Our train may occasionally be late, but it is certainly never infinitely long. In this sense, the world as it appears before us, may seem to be a little disappointing when compared to our favourite Sci-fi planet. Perhaps this is because fiction has the power to portray ideals – those concepts and objects that transcend empirical, experiential reality. Infinity and perfection are two significant examples of such ideals; while we may understand the concept of perfection, we are unable to tie it to a thing that we experience in our own reality, because we simply haven’t ever had the perfect slice of pizza or a truly bottomless drink. In this sense, there is a disconnect between ideals and our reality. However, in a fictional realm this disconnect is somewhat breached.
infinity pool (not an infinite pool)
Infinity is, to me, the most fascinating ideal, since it can be applied to space and time. We seem to possess the ability to ponder the notion of an infinite train or boundless swimming pool, and even imagine how we would experience such things. However, in fictional works, we may take this a step further. Infinity can be portrayed as a mechanism that ‘successfully’ operates within the fictional world. For instance, a fictional character may pick up a book with an infinite number of pages and we may read about ways in which it plagues him (this is the content of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Book of Sand). Or perhaps we are met by a character who has lived for an infinite amount of time: when they account for their experience, there is no moment to doubt the truth of the tale: it simply is true within the world presented to us by the author. Significantly, we are told how interactions with infinity play out and what happens next. In this sense, infinity descends from a purely conceptual realm to interact with the fictional world. Our lack of agency, as readers dropped into the author’s narrative, enables us to encounter the infinite and observe its effects in ways usually limited by our faculties of doubt and reason.
However, the introduction of such ideals into a fictional narrative does not come without complication. A fascinating dichotomy arises between the ‘ideal’ and the ordinary mechanics of the world: between perfect and ordinary; infinite and finite; linear and nonlinear. Roland Barthes touches upon these tensions in Mythologies. He discusses Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – a novel that, in many ways, challenged the perception of time and space. Verne places the infinite and finite in tension with each other: the confined space of the Nautilus submarine is depicted traversing a seemingly inexhaustible world at great speed. Barthes notes that“the vastness of their circumnavigation further increases the bliss of their closure, the perfection of their inner humanity.” To some extent, the passengers’ confinement is presented as almost fractal; as we zoom into the finite, defined boundary of the Nautilus, it seems as though we may repeat this process perpetually, zooming in on the objects and realms within the confined space. The seclusion of Verne’s submarine with a window facing out at true vastness induces a feeling of paradoxical vastness itself, for an infinitely finite space. For Barthes, Verne exercises a “ceaseless action of secluding oneself.” It is the kind of exercise that aches the brain.
Fractal Zoom (Mandelbrot set)
Perhaps above all, the power of Verne’s fiction is his portrayal of characters responding to the forces at play in the fictional world. By presenting the characters’ relations with the infinite vastness and excruciating finiteness, we are given a more tangible account for these concepts. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the passengers’ reactions to confinement are varied. For Ned Land, the confinement is nauseating imprisonment, whereas for Professor Arronax, the vast ocean provides a seemingly infinite source of intrigue. By observing the characters’ responses to the infinite and finite, we may somewhat establish relations with these transcendent concepts ourselves.
Bibliography:
Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Project Gutenberg, 1994
Roland Barthes, ‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat’, in Mythologies (Vintage 2009)
Nemo means nobody in Latin, which reveals that the author thinks subjectively that no one can be Captain Nemo. This seems to presage Nemo’s tragic fate from the very beginning, and the author’s belief that his ideal will never come true.
In the second part of Verne’s trilogy, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Captain Nemo finally chose to blow up the island because of the enemy’s invasion and piloted the Nautilus to dive into the sea. Tragically, Nemo himself dies of his wounds.
However, does his death mark a defeat for anti-colonialism and freedom? When Nemo was near death, his breast was swelling with sobs and he whispered to himself, “Almighty God! enough! enough!” (Verne, 1994, part II, chapter XXII). This indicates his physical death, but at the end of the story, Professor Arronax, Conseil and Ned Land escape from the Nautilus and spread the word of what they had seen and heard on board. The story of the Nautilus may inspire readers to yearn for peace and resist aggression. Hence, to a certain extent, ideal of Nemo did not fail.
Jules Verne
Through the story of “Mysterious Island”, we can know that Nemo is an Indian prince, he found a Spanish shipwreck containing a large amount of gold treasure at the bottom of the sea, and secretly used the treasure to support the struggle for national independence. But it did not do much to change the course of the bloody war.
Thus, Nemo tried to build a kind of self-sufficient cosmogony, which has its own rules, its own time, space, fulfilment, and even existential principle in the ship (Barthes, 2010, p.102). In this enclosed space, Nemo temporarily managed to keep everyone on board fed, clothed, and free from war, although this was in exchange for freedom. Nevertheless, from my perspective, this seemingly happy moments did not represent that Nemo had achieved his dream. The balance on the ship is fragile, and when Nemo choose to live in seclusion, they give up the right to communicate with the rest of the world, passively observing the views of others rather than exporting their own. So, in the best of circumstances, only the people on board would live in peace, and it would be very difficult for outsiders to join in. Hence, he could hardly keep most people away from national oppression and colonialism.
Besides, there is no mention of the ship’s economic system in the book, whether they were distributed according to work or according to need. Why does the captain Nemo have the ultimate power and get the best food and room? All these signs suggested that the Nautilus was probably Nemo’s utopia, not all the crew’s. Then such a closed culture can possibly become totalitarian in the end.
Theatrical poster for the film Forbidden Planet (1956).
‘Its trace it will remind us that we are, after all, not God’ (Commander Adams, played by Laslie Nielsen, to Altaira, played by Anne Francis)
‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956) was directed by Fred M. Wilcox and Written by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, adapts The Tempest by Shakespeare, and mingles it with Freudian Psychoanalysis, and adds a different ending. The characters of the Shakespearian play find their pendants in Forbidden Planet, just a Caliban is missing. Caliban in his animalistic viciousness and anarchy presents a character, which is nearly untameable, a furious and physical alternative to the (self-)mastery of Prospero. In this sense, one could argue that he has much in common with what Sigmund Freud calls the id, a part of the human subjectivity motivated by (partly destructive) drives and desire. Freud claims that the id is an existential part of every human subjectivity, controlled by the superego, and the ego, which mediates between the id and the disciplining Superego.
‘There is no exact equivalent to Caliban in Forbidden Planet […] but in the hole [the film] inserts the Id-beast’ (Merrell 1994).
Morbius, the Prospero of Altair IV, the isolated planet, just inhabited by the presumed survivor of a failed colonizing mission and his daughter Altaira, manipulated his mind, that he can create a robotic servant, his Ariel. But he has also freed the animalistic id, which presents itself attacking the earthy space mission and defending his incestuous claims on his daughter, who starts exploring heterosexual love with the manly crew of the space shuttle, and especially with Commander Adams, leader of the rescue expedition, the Ferdinand of Forbidden Planet. The monsters are materializations of Morbius’s id. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it clearly: ‘The monsters ‘are the realizations of the primordial father’s incestuous destructive impulses against other men who might threaten his symbiosis with the daughter’ (Zizek 1999).
Morbius (Walter Pigeon) faces Altaira (Anne Francis) and Adams (Leslie Nielsen). (From left to right).
Morbius uses Robby the Robot who is an enabler of his repressed desires and is suspicious about the invaders coming from planet earth. But he can’t see himself, and Robby reinforces Morbius’s state of mind by just following his instructions and being a mindless robot, or more precisly: he can’t see a mostly unconscious part of himself, the id, his id, manifests as a monster. Realizing that it is his ‘dark’ side that threatens him, trying to invade his station, it is too late: His id destroys everything even himself.
The materialization of Morbius’s id under attack.
In this sense, Morbius is a transgressor in two ways, by following his mostly hidden incestuous tendencies and appropriating the forbidden knowledge of the highly developed but perished civilization of the Planet. Morbius suffers and dies from the aftermath of his transgressions; therefore the movie can be reasonably described as a ‘cautionary moral fable’ (Merrell 1994).
The movie sanctions the id’s greed for omnipotence with death and reminds the audience of the deficient human disposition. On the one hand, it could be understood as a memento mori: ‘remind[ing] us that we are, after all, not god’, as quoted above. But on the other hand, it is way too moralistic by just showing the complete dystopia, which was initiated from the inside of Morbius. The movie isn’t showing a line of flight for handling the abyss of the id but is determined ‘by the peculiar and pointedly moralistic conventions of the 1950s science fiction film’ (Merrell 1994). The couple of Adams and Altaira can finally escape the dystopian monster emanating from Morbius’ Inner space and presents therefore from today’s point of view, a more than ambiguous, if not clearly moralistic ending.
Sources:
Knighten, Merrell: The Triple Paternity of “Forbidden Planet”. In: Shakespeare Bulletin , SUMMER 1994, Vol. 12, No. 3 (SUMMER 1994), pp. 36-37.
In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’stwo protagonists appear to be abandoned beside a country road, awaiting the arrival of someone, or something, called Godot. Despair and failure are central themes in the play, with Estragon and Vladimir succumbing to bored insanity in the face of a seemingly futile, meaningless world. From the moment the play commences, we are dropped into a state of limbo; Estragon is tries and fails twice to remove his boot, before declaring that there is “Nothing to be done.” Indeed, from this opening line onwards, nothing is done.
But what is Beckett aiming to convey with such a pessimistic portrayal of the world? We might first infer that Waiting for Godot is a reflection of the widespread nihilism that spread across the postmodern world; after the Second World War, many lost faith in the fundamental human values of reason and meaning, having witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust. Estragon and Vladimir appear to be in some kind of post-apocalyptic setting, promoting us to make this connection. But perhaps more relevant than the nihilistic undertones of the play are its references to existentialism. The protagonists’ relentless faith that Godot will arrive and repetitive behaviour are reminiscent of the Myth of Sisyphus, which was used by existential philosopher Albert Camus to illustrate the absurdity of life. Sisyphus was condemned to endlessly repeat the meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, just as Estragon and Vladimir appear to have condemned themselves to the endless task of waiting for Godot; in both cases the situation is static. The final interaction closes the play while also opening it up to a perpetual looping:
ESTRAGON:
Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR:
Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
Curtain.
Camus concludes that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” since he must become contented with the absurdity of his task. But what about Estragon and Vladimir; in this reading of Beckett, can we conclude that his heroes are of Sisyphus kind, accepting of their fate? I would argue that it is unclear as to whether they have even become conscious of their perpetual task.
However, we may explore a further existential reading of Waiting for Godot: one that may get closer to Beckett’s intended message. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre distinguishes two mutually exclusive kinds of being: the unconscious (being-in-itself), which is unchangeable and concrete in its essence; and the conscious (being-for-itself), which is aware of itself and changeable, but lacks a prescribed essence. For Sartre, the conscious being must create itself out of nothingness, since it lacks a predetermined essence; unlike a tree, which is fated to simply be a tree, humans act within the world and thus actualise their being. In Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir appear to have estranged themselves from such freedom and consciousness, instead opting for inaction and ceaseless waiting in a world full of nothing. But, unlike the tree that they stand beside, our protagonists may in fact possess the power to shape their own essence from this nothingness.
To our despair, we leave Estragon and Vladimir still fixated on the arrival of Godot, wherein their essence is estranged. They seem to be stuck in a ditch, unwilling to actuate their own being from the nothingness around them.
Samuel Beckett was born in 1906, in Foxrock, Ireland and died in 1989. He wrote mostly in French.
‘Vladimir: Say something!
Estragon: I’m trying!
[Long silence]’ (54)
The play ‘En attendant Godot’ (‘Waiting for Godot’) written by Samuel Beckett was firstly staged in Paris in the year 1953. Vladimir (‘Didi’) and Estragon (‘Gogo’) are waiting for Godot in two Acts, but he never comes. Instead, they are meeting Pozzo and Lucky and a Boy who brings the message of the delay of Godot. Beckett presents with his play a realm in between, difficult to define or to locate, and in which “nothing happens twice” as famously described by Irish critic Vivian Mercier. The first sentence of the play “Nothing to be done” uttered by Estragon, introduces the paradigm of the following.
But what are the protagonists doing on the edge to nothingness?
I argue that the play, in which obviously somehow ‘Something’ happens, surrounds the topic of langue. Vladimir and Estragon are talking the whole time and there are methods with which Beckett problematizes language itself.
Vladimir and Estragon have problems understanding each other: ‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying’ (13) but continue speaking. Their plaintive parlando style conveys a mood of uncertainty and meaninglessness. There are many pauses between the mostly short utterances of the characters. Their usage of language implies a strangeness to the intended meaning. They repeat some words and split them into syllables:
‘Vladimir: Tied?
Estragon: Ti-ed’ (13)
Production photograph of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953 premiere at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris), directed by Roger Blin, who also played Pozzo (in the center), the productionstarred Lucien Raimbourg as Vladimir (on the left), Pierre Latour as Estragon (on the right) and Jean Martin as Lucky (not in the Foto).
The split and redundancy reveal the materiality of the words, and thus violate the unity of signifier and signified. Another example is the play with homophonic names:
‘Estragon: [Pretending to search.] Bozzo….Bozzo…
Vladimir: [Ditto.] Pozzo… Pozzo…
Pozzo: PPPOZZZO!
Estragon: Ah pozzo… let me see… Pozzo….
Vladimir: Is it Pozzo or Bozzo?’ (15).
The words lose their initial meaningful purpose, becoming mere sounds in an empty space, or simply just printed marks.
These are assaults against the grounding, the stability of language itself. Didi and Gogo are stuck in between the usage of the language as a habit filling the silence and the real process of symbolizing which can touch or move. ‘But habit is a great deadner’ as Vladimir says, and a few moments later: “I can’t go on! [Pause.]’ (83). He speaks as a subject seemingly conscious about what he said. But in the next moment, he is uncertain asking himself the comedic question of ‘What have I said?’ (83). For me, this part stands characteristically for the potential alienation of language, the strangeness of ourselves, the otherness within the subject. We touch something by symbolizing it and in the next moment we are alienated from it or language was lacking representing what we really wanted to utter. We are Estragon and Vladimir, waiting for the impossible moment of clarity where everything seems alive in contrary to the dead habits. But we maybe couldn’t stand it, as well as Didi and Gogo protesting Lucky’s torrent of words. Beckett succeeds to presents the slipperiness and artificiality of representation and meaning within and through language.
But just as Estragon tries to follow Vladimir’s imperative to ‘Say something’ as quoted in the first sentence, Beckett tries to follow the obligation to express, answering a question about the makers’ possibilities and told what he preferred:
‚The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.‘
Sources:
Mercier, Vivien: “The Uneventful Event”. The Irish Times, February 18, 1956
Beckett, Samuel: Waiting For Godot. faber and faber, London 2006
Gontarski, S.E.: Beckett and the ‚Idea‘ of theatre. In: The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1015
Beckett, Samuel and Duthuit, Georges: Three Diologues.
Herland, as a classic feminist utopian novel, tells the story of three American men who discover an isolated, all-female country while exploring. Herlandians were wise, gentle, kind, and they raise their children together. It seems to show a dreamful world made up of women. (More details…)
1. Clues
Because this is a first-person perspective book, and it is a feminist fiction in my preconceptions, I did not realize that the protagonist was a man rather than a woman until the protagonist explicitly stated that he was a male like the other two.
It is so strange, isn’t it? As a feminist utopian novel, the whole setting is still based on the logic of male-domain world, with the opposite gender idealized to fit the imagination of utopia.
2. Arguments
More’s utopian bliss is to be attained only through the imposition of a distinctively male hierarchy. The patriarchal family is the core of maintaining order and assigning jobs (Chris Ferns, 1998). However, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland did not break out this tradition at all. Although there is an impeccable land of healthy eating habits, helpfulness, equality, and crisis handling mechanism (Gilman, C.P., 1979), its social structure is presented by the narrative of a male, discovered and explored by the male. Their evaluation is a male interpretation of what they see and hear. And this male gaze is evidence that Herlandians still live in a patriarchal society.
Conversely, male gaze, to some extent, in Herland is progressive. At the beginning, the three heroes despised women and believed that a country must have men to build fine walls and houses. But finally, they married Herlandians and sincerely believed in the ideology of Herland. Although these men ultimately approve of Herland’s excellence, it does not stop us from thinking that a female society’s need for male approval is ridiculous. Perhaps the novel would have been more realistic if the author had included a woman in the three-man exploration team.
3. Conclusion
From my perspective, the respectable and evil of human nature is never caused by either man or woman. Hence, a utopian world like Herland cannot be achieved without innovation in the political and economic system. Though the author tries to make people face up to women’s contribution to society, the book is more like a fantasy novel, which only satisfies the author’s perfect imagination of women in the patriarchal system.
In addition, there are other implicit discrimination issues in the book, you could click it if you are interested.
Reference
Ferns, Chris “Rewriting Male Myths: Herland and the Utopian Tradition.” A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Val Gough and Jill Rudd, 1st ed., vol. 14, Liverpool University Press, 1998, pp. 24–37. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjjgp.8
Gilman, C.P., 1979. Herland / by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; with an introduction by Ann J. Lane., London: Women’s Press.
“(…) a year of doing nothing changed everything (…)” (Source)
‘Doing Nothing’ in the Corona-Pandemic
Not only since the worldwide Corona pandemic has “doing nothing” been in vogue – on the contrary: in literary, artistic and cinematic works, doing nothing is often ascribed significance and even receives philosophical readings such as nihilism or fatalism (cf. Ehn/Löfgren 2010). These are two traditions of thought that question the meaningfulness of human life or refer to contingency (randomness) and fate. In addition, the pandemic was used by some to engage with themselves or become spiritual. But beware: these romanticising and glorifying narratives put the deadly virus and its losses such as lives, jobs, homes and infrastructures, etc. into perspective.
However, the practice of doing nothing can also be transferred from empirical phenomena to literary works, such as the absurd theatre, which I will now present. The aim of this article is to present ‘doing nothing’ using the example of waiting.
Literarised ‘Doing Nothing’ – Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett, 1953)
The motif of doing nothing is represented by the motif of waiting in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot. The two tramps Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for Godot, whom they only glimpse. The two characters characterise different attitudes towards doing nothing and waiting, respectively: While Estragon suffers from the wait and tries to break it off several times, Vladimir is more relaxed. However, all attempts to leave are blocked. Doing nothing and waiting remains the credo. A messenger of Godot, who brings news, supports the practice of waiting by fuelling hope.
Excitingly, despite the passivity of doing nothing and waiting, a performative, productive and active character of the actions can be discerned, for example, in the taking off of shoes, the exchanging of hats, the imitation of the arriving characters Pozzo and Lucky, insults and then reaffirmations of friendship, the search for names or even physical exercises.
The moral coding of the social and cultural practice of doing nothing
What becomes visible against the context of social developments and, since Marx’s emphasis on labour power and activity, is the moral interpretation of ‘doing nothing’ that became visible both in the literary work and in the Corona pandemic (cf. Odell/Zettel 2021). While doing nothing in the Corona Pandemic was used to stay at home to reduce the risk of infection and to avoid social contact to prevent infection, in the example of Waiting for Godot we have a different reading:
Here, there is a double structure of self-fellowship: In the endurance of a triviality, the aim is to pass time. In dealing with the urgent questions of the post-war period, it is thus a matter of driving away thinking and evading questions about the causes in order to avoid responsibility. What becomes visible in the play on the micro level is the moral refusal of a world that has to deal with its traumas and work on them. The play repeats the company of doing nothing, it is meant both descriptively and in the question of causes and responsibility. wWthout this analytical distinction, Beckett’s concepts of action and the moral critique that goes with them remain absurd.
Beckett, Samuel: Waiting on Godot. Paris 1953.
Ehn, Billy/ Löfgren, Orvar: The secret world of doing nothing. London 2010.
Odell, Jenny/ Zettel, Annabel: Nichts tun: die Kunst, sich der Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie zu entziehen. München 2021.
Michel Foucault and Michael Stoneman, Death Valley, 1975. Foucault was visiting California, today’s training ground for upcoming generations of entrepreneurs.
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