Lord of the Afternoon

by Pablo Capanna Lord of the Afternoon

  The success of Lindner’s innovative therapy allowed Linebarger to overcome his delirium. Another approach might have compelled him to “adapt” to society, which would have entailed abandoning his powerful capacity for fantasy. This would not have led to the overcoming of contradiction but simply opting for one of its extremes, in this case the more socially acceptable of the two. The patient identifies with his determinations again, but his desire for totalization is inhibited.

  Lindner acted in the best way possible, in accordance with the criteria that a philosopher formulates in the following way: “It is useless to want to strip existence of mythical representations, of utopias and uchronias, of poetic dreams that penetrate all of its parts. In addition, it would be catastrophic to do so. Yet it is supremely important that one dream consciously, such that the imaginary world and the relation of identification with totality do not eliminate the real world and all mediations are allowed to endure.”23

  Paul was able to overcome “Kirk’s” dream without sacrificing his creativity, subsequently devoting his energies to constructing an imaginary world in which he no longer ran the risk of becoming alienated. The work of “Cordwainer Smith” would not be a new fantasy but rather an elaborate literary fiction, which the humor that colors it and the allegories that anchor it in its historical time make undeniably clear.

  With his first stories, Cordwainer Smith leaves the world of Kirk Allen behind and embraces the historical present. In these tales, however, the realistic context is accentuated by humor, which acts as a solvent, or rather a relativizing agent, when confronting the Absolute.

  The Beyond of “Angerhelm” or the incomprehensible future of “No, No, Not Rogov!” embody the mystery that irrupts in a world of technological efficiency and leaves military officials and politicians dumbfounded.

  In “When the People Fell”, the geopolitics of Mao Zedong, who proposed Chinese demographics as a potential weapon, is taken to an absurd extreme.

  In “Mark Elf” two weapons appear which no one can control. One is the menschenjager, the manhunter-machine created by the Nazis, a caricature of racist insanity programmed to destroy whoever does not think in German. The other is the “Kaskaskia effect”, an American weapon (it is named after a city in Illinois) that paralyzes everything “except pure and simple-minded men, and animals.”

  In “Western Science Is So Wonderful,” a naïve genie overwhelmed with admiration for the heights of American achievement (a lighter, a watch, and a delivery truck) is treated ironically.

  “The Fife of Bodidharma” asks the question: Will our civilization be mature enough to deserve powers that require prudence and wisdom?

  This skeptical phase ends around 1960, with the appearance of the underpeople.

  In the progression of figures that Hegel presents in the Phenomenology of Spirit, skepticism is followed by “unhappy conscience”. In Hegelian Gnosticism, this figure personifies the Christian experience.

  History and common sense suggest that skepticism is born both of the erosion of dogma due to rationalism and the secularization of customs. Nevertheless, for Hegel, the more religious a person becomes, ironically, the more skeptical he is. In the wake of an experience that resulted in the discovery of the contingency of the world, the skeptic falls back on faith, searching for an absolute that will allow him to feel rooted again. The axiological vacuum (Nietzsche’s “nihilism”) ultimately becomes unbearable. 24

  In the aforementioned skeptical phase, Cordwainer Smith learned to doubt political legitimacy, the cult of science and technology, and a form of justice that he saw as more proclaimed than respected. Soon he would learn that truth too is rarely on the side of the powerful.

  In the first stories, the Instrumentality appeared as an inscrutable power immune to skeptical doubt. Now, however, it begins to reveal itself as an unjust institution, one that is decadent and doomed to failure.

  It could be said that by rejecting the Instrumentality, Cordwainer Smith was denying the imperial power it symbolized, which anyone familiar with psychoanalysis would agree. The basis of this negation is not ideological, though, but religious.

  The epic of the underpeople becomes uncontainable as political circumstances change and the underpeople acquire a different status. God appears to be on their side, toppling the mighty and exalting the humble, like in the Magnificat. When Martin Luther King was at the peak of his career, Linebarger wrote “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”, an apology for active non-violence. At this point he seemed to believe that mobilization of moral power would be capable of encouraging authentic political reform. In the fiction it is what ultimately undermines the technocratic control of the Instrumentality and establishes a new focus of power.

  As non-violent struggle seemed to overcome the obstacles of school integration in the United States, Smith’s fiction mentions concessions that the Instrumentality makes: the civil rights of the underpeople and the Rediscovery of Man.

  Beyond politics, Cordwainer Smith ultimately entrusts the underpeople with nothing less than the salvation of humanity, appropriating the biblical theme of the poor and humiliated as redeemer.

  As a narrator, Cordwainer Smith sides with the underpeople. Still, this does not prevent him for showing tolerance toward the Instrumentality and even justifying its cruelty.

  “Under Old Earth” brings this tension to the fore. The conservative Sto Odin traces a thought-provoking historical parallel: after asking himself what the happiness that the ancient Americans chased after so maniacally on their interstates might have been, he wonders what the meaning of the life offered by the Lords is. He concludes that the Instrumentality has failed in its mission to make men and women happy. While it has granted them security, it has taken away their freedom.

  Sto Odin is a stand-in for the author. Like Smith, he is sick and knows his days are numbered. He condemns a “happiness” in the name of which the Instrumentality is exhausting the vital forces of the human race: the consummation of comfort that for the Carola of the 20th century summed up the whole of civilized life.

  Not only does Sto Odin think that “happiness” understood solely as material security is a spurious objective, he is convinced of the senselessness of imposing it.

  Before dying, he decides to interrogate the rebels of the system so that he can hear “their” truth. To do this, he descends “to the underworlds” and visits hidden places where insane people and non-conformists are confined. Elaine also descends to the catacombs of Kalma, while Rod MacBan visits the bowels of Earthport.

  Lord Sto Odin dies without renouncing the old order, and it could even be argued that he sacrifices his life defending it. Centuries of service to the Instrumentality prevent him from changing. But even after snuffing out the flame of Dionysian religiosity, the anarchy for which the oppressive order of the system is itself responsible, he does not feel particularly triumphant, aware that summa nulla est, “the sum is zero”, or in other words some win and some lose. The answer will come from Santuna, saved by Sto Odin from destruction and entrusted with the mission of the Rediscovery. Sto Odin could not stifle the rebellion: he was only able to redirect it.

  Reconciled identity

  In his final phase Cordwainer Smith dared to penetrate deeply into such ambitious subject matter as the fate of humankind and the meaning of history.

  Despite the skeptical irony that continues to resound in the voices of some Lords and Ladies, this represents the last synthesis that Linebarger will realize before his premature death.

  There is little sense in speculating how his thinking would have evolved if he had lived to witness what the 20th century still held in store for us. His friend Arthur Burns insisted that Mao’s Cultural Revolution would not have taken him by surprise. If he were still around today he probably would not have been shocked to see that China is still China and has become a rival of the United State
s, as his teacher Stapledon predicted. The fall of the Berlin Wall certainly would not have caught him off guard, nor would the fact that the Guomindang argued for the reunification of China. Without a doubt, post-modernism and all it entails would have reminded him of the Rediscovery of Man. I imagine he would have applauded Barack Obama.

  The final identity that Linebarger assumed was “Cordwainer Smith”. It is the one that allowed him to reconcile himself to his historical present and give voice to his most intimate philosophical concerns.

  The texts from this period are characterized by an existentially toned reflection on death and love. Death is conceived as the stigma of finiteness and emblem of the human condition, while love is the antagonist of mortality and vector of eternity. This meditatio mortis has Christian roots, although in the 20th century it was de rigueur to reduce it to Existentialism and the Hegelian “unhappy conscience”.

  This “figure” is useful to us as a concise phenomenological description of a religious experience. Proof of this is that Hegel’s titanic adversary, Kierkegaard, adopted it practically without changes.

  According to Hegel, the “unhappy conscience” of the Christian apprehends reality as divided, placing a chasm between internal (the soul) and external reality (the world).25

  In the framework of Hegel’s Phenomenology, this figure is in itself transitory and incomplete. The descendants of Hegel, meanwhile, were split between those who believed that the plenitude of reason would culminate in a kind of theosophy and those that saw its coronation in atheism. Both considered an “unhappy conscience” to be a precarious and even morbid mode of reason, one that prevents moving beyond a meditation on the finiteness of existence.

  In Hegel’s later “system,” finitude is seen as being neutralized by the abstract immortality guaranteed by works of objective spirit. The persistence of knowledge, institutions, and a national historical community are charged with salvaging mortal existence from forgetfulness and death.

  In this respect, the Marxists, both the orthodox and heretical varieties, were Hegel’s most immediate heirs. In an attempt to overcome individual finiteness they constructed a kind of collective immortality through participation in a common task and the hope of persisting in social memory. The utopian Marxist Marcuse uniquely articulated this rebellion against time and death, which he defined as the ultimate enemies. If death must endure, Marcuse wrote, it shall be a necessity against which the irrepressible energy of humanity will protest, against which it will wage its greatest battle.26

  The Existentialists also inherited a portion of Hegel’s intellectual estate. Making an obsession of death, they isolated personal drama from its historical context. Existentialism, however, was short-lived: its tragic mood could survive neither the blows of the marketplace nor the anti-humanist wave that began to gather force with the emergence of Structuralism. After the death of God, Michel Foucault announced the death of Man. Conformist minimalism, dissolution of the subject and weak thinking came to dominate the scene. Among other things they pushed death and pain to the margins of discourse.

  Today’s philosophes have become chroniclers of the perennial spectacle, tourists of non- places, and advisors regarding how to live a healthy life. And yet human beings continue to be afraid, above all of death and physical decline. To confront this, the only remedies are placebos, sedatives, drugs, illusions and technology. It is a panorama which, decades ago, our author (considered a genre writer) christened the “pleasure revolution”.

  Obviously, the Christian attitude toward death is more existential than intellectual. The Christian accepts death as proof of finiteness. Christian believers do not attempt to comprehend the Totality but rather to participate in it. While the Christian is confident that he has been “liberated” from death, his faith is not a talisman but a commitment, and his life is no less contradictory than the lives of others. These seem to have been the spiritual certainties of Cordwainer Smith.

  But let’s not be in such a hurry to close the case so quickly, confident that everything can be easily unpacked under the heading “Christian”.

  Cordwainer Smith worked hard to construct an identity, one that he kept hidden until the very last moment behind a variety of masks. The caution that induced him to conceal his contradictions from indiscreet eyes found safe harbor in a religious conscience.

  In his search, Smith finally was able to anchor himself in an eternity that shielded him from the contingency of the world. Yet, as a Christian, he was left with the never-ending task of assigning new meaning in this light to the whole of temporal existence. And it is at this point that he appears to get bogged down by the dualism of an “unhappy conscience”.

  Recall the highly personal farewell he bade Eleanor. In it he spoke of a world where differences between human beings did not exist, a realm outside of time. The words he used sounded almost like those of E’telekeli: “We know that everything which loves has a value in itself, and that therefore this worthlessness of underpeople is wrong. We are forced to look beyond the minute and the hour to the place where no clocks work and no day dawns. There is a world outside of time, and it is to that which we appeal.”27

  Yet this reference to the “transmundane”, as Nietzsche disrespectfully would have said, does not fill the abyss between “being” and “should be”, nor does it resolve or mitigate the contradictions in an all-inclusive absolute. The conflict remains and the synthesis is precarious. This is because in the final phase of the career of Cordwainer Smith, the fascination with power persists, irreducible as ever.

  In some of his stories –apart from the saga of the underpeople– the Instrumentality is triumphant, and one could argue that its cruelty is even forgiven. In some dark recess of Linebarger’s soul, it seems, the spy Dugan refuses to let go.

  One of Linebarger-Smith’s most enigmatic tales is “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal” (1964), which appeared at a time when the Vietnam War was already irreversible.

  Commander Suzdal uncovers a threat to the human species. To combat it, he unleashes uncontrollable forces and, without wanting to, creates an even greater threat. The reader never learns what he is guilty of: we only know that the Instrumentality sentences him to the worst of punishments. His error might simply have been failure, or perhaps it was the Instrumentality itself that failed to understand him.

  Suzdal has created a race of warrior cats in whose genetic structure is imprinted the command: “You shall serve man”. Yet he has granted them autonomy as well, which makes them a potential threat. This seems to be a metaphor for the creation of navies, fictitious regimes and puppet states by the great powers, a strategy Linebarger was familiar with firsthand.

  The whole story could be read as foreshadowing the “escalation” in Southeast Asia, an allusion to the machinations to overthrow Guatemalan president Arbenz in 1954, or a prophecy of the rise of Fidel Castro, favored, incidentally, by the United States. In 1961, anti-Castro Cubans, armed by the CIA, disembarked in the Bahía de Cochinos. Later, they would become as inconvenient for the Americans as Suzdal’s cats are for the Instrumentality.

  Linebarger must have been aware of these operations, ones that Castro attributed to officials of the Eisenhower administration encysted in the Kennedy government. He also would have been privy to other regimes created and sustained by the United States, such as Taiwan and South Korea. At the time the story was published, planning for the next “punitive expedition” was already in the works: the invasion of Santo Domingo, in 1965.

  In any event, the appearance of the Suzdal story justifies suspecting some kind of hidden meaning. Smith/Linebarger insists so intently on Suzdal’s “innocence” that it is hard to believe him: “Do not read this story; turn the page quickly. The story may upset you. Anyhow, you probably know it already. It is a very disturbing story. Everyone knows it [...] it has been told in a thousand different ways. Don’t let yourse
lf realize that the story is the truth. It isn’t. Not at all. There’s not a bit of truth to it. [There are no such things]. These are all just imaginary; they didn’t happen, forget about it, go away and read something else.”

  Toward the end, he issues another warning: “That’s the story. Furthermore, is isn’t true.”

  And yet this is neither the first nor the last “punitive expedition”.

  In 1965, after Johnson already had deployed troops to Vietnam, Linebarger published “Three to a Given Star”. The story describes the punishment that the Instrumentality inflicts on an extraterrestrial species about which the only thing known is it hates humans. The species has never been seen before, and given the fact that its members have never ventured from their planet, it hardly represents a threat. Descendants of earthly chickens, they are the only underpeople depicted as enemies.

  The entire operation is a maneuver of psychological warfare, yet it culminates in a crushing blitzkrieg conceived to spread reverential terror of the image of Man.

  The giant and fearsome representatives sent from Earth bear apocalyptic sounding names like Finsternis, Folly and SAMM (Uncle Sam?). They destroy, kill and level the rebel planet, terrorizing its inhabitants into a state of submission. The following sums up the success of their mission: “All hatred ceased as the haters died. Only the submissive ones lived on.”