In this section, I present a chartto epitomize how the virtual impersonal memory of
“the past in general” is transformed/translated into the actual records at Point S, a point of
“contraction.”
Figure 3.5
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After exploring the virtual coexistence of all the levels of the past through Johor’s virtual memory, I now discuss the Lock, the cosmic bond, which points to a deeper level of the impersonal memory of the evolving cosmic system and represents the virtual coexistence of multiple fluxes (narratives) and durations of multiple beings. We can consider the Lock as Deleuze/Bergson’s “the past in general,” where Johor can see “a single time”
(Bergsonism 100) that allows all beings to “coexist in a Unity” (100). When Johor records, warns, and rescues the Shiakstans, the virtual impersonal memory of “the past in general” is transformed/translated into the actual records at Point S, a point of
“contraction.” It is not until Johor takes action at Point S that we encounter the
differentiating forces of virtual Life in the evolving cosmos, glimpsed through the actual records from Rachel, Chen Liu, Benjamin, Shammatan spies, eugenists and many others.
At Point S, the virtual, inactive memory is turned into an actual, active memory that directs Johor to action. The Archive records snapshots of the oscillation between the memory of the Lock as “the past in general” and the actual, personal records.
What is the Lock anyway? It is the cosmic bond, the virtual link, between planets in the evolving cosmos. The aim of establishing the Lock is to connect Shikasta, embodied by the Giant-Native match, with Canopus and the other galactic planets. The Giants from Planet 10 are eager to be linked to the galaxy because their genetic memory stores the image of the Lock as “the past in general” of the whole evolving cosmos. Johor records,
While none of them, as an individual, remembers genuine contact—the free flow of thought, ideas, information, growth between planet and planet across our galaxy—it is not long since the oldest of the Colony 10 immigrants died, and, in any case, their genetic memory is strong, active, developing. (Shikasta 15)
The Giants yearn to be linked to the impersonal, cosmic memory of the Lock, “the past in
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general” of the whole evolving cosmos, because their beings are always in accordance with the cosmic rhythm. They feel isolated when they are separate from the cosmic bond.
The fact that they can only possess personal memory without the ability to link to the impersonal, cosmic memory saddens them. The cosmic memory comprises “the free flow of thought, ideas, information, growth between planets.” In the Lock as “the past in general” of the whole evolving cosmos, as the dynamic reservoir of memory, the boundaries between various beings dissolve.
The different narrative strands of Johor’s virtual memories embody the multiple fluxes Johor encounters, intervenes in, and incorporates. Before memories are actualized by Johor’s recollections of specific images, the individuality of each memory/duration is eradicated, via the Lock, in the process of the relays of thoughts/memories. The process of eliminating individual memory constitutes a move toward what Deleuze and Bergson call “the impersonal time.” Deleuze claims that
a single duration will pick up along its route the events of the totality of the material world; and we will then be able to eliminate the human consciousness that we had initially had available, every
now and then, as so many relays for the movement of our thought: there will now only be impersonal time in which all things will flow. (Bergsonism 82) Through the relays of our thought, human consciousness is eradicated so that we are linked to “impersonal time.” On the ontological level of life, the boundaries between different beings disappear. Deleuze demonstrates the relationship between things and the cosmos:
If things are said to endure, it is less in themselves or absolutely than in relation to the whole of the universe in which they participate insofar as their
distinctions are artificial. Thus, the piece of sugar only makes us wait because,
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in spite of its arbitrary caning out, it opens out onto the universe as a whole. In this sense, each thing no longer has its own duration. (Bergsonism 77)
The process of duration absorbing different beings is like that of water absorbing sugar.
Sugar will lose individuality when it melts in water. Likewise, each duration is stripped of its individuality because the boundaries between different beings are artificial in duration. When the boundaries are eradicated, the multiple memories and fluxes coexist virtually along the trajectory of cosmic evolution, where the actual forms are temporarily put aside.
However, if all human consciousness is eliminated, why then can Johor incorporate multiple records from different narrators with their names instead of using his own tone to narrate the events as if all the material were what he witnessed? What do all the names and specific functions convey to us? What is the function and relationship of the different archival materials? The actual records include Johor’s recordings but also records from different characters at different time, such as the archivists, eugenists, Rachel Sherban, case studies on some individuals (Link- Persons), Chen Liu (Chinese official ), the Shammatan officers and spies, Sirius’ spies, individual case studies, Taufiq’s record and request about giving up the unbearable mission, Benjamin’s letters to Johor about his work as a leader of the Youth Camp, Kassim’s record of the rebuilding of the city, Lynda Coldridge’s letters to Benjamin, and many others. The records from different viewpoints are not only kept by Johor but also, as Shadia Fahim explains, by “the reports of the extraterrestrial Canopean archivists and envoys, and then by the journals, letters and recollections of various ‘individuals’ living on Shikasta. The reader is, therefore,
confronted with disparate points of view that incorporate a variety of extraterrestrial and human perspectives” (Sufi Equilibrium 155).
The relationship between duration and virtual memory is dynamic relationship. To
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use Point S on the memory cone as the starting point of explication, we can say that when Johor actualizes the memory, he is simultaneously creating life by differentiating life.
Johor’s virtual memories enact differentiating beings, different lives, in the evolving cosmos. In Bergsonism, Deleuze says, “These lines of differentiation are therefore truly creative: They only actualize by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level that they embody” (101). In
Shikasta, the “lines of differentiation” are virtual memories and the records kept by
different individuals, and the ontological level is the Lock as “the past in general.” The Lock not only enables the storage and accumulation of memory but also links different life forms together, not through the physical forms, but through the vibrations that can transcend the physical boundaries of different beings. Johor records the establishing of the Lock: “When the Lock took place, the powers, vibrations (whatever word you like, since all are inaccurate and approximate) of Rohanda were fused with Canopus, and through Canopus with its subsidiaries, planets, and stars” (Shikasta 24).Thus, the cosmic bond, the Lock, subverts the boundaries between the Natives and Giants, Shikasta and Canopus, and bring us to the coexistence of multiple beings, narratives, memories and, using a word from Deleuze, “fluxes” in duration. We are led from the dimension of memory to that of life as duration. When we are linked through the Lock, the impersonal memory takes us to the multiplicity of fluxes. Deleuze points out the link between memory and duration directly in claiming that “Duration, Life, is in principle (en droit) memory” (Bergsonism 106) virtually.How is the virtual coexistence of all the levels of the past related to the coexistence of durations? To simplify, how is memory related to duration? In Bergsonism, Deleuze explains that “Everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous Memory” (77).
Life manifests itself through a multiplicity of fluxes, which echo and reflect different
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levels of past memory. For Deleuze, “This extension of virtual coexistence to an infinity of specific durations stands out clearly in Creative Evolution, where life itself is
compared to a memory, the genera or species corresponding to coexisting degrees of this vital memory” (Bergsonism 77). Life and memory overlap in cosmic evolution so that when the Lock releases us to the impersonal memory, simultaneously we are initiated into the multiple fluxes of life.
In Shikasta, various life forms coexist harmoniously. The subhuman ape, the Giants, the Link-persons, the extraterrestrial spies, the Canopean galactic messenger, the stones, the cities, the water system, the animals, and the plants form a dynamic choreography of fluxes. The dichotomies among different beings are shown through the process of
divergences. Deleuze declares that a philosophy of life should “involve a virtuality that is actualized according to the lines of divergence” (Bergsonism 100). Life evolves through creative lines of differentiation that “create in these conditions the physical, vital, or psychical representative of the ontological level that they embody” (101).
This divergent, differentiating act helps to answer the aforementioned problem regarding why Johor records the names of different narrators instead of incorporating all the materials under his name. Johor’s act of recording the divergent materials is a
significant creative act that reveals the differentiating force of life. His act of remembering, says Deleuze, is an act of inventing and creating that epitomizes a
“gigantic memory, a universal cone in which everything coexists with itself” (Bergsonism 100).
This chapter of my dissertation delineates how Johor gradually moves from his personal memory to the impersonal, cosmic memory via encounters with the ape,
Giant-Mind, and the Lock. With help from the ape’s memory, Shammat’s evil motivation, scheme, and deeds, are realized in the crystal image and spiral circuit of Johor’s virtual
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memories. Being aware of the existence of the lurking, pirating Shammat, Johor actualizes virtual memories of Shammat's sabotage through psychological
contraction/translation and gains the active power to change the present and the past at Point S on the memory cone, where Lessing’s dual vision is formed and transformed infinitely. We are transported from awareness of Shammat sabotage to the action of amending it at Point S, signifying Johor’s participation in the composition and trajectory of the cosmos. The ensuing access to the Lock, the cosmic bond, initiates Johor into “the past in general,” impersonal, cosmic memory that stores a multiplicity of memories and life. Through Johor's creative differentiating action, divergent branches of records are engendered along with his process of leaping into the virtual shadowy past. The Archive becomes a matrix encompassing the interplay and cross-fertilization between the present and the past, the actual and the virtual, the personal and the cosmic.
Lessing’s dual vision triggers the emergence of a virtual chaosmos that allows the divergent and incompossible memories to be incorporated into the Archive. The “virtual”
Johor provisionally subverts temporal limitations so as to facilitate intervention into the Archival cosmic memory matrix, where the virtual co-existence of the past allows him to interact with the cosmic memory. His intervention in the cosmic memory through his multiple reincarnations and long virtual life helps generate the virtual chaosmos of symbiotic evolution.
It portrays entwined relationship between the actual present and the virtual past, personal memory and ontological memory. Lessing delineates the dual vision so as to turn it into multiplicity and symbiosis. Although application of Deleuze’s/Bergson’s theory of time/memory illuminates the contradictory nature and interplay of the two types of memory, the dynamic power of the actual present in Shikasta cannot be fully
accounted for because Lessing focuses more on how the interplay of the past and the
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present redirects the trajectory of cosmic evolution and shapes the future. Though Deleuze does deal with the future in his Third Synthesis of Time, which proposes the concept of eternal return, Lessing’s vision of future involves more expansion than repetition.
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Conclusion
In Shikasta, Lessing depicts the dynamism of utopian Canopus and dystopian Shikasta via oscillation of identity, space, and time between the actual and the virtual.
Johor travels between Canopus and Shikasta observing the colonial dilemma from the perspective of a colonizer and then from the perspective of a colonial. Having become aware of the dilemma of utopian aspiration, he both adheres to and revises the cosmic Master Plan for the functioning of the Canopean Empire. He transforms the cosmos pre-ordained by the cosmic Master Plan into a utopian cosmos free from orderly conditioning. In Deleuzian terms, he transforms the monadic cosmos into a utopian chaosmos that, in determining the new trajectory of cosmic evolution, foregoes pre-determined order and incorporates divergences.
Johor realizes that Canopus, with its cosmic Master Plan, is not the center of the cosmos, realizes that the symbiotic relationship among different beings, institutions, and forces generates a new virtual chaosmos that aims not to demarcate a cartography separating utopia from dystopia or the colonizer from the colonized. With the virtual traversing the actual, Lessing’s dual vision becomes a kaleidoscopic vision of multiplicity.
Johor’s special roles as observer/mediator and citizen, comparing and critiquing the two societies, lays bare the problematic foundation of the Canopean Empire as the
designer of the cosmic Master Plan: it is merely one link in a vast galactic chain. As well, expansion of the spatial cartography—the cities—and the temporal configuration—the Archive—fuel comparison and contrast of the degenerating dystopia and the blossoming utopia.
Lessing stresses the impossibility of escaping the dichotomy if one’s endeavor is to
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prioritize one over another. She creates, not replication of a pre-established utopian cosmos, but a unique chaosmos, where the divergent and incompossible elements are not eliminated for the purpose of upholding Canopus’ cosmic Master Plan, which intends pre-determined harmony, but are incorporated and reconceived in this utopian system of infinite speed and perpetual re-composition.
Lessing appropriates a new cosmic colonial relationship between Canopus and Shikasta to forge this new chaosmos that can escape the dilemmas of entropy and anarchy.
The colonial relationship, superficially, involves the dichotomous relationship between Shikasta and Canopus; if we perceive them from the virtual perspective, we can see the cross-fertilization and transaction between them. The utopia-dystopia dichotomy becomes a chaosmic multiplicity. Lessing employs science fiction’s important
utopia-dystopia motif to illustrate the limitations of traditional utopian thinking, revealed in the novel as the limitations of the cosmic colonial relationship. The cosmic Master Plan that aims to proceed with pre-established harmony is rejected as an “ideal” blueprint, while its vision as a dream is preserved. Lessing appropriates the utopia-dystopia motif in the hope of creating a chaosmos of multiplicity that escapes from the “I-We” dilemma of customary utopian thinking.
Deleuze’s concept of singular and (in)compossible divergences helps explain how Johor/George incorporates incompossible divergences into the cosmic system and thus triggers emergence of a chaosmos. Deleuze revises Leibniz’s theory of monad in The
Fold and Logic of Sense, proposing that, although Leibniz proposes the concept of monad
to subvert the enclosed subject by the entwined relationship between the monadicindividual and the world, he is still hindered by the choice of God because the
divergences of singularities are expelled from the compossible world. Leibniz endows God with a new basis at the level of incompossibility: “God plays tricks, but he also
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furnishes the rule of the game (contrary to Borges’s and Leblanc’s game without rules).
The rule is that possible worlds cannot pass into existence if they are incompossible with what God chooses” (The Fold 63). Leibniz’s subjecting the viewpoints to exclusive rules eliminates the divergent series and limits the world and individual to a compossible world where only converging series can be recognized. Deleuze eradicates the influence of God and frees singularities from the confinement of God’s rule, proposing that “when the monad is in tune with divergent series that belong to incompossible monads, . . . [i]t could be said that the monad, astraddle over several worlds, is kept half open as if by a pair of pliers”(The Fold 157). Deleuze’s monad encounters the divergent series outside its enclosed world and is forced to be torn open by them. It turns out that there are no longer several Adams in different worlds but an Adam that is astraddle multiple incompossible worlds. Since he is simultaneously “in” different worlds, the world he folds or expresses is now “made up of divergent series (the chaosmos)” (The Fold 157). He transgresses the boundary of the compossible world and is initiated into the incompossible world. “It is clear why Borges invokes the Chinese philosopher rather than Leibniz. He wanted, just as did Maurice Leblanc, to have God pass into existence all incompossible worlds at once instead of choosing one of them, the best” (The Fold 62).
In Logic of Sense, Deleuze claims Nietzsche attempts to tear open the compossible world by allowing the existence of discordances and divergences. His perspectivism serves as a better illustration than Leibniz’s point of view, “for divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, and disjunction no longer a means of separation. Incompossibility is now a means of communication” (Logic of Sense 174). Divergence will be folded into the monad that is pried open by the divergent series. In this way, the cosmos of
pre-established harmony is turned into a chaosmos, wherein the boundary between compossible and incompossible is transgressed because the incompossible elements are
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incorporated into the compossible world. Deleuze, pointing out the limitations of Leibniz’s theory of monad, argues that the divergences of singularities should not be expelled to the incompossible world and instead should be incorporated into the compossible world.
In Shikasta, Canopus establishes the cosmic Master Plan to fulfill its utopian aspiration; however, its adherence to the cosmic plan causes it to expel undesirable divergences because deviations threaten the fundamental structure of the orderly cosmos of pre-established harmony. Johor mediates between Canopus and Shikasta, feeding divergences back into the cosmic Master Plan, transforming the Plan and reconnecting it with SOWF and Lock. The link to the cosmic force returns elements to their multiple durations instead of pairing them in dichotomies. Johor is different from the betraying Giants and Taufiq because he is mediating between different elements and perspectives rather than judging things form his own self-centered judgment. Another difference is that Johor’s becoming relationship with the other beings tears open his enclosed identity and enables him to incorporate divergent elements. Such mediation between and
incorporation of heterogeneous elements makes possible this new utopian chaosmic communication, connectedness, and evolution. Johor’s poignant journeys of self-critical scrutiny and spatio-temporal deterritorialization catalyze transformation of the enclosed, static society into a chaosmos based on perpetual movement.
The utopian “I-We” dilemma is embodied in the Shikastans’ divergences and Canopus’ implementation of the cosmic Master Plan. If individual freedom easily falls prey to anarchy and utopian aspiration can hardly escape the trap of entropic collectivism, then what can be imagined and what can be done? Lessing, intrigued by this question,
The utopian “I-We” dilemma is embodied in the Shikastans’ divergences and Canopus’ implementation of the cosmic Master Plan. If individual freedom easily falls prey to anarchy and utopian aspiration can hardly escape the trap of entropic collectivism, then what can be imagined and what can be done? Lessing, intrigued by this question,