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American Literature 75.1 (2003) 61-90



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Frank Norris, Market Panic, and the Mesmeric Sublime

David A. Zimmerman

As the oracle gave place to the astrologer, the astrologer to the alchemist, the alchemist to the witch, the witch to the magnetizer, the magnetizer to the clairvoyant, the clairvoyant to the medium, the medium to the mind-reader, upon whom now shall the spirit of the mind-reader fall?

—George Beard, "The Psychology of Spiritism"

Men do not make panics deliberately; they are their unconscious agents.

—Charles Albert Collman, Our Mysterious Panics

In The Shadow World (1908), Hamlin Garland's second novel about his experience as chief investigator of the American Psychical Society in the 1890s, the narrator describes watching a medium who plays a piano without touching it. He reports that "invisible fingers seemed to drop to the strings beneath" the closed lid of the instrument and play a tune according to his request. 1 No scientific law, he says, can account for the "occult force" of this "invisible musician." The purpose of his investigations, catalogued in the novel, is to shed scientific light on such "supernormal" activities: Did the invisible hand guide itself? Were mediums—those not discounted as frauds—truly the instruments through which departed spirits communicated and demonstrated their powers? Or was the invisible hand guided by the medium's mind? No skepticism could match the suasive force of directly experiencing such powers, according to Garland: "A man will stand out against Z–llner, Crookes, Lodge, and Myers, discounting all the rest of the great [psychic] investigators, and then [End Page 61] crumple up like a caterpillar at the first touch of the Invisible Hand when it comes to him directly." 2

Such invisible hands and their uncanny independence from conscious control preoccupied psychic investigators and psychologists in the decades before the turn of the century. Spectral hands tapping at parlor organs during séances, immaterial hands spelling out messages from the dead on planchette boards, hysterics' hands mechanically scribbling out letters and novels while the patient slept or talked—all these phenomena seemed to be signs and instruments of an agency lurking beneath or beside consciousness. The autonomy of these hands eerily demonstrated that the hegemony of consciousness was tenuous, that under certain conditions other selves and other energies could usurp control of the mind, that there was a mechanism churning just below consciousness that might sometimes be given over to its own uncanny automatism.

Psychologists, of course, were not the only ones at the end of the century preoccupied with invisible hands and their sovereign behavior, for political economists and those writing about economics were also trying, as they had for over a century, to fathom the mysterious movements of the invisible hand of the marketplace, to read the inscrutable, even divine, agency behind it. Like psychologists, late-nineteenth-century American economists studied abnormal behavior—crises and convulsions and epidemics, moments when self-regulation manifestly failed, when the latent automatism of the market ran out of control. And they studied moments when the invisible hand, as in Garland's novel, became uncannily visible and stunned them. Indeed, the preoccupations of economists and psychic researchers converged at the turn of the century. Economists turned to the study of hypnotism, hysteria, and second selves to make sense of financial manias and panics. Anything that swayed the calculations, hopes, and fears of speculators swayed the market; prices were, at bottom, only expressions of investors' opinions and needs. Relying on the findings of crowd psychologists, economists considered the extraordinary emulativeness of investors an effect of mass hypnotism; in panics, it became a kind of hysteria. The market was an aggregation of minds, and in panics, driven by the consensus of investors, it acted like a single mind. The second self of the market, the psychologists claimed, like that of the entranced medium or hysteric, came forth pathologically and expressed itself uncontrollably. [End Page 62]

Like economists and psychologists, late-nineteenth-century American fiction writers struggled to make sense of financial panics. In his novel The Pit (1903), the story of...

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