Alexis Didier (1826-1886) in his mature years
Last week I wrote about a German novelist who claimed to have been able under medical hypnosis to reconstruct from memory the lengthy unique manuscript of a novel that had been confiscated from him by his captors years earlier. This topic came fortuitously into my life at a time when I was already mulling over the mysterious relationships between sleep and heightened consciousness. This week it is a nineteenth-century French youth, Alexis Didier, said to be the most remarkable clairvoyant to emerge from the great century of celebrity mediums, table rapping, ectoplasm, spirit photography, trance writing, Spiritualism, and the heyday of the Society for Psychical Research..
I depend on my son Luke, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Montreal for all sorts of intellectual tips. He is big on French intellectuals, supplying me many great recommendations, and occasionally one that is a little out there. That is how I would characterize Bertrand Méheust, a French expert on the history of parapsychology and (according to his Wikipedia page) an ufologue—a wonderful word meaning, one presumes, an expert on UFOs. He is also an expert on Alexis Didier, to whom I shall come presently. His book about Didier is raggedly written, though a piece of cake compared with his Mad Professor English-language lecture on the same subject.* But I must not bite the hand that feeds me. There are not a lot of Didier experts.
Of several individual seances discussed by Méheust, one invigilated with suspicion by the famous illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin in May of 1847 can perhaps serve as well as any to exemplify at once the mystery, the questionability, and the eventual practical banality of the young man’s powers. Didier was twenty-one, and his fame was growing. Robert-Houdin, in his early forties, was already established as the most famous illusionist and prestidigitator in Europe. That is, he was a theatrical performer whose claims to achieve actual “magic” were generally understood by everybody to be rhetorical adornments of unfathomable tricks of skill rather than physical miracles. But since nobody knew how he did it, the difference between the two might often seem moot. Didier on the other hand, not a conspicuous showman, presented himself as a psychic, a person possessed of extraordinary, inexplicable mental powers rather than a baffling thespian genius. To have Robert-Houdin investigate Didier was as much as to say it takes a thief to catch a thief. At this séance a blindfolded Didier, in addition to other “blind” perceptions (1) correctly identified by suit and value many specific playing cards that he had not seen and could not have seen; (2) described in convincing detail the eccentric decoration of a distant room he had never seen and never could have seen; (3) was partially successful in reading phrases from specifically identified pages of a book unknown to him; (4) was able to identify by name the writer of a letter—a person wholly unknown to him--when touching its unseen paper sheets to his forehead. Robert-Houdin was very far from catching a thief. Convinced that he was a witness to the paranormal, he signed a testimonial that it was impossible to classify Didier’s feats “among those that are the object of my own art and labors,” meaning of course theatrical magic.
Didier was a somnambulist, meaning not that he was a sleepwalker, but a sleepseer—somnus being roughly a Latin equivalent of Greek hypnos, words meaning both sleep and the trance or mental alteration of sleep, somnambulism or hypnotism. Some version of this indeterminate state, perhaps that of which Saint Paul writes:--“whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows”—was required for Heinrich Gerlach to recover the lost memories of his novel about Stalingrad and for the psychic Didier to read from the pages of tightly closed books. This led me to my question in the last essay: Do we know things when we are asleep that we cannot know when we are awake?
Perhaps the first scholarly article I published was inadvertently about ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception). It is a linguistic essay about Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue of 1864, “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” a barely disguised attack on Daniel Dunglas Home, an American spiritualist, psychic medium, and levitator, who conned his way through high-society seances on two continents. Browning heaped contempt upon this fraudster. (The oblique point of my own essay was not about ESP; it concerned Browning’s attempts to capture distinctive Americanisms in Sludge’s English speech.) More than forty years later, animated by very different interests, I published a book called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, in which I did deal a little more directly with the history of the “paranormal” quest. That the quest was a serious project of Enlightenment is itself telling. The theory of “animal magnetism” of the German physician F. A. Mesmer (1734-1815), embraced by an army of progressive “magnetizers” (hypnotists), is now regarded as one of the exotic mental aberrations of history, something akin to alchemy, also an Enlightenment enthusiasm. But Mesmerism beat at the doors of the Temple of Science for decades and came surprisingly near to gaining admission. The only actual distinction between alchemy and chemistry is that one retained its Arabic article. And as the alchemists developed laboratory techniques and procedures that greatly advanced the chemists, so also is there a line of reluctantly acknowledged filiation from Mesmer to Freud and Jung, to all ideas of subconscious or unconscious mind in its relationship to curated sleep, hypnosis.
Méheust is particularly good on one point. Most psychics, including Didier, failed more often than they even appeared to succeed. A large number were exposed as active frauds, often of a cruel and mercenary sort, and we are right to harbor suspicions of many others. But only by an illegitimate extrapolation can a thousand exposed frauds be thought to disprove even one evidentiary claim made on behalf of Didier or dozens of others. One of Chaucer’s subtlest stories, that of the Canon’s Yeoman, presents us with an alchemist who practices fraud not because he does not believe in the power of the Great Art but because he does believe. All he needs are the resources to finance one more experiment, and, yes, one more….What did the mathematician Blaise Pascal mean when he said “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…”? The same thing, I think, as Jesus when he said “Man does not live by bread alone.” The French Academy in the nineteenth century became so irritated and embarrassed by the erudite madness in which certain topics floundered and drowned that they actually cancelled the topics, forbidding their discussion in their august lecture halls and publications. One such topic was the origin of human language, another the hypnotic trance of animal magnetism.
tabling the motion
*B. Méheust, Un voyant prodigieux: Alexis Didier 1826-1886. (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003); for the lecture: https://vimeo.com/37790155
