I Wrote It Again Yesterday
“You wrote that?”
“Yesterday, as a matter of fact.”
“It was written by an Earth man named Shakespeare a long time ago!”
“Which does not alter the fact that I wrote it again yesterday!”
—Garth and Marta, referring to “Sonnet XVIII,” TOS, “Whom Gods Destroy”
The characters in the Star Trek universe do not just experience these texts as reading material, however. For them, the Great Books are worlds to be discovered in a variety of ways. One of the most logical types of literary immersion is theatrical performance. Shakespeare is a natural choice for literary performances, as his plays were meant to be performed on the stage rather than read in print form. We only have the texts thanks to the original actors who kept their scripts; the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was not published until 1623, seven years after his death. When actors are aboard the Enterprise, as when Anton Karidian’s acting troupe arrives in “The Conscience of the King” (TOS), theatrical performances are logical and expected. It is also unsurprising to see Shakespeare performed when the crewmembers are passing themselves off as a theatrical group, as they do in the two-part “Time’s Arrow” (TNG).
Plays are sometimes performed, though, in circumstances in which such presentations are not necessarily expected. The crew of the Enterprise engages in theatrical performances as personally enriching recreation, from Data playing Henry V (TNG, “The Defector”) or Prospero (TNG, “Emergence”), to the mentally upgraded Lt. Barclay playing Cyrano de Bergerac (TNG, “The Nth Degree”). The characters participate in these performances because they are fun, which attests to the continuing appeal of the great dramas.
Even historic texts not originally designed for performance become opportunities for role-play in the Star Trek universe. Frequently, the characters immerse themselves in the Great Books, even those that are not intrinsically dramatic. Rather, the stories are so valuable that they are integrated into the crew’s recreation and even their hallucinations. On the amusement-park planet of “Shore Leave,” Lewis Carroll’s Alice and her punctuality-challenged White Rabbit appear out of Dr. McCoy’s impression that the place resembles Wonderland. While under the influence of a mind-altering virus in “The Naked Time,” Mr. Sulu acts out his Alexandre Dumas sword-fighting fantasy. Authors from the past also get in on the act, as when Mark Twain and Jack London meet the Enterprise crew during their trip back in time to 1893 San Francisco (TNG, “Time’s Arrow” parts I and II).
Perhaps no tool is more useful to individuals hoping to meet beloved authors or to wander through their favorite books than the holodeck. Although Enterprise crewmembers can use the remarkable device and its fully realistic, computer-generated images to create any experience, from visiting their home worlds to engaging in exotic athletic competitions, they frequently use the holodeck as a tool for entering historic Earth books. The crewmembers apparently enjoy taking part in actual theatrical presentations, but the holodeck provides a more complete experience.
These literary excursions are often fairly true to the original texts, but they just as frequently allow the participants to alter the original texts, such as in Data’s efforts to create a truly challenging mystery for his Sherlock Holmes and Geordi La Forge’s Dr. Watson in “Elementary, Dear Data.” Ironically, such reader interaction and intervention in the story is not an experience only permitted by advanced technology; the actual course of the Holmes stories was affected by fan response among readers to whom Holmes was at least as real as a holodeck character, and maybe more so. When the story “The Final Problem” was published in 1893, in which Holmes presumably meets his death in the climactic struggle with his nemesis Moriarty, “Holmes’s death horrified the nation, and young City men that month put mourning crepe on their silk hats or wore black armbands.”6 The Strand magazine, which serialized the Holmes adventures, reportedly lost over twenty thousand subscriptions.
Clearly, those London readers were not Star Trek fans, or they would have been well aware that any death is hardly permanent for a beloved fictional character, from Mr. Spock to Data himself. Just as Data can control the Holmes adventure in the holodeck (at least until the holo-Moriarty comes on the scene), the fans clamored long enough and loud enough (and the promise of significant financial rewards was tempting enough) that Doyle resurrected Holmes in 1903, revealing that the intrepid detective had not actually died in the fateful encounter at Reichenbach Falls. Just as Data alters the Holmes adventures to suit him, readers have produced a variety of theories about what Holmes was doing while his fans believed him dead. Even without the aid of twenty-third-century holographic technology, readers in the past have entered, and perhaps even controlled, the stories that their favorite characters inhabit, including the stories entered by the crew of the Enterprise.
“Actually, I Never Read It”
Even without actually reading the classic texts, Star Trek characters seem to be so fully immersed in the stories and characters that their conversations are saturated with references to the Great Books. Many of these references are mere colloquialisms, such as the numerous biblical allusions scattered throughout original series episodes such as “The Apple” and films such as Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, or the use of literary names, like that of Ensign (later Commander) Pavel Chekov, whose name is a salute to the famous Russian playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Undoubtedly, a tremendous number of the phrases incorporated into colloquial speech are from literature. Shakespeare coined thousands of words and phrases, many of which people use without any intent of quoting the Bard of Avon. Shakespeare “filled a universe with words,” so it is only appropriate that his language continues into the universe with futuristic space explorers.7
Other uses of the Great Books as references are far more intentional, demonstrating that even when literary phrases have been absorbed into language, there are some who will recall their origins, as when Spock, trying out his newly restored memory in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, correctly identifies Dr. McCoy’s glib use of the lines “angels and ministers of grace defend us” as originally coming from Hamlet, Act I, Scene IV. When the Shakespeare-obsessed General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country belts out quotations from plays including The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet (which also provides the title of the film, taken slightly out of context, as Hamlet refers to death rather than to the future as “the undiscovered country”), he is clearly aware of their origins.
The literary scholar Harold Bloom, who claims that Shakespeare actually invented our notions of personality, proclaims that “Shakespeare will abide, even if he were to be expelled by the academics.”8 Regardless of what is on the reading list for future institutions of higher learning, Shakespeare remains the most popular poet among a crew whose members’ specialties range from engineering to medicine to navigation; no Enterprise has a literary officer, and the Klingons are certainly the last species one might expect to see establishing a humanities department, yet every character seems to have enough grounding in the canon of ancient English literature to at least pass a multiple-choice final in an undergraduate survey class. Even when they may not specify or correctly identify the exact textual reference, the characters in Star Trek demonstrate an uncanny familiarity with the elements of the Great Books. Thus, although Captain Picard is concerned that he might not remember the Epic of Gilgamesh well enough to tell it to the Tamarian captain in “Darmok,” he gives a fantastic rendition of it, reflecting the ways in which the ancient story has been embedded into the very structure of the culture, as well as into Picard’s own personal experiences.
Ironically, the way in which literary references appear in the Star Trek universe mirrors the way in which references from Star Trek (and other popular culture staples) crop up in our own discussions, although such references might make us as incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with Star Trek as the Tamarians are to the Federatio
n. Those people who are not well versed in Western popular culture would be as baffled by conversations including “My day went by at warp speed” or “Make it so” as Picard is by the statement “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” It is intriguing that Star Trek characters do not use popular cultural allusions from movies and television shows of the twentieth century but from books that have already taken on historical significance in our own time period. Some of these allusions are far less familiar to many twentieth- and twenty-first-century people than lines lifted from our own popular media would be. Although some Star Trek characters, notably Voyager’s Lt. Tom Paris and Deep Space Nine’s commanding officer Benjamin Sisko, do have a fondness for our popular culture, the general absence of allusions to television or movies in favor of Shakespearean or other literary sources attests to the lasting power of the Great Books.
This power seems to live on even in dire circumstances, such as the post–Third World War era of 2063 when Lily Sloane admits she’s never actually read Moby Dick, after calling Captain Picard “Ahab” to shock him into the best course of action in Star Trek: First Contact. Yet, even without ever having read the book, Lily is acquainted enough with the character of Ahab to know her jibe will galvanize Picard. Thus, the elements of the great texts of history are already woven into the fabric of life and experience, so it’s no wonder that by the twenty-third century the process of embedding text into life has continued, with the revival of human culture bringing with it a new interest in books.
Dammit Jim, I’m a Doctor, Not a Literary Historian!
Beyond the characters reading actual historic books or using them for allusions in their conversations, the Star Trek adventures are frequently built upon the literary scaffolding of these texts, whether it’s Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew—which provides the framework for “Elaan of Troyius” (TOS)—or the Lewis Carroll–inspired parallel or “mirror” universe in which the Federation is a vicious empire and Spock has a beard. Such scaffolding usage is a staple of popular culture, and, with episodes such as “A Piece of the Action” (TOS) and “The Royale” (TNG), Star Trek frequently attests to the power of the written word to influence and even control our lives and cultures. In the world of Star Trek, the most intriguing literary scaffolding is actually a double scaffolding that reflects both competing ideologies and literary histories.
In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Admiral Kirk and his old adversary, the genetically engineered “superman” Khan, are not only operating from the basis of conflicting moral and social codes but also from opposing literary backdrops. Kirk reads and quotes from the alchemical drama of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, while Khan spouts lines from the revenge tragedy of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. When Kirk asks Spock if there is a message in his old friend’s choice of A Tale of Two Cities as a birthday gift, he is establishing this opposition of texts. He reads: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the novel’s opening, the beginning of probably the best-written and best-known run-on sentence in all of literature, which includes seven paired opposites:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope. It was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.9
The number seven, of course, is one whose symbolism resonates throughout all of literature, but it also resonates in the world of Star Trek. The television series that were ended voluntarily were concluded after seven seasons, the core crew of each incarnation in three of the series numbers seven, and the cinematic transition from Kirk’s generation to Picard’s takes place in the seventh film. The pairing of opposites is also a central underpinning of the entire Star Trek canon, from the concept of a mirror universe and alternate realities to the pairing of unlikely characters in professional and personal relationships. Just as Dickens sets up London and Paris as foils for each other, Kirk and Khan function in opposition, and the texts they choose for their personal story scaffolds are notable for their contrast to each other not only in their contents but also in their individual publication histories.
Kirk’s birthday present, the iconic novel A Tale of Two Cities, and his connection with the physical text is reflected in his internalization of the story. The novel was a roaring commercial success upon its initial release as a serial publication in 1859. Although interest in Dickens’s work has, over time, waxed and waned with trends in criticism and taste, he was a popular and beloved author during his lifetime, with a fan following to rival that of a modern movie star. A Tale of Two Cities was a best seller, appealing to readers at both ends of the sophistication scale. It is also an alchemical drama, a story in which opposites, like those of the opening sentences, are resolved to create something new. One of the best-known literary examples of an alchemical drama is Romeo and Juliet, in which the children of two opposing families collide, are destroyed, and in their deaths, bring about the peace that has eluded Verona for so long. Dickens, who was a reader and admirer of Shakespeare, appears to have very deliberately crafted A Tale of Two Cities on the alchemical scaffolding used by the Bard: “Dickens is writing according to strict alchemical formula. . . . The famous opening announces that the book is about contraries and contrasts.”10
Unlike Kirk’s, Khan’s literary scaffolding comes from a novel, and an author, with a far less stellar history. When Commander Chekov studies the scant bookshelf on the wreck of the Botany Bay on Ceti Alpha V, he sees the Augments’ tiny collection of Great Books, including Khan’s favorite book, Paradise Lost; this is the text he had quoted (to the bafflement of Montgomery Scott) fifteen years earlier upon his sentence of exile in the episode “Space Seed” and which includes the classic declaration, made by John Milton’s Satan, that it is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. However, the obsessed Khan admires another book on his shelf, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Widowed, marooned, revenge-maddened Khan Noonien Singh is no longer building his own story around that of Milton’s noble and militaristic fallen angels, nor even around the publication history of Paradise Lost itself; rather, he has chosen a new template that reflects his changed circumstances in its publication history and narrative. Paradise Lost allowed John Milton to rise almost immediately from a blind, discouraged political pariah to what Alfred, Lord Tennyson called “a name to resound for ages.”11 By contrast, the publication of Moby Dick nearly destroyed Melville’s career, partly because it was originally published without the epilogue that explained that the narrator, Ishmael, survived the Pequod’s sinking. Even with corrected later printings, the novel’s genius was not recognized until well into the twentieth century.
Similarly, Khan went from a confident world dictator who viewed himself as rising to a new challenge to an egomaniac with only revenge fueling him. Khan, with his perceived genetically superior mind and body, is left with his followers on Ceti Alpha V, and he is now a bitter, broken captain who steps easily into the shoes (or one shoe and one ivory peg leg) of another captain, and he even steals some of his best lines. Khan repeatedly quotes Melville’s Captain Ahab, referring to Kirk with Ahab’s lines about the great white whale that evades him and whose pursuit destroys Ahab and his ship and all of his crew, except Ishmael, who is left alive to tell the tale. As he launches the Genesis device, presumably to destroy both himself and the Enterprise, Khan hisses out part of Ahab’s last speech, made as he hurls his harpoon at his adversary and is tossed into the sea and to his death: “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
Like Khan, the text of Moby Dick is unabashedly dramatic, with blatant stage directions included in the chapter headings toward the book’s end. Khan’s bombastic, but ultimately appropriate, demeanor is thus a reflection of the book he has embraced.
Eve
n if we didn’t expect our heroic admiral to win the day, the choices of literary templates made by Kirk and Khan immediately set up the film’s final outcome. Kirk, as popular and as accessible as the beloved Dickens, is made new by the sacrifice of his friend that, like Sydney Carton’s in A Tale of Two Cities, has all the traits of an alchemical drama: the opposing forces of Spock’s selflessness and Khan’s selfishness collide, destroying them both, but in the process, it ushers in a new creation foreshadowed by false deaths and resurrections early on in the story, a technique also used by Dickens. Khan, like Captain Ahab, “manage[s] to kill everyone else” along with himself. He dies thinking he has taken Kirk with him, but he retains the grandeur that makes him one of the most enduring of all Star Trek villains: like “Ahab . . . mad though he is . . . is a grand figure.”12 Denied the ultimate revenge (even Spock doesn’t stay dead), Khan sets in motion an ongoing rejection of the Melvillian formula.
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