行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告
雄渾、恐怖、與他者:勒孚克萊夫特之恐怖科幻小說
(II-II)
研究成果報告(完整版)
計 畫 類 別 ： 個別型
計 畫 編 號 ： NSC 99-2410-H-009-007-
執 行 期 間 ： 99 年 08 月 01 日至 100 年 10 月 31 日
執 行 單 位 ： 國立交通大學外國語文學系
計 畫 主 持 人 ： 李家沂
計畫參與人員： 此計畫無其他參與人員
公 開 資 訊 ： 本計畫可公開查詢
中 華 民 國 101 年 01 月 21 日
日〉一篇，敘述了吉立斯於太空船孤單活過 32 年並意外死亡
的故事，32 年間船艦其他乘員恆處生體靜滯保存狀態，太空
船則於吉立斯身歿 198 年後，順利登陸行星郊狼。本論文從
海德格「此在」出發，閱讀吉立斯之存在處境，進一步論辯
吉立斯存在之獨特性，有別於海氏據以架構「此在」及其世
界之「在」。文末則環接海氏對科技與藝術之思慮，檢視科
幻小說作為文學文類之潛能，並論及科幻小說或有其力，任
其所責，詰難當世漫漶之科技工具理性。
英 文 摘 要 ： ’The Days Between’ is a story that appears as the
second chapter of the novel Coyote, written by
American science fiction writer Allen Steele. It
tells of a man, Gillis, who lives all alone on a
spaceship for 32 years—the other crew members being
in an extended state of deep sleep or biostasis—and
then dies in a random accident, 198 years before the
ship will arrive at the planet Coyote. This paper
begins from a Heideggerian interpretation of
Gillis’s existential condition, and then argues that
Gillis’s unique existence presents a challenge to
Heidegger’s grounding assumption of a being-in that
constitutes both Dasein and its world. In the
conclusion, the potential role of science fiction as
a literary genre is discussed in relation to
Heidegger’s own thinking about technology and art,
with the suggestion that science fiction may be
needed today for its power, a saving one likely, to
elicit a responsible response to the pervasive
technological instrumentalization.
英文關鍵詞： science fiction, Dasein, being-in, Angst, horror,
technology
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37.1 March 2011: 123-142
The Horror of Dasein:
Reading Steele’s “The Days Between”
Chia Yi LeeDepartment of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Abstract
“The Days Between” is a story that appears as the second chapter of the novel Coyote, written by American science fiction writer Allen Steele. It tells of a man, Gillis, who lives all alone on a spaceship for 32 years—the other crew members being in an extended state of deep sleep or biostasis—and then dies in a random accident, 198 years before the ship will arrive at the planet Coyote. This paper begins from a Heideggerian interpretation of Gillis’s existential condition, and then argues that Gillis’s unique existence presents a challenge to Heidegger’s grounding assumption of a being-in that constitutes both Dasein and its world. In the conclusion, the potential role of science fiction as a literary genre is discussed in relation to Heidegger’s own thinking about technology and art, with the suggestion that science fiction may be needed today for its power, a saving one likely, to elicit a responsible response to the pervasive technological instrumentalization.
Keywords
In 2002, American science fiction writer Allen Steele published Coyote: A
Novel of Interstellar Exploration. The second of eight individual yet interconnected
stories in the novel, “The Days Between” stands out as something quite different from our usual conception of a science fiction story, and for this reason has aroused the interest of some critics.1 From science fiction, after all, we tend to expect a surprise, something shocking new and different, and it is its very “ordinariness” or “everydayness” which makes this story seem so anomalous. For what could be more plain and ordinary than a virtual nobody’s thirty-two-year life alone on a spaceship, a life he mainly spends writing and one during which nothing special happens until he dies in a random, run-of-the-mill falling accident. However, it is of course precisely this “too much ordinariness” that accounts for the “extraordinary” quality of this narrative, and perhaps also its “philosophical” (indeed “metaphysical”) sense. If science fiction as a genre is largely defined by the occurrence of entirely new events (Parrinder 152), here on the contrary we have the sense not only that “nothing new happens” but that “nothing happens at all”— unless perhaps we give an active sense to the verb in “Nothing happens.”
Although the reading of the story to be offered here is influenced and inspired by Martin Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein in his 1926 book Being and Time, I should qualify at the outset the sense in which one might actually see this as a “Heideggerian reading” of the story. For while Heidegger’s conceptions of Dasein (being-there), being-toward-death, being-in-the-world and existential Angst (dread) are offered as a sort of background that seems to generally fit the setting or “world” of Steele’s “The Days Between,” my argument here will be that the story in fact conjures up a state of existence that is not yet touched by the Heideggerian analytic, and thus cannot yet be accounted for by it. One key point will be that Heidegger’s Mitsein or “being-with” (other people) or Mit-dasein (Dasein-with), which plays a significant role in Dasein’s being-in-the-world, is simply not operative, not present in Steele’s story, where there can be no spoken communications with living beings other than oneself.2 The point that when he awakens from biostasis Gillis will find
1 One reviewer of Coyote, for example, singles out “The Days Between,” allotting more space to it than to other stories, and calls it “creepy,” “eerie,” and “tragic” (Speer). Another reviewer, also using the word “eerie” to describe the story, admits that its attraction to him is due to its not entirely conforming to the generic convention of the space opera—“[w]here I had hoped for another chapter to rival ‘The Days Between’ . . . , Steele chooses to keep the novel on more conventional ground” (Howe). Citations taken from electronic sources will bear no pagination. See Works Cited for source details.
2
Gillis does however decide to “fill his time” with the lonely and deferred art of writing fiction, although later we will find out that basically no one will ever read or care about the stories
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 125
himself already “thrown” into one and the only “world” of a speeding spaceship may also call for an interpretation that moves (at least one step) beyond Heidegger’s notion that Dasein is by definition geworfen, “thrown into” the world. The question then arises: Can Heidegger’s Dasein come close to catching the dread, the “horror” of Gillis’ existential condition?
In the conclusion, I will venture to suggest that the literary potential of science fiction to present and to imagine a radical state of being of humans means that science fiction, with its capability in evoking the horror of Dasein, can help hint at the horror of the Lebenswelt (lived-world) under non-human or trans-human mechanization and automatization. And this fact only reinforces the potential of the sci-fi genre to issue a (responsible) response to, to provide an internal checking for, the growing technological instrumentalization of our present world. Here this idea will be discussed in relation to Heidegger’s own thinking about both technology— which “enframes” the world, making it no longer a familiar “home”—and art, which over against technology seems to offer a “world-opening” that makes possible a “dwelling.”
Between the Days
Back in 1959, the “space opera” was to popular science fiction what the “horse opera” was to the western, or the soap opera to daytime TV melodrama. The space opera has enjoyed a revival since the 1980s, claiming as its domain the “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action . . . and usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone . . . often deal[ing] with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes” (Hartwell and Cramer 17).
Given this definition, the individual stories in Coyote may easily be seen as examples of space opera, and taken as a whole as a larger (if somewhat loosely constructed) space opera. The novel tells of the adventures of a number of D.I.s (dissident intellectuals) after their landing on Coyote, the fourth satellite of the third planet in solar system of 47 Ursae Majoris, a 46-light-years-from-earth type-GO star (much like our sun in terms of both spectral and thermal type). Starting from
he writes, that this whole enterprise of writing will have been, so far as communication is concerned, in vain.
the year 2300, Coyote chronicles the lives of these pioneers—who are mainly scientists and intellectuals—as they explore the diverse terrains of Coyote and record the planet’s geographical and ecological features. Casting his stories in various narrative forms—those of the memoir, journal, and (pseudo-)scientific report—Steele presents a large-scale action adventure set on an outer-space world in the distant future. With these last qualities, the novel is generically congenial to space opera.
Of the novel’s eight stories only two are set before the year 2300. The first story, “Stealing Alabama,” provides background details on these dissidents’ suffering under a regime whose political intolerance grows as the technology of space exploration advances. Seeking a life of peace and freedom in some new haven in outer space, they finally conspire to hijack the most advanced spaceship of the time. Combining the themes and techniques of political allegory, military conspiracy and a scientific (pseudo-)history of space exploration, this opening story is not lacking in space-operatic large-scale action and technological scenes and settings. Chronologically, “Stealing Alabama” covers only two days before the unscheduled launch of the spaceship Alabama: July 4 and 5 in the year 2070—230 years prior to Alabama’s final landing on Coyote.
“The Days Between,” the second story in the “novel,” also takes place before the year 2300. However, here there is nothing dramatic, adventurous or large-scale, let alone anything heroic about the central figure. The story is not set on a distant planet but on a spaceship filled with silence and a sense of total inactivity. A remark made by the captain of the Alabama near the end of the novel gives a ready synopsis of “The Days Between”: the story is about one Leslie Gillis who, “[a]wakened from biostasis three months after we left Earth, spent the next thirty-two years alone aboard the ship. Wrote fantasy stories to pass the time . . .”(Steele 381). Gillis awakened earlier than planned and then, with the rest of the crew still in biostasis, lived out the rest of his life virtually alone on a silent ship; at last he died and his body was quickly disposed of, garbage-like. The story spans the period from October 3, 2070, to February 25, 2102; the adventures of the Alabama’s crew on Coyote will not begin until 198 years later.
“The Days Between” has a matter-of-fact opening: “Three months after leaving Earth, the URSS Alabama had just reached cruise velocity when the accident happened: Leslie Gillis woke up” (93). Complete here are an index of time (three months), a place-cum-space (one spaceship), an event (the accident of waking-up), and an agent (Leslie Gillis). Though simplistic, this opening already prefigures the “world” of the story. The first part of the story goes on to tell of
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 127
Gillis’s accidental revival from biostasis, his seeking of a solution, and his failure to find one. Basically, Gillis is awakened by mistake. His biostasis cell, C2A-07, should have been occupied by another ensign named Eric Gunther, who as it turns out is a mole sent by the ISA (Internal Security Agency) to sabotage the Alabama and is now sleeping in C1A-07, where Gillis should have been. After communicating with the ship’s AI, Gillis finally figures out what has happened. He cannot go back to sleep because Gunther’s initial mission was a suicidal one such that the cell C2A-07 is “permanently deactivated” to secure a point of no return. He cannot wake up Gunther or, for that matter, anyone else on board because there is no “mission-critical emergency” to authorize the procedure of early revival (103). Nor can he communicate with Earth, for the engine’s “ionized particles” will distort all outgoing radio signals. As a result, “the Alabama would remain under constant thrust for the next 230 years. . . . Gillis had realized the irony of his situation. He was the chief communications officer of the URSS Alabama. And he was doomed because he couldn’t communicate” (104).
The second part of “The Days Between” consists of Gillis’s efforts to keep his life in order and his mind in check. After a period of being in denial, refusing to really believe that he would have to live his life alone until his death, Gillis has to face the futility of all his efforts. Removing the tapes that had previously been used to cover every chronometer on the ship (to blind himself to the flow of time), Gillis once reads the panel: “April 17, 2071. A little more than six months had gone by since his awakening. He could have sworn it had been six years” (115). Coming next is an interlude where Gillis is seen preparing for suicide. Then he catches a glimpse of a fleeting light outside the porthole and, thinking it may be a spacecraft, tries to send a signal, but to no avail. This incident prompts him to start writing, with a pen and paper.
The final part narrates the next thirty-one and a half years of Gillis’s life, spent mainly in writing fantasy stories about one Prince Rupert. Nothing really happens during this time span. There is just one man continuing to write obsessively, basically in order to remain sane, for years on end. Then there appears another dot of light outside the porthole. Gillis makes a second attempt to communicate, but finds difficulty in even saying out loud his own name. In the end, he dies a random and absurd, perhaps Kafkaesque, death. Greatly confused by the light, he accidentally falls from a ladder. Shortly before his neck snaps, he hears his own final words: “Oh, no” (124). A brief epilogue ensues in which the on-board mechanical bots find the body and dump it into the void of space. The story ends like this: “the AI closed the shutters of the windows Gillis had left open, then
methodically turned off all the lights, one by one. The date was February 25, 2102, GMT. The rest of the flight went smoothly, without further incident” (125). “The rest of the flight” will last, as we know, for another 198 years. “The Days Between” is basically about the thirty-two years spent by a man living all alone on a spaceship until he dies. The duration of these “days between” amounts to only a tiny fraction of the time of the overall flight. Stripped of any incidents, this non-dramatic, unadventurous story leaves utterly naked the state or condition of a particular human life, a human existence. Summarized in Heideggerian terms, we might say that the story is about one man’s dealing with the dread of his own inevitable death. The story, in brief, can be interpreted as a narrative account of Heideggerian Dasein.
Gillis and Dasein
Certain features of Gillis’s experience may remind us of Heidegger’s analytic of our being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) in his Being and Time. Heidegger says that we experience our own state of ex-istence (literally “stand-outside”), that is, of “standing outside ourselves” in the flow of time, as a sense of thrownness (Geworfenheit), as if we have been contingently thrown into this world. Having been revived from biostasis by chance (or by mistake), Gillis finds himself thrown into his state of being-in-the-world of the spacecraft, or more simply that of his being-in it. The world he finds himself in is however not a normal human one. The other Seinde, beings or entities around him (the ship itself and its compartments and parts, the machine bots and the AI on board) are merely objectively present (Vorhanden), but never really handy (Zuhanden), never something he is directly involved with as if it were in effect part of “himself.” More strikingly, even the other humans on the ship, though alive, are in a state of deep sleep and thus virtually dead to him: there is a more radical sense of Gillis’s isolation or detachment from other people, from what Heidegger calls “the They” (das Man).
In his thrownness,3 Gillis is forced to face the certainty of his death, to be attuned4 to the being-certain, the truth, of death as his “ownmost possibility” and also as the “possibility of the impossible.” By its denial of his actualization, this ownmost possibility signifies not only the end of Gillis’s physical existence, but an end to all other possibilities of Gillis’s being. In the wake of this attunement, dread
3 This Heideggerian term seems quite apt given that the world in question is that of a speeding spaceship which is getting ever further away from earth.
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 129
arises and throws Gillis into a state of radical individualization whereby the world he has previously been falling prey to (Verfallen) sinks away. With nothing left but his own being-ahead-of-himself in time, Gillis is brought face to face with his being as Dasein, as being-there, through his dread of being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tod). Undergoing a process of self-rediscovery that moves through the awareness of mere facticity (being-in) and that of falling prey (being-together-with, Mitsein), and finally arrives at the awareness of his own ex-istence (being-ahead-of), Gillis’s experience could easily be seen and read as well in Heideggerian terms. However, this assumed interpretive correspondence will become unsettling with two moments of Gillis’s condition: namely, his being thrown into his in, and his being-certain of his own death.
Although Macquarrie and Robinson, in their English translation of Being and
Time, use anxiety to translate Angst (Heidegger, Being 227 [182]),5 their word choice may be problematic. As one critic puts it, a better term would be dread (Gelven 115), and Heidegger himself would seem to agree. In 1928, soon after the publication of Being and Time, he delivered a speech on the occasion of following Husserl as the Chair of Philosophy at Freiburg. In this speech, entitled “What Is Metaphysics,” Heidegger makes explicit that by “‘dread’ (Angst) we do not mean ‘anxiety’ (Ängstlichkeit), which is common enough and is akin to nervousness (Furchtsamkeit)—a mood that comes over us only too easily” (“What” 302). If one turns to Being and Time, a more detailed description of Angst seems to fit well the situation of Gillis:
What Angst is anxious for is being-in-the-world itself. In Angst, the things at hand in the surrounding world sink away, and so do innerworldly beings in general. The “world” can offer nothing more, nor can the Mitda-sein of others. Thus Angst takes away from Da-sein the possibility of understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the “world” and the public way of being interpreted. It throws Da-sein back upon that for which it is anxious, its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world. (BT 175-76 [187])6
5 The pagination in square brackets refers to the German edition. 6
Further references to Being and Time are taken from the translation of Joan Stamburgh (rather than that of Macquarrie and Robinson) and will be hereafter abbreviated as BT.
Gillis’s dread could indeed be taken as this Angst in the experience of which the “what-is-in-totality” is turned into “the pure Other” by its “till now undisclosed strangeness,” so that its withdrawal not only “crowds round us,” but “oppresses us” (Heidegger, “What” 302, 303). The “what-is-in-totality” should be understood as the world where, along with Dasein, innerworldly beings and entities reside. In the state of dread, this world which Dasein is thrown into withdraws and, by its withdrawal, turns toward Dasein as an oppressing Other. Innerworldly beings withdraw, and Dasein cannot have any recourse to “the They” (das Man) and public “interpretedness” in order to understand itself. Innerworldly entities withdraw, and Dasein can hold no longer onto anything to maintain an equipmental totality from which the world’s existential character derives. Things, under these circumstances, stop being handiness (Zuhandenheit), and “sink away,” falling into the state of being mere objective presence (Vorhandenheit) (BT 65 [69], 39 [42]) which, in turn, contributes to and indeed constitutes the oppressing character of the world as “what-is-in-totality.”
Awakened in or into a spaceship where no one is awake, Gillis is besieged by dread, not because of this or that particular entity or object but because of the very totality of the “what-is.” This what-is manifests its strangeness across the full range of Gillis’ awareness—through the objective presence of Gillis’s fellow crew members in deep sleep (Mitsein) as well as that of things no-longer-handy. If Gillis had been threatened, as a matter of life and death, by any (dead or living) things on board, he would have experienced fear. Instead, what threatens Gillis is the “what-is-in-totality” of the spaceship and all organic and inorganic entities therein. The pure Otherness of this world is threatening not because those entities are in any way outré or alien (like extraterrestrial beings), but because they are so familiar that, when their familiarity slips away, their objective presence emerges to reveal their uncanny strangeness. Suffocated by this existential Angst or dread, Gillis is only one step away from ending his life in a fit madness.
So he slept, and he jogged, and he ate, and he studied, and he played long and futile chess games, and otherwise did everything possible to pass the time as best he could. Every now and then he caught himself murmuring to himself, carrying on conversations with only his own mind as a companion; when that happened, he would consciously shut up. Yet no matter how far he managed to escape from himself, he always had to return to the silence of the ship’s corridors, the emptiness of its compartments.
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 131
He didn’t know it then, but he was beginning to go insane. (Steele 111-12)
Estranged from the world he is thrown into, Gillis consequently loses “the referential totality of significance (which is constitutive of worldliness)” (BT 179 [192]). For the world to obtain its worldly character, Dasein has to be a “practical subject” (Hall 24) that, through its encounter with things at hand, not only constitutes the innerworldly nature of other beings and entities but is itself constituted as being-in, as a thrown project. The worldly world, innerworldly entities, and thrown Dasein are mutually dependent, and equally primordial, in mapping out a context of relations to form an equipmental totality, one within which Dasein can understand itself despite the always present danger of “the lostness in the they-self” (BT 245 [266]). Gillis’s efforts to do “everything possible to pass the time as best he could” (Steele 111) suggest his attempts, desperate though futile, to engage in every possible way with things on the ship (whether it be a book to read, a floor to jog on, a data file to study, a chess game to play, even a bunker to sleep on) in order to rebuild the equipmental context that can help him regain a self-understanding through his being-in. The “referential totality” (BT 72 [77]) Gillis is eager to re-discover or re-claim in his non-thematic acts of self-absorption is the only support he can count on to withstand the oppression of the “what-is-in-totality” and to fight against the overwhelming affect of dread. Yet the harder he tries to keep his daily life in order through routine chores, the more all-pervasive becomes this dread lurking in the otherness of this no-more-worldly world. As there is no world that Gillis can fall prey to, he can only fall back onto himself, alone. What Gillis possesses for now are a lone self, a world in a shambles, and his own certain death. His going insane is, therefore, foreseeable and almost inevitable.
Yet Gillis seems to show neither the “joy” nor the “peace” that Heidegger always associates with Angst, a fact which gives Gillis’s dread a disconcerting twist. On one occasion, Heidegger says that “[t]ogether with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility” (BT 286 [310]); at another point he says it “would be truer to say that dread is pervaded by a peculiar kind of peace” (Heidegger, “What” 302). The latter statement refers to Dasein’s “transcendence” which dread helps to manifest. Dasein is not only “already beyond what-is-in-totality,” is not only the other of the what-is. In dread, Dasein is brought face to face with that which makes what-is is. “Peace,” therefore, is seen to derive from Dasein’s ontico-ontological experience of (or
attunement to) the condition that makes possible the totality of the what-is (304, 308).7 Aside from peace, “awe” (Scheu) also accompanies dread. Dread is not identical to fear since, in dread, one will stand in awe of “the marvel of all marvels: that what-is is” (309, italics original). Joy follows from Angst because, in its anticipation of death, Dasein is freed from its confinement to the They-world as it chooses its own potentiality-of-being as pure ownmost possibility.8 There thus arises “the resoluteness of ‘acting’” (BT 286 [310]), or the “courage” to “endure, as at home, in enduring” (Heidegger, “What” 309). What Angst unfolds is not joy in the sense of exuberance, but the joyful endurance of one’s being-there.
It would be easy to argue, however, that Gillis’s being on the Alabama all alone for thirty-two years is anything but a joyful or peaceful life. Although the story’s third part seems to imply a change in the his manner of dealing with dread as he starts writing fantasy stories on ledgers, the suggestion that he is thus able to gain joy or peace (in perhaps any sense of these terms), or even to achieve his transcendence, might seem unjustifiable. Giving few clues that could point to any form of affirmation (saying “yes, yes”) on Gillis’s part, the story discloses rather the futility and indeed absurdity of Gillis’s act of enduring. One example of this is his death scene.
If he could remember the correct commands, he might still be able to send a signal to Prince Rupert’s ship before it passed beyond range. He just needed to. . . .
His left foot missed the next rung on the ladder. Thrown off-balance, he glanced down to see what he had done wrong . . . then his right hand slipped off the ladder. Suddenly he found himself falling backward, his arms and legs flailing helplessly. Down, down, down. . . .
“Oh, no,” he said softly.
An instant later he hit the bottom of the shaft. There was a brief flash of pain as his neck snapped, then blackness rushed in upon him, and it was all over. (Steele 124,ellipses original)
7
Heidegger uses “ontic” to refer to the more common sense (or level) of “being” as the “being of beings,” whereas “ontological” refers to being qua being, or “being” in and of itself.
8
Heidegger’s term for the “authenticity” of a Dasein that resolutely “chooses” in this way,
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 133
Right before his death, Gillis is trying to establish communications with a fleeting dot of light he has seen through the window. Then the fleeting thought enters his mind that he is confusing this spot of light (if he really saw it) with the one he had seen thirty-two years earlier, and also mistaking it for the ship of Prince Rupert, the leading character in his fantasy stories. This slippage in his thinking is immediately followed by his physical slipping, fall, and death. The too “softly” spoken words are more like a murmuring to himself, words spoken to nothing and nobody. The sense of absurdity may seem to overshadow any feeling of joy or peace that might have been suggested. Gillis’s backward fall, with his hands and legs waving about uncontrollably, not only may remind us of Gregor Samsa as a giant insect (Ungeziffer)—one that also falls painfully from a wall at one point—in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” but, taken together with his dying words, reinforces the impression that Gillis’s death is trivial, and his endurance in and through writing, futile. The absurdity will be clearer when the story is read against the novel as a whole.
Gillis’s legacy, if there is any, consists of the thirteen ledgers (and an incomplete fourteenth one) filled with stories of Prince Rupert’s exile and adventures, and a few mural paintings on the ship walls as illustrations to the stories. One hundred and ninety-eight years after Gillis’s death, when the Alabama successfully lands on Coyote and its crew members are awakened from biostasis, their major interest in Gillis, the long-dead chief communications officer, centers on his note divulging the conspiracy and the identity of the saboteur. Gillis’s oeuvre, as it were, is mentioned only on occasions far and between. At one point we are told of a young man named Carlos whose Huckleberry-Finn-like passage is inspired by the Prince Rupert’s stories (272, 336, 342); at another point we hear that the stories are used indirectly to reveal to the saboteur’s daughter the truth about her father (381). Not until this latter occasion is the full title of Gillis’s work finally given: The
Chronicles of Prince Rupert. Gillis is only faintly remembered, largely for his
ill-fated thirty-two-year lonely life. Mentioned only sparingly and left to adolescent fancy, Gillis’s written legacy is never taken seriously by his comrades for its own sake, and never granted the status of an Aeneid-like founding myth of a new (outer-space) colony. Reading Gillis’s life against his afterlife, one can hardly shake off the sense of absurdity that saturates Gillis’s being-there (or his having-been-there, and perhaps his having-been-where).
As Gillis’s experience of dread entails a sense of futility, absurdity, and even horror (rather than merely joy, peace, or even awe), one would hesitate to say that the Heideggerian interpretation fits it. Heidegger says that “What Angst is anxious
for is being-in-the-world itself” and yet this world withdraws, “sinks away,” and thus Angst also “throws Dasein back upon that for which it is anxious, its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world” (BT 175-76 [187]). In the state of Angst or dread, then, Dasein is anxious for two things: one is its “being-in-the-world” and the other, its “potentiality-for-being-in-the-world.” Inherent to Angst, therefore, is a bi-directional trajectory. Angst not only takes away the world from Dasein, but throws it back upon its own potentiality. Put another way, Dasein is lifted above the world and then re-inserted into it, but this time with a different self-understanding. This bi-directionality or double-movement is made possible by Dasein’s attunement to the being-certain of its own death at an indefinite time in the future (BT 238 [258]). Since death has the character of “mineness” (BT 223 [240])—it can neither be shared with others nor be appropriated by any public interpretedness, the attunement to death will put Dasein in radical aloneness or “ownness” to reveal its own potentiality.
Therefore, Dasein’s thrownness has three phases. First, Dasein is thrown into the world, which constitutes its being-in the They-world; second, upon its attunement to death, Dasein is thrown out of the world; and, third, Dasein is thrown back upon its ownmost potentiality to be realized in the world. Although the last two, taken together, bespeak Angst’s trajectory, it is the first thrownness that grounds Angst more primordially. Without Dasein’s being thrown into the world in the first place, the other two phases could never have taken place. And Dasein’s ownmost potentiality is still for a world, still for being-in-a-world. That is, Dasein has to be thrown back into the world for its potentiality to be the “authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world” (BT 176 [187]). As one scholar puts it, “facticity [being-in] and thrownness [being-with] . . . are the existential counterparts of the ontological phenomena of the ‘Who’ and the ‘World’ which, of course, belong together in the unitary configuration being-in-the-world” (Macann 225). Yet the interpretation I would like to suggest here sees Gillis, in his “being-in,” as lacking just such a unitary configuration.
Gillis’s Being-In
Gillis, after all, is at first thrown not into the world but, awakening abruptly from the womb-like state of biostasis on a speeding spaceship, out of it. When revived from biostasis, he is thrown into a world whose worldliness is already in a
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 135
shambles. What he faces is a twofold situation.9 First, he is completely disconnected from the world that existed before the crew members had gotten on the spaceship, one whose “worldliness” (back on earth) was still grounded in his in-the-world as a Mitsein (with) or Mit-dasein (Dasein-with, being-together-with-other-Daseins). Second, upon awakening prematurely from biostasis Gillis is thrown into a world without worldliness, one with no beings or entities he can encounter or engage with, whereas Heidgger thinks that Dasein’s awareness of its own “who” is closely tied to this Mitsein and Mit-dasein. What Gillis is thrown into is not a state of being-in-the-world (or being-in-any-world), but merely one of being-in-death.10
Of course, Heidegger would not speak of “being-in-death.” Being-in is always in the world; once the world is not there, there is no being-in. In view of this observation, Gillis has already lost his (potentiality for) being-in the moment he is awakened. Yet let the perhaps paradoxical term “being-in-death” be kept here for a moment as a contrast to “being-in-the-world.” And the term, once kept, should be refined in order to clarify this contrast: instead of “being-in-death,” the proper term should be “being-in-being-certain-of-death-all-the-time.” Despite its awkward and seemingly unnecessary verbiage, the latter term will render intelligible three consequences of Gillis’s not “being-in-the-world.”
As no one, no single human being, can live for 230 years, Gillis will have to die on the ship no matter what. His own death is not only certain but also indefinite—thinking here too of the literal senses of fin (“end”) and finite—because he can never know with certitude beforehand the time (as well as the manner) of his death. Yet Gillis is not being-in-death, as no one in-death can still be. Rather, he is certain-of-death or, to be still more exact, he is being-in-being-certain-of-the-indefiniteness-of-death. Up to this point, there is no difference between Gillis and Dasein with regard to the double-movement in the relationship of Angst-death. The real difference springs up when this “all-the-time” comes into play.
For Heidegger, the being of truth is a “being certain,” but truth is a-letheia, “not-concealed,” and thus is itself constituted by the interplay or shadow-play of concealment and unconcealment (BT 202 [219], 204 [222], 236 [256]). Since death is indefinite, Dasein’s being-in the They-world provides an easy escape from the
9 Here we will not speak of the state of biostasis itself beyond saying that it would seem like something very death-like, very close to being dead.
10
certainty of death. While the “being-certain” corresponds to the movement of unconcealment, the “indefiniteness” corresponds to that of concealment. The attunement to death will never be a constant mood11 because Dasein always has various worldly concerns (Sorge) to take care of so as to forget (or conceal from itself) its own death. The point is that in the “normal” case of Dasein, there is no “all-the-time” but only a continued movement of alternation, of back-and-forth.
What then does it mean to be-certain-of-the-indefiniteness of death “all the time”? As Gillis has already lost his being-in due to his complete disconnection from the world—not just during biostasis but also, in a more conscious state, after waking up from it—he has no They-world as a last resort to allow himself to flee from the certainty of his death. To be brought face to face with the truth of his death “all the time,” Gillis is trapped in a situation where, upon losing the alternating movement or interplay of concealment-unconcealment, the truth has come into full presence and become stiflingly oppressive. Dread thus becomes a constant mood, one that forces Gillis to face his death without any escape. The first consequence of Gillis’s not “being-in-the-world” is his being oppressed by the truth all the time.
The attunement to death, in the normal case of Dasein, will make explicit Dasein’s freedom at two interdependent levels. At one level, Dasein is freed from the They-world through the individualizing effect of its “mineness” (“ownness”). At another, Dasein is brought back to its primordial freedom so that it can freely choose its ownmost potentiality-of-being. Death for Dasein is the final limit beyond which it can never be, yet within (before) this limit almost infinite possibilities await Dasein’s realization. Yet Dasein’s potentiality has to be put back again into the They-world so that it can be the “authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world” (BT 176 [187]). In contrast, Gillis’s being-thrown into a worldless world has a detrimental effect on his freedom. Rather than being freed from the They-world, Gillis is completely cut off from it. That is why he remains so attached to the They-world that had existed before he got on the ship (i.e. before his biostasis) that he avoids at first opening a box lest its contents (photographs, at least) “would make him only more miserable than he already was” (Steele 105); he does, however, open it later, when he decides to kill himself in order to end his “lonesome misery” (117). Gillis finds it difficult to enjoy a freedom that is, as it were, forced upon him, one that he has been thrown into on a worldless spaceship. He is therefore bound to choose the only choice left to him: the always and already sure death of his. If Gillis
11
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 137
has any freedom, it is a cursed one, and this bespeaks the second consequence of his not “being-in-the-world.”
When Gillis has decided not to kill himself and embarked on writing fantasy stories, this act, desperate and compulsive as it is, may arguably be taken as his eventually choosing his own potentiality through “the resoluteness of ‘acting’” (BT 286 [310]). Hence we may liken his writing to the joyful endurance of Dasein. Yet, given the fact that Gillis is remembered primarily not for his stories but for his note about the attempted act of political sabotage, his literary efforts are saturated with futility. With no world to support his oeuvre’s “re-insertion” (at least long after his death), Gillis’s potentiality, if any, can never become “the-potentiality-for-being-in-the-world.” Entirely losing his being-in, Gillis is doomed to have all his efforts to realize his potentiality, no matter how resolutely he made them while alive on the ship, turn out to have been finally, and entirely, futile. In a sense his situation is “for all of these efforts to have been futile”; this “to have been-ness” largely defines his situation, which brings us the third consequence of Gillis’s not “being-in-the-world.”
Gillis is, as it were, oppressed by the full presence of death, cursed by the freedom of having only one choice (to live-toward-death), and imprisoned in the futility of all his actions. In a lecture on Plato’s Sophist two years prior to Being and
Time, Heidegger says that being-in as “the preceding uncoveredness of the world” is
not just equiprimordial with the worldliness of the world that helps constitute “the universal connection of phenomena [the koinonia]” (qtd. in Batnitzky 322-23). Through the interrelational totality that derives from it, this being-in is also essential in allowing “beings to stand together as unique in their being—the community of
eidē” (Borgan 91),12 that is, in allowing Dasein to be itself the being of beings. Being-in-the-world, therefore, is “primordial [ursprünglich]” in a sense stronger than simply that of being “prior in time,” for it alludes to “the conditions of possibility” under which Dasein’s stance can be realized intelligibly (Taylor 333). As there is no world for Gillis to be in, thus rendering the conditions of (his) Dasein null and void, Gillis’s dread is bound to develop into a horror that is attuned to the impossibility of his being-there. Gillis’s story is not one about the horror of death, but rather one about the horror of being a lone Dasein whose worldliness is all in a
12 In this regard Tony Davis observes: “Each of us lives our human-ness as a uniquely individual experience; but that experience, we are asked to feel, is part of a larger, all-embracing humanity, a ‘human condition’. . . ” (21).
shambles. Or, to be exact, it is not a horror story of not being-in, but a horror story of no being-in.13
Gillis, Heidegger, and Science Fiction
In this way “The Days Between” can be understood as that of one man’s futile attempts to deal with the horror of his twofold thrownness—thrown out of his being-in(-the-world), and into the full and oppressive presence of his own death. The story is basically about the futility of all human efforts to deal with the horror of no being-in all the time. Yet, if this issue of being-in is crucial to the reading of the story via Heidegger, it also holds true for understanding Heidegger via the story. The point is that the story opens for us a way through which we might, not critique Heidegger’s system of thought, but read differently his concern with being-in-the-world. Heidegger is concerned with being-in, the world, and Mitdasein. Yet again we have the double-movement or the “two levels” when Heidegger says thatAngst “is anxious for . . . being-in-the-world itself” and so brings Dasein face to face with “its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world” (BT 175-76 [187]). Dasein’s separation from and reinsertion into the world of Mitsein (Mitdasein) account for Dasein’s existentiality in an essential way.
What Heidegger fails to concern himself with, however, is the existential situation where there is no being-in, no world, and no Mitdasein at all. What his analysis cannot (and need not) deal with is a world whose worldliness is completely in ruins, and where only a lone Dasein endures. It cannot deal with this because this worldless world lies already outside the scope of that which is always grounded on the primordiality of the world. It need not, because Gillis’ situation is so unique that
13
The sense of “horror” here must of course be distinguished from that of horror-story (horror-movie) where the psychological mechanism of fear predominates. Gillis’s story can hardly be read, or felt, as a horror story in this generic sense. In Being and Time Heidegger says: “When what threatens has the character of something completely unfamiliar, fear becomes horror” (BT 133 [142], emphasis added). True, it had already been said that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (Lovecraft 105). However, Heidegger’s discussion is guided by “fear (Furcht)” as an existential mode of attunement (Gestimmtheit) to which Angst also belongs, rather than as a matter of psychological “feeling tones” (BT 133 [142]). For Heidegger, fear, along with the horror it might become, is always a way of disclosing innerworldly beings as threatening and in as a being-threatened—that is, “fear predominantly discloses Da-sein in a privative way” (BT 133 [141]). Yet the horror of Gillis’s story is more horrifying than this, and might need be put in the context of the movement from “not-being-in” to “no-being-in.”
Lee / The Horror of Dasein 139
at the level of everydayness, Dasein can never be put in such a situation where “no being-in” will gain so full and enduring a presence. Yet it is to this can not and need
not of the Heideggerian being-in that the story of Gillis responds with an
affirmative yes. In the “The Days Between” Steele does give us a Dasein that endures its “no being-in” until it dies. In view of this, we may say that science fiction always has this generic capacity to put human beings in a situation where all phenomenal and experiential frameworks are temporarily suspended in order to reveal the skeletal remains of human existentiality (Pringle 9; Roberts 25). And the situation thus imagined can be so unique and radical that any genre having a generic footing on the primordiality of being-in-the-world need not, and perhaps dare not, deal with it. “The Days Between,” as it were, does cultivate and develop this generic capacity of science fiction.
In a sense the “limits” of sci-fi as a genre are implicit in its own inventions. Gillis’ own situation of “no being-in” may after all be seen as entirely a function of the scientifico-technological instrumentalization which was present-to-hand in the not-so-remote future imagined by the author. Heidegger was already concerned with the problem of technology in the 1940s (World War II). He speaks of the essence (Wesen) of technology as its capacity for “enframing” the world in such a way that we can no longer simply “dwell” in this world as we once did, can no longer be simply “at home in” this world as we once were, insofar as our dwelling places have been replaced by a universal world-space whose main function is to be easily instrumentalized, to be readily instrumentally useful (Heidegger, The Question 134).14 This point may seem to further justify, not just a Heideggerian “reading” of a science fiction story, but the implicit connection between, on the one hand, the sort of technologized or enframed-future-worlds self-critique that the sci-fi genre is uniquely qualified to undertake and, on the other hand, Heidegger’s own critique of technology. But inasmuch as Gillis could be seen as (a) Dasein shrouded in the horror of “no being-in”—something which Heidegger can hardly account for in
Being and Time, then the point is also that the Heideggerian critique of
technology—of a 20th-century technology that already in Heidegger is “opening into the future”—can get an extra impetus, an extra bounce from science fiction.
Moreover, inasmuch as science-fiction is a form of literary art, one would naturally think too of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Urpsrung des
14 One may think here too of Rilke’s line in the first Duino Elegy: “Even the resourceful animals certainly notice / that we are not at home (zu Haus), not reliably, / in the interpreted world” (ll. 11-13; Rilke 27).
Kunstwerks) in this context. Here he says, keeping in mind the notion of truth as
(the double-movement of) aletheia or “unconcealment,” that the artwork (e.g. painting or poem) is both closed (as “earth” and in some sense as “material thing”) and open (as “world”), where this openness-to-Being could also imply a temporal openness. For Heidegger art therefore can “save us” from technology: it can not only “warn us in an exemplary way of the essence of modern technology and its danger, homelessness,” but “disclose an altogether different conception of . . . a
dwelling place” (Wright 255, italics original). The ‘dwelling place” disclosed (uncovered, unconcealed) by art is “different” from that presupposed by technology, perhaps in part because it is not something “useful” (also Kant’s point about aesthetics), and because it “opens” as much (or more) into the past as (than) into the future.
But then the role of sci-fi as art is a special one. Insofar as sci-fi already has a special connection to or embedment in technology, and also to or in the future—that is, insofar as it is endowed with the capacity of “mortgaging the future” (Sardar 1), and already tends to deal with a “not being (spatially and temporally) any longer at home”—it can warn us in a very special way of the “essence of modern technology and its danger, homelessness,” and disclose to us “an altogether different conception of a dwelling place.” The question then becomes: To what degree might the power of sci-fi as an imaginative form of narrative, as a force of imagination, make of this future dwelling-place something quite different from a merely material-mechanical-technological one? For if literature has already been pushed to the margins due to its instrumental uselessness in a pragmatic society, science fiction has also already been placed in the margins of literature, in the margin of a margin. Yet precisely this position might give science fiction its own “saving power,” if not the power to provide us with “a new understanding of being,” at least the “power of insignificant things” whose practices may build cultural resistance to instrumental efficiency, thus suggesting a possible new paradigm (Dreyfus 310).15
Albert Camus has once said: “A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images” (199). Coyote may be a good read of science fiction, but hardly on a par with Camus’s remarks here. Yet one story therein, “The Days Between,” does furnish an unusual display. Though not a story unsurpassed for its artistic merits, it
15
At the moment, we also have to admit that it remains to be seen whether science fiction can finally harness the power comparable to, say, that of a sculpture, a temple, or Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes in disclosing and providing a “dwelling place” other than an instrumentalized world-space.
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is a “good” story in the sense as is meant by Camus: images pregnant with philosophy. Perhaps more than a good horror story of no being-in, “The Days Between” shows in what way science fiction can be made a good genre: to respond responsibly to a world as it ought, or ought not, to be.
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About the Author
Chia Yi Lee is Associate Professor of Literature at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His articles have appeared in Concentric and Journal of European and American Studies. E-mail: cyberik@mail.nctu.edu.tw
