A "maker" after Boing Boing's heart, he crafted a handsome table, inset with what looked like polished stones but were, in fact, human organs, preserved, cut into geometric shapes, and fitted into a colorful mosaic. When Segato proudly presented a local noble with the results of his handiwork, the squicked-out noble declined.) And then there's the incomparable museum of teratology and pathology, just a building away in the same hospital, with its mind-altering waxes of skin diseases and its wet specimens of congenital deformities, a Boschian garden of unearthly (yet all too human) things, unforgettable, almost indescribable. And then there's the Museum of Veterinary Pathology and the Ercole Lelli waxes in the Palazzo Poggi, both in Bologna, and...and...

Happily, I'll be blogging about all these things at Shovelware, so if my posts over the past two weeks have whetted your interest in the Pathological Sublime, do drop by. Blogging for Boing Boing has been thrilling, if exhausting. As I said in my opening post, the collective intelligence of Boing Boing's hive mind is among the smartest readerships anywhere. Of course, every wise crowd has at least one troll-tastic Master of His Own Domain, the all-knowing and tirelessly punctilious offspring of George Costanza and Felix Unger. Nonetheless, I'm immensely grateful to those of you who took the time to offer constructive critiques, suggest alternate angles of attack on my subjects, or point me toward stones left unturned in my research. To you I can only say: mille grazie---and then some.

"Why have we not developed an aesthetic of the inside of the body?," wonders one of the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He speaks for Cronenberg, who took up the thread in an interview he and I conducted. "We have contests in which we decide who is the most beautiful woman in the world," said Cronenberg, "and yet, if you were to show the inside of that woman's body, you would have a lot of grossed-out people. Why is that? We should be able to have a World's Most Perfect Kidney contest, where women or men unzip to show their kidneys. We can't become integral creatures until we come to terms with our bodies and we haven't come remotely close to that. We're incredibly schizophrenic."

Cronenberg's visceral aesthetic is bodied forth (so to speak) in La Specola, an 18th century anatomical museum at the University of Florence. It's fitting that the name, from the Latin for mirror (the museum is housed in a former observatory), is close etymological kin to speculum, an instrument used, as every woman knows, to dilate the opening of a body cavity for examination. La Specola is home to a collection of visible women and men, medical teaching aids that comprise some of the finest examples of ceroplasty, the art of modeling anatomical specimens in wax.

La Specola's waxworks are wondrous strange, indeed---a pathological beauty pageant worthy of Cronenberg's wildest dreams. "Le Grazie Smontate,"the "Dissected Graces" of the master modeler Clemente Susini (1754-1814), is a trio of recumbent young women, their tresses spilling over their shoulders, their shapely legs gracefully arranged, the fat, yellow sausages of their intestines coiled neatly on their disemboweled torsos. Gazing languorously up at the viewer, one grace toys girlishly with a braid, her modesty intact despite her bared entrails. Another sloe-eyed beauty flaunts a pert rosebud of a nipple, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that her breast hangs from a flap of flesh peeled back to expose her heart. The hard nipples; the bent leg partly covering (or coyly revealing?) the downy pubes; the head thrown back, lips slightly parted, in an attitude that hovers unsettlingly between post-orgasmic languor and the marionette floppiness of the corpse: these images tap a subterranean river in the erotic imagination. Behind the curtain of scientific progress and public edification drawn across La Specola lurks the shadow of a more than clinical interest in such things.

In A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America, Michael Sappol argues that the popular anatomical museums of the 19th century---that is, those museums open to the general (male) public, as opposed to those for medical professionals only---cannily exploited this pornographic subtext even as they veiled it in moral sanctimony. "[B]eginning in the 1830s and intensifying in succeeding decades, there arose a variety of anatomical entrepreneurs, eager to cultivate, exploit, and cater to the audience for anatomy through anatomical museums and exhibits,"writes Sappol. "And from the outset...anatomy was assimilated to the purposes of satisfying and profiting from the demand for sexual material, to its critics pornography."

Hillel Schwartz has his finger on the source of the Venus's bizarre charms when he writes, "The female anatomical figure with removable parts...was truly a pedagogical tool, but in wax it also suggested malleability, voluptuousness, and morbidezza: delicate flesh." There's a voluptuous luster to her beeswax-and-animal fat flesh that makes her uncannily lifelike, more so after two centuries than modern waxworks made of synthetic paraffins or the latex-skinned grotesques in theme-park robot dramas. Unlike an actual cadaver, whose waxy pallor makes it look as lifeless as a mannequin, the Dissected Venus seems almost to glow, if not with life, with a robust undeath.

Of course, any poetic reveries about the sex appeal of Dissected Venuses must take account of the extent to which these wax women hold a mirror up to culture rather than the nature---specifically, the Enlightenment culture into which they were born, when scientists were busy weaving myths about gender and the "natural order" that denied women the democratic promise of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and redefined them as weaker vessels, consecrated to procreation and (male) recreation. The anatomical models of the day dramatized this reduction of woman to womb.

But, all that said, the creepy seductions of eviscerated wax women can't be neatly disposed of as a misogynist's guilty pleasure. There's more to La Specola's anatomical models than meets the male gaze. They were essential aids to medical pedagogy and obscure objects of desire, disseminating life-saving knowledge about female anatomy even as they reaffirmed the primacy of women's sexual and maternal functions. Now, more than two hundred years after their birth, the anatomical Venuses still taunt us. The morbid fantasies they inspire are reviled by feminist critics and relished by aesthetic transgressors in the Bataillean mode.

Walking from vitrine to vitrine, in La Specola, I'm mesmerized by the visceral charms of these obstetric Ophelias, floating through the centuries on suggestively rumpled sheets. I can't tear my eyes away from the hallucinogenically vivid colors of their coiled intestines, no less lovingly modeled than their unmistakably Florentine faces. Their sheets are brittle, fraying to ribbons, but they seem not to have aged a day since they were first unveiled to the public eye in 1780. Analyzing the welter of conflicting reactions, philosophical and psychological, that they inspire, I recognize these Aphrodites of the Operating Theater as disquiet muses of the Pathological Sublime---sisters of the nude sleepwalkers in Paul Delvaux's surrealist nocturnes, or of the naked victim in Duchamp's creepy, Hitchcockian last work, a museum-style diorama of a sex murder called Étant donnés. I think of the Victorian critic Walter Pater's famous meditation on the Mona Lisa:

[L]ike the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

F. Gonzalez-Crussi calls wax modeling, which replaced the cadaver on the dissection table with a lifelike simulacrum, "the first successful effort we undertook to distance ourselves from the dead. Since then, we have not ceased in our efforts to deepen the gulf."The invention of ceroplasty marks the beginning of the history of the virtual cadaver, an ongoing chronicle whose latest chapter is the Visible Human Project, in which a male corpse was sliced into 1871 millimeter-thin sections with a laser, digitized, and transformed into a navigable 3-D atlas of the human body, accessible via the World Wide Web.

Paradoxically, wax anatomical models also recall us to a time when death and disease were an everyday affair and we were able to establish what Gonzalez-Crussi calls "a certain communion with the dead." La Specola's wax women offer a taste of that sacrament.

In February, 2009, I approached Steven Pinker, a deep thinker about linguistics and cognitive science who fishes where the two streams flow together, with a request for an interview. I was on assignment for the cultural studies journal Cabinet, writing a personal essay that would intertwine my own fraught relationship to the notion of intelligence with a historically informed critique of the cultural politics of the IQ test, specifically the Stanford-Binet and its successor the Wechsler.

A professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT), Pinker has popularized his theories of language and cognition through articles in the popular press and via critically acclaimed books such as The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. The furthest thing from a vulgar Darwinian---he rejects the term "genetic determinism"as a social-constructionist slur---Pinker is nonetheless a vigorous opponent of what he contends is the ideologically inspired insistence (often from the academic left, he maintains, and typically from those in the humanities rather than the hard sciences) that we are exclusively products of cultural influences, rather than, as he puts it, "an evolutionarily shaped human nature."In his popular critique of this assumption, The Blank Slate, he takes up the sword for evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cognitive science against social constructionism.

Exhaustively knowledgeable about the science of cognition, and a foeman who gives as good as he gets (if not better) in the nature-versus-nurture culture wars, Pinker seemed the perfect foil for some of my ideas about the IQ test. Thus, I was delighted when he agreed to an informal e-mail exchange that lasted through much of February and into early March. I was equally chagrined when I had to inform him that his thoughtfully considered, sharply argued quotes didn't make it into my published essay. Happily, my guestblogger stint offered the perfect solution: publish our spirited exchange as a Boing Boing exclusive. I owe Professor Pinker a debt of gratitude for allowing me to publish our interview on Boing Boing. I'm very much the beneficiary of his deeply insightful, eloquently argued ideas; the privilege of sharpening my ideas on the whetstone of his intellect is a rare one, and I'm delighted to share that opportunity with Boing Boing's readers...

Mark Dery: I'm interested in the relationship between a facility with language---eloquence, by any other name---and intelligence. I'm especially interested in the question of whether people possessed of a certain facility with language can use language as a sort of simulation engine to create the illusion of a greater intelligence than they actually possess, whether through eloquence or, more crudely, the strategic use of a large vocabulary (specifically, arcane words or rarified jargon), highbrow allusions, and the like.

Steven Pinker: Unfortunately, there has not been much systematic work on the relation between language fluency and psychometric measures of intelligence. There are some neuropsychological and genetic syndromes in which retarded children and adults can speak deceptively well, fooling onlookers into thinking that there is nothing wrong with them. I discuss one case of hydrocephalus, and another of a child with Williams Syndrome, in chapter 2 of The Language Instinct.

Within the normal range, the word "glib"pretty much captures the common-sense intuition that it is possible to be verbally fluent without saying anything intelligent. On the other hand, even if fluency, high vocabulary and the like can momentarily fool listeners into overestimating the person's intelligence (or at least the quality of his thought, which is not perfectly correlated with intelligence---smart people can say foolish things), I suspect that the vast majority of verbally fluent people are also intelligent by standard measures. Vocabulary, as you probably know, is highly g-loaded, and on average, people who test well in verbal intelligence also test well in all other measures of intelligence (that is the basis for "g").

On your cultural critique of IQ tests: I'm not sure if you plan to reiterate the arguments of Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man (and similar critiques from Leon Kamin and others) but I assume you know that his arguments were considered highly inaccurate (to the point of dishonesty) by the scientists who study intelligence even when the book was published, and by now have been pretty much discredited.

MD: I take your point about glibness, although I'd argue that, in popular parlance, the usage implies a certain mendaciousness or sophistry or flipness---a use of language to hoodwink. Then again, perhaps that's just the Judeo-Christian mistrust of the silver tongue reasserting itself: Satan the special pleader, and all that. You write, "I suspect that the vast majority of verbally fluent people are also intelligent by standard measures."But, as you note, there's no hard data to support that presumption, correct? Obviously, your gut instinct is surely better than virtually anyone's, on this subject, but I wanted to be sure I had that right. By the way, mightn't the phenomenon I've described be a species of savantism, at least in theory? Or do I misunderstand savantism?

As for my critique of IQ tests, I'm not out to mailbox-whack the IQ test, although I am inclined to believe that no psychometric instrument is immune to the intellectual climate of the moment that gave birth to it, or uninflected by the prejudices and presumptions of the culture around it. In a previous essay, I delved deep into the MMPI, researching it in depth and, ultimately, taking the test. I was simply flabbergasted, and not a little alarmed, to discover that such a risibly biased artifact---a perfectly preserved fossil of antediluvian attitudes toward women and gays---was still in use in corporate and military contexts. It was like learning that Harvard medical school's core curriculum still included mesmerism and phrenology!

In any event, I am aware that the battle lines are drawn between social constructionists and genetic determinists. I believe we can give Darwin his due while rendering unto Gould what is his.

SP: There are no hard data (that I know of) showing that verbal glibness or sophistry is correlated with general intelligence, mainly because there are no standardized tests (that I know of) for verbal glibness or sophistry. There are measures of "verbal fluency"(e.g., how many synonyms a person can come up in some unit of time), and they are correlated with intelligence, but that's not exactly the same thing.

Retarded people with excellent language fluency are generally not thought of as savants because their abilities do not exceed that of normals, in the same sense as, say, autistic people who can do lightning-fast calculation or calendrical computation. There are some autistics who seem to be "savants"at acquiring multiple languages, but again that is not the same as silver-tongued patter.

It is not accurate to write that "the battle lines are drawn between social constructionists and genetic determinists."When it comes to psychological traits, there are no "genetic determinists"(i.e., people who believe that genes determine psychological traits such as intelligence and personality with probability = 1). The term is a debating tactic designed to misdescribe those who note that genes probabilistically influence psychological traits---that is, it is a crude form of straw-manning.

MD: Surely the sheer size of something as unsubtle as vocabulary could be quantified, and perhaps even its "breadth,"i.e., the extent to which esoteric words are represented within that data set (although esoteric is, of course, an inescapably subjective judgment)? Obviously, determining how many synonyms a person can come up with in a limited time period may measure fluency, though it may not sound the depths of the subject's vocabulary or map its outer bounds, if that makes sense. Is there a psychometric test that accurately gauges vocabulary size in, say, the same way that some such tests gauge mnemonic ability? In the popular mind, a large vocabulary is shorthand for being smart; hence the tendency to characterize eggheads as people who use arcane or polysyllabic words while the rest of us stumble along with garden-variety vocabularies. Hence, too, the ever-expanding pop-psych business literature of "vocabulary building,"which attempts to arm the corporate warrior with "word power."Both presume that words = smarts; the bigger the word, the smarter the speaker. (Of course, class animosities in American culture, manifest in the American preference for "plain speaking"and g-droppin' "tough talk,"also ensure that public speakers with big vocabularies are tarred with the charge of elitism---Palin and McCain tried to make that charge stick to the more verbally fluent Obama, in the recent race.) Of course, popular perceptions are hardly hard science, so the connection may simply be a figment of the mass imagination. My point is that we may be able to isolate testable aspects of verbal ability---vocabulary---as opposed to glibness, which as you say may not be testable. And we may be able to isolate vocabulary in a manner that tests not only for the ability to use it, on the fly, but that also gauges its size and breadth (variety).

Interesting to hear you say that "when it comes to psychological traits, there are no 'genetic determinists' (i.e., people who believe that genes determine psychological traits such as intelligence and personality with probability = 1)."I just finished interviewing a source who told me, unequivocally, that "about 50% of our personalities"is attributable to genes. Clearly, there are those who are pushing the position beyond the one you've outlined.

In any event, point taken that your use of genetic influences isn't simplistically deterministic. But your statement that I should be wary of Gould's Mismeasure---specifically, the pre-emptive nature of that statement, coming as it did before I had expressed any affinity with Gould's ideas---only reaffirms my perception that the culture war rages on, even within the secured perimeters of "value-neutral" hard science. I'm no postmodern practitioner of science studies who thinks empirical truth (small "t") is some Baudrillardian mirage (although I do believe that the Alan Sokal-style mischaracterization of the postmodern position as the belief that there's "no such thing as reality"is, to use your phrase, "a crude form of straw-manning"). But neither do I think that science, in everyday practice, can possibly remain untouched by the cultural that surrounds it or the historical moment in which it is embedded. The history of science, from social Darwinism to eugenics, Victorian "cures"for "hysterical women"to the midcentury vogue for lobotomies, is instructive, I think. Let me be emphatic: I am not, repeat not, using the cheap, guilt-by-association tactic to tar your work or the work of any who reject Gould, here. Rather, I'm simply noting that both sides of the debate see their positions as based on incontrovertible scientific evidence and their opponents as blinded by ideology. My position is that ideology is part of the cultural air we breathe; that humans are creatures of nature and culture; and that we must give both Darwin and the devil (Gould?) their due.

Of course, we part company on the question of human nature. By my lights, nothing could be more unnatural than the human animal. The naked ape is unquestionably a product of evolution, to be sure, and much of what we once thought was imbued in us by nurture or the wider society is turning out to be genetically influenced. Yet, at the same time, culture is nature, for naked apes, and is only becoming more so, as we live more and more of our lives immersed, headfirst, in the world on the other side of our screens, coming up for air at ever more rare intervals.

But now I'm talking poetry.

Thanks for hearing me out, nonetheless.

SP: Vocabulary generally makes up a substantial portion of verbal IQ tests, as well as the verbal component of SAT and GRE. My understanding is that it correlates highly with other measures of intelligence. Indeed, there is a quickie IQ test called the Wordsum that consists simply of ten multiple-choice vocabulary questions, and it correlates > .8 with IQ measured by traditional tests. Likewise, a commonly used test for intelligence in children consists of matching words to pictures; again it correlates well with other measures. There are several possible reasons why this could be so: rarer vocabulary involves more sophisticated concepts; learning words from context requires powerful inferential abilities; smart people read more and are exposed to more words. I don't know enough of this literature to know whether any have been confirmed or disconfirmed.

The degree to which words are "esoteric"is easily quantified. The frequency of words in large corpora (occurrences per million words of text) have been tallied, and are routinely used in psycholinguistics experiments.

If your informant literally said that "50% of our personalities is attributable to genes,"he or she does not understand the concept of heritability, which quantifies the percentage of variance in a trait, not percentage of a trait. If he or she said that 50% of the variation in personality is attributable to variation in genes, then he or she is not a genetic determinist, because 50% is different from 100%. No one who understands the concept of heritability and is familiar with the past hundred years of data in behavioral genetics is a genetic determinist when it comes to psychological traits. (When it comes to certain diseases, such as Huntington's, genetic determinism is correct.)

My own view, and I suspect that of most scientists, is that ideology is a nuisance that good science is designed to work around. It's like personal ego, financial conflicts of interest, methodological sloppiness, cognitive limitations, and other barriers to discovering the truth---obstacles that make doing science nontrivial, and that call for countermeasures such as peer review, open criticism, academic freedom, testability and falsifiability, and others. The fact that science has undeniably progressed, both intellectually and practically, is evidence that those countermeasures have been successful, though of course they are not perfect and cannot act instantaneously.

I also find that many specific examples alleging that scientific theories are products of culture and ideology are pretty flimsy---after-the-fact just-so stories that aren't rigorously tested against alternative explanations. Worst of all, I've never heard of anyone admitting that his own claims are culturally biased; it's always "relativism for the other guy."

MD: Yes, science always intends to work around ideology, the weasel word here being "intends."Peer review, open criticism, academic freedom, testability and falsifiability are all intended as guarantors of good science, and as a true son of the Enlightenment, I place much faith in them---but not all my faith, since peer review is only as good as the peers involved, and entire cultures can suffer from ideological blind spots, prejudices and presumptions that are the birthright of anyone born at that time, in that place, in that socioeconomic class or gender or whatever. Peer review, open criticism, academic freedom, testability and falsifiability were---more or less---alive and well in the '20s, weren't they? And yet the scientific establishment's best minds toasted the bright future promised by eugenics and state legislatures followed suit, mandating the forced sterilization of felons whose subnormal criminal minds, as any good scientist knew, were hereditary.

Regarding your assertion that "many specific examples alleging that scientific theories are products of culture and ideology are pretty flimsy---after-the-fact just-so stories that aren't rigorously tested against alternative explanations": How, then, to explain the medical practices enumerated in my earlier letter? I'm not arguing that scientific theories are entirely products of culture; nor would I deny that they are less so now, happily, than they were in the past. Rather, I'm arguing something subtly different: that in everyday practice scientific theories have, at various historical junctures, borne the deeply embossed stamp of ideology.

In the past hundred and a half years, we've witnessed the dominance of scientific theories that even in their purely theoretical form, let alone everyday practice, were sharply etched with the prejudices and presumptions of the day. I've mentioned eugenics; I'll name a few others: the 1950s vogue, in psychotherapy, for dosing with antidepressants or institutionalizing housewives suffering from what Betty Friedan later called the Problem With No Name (a suicidal dissatisfaction with the role of the happy homemaker). Psychiatry and psychosurgery have been used, throughout their morally checkered history, to bring to heel women who were feminists avant la lettre, as well as political radicals and others who questioned the ideological assumptions of the world they were born into. "Science"decreed them aberrant, and "science"dealt with them, summarily. If pills didn't work, the electroshock room beckoned, or perhaps the leucotomist's pick. Another example: What peer-reviewed journals, open debate, and falsifiability claims prevented the pathologization and in many states criminalization of homosexuality, which was only removed from the DSM-II in 1973? Who, in the peer-reviewed medical journals and openly critical medical community, stood up (until very recently) to oppose the routine surgical "reassignment"of intersex (hermaphroditic) babies, at birth, to a single gender? To be sure, hermaphroditism is anomalous in the strictly statistical sense, but the reflexive assumption that the intersexed patient must be "normalized"with the knife---like the presumption that homosexual "deviance"must be psychopharmaceutically treated---is inarguably a cultural bias, soaked through with ideology. So, too, is the not uncommon tendency, in such cases, to "rationalize"the hermaphroditic male infant with the small but fully functional penis (and male reproductive system) into a female, on the presumption that a small penis is too unendurable a humiliation for any man to bear, in American society. These are only a few examples of science corrupted by cultural bias---ideology, by any other name. If sexism, homophobia, and culturally bounded notions of the normative aren't to blame for the lamentable chapters in American medicine I've just detailed, then what alternate explanation would you posit?

As for your assertion, "I've never heard of anyone admitting that his own claims are culturally biased---it's always "relativism for the other guy." Well, I'll happily admit that my oppositional politics incline me to be wary of institutional power, whether it wears a mortarboard, a white smock, or a power suit with the requisite American flag lapel-pin. I try to correct for that bias by honoring reason, logic, empirical evidence, and the scientific method. But I'll be the first to admit that our blind spots are, by definition, unknown to us. This is precisely why even science needs its watchdogs, and why a few of them must not be peers.

In any event, this fascinating debate was intended to be a preamble to questions about the history of, or scientific validity of, the IQ test. Beyond your own work, and Gould's, who else would you suggest I read regarding the history of, controversies surrounding, and scientific validity of either the Stanford-Binet or the Wechsler (which I gather has largely if not entirely superseded the Stanford-Binet)? In IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea, Stephen Murdoch is quite critical of the Wechsler. I wondered if you were familiar with his critique. (Interestingly, he doesn't cite Gould!)

SP: Thanks for the explication, but I'm not persuaded by the examples. Even putting aside the fact that eugenics is not a scientific theory but a political policy, I don't see any evidence that the practices and policies you mentioned are connected to the ideology of the times (as opposed to being examples of stupidity, ego, error, ambition, unanticipated consequences, bad science, and so on ). Eugenics was popular among the robber-baron right and among the progressive left (e.g., Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger); was institutionalized in the American South and in Scandinavia; today it's practiced in Singapore and often rediscovered by ingenuous undergraduates. I don't see any ideological common denominator, or identifiable ideological change that correlates with its rise and fall in popularity. (As far as I can tell, the main reason for its current taboo status is the historical experience of Nazism.) The same with the medical practices you describe: most were abandoned when people became aware of the harms they led to, or were replaced by better techniques; in some cases, they are still used when the evidence suggests they can be helpful (e.g., electroshock). Some of these changes were driven by explicit moral argumentation (e.g., in the case of sex reassignment surgery or the classification of homosexuality as a "disorder") which persuaded people to change their practices. And yes, the mechanisms of open disagreement, review, moral argumentation, examination of hypotheses in the light of evidence, and so on, were effective in changing these practices; that's why lobotomies were abandoned after a couple of decades, whereas trephination, exorcism, prayer, etc. lasted for millennia.

My point isn't that science (or more generally, rational and evidence-driven argumentation, of which science is a part) could ever prevent people from trying out stupid and evil things. It's that I don't see the evidence that these stupid and evil things are inevitably, or even usually, products of the surrounding social and political ideology. Maybe they are sometimes, but that has to be demonstrated in comparisons with simpler, alternative explanations, by getting independent assessments of the prevailing ideological climate and showing that they predict which kind of bad ideas arise in a given period. The tendency I see in the science-studies mindset to treat ideology as the self-evident, only thinkable explanation.

My own books are not about IQ or IQ testing, so I don't go over the history myself. The Bell Curve, though treated as toxic by many intellectuals, has some clear historical discussion, and the journalist Daniel Seligman (who died a couple of weeks ago) wrote a history of intelligence testing a while back. An interesting article on the original embrace of intelligence testing by progressives was written by Adrian Wooldridge: "Bell Curve liberals," New Republic, February 27, 1995. Linda Gottfredsen has documented the predictive power of IQ tests in her work, and Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have many papers on the predictive power of high SAT scores in their sample of people who were given the test in early adolescence. J. B. Carroll has written a number of books and edited handbooks on intelligence, and I suspect that one or more contain histories of the field. Ian Deary is probably the most active researcher today on neural correlates of intelligence as measured by IQ tests, and Robert Plomin the most active researcher on its heritability. I also have citations to a number of reviews of Gould's book that challenge his prosecutorial history of testing:

I'm by no means an expert the particulars of individual IQ tests. The Wechsler strikes me as pretty cheesy, but that's part of the scientific interest of it: you can measure intelligence with all kinds of disparate, fishy, and amateurish-looking tests, and they all correlate with one another---Wechsler, Stanford, Raven's, SAT, Wordsum, Wonderlich, and even a three-item test devised by Shane Frederickson at MIT. Basically, any test that anyone devises that depends on what common-sense would call "intelligence"is going to pick up the same thing. This is part of the pattern in which the various subtests of any IQ tests correlate with one another, and have surprising predictive power in real-world outcomes. All of this tells us that a large part of intelligence consists of some big, robust, unsubtle dimension of individual variation. It's a bit like height: you don't need lasers to document that some people are taller than others.

The hypothesis that "while IQ is highly heritable, the environment also has massive effects"is the consensus these days, if by "environment"you mean "not the genes."It's a simple restatement of the fact that heritability of IQ is less than 1. The concession that "IQ is highly heritable"is quite a departure from the Kamin-Lewontin-Rose-Gould position: Kamin wrote in 1974, and reiterated in 1984, that "there exist no data which should lead a prudent man to accept the hypothesis that IQ test scores are in any degree heritable."

The problem is in identifying those "massive environmental effects."This is a complex question (see, e.g., the "Children"chapter in The Blank Slate). At any one historical period, and holding culture more or less constant (e.g., more-or-less middle class), the 50% or so of the variance that is not genetic (the "environmental"effect) is, as far as I can tell, due to random chance, probably in prenatal or early postnatal development of the brain; it doesn't correlate with anything in the environment you can measure.

On top of that there has been an environmental factor, probably now petering out, that increased IQ scores across the board about a standard deviation between the 1920s and the recent present (this is the Flynn effect). In addition, low-SES [socioeconomic status] kids may show bigger environmental effects than the middle class, and in addition to that, there is some factor that causes black people to score a standard deviation lower than white people, on average. Flynn used to suggest that whatever caused the Flynn effect (no one really knows) might also cause the B-W difference, but has backed off from that claim, since the B-W difference is in g, and the Flynn effect is in a slightly different constellation of mental abilities. I believe that while IQ variation has a substantial genetic component, there is enough non-genetic variance in addition that the B-W difference could be completely environmental.

MD: Respectfully, I think you're moving the goalpost---defining as "science"whatever seems most defensibly untainted by ideology. To say that eugenics was political policy, not scientific theory, is to perform a forensic sleight-of-hand, not to mention some tactical revisionism of inconvenient historical truths. I'd argue that eugenics was scientific theory that, in time, influenced political policy. If you're arguing it wasn't scientific theory, then how do we account for its defenders among the ranks of scientists, from Francis Galton to Julian Huxley to Charles Davenport to John Watson? The historical record amply evidences the vocal support of prominent scientists; as well, the racial theories undergirding eugenics were widely perceived, by popular audiences as incontrovertible fact: "Galton said it, I believe it, that settles it."Eugenics robed itself in the cultural authority of the white lab coat, legitimated its discourse with the languages of population genetics and evolutionary biology, and pleaded its case in the statehouse and the state fair based on the scientific soundness of its social program. It's a riddle to me how eugenics could have so many scientists among its defenders---claiming the mantle of science, employing the rhetoric of science, and justifying its social program in the name of science---and not believe itself to be scientific theory, nor be popularly received as such. Perhaps you can help me unriddle it.

As for the progressives you count among the company of the guilty, you'll get no argument from me on that point. But if you're arguing that the left and right are equal-opportunity eugenics offenders, and that this proves there is no "ideological common denominator,"I can't agree. Jack London and Jacob Riis were both progressives, yet both bore the stamp of social Darwinism. Are you arguing that a culture, in a given historical moment, isn't governed by prevailing ideas? Or are you conceding that, yet arguing that science stands outside culture and history, untouched by either? Perhaps the tripwire, here, is the word "ideology."I use it in the Marxist/post-Marxist sense, meaning: the hegemonic worldview of the power elite (as opposed to the narrower, purely political definition).

In that sense, I believe that eugenics was part of the warp and woof of Western thought, expressing itself in the 19th century as social Darwinism and even earlier in the notion of the Great Chain of Being. The "ideological common denominator,"throughout much of this period, is the white, patriarchal, Eurocentric, Christian worldview. Ideology is the air we breathe---the unconsidered (because self-evidently "true") prejudices and presumptions that inflect our view of ourselves and the world around us. Hierarchical dualisms (man/woman, self/Other, culture/nature, white/black, Christian/heathen, civilized/savage, empire/colony, et. al.) have structured Western epistemology for centuries; only recently have they been called into question by critical theorists and activist intellectuals who've exposed and interrogated their philosophical foundations, and the moral and ethical implications of those foundations.

The a priori assumptions that permeated the historical moments in which social Darwinism and eugenics flourished were profoundly ideological in that they manifestly served the interests of power. Ideology is the theology of power. Which is why intellectuals on both the right and left swelled the ranks of the eugenicists. Slice that stat another way, substituting class for political consciousness, and you'll find that nearly all of its adherents were white, upper-middle-class or upper class Americans and Europeans---the very flower of the ruling class. Class makes happy bedfellows of political foes, sometimes. Yes, the Third Reich made racial hygiene the untouchable third rail of public discourse, but many of its devotees---including its apologists among credentialed scientists, simply found more palatable ways to articulate such ideas, or to promote such programs. of course, you'll still find indefatigable adherents among those who consider themselves to be both members of the cognitive elite and the socioeconomic elite, some of whom are even indiscreet enough to out themselves as eugenics sympathists in front of a live microphone. I'm thinking of poor, dotty old James Watson. Oddly, it's only ever white people, most of them men, most of them upper class, who exhibit such sympathies. Women, blacks, and especially black women are curiously underrepresented among their number. Which would argue my point: that this pseudoscientific cant, legitimating the evolutionarily ordained superiority of the white, European male, is the theology of power, a theology that even some scientists ardently espoused, when the world was a little younger.

SP: Actually, the characterization of "science"that differentiates it from ideology in the case of eugenics goes back at least a century. G. E. Moore, in his famous paper introducing "the naturalistic fallacy,"specifically cited eugenics as the paradigm case of illegitimately leaping from an "is"to an "ought."And that's the criterion I was appealing to. Eugenics is not a theory of how anything works or how it came to be ("is"); it's a prescription for how to improve society ("ought"). Yes, I know, I know, postmodernists and Marxists reject the is/ought distinction, but that's one of the reasons I'm not a postmodernist or Marxist.

I'm not arguing that science, in practice, stands outside of culture and history, just that ideology, class, race, and gender interests are one subset of many sources of human folly and error, together with ego, greed, ignorance, cognitive limitations, illogic, the information available at a given historical period, and so on. I would argue that the institutions of secular reason (including science) are designed to overcome these nuisances, and that over the course of history, they more or less work, haltingly and unevenly. The exposition of the Marxist/postmodernist view that you provided in your email is well put and clear, but I think it's a dogma; it has swept the humanities, but has never been convincingly demonstrated (as I mentioned in a previous e-mail, the fact that our predecessors made blunders has numerous explanations, of which class/race/gender interests don't strike me as the most compelling). To take just one example, the intellectual opposition to eugenics, as I understand it, mainly came from the church, another group of privileged white males who subscribed to all those tenets of Western epistemology.

MD: For the record, I'm not a card-carrying Marxist, although I'm convinced that Marx is one of our most prescient, poetically eloquent critics of the cultural corrosions of capitalism. Likewise, I believe postmodernism has much to teach us about life in the Digital Age, a historical period whose salients include information overload, technological hyperacceleration, global capitalism, appropriation aesthetics (the tendency toward quotation and recombination that characterizes our visual culture, from Hollywood to the Web to gallery art). The assertion, popular in some quarters, that postmodernism entails believing there's no such thing as an empirical fact is in my opinion a straw man---the merest Sokal-ism.

But I digress.

What, in your opinion, accounts for the Flynn effect? Richard E. Nisbett has speculated that the upspike in IQ scores might have something to do with an increased emphasis, in elementary-school education, on math and related, problem-solving skills---the very skills the Wechsler measures.

SP: As I understand it, no one really knows what caused the Flynn Effect. The problem is that the effect itself has chugged along for more than 70 years, but no single putative cause ---literacy, schooling, nutrition, technology---has been increasing steadily over that time. Most likely there has been a mixture of small factors, overlapping in time, and all pushing in the same direction. They would include schooling and literacy (more so in the earlier part of the century), electronic gadgets with visual controls, and an increasing emphasis on abstract thinking in schools, businesses, and public life---what Flynn himself calls the spread of "scientific spectacles,"as reasoning styles from the sciences and social sciences have left the academy and permeated everyday discourse. This last factor is vague and hard to quantify, but may account for why the increases seem to be in the most abstract subtests of IQ tests, like similarities, analogies, and pattern extrapolation, rather than in world knowledge, memory, or mathematical calculation.

MD: I'm going to ask you to play cultural critic for a moment. Not your bailiwick, I realize, but since you obviously do not shrink from spirited debate, I thought you might be willing to try your hand at cultural commentary. My question is this: What do you think is America's relationship to Intelligence? (I capitalize the term to signal that I mean it in a mythic, or iconic, sense.) Intellectuals, especially left-leaning ones, have argued that American culture has historically been hostile to intellectualism, which is metonymic, presumably, of intelligence. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in America is the classic text for this argument. Hofstadter and others maintain that our puritan roots, and the Christian tradition more generally, have created a cast of mind that is suspicious of skeptical inquiry rather than leaps of faith. As well, the argument goes, our Benthamite utilitarianism and our embrace of laissez-faire capitalism as a national religion ensures a certain hostility toward "impractical"thought---philosophy, the arts---that has no immediate market value. At the same time, the shelves of bookstores groan under the weight of business books that console anxious executives with the knowledge that they, too, can build "word power"and pump up their memory muscles. And the Web is overgrown with pop-up ads for bogus IQ tests. On one hand, we elected that manifestly incurious C-minus student George W. Bush, and a certain segment of the public thrilled to Sarah Palin's mockery of Obama's apparently suspicious "eloquence"; on the other, many of us seem to rejoice in the knowledge that we have, at long last, a smart guy in the Oval office (although Maureen Dowd derides our brainiac-in-chief as too Spock-like in his coolly deliberative intelligence). So which is it? Do we respect intelligence, or revile it? What is our relationship, as a nation, to the notion of smartness?

SP: I hesitate to generalize about America because it is so heterogeneous. At a first cut it comprises two political cultures: a culture of the Enlightenment and a culture of honor, to use the anthropologist's term (and the title of another of Richard Nisbett's books). This corresponds roughly to the blue-state/red-state divide. David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed, cuts the pie into finer slices, and traces them back to the regions in England from which the first waves of colonists originated.

I suspect that many of the contradictions in the embrace of intellectualism come from differences among these subcountries, with the dominant strand at any time coming from the various borderline, neutral, and uncommitted blocs that tip their allegiance one way or another. In a culture of honor, the cardinal virtue is resolve, strength, deterrence, and pursuit of justice (often in the form of revenge against insults). Thinking too much corrodes these virtues, since a thinker may correctly calculate that retaliation is not in his best interests, which only emboldens his adversaries. Standing firm as a matter of constitution rather than rational choice makes your implicit threats more credible, because you can't be talked out of them. Your adversaries have more trouble making you an offer you can't refuse.

MD: You write, "What Flynn himself calls the spread of 'scientific spectacles,' as reasoning styles from the sciences and social sciences have left the academy and permeated everyday discourse. This last factor is vague and hard to quantify..."This is especially intriguing, since it belies the received wisdom, at both ends of the political spectrum, that we live in an Age of Unreason, when irrationality owns the cultural battlefield. Liberals like Susan Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason) argue that the anti-science, anti-rationalist cast of the evangelical mind, together with what she sees as the dumbing-down of the culture brought on by post-literate media (no friend of Grand Theft Auto, she), have turned us into a "nation of dunces."On the right, American Tories like George Will bemoan the flood tide of "graphic entertainments"(the dreaded video game again!), which he contends are hastening the "infantilization"of American culture, drowning us in "stupidity."Left and right make common cause, it seems, in their contempt for what Mencken called the "booboisie."

Yet you, a scientist, argue that "reasoning styles from the sciences"are permeating "everyday life."What's the channel by which these values are transmitted? More to the point, can you offer any evidence of the percolation of scientific values---the importance of skeptical inquiry; of self-critique and peer review; of falsifiable propositions based on logical, causal reasoning and material evidence---into "everyday discourse"? Our notorious scientific illiteracy has made us the laughingstock of the so-called first world: more of us believe in the literal existence of a horned-and-tailed devil than in the truth of Darwinian theory (62% versus 42%, according to a 2007 poll), and as of 1988 one in five of us was, in effect, living in a pre-Copernican cosmos, based on a National Science Foundation study that found that millions of Americans were convinced the sun revolves around the earth. Thus, I'm curious to know what evidence you've found to support the notion that the reasoning styles of the sciences, hard or social, have taken hold in the public mind.

Your use of the "culture of honor" argument makes me think of game theory---Prisoner's Dilemma, that sort of thing. But doesn't the tenacious grip of irrationalist epistemology, most notably religion, play a larger role in our attitude toward intelligence? Perhaps I'm confusing intelligence and reason, or rationalism, although by my lights they're inseparable. (I'm a creature of my culture---the scholastic culture of academe!) But surely the fact that America is more zealously religious, and more biblically fundamentalist, than so many European nations cannot be unrelated to our pervasive hostility to science in everyday life: Darwin in the classroom, stem-cell research, global-warming research, and so forth. And doesn't it logically follow that an intractable, irrational hostility toward Darwin and others who dethroned the divine would translate, in the popular mind, into a hostility toward skeptical inquiry and reasoned debate---intelligence, by any other name? Or maybe I'm using the term "intelligence"too broadly. But it simply stands to reason, in my mind, that an insistence on blind faith over proven fact correlates to a suspicion and hostility toward the intellect. Is it mere happenstance, I wonder, that so many religious traditions insist that the price of enlightenment is unplugging one's critical intellect? Whenever I hear the exhortation to turn off my mind, I reach for my Bertrand Russell.

SP: There are several dimensions to scientific thinking, and Flynn's suggestion did not address the culture of discovery in science (open criticism, testability, etc.) so much as the analytic tools that have escaped from the ivory tower and become part of conventional wisdom, everything from "zero-sum,""exponential growth,""triangulate,""circular reasoning,""fuzzy math,"and "market forces"to the very idea of taxonomic categories. An uneducated person in the 1920s who was asked "What do a fish and a crow have in common?"(one of the kinds of IQ-test questions that has shown a Flynn effect) might have replied "absolutely nothing."Today we would expect even a child to note that they are both exemplars of the category "animal,"a fact that would have been considered too banal and irrelevant for the 1920s respondent to mention. But the scientific tool of putting things in valid categories so as to generalize from them (e.g., you can deduce that a crow breathes even if you have no direct experience of that fact) has become part of our accustomed ways of thinking. This use of analytical tools from science might be independent of other aspects of scientific reasoning such as skepticism and falsifiability, not to mention an explicit embrace of intellectualism and articulateness.

I don't know of any direct evidence for Flynn's hypothesis (as I mentioned, I don't think anyone has a well-validated theory of the Flynn effect, perhaps because it was caused by many factors). You may want to look at Flynn's recent book on intelligence, or at The Rising Curve, a collection of essays (now probably out of date) that grapple with the phenomenon. Recent evidence suggests that the Flynn effect is petering out in the Western democracies.

I suspect that the American reluctance to accept evolution is not so much scientific ignorance (most people who believe in evolution don't really understand it, and probably couldn't tell you the evidence for it) as using a belief as an identity badge for moral worth and community identity (a common human vice, and another source of folly that good science tries to circumvent, not always successfully). In much of the country, to say that you doubt evolution is to affirm that you're a decent person with loyalty to family, community, and morality, opposed to the godless and amoral forces that foster pornography, urban violence, illegitimacy, and so on. This particular badge is probably a historical legacy of the fact that in much of the anarchic American West and South, religion was a civilizing force: the brawling, hard-drinking cowboys and miners only settled down with families after the women and preachers arrived (see David Courtwright's Violent Land). I think this in part explains why "family values"and "faith"are such talismans in red-state America. In Europe (and the parts of the US that are extensions of the European mindset), law and order has been maintained by government for centuries, and religion is more of a joke.

MD: For my last question, I'd like you to put yourself on the psychobiographical couch. Self-analysis, in public, is odious to the scientist in you, I suspect, but perhaps this question will go down easier if you think of yourself as a lab rat whose cortex you're dissecting in the lab.

Question: I've interviewed several subjects for this essay, all experts on intelligence, and all have had revealing stories to tell about what drew them to the subject. I'm not asking what intellectual passions led you to the subject of intelligence, but rather what formative events in your childhood struck the catalytic spark of your interest in intelligence. What was your relationship to intelligence, as a kid? You were, I suspect, the smartest kid in the room, in many situations, and knew it. How did you react to that realization, psychologically? How central to your sense of your own self-worth is your sense of yourself as smart? Do you find yourself unconsciously ranking others according to intelligence? On what do you base that estimation, in social or professional encounters? How did your immersion in the academy, where smart people congregate, change your relationship to the idea of intelligence? Do schoolyard anxieties regarding who's the smartest kid in the room still prevail, at conferences, beneath the veneer of scholarly civility? To what extent is the desire to prove one's intelligence---let's call it the Alpha Geek syndrome---and a gnawing anxiety about who's the brightest bulb in the field---Cortex Envy, I call it---shape the psychologies of academics, even in the sciences?

SP: Funny you should ask about formative childhood experiences: see my recent article (PDF) in the New York Times magazine, where I hardly shy away from self-revelation. I'm not particularly interested in intelligence as a research topic, and in fact said some rude things about it in the final pages of my first trade book, The Language Instinct: "To a scientist interested in how complex biological systems work, differences between individuals are so boring! Imagine what a dreary science of language we would have if instead of trying to figure out how people put words together to express their thoughts, researchers had begun by developing a Language Quotient (LQ) scale, and busied themselves by measuring thousands of people's relative language skills. It would be like asking how lungs work, and being told that some people have better lungs than others, or asking how compact disks reproduce sound, and being given a consumer magazine that ranked them instead of an explanation of digital sampling and lasers."Some individual-difference researchers gave me a hard time about this passage.

I only began to mention intelligence when I detected that academics' hypocrisy about the topic was a symptom of the doctrine Of the blank slate. As I wrote in my book with that title, "I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another."

Ideological denials aside, academics probably have a similar relationship to intelligence that professional athletes have to innate athletic talent. It goes into the status hierarchy, to be sure, and to all the anxieties that that triggers, but is modulated by a number of realizations. One is that there will always be colleagues and competitors who are smarter than you, so being the smartest person in the room is not an option. Another is that intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for productive work: we all have colleagues and students who are brimming with raw intelligence but never amount to much, for any of a number of reasons: they're head cases; they are so critical of everyone's work, including their own, that they never take chances or publish anything; they're lazy; they're uncreative; and so on. Conversely there are contributors who are not off the chart in raw intelligence, but who have the minimum, and who achieve stardom by being creative, indefatigable, insightful, have a "feeling for the organism,"or are just plain lucky.

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

As its name suggests, the Brooklyn-based quarterly magazine Cabinet is a wunderkammer between two covers, a Baedeker for psychogeographers, a random walk through the postmodern baroque.

Although many of its contributors are card-carrying members of the professoriat, a significant number are artists and some are "independent scholars," a discreet euphemism for defrocked academics; trust-fund autodidacts who've disappeared down the rabbit hole of their obscure obsessions; intellectual omnivores with a magpie's eye and a hummingbird's attention span who Want to Know Everything About Everything (a cardinal sin in an age of intellectual niche marketing).

Slavoj Žižek, the Plastic Man of continental philosophy, has called Cabinet "my kind of magazine; ferociously intelligent, ridiculously funny, absurdly innovative, rapaciously curious. Cabinet's mission is to breathe life back into non-academic intellectual life. Compared to it, every other magazine is a walking zombie." Zizek's emphasis on the importance of non-academic intellectualism is deeply political, a pointed jab at the intellectual foppishness and laughably extravagant self-regard of academe at its worst, typified by academic journals like October, a petting zoo for mandarins. Re/Search magazine's Industrial Culture Handbook, early Amok Press catalogues, Disinformation.com and The Baffler and Hermenaut in their heyday, Juxtapoz magazine (when it isn't taking its studious lowbrowism to sub-Bukowski extremes), not to mention the art criticism of Dave Hickey's Air Guitar and Ralph Rugoff's Circus Americanus, the Ballardian urbanism of Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG, the edgy enthusiasms of New New Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, and virtually anything by Mike Davis, 21st century socialism's unchallenged master of intellectual parkour: all of these examples of bracingly original analysis are a standing rebuke to the timidity and claustrophobic self-referentiality of too much academic cultural criticism. They remind us that the academy doesn't have a monopoly on the Act of Thinking Deeply; that some of the most critically engaged analysis of the world around us is being done by thinkers willing to wade hip-deep into it; and, to belabor the obvious, that intelligent analysis---intelligence, period---isn't an academic prerogative. (Yes, some of the writers mentioned above have been academics, but most of them keep one foot in the popular arena, and tap much of their intellectual voltage from non-academic sources.)

According to founder/editor Sina Najafi, Cabinet is committed to "the politics of curiosity." And that rage to know is evident in every one of its themed issues. (I've always loved the editorial coherence, the intellectual holism, of themed issues. Granta uses this device to brilliant effect. Why haven't more magazines followed suit, I wonder?) Its post-postmodernism notwithstanding, Cabinet exudes a Victorian gentleman-scholar eccentricity, a mauve-glove, pince-nez appetite for the curious and curiouser. Call it Richard Dadd-aism. A bouquet of titles, gathered from the magazine's 34 issues to date: "Speaking Martian"; "The Celestographs of August Strindberg"; "Incorruptible Teeth, or, the French Smile Revolution: Laughter and the Birth of Dentistry"; "The Golden Lasso: Wonder Woman and the Birth of the Lie Detector"; "The Human Telegraph: Francisco Salva's Shocking Invention"; "Captured Lightning: The Fractal Beauty of Lichtenberg Figures"; "A Minor History of Useful Corpses: Not All Bodies Molder in the Grave"; "Ingestion: The Beast Within---The Tale of the Tapeworm"; and, apropos of nothing, the "Condensed Directions for Using the Drake Electrical Vibrator, 1922."

As it happens, I've appeared in a number of issues, including the latest, Issue 34: Testing (Summer 2009). My contribution to the titular theme is "Cortex Envy," a psychobiographical essay on the IQ test in which I refract the social history of the Wechsler and the Stanford-Binet through the prism of my intellectual anxieties, rooted in a suitably neurotic childhood. Trying to make sense of the enduring effects of an IQ test I took in early childhood, I peel back the scientific "objectivity" of intelligence testing in American society, revealing a muck pond of eugenicist social engineering. Then, I guinea-pig myself by confronting the IQ test again, at the age of 49---a revealing, if harrowing, experience. (And no, you can't see my scores. But I do disclose some revealing details.)

A snip from my essay:

For much of their history, intelligence tests have been rotten with the cultural and class biases of their makers, a diagnostic deck stacked against minorities, immigrants, and those at the bottom of the wage pyramid.

[Louis Terman, inventor of the Stanford-Binet test] begrudgingly conceded that environmental factors might play some small part in IQ-test scores. For the most part, though, he was a thoroughgoing hereditarian. "High-grade or border-line deficiency...is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes," he notes, in The Measurement of Intelligence (1915). "Their dullness seems to be racial...Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers."

At the very moment that intelligence testing was sanctifying the race-based educational neglect of blacks, Mexicans, and other textbook examples of the "defective germ plasm," legislatures in 33 states were writing the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit" into law, a stroke of the pen that would lead, over time, to the coerced sterilization of 60,000 Americans. The black stork of the eugenics movement was spreading its wings across America, and in much of the era's officially sanctioned bigotry, the IQ test was a silent partner. "While America has had a long history of eugenics advocacy," notes the historian Clarence J. Karier, "some of the key leaders of the testing movement were the strongest advocates for eugenics control. In the twentieth century, the two movements often came together in the same people under the name of 'scientific' testing."

Knowing what a blunt instrument the IQ test is, what a dark and storied history it has, why am I so nervous about taking the WAIS [Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test]? Why am I so inordinately proud when I knock a few softball pitches---What is the speed of light? Where were the first Olympics held? Who was Catherine the Great? What is the Koran?---out of the park? Why do I experience a near panic attack when I can't name three kinds of blood vessels or (to my undying chagrin) the seven continents?

Read the rest in Cabinet 34: Testing, available---forgive product placement---here.

IMAGE TOP: Prison inmate taking the cube-pattern performance section of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, 1939. From Paul F. Ballantyne, American Schooling, Administrative Reform, And Individual Ability Testing: Assimilation and Sorting before World War I.

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

Unloved, underfunded, and more or less untended, the Museo Storico Nazionale dell'Arte Sanitaria---"National Museum of Healthcare," in your correspondent's me-talk-pretty-someday Italian---is, like so many of Italy's obscure museological gems, a study in abjection.

The Museo is housed in a 17th-century building, in the middle of a complex that some claim constitutes the oldest hospital in Europe: the Ospedale di Santo Spirito, erected in around 1198 by Pope Innocenzo III on the site of the Borgo Sassia, a hotel-cum-hospital for pilgrims to the nearby Holy City. "Its historic memory as an institution, recorded on its walls in frescoes ranging from the 15th to the 18th century, goes back to the 13th," writes Milton Gendel in his article "Rome's Unknown Museum Of The Holy Ghost" (PDF). But "the history of the hospital and hospitality on the site is at least five hundred years older than that," he notes. "Nero's grandmother, Agrippina, owned a suburban villa here on the right bank of the Tiber, and it was on this land that her son Gaius, known as Caligula, built his circus. In Nero's reign, St. Peter was crucified head down in the middle of the race track, having been condemned for proselityzing the Christian religion, which was held to be an anti-state activity before the Emperor Constantine, three centuries later, was himself converted." (Somewhere, Sam Harris heaves a sigh of regret for All That Might Have Been...)

During the 15th century, the hospital accepted unwanted babies via a revolving drum built into a wall, which enabled mothers to make ATM-style deposits anonymously by pushing their babies through, then yanking a bellpull, which alerted nuns on the other side. The foundlings were reared as wards of the hospital. "If the consigner did not care to remain unknown a receipt was given," writes Gendel. Either way, "the child was tattooed on the right foot with the double-armed cross of Santo Spirito."

The Museo is of interest to us because of the Sala Flajani, whose heart is the anatomical collection of the physician Giuseppe Flaiani (1741-1808). A musty salon whose four walls are lined with antique cabinets, it contains dried anatomical preparations; the odd---and I do mean odd---fetus swimming in preservative, its features blurred by decay; a collection of stones removed from the livers, kidneys, and bladders of Santo Spirito patients during the 19th century (collect them all!); and some wax anatomical models executed in the late 1700's by the sculptor Giovanni Battista Manfredini in collaboration with the anatomist Carlo Mondini. (Mondini is best known for his research on the anatomy of the eye and on the causes of deafness; he identified the congenital deformation of the inner ear known as Mondini's dysplasia. But what endears him to me is his 1777 discovery of the location of eel ovaries, "which for centuries had been sought after in vain," according to an 1879 U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries report. Who knew?) Manfredini is renowned---okay, renowned among medical historians and connoisseurs of the irretrievably weird---for his terracotta obstetric models, a set of which are installed in the Museo Universitario di Storia Naturale e della Strumentazione Scientifica in Modena, Italy. With expressions familiar from the iconography of Catholic kitsch, yet posed salaciously, like anatomical strippers---one model peels back her flesh to expose her gravid womb---Manfredini's women inspire a kind of semiotic indigestion. And that, as Martha would say, is A Good Thing.

We orbit the room, taking in the dessicated fetus, a mummified Alien Gray, old beyond imagining yet so young it never saw its first birthday. A time traveller frozen in the wind tunnel of years, it leans into the oncoming days.

We stare at a jaunty trio of malformed doll skeletons sharing a joke: one is talking his arms off, living up to the Italian stereotype, while his death's-headed friend grins broadly, as all gaping skulls do.

We look pityingly at a pair of pickled foetuses clinging to each other in a bottle of formalin, the Romulus and Remus of the carnival midway.

A full-sized wax model of a man stops us dead in our tracks, his body unzipped from his upper lip all the way to his groin, the flaps of flesh peeled back for our edification. But he has the last laugh, waggling his tongue obscenely, eyes closed, savoring the moment.

Weirdest of all is a display of two crudely sculpted clay heads, fitted with false teeth and glass eyes. They'd look more at home on a Santería altar than here, in the inner sanctum of an 18th-century medical museum. Beside them lolls what appears to be a skinned, inexpertly stuffed human infant, head propped pensively on its hand.

The Sala Flajani is Jame Gumb's idea of a garage sale. A cabinet of wonders curated by Joe Coleman. The waiting room for Disney's Haunted Mansion, as reimagined by Julia Kristeva. Or all, or none, of the above. Perhaps Babelfish puts it best, with that crackbrained, syntactically fractured robot wisdom that sometimes manages, by dumb machine luck, to eff the ineffable. Translating the museum's webpage, it describes the Sala Flajani as housing "a merciless sample of birth deformity or morbid. These preparations anatomo-pathological...include skulls of fetuses and small skeletons, some of which macrocephaly and a two-man. In addition to this overview of deformities in wood shelving in the purest pink empire is gathering a collection of wax."

And what macrocephalic two-man, anywhere in our purest pink empire, can argue with that?

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. [...] There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this queer way... In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life... Their skulls (some quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now screeching through eternity.

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

On a recent flight to Rome, I found my sleep-deprived thoughts turning to the question that has launched a thousand doctoral dissertations: Why is Hannibal Lecter an Italophile?

He wasn't always. When we first meet the debonair, serial-murdering doctor, in the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, he's curled up with a copy of Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. We can see from the class signifiers he flashes---waspish wit, feline grace, courtly manners, and refined, Old Money tastes---that he's a highbrow degenerate (in the evolutionary, Max Nordau sense of the word), struck from the mythic mold that gave us real-life archetypes such as Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and the Marquis de Sade, as well as their fictional kin (most notably, Count Dracula (with whom Lecter shares many supernatural traits). His unabashed Eurocentrism would gladden George Will's wizened heart, but he hasn't yet outed himself as a flaming Italophile.

By Silence of the Lambs, however, the Lecter of the first book, who was little more than a few memorably zingy lines, glued together with attitude, has evolved into a suave, mordantly witty bogeyman for the age of the branded lifestyle: Milton's Satan in a Prada suit. This is a man-eater who would never use the wrong knife when slicing out your sweetbreads and sautéing them in a beurre noisette before your dying eyes. He's a card-carrying member of the cultural elite, a status that Harris signals through Lecter's exhaustive knowledge of Italian high culture. His tastes in interior decoration, in his cell in a prison for the criminally insane, run to pencil sketches of Florentine scenes: "the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo, as seen from the Belvedere." He admonishes Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee who's interrogating him, to look up the early Italian Renaissance painter Duccio if she wants to see an accurate depiction of a crucifixion, and to pay Titian's Flaying of Marsyas a visit, at the National Gallery, if she wants to study the fine points of human-skinning. He famously eats a census-taker's liver with "fava beans and a big Amarone" (a signature Italian dish, paired with an Italian wine) and offers Starling a clue to her case in the form of a quote from the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.

In Hannibal, Lecter might as well work for the Italian national tourism board. His manor-born elegance, classical erudition, and, most of all, pitch-perfect taste are inextricable from his deep immersion in Italian culture, which for Harris (and presumably his mass audience) is shorthand for the profound knowledge, as sensual as it is intellectual, of all that makes life worth living---a cultural patrimony bequeathed to the world by the land that gave us the Roman empire and the Renaissance, Verdi and the Vespa, Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano, la dolce vita and menefreghismo (the Fine Art of Not Giving a Fuck, according to Nick Tosches). Lecter lives in Florence, where his nonpareil mastery of Dante, Florentine history, and archaic Italian---he demonstrates "an extraordinary linguistic facility, sight-translating medieval Italian and Latin from the densest Gothic black-letter scripts"---wins him the position of curator of the Palazzo Capponi. (Well, that, and the fact that he hastened the former curator's shuffle off this mortal coil.) Lecter shops for exquisite unguents at the Farmacia of Santa Maria Novella and tartufi bianchi at the gourmet emporium Vera dal 1926; reads himself to sleep with the piquant correspondence of a 15th century Venetian; accessorizes his mental Memory Palace with the Riace bronzes. Naturally, his mother is "a high-born Italian, a Visconti." It's all very Ted Bundy-under-the-Tuscan-Sun, Lucrezia Borgia-meets-ladies-who-lunch.

The question is: How did we get here? At what point did Italian culture become the capstone of the taste/class pyramid, morphing seemingly overnight from lowbrow to highbrow? At what specific historical moment, and by what cultural logic, did the fickle alchemy of mandarin taste transform balsamic vinegar into Bottled Essence of Snob Appeal, fetishized by status-conscious bobos who dole it out at dinner parties with the sort of breathless reverence they used to reserve for lines of Peruvian blue flake?

Not long ago, in the racialized anthropology of the late 19th century and the eugenic "science" of the early 20th, the "Mediterranean races" were demonstrably inferior to Nordic man. In 1924, congress passed the Johnson Act, which radically restricted immigration from the Mediterranean countries (as well as Eastern Europe) to forestall further pollution of the Anglo gene pool.

In the '70s, when I was a teenager growing up white and middle-class in the ardently Aryan suburbs of Southern California, "Italian" was a mama-mia, that's-a-spicy-meatball punchline, an ethnic caricature sketched in bold strokes: Mama Celeste frozen pizzas; Dean Martin singing "That's Amore"; the LaBella family, proprietors of the local Italian restaurant, the one with the inevitable rainbow-colored candles in the straw-wrapped Chianti bottles. Squid---no one called it "calamari"---was bait; pasta meant spaghetti---no one called it "pasta"; and radicchio, arugula, and fresh parmesan were unknown, at least to WASPs. (To this day, my suburban relatives obligingly produce a can of plastinated Kraft cheese dust when I ask for parmesan.) When did things change? Their problematic mix of ethnic stereotyping and ethnographic fact notwithstanding, were the Godfather movies (1972, 1974) instrumental in introducing WASP America to an Italian America that, for all its internecine bloodletting and dese-and-dose goombah-ism (as reflected in the Hollywood eye) also preached a conservative gospel of folkways and famiglia values (gangster family values, ironically, but no less traditional for that) and hard work? To a teenager adrift in the suburban badlands of San Diego, whose psychic geography was cratered by divorce and PTSD'd by Vietnam and Watergate and Helter Skelter, Connie's wedding, at the beginning of The Godfather, offered a seductive glimpse of an ethnic otherworld---the Old World teleported to the New World, with all its close family ties and cherished traditions magically intact.

After college, in the mid-'80s, I would go East, to be part of the advancing guard of bohemianization making the Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn safe for alt.culture. Raised in the land of puka-shell necklaces and huaraches, where real-life Malibu Barbies and Bitchen Dudes disported themselves in the Endless Summer, I marveled at the studiously sullen young guys (codeword: guido) in the regulation tight T-shirts; equal parts greaser, disco stud, and hip-hop homeboy, they seemed to be channeling John Travolta's Tony Manero, some Italian-Stallion take on Mailer's white negritude, and, incomprehensibly, a collective memory of the Doo-Wop '50s. Shrines to patron saints sprouted throughout the neighborhood; in one front yard, a life-sized Saint Lucy held a plate with her plastic eyeballs glued to it, like a waiter serving canapés. I was enthralled by the thinly veiled paganism of the annual feast and procession of Maria SS. Addolorata, in which celebrants (just like the revelers in the Feast of Saint Rocco in The Godfather II!) carry a sad-eyed statue of the Blessed Virgin through the streets, where the devout festoon her gown with paper money, as they have done since 1948. The parade ends at the neighborhood's symbolic heart, the Mola Di Bari social club, which takes its name from the Southern Italian town to which many of the neighborhood's earliest Italian immigrants can trace their bloodlines. At the same time, there was an ugly side to this picturesque translation of smalltown Southern Italy into Brooklyn's doo-wop vernacular, exacerbated by the culture wars between Italian-American locals and the hipster homesteaders gentrifying the hood. After one too many encounters with carloads of goons yelling "faggot," and a horrifying episode in which a bat-wielding gang attacked a longhaired Asian-American guy, my wife and I joined the bobo exodus to the upstate burbs.

To be sure, Our Friends from Corleone also packed their blood feuds and backwater ignorance in their psychic baggage when they boarded the ship for Ellis Island. But the occasional horsehead in bed seems a small price to pay for idyllic afternoons in the sun, sipping Trebbiano d'Abruzzo while the accordions play "C'é La Luna Mezzo O Mare." Harry Lime had it right in The Third Man: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed---but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." (Never mind the fact that, as my Swiss friends point out with some heat, the cuckoo clock is a German invention. You get the point.) In the popular imagination, mythic Italy draws its symbolic voltage not only from its relatively newfound role as a bobo emblem of gracious living and good taste, brought to you by Williams-Sonoma, but also from the delicious depravity of all those Borgias and Medicis, not to mention the Caesars, whose sybaritic excesses thrilled the pants off Gibbon's readers. Lecter loves his tartufi and his Amarone, but he also loves the operatic passions and gothic brutality of the Quattrocento, when rough justice for, say, conspirators against the Medici capo Lorenzo the Magnificent meant being hung, naked, from a high window in the Palazzo Vecchio, as an object lesson---and guaranteed crowd-pleaser---for the rabble. The Mythic Little Italy of our multiplex fantasies, from Goodfellas to Moonstruck to The Sopranos, is among other things a wish-fulfillment fantasy for WASPs---middle America's dream of giving its superego the one-armed salute and partaking of the emotional catharses enjoyed by those passionate Mediterraneans. Of course, there are two sides to the Return of the Repressed: heads, you get Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, indulging in a nighttime dip in Rome's Trevi fountain; tails, you get Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, beating another mobster to bloody jelly because the guy insulted him.

All of which is to ask: What does Italy mean? What does it signify, in the dream life of the West? A hopelessly knotty question, too complex to be teased out here. During my recent travels in Rome, Florence, and Bologna, I wondered if I was ever really seeing Italy, or if a million media apparitions---the Italy of The Talented Mr. Ripley and HBO's Rome, Death in Venice and The Monster of Florence---would always swarm before me, obscuring the thing itself, like those transparent overlays depicting the musculature and the nerves and the lymphatic system, in anatomy textbooks. In his masterful 1964 study The Italians, a cultural critique that is to Italy as Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude is to Mexico, Luigi Barzini is thoughtful on this point. In a poetic, unsettling meditation on the siren song of Mythic Italy, he talks about foreigners who visit the country and never leave, metamorphosing into that liminal being, the expatriate, suspended in that Phantom Zone between cultures. Many attempt to go native; some succeed in becoming more Italian than the Italians themselves, in some paradoxical sense. And many, as Barzini notes,

find, at one point, like Hawthorne, that they can no longer leave... They can no longer face the harsher world where they came from, where they see things perhaps too clearly, and where every word in their familiar language has a precise meaning. They have become hopelessly addicted to the amiable and mild ways of Italy. Many also have nobody left to go back to. They cling to their little lair, the view of the sea from the hill, the view of the Coliseum from the window if you turn your neck far enough to the right, the view of the Grand Canal, the roofs of Florence, the decayed villas of Rapallo... Italy is filled with people growing old, who can no longer think of leaving, living alone, comforted by a cat or a dog, waited on by a servant, an honest person at times but often enough an unscrupulous maid who feeds her family with what she steals. A day comes when these old people grow ill and helpless, far from the familiar sights and sounds of their youth, self-exiled for reasons which have become dim in their memories, in an alien place which they never really saw as it is and quite understood... Many die every year and are buried hurriedly in the corner of an Italian cemetery reserved for heathens or heretics; some bodies are shipped home to practically unknown and indifferent relatives. Many die without having really discovered why they chose to live the last years of their lives in Italy, of all places.

Cue the Godfather Waltz.

Image: Hannibal Lecter, taking the air in Florence. From the movie Hannibal. Reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

So, what is this thing, the Pathological Sublime? Many, if not most, Boing Boing readers who have done the grad-school death march will be familiar with the sublime, a durable philosophical meme that, arguably, dates back to the Greeks but is more typically associated, in academic circles, with Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The invaluable Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism helpfully defines the sublime as:

a sense of wonder or awe (colored by fear, according to English theorists), which is created by the experience of grandness or 'vastness'; and in some cases writing on the sublime comes close to being nothing more than a list of objects said to produce the effect in question: mountains, oceans, Milton, an angry deity, etc. At its most sophisticated, however, 18th-century reflection on the sublime shows a new interest in aesthetic psychology, with attention shifting away from the sublime object and onto the response of the reading or perceiving subject.

The Dictionary goes on to note that this tactical interest in the psychological reverberations of the sublime was in some ways a reaction against neo-classical virtues such as order, symmetry, and The Beautiful, with which it (the sublime) is often counterpoised.

(This cultural dynamic replayed itself in the postmodern era, when critics such as Jean-Francois Lyotard rebooted the sublime as a corrective to the instrumental rationalism of modernism. Personally, when I need to destabilize "repressive totalities," I reach for a Bombay martini, the reliable culprit behind many of "Poppy" Bush's snarling rants to the startled press corps on Air Force One, according to several Bush family bios.)

In time, the sublime came to be associated with Romanticism, especially German Romanticism. The 19th century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich is the poster boy for brooding, fog-haunted sublimity. His "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (1818) is a textbook example of the human psyche overwhelmed by the illimitable vastness and awful grandeur of nature, whose monumental scale and mysterious workings and, more to the point, utterly alien lack of purpose (teleologically speaking, at least) or meaning (in any human sense, anyway) combined to make the viewer's sense of self dwindle suddenly to a guttering spark, alone in the cosmos. (Paul Bowles anatomizes this phenomenon with his usual surgical skill in a marvelous little reverie called "The Baptism of Solitude".)

But the go-to guy for the sublime, as we know think of it, was the 18th century conservative politician and philosopher Edmund Burke. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Burke drove a wedge between the accepted definition of the sublime and prevailing notions of beauty, arguing that, in our psychological experience of sublime nature, delight and terror---a sort of epistemic vertigo, in which our sense of our place in the order of things is unsettled---commingle disconcertingly. "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature...is astonishment," wrote Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry. "And astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror."

Pardon my grad-school seminar. But I had to tell you these things, by way of background, to make sense of the Pathological Sublime. Back in the late '90s, while researching an essay on "Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque" for my book The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, I was thinking about the fervent cult following that had sprung up, like toadstools in the cultural unconscious, around the morbid photos of Joel-Peter Witkin. I was thinking, too, about the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and its growing status as a must-destination for medical-goth tourists---Hannibal Lecter's idea of family fun. Felicitously, the Mütter's beloved (and now late and much-lamented) curator Gretchen Worden faxed me what I would come to regard as the skeleton key to the deeper meanings of these subcultural phenomena, in the form of a brief, unsigned essay from the May 21, 1845 issue of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.

Worden was emphatic in her belief that the author of the anonymous essay was none other than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a thought leader in the medical community of his day as well as a celebrated wit, poet, popular essayist for Harper's, and author of the best-selling collection of squibs and vignettes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). The evidence seems to be on her side: certainly, the droll style is vintage Holmes. It's a deliciously bizarre little bon-bon, well worth searching out. (Lawrence Weschler reproduces the "marvelous unsigned item," virtually in its entirety, in the endnotes to his book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, about the Museum of Jurassic Technology.)

Titled "Illustrations of Tumors among the Chinese," the item in question is a droll, tongue-in-cheek (?) review, by a doctor addressing the medical men who made up the journal's readership, of an exhibition of oil paintings of Chinese patients with skin diseases, many of them characterized by grotesque tumors. The author exhorts "worshippers of morbid anatomy" to savor the perverse pleasures of these startling images. The fact that "these monstrous diseased growths are very serious things to our poor fellow-creatures of the Celestial empire" doesn't inhibit the writer's artistic appreciation of another man's afflictions. (Edward Said, White Courtesy Phone: cringing at the author's genteel colonialism, the contemporary reader reminds himself that Holmes---granting that Holmes is the author---was writing in the Victorian age, when the Great White Male's self-satisfied perch atop the Social Darwinian ladder was plain for all to see, received anthropological wisdom well-supported by craniometric fact and cultural achievement.) Transposing the Burkean sublime into the key of pathological anatomy, the author writes, "The truth is, the practiced eye kindles at the sight of any very remarkable excrescence, as the traveler's does at that of lofty mountains or colossal edifices."

Holmes has done a fascinating thing, here, shifting the philosophical gaze from wild nature (storm-tossed seas, vertiginous chasms, Olympian mountains) to the human, specifically the human body (and by implication its mysterious interior, a lead pursued by the photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg in The Sacred Heart, a gasp-inducing book of images from operating rooms, such as Hellweg's photo of a ribcage jimmied open to expose a heart beating in a slurry of gore, the body exhaling its heat from the newly opened crevice like the corporeal equivalent of a hydrothermal vent). Holmes pushes the envelope of Burke's horror into what for Burke would have been regions of unimaginable strangeness: the abject flesh of the pathological (and, by extension, teratological) body. A transport of aesthetic rapture that is equal parts horror and wonder, the Pathological Sublime is inspired by dark matter that holds beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. Refusing the moral gaze, the Pathological Sublime surrenders to the spell, at once aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical, of the fascinating (a word whose etymological roots are instructive: from the Latin fascinatus, "bewitch, enchant"), no matter the moral or ethical cost.

Holmes's insights have proven invaluable in my thinking about what makes "worshippers of morbid anatomy" tick---why so many of us fall prey to the uncanny seductions of La Specola's obstetric Venuses and the wax moulages of pathological conditions on display at museums such as the Mütter. It's also helping me wrestle with questions like: When do we avert our eyes in horror, and when do we reserve the right to stare, in a world where any morning's forwarded e-mail can bring us face-to-face with terrorist trailers for real-life beheadings or worse, images that once seen will replay themselves forever in the multiplex of the mind, scarring us in ways we don't yet understand? Where does aesthetics end and ethics begin? (Sontag had some thoughts on this in Regarding the Pain of Others, but her moral ponderousness, her ever-present sense of her own gravitas, crushes flat the subversive glee in Thinking Bad Thoughts and Looking at Forbidden Things that I believe is essential to free thought.) What are the long-term effects, in individual as well as societal terms, of gawking at the atrocity exhibition?

Recently, while rolling these ideas around in my head, I decided, on a whim, to try to track down the paintings in Holmes's review. Incredibly, I believe I've located the very images whose virtues he extolled; I believe, as well, that I'm the first scholar to have done so. Tucked away in the basement of Yale University's Historical Medical Library are the archives of the Reverend Dr. Peter Parker, a Yale graduate and the first American surgeon to practice in China. A medical missionary, Parker established the first American hospital in Guangzhou and, while there, commissioned the Chinese artist Lam Qua to paint a series of before-and-after portraits of patients suffering from tumors, which Parker surgically removed. We know, from Stephen Rachman's illuminating essay, "Curiosity and Cure: Peter Parker's patients, Lam Qua's portraits," that Parker was in Boston in 1841, lecturing to "an enthusiastic audience gathered at a special meeting of the Boston Medical Association"---a presentation Parker illustrated with the Victorian equivalent of PowerPoint: a series of photorealistically accurate paintings of patients with unspeakable tumors, and of those same sufferers delivered from their agonies by Parker's deft scalpel. I believe Holmes was in the audience at one of Parker's lectures, and that the brief, untitled review in the Journal is his response to Lam Qua's astonishing images, "hand-painted dream photographs" (Dali) of pathologist's nightmares.

Rachman argues that the Parker paintings drew crowds of medical men---for purely professional reasons, ostensibly, although Holmes's little essay debunks that notion neatly---at "a time when Americans began to participate on a mass scale in the business of curiosity" through P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York City, dime museums in other metropolises, and carnival midways in small towns. Even now, he argues, the paintings "remain 'curiosities,' uncontrolled growths like the tumors they present, artifacts that startle tact and science rather than promote scientific and cultural order." He cites, in support of his argument, a telling "bit of undated doggerel" found inside one of the cabinets containing the rarely exhibited paintings:

When the American Academy in Rome appointed me a scholar in residence for two weeks this summer, an evil gleam kindled in my eye. I knew exactly what I wanted to do: worship Italian cooking in its birthplace like some foodie penitent, a gastro-fundamentalist version of those frighteningly devout pilgrims who earn plenary indulgences by ascending, on their knees, the steep marble stairs of the Piazza di Porta San Giovanni in Rome. (Pontius Pilate's staircase, allegedly, lugged all the way to from the Holy Land to the Holy City in the year 326. A wood casing protects the venerated steps; strategically cut openings reveal what are purported to be Christ's bloodstains. Believer beware...)

That was my first, albeit covert, order of business.

My Official Reason for Being in Italy was to research my book-in-progress, The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation of the paradox of awful beauty---beheld things whose retinal seductions are irresistible yet whose content is morally horrific, politically incorrect, or at the very least, viscerally repulsive. (About which, more shortly, in my next post.)

The second item on my hidden agenda was to convince the editors of Boing Boing to let me blog my Grand Tour, which I hoped would be of interest to like-minded Mutants. With the editors' blessing, I would chronicle my encounters with Wonderful Things&trade in a style that, in my dreams, crossed the scholarly fastidiousness of Charles Willson Peale with the deadpan urbanity Rod Serling, whose brand of suave always hit that sweet spot between Mad Men and the mortician's prep table.

I'm not being glib, here. In his famous natural-history museum, Peale was one of the first to embrace the logic of the Linnean taxonomy, a paradigm-shift away from the jumbled cabinets of curiosity, or "wonder closets," of the 17th century, whose intent was not to rationalize and secularize/de-sacralize the world, but to inspire wonder and horror at wild nature and exotic cultures in a time when fact and fable were conjoined twins. Boing Boing's insistence that it is a "directory" implies a certain Enlightenment epistemology, an ordering impulse, the same desire to Explain the Mystery of It All that flickers through the pop sociology and scientific edutainment of TED videos, WIRED articles, and Gladwell lectures. At the same time, Boing Boing is all about "wonderful" things---tagged by category, to be sure, yet experienced by the reader as a free-associated stream of images and ideas and events. The site is a wunderkammer of the Web, where a post about Jack Kirby's comic-book retellings of readers' dreams might follow an item about a summer camp for atheist kids or a link to a photo that does (or does not) bear an uncanny resemblance to the famous image of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. The implicit logic, here, is less that of the diligently taxonomized archive than that of the madcap cabinet of curiosities, where the prehistoric insect embedded in a piece of amber sits next to the bona fide unicorn's horn, the anencephalic fetus in a vitrine full of brandy keeps company with the mummified mermaid on the shelf beside it.

I'm thrilled by the prospect of submitting these sights, and my insights, for your sharp-witted consideration. In my experience as a reader and a writer, the bb multitudes are smarter by an order of magnitude than nearly any avant-pop, mass/cult audience I've encountered. As important, you've earned your weirdness stripes through frequent exposure to the unkillable GOATSE meme. Over breakfast.

As I go, I'll be test-driving arguments for my book-in-progress; any Mutant whose comments sharpen my analysis or inspire previously unconsidered angles of intellectual attack will of course be cited in my acknowledgements.

Is all of this a bit much for a Monday morning? If so, my apologies. But I never promised you a unicorn chaser.

Image: "The Artist in His Museum," Charles Willson Peale, self-portrait, 1822. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George W. Elkins Collection. Used under the Fair Use provision.