by Eric Wargo
As with Finnegan, Robertson’s own prophetic gift was a fickle and ambiguous one, and he seems to have thought that drink was a necessary tool to get in touch with his muse. He felt unable to write when his muse was not available, which probably drove him to drink more to get it back, in a kind of vicious cycle. Robertson regarded himself, and was regarded by his many friends, as a kind of tragic psychic, constantly frustrated that his prophetic gift could not somehow redeem him. Several friends (writing in a 1915 volume called Morgan Robertson the Man ) referenced Robertson’s psychic interests and ability, although oddly enough, none of them mentioned his most uncanny prophecy about the Titanic , nowadays his only claim to fame. (Eisenbud assumes this lacuna is probably because such mention would have seemed in bad taste, just three years following the disaster.) Somehow fate always ensured that Robertson’s gift of seeing the future brought him misery in the end. Although Robertson saw alcohol as an escape from these punishments, his addiction was clearly just as much responsible for them.
Very sadly, alcohol addiction left Robertson, in his early fifties, a destitute and forgotten failure in his own eyes. He died three years after the Titanic disaster, in 1915, at age 54, in an Atlantic City New Jersey hotel room—where, according to a New York Times account, he had been staying for some time following a nervous breakdown. He was found, oddly enough, standing up , leaning against a bureau. It is likely that Robertson was actually staying in the hotel in an attempt to detox from alcohol. The examining physician attributed his death to heart failure, but a bottle of a sedative called paraldehyde was on the bureau next to him, which the Times reported he had been taking to help induce sleep. In fact, this medication was widely prescribed at the time to treat alcohol addiction. It would have been probably his third attempt seeking medical help for his drinking. 9 Unfortunately, people who tried this cure for their alcohol addiction readily became addicted to paraldehyde, and sometimes they ended up taking it in such excess as to cause organ damage. It is thus possible that paraldehyde addiction directly contributed to Robertson’s death.
Unavoidable disasters lurking in the fog of the future were a big theme for Robertson. In a short autobiographical piece published anonymously in The Saturday Evening Post a year before his death, “Gathering No Moss,” the writer describes a remarkable interlude in his life that probably occurred sometime shortly after the turn of the century—one that, like his stories, centers thematically on the idea of foresight but the ultimate futility of avoiding obstacles ahead. Feeling creatively dried up, he said, he visited “a noted professor of psychology [who] had done some wonderful things by hypnotic suggestion” 10 —although it is likely that the problem for which Robertson sought help on this occasion, too, was his alcohol addiction. The professor, who knew Robertson’s work, diagnosed him, he wrote, with “brain fag”—“I had overtaxed my brain in trying to invent too many stories”—and turned his attention to the topic of great inventions, with the idea of turning his creativity in a new direction.
The suggestion manifested itself in an unexpected way—it always does. I had to write another story to get a needed hundred and fifty dollars, and I went down the coast many miles to consult a naval officer, a friend, about a new feature that had been added to a battleship. While there I was taken on board a submarine boat which happened to be at anchor in that particular bay. It was then I got the idea of my first invention—the periscope. 11
A periscope, of course, is a technical solution designed to do precisely what Finnegan’s sixth sense did: “see” what lies ahead, out of sight, in hopes of averting disaster. In keeping with his beliefs about fate and providence, Robertson saw his visit to the naval base as fortuitous:
Now, I believe that nothing but hypnotic suggestion could have made me go down there to see an officer and then find the very thing needed to turn my thoughts to a new channel of invention. If I had gone at any other time the submarine boat would not have been there. Those things are not coincidences. Though no one has definitely located it, I firmly believe there is a law behind them. You cannot make me believe that when one man is thinking of another, and just at that moment sees him coming round a corner, it is a coincidence. It occurs too often. 12
With the Navy’s blessing, Robertson spent the next few years learning physics and optics sufficiently to create a design and model of the new device in order to win a patent for it—hopefully then to rescue him and his then-new wife from their always-dire financial straits. But fate crushed his hopes for a better future when his patent was denied. A French writer had already substantially described such a device in a magazine article, and while the man had not actually made a design for it, it was enough to make the idea public property.
Robertson describes returning to his typewriter after this heartbreak as the saddest moment of his life. So, here in real life, just like in many of his stories, Robertson attributed his actions to a kind of providence, but unlike the case of happy-go-lucky Finnegan, that providence fails to redeem him and indeed only brings him deeper misery in the end.
The foregoing details are virtually always omitted when Robertson’s Futility is held up as an example of literary prophecy (only to be debunked in many cases), but it arguably adds much weight to the “yes, it was prophetic” column of the balance sheet. Robertson’s (now-) most famous novel was not some random textual dolphin caught by accident in the tuna trawling of hindsight. It happens to be just the most notable instance in the life of a writer who already thought he was guided by a subliminal sixth sense, caught in a world ruled by coincidence, and was even noted by others for his preternatural—but simultaneously “useless”—ability to discern the future in his writings.
The Sublimest Object
The Titanic disaster was remarkably similar to 9/11 in that it was a “media event,” one that unfolded slowly over the day of April 15, 1912, as news trickled in; it was not a single devastating headline as we may now imagine. The first abbreviated telegraph reports indicated only that the ship had struck an iceberg, not that it had been lost, and some of the first news stories inaccurately reported that the ship was safely being towed to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Only gradually did the public learn the true magnitude of the disaster and loss of life. Thus, as with 9/11, the public engaged with the news as an unfolding story, producing a sequence of greater and greater shocks. It would have brought families together in conversation and brought coworkers together over the 1912 equivalent of the water cooler. People would have taken a kind of ambivalent pleasure in the news—eagerly read the story and talked about it, feeling a complex mix of curiosity and fascination and excitement and horror. In other words, they would have “enjoyed” the disaster in precisely the same way cable news audiences “enjoyed” 9/11.
The Titanic trauma has stuck in the craw of our culture for over a century because of these conflicting and unresolved emotions. The endless historical studies, TV documentaries, novels, movies, robotic undersea investigations, and so on could be thought of as the same kind of repetition compulsion underlying commemoration of other historical traumas like the Civil War or the Holocaust. For Slavoj Žižek, in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology , the wreckage of the Titanic , which had finally been discovered by Robert Ballard just four years earlier, was the quintessential “sublime object” of our era, reminding viewers of their awful enjoyment-in-destruction. Readers of Time and other magazines featuring the story gazed on the shadowy photos of the ship’s ruins looming out of the gloom with the precise mixture of emotions captured in the term jouissance , a spooked fascination or even a kind of vertigo. “By looking at the [Titanic ] wreck,” wrote Žižek, “we gain an insight into the forbidden domain, into a space that should be left unseen: visible fragments are a kind of coagulated remnant of the liquid flux of jouissance , a kind of petrified forest of enjoyment.” 13
Subjecting the Titanic disaster, and Robertson’s curious prophecy about it, to a kind of Lacanian re-reading, Žižek argued that the sinking of the ocean liner n
eeded to be properly viewed in hindsight as something inevitable, and that its inevitability (rather than its unexpectedness) was partly the source of its traumatic impact. He has a point: Far from being unthinkable, the disaster had in some sense (and the sheer number of prophecies, even published fiction, show it) been overthought in advance. 14 Some disaster or comeuppance befalling the blithe elite, as well as a disaster involving an ocean liner with too-few lifeboats, was easy to imagine, if not exactly anticipate with the specificity that Robertson did.
As a Marxist, Žižek might have gone one step further and highlighted the role played by guilt in the Titanic story: The trauma was not simply that everyone had been expecting some spectacular disaster to befall the rich; the trauma was that they had actually been wishing for such a disaster and then were somewhat horrified to find their wishes fulfilled. When they saw the bold New York Times headline, “TITANIC SINKS FOUR HOURS AFTER HITTING ICEBERG,” many readers may have felt a vague guilt for dimly-held class resentments aimed at the cosmopolitan elite they often read about in the same paper’s society pages. Those names now dominated the headlines as either having perished in or (if they were women) survived the disaster. Readers may even have felt on some very dim unconscious nonrational level that their wishes/desires had actually caused the iceberg to sink the ship. That was another of Freud’s brilliant and enduring insights: The unconscious ( which appropriately he likened to the submerged, dangerous majority of an iceberg) is completely illogical; it lacks a rational sense of time, causality, and responsibility. We feel guilty when outcomes we have only dimly hoped or wished for come to pass. 15
The “rewards” for Morgan Robertson on that big news day in April 1912 would have been even greater than for most. Beyond just surviving the disaster (in the same sense that all Americans that day had “survived”), there was also reward precisely in the fact that he had seemingly foretold it in a novel—not to mention what that foretelling implied about the immutability of fate. That New York Times headline came at a point in his life when he was feeling like a forgotten failure, with deepening shame at the wreck drink had made of his life and prospects. Whether or not Robertson knew of the block universe idea formulated by Minkowski in 1908, the Titanic ’s sinking would have been a stunning but welcome confirmation of precisely what his drugged protagonist Rowland had railed against just before the Titan ’s fatal collision: the inevitability of things and the futility of attempting to avert cruel necessity. The Titanic ’s “measurement” of the iceberg yielded confirmation that the universe was itself a big cold solid iceberg-like mass. Glimpsing this truth, as Eisenbud suggested, would have provided a much-craved sense of absolution. Remember that while the iceberg destroys the fictional Titan and most of its passengers, the iceberg is what saves the author’s stand-in, Rowland (along with little Myra).
It is important to underscore that the Titanic disaster would have had this absolving meaning for Robertson precisely because he had already described it in his own novel—our old friend the time loop. We might thus see Rowland’s grim soliloquy on the inevitability of fate as the future train of thought that would dominate Robertson’s mind 14 years later, when real-life events turned his novel into a prophecy, the same way the “Irma” dream in 1895 may have pre-presented thoughts Freud would have 28 years later, upon a similar realization.
Because they overlook Robertson’s obsession with immutable fate and the foreknowledge it somehow makes possible, and because they fail to take into account the likely state of Robertson’s mind as he entered his sixth decade, nearly all the efforts to calculate the odds of the details in Robertson’s story coinciding with those of the real Titanic disaster greatly miss the point—and not just because the problem is ill-formed, as Martin Gardner contended. Robertson’s entire life and work seems to have been one long premonition of a disaster looming in the fog of his future, unavoidable because of the inexorable laws of cruel necessity, but also rewarding to him precisely because of that inevitability . It expressed perfectly the logic of jouissance , as a kind of catastrophe that brings us a reward along with it. Zeroing in on specifics of passenger capacity, tonnage, etc. is to miss this meaningful forest for the statistical trees. When the Titanic sank, it was the ultimate sign from the universe that there was nothing poor Morgan Robertson could have done different.
Thus, rather than read the title Futility in a somber, grave, tragic voice, we might imagine that Robertson inwardly would have pronounced that word with a sense of grim triumph, a kind of “I told you so.”
Robertson the Woman?
With prophecy, we are in a Freudian as well as an Einsteinian universe, and thus the psychological or psychodynamic dimensions to Robertson’s prophetic life may go even deeper than shame at an addiction. The world of Robertson’s fiction is mostly a sweaty fantasy of manly seamen pressed into service, constantly bloodying each other in brutal fistfights. In his autobiographical moments, the writer was unrelenting in his assertion of his masculinity and his derision for effeminacy. But as Eisenbud notes, “if you scratch an intense masculinity, you can never tell what will come out.” 16 Eisenbud suspected that the writer may have abused alcohol to escape from or cope with the same (at the time) unspeakable sexual orientation that Eisenbud’s precognitive clergyman patient also struggled with. He interpreted Robertson’s hyper-masculine pose as an overcompensation and a defense, suggesting that it may have been precisely this forbidden desire that drove Robertson to choose a life of the sea for a decade as a young man, yet spend the rest of his life writing of that career as though it were a kind of grim fate he could not avoid. Eisenbud hastens to remind us that, in that much more repressed time, the writer himself may not consciously have been aware of such an orientation; he may have experienced it merely as a general pain, frustration, and unhappiness.
Eisenbud also diagnosed Robertson, even more confidently, with an overwhelming Oedipus complex. There is little or nothing in the way of convincing sexuality or sexual feeling (either hetero- or homo-) in Robertson’s stories. Many of his protagonists pine for young girls met as children who, after many years at sea and through some impossible coincidence, turn up as sole survivors of shipwrecks or otherwise amazingly reenter the protagonist’s life. 17 Some of his love interests are mother figures; in one case, a sailor pines for his mother who he knows is awaiting his return. 18 One could add to the generational confusions also blatant castration symbolism, such as lost arms. As everyone steeped in Freud or the Star Wars trilogy knows, losing an arm is a classic castration symbol. (Significantly, it is upon the cold, Minkowskian iceberg itself that poor Rowland’s arm is fatally maimed—it saves him, but it exacts an awful price.) Robertson’s life story, as he told it himself, was that of the typical neurotic: a story of being thwarted, cut off , unable to capitalize or benefit from his efforts and his gifts. 19 We know little about his father, but one senses a great and thunderous “no” rolling through the writer’s life.
There was also the theme of blindness. Remember that Robertson’s eyesight, which began failing him in his early thirties, had forced him to abandon his second chosen career as a jeweler, and blindness was a theme in some of his stories. Blindness is another classic castration symbol, according to Freud, and the template for the “blind prophet” goes back to the ancients, including the mythological backstory of Freud’s favorite tragedy Oedipus the King . That story is in some sense just as relevant to the tragic life of Robertson as it is to that of Freud, but in a very different way.
Oedipus’s self-blinding when he realizes his own guilt links him to the blind seer Tiresias, who announces the king’s guilt at the end of the tragedy. Audiences would have known the mythological backstory of the seer and his blindness, just as they knew that of Oedipus. In his younger days, Tiresias had come upon two entwined snakes in the forest and touched them with his staff; upon doing so, he was transformed into a woman. After living as a woman for seven years, Tiresias encountered the snakes again, touched them, and was turned back into a
man. Summoned to Mount Olympus to report on his experience, he revealed to Hera, in front of her husband Zeus, that (based on his extensive experience) women get much more enjoyment from sex than men do. Hera blinded him in punishment for revealing this secret, and Zeus gave him prophetic foresight in recompense. Tiresias thus reveals an ancient symbolic association between these two ideas, prophecy and sexual/gender liminality or boundary-crossing. 20
The symbolism of the Sphinx, the guardian whose riddle Oedipus had to answer to become King (and thus to marry his mother), is also relevant here. Sphinxes are symbolic guardians of time, 21 and not accidentally, sphinx is closely related to the word sphincter : a guardian (literally a “strangler”) designed to mainly admit the passage of things in one direction but sometimes capable of admitting other things traveling in reverse. As I hinted earlier, suggesting that the normal order of causality can be transgressed arouses similar hostile reactions from skeptical guardians of Enlightenment science that the prospect of a phallus—the ultimate “causal arrow”—moving the wrong way through a sphincter arouses in gatekeepers of patriarchal “Christian” morals. In a sense, Oedipus and Tiresias were permutations of the same basic possibility—transgression of some kind of sexual boundary, punished by symbolic castration but also (at least in Tiresias’s case) compensated with foresight. Transgressive enjoyment, which “impossibly” connects the future to the past, is thus what turns precognition into a psychoanalytic problem. As with Tiresias, the point of Oedipus’s story is not merely that he “traveled the wrong way through time” by marrying his mother and killing his father; it is that he committed these crimes and enjoyed them , and only belatedly discovered what it was that he had been enjoying. His guilt was not over his actions but over his enjoyment. Our ignorance as to our enjoyment (that is, our blindness to it) allows both the past and future to affect our lives in uncanny and seemingly “impossible” ways like the kinds of coincidences and twists of fate that seem to have characterized Robertson’s life.