The heart of existence had a diameter of 140-feet and a height of 106, an iron dome gilded in decorated papier-mâché with an oculus beaming the light of knowledge down onto as many as three hundred researchers who could be gathered in the circle of the former British Museum Reading Room. Completed in 1857, and at the center of the Great Court which the British Museum with its pilfered colonial treasures was arrayed around, the reading room held some 25,000 books that readers had to first be issued a special permissions card to consult, a fraternity that included the professor Karl Marx and his student Vladimir Lenin, the great aesthete Oscar Wilde and his austere (but equally funny) fellow Irishman George Bernard Shaw, that Indian-born advocate for empire Rudyard Kipling and that Indian-born anti-colonial George Orwell, the consummate Bolshevik Leon Trotsky and the arch-libertarian Friederich Hayek, the explicator of society Charles Dickens and the interpreter of its persons Virginia Woolf. And Enoch Soames.
An obscure English poet who wrote verse in imitation of the continental Decadents, Soame’s only reference is in a satirical fabulism by his friend the author Max Beerbohm. First published in a 1916 edition of The Century Magazine, the short story “Enoch Soames” recounts a strange incident from June 3rd, 1897 wherein Beerbohm met for lunch with his titular subject, who as usual complained about a lack of acclaim out of proportion with his own (inflated) self-sense of genius. At an adjoining table in the London café, a debonair gentleman revealed himself to be Satan, and offered in exchange for Soame’s soul the chance for the ignored poet to travel exactly a hundred years into the future to investigate the literary references in the British Museum Reading Room so that he could discovery just how posterity would evaluate his work (a deal which was agreed to). The anxious poet vanishes, and upon reappearing, he reported to Beerbohm that in the Dictionary of National Biography it was claimed that the diabolical writer was merely a satirical fiction, the only reference to him as having been an invention of the author of “Enoch Soames.”
Luckily for enthusiasts of Faustian time travel narratives the British Museum Reading Room was still operational on June 3rd, 1997, but just barely, as the space was about to close in a few months and the collection to be moved a few miles away to a new, red-brick, brutalist edifice near St. Pancras that was to be the new British Library (home to a few million books rather than a few thousand). Though Beerbohm records that Soames gave a few scant details about the future that don’t match our own knowledge of 1997 – a new phonetic spelling, uniforms of white woolen tunics – the damned poet does report that a crowd “stared at me, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of attention.” Indeed, on that date a century after Beerbohm and Soames had their lunch with the Devil, a group of enthusiasts did gather at the reading room to see if the poet should make his appearance. And, at approximately two-in-the-afternoon, a slender, stooped, disheveled, shambling man in a crinkled brown suit, a grey cape, and a flaccid black velvet hat with a wispy, bilgewater brown mustache (appearing very much like illustrations made by both Beerbohm and the caricaturist William Rothenstein) entered the room, looked about briefly in confusion, drew a few volumes from the shelves which he consulted with finger on page. The few dozen women and men who’d come to see if Soames would appear like Punxsutawney Phill looking for his shadow followed the stranger about at a respectful distance until he vanished into the stacks.
A professional woman from Malibu, a student from Cambridge University, a London Teddy Boy, and most tellingly Teller, the mononymous mute member of the magical duo which includes the hulking libertarian Penn Jillette. Teller, in a charming recounting published in the November 1997 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, describes how upon the arrival of the stranger – of Soames – the “crowd parts as he moves away from the catalogue. Whether he be actor or specter, to touch him would be sacrilege.” Returning to a century before, but after Soames’ perambulation in the archive (for such are the paradoxical vagaries of time travel), the poet will ask Beerbohm to do what he can to ensure that history remembers him, as the Devil rudely pushes him off towards perdition. Beerbohm, haunted by the disappearance of Soames, and fearful of being blamed, is surprised to find that nobody in London literary circles much minds the loss of one more poetic poseur. Because of that haunting, Beerbohm tries to heed his friend’s final request, though the irony is that the best that can be done is to be immortalized as that fictional character in “Enoch Soames.” Because sometime before 1997, Beerbohm writes, “somebody will have looked up this memoir, and will have forced on the world his inevitable and startling conclusion,” that on that ordained date there will be an anticipatory audience, because they will “have been prepared for his ghostly visitation. They will have been awfully waiting to see whether he really would come.” And they were, and he did.
Perhaps Soames wasn’t a fictional character and maybe Beerbohm’s friend really was transported a century forward to the library; more likely, it could have been a hell of a coincidence when just another eccentric in a trenchcoat and floppy hat entered the room; most likely, Teller had something to do with it, though as interviewer Chris Jones wrote in a 2012 Esquire profile the performer “didn’t confess his role” (the best magicians never do). But what if there is another possibility, maybe more exotic than the inevitability that this was an extremely clever and well-timed trick, but something worth considering all the same, that the audience – indeed decades-worth of Beerbohm enthusiasts – had done something to, well, generate Soames from the ether, to let Enoch descend down from the astral plane to where he had first been taken? “There was something rather ghastly to me in the general unconsciousness that Soames had existed,” writes Beerbohm, “and more than once I caught myself wondering whether…. [he was] a figment of my brain.” Maybe a figment of that audience’s brain, of the collective readers who’d encountered “Enoch Soames” and then encountered Enoch Soames in the decades after that tale was published?
The Belle epoque Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbetter, writing only four years after Soames’ imagined demonic contract, referred to “thought-forms” in a tract of that same name, claiming that “All thoughts create thought-forms… The thought-form creates, manifests, and attracts that which is similar to it.” In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a similar concept of the the enigmatic Tulpa, an imaginary friend that an initiate manifests into conscious reality through focused meditation. The eccentric mystic, anarchist, explorer, and orientalist Alexandra David-Neel in her 1929 Magic and Mystery in Tibet wrote that once a “tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control,” like a golem escaping Rabbi ben Lowe, the monster free of Dr. Frankenstein, or a child setting out from his parents. Western esotericists in the first half of the twentieth-century called them “egregores,” what Valentin Tomberg in his 1967 Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism described as “artificial beings” generated by language, which owe their existence to the collective will of those who read about them. Carl Jung had his concept of the “psychoid;” the Sufi philosopher Henry Corbin called them “imaginals.” As literary critics, we might just prefer to call them “characters.”
Historically there are humanistic approaches to literature (philology, close reading, various schools of theory) and empirical ones (linguistics, anthropology, digital methods), but there is unfortunately scant consideration of the occult methods of reading, at least in a literary critical sense. My claim is only partially as a joke. Yet in my four decades of being a reader, I’m still struck by just how weird the phenomenon of literature is, this strange and seemingly theurgic ability of authors to generate complicated fantasies which feel real, of these thinking and speaking phantoms that are closer to us than the very patterns of our own thoughts. All of it generated by the arrangement of letters into words and words into sentences then conveyed through ink stains on paper (or alteration of light on a screen). Potent type of incantation and conjuration this literature. This is not a rare observation. Psychologists speak of a phenomenon called “experiential crossing,” that is the way in which some readers can become so enraptured by the seeming reality of a fictional character that they almost conjure them into being, albeit only within their minds.
A 2017 report in The Guardian by Richard Lea reports that a fifth of readers claim that fictional narratives and characters feel as if they “seep” into their everyday lives. Based on a study by researchers at Durham University conducted at the 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival (an admittedly self-selected lot), a majority of those questioned claimed to clearly hear the voices of fictional characters while reading, with one out of seven recounting more powerful experiences. Charles Fernyhough, a psychologist on the study, is quoted as saying that “One respondent… described ‘feeling enveloped’ by [Virginia Woolf’s] character Clarissa Dalloway – hearing her voice and imagining her response to particular situations, such as walking into a Starbucks,” as clear as Soames scurrying into the British Museum Reading Room. Certainly there are any number of positivist explanations for this, just as there are humanistic means of interpretation regarding the phenomenon, and yet other than a few scant studies, there is little discussion about this odd effect of literature that is omnipresent, that is universal (you’re experiencing it right now, but I assure you that I’m not a fictional character, at least anymore).
What I’d like, if I can be a bit hermetic about things, is for the humanities in general and literary study in particular to occasionally embrace the woo a little bit. The woo is an inchoate term, equal parts disparagement, admission of cringing embarrassment, and vague catch-all for those in the paranormal community – specifically those who are interested in UFOs – who are apt to lapse into explanations that appear both magical and mystical. Among UFO folks (and I should say I don’t include myself as such, though I’ve explored the more eccentric corners of Reddit occasionally) “the woo” refers to explanations of anomalous aerial sightings not as being extraterrestrial crafts or some variation of hypothesis that is at least broadly within the purview of the natural sciences, but rather in a language that’s more fit for psychics, mystics, prophets, magicians. The woo is the realm of telekinesis and telepathy, precognition and dream vision, interdimensions and extradimensions, angels and demons. Many figures in the UFO community, already painfully aware of the minority position they hold in the pantheon of intellectual respect, blanche from the woo, while others see it as a challenge to the positivist stranglehold on what can be considered, a Fortean call to the firm belief that there are more things in heaven than have been dreamt of, well you know the rest…
The steadfastly positivist, naturalist, and materialist metaphysic which defines scientificity (but not necessarily science, which is neutral in that regard) clearly rejects the woo; humanists, if they are even aware of it, simply ignore the woo. An exception is Rice University philosophy professor Jeffrey J. Kripal whose How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else, wherein he considers everything from near death experiences and past life regression to alien mantis abductions and extrasensory perception (published by the University of Chicago Press no less!) is either the most boundary-pushing and perceptive epistemological work of the 21st Century or totally bonkers, bat-shit insane (maybe both). Nonetheless, Kripal very much takes the woo seriously, and sees it as a methodology, a discipline, an approach, a perspective, and a metaphysic by which those anomalous things excised from consistency are recentered, and his is a clarion call for not just those in the lab but also the library to look clearly at that which is weird. Kripal’s is an argument about “why the humanities must stop ceding reality to the sciences,” where we “have to stop assuming that our most fantastic stuff is merely legendary.” His is a claim for that which is neither literal nor figurative, of the ideas that exist beyond metaphor and that which they represent, the hidden bit between the sign and signified. In other words, “Did Soames walk into that library in 1997?” isn’t exactly the right question (though not totally the wrong one either).
Kripal is a philosopher with a focus on religion, and necessarily his focus understandably tends towards those disciplines, even while he does reference the oddly not uncommon accounts of author’s meeting their own fictional creations or feeling as if their characters are somehow willing themselves into being. To borrow Kripal’s category of “thinking impossibly,” I wonder what it looks like to do so when it comes to the parsing of narrative and the reading of text? Especially since so much of the actual experience of the reader (verboten in literary theory from the New Critical Effective Fallacy through the Post-Structuralist Death of the Author) can hew towards the positively spooky, of Soames in the stacks and Dalloway in Starbucks? We all know that there is something incongruous about literature, this intricate building of an illusory world like some fantastic wizard’s trick, but do we really know – do we really understand it? There is an alchemy of syntax, diction, and punctuation that’s as Prospero’s spells, where the most adept of authors – and more importantly the most committed of readers – will them into existence.
Literature makes us able to think the thoughts of people who are not ourselves, to perceive and experience the world in another’s soul. Does the fictitiousness of some of those people make them any less real? After all, whether you share my thoughts or Soames’, the thoughts remain what they are. Consider the sheer preponderance of characters so viscerally real, crafted not just by their initial creators but by the devotion of millions of readers, so that they apotheosize into a type of tangibility? Soames, whether real or not, did for the most part largely endure as a mere footnote, and yet a dozen people waited for his return. How then much more manifest are those figures whose names we all know? Don’t deny that you can envision them right now, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, Count Dracula and Ebenezer Scrooge, each in their own way real and independent and in someways more vibrant than Arthur Cannon Doyle, Ian Fleming, Bram Stoker, and Charles Dickens. You can see Bond, James Bond, more clearly in your mind than Fleming, even with multiple avatars from Sean Conner to Daniel Craig having been possessed by him. A 2008 UKTV Gold survey in the United Kingdom found that 58% of Britons believed that the deerstalker capped detective at 221B Baker Street was real, and who am I to say that on some level they’re not correct? Today we call them fictional characters, but the ancients knew such things as myths. Like God, if James Bond didn’t exist it’d be necessary to invent him. All true characters are fictional to begin with, it’s we who will them into existence through the incantations of writing and the conjurations of reading.
Then there is the eerie verisimilitude of those who bring these people into our dimension like a psychic at a séance, such as the graphic novelist Alan Moore (an avowed pagan acolyte of chaos magik) who has said that he’s been visited several times by his own John Constantine, a kind of supernatural investigator capable of journeying to both heaven and hell, as well as apparently Northampton. Science fiction pulp genius Philip K. Dick, admittedly a diagnosed schizophrenic and enthusiast of psychedelics, frequently encountered his own imagined characters in the wild as well. In a 1976 interview with Science Fiction Magazine, Dick referred to the totality of reality itself as a kind of “consensual hallucination,” understanding literature as a type of magic that could manifest “partially actualized realities.” More canonically than either Moore or Dick, no less a mainstay of the syllabus and the dissertation than William Faulkner would apparently be itchy to get back to his typewriter so as to continue the stories of the Snopes family in The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, telling a group of University of Virginia graduate students in 1958 that as a writer all he does is “trot along behind [his character] with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does,” the characters as spirits and the writer as medium.
In my 2022 book Binding the Ghost: Theology, Mystery, and the Transcendence of Literature I attempted to push the neologism of “Orphic Criticism,” a way of reading fiction, poetry, and even nonfiction as a variety of theurgy, ever committed to the strange abilities in arranging letters and words. The term never took (fingers crossed on its luck as a deep cut however!), but as time goes on I remain ever more committed to this sense that this is a valuable manner of talking about literature that we shrink away from in embarrassment, more contented to keep our feet on the ground than audacious enough to let our minds float in the clouds. As Corbin argued in Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, “between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception…. And the universe perceptible to the sense, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images,” or as we might put it, the world of literature. A separate space, domain, dimension that doesn’t actually exist and yet is as close and intimate as the thoughts in our own brains. Jorge Luis Borges, a writer who understood these principles well, explicates as such in his sonnet to the pantheistic philosopher Baruch Spinoza, describing how in penning a manuscript the author is “weighed down with the infinite,” for this is an art whereby the “magician moved/Carves out his God with fine geometry… from nothing, he’s begun/To construct God, using the word.” Auden may have had it that poetry does nothing, but the truth – and paradoxically it’s not an opposite one – is that poetry does everything.
