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The somnambulist's hour: unruly bodies and unruly modernism, 1913-1947

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The somnambulist's hour: unruly bodies and unruly modernism, 1913-1947

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Content The Somnambulist’s Hour Unruly Bodies and Unruly Modernism, 1913-1947 by Samantha Carrick A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2016 Copyright 2016 Samantha Carrick Table of Contents Introduction: A Born Somnambule………………………………………………………….……1 Chapter One: Feeling As If Dead: Septimus, Francis and the Zeppelins Above………………...26 Death from Above 1915………………………………………………………………….31 Shell Shock………………………………………………………………………………45 How Do We Solve a Problem Like Septimus?..…………………………………………50 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….71 Images from Chapter One………………………………………………………………..76 Chapter Two: A Most Far-Reaching Obedience: Somnambulism & Weimar Cinema………….83 German Modernism……………………………………………………………………...85 Psychoanalyzing the Sleepwalker………………………………………………………101 Before the War………………………………………………………………………….107 Becoming Cesare……………………………………………………………………….110 Becoming the Archetype………………………………………………………………..117 Caligari Redux………………………………………………………………………….123 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...132 Images from Chapter Two……………………………………………………………...137 Chapter Three: Precarious Bodies: Sleepwalking & Labor Unrest in American Animation…..146 Why Funny?...…………………………………………………………………………..149 The Hard Work of Humor………………………………………………………………156 Dream Walking…………………………………………………………………………165 Labor Unrest Moves West……………………………………………………………...170 Walking the Line………………………………………………………………………..177 Characters on Strike…………………………………………………………………….180 Pluto the Somnambulist………………………………………………………………...182 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...190 Images from Chapter Three…………………………………………………………….192 Coda: The New Sleepwalker…………………………………………………………………...202 Images from the Coda…………………………………………………………………..209 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….214 Our dreams have been assaulted by a memory that will not sleep. —From “The Orchestra” by William Carlos Williams That somnambulistic melody That sleep walking strain It comes a stealing when the shadows creep It sets you reeling when you’re fast asleep It seems to want you It seems to taunt you It seems to linger in the night to haunt you; — “Somnambulistic Tune,” lyrics by Gene Buck Introduction A Born Somnambule This project begins and ends with Robin Vote. Robin, the mysterious heroine of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was my first sleepwalker, and I followed her path into the darkness unsure of what I’d find. Robin is the heart of Barnes’s famous lesbian novel, which was originally titled La Somnambule, or the sleepwalker, after her character who is described admiringly as a “born somnambule.” But despite her centrality, Robin has more power to Barnes’s novel in her absence than in her presence, flitting in and out of the story. Largely missing from the narrative itself, she is its obsessive focus. The trail she leaves through the emotional lives of Nightwood’s other characters—whether Barnes’s own stand-in Nora Flood, Robin’s first husband Baron Felix Volkbein or the eccentric doctor Matthew Might-Grain-Of-Salt-Dante-O’Connor—burns hot. She appears mysteriously, fainting amidst tropical foliage in a Parisian hotel suite; she disappears abruptly, leaving her husband and son in the lurch, only to reappear on the arm of the American Nora who in turn finds herself abandoned and devastated by Robin. 1 This pattern repeats until the book culminates with Robin and Nora—clearly Robin’s truest partner by Barnes’s estimation—reunited in an abandoned folly on Nora’s family estate in Upstate New York. This project began as a pursuit of Robin, and of the answer to why her somnambulism was spoken of so deferentially. When I began, the only other sleepwalkers I could think of were Cesare the somnambulist-murderer from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Mike Birbiglia’s autobiographical story from Sleepwalk with Me. I also had a vague recollection of the sleepwalking Heidi from a television adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s novel that I’d seen as a child. 1 Her room, number twenty-nine at the Hôtel Récamier across from Saint-Suplice, remains available to tourists. Carrick 2 There seemed little in common among the three other than the mysterious affliction that made their bodies so unruly. And it was this unruliness that so intrigued me. That this condition could make the body move during sleep—a state so significant to us we devote entire sections of our drugstores to its pursuit—leaving the body exhausted by morning, or if woken suddenly much worse, was fascinating. Hell, it was mysterious enough that it had been used as a murder defense repeatedly, with mixed results. 2 Some juries seem quite persuaded that any violence committed while asleep must be the work of an innocent. A madman, perhaps, but someone who is innocent in the eyes of the law. But just as many seemed to find sleepwalking a poor excuse for violence. The sleepwalker was just enacting violence they had planned all along. Or was faking their fit of somnambulism to begin with. So I started with Djuna Barnes and Robin Vote. I pursued Robin, described by her pungent smell “which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire… the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two 2 See for example, the cases of Simon Fraser who killed his 18-month-old son in 1878 Glasgow (Couper 71); Holocaust survivor Wasyl Gnuypiuk who was hung for the murder of his landlady in Lincoln, England in 1962; U.S. Sergeant Willis Boshears who killed Jean Constable in Wethersfield, England in 1960 (Ottawa Citizen 41); Kenneth James Parks drove fourteen miles to kill his mother- and father-in-law in 1987 (Lewiston Journal 1A) and his eventual acquittal made Canadian legal history in the case Regent v. Parks in 1992 where the court referred to Parks’s condition as “automatism (sleepwalking)” (R. v. Parks). A TV movie inspired by the case starring Hilary Swank was released in 1997. Spaniard Antonio Nieto was convicted of murdering his wife and mother-in-law while claiming to be dream of attacking ostriches in 2001 (Diario Sur), while in 1943 sixteen-year-old Jo Ann Kiger was acquitted after killing her father and brother during a nightmare (Recorder 1). In 2004, San Diego’s Steven Reitz was convicted of murdering his girlfriend Eva Weinfurtner on Catalina Island; his case was later covered by Dateline in an episode called “Deadly Dreams” (2008). In general, the defendants tend to be men and the victims tend to be romantic partners, the people most likely to be sleeping beside the men when they awake. The defense persists and has become more popular as sleeping pills and other sedatives have become more popularly prescribed. This premise is explored in the 2013 Steven Soderbergh film Side Effects. Carrick 3 worlds” (Barnes 34). I followed this somnambule, always stuck somewhere between the world of sleep and the world of the living, inhabiting an unruly body that moves and acts without the consent of her conscious mind. Robin is the center of the narrative and drives the plot with her romantic entanglements, but remains largely absent from the novel itself, instead coming into focus most visibly in conversation rather than action. While Robin is the topic of conversation and object of obsession for the entire novel, she herself speaks only one hundred and ten words. Most often her dialogue is related through the hearsay of another character during her absence; one character reflects upon the fact that imagining her is impossible until she was no longer there, when she leaves “a sensation of beauty without its details” (39)—hardly a description I could pass on to a police sketch artist. But the vague details of her form only serve to mimic the amnesia that strikes the sleepwalker upon waking—leaving them only with questions: what am I doing out of bed? Where have I been? What have I done? Based partly on the great love story of Barnes’s own life, Nightwood tells the story of a false Viennese Baron who falls in love with a young American Robin who gives birth to their son but quickly turns to drink and soon leaves him. 3 She takes up with another American woman Nora a publicity agent for the circus who is Robin’s true love. Soon, however, Robin resumes wandering and carousing again and leaves Nora for a wealthy and decrepit widow, Jenny Petherbridge, though they are eventually reunited. All these misadventures are observed and commented upon at length by Dr. Matthew O’Connor, a gay cross dressing quack-cum- philosopher who functions as both the chorus and as the actual protagonist of the novel with his 3 Barnes famously denied being a lesbian claiming she “just loved Thelma [Wood]” on whom Robin Vote is at least partially based (Broe 165). Wood bedded several other famous expatriates including photographer Berenice Abbott and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (Herring 156, 158). Carrick 4 pages-long speeches about the state of the world. Instead of remaining present in a novel devoted to her, Robin wanders, both geographically around Europe and back to America, and romantically. Barnes makes no account of Robin’s history or motivations and we see only the path of emotional destruction she leaves in her wake. And let me reiterate: this is a novel entirely obsessed with Robin herself. Aside from the opening chapter, which introduces her husband’s dubious family history and desperate need to appear legitimately aristocratic, Robin is the entire focus of novel. Each in turn, the Baron, Nora and even the bizarre Jenny Petherbridge unpack the disaster that was Robin with the Doctor. Their losses are visceral and violent, but also strangely dislocated from time: “An amputated hand cannot be disowned, because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce” (53). Even before she has entirely abandoned the Baron, her ability to transcend time, to reflect some sense of futurity, frightens: “People were uneasy when she spoke to them, confronted with a catastrophe that had yet no beginning” (45). And though Barnes frames her influence as menacing, Robin herself remains unscathed despite her apparent descent into wanton cuckoldry. Nora Flood finds in Robin a fellow traveler and a fellow member of the night watch, and Barnes makes sure to show their connection is deeper than those Robin had with her husband and Jenny, despite the fact that Robin spends the majority of the novel separated from Nora. But Nora is does not pace toward the horizon with a fevered pace. Barnes demonstrates her disconnect from normativity in similarly spatial terms, however, explaining that in universal pain, some figures slip through. One such figure is Nora, who is “eternally moving downward; Carrick 5 but in one place, and perpetually before the eye…. [with] some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune to her own descent” (47). Nora’s descent is both a physical impossibility and an inverse for Robin’s own somnambulistic condition. Nora, like the sleepwalker awakened and unaware of their night’s wanderings, does not know that she falls. Like Robin, she seems out of place, out of time. In her face, which has “the skin of a child” is already visible “an undocumented record of time” (46). But, and very significantly, unlike Robin, she cannot defer her own mortality through her inevitable motion alone, but instead seems to hasten it, drawing ever closer to the earth: “Robin, like something dormant, was protected, moved out of death’s way by the successive arms of women; but as she closed her eyes, Nora said ‘Ah!’ with the intolerable automatism of the last ‘Ah!’ in a body struck at the moment of its final breath” (57). Nora’s only hope is to arrest her descent, to linger in the moment before she shatters on the ground. This is the moment she lives in with Robin, it seems, their trajectories intersected and thus seized in the ecstatic act of love. When the past no longer made sense, as the war had shattered all attempts at logic, and the future remains unknown, the only figure for whom these spaces are truly knowable is the somnambulist, Barnes suggests. Deliberately embracing the sleepwalker, for Robin, became a way of mastering death and living in ecstasy—though her sense of ecstatic release is more a gesture of jouissance than of joy. Naturally, this kind of embodied disregard for emotional attachment results in some collateral damage. Robin Vote, sleepwalking with her eyes closed, is blinded to what surrounds her though Robin must ultimately be made animal in order to return to the world in which Nora longs for her—rejecting her potential for a solitary utopia for love. They are, after all, the two lonely members of the night watch; Robin the sleepwalker and Nora the lover who waits anxiously for the sleepwalker to return so she can report her wanderings in the Carrick 6 morning. Inherent to Barnes’s identification of Robin with the sleepwalker is both the bodily experience of disorientation and the dislocation that results from the amnesia that most sleepwalkers experience upon waking, which I identify as phenomenological disorientation. But key to Robin’s life as La Somnambule is not her phenomenological disorientation, but rather an affective disorientation which makes her immune to heartache and prone to departure. Barnes’s biographer Phillip Herring referred to Robin as “lack[ing] direction,” an accurate if wrongheaded criticism of Robin’s emotionless disorientation. For Barnes, sleepwalking is an affective strategy—an affect that numbs other affects. And though Barnes reunites Robin and Nora in her novel, a reunion she never experienced in life, the implication remains that Robin has somehow transcended typical senses of love and relationships in a way that is to be admired. She has, after all, hypnotized a Baron and an heiress in pursuit of… well, in pursuit of what is never exactly clear. And it is this lack of clarity that thrills her, drawing her partners briefly into her ecstatic orbit. 4 Guided by Sara Ahmed’s work in Queer Phenomenology, I traced this sleepwalker’s trail, her desire lines— “unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow” (19-20)— in order to examine the disjunction between waking consciousness and the unconscious desire that drove her from her bed. Ultimately, I hoped to find what chased all sleepwalkers from the comfort of 4 I very deliberately invoke José Esteban Muñoz’s sense of ecstasy here, in order to direct my sense of Robin’s disorientation toward his idea of the horizonal—as opposed to horizontal— nature of queerness. That is, that the value of queerness depends on it being understood “as only visible in the horizon”: a state that is always aspirational and out of reach, and thus something we are always walking toward (11). I presented a shorter version of this introduction at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2015 conference at a seminar called “Ecstasy.” My thanks go to Adam Ahmed of UC Berkeley and Seulghee Lee of Williams College in particular for their feedback. Carrick 7 their beds. In their pursuit of these desire lines— a theme that remains unchanged despite the shifts in depictions of sleepwalking, which I will examine at length throughout this dissertation— the sleepwalker becomes alien to the waking self. Motives and even the events of the night before are totally unremembered by morning, and the only clues are physical exhaustion, a chair left askew, an open window. In my own pursuit of Robin, I dove into the archives expecting a slew of other queer sleepwalkers reveling in the unruliness of their bodies. And I suppose like any good scholarly quest, my presumptions were dashed. As much as Barnes had celebrated Robin’s somnambulism, reveling in her insensitivity, other modernists found the figure far more sinister and—much to my surprise—far more normative. *** The 1916 production of the Ziegfeld Follies, perhaps more famous for introducing actress Marion Davies to her millionaire paramour William Randolph Hearst or the triumphant return of Fanny Brice after a six year absence, featured an apparently-unremarkable number lead by ingénue Frances White and The Sparkling Girls. 5 This routine, called “Somnambulistic Tune,” featured a sleepwalking heroine who claims to be wakened from her sleep by a “ghost of a tune” that only she can hear. A review of this production by Sime Silverman for Variety noted that this song featured particularly innovative stage design, including a darkened stage covered by a mat that lit up under the dancing feet of the white-clad Sparkling Girls. 6 5 White is more famous as half of the vaudeville duo Rock and White, popularizing a tune about spelling called “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I” and for being the former wife of Frank Fay—first husband of Barbara Stanwyck. The strained Stanwyck-Fay union is the possible inspiration for A Star in Born. 6 Silverman, Sime, Variety, 16 June 1916. A highlight of this somewhat florid review is Sime’s proclamation that the Follies are “led by Flo Ziegfeld’s great triumvate [sic], Pulchritude, Carrick 8 Produced during the last summer before the US entered the Great War, the Ziegfeld Follies production of 1916 featured a light-hearted reference to the parasomniac night wanderings that fascinated Victorian artists and scientists alike. But the Sparkling Girls had little to fear from the night. The dancing chorus girls of Ziegfeld’s stage literally lit their own way across the stage using the kinetic motion of their bodies against the “mysterious…raggy fear” of the darkness. 7 “Somnambulistic Tune” appears in the popular lexicon when America was on the brink of making good on its long-threatened entry into World War I. A relatively unremarkable song by Dave Stamper and Gene Buck that featured far more popular songs, including Jerome Kern’s “Have a Heart” and “Ain’t It Funny What a Difference a Few Drinks Makes” as well as Irving Berlin’s “In Florida Among the Palms.” The number was buried in a production inspired by the works of Shakespeare, though seemingly no connection is made between “Somnambulistic Tune” and Lady Macbeth. “Somnambulistic Tune” does reflect a sense of innocence and romance that would soon largely disappear from the popular understanding of sleepwalking. Indeed, it was, as I was soon to discover, long-threatened war that seemed to turn the somnambulist from a romantic figure celebrated by 19 th century novelists to the sinister figure that would come to dominate the rest of this project. Before the dramatic influx of shell shocked soldiers forced reconsideration of the sleepwalker, pre-War literature and popular representations of sleepwalking shared much of the same premise as the “Somnambulistic Tune”: somnambulists were most often women who were somehow involved in a romantic conflict that left them unable to express their innermost desires. Production & Personality” (13). He identifies Joseph Urban as the production designer, and notes another number featured a Zeppelin pursued by planes. 7 Original sheet music is available on the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections. Carrick 9 After the war, sleepwalkers were more frequently male and more frequently suffering from the effects of a suppressed or unacknowledged trauma that surfaced in their nightly wanderings. The still nascent field of psychoanalysis sprang up in Germany, so it’s unsurprising that German artists explored themes of the mind even before the traumas of the war led these themes to greater prominence internationally. That these German-language sleepwalkers changed just as dramatically after the war is a bit more surprising considering this history. While Freud considered sleepwalking only briefly throughout his career, his student Isidor Sadger wrote extensively on somnambulism, outlining numerous examples of women unable to give voice to their unconscious desires, who were then overtaken by the power of these same desires during somnambulistic attacks. Sadger wasn’t alone in his fascination with somnambulism. Sleepwalking had a long history of romantic entanglement and psychoanalytic revelations. In 19 th century German and Danish literature, including novels like Frenssen’s and Maria (1842) by Otto Ludwig, sleepwalkers had most often been women who wandered insensible in the night toward the bedrooms of their unacknowledged true loves. Their arrivals would confirm their unspoken love and they consummate their relationships while fast asleep—often becoming pregnant. Troubling consent issues aside, sleepwalking was a convenient deus ex machina for the pre-war mind, allowing characters to embrace inner desires forbidden by circumstance without challenging the will-they-won’t-they plot structure that was later perfected in the 1990s TV sitcom. Once the western world was at war, however, sleepwalkers lost their romantic reputation for all but a few oddballs like Barnes. Too many men were coming back from the trenches changed. Altered not just physically, but mentally—and often in ways they couldn’t articulate. Sleep disorders became wildly prevalent among those soldiers who returned with what would Carrick 10 eventually be classed as shell shock. 8 While sleepwalking happens quite naturally to some, as a symptom of war trauma, it became a much more common condition than ever before. The subliminal presence of sleepwalkers as a symbol of the body-beyond-control in the post-WWI period reflects a growing awareness of the potential threat of sleep to otherwise able bodies. The accompaniment of sleepwalking and amnesia makes the parasomniac condition invisible to the person experiencing it save for hints they might find upon waking, whether that entails items subtly shifted out of place or the reports of a partner. Indeed, much of the history of sleepwalking preceding the war sees a direct connection between various parasomnias, or so-called “disordered sleeping” and the amnesiac seizures of an epileptic. 9 Sleepwalking not only destabilizes the productive possibilities of a supposedly able body by leaving it exhausted after what should have been a full night of sleep, but also reflects the insidious possibility that the call to disruption might be coming from inside the house. *** Sleepwalking, by its very definition, occurs without the consent and awareness of the person experiencing it, making the sleepwalker nonchalant, yes, but also amnesiac upon waking and discovering themselves far outside the safe confines of their beds. Current medical science still struggles to understand the mechanisms within the brain that cause sleepwalking, though neuroscience seems to find connection between the early stages of sleep— particularly an interruption of NREM or non-rapid eye movement during the slow-wave stage of sleep. Such a disruption allows the body to remain “awake,” while the brain has not yet moved into deep sleep 8 Much more on these sleep disorders and the history of shell shock in Chapter One. 9 One of Freud’s mentors, the French neurologist and father of hysteria Jean-Martin Charcot sought a connection between somnambulism and epilepsy while working at the famous Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris, according to Roy Porter (547). Freud’s student Isidor Sadger, who will appear throughout this dissertation also linked the disorders . Scientists claim no such link today. Carrick 11 and the corresponding non-essential muscular paralysis (Perrault 1468). As a result, the body is physically mobile during a phase of sleep when it would, in a non-parasomniac condition, be in a state of paralysis. Fundamental to my understanding of sleepwalking is the disjunction between mind and body that allows a sleepwalker to traipse without memory throughout the night. The mind is in confrontation with the material body because the body has found a back-route to control. Whether or not the movements enacted during sleepwalking are revelations of unconscious desire, the body, normally paralyzed in deep sleep, remembers its own mobility. The sleepwalker’s body, it seems, is almost too able-bodied. The presence of mind (forgive the pun) that allows the mind supremacy over the body is rent. The body is a free agent and whether the unconscious is along for the ride seems up for debate. Most fundamentally, the sleepwalker is stuck between sleeping and waking. Sleepwalking is most common in children, but also appears to be hereditary, most likely due to the relative immaturity of their brains and the overload of stimuli being acquired during waking hours (Hughes 485). Conversely, sleepwalking can become more common in the elderly as a sign of degeneration or dementia, as in Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s (Rongve 480). It has also become increasingly prevalent as a side-effect to sleep aides and other sedatives popularized during the so-called pharmacological revolution (Daley 535). Many of these still-unsure “facts” about sleepwalking emerged only from concrete study of sleep patterns after the advent of the electroencephalogram, which was still in development for much of the post-WWI period and not in popular use in research until the 1950s. 10 Though 10 Formal discovery of the electroencepalogram is most frequently attributed to Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist, in 1929, though earlier examinations and iterations of this technology were explored on non-human mammals by Richard Caton, Napoleon Cybulski, Adolf Beck and Carrick 12 medical knowledge was progressing by leaps and bounds in the early years of the 20 th century, psychoanalysis was still — now seemingly incorrectly— at the fore of the science of sleepwalking. In “A Metaphysical Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” from 1917, Freud identified sleepwalking with an acting-out of the contents of dreams and affirmed, “We do not know what conditions make this [sleepwalking] possible, or why it does not happen more often” (Strachey 3032). Freudian psychoanalysis, predictably, drew a connection between the unconscious and sleepwalking— one that came to define many popular depictions of sleepwalking, though this connection had been made even earlier. In addition to being a convenient plot device, the sleepwalker proliferated in 19th century literature in tandem with the surge in Spiritualism that sought to commune with the dead to pursue greater questions of order and the nature of God and the universe. 11 Little to no distinction was made between so-called natural somnambulism and artificial somnambulism, which is now called hypnotism, in English-language medical literature of the day. 12 Both those who were natural somnambulists and those receptive to artificial somnambulism were understood to be hypersensitive to potential messages delivered from beyond the earthy realm, according to Anton Kaes (59). Indeed, early studies of sleepwalking were often aligned with those closer to hypnotism, including animal magnetism. others. Berger is a particularly interesting figure as his entry into neuropsychology was preceded by a near-death experience, after which his family sent him a telegram from home because his sister had experienced such a sense of foreboding. He remained convinced that he had experienced telepathy, and this experience motivated his scientific study. For more on this, see David Millett’s “Hans Berger: From Psychic Energy to the EEG” in the Autumn 2001 volume of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 11 For more on the history of Spiritualism, see Molly McGarry’s Ghosts of Future’s Past and Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism. 12 Translations of Freud’s “Studies in Hysteria” stick to this trend, while the original German uses the noun Hynose and verb hynotisieren, making the distinction much clearer in German than in English. Carrick 13 But the somnambulist faded somewhat in popularity at the turn of the century, remaining popular in more sensationalist fictions. There was much speculation that artificial somnambulism might yield a pliable body to the control of the hypnotist, allowing them to make the objects of their hypnotic focus carry out crimes against their own will. Indeed, this trope appears again and again in the detective fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian period, perhaps most famously in The Detective and the Somnambulist by the detective and self-promoter-turned-novelist Allan Pinkerton from 1875. Following the death of Charcot in 1892 and the drop in popularity of hypnotism in psychoanalytic treatment models, the sleepwalker became less popular as a figure in literature and popular culture until the massive upsurge in mental illness diagnoses during and after the Great War brought the condition back into the forefront in the popular imagination. Now, however, sleepwalkers began to take on a sense of displacement and dislocation that spoke less to an access to universal knowledge that the sleepwalker might be conduit to and more to the disorienting effects of modernity. Of course, the figure of the sleepwalker is a manifestation of the disconnect between mind and body that so intrigued high modernists, but in functioning at this disconnect, the sleepwalker privileges the bodily. The body wanders the city, not as a husk lacking the unconscious, but instead as a kind of automaton acting as if from a will all its own. 13 *** 13 I again point to the legal precedent of Regent v. Parks, the Canadian murder case wherein the defendant was ultimately acquitted due to his “automatism (sleepwalking).” This choice of words seems particularly telling. Legally, this judgment implies that actions undertaken while sleepwalking are without conscious motivation or are purely physical. The case was specifically argued to differentiate between automatism and so-called “insane automatism” which would result in a verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity” rather than “not guilty” verdict. Ultimately Parks’s acquittal was upheld by the Supreme Court. Carrick 14 Robin Vote is to be admired in her leisurely wanderings through the emotional worlds of Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge, Barnes argues, because her sleepwalker-like qualities allow her to wander unimpeded by the weight of feeling that comes with loving her. The sleepwalker, la somnambule, is an object of love but never a lover. She is a muse. La somnambule cruises the city in her sleep. Barnes asks us to admire Robin and her leisurely approach to romance, yes, but no more than Baudelaire asked us to admire the bourgeois leisure afforded to the flâneur of the Parisian arcades. Like, la somnambule, the flâneur is a utopian figure. A man— always a man— of leisure and means, he ambles throughout the city admiring both its architecture and its occupants. His gaze is passively judgmental and absorptive. His comfort in the arcades is much like that he would feel in his own home, and he prefers the aesthetics of the street to those of his stuffy drawing room (Modern Life 68). In his 1863 essay on painter Constantin Guys, Baudelaire best lays out his understanding of the flâneur and flânerie, which would become the definition of modernity’s first man: La foule est son domaine, comme l’air est celui de l’oiseau, comme l’eau celui du poisson. Sa passion et sa profession, c’est d’épouser la foule. Pour le parfait flâneur, pour l’observateur passionné, c’est une immense jouissance que d’éclire domicile dans le nombre, dans l’ondoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif et l’infini. Être hors de chez soi, et pourtant sentir partout chez soi; voir le monde, être au centre du monde et rester caché au monde… (Stierle 428-429) [The crowd is his domain, like air is for the bird, water for the fish. His passion and his profession are to become one with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it’s an immense joy to take up residence in the great number, in the swaying, in the movement, in the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home, and nevertheless to think everywhere is home; to see the world, to be the center of the world and to remain hidden from the world…] 14 Walter Benjamin took up Baudelaire’s flâneur as his own in his incomplete Arcades Project, where the flâneur becomes the touchstone for his exploration of Paris as the first truly modern 14 Translation is my own. Carrick 15 city, which is as much shaped by the flâneur as the flâneur’s walks are shaped by the architecture of the city itself. Benjamin’s vision of Baudelaire’s much-lauded flâneur identified the figure as the harbinger of modernity: lonely in a crowd, perhaps, but also inherently blessed with a sense of observation and vision that redefined the design of the city itself. Their devotion to a casual pace both resisted and redefined the breakneck speed of modern urbanity. The sleepwalkers that I encountered flourishing in the peripheries of modernist literature and film, while not necessarily so casual as the dandies strolling the arcades in quiet observation, do share with these flâneurs what Benjamin identified as their “protests against the production process” (“Central Park” 157). But the sleepwalkers of modernism do not perambulate with the flâneur’s “ostentatious nonchalance.” Well they don’t, that is, unless they’re Robin Vote. *** Before the cannons quieted on the battlefields, doctors at home were already grappling with thousands of soldiers experiencing the debilitating symptoms of what would eventually come to be codified under the term “shell shock.” 15 While many of these symptoms are quite familiar to us today with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with varying levels of post-traumatic stress—including flashbacks, edginess, sleep problems and co-morbid substance abuse issues— doctors during the Great War were baffled by the extent of these complaints. 16 Though some version of shell shock had been reported during the American Civil War, the Boer 15 While the relationship between studies of soldier health and the armed forces themselves might seem a fairly obvious one considering the incapacitating affects of shell shock on fighters of all ranks, the allegiance that these highly decorated physicians felt toward the government reflects the symbiotic relationship between researchers and biopolitical oversight in the period of “getting things back to normal.” I explore this further in Chapter One. 16 The National Institutes of Health have extensive information available about current understandings of and treatments for PTSD on their website. Carrick 16 War and the Crimean War, the unprecedented scale of World War One simply made the psychological impact of modern warfare exponential. 17 Men on the battlefields were being blown to shreds in record numbers, and those who survived were returning shattered. None of this, certainly, will come as a surprise to most even middling students of world history. Shell shock is a flash-card catchphrase of rote memorization for many a high school student. And certainly its affects on modernist art and literature cannot be understated. But what intrigued me was the dramatic number of these men, these traumatized men, who found themselves suddenly prone to sleepwalking. Here, in the shell shock epidemic, is the crux of the shift I discovered in depictions of the sleepwalker from romantic to rogue. Robin Vote is a utopian figure for Barnes because she can disconnect emotionally from her romantic entanglements, allowing her as a sleepwalker to disappear into the crowd and into the night. It is no coincidence that Robin nearly disappears into this narrative, more visible as a memory recalled by secondary characters than within the action itself. Robin can represent this, I discovered, because she was already other. Not because she was a lesbian, but because her physical presence—though “tall… with the body of a boy”(43)— primes her, without having to say a word, as someone whose body can be used against her. In some ways, the shell shock epidemic leveled the playing field. It didn’t feminize men, but it did remind them of their very corporeality. Barnes celebrated this corporeality as transcendent simply because her character had never had the privilege of forgetting her own body, choosing to revel in it instead. Many of the men returning from the battlefields of the Great War found their bodies suddenly visible when without any physical injury they no longer behaved upon 17 C.S. Myers originated the use of the term “shell shock” in the February 13, 1915 edition of The Lancet in a study of three soldiers he had treated at the Duchess of Westminster’s War Hospital at Le Touquet. Carrick 17 command, and it was terrifying. The relationship between sleepwalker and shell-shocked soldier might not be an obvious one, but a shell-shocked soldier is no more capable a fighter than he is a laborer or citizen, particularly if he sleeps all night but wakes up exhausted the next day. The tension between a developing sense that these men could not simply return to business as usual despite the best treatment of the most advanced medical science at the time made the sleepwalker a prime figure on which to project cultural anxieties about the body— a body potentially emasculated by war through the paradoxical weakness of its overpowering mind. Sleepwalking is not innately sinister or representative of a disconnect between the mind and body—after all 19 th century representations of sleepwalkers had shown them to be more attuned to their unconscious desires while sleeping than while awake. But the shell shock epidemic forced reconsideration of the relationship between mind and body that recast the sleepwalker as dangerous, particularly for those who once had the least to fear from their bodies: white, able-bodied men. Suddenly, sleepwalkers were no longer on a nighttime stroll to find true love. Sleepwalkers had lost control. *** In this project, I take up the shell shock epidemic in more depth in order to examine the origin of this shift from romantic to menace in greater detail. I divide my chapters by country because though all my objects of study have much in common in the ways they manifest anxieties about labor and modernity in the figure of the sleepwalker, the differences between these portrayals of the sleepwalkers demonstrate culturally specific unease about newly-suspect bodies in the post-war world. I also discovered objects specific to each nation that allowed a truly multimedia exploration of this enigmatic figure, allowing me to examine the sleepwalker Carrick 18 across high/low culture divides and across media. This figure was not wedded to a specific genre or to a particular nation, but is a transnational nexus for anxieties about the body that arose for men asked to return to work before they had recovered from the traumas of war. In my first chapter, I focus on the sleepwalker in the United Kingdom, with particular emphasis on England. In this chapter, I consider the relationship between sleep on the home front and sleep as it was understood by soldiers in order to develop a richer understanding of the post- war paranoia about sleep and the sleepwalker that developed in Britain. British doctors were among the first to begin the difficult work of investigating and codifying the innumerable symptoms that came to be called shell shock, most famously at Craiglockhart War Hospital just outside Edinburgh where the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were treated. 18 Patients were sent to Craiglockhart and other similar war hospitals, sometimes straight from the battlefield, with symptoms as varied as complete paralysis, violent ticks, inability to void their bowels and bladder or a variety of parasomnias. The latest medical technologies were being used to determine the causes of these symptoms, leaving doctors baffled when no somatic cause could be identified. Simultaneously, British civilians cowered. The night skies above any town with more than a modest number of electrical lights were suddenly suspect. Aerial warfare was in its infancy and zeppelins, and to a lesser extent airplanes, had started dropping bombs en masse. This brought the war home in with unprecedented destruction. It was not simply that civilians were being targeted—they weren’t even the real targets, munitions factories and bases were—but 18 Sassoon gave Craiglockhart the nickname “Dottyville” in reference to the many shell-shocked patients receiving treatment there. For more on Craiglockhart, see “‘Dottyville’—Craiglockhart War Hospital and shell-shock treatment in the First World War” by Thomas E.F. Webb in The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2006 Jul; 99(7): 342–346. Carrick 19 that if the airships came in the middle of the night, as they often did, these civilians would be pulverized in their beds. This was not the sudden death of disease, of apoplexy or fever. This was disintegration and being rent limb from limb with only the rumbling engines of the zeppelin as warning. Conflicting information from the official government bodies tasked with deciding the safest location to take shelter during an air raid led to confusion, and sometimes even to disputes. Often one member of a family, hearing advice from a friend, would insist on staying the night in the cellar while another would assure the rest that being outdoors was the only sure way to avoid falling brickwork should the building be struck by one of the zep’s missiles. Stories in the newspaper only amplified this tension by reporting in gory detail the tragic deaths of mothers and children and elderly couples who had failed to wake for the alarms. By war’s end, paranoia about sleep persisted despite the now-safe skies. And it’s in this atmosphere that Virginia Woolf wrote her own novel on shell shock, Mrs. Dalloway. In my first chapter, I reflect on the ways that in Britain, sleepwalkers represented returning hero, shell- shocked by war and unaccustomed to the new paranoia about sleep that he now encounters. In this chapter, I consider Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in conversation with famous war memoirist Vera Brittain’s novel Account Rendered, the story of a veteran who kills his wife during a spell of shell shock-related somnambulism set off by the impending threat of the Blitz and the second great bombing campaign of British soil by the Germans. Both authors acknowledge the different England to which their protagonists return, but only Woolf attempts to offer no solution. Her war hero is now irreparably at odds with a nation so insistent on returning—literally—to business as usual. While Brittain’s hero is ultimately acquitted and redeemed through a miraculous series of events wherein he again confronts the bombs that so traumatized him, Woolf denies the reader Carrick 20 this neatness. This is a world changed. Not even his bed can be trusted. In my second chapter, I turn toward the nation sending these bombs across the North Sea. In my work on Germany, I again reflect on the impact of the Great War on senses of the body. In this chapter, I follow the path of an iconic sleepwalker: German cinema’s somnambulist Cesare in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Though early advertisements for the film commanded audiences to become Caligari, I argue that this film actually reflects an imperative identification not with the controlling figure of Caligari but with his sleepwalking minion Cesare. The development of post-war German cinema corresponds closely to the history of German documentary filmmaking, which found its focus in so-called kulturfilm or films designed to educate that were better known for their ample use of nudity and frank discussions of sex. Their supposed educational purpose made these kulturfilms marketable internationally and their sexy imagery made them bestsellers. The money that flooded the studios helped to fund the films that came to define Expressionism, including those in which sleepwalkers repeatedly appear. 19 But these kulturfilms did more than finance films that depicted sleepwalkers and became iconic for their use of innovative stage design and costuming, they highlighted growing German interest in Körperkultur or body culture. Though the bodily practices invented by proponents of body culture and celebrated in kulturfilms became somewhat universal, these attempts to reestablish the intelligibility of the body were explicitly tied to early master race narratives that would ultimately be incorporated into the logic of Nazism. German body culture might be most familiar today in its loving depictions of the human body in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, but it also saw a push to incorporate physical fitness and celebrations of the healthy body that grew directly out of post- 19 Three particularly famous examples were released between 1920 and 1922: Caligari (1920), Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) and Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). Carrick 21 WWI senses of failure and physical weakness. 20 Riefenstahl’s glowing, muscle-bound Olympians function as antidote to bodies twisted by mortar fire, to bodies made suspect by shell shock or even by sabotage. The forms celebrated by body culture were not just ideals of physical or even of Aryan perfection—they were antidotes to the physical impact of modernity. The rhythms of the city were, body culture proponents argued, diametrically opposed to the natural rhythms of the body. It is no wonder, then, that men returning to work from the battlefields would find themselves out of sorts. The cities had sprung up without them—built by Socialists and Jews who never enlisted—and now forced their bodies into unnatural positions. 21 The labor unrest that immediately followed the war only served to reinforce this idea among the far Right, planting seeds of fascism that would be taken up in the Dolchstoßlegende or Stab-in-the-Back myth. The Stab-in-the-Back myth claimed betrayal by Socialists and Jews had set Germany up for failure in the war and in post-war treaty negotiations by infiltrating their ranks and demoralizing them. Ultra-nationalists embraced the Stab-in-the-Back myth, and were often the same people who sought to celebrate the physical primacy of the German form through body culture. The sleepwalker in films of this period is, in a sense, a stand-in for the average German soldier returned. Films that were later classed by critics as befitting the category Caligarismus make little distinction between natural somnambulism, or sleepwalking, and artificial somnambulism, or hypnosis. The line between a sleeper disturbed by the contents of his own mind and that of an individual whose mind had been infiltrated was blurry. No longer able to acclimate to life at home and the fury of its pace, he finds himself looking for the mastermind 20 Rhythmic gymnastics was invented by a proponent of Körperkultur, Rudolf Bode, who would eventually work within the Nazi government. 21 Of course, Jewish soldiers actually fought in higher numbers per capita, but more on this in the chapter. Carrick 22 who drove him to war. The sleepwalker is terrifying because in him is a sense that they had been sabotaged from within, that just like the Fatherland, their own bodies might be permeated by undesirable, un-German saboteurs. In my final chapter, I travel with the sleepwalker to America where this figure is a marker of comedy rather than of terror, a surprising turn considering both the sleepwalker’s connection to bodily anxiety in the post-war world and the relative prevalence of sleepwalking related deaths in the newly urbanizing American landscape. While sleepwalking was a theme explored throughout American comedy, even in early and less successful shorts by Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, I focus on the world of animation to consider a sleepwalker who is no longer bound by the realities of physics. 22 In this boundary pushing, American animators combined the humor that was typical of their genre with a hint at the sinister implications that sleepwalkers had undertaken in Europe to create a style of humor dependent on the precarity of the physical body as it was under the threat of great harm that was its own making, but that the owner of that body was totally ignorant to. The sleepwalkers of American animation are wholly unlike Robin Vote. They are cartoon ducks and dogs. They wander the skeletal bones of growing skyscrapers, nearly stepping over the 22 While in Caught in the Rain (1914) Chaplin had emphasized potential comedy of manners associated with the delicate states accessed during sleepwalking, the Lloyd’s iteration in High and Dizzy (1920) pushed this vision further, reintroducing a sense of danger to sleepwalking that had predominated European depictions. The visual medium allowed a sense of sustained tension that depended on the sense that the sleepwalking figure on screen could at any moment plummet to his death. But in an early exploration of the technology and camera effects that would be his greatest innovation to early cinema in his iconic film Safety Last, Lloyd complicated this inherent threat with the introduction of slapstick. His humiliating pratfalls and the degree to which he flailed on ledges over the city below emphasized the absurdity of his situation— a man pursuing a strange woman inches away from certain death— and created a sense of exquisite comedic tension. What had begun as nervous laughter would become uproarious relief. Carrick 23 edge time and again. This gesture toward death—toward the smashing of their bodies on the pavement below—elicits nervous laughter rather than the hearty chuckles we might give at a Mickey Mouse matinee. The laughter leaks out, catharsis for our anxious identification with the ignoramus walking closer and closer toward his certain doom. The precarity these animated sleepwalkers embody isn’t just physical. At the same moment these shorts were being produced, the major animation studios were in their first rumblings of unionizing and by 1947, all had experienced serious labor strikes. 23 The incredibly time consuming and exhausting work of animation had been the work of skilled artists, but as studios sought to increase output, conditions for some workers became unbearable—particularly as studios like Disney and Fleischer shifted focus from producing only shorts to releasing shorts and feature length films simultaneously. 24 While Walt Disney had built his studio on a model of utopianism and family that demanded both loyalty and lower wages than studios on the east coast, he had failed to maintain this atmosphere once his attentions were divided between the shorts featuring fan favorites like Donald Duck and Pluto (both sleepwalkers), one-off shorts featuring exotic locations inspired by his anti-communist ambassadorial trips to Latin America, his features and his increasing number of commissions from the U.S. government as America became more and more involved with the second World War. His animators responding by striking, but not before using the sleepwalking Pluto to develop a storyline about cooperation and wealth sharing that would have horrified Walt had his attentions not been so divided. 23 First was the Fleischer Studio in 1937, followed by Disney in 1941 and finally Terrytoons in 1947. Fleischer was home to Popeye and Betty Boop while Terrytoons’ most famous product was Mighty Mouse. Disney remains a powerhouse today, and their archives are locked. Luckily striking cartoonists donated their materials to the union collection at CSU-Northridge. 24 Fleischer and Disney both began work on their features nearly at once in order to compete with one another, with Disney’s increased demands on animators and debts resulting from Snow White very directly creating tensions that would lead to the 1941 strike. Carrick 24 What Walt hadn’t noticed, either, was the way this kind of commie cuddly nonsense had found its way into the Fleischer Studio’s Popeye releases around the same time they had had their own strike. Sure, there was the famous short where Olive Oyl sleepwalks and Popeye and Bluto fight to rescue her, briefly putting aside their differences—but there are hints at the relationship between cooperation, collaboration and physical precarity all over the Popeye universe. 25 Robin Vote is not the sleepwalker that was popularized in German film as horrifying monster, but neither was she the slapstick comedian nearly walking over ledges that proliferated in American comedies and cartoons in the post-war years. Barnes’s use of the term “somnambule” was both metaphorical and deliberately evocative of such characterizations, however. The physical precarity that came to define the American sleepwalker, particularly in contrast to their European compatriots certainly doesn’t seem entirely befitting the slightly clumsy ecstasy of Robin Vote, whose path I followed into this quagmire to begin with. Her life is never under threat. She does not fear saboteurs or the approach of incoming bombers. The sleepwalker who Barnes valorizes had always known her body was vulnerable. The sleepwalkers of this final chapter do seem most akin to her, in a way. Not that they know that they are vulnerable, but that they keep going—consequences be damned—and never quite step over the edge. For modernists, and for other artists working in the interwar period, the sleepwalker resonates with the sudden visibility of bodies that had had the privilege of remaining neutral to 25 Olive Oyl is the only female sleepwalker in my project other than Robin Vote, though there is also one in High and Dizzy, played by frequent Lloyd collaborator (and his eventual wife) Mildred Davis. Lloyd’s character is a drunk who rescues her from sleepwalking on the ledges of a downtown hotel. They fall in love in the process, perhaps helping alleviate the impropriety of his being caught with her in her nightgown. Carrick 25 the point of disappearing before being crippled by the psychological traumas of war. These bodies were startling manifestations of psychic pain, certainly, but also came to represent working class men who saw modernization as a threat insofar as it turned their bodies against them. The sleepwalker is a figure of alienation and of disorientation. The sleepwalker defies the demand to get a good night of sleep before the alarm clock rings in the morning. The sleepwalker sabotages your career, threatens the safety of your family and can make you throw yourself off a ledge—all without conscious motive. The sleepwalker is anarchic even as the waking man is predictable, dividing him and making him alien even to himself. That this figure resonated across several nations only reinforces how sinister he appears, wandering insensible in the night. Chapter One Feeling As If Dead: Septimus, Francis and the Zeppelins Above On April 16, 1916, a young man discovered his landlady hanging from the banister in her Mansfield, Nottinghamshire home. 1 Alice Howitt, née Huskinson, was 58 years old, widowed and notoriously afraid of zeppelin attacks. 2 Her death set off a flurry of reporting and her name briefly became synonymous with the heightened paranoia that had swept through England after the first zeppelin air raid in January 1915. 3 Though there was some speculation that another widow’s recent suicide had encouraged her own, the coroner’s inquest brought back a verdict of “suicide whilst temporarily insane,” saving her survivors the shame of a suicide executed while of sound mind. 4 Despite the flurry of reportage and interest, Alice Howitt’s case seems in direct conflict with news reports consistently reporting no panic or fear on the part of the British civilians faced with nightly visits from the deadly German airships, and the British government’s use of these zeppelin raids in propaganda seems to speak more to a public that might identify with Alice Howitt than with the stoic call to “Keep Calm and Carry On” that would highlight 1 Mansfield might best be known to Modernist scholars by D.H. Lawrence’s description in Lady Chatterly’s Lover of it as “that that once-romantic now utterly disheartening colliery town” (Selected Works of D.H. Lawrence 888). 2 I presented a very condensed version of this chapter on a panel I chaired called New Sleep Studies at the American Comparative Literatuer Association in 2016. I am indebted to my colleagues on the panel for their feedback. 3 Cross. Zeppelins of World War One, pp. 19. Cross’s book is one of several written by amateur zeppelin enthusiasts which are very useful for facts and dates but are much more invested in following the men of genius that pushed the development of the zeppelin program in Germany than in the civilian consequences or even in the lower ranked technicians or captains of the zeppelins themselves. H.G. Castle’s Fire Over England, which I will discuss at further length later in this chapter, is another such resource. 4 “TERRIFIED BY THE ZEPPS. HUNG FROM THE BANNISTERS.” Mansfield and North Notts Advertiser. 21 April 1916. Carrick 27 government responses to the Blitz in the Second World War. 5 In my first chapter, I begin with the British home front in order to consider the ways that sleep became suspect not just for returning soldiers psychically damaged by the battlefield, but also for the civilians who remained behind. Here, I argue the introduction of modern airborne bombing created a culture-wide sea change in the palatability of sleepwalking and other sleep disorders that was only reinforced by the traumas of shell shock. In the civilian world, the boundaries between sleep and waking were more tense during the War than they had ever been in peace. Though perhaps not as fraught as the tension between life and death that the soldiers on the front were experiencing on a daily basis, the tension between sleeping and waking had become particularly dangerous in civilian life during the War, and the continued push to modernization had done little to soothe this tension in the years following. The air raids experienced back in London at the height of trench warfare led to a striking parallel between the imagery of Britons rousted from bed and sent to the shelter of a basement or tube station in their pajamas and that of a typical sleepwalker. Home side, the sleepwalkers came in greater numbers and moved with a greater sense of urgency. Before the dramatic influx of shell-shocked soldiers forced reconsideration of the sleepwalker, pre-War literature and popular representations of sleepwalkers were most often of women who were somehow involved in a romantic conflict that left them unable to express their innermost desires. After the war, sleepwalkers were more frequently male and more frequently suffering from the effects of a suppressed or unacknowledged trauma that surfaced in their nightly wanderings. I will first interrogate the changes that this figure undergoes during and 5 The iconic poster was printed and distributed by the Ministry of Information in 1939 and includes an image of a crown, signifying that the call to calmness came from on high. It had a popular resurgence in 2010-2011 as a graphic thanks in large part, I suspect, to the influence of Pinterest. Carrick 28 immediately following the war in order to reflect upon the ways that sleepwalking represents a general distrust of the body that sprang from the battlefields of the Great War. Then, I will turn to two novels in order to reflect on attempts to redeem these literary figures caught between states. In the rest of my dissertation, I then follow the ways that sleepwalking proliferated in the literature and popular culture of the age as an unexpected icon of economic unrest and resistance to postwar attempts to return to business-as-usual. This chapter will first reflect on the tension between senses of sleepwalking before and after the war, and then proceed into analysis of two significant literary depictions of shell shock that find themselves in opposition over the efficacy of psychoanalysis in treating the somatic illnesses of the mind. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the later Vera Brittain novel Account Rendered both reflect on the appropriate treatment and care of shell-shocked soldiers returned to England, as well as on the particular significance of sleep and disordered sleeping for soldiers attempting to reintegrate into their families. Using contemporary accounts in both newspapers and medical journals, I will argue that both of these novels reflect not only the disordered sleep of the shell-shocked soldier but the paranoid sleep that resulted for many civilians left behind in Britain because of the first large campaign of aerial bombing undertaken in modern warfare. I argue that shell shock, and the experience of being buried alive on the battlefield in particular, and the paranoia and anxiety that resulted from the Zeppelin bombing campaigns created a post- War England that found itself obsessed with sleep and with the potential menace of a body caught sleepwalking. Both novels revolve at least partially on the consequences of soldiers being asked to return to business as usual. Brittain’s novel is a project of rescue, focused on redeeming the shell-shocked soldier to the point of erasing the nuance and complexity of the England he returned to. Woolf’s novel, however, is invested in a project of redemption for this figure that Carrick 29 provides a sympathetic portrait of a man destroyed by war without offering a solution for their suffering, thus avoiding the maudlin neatness of Brittain’s heavy-handed pacifist tome. Instead, I argue that changes Woolf makes between earlier drafts and the final version of Mrs. Dalloway reflect her reimagining of the liminal generation of men forced to live as sleepwalkers upon their return to civilian life in order to refuse the stoicism expected of all docile and productive citizens. Today, sleepwalking is typically classified as a parasomnia, or a form of disordered sleeping, because the body acts without the consent of the waking mind. While we might associate this lack of consent with the well publicized cases of pharmacologically induced sleep- eating or -driving episodes that have appeared due to the popularity of sleeping pills in the American market, I argue in this chapter that sleepwalking in its more organic forms— whether the sleepwalking of childhood or as the result of a traumatic event as in war— reflects a sense of the body that was radically different from that which preceded the Great War. Not only did cases of sleepwalking dramatically multiply, but so did attempts to understand the mechanical and psychical causes of sleepwalking in the medical community. Sleepwalking became a threat to the sleepwalker, and in this sense, the threat has only increased during the pharmacological revolution of the twentieth century. Fundamental to my understanding of sleepwalking is the disjunction between mind and body that allows a sleepwalker to traipse without memory throughout the night. The mind is in confrontation with the material body because the body has found a back-route to control. Whether or not the movements enacted during sleepwalking are revelations of unconscious desire, the body, normally paralyzed in deep sleep, remembers its own mobility. The sleepwalker’s body, it seems, is almost too able-bodied. The presence of mind (forgive the pun) Carrick 30 that allows the mind supremacy over the body is rent. The body is a free agent and whether the unconscious is along for the ride remains unclear and, at least for the moment, irrelevant. The sleepwalking body allows us to question the relative permeability of the body, whether this permeability opens the body to enactments of the unconscious or, as the Victorians initially suspected, it opens the body to the control of external forces. I find Judith Butler’s work on the materiality of the body useful in interrogating the ways that sleepwalking disrupts the logic of a static, concrete body which is entirely intelligible and controlled by the mind: “psychic projection confers boundaries and, hence, unity on the body, so that the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material. Bodily contours and morphology are not merely implicated in an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material but are that tension” (Bodies 66). In this sense, the phenomenological experience of being in ones own body is its own psychic construction, but it is in this constructedness that sleepwalking disrupts the narrative of logic that the body can claim. Key to this disruption is the relatively universal understanding that, aside from some tossing and turning, sleep is a state of relative stasis. Yes, the mind is capable of great feats of travel and change, but the body itself remains largely immobilized in bed. Disorientation is at the heart of both novels I focus on in this chapter, and, as many have argued before me, at the heart of the Modernist project. 6 I, however, am more interested in a sense of disorientation that finds its origin point in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, wherein Ahmed quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assessment of disorientation, which features not only “the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, 6 See, for instance, Kimberly Devlin’s work on James Joyce, Brian W. Shaffer’s study of the “literature of estrangement” in Russian formalism and recent work by James Buzard and Eric Bulson, among others. Carrick 31 which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us” in order to reclaim disorientation for individuals for whom orientation has too often led toward untenable horizons of docility (4). For Ahmed and, I argue, for Septimus Smith, phenomenological disorientation functions both as a gesture of resistance and as a reminder of life and feeling. To feel disoriented is, by definition, to feel something, and in Septimus’s many moments of panic about not feeling, his panic is this same giddiness and nausea and disorder that can feel incredibly vital compared to nothing at all. Septimus becomes engaged to his wife Rezia “one evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel” (86). Despite his concern that he is incapable of feeling, Septimus’s sensory abilities seem heightened, as when he realizes in the park that the “leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body” (22). This is not the experience of someone who is unfeeling. In her introduction to Touching/Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick quotes Silvan Tomkins in order to elucidate what she sees as the commonalities between affects and drives. I find this distinction useful in differentiating between affective and phenomenological disorientation, particularly as Tomkins’s explanation speaks to Septimus’s affective disorientation: “Affects enable both insatiability and extreme lability, fickleness and finickiness” (21). Septimus is not a man numbed by war. Septimus is a man disoriented by war, as, indeed, was then culture-wide. Death from Above 1915 The disorienting effects of war did not stay confined to the battlefields and trenches of the Continent as they had in the campaigns of recent memory. This war made itself known to the civilians at home as well as the soldiers abroad. The naval and aerial raids necessitated a reevaluation of the Warfare itself. Indeed, before the zeppelins had made it to British shores, Carrick 32 confidence in the British defenses was high, and concerns regarding the raids were distinctly more financial than human. 7 Despite the confidence touted in The Times and smaller local newspapers, British insurers had begun to offer policies protecting from damage caused by aerial attacks as early as the second month of the war—still months before the first zeppelins received authorization from the Kaiser to drop bombs. 8 As historian Susan Grayzel has argued, the stakes for such warfare was so unprecedented that this is the first war during which the English vernacular developed terminology differentiating between the site of battle and the theoretically civilian spaces of home. This was the war that “gave rise to the expression ‘home front’” due to the increasing understanding that civilian spaces, too, were vulnerable to attack and had become theaters of war of their own kind; “The air raid shattered this sense of separateness between the two fronts” (3). Once the media was more willing to admit air raids were likely, they still had to grapple with the unfamiliarity of aerial warfare. 9 Air raids were a novel enough concept to British 7 To quote The Times, pre-raids, “a Zeppelin or two may come over to make itself distinctly unpleasant, for a matter of two or three tons of explosives deposited over London would make quite a noise and do considerable architectural damage, but the deleterious effect on the national moral would be slight, and, as Mr. Runciman [then President of the Board of Trade under H.H. Asquith] said, it would stimulate recruiting, and the actual financial damage would not be of any importance.” Emphasis is in the original. "Airship Raids." Times [London, England] 15 Oct. 1914: 7. 8 As of October 10, 1914, the premium was “2s. 6d. per cent” and rising, according to reports in The Times. The first zeppelin raid would not occur until the night of January 19-20, 1915. ("British Airmen's Feat." The Times 10 Oct. 1914: 9.) In July 1915, an article in The Times noted that as much as 30s. per one hundred pounds sterling was being paid to insure merchandise. (The State And Air Risks. The Times, Monday, Jul 12, 1915; pg. 5.) By September 1915, The Times was publishing full articles advising its readers on the rights of tenants with indirect damage like broken windows if the tenants were uninsured against zeppelin damage. As a general rule, The Times suggested insurance. (Bombs On Houses. (FROM A LEGAL CORRESPONDENT.). The Times, Saturday, Sep 18, 1915; pg. 3.) 9 Indeed, much of the early coverage of the zeppelins in the Times was on their fragility rather than what proved to be their very real threat. See, "The Weakness Of Zeppelins." Times [London, England] 20 Feb. 1915: 7. Carrick 33 authorities that they initially failed to predict that the German dirigible zeppelins were capable of flying far higher than the small airplanes then becoming a part of the British defense system. 10 Official government releases advised that civilians remain indoors and change locations only if they have the option to move into a basement. In the aftermath of the first zeppelin raid on Yarmouth, on coastal Norfolk during the night of January 19-20, 1915, The Times reported that a New Scotland Yard representative noted that “[t]he chances of any given building being struck by a bomb from an aircraft are extremely remote, and, though a bomb might do much damage and cause injury and perhaps loss of life in a particular building, it is held that many more casualties would result if people flocked into the streets, where they would be exposed to bullets and flying fragments of shell from anti-aircraft guns.” 11 It hardly seemed a reassuring call to stay in bed upon hearing the distinctive buzz of the zeppelin motors above and it was a call only sometimes heeded in the panic that ensued in the approach of the bombers. For the sake of both British morale and German disinformation, only very limited information was released following many of the air raids that followed the initial Yarmouth attack, but on occasions where approximate timelines of raids were released in the Times, it quickly became clear that the later in the night that the zeppelins made their visits, the larger the death toll would be. 12 The zeppelins moved slowly and were large, so raids always occurred after 10 Two days after the declaration of war, a report in the Times speculated that a zeppelin flying under 4,000 feet would be vulnerable to rifle fire, a theory that was quickly disproven upon their arrival in January of the next year. "The German Airships." Times [London, England] 6 Aug. 1914: 4. 11 "The Public And Air Raids." Times [London, England] 20 Jan. 1915: 5. Yarmouth was hit by a second raid in April 1915. "Former Zeppelin Raid." Times [London, England] 15 Apr. 1915: 10. 12 After the first attack, the Times published a full town-by-town timeline of the zeppelin’s path around the greater Yarmouth area between 8:20 pm and 11:00 pm, but censorship soon caught up with media reports on the air raids (“A Zeppelin Raid.” 20 Jan. 1915: 8.). By June 1915, air raids often went officially unannounced for several days and then only general region and death toll were released. For an example of this kind of report on the air raids see "New British Attacks" Carrick 34 dark during the first two years of the war, and did not occur during the extended hours of darkness in wintertime due to inclement weather in their North Sea passage back to safety. 13 As a result, the majority of zeppelin attacks occurred during the hours of sleep—for all except those working night shifts in the essential war factories that were themselves the targets. 14 But the zeppelins were noisy and had to fly high to avoid anti-aircraft guns and the small planes sent after them by the British home defenses, and even when zeppelin bombers could see those factories, they often missed, striking homes instead. Zeppelins had to navigate with the scant visibility provided by the light of the moon in order to traverse a landscape then under partial blackout. Though the blackout was not as thorough or enforced as in the Second World War, the streets of London (along with the smaller cities and villages of the rest of Britain) were, nevertheless, shockingly dark. In 1916, Karl Kingsley Kitchen, an American traveling the European capitals and reporting on their changed atmosphere noted that London was the most changed of all the cities he had visited in his book After Dark in the War Capitals, “I never dreamed that huge city could be as dark as I found it…. You won’t find a single person in London who will admit that he is afraid of being killed by the Zeps, as they are called. Still the fact remains that Londoners never know when the giant aircraft will be overhead, raining bombs on them…. Instead of remaining in their homes the people find their way about in he dark” (103- and “Fresh Zeppelin Attack.” Times [London, England] 17 June 1915: 8. A raid in August 1915 was simply described as having occurred in “‘the Eastern counties’” and The Times includes an explanation of this campaign of limited information to the British public in light of “public irritation because the official statements are so curt and obscure.” The Government and Air Raids. The Times (London, England), Thursday, Aug 19, 1915; pg. 7. 13 Occasionally the weather in these months would be clear enough for attacks, but as Cross notes, there were no air raids scheduled between October 1915 and January 1916 after repeated zeppelin crashes and the capture or death of multiple crews (57-58). 14 Factories outfitted with skylights were particularly difficult targets as they were often forced to run production all night and it was difficult to accurately comply with blackout coding on the skylights themselves. Carrick 35 105). Kitchen’s tour of the capital focused largely on the most exclusive night spots like dancing at Ciro’s, so it’s likely, were they more than fictional, his London crowd and Clarissa Dalloway’s might be the same. But an image appearing in The Times History of the War Volume VII proves that, at least in the less bustling coastal towns that proved easier to raid than London, the compulsion to leave the home to gawk at the damage being wreaked by the zeppelins was too great to resist [See Figure 1.1]. This illustration depicts the May 10, 1915 raid on Southend, a coastal town on the Thames estuary, and shows awe-struck men and women staring upwards at a zeppelin flying in the upper left of the frame. More significant than the zeppelin are the figures, who gaze dreamily while dressed in their pajamas. Some are also clad in overcoats, while others remain dressed only in items intended only for intimate use. A woman in the foreground holds her hand to her chest in shock while her hair remains in a braid, likely the first time this would have happened out of doors since childhood. On the woman’s left side, a crowd is gathering. Some people run toward the zeppelin. Some stop and point, also showing the telltale ankles in slippers and pajamas under their woolen coats. Behind the woman, on the right of the frame, a man stands alone in a pajama set. The drawstring from his pants drags sloppily, suggestively downward. But it is these two, seemingly immobilized figures that most fascinate me. They are the focus of the image despite the action underway on the left. They appear dazed, disoriented. They’re wandering the streets in their nightclothes, seemingly oblivious to the exposure inherent in appearing outdoors in ones nightclothes to propriety-conscious Britons. The arrested fascination indicated by their posture seems at odds with the yawns they might still be stifling, with the sleep they might still be wiping from their eyes in order to better see the magnificent and unbelievable sight before them. These figures have become waking sleepwalkers; refugees Carrick 36 from their beds and from the relative safety of sleep, they seek solace in the crowd but find only more disorientation, and, occasionally, shrapnel, debris and death. Southend’s local newspapers The Southend Standard and the Westcliff Graphic controversially published special supplements covering this raid, both of which were considered violations of local censorship and were subsequently debated in Parliament. 15 The Southend Standard Special Air Raid Supplement includes references to “narrow escapes” from the “vessel the shape of a ‘sausage,’ or a ‘stick of pencil’ or a ‘cigar’” and includes much speculation about the length and intention of the zeppelin visit and responding British aeroplane defensive (2). No one panicked, it was noted, but some were almost too gleeful to experience the raid and “private motor cars flying about, bent on sight-seeing…seriously inconvenienc[ed] traffic in the congested areas” (3). There is some speculation that in the event of a second raid, the authorities would eliminate the need for voluntary compliance with the mandatory blackout by cutting the electrical and gas supplies for the duration of the proposed blackout period (3). This was suggested because due to an unexplained snafu, the air raid whistle, normally used to warn civilians to take shelter and put the blackout into effect, had blown “minutes after the raid was over, and its only effect was to bring thousands of people hurrying into the street.” Though the emphasis was given to underselling the fright implicit in experiencing airborne bombing in the opening, a section cataloguing the damage wrought by the zeppelins noted that one young mother grabbed her baby and “ran out into the street in her night attire” (3). Another, “[c]lad only in her night dress…climbed through the window and jumped into the front garden” (6). 15 My many thanks in this section go to Nicholas Skinner, the historian who curates the Southend Timeline who obtained and scanned the entirety of the Southend Standard’s Special Air Raid Supplement from Thursday May 13, 1915 for me and provided additional information on this region, which is close enough to London to be largely ignored in historical texts on the air raids. Southend is most famous today, as it was during The Great War, as home to the world’s longest pleasure pier. Carrick 37 Finally in a section called “Sight-Seeing After the Raid,” our scene is described, but these figures are not awed wanderers, but excited sight-seers coming out to view the wreckage after the raids! It reads: “…large crowds of people began to arrive until the thoroughfares were thronged with them. Many had had but little time to dress and had come out in slippers, with a convenient overcoat covering all, and minus collars and ties” (10). But the description provided by The Southend Standard does not match the image produced for The Times. Yes, the civilians are on the streets in slippers and overcoats, but they also stand as if awe struck or flee as if terrified. These are not the actions of gawkers happening upon a thrilling and grisly scene. These are people torn from their beds and forced to grapple with a new sense of the sky. Zeppelin captains quickly earned the nicknames “baby killers” for their focus on their supposedly unimpeachable civilian targets (Castle 107) [See Figure 1.2]. Debates raged about whether it was better to stay in bed or seek shelter in more stable locations, like a tube station or basement, and the inconsistent tone of reporting only encouraged confusion about how imminent the threat really was. On May 1, 1915, The Times report of an air raid seemed to challenge German raiders to strike harder and with more accuracy: “The alarmed of the people of East Anglia at the latest air raid has rapidly turned to scorn. ‘What sort of enemy is this,’ they say, ‘that flies hundreds of miles simply to burn a few cottages and shops?’” 16 Ten days later, another 16 “Midnight Air Raid.” Times [London, England] 1 May 1915: 5. I find work by Gustave LeBon, an early anthropologist and crowd psychology theorist, particularly useful for contextualizing this particular quotation. LeBon innovated theories of the collective unconscious in the late 19th century. The popularity of LeBon's work on the "group mind," some have argued, set the precedent for fascism as both Hitler and Mussolini were known adherents of LeBon's theories of group manipulation. Though Psychology of the Great War is understood as one of LeBon's lesser works, it provides a fascinating mirror into mid-war attempts to understand the collective decisions that led to war and the nationalist character traits that may have been prolonging it. Perhaps most interestingly of all, LeBon's study shows the relatively “sporting” approach the officer classes of the various nations seemed to take with the war. Indeed, LeBon notes that an unnamed German General interviewed in the French press in Carrick 38 article in The Times opened with the observation that “The German lust of murder is still unsated,” before describing the burning death of a Mrs. Whitwell of Prittlewell. 17 The popular narrative of the bombings seemed to vacillate between these extremes for much of the War, becoming increasingly weighted toward the pathos-ridden invocation of innocence destroyed by the ruthless Huns playing outside the rules of civil warfare as the zeppelin raids were eventually adopted by propagandists. Before the raids had ever reached British soil, a speculative report in The Observer claimed that “if the Germans thought they could frighten the people by such raids they had once more miscalculated the British character, for nothing would more stimulate recruiting than a Zeppelin raid on London,” and once the raids began, propaganda posters were printed to guarantee this presentiment. 18 Of course the posters only served to stoke the fires of paranoia in those, like Alice Howitt, who were already watching the skies expectantly. One famous example of these posters was commissioned by the Publicity Department of the Central Recruiting Depot sometime after February 1915, and printed by Andrew Reid & Co. of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (Rickards 15). The design is striking, though the designer is unknown [See Figure 1.3]. The poster is divided horizontally with the top half devoted to an image of a zeppelin, spot-lit with a search light from the left that mimics dynamic motion toward the heart of England, over a background of silhouettes of St. Paul’s cathedral and Big Ben. Beneath the image an all block letter sans serif text notes “IT IS FAR BETTER TO FACE THE BULLETS THAN TO BE October 1914 suggested that the French would be better equipped to fight if there was less emphasis on courage as a prevailing trait. The General suggests: "'You do not seem to know that if you want to conquer you must conceal yourself to the enemy as little as may be, dig a hole in the ground and lie snug in it, make use of every rock and recess in he countryside, see the enemy and not be seen by him'" (316). 17 "Airship Raid On Southend." Times [London, England] 11 May 1915: 9. 18 “If, Zeppelins Raid London ‘Nothing Would More Stimulate Recruiting.’” The Observer; Oct 11, 1914, pg. 8 Carrick 39 KILLED AT HOME BY A BOMB” followed by “JOIN THE ARMY AT ONCE & HELP TO STOP AN AIR RAID” and finally “GOD SAVE THE KING.” The implication of this poster, of course, is that the cowardly men of Britain who refuse to voluntarily enlist and instead linger at home should both be ashamed of their disinterest in warfare and should fear the zeppelins doubly. Of course the Recruitment Depot had little interest in sugar coating the threat of zeppelins for a panic stricken public if that meant reducing enlistment numbers, but the option to enlist was not available for many civilians on the home front. Indeed, many civilians were female, elderly, disabled or had already been relieved of duty because they were showing signs of irreparable shell shock. As much as the emphasis in newspaper coverage of the air raids had largely been on Britons unwavering stoicism in the face of the violence of these zeppelin raids and the mounting casualties of the soldiers on the Continent, sometimes civilians felt safer in the streets than in their houses, which they had seen collapsed doubles for on recruitment posters encouraging young men to enlist rather than to die in bed by means of a zeppelin. In another poster produced by the Recruitment Depot, this time designed and printed by Johnson, Riddle, & Co. Ltd. of London, a painted version of a then-famous photograph by F. Foxton of a house in Scarborough, North Yorkshire that had been hit by a shell launched by a German naval vessel in the North Sea appears at the center [See Figure 1.4 and 1.5]. 19 The original photograph, and many others like it from particularly nasty bombings, was turned into a postcard that circulated fairly widely [See Figure 1.5]. The brick building is in ruins, but unlike the photograph, the painting features a little 19 See Figure Five for a second example of the use of the destroyed buildings in postcards. Recently, the BBC did a short feature on the Scarborough bombardment that included an interview with the current tenant of No. 2 Wykeham Street, who explained that many tourists visit with the postcards or books featuring the images of the bombed house each year. To view the interview, see http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-26319717. Carrick 40 blonde girl holding a baby with the caption “No. 2 Wykeham Street. SCARBOROUGH after he German bombardment on Decr. [sic] 16 th . It was the Home of a Working Man. Four People were killed in this House including the Wife, aged 58, and Two Children, the youngest aged 5.” This poster, too, asks British men ifthey are willing to “stand this,” but it is the juxtaposition between the image and caption that again demonstrates the bizarre mix of attitudes modeled for British civilians in this new kind of warfare. We know two children have died in this building, but why then would two more pose in front of the wreckage? Neither child looks particularly mournful and the baby is certainly too young to represent the children lost to the bombing itself, the youngest of whom also seems to have been too young to have been the child of “the Wife” of “the Working Man.” Instead, these children seem to represent the ideal British civilian: both aware of the new dangers present in daily life and disinterested in responding to them with anything but the most staid demonstrations of acknowledgement. Another artifact from the Scarborough bombardment reinforces the need to return to business as usual in a fairly literal sense, in this case, in a photograph that originally appeared in The Times History of the War Volume II (389). Here, Joseph Merryweather stands in front of his boarded up “Cheap Food Stuffs” store which has several placards reading “BUSINESS AS USUAL” and “THANKS FOR PAST FAVOURS” hanging on the boards [See Figure 1.7]. A business man hoping to return to business after his store has been damaged is unremarkable at best, but it is the caption provided by The Times that shows the near-sacrificial nature of this commitment to business as usual. Below a quotation of Merryweather’s signs reads: “Mr. Merryweather’s wife was killed whilst taking some ladies down to the cellar for safety.” Perhaps business as usual was a way of coping for Merryweather. Perhaps he needed to earn the money to pay for his wife’s funeral. Whatever the reasons, the premium placed on bearing suffering Carrick 41 with a stiff upper lip again speaks to the ways that Septimus seems to contractually fail in his Britishness and stoicism after the war. The bombardment of Scarborough came fairly early in the war, on December 16, 1914, and initial attacks might have seemed relegated to coastal towns, but the zeppelin raids began the next month, making possible, if never likely, frightful prospect of being blown to pieces in your own bed real. Indeed, the zeppelins made their visits during hours when most in the countryside were already retiring and children were already in bed. When raids began in London in May 1915, reports often observed the precariousness of the packed theaters and nightclubs in the bustling capital; one particularly colorful report by William G. Shepherd was reprinted in The Times from a United Press report showed a dramatic scene of theatergoers drawn out to watch the zeppelin raid: Above the din of the orchestra there sweeps over the theatre a cavernous bass ‘boom.’ ‘Zeppelin!’ whispers a pretty girl sitting next to a Scotch officer. ‘No,’ you hear him whisper, ‘it’s a door banging.’ He’s lying and he knows it…. The long fingers of searchlights, reaching up from the roofs of the city, are touching all sides of the death messenger with their white tips…. “Oh—my neck!” says a pretty girl in evening wraps. “I can’t look up a minute more.” But she does. 20 Of course, the theaters are filled with the upper classes, the men and women like Lady Bexborough, who are expected to keep a level head despite the impending threat of the bomb and who have the resources to enjoy the leisure of the city. But it might be here, in the parts of town still euphemistically referred to as “places of amusement” in The Times, that the stark 20 When The Zeppelin Came. The Times (London, England), Saturday, Sep 25, 1915; pg. 6. Carrick 42 contrast of the blackout might be clearest. 21 London was a newly electric city and the blackouts seemed more dramatic here than they did in the relatively tiny coastal towns that had been the previous targets of the zeppelin attacks. 22 The zeppelins themselves were often the first airborne vehicles witnesses had ever seen— this was just slightly over a decade since the first flights at Kitty Hawk—and the searchlights gave the floating vessels an otherworldly quality. Civilians were often unable to resist the enthralling sight of the “Zeps” silhouetted by searchlights and attacked by British planes, and ran outside in their pajamas, propriety and safety be damned. It was a frequent comment in articles on air raid precautions in The Times that government officials often hesitated in ringing the warning alarms for fear that the civilian population would take to the streets in panic and excitement. 23 In fact, Shepherd’s piece, in one of its more poetic passages, gives contrary advice to the “7,000,000 harmless men, women, and children anxiously listening the zeppelin circle: Mourners tonight will leave the side of their dead to look into the sky fearfully. Little children who have said ‘Now I lay me down—‘ and have gone to sleep will be awakened and rushed into cellars to save them from death.” Cellars should be rushed into, yes, but no one should be staring upward. Bombs are falling from the sky, after all. In his history of zeppelins in the First World War, Harold George Castle recalled witnessing the first successful aerial attack on a zeppelin by a British plane, which did not occur until the night of September 2-3, 1916, more than two years after the start of the war, and more 21 See, for instance, the air raid precautions published in Hucknall Dispatch, 4 February 1915. 22 Indeed, the lighting in London was so extensive that the first air raid was met with very few precautions. Though residential neighborhoods had been somewhat dimmed under the blackout, the Oberleutnant of zeppelin LZ 38 Erich Linnartz recalled “‘There seemed to have been little effort to dim the city’” due to the visibility of landmarks like “East End thoroughfares such as Commercial Road, and London’s pleasure ground, the West End” (Castle 59). 23 This seems particularly true in the countryside. See “The Public And Air Raids.” The Times, Wednesday, Jan 20, 1915; pg. 5. Carrick 43 than eighteen months into the raids. Castle, like many, slept through the initial warning approach of the zeppelin’s engines, awakened by the sound of guns once the responding attack began. He joined many thousands of others on the streets to watch the zeppelin face attack by the tiny plane, finally watching it burst into flame and crash to the earth: “People danced, kissed, hugged and sang. The hysteria and abandoned emotions were not confined to one neighbourhood. The destruction of the airship was said to have been seen from the ground more than forty miles away” (140). Though the destruction of the zeppelin certainly seemed a moment for celebration and a relief from the tensions of the bombing campaign, this celebration, this “hysteria,” confirms the speculations that government officials had that the average citizen could not be trusted to stay safely away from the ricocheting bullets and exploding shrapnel such an aerial display would necessarily include. 24 Of course, staying in bed often proved no safer than taking to the streets. During the first bombing of the greater London area on May 31, 1915, two households suffered casualties that were well publicized to the extent of being romanticized in popular media. One of these was the death of a couple, Thomas and Caroline Good. 25 The Goods were relatively unremarkable, but the manner of their deaths was perfectly fitting in tone with the frenetic balance between martyrdom and aggressive bravery being struck in the media. The Times report of the inquest features the appropriately grisly details of a couple burned to death in a fire caused by an incendiary bomb, but it is the posture in which this couple was found that so resonated with the British public: they were kneeling by their bed, as if in prayer. Reports of their deaths were often 24 Percy C. Simmons, chairman of the London County Council Fire Brigade also requested that citizens calling for the fire brigade do so only in the event of an actual fire and not simply because “a Zeppelin was about, no matter how far away” as had become common as anxiety grew. From “Air Raid Precautions.” Times. 24 Junes 1915: 5. 25 Victims Of The Air Raid. The Times (London, England), Thursday, Jun 03, 1915; pg. 3. Carrick 44 paired with reports on the death of Elsie Lilian Leggett, a three-year-old who had been sleeping in a bedroom with four of her siblings when her family home was hit by a bomb. Her father had successfully rescued all of her siblings, and in the confusion of the resulting fire, hadn’t realized Elsie was not among them until it was too late. For the newspapers of Britain, the Goods and Elsie Leggett represented the array of innocence that could be found in the British bedroom. Countless more stories of innocence appeared in newspapers around the country, but few resonated so deeply as the Goods and Elsie Leggett. Indeed, the panic induced by the immodesty of needing to flee from the impending flames while still dressed in their nightclothes occasionally sent Britons into paroxysms. An appropriately titled article from The Observer, “Pathetic Stories Told at the Inquests” included reports of “… an elderly man, who died [of shock rather than injuries in an air raid] whilst hastily dressing after jumping out of bed” while a younger man “who ran out of a house received a fatal wound in the stomach,” seemed punished for his immodesty, “but the other occupant, who remained behind to dress, escaped unhurt.” 26 More often though, the violence seemed arbitrary: “One of the men killed was a soldier who was in bed with his wife. An incendiary bomb fell through the roof and dropped on his chest. He was killed outright but his wife escaped uninjured.” 27 Sometimes survivors seemed almost gleeful their escapes were so inexplicable and tragic: “‘I was in bed,’ he said, ‘with my wife and little girl…. Suddenly a crash came, the house collapsed, and we were buried in the debris. It was a terrifying experience, but I remained cool, and the next thing I remember was being pulled from 26 Zeppelin Raid Victims: Pathetic Stories Told At the Inquest Deaths From Shock. The Observer (1901- 2003); Oct 17, 1915; pg. 11 27 “In an East Midland Town.” Nottingham Evening News, 25th September 1916. Carrick 45 amongst bricks and mortar. I had a miraculous escape, but regret to say my wife and little girl were both killed.’” 28 In the same report, there were several references to zeppelin casualties who had been killed in their sleep or who appeared in repose as if still asleep: One man of the artisan type was picked out of the debris of a ruined cottage still lying on his mattress with his right hand peacefully under his cheek as though at rest, as indeed he was. In an adjoining cottage a man and his wife lay together in their last long sleep, while here and there among the debris the mangled bodies of men, women and children were discovered among the terrible chaos of bricks, mortar, slates, and miscellaneous litter. Certainly the comparison between the sleeping and the dead was not new to the Hucknall Dispatch’s civilian readers in 1916, but the comparison between these figures, supposedly appearing asleep and the more common scenes of grisly mayhem embodied by the Goods reflects the implicit culture of fear that developed around sleep on the home front. Though sleep was suspect, there was hope that if death did come it might come like it did for this artisan-type rather than fully conscious and aflame. Shell Shock In his introduction to Dr. E.E. Southard’s lengthy 1919 study of shell shock and neurology, Charles K. Mills made the claim that the rampant cases of shell shock would ultimately serve a benefit to mankind by forcing the cultivation of better curated studies of neurological disorders and a greater emphasis on preventative screenings in the event of another conflict. In his Preface, Southard praises the “enlightened policy of our army in establishing special divisions of the Surgeon-General’s Office dealing separately with those [neuropsychiatric] problems” and quotes Chavingy (presumably a policy maker or health 28 “Zeppelin Raids.” Hucknall Dispatch, 28th September 1916. Carrick 46 professional), saying, “‘[S]hooting madmen neither restrains crime nor sets a good example’”(I, ii). The lighthearted optimism of the Preface belies the catalogue of horrors documented in the sterile language of the case study. Whether documenting new neuroses or, as Mills puts it in his introduction, “‘weak spots’ [that] were present before martial causes became operative” (vi), this is a catalogue of men shattered by war. 29 The charmingly titled Shell-Shock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems: Presented in Five Hundred and Eighty-Nine Case Histories from the War Literature 1914-1918 is dedicated to the “National Committee for Mental Hygiene and its work in war and peace.” Here, Southard, the former director of the U.S. Army Neuropsychiatric Training School and currently of Harvard Medical School, uses cases from dozens of intra- and post-war neuropsychiatrists in order to attempt a working definition of shell 29 War diaries and poetry give some glimpse into the unique horrors of this first “modern” war. In his war diaries, American soldier Charles D. Dermody confirms both the intensity of wartime horror and the continuing effect such horror had on his dream life. Dermody described his first night in the woods as “my initiation into hell.” Perhaps expectedly, Dermody found himself frozen, still delicate to the intensities of battle. Significantly, in his fear, Dermody became immobilized not through a lack of will, but because his body will not heed his desire to flee: “I was panic stricken. I tried to rise, but couldn’t. I tried to speak, my tongue was paralyzed. I could not yell, I had no voice. My nerves were the only thing alive. They crawled madly over my entire body.” That he continued to fear air raids seems fairly logical considering their destructive threat, but it is the inability to dismiss his fear that makes Dermody’s account indicative of the nervous disorders that would later be described as shell shock, though he himself seems to have escaped any such diagnosis. He continues: “Even when my mind cleared somewhat, I had no control over my body. I hopped like a fish. I must have been a pathetic sight for some 20 or 30 minutes. The boys who were with me tried in every possible way to calm me.” From here, Dermody and company eventually reach the front lines, wherein they find themselves battling lice and rats and acclimating to the order set in place by the already-established French and British troops. And though the air raid continues to reverberate in Dermody’s psyche long after he returned to Illinois, moments he recounts from the experiences of comrades seem even more traumatic. During a dawn battle, gas-masked Dermody and a fellow soldier hunker down in a shell crater awaiting a lull in the shrapnel, when “We looked up and there stood John Lydon, face white as a sheet, looking down at us….Later, he told us that when the shelling started he dove into the nearest shell hole and, when he did, he landed in something mushy which he figured at the time was mud…. It was then that Lydon saw what his fingers had dug into. Two dead Germans, decayed until mushy, were there under his feet. What he had thought was mud had once been man. In sudden shock he lost no time getting out of there, even though it was almost certain death to walk through the shelling.” Carrick 47 shock itself, cataloguing nearly six-hundred treatments with varying degrees of success. From Southard’s work, it becomes clear that neither neurology nor psychoanalysis, let alone the governmental bodies they heap with praise for their responses, were prepared for the morbidity of war-related psychiatric problems. Indeed, early patients were frequently identified as malingerers and imprisoned or forced back to the trenches. Of course, Southard notes, a certain number of soldiers exhibiting the symptoms of what was now tentatively called shell shock left the battlefields of previous wars, but the Great War had seen unprecedented numbers of troops incapacitated despite their lack of physical injuries. The scale of violence had simply multiplied exponentially. 30 While the relationship between studies of soldier health and the armed forces themselves might seem a fairly obvious one considering the incapacitating effects of shell shock on fighters of all ranks, the allegiance that these highly decorated physicians felt toward the U.S. government reflects the symbiotic relationship between researchers and biopolitical oversight in the period of “getting things back to normal.” A shell-shocked soldier is no more capable a fighter than he is a laborer or citizen. The callousness of remarks like “The fact that an imbecile can shoot straight and face fire comes out in the one or two places, but this does not seem to 30 Art and literature attempting to represent the psychologically crippling effects of war multiplied as well. Wilfred Owen wrote some of the most acclaimed poetry of the Great War. Famously championed by Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, Owen’s poetry interrogates the assumption that becoming accustomed to the toll of war was a blessing. Though these stunned soldiers might better fight without the hesitation of nerves and morals, they are, as Owen explains in his poem “Insensibility,” are “cursed… whom no cannon stuns, / That they should be as stones.” Vividly, Owen claims that a man so numbed to the realities of war, find themselves insensitive to all feeling, not just to the shells and bullets: “Alive, he is not vital overmuch; / Dying, not mortal overmuch; / Nor sad, nor proud, / Nor curious at all. / He cannot tell / Old men’s placidity from his” (Owen 83). This is a man prematurely old. Not incurious from a placation and satisfaction but from a crushing down all inquisitiveness and desire. Owen had himself been temporarily returned to the UK to receive treatment for shell shock, but returned to the front only to die a week before Armistice. Carrick 48 prove that a good rifleman is necessarily an all-round good soldier,” and “Should we not be reasonably sure we are not facing a man inadequate to start with, so far as mental tests avail?” reflect than this is an informational manual intended to streamline and make efficient the process of “curing” the shell-shocked veterans that they might return to productive lives (iii). Indeed, several of these cases end abruptly after one or two sessions of hypnotism, or artificial somnambulism, which alleviates symptoms to the extent that soldiers were declared cured and sent back to the front. Southard explains in his introduction: Miracle cures are wrought through many pages. Mutism, deafness and blindness, palsies, contractors, and tics disappear at times as if by magic under various forms of suggestion. Ether or chloroform narcosis drives out the malady at the moment when it reveals its true nature. Verbal suggestion has many adjutants and collaborators— electricity, sometimes severely administered, lumber puncture, injections of stovaine into the cerebrospinal fluid, injections of saline solution, colored lights, vibrations, active mechanotherapy, hydrotherapy, hot air baths and blasts, massage, etc. Painful and punitive measures have their place…. It is rather striking that few records of Freudian psychoanalytic therapy are presented. (xv) After all, the study of psychological problems was in the beginnings of its renaissance and though such symptoms were recognized in cases of hysteria, little work had yet been done to address the ways that way blurred the still-gendered lines of diagnosis. Key to my work here, Southard’s study categorically aligns the proliferation of sleepwalking among former soldiers with the new battlefield experience of being buried alive when the very earth was upended by shell bursts. Of the 589 cases in his collection, many feature sleepwalking in men who had experienced their own burial. One of the most interesting of these is Case 361, culled from a neuropsychiatrist named Myers in February 1915: A healthy-looking man, with flushed face and large dark eyes with wide pupils, complained of pains in abdomen, back, and limbs, chiefly in knees and ankles, and of visual impairment. This corporal said that his sight had been very indistinct since he was buried, and that if he looked at an electric light, he could see nothing for five minutes afterwards. He was admitted to the Duchess of Westminster’s War Hospital at Touquet, December 11, 1914, having been buried for 48 hours, December 8, when a shell blew in Carrick 49 the trench where he lay. He said he could remember nothing until he found himself in a dressing station, lying on straw, in a barn. He was at that time unable to see and fell over something when he tried to walk. (499) The patient is tested repeatedly for seemingly psychological blindness, which improves, as well as for taste and smell, both of which show abnormalities. After several days of treatment through hypnosis, or artificial somnambulism, he recalls the strange dreams he had while buried for 48 hours. Southard then notes that the patient is known to be unreliable and was likely underground for an hour or less, but had, according to fellow soldiers, somnambulistically wandered out of the trench after being freed, waking only upon reaching the medical station of another regiment. No reflection is given as to whether this soldier found peace from his symptoms, though Southard does note that somnambulism is a natural “sequel” to the “feeling as if dead” that results “on the part of certain buried persons” (501). Poet Wilfred Owen documented his experiences with shell shock in his poetry. 31 While on medical leave receiving treatment for shell shock at the Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland, Owen was encouraged by his doctor to record his memories and dreams after the Freudian fashion. The majority of Owen’s poetry results from this convalescent period. Owen’s dream archive gives us a dream world that might function as a catalogue of war nightmares. In one particularly gripping dream, recounted in the poem “Strange Meeting,” Owen finds himself confronted with the ghost of an enemy that he himself had killed. The dead soldier explains how little difference there is between them, ending by saying: “‘Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. / I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. / Let us sleep now . . .’” (Owen 95). The implication of this closing, of course, is that the speaker has joined his doppelgänger-cum- 31 Owen officially received a diagnosis of neusthesia, which was the catchall diagnosis before shell shock became the more colloquial and more popular equivalent for what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Carrick 50 enemy in death. This speaker is dead, standing in for the shell shock victims who saw themselves as already-dead after experiencing—even briefly— their own entombment and burial. Though it might seem obvious that this speaker would, like Case 361, join ranks of the somnambulists if he were to find himself actually still among the living, shell shock was never so predictable. Certainly, Southard and others note, those buried in shell blasts were certainly more likely to enter into states of somnambulism, but others might experience hysterical paralysis or muteness instead. What all held in common was the physicalizing of psychic trauma. Their unconscious bodies are inscribed with the memories of their traumas, even if they are themselves amnesiacs to their own histories. How do we solve a problem like Septimus? The prototypical shell shock sufferer of English-language literature, of course, is Septimus Warren Smith. Haunting the peripheries of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus begins his day-long journey in the novel either at the verge of madness or revelation, and ends it impaled on a rusted fence outside his flat. Woolf spends as much time with Septimus’s conflicted interior as he does with his society-numbed mirror, Clarissa Dalloway. Shell shock, like sleepwalking itself, follows two general lines: either the affected soldiers found themselves insensible in some (or in the case of catatonics, all) capacity, or like Septimus, they find themselves overwhelmed by a plethora of feeling. Like many of the patients depicted in Southard’s medical textbook, Septimus has been dragged to at least two doctors by his miserable wife, Rezia, who wants nothing more than her old Septimus back. Septimus’s case might be of particular interest to a physician like Southard because, as his second doctor, the mental health expert Sir William Bradshaw notes, he suffers Carrick 51 not from a continued case of shell shock but a kind of retroactive shell shock that manifested several years after the close of the war (183). Septimus meets his end in the melancholia of shell shock in June 1923; otherwise, Septimus’s case might well be featured in Southard’s text. He has racing thoughts and visions, has developed paranoid delusions that leave him raving in public. And perhaps most interesting of all, Woolf seems to imply his paranoia is well founded. Indeed, after Septimus develops a fixation on the first of his caretakers, the quack Dr. Holmes, and when he becomes convinced the man is out to ruin him, his concerns seem confirmed. After dismissing the malingerer-style diagnosis that Holmes gave to Septimus, Sir William, a preeminent expert, decides to send Septimus to a sanitarium in the country. Expecting his arrival to take Septimus away, Rezia instead finds herself battling to keep Holmes away from Septimus, who, upon seeing this hated doctor enter, jumps to his death. In order to better understand both Septimus himself and the particular importance of shell shock parasomnias to both Woolf’s text and the greater post-War culture, I will consider Mrs. Dalloway alongside Vera Brittain’s Account Rendered. First published in the U.S. in 1944 and the U.K. in 1945, Brittain’s novel follows the travails of Francis Keynsham Halkin, a gifted composer and reluctant industrialist, whose experiences on the battlefield during the last months of the First World War ultimately result in his wife’s death and his own imprisonment as a “criminal lunatic.” Brittain’s work provides a particularly useful contrast to Woolf’s for several reasons: first, the novel was published at the end of the Second World War and the narrative encompasses the entirety of the interwar period, allowing for longer-term reflection on the consequences of untreated shell shock; second, Brittain’s novel was very clearly inspired by real world events—particularly the trial of Leonard Luckhart, which Brittain attended—and is Carrick 52 formally more a courtroom thriller than an avant-garde bestseller; and finally, Brittain attempted to use her novel to make the case for pacifism not just for the sake of soldiers who were mentally scarred by the battles but also for the civilians threatened by nightly air raids and by the prospect of rehabilitating men damaged beyond repair. On the June day five years after the war that constitutes the setting for Mrs. Dalloway, we see none of Septimus’s battle experiences and know little of the roots of his psychoses. 32 Septimus, sometimes called Bernard Septimus, and sometimes finding his last name hyphenated, emerges from the ether in The Hours with a more complex back story and a longer-standing strangeness than the Septimus more popularly known in Mrs. Dalloway. This back story only serves to reinforce Septimus’s fragility, however, and does little to provide a clearer sense of the experiences on the battlefield that left him so scarred; instead Woolf’s portrayal of shell shock both obscures the origin points of the disease and makes clear the somatic symptoms of the distressed mind. In The Hours, Septimus reflects upon the tension manifest in his flesh, thinking of “[e]ach nerve throughout <in> his body thickened itself, as if wax a line were drawn along <[through?] wax> a line of frayed silk; & thus stilled, smoothed, composed” (61). 33 The interior fibers of sensation, the nerves, find themselves swollen and waxed, tamed like a pomaded mane but aware that no amount of smoothing removed the trace of his history: “yes <he was> the first 32 Though we do not see Septimus in battle, his fixation on his lost comrade Evans does provide insight into the challenging intimacies of war. As Santanu Das has claimed, “Mutilation and mortality, loneliness and boredom, the strain of constant bombardment, the breakdown of language and the sense of alienation from home led to a new level of intimacy and intensity under which the carefully constructed mores of civilian society broke down” (Touch and Intimacy 111). Certainly Septimus’s continued longing for Evans bespeaks a relationship newly endowed with the intimacies and tenderness of war. 33 The strike-outs indicate cancelations or deletions, the chevron brackets indicate an insertion. Smaller font items on the left indicate marginalia also in Woolf’s hand. These notations are carried over from Wussow’s published transcription of The British Museum manuscript, now housed in the New York Public Library in three small notebooks and a series of loose notes that were found shoved in books in the couple’s personal library following Leonard Woolf’s death. Carrick 53 man to cross from life to death” (61). In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus’s reflection on his nerves functions differently: “His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock.” Rather than finding all his sensory fibers oversized and wrangled to serve some sense of propriety, Septimus is reduced only to his nerves. He understands himself, if only momentarily, as an exposed network of nerves draped like lacework on the very earth; Septimus has become the skin of the earth, but he feels no less because of it. Though Septimus fixates on the legitimately menacing Dr. Holmes, Septimus’s double, Clarissa, finds herself equally unnerved by the supposedly-expert Sir William. In her closest encounter with Septimus, wherein Sir William discusses his death at her party, Clarissa notes, that much like the phenomenological disturbances of the shell-shocked, “she did not know what it was--about Sir William; what exactly she disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, ‘didn't like his taste, didn't like his smell’” (183). Clarissa, though obviously not shell-shocked in any traditional sense does seem to experience the numbness that can sometimes characterize Southard’s cases. Of course, Clarissa’s numbness is as much anticipation as it is a real lack of feeling: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen” (3). The presentiment of dread that Clarissa experienced as a young woman returns to her in middle age, mimicking the panic that Septimus feels in response to his own war- numbed nerves in his proposal to Rezia. Both Clarissa and Septimus experience surges of anticipation and emotion that leave them affectively disoriented and unable to establish emotional equilibrium. Carrick 54 In earlier drafts, then called The Hours, Woolf toyed with the idea of her two protagonists trading places, with Clarissa ending the novel in suicide and Septimus surviving. Woolf revealed this early version in her introduction to the 1928 edition, noting, “In the first version, Septimus who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and, that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party” (vi). 34 That Septimus and Clarissa act as doubles in the text certainly needs no rehashing. A supporting note in The Hours from October 16, 1922 identifies their relationship as: “Sanity & insanity. / Mrs. D. seeing the truth. S.S. seeing the insane truth” (412). Ultimately, Woolf concludes, in this same note, “The Question is whether the inside of the mind is [sic?] both Mrs. D. & S.S. can be made luminous— that is to say the stuff of the book—lights on it coming from external sources” (412). 35 But the tenuousness of their ultimate fates, the potential for them to be switched defamiliarizes the relationship between these characters. Rather than thinking of them as straightforward doubles or as two sides to the same coin as Woolf seems to in her notes, Septimus and Clarissa function more as two figures caught at the extremes of relative states of awakeness. 36 One component of his extreme connectedness and difference Woolf identifies between the two characters is Septimus’s luxuriating in grief and feeling. Certainly Septimus’s continued longing for Evans bespeaks a relationship newly endowed with the intimacies and tenderness of war. Septimus not only grieves for Evans after his lieutenant’s death, but he begins to see and 34 Woolf wrote this introduction in June 1928, or five years after the action depicted in Mrs. Dalloway, the events of which occur five years after the end of the Great War. In her introduction to Virginia Woolf’s “The Hours” The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, Helen M. Wussow notes that there is no textual evidence to support this claim. Whether Woolf misremembers her early work, destroyed an early manuscript or deliberately provides an intriguing but false back-story for the readers of her second British edition is unclear. 35 This note originally appears in a notebook largely devoted to Jacob’s Room, turning to the still-then-titled The Hours on page 153. 36 The “doubles” narrative is now a fairly well accepted reading of the novel. Some version of the doubles argument has been made by Bonnie Kime Scott and Elizabeth Abel, among many others. Carrick 55 hear signals of Evans everywhere: “He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself—…. A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed” (70). In his hallucinatory invocations of Evans, Septimus marks himself as other to the self-numbed business as usual types like Clarissa who admire the stiff upper lip of other society women. 37 In her work on nineteenth century mourning practices in Arranging Grief, Dana Luciano contends that mourning developed an extended temporality that mimicked the paces of emotional attachment, allowing mourners to linger in their grief while simultaneously marking modernity’s shifting emphasis onto extending life through biopolitics (6). 38 In contrast, I argue, mourning during the Great War shifted focus to efficiency and concerns with continued productivity. The scale of casualties meant more death and opportunity for mourning was on the horizon. Even women who were not expected to work during the war were expected to maintain the appearance of preparedness for the next great military or domestic disaster. The threat of attack by zeppelins only reinforced the emphasis on efficient mourning and stoic dedication to King and country. The economy of mourning was no longer extricable from the economy of war. Clarissa’s admiration for a woman who is better suited to this new economy of mourning isn’t exclusive to the final draft of Mrs. Dalloway, but like her focus on the war itself, Lady Bexborough’s admirable qualities become more about keeping calm and carrying on than the 37 Susan Bennett Smith notes the shift in styles of mourning that is highlighted by Clarissa’s admiration for Lady Bexborough from the performative grief of the Victorians to the business- as-usual grief expected of women during wartime in her article “Reinventing Grief Work: Virginia Woolf's Feminist Representations of Mourning in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.” 38 Luciano adopts Foucault’s conception of biopolitics to further consider what she calls “chronobiopolitics, or the sexual arrangement of the time of life” (9). Carrick 56 initial narrative suggested. Perhaps befitting the flighty socialite, Clarissa’s focus is exclusively aesthetic rather than emotional in The Hours, where she admires the older woman’s “skin of crumpled leather & beautiful eyes”; going on to note that “she admired [her] most of all women in the world, slow & stately; & interested in politics like a man” (The Hours Draft, Wussow 268). These terms appear in Mrs. Dalloway as well, but in the final version of Mrs. Dalloway, when war is now the subtext for all the characters, Clarissa’s admiration for Lady Bexborough takes a different focus: For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like… Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven — over…. This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar. (10) This emphasis on Lady Bexborough’s stoicism rather than her weathered skin or talk of politics seems in particular contrast to the constant tension and collapse that Septimus faces. Clarissa identifies their age, now finally the post-War age after five long years of technical but not-yet- felt peace as a period of universal sorrow and suffering but remarks upon Lady Bexborough’s remarkable ability to withstand the pressures of such misery and to continue performing the appropriate duties of the aristocrat. 39 Her stoical bearing is held in direct contrast to the universality of sorrow that calls for stoicism but finds no one capable of performing such an act in “The Hours”: Tears unshed, tears deep, salt, still, w stood stood about her being for all deaths & sorrows; thr there being now, after the in this late age of the worlds experience, an having bred in her & in them all; all men & all women however frivolous they seemed, a sense of sorrow <well of tears,> 39 In her diary, Woolf notes that the rationing and general atmosphere of tension continued for several years after the War ended. This included several major strikes (Diary Vol. 1, 304). Carrick 57 flow many <or> deaths, & sorrows; & also, of course, of courage, of the endurance & vigilance; & a perfectly upright stoical bearing. (The Hours Draft, Wussow 266) In Woolf’s earlier draft, the subject of this stoicism remains ambiguous, implicitly shifting the weight of this requirement to both the universal victims of suffering and by extension onward to Clarissa herself, a troubling thought considering the emphasis other characters give to reflecting on her frivolity. Indeed, the Clarissa of The Hours immediately returns to reflecting upon the ways that she is frivolous even in her party planning, incapable of doing something simply and in a way that will please and delight her guests and her husband (266-267). But the real purpose of this reflection is not to emphasize Clarissa’s frivolity but instead to reflect upon the inherent ridiculousness of the assumption that a nation, or even a world, racked by sorrows so universal as those inflicted by the bombs of war might then be able to stoically return to business as usual even five years after the war. 40 In the final version of Mrs. Dalloway, Rezia describes Septimus’s at first slow and then sudden deterioration: Septimus let himself think about horrible things, as she could too, if she tried. He had grown stranger and stranger. He said people were talking behind the bedroom walls. Mrs. Filmer thought it odd. He saw things too — he had seen an old woman’s head in the middle of a fern. Yet he could be happy when he chose. They went to Hampton Court on top of a bus, and they were perfectly happy. All the little red and yellow flowers were out on the grass, like floating lamps he said, and talked and chattered and laughed, making up stories. Suddenly he said, “Now we will kill ourselves,” when they were standing by the river, and he looked at it with a look which she had seen in his eyes when a train went by, or an omnibus — a look as if something fascinated him; and she felt he was going from her and she caught him by the arm. But going home he was perfectly quiet — perfectly reasonable. (66) Woolf’s depiction of Septimus’s periods of seeming insanity—including hallucinations and suicidal threats—followed periods of remission marked by seemingly normal behavior and calm, 40 Many of the battlefields remained scarred many years after the war. Some shells took years to explode, including one that blew up outside of Ploegsteert, Belgium in 1955 (Fussell 14). Carrick 58 mirror more contemporary understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder. But in an earlier draft, Rezia’s account is even more telling: floating, he said, like little lamps, But Septimus had grown stranger—stranger. He had let himself think about horrible things. So could anyone. He had begun to forget things. He frightened her. Sometimes He said people were talking behind the wall of the bedroom. Mrs. Filmer thought it odd. He had seen an old woman in the leaves of a plant. And then he was happy as he could be for hours together. They went to Hampton Court, where all the crocuses flowers were out Suddenly he had said “Now we will both kill ourselves.” And now she could always see him And there was the lake; He had looked at it with an expressed which terrified her. She now knew when she saw anything that had seen a train went by them, or an omnibus, <or,> they walked by the river.—a terrible look because it made her feel that he was a stranger. She was absolutely alone, as if he had already died. He squinted too. as if he were already dead, & she walked with him holding his arm. (The Hours Draft, Wussow 56) In the British Museum manuscript, the text that remains after the deletions frequently did not make it into the final text. While the framework for this reflection of Rezia’s remains—Septimus is stranger by the hour and now threatening both his death and hers—the specifics of the passage are quite different from draft to final product. In this earlier version, Rezia is more afraid not that Septimus might throw himself under the omnibus or into the lake, but that somehow he has already done so and is, much like our sleepwalking soldiers, already “feeling as if dead.” He has “something uncertain” in his walk now (Wussow 102). Indeed, Septimus has begun to forget things. Never mind that forgetfulness is a common symptom of many psychiatric conditions, of greater concern is that Septimus seems to be preparing for the next world by shedding the memories of his mortal life and only Rezia has realized it. 41 41 In “The Hours,” an unnamed observer notes both Septimus’s strange walk and that his face betrays “that shado shade of absent mindedness which generally means education; reading, Carrick 59 There is nuance in the changes made between the British Museum manuscript and the final published version of Mrs. Dalloway. Though many sections remain unchanged, Woolf ultimately reconsidered the role that Septimus had to play in her novel and casts him more sympathetically as a man shattered by something though what we never quite know—in the final version. His shattering is, in some ways, an opening up of Septimus’s mind to the possibilities of another world while foreclosing it to the limitations implied by this world. In the final version, Woolf has once again allowed Septimus to toe the line between life and death, but instead of functioning as a man who is also already dead but still going through the motions of living, Septimus understands himself to be alive despite once being dead: “I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still… and as…the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen” (69). 42 In an earlier draft, Septimus realizes “He had only to open his eyes… <he woke; he rose rose into life.>… Everything was alive, was conscious of his coming” (The Hours Draft, Wussow 62). Septimus sees his final day of life, though he does not yet know it is the final day, as an awakening. What to Rezia has appeared as the signs of an impending or increasing mental break, perhaps brought on by the experiences of War, look to Septimus like a developing harmony and awareness of the world around him. Yes, this awareness does require a sacrifice, does require that he and Rezia submit to death, temporarily by making the suicidal gesture he keeps threatening; but Septimus has already returned from leisure” (103). Septimus is the type that would “wake & drumming in his ears when he woke a wild sort of clamour, the birds tossing in the air, the peach blossoms trembling.” Peter Walsh is the predominant narrative focus of much of these texts in much the same way that Clarissa is in the final version, but this voice belong neither to him nor to either of the Smiths. 42 In “The Hours,” this passage begins “Now I will wake, he said. Now I have passed through death. he said. I am dead have passed through death, he said” (62). Carrick 60 death. And though he is not undamaged, he finds himself more sensitive to the language of the trees, to the ways the world speaks to him without speaking. Though Woolf’s vision of the shell-shocked soldier might seem particularly nonfunctional in light of his comparisons with Clarissa and her constant thoughts about her own inferiority and frivolity, Septimus’s return from death certainly speaks to the “feeling as if dead” that Southard identifies as characterizing cases of soldiers who display symptoms of somnambulism upon their return to civilian life. Clarissa’s brief rhapsodies on Lady Bexborough’s enviable stoicism evoke the stiff-upper-lip-ism that pervaded media coverage of both soldier casualties and civilian sacrifices during the War itself. The emphasis that such praise placed on bearing suffering without complaint, but the implicit martyrdom attached to such an effect once the sufferer was female, certainly encouraged negative perceptions of shell shock victims, but it had an even more complex effect on civilian life. Public campaigns encouraging “proper” behavior—particularly that invoking gendered suffering of women and young children—undermined the relative domestic stability theretofore guaranteed by sleep. Of particular interest is the tension between reportage and censorship, as well as between propaganda and misinformation that would encourage both the stoicism that characterizes many of the news reports—and, indeed, the celebrated British stiff-upper-lip—and an underlying sense of anxiety that resulted in both conflicting air raid safety guidelines and at least one widely reported suicide inspired by the panic. Woolf strikes to the very heart of the shell-shocked soldier’s challenge in receiving proper care: variation between intense feeling and total numbness or insensitivity in both a physical and emotional sense made shell-shocked patients, particularly those who were uncooperative—whether because they felt that treatment for mental disorders were unmanly, Carrick 61 they had been mistreated by previous practitioners presuming malingering or they were incapable of self-advocacy—slippery to diagnose and treat. In this way, even those soldiers who returned from the war shell-shocked but without parasomniac symptoms shared much in common with sleepwalkers. Medicine had been attempting to answer some of the fundamental questions of sleepwalking for centuries, but by the nineteenth century very little consensus had been reached. Sleepwalkers, it seemed, were either souls of extreme sensitivity who could feel and sense the pain of others at a distance while in their somnambulistic state or they were physically insensitive to all pain, including needles stabbed into their arms. 43 Sleepwalkers, like some soldiers exhibiting shell shock, sometimes appear normal until a candle is brought near their open eyes, at which point their pupils do not react (Umanath 257). Medical researchers also puzzled over the ways that sleepwalkers were generally able to navigate safely in near or total darkness with unresponsive eyes, and perhaps most intriguingly of all, how sleepwalkers might engage in complex activities and conversations but retain no memories of them upon awaking. The relationship between sleepwalking spells and total amnesia of the events that occurred during such spells upon waking is certainly reminiscent of waking episodes of dissociation that were often referred to as spontaneous waking somnambulism in medical texts devoted to shell shock. The amnesiac qualities of sleepwalking redouble the threat that such nightly rambles might pose by reinforcing the obliterating nature of sleep: now not only might 43 The needle method seems to have been particularly favored by adherents of Dr. William A. Hammond, a former Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, who had encouraged the test to differentiate between “real” cases of somnambulistic hysteria and malingering in his 1881 textbook On Certain Conditions of Nervous Derangement: Somnambulism, Hypnotism, Hysteria, Hysteroid Affections, Etc. (24, 251-254). Carrick 62 we be dreaming unremembered dreams, but the body might be enacting such dreams without the waking consent of the conscious mind. In Account Rendered, Francis finds himself grappling with the possibility that his body is acting without his consent after his untreated shell shock is triggered some years after the conclusion of the war. After Francis’s injury in the Great War, Brittain’s narrative picks up some seventeen years later, in March 1939. From this vantage, Francis reminisces about his failed performance career—brought to a halt by his first post-War dissociative attack (84-87), wherein he collapses on stage during his debut performance. Significantly, Francis has no memory of the attack itself and Brittain does not reveal the events of his blank hours until Francis is on trial. Like his mind’s “strange vacuum,” the events of these hours too go unspoken for more than a hundred pages. His former patroness describes Francis at the time of his collapse as “‘like a man in a dream—or perhaps a sleep-walker….after about an hour he regained his normal consciousness’” (199). That Brittain both withholds the contents of these moments of blankness from Francis’s life and dabbles in omniscience that allows the supporting character Enid Clay to function as a broken record of undying devotion to her accused and unknowing beloved reflects the delicate generic balancing act she attempted with Account Rendered. This is a novel about a delicate artist unsuited to war who is silently destroyed by it but brings good to others before destroying the one person he loves most. It is a novel about redemption and second chances at love and heroism. It is a novel about how the modern age must reconsider both warfare and the ways that factories are run. But it is also none of these novels in any particularly good way. Indeed, though it was featured as one of the “Novels of the Week” by The Times Literary Supplement September 8, 1945, it received only a brief and savage review, calling Brittain’s writing ill-suited to sustaining curiosity, as well as “flat,” “lame” and “awkward.” Isabelle Mallet Carrick 63 suspects, in her New York Times review, that Brittain “is over-anxious to get down to the bare bones of argument” to write the novel part of her novel. 44 I make no attempt to rescue Brittain’s novel from obscurity here, but instead hope that her vivid if preachy depiction of a man tortured by shell shock many years after the events of the War and the consequences this has for his family helps to elucidate the greater climate of anxiety that welcomed home soldiers in various states of injury, mental or physical. Unlike Septimus, Brittain’s hero Francis very willingly seeks treatment when he begins to experience bouts of amnesia brought on by extreme stress and performance anxiety. 45 Francis seems ill suited to war, indeed, he is sent to music school because he is too artistic for his family’s industrial trade, the euphemistic implication of this of course being that Francis is delicate, temperamentally and emotionally. He was first called to the Front days after his mother’s death and within his first three or four days in the trenches, a blast “loosened part of the trench parapet and buried him in an avalanche of earth and sand….the heap of debris descended, blotting out the stars and quenching in unconsciousness the roar of explosions” (29-30). Later he discovers that “[h]e had been unconscious only an hour, though for all he knew it might have been days” (30). Francis is then allowed a few days of recovery, during which he finds himself weeping for his dead mother and reeling from the pain of his “slight concussion” (31). But being buried alive is only the beginning of Francis’s war troubles. Francis returns to the trenches within a matter of hours and in order to boost his lagging spirits he listens to his portable gramophone recording of Henschel’s Morning Hymn, which will 44 Mallet, Isabelle. “Healers of Tomorrow: Account Rendered. By Vera Brittain. 339 pp. New York: The Macmillan Company.” New York Times. December 10, 1944, pp. BR6. 45 Francis goes by Keynsham when he is composing music and by Halkin for his official duties in the family’s paper factory. He will be referred to interchangeably in quotations from the text, but for the sake of clarity, I will call him Francis. Carrick 64 later trigger his amnesiac fits. 46 Brittain then ends the chapter with Francis awaiting dawn, famously the most dangerous hour for trench soldiers. 47 The next chapter begins with Francis on a stretcher, attempting to remember how he got there: “But the harder he strove for recollection, the more thoroughly broken was the sequence of cause and effect by a gulf of emptiness in his mind” (35). In his dizzying attempt to recall the sequence of events that led to his apparent but still-unfelt injury, Francis begins to hear the stretcher-bearers walking to the beat of the Morning Hymn but finds “[a] roaring in his ears, like the sound of flooding water, quench[ing] the notes of his song” (35). After a panicked conversation with a nurse wherein he discovers several days have now been wiped from his memory, Francis decides to hide the “strange vacuum in his mind” (36), claiming to be a lifelong sleep-talker when questioned by another patient about his unconscious wild arguments with the German-language lyrics to the Morning Hymn (41). He is constantly haunted by images of the rotting bodies caught in razor wire his regiment had to retrieve on his first day in the trench, only now they include among them the friends who died in the now-blank hours of battle. 46 Today, this song is most famous for its inclusion in The Sound of Music in a scene where it is sung by penitent Austrian nuns preceding the entrance of Julie Andrews’s rebellious Maria. 47 Richard Aldington, perhaps most famous today as the husband and beard of the poet H.D., documented his time in the trenches in poetry, publishing the collection Images of War the year after Armistice. Though Aldington somewhat romanticizes the effects of battle through his invocation of the muses and references to classical mythology, he, like Charles Dermody (see footnote 28), reflects on the dramatic scale of the war, if not so explicitly on the details of rot and decay that most resonate in Dermody’s reminisces. In his poem “Dawn,” Aldington addresses the most fraught hour of the day in trench life. All offensives began at dawn, so even in the event that no officer was ordering Aldington “over the top,” he must always anticipate and expect a swarming mass of the enemy. On this morning, he and his fellow troops march forward, anticipating the sting of bullets and the obliteration of shells. Dawn became limbo incarnate for the soldiers, and Aldington concludes his poem begging for a resolution and the luxury of dying in sleep: “O God, end this bleak anguish / Soon, soon, with vivid crimson death, / End it in mist- pale sleep!” (Aldington 68). Aldington’s speaker begs to die in his sleep, reflecting on the now- popular perception that sleep equated with an insensitivity that made it the most humane realm for death. But as other soldiers were to discover, the numbness of sleep could be its own kind of limbo. Carrick 65 After he returns to civilian life, he finds himself brought to his amnesiac states by the very music he found most soothing on the battlefield after his mother’s death (4, 33). But it is not music alone that triggers the attacks that will ultimately result in Francis facing charges of murder. After returning from the War, he has married a childhood friend, the highly-strung Sally Eldridge, and they have lived an idyllic if childless marriage despite Francis’s disappointing musical career and their move back to their hometown to help run the family factory. The narrative jumps forward to March 1939, six months before the official entry of the British into the Second World War. He and Sally have been married for nearly fifteen years (61). They are both terrified, and rightly so, that the impending war will bring more bombings in the style of the First World War. Brittain’s hero, perhaps because he remains childless or perhaps because he represses the psychic traumas of his time on the battlefield at Arras, has aged little, changed only by the slight graying of his hair and a newfound dignity “and an unself-conscious awareness of distinction which was oddly interrupted by an occasional jerkiness of movement, and by the anxious frown which now and again distorted his brow” (61). Francis, it seems, has aged little because so little has changed despite the dramatic technological and artistic advances of the inter-war years; he is constantly negotiating between his own pessimism and the feelings of his wife who shivers at the suggestion that they might need a bomb shelter (63). As the months progress, and as does the march toward war, Francis begins to experience vivid nightmares about their home being bombed and finding Sally’s headless corpse mutilated in the rubble and develops “a renewed habit of semi-conscious listening, added to his fear of sleep, produced now a habitual insomnia Carrick 66 which was rendered the more unbearable by the feverish reconstructions of daytime problems” (122). 48 He guarded the terrors of his sleeping hours ferociously from his wife. Francis manages to continue business and life as usual until June 14, 1940, the day the Germans entered Paris. That night, he and Sally draft a will in case they are both killed in a bombing while listening to the wireless. Briefly, perhaps in imagination only, Francis hears the “Morning Hymn.” The couple has an uncharacteristic drink and Sally goes out into the garden: “Francis followed her mechanically, hardly knowing what he did. The sense of unreality, of gradually dissolving into space, which he had noticed indoors, seemed to be growing upon him, eclipsing memory and dulling awareness” (139-140). By morning, Sally is dead, drowned in the 48 Francis’s dream is reminiscent of a dream featured in one of Southard’s cases, wherein a captain asked a sergeant to record his dreams while he was hospitalized in February 1918. In case 341, the unnamed sergeant had recurring dreams about dismembered bodies, beginning with the legless body of a comrade lost in the trenches and continuing in a second dream: “‘After spending an evening with a brother (dead 11 years ago) I was making my way home when I violent storm compelled me to take shelter in a kind of culvert, which later turned into a quarry, situated between two houses. Men were doing blasting operations in the quarry, and whilst watching them I saw great upheavals of rock, and eventually the building all around collapsed (explosion of a mine). Amongst the debris were several mutilated bodies, the most prominent of which was legless. I tried to proceed to the body, but found that I was myself pinned down by masonry which had fallen on top of me. As I struggled to get free the whole scene appeared to change to a huge fire, everything being enveloped in flames, and through the flames I could see the legless body which now bore the head of my wife, who was calling for me. I was struggling to get free when my mother seemed to be coming to my assistance, and I awoke to find the nurses and orderlies standing over me.’” Southard casually editorializes the case, noting, “It appears that the patient had been shouting in his sleep, beginning in a low voice and gradually becoming louder until at last he was shrieking. The legless body occurred in all his dreams; the sight of this had evidentially produced a profound emotional shock” (Italics in original, 470-471). Southard’s reaction to the sergeant’s dream forms a convenient stand-in for the collective wisdom of the administrators grappling with the stream of shattered men, surely largely malingerers, who were returning from the trenches. Of course, we now know these to be cases of shell shock-cum-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but when so separated from life in the trenches, the reading Southard gives the sight of the legless body, implicitly created by the solider in his own unconscious, and the way that it “evidently produced a profound emotional shock,” reflect the umimaginability of the trenches. Southard coins the phrase “psychic trauma” for the reverberations such an event might have in the world of sleep. Carrick 67 river that runs through their property and Francis is half-drowned himself (149). He has no memory of the events of the night. The remainder of Brittain’s text is devoted to Francis’s trial, conveniently, a blossoming love story with a secretary from his factory who trusts him despite guilty verdict—that the jury foreman also “that ‘e was insane at the time ‘e committed the hact” by the M’Naghten Rules— and waits for his release from the asylum (245). 49 But much in the manner of a Looney Tunes cartoon, Francis seems to need more of the event that sent his mind reeling in order to again reconcile it with his body. 50 While nominally imprisoned at the Redhurst Asylum (Francis is actually a favorite of the guards and warden and is granted many technically banned privileges), his building is hit by a Nazi bomb and he “completely forgot he was a fellow-patient with these demented criminals” and begins to aid in the recapture of the escaped madmen before coming to the aid of the one guard who had theretofore shown him only hostility (283). 51 In the interest of unity, Francis instead finds himself both a hero and a second live burial: “he had just managed to raise it [the collapsed wall] from the pinioned leg when the last bomb fell in the soft ground to the right of the House. The convulsion that followed brought down the toppling wall, and with its 49 The M’Naghten Rules are Britain’s insanity laws, named after Daniel M’Naghten, who in 1843 killed the private secretary to Prime Minister Robert Peel thinking him Peel himself. He attributed the murder to the Tories, who he claimed were harassing him. He was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity committed to an asylum and the resulting public outcry resulted in clarification of the so-called M’Naghten Rules for arguing an insanity defense. The M’Naghten Rules also reflect a somewhat backward route to lawmaking that has allowed them to remain controversial despite their groundbreaking acknowledgement of mental illness as a legitimate argument against capital punishment internationally. This law is still cited in contemporary insanity pleas internationally, and has been of particular interest to me in cases of homicidal sleepwalking, including the Boshears case in the UK, the Parks case in Canada and the Falater case in the US. For more on the M’Naghten Rules and the controversy, see Ronnie Mackey’s entry “M’Naghten Case” in The New Oxford Companion to Law (2009). 50 Freud might enjoy this connection, having identified the relationship between repetition and trauma in his 1914 essay “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through.” 51 I think here of the cartoon cure for amnesia which is always a second bump on the head with a heavy object, frequently an anvil. Carrick 68 collapse, darkness descended upon him” (286). This scene both demonstrates the frustrating neatness of Brittain’s text and the aggressive project of rescue she was determined to give. Francis was damaged by war, certainly, and he suffered greatly as a consequence. 52 But to Brittain, Francis is the perfect everyman, a devoted son of Britain with the heart of one its great poets who was unable to bear the threat of a second war as shattering as the first. Luckily, by novel’s end he is rehabilitated enough that he returns to war a second time, this time leaving his new wife and baby at home, and the novel closes with a tone of confidence about the whole family’s survival despite much higher death tolls in both the Second World War and the Blitz. 53 It comes as no surprise, perhaps, that Brittain, too had suffered greatly in the First World War and aggressively promoted pacifism during the Second World War. Account Rendered was her love letter to the men who had entered into the fray nobly and been destroyed in ways that remained invisible to even themselves as a result. Unsurprisingly, it was not a best seller and Brittain continued to be better known for her war memoir Testament of Youth than for this romantic tome centered on the inherent goodness of a wealthy and artistic industrialist who, despite the murder of his wife, never has a single bad word spoken about him. 54 52 The text, in general, is only mildly interested in the suffering experienced by his dead wife, but that is another matter entirely. 53 Perhaps the one interesting component of Brittain’s perfect redemption plot is that Francis’s new wife Enid Clay has already faced the dangers of the Blitz head on in Francis’s factory and reacted very admirably, saving all the company files (269-271). After receiving accolades, including a congratulatory watch, of which Francis seems peculiarly jealous, she moves to the East End in order to provide support and first aid to the poorest and hardest hit by London’s bombs (272). Of course, this being Brittain’s schmaltz-fest, she does so out of a sense of self- sacrifice and martyrdom because she cannot be with Francis rather than from personal motivation. A slightly different version of this character might redeem the entire novel, but alas, Brittain’s allegiances lie firmly with Francis. 54 The events surrounding Sally’s death are never clear. We see Sally fall and hit her head in the garden. Francis then picks her up and begins to run and the chapter closes, jumping ahead to the opening statements of his trial in November 1941 and his plea. The coroner notes that she has died by drowning, so there is some room to speculate that Francis attempted to revive her after Carrick 69 Francis remains unimpeachable because his shell shock appears intermittently and he has the option of returning to his family business after its effects ruin his career as a concert pianist. His shell shock is moderate enough that he can get back to business as usual, and, indeed, it forecloses his performance career, making him a more valuable bourgeois citizen both in the sense that he becomes involved in production and in that by the beginning of the Second World War, his father has died and Francis has proven himself a more than capable manager. Though his artistic temperament marks Francis as special—he continues to compose and develops an international reputation that makes him a target for suspicion during his trial despite his performance career being at an end—it is his very connection to music that triggers his flashbacks and ultimately leads to his wife’s death. It is no coincidence that the in the case that originally inspired Brittain, the figure who inspired Francis, Leonard Lockhart, was a doctor- industrialist rather than a musician. 55 Perhaps a doctor’s temperament seems too incongruous her fall by putting her in the cold river, but Brittain never confirms the events of the night, even after Francis’s supposed rehabilitation. 55 Indeed, Brittain makes several changes to the fundamental story. She attended Lockhart’s trial, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lockhart, like Francis, lived in the North of England and was accused of murdering his wife, perhaps in a failed suicide pact. Unlike in Account Rendered, Lockhart and his wife were found the day after the invasion of Poland when a servant arrived and discovered a note reading “Keep out, gas, study, fetch police.” Mrs. Lockhart, who was found nude, was dead. Mr. Lockhart was revived. Later it was discovered that Lockhart had anesthetized his wife into unconsciousness using a hypodermic needle before turning on the gas. Much of the courtroom testimony was focused on Lockhart’s memory. A witness for the defense, Lord Dawson of Penn, who was physician to the Royal family and President of the Royal College of Physicians, argued, “The higher levels of his brain are concerned with the greater part of his knowingness. Without that knowingness he had not the power to value what it he is doing and he had not the power of choosing. If he cannot value it he cannot choose. If he does not choose rightly he has no power actually of his own conduct, and has not the means of knowing what his conduct ought to be.” During the trial, Lockhart claimed to recall some details of his wife’s death, “‘There was a strong smell of gas… They are images in my mind, just as one recovers bits of a dream.” Lockhart was ultimately found guilty but insane under the M’Naghten rules like Francis himself. For more on this case see: “Doctor Accused Of Murdering Wife.” The Times (London, England), Friday, Nov 17, 1939; pg. 5. Doctor Accused Of Murdering Wife. FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT. The Times (London, England), Carrick 70 with a nervous murder. Brittain asks her reader to forgive Francis because he has tried to do everything right, and once he has been “rehabilitated,” he will continue to do so, by returning to his former life with a new wife in tow. And it is this ability to return to business as usual, to docility and appropriate bourgeois subjectivity that makes Francis the perfect man for Brittain’s cry for peace while making him an imperfect case study for the effects of shell shock. Where Francis has only three major amnesiac episodes in his life, he is able to return to a life of productivity after proving his masculinity has been rehabilitated. Productivity here is meant to signal both his return to wartime production as the head of the family factory and also to his second chance at family with his second wife. 56 Francis’s redemptive return to productivity is precisely the happy ending sought by the doctors and psychoanalysts submitting data for Dr. Southard’s study. 57 Of course, many of these men were damaged beyond a return to a normative life by what they had experienced, but more importantly, for many an attempt at business as usual resulted in unconscious rebellion from the parts of their minds that weren’t interested in trying to return to the life they lived before; frequently sleepwalking was the result. Often with treatment, the waking manifestations of their traumas could be controlled, sometimes with the aid of hypnosis, but more often once the threat of being returned to battle was gone and with the tincture of time. The morbidity of shell shock frequently meant that soldiers like Francis who did not have very dramatic somatic symptoms Saturday, Nov 18, 1939; pg. 8. Doctor Guilty, But Insane. The Times (London, England), Monday, Nov 20, 1939; pg. 3. 56 The exact nature of the factory is never precisely clear, but it is located in the region of Stoke- on-Trent, Staffordshire that is commonly referred to as The Potteries for its concentration of ceramics and pottery factories, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. 57 Brittain’s project certainly seems to jibe with Southard’s when he notes at the end of his preface, “…out of Shell-shock Man may yet get to know his own mind a little better, how under stress and strain the mind lags, blocks, twists, shrinks, and even splits, but on the whole is afterwards made good again” (iv). Carrick 71 would go largely untreated in favor of more pressing cases displaying uncontrollable shaking, pain or violence. Often soldiers like Francis and Septimus who display no somatic symptoms would be treated with a single session of artificial somnambulism and then released back to the general population for reassignment. 58 It is unsurprising, then, that both Francis and Septimus might find themselves suddenly battling greatly increased symptoms if they received only cursory treatment to begin with, but in the end, Francis’s cure is too neat; it is Septimus, impaled on the fence and bleeding out, whose fate seems a fitting one for the story of a man destroyed by modern war. There is no redemption here; there is no safety to be found, even in sleep. CONCLUSION Though neither Mrs. Dalloway nor Account Rendered were written during the period marked by the air raids themselves, both novels are engaged in projects of remembering that involve more or less explicit engagement with the traumas of the past. And though Clarissa admires Lady Bexborough, Woolf seems to find more to admire in Septimus’s expressiveness. Indeed, stoic silence can be as much a symptom as a sign of strength or efficiency. “It is,” after all, “the English way…to be very silent…. She liked the silent Englishman,” Rezia thinks of Septimus, having only her small world of English people to make the comparison with (The Hours Draft, Wussow 112-113). Clarissa is incapable of returning to life as it was before the war because that life is no longer possible and this is the fact that Septimus knows all too well. 58 In fact, as Southard notes in his study, “With respect to the frequency of immediate somnambulism [in this case, artificial or hypnotic] for the first trial, P. [Dr. Podiapolsky, the reporting doctor on Case 539] states that, although authorities set the percentage of successful immediate somnambulisms at 17-20 per cent, war conditions yield three or four times as high a percentage. The war has produced a suitable soil for hypnotism” (754). Hypnotism was a popular treatment, and sometimes was the only treatment offered. More on hypnotism and sleepwalking in Chapter Two. Carrick 72 Whether scarred by the explosions of the battlefield or of the air raids, these Londoners are refugees returning to their homeland only to find themselves inundated with emotion. The ability to regulate emotion is closely tied, of course, to the ability to regulate and check the unseemly functions of the body. In her book Anatomy as Spectacle, Elizabeth Stephens makes the claim that post-Enlightenment anatomical museums and exhibitory culture helped develop modern subjectivity and concepts of the “respectable self” through “bourgeois investment in notions of self-cultivation and individual responsibility” (11). As senses of self-regulation and hygiene proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, diseases or conditions that were considered markers of a lack of control—including mental or mood conditions and sexually transmitted infections—became particularly unseemly. Slowly throughout the nineteenth century, in the name of biopolitical bodily oversight, government regulation came into play when an individual was seen to have failed or when a need to perfect individual oversight becomes apparent, as in times of war. During the Great War, public service campaigns warning about the danger of syphilis and the need for early treatment if infected. 59 The American Social Hygiene Association and their campaign to resist sexual appetites mirrored a contemporary understanding that the body makes visible on its surface the damage inflicted upon its internal anatomy through improper or incomplete self-care (83). 60 59 The Imperial War Museums in the UK have a fairly extensive collection of holdings on syphilis public health releases which encouraged soldiers to avoid visiting Continental prostitutes. 60 Of course, emphasis on public hygiene is closely tied to the development of eugenics in America. Stephens notes that the American Social Hygiene Association was founded in part by Francis Galton, best known for coining the term eugenics as well as developing the “nature versus nurture” in his work on heredity. That this footnote falls at the end of Stephens’s chapter on the spermatorrheoa panic, opening into her chapter on disability and the freak show, seems key to her project. Though not explicitly a work on disability, the history of anatomical displays that she traces follows the cultural development of disability as a category, and, perhaps without Carrick 73 In fact, Southard’s study catalogues hundreds of results of syphilis screenings or the then- groundbreaking Wassermann tests, done with a sample of cerebrospinal fluid—taken as the name implies, from the spine, frequently without anesthetic—that reflect the close entanglement between sexual and mental healthcare at the time. 61 Soldiers returning to Britain from the Continental battlefields, particularly those—like Septimus—who had late-onset symptoms, were frequently treated for syphilis, accused of malingering and dismissed from treatment. The lucky few who found themselves in the care of sympathetic doctors may still not have experienced any relief due in part to rudimentary treatments, backwards therapies and the severity of their illnesses. Of course, this presumes the returning soldier could afford to pay a doctor at all. 62 While the damaged hero of Brittain’s Account Rendered is the heir to an industrial family who opts out of treatment for a condition he feels incapable of discussing and thus represses, Septimus Warren Smith has a less obvious avenue to the funds required for his successful treatment. Rezia ultimately gathers the funds for Septimus’s initial visits to both the lecherous Dr. Holmes and the disinterested but lauded Sir William Bradshaw. 63 The suspicions cast upon deliberately exploring it, that disability as an explicit marker of health develops as the docile bourgeois subject comes into being. 61 In the introduction to Southard’s study, Charles K. Mills refers to this as one of the “weak spots” that might have preceded wartime shell shock and repeatedly suggests testing for syphilis immediately (vi, 1). As such, more than half of the cases documented include information about the administration of the Wassermann Test. Only a soldier who had a negative result was then treated for shell shock. What the consequences might be for a soldier infected with syphilis also manifesting signs of shell shock seem of very little concern. Presumably they would be treated for syphilis, still rudimentary in the pre-antibiotics days, and returned to the front. 62 I have suspicions but not the time to verify with extensive study that the morbidity rates of shell shock had some influence on the development of the National Health Service in England during and immediately after the Second World War. 63 That Rezia’s hats are built on forms of buckram (87, 145) and that buckram fabric is frequently used in bookbinding, particularly in the mid-value between fine leather bindings and cheap paperbacks, strikes me as a potential parallel between the author and the character trapped by circumstances beyond their control. Speculations on such biographical details seem particularly overwrought in Woolf’s case, and so I will resist pursuing this question further. Carrick 74 the honesty and sexual integrity of a man reporting symptoms of shell shock only multiplied when he returned to civilian life and found himself incapable of supporting himself financially. 64 Then again, Septimus was, perhaps, never particularly well suited to supporting a family. 65 The war forced him to develop “manliness,” a feature implicitly lacking in the young man his supervisor Mr. Brewer had hoped would take up football; he watches the final shells “explode with indifference” (86) In this chapter, I have attempted to draw a parallel between the affective disorientation experienced by Septimus Smith in the day preceding his death and the phenomenological disorientation experienced by a sleepwalker. While at times I may have strayed from the central premise of sleepwalking, it is to focus on the ways that the larger cultural understanding of sleep became suspect not just for soldiers but also for British civilians and anyone else who discovered that modern war could result in instantaneous death. To return from war and to be asked to return to business as usual was like being woken up while sleepwalking. The danger in waking a sleepwalker does not lie in their propensity toward shock or terror, but in the likelihood that someone woken in an unfamiliar situation might blur the lines between the reality of their dream world and their waking world and strike out with violence. Of course, the possibility of violence greatly increases when the sleepwalker is enacting a flashback from post-traumatic stress. Perhaps this is the cause of the unexplicated 64 For more on this see Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War One, Santanu Das’s Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature and Sarah Cole’s The Violet Hour. 65 Kathryn Van Wert makes the argument in “The Early Life of Septimus Smith” for Modernism/modernity that Woolf adds the War to Smith’s narrative as an afterthought but that he was intended to be a sensitive artist type regardless. I am disinclined to agree with her reading in part because Woolf’s drafts imply the presence of the War as a monumental, if somewhat less central, focus of the text throughout the drafting process. I do find Van Wert’s readings of Smith’s childhood very useful, however. Carrick 75 murder at the heart of Vera Brittain’s ultimately unsuccessful call for peace, Account Rendered, but of greater concern is the ways that both Brittain’s and Woolf’s novels demonstrate the new culture-wide distrust of the relationship between the mind and the body, particularly during the relatively permeable hours of sleep. Sleepwalking proves that the body is capable of acting out when we think it is beyond mobility, paralyzed in sleep. For some soldiers returning to civilian life, this unconscious acting out was the last remaining avenue of protest from bodies and minds that had been irreparably damaged by the brutality of modern war, a brutality that civilians on the home front knew all too well. Carrick 76 Figure 1.1: The Times History of the War Volume VII Carrick 77 Figure 1.2: “The End of the ‘Baby-Killer.’” Carrick 78 Figure 1.3: “It is Far Better to Face the Bullets…” Carrick 79 Figure 1.4: “Men of Britain! Will You Stand This?” Carrick 80 Figure 1.5: “German Raid, Dec. 16 th , 1914.” Carrick 81 Figure 1.6: Photograph F. Foxton; Postcard, Unknown. Carrick 82 Figure 1.7: The Times History of the War Volume II Chapter Two A Most Far-Reaching Obedience: Somnambulism & Weimar Cinema In the dead of winter 1920, just after the New Year, posters began appearing on Berlin Anschagsäulen or advertising columns with the aggressive suggestion “Du musst Caligari werden [You must become Caligari].” The commands appeared in a swirling pattern that was suggestive of a gramophone record, or what might later come to be associated with the hypnotic spiral [See Figure 2.1]. 1 Below the command the poster simply gave the venue and date of the premiere, the Marmorhaus in Berlin, without further detail or even explicit indication that the subject at hand was a film. Another version of the advertisement featured saturated colors and more of the stylized angles that had come to dominate the designs of Expressionist film and theater. But this time the command included an image: a figure rising from below the frame of the poster, grabbing at the letters forming the mysterious word “Caligari” and seeming to drag them down the page with him into the negative space that creeps in from below [See Figure 2.2]. That he faced away from the viewer only reinforced the urgency with which he clawed at the letters, bisecting the word “werden” with the thrust of his left arm. Was this man so desperate to become Caligari that he attempts to deny others the pleasure of this opportunity, perhaps by stealing his very name, and thus erasing it from memory? Or was his erasure an act of revenge, the act of a man made desperate by the Caligari he so urgently sought to remove evidence of? 1 In reality, the first gramophone records were produced and demonstrated in Germany in the late 1880s by a German émigré to America named Emile Berliner (“Emile Berliner”). They competed with Thomas Edison’s graphophone which utilized a much less durable wax and metal cylinder, eventually gaining popularity once Berliner’s patent expired in 1919. For more on this competition and Berliner’s groundbreaking contributions, see the Library of Congress’s American Memory Series feature “Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry.” Carrick 84 Though Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari has become one of the most iconic films produced by German cinema, these posters created a sense of intrigue and excitement before the film’s release date that helped to solidify its reputation as the artistic triumph of the Weimar period. The campaign was successful enough to warrant mention in the film’s program, produced by the Illustrierter Film-Kurier, where Claus Groth opens his essay on the film by describing the command as a “kategorischen Imperitiv [categorical imperative]” and noting at least one acquaintance who already claimed to have successfully become Caligari without actually knowing yet who or what Caligari was (2). 2 Contrary to the implications of this ad campaign, however, I argue in this chapter that the preponderance of films featuring sleepwalking and hypnotized characters in the Weimar period reflects an identification not with Caligari but with the tool of his insane machinations, the somnambulist Cesare. Figures like Cesare abound in Weimar cinema, in films including Murnau’s Nosferatu, which includes a single sleepwalker, and Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler, which shows a host of characters come under the hypnotic spell of the titular gambler/psychoanalyst. Film became the most important Weimar Germany’s most important cultural export and was a medium for exploring the questions left open by the devastating end to the Great War, particularly those of loyalty and trust that grew out of suspicions of deliberate betrayals and minority scapegoating. I find the increased popularity of the sleepwalking/hypnosis trope part of a larger trend aligning sleepwalking with states of modernist disorientation, and to a lesser degree with residual 2 This and all other archival materials related to films discussed in this chapter are part of the collection of the Deutsches Filminstitut, the Textarchiv of which is housed at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt, Germany, unless otherwise indicated. I was able to visit these archives thanks to a grant from the Hovel Memorial Award from USC and received extensive help in the archive from Uschi Rühle and Christiane Eulig. Carrick 85 anti-bourgeoise tension from both the revolutionary proletariat and the remnants of the Imperial aristocracy. German performances of sleepwalkers and hypnotized subjects in general emphasize a visceral phenomenological identification with the body depicted on screen. The audience is asked to identify with these figures two-fold: first as bodies undergoing transformation from a waking state to either the senselessness of sleep or the limbo of hypnosis; secondly, viewers are meant to identify with the psychic core left present but numbed to the actions undertaken by their own bodies. It is in this double identification that the sleepwalkers of German cinema became a horror trope. The dislocation between mind and body put both at risk. German Modernism Many of the aesthetic developments of German Modernism that preceded the war found themselves stalled in the unstable period immediately preceding and following the Armistice, but the film industry had just begun to flourish with the development of German production companies. German embargos and international trade breakdowns during the war had vastly decreased the import of films for a movie-going public hungry for distraction from the realities of war, and the continued demand encouraged proliferation of domestic production. Though film had become a popular entertainment in the years preceding the war, imported films occupied approximately 85% of the market share. The country’s wartime isolation led to a more than ten- fold increase in production companies and more than five-fold increase in distribution companies from 1913-1918 (Leab 59). As a result, German films flourished, and the exported product of this renaissance solidified Germany’s reputation as an artistic capital. During the Second World War, cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer was asked by curators of the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to write a history of German film Carrick 86 in the interwar period to augment their extensive collection. Kracauer, himself a refugee from the Nazi regime, worked partially from the archives and partially from memory to produce, in 1947, one of his most famous works, From Caligari to Hitler, which argued that films like Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari represented a generation of Germans left vulnerable to the charismatic influence of totalitarianism. Like Kracauer, I argue that in the case of Caligari, contemporary audiences were asked to identify not with Caligari, as Groth’s friend had so readily done, but with his murderous dupe Cesare the somnambulist. But unlike Kracauer, I pursue questions of performance and contemporary German culture that expand beyond the world of film and I am more concerned with tracing the development of the sleepwalker archetype than in mining for presentiments of Hitler. German film audiences were literate in the language of film by the post-War years. Already familiar with the novelties of movement pictures and the thrills of the new narrative form, audiences had acclimatized to this most modern of media even while film itself struggled to depict the dizzying effects modernity had on everyday life. In Germany, Expressionism pre-dated the war, largely flourishing in the theater in lieu of the still-nascent film scene. Scholars have largely disagreed over consistent definitions of the movement, but I find Richard T. Gray’s assessment that the movement owed a debt to Nietzschean devotion to a “belief in a deeper, more authentic dimension of reality beyond (or below) the world of empirical phenomenon” useful in thinking through the relationship between Expressionism’s focus on hidden psychological motives and the bizarre and sometimes jarring sets and lighting that became iconically aligned with Expressionist mise-en-scène (62). 3 Lotte Eisner, in the other iconic history of Weimar film The Haunted Screen, traces the origins of 3 Italics in original. Carrick 87 filmic Expressionism back through to German literature, which saw itself as distinctly anti- Romantic and anti-Naturalist in its focus; as Eisner puts it: “The Expressionist does not see, he has ‘visions’… [he strives for] an object’s ‘most expressive expression’” (10-11). This “most expressive expression” often took the form of dramatic and expansive abstraction which was thought, in part, to reach beyond the reality of the object represented toward a deeper essence of what the true reality of that object was. Whether or not this pursuit of a reality beyond empirical proof was the ultimate goal behind the set designers of Expressionist films is of little consequence when the uncanny effects are so apparent. Upon its release Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari became almost synonymous with Expressionism in film. Caligari became a cult film in cinema institutes and film societies across Europe in the post-WWII years. Kracauer’s assertion that the film was influential in creating a cultural atmosphere conducive to the hypnotic influences of a charismatic leader in Hitler himself may have partially influenced its popularity. More interesting than its latter-day reputation, is the categorization of certain films under the banner Caligarismus by German film critics of the 1970s or Caligarisme by the earlier French. 4 Used as a loose term to define films adopting both the Expressionist mise-en-scène of Caligari and, as an article describing the phenomenon in Die Welt put it, “eine dämonische Strahlkraft [a demonic charisma].” 5 4 I find Caligarismus a more useful term because it keeps the assessment of the film and those sharing its genre within the national framework. The French are famous for being the first to recognize the artistic and critical value of many film movements before their originators, see for example their reclamation of film noir in the Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, and their early embrace of Caligari was just one such example. 5 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. In The Haunted Screen, Eisner notes that when she uses the term “dämonisch,” she is using it in the “Greek sense—as it was understood by Goethe… ‘pertaining to the nature of super natural power’” rather than in the English sense (8). It is unclear which meaning Jörg Becker, the author of the Die Welt piece, might hold as both seem appropriate to the content of the film at hand, depending on the preference of the reader. I therefore leave the precise translation open to interpretation. Carrick 88 Caligarismus included in its canon films like Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler and its sequel Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, as well as Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, the only of the three Golem films by Paul Wegener that is still extant. These films share a sense of horror and an exploration of the human psyche that was already developing in German cinema during the pre- Weimar period, as demonstrated in Wegener’s earliest Golem film from 1915 and the pre-War film Der Andere or The Other, analysis of which will follow later in this chapter. An under-remarked upon shared feature of the films that characterize the Caligarismus canon, however, is their fixation on the body beyond the control of the inhabiting subject. Caligari and the Dr. Mabuse films feature characters who are somewhere between sleepwalking and hypnotized and the Golem films focus on the eponymous Golem of Prague myth featuring a senseless automaton made of clay who first saves and then torments the Jewish people. That these films are classed together stylistically as well as for their devilish plots but not for the fixation on the body run amok is a failure of the critics to inhabit the films themselves. And considering the spiny beauty of Caligari, one can hardly blame them for their aesthetic distance, but to do so fails to draw together a phenomenological narrative that allows bodies that are no longer our own to be parables for the war torn bodies of Germany’s defeated and much-maligned soldiers as well as for the war-weary nation itself. The tie between government, military and film was so close in wartime Germany that the controlling figure under Kaiser Wilhelm—who was then little more than a figurehead—General Erich Ludendorff promoted the development of an army film office that would eventually evolve into UFA, or Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft [Universe Film Incorporated] (Leab 67). UFA was partially an outgrowth of this army film office and partially a consolidation of private production companies, and it shifted between government and private control with different Carrick 89 regimes. From its founding until 1921, it was a government-owned company (Kreimeier 70). 6 UFA would become the largest production company in Europe, the production company that helmed Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari, an eventual tool of Nazi propaganda and remains a powerful production company in today’s Germany. One of UFA’s biggest money makers during the Weimar years was the so-called kulturfilm, which was an early documentary format that became particularly popular in the period due to its risqué subject matter and resulting appeal to foreign markets, as well as the easy translation of kulturfilm topics to issues of German nationalism, which according to Sabine Hake, promoted certain senses of “moral sincerity, social responsibility, and deep commitment to German culture” (207). Concerns that narrative film had caused potential health threats to the so- called “vulnerable sectors” of the viewing audience, which included children but most importantly workers, like damage to the eyes or nervousness, led to the development of the first of the kulturfilms, which were designed to outweigh concerns about potential damage to the backbone of the economy with education (Uricchio 268). The kulturfilm was a tool of biopolitics. A tool designed to calm dis-ease about the damage films as entertainment might do to production by the upstart film industry itself that was embraced after the war by the old Imperial guard, shaken by the loss of their figurehead and economic stranglehold. Thus the kulturfilm, and particularly in the body kulturfilm, where the strength and beauty of the 6 Initially, the government owned a one-third stake in UFA. Another major shareholder was the Deutsche Bank (Kauffman 354). This would be sold off in 1921 but then UFA would be nationalized by the Nazis in 1937. For more on the history of UFA see Leab and Kreimeier. Carrick 90 unadulterated German body was celebrated at length on screen, was increasingly embraced by the far-Right. 7 William Uricchio has argued that the kulturfilm movement was key to the development of cinema as an art form and “legitimate cultural force” in Germany, particularly in its appeal to educators (264), and I find this argument useful in considering the implicit class questions being raised by the regulatory focus of such kulturfilm at the time. 8 Popular films including those that are considered artistically significant today, like Caligari, were still very much considered a bourgeois entertainment, a point which Kracauer himself makes (187). That these popular films themselves also engage in questions of the physical consequences of modernity in less overt ways was of little consequence to Imperially-minded filmmakers who sought to replicate the glory of the German Empire in the glory of the German body. The fact remained that to the general public, the cinema was a bourgeois medium expressing bourgeois anxieties. Class tensions were incredibly high in the early Weimar years, creating a particularly divisive atmosphere for these intersecting questions of aesthetics and economics. In late January and early February 1918, months before the Armistice, massive if short-lived German strike of January 28-February 3, 1918 only served to reinforce panic on the far-Right with regard to the threat of real socialist upheaval once the war was over (Bailey 158). This strike, which called for an end to the war and the democratization of the country, was actually indicative of a major split within the SPD that pitted the majority Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democrats or SPD) and Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands 7 The Reichs-Film-Archiv classified kulturfilm and Spielfilm (fiction movies) as two entirely different genres despite many kulturfilms being marketed and viewed for entertainment purposes (Uricchio 266-267). 8 Uricchio opens with an appropriate, if troubling, epigraph from Hitler: “ Die Kunst wird stets Ausdruck und Spiegel der Sehnsucht und der Wirklichkeit einer Zeit.” [Art is always a reflection of the longing and reality of a time.] (263). Carrick 91 (Independent Social Democratic Party or USPD) against radical Spartakusbund who sought full- blown revolution (159). Though the strike was the primary tool of this protest, the demands were political rather than economic, underlining the developing conversations about self- determination that would seem particularly necessary given the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that would follow the Armistice. By the time the Revolution of 1919 was fully underway, the Kaiser had abdicated and a new government, the Weimar government, was attempting to solidify power, but found itself struggling to assert authority in a nation whose infrastructure remained largely old guard Imperialists or increasingly radicalizing Rightist military. Two weeks after the premiere of Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari a right-wing revolution, called the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, was also attempted, though much less popularly supported. The Putsch was quashed by Weimar-government supported general strikes (Lutz 243-4). Considering the wealth of potential tensions in German political culture, film culture flourished, and kulturfilm in particular became a space for more bourgeois voices to make themselves heard. Because kulturfilm was so closely aligned with government production in the form of UFA in addition to its supposed devotion to educational narratives, it became a particularly ripe venue for the then-developing field of Körperkultur or body culture. Body culture was a health and lifestyle movement out of which grew various physical fitness crazes, including rhythmic gymnastics and forms of nude dancing called Nacktballet, all of which emphasized the threat posed by modernity toward the human body. 9 While some kulturfilm had served as semi-educational guides on the dramatic effects of syphilis, films that grew from the body culture movement saw modernity itself as an infectious disease. 9 An off-shoot of Nacktballet and Körperkultur called Freikörperkultur [free body culture] also blossomed in this period. It emphasized communal living and nudism, and Germany continues to have some of the least restrictive public nudity laws internationally as a result of its popularity. Carrick 92 The body culture movement’s roots precede the First World War, but the boom years were the 1920s. 10 Body culture sprang from a wide range of theorists and practitioners, including philosophers like the Nietzschean Ludwig Klages, the philosopher-economist Karl Bücher and countless dancers and lifestyle gurus. 11 Though the interplay between natural and artificial rhythms is certainly a facet of modernism internationally, German modernism seemed particularly obsessed with analyzing and engaging with the ways that modernity created tension within the human body. 12 The developing German film industry invested in kulturfilm projects that had a strong body culture emphasis in order to promote what Karl Toepfer has called “the German appetite for a more radical, ecstatic, and transformative definition of rhythm that yielded a distinctly ‘German’ expression of modernity” that arose from studies of rhythm and the body in the interwar period (Empire of Ecstasy 126). The development of a mass body culture in Germany between the wars emphasized a particular way of understanding the body that was seen as particularly German, that “Germanness revealed itself in the origin and formation of the definition, not in the bodies that applied or appropriated the definition” (126). The German way of approaching the body saw 10 My history of the body culture movement relies on the entirety of Toepfer’s excellent book. 11 These practitioners included among them Mary Wigman, Dorothee Günther, Edith von Schrenck and Adolf Koch. One of the best known practitioners of body culture in the early stages of its development was Margarete Van Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, who became notorious as one of the more titillating and less health-oriented nude dancers that scandalized the European capitals in the war years (Toepfer 25). 12 Toepfer’s major questions in pursuing this project are useful in clarifying the stakes of German body culture as a whole: “How can the body itself assume a modern identity? What are the dominant signifiers of a modern body? What are differences between normative, ideal, and perverse bodies in a modern context? How do the sexes differ in using their bodies to signify attitudes toward modernity? What are relations between modern bodies and mechanized identities? How does modernity construct a new relation between the body and metaphysical dimensions to identity, such as soul, spirit, consciousness? What sacrifices are required to achieve a modern body? How does a modern body function as a sign of tension between individual and social identity?” (7-8). Carrick 93 it both as a part of the culture of modernism and as inherently in resistance to modernism. In images of bodies that arose from this period, “the viewer always sees the body as a phenomenon that resists abstraction” (5). That the development of body culture coincident with the development of new cinematic technologies was no coincidence. Mechanization and modernization encouraged new questions about the impact of such technology on the human body. Klages, a foundational figure to the body culture movement who was a philosopher and psychologist wrote perhaps the most influential work on rhythm in the period, Das Wesen des Rhythmus [The Essence of Rhythm] (1923), wherein Klages drew a dichotomous distinction between organic and mechanical rhythms. The artificial or mechanical rhythms— called Takt which best translates to the recurrent beat, pulse or meter of music and poetry— of machines were in direct opposition to the natural rhythms of the body, including the heart and breath— called Rhythmus (231-232). Modernity, with its emphasis on rapid transit, mechanization and the expansion of urban centers, was for Klages, the ultimate embodiment of Takt. Increased emphasis on modern dance coincided with an increased emphasis on physical fitness, one that would eventually be co-opted by the Nazis as a part of their programmatic focus on the German and Aryan body that developed alongside their other ideological and political theories. Indeed, one of the foundational figures of body culture, Rudolf Bode, began as one of the early advocates and developers of rhythmic gymnastics and his books Rhythmus und Körpererziehung [Rhythm and Relationships with the Body] (1923) and Der Rhythmus und seine Bedeutung für die körperliche Erziehung [Rhythm and its Importance for Physical Education] (1920) would eventually catapult him to a position within the Nazi government advising on all Carrick 94 matters gymnastic. 13 Bode’s vision of movement was deeply inspired by Klages, but stripped of the limited intellectualism of even Klages’s work, which had emphasized the danger of analysis in creating “unnatural, strained, discordant, stifled movement” (Toepfer 127). From Klages to Bode, we witness the range of body culture as a conceptual theory that was underway in the German popular consciousness during the 1920s. Nacktkultur and other body culture movements grew out of a desire to react both to the physical constraints of modernity as well as to reinforce “enthusiasm for system, for rationalistic, technocratic, and mechanistic constructions of identity, even if its advocates proclaimed the opposite” (12). It is the tension between the call to return to the bucolic and a consistent reference to bodily correctness that links the bodies of German sleepwalking films to the flourishing world of German body culture. Bode, like many others, saw the Rhythmus as inherently female and Takt as inherently male (Cowan 239), which reiterates the transgressive nature of the cinematic sleepwalker’s incorporation of both Rhythmus and Takt. The bodies that I interrogate in this chapter possess both Takt and Rhythmus in excess and, like many of the practitioners of experimental body culture movements, express this excess in physical movement. What separates these cinematic sleepwalkers from the real-world practitioners of Nacktballett and rhythmic gymnastics is that these moments of physical release always came at a cost. In his essay “The Heart Machine: ‘Rhythm’ and Body in Weimar Cinema and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” Michael Cowan cites numerous Weimar German philosophies on rhythm in order to untangle the role rhythm played in the greater Weimar cinematic realm. Cowan argues 13 There is a fascinating side history of anti-Nazi resistance that begins in the world of rhythmic gymnastics. One of Bode’s greatest opponents, Dore Jacobs, developed her school of rhythmic gymnastics while affiliated with The Bund, or German Socialist Party, and her style of teaching emphasized a kind of bodily mindfulness that is more reminiscent of more contemporary yoga as well as a spirit of collectivity that was in direct opposition to the version of gymnastics championed by the Nazis (Guilbert). Carrick 95 that contemporary filmmakers including Wilhelm Prager responded directly to Klages’s call to return to the natural Rhythmus of the body, particularly in Prager’s film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925), which features “a bourgeois family caught in the throws of nervous convulsions and shot in rapid and abrupt montage style” which is then juxtaposed with “an impressionist collage of superimposed images of hustling city traffic” and “endless tracking shots showing lines of workers attached to oppressive factory machines”(232). 14 Cowan moves on after describing these opening scenes, but there is more to Prager’s kulturfilm than might appear from this description. Prager’s film is a blatant condemnation of bourgeois modernity and the softness that this has encouraged in the German people while still an affectionate enough love letter to the class hierarchies already in place that the film was financed and produced by UFA. At one point, the hand of a clock at a nightclub is animated, becoming a the bony hand of a skeleton holding an hourglass as the partiers merrily dance below. Another demonstrates the physical damage caused by corseting. Later, an iris wipe from black opens on the contorted backs of children suffering from severe spinal deformities. “Ein Körper, der von Kindesbeinen an vernachlässigt wird, wird schneller altern als andere [A body that is neglected from an early age will age faster than others],” reads the accompanying title card. He shows the reflex responses of infants to demonstrate the supposedly natural inclination of man toward strength and movement that are antithetical to the life encouraged by their bourgeois lifestyles. Prager’s film then offers physical fitness, often performed in nature, as a solution to the dangers of 14 Today Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit is most famous as the film that introduced Leni Riefenstahl as an actress, and it certainly seems to have influenced her own work in her Olympia films, and by extension, the filming of athletic bodies in the decades that followed. Riefenstahl later denied any involvement in the film, perhaps due to its copious nude dance sequences (Bock 395). Carrick 96 modernity. His characters undertake tasks in the nude to demonstrate the damaging effects their modern chores have had on their bodies. 15 It is also significant to Prager’s argument that he aligns his return to natural with a pastoral romanticism that identifies bourgeois life as inherently unhealthy. In the opening scene described by Cowan above, a family struggles ham-fistedly to fasten the collar of their patriarch’s shirt, all twitching with manic energy, as their driver honks for them impatiently outside. Despite the attempts of his almost comically well-dressed wife— who manages to poke him— only the family maid is able to “Die Menschen heute sind nicht alle gut gebaut, nicht alle kräftig, aber stets sind sie nervös [People today are not well built. They are not all powerful, but all nerves.],” reads the title card. While Prager juxtaposes this scene with images of countless factory workers engulfed by hulking masses of their machines, in this moment of prowess, the bourgeois family’s maid demonstrates herself to be somehow exempt from this epidemic of nervousness. Her body is not broken by her work at a sewing machine, which is one of the tableaus Prager later creates using a nude woman to show how this kind of labor destroys the spine, nor is she the frantic, ticking mess that her mistress is. Prager yearns for pre-Industrialism while also enforcing the contemporary hierarchy of servitude. Indeed, it is this very contradiction between the supposed health benefits of the body culture movement and its predominant political motives— or lack thereof— that most clearly align this fascination with the body with the sleepwalkers that would haunt Weimar cinema. The “good” bodies modeled by the body-focused kulturfilm like Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit met head-on with the supposedly “bad” bodies crippled by modernity in sleepwalking 15 To a cynical viewer of today, the film certainly takes a lot of opportunities to allow very physically fit people to flex and dance while nude or partially clothed, but the nods to proper athletic technique seem sincere if inserted in an attempt to avoid claims of gratuity. Carrick 97 and hypnotism. It is no coincidence that sleepwalkers became a common theme in the post-war years when the trauma of shell-shock had made somatic conditions far more visible than they had every been before. As I demonstrated in the first chapter, sleepwalking had become both a symptom of a troubled mind and a symptom of the body resisting a return to normalcy. That hypnotism appeared like sleepwalking with the added threat of a Svengali who controlled the mind without the hypnotized subject realizing it. 16 Nineteenth century Europeans were fixated on the threat of hypnotism as well as the psychic implications they saw as inherent to sleepwalking of both a natural and artificial nature. Contemporary scientists attempted to answer questions about the lengths to which an artificial somnambulist might go upon the immoral suggestions of the hypnotist holding them under his power. Studies by preeminent early neurologists and psychologists, including George Gilles de la Tourette and Hippolyte Bernheim, a teacher of Freud’s, were met with mixed results, but the threat of the unpalatable escapades that a body under such an influence might do remained of popular consideration during the early years of the 20th century. 17 The interchangable use of somnambulism to represent both sleepwalking and hypnosis originated with one of Anton Mesmer’s most devoted students, the Marquis de Puységur who became particularly fascinated with the trance-like state that certain individuals fell under when subjected to animal magnetism. Puységur initally called this state “magnetic sleep.” But Puységur noticed the continuity of memory between sessions of “magnetic sleep” as well as the 16 The Svengali figure, too, is a remnant of Victorian anti-Semitism, from the British novel Trilby by George du Maurier wherein a Jewish hypnotist uses his power to turn a tone-deaf girl into an acclaimed singer and then dies, leaving her with no memory of her successful career. Even here, the amnesia of hypnotism is essential to the plot. 17 Freud actually translated Bernheim’s “De la Suggestion et de son Application à la Thérapeutique” into German in 1888, according to Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time (51), so to call him a teacher may be an understatement of his influence on Freud’s practice. Carrick 98 total amnesia to the events that unfolded during the trance upon waking and instead renamed the state “magnetic somnambulism” after relating it to the conditions of natural sleepwalking. Soon this term was adopted into “artificial sleepwalking” (Crabtree 558). 18 As such, the sleepwalker became a particularly salient figure during the 19th century, particularly in regions of the Western world where sleepwalkers might be understood to tap into the energetic forces that connect all men and thus into the commonality that rationalized pushes toward universal suffrage, the elimination of slavery and gradual deconstruction of the most obvious structures of empire. Artificial somnambulism, whether authentic or faked, was also a common popular entertainment. Stefan Andriopoulos quotes Gilles Tourette, who describes 400- 500 cabinets not unlike Caligari’s around Paris in 1887 (2). 19 Epileptics and sleepwalkers shared an identification and alignment with early studies of hysteria that placed emphasis on the ways that a disordered mind might influence the workings of the body. Most famous among the Victorian doctors devoted to unlocking this relationship was Jean-Martin Charcot, the head of neurology at the Salpêtrière teaching hospital in Paris. Charcot became an incredibly influential figure in early psychoanalysis and neurology, though he is perhaps now most famous for photographing his hysterical patients and thus influencing the work of the Surrealists, and some argue also the advancement of modern dance and the Ballet Russe, in the next century. Of course, comments like “This whole portion of the seizure is . . . , if 18 Isidor Sadger notes: “Further comparison shows the night wandering as symptomatically similar to hysterical and hypnotic somnambulism” (ix). 19 Crabtree’s bibliography is also very useful for determining the importance of spiritualist practices like hypnotism, mediumship and animal magnetism were to German culture after the war. Between 1919 and 1925, thirty-nine German-language books were published on these subjects as compared to eleven books published in the six years preceding the war. In 1918 no books were published, presumably due to the effects of the war on the publishing industry. Carrick 99 I am permitted to say so, in 20 credibly beautiful and every single posture would merit documentation by the process of instantaneous photography” (Andriopolous 68). Charcot combined aesthetic critique with scientific study, making his work a natural fit for artists attempting to visualize the conflicted mind. The visualization of the mind was possible for Charcot only because of his patients’ hysterical muscular contortions. Put simply, his hysterics were subject to the aesthetic gaze of the artist because, as Charcot understood it, their bodies were subject to the control of their unconscious. The natural somnambulist faded somewhat in popularity at the turn of the century, remaining popular in more sensationalist fictions. There was much speculation that artificial somnambulism might yield a pliable body to the control of the hypnotist, allowing them to make the objects of their hypnotic focus carry out crimes against their own will. 21 Following the death of Charcot in 1892 and the drop in popularity of hypnotism in psychoanalytic treatment models, the sleepwalker became less popular as a figure in literature and popular culture until the massive upsurge in mental illness diagnoses during and after the Great War brought the condition back into the forefront in the popular imagination. Now, however, sleepwalkers began to take on a sense of displacement and dislocation that spoke less to an access to universal knowledge that the sleepwalker might be conduit to and more to the disorientating effects of modernity. Indeed, as Kaes notes, the August 6, 1919 edition of Germany’s largest film trade paper, Der Kinematograph featured a full-page ad for “‘Minx, the Man with the Black Mask—Telepathic novelty that forces a randomly chosen person to do an experiment the audience thought up, and 20 For more information on Charcot’s career and influence, see Constructing Neurology: Jean- Martin Charcot, 1825-1893. 21 For more on the real scientific debates regarding the legitimacy of this possibility, see Stefan Andriopoulos’s excellent book Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction and the Invention of Cinema. Studies were performed by Charcot, Tourette, Franzos, among others. Carrick 100 that without any hypnosis and suggestion,” pre-dating the German release of Das Cabinet von Dr. Caligari by slightly over six months (58). Eventually stage shows featuring hypnotism and other occultic arts were so popular that the chief of police for Berlin “commissioned a report on the legal and public health questions this raised,” which was undertaken by famed spiritualist researcher Albert von Schrenck-Notzing who concluded the massive resurgence of spiritualist entertainments was due to “‘mass psychosis of the war and the revolution,’ and the desire of a public destabilized by ‘war, depression, economic decline, and perturbations of the revolution for mysterious and uncanny sensations’ (Kaes 58). 22 As we see in the films discussed in this chapter, the imposed will of the hypnotist and its influence on the bodily actions of the hypnotized person and the threat that this posed to personal autonomy and morality was particularly pertinent to post-war Germans. The relationship between a nation decimated by a war for which they had unfairly taken nearly all the blame in the immediate aftermath and figures whose bodies betray them in order to pursue the desires of some external figure is fairly straightforward. Stefan Andriopoulos outlines this relationship, particularly with regard to legal definitions of personhood and autonomy arising out of 19th century German legal and psychological culture, but I would like to push this argument further in order to elucidate the role that sleepwalking plays not only in Germany, which begins with this sense of disavowed personhood but ends with deliberate disruptions to capitalist mechanisms that, when encouraged by the far Right, slowly developed into fascism. This was precisely the 22 Albert von Schrenck-Notzing was discredited posthumously for not himself discrediting the fraudulent psychic Eva Carrière, who claimed to produce ectoplasmic images, which were actually altered photographs taken from the newspaper wrapped in gauze, which she then regurgitated during her séances. Several preeminent psychic researchers, including von Schrenck-Notzing were aware of her fraud but vowed to keep it a secret due to their belief in psychic mediumship and their concern that Carrière’s case would damage legitimate research. For more on this story, see Sofie Lachappelle’s Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France, 1853-1931. Carrick 101 turn that fascinated Kracauer after the end of the Second World War, but his reading of Das Cabinet von Dr. Caligari fails to recognize the greater theme of psychic manipulation within Caligarismus. Again, I am reminded of Butler’s work on the materiality of the body. If, as we have learned in my first chapter, natural sleepwalking disrupts the logic of a static, concrete body which is entirely intelligible and controlled by the mind, or as Butler puts it: “psychic projection confers boundaries and, hence, unity on the body, so that the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material. Bodily contours and morphology are not merely implicated in an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material but are that tension” (66). If then, the body is a psychic construction, then how are we to reconcile this psychic construction with the invasive psyche of another, as in the case of artificial somnambulism? What are the consequences to the body to have it suddenly occupied by not just one subconscious but two? Here we must turn to psychoanalysis for answers. Psychoanalyzing the Sleepwalker Artificial sleepwalking is menacing because the will of another is imposed upon your docile body, but natural sleepwalking opens the possibility that even you own will or unconscious is beyond your control. 23 As Freud argued in Interpretation of Dreams, first published in December 1899, sleep and dreams are a place in which neurotics are able to revisit past traumas. Freud explains, “These dreams are endeavoring to master the stimulus 23 Kaes argues that the audience would understand that Cesare’s somnambulism was truly hypnotism the entire time, but I disagree (61). It is clear that Caligari’s experiments depend on the availability of a natural somnambulist, or an actual sleepwalker, to enter into his clinic, or else he could have begun his experimentation on any of the numerous patients under his control. Of course, which of the framing stories we are to take as factual rather than the invention of Franzis’s seemingly unwell mind is unclear, but my point remains relevant nonetheless. Carrick 102 retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (32). We have encountered such reenactments in the first chapter, wherein former soldiers found themselves returned to the battlefield in sleep, and sometimes found themselves enacting great violence as a result. But what Cesare represents in Caligari is not the singular trauma. He has, indeed, been sleeping for twenty-five years, if Caligari’s carnival hype is to be believed. Instead, Cesare’s somnambulism, both artificial and natural, represents the manipulation of the German people as a whole. Here is a man made to sleep forever, but allowed— perhaps encouraged— to wander the streets with violent intentions at night, re- enacting a trauma that is not his own over and over again. 24 It seems no coincidence, then, that Freud reworked his conception of repetition and trauma immediately following the war in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Freudian psychoanalysis would initially have its strongest influence on popular culture in the German-speaking world. Freud was, after all, a preeminent psychoanalyst in Viennese society until the Nazi rise to power forced him to flee to London the year before his death in 1938. Indeed, that the psychoanalyst became a villainous trope in German popular culture in the years following the Great War should come as no surprise after reading the attempts of psychoanalysts to “cure” shell shock elaborated upon in the previous chapter. Freud, initially under the influence of his mentors Charcot and Bernheim, first identified sleepwalking with an acting-out of the contents of dreams. Later, he revised his official opinion on sleepwalking, attributing the mysterious actions of the sleepwalker to a desire to return to the 24 Kaes argues that film, like dreams, is a space for traumatic reenactment, and that this was particularly the case with the horror films of Weimar Germany. While, I agree that this is certainly the case, I think this argument does not take into account pre-war explorations of similar themes, like we have seen in Der Andere, which certainly boomed in the post-War years, but were by no means new. Carrick 103 nursery-room bed, even into adulthood. Later, Freud, like many of his contemporaries, saw little distinction between the state of deep hypnosis and sleepwalking, and as such, he tended to use the terms somewhat interchangeably. However, his opinions on hypnosis seem to have changed fairly dramatically throughout his career, particularly shown through his consistent return to Josef Breuer’s Anna O case. 25 That found Breuer’s study of Anna O. so useful comes as little surprise considering that “Anna” herself called Breuer’s methods her “talking cure,” becoming one of the foundations of modern psychoanalysis. Breuer described Anna as cycling, with decreasing regularity as her “talking cure” proceeded, between hallucinatory agitation, waking confusion and inability to speak in her native German, and finally a somnambulistic slumber. At first, this period of somnambulism was fairly contained to the afternoons, which Breuer noted as related to her role as nursemaid to her dying father, whom she anxiously watched during more typical sleeping hours. Anna O. was unusually susceptible to hypnosis, which allowed Breuer to explore the remarkable disconnect between behaviors and memory that he identified between her two states of being. 26 Perhaps what is most fascinating about these cases is not the symptoms these women presented or even the various methods used to treat them, but that the amnesia associated with hypnosis allowed Freud to begin to develop his theory of das Unbewusste or the unconscious. The term appeared in the Anna O. section for the first time in the psychoanalytic sense, and 25 Freud and Breuer wrote Studies of Hysteria together, inspired by Breuer’s encounters with Anna O., really Bertha Pappenheim. The real led a fascinating life, of more relevance to my concerns is the way that her “talking cure” and treatment with Breuer influenced early Freudian psychoanalytic techniques. Breuer was himself already an established Viennese doctor while undertaking Pappenheim’s treatment, and Freud was in the process of establishing his practice (Studies in Hysteria x-xi). Translator James Strachey notes the lack of popularity of the text in contemporary German medical journals (xv). 26 Freud specifies in “Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment” that by his terms somnambulism is the deepest level of hypnosis (1596). Carrick 104 Strachey, Freud’s translator for Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press speculates that Breuer’s use of quotation marks implies he is attributing the term to Freud rather than to himself (Hysteria 45 n. 1). Certainly, the close relationship between somnambulism, hypnosis and the development of the core concept of psychoanalysis is a fascinating one. Following the account of her ability to “talk through” her hallucinations during her somnambulant states, Freud sought to replicate this state somewhere between sleeping and waking in order to allow his own patients access to the “talking cure” and to their unconscious. As such, he sought training from Charcot, Janet and Bernheim in the still-developing mesmeric arts, including hypnotism, and attempted to incorporate hypnotism into his clinical practice with mixed results. Freud first experimented with hypnosis in December 1887 while his practice focused almost entirely on the treatment of hysteria and after he had returned to Vienna from study with Charcot in Paris. He began in much the same vein as Breuer but began to make a point of using hypnosis in a different manner than his elder had, specifically aiming to move away from therapeutic suggestion and toward the use of hypnosis as a tool of catharsis (Hysteria xi). His case study of Frau Emmy von R. was the first to receive this emphasis on catharsis. 27 That Freud felt it necessary to move away from therapeutic suggestion during these hypnosis sessions suggests the fraught world he encountered upon uncovering the unconscious. The relationship between analyst and patient could become fraught with the emotional resonances of the past relationships and encounters being dredged up in sessions. 28 27 Later in life, Freud complicated the timeline of his involvement with Breuer, hypnosis and psychoanalysis in general after being accused of minimizing the achievements of Janet by, well, Janet and as a result there is some speculation that Cäcilie M. might be his first patient to have received the cathartic hypnotic treatment, but the greater consensus seems to support Frau Emmy von R. as the first (Hysteria x-xii, 284). 28 The Anna O. case proved the particular danger of this to the analyst himself. Despite his final claim in Studies in Hysteria that Anna O. had fully recovered since that time,” she was not yet Carrick 105 Like Anna O., Frau Emmy von N. was also easily hypnotized: “I had only to hold up a finger in front of her and order her to go to sleep, and she sank back with a dazed and confused look….After this first hypnosis she retained a dim memory of my words; but already at the second there was complete somnambulism (with amnesia)” (50-51). In a footnote, Freud describes her confusion waking from her trance, each time disoriented. Frau Emmy von N. exhibits perfect affective disorientation upon waking: Every time she woke from hypnosis she looked about her for a moment in a confused way, let her eyes fall on me, seemed to have come to her senses, put on her glasses, which she took off before going to sleep, and then became quite lively and on the spot. Although in the course of the treatment…we discussed every sort of subject, and although I put her to sleep twice almost every day, she never made any comment to me about the hypnosis or asked me a single question about it; and in her waking state she seemed, so far as possible, to ignore the fact that she was undergoing hypnotic treatment. (51) Frau Emmy von N. demonstrates the continual confusion of the somnambulist—you just never get used to waking up somewhere strange— while continuing to perform perfectly the role of bourgeois widowhood. She wakens confused, but cannot acknowledge the potential impropriety of allowing her sleeping, entranced body to be subject to experimental science. Instead, she asks nothing of Freud and simply returns cheerily to the role that is expected of her despite her evident surprise and discomfort upon waking. But Freud writes of her with the compassion of a caregiver, and the implication of impropriety seems foolish, yet obvious from contemporary perspectives of medical malpractice. Freud even implies the potential that hypnotism had for abuse in a footnote in the Frau Emmy von N. section. He explains that in treating his patients using artificial somnambulism, “I well. After a period during which she no longer experienced her somnambulant episodes and began to hallucinate more freely, Anna eventually imagined herself pregnant by her doctor, and Breuer terminated her treatment. She was later institutionalized for brief periods over several years, but went on to be a foundational figure in the development of social work in Germany. Carrick 106 have been deeply impressed in another of my patients by this interesting contrast during somnambulism between a most far-reaching obedience in everything unconnected with the symptoms” but had been met with total stubbornness with regard to the actual symptoms under treatment (100). Freud then begins a specific anecdote about a patient, but in this phrase “a most far-reaching obedience” comes the implication that a patient under hypnosis might be compelled to perform acts that he or she might not normally feel comfortable doing. Indeed, it was this very obedience that made artificial somnambulism valuable as a therapeutic tool to begin with. But implicit in this statement is that not only could a patient be persuaded to act against their natural inclinations but could also be made to entirely forget the experience. Though the tenet of propriety go unviolated in Freud’s relationship with Frau Emmy, this relationship, too, reveals a troubling power imbalance that made the artificial somnambulist such a salient figure for Weimar Germans. After a gap in treatment of eighteen months, during which Frau Emmy von N. was relatively untroubled by the constant anxiety and persistent tics that had brought her to Freud’s office in the first place, she returned complaining of concerns of memory loss. Freud, knowing full well that these gaps in her memory, some going far back into her childhood and into the early years of her children, are due to his use of therapeutic suggestion— specifically suggesting she forget the memories which caused her distress when recalled— offered her no comfort regarding the source of her missing memories: “I had to be careful not to tell her the cause of this particular instance of amnesia” (61 n. 1). Freud, of course, gives no indication that the deliberate erasure of a patient’s memory might have ethical concerns for him, but this is implicit in his move away from suggestion and toward the cathartic use of hypnosis as he became more comfortable with the technique. Carrick 107 Later in life, with the guidance of Bernheim, Freud came to the conclusion that such somnambulistic states did not actually result in any long-term memory loss or amnesia, even of the moments experienced while under hypnosis. 29 In his Introductory Lectures of Psycho- Analysis he explains his new perspective on artificial somnambulism: “In natural sleep we withdraw our interest from the whole external world; and in hypnotic sleep we also withdraw it from the whole world, but with the single exception of the person who has hypnotized us and with whom we remain in rapport…The assumption that in a dream too a knowledge about his dreams is present, though it is inaccessible to him so that he himself does not believe it, is not something entirely out of the blue” (127). Freud has followed the complexities of hypnosis toward the development of his theory of the unconscious! Only in a state that mimics the forgetfulness of sleepwalking, but allows a single conduit back to waking life in the form of the hypnotist can the human mind mimic the same pathways that it does in natural sleep and thus open itself up to the kind of psychoanalytic interrogation that provides understanding of the until-then unexplored workings of the unconscious. Before the War A hearty servant girl, typically known more for her singing than her brooding, cries out in her sleep after finding herself disturbed by the light of the moon. The next night, she gazes at the stars with her master, a gentleman farmer, and imagines a burning barn when she looks through his telescope. She retires to bed but emerges from the farmhouse a ghostly apparition all in white, “holding one hand over her eyes and groping along the wall as though seeking an entrance where there was no door, and talking to herself the while with quick excited words” calling to 29 Freud mentions this multiple times throughout his work, including in his Auto-biography. Carrick 108 her master to awake to help her fetch the loose calves in the garden. Instead, he catches her in his arms and gently wakes her from her reverie and returns the shamefaced girl to her bed. The next day, charmed by her evening somnambulism, he resolves to marry her. Gustav Frenssen’s Jörn Uhl tells the story of a gentleman farmer who slowly falls in love with a stubborn housemaid named Lena Tarn, who is constantly mocking him for refusing to marry. Their flirtation seems predicated both on a mutual attraction and their willingness, particularly Lena’s willingness, to test class lines by flirting with her master. Naturally, this being a pastoral romance, they are ultimately united in love, but not before Lena Tarn manages to finally reveal her feelings only through this episode of sleepwalking. Published in 1902, Frenssen’s biography of farmer Jürgen (Jörn) Uhl deals with sleepwalking only in this single episode. But Jörn Uhl was a bestseller and functions as a convenient crib sheet to pre-war German representations of sleepwalking, which saw somnambulism as a symptom of romantic desire unfulfilled rather than the helpless dupes that they would soon become. The German-speaking world was the heart of the then-burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, so it comes as little surprise that German writers and artists were exploring issues of the psyche before the cataclysmic events of the Great War forced them to the fore of the popular consciousness. That these German sleepwalkers, like those of the British, changed dramatically after the comes as more of a surprise, however, considering this fixation on developing theoretical models of the mind that flourished in Vienna and Berlin. Though Freud himself focused only peripherally on sleepwalking in his work, his student the Austrian psychoanalyst Isidor Sadger wrote an entire volume on the topic. Sadger’s most famous work focused on the causes and cures for homosexuality, so perhaps it is no surprise that his work here fixated on the libidinal origins of sleepwalking. His work Über Nachtwandeln und Mondsucht : Carrick 109 eine medizinisch-literarische Studie [Sleepwalking and Moonwalking: A Medical-Literary Study] was first published in German in 1914, and translated into English in 1920. 30 In it, Sadger makes the claim, following his mentor Freud, that sleepwalking is frequently tied to childhood libidinal impulses that drive the sleeping to seek the beds of their originary love objects— usually their parents of the opposite sex. Other cases, of much less interest to Sadger feature an acting-out of dreams that seems more connected to family histories of sleepwalking than to any actual unconscious desire. Sadger is more famous for his work on homosexuality and for inventing the terms Sadomasochismus and Narzissmus, so his work in Sleepwalking and Moonwalking reflects with particular relish on the ways that sleepwalking reflects unconscious sexuality. His longest and most developed analysand case study in Sleepwalking and Moonwalking features a young woman who found herself drawn sexually to her own mother, though Sadger notes her sleepwalking impulses were largely alleviated when she became sexually active with multiple men at the age of eighteen. Though his case study relies largely on self-reported biographical data, conveniently adding credence to his claim that some sleepwalkers are triggered by the light of the moon to pursue these childhood objects of desire, particularly if this desire has been repressed. Though Sadger’s study follows the Freudian model of Studies in Hysteria and his cases seem at best somewhat dubious in their support of his hypothesis, he, like Freud, finds himself inclined to augment his case studies with cases from literature. His arguments may seem no more convincing through literature than they do through the biographies and etiologies of his patients, 30 I am working with the translated version of Sadger’s text, which is now in the public domain. Carrick 110 but his study does do convenient work of cataloguing the ways that sleepwalking was most frequently understood in European literature in the years preceding the Great War. 31 Sadger’s catalogue ranges from German and Danish romances of mid-century through 1901, ending with the epitome of canonical sleepwalkers, Lady Macbeth, showing the popularity of the somnambulistic sex narratives to explain their heroine’s unconscious desires for their heroes. Put simply, these women, whether housemaids or princesses, wonder into the bedchambers of said heroes, make either a verbal or physical declaration of love, and then consummate their relationship. Being attacks of somnambulism, the love-struck heroines have no memory of their trysts and then, luckily, it seems, find themselves overjoyed (rather than terrified) to find themselves pregnant. In Germany, the quasi-erotic pleasure of the turn-of-the-century somnambulist would not outlast the Great War— or rather—this pleasure would become a threat rather than a thrill. Instead, the somnambulist would become a representative for German feelings of betrayal and powerlessness that would dominate German politics domestically for the duration of the short- lived Weimar Republic. Becoming Cesare The prevalence of sleepwalkers and victims of hypnosis in films of the Weimar period reflect not only a cultural memory of the unfair beating Germans saw themselves in the post-War redistribution of power but also the bodily memory of being led to fight a war that no longer seemed theirs. Inherent to this identification with the sleepwalker is both the bodily experience of disorientation and the dislocation that results from amnesia upon waking. Not only did the 31 It is, of course, from Sadger that I initally learned of Jörn Uhl. Carrick 111 German people feel that they were misled— here made metaphor with by the mad Dr. Caligari physically controlling Cesare’s body— but their initial motivations for entering the war seemed negated by the scapegoating they received at the hands of the Allies. The sleepwalker who wakes feeling confused about his actions throughout the night became the perfect figure for identification, and the artificial somnambulist who finds his body taken over to perform the evil machinations of an anonymous figure is even clearer. Natural and artificial somnambulism resonated with post-war German filmgoers because they too were dupes, gone to the trenches to fight a battle that was no longer theirs, gone to the factory to produce goods for an economy and a nation that discarded them. Immediately following the Armistice, the Allied powers went to work crafting an agreeable treaty to settle the international conflict. Famously, American President Woodrow Wilson crafted a plan to create the League of Nations which grew from the final of his “Fourteen Points,” which he introduced in a speech on January 8, 1918. The resulting treaty included a section, Article 231, frequently referred to as the War Guilt Clause, which read: The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies. The larger delegation of allies negotiated a harsh and condemning peace which Germany was forced to sign under threat of renewed military assault from the allies eight months after the Armistice. Historical consensus now seems to agree that this Article’s authors, Norman Davis and John Foster Dulles, wrote the Article in language designed to suggest not Germany’s complicity or guilt in the war, but the nation’s responsibility in paying war reparations, which was outlined further in the following Article. Contemporary German views of Article 231, however, identified the dry language of the Article with overt condemnation. It certainly didn’t Carrick 112 help matters that the first version of the Treaty mistranslated this article, placing more overt blame on the German people and requiring them to openly bear the burden of responsibility for the war (Binkley 399-400). It is possible that the anger that developed in the German public as a result of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles brewed a spirit of ultra-nationalism and resentment that eventually came to a head in the Third Reich, but it is just as possible that the Treaty of Versailles eliminated a real threat of continued military conflict. The actual socio-political consequences of both the incredibly high reparation requirements and the inclusion of Article 231 have been topics of debate for decades among political scientists and historians, and they are ultimately of little import to my argument. 32 More significant to my concerns is the way that contemporary Germans identified Article 231 and the Treaty of Versailles with an international scapegoating campaign that condemned Germany to hyperinflation and emasculated the German people. The Stab-in-the-Back myth that perpetuated among the German populace after the signing of the Treaty encouraged anti-Socialist and anti-Jewish feelings, popularly perpetuating the story that the German military forces would have won the war if it weren’t for the overthrow of the monarchy. Though this myth flourished in the far-Right, versions of it proliferated (McElligott 43). The seeming allegiances between socialists and German Jews reinforced already-present anti-Semitism and encouraged distrust of unions that brewed German fascism. Ultimately the Nazi’s adopted the Stab-in-the-Back myth wholeheartedly into their official history. Article 231, derisively called the Diktat, had laid the blame of the Great War on German shoulders, and as a portion of a larger economic punishment, created a climate of hostility to 32 In a true tangent, John Maynard Keynes, friend of Virginia Woolf and internationally renowned economist condemned the reparations as cripplingly punitive in his 1919 book The Economic Consequences of Peace, calling the terms a “Carthaginian peace.” Carrick 113 foreign influences even while being consistently subject to such influence. That the German people so identified with characters who found themselves subject to the hypnotic powers of outsiders, literally finding their bodies controlled by forces foreign to their own minds, should come as no surprise, particularly as the Revolution that grew out of the disappointments of war repeatedly flared and was crushed throughout 1919. Each major strike or shootout in the street served as another attempt to regain control over the newly post-Imperial German nation. Coupled with the Revolution that followed, these mid-war strikes only served to reinforce far-Right anti- Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-socialist feelings which then developed into the popular fascist “Dolchstoss” or “stab-in-the-back” myth (Gerwarth 7). This “stab-in-the-back” supposedly originated when the future first president of Germany Friedrich Ebert claimed, “kein Feind hat Euch überwunden [you were defeated by no enemy]” in his address to the troops returning home from December 10, 1918 (Niess 38). The strikers and the socialists who encouraged the mass strikes, which originated in Berlin but spread throughout the major German cities were clearly the friends that Ebert had implied, or so the far-Right parties Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party or DNVP) and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Worker’s Party, the Nazis, or NSDAP) claimed. Critic Anton Kaes explains the irony of the Dolchstoss myth in his book Shell Shock Cinema: “Though the Great War was more thoroughly documented in photographs, newsreels, and autobiographies than any previous armed conflict, the painful reality of defeat remained taboo for everyone except left-wing intellectuals and pacifists—the very parties held liable for this devastating outcome” (2). Carrick 114 It was into this atmosphere that Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari premiered in February 1920. 33 The film opens with a young man, Franzis or Francis, exchanging hair-raising tales with an elderly man in a garden. A beautiful woman dressed all in white walks past them, seemingly without noticing either man, and Franzis begins to relate the main narrative of the film, which both he and this somewhat insensible woman Jane, who he identifies as his betrothed, have experienced together in their hometown of Holstenwall. A fair has come to Holstenwall, and with it, the charlatan Dr. Caligari. We learn that Franzis good-naturedly competes with his best friend Alan for Jane’s attention, and we encounter Caligari, who has already had a run-in with a nasty town clerk. That night the clerk dies mysteriously, setting off a chain of murders that will ultimately be revealed to be the work of the sinister Doctor and his fortune-telling somnambulist companion, Cesare. The next day, Alan and Franzis visit Caligari’s show where the titular cabinet is revealed. It is, in fact, a coffin, housing the Cesare his psychic somnambulist. Alan playfully asks Cesare when he will die and laughs when he is told he will not live to see the next sunrise. That night Alan, too, is murdered. Franzis remembers the prophecy and alerts the police who are initially led astray by another attempted murder unrelated to Caligari’s spree. Jane visits the carnival and piques Caligari’s interest, which turns out to be a grave mistake. Determined to find his friend’s murderer but unconvinced of the suspect’s guilt, Franzis guards Caligari’s cart night and day. But Franzis has missed Cesare’s exit. Caligari keeps a realistic facsimile in his cabinet allowing 33 A quotation taken from the program from a slightly later Caligarismus film more overtly featuring hypnotism, Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler, helps to elucidate contemporary feelings about the state of affairs in post-war Germany: “Kein wesentliches Symptom der Nachkriegsjahre fehlt. Börsenmanöver okkultistischer Schwindel, Straßenhandel und Prasserei‚ Schmuggel, Hypnose und Falschmünzerei, Expressionismus und Mord und Totschlag. [No significant symptom of he post-war years is missing: stock market manipulation, occult swindling, black market trading and debauchery, smuggling, counterfeiting and hypnosis, Expressionism and murder and manslaughter.]” Carrick 115 the somnambulist to wander, which he does, straight into Jane’s bedroom. Cesare raises the knife to stab Jane but seems paralyzed by her beauty. Instead, she wakes and they are caught in a frantic struggle. He drags her out into the night, closely followed by several men from the village. He drags her limp body across the countryside, finally dropping her before staggering to his own death by exhaustion. Jane identifies her kidnapper and Franzis, confused, races to the police station to check on the other suspect, who remains in his cell. Together he and the police rush to Caligari’s and discover the decoy, though Caligari himself has fled. Franzis chases him to a local asylum, and presumes he is one of the patients. He is horrified to discover Caligari is not Caligari at all but the director of the asylum, assuming the guise of a mythical Caligari from the 12 th century who controlled the will of a somnambulist through the use of hypnotism. The asylum’s doctors help Franzis sneak into his office and together they read of his obsessive fascination with the story, which culminated with the arrival of a somnambulist to the hospital. Caligari seeks to force the somnambulist, so susceptible to outside influence, to commit murder against his own will. The group then confronts Caligari with Cesare’s body and he raves before being restrained in a straightjacket. We return to the framing narrative in the garden, where Franzis claims that Caligari raves in a cell still. Soon, though, it becomes clear that Franzis, Jane and even Cesare are all just patients in the very asylum he saw Caligari locked up in. Their relationships to one another and the story of the violent murder spree were all the fevered imaginings of a madman. The doctor himself remains warden and Franzis’s protestations only see Franzis himself tied down in the straightjacket while a kindly Caligari looks on, claiming this revelation that Franzis thinks he is actually the mythical Caligari will allow him to cure the raving man. Carrick 116 Kraucauer famously argued that Caligari and the evil psychoanalyst type himself reflected an increasing openness to and interest in absolute power in the German popular psyche during the interwar years. While I agree with Kracauer that Caligari seems to ask the audience to identify with the somnambulist rather than the hypnotist, I would like to make the case that part of the horrific appeal of this identification is that these characters find themselves driven to their own destruction against their will and without logical recourse to blame anyone else. Caligarismus is, above all, an aesthetic and thematic obsession with the body controlled by another. The best contemporary readers of Das Cabinet Des Caligari have appeared throughout this chapter and certainly influence my readings of the film. Among these are Anton Kaes who speaks only briefly of Caligari in his study of Weimar cinema influenced by the traumas of war, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. But Kaes speaks eloquently of the limbo that Cesare and his companion sleepwalker, Ellen in Nosferatu live in, describing them as occupying “a state between waking and sleeping, life and death” (Kaes 116). Stefan Andriopoulos has written perhaps the best text on the relationship between hypnotism, crime and the post-War German state where he seeks analogy with legal definitions of both personhood and corporations. Other recent criticism, including essays by Julia A. Walker and Julie Hubbert, as well as an older book by Leon Barsacq has largely focused on the aesthetic questions raised by the Expressionist sets and costumes rather than the enigmatic sleepwalker himself. One critic, Allison Whitney, makes the connection between Expressionist cinema and body culture, and even opens her piece with Caligari, but only to summarily dismiss the film in favor of Wiene’s follow-up Die drei Tänze der Mary Wilford [The Three Dances of Mary Wilford]. Unlike Whitney, I see the influence of body culture predominating representations of Carrick 117 sleepwalking. After all, what could be more central to depictions of bodies wracked by out-of- control modernity, like those in Prager’s film, than bodies that move beyond the control of the very minds that once controlled them. Becoming the Archetype Der Andere pre-dates the outbreak of war but reflects many of the thematic concerns with the bad body created by modernity that would come to a head in Caligari without the stylistic panache of the later film. 34 Directed by Max Mack and based on the Paul Lindau play of the same name, Der Andere [The Other] was released to some acclaim in February 1913. Perhaps largely due to the already celebrated reputation of its lead actor, Der Andere was considered by some contemporary critics to be the first German of real artistic merit. The film was remade back-to-back in German and French by Calgari’s director Wiene in 1930. The original film version of Der Andere features a narrative that is all Caligarismus while its visuals and acting are those of a fairly straightforward drama, with one notable exception: the visual transformation of the film’s main character. Albert Bassermann, who plays the protagonist, a society lawyer Hallers, and who would go on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent made his film debut in Der Andere. He had already been acting for more than twenty-five years on the stage and had famously refused to be photographed, let alone filmed, until making his debut in the adaptation of Lindau’s play. Bassermann brought particular attention to the film, which is among the first to 34 I was pointed to Der Andere and Bassermann’s performance as a precursor to Veidt’s by Stefan Andriopoulos, who mentions the film in a single sentence (95). Today Der Andere is extant in only two archives, the Deutsches Filminstitut in Wiesbaden, Germany and the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. I was able to view the film at the Deutsches Filminstitut with the help of Michael Schurig, the head of the institute’s film archives. Carrick 118 receive some critical attention for its artistic qualities as well as for its entertainment value (Bär 100). When Kracauer mentions Der Andere in his screed From Caligari to Hitler, he describes it as “a Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde case” shifted “into a stuffy bourgeois atmosphere” (33), and his assessment largely rings true. Hallers has a friend the judge Arnoldy read him a description of mental illness at a party, leading Hallers to make the argument against the use of such mitigating circumstances as a defense in court. Shortly afterwards, Hallers falls from his horse while participating in an equestrian show and receives a brain injury. Agnes witnesses this, fainting. Afterward, while seemingly recovered, Hallers begins to sleepwalk, which is at first only hinted at and eventually shown outright on screen. Soon it becomes evident that he has been sleepwalking repeatedly. Meanwhile, a side plot is developed featuring a housemaid named Amalie and Arnoldy’s sister Agnes. A tired and yawning Amalie absentmindedly places Agnes’s broach in her pocket while helping her undress. She is caught by Arnoldy discovering the broach in her pocket and is fired immediately. Later, when Hallers has begun to sleepwalk, he encounters Amalie at a neighborhood bar, where she has become a barmaid. She recognizes him instantly, and like all the other patrons, realizes he is sleepwalking. She gives him her picture in the hopes of jogging his memory and helps to bandage a wound she had given him earlier in her sleepy state. Soon, a table full of ruffians takes notice of Hallers and invite him over. It seems apparent that the leader of the group Dickert is some kind of thief. Meanwhile, the chief of police, who is following the thief, has snuck behind the bar in order to follow him to his next heist and catch him red-handed. Soon the thief realizes he can follow the sleepwalking Hallers in order to find an appropriately bourgeois home to rob. He does so, following Hallers into his own study, where he attempts to split the loot with Hallers. The chief of police arrests the thief on his Carrick 119 escape and brings him back to face Hallers, who eventually awakes, who he still thinks is his ally. Finally Hallers’ role as master of the house is revealed and he realizes he has been sleepwalking though he has no memory of the events of the night. Finally, he moves out of the city and marries Agnes, seemingly cured of his split personality and nasty habit of sleepwalking by the forced stability of married life. While the film itself is a somewhat staid retelling of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, there is nuance in Bassermann’s performance that belies the simplicity of the plot and dull mise- en-scene. Though critical reviews of the film seem to identify Hallers’s transformation as one of man to criminal, Bassermann’s gesture is more subtle. The transition always begins with Hallers falling asleep, typically at his desk while fully clothed. He rises again, somehow fundamentally different, his face held in a slight grimace, his shoulders tensed toward his ears. He spasms slightly and walks stiffly, not unlike the familiar sleepwalkers post-Caligari, but without his arms outstretched in front of him. His acting calls to mind a presentiment of medical documentary films of shell shock that would appear in the years following. Bassermann, as Hallers, is a man acting out the somatic effects of trauma, but in this case, the trauma is falling from a horse. In the case of Der Andere, a pre-war film, the concerns are more overtly traditional and the setting and characters more typically bourgeois than Caligari. Hallers takes on the guise of his lower class secretary— not a prince becoming a pauper certainly, but the ill-fitting coat denotes his demotion— and is adopted into the underworld almost instantaneously. Though he had initially scoffed at the threat of mental illness, Hallers’s brain injury now transforms his sleep into a parasomniac state, where the lines between sleeping and waking, and the lines between self and other are blurred. Carrick 120 Bassermann’s interpretation of sleepwalking seems to set the tone for how both sleepwalking and, to a certain extent, hypnotism were portrayed by actors on screen. Physical transformation that marked the body as under the control of a different force was particularly necessary in silent film, and in the case of Der Andere, Hallers’s transformation scenes were often the longest ones in the film, uninterrupted by title cards or cuts. Bassermann’s reputation as a masterful actor certainly lent itself to these extended reveries on the physicality of the sleepwalker, but it the medium itself on serves to emphasis the skill Bassermann honed on stage. The deterioration of film has only served to emphasize the jerkiness of Bassermann’s performance as der andere, and it is this jerkiness that seems most remarkable in the early development of this trope. As Hallers’s Andere, Bassermann’s joints lock and his neck tenses and flares. His eyes are unfocused but stare. The effect is textbook unheimlich. His physical interpretation of the transformation reflects an inherent tension between his muscles and bones, which are drawn tight against one another to move in the unpredictable motion of the sleepwalker. Gone is the fluidity of the waking walk. Instead, Bassermann’s very early performance of sleepwalking is all angles and tension. His body enacts the very tenants of modernity in its sleeping state. Mack further emphasized the nuance of Hallers’s transformation through direction. Just before his first on-screen attack, Hallers’s secretary notes that the coat he wears to protect his clothing from ink has been torn and is wet. Both he and Hallers seem confused, but soon enough, once Hallers is alone and dozing, he sleepwalks over, stiffly puts on the coat and climbs out the window. This white smock-like coat becomes the most obvious visual marker of Hallers’s transformation, and it is significant not just because of the emphasis it draws to Bassermann’s acting or even because the tall man in the small coat provides a moment of comedy in a tense, Carrick 121 uncut scene. No, what is most significant about the white coat is that the sleepwalking Hallers visually marks himself as a member of a lower class by donning the uniform of one of his employees. While Hallers the lawyer could dismiss the symptoms of schizophrenia, perhaps Hallers as a secretary could not do the same. And while his typical dress seems unremarkable and is by no means flashy, this white coat certainly seems to signal a shift in affairs. Of course his self-demotion is hardly a dramatic fall, but the torn and ill-fitting marks Hallers as available for misadventure to the characters he encounters. Dickert sees a compatriot and fellow thief in this version of Hallers while Amalie sees a man who had been kind to her in danger. In becoming a sleepwalker and entering into the bizarre state between the total stasis of more typical sleep and the activity of wakefulness, Hallers has also found himself demoted to hardscrabble member of the proletariat. Though his body takes on a stiffness that we might today associate with the depiction of automatons or androids, Bassermann is instead enacting the muscular tension of a body caught between two conflicting states of being. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane explains the heightened importance of physical performance in silent film, quoting Hugo Münsterberg, who in 1916 wrote, “‘To the actor of the moving pictures… the temptation offers itself to overcome the deficiency [the absence of ‘words and the modulation of the voice’] by a heightening of the gestures and of the facial play, with the result that the emotional expression becomes exaggerated.’… The uncanny effect of the silent film in the era of sound is in part linked to the separation, by means of intertitles, of an actor’s speech from the image of his/her body” (33). Traditional reflections on these exaggerated movements have often read the mechanized motions Carrick 122 of developing modernist technologies into the physical performances of silent actors. 35 The mechanization of the body in Weimar cinema certainly abounds, and the filmic medium certainly encouraged reflections on speed and movement that have been highlighted in earlier modernist histories of the body, including Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines, which argues for an intimate relationship between man and machine as well as a definition of the body that allows it to function as both history and meaning (10-13). 36 This tension is an enactment of the interplay of Takt and Rhythmus that so fascinated contemporary body culture fanatics. Muscular tension became inherent to the performance of sleepwalking, thanks in no small part due to Bassermann’s performance of a bourgeois lawyer whose accident sends him into a sleeping limbo of crime and class transgression. The body, even in this pre-War film, was a space where the tensions of class expectation can become literal physical tension. Once again we see the somatic manifestations of interior traumas. And because this film so influenced the direction of Caligari, and Calgari has become the touchstone for archetypical portrayals of sleepwalkers, the somatic manifestation of trauma has remain etched on the bodies of sleepwalkers in popular media ever since. If Veidt is the father to the sleepwalker archetype then Bassermann’s Hallers is the grandfather of all Western sleepwalkers, as yet unacknowledged for his groundbreaking performance. This early film gives us the benefit of hinting this with its name, Der Andere, or The Other, implying that Hallers’s is not just living out some untapped desire of his own mind but becoming entirely other to himself. His upper body rises— his shoulders hunched toward his ears, his neck and face taut in a grimace of seeming pain— while his lower body seems to suddenly adopt the 35 For more on this, see Hugh Kenner’s The Mechanic Muse and Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. 36 Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis (1927) likely provides the best reflection on these issues from the German interwar period. Carrick 123 gait of an aged man. The nuance of Bassermann’s physical performance reminds the viewer of the physiological underpinnings that rest beneath his own skin. The shudder of his step is reiterated and enhanced by the slight jerkiness of twenty-four frames per second. This alienation from the self is a recurrent theme in the post-war German depictions of hypnosis and sleepwalking as well, though, as I argue, the emphasis is no longer on bourgeois propriety. The sleepwalkers of the post-war years reflect a greater German sense of their own lack of control. In Caligari wherein the sleepwalking is artificially simulated using the hypnotic techniques of a more powerful figure, sleepwalkers become a metaphor for Germany itself: ravaged by war, eventually uncontrolled hyperinflation and forced to admit guilt for a war that they thought had been the shared responsibility of the whole world. 37 Caligari Redux Key to understanding the significance of Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari to the German state of mind in the post-War period, as well as to understanding the significance of the sleepwalker to larger cultural questions, is the ways that Cesare must function both as a natural and an artificial somnambulist for the narrative logic of the film to stand. Cesare remains entranced throughout his entire time on screen. He enters Caligari’s asylum already catatonic, presumably struck down by the effects of his parasomnia, and it is because he arrives in this state that Caligari is able to perform his twisted experiment in the first place. Critical responses to the film class Cesare either as a sleepwalker or as the victim of the hypnotist’s machinations, but he must be both: Cesare must already be vulnerable in order to facilitate Caligari’s psychic take-over. And it is this very 37 Economist Gerald Feldman calls 1922, the height of the hyperinflation period, “The Year of Dr. Mabuse” in his book Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924. Carrick 124 vulnerability that allowed war-weary soldiers to identify with the silent, docile Cesare rather than his brillant captor. The audience first encounters Cesare when Franzis and Alan vist the fair. Cesare, who has slept for 25 years, is about to wake. Cesare’s cabinet sits upright, and so does he when he is first introduced. When Caligari commands he wake, he seems to test the gamut of his senses before becoming fully awake, flaring his nostrils and stretching his mouth as if in disgust, finally opening his eyes wide with surprise and stepping forward. When he does walk, it is not in the posture now most traditionally associated with sleepwalking: the arms outstretched ahead of the torso, lifted parallel with the shoulders. Instead, Cesare’s arms are bent and his hands face one another, grasping the air. He walks as if he’s carrying a pot of boiling water and he worries it will spill. His hesitance is amplified by the tenuous thinness of his legs in their black leggings. In the original script, this moment is as follows: “Caesare [sic] stands motionless for several more seconds… Something like a shudder quite subtly and remotely shows on his face!… His arms, pressed to his body, rise forward, as if automatically, in small, distinct intervals, as though they wanted to catch hold of something” (Andriopoulos 95). Thankfully his tortured forward motion only lasts for a couple of steps and he takes his position as soothsayer with arms pressed to his sides once more. But Cesare’s menacing affect has little impact on his audience within the film, perhaps because his grasping implies such a lack of stability or security. When Alan, best friend to the film’s protagonist Franzis, asks the psychic somnambulist how long he will live and receives the foreboding reply that he will die before the next day, he initially responds with exaggerated horror which quickly melts into jovial laughter. Clearly Caligari and Cesare are understood to be charlatans playing on the visual trappings of fear and authenticity. It does, after all, seem strange Carrick 125 that a man possessing as much power as Caligari would spend his hours traveling country fairs busking for cash— one need only look to Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler to see the plethora of criminal possibilities that are available to one capable of controlling other people through psychic force. The initial relationship between sleepwalking and the ability to predict the future might seem particularly bizarre given the ease with which the Holstenwall natives Franzis and Alan accept the novelty, but a long scientific history actually connects them. Indeed, the inventor of the term “artificial somnambulism” the Marquis de Puységur noted clear resonances between the hypnotic states he was able to induce in his patients and their ability to sing songs he had only imagined (Crabtree 558). But as Kaes notes, a hypnotism sideshow like Caligari’s, though likely set in the pre-war years based on the costuming and pre-industrial setting, was not uncommon during a post-war boom of fringe science and the occult (58). 38 Late-Nineteenth Century senses of somnambulism understood both natural and artificial sleepwalking as endemic to people who are particularly sensitive to energetic forces invisible to the naked eye that bound humans to nature and one another. Sometimes called Odic forces, but perhaps more familiarly termed animal magnetism, this connection presumes both a universality to life and an exceptional ability to sense such lines of communication. 39 38 Britain and America saw very similar resurgences of Spiritualism and mediumship in the post- war years that was itself often related to claims of sleepwalking and so-called heightened psychic sensitivity that had originally fascinated the public in the Victorian period. For more on this resurgence, see Patricia Rae’s Modernism and Mourning and Leigh Wilson’s Modernism and Magic. 39 Explorations of animal magnetism and hypnosis originated with Anton Mesmer and were carried on by his students, including the Marquis de Puységur and Abbé Faria. For more English- language writings on the later history of animal magnetism, see Dr. William Gregory’s Letters to a Candid Inquirer (1851), Charles Poyen’s Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England (1837) and Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy’s An Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism (1837). Also very useful is Crabtree’s Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism, and Psychical Research, 1766-1925: An Annotated Bibliography (1988), which includes over 1900 entries. Carrick 126 Throughout Caligari first encounters are essential to establishing the narrative twists the film takes in its final acts. The viewer first encounters Jane on the grounds of the insane asylum, wandering insensible, but still aware enough of her surroundings to sweep hanging branches out of her face. The film initially suggests that she has become sleepwalker herself, and though she walks somewhat stiffly, Lil Dagover’s affect is slight compared to Bassermann’s. Her arms remain at her sides while her eyes gaze upward, unfocused. Though we later learn that Jane— likely not her real name—has been mad the entire film, only inserted in the fantastical dreams that Franzis has invented to explain the extreme hierarchy of the mental hospital they both inhabit, the film suggests to us that Jane might have been transformed by her encounter with the sleepwalker Cesare. Kracauer quotes Carl Meyer and Hans Janowitz, the screenwriters of Caligari to note that the framing story was added after the fact and with objections from both writers (66-67). The original film suggested an anti-authoritarian story that resolved with no more satisfaction, but also did not condemn the whistle-blowing hero Franzis to madness. In the final cut of the film, Cesare captures Jane fairly late in the film. He drags her into the night, finally abandoning her to be rescued right before falling to his own death, and the audience is led to believe, at least briefly that the strange spell that holds him captive to Caligari has transferred through some invisible action or gesture onto the unwilling woman who we have already seen wandering around insensible. Though we are later corrected of this belief, there is a lingering thought that perhaps Caligari could turn the whole town to somnambulists, if he so desired. Carrick 127 The use of gesture is incredibly important in Das Cabinet de Dr. Caligari, Willy Hameister’s cinematography and Wiene’s direction reinforce this time and again. 40 Despite his powers of foresight, evasion and strength, even Cesare has his senses dulled by the night; gripping a wall, he wanders the town toward Jane’s bedroom. But once she awakes and he is forced to flee while carrying her, he is suddenly unimpeded by a lack of sensation. But he drops her prone body when their pursuers come too near, finally taking up the classic posture of the sleepwalker: arms held roughly perpendicular to the torso, hands curling downward like claws, he staggers up a hill and collapses. When Jane awakes, she again grasps at her throat with desperate hands and cries out Cesare’s name. Later, Caligari must face his now-dead protege, and he, too, tenses his hands in despair before lunging at the throat of one of his attending doctors. The gaggle of white coated men then tie him down in a straight-jacket, perhaps the ultimate expression of physical tension met with external restraint, control and ultimate frustration. There is a tenderness, too, in Caligari and Cesare’s relationship that seems particularly bizarre considering their roles as captive and captor. The doctor lovingly feeds his charge as Cesare continues to sleep, and dozes as he keeps watch over a facsimile of his charge while the real Cesare stalks Jane. Both the real Freud and Frau Emmy von N. and the fictional Caligari and 40 Eisner outlines the hazy provenance of production design and direction of Caligari. Many filmmakers rushed to align themselves with the project after its popularity was established, and it is unclear how many, if any, had actually been involved in the making of Caligari (Haunted Screen 19). She cites the heavy involvement of the German government in the film industry for the lack of a real German film avant-garde and argues that Caligari did not establish a genre, a point which later critics clearly came to dispute, as I have already discussed. She also quotes Rudolf Kurtz’s 1926 book Expressionismus und Film, where he argues that only Conrad Veidt (Cesare) and Werner Krauss (Caligari) “achieve a ‘dynamic synthesis of their being,’ by concentrating their movements and facial expressions” to mimic the angular set design (25). I am inclined to agree, but I think Kurtz does not recognize how little the other characters should fit with the eerie sets. I don’t think this is a failure, but a deliberate contrast between the world of normative life and that of darkness, sleep and control. Carrick 128 Cesare enact the complicated ethical balancing act that hypnotic relationships require. And while Caligari’s charge may largely be treasured for the sadistic pleasure he is capable of giving his mad captor, there remains some indication of genuine affection, which only serves to reinforce the sense that Cesare acts not of his own accord but blindly, perhaps not even consciously, to please his master. Veidt’s physical performace and its emphasis on muscular tension, like Bassermann’s, reinforces Cesare’s visible unconsciousness. And Wiene, has, after all, used physical tension to demonstrate madness and internal tension throughout the film. His montage of mental patients include compulsive piano players who tap on invisible keys, pacers and others who twitch and tic around the courtyard of lost souls, and finally Franzis too is wrestled into a straight-jacket. Earlier, when Alan is attacked in the night, and there is a brief shot of disembodied hands. We cannot know for sure whether these are his hands, tensed in fright, or those of his murderer, who we see only in silhouette— stabbing. The rapid cutting and sharp angles of the actor’s bodies mimic the expressionist setting, reminding the viewer of the peculiarity of this town, of Cesare’s spindly legs, of the clutching hands. Wiene gives a plethora of reminders, having Jane make the same gesture while clutching at her own throat when she hears of Alan’s death. These mimetic whispers reflect a constant reminder that you, too, could become subject to the whims of a madman or perhaps even an idea whose magnetism and wile are greater than your own. Several years after the release of Caligari, these mimetic gesture echoed extradiagetically in a particularly telling way. In a propaganda poster released by the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) or German National People’s Party in 1924 [See Figure 2.3], a far-Right party promoting the stab-in-the-back myth, a German soldier spasms in pain as he is stabbed in the back by a masked figure. He holds a tattered German flag in his hands. The none-too-subtle Carrick 129 poster is printed in two colors, red and brown, and the soldier appears all in brown with the exception of his utility belt and rifle butt. His attacker is drawn only in red, including his skin, with the exception of his mask and the slight protruding handle of the knife in brown. The soldier grimaces on the left third of the image as his attacker jumps across the page toward him, appearing both smaller than the soldier and appearing to aggressively sneak up behind him. The language of the poster is telling as well, calling the December 1924 general elections “den zweiten Dolchstoß” or a second stab in the back. These elections had been fairly uneventful, with the SPD maintaining the largest numbers in the Reichstag with a gain of thirty- one seats and the DNVP gaining eight seats since the previous election to hold 131 and 103 respectively, both parties tailed distantly by the Deutsche Zentrumspartei or Zentrum, the moderate Catholic party (Nohlen 762). 41 But the period just preceding the elections had been one of particular turmoil for the new Weimar Republic and for the DNVP in particular, who were threatened by dissention over whether or not to ratify the Dawes Act, a plan set up by the Allies to deal with German’s defaulted reparation payments and out of control hyperinflation (Kolb 63, 73-74). The party nearly split over whether to ratify the act, which required amending the new constitution, and this poster is one of the pieces of propaganda that was produced in the aftermath to redirect blame for Germany’s subservient position onto the leftists and socialists that the DNVP had for years been promoting as the reason Germany lost the war to begin with. The poster quotes Albert Vater, who they identify as the Party Secretary of the SPD, though he was now very much aligned with the Communist KPD in his native Magdeburg, and by 1924 was dead, committing suicide after being accused of treason and imprisoned: Wir haben unsere Leute, die an die Front gingen, zur Fahnenflucht veranlasst. Die Fahnenflüchtigen haben wir organisiert, mit falschen Papieren ausgestattet, mit Geld und 41 Kolb claims 111 seats for the DNVP “including the Landbund” (74). Carrick 130 unterschriftslosen Flugblättern versehen. Wir haben diese Leute an alle Himmelsrichtungen, hauptsächlich wieder an die Front geschickt, damit sie die Frontsoldaten bearbeiten und die Front zermürben sollten. Diese haben die Soldaten bestimmt, überzulaufen, und so hat sich der Versall allmählich, aber sicher vollzogen. [We had our people who went to the front desert. We have organized the deserters, equipped them with false papers, with money and unsigned leaflets. We sent these people in all directions, but mostly back to the front so they could hammer away at the front line soldiers and wear them down. They made these other soldiers determined to defect, and then the Fall was gradually but surely accomplished.] 42 The quotation reveals that, of course, the masked figure is one of the socialists that had stirred up strikes in January 1918 and again throughout the first months of the Republic. What the poster strives to make clear is that not only did the socialists and communists attempt to disrupt wartime production and generally defensive capabilities economically, but in morale as well. Though the stab remains concretely metaphorical, and the fantastical redness of the figure reinforces that, the Vater quotation serves to emphasize that like the soldier he attacks, this masked villain is only one of many. Representations of the stab-in-the-back were nothing new. Versions of this image had appeared repeatedly throughout the Armistice and early Weimar period, frequently with explicit anti-Semitic visuals, including prominent Stars of David and caricatured Jewish features. But this poster, and another image that follows from 1942 [See Figure 2.4] subtly shift the recurrent representation away from a looming presence above the entrenched soldier to a figure appearing alongside the soldier. The implication in this image is not only that the attack came from an equal and peer, but that this equal was able to pass unidentified. He was masked and able to adapt to the anonymity of the crowd. This poster in particular, with its bold use of two color 42 Vater seems to have been a relatively minor figure nationally, and I could neither confirm this quotation nor find any reference to him in any major histories of the Weimar Republic that were not references to this poster. Carrick 131 printing, highlights a clear resonance that these depictions of the Dolchstoßlegende have with Cesare’s death scene in Das Cabinet von Dr. Caligari [See Figure 2.5-2.8]. Cesare has thrown Jane to the ground after spiriting her away from the safety of her bedroom, clearly violating his typical order to kill his targets on sight. The somnambulist then staggers up a hill, depicted at nearly a 45º angle in the dramatic expressionist style of the film, his arms raised ahead at shoulder level, with elbows bent and back arched. Suddenly, he stops, leaning backward toward the bottom of the hill, twisting slightly to face the camera before spasming and collapsing to the ground. 43 This is precisely the gesture we see enacted by the betrayed soldier in the far-Right propaganda. He too grimaces, twists, tenses his body in shock. The two-color printing even allows us to image the effect: eliminate the parts of the image depicted in red, and even the villain himself, and suddenly the solider is Cesare, or perhaps more fittingly, Cesare is the solider, but he has been stabbed by an invisible fiend rather than a socialist dressed so cunningly as slapstick crook. By making the comparison between the death of Cesare and the Dolchstoßlegende, I do not intend to point to any act of mimicry or inspiration on the part of the graphic designers hired by the DNVP. On the contrary, I find the echoes of this performance of collapse to speak more to the way that Caligari and Caligarismus and the concerns those films generate about losing 43 We have just seen Cesare’s death throes though we do not necessarily align these gestures with his death until his body is found after much exposition, including the famous hallucinatory scene where the asylum’s warden becomes Caligari (“Du mußt Caligari werden!”). Again there is pause to speculate that Jane may now be subject to the strange spell Cesare was once under, but are too busy following Cesare’s corpse to Caligari’s office at the asylum, where Caligari, too, tenses his hands and arms in anguish before collapsing on his former captive. Finally, he lunges for one of his asylum assistants, strangling the man with the same tension and fury that appeared in the disembodied hands from the attack scene. Caligari must be restrained by six of his white- coated assistants who straightjacket him, ending the story-within-a-story of the film. Carrick 132 control were particularly timely for a country and culture so adamant about keeping a grip on theirs despite the ravages of war and modernity. The mimetic associations this propaganda poster creates reflect both the shattered body of a soldier on the front and of a sleepwalker who has lost all autonomy and agency. Conclusion The sleepwalker and the object of the hypnotist’s gaze, were, for Weimar Germans, the ultimate dupe. That figures had been transformed so dramatically from the Imperial romances that had highlighted the heady thrill of waking up somewhere unknown had perhaps not yet been realized when the crop of UFA-financed films featuring sleepwalkers made its way to global distribution. But in some ways, for outsiders, the somnambulist became the epitomic German in the pre- Nazi/post-Jerry years where outsiders sought a way to redefine their former enemy. Perhaps this is one reason Veidt’s performance as the somnambulist Cesare became so salient, so influential on future portrayals of sleepwalkers of all types. The tension that Veidt had translated from Bassermann’s performance, which resulted in his halting gait and his jerking movement, was reiterated time and again in countless comic reinventions, particularly in America— as we will see in Chapter Three. But more significantly, this bodily tension seemed to enact the tension of an entire nation forced to denounce its monarchy and attempt to find a common government during the aftermath of the greatest war the world had ever known. And not only that, but this same country found themselves blamed for this war while also grappling with the near-total decimation it had wrecked. Carrick 133 The other iconic German archetype that invaded international popular culture after this period was closely tied to the sleepwalker: the psychoanalyst. That Freud and his students sought to understand sleepwalking should come as no surprise. But that a caricature of the sleepwalker became so iconic and so distrusted perhaps has as much to do with Doctor Caligari as it does with actual psychoanalytic attempts (and failures) to grapple with the emotional unrest of a nation. Article 231, the so-called Diktat, was intended as a benign passage assuring German liability for the payment of war reparations but it became emblematic of the betrayals the German people felt had come from inside their own ranks. The signing of the Versailles Treaty, which came under threat of renewed war if left unsigned, and consequent affirmation of this passage bred resentment and distrust that blossomed in years of unrest and assassinations. Matthias Erzberger the representative signee of the Armistice was eventually murdered by far- Right assassins, as were Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, co-chairman of the Rat der Volksbeauftragten [Council of People’s Deputies] Hugo Haase and Kurt Eisner, who had declared the republic of Bavaria, all instrumental figures in the founding of the Weimar Republic who were blamed in one way or another for Germany’s downfall. Clashes between government- backed troops, including the far-Right Freikorps, and striking workers supported by communists led to thousands of deaths in the Ruhr Valley. The instability faced by this new government, bombarded by Revolutionary Spartacists on Left and violent assassins on the Right, found its embodiment in the somnambulists of popular cinema. While body culture and kulturfilm attempted to create a reparative story of the German people’s resiliency and natural fitness, popular fiction films reflected the extremes that the economy and politics faced. Carrick 134 Film, was, after all, the perfect medium for these heady times. As has been outlined many times before, film’s new technologies modeled the new and rapidly changing times, but more significantly, film became Germany’s most viable export after reparations and hyperinflation crippled their economy. Germany, before France, the Soviets and even Britain, was able to claim artistic and exportable films that sold well in international markets and brought profits back to the government production company UFA, which had a hand in all productions of importance. The interplay of film production and economic production is not to be underestimated. This is particularly true in a period where questions of productivity were so inherently tied to the waves of nation-wide strikes had unfurled thanks to the efforts of socialists and reformers who ultimately found themselves targeted for assassination as well. These strikes, and Germany’s attempts to return the nation’s systems of production back to pre-war levels to meet the demands of reparations were met with the realities of a populace exhausted and often crippled by war, both unwilling and unable to return to work as it had been done before the war. The distinction between natural and artificial sleepwalking is a subtle one. In both cases, the sleepwalker’s conscious mind is unaware of the actions his or her body undertakes, but in the case of artificial somnambulism, the potential for the controlling force to be an outsider rather than the unconscious mind of the same sleepwalker was high. Earlier in this chapter, I cited an example from pre-war German romance, Jörn Uhl, where a sleepwalking servant girl Lena Tarn returns in her sleep to visit the gentleman farmer that she secretly loves. The farmer, the titular Jörn Uhl, meets her in the field as if ready for her arrival, prepared to comfort her with an intimacy hitherto unknown to the employer and his employee. In this romance, her sleepwalking allows the lovers to drop the pretense presented by their conscious senses of propriety and decorum and enter into a union that defies class boundaries. Carrick 135 One need only compare this scene from Jörn Uhl to one from Murnau’s film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens [Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror], where the heroine Ellen sleepwalks while thinking of her beloved to see how such a scene would be unimaginable twenty years later. Ellen Hutter has been left behind by her businessman husband while he travels to Transylvania to sell the mysterious Nosferatu some property. Nosferatu is, we know, a vampire, and begins a campaign of slowing draining Thomas Hutter of blood, which Ellen seems to sense despite the hundreds of miles between them. She begins to sleepwalk while staying with friends in their hometown, calling out Thomas’s name at the same moment he is attacked by Nosferatu. Rather than connecting her to her husband, Ellen’s call startles Nosferatu, who seems to hear her. Unlike Lena Tarn, who has wandered in the night in order to express her unspoken love for Jörn Uhl, Ellen speaks her love, but only manages to notify Nosferatu to her presence. In Nosferatu, this sleepwalking episode serves to draw the vampire away from his stately home and into the city, where he pursues Ellen, bringing pestilence and death as his footmen. Though her sleepwalking may have briefly saved Thomas by distracting Nosferatu from his task, it only serves to set the Count on a path of much greater destruction in his pursuit of Ellen herself. Sleep was clearly no longer a place to safely explore and express desire, and entering into states similar to sleep only opened the body up to manipulation from outsiders who might turn you into a murderer. What had been a trope used to highlight the unconscious desires of stubborn milkmaids and overly decorous princesses in romance novels became a part of the realm of horror and began to represent a kind of enslavement. No longer was sleepwalking a route to romance, but instead an avenue to the ultimate lack of control, not just of your body but of your mind too. While the sleepwalker in British literature had functioned as a tragic hero, destroyed by war but striving to do right, in Germany the sleepwalker was a dangerous conduit for others’ Carrick 136 desires. The German sleepwalker, like the German veteran, was little more than a pawn for the unsavory machinations of far more powerful men. Carrick 137 Figure 2.1: “‘Du musst Caligari werden’ im Marmaorhaus.” Carrick 138 Figure 2.2: Designed by Otto Arpke and Erich Ludwig Stahl; distributed by DECLA Film Gesellschaft. Carrick 139 Figure 2.3: Imperial War Museum, London, UK. Carrick 140 Figure 2.4: Dolchstoßlegende, from the Nazi magazine Der Schulungsbrief (1942). Carrick 141 Figure 2.5: A still from Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920). Carrick 142 Figure 2.6: A still from Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920). Carrick 143 Figure 2.7: A still from Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920). Carrick 144 Figure 2.8: A still from Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920). Carrick 145 Figure 2.9: A still from Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920) Chapter Three Precarious Bodies: Sleepwalking and Labor Unrest in American Animation High on the bare beam of one of the many skyscrapers newly reaching for the heavens during the building boom of the mid-1930s, a woman walks. She walks in silhouette, coming into stark contrast against the moon, which shows how sheer her flimsy nightgown is— redoubling our sense of both how small she is compared to the empty construction site in which she walks and the vulnerability of her fragile body high above the ground. [See Figure 3.1] Because this scene is from a Popeye the Sailor short, the man guarding the construction site shows far more concern with his hamburgers than with her plight, noting that the problem will resolve itself and “she’ll awaken when she falls.” But she never does. Though this scene is played for humor, sleepwalkers fairly regularly fell from buildings, particularly as rapid urbanization had sent more and more troubled sleepers higher and higher off the ground for their nightly slumber. 1 Indeed, sleepwalkers tumbled to their deaths from high-rise buildings in Cincinnati in 1908 2 ; in New York in 1922 3 , in 1924 4 , twice in 1926 5 , in 1931 6 and in 1942 7 ; Bridgeport, CT in 1939 8 and Hartford in 1900 9 ; in San Francisco in 1920 10 ; in St. Louis in 1 For more on the (surprisingly contentious) history of the skyscraper and the changes it wrought to the urban space, see Rosemarie Haag Bletter’s “The Invention of the Skyscraper: Notes on Its Diverse Histories.” 2 “Sleep Walker Killed by Fall.” 3 “SLEEP WALKER KILLED: Plunges Four Stories and Skull Is Fractured.” 4 “Sleep Walker Dies From Fall.” 5 “Sleep-Walker Killed by Fall” and “Woman Sleep Walker Killed.” 6 “SLEEP WALKER DIES AFTER 5-FLOOR FALL.” 7 “SLEEP WALKER IS KILLED: Plunges Out of Window of Hotel Within Earshot of Finance [sic].” 8 “Sleep Walker Killed In Fall at Bridgeport.” 9 “Sleep-Walker Killed.” 10 “Sleep-Walker Killed; Jumps Out Window.” Carrick 147 1921 11 and 1926. 12 One particularly gruesome account from St. John New Brunswick, Canada described a fifteen-year-old boy who “was dashed to death, his skull being crushed in,” while another lurid story from Washington D.C. noted that the dead sleepwalker had been found nude, clutching a sheet. 13 One early case from San Francisco included a beautiful illustration of the sleepwalker, Mary Jackson, falling three stories to her death [See Figure 3.2]. Countless more stories hide in the archives. As the buildings grew taller, the somnambulists only had farther to fall. As we have seen in the previous two chapters, German and British sleepwalkers had reflected the anxieties of nations rocked by the greatest conflict the world had yet experienced, in America, sleepwalkers reflected a whimsy and humor as-of-yet unfamiliar to their European counterparts. While German expressionist films had established the jerking gait and raised arms of the archetypical sleepwalker, American films perpetuated the trope, adding a sense of precarity that developed humor through tension rather than through outright pratfalls. The sleepwalker proliferated throughout the inter-war period in American comedy, appearing in comedy shorts starring Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, among others. Lloyd’s interpretation of sleepwalking, in particular, focused on the death defying stunts that would eventually become his signature, reinforcing the dizzying heights at which the actors performed their seemingly unsimulated stunts. The stunts that Lloyd was able to perform were limited, and so it seems natural, perhaps, that the physical feats of the unconscious sleeper might better translate to a world unbounded by the logic of physics: animation. 11 “SLEEP WALKER DIES FROM INJURIES SUFFERED IN FALL: John Schuenemann...” 12 “Girl Sleep-Walker Falls 3 Floors; Dies.” 13 “SLEEP-WALKER KILLED” and “SLEEP-WALKER DIES IN FALL TO STREET: Georgetown Medical Student.” Carrick 148 Like film itself, animation was a new and fast developing field wherein technological innovation and novel approaches to humor drove relatively jovial competitions between the few studios that had sprung up in New York and, eventually, Los Angeles. 14 Though animated films were relatively labor intensive and time consuming compared to live-action films of a similar length, and as a result a relatively small share of the film market, by the 1930s an animated film was included on nearly one in three film showcases, according to contemporary newspaper ads. Sleepwalking narratives appeared repeatedly in animated films of this period, including shorts from three of the largest animation studios Disney, Fleischer and Terrytoons. The Disney Studios found such success with the trope that they released three different sleepwalking stories between 1942 and 1947, occupying just over 3% of their shorts releases with somnambulism, a not insignificant number. 15 The prolific connection between sleepwalking and animation in America is an intriguing one, particularly as this introduces a broadly humorous element not present in the German and British incarnations of the trope. But underlying this shift are many of the same post-War economic concerns, concerns which had bubbled up into full-blown attempts at revolution in Germany, but were in America a reflection of tensions very specific to the friction between the studios distributing these sleepwalker films and the animators themselves. Though American sleepwalkers are funny, they reflect no less serious a concern with autonomy and agency than those who appeared in Britain and Germany. The humor of American sleepwalking is not simply convenient slapstick or the result of medium specificity of animation, it is actually a comment on the detachment, isolation and precarity engendered by modern labor conditions, a problem 14 Walt Disney’s famous connection to Southern California began relatively late, in autumn 1923, after two failed attempts to open studios in Kansas City, Missouri and several years after the debut of Max Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell” series. 15 The Disney Studios released 94 shorts between 1942 and 1947. Carrick 149 particularly under scrutiny in the animation industry in this period. American representations of sleepwalking bear similarities to their British and German counterparts, particularly in the ways that these figures also resonated with American animators who identified with them as they too struggled for autonomy in the face of industrialization and modernization of an industry whose mythos was built around artistry and family. These comedic sleepwalkers, though much more optimistic, continue to reflect the anxieties that had been tied to a cultural distrust of sleep in England and a sense of defeated masculinity in Germany. Cartoon sleepwalkers proliferated because the liminal state of the sleepwalker proves fertile ground for depictions of the way that connections can be forged across consciousnesses, despite and sometimes because of the barriers put in place by industrial capitalism. Why Funny? Humor was closely tied to animation from its inception, and the proliferation of sleepwalking in animated shorts reflected both this association and a departure from the horror and victim narratives that appeared nearly simultaneously in Germany and Britain. The shorts “The Enchanted Drawing” (1900) and “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906), both by James Stuart Blackton, considered by most animation historians the first animations on standard film employed sight gags and the developing association between early animation and vaudeville cemented the relationship between humor and the animated world. 16 Norman Klein reiterated the influence of vaudeville on the development of animation while also noting attempts to copy the 16 The association of sleepwalking and humor exceeded the medium, with sleepwalking predominantly featured in not only the above-mentioned shorts but also Fatty Arbuckle starring in Bombs and Bangs (1914), the British comedy team of Charles Ruggles and Mary Boland in Early to Bed (1936), as well as one comedy about a sleepwalker determined to serve in the Great War and followed by his loyal chauffeur and valet after he is rejected from the Army and Navy due to his condition in The Gay Retreat (1927). Carrick 150 spectacle-based entertainments of more carnevalesque venues, including circuses, fairs and amusement parks (Klein 19). These earliest animations, including The Enchanted Drawing, were reminiscent of vaudeville-style chalk talks, a combination of monologue and drawing (Maltin 1). 17 Indeed, the film most often erroneously identified as the first animated short, Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) was a major part of McCay’s stage act. The live audience of the theaters, circuses and fairs along with the vaudevillian emphasis on nurturing comedic talent set the tone. Of course, not all animated films were comedic. Despite his overwhelming association with Little Nemo in Slumberland, Gertie the Dinosaur and his surrealistic humor, McCay is much less known today for creating the first animated documentary, The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918). The naturalistic, twelve-minute film was, at the time, the longest animated film ever created and is thought to be the first to feature a serious or dramatic subject (Wells 116, Mikulak 71). That animation was not utilized for a serious topic until 1918, does, however give added weight to the particularly strong associations between animated films and comedy in its early years, associations which animation scholar Kirsten Thompson has identified as “the magic of cartoons—[wherein we enjoy] first in the novelty of their very movement, and second in the magical violation of the rules of reality…. Cel animation delights in breaking the rules of gravity and space, and by doing so, draws attention to its artifice as a graphic medium” (139). McCay himself noted the significance of artifice for audiences acclimating to the new realities of animation in these earliest years. McCay explained that while his first two films, Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912) were great hits, it was not until his third film, 17 A sight gag from The Enchanted Drawing, for example, shows Blackton drawing a bottle of wine and glass on his easel and then as if by magic, removing the wine from the two-dimensional plane and drinking it. For more on sight gags see Noël Carroll’s “Notes on the Sight Gag” in Theorizing the Moving Image (1996). Carrick 151 Gertie the Dinosaur that the “audience [understood] I was making the drawings move” and it was not “some trick with wires” (Maltin 4). This claim seems especially surprising considering Gertie borrows its plot almost entirely from McCay’s first film Little Nemo, which features the artist betting his other society friends that he will make 4,000 pictures move within the next month. The majority of the film then follows his slapstick attempts to sort through his many sheets of paper as an assistant knocks them over and the delivery of several barrels of ink and palates of paper to suit his task. Finally, McCay exhibits his finished product to his chums, and only here do the stories diverge with Nemo’s characters dancing and flipping and Gertie demonstrating her obedience training. In both cases, McCay remains bodily present within the film and in the former, is a shot of McCay’s hand illustrating a single image at an exaggerated pace, drawing a banner which reads “Watch Me Move,” above a completed illustration of Flip from his popular comic strip—imploring the audience to recognize the technological achievement unfolding before their very eyes. 18 As Leonard Maltin puts it in his seminal animation history Of Mice and Magic, “the effect is dreamlike” (3-4). Certainly before the introduction of sound, much of the humor of character-based animation depended on slapstick and physical comedy like the flips and dancing found in Little Nemo. Comedy theorists have delineated countless subcategories and subgenres for the different kinds of humor exhibited in a Falstaffian quip or Laurel and Hardy pushing an unruly piano up 18 When the animation ends in Nemo, so too does the film, with no fanfare for McCay’s triumph over his blustering pals. In Gertie, McCay receives a celebratory toast and a compatriot named George pays for the group’s dinner. The animation is proof enough of its own marvelousness. But what the filmic version of Little Nemo does prove, however, is that animation was a ripe medium for the surrealistic feats explored in early comedic explorations of sleep on film. Here, like in the comic strips through which McCay first explored the world of sleep and dreams, the physical bounds of reality and the relatively limited special effects skills of the age were no longer a limiting factor in visual representation. Carrick 152 an over-long staircase, and often these theorists conflict in their definitions. 19 I strongly identify the foundation for my approach to animated humor with slapstick and physical comedy not only because the shorts I have discussed thus far are pre-sound, but also because sleepwalkers in animated film are themselves non-verbal. Though the films I will discuss premiered well after the introduction of sound, shorts like Disney’s “The Sleepwalker” and Fleischers’ “A Dream Walking” depend much more on the non-diegetic music of the soundtrack than on dialogue. In the Disney version, dialogue was of so little importance that the sleepwalker plot was given to their one major non-verbal recurring character, Pluto. And like Pluto, driven by his animal desires for food and dominance, laughter, too, is one of the baser human compulsions. In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler quotes a then-preeminent psychologist who called laughter “a safety valve [for the] overflow of emotional energy,” which speaks, perhaps to the nervous laughter that bubbles out when the sleepwalking Olive Oyl traipses precariously close to a swift drop down seven stories to harsh concrete of the side walk (97). 20 Such moments seem a release, certainly, dependent on a doubled recognition—“the first a superficial or manifest meaning [and] the second a deeper or latent meaning [that] contradicts the first impression” (qtd. in MacHovec 63). But when the latent meaning is the threat of immanent death, the resulting laughter is more akin to what Wylie Sypher saw in Baudelaire’s laughter; not release but “a nervous convulsion, an involuntary spasm” (qtd. in MacHovec 60). Donald Crafton has called this kind of laughter— laughter with both purpose and potential to create meaning in and of itself “instrumental laughter,” a term I find useful when considering, as Crafton does, the potential political and 19 See for example the different definitions of a sight gag given by Carroll (Note 16) and that given by Kristen Thompson, who calls the sight gag a “visual literalization of puns, proverbs, or metaphors” (148). My colloquial understanding of the sight gag was always in line with Carroll’s definition, and so it is with that definition I have stayed. 20 This psychologist is Cyril Burt, discredited after his death for his likely fabrications on studies that indicated that intelligence was inherited (Lahna). Carrick 153 economic weight that might underlie such paroxysms despite the apolitical claims of a cartoon’s creators (Goldmark 71). This emphasis on laughter should not, however, indicate these objects were trivial in their time. Indeed, early animated films were a flashpoint for some of the greatest questions posed by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, particularly in conversations between Theordor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. 21 In an early draft of Benjamin’s famous essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” (1936), he originally called the section in which he introduced the concept of the optical unconscious “Micky Maus” (Hansen, “Of Mice” 30), implying the Mouse had opened an entirely new realm of sensation never hitherto experienced by the consciousness. 22 Benjamin, it seems, implies that Mickey Mouse is as much a gateway to the unconscious as psychoanalysis had been for Freud. Adorno took issue with the weight that Benjamin had put on this point, not simply because, as he and Max Horkheimer would later explain, the common man prefers the tools that are imposed upon them to real art, calling “for Mickey Rooney rather than the tragic Garbo, Donald Duck rather than Betty Boop” (“Culture Industry” 106). No, Adorno took issue with Benjamin’s attachment to Mickey Mouse because Mickey represented the products of a culture industry invested in reinforcing the docility of the laboring consumers they supposedly served. 23 21 Miriam Bratu Hansen has made a career of studying the provocative arguments Benjamin and Adorno maintained about questions of art and the (perhaps insidious) bourgeois nature of animated films—particularly those by Disney. 22 The optical unconscious, for Benjamin, was a way of perceiving that had—until the advent of cinema—been inaccessible to the conscious mind. This phrase has since been adopted and expanded upon by many others, including in a book by the same name by Rosalind Krauss. 23 Adorno and Horkheimer use “culture industry” in order to emphasize the inextricable ties between industrial, capitalist production and what had formerly been considered artistic creation that now existed, particularly in America and particularly in film, as a result of late capitalism. Carrick 154 In the most famous essay from their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Adorno and Horkheimer excoriate the culture industry, of which the film and animation industries and particularly Disney were particularly potent members, for reinforcing the labor standards of late capitalism by conditioning the worker to accept conformity. Workers were encouraged to see their off-hours as time to tune-out rather than to engage intellectually or politically; the culture industry created an atmosphere in which “[e]ntertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again” (109). Even the slapstick humor that was so popular in this golden age of animation was part of a process of acclimatizing the worker to disposability: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs” (110). 24 Like Benjamin, who had died by his own hand attempting to escape Europe, Adorno and Horkheimer were both Frankfurt School philosophers and refugees from Hitler’s Germany (104). 25 Their project was grounded in an inherent suspicion of the fascistic uniformity and repetition they saw across supposedly disparate cultural products and, for Adorno in particular, in the loss of the independent artist and the individual themself, who is intelligible to the culture industry only as a consumer and/or an employee (118). The individual is in a constant state of precarity (121), threatened with obsolescence as an employee—replaced by machines—and thus invisibility as a consumer. Culture was now inextricably tied to capitalism, and constant precarity was the result. 24 In a letter to Benjamin regarding a draft of “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Adorno identifies the laughter emitted at the cinema during a slapstick was that of “bourgeois sadism,” citing Mickey Mouse and Charlie Chaplin cartoons as particular offenders (Art and Politics 123). 25 The use of the term “late capitalism” implies an almost smothering pervasiveness to the forces of the economy, which are now influential in the social world in its entirety. Carrick 155 That such precarity made literal might best manifest in the vulnerable body of a sleepwalker creeping ever-closer to a ledge, and to a 100 foot drop to concrete sidewalks, should come as no surprise. 26 Precarity is a term more typically used in a critical ethnic studies and cultural studies context to imply a kind of labor exploitation that diminishes life worth, not simply economically but also beyond the economic; it is frequently used in conversations about migrant labor and police violence. Kathleen C. Stewart, in her beautiful lyric essay “Precarity’s Form,” explains the multiplicitous ways of understanding precarity: “Precarity can take the form of a sea change, a darkening atmosphere, a hard fall, or the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve” (1). It is the moment before the hard fall in which I situated my sense of the sleepwalker’s precarity. Sleepwalkers had come to represent tragic heroes in Britain and docile puppets in Germany. It only seems fitting that in the epicenter of the blooming culture industry, America, the sleepwalker might, in the guise of playing the clown, function as precarity itself. I interrogate entertainment texts, and interrogate them with explicit questions of labor in mind, but I do so from behind the light table. The cartoons which I explore in this chapter share not only a theme of sleepwalking, I argue, but also a tenuous but powerful connection to the history of labor unrest in the Hollywood studio systems which manifests through subtle use of such instrumental laughter. And while the laughter of the production team might mirror the convulsions of Baudelarian nervousness, the audience’s laughter served to reinforce themes of cooperation and profit sharing that implicitly test the numbing and complacency-encouraging model of entertainment understood by Adorno and Horkheimer. The American sleepwalker is the rodeo 26 I am indebted to my colleague Feng-Mei Heberer for my understanding of this theoretical approach, as well as to widely celebrated writers who work on precarity including Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Jasbir Puar and Kathleen C. Stewart. Carrick 156 clown whose precarity disguises the inherent danger of his occupation in order to create levity. The humor with which such visions of precarity appeared made them more palatable. But often this comedic distraction only serves to distract from the implicit political and economic dangers at hand. In the case of Pluto the Dog, his sleepwalking generosity and waking indignation mask a very real message of shared collaboration, while Popeye teaches the importance of cooperation with former enemies to save lives. Though the messages seem facetious, it is the interplay between vicarious thrill of precarity and the assured safety of the comedy’s happy ending that allows the sleepwalker to become a figure for commentary. The Hard Work of Humor Despite the jolly nature of their art, animation was an exhausting industry in the early days. The realities of a workday in an animator’s studio were much more the numbing automatism of Modern Times than the casual chalk talk-style vision of production that McCay had promoted in Gertie and Little Nemo. These earliest animators drew thousands of images by hand to produce a single minute of film. Technological developments, including the introduction of the peg system by Raoul Barré and the patenting of clear cel by Earl Hurd in 1917 had helped to streamline and speed production, but it was Bray who fully integrated the principles of Taylorization and the production line into his films. 27 By the animation boom of the late 1920s, Bray’s system, in which artists were given much smaller jobs, like the design and animation of a particular character, inking, backgrounds and so on, rather than the all-in-one jobs they had held before the production line. Disney proudly said his studio was like a “Ford factory” but “our moving arts were much more complex than cogs— human beings, each with his own 27 Tom Arndt cites a very different genealogy for the development of the now-standard peg technology, but Barré is most often cited as the technique’s inventor. Carrick 157 temperament and values who must be weighted and fitted into his proper place” (Gabler 186). Despite the advances, however, nearly all animators remained overworked and underpaid. Animation labor historian Tom Sito cites a 1930s industry-standard six day work week that could be cut down to five if an artist negotiated with the boss to work until 11 pm on Thursday instead (15-16). 28 In a column from 1938 that was snipped and saved in the files of the early Screen Cartoonists Guild, Ted LeBerthon, drama and film critic for The Los Angeles Evening Herald, noted that despite the romantic appeal of cartooning, the cartoon studios are jammed with sweating commercial artists, who work at breakneck speed on monotonous routines at meager pay, and leave at the end of each day so jaded, befogged and dazed, that it takes some of them hours to throw off the frenzied vibrations, the mad driving rhythm of their day. Some suffer such intense eyestrain that they feel their eyeballs are being pulled out of their heads…. Many animators are heavy drinkers…. [W]hen all the celluloid used is washed by men known as “cell [sic] washers,” so that it may be used again. This is the dirtiest work in the plant, and the poorest paid, and usually is done by Negroes who rarely are ever promoted. At the Disney Studios a building boom in the mid-1930s corresponded to the beginning of the Snow White project, but the lowest ranked animators, called “in-betweeners” were still working in the “sweltering basement,” called the bullpen (Gabler 237). 29 28 My chapter relies heavily on Sito’s work because he is the only scholar working on these animation studio strikes. The relative lack of critical interest in these strikes is, I suspect, due to the secretiveness of the Disney archives and relative dearth of archival material available from the strikers themselves. I do make extensive work of what I discovered in this archive— the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild Local 839 Collections at Oviatt Library Special Collections of California State University, Northridge. I think there is also a relative lack of critical interest in the Fleischer strike because Max Fleischer is himself so fascinating as an artist and inventor who innovated animation as a field. Because animators have reputations as artists even more than as craftsmen, the mythos surrounding the unionization period is more about the development of new technologies and artistic skills of animation rather than about advancements in work conditions or wages. 29 Animator Ward Kimball described the basement much like the engine room of a ship, where the “in-betweeners” worked “overtime when it was 95 degrees outside. We used to strip to our waists to keep cool and work for nothing so some supervisor could win a package of cigarettes, because he’d promised to get a picture out on time” (Sito 110). Carrick 158 Despite the obvious capitalist motives driving the cultivation and growth of an animation studio—turning a profit with essential to staying open, after all, and no one expects a film studio to be socialist wonderland—the early animation studios seemed particularly predicated on the notion that a studio could function like a family as much as like a hierarchical business. In 1941 Disney animators went on strike after several years of unsatisfying attempts at unionizing, salary and benefits negotiation and cost of living raises that left them at odds with the managerial staff, chief among them Walt Disney himself. The first stirrings had begun back in December 1937. Once these unionizers, led by Art Babbitt, presented the Disney brothers their list of demands and were rebuffed, the federation disbanded (357). This acquiescence reflected, Walt Disney biographer Neil Gabler argues, their loyalty to the Disneys and their earlier reputation as a “family” studio where artists were treated as relative equals and certainly received higher pay than other studios of the time. Walt had even toyed with the idea of making the studio an employee-owned co-operative before making the company public (326). Even as tensions rose before the strike, Walt had used a new and expanded studio with its new amenities and plethora of extracurricular activities as a way to build a surrogate family, much like Snow White finds in her home with the Dwarfs (240). These gestures at what might now be termed “team building” only reinforced the betrayal Walt felt when many of his artists went on strike. Studio amenities and activities like lunchtime volleyball games were all well and good, but if, as the story famously goes, the union gained traction at the studio because one of the inkers fainted because she was too poor to afford lunch, Carrick 159 they were particularly empty gestures (358). 30 Perhaps Walt’s project in the studio was ultimately utopian—a failed utopia for the workers, perhaps, but utopian nonetheless. But the Disney strike was neither the first nor the only major animation studio strike during the 1930s and 1940s. 31 There were three major animation studio strikes during this period, of which Disney’s was the second. First was the Fleischer Studio in 1937, followed by Disney in 1941 and finally Terrytoons in 1947. The origins of the Fleischer Studios strike, according to Sito’s history of animation unions, was the death of a young animator named Dan Glass from pulmonary tuberculosis in January 1935 (84). Though Max Fleischer, creator of Betty Boop and patentor of the Rotoscope system of animation, had helped to send Glass to a New Jersey sanitarium, many of the Studio employees attributed Glass’s death to “the long hours, bad pay, and cramped and badly ventilated workspace” in the studio itself (84). Max ran the New York studio with his brothers Dave and Lou, both of whom were unionized already under the Local 802 (83), but the Commercial Artists and Designers Union Local 20239 (CADU) had been looking to unionize the studio from the outside with little to no interest from the Fleischers. The leaders of CADU saw Glass’s death as an opportunity to rouse animator support against the Fleischers and a flyer began to appear reading, “Max Fleischer Killed Dan Glass!” But when the Supreme Court upheld the labor-friendly terms of the Wagner Act in 1937, encouraging the West Coast branch of the CADU, the Federation of Motion Picture Crafts, to strike for better conditions in March. CADU began to push the Fleischer Studios to allow them 30 Though animation was almost exclusively a male profession, many of the more repetitive or menial jobs were staffed by women including most of the inking work. 31 Disney’s strike receives the most critical attention today, I suspect, because they remain such a powerhouse in animated films; Walt Disney attributed the strike to communist forces during the later House Un-American Activities Committee hearings; and because Disney’s archives are closed to public research, creating an additional sense of allure for researchers like myself. Despite Adorno’s outrage, Mickey simply remains more popular than Fleischer’s Betty Boop. Carrick 160 to talk to their employees and proposed a list of demands including reducing the workweek from fourty-four to thirty-five hours, double pay for overtime, sick leave, vacations and raises for all employees (85). Fleischer responded by firing two of the “in-betweeners,” though he gave reasons unrelated to their union activity. Within weeks, the work orders for Popeye cartoons had increased without explanation and artists were creating a deliberate slowdown, leading to another firing (85). The CADU asked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to require Fleischer to hold an election proving his employee’s investment in the union and its demands, but Fleischer again refused, firing thirteen more in-betweeners on May 6, 1937 (87). 32 The Studio lawyers denied the validity of the vote. The strike began at 6:30 pm on Friday, March 7, 1937 outside the Fleischer Studios in Times Square with approximately three hundred picketers, nearly all of whom were lower ranked artists: assistants, inkers and painters (88). Signs read, “I’m Popeye the Union Man!”; “I Make Millions Laugh But the Real Joke Is My Salary!” and “You Can’t Buy Much Spinach on $15 a Week” while in one, Popeye punches “Low Wages” creating dizzying stars. When artists who remained loyal to the Fleischers attempted to cross the picket, a physical fight broke out and fourteen employees were arrested, including two at least two female employees— one for biting a policeman (89). 33 Despite the violent display, however, the crash of the Hindenburg and the wedding announcement of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson relegated the strike to page nine of the New 32 The National Labor Review Board (NLRB) would certify the CADU as the official bargaining body for the employees of the studio by a special vote on August 16, 1937, more than three months after the strike had begun (“STUDIO TO CONTEST DECISION BY NLRB…”). 33 “14 PICKETS SEIZED IN BROADWAY FIGHT: Strikers From Cartoon Studio...” Carrick 161 York Times (89). 34 They did report, however, that the fight between strikers and police gathered “a large Broadway audience [who] stood by and cheered both sides.” A report on the president of CADU sending Mayor LaGuardia a telegram decrying police brutality received slightly more traction, appearing on page four the next day, but after that the story seems to have largely become comic filler or a derisive example for anti-union articles published throughout 1937 by The New York Times. 35 No mention was made of the strike whatsoever in the Los Angeles papers despite the industry connection. Clearly the unionization of the first animation studio was not major news. The strike would last until October, and the picketers’ numbers would vary, though at one point they counted themselves as seventy-four in number. The demoralized strikers would make various attempts to lure more of the better-paid animators into their numbers, including a failed balloon and kite contraption including the phrase “Don’t scab. You’ll Never Live It Down” which was reported upon with some humor by The New York Times in early August. 36 When they did return to work, the union workers and non-union workers found themselves uncomfortably divided and the friendly atmosphere of the pre-strike studios was gone. Once the strike broke, the Fleischers agreed to a forty-hour workweek, increased wages and vacation time, but in January 1938 they announced the studio’s move to Florida. Florida was an aggressively anti-union state; Governor Fred Cone had even publically advocated lynching 34 Sito notes the article is on page six, but it appears on page nine, holding even less prominence than Sito originally ascribed it (“14 PICKETS SEIZED…”). 35 “MAYOR GETS UNION PLEA: Fleischer Studio Strikers Score Treatment by Police” and “Swarm at Midtown Shops; Some of Them Have No Idea Why…” 36 “NOVEL PICKET SIGN JUST FLOATS AWAY: Attached to Balloons, It Was Supposed to Soar Outside 'Popeye' Art Studios BUT IT NEVER GOT THERE Plea to Artists Remaining on Job Went Skyward When Slipknot Came Undone.” Carrick 162 union organizers (Shofner 303). 37 The Fleischers raised salaries significantly to lure artists down to relatively undeveloped Miami. 38 The Fleischers continued to show preferential treatment to employees who had not joined the union, putting up their favorites in luxury hotels during the transition while the union men stayed in flea-infested transient motels in the red-light district (Sito 85). The Fleischers raised salaries significantly to draw talent south from New York and east from California. In the June 1, 1938 issue of The Animator, the Screen Cartoonists Guild’s newsletter, begged artists defecting from the lower paying California studios to wait until they received word from the United American Artists union, which was then representing the Fleischer artists, that a contract had been established in the new Florida studio or they would risk undoing all of the gains made by the strikers. Despite tax breaks offered at the city and state level, the cost of shipping film stock to and from New York for development combined with these higher wages eventually made the studio unprofitable. And though they were able to produce their full length feature film Gulliver’s Travels, made to compete with Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, both it and its follow-up Mr. Bug Goes to Town were flops. Paramount, Fleischer’s parent studio since 1928, closed the studio in 1942 and redistributed its assets, sending its artists back to New York only five years after the strike (97). Other studios followed Fleischer’s lead one by one, with MGM unionizing in early 1941 and Warner Bros. shortly following suit under the leadership of renowned animation director Chuck Jones, perhaps the highest ranked animator to ever lead a strike, one which lasted only six 37 Sito more colorfully rewrites this quote as a threat to hang unionizers from lampposts (94). 38 Miami’s metropolitan boom was yet to come in the 1950s and ‘60s (Mohl 66-67). Carrick 163 days before producer Leon Schlesinger was persuaded to sign with the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild (Sito 106). Several years before the collective negotiation was attempted at the Fleischer Studios, they had released a Popeye the Sailor short that would ultimately become the most critically acclaimed and popular of the series. It was 1934’s “A Dream Walking” that Leonard Maltin declared was when “the Popeye that we know and love comes into focus” (109), and it was in this short that Popeye and his nemesis Bluto were forced to band together in order to save their mutual love interest, the somnambulist Olive Oyl. Popeye the Sailor had first appeared in Elzie Crisler Segar’s daily strip Thimble Theatre in January 1929, eventually becoming such a popular character that the strip was renamed after him (Grandinetti 5). Though Thimble Theatre had been syndicated by William Randolph Hearst’s King Features since 1919, the introduction of the ornery seafarer had revitalized the strip, greatly expanding its audience and catching the eye of the Fleischer brothers, animators whose studio contracted with Paramount Pictures to begin producing Popeye shorts in 1933 (Maltin 107). By the time they negotiated the Popeye deal, the Fleischer Brothers’ Studios had already produced several major hits, thanks in no small part to Max Fleischer’s technical innovations. Max had patented the first Rotoscope in 1915, initially with some intention to sell the invention for military use, quickly utilizing his new style of animation for his own series of animated shorts (Crafton 170). These military applications would be realized when Bray used rotoscoping for his Army training films during the Great War (Crafton 158). Eventually, Max would hold fifteen different animation patents (Maltin 117). After both brothers returned from the war, Max transformed his pre-war Rotoscope experiments into the first of his Out of the Inkwell series, Carrick 164 which initially premiered under the Bray Studios banner. By 1921, the shorts, and their star the then-unnamed Koko the Clown, had become so popular that the Fleischers opened their own studio in five blocks from Times Square (Crafton 175). To the public, the Fleischer Studios were better known as the home of Koko the Clown and Betty Boop, two of the most famous characters of pre-Disney animation, than for their groundbreaking innovations. Popeye made his cartoon debut in a 1933 Betty Boop cartoon— in which Betty herself appeared for less than a minute, and pressures from the newly-imposed Hayes Code soon allowed the less sexually risqué Popeye’s series to eclipse the once titillating Betty’s. Popeye was particularly popular after the first year of production, by which point the character had begun to be voiced by Jack Mercer, who along with Mae Questel— voice of Olive Oyl and Betty Boop— developed Popeye’s characteristic mumbled asides (Maltin 108-109). By 1934, the Popeye shorts had become one of Paramount’s most valuable properties and Popeye was a merchandising sensation in much the same manner that Mickey Mouse had been in years previous. Within two years of the Fleischer Popeye’s debut, Popeye became a popular nickname for baseball players and boxers, Popeye sweatshirts were being advertised in newspapers across the nation and at least one local gossip columnist had taken on the moniker “Popeye and Wimpy” in the Philadelphia Tribune. 39 By late January 1934, The Washington Post reported, “Those ‘Popeye, the Sailor’ cartoon comedies are becoming more and more popular… An audible ripple runs through the house every time one is announced on the screen,” though 39 The column itself, called “Excavating the Hilltop,” was particularly bizarre. Focused on the exploits of alumni of “O.H.S.”— which seemingly stands for Overbrook High School, now famous for its alumni, including Will Smith and Wilt Chamberlain— the column ran from October 1934 through March 1936. It appeared approximately monthly for six months between 1934-1935 and reported on marriages and reunion planning, but was cheekily signed pseudonymously under the Popeye banner for the length of its run. Sportsmen with the Popeye nickname include baseball player Lee Roy Mahaffey and a “Popeye” McNulty as well as boxers Joe Benson, Henry Irving, a “Popeye” Pepin along with several others. Carrick 165 The Manchester Guardian noted that no matter the popularity, Popeye was “funny, though not to be mentioned in the same breath as Mickey Mouse.” 40 Despite the series’ apparent failings, Variety reported that it “had been a gold mine for Paramount.” 41 Dream Walking If “A Dream Walking” was the first short of the series to really solidify tropes that would characterize the series— including the gritty urban setting, the comedic violence and Popeye’s muttering—it does so while solidifying many of the near-physics-defying antics that would eventually become canon to cartoon sleepwalking. As the short opens, Popeye, in the manner that he does just about anything, sleeps so vigorously that we see his prone body and his mattress rising and falling in rhythm together, as he puffs aggressively on his corncob pipe under a picture of his paramour Olive. In the very next apartment, Bluto sleeps with a similar fury under the very same portrait, sending his blankets up and down the length of his bed with each breath— eventually doing so with such energy that the blankets themselves rip in half. A floor above, Olive sleeps between companion portraits of the rivals, and slowly rises from her bed with the familiar arms-out gesture inherited from the sleepwalkers of German silent cinema. 42 As if to meet the hasty demands of the short’s narrative frame, sleepwalking Olive immediately wanders out her own window and onto an empty flagpole, hanging parallel to the 40 “A Cross-Section Choice of January's Best Films – ‘Red’ Lewis Goes...” and “MANCHESTER THEATRES AND MUSIC...” 41 “Editorial: Inside Stuff--Pictures.” Variety. 114.6 (Apr 24, 1934): 51. 42 In another moment inherited from German cinema, Olive and Popeye visit a hypnotist’s show, reminiscent of the one featured in Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, where Popeye must beat the hypnotist and even Olive herself in order to restore order after the titular “Hyp-nut-tist” has turned Olive into a chicken and Popeye into a jackass. Though the American sleepwalker appears in comedies, this figure shares far more in common with her German compatriots than might initially seem obvious, including their origin points in the traumas of war. Carrick 166 sidewalk far below, from the roofline of her eighth floor penthouse. Returning to the ledge, she knocks a planter to the sidewalk, waking both Popeye and Bluto, who argue over the right to save her. 43 Meanwhile, she was managed to walk over gaps between buildings traipsing high on the roofs of the metropolis. Her regular steps manage to take her over the spaces between the tightly pack tenement buildings without hazard [See Figure 3.3], but when she reaches an edge with no building, presumably marking the location of a street below, she instead follows the ledge, but not before giving a momentary hesitation implying she might take a tumble to the street seven floors down. She walks on rooftops, ledges and power lines, finally ending up in the raw skeleton of an in-progress skyscraper. When we next see her, she is now, naturally, somehow made it to the top of the frame, twelve stories from the ground below, and Bluto just manages to save her from certain death by sending over a girder with his seemingly random gestures working the steaming controls of the cranes. She is no safer, however, but a couple of stories closer to the ground. Bluto and Popeye rush into the building and tussle as they attempt to redirect her from doom, briefly getting knocked insensible themselves, and soon becoming so distracted by their rivalry that they forget Olive and brawl instead—typical Popeye and Bluto behavior. They are much more invested in their rivalry than in their respective romances or even in rescuing their endangered beloved. Olive manages to continue her routine of moving from one object to another, this time seemingly endless girders moving through space one after another, finally making her much- threatened fall, only to land back on the flagpole right outside of her own window. She returns to bed, none the wiser, and awakens only when Popeye, exhausted from chasing her, knocks over 43 Bluto functions as an all-purpose villain in the shorts, varying between sexual menace, rival suitor, economic rival and so on as the situation requires. He occasionally spends part of an episode aligned with Popeye, but typically this is only in order to redouble the impact of his betrayals, as when he steals Popeye’s treasure map in “Dizzy Divers.” Carrick 167 her alarm clock, making her think he is a peeping tom. He begrudgingly takes her abuse, claiming, “I saw my duty and done it!” As early as the second Popeye short, Bluto and Popeye were at odds over Olive Oyl. The love triangle between these three characters was at the core of what little continuity there was between the various episodes of the Fleischer shorts. The implication that Olive might be equally enamored with Bluto and Popeye was a variation on Bluto’s constant, aggressive pursuit of Olive and Popeye’s constant rescues. 44 This twist does, however, redouble strangeness of the shared goal between the two violent foes. Bluto and Popeye must save Olive from what seems to be certain death, playing against type and defying the expectations set by their relationships in the other early shorts. 45 These rivals were known for their constant physical assaults on one another, almost always prompted by attempts to woo Olive herself. In their scramble to save her—a scramble that they ultimately abandon in favor of their usual rough-and-tough antics while Olive saves herself—Popeye and Bluto nearly reject the animosity that is core to their characterizations. 44 Popeye and Bluto are often competing for Olive’s affection, but her attentions to Bluto are rarely returned. In “Beware of Barnacle Bill,” “Pleased to Meet Cha!” and “You Gotta Be a Football Hero” Olive is also in love with Bluto, but she is much more likely to be horrified by him than attracted to him. In “For Better or Worser” both men meet her at the same time through a matrimonial agency and battle their way to the altar at which point Popeye rejects her once he sees her shoddy makeup job. In a later short, “I Yam Love Sick” (1938), Olive has left Popeye for Bluto, which she later regrets. Some version of this story, typically involving a rescue happens repeatedly, most significantly for my argument in “I Never Changes My Altitude.” 45 I roughly define the early shorts as those in the first series released by Fleischer 1933-1935, or roughly the first twenty-six shorts. After short twenty-six, the shorts became more formulaic, including consistent turn to spinach in emergencies, at which point Popeye’s arm would swell and be superimposed with a powerful object like dynamite or the Rock of Gibraltar and a Souza march would play as he pummeled his enemy—typically Bluto—into submission. The twenty- seventh short, “The Adventures of Popeye the Sailor” was a partially live action compilation of shorts from earlier in the series. Carrick 168 Through their shared goal of saving Olive, an as-yet unheard of gesture toward agreement in the Fleischer shorts, the foes reinforce the precarious danger the sleepwalker is in, particularly in the booming metropolis of construction sites and lazy, hamburger guzzling watchmen. They remain antagonists, however, tossing colorful insults that reflect their normal relationship—Bluto shouting that he’ll save Olive before he lets the “Pop-eyed freak” rescue her. To continue their entirely antagonistic relationship, it seems, would guarantee her death. And though they cannot resist their baser impulses and ultimately fall into their regular routine of bashing one another’s brains in, for a time, Popeye and Bluto work to save the woman they both love. While Olive appears the damsel in distress in “A Dream Walking,” she holds her own, just as she frequently does even while crying out for Popeye’s aid. In the first short of the Popeye series, “I Yam What I Yam” (1933) she leaves a pile of attackers defeated with single punches while Popeye dilly-dallies with a bunch of ducks. On another occasion, she beats the giant Bluto single-handedly with a club, holding him a bay while awaiting rescue from Popeye. 46 Olive even rescues Popeye on occasion, bringing life-saving spinach to his bout with Bluto in “Let’s You and Him Fight” (1934). Olive’s turn as sleepwalker in “A Dream Walking” proves no different. Though she is seemingly insensible as she walks across the moonlit iron girders of a growing skyscraper, her steps are sure and she never fails to find her footing. Popeye and Bluto, however, sense the very real danger that she is in despite her ignorance and aim to save her. It is particularly striking that in their rush to save her, they’re based senseless on a flying girder and briefly become sleepwalkers themselves, and all three protagonists wander the bare frame of a building aimed toward a mid-air collision [See Figure 3.4]. While rushing to protect Olive from her potential 46 The implication of this scene, from “Blow Me Down” (1933), is that Bluto is attempting to rape Olive, which is often the threat of such attacks. This trope repeats throughout the series. Carrick 169 fall, Popeye and Bluto become victims to her almost rhapsodic insensibility, but unlike Olive, who sleepwalks authentically—or at least could be said to be actually asleep—they do not gain the powers of avoidance and dodging that had kept her safe despite rather than because of their help, and they are jolted back to their senses when they bash into one another. Even more remarkable than this brief foray into three-way somnambulism, however, is that themes of precarity became more prevalent as the threat of a strike at the Fleischer Studios became more tangible. A similar chase through bare girders appears in “Bridge Ahoy!” (1936). The climactic battle on the partially completed bridge follows Popeye, Olive and Wimpy’s decision to gather their resources to build a bridge in order to compete with Bluto’s overpriced ferry. “You charges too much. We’ll build a bridge and let people across for nuttin’,” Popeye declares. 47 The characters are assaulted while trying to create a free alternative to his economic monopoly—physical precarity and economic precarity are, in the climax of this short at least, one and the same. Another variation on the theme features in “Hold the Wire” (1936), where Popeye and Bluto fight while balanced on a telephone wire [See Figure 3.5]; they also battle it out on the ledges of a constructed building while cleaning Olive’s twentieth floor stenography business’s windows in “The Paneless Window Washer” (1937) [See Figure 3.6]; and brawl on the wings of their planes while attempting to be amateur pilots to impress Olive in “I Never Changes My Altitude” (1937) [See Figure 3.7]. By the post-strike period, however, precarity had become a rote occurrence in Popeye’s world and more surreal narratives were required to continue the run of visual heights-based gags. In “The Jeep” (1938), a “magical dog” that “can disappear and 47 Popeye is prompted to action after Bluto’s greedy attempts to cram the ferry destroys Olive’s car and he casts Wimpy overboard for being unable to pay. This storyboard could read as the explosive moments that inspired a strike leader were the protagonist not a sailor with comically enlarged forearms and an extra-human propensity for violence. Carrick 170 things” helps Popeye track down Swee’Pea through an urban landscape that combines the ledges and heights of “A Dream Walking” and “The Paneless Window Washer” with the perilous balancing act of “Hold the Wire” [See Figure 3.8]. 48 As the decade progressed, this gesture of continued antagonism with a shared goal toward developing cooperation would become a key element of the developing push for unionization in animation studios on both coasts. That the sleepwalker first became a symbol of physical precarity during the height of the economic depression seems particularly telling. Though these figures flourished in a genre designed to make audiences laugh, this was no escapism, but a signal of great changes to come. Labor Unrest Moves West In 1941, after a six-day lockout where he attempted to force the Screen Cartoonists Guild out of his studio, Warner Bros. animation studio head Leon Schlesinger signed with the union with a quip inquiring when the union heads would go after Disney (Sito 106). 49 Walt Disney had built a lucrative empire by the beginning of the Second World War. But what had begun as a small studio run through a partnership with his brother Roy had become increasingly complex, particularly with the introduction of feature-length animation with his Snow White in 1937. Walt himself had decreasingly been involved in the production of the money-making backbone of the studio, the still-wildly popular shorts, though he still stalked the studio providing approval or 48 The Jeep was a character from the “Thimble Theater” comics, but he was a relatively recent addition, appearing for the first time in March 1936, well after the precarity themes were already being explored in the Popeye shorts. His magical powers include teleportation and the ability to walk through walls, both of which feature in “The Jeep,” as well as somewhat complex communication using body language. 49 Schlesinger saw Disney as something of a nemesis due to his studio’s success and critical recognition over Warner Bros. own Looney Tunes and Merry Melody cartoons (Sito 106). Carrick 171 harsh disapproval of his artist’s work. His eye was ever-trained toward the next great innovation with the breakthroughs of “Steamboat Willie,” “The Three Little Pigs.” The utopian project that had grown out of these groundbreaking shorts had culminated in a brief promise from Walt to distribute the shares of the Disney Company among his employees— though he, his wife and his brother and his wife retained the vast majority of the shares. 50 Life at the Disney Studios was, however, largely better than it was at the other animation studios. Sick leave was available; and until they moved into feature film work, the studios generally closed in late-August and even once production began, employees with a full year of work under their belts got a two week vacation (Gabler 240). Walt had even introduced a prototype profit sharing system in 1933, though this was eliminated when work began on Snow White (Sito 110). Certainly, the press saw the animators’ conditions as favorable. In a 1934 article for The New York Times Magazine, Donald Churchill fêted Walt for being elected to the Art Workers Guild of London, whose previous nominees included George Bernard Shaw. Churchill opens by calling Walt the “Horatio Alger of the cinema” and noting that “[h]is ambition is to pay his employees well enough for them to save for old age and still enjoy living as they go along.” In another article, Walt explained his business philosophy: You see this isn’t a ‘business’ in the sense of primarily making money for shareholders who don’t work at it. My brother and I own all the stock and I keep a controlling interest. We won’t sell to any outsiders nor to employees. If either of them owned stock they might want the studio to make money first and good films would come second. We put the good films first. (Millier) 50 The company officially went public in 1940. Carrick 172 Though his preciousness with what he ultimately treated as a series of products in the culture industry rings a bit insincere, the critics were inclined to agree with him, even as philosophers like Adorno were not. 51 The first stirrings of unionizing the Disney Studio had begun as early as 1932, when Ub Iwerks, Grim Natwick and others had begun to meet in secret, calling their group a club to protect themselves from retaliatory firings (Sito, “Disney Strike”). By October 1940, however, the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild, which had unionized the Fleischer Studios, had begun gathering cards from the majority of Disney’s employees and was formally calling for recognition. Walt attempted to form the Cartoonists’ Federation—a technically illegal in-house union— with the hopes of keeping all union activities under his control, but was rebuffed. 52 Workloads had only gotten heavier. As work for Snow White picked up pace, the Studios were still attempting to meet the same schedule on the Silly Symphony and Mickey shorts, releasing a film approximately every two weeks. This left animators to produce around seventy- five feet of film a day and resulted in longer night shifts for the in-betweeners who were still expected to work during the day (Gabler 242). By the time the deadline to deliver Snow White to RKO approached in summer and autumn 1937, animators were working at such a pace that they were left with burns from their overused lightboards. The photography department eventually 51 I side with Adorno in this assessment of Disney, though perhaps not with all his feelings on Disney. 52 Gabler gives an excellent run-down of the ways that the Disneys’ unwillingness to negotiation with unions and desire to control the unions had soured the formerly familial relationship they had with their animators in his biography of Walt. He is the only biographer allowed access to the Disney archives so his account includes actual letters and documents from the strike period that are closed to contemporary researchers. The focus of Gabler’s account is the lead organizer of the SCG Herbert Sorrell, a former prizefighter who once promised to “[s]queeze Disney’s balls ’til he screams” and once called in sixteen scabs to work in order to break their drawing arms (358-359). Sorrell would later be instrumental to the set decorators’ strike that would culminate in the so-called Hollywood Black Friday riot, which would later appear in Pynchon’s Vineland. His story is fascinating but not particularly relevant to the work at hand here. Carrick 173 had to work twenty-four hours a day in two twelve-hour shifts in order to keep up with the production. 53 By August 1937, Walt had also begun planning what would be the fifth feature released by the studio, one of two released in August 1942, Bambi (264). 54 Walt also pushed his staff to develop a multi-plane camera to better create a sense of three-dimensionality on film. 55 The new camera added unbelievable depth of field to shots but was incredibly unwieldy and made rooms unbearably hot to work in for the four to eight men required to set up each frame (258). Work quality and morale slipped as energies did. As an incentive to improve output, Walt and his brother put a twenty-percent stake in the company in a trust used for employee bonuses, though Roy quickly revised the plan so that the company could use the twenty-percent to back the film instead, promising bonuses if and when the film was a hit (243). At first, the bonuses plan was a success and Walt paid out $32,000 in 1934. But by 1936 when Snow White moved from planning and tinkering and into production he decided he should dole out bonuses more scientifically. 56 The resulting system forced all animators to be graded on a quality scale per foot and paid accordingly, the idea being that anyone who exceeded their originally salary would receive a pay adjustment the following year (243). The new system put slow animators at a vast disadvantage and some better animators may have had to redo the work of poorer ones without pay. The difference in skill and style between feature work for Snow White and the shorts work for Silly Symphonies and Mickeys made the scale inconsistent at best and unfair at worst. A 53 I can’t help but picture some hybrid vision of Chaplin’s Modern Times and the scenes imagined for the screenplay written by Joe Gillis and Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard when picturing this maddening level of production for cartoons. 54 The other August 1942 feature release is the less fondly remembered Saludos Amigos. 55 This design was at least partially stolen from his former partner and current rival Ub Iwearks, according to Gabler (258). 56 Snow White was scheduled to premiere on December 21, 1937, and though they did meet the deadline, animation was still in process as late as December 1, 1937 (Gabler 253, 268). Carrick 174 version of this grading system which survives in the SCG papers, “outline for the inking and painting rating system,” involves twenty-three steps and two different conversion charts involving time, grades and percentages for both quality and speed. The “outline” is seven pages long and certainly seems to emphasize the interchangability of the inkers and painters whose work would be judged in relation not only to the quality and speed of one another’s work but also in relation to pre-determined footage quotas that changed without notice or regard for the different skills each artist brought to the studio. It seems no coincidence that the most serious stirrings of unionization were occurring just as the pressures of the Snow White deadlines were reaching a fever pitch. Tempers were high and morale was incredibly low. The entire studio had functionally faced restructuring in order to support the shift into the production of feature-length animation, but it was increasingly possible that the film would both be incomplete at the point at which the Disney brothers had agreed to deliver it to RKO in time for a Christmas release and that the film itself might prove its own undoing once it was released. Walt’s emphasis on realism and innovation had not just slowed the production down, but also created some legitimate concerns within the production staff that animation might lose its magic if it were to attempt to appear too real, too three-dimensional. This was no Betty Boop—not only was their star an animated human girl, but she was proportioned like a real person. Perhaps in invoking reality so overtly the studio was daring the audience to find the animated vision of reality lacking in comparison. With their bonuses hanging in the balance, it was certainly a hell of a gamble. Carrick 175 Ultimately, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was the highest profiting film of 1938 by nearly four-fold despite many of its tickets being priced at a child’s discount (Sito 111). 57 The promised bonuses, however, were reinvested into a new home for the studio in Burbank, which did, to be fair, offer its artists the benefit of air conditioning (112). 58 The end of Snow White brought no relief to the studio. As the staff readied for the move to the new plush Burbank studio in late summer and early autumn 1939, war broke out in Europe. Hitler effectively shuttered the European market, eliminating somewhere around forty- five percent of Disney’s revenue sources (Sito 113). In March, the Disney Studios registered to become a publicly traded company in order to raise $4 million of new capital. 59 The public registration of the company also revealed the salaries of the highest ranked officers. 60 The studio sought this money in order to pay back the Bank of America for the loans they had taken out in 57 Between the premiere on December 21 and January 5, 45,000 people had been to see it, breaking previous records for the famed Carthay Circle movie house (“Snow White” Sets Records at Carthay”). A Chicago Daily Tribune article on the registration of the Disney Studios as a publicly traded company in March 1940 noted the total profits as $4,677,863 until December 31, 1939. A rough estimation of the value of this profit today is $78.5 million (“Walt Disney's First Public Stock Issue Is Registered”). 58 Most of the other on-site amenities, including fine dining, masseurs and a personal trainer, remained unaffordable for anyone outside the upper echelons. 59 They planned to register 150,000 shares at $25 per share with an additional 5,000 shares to be held by employees and “company officers” though Walt and his wife would each own 106,500 shares and Roy and his wife 71,000 shares each in order to maintain control of the company (“Walt Disney's First Public”). 60 Walt’s salary ($108,298) was approximately $1.8 million in today’s dollars. Roy’s salary ($54,185) equated to $908,000 and their notoriously anti-union lawyer and executive vice president Gunther Lessing’s ($14,335) to $240,000. In a 1933 article in The Washington Post, Roy announced that Walt had given himself a raise from $150 to $200 a week, and the article praised his modest lifestyle. Certainly compared to many studio heads, Walt’s salary was fairly small, but with the studio’s volume of debt and his proclamations about not being in the business of making money, it certainly seems suspect (“Famous Artist Boosts Salary To Living Wage: Walt Disney Sets Example.”). Carrick 176 order to build the Burbank facilities. 61 The stocks that were once $25 per share were quickly worth only $3 (Sito 114). By February 1941, the Disney Studio owed Bank of America more than $2.5 million and still had the option to borrow more (Barrier 163). Rumors were circulating that Bank of America was going to take over the studio “a prospect, wrote animator Shamus Culhane, that ‘created a feeling of tension in the studio that almost made the air crackle’” (qtd. in Gabler 263). In January Walt had attempted to prevent the impending strike by cutting the workweek down to forty hours a week on the advice of Lessing, the man behind the studio’s in-house sham union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists. 62 On February 21, Walt made a speech to his gathered employees that was intended to remind them of the spirit of collectivity in which he sought to found the company but quickly devolved into threats not to let the animators use his pool anymore. 63 Walt had no idea what the strikers were upset about. On May 26, the SCG voted to strike after both the Screen Editor’s Guild and Publicist’s Guild had filed complaints with the NLRB for the studio’s unwillingness to “negotiate in good 61 $1.6 million of the proposed $4 million raised would go toward paying off these debts with $1.3 million being “used to redeem all of the outstanding 10 year 4 1/2 per cent sinking fund debenture notes due April 1, 1947” (“STOCK OFFERED IN WALT DISNEY MOVIE COMPANY”). 62 Walt and Lessing had set up the Federation of Screen Cartoonists in an attempt to avoid outside unionization. The FSC was eventually ruled illegal by the National Labor Review Board after a suit was brought against them in early February 1941, but Walt continued to point to this union as a sign of compromise and accommodation, despite its fairly obvious role as an empty gesture of appeasement. The literature produced by the FSC aggressively opposed the outside attempts at unionizing; one flier began with the phrase, “But, Mr. Babbitt… We don’t feel company dominated.” Their motto was “An Independent Union,” which consistently, and ironically, appeared in quotation marks at the bottom of their official communication (“Film Concern Formally Charged…”). 63 Later, Bill Melendez, an assistant animator, explained, “If only Walt had leveled with us about how bad things were, we might have gone along. But instead he patronized us and called us and called all union talk Communist” (Sito 119). Carrick 177 faith” (Sito 120). The two sides met again two days later in a final effort to avoid the strike, but Walt once more insisted that the SCG had no legal right to negotiate on behalf of his employees, once again putting negotiations at a deadlock (121). Walt left the meeting and immediately fired Babbitt and sixteen other pro-union animators. Gunther Lessing, the studio’s head lawyer and executive vice president sent Babbitt a memo officially citing his union activity as the reason behind his termination (121). The strike was finalized in an emergency meeting that night, and on May 29, 1941 the picketing began. Walking the Line “It was the Civil War of animation,” argues Sito, and the tensions that remained in the studio after the resolution of the strike certainly back his claim (“Disney Strike”). The strike began with approximately three hundred and seventy picketers and stabilized at around seventy-five. Like in the Fleischer strike, the Disney picketers received support from other unions, including a free soup kitchen and $1000 a week of financial support for the striking workers care of the Screen Actor’s Guild (Sito 130). By August, the Disney picketers had been joined by the Teamsters, the Screen Editors Guild and artists from Warner Bros. who, led by Chuck Jones, would perform mock executions of Lessing by guillotine while dressed as heroes of the French revolution every Wednseday (Sito 133, 130, 126). 64 In a departure from the Fleischer strike, at least some local sympathies seemed solidly on the side of the striking workers. The Catholic Charities sent food aid care of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles (133). Babbitt visited the Congress of Industrial Organization’s local offices to beg 64 When the Warner Bros. artists joined the strikers for their weekly pantomime, their placards read, “Liberté, Fraternité, Closed-Shoppité” and they sang a song about killing Lessing to the tune of “La Marseillaise.” Tensions were high, but these were professional comedians. This story is from the On the Line newsletter produced by the striking animators. Carrick 178 for financial support, not realizing his affiliation with SCG was with the opposing American Federation of Labor but managed to beg his way to financial support regardless. 65 The SCG’s newsletter The Animator and the Women’s Auxiliary’s newsletter kept tally of outside donations to the strikers which included money from a number of local unions and donations from quite a few individuals, including writers Dalton Trumbo (who donated $50 with another $15 weekly for the duration of the strike), Dorothy Parker (and husband Alan Campbell), Jerome Chodorov, Sydney Buchman and Sheridan Gibney and actress Aline MacMahon. 66 A local pharmacy at the offered to fill striking animators’ prescriptions for free on July 7. 67 Sympathy for the strikers ran so high that, according to the strikers’ own On the Line newsletter from June 4, 1941, The El Capitan Theater, now a bastion of Disney premieres and high production sing-alongs, refused to include a Disney film with their screening of Citizen Kane. On June 6, a press release from the strikers noted that the screen extras had offered the strikers “200 picketing Indians in full regalia” to augment what they then claimed as four-hundred and seventy picketers. The strike was becoming a sideshow and this was precisely what Walt had feared. In the July 1 edition of On the Line, the strikers noted their pride at having pinched and scraped in order to fight for their common cause together, no matter the outcome of what then seemed to be inevitable negotiations with Walt. Reading through the archives, there is a real sense of collectivity that had been lacking from Disney’s “family.” Within the SCG, higher paid artists were donating large portions of their salaries to help support the strikers now struggling to eat. Walt’s attempt at a family atmosphere may ultimately have been what made his picketing artists so effective against him. In the July 1 edition of the On the Line, the strikers claimed, “we 65 The AFL and CIO have merged into the largest federation of trade unions in the United States in 1955. 66 Trumbo would famously be blacklisted as a member of the Hollywood Ten . 67 On the Line, July 7, 1941. Carrick 179 have a solidarity of purpose and a democratic standard that is the envy of every union and guild in Hollywood…. We have had to make pinching financial adjustments to our families and to ourselves, but, we have remained strong through every test because we are a union.” Indeed, the strike lost very few members until Walt and Roy began negotiations with SCG rival International Allegiance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) in late June in an attempt to circumvent the SCG’s influence. 68 The IATSE, however, was exactly the type of union Walt most feared, run by Willie Bioff— a former associate of Al Capone who had been convicted of racketeering and ultimately died in a car bombing and likely mob hit. 69 Disney spread rumors in the trades that the strike was on the verge of ending and somewhere between twenty-one (according to the SCG) and ninety-eight (according to the studio) strikers went back to work, though the strike wasn’t over and IATSE had been roundly rejected as a reasonable arbitrator. 70 Meanwhile, strikers had received threats from the anonymous “Committee of Twenty-One,” who aimed to sound like a secret society of animators moving in opposition to the greater strike, but was almost certainly written by Lessing and Walt. 71 Finally, a government mediator, Judge James F. Casey had arrived in Burbank to arbitrate the still boiling dispute between the strikers and the studio and a deal was announced on July 28, 68 Gabler notes that it is unclear who approached who first at this point, though Willie Bioff had first visited the studios in 1937 hoping to introduce the IATSE. Walt later claimed, in a Los Angeles Daily News article, that Bioff offered to intervene in the strike (Gabler 369). 69 Bioff would again be convicted of racketeering in 1943, but this time turn State’s Evidence and receive a new identity. He was eventually assassinated while living under his new identity in Phoenix (Gabler, “Mob”). 70 Numbers are from On the Line and the SCG scrapbook, which cut off its newspaper masthead. Searches have been unsuccessful. 71 A telling passage from their first flier read: GHOSTS haunt you,— GHOSTS of Subversion,— GHOSTS of traitors and Fifth Columnists, — GHOSTS of deceptions, of false promises, of broken pledges, of cheap leadership,— the RED GHOSTS of a disillusioned To-Day,— the YELLOW GHOSTS of a shattered to-morrow…” and it continues on from there ad nauseam for the full length of a single-spaced oversized page. Carrick 180 1941. 72 Terms were finally agreed upon and work resumed September 21, 1941, nearly five months after the strike began. The bitterness in Walt’s mouth over this affair would later boil over during the House Un-American Activities Commission hearings where he condemned SGC leader Herb Sorrell. The artists were back in the studio, but there was no hope of rebuilding the family now. Characters on Strike In the archival photographs of the picketing artists, there are the witty animated signs typically reported on in the press and in the SCG’s own releases, but there are also occasionally signs depicting the disembodied heads of their most popular characters. I discovered both a sign featuring Donald Duck and a sign featuring Pluto the Dog while pouring over the images with a stand magnifier [See Figure 3.9 and 3.10]. Relevant to my purposes, and remarkable considering the place that Pluto now holds in animation history, is that he appears grinning on the placard, his usual jovial self. Donald, on the other hand, furrows his feathery brow, his mouth agape and his hat askew as if he, as is his wont, were twirling his fists in an attempt to challenge his partner to a fistfight. Of course, he has no fists at all, but the line between his eyes and above his beak shows a concentration and anger not present in Pluto. The dog just seems happy that everyone is spending time together. And considering his appearance in “Playful Pluto,” a short often cited by animation historians as the first to feature realistic expressions of emotion, and the groundbreaking work this character had done to encourage more lifelike emotive expression in animation, the dog’s 72 Despite the agreement, however, the studio was still pushing to fire more than 200 of the unionized workers, again putting negotiations at a standstill and forcing both union and studio reps to go with Judge Casey to Washington for a second round of serious arbitration in which he consistently sided with the union (“Disney Studio Strike Ends; Unionists Back…”). Carrick 181 blankness in the midst of such strife seems particularly telling. This was, after all, a character entirely dependent on the silent communication of his face. In the pamphlets distributed by the SCG, Pluto is more foreboding. In one, he marches with Mickey and Goofy, Pinocchio and the dwarves Sleepy and Doc while carrying his own placard—well the placard is tied around his waist. Goofy’s reads “Even I Got Wise” while Pluto’s, perhaps out of some sense of canine kinship agrees “Me too” [See Figure 3.11]. On the picket line itself, Pluto smiles blissfully, delighted to see his pals. But make no mistake, the pamphlet’s Pluto says, he is a dog of the people and he is fed up. But in one of the more famous placards of the Disney strike, it is Pluto’s very simplicity that makes him an appropriate icon for the strikers. A grinning Pluto sits, facing the phrase “I’d Rather Be a Dog Than a Scab!” [See Figure 3.12]. Initially the comparison between the scabs workers crossing the picket line and the lowliest character in the catalogue might seem an obvious one, but in the in the immediate aftermath of the strike, Pluto became a favorite in the shorts who was as notable for his kindness and generosity as he was for his doggishness. He was engaging without the Donald's fiery temper, which now seemed more like Walt than some might like to admit, or the blind obedience of Goofy. And he wasn’t the company man that Mickey turned out to be, despite his rebellious beginnings. 73 Pluto was subject to Mickey’s whims, but also increasingly autonomous. He became a family man (“Pluto Junior”) and lived a life independent of the characters in Disney who were capable of speech, as he did with his tumultuous courtship in “The Sleepwalker.” 73 Early Mickey is nothing like the cuddly character marketed by Disney today. In one short “The Chain Gang” (1930), he incites a prison riot. This short is also the first appearance of a dog that would eventually become Pluto, hunting the escaped Mickey down. Carrick 182 Pluto the Somnambulist By the time the strikers returned to their lightboards, the atmosphere in the studio and changed, marked by both an increased sense of tension and less aggressive oversight from Walt, who wanted to avoid the animators who he felt betrayed by (Takamoto 45). It was from this post- strike mood that three different iterations of the sleepwalker short would be produced before the end of 1947. With less crippling oversight by Walt but also a much less convivial environment, the sleepwalker thrived. In “The Sleepwalker,” released ten months after the striking artists had returned back to work, Pluto jealously guards his bone from a girl dachshund while he is awake, but repeatedly brings it to her as a gift once he is sleeping [See Figure 3.13]. This short featured none of the literal physical precarity that would come to characterize the most popular tropes of American sleepwalking but very precisely engages with underlying questions of economic precarity that may have driven the renaissance of such imagery during the interwar years to begin with. Whenever the infuriated Pluto wakes up and discovers his bone is missing, he rushes back to the dachshund and indignantly retrieves his prize, only to return again the next time he settles in for a nap to offer the bone to her, besotted. The farce carries on for several repetitions until conscious Pluto finally enraged by her seeming scheming, destroys her doghouse in a rage, only to discover she is mother to several young pups. Pluto, penitent and regretful, returns his much- cherished bone, and then donates his own doghouse and a secret stash of another dozen bones to the now-homeless family. It is in keeping with Pluto’s “simple dog” persona that his final gesture of open-hearted sharing is intended to reflect a kind of ultimate childishness and compassion that a character like Donald Duck would be incapable of. Pluto, while driven by the baser desires of our more animal nature, cannot reflect malice or irritation in the ways that more complex Disney Carrick 183 characters like Donald Duck might, and to remain a character worthy of protagonist status he must redeem himself or be humiliated. Despite his simplicity, it is essential to reflect upon the ways that redemption for Pluto is bound to a sense of shared wealth or cooperation in which he becomes responsible for the health and well being of his dachshund friend’s family because he has selfishly destroyed their home. Yes, the morality at work here is fairly simple, but so too is the need to share the wealth rather than to keep it all for oneself, particularly when family—and this was Walt’s favorite word after all—was at stake. Rather than sleepwalking ever-closer to an economic collapse, the Disney sleepwalker is instrumental in creating one. The script is flipped and the power is all his. Pluto the Dog had debuted in his classic form in 1930’s “The Picnic” where he belonged to Minnie and used his bulk to disrupt her and Mickey’s bucolic afternoon in the countryside— though the ants that devoured their spread and the storm that washed them back inside were more the focus of the plot. 74 Quickly, however, he was established as Mickey’s constant companion, though he did not become a major character until the 1934 short “Playful Pluto” which is cited by some as the first example of animation capturing nuanced and realistic expression. 75 In “Playful Pluto,” the befuddled dog causes countless mishaps around the house for Mickey, who is doing yard work. The short culminates with Pluto stuck to a piece of flypaper. He tries with 74 His debut in “The Picnic” directly recycled frames from “The Chain Gang” a short from slightly earlier in 1930. 75 See Didier Ghez’s Walt’s People (84), Jeff Lenburg’s Who’s Who in Animated Cartoons (81) or Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age (114) for more on Pluto’s expressiveness. Carrick 184 various parts of his body to escape from the seemingly omnipotent stickiness, furrowing his brow and strategizing, finally having to be rescued by Mickey. 76 Though he arguably holds less iconic status, due perhaps in part to his more realistic and less anthropomorphized portrayal, than other early Disney characters, he predates favorites Goofy and Donald Duck by two and four years, respectively. 77 Indeed, Pluto and his characterization in “Playful Pluto” served to pave the way for characters like Donald whose personalities were based entirely on exaggerated reaction. Pluto, however, generally inhabited a part of the Disney universe that was decidedly domestic and he typically played the role of, well, a dog, despite being owned by an anthropomorphic mouse. As the “Playful Pluto” period of the Pluto cartoons came into focus, Pluto’s presence usually signaled a more realistic setting and a simpler narrative. These were no longer the shorts where Pluto and Mickey raced through the snowy wilderness after Pegleg Pete, who had nefariously captured Minnie for his own pleasures or a mad scientist experimented on Pluto as Mickey fought to save him. 78 These were the shorts of minor disputes made large. When the Disney Studios released “The Sleepwalker” to theaters the day before Independence Day 1942, Pluto was already having a banner year. In February, “Pluto Junior” had been released and even months later when “The Sleepwalker” premiered in July, it remained a mainstay in theater billings. 79 In that short, Pluto’s son gallivants around the backyard while his 76 This sequence is famously featured in a scene in 1942’s Sullivan’s Travels, in which cripplingly serious movie director played by Joel McCrea, rediscovers the importance of comedy while watching Pluto’s hijinks with a chain gang of laughing, toothless prisoners. 77 Goofy made is debut in 1932’s “Mickey’s Revue” and Donald in 1934’s “Wise Little Hen.” 78 “The Klondike Kid” (1932) and “The Mad Doctor” (1933). 79 More on billing “The Sleepwalker” to come. Carrick 185 father naps until he must be rescued when he ends up precariously hanging from the two story clothesline. 80 Naps in the doghouse seem a very essential component of Pluto’s daily life in 1942. Both “Pluto Junior” and “The Sleepwalker” feature uncredited direction by Clyde Geronimi, who would go on to direct Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and The Lady and the Tramp (1959) for Disney, so perhaps their shared themes of sleep owe something to his direction. 81 I would argue, however, that of more interest is the ways that these themes resonated despite their relative ubiquity. In the year 1942 alone, the Disney Studios released twenty-four different shorts into theaters. 82 The Pluto-starring short “The Sleepwalker” proved popular in only a few venues. In Atlanta, the short ran for several days alongside one of Bogart’s lesser known films Across the Pacific, which had suffered from a convoluted plot after director John Huston was drafted during production. The two films screened along with the radio commentary show “Kaltenborn Edits the News” during the lucrative period between Christmas and New Years at the luxurious downtown Paramount Theater. 83 Despite its lack of popularity compared to the wildly successful short “Pluto Junior,” which dominated the Disney shorts market for most of 1942 after its February release, the juxtaposition between “The Sleepwalker” and the other items it was billed with is telling. In this instance, both the feature film and the radio show were focused on the War. Across the Pacific follows a former Captain of the U.S. Coast guard, played by the aforementioned Bogart, who 80 Perhaps like father, like son, but much of the plot here seems recycled from “Playful Pluto” with Pluto now in the Mickey role. 81 Geronomi was not a striker. 82 Between 1930-1945, Disney Studios released 263 shorts, averaging a little more than sixteen a year. The most productive year was 1942, followed closely by 1932 when they released twenty- three shorts. 83 “To Amuse Us Today.” Atlanta Constitution. 28 Dec 1942, pp. 13. Carrick 186 attempts to join first the Canadian Army and then the Army of Republic of China after being courtmartialed for theft— though the majority of the action occurs en route via New York and Panama. H.V. Kaltenborn of the series “Kaltenborn Edits the News” was among the first in American culture to introduce critical analysis of news as a component of reportage. Kaltenborn was forebear to the celebrated newsmen of the later twentieth century, including Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. After the conflicted patriotism of Bogart’s cad-turned-hero Rick Leland and the sobering critique of Kaltenborn’s reportage, the audiences of Atlanta might have welcomed Pluto’s hijinks. While “The Sleepwalker” ran at the Trans-Lux Theatre in Washington D.C. it ran alongside a newsreel featuring the dramatic rescue of World War One hero Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who had been adrift at sea after a plane crash and assumed dead for twenty-four days as well. There was no feature on this bill, only newsreel short on Rickenbacker, one on the sinking of the S.S. President Coolidge and more on “MacArthur’s troops getting training in the jungle, the amazing revelations of the Lend-Lease report, a destructive fire in Sydney, Australia; women taking over the duties of a railroad section gang and a wide spread of other topics,” including less immediately topical and more educational shorts. “The Sleepwalker” provided “the week’s laughs” according to The Washington Post. 84 Here, too, the short seemed to act as a brief moment of cathartic relief. Elsewhere, the film bill incorporated “The Sleepwalker” in ways that were less overtly tied to catharsis. The only mention of the short in The Christian Science Monitor comes from a 1947 screening at the Laff Movie Theater on West 42 nd Street in Times Square New York. Here, 84 “Trans-Lux.” The Washington Post December 21, 1942, pp. B6. Carrick 187 the now five year old short played alongside the 1938 Milton Berle and Ann Miller feature Radio City Revels as well as the 1945 Merry Melodies short “One Meat Brawl” featuring Porky Pig as a hunter, a Little Lulu cartoon and a short called “Do or Diet” starring Edgar Kennedy. The Laff Movie (or Laffmovie as it is called in The Christian Science Monitor)—later to be renamed Empire Theater—bill seems dependent on cheap reels of largely-forgotten recent films. 85 In 1943, Chicago’s Midwest Theater had screened “The Sleepwalker” alongside another Bogart film— this one a hit— as well as a short newsreel “Beyond the Line of Duty” narrated by Ronald Reagan. 86 Bogart again plays the ne’erdowell entangled in international affairs, this time alongside Ingrid Bergman in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca. This time, however, Bogart’s cad has more in common with the sleepwalking hero of the Disney short than Rick Leland did as the voluntary hero in Across the Pacific. Rick Blaine (Bogart) runs an upscale bar that caters to all despite their country of origin and their warring status with Rick’s native America. Rick lives as a mercenary, simultaneously ultra cosmopolitan and at the fringes of society. I am not about to argue that a cartoon dog is particularly comparable to an expatriate sophisticate in a white tuxedo jacket, but I do contend that the bare bones (forgive me) narrative arc of Casablanca and “The Sleepwalker” have much in common: a lonely character discovers that despite attempts to self-isolate and create a life independent from emotional attachments— whether this is by way of material possessions (a bone or a nightclub) or the ability to control the entirety of ones environment (through bribery or intimidation)— both Pluto and Rick are confronted with life-changing choices when their isolation is breached. Of course, Rick’s 85 “New Melodrama and Comedy in Prospect… ”Christian Science Monitor May 14 1947. 86 Display Ad 114. Chicago Daily Tribune. 11 April 1943, pp. F9. Carrick 188 isolation is breached by the epic forces of war and love while Pluto is faced with the consequences of his own sleepwalking generosity. On awaking for the final time, Pluto is again enraged to discover that his dachshund neighbor has again, apparently, stolen his bone— when he has in fact brought it to her himself. In an act of revenge and fury, Pluto destroys Dinah’s doghouse, only to reveal that she has been a single mother to several puppies the entirety of the escapade. Remorseful, Pluto brings the brood his own doghouse as well as a cache of hidden bones to make amends and ends the short blissful in a pile of discarded newspaper [See Figure 3.14]. Like Rick, Pluto must confront and sacrifice his desires in order to support the greater good. In his book Donald Duck Joins Up, Richard Shale argues that Pluto’s turn to generosity acts as a critique of wartime hoarding and encourages a redistribution of goods for the greater benefit of the community, but his argument seems more in fitting with the facetious comparison I have drawn between a cartoon dog and one of the great romantic sacrifices of American cinema. Instead, I argue, Pluto’s behaviors in “The Sleepwalker” form a parable of greed and wealth sharing designed to speak to conflicts at hand even closer to home. Sleepwalking became a conduit to critiquing Walt Disney’s own nation- building project in the days of Disney’s post-utopian war years. It is no coincidence that the sleepwalker— a figure who had been explored in comedy before the beginning of the Depression— became a resonant touchstone for animators, who felt particularly manipulated and unrecognized for their labor. But unlike German artists who sought to identify their kinship with sleepwalkers as one of shared victimhood, American animators sought to use the sleepwalker trope to focus on the concept of cooperation and shared wealth. In “A Dream Walking” the sleepwalker walks on the edge of the building while in “The Sleepwalker,” this figure is instead forced to grapple with a sense of precarity that is far more Carrick 189 metaphorical. Despite their differences, both animated sleepwalker shorts resonate with issues of individual and collective economic precarity that occupied the artists who made them. Like the German sleepwalkers who had found somnambulism an avenue to resisting the back-to-business push of the post-war years, these American comedic sleepwalking narratives beg questions of cooperation and collectivity while encouraging a kind of laughter dependent on potential doom. Precarity and the threat of death is what makes the Popeye short funny. By the time this trope appeared in “The Sleepwalker,” it had been removed from its precarious contexts in order to emphasize an economic narrative—but when the strike became a slightly more distant memory, the Disney sleepwalkers began to become involved in some very real danger. In 1944 and 1947, Disney revisited the sleepwalking theme in “The Pelican and the Snipe” and “Sleepy Time Donald.” The former features two one-off characters, birds named Monte and Viddy living in Montevideo. 87 Monte flies in his sleep and his tiny snipe friend is constantly trying to save him from certain death, angering his ignorant pal in the process. His night maneuvers are eventually interrupted by the local air force, which nearly kills both of them but reunites their friendship. The lesson at hand is to trust your friends as the more obvious antiwar message would have been unpatriotic at the time. In “Sleepy Time Donald,” Donald sleepwalks to Daisy Duck’s house and then takes her on a midnight date to the zoo. She decides to go along, declaring, “I mustn’t wake him or it would be fatal.” But unlike the stakes of the similarly premised Popeye short “A Dream Walking,” what initially seems like very risky hijinks on Donald’s part ultimately prove entirely harmless when he turns out to no longer be subject to 87 This is likely a holdover from a series of Latin American themed films released by the company after Walt took a mid-strike goodwill mission to woo the region away from the Axis upon the suggestion of John Rockefeller. Longshoremen picketed Disney several times throughout the trip, at least one of which was parodied in a drawing that is in the CSUN archives in which Disney misreads the Spanish signs of angry picketers as those of welcome. Carrick 190 the laws of physics during his sleepwalking episode. While the Popeye short opens with a flower pot crashing to the sidewalk to demonstrate the potential end point for Olive should she miss her footing, there is no such implicit threat in “Sleepy Time Donald.” Instead, he suffers his greatest trauma when Daisy pummels him for laughing at her, and promptly returns to bed. CONCLUSION The evolution of Disney’s sleepwalker reflects not only a slightly different sense of the stakes of precarity for such a figure, but also a sense of optimism that remained despite the contentiousness of the strike. While the Popeye short featured mortal enemies nearly failing to save a woman they love because they were too busy brawling, the Disney sleepwalker shorts speak to a kind of cooperation that would be alien in the darker world of Popeye’s urban sprawl. Pluto must sleepwalk in order to learn to share in his bounty, something perhaps only Olive and Popeye might be capable of in their world—and then only on the best of days. I don’t, of course, mean to imply there is a legitimate kindness inherent to the Disney approach that speaks from the same spirit that unionized the company, but instead to suggest that the family atmosphere Walt had worked so hard to develop may better be understood as a project of utopianism failed by capitalism. Comic representation of the sleepwalker that proliferated in the American scene in the post-War years originated, it might first appear, from a very different point in history than the war-torn origins of their European cousins. We have seen, however, how closely intertwined the labor unrest of interwar Germany was related to the mass disenfranchisement of returning soliders abandoned to the new mechanized economy. In America, too, labor unrest was inherently tied to the costs of war, though these connections were less evident and direct than the Carrick 191 immediate socialist uprisings that had occurred in their enemy nation. Instead, Americans had ended the war an first economic super power for the first time in history. The British Empire was in the middle of collapse and a new American Imperialism was on the horizon. But America’s foreign policy was of less immediate relevance to the development of the funny sleepwalker than the abandonment American veterans felt after American interests had moved on. The men who had once filled the trenches, buoying the spirits of their war-wearied allies, were filling the bread lines and sleeping rough by the market crash. Unionizing became the primary tool of protest for many, and was particularly significant to Hollywood, which was still very much a company town. Carrick 192 Figure 3.1: From “A Dream Walking” (1934) Carrick 193 Figure 3.2: Illustration from “Walked in Her Sleep and Fell to Her Destruction,” San Francisco Call. Vol. 85, No. 156: 5 May 1899, pp. 12. Carrick 194 Figure 3.3: From “A Dream Walking” (1934) Figure 3.4: From “A Dream Walking” (1934) Carrick 195 Figure 3.5: From “Hold the Wire” (1936) Figure 3.6: From “The Paneless Window Washer” (1937) Carrick 196 Figure 3.7: From “I Never Changes My Altitude” (1937) Figure 3.8: From “The Jeep” (1938) Carrick 197 Figure 3.9: Photograph of Disney artists on strike, photographer unknown (1941). Courtesy of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild, Local 839 Collection (1937- 1951)—California State University, Northridge. Figure 3.10: Selection from the above photograph. Carrick 198 Figure 3.11: Screen Cartoonists Guild Pamphlet (1941). Courtesy of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild, Local 839 Collection (1937-1951)—California State University, Northridge. Carrick 199 Figure 3.12: Photograph of Disney artists on strike, photographer unknown (1941), Los Angeles Evening Herald, 28 May 1941. SCG Scrapbook. Courtesy of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild, Local 839 Collection (1937-1951)—California State University, Northridge. Carrick 200 Figure 3.13: From “The Sleepwalker” (1942) Carrick 201 Figure 3.14: From “The Sleepwalker” (1942) Carrick 202 Coda The New Sleepwalker As I polished the final drafts of my chapters in March 2016, I finally got a chance to visit Los Angeles’s brand new museum of modern and contemporary art, The Broad, after my partner had snagged us some tickets back in the fall. We headed to the top floor, where the Kara Walkers and Robert Rauschenbergs had their own rooms, losing each other in the chaos of the crowd. I searched for her in the galleries and ended up in one of the relatively quiet pockets of the top floor, sandwiched between Charles Ray’s statue of a gargantuan woman in a pink power suit and a wall-sized glowing photograph—actually a transparency in a lightbox I learned later— that looked uncannily familiar [See Figure C.1]. It was Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), and in it Soviet soldiers stumble back to life in heaps as the few Afghan soldiers who killed them rest and pile together Soviet weapons. Some of the soldiers seem stunned, holding together their mortally wounded bodies with ashen hands. Others playfully pose for one another with their exposed entrails. None seem concerned with the Afghans who remain in their midst and the Afghan soldiers seem equally disinterested in the revivified monsters who surround them. If it weren’t for the title, I would have assumed these soldiers were meant to represent those destroyed in the Great War. Though I’ve since learned a bit more about differentiating the eras of Soviet uniforms (very little), the olive drab and single-piece metal helmets—not to mention the rocky landscape that read to me as a trench—all left me in awed contemplation of what I thought was the ultimate piece of World War One zombie fan art. My presumption isn’t as strange as it first sounds. Carrick 203 In 1916, French director Abel Gance filmed a scene for a film he would release three years later under the title J’accuse using 2000 troops on a brief leave from the Battle of Verdun 80% of whom Gance would claim died within weeks of returning to battle (Brownlow 535). 88 The scale was impressive, yes, but more poignant is that these amateur actors were playing soldiers returned from the dead. Though J’accuse centers on a love rivalry between two soldiers over one’s wife, Edith, only one man survives the war. This soldier is Jean Diaz and he is shattered by what he has experienced on the front. Before the war, he was a romantic and poet, and much like Septimus Smith or Francis Keynsham Halkin, he returns irreparably changed by the war and haunted by the betrayals of shell shock. 89 His beloved Edith, though now available for him to claim due to her husband’s death at battle, has also been altered by war after she is raped by German soldiers and impregnated. Edith’s father, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, vows revenge. But, Gance seems to suggest, he simply cannot comprehend either the scale or the brutality of this war and is walking straight toward his own death. 90 Once the now-mad Jean returns for good, he gathers the townspeople at Edith’s house and tells them a fantastical story about a night on guard. The battlefield is littered with the 88 Famous Swiss-French Modernist poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars was an assistant director on the film as well. Cendrars had lost his right arm during the war and wrote a memoir La Main Coupée, or The Severed Hand on the subject. 89 For Jean, shell shock is instantaneous when a friend he is speaking to is killed and he begins giggling and referring to his love rival by the dead man’s name. 90 J’accuse’s portrayal of the Great War is more direct and far more visceral than any of the others I have explored throughout my dissertation, excepting, of course, the poetry of British soldiers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon that I discussed briefly in the first chapter. Gance rejoined the French Army's Section Cinématographique after a health-based discharge and as a result the battles on screen were real, including the Battle of Saint-Mihiel (Brownlow 532). Carrick 204 crosses of thousands of graves. 91 Jean, the solitary survivor leans on his rifle as the crosses slowly fade into the fallen corpses of the destroyed French forces. He reacts with violent horror when he realizes the change. Though he has described it as a “miracle,” Jean runs off the battlefield, only to watch as one of the dead, his love rival François, calls to his compatriots: “Mes amis, le temps est venu de savoir si nos morts ont servi à quelque chose! Allons voir au pays si on est digne de notre sacrifice: ‘Réveillez-vous!’” [“Friends, the time has come to learn if our deaths have served a purpose! Let’s go to our country to see if it’s worthy of our sacrifice: ‘Wake up!’”] 92 As they follow Jean back toward home, they bunch in convivial clusters: holding each other up, clutching at one another, stumbling but not in the George Romero-style of the zombies we’re used to. 93 Instead, these undead soldiers embrace, tripping along like they’re on a bar crawl or at a bachelor party, not returning from the dead [See Figure C.2]. This “same sex intimacy” the kind of intimacy that Santanu Das has noted “must also be understood in opposition to and as a triumph over death: it must be seen as a celebration of life”—and when you realize one soldier carries another on his shoulders like they’re watching Beyoncé at Glastonbury, it’s not hard to see why (Das, “Dying Kiss”). These men have returned from the dead, it seems, not just to confront their survivors, but also to revitalize the intimacies which united them in the trenches, once again feel the touch of their companions—even if the hands now grasping theirs are cold as marble. Eventually they march with their hands waving above their heads, more like sleepwalkers than The Walking Dead [See Figure C.3]. The soldiers approach Edith’s house as Jean blames each of the villagers for betraying the memory of the family member who died for them on the battlefield, allowing them, too, to have 91 The image is so similar to the more famous and later image of the crosses on the beach in Nosferatu (1922) that I am certain Murnau must have seen J’accuse (1919). 92 Translations are my own. 93 This scene is intercut with a grand parade of military ranks through the Arc de Triumphe. Carrick 205 visions of the undead visiting them with accusations, “…qui avez lâchement profité de la mort de vos maris, de vos frères, de vos enfants… J’accuse! […whoever has profited off the deaths of their husbands, of their brothers, of their children… I accuse!].” Finally the zombies arrive at the threshold, confronting the villagers and driving them to supplication. Edith wonders, “Avons- nous rêvé? N’est-ce pas une suggestion formidable [Were we dreaming? Was it simply incredible suggestion?].” Perhaps they were dreaming. The zombie soldiers wander back to their graves despite Jean’s insistence that more than one of the townspeople have been up to no good while their loved ones suffered and died on the battlefield. Gance even shows the dead men watching them carouse [See Figure C.4]. But they’re left with no tangible evidence that the men were ever there. No footprints and no bloody bandages remain. The town and the villagers themselves are physically unchanged. To have shared an experience of that magnitude and to have no evidence of their collective revelation would be maddening, and functions as a neat metaphor for Jean’s irreparable madness, which only appears obvious to Edith after she sees her zombie husband and father. But she is a mother now. And though the only scene remaining in the film is Jean’s, Edith must be continuing the work of motherhood and of running the three households she now manages as orphan, widow and sole caretaker to the mad Jean. Even when the dead return to reveal your greatest shame, you still have to get out of bed in the morning. I can’t help but imagine a sequel to J’accuse about Edith. Jean dies at the end of J’accuse, so she now mourns all the men she has ever loved and raises a child she loves, but is a constant reminder of her violent rape. She also has to comfort her daughter as other children continue to tease her for being half German. Edith endures, but with a certain amount of Carrick 206 resignation, of numbness. We watch her walk the same paths she walked with François and Jean, her body stiff with grief. We watch her get a job at a new factory in town, bobbing her hair to keep it from getting entangled in the machinery. Edith has become a zombie herself. Not literally dead, but deadened. An affective as well as a phenomenological numbness. Edith has no time to mourn. The zombie versions of her father and husband have left no tokens over which to linger [See Figure C.5]. They are gone and she must keep living, as best she can. And we can see this narrative as admirable because we see getting back to business as the right thing to do because we’ve been trained that capitalism is more important than emotion. And perhaps that’s right, but the Edith of my hypothetical sequel never gets a chance to consider the question because unlike sleepwalkers, zombies don’t think. The cogs in the machine that are now familiar to us as zombies—Time magazine calling them the “official monster of the recession” (Grossman)—were once more familiar to artists and audiences alike as sleepwalkers. I use the word zombie in this coda not, I hope, to erase the history that this word and idea have in West Africa, Haiti and Brazilian in origin (“zombie,” OED). 94 Of course, there were some very Westernized versions of zombies that overlap with the time period I wrote about here, most notably the Hollywood films White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) or the William Seabrook novel The Magic Island (1929), which Time claimed introduced the word “zombi” to American English (“Books: Mumble-Jumble”). It is this bastardized zombie, whose development in the Imperialist West runs parallel to more honest Western attempts to understand these traditions like Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (shot between 1947-1954, released 1985), that seems most in line with the ways that sleepwalking suddenly became code for the ways that normative bodies became 94 Mike Mariani wrote a fantastic article for The Atlantic about pop culture’s erasure of this history. Carrick 207 suspect after the Great War. 95 While queer and trans people, people of color, women, the disabled and those identifying by all combination of these categories already aware of the potential danger their physical bodies could pose by just marking them as visible Other, the Great War shook the surety of even the most normative bodies. At some point between 1947 and today, sleepwalking lost its menace. I argue that whitewashed zombies came in its stead. A longer study would, I suspect, discover the origin of this shift in the pharmacological revolution of the twentieth century. As uppers and downers became more viable and widely available, disordered sleep only became more ubiquitous. 96 Sleepwalkers were to the two world wars, particularly the Great War, what zombies would be to the Cold War. Sleepwalking might not spread by biting like with canonized depictions of zombies, but it did seem to trend among the mentally ill, the emotionally unstable or, most sinister of all, among children. Sleepwalkers walk dangerous paths, seemingly indifferent to danger and carried along by desires and drives that were unintelligible to the unaffected. Like zombies, sleepwalkers could be terrifying or hilarious. Sometimes they were both at the same time. Sleepwalkers reflect an impermanence that goes away when we transition to zombies as our avatars. Zombies return, but are no longer themselves. No longer able to return to the essence of what made them themselves, and thus the alien posture and stumbling walk. Their very bodies have become permanently, infinitely foreign and alienating. Zombie apocalypse stories thrill and terrify us because the threats feel genuine enough to test the limits of the environment or the fingers on the big red buttons. Sleepwalking has lost some of its menace due to its very ubiquity. With a poorly timed Ambien or Lunesta, I could be 95 More honest, but still imperfect, certainly. 96 Valley of the Dolls, anyone? R.I.P. Neely O’Hara/Patty Duke. Carrick 208 sleep eating a Big Mac with my car perched over the center divider in a matter of minutes. But unless my circumstances change dramatically—and god willing they won’t—I won’t soon be playing a game of jump rope with my entrails. Carrick 209 Figure C.1: Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992, The Broad, Los Angeles. Carrick 210 Figure C.2: A screen shot from Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919); the newly awakened soldiers physically support one another on their journey home to confront their families. Carrick 211 Figure C.3: A screen shot from Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919); the zombie soldiers walk with the arms held aloft, like sleepwalkers. 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Creator Carrick, Samantha (author)

Core Title The somnambulist's hour: unruly bodies and unruly modernism, 1913-1947

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 06/17/2016

Defense Date 04/25/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag disorientation,Labor,masculinity,OAI-PMH Harvest,precarity,Shell Shock,Sleep

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Gómez-Barris, Macarena (committee member), Halberstam, Jack (committee member)

Creator Email samantha.carrick@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-254127

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