A cultural history of chess-players: Minds, machines, and monsters 9781526120540

Citation preview

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-7849-9420-4

9 781784 994204

SHARPLES

John Sharples is an independent historian

S H A R P L E S

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF CHESS-PLAYERS

This study concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images. The formation of these images has been underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess’s status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since rule changes five centuries ago. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure, whose many faces have frequently been obscured. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work takes aim at the kaleidoscopic chess-player. It aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity, one looking forwards and backwards, lurking out of reach at the heart of modernity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject whose identity is used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster. Covering a wide variety of locations and individuals including Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, the Automaton ChessPlayer, and moving from Victorian Paris to the neo-Gothic castles of twenty-first-century New York, this work is aimed at students and researchers in the fields of cultural history, leisure and sport, and monster theory, as well as those interested in the intersection between human and machine.

J O H N

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF CHESS-PLAYERS Minds, machines, and monsters

A cultural history of chess-players

A cultural history of chess-players Minds, machines, and monsters JOHN SHARPLES

Manchester University Press

Copyright © John Sharples 2017 The right of John Sharples to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 1 7849 9420 4  hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-­party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Πάντα ῥεῖ

Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction: ‘Of magic look and meaning’: themes concerning the cultural chess-player

1

Part I: Minds 1 Sinner, melancholic, and animal: three lives of the chess-player in medieval and early-modern literature 2 ‘A quiet game of chess?’ Respectability in urban and literary space 3 Elementary: the chess-player and the literary detective

17 39 61

Part II: Machines 4 Future shocks: IBM’s Deep Blue and the Automaton Chess-Player, 1997–1769 83 5 A haunted mind: Kasparov and the machines 105 6 ‘Everything was black’: locating monstrosity in representations of the Automaton Chess-Player 126 Part III: Monsters 7 Red, black, white, and blue: American monsters 149 8 Performance notes: absence and presence in Reykjavik, Iceland, 1972 170 9 Kapow! The chess-player in comic-books, 1940–53 191 Epilogue: exploding heads and the death of the chess-player

211

Select bibliography 217 Index  219

Acknowledgements The writing of a book inevitably absorbs the inspiration and advice of many people. Of those who have assisted in the creation and completion of this particular work, several individuals stand out. First and foremost, special thanks to Jeffrey Richards and Thomas Rohkrämer whose guidance, contributed in many enjoyable discussions, was invaluable. Thanks to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University and the Lancaster University History Department for opportunities and guidance. A multitude of individuals offered support and I would like to thank Alex Wilkinson, Kelly Maddox, and Thomas Hopkinson who all helped spark ideas, suggested books, or offered advice. Many thanks to Amelia Federico for constructive criticism on draft chapters, for moral support throughout the writing process, and for her friendship. Thanks also to Manchester University Press. Embryonic chapters and arguments were presented at the Lancaster History Department’s Postgraduate Research Seminar Series and Postgraduate Conference HistFest 2011–13; the Social History Society Conference 2013 and 2015; the British Society of Sports History Conference 2014 and 2016; Locating Fantastika 2015; and the British Association of American Studies Conference 2015. Thanks to all listeners and questioners for their contributions. A final thanks to all family (Mum, Dad, Joseph, and Ben) and friends who have assisted in any way. A substantially altered version of Chapter 2, ‘“A quiet game of chess?” Respectability in urban and literary space’, previously appeared as ‘“I am a Chess-Player”: Respectability in Literary and Urban Space, 1840–51’, Sport in History, 35.2 (2015), pp. 296–321, copyright © The British Society of Sports History. Recurring material is reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The British Society of Sports History. A shorter version of Chapter 6, ‘“Everything was black”: locating monstrosity in representations of the Automaton Chess-Player’, previously appeared as ‘Devoid of Breath: Two Representations of the Automaton Chess-Player’, Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous, 4.1 (2014), pp. 35–47. Thanks to both journals for the opportunity of publication and for the comments of anonymous peer reviewers.

chess, n.1 1 a. A game of skill played by two persons, on a chequered board divided into sixty-four squares; each player having a set of sixteen ‘men’, consisting of king, queen, two bishops, two knights, two castles or rooks, and eight pawns; the object of the game is to place the adversary’s king in checkmate. Oxford English Dictionary But by far the most frequent use of ivory is for the manufacture of men for chess and nard … When the Indians play at chess or nard, they wager stuffs or precious stones. But it sometimes happens that a player, after losing all his possessions, will wager one of his limbs. For this they set beside the players a small copper vessel over a wood fire, in which is boiled a reddish ointment peculiar to the country, which has the property of healing wounds and stanching the flow of blood. If the men who wagered one of his fingers loses, he cuts off the finger with a dagger, and then plunges his hand in the ointment and cauterizes the wound. Then he returns to the game. If the luck is against him he sacrifices another finger, and sometimes a man who continues to lose will cut off in succession all his fingers, his hand, his fore-arm, his elbow, and other parts of his body … The custom of which I have spoken is a notorious fact. Tenth-century Arabic historian al-Mas’uˉdıˉ

Introduction ‘Of magic look and meaning’: themes concerning the cultural chess-player Beginnings This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images. The formation of these images has been underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess’s status as an intellectually superior and socially useful game, particularly since rule changes five centuries ago. Yet the chess-player is an understudied figure whose many faces have frequently been obscured. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess histories have retreated into tidy consensus. In particular, over one hundred years since the publication of Harold Murray’s A History of Chess (1913), the game’s chroniclers have diverged from that work’s twisting-and-turning literary form, which acknowledged the complex nature of the game. If Murray’s opus is, as some claim, unreadable, so too is the chess-player. Or, rather, the figure requires a different way of reading. In the spirit of Murray’s efforts, this work takes aim at the kaleidoscopic chess-player. It aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity, one looking forwards and backwards, lurking out of reach at the heart of modernity. To this end, this book is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject whose identity is used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to the mind, body, and society. This orientation necessitates a culturally focused, amorphous conceptualisation of the figure. The modern chess-player has resisted disenchantment. A chess-player is not simply one who plays chess just as a chess piece is not simply a wooden block. Shaped by expectations and imaginations, the figure occupies the centre of a web of a thousand radiations where logic meets dream, and reason meets play. Questions of usefulness and value intimately connect the chess-player

2

A cultural history of chess-players

to the most basic philosophical questions of how an individual should live and occupy one’s time. The chess-player has both sat comfortably within the halls of civilisation, welcomed as a possessor of desirable intellectual power, and, in its tendency towards excesses and absences, appeared on the cultural edge, challenging common sense and cognitive, emotional, and behavioural norms. Attempts at comprehension have seen a series of relationships emerge in an attempt to label the figure, including respectable and disreputable (behavioural); human and machine (technological); human and animal (biological); individual and community (social); reason and insanity (cognitive); Western and Eastern (geographic); sighted and blind and vocal and mute (sensory). Within these paired meanings lie ambiguities, cultural preferences, double meanings, and a tension ‘lingering there at the very centre of Western scientific knowledge; something like a shadow of forgotten ways of knowing and being’.1 The chessplayer can hence appear as a heterogeneous element within society, a ‘curious vision of modernity’, deemed so due to its potential ‘“unproductive” qualities, such as violence or delirium or madness’.2 Whatever cultural work is accomplished by the chess-player has revolved fundamentally around the relationship between ocular perception (looking at and being looked at) and cognitive action. The history of the cultural chessplayer is the representation of a peculiar and highly focused internal process made comprehensible in outward terms. It is a spectacle, a collision of tradition and recycling, which rejects the idea of the statuesque chess-player. Instead, the chess-player is a living, performing entity. Acknowledging its multi-sided nature, this inquiry moves from the Great Men to the Great Many, the particular to the general, ‘the extraordinary to the everyday’.3 Attempting to grasp the figure’s diversity, the following chapters are grouped under three expansive themes concerning the cultural image of the chess-player as mind, machine, and monster. Each figure covers a variety of ground. The chess-player as mind encompasses the figure of the virtuoso, ‘people who … excel in spectacle-­ making, technical skill, and self-promotion’, as well as those viewed exclusively or largely through the expression of mental faculties.4 The chess-player as machine encompasses the automaton, one with the power of spontaneous movement, or a human viewed materially, a mechanism with its motive power hidden, or an individual whose actions are mechanical.5 The chess-player as monster shares cultural space with ‘dragons and demons … vampires … giants … shape-shifters … ghosts … border-walkers and margin-steppers’.6 The term monster is also used here as an umbrella term for a variety of other chess-player forms, including the superhero, child prodigy, and transhuman.

Introduction 3

Problem While this study does not aim to be a comprehensive or definitive account of chess-players, mental faculties, or monsters, it does aim to trace an alternative approach to the cultural chess-player’s history, applying something of Murray’s approach. Readers are encouraged to investigate material in the notes for further information and, should they wish for a re-treading of Murray’s A History of Chess, to revisit the original work. This is not a work of synthesis nor a work which covers all aspects of the chess-player. It is not a work of straight lines. The smooth movement of chess’s global migration prioritised by recent works is merely one highly selective narrative giving primacy to national borders and chronology. The cultural chess-player slips between boundaries, between firm definition, and solid outline, unlike the lines on a map or a calendar. Certainly, the player is not a blank slate. Efforts to inscribe the chess-player’s mind and body with specific political, national, and cultural identities have contended with the legacy of historical change. Of more importance to this study, however, is the chess-player’s dexterous adaptability, able to take on new meanings and discard others. The chess-player is not just close to civilisation, as some might argue, but distant from it, a faraway body speaking a mysterious language, possessing uncertain coastlines, associated with mind-altering powers, hermetic secrets, and the occupation of secluded spaces.

Story-time A standard history of chess – useful despite its selective inclusions and omissions – goes something like the following. Although clouded in mystery, the game is thought to have arisen in the ‘East’ and settled in the ‘West’. D. Li’s Genealogy of Chess (1998) alleges Chinese origins for the game, although India, Persia, and China all evidently played some part.7 As Harry Golombek noted, ‘where exactly, when exactly, how exactly, and by whom exactly the game of chess was invented we do not know’.8 This uncertainty has been used by some to add oriental mystique to the game, and codify a progressive narrative whereby the game was brought to and refined by European hands. Chess, originating roughly 1,500 years ago, is not the oldest known game, nor has it always been the most prestigious. Widely played in the Arab world by the ninth and tenth centuries, chess did not become a vehicle for intellectual effort beyond the efforts of early theorists al-‘Adli, as-Suli, and al-Lajlaj. Instead chess-problem collections became ‘more a literary form than a contribution to theory’, placed

4

A cultural history of chess-players

within the realm of story-telling,9 with the first two centuries of the ‘Abba¯sid caliphate marking ‘the beginning of the vast literature of chess’.10 Nevertheless, much of Islamic chess is shared with other forms of the game, including the distinction between opening, middle, and end-game.11 Similarly, the jargon of chess worked its way into language, proving ‘a very fruitful source of similes, metaphors, and word-plays for both Arabic and Persian poets’.12 Further, players were ranked by ability, and the names of the chess champions from the years 800 to 950 are known.13 Around the beginning of the eleventh century, chess entered Europe, probably through Arabic–European connections in the Mediterranean. Much early terminology relating to the game derives from the Arabic language.14 By the twelfth century, chess had reached Bavaria, France, and England, and by the mid-thirteenth century it had reached Iceland.15 Ever since, Europe has been the cradle of the game’s development.16 The division widened between chess as a leisure pursuit and as a didactic cultural object employing allegorical descriptions of chess’s pieces and linking the game with the contemporary social condition and hierarchy.17 Moralising works ‘exercised a potent influence on the nomenclature of the pieces; they may have carried a knowledge of chess to circles where it had not penetrated before; they may have helped to break down the ecclesiastical prejudice against the game’.18 As Jenny Adams, whose Power Play (2006) provides a fascinating look at material relating to the political metaphors of chess-play, notes, ‘that medieval culture wanted to see itself in the game is most indicative in the changes Western players … made to the pieces and the rules’.19 By the mid-twelfth century, economic and political development, and the growth of education, made chess-play more compelling for the aristocracy and higher clergy.20 While recognisable, this was culturally and socially a much different game than that played in the modern world, with different, perhaps greater, degrees of participation. Rule changes in the late-medieval and early-modern period transformed chess-play. These new rules were motivated by a demand for less time-consuming leisure pursuits and provided the only major change to how the game was played in over a thousand years.21 Reforms included the adoption of new legal moves, such as the pawn’s extended first move, and the inclusion of the new pieces of queen and bishop. The changes ‘revivified chess altogether’ and ‘led to the great chess activity of the period 1550–1640 in Italy and Spain, during which the reform was completed by the addition of “castling,” the combined move of king and rook. The reformed game was then adopted in Europe generally.’22 Following this, chess was transformed gradually, partly by the seventeenth and eighteenth century, certainly by the nineteenth, into a Eurocentric, intellectual, rational game, played initially as an amateur pastime, then more seriously and

Introduction 5

as a profession. The reformed game was instantly recognised as more challenging and ‘reclaimed much of its earlier intellectual character’.23 Furthermore, through the development of chess notation, the game became easily transmitted regardless of national borders. One of William Caxton’s first printed books, for example, was Game and Playe of the Chesse (1474) which detailed rules, allegory, and origin stories, although a new seriousness post-1530 saw analysis, not allegory, become the ruling motive in the literature of the game.24 Old and new chess coexisted temporarily, and the period 1470–90 was a period of transition. Following these developments, the span between 1561 and the mid-­ seventeenth century has been described as the heroic age of chess. ‘Romanticised and embellished’ tales of daring deeds appeared, of pirates, poisonings, oriental journeys, and golden treasure won at the chessboard, retold at gatherings of the new social chess clubs.25 Chess’s intellectual reputation increased. In Germany, one commented, ‘it is necessary to pay more, and more diligent, attention, a skill which practice best gives and teaches’.26 The possibility of the ‘Scholar’s’ or ‘Fool’s Mate’ also necessitated a modicum of study to avoid embarrassment. The eighteenth century saw chess radically diverge from its medieval inheritance, being played for ‘new reasons and in a new way … because of its ­intellectual and sporting qualities rather than its symbolic prestige’.27 Intertwined with Enlightenment ideas, in an often ambiguous and contradictory manner, developing out of the cafés of France, Italy, and England, the new game, more complicated and considered ‘too serious’ by the older group of aristocratic players, was deemed a suitable pursuit by the new intellectual class. This period also saw the publication of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des art et des métiers (1751–66), and its lengthy assessment of the game provides an important document in recording its confused cultural image, as well as the potentially humanist and transhumanist potential seen within the chess-player. Spatial issues, concerning where chess was played, also became more relevant as social norms and notions of respectability demarcated space and time. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the development of a familiar cultural atmosphere surrounding the game, involving greater participation, the development of chess as a literary topic, and the emergence of celebrity players, such as François-André Philidor, the Automaton Chess-Player, and Paul Morphy.28 This period saw the chess-player firmly established as a cultural figure, even a distinct cultural type. The game became viewed, in part, as respectable and embodying characteristics of a rational recreation as international tournaments were held and chess-play became spectacle. Twentieth-century chess appeared as something of a coda to the nineteenth. The era of ‘sports chess’ saw it supposedly develop into a ‘sedentary sport’ with ‘a new age of increased

6

A cultural history of chess-players

regulation and nationalistic rivalries. Soviet domination notwithstanding, chess resembles many sports in its general post-war history’ after 1945.29 Aspects such as mass-media coverage, sponsorship, larger venues, merchandising, and money-making have become more central to the game’s identity. Two logical end points are the victory of IBM’s computer Deep Blue over Garry Kasparov, the then world chess champion, in 1997, and the death of the one-time world chess champion, Robert J. ‘Bobby’ Fischer, in 2008, which marked the most recent front-page events in chess’s history.

Underpinnings This inquiry utilises the traditional history of chess as a foundation for alternate readings and re-readings of the cultural chess-player. The chess-player’s cultural image assessed here is one of virtuosity, automaton-like features, and monstrosity which comes from a combination of performance and performative features. It is the use, occupation, and transformation of space. It is the perception of individuals at play. It is the impact of encountering the unfamiliar. It is the interface between body and mind. It concerns the placement of the chess-player as the centre of various technological developments eroding the human–machine boundary. It is the imagined weight of a cross-cultural enterprise across time, an orientalism, an activity brought to the West, appropriated, exploited, and made to do the work of reason and progress (both looking increasingly disturbed). It is simultaneously absence and presence. It is the dehumanising effort to read the chess-player’s mind and body. It is an attempt to maintain the category of human (chess-player). These are the most prominent and important aspects of the cultural chess-player’s history. To grasp this diversity, inspired by J. J. Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses) (1996), seven methodological structures run through this work. 1 / blurry

The cultural chess-player is a blurry outline. Different representations suggest different understandings. The coherence of the game’s rules allows one to study the whole even as the many representations of its players present a more problematic object of study. Aside from this unified body of rules, within cultural representations of the chess-player ‘you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that … [S]imilarities crop up and disappear.’30 Compared to the above history, all neat divisions and delineations, this concept of the chess-player is one with blurred edges. This is no disadvantage. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pertinently asked, ‘is it

Introduction 7

even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture with a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?’31 The chess-player is one figure but also many, defined differently in each age, spatially and temporally varied. The figure performs in dissimilar places and for dissimilar reasons under one name. Even as the problem of separating the responses to the game or player become problematic, the inextricable boundary between the two is advantageous in suggesting links between disparate images. 2 / body

The cultural chess-player is a living thing, an imagined space, and a historical space – a time-traveller. Part paper, part flesh, and part stone, its history is composed of interactions within written records and spaces. Like the statue, the cultural chess-player is conceived of (paraphrasing Katharine Verdery) as a dead person cast in bronze. As David Martin comments, one has to contend with ‘the chilling thought that within a statue, like a living soul of the corporeal, lies the captive body of the person the statue is said to represent … [T]he imprisoned flesh of the body is that of a repressed heterogeneity; its bronze casing is the discourse of history.’32 Within the body of the living chess-player also, this inquiry finds the captive body of the past, the dead matter of myth, mystery, and magic. Talk of an evolution of the chess image is misguided. Images bounce around like light in a hall of mirrors, repetition and reflection introduce distortions, and the breath of men long dead clouds and influences the present-day imagery of chess-players.33 Repetitions and reiterations of this heterogeneous object appear within a history of ghostly and cloned events.34 3 / fragments

The cultural chess-player is fragmented, a harmonious unity and a cacophonous plurality. To write a cultural history of the figure is to sift through these fragments discovered within the treasure-trove and rubbish-heap of the past. The historian’s task becomes that of the pearl diver.35 Time melts together. The imagined is fused with ‘objective’ reality. Richard Eales claims that ‘press and media portrayals of “typical” chess players have now abandoned the once-popular stereotype of the eccentric old gentlemen … monomaniac or cold warrior’, instead ‘showing simply competitive people’; but cultural time moves slowly.36 While the modern-day practice of chess has seen chess-players become sports professionals, representations have not adapted as quickly and are nothing like as monolithic or stable in any era. Regardless, to talk of a singular cultural ‘image’ is distorting and restrictive, particularly concerning a figure based partly within the imagined

8

A cultural history of chess-players

and fictive realm. What the chess-player connotes depends not on its ‘relation to the real but to other signifiers’, on its relation to the individual but ‘also from [its] multiple references to a wider culture’.37 The stickiness of popular cultural memory carries the accumulated burden of the past. Chess and chess-player are signs with cultural dimensions, understood in relation to exterior cultural detritus. The chess piece, for example, is associated with an intellectual meaning and a cultural weight. The Holmesian magnifying-glass is another such object associated, to give one meaning, with superior intelligence. A human–object relationship governed by personal and cultural memory is evidenced. 4 / spectrum

The cultural chess-player is a kaleidoscopic subject of many forms, intentions, potentials, and effects. Of all technologies of seeing, the kaleidoscope most embodies fragmentation and ordering. The kaleidoscope is a device ‘for creating and exhibiting beautiful forms’, bringing fragments into focus around a central point.38 In this inquiry, the chess-player is the central point of a kaleidoscopic history, around which the world reorientates and reveals multiple aspects of this figure, across media, time, and in different spaces. Other forms of seeing make allusion to the camera, microscope, telescope, and spectacles. Each technology has become associated with a model of historical writing, some taking macroor micro-historical perspectives, or attempting to freeze a moment for later analysis, in a photograph or on a glass slide. One can instead propose history as kaleidoscopic, as both a complex pattern (implying order) and chaotic (suggesting no order). The kaleidoscopic image tricks the brain, becoming the place where dreams free themselves from restraint, becoming one of the principal ­storehouses of imagination, a place of strange creatures.39 Only when recognised as such can the contingency of the kaleidoscopic image be contended with. Before this point is beautiful, dizzying, dazzling entrancement. 5 / monstrous

Not all forms of the cultural chess-player considered in this book are mysterious or monstrous, but, considered collectively, monstrosity is evident as a persistent undercurrent. This condition intersects with a number of theoretical lines of thought, specifically the idea that physical monstrosity was replaced by the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries by a morality-based monstrosity. The transformation in how difference and otherness is perceived, categorised, and debated in general is not one considered here, however. Instead, the primary focus is the nature of how inward signs of otherness manifested themselves

Introduction 9

outwardly in literary culture. The mind and body are the battleground over which a conflict for identity is fought. Deviation from this abnormality by the chess-player can also itself seem abnormal. Accompanying the cultural chessplayer’s formation has been a de-orientalising or rationalising tendency, but also the persistence of a lingering unease surrounding human status. Concerning linguistic and cultural differences between the terms monster, monstrous, and monstrosity, any reference to monstrosity or to the chess-player as a monster or ­possessing monstrous qualities below is as the identification of ‘a narrative on certain appearances or behaviours at particular times in specific social contexts’, measuring the impact of the chess-player, or its challenge to common sense.40 This may go against a certain historical usage, although the recent Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012) has confirmed the broad, increasingly widening scope of the term and its malleability, which the present author welcomes. 6 / improving

The chess-player is a humanistic and transhumanistic subject. Such an image aligns with the emergence or remaking of the cultural chess-player within environments influenced by Enlightenment humanism, with its exclusionary, forgetful emphasis on progress, self-development, and the application of reason. Chess-playing machines and images of the human chess-player as automaton and cyborg also suggest a development beyond humanism which has involved the use of technology to overcome biological limits.41 The connection between the humanistic and transhuman chess-player and the application of reason highlights the wound at the heart of chess, namely its cultural appropriation, via cultural transmission in one sense, and its movement, from East to West and beyond. The transhuman chess-player appears as monstrous, ‘“mis-known” [or] unrecognized and misunderstood’, and as something seen and potentially domesticated.42 Yet if arrival only leads to domestication, then the chess-player never fully arrives. It remains on the point of invisibility, through its tendency to excess, presence, and absence. This state persists even in the face of an improving ambition, and places the chess-player within culture as a form of entertainment and edification, a willing, then an unwilling, virtuoso, a puppet and a mannequin, a statue and an idol, a god of reason and a creature, a glimpse of the future and of the past. 7 / performance

The chess-player is a performer of a kind of secular magic, sharing enchanted links with the conjuror and circus-performer. Richard Schechner finds seven

10

A cultural history of chess-players

functions of performance: To entertain. To make something that is beautiful. To mark or change identity. To make or foster community. To heal. To teach, persuade, or convince. To deal with the sacred / demonic.43 Further, a partial outline of the features of performance by Victor Turner includes manual gesticulations, facial expressions, bodily postures, rapid, heavy, or light breathing, and tears (at the individual level), as well as gestures, dance patterns, prescribed silences, synchronised movements, and aspects of game-play and rituals (at the cultural level).44 Each of these functions and features has contributed to the affirmation of the performativity of the chess-player, in its ‘reiteration of norms which precede, constrain and exceed the performer’, particular those concerning mental skill and intellectual superiority (by no means natural categories).45 The chess performance hence becomes an imposition of boundaries on bodies and minds on stage.

Frameworks Influenced by these seven structures, the present study recontextualises the chess-player as mind, machine, and monster within the traditional history outlined above. This provides reason enough to justify another look at the chess-player. In addition, several aspects of the aforementioned chronology are challenged, extended, ignored, or discarded as a consequence of this book’s focus on the player, not the game. The scope of this book, in geographic terms, is predominantly the English-speaking West from the medieval to the modern period, with more emphasis on the second half of this period. With this in mind, relevant source material, predominantly English-language, is varied and wideranging, including newspapers, films, cartoons, detective and science fiction, comic-books, and chess instructional manuals. The vast quantity of data available requires a somewhat abstracted view, a collective history rather than a personal one, where order and simplicity become apparent when groups and repetitions are the subject; yet to return to the idea of the historian as pearl diver, this study aims to blend the bird’s-eye view with the deep dive, combining broad historical panoramas with intense readings of individual items of interest. This book consists of nine chapters divided between three parts. Part I, entitled ‘Minds’, introduces the cultural chess-player. Chapter 1 considers three lives of the chess-player as sinner (concerning behavioural and locational contexts), melancholic (concerning mind-bending and affective contexts), and as animal (concerning cognitive aspects and the idea of human-ness) from the medieval to the early-modern within non-fiction. Chapter 2, through the concept of respectability, considers an evening at the mid-nineteenth-century

Introduction 11

Parisian Café de la Régence, incorporating discussion of the blindfold chessplayer, the chess-player as virtuoso, and as automaton. It redefines the café as a haunted house or repository of history and memory, an ethereal existence paralleling past and present. Chapter 3 considers the role of the chess-player in detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Raymond Chandler, contrasting the perceived relative intellectual reputation and social utility of the chess-player and the literary detective. Part II, entitled ‘Machines’, considers various chess-playing machines. Chapter 4 moves backwards and forwards in its considerations of IBM’s late-twentieth-century supercomputer Deep Blue and Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1769 Automaton Chess-Player, via the concepts of automaton and statue. Chapter 5 examines Garry Kasparov’s 1997 defeat to Deep Blue and how the spaces of the game, considered again in terms of a haunted house, were instrumental in transforming the encounter into a modern-day Gothic tale for the human contestant. Chapter 6 discusses emotional responses to the automaton chess-player within three science-fictional texts. Part III, entitled ‘Monsters’, considers the way human chess-players have been represented as monstrous in the twentieth century, touching on the concepts of the child prodigy, superhero, and transhuman. Chapter 7 considers Bobby Fischer’s early career in mid-twentieth-century American society. Chapter 8 examines Fischer’s 1972 championship victory over the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky and the way the performance space, a third haunted house, became surrounded by a peculiar atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, exaggerated by Fischer’s (anti-)virtuoso stance. Chapter 9 examines portrayals of the chess-player within comic-books of the midtwentieth century, considering themes of monstrous bodies, masculinities, and moralities. An epilogue considers the chess-player from an early twentyfirst-century perspective.

Notes  1 D. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. xiv.  2 Ibid., p. xv.  3 F. Moretti, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2007), p. 4.  4 P. Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 1.  5 Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘Automaton’, quoted in W. B. Hyman, ‘Introduction’, in W. B. Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 5.

12

A cultural history of chess-players

 6 ‘Acknowledgements’, in A. S. Mittman (ed.) with P. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. xxii.  7 D. H. Li, The Genealogy of Chess (Bethesda, MD: Premier Publishing, 1998).  8 H. Golombek, A History of Chess (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 10.  9 R. Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole, new edn, 2002), p. 37. 10 H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, facsimile reprint of 1913 edition, 2002), p. 169. 11 Ibid., p. 234. 12 Ibid., p. 183. 13 H. J. R. Murray, ‘Chess’, in G. Grigson and C. H. Gibbs-Smith (eds), People, Places, and Things: Things (London: Grosvenor Press, 1954), p. 89. 14 Eales, Chess, p. 40. 15 Murray, ‘Chess’, p. 89. 16 Eales, Chess, p. 39. 17 See also D. E. O’Sullivan, ‘Changing the Rules in and of Medieval Chess Allegories’, in D. E. O’Sullivan (ed.), Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 199–220. 18 Murray, History of Chess, p. 529. 19 J. Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 2–3. See also K. Juel, ‘Defeating the Devil at Chess: A Struggle between Virtue and Vice in Le Jeu des esches de la dame moralisé’, in O’Sullivan (ed.), Chess in the Middle Ages, pp. 87–108. Italics in original. 20 Eales, Chess, p. 51. 21 Ibid., pp. 71–2. 22 Murray, ‘Chess’, p. 90. 23 D. Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (New York: Doubleday, 2006), p. 70. 24 Adams, Power Play, p. 160. 25 Eales, Chess, pp. 83–5. 26 Ibid., p. 78. 27 Ibid., p. 95. 28 Murray, History of Chess, p. 886. 29 Eales, Chess, p. 157. 30 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 3rd edn, 1986), pp. 27–8. 31 Ibid., p. 29. 32 Martin, Curious Visions, pp. xvi–vii. 33 Adapted from J. L. Borges, ‘Mirrors’, from The Maker (1960), in A. Coleman (ed.), Selected Poems, trans. Alastair Reid (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 105–9. 34 J. Baudrillard, ‘Paroxysm: End of the Millennium or the Countdown’, Economy and Society, 26.4 (1997), pp. 447–55. 35 H. Arendt, ‘Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940’, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 54.

Introduction 13

36 Eales, Chess, p. 196. 37 D. Sayer, ‘The Photograph: The Still Image’, in S. Barber and C. Peniston-Bird (eds), History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 63. 38 D. Brewster, A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1819), 1. 39 J. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 195. 40 A. Wright, Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 3–4. 41 M. More, ‘1. The Philosophy of Transhumanism’, in M. More and N. Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 3–4. 42 J. Derrida, ‘Passages – from Traumatism to Promise’, in J. Derrida and E. Weber (ed.), Points…: Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 387. 43 R. Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 38. 44 V. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ, 1992), p. 9. 45 J. Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, GLQ: A Journal in Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1.1 (1993), p. 24.

Part I Minds

1 Sinner, melancholic, and animal: three lives of the chess-player in medieval and early-modern literature At the margins From the arrival of chess in medieval Europe, the chess-player was a troubling figure, raising issues concerning sin, leisure, intellect, and emotion. The assumed Islamic origins of the game and its associations with a number of vices related to play pushed the chess-player into a marginal space in a society defined by Christian regulation and authority. Yet, in parallel, the chess-player and the game found secure footings within highly contextual geographical, social, and bodily limits, and were ascribed a not-insignificant utility. A gradual acceptance of the game and the chess-player could be suggested. One commentator has claimed that by the mid-eighteenth century, becoming a great player was ‘regarded as a great accomplishment, without qualification’, and, from then on, arguments for and against chess were no longer made.1 This is not completely the case. Instead, the tensions found in medieval and early-modern texts regarding the emotional, intellectual, and social values which the game was thought to provoke persisted far beyond their immediate historical situations. One set of configurations which makes visible these issues is the consideration of the chessplayer as sinner, melancholic, and animal. Culturally determined rules and hierarchies which governed chess-play and the feelings of the would-be chess-player are evidenced in representations of these three lives, as everyday experience collided with the conventions of play. One sees a resistance to the classification of the chess-player under a reassuring label. Many of the images discussed in this chapter reappear below within evolving scenarios. When the chess-player is considered as a figure poised between acceptability and disapproval, the provisional natures of human status and otherness become visible. Whether through sin, emotional behaviour, or the mental faculties thought to be employed, the way the chess-player ‘in action’ was recognised

18 Minds

and represented, as insider or outsider, changed over time and was highly contextual. What was thought ill of in one circumstance was celebrated elsewhere. As a recreational activity, chess-play was seen as both valuable for relaxation but also potentially without worth and a distraction from one’s religious or social duties. These multiple attributes became attached to the game’s practitioners as rule changes across the medieval period made chess-play more complicated. Declining participation, not always due to religious regulation, created further mental and physical distance between performers and observers, producing a segregated space into which a whole host of anxieties were poured. Accounts by and concerning chess-players suggest emotional states which the game was thought to require, while certain mental faculties, in accordance with contemporary maps of the brain and mind, were connected to the activity. These attributes reveal the cultural chess-player as an expression not just of medical thought but social and cultural values. Further, chess-play was linked with the alteration of specific emotional and cognitive aspects, transforming the chess-player into a subject to be made and remade through the practice of its chosen game. In light of these aspects, the purpose here is not to survey the literature as a whole but to consider the following thematic strands: in the medieval and early-modern context, the chess-player as sinner will first be considered in terms of a perceived absence or presence of social utility raised by gamesters and religious commentators (the most vocal disseminators of the prevailing socio-cultural structure of the time). Discussion of the supposed impact of the game on mind and body according to medical and pseudo-medical theories will follow, tracking the development of new contexts for play and discussion about play. Debate on the mental faculties utilised by the game raised in Renaissance satire on animal chess-players which sought to confine chess-play to a human realm will conclude this chapter. Each of the three chess-playing figures considered here, of sinner, melancholic, and animal, affirmed or challenged assumptions concerning human and social status.

Three figures in context Upon chess’s entrance into Europe, religious and cultural orthodoxy based on Christian traditions towards play dictated the purpose, values, and limits of the game. These traditions were not homogeneous, unchanging, or consistently applied. Instead, the game encountered provisional challenges and approvals. That Catholic and Orthodox Churches repeatedly condemned the game from on high was both an echo of its popularity and evidence of the breaking of attempted regulation.2 Regulation was applied to many ends. Illustrating the range of



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 19

Catholic opposition, for example, all seven of the deadly sins appeared at times in association with chess-play, manifested in the actions of the chess-player. However, while religiously motivated attempts to shape behaviour reveal sites of contest and fractures within society, other forms of regulation and legitimisation did emerge.3 As leisure patterns, predominantly of the aristocracy but by no means exclusively so, evolved, confirmed by texts such as The Compleat Gamester (1674) and John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692) which ‘challenged a long lineage of thought that defined play as idleness, wasted time and even sinfulness’, an expansive, emergent literary culture saw gaming become a literary topic and a fashionable activity.4 While chess-play’s place in the hierarchy of pursuits was a marginal one, gaming became more clearly demarcated in space and time, principally in the visible, exterior settings of the gambling house and tavern, and secondarily in the private domestic setting where religious observance or social conventions could be ignored. Attempts to civilise leisure and reform manners saw religiously inspired proscription and ­regulation swamped with other meanings, becoming, by the early-modern period, simply one of many ways of regulating and enforcing the play-structure around chess-play and other activities. Even as the cultural image of the chess-player increasingly diverged from other gamesters, evidenced most clearly within the developing café culture and spaces such as the Café de la Régence (discussed in Chapter 2), underlying associations were retained. This makes the question of chess-play within this period, despite its marginal status, an important issue, regardless of its unique combination of problematic origin, association with other games, and intellectual and emotional reputation. Moving inward, the chess-player’s performance was connected to humoral theory, the dominant medieval medical structure related to the body. The four humours (or tempers) of melancholy, choleric, phlegmatic, and sanguine were each raised in association with the chess-player at various times. This chapter predominantly considers melancholy, on account of its foreshadowing of the features of the human and non-human automaton chess-player considered in later chapters. Chess-play was thought to affect players in specific ways related to the improvement and worsening of both behaviour and cognitive ability. Melancholy, as an aspect of sadness related to ‘just about everything connected to hardship and dejection’, was, for example, believed to be remedied by the distraction provided by the game.5 Chess-play was also thought to lead to the raising of other temperaments, specifically the choleric and phlegmatic temperaments, provoking violence or rousing one from apathy. Historical accounts of violence at the chessboard, with pieces dashed everywhere and chessboards cracked over heads, are numerous enough to be significant. Chess’s connection with humoral theory and mental faculties also anticipated a connection with

20 Minds

other medical theories, now thought of as pseudo-science, such as phrenology, and later attempts to shape behaviour through leisure, seen in the rational recreation movement of the nineteenth century and scholastic chess programmes in the USA in the twentieth century. In each case, any attempt to consider historical emotional life – temptingly described by Lucien Febvre as both ‘extremely attractive and frightfully difficult’6 – must be acknowledged as imprecise and ever-changing. Discussion of the mental and emotional life of the chess-player was not limited to human figures. An already stated aim of this book is to consider the chess-player in all its endless, beautiful forms, and one particular shape the chess-player took was as an animal, usually an ape or monkey, predominantly within Renaissance satirical and didactic literature. This literature was itself a space where the nature of the human–animal boundary was under scrutiny, and in which the chess-player as automaton was encountered. The zoomorphism of these stories, whereby ‘humans share space and consciousness with the beast’, was a common feature of works of the medieval and early-modern period.7 In these tales, the human is forced to share territory and a mental platform with the animal. Civilised human society is overturned and its foundations examined. These stories engage in ‘the game of playing with recognized animal attributes, making apt, unlikely, or outrageous correspondences with human types or behaviours’.8 The chess-playing ape, not unusually, ‘raised questions about the boundaries of the human and animal, a highly uncertain and contested limen’.9 Human becomes beast and beast becomes human. The ape adopts the modes of a civilised person, seemingly undercutting the space which Cartesian and Christian philosophies sought to demarcate as uniquely human. Yet, while performing human games, the animals were not always held to possess specific human intellectual attributes, merely the appearance of such traits, revealing a tumultuous undercurrent to chess performance. The chess-playing animal highlights a specific performative dimension to chess-play which even when masked revealed its surface or superficial nature. These satires also anticipated future controversies on machine chess-players (discussed in Part II) which were characterised in one act of resistance as, to paraphrase philosopher-of-the-mind John Searle, sign manipulators rather than truly logical, reasoning machines. These three partially overlapping figures of sinner, melancholic, and animal, suggest a way of writing about the chess-player. Rather than straightforward chronology, this chapter gives prominence to the fragmented shape of the cultural chess-player by successively presenting three short readings of the figure. The focus of these three images moves between surface and interior, from actions to inward feelings, and back again. Why do this? One could consider this a modest attempt at writing which mimics the shape of its subject. Its intentions



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 21

are to highlight the multiple ways of considering the chess-player discussed in the introduction – as blurry, body, fragments, spectrum, monstrous, improving, and performance – and to challenge the preconditioned expectation of chronological development and change suggested by previous chess histories. Further, in suggesting the cultural chess-player as a monstrous figure, this structure, stacking three readings closely together, aims to mimic the simultaneity of emotions, feelings, and faces which any monstrous figure may present.

Sinner Within medieval European society, chess-play assisted the education and socialising of the aristocracy.10 Discussion of gaming, including chess, also appeared in the genre of didactic literature known as specula principis (mirrors of princes), although rarely in England.11 Skill at the game was considered a knightly accomplishment and suitable for ladies at court. Yet chess-play was also grouped with tables, dice, and activities deemed idle pastimes. Robert Bubczyk notes that opposition to chess came predominantly from representatives of ecclesiastical authorities, despite clergy, preachers, and other ecclesiastics playing the game and using it as a didactic tool in sermons.12 The medieval model of play traced an uneasy and permeable boundary between activities thought necessary for recovery, recuperation, and learning, those thought too far distanced from everyday life to be useful, and those thought sinful, by association or in themselves. The imagined oppositional spaces of church and tavern were, while clearly defined, not always maintained, signalling the game’s already fractured nature. Chessplay was simultaneously the affirmation of life and a performative space away from life. Bubczyk highlights two early criticisms of chess-play which anticipate two important features of later commentary. In the first, the English clergyman Robert Mannyng (1303) urged his flock to show restraint while participating in games of dice, chess, and tables, particularly before noon. Such play was ‘against the commandment and the holy Church’s approval’. Meanwhile, the Scottish Ratis Raving (Advice from a Father to a Son, fifteenth century) presented chess-play (and tables) as so absorbing that ‘immersion’ could lead to distraction and missing Mass.13 Both sources raise issues of behaviour and self-control, as well as the theme of proximal disreputability which could arise due to association with other games such as tables or dice, as well as gambling, drinking, and other sinfulness. That chess-play was played for stakes and, occasionally, with dice made the association more pertinent than it might appear at first glance to the modern reader. Mannyng and Ratis Raving illuminate how disreputable activities could distract

22 Minds

one from ‘correct’ ways of living. Distrust and suspicion may have stemmed from the game’s alleged Islamic origins. Edward Pettit described chess as ‘the Antichristian game’, possibly with this in mind.14 Yet permitted behaviour was not unchanging. Condemnation was balanced with praise for the game’s intellectual reputation, even before rule changes and its acceptance by the aristocracy.15 Despite this, as well as tolerance and recommendation in other aspects of cultural and social activity, official Church policy tended towards disapproval of gaming.16 This underlying point recurs throughout the cultural history of the chess-player – the game and those who played it were at once both welcome and unwelcome. The production of a discrete identity surrounding the gamester as gamer and the chess-player solely as player was not maintained. Escaping binary expression, play was neither straightforwardly sinful nor spiritual. Chessplay appeared somewhere between the two, a practice which could muddy the everyday flow of life. Such an issue was raised by the eleventh-century Saint Peter Damian, who queried whether it was right to pass the time at chessplay, an activity which could ‘defile the hand which offers up the Body of our Lord, the tongue that mediates between God and Man’.17 The exoticism of the game, transferred on to the players through touch and speech, figured in the saint’s story as a pollutant or foreign body, is balanced by the author’s familiarity with the game in this and other accounts.18 Perhaps the saint protested too much. Similarly, indexes and categorisations of leisure practices which sought to separate chess-play from other less virtuous pastimes (predominantly involving gambling), such as those of Robert Burton and John Wilkins, were never wholly successful.19 The later Middle Ages saw the ambiguous status of chess-play persist. Indeed, the period has been characterised as both a time of ‘progressive relaxation’ towards chess-play and a time of hardening religious opinion from disapproval to condemnation. European socio-economic development allowed for limited leisure time and increased cash flow made the issue of gaming more relevant within ideological and theological debates. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) prohibited the clergy from playing and observing dice – a command which influenced local church authorities in various ways. In England, the clergy were forbidden to play dice and chess according to a directive issued by the Synod of Worcester in 1240. In 1281 the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham, condemned chess ‘and other clownish entertainments’. Other clergy were more sympathetic. Bogo of Clare (d. 1294) was a known admirer of the game, and played for stakes, again confirming that chess-play existed in a free space between ideal behaviour and everyday life. Conditions of play seeped outside their boundaries. Obligations to clerical activities were lost within the play vortex. The chessplayer mask could be a temporary assumption of an identity, a hidden alter



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 23

ego, acted out in private or conspiratorially with other like-minded individuals, which was not always retained, desirable, or proper.20 The contrast between permissible and sinful behaviour took on spatial and temporal dimensions, imprinting on the physical environment and establishing play as intervening on daily religious obligations. Robert Rypon, in Durham, who preached against games in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on the grounds that players ‘lose their time and deserve misfortunes’, emphasised the temporal context.21 John Wycliffe, in stating that clergymen could and did play chess and tables in taverns ‘until they los[t] their wit’, emphasised the spatial dimension.22 The tavern (with parallels to the later café culture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chess-player) and the church were oppositional geo-temporal spaces. Each was constructed and experienced as an imagined community in which shared states could be attained. Each was seen as a space of becoming, through gambling or prayer or other bounded, repeatable acts. Church – originally meaning a body of believers – functioned, in physical and mental terms, as a building and as an idea, as the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual centre of the medieval period formed by the faith of Christian belief. The imagined tavern conversely amplified baser tendencies and was connected with swearing, drinking, and gambling.23 Oppositional spaces such as these denote what a culture holds dear and the priorities of the individual. This othering strategy created two parallel states, denying any continuity between them except for the purpose of instruction, even as mere proximity was thought sinful – an idea returned to below in the context of the Victorian city. A 1364 statute, for example, issued by Simon of Langham, banned chess-play and dice, but also ‘spending time in the proximity of those who pursued such pastimes’, arguing that ‘such practices distracted priests from God and led them to divest their holiness to demons’.24 When chess-play invaded the church, in sermons or in lapses of behaviour, it did so as an interloper, a figure of disruption.25

Melancholic Wycliffe’s and Rypon’s comments exteriorised the neglect of religious or social duties with recourse to its demands on time and space.26 Yet the tavern and the church were not the only cultural spaces in which the chess-player’s sins were discussed. Equally significant was the mind, arguably the most important cultural space in consideration of the chess-player beyond the medieval. Religious figures including Jan Hus, whose opinion on the game was shaped more by conformity with Church doctrine than his own independent thinking, as well as the aforementioned Ratis Raving, commented on the game’s effects on the interior

24 Minds

mind, its disordering capabilities, and, most powerfully, its hypnotic power.27 That is, religious criticisms were recontextualised towards the interior mind. These issues came together in A Letter from a Minister to a Friend Concerning the Game of Chess of 16 April 1680, detailing the author’s ‘reasons for disusing and declining the game of chess’ on religious grounds and due to its effects on the self. The minister’s concerns echo earlier tensions surrounding the game. In the Letter, we see the reaction of someone becoming a chess-player and resisting this becoming. Indeed, the minister is initially complimentary concerning the game, terming it lawful, ingenious, and delightful, without the contingency of other games, and ‘nothing but Art’.28 As suggested above, with some interpretation, each of the seven deadly sins can also be identified in the letter, although it is unlikely that this was the intention of the author, and it merely demonstrates the scope of the minister’s complaint rather than any serious attempt at covering the sinful spectrum completely. The minister initially presents two familiar arguments against chess-play and gaming and gambling more generally, suggesting that chess-play compelled him to idleness, wasting ‘many precious hours’, and damaged his finances through greed and pride after losing. Like any gambler, however, he apparently used up only a ‘little expence of money’.29 His other motivations for avoiding chessplay are more intriguing, particularly due to the language used, pointing to the inward turn which the chess-player could take. The minister confessed, ‘I have been bewitcht by it; when I have begun, I have not had the power to give over’, as with sloth or a kind of hypnosis. Rather than use the game for his own ends, instead he was ‘brought under the power of it’, which diminished his agency and made him envious of others. ‘It hath followed me,’ he continued, ‘into my study, into my pulpit; when I have been praying, or preaching, I have (in my thoughts) been playing at chess; then I have had as it were a chessboard before my eyes’, like a glutton dreaming of more. The game caused the minister to break ‘many solemn resolutions, nay vows and promises’, overtaken with lustful passion. Lastly, the game damaged his social circle, eroding his links with the exterior world. ‘It hath been scandalous and offensive to others’, he remarked, his friends the victims of his wrath and inward focus. The Letter from a Minister’s remarks on the mind-altering powers of chess-play suggest a concern for the game’s effect on the individual or self as much as its wider everyday impact, positioning the chess-player as one under the power of the game. Two relevant underlying structures of the medieval mind and body which clarify this turn inwards concern humours and mental faculties – the humours being divided into melancholy, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine; and the three faculties of the mind being divided between memory or memoria, reason or intellectus, and imagination or fantasia. Changes in the characteristics connecting



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 25

game to player show the malleability of humoral and cognitive theories within cultural discourse. The imperfect mapping of feelings on to the brain and body’s surfaces combined popular understanding with medical theory, often visualised in elaborate drawings. The division of brain function into three mental faculties represented the ‘earliest known Western illustration of brain function’, traced back to classical Greek thought.30 Evolutionary and important advancements on the model were made by the fourth- and fifth-century Church Fathers, Herophilus, John Locke, René Descartes, Robert Burton, Thomas Willis, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Albrecht von Haller.31 Memory recorded sensory impressions, the intellect was thought to house innate ideas or first principles outside experience, while reason (related to intellect) ‘made comparisons and classified data, and the imagination made pictures based on its response to the world’.32 To simplify drastically, this system and its terminology largely persisted until the phrenological developments of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim – another attempt to describe the mind which became connected with the chess-player (discussed in Chapter 3). Regarding humours, the system of the four humours was found in preliminary form in the work of Hippocrates (fifth century BC) and others, was more formally codified by Galen (second century AD), and was only seriously challenged by Andreas Vesalius (mid-sixteenth century), after which the idea embarked upon a slow, though still not complete, death.33 Humours were bodily fluids thought to impact on one’s health and character. Blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm were each related to one of the four elements thought to have birthed the origins of life: fire, air, earth, and water (or hot, dry, cold, and wet). Equilibrium of humours equated to good health. When one humour became excessive or deficient, sickness or emotional imbalance followed. Personality traits, such as melancholy or choler, originate in this model of the body. According to one guide, for example, the melancholic was ‘a burden to themselves and others’.34 In talking of humours and mental faculties, the central issue in hand is the ­purpose of the game. Why would one play chess? What was it good for? What feelings might it provoke in a player? The Letter from a Minister had, after all, noted some positive qualities to chess-play. Writers such as Robert Green and Petyr Vermigli had declared the game an exercise of the mind, analogous to its bodily counterpart, implying an expending of energy but also a restorative or improving activity.35 Others agreed, but came to more negative conclusions. Thomas Fuller cautioned his readers to ‘take heed of cousening thy mind, in setting it to do a double task under pretence of giving it a play-day, as in the labyrinth of chess and other tedious and studious games’.36 That is, Fuller claimed, chess-play did not offer any improving results. Another, agreeing with Fuller that the game was ‘exceeding laborious’, could still recommend it for

26 Minds

precisely these reasons, for with this labour came ‘the pleasure of so many furious encounters, plots, and justlings’.37 Indeed, Sir John Pringle, playing with Benjamin Franklin, apparently discovered the velocity of his and his opponent’s pulses much increased during chess-play.38 This game, which warmed ‘the blood and the brain’, seemingly aroused the energies of the player.39 Yet what constituted excess, the degree to which the game awoke one’s mind, and exactly what it awoke, were contested.40 Certainly, multiple effects on body and mind were evidenced in the game’s earliest printed outlinings. Luiz Ramírez de Lucena’s Discourse on Love and the Art of Chess (1497) – the first accurately dated description of chess after the introduction of rule changes and new pieces and the earliest printed extant book on chess-playing, as well as ‘a product of the transitional period’41 – focused predominantly on chess problems rather than description, but two ideas ­concerning the emotional, cognitive, and behavioural impact of chess-play within the ­material outside the main text are striking. The dedication informs the princely patron of the work that one might alleviate his fatigue with enjoyment, balancing this praise with a note of caution warning that the game could equally ‘produce disturbances in the intellect and memory’.42 Apparently speaking from experience, the dedication continued: ‘[one] should not spend much time playing so that the time lost therein be minor and no cause for grief: since otherwise it could well alter his talent and upset his memory’.43 That is, the game was beneficial if taken in the right amount, but potentially dangerous in too large a dose – a pharmakon – which distinguished it from games such as hazard or gambling, which were not thought to possess intrinsic beneficial qualities by theologians or moderators of behaviour. This was a subtler warning than those given by those such as the minister, suggesting that the game had its place in a balanced lifestyle, but that caution should be taken, and likewise confirming that the chess-player stepped into dangerous territory by playing the game.44 The parallels and repetitions between Lucena’s Discourse and the Letter from a Minister are evident. Each suggests the various ways the game could inflame or calm the player. The minister, unlike Lucena, however, most explicitly found the root of the game’s unsuitability in his humoral identity. His own constitution was, he said, phlegmatic. Should he have need of any exercise, it was of the stirring and labouring kind. Seemingly chess was well suited to the task, as Lucena also implicitly suggests this tendency. Rather than de-phlegmatising him, the game, however, according to the minister, caused damage to the health of his soul, body, and mind, provoking sin, and bringing him to idleness and to neglect of his religious and secular duties.45 Yet more frequent and persuasive than connections with the phlegmatic condition were connections between chess-play and the alleviation of melancholy. Melancholy was the theme of one



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 27

of the more impressive efforts of early-modern literature, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which included chess-play as an activity that, like cards, tables, and dice, was ‘often abused’. Burton’s work, covering everything the mind could conceive of, quoted the sixteenth-century Dutch physician and author Levinas Lemnius in including chess as one of several games ‘forbidden as things most pernitious, insanam rem & damnosam’. That is, chess was one of several games which could lead to sinful behaviour including playing for and coveting money, swearing, drinking, and loss of time. In this way, an ‘honest exercise’ could be ‘contrarily perverted … Vexat mentes insana cupido’.46 This was balanced with a claim that chess-play, seemingly alone among games, was a good exercise of the mind ‘for some kind of men, and fit for such melanchol[ics], as Rhasis holds, as are Idle, and have extravagant impertinent thoughts, or are troubled with cares, nothing better to distract their mind, and alter their meditations’.47 Like Lucena’s dedication, however, it was also suggested that a careful dose was required, since too much study could ‘do more harm than good, it is a game too troublesome for some men’s brains, too full of anxiety, all out as bad as study, and besides it is a testy, cholericke game, and very offensive to him that looseth the Mate’.48 Equally, Burton’s warning that the game’s ‘cholericke’ nature could provoke violence and excess in the majority of individuals reiterated the opinion that chess-play was thought more likely to produce disruption in the player as a reflection of an individual’s inner torment, ‘disorder[ing] the passions’ and ‘toil[ing] the spirits’ rather than ‘recreating’ them.49 The Letter from a Minister pointed to several ways in which this effect manifested itself. Likewise, one ­seventeenth-century fiction by a ‘Turkish spy’ in the court of Louis XIV violently declared the game ‘too intricate and puzzling, [it] deserves the name of business rather than of recreation: It commits a rape on the mind.’50 King James I had also, in a discussion of recreations, remarked that brain-filling chess-play was ‘over-wise and Philosophicke a folly … [It] filleth and troubleth mens heades, with as many fashious toyes of the play, as before it was filled with thoughts on his affaires.’51 In each case, one can identify the creation of marginal groups of chess-players – those with a specific temperament or mindset. Such a tendency of marginalisation was repeated in a variety of other contexts which will unfold throughout this book. Burton’s perspective provided a way out of religiously inscribed proscriptions of chess-play, turning a game’s value away from religious society to the effects on the individual self. Samuel Gott noted, like Burton, in the m ­ id-seventeenth century that chess-play could help one escape ‘the Tyranny of … serious Anxieties’. Yet Gott developed Burton’s advice in several ways, adding that ‘as we must thus manage our Minds, so we must govern them by a right Judgment and pure

28 Minds

Reason, abstracted from all Fancies and Opinions’.52 The underlying assumptions of Gott were of a different order than any cautious religiously inflected praise or advice of all-things-in-moderation, instead connecting the game to new authorities of judgement and reason. Yet this difference should not be exaggerated. In the texts discussed above, in spite of their different measures, the game is always firmly within the orbit of the human domain of play. The failings of the chess-player described by the minister are human failings. The religious warnings of Church figures were rooted in the fallibility of the sinner. Medical and pseudo-medical uses of the game aimed to soothe and solve life’s difficulties. Each intervened in the question of how one should live.53 Likewise, while increasingly chess-play was connected with a new role under reason, this did not stop calls for moderation. Although chess-play may have been deemed to ‘put off heavy, melancholy, or idle thoughts’, spending too much time on the game was considered ‘unseemly in a Gentleman’, confirming the game’s developing social and private role.54 New questions were provoked concerning the game’s utility and values, picked up below and in Chapter 2.

Animal To stop at this point – a safe, smooth progression from religiously inspired behavioural control to something like modern ideas of gaming used for recreation and away from excessive societal scrutiny – would be to ignore a significant parallel trend concerning the chess-player which problematised its occupation of an exclusively human domain and questioned the emergent link between chess-play and the values of, as Gott stated, judgement and reason. To answer the question – what mental faculties was chess-play thought to require in the medieval and early-modern period? – is not straightforward, despite Gott’s confidence. For example, despite much evidence asserting the predominance of the intellect and reason in the game’s operation, both Juan Huarte’s Examination of Men’s Wits (1594) and David Abercromby’s A Discourse of Wit (1685) agreed on an underlying point, that ‘chess-play, is one of the things, which best [reveals] the imagination’, as opposed to the intellect.55 Chess skill was ‘an evident mark that [one’s] Imaginative faculty hath the advantage above the Intellective’.56 Yet in the former, this assertion is put to a partial and devious use: to justify an affirmation of social hierarchy. Huarte recalled a story of a school divine, who lost repeatedly to his servant at the game, dismissing the notion that his social inferior had ‘a better wit’ than he. In fact, the divine suggested that the devil had revealed what moves to make to his servant.57 Understanding and memory were also considered as outside the realm of chess-play, mathematics, or other



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 29

mechanical exercise, but applicable to the sciences instead.58 Book-obsessed scholars or divines, with their ‘books well righted, and their chamber welldressed’, were hence assumed to possess ‘a certain difference [or lack] of imagination, very contrary to the understanding, and to the memory’.59 A certain absence of imagination was conceded in order to assert the scholar’s dominance over his social inferior. A cultural space which helps shed more light on the mental faculties applied to chess-play and the motivations behind such applications is within satirical early-modern texts. A variety of these texts concern the animal, usually ape or monkey, as chess-player. In these, one sees that intellectual ability is, in part, a cultural category, one applied with preconceptions and assumptions. These early-modern encounters, and their later interpretation, challenged the identity of the chess-player as almost exclusively 1) European, 2) male, 3) of the middling, middle, or upper classes, 4) adult, 5) assumed to possess some specific mental faculty, and, most importantly, 6) human. The way these stories were received also anticipates the reaction to chess-playing machines in many ways. Representative strategies sought to diminish, marginalise, or negate the impact of animal chess-players, to dismiss them as automata or the subject of fable. As Erica Fudge states, animals raise anxiety over ‘the nature of being human itself … Achieving human status has never been easy. The ways in which being human is defined rely on the exercise of certain skills’, such as speaking or, one might add, chess-play.60 Fudge’s discussion of the highly useful and highly tempestuous concept of ‘human-ness’ also informs this discussion of the animal chess-player. The sixteenth-century tale of a chess-playing Indian or Iberian ape or monkey is characteristic of the manner in which the animal world was utilised in narratives for self-reflection and also amusement. Two tellings, Giovanni Nenna’s A Treatise of Nobilitie (1595) and Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1556), situate the tale among other ‘pleasant’ or ‘diverse’ tales, turning their stories into early-modern water-cooler talk.61 Nenna uses the story to mock a group who ‘brag so greatly of their Nobility’. His friends ‘in jests … [told] certain tales … far from the truth: but these noble men did marvellously wonder at them’. One of these was ‘the tale of the ape of India [that] plaid so well at chess’. All who ‘had any quick capacity, invented some fable or other’. Such was the noblemen’s ignorance and acceptance of their stories, that ‘it ma[de] them like unto brute beasts’.62 Nenna’s story suggests that an inversion has taken place, whereby the nobility become as stupid as beasts, failing to distinguish fact and fiction. Their nobility may not be questioned, but their capacity for common sense was under threat. They lacked a kind of sociability by believing the truth of the tale of the chess-playing ape. Castiglione’s version, possessing a related meaning, is situated at the court of the King of Portugal, and describes an ‘Ape,

30 Minds

quite different from the common sort’, which ‘played very skilfully at chess’, winning by ‘some very cunning movements’.63 The defeated opponent becomes the beast, violently attacking the ape. Playing the second game, and anticipating a physical beating, the ape covers itself as it makes the winning move. ‘Now,’ says one translation, ‘see whether this Ape were not wise, circumspect, and of a good understanding.’ Again, an inversion has taken place; the opponent becomes violent when defeated, more beastly than the beast. ‘This story,’ recorded Richard Twiss, the eighteenth-century collector of much chess m ­ iscellany, ‘has been copied into many modern books, without the following concluding line, which explains the whole. “At this [story] every man laughed … for the lye.”’64 The story, that is, was well understood as parody, a temporary carnival space where that which was peripheral (India; Portugal; ape; at play) became the centre, reorienting the social landscape. These stories existed in a well-established lineage of similar stories – ‘a recurring motif [within Renaissance literature] in ape and monkey folk lore has to do with the animal’s ability to play chess, fetch wine from taverns, and do other feats ­seemingly requiring the ability to reason’.65 The emphasis here, of course, should be on the word ‘seemingly’. By the seventeenth century, writers described ‘a Monkey in the King of Spain’s court [who] was very skilful at chess-play’66 and ‘the Monkey that played at chess with his master’,67 ‘a monkey to have so well learnt, and obeyed the rules of his tutor, that he would not only play a game at chess, but often give a checkmate to a good gamester’.68 Elsewhere, English poet Richard Brathwaite wrote of ‘An Age for Apes’, describing a chess-playing Ape brought from Portugal, ‘a nimble thing’.69 Brathwaite’s story reflects Keith Thomas’s contention that the seventeenth century in ‘general saw a “narrowing gap” in perceptions of human and animal intelligence’.70 The Cartesian Sir Kenelm Digby’s 1644 argument that apes could not exhibit reason has been seen as evidence that the belief that apes and other animals exhibited reason was widely held. Digby ‘made the case … for what we would now call the effects of behavioural conditioning [including repetition] … His conclusion was that “assuefaction and custom, not judgement” [explain] the ape’s apparent capacity for rational thought’, in the face of widespread belief concerning the close relationship between human, ape, baboon, and monkey intelligence.71 Indeed, the possibility of intelligent animals, outside the ordinary, with a conscious soul, had been given biblical justification, since ‘although the Scripture tell … of some Beasts that have no understanding … it sends us for instruction to others’. Commentary by certain classical ‘learned men’, including Porphyrius, Plutarch, Raymondus and Sebondus, also allowed ‘Reason to Beasts’. Such authors highlighted examples of famous clever animals – Pliny’s elephant repeating his lesson in the moon-shine, for example, and a gaming ape.72



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 31

Two underlying positions can be discerned from these early-modern stories, one giving credence to the idea of the ape as possessor of reason during chessplay, the other suggesting the ape’s performance to be an imitative act. The first, by the seventeenth-century French physician and philosopher Marin Cureau de la Chambre, prioritised surface appearance, stating that ‘essences and properties are known but by effects: Is it not more reasonable to conclude that beasts doing reasonable things, have a reasonable faculty, then to affirm that the effects are not reasonable, because Beasts have not a reasonable Faculty?’73 Continuing, he noted that ‘the greatest difficulty seems to be in the terms; those who call it Instinct, cannot deny but it acts with Reason; and those that allow them Reason, deny it to be Intellectual’.74 Contrarily, in line with Cartesian ideas of animals as reflex-driven machines with no intellectual capacities,75 Brathwaite thought the ape’s skill to be ‘imitative’, earned through ‘the daily use and practice of that game’76 rather than ‘intellective’, agreeing with earlier descriptions of the ape as ‘of such nature that when he sees one do a thing he enforces him to do the same’.77 In both cases, incidentally, the faculty of reason was unquestioningly assumed necessary for chess-play outside of the ape’s play. Brathwaite recorded, for example, that ‘no game requireth a conceit more pregnant than the chess’.78 Both positions had implications for the status of chess and the chess-player. If an ape could play chess convincingly while not exercising reason, then what did this mean for the human chess-player? If animals did possess the faculty of reason, then how did this impact the status of chess-play? If superficial appearance could not be distinguished from hard-won ability, then what was chess skill useful for? These and other related questions recur in the context of chess-playing machines in Part II below. By the Victorian period, to take a momentary leap forward, the chess-­playing ape was interpreted as challenging the idea that chess was 1) difficult, 2) representative of intelligence, and 3) more generally emblematic of respectable human civilisation. The idea of a chess-playing anything-but-a-white-male, whether animal, machine, child, or non-European, was threatening. Even when discussing animals, it was always the ‘human itself that c[ame] under the greatest scrutiny … [animals] raised the spectre of human limitation; they provoked unease about the distinct nature of humanity; they undid the boundaries between human and beast even as they appeared to cement them’.79 Responses to the tales show that ‘the boundary between human and animal is also, and inevitably, firmly reiterated … Where there is a fear of the collapse of difference, there is also an urgent need to reiterate human superiority.’80 Resistance to the belief in chess-playing animals, as with chess-playing machines, was an affirmation of the nature of human-ness as much as the intellectual status of chess, clearly segregating the play act from animal existence. As one author noted, in an article

32 Minds

reproduced in various reviews of 1849 including the Living Age, Quarterly Review and Littell’s Living Age, since chess-play was considered to require uncommon readiness and accuracy of calculation, we must … withdraw the credence too freely given in our youth to the charming story in the animaux celebres, of a certain chess-playing monkey; how he beat his royal master, and how, after receiving sundry blows in reward of his victory, he prefaced the next checkmate by taking up for his personal security a cushion which lay convenient.81

The Lady’s Magazine and Museum, in the 1830s, also recorded a story of a chess-playing ape, ‘for the verity of which we are far from vouching’, and ended with the thought that ‘whether deservedly or no, some superior mental power is attributed to the successful issue of a game at chess’, implying further doubt over the ape’s successes and linking the veracity of the tale more with the culturally constructed image of the game than the nature of human–animal division.82 Few Victorians would have treated the tale as fact. Yet, again revealing the parallel readings which can occur within and around the same contested territory, while dismissing the story as ‘spirited fiction’, nineteenth-century stories of animaux célèbres such as that of ‘The Sagacious Dog’ were frequent.83 Indeed, the nineteenth century was an ‘era rich in examples of animal scholarship’, such as, to mention another learned canine, the royally patronised Munetto, the ‘Isaac Newton of his race’; the period delighted in examples of non-human intelligence, although these were largely understood as staged performance, not acts of genuine cognition.84 To reiterate, while the mid-nineteenth-century affirmation of the human chess-player certainly rested on uncertain ground, the game was widely considered to have an intellectual and somewhat polite reputation, despite the precise mental faculties thought to be employed in chess-play being varied and undefined. William Hauff’s Orientalist The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves (1815), to confirm this sentiment, described an ape infiltrating polite society and beating the local parson at chess. The ape, a ‘hellish delusion’, and the perpetrator, a ‘magician’, corrupt the civilised values of the town. ‘The greatest mortification’ for the townsfolk, ‘was that of the younger part of the community, at having imitated the bad habits and manners of the ape’. Their ‘only consolation was that it had all happened by witchcraft’.85

Endings / beginnings The early-modern and modern period only saw anxiety over the chess-player increase. The ‘chess-player’ as a cultural figure became separated from those



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 33

who merely played chess, the former – in the realm of ideas – being a mysterious, unnamed, or unknown other, and the latter – in the mundane everyday world – a recreational player who filled spare time, perhaps to some useful end. Marking the end of the early-modern period, the virtuosic appearances of François-André Philidor (considered in the following chapter) and the publication of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1755) provided two redefinitions and re-presentations of the cultural image and value of the chess-player. The Encyclopédie’s obituary-like article on chess seemingly disagreed with the notion that ‘good chess players are gifted with superior capacities’, reminding the reader that ‘intelligence’ or hierarchies of mental talent were not essential categories but were always culturally determined. The author queried ‘why socalled geniuses are deficient at it and mediocrities often excel at it’, claiming that skill at chess was not associated with any other talents, instead stemming from habits, continual practice, a machine-like memory, and a localised talent for the game, taking inspiration from the stories of the school divine and the chessplaying ape. Indeed, the Encyclopédie also remarked, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, on how ‘chess has more or less generally fallen out of fashion, and other … manners of wasting one’s time … have succeeded it’. Yet contradictorily on these two issues, the article’s first words describe a game ‘which everyone knows and which very few play well … the most erudite of all the games wherein the intellect takes part’.86 The game’s parallel interpretations, and with them the ambiguous identity of the chess-player’s mind, persisted. Considering the chess-player as sinner, melancholic, and animal anticipates the monstrous, automaton-like, and virtuosic aspects of the representation of this figure in the modern period. There is no reason to think any of these three lives are over. Underlying these images is the becoming of the chess-player within Western culture, as a spectacle and marginal figure. On the one hand, the chess-player emblematised indiscipline and indulgence, through associations with gambling and excess of effort and time. On the other hand, the chess-player was a sign of detachment from society, gaining an association with solitary potential and, latterly, a connection with reason and associated intellectual faculties. While authors such as Burton had already pointed to the improving potential of the game, Enlightenment thinkers such as the Marquis de Condorcet and the writers of the Encyclopédie established humanist and proto-transhumanist lines for the chess-player to cross. Chess-play was potentially one of several ‘instruments which increase[d] the power and direct[ed] the exercise of those faculties [including reason] or [facilitated] the improvement of [the] natural organization itself’.87 Despite the perpetual renewal of the chess-player, the figure could never discard its past, defying, through echoes and fragmentation, summation and closure. Indeed, the following two chapters consider the re-presentation of

34 Minds

the issues considered above, within Victorian respectability narratives and crime fiction, following the emergence during the eighteenth century of the chessplayer as a public figure and as a virtuoso combining commercial, technical, and spectacular ambitions, employing new media forms and urban settings.88 The roots of these cultural images can be located within medieval and early-modern negotiations of the chess-player.

Notes  1 P. Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 52.  2 F. Galofaro, ‘Chess and Variations of’, in R. Carlisle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), p. 127.  3 S. J. Matt, ‘Recovering the Invisible: Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions’, in S. J. Matt and P. N. Stearns (eds), Doing Emotions History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013), pp. 45–6.  4 C. M. Walker, ‘Europe, 1600–1800’, in Carlisle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Play, p. 203.  5 E. Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 4.  6 Lucien Febvre, quoted in Matt, ‘Recovering the Invisible’, p. 41.  7 K. Perry, ‘Unpicking the Seam: Talking Animals and Reader Pleasure in Early Modern Satire’, in E. Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 19.  8 Ibid., pp. 19, 21–2.  9 J. Knowles, ‘“Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?”: Apes and Other on the Early Modern Stage’, in Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts, p. 139. 10 R. Bubczyk, ‘“Ludus Inhonestus et Illicitus?”: Chess, Games, and the Church in Medieval Europe’, in S. Patterson (ed.), Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 23. 11 Ibid., p. 25. 12 Ibid., p. 23. 13 Ibid., p. 25. 14 E. Pettit, The Visions of the Reformation (London: Joanna Brome, 1683), p. 131. 15 Bubczyk, ‘Ludus’, p. 28. 16 Ibid. 17 R. Twiss, Chess, Volume I (London: G. Robinson, 1787), p. 110. 18 See R. Twiss, Chess, Volume II (London: G. Robinson, 1789), pp. 77–8. 19 See J. Wilkins, An essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (London: Sa. Gellibrand, 1668), p. 241. 20 Bubczyk, ‘Ludus’, pp. 30–3. 21 Ibid., p. 34.



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 35

22 Ibid. 23 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 15–16, for a description of such an imagined community: imagined because its members never know, meet, or hear most of their fellow members, while feeling part of a group; limited because each community is restricted in size and based on knowledge of chess; sovereign because each is socially and intellectually distinct; and a community because of the inherent comradeship of each group. 24 Ibid., p. 35. 25 R. Waterhouse, ‘“Beowulf” as Palimpsest’, in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 29. 26 See also Edward IV’s and Henry VII’s anti-gaming laws of 1478 and 1495 respectively (‘Edward IV: January 1478’; and ‘Henry VII: October 1495’, in C. Given-Wilson et al. [eds], Parliament Rolls of Medieval England: British History Online [Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005] [www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval/ january-1478; and www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval/ october-1495, accessed July 2016]). Both emphasised the pull of games away from more important secular duties, and remind one that gaming did not exist in a zone proscribed solely by religiously inflected modes of power. Henry VII also played chess for money. Records show an entry for 13s. 4d ‘for the Kinges losse at chesse’. S. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, or, Illustrations of English History (London: Richard Bentley, 1831), p. 126. 27 See also Jan Hus’s letter in which he regretted his chess-play; quoted in J. Foxe, Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church (London: Iohn Daye, 1583), p. 631. 28 See also a historical definition of ‘Art’ in R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fourth Estate, 2nd edn, 2004), pp. 40–2. 29 Anon., A letter from a minister to his friend concerning the game of chesse (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1680). 30 E. Clarke and K. Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function: Imaging the Brain from Antiquity to the Present (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1996), p. 9. 31 Ibid. 32 S. Crowley, The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), p. 17. See also C. G. Gross, Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 33. 33 N. Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), pp. 3–44. 34 A. von Knigge and P. Will, Practical Philosophy of Social Life or, The Art of Conversing with Men (Lansingburgh: Penniman & Bliss, 1805), p. 51. 35 R. Greene, Morando the tritameron of loue (London: J. Kingston and J. Charlewood, 1584); and P. Vermigli, Most fruitful and learned commentaries (London: John Day, 1564), pp. 220–1. 36 T. Fuller, The holy state (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1642), p. 184. 37 J. Hall, Horae vacivae, or, Essays (London: E. G., 1646), pp. 147–8.

36 Minds

38 World and Fashionable Advertiser, 18 June 1787, quoted in Twiss, Chess, vol. I, p. 190. 39 J. Hervey, ‘A Letter to the Craftsman, On the Game of Chess’, Country Journal or The Craftsman, 15 September 1733, p. 29. 40 See also W. Gearing, The sacred diary (London: J. D., 1679), p. 154. 41 R. Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole, new edn, 2002), pp. 72–3. Half the problems, taken from other sources, were from the old and half from the new rules. 42 Extracts from ‘Dedication’, Luis Ramirez de Lucena, Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess (1561), trans. R. Calvino and M. Romeo, www.goddesschess.com/ches​ says/lucena6x9draft.doc (accessed March 2012). 43 Ibid. 44 The idea of chess-play as both ‘remedy’ and/or ‘poison’ mirrors the concept of the pharmakon, discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus and in J. Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 63–171. 45 Anon., A letter from a minister to his friend. See also R. Twiss’s comment that ‘The Spaniards say, that the game of Chess is of use … to dephlegmatize a man’, quoted in Twiss, Chess, vol. I, p. 25. 46 R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1621), pp. 346–7. 47 According to Twiss, Rhasis was a tenth-century Arabian physician who, ‘according to Dr Hyde, wrote a book upon Chess, called, Apologeticus pro ludentibus al Shatrangi, Auctore Al Razi, qui vulgo Rasis, and another de Arte Neriludii, both in Arabic’; quoted in Twiss, Chess, vol. II, p. 47. My italics. 48 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, pp. 346–7. 49 B. Ashwood, The heavenly trade (London: Samuel Lee, 1678), p. 250. 50 G. P. Marana, The fifth volume of letters writ by a Turkish spy who lived five and forty years undiscover’d at Paris (London: J. Leake, 1692), pp. 33–4. My italics. 51 James I, King of England, The Works of the most high and mightie prince, Iames by the grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, defender of the faith (London: Robert Barker and John Bill, 1616), pp. 186–7. 52 S. Gott, An essay of the true happines of man in two books (London: Rob. White, 1650), p. 93. 53 For some beginnings on chess-players who were not European, white, or male, consider Twiss’s notes: ‘Of Ladies, he [referring to himself, it appears] has not met a first, or even a second rate player’, and ‘I have never heard or read of a Negro’s playing at Chess’; Twiss, Chess, vol. I, pp. 165, 189–90. 54 W. Ramesey, The gentlemans companion, or, A character of true nobility and gentility microform (London: E. Okes, 1672), p. 126. 55 J. Huarte, Examen de ingenious: or, The tryal of wits (London: Adam Islip, 1594), pp. 112– 13. Text modernised for clarity. 56 D. Abercromby, A discourse of wit (London: John Weld, 1686), pp. 34–6. 57 Huarte, Examen de ingenious, pp. 112–13.



Sinner, melancholic, and animal 37

58 Abercromby, A discourse of wit, pp. 34–6. 59 Huarte, Examen de ingenious, pp. 112–13. 60 Fudge, ‘Introduction’, in Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts, p. 1. 61 G. B. Nenna, A Discourse Whether a Noble Man by Birth or a Gentleman by Desert is Greater in Nobilitie, trans. William Jones (London: Peter Short, 1600), pp. 77–9; and B. Castiglione, ‘Il Libro del Cortegiano’ (1556), in N. Knight and W. Guy (eds), King, Queen and Knight: A Chess Anthology in Prose and Verse, trans. T. Hoby (London: B. T. Batsford, 1975), pp. 142–3. 62 Nenna, A Discourse, pp. 77–9. 63 Castiglione, ‘Il Libro del Cortegiano’, pp. 142–3. 64 Twiss, Chess, vol. II, p. 100. 65 J. E. Howard, ‘Bettrice’s Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy’, in J. G. Singh (ed.), A Companion to the Global Renaissance (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 328. 66 T. Powell, Humane Industry, or, A History of Most Manual Arts Deducing the Original, Progress, and Improvement of Them (London: Herringman, 1661), p. 174. 67 J. Harrington, The Oceana of James Harrington and His Other Works (London: Booksellers of London and Westminster, 1700), p. xlii. 68 J. Harrington, Horae Consecratae, or, Spiritual Pastime (London: for the author, 1682), p. 230. 69 R. Brathwaite, The Honest Ghost, or, A Voice from the Vault (London: Ric. Hodgkinsonne, 1658), p. 141. 70 B. Cummings, ‘Pliny’s Literate Elephant and the Idea of Animal Language in Renaissance Thought’, in Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts, p. 165. 71 Howard, ‘Bettrice’s Monkey’, pp. 328–9. 72 M. C. de La Chambre, A Discourse of the Knowledge of Beasts, Wherein all that hath been said for, and against their Ratiocination, is Examined (London: Tho. Newcomb, 1657), p. 4. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 S. J. Crowley and C. Allen, ‘Animal Behavior’, in M. Ruse (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 331. See also ‘Mendax’ (1783), in N. Knight (eds), Chess Pieces (London: Sampson Low, 1949), p. 220; G. Magalhães, A new history of China containing a description of the most considerable particulars of that vast empire (London: Thomas Newborough, 1688), pp. 319–20, for the story of a chess-playing bird at the Chinese palace called Hu Chim Tien (the Palace of the Walls of the Tiger); and W. C. McDermott, The Ape in Antiquity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), p. 137. 76 R. Brathwaite, The English gentleman containing sundry excellent rules or exquisite observations (London: John Haviland, 1630), pp. 169–70. 77 W. Caxton, Game and Playe of the Chesse: A Verbatim Reprint of the First Edition, 1474 (London: Elliot Stock, 1883). 78 Brathwaite, The English gentleman, p. 224. 79 Fudge, ‘Introduction’, in Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts, p. 13.

38 Minds

80 Ibid., p. 2. 81 ‘Chess’, Living Age, 22.18 (August 1849), p. 292. 82 ‘Chess Playing’, Lady’s Magazine, 2.2 (February 1833), pp. 56–7. 83 ‘A Sagacious Dog’, Living Age, 3.30 (7 December 1844), p. 345. 84 R. Jay, ‘The Faithful Monetto and The Inimitable Dick’, in R. Jay, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), p. 3. 85 S. Spring, ‘The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves’, United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 16 January 1815, p. 49. 86 L. Jaucourt, ‘Chess’, in D. Diderot (ed.) with J. d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Volume V, trans. J. T. Kuznicki (University of Michigan Library: Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, 1755), pp. 244–8, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.504 (accessed November 2013). 87 M. More, ‘1. The Philosophy of Transhumanism’, in M. More and N. Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 9–10. 88 Metzner, Crescendo, pp. 1–2.

2 ‘A quiet game of chess?’ Respectability in urban and literary space Tavern to café The decoupling of gaming from religious and cultural doctrine which ostracised and restricted certain actions remains incomplete. Nevertheless, parallel thought-models that encouraged and promoted activities including chess-play emerged in the early-modern period. A number of instructional manuals were produced which collectively represent a ‘coming-out’ of the chess-player, an attempt at shedding a sinful skin. In the mid-eighteenth century, the virtuoso chess-player François-André Danican Philidor commented that there was nothing else to add on the game’s virtues: ‘So many ancient Authors,’ he said, ‘have spoken in praise of the Game of Chess, that it would be needless for me to say much of it’.1 Others jumped head-first into technical details, feeling no need for justification.2 Yet gaming manuals such as Charles Cotton’s Compleat Gamester (1674) demonstrated a perceived need to defend the broader topic of play from ‘the cold welcome’ it could receive.3 Certainly, Cotton optimistically and rhetorically assumed that ‘there is no man so severe to deny the lawfulness of Recreation’.4 Nevertheless, conscious that there were such severe men, Cotton, before going on to defend gaming, vividly warned that Gaming is an enchanting witchery, gotten betwixt Idleness and Avarice: An itching Disease, that makes some scratch the head, whilst others, as if they were bitten by a Tarantula, are laughing themselves to death … it is a paralytical distemper.5

Chess-play lay partially outside of this condemnation, hence Philidor’s bold claim. Cotton noted its status as ‘a Royal Game and more difficult to be understood than any other Game whatever’, while adding that it ‘will take up sometimes in the playing so long a time that I have known two play a fortnight at times before the Game hath been ended’ – a recurring myth surrounding the game, repeated into and beyond the nineteenth century, indicating the game’s

40 Minds

immersive qualities. Yet, puncturing the atmosphere, he added that ‘I believe the tediousness of the Game hath caus’d the practice thereof to be so little used’.6 Later editions reproduced this mix of warning and praise, as did the aforementioned Encyclopédie.7 Around fifty years after Cotton, Edmund Hoyle and Richard Seymour could, however, both remark on a re-emergence in England of the game among the respectable classes. Hoyle in particular praised the chessplayers Sir Abraham Janssen, Mr Montgomery, and Mr Bosan for spreading instructional knowledge.8 Likewise, Seymour claimed that gaming, including chess-play, was ‘becoming much the Fashion among the Beau Monde’.9 This should not be understood as signalling the arrival of chess as a game of mass participation. Instead the game, lying in wait for newer cultural contexts to invigorate it, remained peripheral outside upper-class gamesters in the early-modern period.10 It is to this new, invigorating context which saw the (re-)emergence of the cultural chess-player that this chapter now turns.

Respectability? Stated straightforwardly: concern surrounding the social utility of the chessplayer from the medieval and early-modern periods found renewal in the nineteenth century within debates on respectability in particular and Victorian values in general. The game’s movement into semi-legitimised social spaces such as cafés saw chess-play re-emerge to become part of the emergent urban landscape. The idea of chess as urban, respectable, and rational – an improbable notion in the early-modern, never mind the medieval, period – had become a possible, if not attained, image of the game by the late Victorian period, signalled by the attention given to the 1851 inaugural International Chess Tournament in London.11 But what of the earlier Victorian chess-player and the historical pathways to this potential reading? This chapter, arguing for the chess-player as a social type in Victorian urban life as important as, for example, the flâneur or prostitute, considers two aspects of the chess-player in early-to-mid-Victorian society which reveal the problematic association of the chess-player with respectability or the ‘improvement of health and physique, personal, civic and national prestige; and personal profit’.12 It offers a partial view of the chess-player only, one that was centred on Paris, the centre of chess-playing at this time. It does not suggest that the image presented was a universal one. It takes as its beginning an assertion in the 1840s that this increasingly visible, if not comprehended, cultural figure was ‘of quiet habits; caring less for notoriety than most other classes of men’,13 someone attached ‘to a quiet old book when alone – to a quiet game of chess when with a friend – [and] to a quiet bottle of Madeira w[hen playing]’.14 These



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 41

characteristics suggested the presence of rationality, control, and an aspiration towards respectability, while connoting the absence of sound and disorder. In seeking the origins of the image of the Victorian chess-player as a member of society aspiring towards rationality and respectability, Harold Murray identified the catalysing effect of ‘the great increase in the number of people interested in the chess problem’, ‘the attention paid to the doings of the more prominent players’, and the development of the printed chess column.15 All three concern the printed page. Indeed, chess became the ‘most common form of intellectual exercise in periodicals’ of the Victorian age.16 The seemingly homogeneous respectability discourse that enveloped all forms of leisure found an ambiguous partner in these chess experiences. Collectively, the developments suggested by Murray hint at the evolution of chess into one of many Victorian pastimes described as ‘formal, institutional and respectable recreations’.17 Howard Staunton, the leading English chess-player of his age, the editor of the ChessPlayer’s Chronicle, and a Shakespearean scholar, favourably suggested that chess was just another leisure activity ‘reinforcing the work ethic, thrift and respectability’.18 Yet Staunton’s ambitions, although on the path to acceptance, were not matched by reality in mid-Victorian society, and by examining the earliest moments of the chess-player in the Victorian literary and urban landscape, one locates alternative readings. To apply the image of a quiet, respectable, and rational game uncritically and uniformly across the entire Victorian period is misleading. It is equally simplistic to suggest that chess-play had achieved respectable status unconditionally by the end of the Victorian period. Echoes of the criticisms levelled at the game in the medieval and early-modern period, including its addictive qualities, and its facilitation of greed, sloth, gluttony, and pride, for example, resurfaced in new contexts. Chess-play’s claims to respectability remain aspirational and select across all time periods, reflecting the diffuse, highly contextual nature of respectable identities. Equally contentious is the entwinement of chess with the rational recreation movement. Adrian Harvey cannily notes that rational recreation is ‘a category which chess can almost be seen as embodying’.19 Any claimed connection is an uneasy one, although the issue at hand here is not the game’s connection with rational recreation as such, but respectable values more broadly.

Texts and author In arguing for the contentious nature of the Victorian chess-player – as someone who could cross lines of respectable and disreputable behaviour – this chapter takes up the challenge raised by Mike Huggins who declared that we

42 Minds

need to question the extent to which beliefs about the unceasing respectability of middle-class leisure were held and explore ‘the notion and significance of an unrespectable set of middle-class values’.20 By close readings of George Walker’s 1841 article ‘The Café de la Régence’ and his 1840 ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’, both published in Fraser’s Magazine and later reprinted in Walker’s edited collection, Chess and Chess-Players (1850), this chapter offers a sense of the chess-player as a figure woven around themes of presence, absence, and excess. In this, it leads on from the above discussion. Both of Walker’s articles are troubled texts, playing on the boundary of history, reality, and fantasy. In the former, we see a riotous, night-time Paris through the distorted, but informative, eyes of an urban, Romantic Victorian. Although a familiar place to the well-travelled Englishman at this time, the city is presented to the reader in overtly sentimental tones as a space removed from everyday life, both magical but familiar, sharing aspects with the culturally constructed church and tavern in its sacred and sordid identities. Walker’s Paris is an imagined Paris, surrounding the most famous space of chess performance and spectacle, the ‘headquarters of Paris literature and chess-playing’.21 He encourages a vibrantly diffuse image of the chess-player, naming over fifty characters, describing another thirty, and encompassing a range of social types, age groups, sexes, and nationalities. His chess-player at the ‘Café’ is a lively, universal, fragmented figure, transcending any specific national culture.22 Forms of respectability and the promotion of ‘right values’ were decidedly not in evidence.23 In the latter text, Walker considers chess played without sight of the chessboard, or blindfold chess. Again, the topic is approached through a blend of history, empiricism, and fantasy. A multitude of historical blindfold chess-players are outlined. The chess-player here appears withdrawn, Gothic, submerged in darkness and isolation. Silence and muteness rule. Walker discusses the game’s difficulties, advertises the task, provides a how-to guide, and, cheerleading, attempts to correct its apparent disregard. Troublesome minds and bodies are related, overwhelming and recasting the image of the chess-player as a static performer, simultaneously at the periphery and centre. Connecting the two texts are the figures of the virtuoso – those ‘who exhibit their talents in front of an audience, who possess as their principal talent a high degree of technical skill, and who aggrandize themselves in reputation and fortune, principally through the exhibition of their skill’ – and the automaton, into which the virtuoso lapses through extremes of behaviour, either through automatic behaviour or through forms of objectification and extremes of (in)visibility.24 George Walker (1803–79) was uniquely well placed to reveal the everyday experience of the chess-player within the context of the game’s growth as a literary topic and as a physical feature of the Victorian city. He was both represent-



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 43

ative of, and involved in, this emerging intersection, recognising the potential of the game to become a mass-participation event – ‘the recreation of the million’ as he optimistically claimed in 1840.25 He was a chess-player of some repute, for a time ‘London’s strongest active player’, and possessed a European-wide reputation.26 He was an author on chess, writing works such as The Art of Chess Play (1832) and Chess Studies (1844). He was a populariser of the game, establishing the first English periodical to cover chess, the Philidorian, in 1837, and writing the Bell’s Life chess column from 1835 to 1873.27 He was a founder and promoter of several chess institutions including the Westminster Chess Club and the St George’s Club, as the centre of the European game shifted from Paris to London. He was, therefore, well suited to guide the reader unfamiliar with the game of chess through its more exciting and little-known features. Urban Victorian leisure was a battleground of respectability, as fiercely contested as medieval and early-modern leisure space. Paul Metzner and Lynda Nead demonstrate respectability within city life to be fragile and diffusive, open to destabilisation in a variety of ways – through immorality, commonly signified by the prostitute;28 through disorder, signified by the crowd; through ostentatious public display of skill, signified by the virtuoso; or through inappropriate employment or reception of the gaze, signified by the flȃ neur or bystander.29 Each of these destabilising effects, and others, were attached, at least temporarily, to the chess-player on display in the bright-lit Parisian evening described in ‘The Café de la Régence’ and the solitary, statuesque performer of ‘Chess, Without the Chess Board’. Their manifestation can be roughly classified into locational contexts, behavioural modes, and associational contexts. The analysis below begins by discussing exterior contexts, before gradually working inwards, towards the interior café and mind, and finally ending with a consideration of virtuosic chess-player performance within the café and the blindfold chess performance. Again, this chapter attempts to reflect the shape of its subject, and fulfil the task established in the introduction of covering general impressions of the chess-player, as well as deeper, more intense images. With this in mind, the overwhelming entrancement Walker experiences in both texts serves as something of a model for the writing below.

Exteriors By acknowledging the exterior Café de la Régence (the physical building) as a practised space, somewhere where one goes as someone, one acknowledges the physical experience of interior chess-play. By acknowledging the ‘Café de la Régence’ (the text) as an imagined space, one acknowledges the h­ istorical

44 Minds

intermingling of the present and the ghostly, and the ability for emotions to overtake the observer. By acknowledging both café and ‘Café’ as historical spaces, one acknowledges their shared state with the past. Walker begins his Parisian winter’s evening with an invitation to the reader to join him on an adventure in a faraway, unfamiliar place, participating in a faraway, unfamiliar experience. Displaced to Paris, the hold of respectability could more easily fracture ‘away from the tyranny of the neighbours, church and respectable workplace’.30 Immersed in the Parisian night, heading towards the café situated on the rue Saint-Honoré near the Louvre on la Place du Palais-Royal, Walker presents one of the more notorious locational contexts of the age. Following his ‘ten-franc dinner’, and dismissing the alternatives of a Parisian Sunday evening – the theatre, Madame B’s soirée, and the concerts of Valentino and Musard – our narrator declares ‘I am a chess-player; and you, my friend, ought to be so too; therefore, put faith in my pilotage. We’ll away to the Café de la Régence, and sip our Mocha among Caissa’s votaries.’31 With this introduction, several potentially unfamiliar but distinct locational and associational contexts are established. Through Walker’s self-referential declaration ‘I am a chess-player’, the exclusion of other spaces and possible evening entertainments, the exclusion of the company of other non-chess-players, and the exclusion of other parts of Walker’s personality, a sense of dislocation is achieved. Concerning blindfold chess, a more disturbing journey is presented. One travels to ‘where the … chess-men and chess board are abstracted, and no longer exist, save in the powers of the mind’. As with his trip to the café, the external world must be cast aside. Blindfold chess-play occurs ‘when the windows of the brain are closed down, and the faculties of sight hermetically sealed; when a bare idea alone remains, and all abroad is darkest night’. The paraphernalia of chess-play’s performance is discarded and ‘all that is left of the chessboard and men is their vague and timid shadow, wandering, spectre like, across the mental chamber, like objects on a camera obscura’. The strain on the mind and body is emphasised. Blindfold chess requires, claims Walker, the ‘efforts of the reasoning and thinking powers to be uninterruptedly prolonged’ for hours without ‘the slightest relief, break, pause, rest, or relaxation’.32 Again, the trip requires cutting off the outside world though without any social compensation. Walker’s visit to the Café de la Régence was for rowdy entertainment. Such an intention seemed to challenge the opinion of Howard Staunton, who dubiously claimed shortly afterwards in 1852 that the chess-player was an individual who retained his own agency and control of the employment of his time and mental powers, further claiming that the game was neither an ‘excuse for indolence’ nor ‘to be made the means of low gambling’. Rather, he asserted,



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 45

chess was the recreation of men ‘fully alive to the responsibilities of their social existence … who, even in their amusements, are desirous of … invigorating to the utmost their intellectual powers’.33 Staunton’s comments, while speculative and equally as subjective as Walker’s, denied any association between chess and disreputable forms of behaviour and the notorious spaces of the Victorian underworld, contrary to ‘The Café de la Régence’. Instead, chess’s rising popularity apparently afforded, by one optimistic reading, ‘gratifying proof of the refined taste of the age’.34 Walker does not suggest any kind of respectability or social utility for blindfold chess, or chess in general. Blindfold chess appears as ‘an extraordinary effort of the human mind’.35 It is on the boundaries of acceptable leisure, ‘not to be taken beyond the family circle, save when performed by a first-rate player, in a first-rate manner’.36 Further, few arrive at the high pitch of excellence. Indeed, Walker states that ‘chess depends on something approaching to an exclusive ­faculty … more than it does upon general sense and capacity … good chess-players are not necessarily talented men’.37 The game is as difficult as any profession. ‘I must add,’ says Walker, ‘a chess-player favourably marked by nature for preferment must still expend the same time upon his object which it costs to attain rank as a linguist, a mathematician, or a surgeon.’38 To emphasise, chess-play is here put on the intellectual level of socially useful labour, but without any usefulness of its own. Indeed, the famous eighteenth-century French chess-player François de Legall’s cautionary tale of playing a blindfold game when young and finding himself ‘so fatigued mentally that it was the first and last time … It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity’s sake’ had already suggested a link between blindfold chess, bodily and mental harm, and lack of reward.39 Regarding the café, in addition to geographic location, the night-time setting of Walker’s article suggests a further air of mystery, even danger, as he heads across the desolate streets. Matthew Beaumont speaks of night as a psychologically other space, beyond the ‘mind-forged curfew’ which ‘continue[s] to be rung’.40 Foucault commented on the Enlightenment ‘fear of darkened spaces’ among the ruling classes and Beaumont highlights night-walking as ‘encod[ing] an expression of solidarity with others in the darkened streets … like the soldiers and prostitutes’ away from authority.41 Something like these attitudes persisted in Victorian Paris. The chess-player walked among his fellow outsiders in a space of possibilities, exception, imagination, and magic. Walker’s revelryfilled experience is first revealed through the contrast between the isolation of the street and the night and the crowded café. The dark streets allow one to think most clearly. ‘Shadow … casts penetrating light’ on an individual’s feelings. Night ‘reveals the presence of individuals [and feelings] occluded in the

46 Minds

chaotic … day. … After nightfall … as the need to preserve a civilized façade for people’s activities slides, the self cannot conceal its secrets.’42 One must, as Walker suggests, surrender to desire. Likewise, the mind is proscribed space. The extraordinary description Walker gives of the mind during blindfold chess-play suggests a monstrous aspect to the enterprise – an internal gaze turned willingly away from the external world, a negation of exteriority, of sociability, of the needs of the self and of society, of the body and mind, which is not condoned. The mind is a place where we are encouraged not to dwell too long. This is night, beyond sight, of a different kind, but ‘this dark world’ is no less mysterious.43 To be individual … is to be isolated, lonely and secluded; [in an] introverted stat[e] … [P]hysical space … gives way … to the internal space of the psyche where the only frontier is a provisional borderline between sanity and madness … Light gives way to dark, day to night, hope to gloom and despair, and health to disease.44

The language of blindfold chess used by Walker reflects this melancholy, Gothic state, in evident contrast to his entrance into the ‘Café de la Régence’. Yet despite the differences, the images of the chess-player which Walker had tapped into, both in ‘The Café de la Régence’ and ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’, occupy peripheries and disreputable social space. Each describes a liminal experience. The cutting-off of other existences is apparent. In ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’, the practice is solitary and confined. We head into the darkness – ‘into a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d …’45 We, the reader, are almost discouraged from going there. In ‘The Café de la Régence’, however, despite Walker’s rejection of other places, other people, and other pastimes, we are invited – with the words ‘you, my friend, ought to be [a chess-player] too’ – to enter this space where the internal codes of the chess-player community outweighed traditional external markers of social hierarchy and identity such as age, class, sex, or nationality. With this process of initiation complete, Walker dashes ‘headlong into the brilliantly illumined salon’ which constitutes his destination and a crossing of boundaries, contrasting with the cautious entering into the darkness of the blindfold game.46 Walker describes the Café de la Régence surreally as ‘the very antithesis of the graceful or lovely, [unlike] the … café of modern times, large, low, and in shape resembling a parallelogram of toasted cheese’.47 This description distinguishes the café from proximate spaces through recourse to its tradition and appearance. His rush past other sites represents a further component of his strategy of dislocation, detaching his destination from the surrounding environment. In contemporary depictions, Honoré de Balzac described the locale as



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 47

the ‘temple of prostitution’ as well as the refuge of ‘the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor’,48 even after the prohibition of gambling in 1837.49 Yet participating in the Palais-Royal night-life was, due to its illuminated aspect, an experience rooted in modernity and performativity. While in 1835 there were 203 gaslights in Paris, by 1839 there were 12,816.50 Gaslight allowed for the consumption of the night, transforming ‘the experience of city space into a mode of visual desire’ where ‘people became characters, and clothes were costumes’ in ‘a dream world, which blurred the uncertain boundaries between the real and the imagined’, and divided the city’s ‘temporal geography’ into ‘a daytime world of organisation and commerce and a night-time world of danger and disorder’.51 As Elizabeth Wilson remarked, ‘in the metropolis, everyone was in disguise, incognito’.52 Hidden in plain sight, the private-public cafés facilitated a form of role-playing. ‘Victorian society was characterised by the co-existence of reputable and disreputable patterns of behaviour’, with slippage between the two.53 Disreputable status could be easily transferred. By contrast, Walker’s description of blindfold chess is as a point where light gave way to darkness, sociability to introspection, sight to night, to inward light, health to automaton status, to disease and disorder. Both his views of the game, Apollonian and Dionysiac, suggest spaces of escape. In the café, windows and doors are closed. Yet, for the blindfold player, sight is sealed shut. Only shadows are perceptible. Unceasing mental labour must occur. With this language, Walker introduces the reader to the interior of the mind when performing. It is not an optimistic, cheery world but ‘a lower deep in the deeps’.54

Interior Moving inwards to the café’s interior, disreputable behaviour is expressed through a number of behavioural and associational modes. Some of these are more immediately disreputable than others, in particular the crowded, hot, and noisy condition of the café. Behavioural modes of disreputability commented on by Walker include a lack of etiquette and manners from chess-players towards each other and to outsiders. Associational modes, less visibly, include the presence of gamblers and ‘sharps’, who swindled money out of unsuspecting newcomers. By the presentation of these subversive and disreputable modes of behaviour against an idealised conception of chess, Walker reveals the gap between the everyday performance of chess and the game’s representations. His own preconceived notion of the café as the ‘temple of the thirty-two’ portrays the Régence, confusingly, as the centre of a civilised world.55 Upon entering the café, Walker is overwhelmed. He walks through the

48 Minds

crowded room where ‘an empty chair is worth a ransom’.56 ‘Stunned with the riot’, he states, we sigh for cotton to stuff our ears; and fight our progress into a far-away corner, in order to recover our bewildered senses. Coffee is brought. We … scan the scene before us; resolving its discordant elements by slow degrees into one vast tableau.57

Physically at the margins of the room, he observes, attempting to make sense of the scene. ‘Would that they all sang the same tune’, he laments, emphasising the scene’s discordant nature.58 Playing against the image of the café as a religious space, chaotic elements of noise and heat come to the fore. Noise is associated with disrespectability, madness, and a lack of control, silence with thought, control, and rationality, heat with the exotic, the sensual, and the passionate. Rather than a space of ‘universal silence’59 and ‘profound silence’,60 Walker discovers a claustrophobic atmosphere ‘stove-heated to suffocation – gas-lighted to oppression – the blackhole of Calcutta was [its] eldest sister’.61 Within readings of chess as noiseless, the ‘epistemological and ontological vacuum’ of silence was filled with respectable connotations of calmness and thoughtful rationality.62 The noise leads Walker to question ‘Can this be chess? The game of philosophers – the wrestling of the strong-minded – the recreation of pensive solitude.’63 Instead of a quiet game, chess is ‘practised amid a roar like that of the Regent’s Park beast-show at feeding time!’ or ‘the asylum of Charenton’ – ‘laughter, whistling, singing, screaming, spitting, spouting, and shouting, tappings, rappings, drummings, and hummings’ fill the air.64 The atmosphere illustrates how the safety of the anonymous crowd, passing through the café like ‘waves of the sea on Brighton beach’,65 was more likely ‘to open up multiple leisure identities’,66 redefining what was and was not respectable. Walker’s impression, for example, of the crowded noisy atmosphere alters over the course of the evening. He remarks that ‘Man gets used to everything except the toothache … The noise is bearable, and presently may become even agreeable.’67 In blindfold play, the participant could become absent or displaced, erasing himself from the social plain, if not entirely the visual or aural plains. In each of Walker’s two texts there is an excess. Of outsiderness. Of centredness. Of quietness. Of noise. Of concentration. Of chatter. Of bohemia. Of austerity. Charles Baudelaire wrote that the crowd offered a ‘singular intoxication’ where a man could ‘lose himself’ and experience ‘feverish delights’.68 Playing ‘with darkened eyes’ offered a parallel opportunity for loss, in this case falling into isolation.69 Each signified a potentially disreputable behavioural context. While Walker could mock one contemporary opinion of blindfold chess as ‘below the notice of a gentleman’,70 his instructions for the beginner involved turning away from sociability and civility:



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 49

Play without spectators until you have passed the first stage … sit with your back to the board … [steal] the lion’s share of the fire … [have an assistant move the pieces for both players] … close the eyes occasionally for a time … harden your heart against any gossipers who may happen to stand around.71

Yet the most disreputable, unforgivable behaviour singled out by Walker is the practice of chess-players playing solely for the acquisition of money at the expense of novices, not the idea of professionalism in general. Most venom is reserved for a certain ‘M. Pillefranc’, a ‘grizzly vulture’ swooping down on the unaware, who is representative of a class of players who leached off chess’s respectable reputation.72 Characters such as Pillefranc – a portmanteau of piller, the verb to loot or steal, and the French currency franc – who swindled money out of unsuspecting players are indicative of how chess’s respectable qualities could facilitate disreputable behaviour. Walker’s call for the con-man to ‘go back to the dark abode from which I have momentarily called you forth’ highlights the jarring nature of this process, suggesting the existence of dark abodes within dark abodes.73 Nevertheless, figures such as these gave Walker’s café a touch of danger. Walker also records one deceitful blindfold chess-player who kept a small image of the board in a watch on his wrist, labelling the player ‘a mere trickster’.74 The noisy atmosphere of the café and silent, solitary, blindfold chess highlight how, as Huggins notes, ‘it was in leisure where the gap between public rhetoric and private life was potentially greatest’.75 While café culture in general may have been public space, the Café de la Régence occupied a more liminal space between public and private, partly due to the closed nature of the chessplaying community before mass popularisation. While chess-play at home may have encouraged socialising with family or the application of logical or reasoning skills, blindfold play shut these out. The café and the interior mind were removed from the outside world, yet at the centre of others; one profane but sacred, full of foreign tongues, but all speaking a shared language, the heart of civilisation, yet a place where ‘all keep their hats on to save space’ and the noise is unbearable; and another, where bodily demands ceased, where communication became internal, and where light failed to enter.76 Walker’s chess-players could mark the presence, to the uninitiated observer, of an anomalous mind, as something ‘alternately coveted, revered and dreaded’.77 Encouragements to conform to respectable forms of behaviour in each case were superseded by the demands and passions induced by the game. Chess, in this context, was not a means to improve one’s character, but a stepping outside of societal pressures.78 A passage selected and recorded by the cultural magpie Walter Benjamin within his Arcades Project, in a section entitled ‘Boredom, Eternal Return’, quotes

50 Minds

one Histoire des cafés de Paris (1857): ‘Chess players at the Café de la Regence: It was there that clever players could be seen playing with their backs to the chessboard. It was enough for them to hear the name of the piece moved by their opponent at each turn to be assured of winning.’79 This arrangement of facing away from the chessboard disturbed a fundamental component and orientation of the chess game performance, namely, the two protagonists facing each other – considered below in the context of automaton chess-players – which allowed for social interaction and respectable behaviour. Turning away is a destabilising, asocial gesture. In René Magritte’s La réproduction interdite (1937), a man looks into a mirror but sees only the back of his own head, suggesting a visual alienation from his own body (he has turned away from himself). The image presents a dislocation in space due to the failure of reflection and an optical illusion, or a failure of seeing, or, rather, a new way of seeing revealed. Blindfold chess also necessitates a turning-away from society. Indeed, Walker emphasises practice over book-learning, seemingly in an attempt to reconnect the interior world with more earthly matters. The minds of book-players, he claims, which ‘wander over the board, and see things darkly, as through a mist’, like a ghostly impression, are even more detached.80 The detachment of blindfold chess is echoed by Walker sitting in the café, recalling Baudelaire’s description of modernity which encompassed ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent … [and the] transitory’; its observer was the passionate spectator, the ‘painter of the passing moment’.81 To observe passionately was to concede agency to the whims of the present. Such behaviour can be seen in Walker’s writing, but he also demonstrates a tendency to step out of the immediate and, like the blindfold chess-player, concentrate on other matters. In one particularly vivid passage in ‘The Café de la Régence’, the narrator escapes from time’s regular flow and raises the dead – specifically, the historic chessplayers who have played at the café. Caught in the throes of emotion, freeing himself of responsibility for his digression, asking ‘can we blame the enthusiast who loves that which embodies so many historical groupings of the great, emblazoned panoramically upon the mind’s perception?’, Walker declares that ‘as I sit [here], I can picture to myself the shades of the departed called from their rest, and joyfully once more doing battle in chess around me’.82 Phantoms of a thousand years past surround him, multi-sensorily; not just visually, but aurally and olfactorily, as he recalls the coffee-house days of Voltaire with ‘scented perukes, amber vinaigrettes, silver-hilted swords, and clouded canes’.83 This experience, nevertheless, comes with a recognition of the constructed nature of his own way of seeing. By stating ‘I can picture’, ‘I can fancy’, ‘I can believe I hear’, and, later, ‘I can believe I see’, Walker acknowledges his role in creating these images. Likewise, by intermingling Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai’s



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 51

fictional love-struck chess-playing protagonist with memories of historic chessplayers, Walker confirms that his ‘Café’ is an imagined construction attuned to his ‘Romantic’, transfixed state.84 In ‘The Café de la Regence’ and ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’, Walker denies a clear linearity of space, playing on the symbolism of entrances and exits, of distinctions between the internal and the external, between the historical and the present, and between the real and the imagined. Walker’s texts evade precision and closure. ‘The Café de la Régence’ in particular presents a more open-ended experience. Instead of closing off the past and restricting interpretation of the space, Walker emphasises chess’s messy, kaleidoscopic nature, with the players possessing overlapping multi-identities, revealing the café’s spatial mutability and its still alive status. Walker’s rendering of the Café de la Régence deviates from social norms; it is ‘a world off-center with respect to normal or everyday spaces, one that possesses multiple, fragmented, or even incompatible meanings’ within the Victorian city.85 Despite his comparison in ‘The Café de la Régence’ between his own efforts at recording the scene and the function of both the daguerreotype and the camera lucida – two devices designed to produce an accurate image of a scene or aid the artist in his reproduction of his subject – his impression, as he states, embodies his way of seeing. Other devices in the two texts include windows and mirrors – relating to sight, its enabling properties (clarifying and reflecting) and its distorting properties (magnifying some scenes at the expense of others, confounding proportion, multiplying inward dimensions, dazzling the onlooker, bending light, and preventing an objective representation of reality). Walker’s image is a disfigured image, bringing to mind Benjamin’s description of ‘the prevalence of mirrors [in Paris]’ which ‘signified the essential ambiguity of impressions that the urban dreamscape induced in the viewer’.86 Rather than ‘engag[ing] in a systematic process of categorising and classifying individuals as “social types”’ and hence ‘restoring order’ or respectability to the chaos of urban life, Walker demonstrates that simple ­classification can never capture fragmented complexity.87

Agency, objectification, and respectability By sitting down and simply observing, Walker’s texts highlight how chess performance was ‘viewed first and foremost as the site for the display, circulation and sale of things and people’.88 Such a view connects representations of chess-players with freak shows and displays of extraordinary bodies residing at the ‘conceptual limits of human subjectivity’, which present their subject as something to be looked at, thus losing the agency which Staunton thought a

52 Minds

f­undamental part of the chess-player’s identity.89 When considering chess as a cultural practice and a visual art rather than a leisure activity, the chess-player is placed within a different frame of reference, with the potential for objectification. An assumed intellectual difference, usually figured as intellectual superiority, placed the chess-player in a social position which provoked as much excitement as anxiety. As living minds and bodies transformed into objects on display in the urban landscape before the uninformed gaze of the unruly crowd and spectators, as well as the intellectual, zoological, modulated gaze of flâneurs, journalists, and phrenological examiners, the chess-player was set under the discipline of consumer society and success became the possession of the public. Loss of respectability related to loss of agency, linked to spectacle, the gaze, and representation, can best be seen in relation to Walker’s depictions of LouisCharles Mahé de la Bourdonnais, then ‘the acknowledged first chess-player in the world’, and François-André Philidor.90 Walker also again invokes optical surfaces – this time a pane of glass – to convey the distance between observers and chess-players, noting how: Jean Jacques Rousseau was wont to play daily in the Régence … [T]he crowd … so eagerly pressed around to get a peep … that it was feared the glass of the front would be driven in; the nuisance being only averted by a guard of the city police mounted on the spot matitudinally.91

Yet Walker himself is guilty of the same type of voyeurism. Like the consumer goods on display in the nearby arcades, Walker’s subjects are there to be looked at. The refrain ‘Do not touch the items on display’ was commonly applied to physical objects, but could equally be applied to the chess-players under Walker’s gaze, and to blindfold chess-players.92 In their reduction to their intellectual status, silenced through a denial of direct speech in Walker’s text and through their lack of interaction directly with the observer, and their inertness, his chess-players are subject to a form of narrative ownership and objectified.93 We see them as ‘chess-players’, but not necessarily as individuals who retain their own subjectivity, and as domesticated individuals whose financial existence rested on having to mechanically and repetitiously perform night after night. Walker’s depiction of Bourdonnais is the emotional peak of his experience at the ‘Café de la Régence’. His impression summarises the performative nature of the game as well as its dual qualities of notoriety and respectability. Bourdonnais’s behaviour itself suggests this dual nature. He appears to be divided into two existences – ‘jokes, songs, and epigrams, burst in a flood from his lips … chiefly after dinner … when winning; for, should the tables turn … the brows of our friend lour like the storm-clouds of Mont Blanc’.94 Staunton’s comment above



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 53

highlights the disdain held by some for the professional. Virtuosic chess-players such as Bourdonnais achieved their status through the public performance of their skill. Although he was of ‘noble family’, his status was based purely on merit. After his wealth was devoured by some ‘unfortunate’ building speculation at St Maloes, he was compelled to live on his earnings as a professional chess-player.95 The manner of Bourdonnais’s profession demonstrates how the chess-player could be a virtuoso through the application of technical skill, selfpromotion, and commercial success. His rock-star entry into the arena, compared to that of a king, with the audience having come ‘from the east and the west, from the north and the south to kneel at the footstool of the monarch’, sees the atmosphere reach fever pitch. Upon Bourdonnais’s entry, the noise reaches its climax, ‘as if the elements of confusion in the cauldron had received their final stir-about’.96 Celebrity-like, ‘fifty persons accost him at once … all shouting, and laughing, and screaming, with the peculiar and prodigious gesticulations of La belle France, rising many octaves above concert pitch’.97 Chess-players on display such as Bourdonnais to an extent sold themselves. They were seller and sold in one. The constraints of performance and chess ceremony in part contributed to the images of the participants. Bourdonnais was ‘employed at Simpson’s Divan’ in order to ‘attract customers’, like a shiny new object in the window.98 Philidor, from 1775 onwards, was paid a retainer by Parsloe’s Chess Club to appear for six months of each year.99 If that (in)famous Victorian figure capable of causing anxiety and concern – the prostitute – ­represented the female body as commodity, and the visually different represented the body as anomalous, then the chess-player within Victorian society commodified and objectified the intellectually anomalous male mind. Subject to such observation, chess-players could fail to sustain their agency and control of their public image. Bourdonnais and Philidor existed within the public sphere under the scrutiny of the public gaze. Despite the attention he received in Walker’s text, Bourdonnais’s declining health and failure to support himself through chess saw the leading British players of the time, led by Walker, raise a collection on his behalf, even contributing towards his funeral expenses. Bourdonnais and Philidor were dependent on others to make their way, subject to public whims. Professional chess-play, as superficial leisure rather than recreation associated with renewal and improvement,100 required freedom from what Walter Benjamin described as ‘the drudgery of being useful’,101 and freedom from the demands of respectability and normative behaviour. Linking ‘The Café de la Régence’ and ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’, Bourdonnais’s death followed a blindfold performance. Walker declared him to be the most talented blindfold player since Philidor.102 Alas, after attempting to play three games on one occasion, within a pawn of his strength, ‘our hero’s

54 Minds

constitution broke down in the trial … The first physicians in Paris have agreed in opinion, that the attack originated from his overstraining the finer vessels in the brain, in the labour of playing blindfold, and have, peremptorily forbidden his repeating the task.’103 He had suffered a stroke and had already received treatment for dropsy in 1838, and he died in 1840. Bourdonnais’s death ‘was the first actual event that led to the widespread opinion that blindfold play was harmful to one’s health’.104 Likewise, Walker recalls that Philidor’s life was marked by veneration but a lack of financial reward. Contrasting with his own financial support for Bourdonnais, he describes how Philidor ‘attract[ed] admirers’, as he shone ‘like the meridian sun – the lesser planets of chess revolving around him’.105 The press described one performance as ‘a spectacle of the most curious kind … to display a very wonderful faculty of the human mind’ and ‘a phenomenon’.106 Yet, in a coruscating passage, Walker’s striking descriptions become self-aware and ironic, as he condemns these spectators for their own passivity: What did these men do in return for Philidor? For their pet? – their chess pastor and master – their idol – their demigod? What did they in his behalf …? Alas! … the rich suffered Philidor to die, if not in actual need of life’s necessities, at least without those comforts which gold can supply …! Philidor died almost literally in a garret … I have never yet been able to discover the spot where he was buried. The grave of Philidor is Europe.107

Exits Within the early-to-mid-Victorian urban space, the figure of the chess-player challenged norms of respectability. George Walker’s ‘The Café de la Régence’ and ‘Chess, Without the Chess Board’ highlight how locational and associational contexts, specific modes of behaviour, and the threat of objectification could render the chess-player a disreputable figure. Despite the late-Victorian image of the game as respectable and rational which became widely accepted, the chess-player was and remained contested ground. Leisure was a space where ‘social distinctions were vulnerable’, which was particularly true of chess-play which ‘like the tomb, level[led] all grades of conventional rank and distinction, and reserve[d] its high places for the best players’.108 Walker’s texts connect this lived experience of chess to its history, while staying close to conceptions of play ‘hedged off from the everyday surroundings’.109 Within the urban landscape, constraints of respectability were weakened by geographic and temporal contexts. In a foreign land, within the city, within the Palais-Royal, within the



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 55

magical ‘Café de la Régence’, at night-time, and in the darkness of one’s mind, leisure activities could be dangerous and exciting, potentially destabilising and socially beneficial, particularly when encircled by ‘the great triumvirate of gambling, sex and alcohol’, or the equally dangerous isolation and silence.110 Just as Victorian leisure in general ‘possessed shades and nuances, general and specific elements’, the Victorians as individuals ‘were multifaceted, leading lives that might entail multiple identities and multiple selves, at different times, at different places, and with different companions. They could [as Walker did] live not in one but in several worlds.’111 In Staunton’s never-attained reading of the chess-player, the game became one of several forms of middle-class leisure ‘integral to the struggle for middle-class dominance in society, integral to attempts to establish social leadership, and integral to the need to demonstrate that their precepts and practices were superior to those of most of the working class’.112 Readings such as this allowed the construction of ‘self-serving dichotomous identities – “refined” and “rough” – and defined a polarised world of absolutes: virtue and vice, morality and immorality, sanctity and sin, purity and impurity, puritanism and pleasure’.113 Within Walker’s texts these polarised absolutes became intermingled. More critically, Walker reduced the chess-player to an object to be seen, emphasising the ‘importance of observing the urban landscape and reading its signs’.114 His texts see him fall repeatedly into Romantic dreaming, despite his objective posture. The scattered series of observations in ‘The Café de la Régence’ suggest time passing with little sequential, coherent argument. The montage-like and impressionistic approach is constructed from small observations. In each case, his subjects become the attention of his critical gaze. He observes without interaction from the edges of the room, rendering his characters as passive, fetishistic objects while reifying their talents. Likewise, ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’ calls upon a large cast of characters. The boundaries between page and person are not permanent. Through ceaseless observation, space is in constant flux and meaning is continuously deferred. The monolithic term chess-player is inadequate or, rather, should be understood as kaleidoscopic. Identity formation within the rapidly multiplying spaces of social interaction in Victorian society and literature was a highly contingent, and temporally and geographically fluid circumstance. The Victorian chess-player disturbed efforts of social categorisation and was an unstable form, fluid in terms of sex, nationality, motivation, or age, despite chess-play’s status as a pastime predominantly carried out in the public sphere by European, middle-class males. Even as Staunton’s conception of the game became a more persistent, if partial, cultural image of chess, Walker’s impressions lingered as a reminder of the constructed nature of any image of the chess-player and its disruptive potential.

56 Minds

Notes 1 A. D. Philidor, Chess Analysed: Or Instructions By which a Perfect Knowledge of this Game May in a short time be acquir’d (London: J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, 1750), p. iii. 2 G. Greco, (c.1600–c.1634), The royall game of chesse-play (London: Henry Herringman, 1656), p. 3. See also the extraordinary claim that chess ‘hath beene practised now 2227 yeers’ in A. Saul, The famous game of chesse-play truely discouered, and all doubts resolued (London: Thomas Snodham for Roger Jackson, 1614), pp. 2–3, 13–14. 3 C. Cotton (attrib.), The Compleat Gamester, or, Instructions how to play at billiards, trucks, bowls, and chess (London: A.M. for R. Cutler, 1674), p. iv. 4 Ibid., p. v. 5 Ibid., p. 1. 6 Ibid., p. 51. 7 C. Cotton, Games Most in Use in England, France and Spain (London: J. Morphew, 1715), p. 72. 8 E. Hoyle, An Essay Toward Making the Game of Chess Easily Learned (London: T. Osborne, 1761), p. iii. 9 R. Seymour, The Court Gamester (London: E. Curll, 1719), p. 3. 10 ‘Chess [after its introduction] … continued to be the favourite game throughout Europe, till it was dropt for cards, not by their superiority, surely, but because inferior players at other games, had a better chance of winning’; St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 20–22 August 1789. Originally published as D. Barrington, ‘An Historical Disquisition on the Game of Chess; addressed to Count de Bruhl, F.A.S.’, Archaeologia, 9 (January 1789), pp. 16–38. The Critical Review amusingly, if only partially correctly, noted that ‘Mr. Barrington’s opinions are in the inverse ratio of the evidence’; ‘Archaeologia’, Critical Review, 69 (February 1790), pp. 122–3. 11 This is not to say that the chess-player was a respectable figure by the 1850s, the 1890s, or, for that matter, the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, but merely to state that the articulation of a cultural image of the chess-player in connection with socalled respectable values, often by its practitioners, became more visible. The reception of such images is not dealt with here, except as future chapters suggest in the case of cultural images which suggest a disreputable set of identities surrounding the terms ‘mind’, ‘machine’, and ‘monster. One should also point out the difference between a reading of chess, as a game, as respectable and the chess-player as respectable. 12 M. Huggins and J. A. Mangan, ‘Prologue: All Mere Complexities’, in M. Huggins and J. A. Mangan (eds), Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2004), p. xi. 13 G. Walker, ‘The Light and Lustre of Chess’ (Part One), Chess Player’s Chronicle, 4 (1843), p. 216. 14 G. Walker, ‘A Night in York – A Chess Adventure of 1842’, in Chess and Chess-Players: Consisting of Original Stories and Sketches (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1850), p. 62.



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 57

15 H. J. R. Murray, History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, facsimile reprint of 1913 edition, 2002), p. 886. 16 T. Harding, ‘Kings and Queens at Home: A Short History of the Chess Column in Nineteenth-Century English Periodicals’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42.4 (2009), p. 359. 17 M. J. Huggins, ‘More Sinful Pleasures? Leisure, Respectability and the Male Middle Classes in Victorian England’, Journal of Social History, 33.3 (2000), p. 585. 18 Ibid. 19 A. Harvey, ‘“You may say what you like to the professional and then dismiss them when you want”: The Rise and Fall of Professional Chess Players in Victorian Britain’, Sport in History, 30.3 (2010), p. 403. My italics. 20 Huggins, ‘More Sinful Pleasures?’, p. 585. 21 ‘Chess and War’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, 4 (1856), p. 289. 22 I use inverted commas to highlight the imagined nature of Walker’s ‘Café’ in contrast to the actual physical building. 23 Huggins and Mangan, ‘Prologue: All Mere Complexities’, p. xi. 24 P. Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 1. 25 G. Walker, ‘The Café de la Régence’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 22 December 1840, p. 676. 26 D. Hooper and K. Whyld, ‘George Walker’, in The Oxford Companion to Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1996), p. 444. 27 T. Seccombe and J. Lock (rev.), ‘Walker, George (1803–1879)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/28483 (accessed March 2013). 28 L. Nead, ‘The Meaning of the Prostitute’, in K. Boyd and R. McWilliam (eds), The Victorian Studies Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 350. 29 Estelle Murail highlights the metamorphosis of the flâneur from ‘type’ to literary character to ‘critical concept’. See E. Murail, ‘Beyond the Flâneur: Walking, Passage and Crossing in London and Paris in the Nineteenth Century’, PhD thesis, King’s College, London, and Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2014, esp. ‘Introduction’, pp. 9–23, ‘Ways of Seeing: Paris and London’s Optical Technologies’, pp. 107–68, and ‘“Du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports”: Baudelaire in De Quincey and Poe’, pp. 220–303. See also M. Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 65–107; and R. D. E. Burton, The Flaneur and his City: Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 1815–1851 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). For further debate on the flâneur and modernity, see particularly K. Tester, ‘Introduction’, in K. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–21. For a fresh approach to issues including the gaze, see M. Huggins and M. O’Mahony, ‘Prologue: Extending Study of the Visual in the History of Sport’, in M. Huggins and M. O’Mahony (eds), The Visual in Sport (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 3–18. 30 Huggins, ‘More Sinful Pleasures?’, p. 592.

58 Minds

31 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 669. Caissa has been adopted by some as chess’s patron saint. 32 G. Walker, ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’, Fraser’s Magazine, 21, no. 123 (March 1840), p. 304. 33 H. Staunton, The Chess Tournament: A Collection of Games Played at this Celebrated Assemblage (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), p. xv. 34 ‘Chess’, British Miscellany (January 1841), p. 90. 35 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 304. 36 Ibid., pp. 304–5. 37 Ibid., p. 302. 38 Ibid., p. 304. 39 Denis Diderot, quoted in E. Hearst and J. Knott, Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p. 23. 40 M. Beaumont, Night-Walking: A Nocturnal History of London (London: Verso, 2015), p. 295. 41 Ibid., pp. 294, 295. 42 Ibid., p. 176. 43 J. Milton, ‘Sonnet XIX’ (1652), in M. Y. Hughes (ed.), Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1957), p. 168. 44 G. Clark, ‘Introduction’, in E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Everyman, 2002), pp. xxiii–iv. 45 Lord Byron, ‘Darkness’ (1816), in P. Wright (ed.), Selected Poems of Lord Byron (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006), p. 775. 46 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 669. 47 Ibid. 48 H. de Balzac, A Distinguished Provincial at Paris; Lost Illusions and Other Stories, trans. Ellen Marriage (Philadelphia: Gebbie Publishing, 1899), pp. 123, 127. 49 W. S. Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Classes, 1789–1913 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 164. 50 J. Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion, 1998), p. 59. 51 L. Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 87, 98, 100, 101. 52 Elizabeth Wilson, quoted in S. Gunn, ‘Public Spaces in the Victorian City’, in Boyd and McWilliam (eds), The Victorian Studies Reader, p. 157. 53 Huggins and Mangan, ‘Prologue: All Mere Complexities’, p. xiv. 54 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 307. 55 Walker, ‘Café’, pp. 669–70, 675. 56 Ibid., p. 669. 57 Ibid., p. 670. 58 Ibid. 59 ‘The Parisian Cafés’, London and Paris Observer, 15 (1839), p. 11. 60 A. Galignani, New Illustrated Paris Guide (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1827), p. lii.



‘A quiet game of chess?’ 59

61 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 669. 62 P. Covarrubias, ‘(Un)Biased in Western Theory: Generative Silence in American Indian Communication’, Communication Monographs, 74.2 (2007), p. 267. 63 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 670. 64 Ibid., p. 682. 65 Ibid., p. 669. 66 Huggins, ‘More Sinful Pleasures?’, p. 592. 67 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 670. 68 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Crowds’ (1869), quoted in C. Poggi, ‘Mass, Pack, and Mob: Art in the Age of the Crowd’, in J. T. Schnapp and M. Tiews (eds), Crowds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 159. 69 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 307. 70 Ibid., p. 302. 71 Ibid., pp. 313–14, 316. 72 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 678. 73 Ibid., p. 680. 74 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 316. 75 Huggins, ‘More Sinful Pleasures?’, p. 587. 76 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 676. 77 R. Garland Thomson, ‘From Wonder to Error: Monsters from Antiquity to Modernity’, in P. Blanchard et al. (eds), Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, trans. T. Bridgeman (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 52. 78 See Walker’s detailing of responses to several female guests at the café, two of whom disturb the delicate atmosphere and look on the players with something like pity. Both are met with angry looks and ‘the profane term of grosse vache muttered … by a vieux moustache … with most un-Paris-like politesse’ (Walker, ‘Café’, p. 676). 79 Histoire de cafés de Paris (Paris, 1857), p. 8, quoted in W. Benjamin, Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 107. 80 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 308. 81 Charles Baudelaire, quoted in J. Werner, American Flâneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 8–9. 82 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 671. 83 Ibid. 84 Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai, quoted in ibid., p. 673. Couvrai’s unfortunate protagonist is insulted and rushes towards his target, but catches his coat-skirts ‘unhappily in a neighbouring chess-table’, ruining a hotly contested game. Abuse ensues. 85 M. Dehaene and L. De Cauter, ‘Preface’, in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. i. 86 S. Gunn, ‘City of Mirrors: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Urban History’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 7.2 (2002), p. 271. 87 Gunn, ‘Public Spaces’, p. 158. 88 Gunn, ‘City of Mirrors’, p. 272.

60 Minds

89 E. Grosz, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 55. 90 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 674. 91 Ibid., p. 670. 92 Gunn, ‘City of Mirrors’, pp. 268–9. 93 See M. C. Nussbaum, ‘Objectification’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24.4 (1995), pp. 249–91. 94 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 681. 95 Ibid., p. 680. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Harvey, ‘You may say what you like’, p. 404. 99 Hearst and Knott, Blindfold Chess, p. 24. Philidor spent the rest of the year in Paris composing and teaching music – a Persephone-like existence. 100 Nead, Victorian Babylon, p. 113. 101 Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 19. 102 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 312. 103 Ibid. 104 Hearst and Knott, Blindfold Chess, p. 25. 105 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 310. 106 Hearst and Knott, Blindfold Chess, p. 23. 107 Walker, ‘Chess’, p. 310. This was foreshadowed by Denis Diderot’s warning, in a letter to Philidor, in which he asked, ‘when you shall have lost your ability, will the English come forward to rescue your family?’ (Hearst and Knott, Blindfold Chess, pp. 22–3). 108 Walker, ‘Café’, p. 676. 109 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 19. 110 Huggins, ‘More Sinful Pleasures?’, p. 588. 111 Huggins and Mangan, ‘Prologue: All Mere Complexities’, p. xiii. 112 Ibid., p. xi. 113 Ibid. 114 K. H. Hayes, ‘Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 56.4 (2002), p. 445.

3 Elementary: the chess-player and the literary detective Useful? George Walker’s readings of the chess-player suggest a figure playing on the boundaries of acceptability, positioned between poles of respectable and disreputable behaviour as well as social utility and idleness. Nevertheless, by the lateVictorian period, fifty years after Walker’s articles on the Café de la Régence and blindfold chess-play, the game’s intellectual reputation and respectable, rational image had become more prominent, if never solidified. One newspaper, by no means alone, noted that chess-play was no longer confined to any age group, class, or sex, even becoming a pastime of the royal family.1 The same newspaper further confined any reading of the chess-player as physically or mentally abnormal to history, casting aside descriptions of the chess-player as studious personages, w[ith] abnormally developed foreheads … men whose withered forms and sunken cheeks were painfully eloquent of premature decay, and whose lustreless eyes, shaded by green spectacles, had long had their light extinguished … a species of amiable monomaniacs, possessed of a supernatural patience, and inevitable destined to terminate their mortal span in the peaceful seclusion of a lunatic asylum.2

Despite this, alternative readings of the chess-player still persisted. There was no monolithic idea of the figure. To find contestations and parallel readings to the respectable and rational image, one can explore other types of literature and cultural images of other social types. With this aim in mind, this chapter considers the chess-player from a different perspective, embracing fictive and imagined properties, namely in terms of a relationship between the chess-player and the literary private detective, another figure assessed predominantly through its ‘superior’ mental faculties and the pre-eminent and most public figure of intellectual power within Victorian culture. Concerning the chess-player and the literary detective, the latter has been described as ‘the gentlemen amateur – elegant, witty, well-bred and ­well-spoken

62 Minds

[with] … a languid manner and a lazy charm, a shrewd brain, a wide knowledge and an unrivalled capacity for logical deduction’, and a love of the esoteric.3 The former has been described, in divided terms, as both a machine-like, ruthless schemer, probably also a gentleman, and an eccentric genius, useless for all tasks outside of chess.4 In addition, the two shared a monstrous cultural image and, at times, a tempestuous relationship on the printed page. The selected detective fiction, from 1845–1950, applied the bizarre, virtuosic, automaton-like, otherworldly, and beyond human identity already discussed to each. Both figures were part imagined, part dream, part literary creature, and part fantasy. Both were able to cross lines of respectability. Both satisfied Mike Huggins and J. A. Mangan’s notion of individuals ‘capable of crossing and re-crossing the changing lines of respectability, and were sometimes “pure” and sometimes “impure”’, questioning Geoffrey Best’s model of an impermeable boundary between the respectable and the disreputable within Victorian and later society.5 Yet the two have been quite differently considered in terms of their social utility. It is this essential difference which motivates this chapter. In examining these two figures connected with superior mental faculties, one faces the same problem as Edgar Allan Poe – that ‘the mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects.’6 The combination of interior power, spectacle, and superficial performativity is a recurrent feature of the cultural chess-player – seen in the context of chess-playing animals and machines – and is shared with the literary detective. This chapter considers the chess-player in the work of four authors in particular (although discussion occasionally ranges beyond these to discuss Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes) from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, roughly covering the beginnings of the genre, classic detective fiction, and early hard-boiled detective fiction. These are Edgar Allan Poe (with his amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin). Jacques Futrelle (Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen), Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot), and Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe). In these, the detective and the chess-player encode anxieties about intelligence, the social order, the self, and the other. They exhibit the chess-player at its most pathetic, most devious, and most philosophical, on the periphery, limited in terms of social type, age group, and sex. Appearances and talents are often expressed in physiognomic and phrenological language. In each, chess-play is persistently viewed as a masculine, logical, reasoning exercise, which demonstrates the detective’s own superior talents. Chess-play also appears as an elaborate mask, demonstrating social abnormality and detachment from the world, and as a mental salve which acknowledges its unsuitability to modern life. In these regards, the images share a good deal with those discussed in the previous chapters.

Elementary 63

Morphologies Two pertinent aspects raised within recent literature concerning these two figures are their emergence at a time of change and the relative playful qualities of each. As Paul Metzner notes, the chess-player and the detective emerged in literature during, and as a reaction to, ‘a period in which outlaws triumphed over established society, that is, during an age of revolution’. In this period, ‘crime became the object of increasing fear … [and] increasing fascination’.7 Against this backdrop, François-André Philidor, the virtuoso chess-player discussed in Chapter 2, and Eugene Francois Vidocq, the French criminal, police officer, and private detective, were the first celebrity chess-player-hero and detective-hero. From the beginning, the literary detective represented the ­re-establishment of order within society, solving problems with applied mental power, just as Philidor represented mastery over confusion through the application of Enlightenment reason. The detective is called upon, is victorious, and returns to his lair to await the next summons, moving from periphery to metropolis and back again, echoing the chess performance. Since Vidocq, the idea of the detective as the all-knowing, super-logical ‘hero’ has persisted, reflecting a characteristic of modernity, namely ‘the emergence of the intellectual professions as new repositories of social power’.8 In Vidocq, mental power was fused with social utility, reflecting the domination of bourgeois values and scientific ways of thinking.9 Against a master criminal, only a ‘greater intellectual, however unlikeable’ could restore order, since, in the puzzle-stories of detective fiction, the detective and the villain are bound together.10 This mirrors the ordering potential of the chess-player and the face-to-face encounter the chess performance compels. The chessboard plays the part of the labyrinth, a symbol of confusion and disorder which, when conquered, allows the game to restart. Both the cultural chess-player and the literary detective are commonly expressed as physically abnormal. Both are usually male. Both are intellectually superior. Both are often players or gamesters. Both are located on the margins of society. Both produce an emotive impact, whether that be terror, mystery, admiration, or fascination. To take the first of these, unusual mental talents, invisible outside their contexts of performance, were frequently paired with physical distinctiveness in this period, at the tail-end and beyond of the age of phrenology and physiognomy. Phrenology viewed the brain and the outer surface of the head as a map of its own functions, while physiognomy interpreted the whole body as the map of its own character.11 Although late-Victorian medical science repudiated the link between individual faculties or personality traits and brain size, contemporary popular culture persisted in the belief of the

64 Minds

d­ ivision of the brain into specialised regions allowing precise mental faculties to be located. Twenty-seven faculties (thirty-five in later theories) were assigned to specific regions.12 Franz Joseph Gall reasoned that, ‘in great mathematicians … the amount of tissue dedicated to the organ of number relations was way above average’ and that this could be observed indirectly through ‘deformations of the cranium’.13 Analogously, the ‘chess bump’ was supposedly found, despite mockery that ‘We might suppose a special organ for Natural History, Chessplaying, Philosophy, and in fact every branch of knowledge for which some persons show peculiar aptitude’, if the phrenologist’s argument was taken to the point of ‘absurdity’.14 Embracing absurdity, in 1900 the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health printed ‘A Phrenological Estimate of Henry Nelson Pillsbury, the Champion Chess Player, by John L. Capen, M.D.’, applying phrenological principles to a leading American chess-player of the age.15 Assuming that the head ‘is of mere average size’, stated Capen, ‘the intellectual portion is large, and the perceptive intellect is the most prominent’. Several areas of skill were recognised in relation to Pillsbury’s chess ability, specifically the ‘observing organs’ and his ‘great power of rapid action’. The observing parts of the brain, described as Individuality, Form, Size, Order, Eventuality, Comparison, Causality, Constructiveness, and Human Nature, were each recorded as being ‘large, as seen by the overhanging eyebrows, which to his forehead give a retreating form – not from the deficiency of reflective brain, but from the great development of these observing organs’.16 More generally, the American Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated had contended in 1866 that chess-play required ‘all the Perceptives and good reasoning Intellect, with Constrictiveness’ and a strong dose of Locality (a branch of memory, another being number), or the faculty that conceives the places occupied by the objects which surround us … Situated in the forehead, on each side of Eventuality and over the inner corner of the eyebrows. Physiognomical Sign – A marked prominence above the inner corner of the eyebrows … Function. Great power in recalling [situations and conceptions].17

Assessments which discussed the physiognomical sign of each mental faculty filtered down to the realm of popular culture where they were applied with broad strokes. In the detective texts considered here, a large forehead or large head was often enough to link any mental faculty connected with intellectual talent with outward appearance. Concerning the literary detectives, in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ (1892), Sherlock Holmes outlines a man’s character and superior intellect from his hat on the basis that it is ‘a question of cubic capacity … a man with so large a brain must have something in it’.18 In ‘The

Elementary 65

Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902), Dr James Mortimer assesses Holmes’s skull, finding it surprisingly ‘dolichocephalic’ and with a ‘well-marked supra-orbital development [the region above the eye-sockets] … I confess that I covet your skull.’19 And in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893), Moriarty, engaging in what passes for trash-talk between geniuses, finds Holmes to ‘have less frontal development than I should have expected’.20 Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot meanwhile is outlined as an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side.21

Jacques Futrelle’s 1905 creation Professor Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S., nicknamed the ‘Thinking Machine’,22 a parody of Holmesian intellect, even more unusual, is considered striking … slender with the droop of the student … and the pallor of a close, sedentary life on his clean-shaven face. His eyes wore a perpetual, forbidding squint – the squint of a man who studies little things – and when they could be seen at all through his thick spectacles, were mere slits of watery blue. [H]is most striking feature … was a tall, broad brow, almost abnormal in height and width, crowned by a heavy shock of bushy, yellow hair. All these things conspired to give him a peculiar, almost grotesque, personality.23

Impact In each of these cases, however, and for chess-players more generally, it is not appearance alone so much as appearance-when-thinking, when the chessplayer and the detective have put on the mask of ratiocination, that turns the phrenological and physiognomic sign monstrous. Thinking-in-action creates the impact of these two figures. Each wears a mask of mental power, which, like a physical mask, ‘as a purely aesthetic experience, carries us beyond “ordinary life” into a world where something other than daylight reigns; it carries us back to the world of the savage, the child and the poet, which is the world of play’.24 Outside this world, the detective and chess-player lose their power. Consider Sherlock Holmes’s lack of knowledge of the Copernican theory of the solar system, or the existence and work of his near-contemporary Thomas Carlyle in ‘A Study in Scarlet’ (1887).25 Such a process of domestication and disenchantment has been discussed in a number of theoretical works, nowhere more clearly than in Scarlett Thomas’s novel The End of Mr. Y (2006), in which the lead

66 Minds

character Ariel encounters circus performers including a bearded lady and the Boy with the Gigantic Head at their homes on Whitechapel Road. Ariel observes the ‘dreary reality between the lurid and gruesome teratology’, as these figures peg out washing and argue. The boy is seen outside his darkened room and costume, away from the limelight, ‘no longer a gaudy freak but clearly a sick child who required medical attention’.26 Cultural power dissipates quickly. In Poe’s, Futrelle’s, and Christie’s stories, we first encounter the detective through his intellectual power. Their appearance is seen through this mask. In Dupin’s case, the detachment of physiognomic features from cognition is more obvious since Dupin is never described in detail in the manner of Holmes, Poirot, or Van Dusen. Poe instead states that, when thinking, his detective’s ‘manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulant but for the deliberateness and entire distinctness of this enunciation’.27 Futrelle’s description of Van Dusen comes after his letters and names have been elaborated on. Holmes’s description by Watson comes after a display of his talent at the breakfast table. Similarly, with Poirot, we hear of his reputation in the text before he is described. When their appearance does enter into the text, the reader’s mind is attuned to expect a degree of otherness. All physical descriptions become mediated by the already described mental talents of the performer. Intellectual foreshadowing operates as the detective’s and the chess-player’s circus advertisement, their darkened room and elaborate costume. A large part of the monstrous, automaton-like, and virtuosic image of the chess-player (and the literary detective) stems from the fact that mental skill is interpreted as something outsized, extraordinary, and even supernatural. This skill could be variously interpreted. John Dickson Carr’s note that ‘nobody is more apt than a detective to say a lot of windy, fancy things about reasoning, and deduction, and logic’ when he means imagination or other faculties, applies equally to the chess-player.28 Nevertheless, broadly speaking, both figures were popularly associated with intellectual faculties encompassing ‘logic’, ‘reason’, and ‘deduction’. Hercule Poirot’s belief that ‘by the deployment of sanity, logic, order and method, the truth could be uncovered’29 bears more than superficial resemblance to the 1894–1921 world chess champion Emanuel Lasker’s observation that ‘the popularisers think of chess as being amenable to order, logic, exactitude, calculation, [and] foresight’.30 As practitioners of logic and the scientific method, attempting to impose order on chaos, representations of chess-players and detectives appear as ‘substitute priests in a secular age’ whose faith was reason.31 S. S. van Dine, Ronald Knox, and R. Austin Freeman restrictively emphasised that the means of solving the puzzle (the crime) ‘must

Elementary 67

be rational and scientific’32 and that ‘all supernatural … agencies are ruled out as a matter of course’33 – such as ‘ouija-boards, mind-reading [and] spiritualistic se’ances’.34 Yet, despite the claim that the detective’s work ‘demands [the] power of logical analysis and subtle and acute reasoning’, both detective and chess-player have more to offer than pure rationality.35 A supernatural dimension is frequently noted.36 Their rational talents are often perceived as beyond any human (hence their transhuman aspect). Noting this supernatural aspect, this beyond-human potential, John Irwin talks of Poe’s Dupin as the valorizing of mind at the expense of the body … Dupin as a kind of Platonic embodiment, a sedentary mastermind whose very lack of physical exertion emphasizes the mastery of mind over the physical world … and desire [of the author] for a magical direct control of his will over the real world, embodied in a modern, scientifically acceptable guise as the figure of the master analyst.37

In detective fiction, we can see a clash between this claim and the claims of the chess-player to embody these values most fully. Dupin acts as ‘an adult mask for … the desire for a physically helpless being for mental dominance … a philosophical defense mechanism against the frustration and constraints of the physical world, on the one hand, and against the dangerous and humiliating demands of the body, on the other’.38 In Dupin, Poe gave us at once the most appealing format and the most glamorous mask for mental work and the mental worker … Poe also gave us a cautionary tale about the mastery of mind and our modern scientific world. For Victor Frankenstein and C. Auguste Dupin are products of the … same impulse, except that Dupin is his own monster.

If detective is ‘the name for a mental position … what he does is the sum total of what he is …’, then so too is chess-player, where the images of automaton-like performances suggest a similar immersion into mind and a leaving behind of the body.39 Consider also Holmes and Dupin, deep in thought, similar to descriptions of blindfold chess games in which the player plays for ten hours ‘without taking even a glass of water, and in bodily pain, too’.40 In these cases we see a doubling of the automaton in its negative connotation as mere repetition and p­ re-programmed logic, and its positive connotation as an unstoppable, unquestionable power – the typewriter vs. the Terminator. While Irwin astutely argues that ‘Dupin’s analytic power is of such superiority that compared to him, other men are like automata, slavish mechanisms’, contrasting ‘the mastermind and the mechanical automata’, the descriptions of Dupin and Holmes as each exercises his d­ etective

68 Minds

talents suggests their own transformation into automata.41 Dupin, as stated above, becomes ‘frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulantly but for the deliberateness and entire distinctness of the enunciation’.42 Likewise, Holmes, deep in thought, ‘for days on end … lie[s] upon the sofa in the sitting-room hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle’ with a ‘dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes’.43 He goes for days ‘without rest’, shunning food, and sometimes fainting ‘from inanition’. He dismisses emotions as ‘abhorrent to his cold, precise … mind’.44 Watson declares, ‘You really are an automaton – a calculating machine … There is something positively inhuman in you at times’,45 and he describes him as ‘the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen’.46 Holmes admits, after we encounter his untidy rooms, to discarding his monstrous body as superfluous: ‘I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.’47 The mask of ‘ratiocination’, to return to the issue of surface interpretation briefly, is one dependent on certain gestures and physical actions. Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker could be renamed The Idler without too much sculptural change. Thinking and daydreaming look remarkably alike in certain ways, emphasising how locational context is crucial. This relationship between chessplayer, appearance, and space is highlighted in Agatha Christie’s The Big Four (1930), based on the short story ‘A Chess Problem’ (1924), which depicts a murdered chess grandmaster and a killer disguised as the Russian champion, Savaronoff, known only as Number Four of the titular Big Four criminal masterminds (an American, a Chinese, a Frenchwoman, and an Englishman). No negative opinion is expressed about the game, and the master villain is in fact not a master chess-player, merely a master of disguise, although he is noted as having intelligence on account of ‘the peculiar formation of his head’ and ‘its unusual height’.48 Poirot, praising the chess-player intellect, states that ‘a great chess player must have a great brain … I could easily understand Dr Savaronoff being the second greatest player in the world.’ Yet Number Four is a chess-player in appearance only – ‘he could not sustain the fiction of a match’, but, as a master of disguise, he acts like a chess-player – ‘he enjoys himself as the professor at that match … He sits and frowns in thought; he gives the impression that he is thinking great plans, and all the time he laughs in himself.’49 Number Four needs only to play two moves before his opponent, Wilson, ‘a second Capablanca’, is electrocuted via a mechanism hidden in the chess piece and the square on which the white bishop is placed on the third move of the Ruy Lopez opening.50 As Poirot notes, the fiction of Number Four’s chess skill could only go so far – a mask without power can only hold for so long – but the point remains that the criminal’s appearance is indistinguishable from that of a genius chess-player.

Elementary 69

Marginal spaces Both the chess-player and the literary detective share ‘the remote or uncivilized habitat of many of the monsters in Western European narratives’, whether we define remote as alone, practising an unfamiliar or unpopular game, one devoid of social utility, or occupying a mental space distinct from others.51 Their representation is the representation of men in marginal spaces. Their otherness is signified by a standing outside of convention, hinting at a loss of human status. Previous chapters have already shown the chess-player repeatedly in the role of automaton: in the case of the chess-player addicted to the game at the expense of his health, duties, and social circle, or the distracting cure for melancholy in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, or Philidor’s static and silent blindfold performances, or Bourdonnais’s repetition of the same act each evening. These are acts that seemingly suspended the demands of everyday life, of eating, drinking, and so on. This isolative need for confinement and detachment was also suggested as one view of the chess-player in the 1871 ‘Chess. By a Tenth-rate Chess Player’. Initially denying that chess was an unsocial game, the author (George Walker hiding behind a pseudonym) described the chess-player as one who possessed empirical, mechanical intensity, located in mental and physical isolation, and as somebody locking himself up in his cellar, turning on the gas, having a simple meal passed in to him once a day, and with a ream of blanks, pen, ink and Sarratt by his side, analyzing all possible combinations, and finally coming forth a very Epimenides, worn with a month’s toil, but laden with wonderful problems in forty-two moves.52

The Tenth-rate player’s description emphasises automaton-like tendencies, outlining an obsessed individual, with everyday life passing him by, where conventions such as eating are secondary, where bodily and mental health suffer for the sake of solution – a familiar image to the reader of the detective fiction of Doyle, Poe, and Futrelle. Both the chess-player and the literary detective engage in a form of play which is ‘distinct from “ordinary” life both in terms of locality and duration’. It is secluded and limited.53 Holmes, Poirot, Marlowe, Van Dusen, and Dupin reside on the boundaries of civilised society, as foreigners or outsiders, initially destabilising and then healing the social structure with their presence after the committing of a crime. Dupin, in Paris, lives in a ‘decadent Gothic atmosphere’. He is ‘a creature of the night, living in a decaying mansion’, shunning the sun, to give the most obvious example of this peripheral occupation.54 In the solving of

70 Minds

these problems of society, these detectives go beyond its accepted parameters. The chess-player sits at the table and the performance begins, while the detective is ‘activated’ when a crime is committed. Between performances, practice may occur (also in seclusion), but this is a pale imitation of the game itself which can be repeated any time ‘or at fixed intervals like a mystery. In this faculty of repetition lies one of the most essential qualities of play.’55 Likewise, in this faculty of repetition lies the most essential characteristics of the literary detective and the chess-player. The stage of the chess-player and the detective is a limited one, marked out deliberately or by unusual circumstances. These spaces are ‘forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain, temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart. Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns.’56 To familiar playspace one might add any number of murder scenes which are marked off materially and mentally, becoming extraordinary, or the Orient Express, or Cell 13, or any number of socially confined spaces where the detective plays at being a detective among high society. Within these spaces, new conventions and expectations abide. The rites of chess performance and the murder scene separate the public from the performers. Nominally, of course, these spaces are away from the periphery, but, through the presence of the detective, these spaces, formerly of civilisation – hence able to be destabilised – become peripheral. Like ‘the magician, the augur, the sacrificer [who] begins his work by circumscribing his sacred space’, the detective (through the action of the criminal and his taking on the case) and the chess-player (through the performance architecture of the game) establish the boundaries of their acts.57

Detective > chess-player Still, for all these shared qualities, the inadequacy of the chess-player in relation to the detective is established in the texts considered here in a number of ways involving emotional attributes, mental faculties employed, notions of respectability encompassing bodily health, mental health, national character, and the establishment or re-establishment of respectable, civilised values. In these comparisons, the chess-player, despite claims of sociability or Stauntonian respectability, is represented as a marginal figure whose engagement with society is more restricted, whose emotional life is narrower, whose mental faculties are employed in a more restrictive way, and whose utility is non-existent. Both Poe, in 1841, and Jacques Futrelle, in 1905, characterised the chess-player as subordinate to their literary detectives. In doing so, each played off the two

Elementary 71

notions of chess which, even as ‘an intellectual game’, had the drawback of being ‘unsocial, absorbing, sometimes protracted, and generally fit only for people of great leisure’,58 while rejecting the link between the game’s intellectual qualities and its sharpening of one’s discipline or moral qualities.59 Hence, we see ‘the theme of the practical uselessness of the good chess-player … voiced by Poe’ in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841).60 In this tale, Poe discussed the relative intellectual qualities of whist, draughts, and chess. Distinguishing between calculation and analysis, Poe began by stating that ‘to calculate is not in itself to analyse’ and that a ‘chess-player does the one, without effort at the other’, arguing that while in chess, ‘it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers’, in draughts the ‘strong exertion of the intellect’ is more valuable as well as requiring the ‘skill of the analyst’. Similarly, proficiency in whist implied for Poe ‘capacity for success in all [the] more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind’ while ‘the best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess’.61 Franz Blaha states that this implies that the chess-player is ‘machine-like, coldly rational [and] semihuman’,62 thus denigrating the figure’s emotional side; John Irwin believes that these views, ‘largely nonsense’, were simply a prop for the author’s intent to ‘associate the differential opposition between simplicity and complexity with the whole question of analysing the analytic power’, thus denigrating the intellectual side of the chess-player.63 Nonsense or not, Poe’s dismissal of the chess-player’s emotional and cognitive limitations and their lack of social utility has persisted. Indeed, as Chapter 1 showed, it was not even a novel concept. The marginalising of the chess-player’s talents in intellectual terms was most clearly expressed in Futrelle’s stories involving Professor Van Dusen, where the detective takes on a world champion chess-player in a battle of intellect. Van Dusen views the game as a mere logical problem, in accordance with his mechanistic idea of the world and, as Horsley states, the trend of the period to ‘amplify the rational, scientific side of the Holmes investigative technique’.64 ‘The Problem of Cell 13’ recounts how Van Dusen acquires the nickname the ‘Thinking Machine’ ‘at the time of a remarkable exhibition at chess’ where ‘he had demonstrated then that a stranger to the game might, by the force of inevitable logic, defeat a champion who had devoted a lifetime to its study’.65 In the match, despite having had no systematic training and with only a cursory knowledge of the rules, the Professor wins. That is, unlike Poe’s distinction between calculation and analysis, Futrelle’s detective is ‘first and above all’ a logician of greater skill than the greatest chess-player. We read that ‘at least thirty-five years of the half-century or so of his existence had been devoted exclusively to proving that two and two always equal four, except in unusual cases, where they equal three or five, as the case may be’ (clearly a useful task).66

72 Minds

Van Dusen’s contest with the champion chess-player is elaborated on in ‘The Problem of Dressing Room A’, serialised in 1906, like other Futrelle short stories, in newspapers including the New York Tribune.67 In ‘Dressing Room A’, Van Dusen remarks to the chess champion, ‘I maintain that the true logician can defeat the chess expert by the mechanical rules of logic. I’ll take a few hours some time, acquaint myself with the moves of the pieces, and defeat you to convince you … It’s a child’s game.’ He then defeats Dr Elbert, ‘the greatest chess-player’, exhibiting a virtuoso-like tendency for spectacle. Van Dusen also elaborates a negative attitude towards chess (as opposed to simply chess-players). Recalling some of the criticisms of churchmen seen above, he states that ‘chess is a shameless perversion of the functions of the brain … It is a sheer waste of effort, greater because it is possibly the most difficult of all fixed abstract problems.’ Hence, the difficulty of the problem is acknowledged, but also the limited nature of the game. He continues, of course logic will solve it. Logic will solve any problem … A thorough understanding of its rules would enable anyone to defeat your greatest chess players. It would be inevitable … I don’t know chess, because I never do useless things, but I could take a few hours of competent instruction and defeat a man who has devoted his life to it.

That is, Van Dusen’s opinion of chess is that the game is all logic, requiring nothing else, whether creativity, imagination, or otherwise. Lastly, he states that the mind of the chess-player ‘is cramped; bound down to the logic of chess. Mine is not; mine employs logic in its widest scope’, suggesting that the mental skills required by chess are not applicable outside chess, again indicating its lack of social utility.68 The issue of social utility is reasserted in Futrelle’s Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire, in which Van Dusen continues his comparison between detective and chess-player, stating that ‘our great chess masters are really our greatest logicians and mathematicians, yet their efforts are directed in a way which can be of no use save to demonstrate, theatrically, I may say, the unlimited possibilities of the human mind’.69 The intention of these observations is twofold. Praising chess – widely understood as requiring intelligence by the reading public – as ‘the most difficult of all abstract problems’ is short-hand for the message that Van Dusen is the intellectual superior of the two figures. Further, criticising chess as irrelevant to human existence also enhances the reputation of the detective, since Van Dusen’s own intellect is applicable to wider problems. In this regard, Futrelle was in agreement with Howard Staunton and Paul Morphy, the American chess-player of the mid-nineteenth century who, shortly after his return from Europe, commented that ‘chess has never been and never can be

Elementary 73

aught but a recreation’. That is, it should not be a profession for life. ‘It should,’ he continued, ‘not be indulged to the detriment of other and more serious avocations – should not absorb the mind or engross the thoughts of those who worship at its shrine; but should be kept in the background and restrained within its proper province.’70 Established in another way, the ludic qualities of the detective genre, particularly after Conan Doyle,71 composed of detective, mystery, investigation, and puzzle element,72 in part influenced by the interwar development of the cryptic crossword, are suggestive of the ways the chess-player could be left heavy-footed in comparison to the detective within these texts. Both the analytical detective story and the cryptic crossword ‘mirror the nature of civilized discourse in their careful ironies, their nuances and clever evasions, and their attentiveness to the exact meanings of words’.73 In each, the answer must be determinable by careful reading of evidence and ignoring red herrings. The reader must be intellectually flexible and creative. Before Conan Doyle, Poe had already suggested the playful dimension accompanying mental features considered analytic – features which were the ‘source of the liveliest enjoyment … [T]he analyst … is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting … a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural.’74 By comparison, while chess-play assuredly was enjoyed by some, and aesthetic and intellectual assessments of chess-play were never stable, John Ruskin, twenty years before Poe, sarcastically commented, ‘pleasant “play,” truly! in which the opponents sit calculating and analysing for 12 hours, tire each other nearly into apoplexy or idiocy and end in a draw or a victory by an odd pawn’.75 This hardly gave the suggestion of a lively, enjoyable pursuit, nor one which was accompanied by a playful mind. This is not to say that Ruskin’s view was a common one, but merely that such a view was in the public domain. When the literary detective did try to adopt the modes and techniques of the chess-player, the results were less than impressive, as seen in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels.76 Marlowe, a chess-player in his spare time, finds the game to be of limited use in his problem-solving. Chandler’s use of chess imagery in The Big Sleep (1939) and The High Window (1942), particularly the knight piece, and Marlowe’s solitary chess-play within the confines of his bedroom symbolise the detective’s moral integrity in the imperfect world of Depression-era Los Angeles, the ‘tainted Eden, a place essentially dark and full of blood’.77 He moves between the world of the high and low with equal discomfort. Significantly, a knight rescuing a lady is the first symbol in The Big Sleep, in a stained glass window. The chivalric themes in The Big Sleep have been traced by Stephen Knight and Andrew Mathis to their medieval roots and the ‘code of knightly fealty, or comitatus’. Chandler employs this knightly behaviour,

74 Minds

in part, as Marlowe’s moral code. Such behaviour was ‘a prominent feature of the late Victorian cult of Gothic medievalism, appearing in many of the poems and stories that Chandler would have read as a student at Dulwich’.78 Many of Marlowe’s troubles stem from the unsuitability of chivalry as a mode of behaviour in 1930s America and the lack of moral and intellectual flexibility surrounding chess-play. As the detective states, after Carmen appears in his bed, ‘knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights’, while acknowledging his own imperfection and that he may not have played the game very well.79 His distinctiveness is established in part through his identification as a chess-player, or a chess piece, as someone who believes the world of chess to be more comprehensible than the morally corrupt American city. Marlowe plays every day, often badly, serving to highlight how the world outside is not always fair, just, and patient, most famously in The Big Sleep with its unsolved murder (missed even by the author, according to one persistent urban myth). Reconstructing José Raúl Capablanca’s games at the end of The High Window, ‘beautiful cold remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability’, provides a rare moment of calm away from the chaotic, unfair exterior world.80 Chess functions as ‘a protective device … as the height of masculine hermeticism, filled with rigid rules and, as Marlowe plays it, an utterly solitary activity’.81 His status as knight defines ‘some form of moral superiority’ in contrast to those ‘more implicated in the world of corruption, depicted as entering into a scene of disorder and acknowledging their own anarchic tendencies and capacity for violence’.82 The contrast is envisaged in sporting terms as traditional sportsmanship, versus the gamesmanship of, say, Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade. Marlowe plays chess, or at least tries to, ‘the same way he approaches life: to solve the puzzle, to render the game intelligible. Not to purge the world of evil.’83

Closing the case The detective, like the chess-player, appears as intellectually, socially, and morally different, possessing logical and reasoning intellectual abilities. Despite his varied monstrous aspects, the detective also represents positive qualities, fulfilling a social function. Just like the chess problem, any detection is a record of a competition between a problem setter and a solver. Without the villain, the detective cannot demonstrate intellectual abilities. In the face of the unease and disorder represented by the villain, the detective solves the problem. In terms of structure, the detective genre, with its increasingly formalised, if not always followed, conventions, also mirrors the chess problem, while allowing for a more

Elementary 75

playful dimension. Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ demonstrates some of these aspects with its closed environment, the puzzle of a difficulty concomitant with the detective’s intellectual ability – solved by a combination of logic and creativity, rather than mechanical thinking – its staged nature, a degree of originality, and a theme. This artificiality breaks down completely in Marlowe’s Los Angeles, where no rules exist. For Conan Doyle’s Holmes, chess-play represented one mark of a ‘scheming mind’,84 yet, as demonstrated by the film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) in which Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes and Jared Harris’s Professor Moriarty play an increasingly intense and violent game, Holmes and chess-play have become linked because of their assumed shared intellectual characteristics and the idea of a mental battle that the game represents. For Professor Van Dusen, an entirely different association with the game is made, with the ‘Thinking Machine’ dismissing the game as a difficult exercise in logic which his mind easily grasps. Compared to the rapier-sharp reasoning and creativity that some ascribe to the chess-player, the chess-players in Jacques Futrelle’s stories appear one-dimensional, though so too, one could argue, does the detective. The chessboard or chess performance separates its two subjects from each other and conjoins them, like the detective and criminal. It conjoins them in space, and separates them by the distance of the board. It separates both from all others, including the baffled spectators who can only wonder and worry, and binds these same spectators to marvelling and wondering at the virtuosic skill on display. Yet for the detective, this performance, for all its play attributes, directly impinges on society. Howard Staunton’s claim that chess-play was the recreation of men ‘fully alive to the responsibilities of their social existence’ clashes here with the real-world usefulness of the detective.85 Where chessplayer and detective meet, we see repeatedly the inadequacy of the former. While Johan Huizinga may have been on the sharp side when he noted that ‘a game of chess may fascinate the onlookers although it still remains unfruitful for culture and devoid of visible charm … [there is] nothing visible or enjoyable about it save the mere fact of winning’, he was, by and large, correct to note that the chess-player is not commonly thought of as a ‘useful’ member of society.86 By contrast, there is a clear social utility to the detective. In ‘The Final Problem’, before his ‘death’, Holmes remarks to Watson that I have not lived wholly in vain. If my record were closed to-night I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the sweeter for my presence. In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers upon the wrong side.87

What chess-player could say the same?

76 Minds

Notes  1 See, for example, entries for 12 September 1837 and 24 April 1840 in Queen Victoria’s Journals: RA MAIN (Princess Beatrice’s copies), www.queenvictoriasjournals.org (accessed March 2014).  2 ‘The Great Chess Match’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 25 January 1893, p. 8.  3 J. Richards, ‘As My Whimsy Takes Me’, The Radio Detectives, BBC Radio 4, 18 May 1999.  4 F. Blaha and M. Cathcart, ‘Chess is for Heavies – Images of Chess in Detective Fiction’, a paper delivered at Chess and the Humanities: An Inquiry into the Value of a Leisure Activity, 26–27 May 1978, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, p. 8.  5 M. Huggins and J. A. Mangan, ‘Epilogue: The Dogs Bark but the Caravan Moves On’, in M. Huggins and J. A. Mangan (eds), Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2004), p. 204.  6 E. A. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), in E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Everyman, 2002), p. 411.  7 P. Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 103, 104.  8 M. A. Kayman, ‘The Short Story from Poe to Chesterton’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 46.  9 L. Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 35. 10 Kayman, ‘The Short Story’, p. 46. Consider the co-dependent relationship between ‘Jim’ Moriarty and Sherlock in the recent BBC adaptation, particularly Moriarty’s haunting, taunting ‘You’re me. You’re me’ from ‘The Reichenbach Fall’, Sherlock, BBC 1, 15 January 2012. 11 U. McGovern, ‘Phrenology’, in U. McGovern (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained: A Guide to the Mysterious, the Paranormal and the Supernatural (Edinburgh: Chambers, 2007), p. 530. 12 S. Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 141. 13 Ibid., p. 142. 14 F. Winslow, M.D., ‘Article VII – On Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Disorders of the Mind’, British Quarterly Review, 40 (July–October 1864), p. 441. 15 J. L. Capen, M.D., ‘A Phrenological Estimate of Henry Nelson Pillsbury, the Champion Chess Player’, Phrenological Journal, 111.3 (1900), pp. 1–3. 16 Ibid., p. 1. See also ‘Phrenological Remarks on Mr. Harrwitz, the Celebrated Blindfold Chess-Player’, Chess Player’s Chronicle, 10 (1849), pp. 317–18, which discusses the nineteenth-century chess-player Daniel Harrwitz’s ‘Concentrativeness’. 17 ‘To Our Correspondents’, American Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated, 43.5 (1866), p. 157. See also F. J. V. Broussais, Lectures on Phrenology: Delivered in the

Elementary 77

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

University of Paris (London: George Routledge, 1847), p. 851; G. Combe, Lectures on Phrenology (New York: Samuel Colman, 1839), p. 243; G. Combe, A System of Phrenology (Edinburgh: John Anderson, 3rd edn, 1830), p. 417; G. Combe, Elements of Phrenology (Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1828), p. 94; and S. Smith, The Principles of Phrenology (Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1838), p. 197. See E. Hearst and J. Knott, Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp. 32–3, for a discussion on the size of nineteenthcentury chess-player Louis Paulsen’s head – described by Howard Staunton as ‘the largest of any man in the United States’. A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ (1892), in A. Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: CRW Publishing, 2006), p. 271. A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902), in ibid., p. 97. A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Final Problem’ (1893), in ibid., pp. 414–15. A. Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (London: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 35. See also A. C. White, ‘Chess in Detective Stories’, British Chess Magazine (August 1911), pp. 305–9. J. Futrelle, ‘The Problem of Cell 13’ (1905), in J. Futrelle, Jacques Futrelle’s ‘The Thinking Machine’ (New York: Modern Library, 2003), pp. 15–16. J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 27. A. Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ (1887), in Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 16. S. Thomas, The End of Mr. Y (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016), pp. 83–4. Poe, ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 415. S. T. Joshi, John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1990), p. 11. J. Richards, ‘The Little Grey Cells of Hercule Poirot’, The Radio Detectives, BBC Radio 4, 25 May 1999. E. Lasker, Manual of Chess (New York: Dover, 1960), p. ix. J. Richards, ‘Send for Paul Temple’, The Radio Detectives, BBC Radio 4, 20 May 1998. This interpretation of a ‘priest’ takes a different perspective than Professor Richards, who utilises the word ‘priest’ to refer to the often single, celibate lifestyle of many fictional detectives, as well as their independence from conventional justice systems. S. S. van Dine, ‘Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories’, American Magazine, 106.3 (1928), pp. 129–31. R. Knox, ‘Preface: A Detective Story Decalogue’, in R. Knox and H. Harrington (eds), Best Detective Stories of 1928–29 (New York: H. Liveright, 1929), www.list​ sofnote.com/2012/03/rules-for-detective-writers.html (accessed July 2013). van Dine, ‘Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories’, pp. 129–31. R. Austin Freeman, ‘The Art of the Detective Story’ (1924), www.gaslight.mtroyal. ca/detcritF.htm (accessed July 2013). For an example of a connection between chess-play and the supernatural, see H. Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (London: John Murray, 1847), p. 36. While the narrator and ship’s doctor play chess, the crew watch on and

78 Minds

‘their wonder rose to such a pitch that they at last regarded the mysterious movements of the game with something more than perplexity … they came to the conclusion that we must be a couple of necromancers’. 37 J. T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. xvi. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. xvii. 40 ‘An Englishman’, Paul Morphy: The Chess Champion (London: William Lay, 1859), p. 178. 41 Irwin, Mystery, pp. 113–14. 42 Ibid. 43 Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, p. 16. 44 A. Conan Doyle, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891), in Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 217. 45 A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Sign of the Four’ (1923), in ibid., p. 59. 46 Doyle, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, p. 217. 47 A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Mazarin Stone’ (1903), in Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 644. 48 A. Christie, The Big Four (New York: Harper, 2011), p. 113. 49 Ibid., p. 121. 50 Blaha and Cathcart, ‘Chess is for Heavies’, p. 3. 51 J. B. Friedman, ‘Foreword’, in A. S. Mittman (ed.) with P. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. xxvii. 52 ‘A. A. B.’, ‘Chess. By a Tenth-Rate Player’, Lippincott’s Magazine, 7.38 (1871), p. 209. 53 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 9. 54 C. J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 22. 55 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 10. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 20. 58 ‘Chess’, Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, 2 (1877), p. 254. 59 H. A. Kennedy, ‘Chess Chips’, Chess Player’s Chronicle, 11 (1851), p. 11. 60 Blaha and Cathcart, ‘Chess is for Heavies’, pp. 4–5. 61 Poe, ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, pp. 411–12. 62 Blaha and Cathcart, ‘Chess is for Heavies’, p. 2. 63 Irwin, Mystery, p. 82. 64 Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p. 35. 65 Futrelle, ‘The Problem of Cell 13’, p. 16. 66 Ibid. 67 See, for example, J. Futrelle, ‘The Thinking Machine, Problem of Dressing Room A’, Sunday Magazine of the New York Tribune, 2 September 1906, pp. 3–4; J. Futrelle, ‘Problem of the Motor Boat – Another Problem for the Thinking Machine’, New York Tribune, 9 September 1906, pp. 27–8. Other Futrelle stories serialised in 1906 included

Elementary 79

‘Problem of the Superfluous Finger’, ‘Problem of the Phantom Auto’, ‘Problem of the Stolen Bank Notes’, and ‘Problem of the Last Radium’. 68 J. Futrelle, ‘The Thinking Machine’s First Problem: The Problem of Dressing Room A’, in Futrelle, The Thinking Machine, p. ix. 69 J. Futrelle, Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire (USA: Kessinger, 2008), p. 6. 70 D. Hooper and K. Whyld, ‘Paul Morphy’, in D. Hooper and K. Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1996), p. 263. 71 Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p. 14. 72 Rzepka, Detective Fiction, p. 10. 73 Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p. 15. 74 Poe, ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 411. 75 J. Ruskin’s letter to the Daily Telegraph, 6 June 1884, reproduced under the heading ‘Mr Ruskin on Billiards and Chess’, British Chess Magazine (July 1884), p. 286. F. W. L., in ‘John Ruskin and Chess’, British Chess Monthly (April 1923), pp. 115–18, later responded that ‘he [Ruskin] is quite unable to comprehend the progressive development of a combination the issue of which shall be simple and conclusive, and in recording the boredom that such processes inflict he has no suspicion that his mental grasp is at fault’. 76 Chess references in noir fiction, the edgier detective tales originating in Depressionera America, are not as plentiful as within classic detective fiction. However, Marlowe shares several characteristics, particularly in private, with the Golden Age detective and can be placed half-way between detectives like Holmes and more hard-boiled PIs such as Sam Spade. 77 I. Rankin, ‘Ian Rankin on “The Big Sleep”’, in R. Chandler, The Big Sleep (London: Penguin, 2005), p. vi. Chandler also employs chess imagery in The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953). 78 Rzepka, Detective Fiction, p. 203. 79 Chandler, The Big Sleep, p. 1. 80 R. Chandler, The High Window (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 272. 81 M. E. Abbott, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 62. 82 L. Horsley, Crime Culture, www.crimeculture.com (accessed August 2012). 83 M. Oriard, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 282. 84 A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Retired Colourman’ (1926), in Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 710. This is the sole reference to chess-play in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. 85 H. Staunton, The Chess Tournament: A Collection of Games Played at this Celebrated Assemblage (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), p. xv. 86 Ibid., pp. 50, 48. 87 Doyle, ‘The Final Problem’, p. 418.

Part II Machines

4 Future shocks: IBM’s Deep Blue and the Automaton Chess-Player, 1997–1769 I, who have felt the horror of mirrors Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable, An impossible space of reflections1

Appearances The introduction to this book suggested the potential for the term chess-player to be greatly expanded and capable of covering a wide variety of physical forms. The previous chapters have discussed the chess-player as sinner, melancholic, and animal, imbricating issues surrounding social utility, emotional values, and the mental faculties required by chess-play, as well as discussing a disreputable figure on the boundaries of civilisation, possessing both virtuosic and automatonlike qualities. Part II reconsiders these themes in the context of chess-­playing machines, mainly the eighteenth-century Automaton Chess-Player (1769–) and IBM’s Deep Blue (1996–97) and their related forms. Specifically, this section considers how these machines were viewed as behaviourally monstrous, how specific sites of performance and initial impressions determined identity formation, and how resistance to these non-human intelligences highlighted or ­deprecated specific cognitive processes and mental faculties. In their cultural guise, these chess machines represent an intersection of past and present and have been utilised contradictorily as objects both pre-historic, pointing back to the most ancient of myths and fears concerning human status, and ‘way ahead of their time – time that otherwise flowed along at a sluggish pace’.2 They were seen as both totems and futures.

84 Machines

Terms Chess-playing machines appear as automata, statues, and magical objects, repeating a number of aspects of the human chess-player already encountered. Concerning the first term’s usage, Wendy Beth Hyman notes that, surrounding the automaton, ‘the only consistency appears to be ontological inconsistency’ and definitions are ‘almost self-contradictory’, quoting the multiple framings of automaton in the Oxford English Dictionary: 1) Something which has the power of spontaneous motion or self-movement; 2) A human being viewed materially; 3) A piece of mechanism having its motive power so concealed that it appears to move spontaneously … 4) A living being whose actions are purely involuntary or mechanical; 5) A human being acting mechanically or without active intelligence in a monotonous routine; 6) Comb. and attrib., as in automaton figure, lips, etc.; automaton-like a. and adv. resembling or like an automaton.3

Importantly, notes Hyman, an object may be considered an automaton even if its movement is only superficially spontaneous, just as a human acting as a monotonous figure may. That is, a machine containing a human controller, as in the case of the Automaton Chess-Player, would qualify as an automaton since ‘its characteristic of being self-generating need only be apparent rather than actual’.4 Chess machines also fulfil the requirements of the statue in the commonsense definition, and in a second definition discussed by Michel Serres. Serres’s outlining of the statue describes the costly, virtuosic, spectacular, repetitive, and celestially oriented creation.5 It places a spectacle of death at its centre. Serres talks of ‘hot, black boxes full of humans’ in the form of statues of Baal in Carthage, with human sacrifice disguised as religious ceremony, and the space shuttle Challenger tragedy, explained by statistically probable technical failure.6 The black boxes considered here, the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue, are in many ways analogous. They were each costly displays of virtuosity, presented as spectacle, aiming for the supplementing of the human either in intention or interpretation. Each placed death at the centre of their spectacle: the death of their occupant, the death of their opponents, the death of chess, and the death of the Human. Further discussion of the term statue threads obliquely through this and the following chapters. The third term – the chess-player as magical object – stems from Simon During’s term ‘secular magic’, defined, refreshingly straightforwardly, as ‘the technically produced magic of conjuring shows and special effects’.7 The idea of chess-playing machines as objects of secular magic does not, incidentally, pre-



Future shocks 85

clude the generation, encouragement, or elimination of veils of mystery and the supernatural around the produced spectacle, as should be apparent around the multiple forms of the chess-player already discussed. Writing on chess machines has also involved other types of magic, including necromancy or other forbidden practices, usually within a strictly performative or literary framework. During’s work echoes David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic (1832) which argued that apparently supernatural phenomena, including Babbage’s Calculating Machine, the kaleidoscope, and other phantasmagoria, ‘could be explained by recourse to optical illusion or imposture with the aid of mechanical devices’,8 acknowledging that discovery of the solution did not kill the sense of mystery,9 and framing magical devices within intricacies of belief, commerce, virtuosity, and spectacle. Paul Metzner and James W. Cook have discussed similar intersections. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of During’s ideas. Yet one thought in Modern Enchantments is pertinent, namely, the pointing towards questions of whether observers of secular magic ‘believed’ in a magical force underlying what they witnessed, whether observers suspended their ‘disbelief’ and enjoyed the show as spectacle, entertainment, or didactic parade. This question of belief has itself been an underlying theme of previous chapters, centring ultimately on the acceptance or denial of the cultural power of the chess-player and chess-play. The three terms of automaton, statue, and magical object coalesce to suggest the resistance of the chess-playing machine to reductionism or essentialism, to constituent parts. Each, as Hyman, Serres, and During suggest, is not merely inanimate. Steven Connor talks of how ‘we do not relish being reduced to the condition of a thing, precisely because we feel that it is a reduction’, quoting Michel Serres’s thought that to be a subject in the world is to be subject to the world, to be under its power, ‘to be demoted from being a subject of infinite potential and a potential for the infinite, into a fixed and finite thing’. Such perspectives suggest that ‘we [the observer] can contain them, while they cannot contain us’.10 And yet the chess-playing machine has demonstrated a tendency to remain in the cultural space of dream and myth, and to resist passive status. The chess-player body, never a ‘docile body’, is a contested ground where fears and hopes are played out, reflecting in their masked state the anxieties of their creators.11 This is as true for the machine chess-player as anything discussed previously, since it awoke concerns about the nature of intelligence, man’s place in a technological order, and feelings of obsolescence against something ‘inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force’.12 Part science and part magic, cultural representations of the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue celebrate humanity’s ability as tool makers, function as strategies of containment which attempt to reduce the impact of either machine, characterise either machine as fraudulent, or redefine the intellectual characteristics required by

86 Machines

chess. Chess machines also, through their extension of the term ‘chess-player’, reconstruct and broaden the hierarchy of chess-player identity.13 To reiterate, chess-player is a continuum, not a single object. The opening and closing of this chapter with stanzas from Jorge Luis Borges’s poem ‘Mirrors’ (1960), recalling Walker’s use of the Café de la Régence as an image of his self, acts as a reminder of the doubling potential of the chess machines in relation to their occupants, observers, and opponents. The chess-playing machines let each see something of themselves, or beyond themselves, outside of themselves.

Introductions The Automaton Chess-Player, or ‘The Turk’, was, in material terms, a wooden box concealing a full-size human, attached to which was a human model of a Turk, constructed by the Hungarian virtuoso Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734– 1804) in 1769 and first presented at the court of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. Its appearance, described by conjuror Ricky Jay, combined a curious mix of cultures, dimensions, and signs, emphasising its uneasy epistemological and ontological status: a turbaned wooden and metal figure of human stature, festooned in Turkish habiliment. The effigy, whose face was carved with an intense, brooding expression, sat behind a cabinet 3½ feet long, 2 feet wide, and 2½ feet high. He was richly caparisoned in robes lined with ermine and he sported an imposing turban that added to both his stature and his mystique. To the surface of the cabinet was affixed a chess board 1½ feet square.14

The machine was not of an uncommon kind in one sense. As Simon Schaffer states, automata in eighteenth-century European science appeared ‘as machines in the form of humans and as humans who perform like machines’.15 Yet by its novel action of mechanising a game widely thought to require rational analysis, the machine stepped into novel territory. For George Walker, inspired by Mary Shelley’s ‘moral indictments of artificial life’,16 the machine was a ‘timber Frankenstein’,17 although commentators before Shelley’s novel were generally much more guarded in their Promethean claims. The existence of the machine’s secret, non-mechanical motive power was never really in doubt, being a question of how rather than if. Automata also became ‘captivating commodities, their meanings established in the market and their value assigned through commerce’.18 Kempelen constructed the Turk ‘to match his own virtues against the vulgar and the merely skilful’ and his creation became a major attraction at fairs and theatres.19 In cultural terms, the machine was described in 1857 as ‘one of the most



Future shocks 87

famous personages of the last hundred years’,20 demonstrating that it had blurred the line between passive object and active subject. Others added that ‘it is supposed that in the course of his various exhibitions he has been seen by more eyes than any terrestrial object ever exhibited’21 and that ‘perhaps no exhibition of the kind ha[d] ever elicited so general attention’.22 After Kempelen sold the machine to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772–1838), a proto-Barnum figure, it toured the world before being destroyed in a Philadelphia fire in 1854. Recent appearances in popular culture, including Doctor Who, have reintroduced the figure – long a sword of Damocles hanging over chess-play – to a modern audience. IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue, a machine similarly intertwined with human enterprise and also a cultural figure in its own right, appeared as the fulfilment of the nightmare and dream of the Turk. The machine, in various iterations, competed in numerous competitions with Garry Kasparov, the then world chess champion, ultimately defeating him in May 1997. An earlier match, held from 10–17 February 1996, ended with Kasparov victorious by four games to two. Significantly, however, 10 February 1996 saw the first occasion when a chess-playing computer defeated a reigning world chess champion under tournament conditions in a single game. This match provided some commentators with the potential for refashioning the dominant narrative of chess in the post-Cold War period. Kasparov was written in the role of hero, which elided with his previous role as anti-communist. Demonisation of IBM and their machine replaced anti-Soviet rhetoric. Like the Turk, Deep Blue’s hybridity, liminality, and outcast status, along with the notion of machine-intelligence as an ‘unpredictable, uncontrollable force’, frequently saw IBM’s invention also become the subject of modern Promethean analogies.23 The leader of the Deep Blue project, Feng Hsiung Hsu, likened building the machine to ‘bringing up the baby’24 while David Shenk compared the process to ‘building Frankenstein’.25 Repeated references to Deep Blue as a monster – ‘IBM’s monster computer’, ‘IBM’s “massively parallel” monster computer’, Kasparov as ‘Dr. Frankenstein at the mercy of his monster’, ‘the silicon monster’, and the ‘monster machine’26 – reaffirmed this impression, placing the machine within the scope of Romanticist critiques of technology. Such critiques argued against the dismemberment of art into constituent parts, sharing common ground with, for example, Kasparov’s lament that ‘mere calculation, mere logic is not enough. Chess is psychological, fantasy, intuition.’27

Mirrors and masks Even as the product of ‘typical media sensationalism’,28 constructions of chess machines as monsters within chess-player hierarchies were consistent with the

88 Machines

popular notion that chess was 1) intellectually difficult and 2) a bastion which, once breached by computer intelligence, could never be recovered. The popular conception of monsters, particularly in film, suggests two modes of encounter – either bringing the monster ‘home’ into civilisation where it runs amok, or seeking out the monster and going into unknown territory. The creation of Deep Blue suggested both modes, in its being a constructed machine made possible by human technology and its going beyond any human skill at chess, albeit through the accumulation and analysis of human chess-play. It paradoxically came from within technological civilisation and attacked from without. Newspaper articles on Deep Blue asking are ‘humans no longer the only possessors of true intelligence?’, ‘are humans now obsolete?’, and ‘who’s the master now?’, and declaring ‘computer topples Kasparov’, ‘even Kasparov has met his match’, and ‘Deep Blue takes a byte out of Kasparov’29 breathlessly connected chess-play with themes of human superiority while reviving references to the scepticism that greeted early-modern chess-playing animals. Indeed, most of the philosophical defences (emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual) to the computer take­ over, even in diluted pop-cultural form, had already been expressed in relation to chess-playing animals. Within Judeo-Christian reasoning that ‘humans have been placed by God in a higher position on the Great Chain of Being; Greek perspectives that, as rational beings, humans are superior to animals and plants … and the Cartesian view that humans have greater worth because they have souls, while other creatures are mere bodies’, hierarchy was asserted.30 This chapter discusses these themes in two ways. First, it considers the spaces where the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue were exhibited and ­performed – spaces which amplified belief, such as the church and tavern. Secondly, and conversely, it considers the ways in which the achievements of each machine were reduced or marginalised, which can be collectively considered as resistance to or disbelief in the machine’s cultural power. Critical to the doom-bringing representations of each machine were the spaces of their presentation. Occupation of liminal spaces is a consistent feature of chess-player imagery, suggesting a complex interplay of ritual, presentation, and reception combining entertainment, deception, and science. In the case of the Automaton Chess-Player, a movement can be seen from private space to public space with socially distinct types of viewers, from the private study of its inventor where it was presented to friends and aristocratic guests, to the Austrian Royal Court which used scientific wonders as signs of national prestige, to public exhibitions where the curiosity-seeking middle classes enjoyed popular shows and novelty, to chess rooms, and finally to permanent attractions in entertainment-oriented theatres in America and elsewhere. The spaces of the Turk’s presentation all encouraged belief, or, at least, not disbelief, and were not unusual in them-



Future shocks 89

selves. Linda Strauss notes that typical locations for automata include tombs, temples, theatres, magicians’ stages, fairs, gardens, laboratories, and labyrinths. These are all liminal spaces, ‘not simply because they exist at the margins of everyday existence’, but due to their location at the boundaries between worlds and states of being: life/death, divine/secular, natural/artificial, wild/ controlled, order/disorder, and illusion/reality.31 Each of these intersections has already been encountered with relation to the human chess-player. Contrarily, how was disbelief in the cultural power of the chess-playing machines expressed as a literary strategy? Pamela McCorduck offers four such strategies of resistance to machines in general, involving arguments of emotion, arguments of insuperable differences, arguments of no existing examples, and arguments of ethical considerations.32 Applied to chess-play, these methods can be represented as arguments that chess-play was essentially mechanistic and solvable (not requiring thought or emotion), arguments that placed the mechanisation of reason outside the ability of machines, assertions that machines would always be incapable of thought, and suggestions that machines should not be allowed to replace human reasoning. Part of the strength of these reactions stemmed from the culture-shock, the future-shock, of ‘the most difficult and complicated of all games’ being played by non-human protagonists.33 A number relied on a perceived but unstated aesthetic and cognitively correct way of playing chess. Others also, as collateral damage, reduced the cultural power of the human chess-player by conceding the ground of chess-play as intellectually challenging. By utilising any of the above strategies, the impact of the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue could be reduced.

Spaces of production The earliest contexts of display regarding the Automaton Chess-Player demonstrate the tensions held by the machine in existing within multiple spaces and between states of being. Karl von Windisch, an early observer of the machine and author of the first published account of it, suggests the impact it initially had, stating Kempelen’s opinion: the machine was a bagatelle [gimmick] which was not without merit in point of mechanism, but … the effects of it appeared so marvellous only from the boldness of the conception, and the fortunate choice of the methods adopted for promoting the illusion.34

The italicised phrases highlight how the Automaton Chess-Player’s elision between science and performance was its defining and intentional f­eature.

90 Machines

Windisch’s words reveal a willingness to believe, a desire to fall into the machine’s and Kempelen’s entrancement. Kempelen’s motives for building the machine began in the court of Maria Theresa, at Schönbrunn Palace. Indicative of the science–performance mixture, a presentation of the virtuoso François Pelletier’s ‘curious combination of magnetism and illusion’ provoked the watching Kempelen to promise to return with an even more wondrous invention.35 Within a year, in 1769, the Automaton Chess-Player was presented. The machine’s daring and humorous appearance at the Royal Court was not the first space it occupied. Rather, it began life in Kempelen’s workshop where it was demonstrated to small groups. As described by Windisch, a picture of an eighteenth-century virtuoso’s magical space emerges, somewhat reminiscent of alchemical laboratories of the sixteenth century: you see nought but joiners, smiths, and clockmakers tools, laying in heaps, in that confusion, so characteristic of the abode of a mechanical genius. The walls of the study … contai[n] books, other antiques, and the remainder, a small collection of natural history; the intermediate spaces are decorated with paintings or prints.36

Again, Windisch’s favourable commentary does not suggest deception, only Kempelen’s role as inventor. This role, however, did not preclude the possession of virtuosic talents for ‘spectacle-making, technical skill, and self-­promotion’ – talents that imagined tellings of the tale of the Turk (discussed in Chapter 6) spun into chaos, derangement, and eccentricity.37 To his ­contemporaries, however, Kempelen was a scientific professional, as evidenced by his later, varied inventions, built on sound observational and empirical evidence. The Automaton was built ‘to impress his sovereign’, although all Kempelen’s works involved differing mixtures of public impact, theatrics, and performance. It is tempting to see a kind of science-fictional quality in them. Kempelen’s contribution to a waterfall project at Schönbrunn Palace, the consequence of a competition of sorts between European aristocrats to possess the most impressive jets and cascades, was contemporaneously described as ‘one of the most ­important and extraordinary inventions of this century’.38 Relying on a ­reputation gained in the manufacture of such inventions strengthened the credibility of his Automaton Chess-Player. Having said this, Kempelen’s chess-playing machine was never straightforwardly a ‘fake’,39 but at once a technical device and a triumph of science. Others, less guardedly, described a work of witchcraft, a piece of entertainment, a symbol of modernity, a vacuous novelty, a malevolent deception, and a ‘thinking machine that couldn’t think’.40 These latter descriptions occupied the space left by Kempelen between contexts of performance and individual reputation as a scientific virtuoso.



Future shocks 91

As with Kempelen’s machine, interpretations of IBM’s motives for building Deep Blue often reflected emotional reactions to the machine. Although Deep Blue had appeared in public in earlier guises, such as Deep Thought, its 1996 match with Garry Kasparov was the first time the machine had appeared on the international stage as a genuine challenger to Kasparov’s intellectual reputation.41 Deep Blue and IBM appeared as modern virtuosos and the machine was first presented, not in a secret workshop or royal palace, but in mass media advertisements and press releases. David Julyk, agreeing with Garry Kasparov, boldly stated that IBM staged their chess events ‘to garner publicity and to bolster the company’s fortunes’.42 The not-so-subtle notion of big-business-as-bad formed the bedrock of later accusations about IBM manipulation, but should not be seen as too dissimilar to Kempelen’s use of his own machine to attract attention to himself. Unlike Kempelen, it should be noted, the computer scientists of IBM were distinct from the promoters. The suitability of chess-play as a subject of importance regarding the development of artificial intelligence and pattern recognition within computer science was confirmed by IBM’s Deep Blue. Alan Turing and Claude Shannon both commented on the use of the game in their respective fields. Chess-play has also been characterised as ‘the drosophila of artificial intelligence’, likening the importance of the game to computer science to that of the fruit fly to biological research.43 Continuing this narrative, IBM’s 1996 press release for the Kasparov match emphasised possible developments for the computer’s new technology. Similarly, Monty Newborn, the computer chess committee chair for the Association for Computing Machinery, wrote how Deep Blue would assist ‘IBM Research’s efforts to assess how computers can solve complex computational problems – chess is the perfect test situation for determining how computers solve difficult problems’. IBM noted how its researchers hoped Deep Blue could be ‘a stepping stone to developing similar computers that will benefit industrial and commercial arenas’.44 Under the question and headline, ‘So What Does a Chess-Playing Computer Have to do with Making Sure My Plane is on Time? IBM’s Deep Blue: Specialised Computing for Commercial Applications’, the areas of pharmaceutical engineering, air transportation, and health maintenance were highlighted as potential areas of focus. At the same time, by lapsing into technical jargon in describing the ‘unique combination of customised processor chips, designed by IBM Research, used in conjunction with the IBM RS/6000 SP system’, Deep Blue was relocated into distant and transcendental space, resistant to interpretation.45 Its technical power seemingly justified its existence in and of itself. Beating a world chess champion provided a more easily explainable goal than hazy forecasts of technological progress, and a greater opportunity for a display

92 Machines

of commercial power and technical skill. The former aspect was certainly never far from the surface. Randal Moulic of IBM, as New Scientist reported in 1991, acknowledged that IBM’s chess research was primarily to promote sales of its computer systems. ‘We do it for the money. M-O-N-E-Y’, he said.46 Publicity for the 1997 contest highlighted the ‘hundreds’ of commercial applications of Deep Blue’s technology47 and suggested an intention to ‘exploit’ the technology further.48 Yet to see business as the only motivation undersells IBM’s commitment to chess performance. The spectacular nature of the event was in the interests of both IBM and Kasparov. The phrasing of the 1996 press release confirms this, stating that sports and science would ‘enter a historic venture … as Garry Kasparov, the reigning World Chess Champion’ matched ‘his genius against the brute force of IBM’s Deep Blue, the ACM International Computer Chess Champion, for $500,000 in prize money’.49 Rhetorical tricks of x vs. y, and arbitrarily distinguishing between brute force (analysing millions of different moves in a short space of time) and genius, underpinned the impulse to go head-to-head. The machine’s black, obelisk appearance only made the threat of ‘brute force’ more apparent. If Deep Blue, in its appearance and jargon-filled spec sheets, showed obfuscatory tendencies to reveal nothing, to silence, to deaden, to mute analysis through enclosure, the intended effect of the Turk’s performance was achieved initially through the appearance of openness. Windisch’s first accounts of the machine’s performance emphasise the public, seemingly deception-free nature of the spectacle. Indeed, Kempelen’s first actions when showing the machine, ‘tuck[ing] up the dress of the Automaton, [taking] out the drawers, and open[ing] all the doors of the cupboard, and in this situation, roll[ing] it round the room, on the castors which it goes upon’, pre-empted Windisch’s suspicions that the machine ‘contained a child’. After this, Windisch notes that his ‘vanity was grievously mortified’ upon seeing his hypothesis ‘instantaneously done away’.50 The gears and wheels of the machine were also illuminated by candle with ‘all the doors of the cupboard open’.51 This aspect of presentation was balanced, more problematically, by the placing of a small wooden case on a nearby table, the utility of which Kempelen had (untruthfully) assured the observers, and which he would go to during the course of a game.52 The presentation completed, the machine was then wound up – another theatrical element – and the game begun. After performances at Schönbrunn and at Kempelen’s house in Bratislava, the automaton toured Europe in 1783, partly at the behest of Emperor Joseph II, then involved in anti-Turkish diplomatic manoeuvres, and partly due to commercial pressures.53 Soon, however, Kempelen retired his machine, selling it soon after, upon which the Turk took up a second life touring the world, as discussed more than ably by James W. Cook.54 Various reasons for Kempelen’s



Future shocks 93

decision have been suggested. Most likely seems the notion that the boundaries between science and performance could not be maintained, particularly the, freely admitted, knowledge that some trickery was at work. The knowledge (or almost-knowledge, since no explanation fully explained the operation of the machine) of the deception damaged the reputation of his other works, and was particularly detrimental to his research on a speaking machine. This new machine was the product of twenty years of experimentation, and was published as Mechanismus der Menschlichen Sprache in Vienna in 1791 and also issued in French. Additionally, as Ricky Jay notes: the reputation of Kempelen’s speaking machine was damaged by association with imposture – not merely by its proximity to a fraudulent automaton on the curriculum vitae of Kempelen – but by its resemblance to an even better-known sham … the Speaking Figure or Invisible Girl.55

Kempelen’s legitimate research into the mechanisation of human speech was largely ignored. His other inventions, including waterworks, bridges, printing machines, and a steam engine, demonstrated a polymathic ability not confined to trickery or gimmicks, and a reputation as a scientific, self-promoting performer, rather than an accomplished engineer, was not necessarily a desirable one.56 Windisch’s words indeed positioned the Turk as deception first and engineering feat second: It can only be a deception, in this the inventor, and every reasonable being will readily agree with you … but such an one as does honor to human nature; a deception more beautiful, more surprizing, more astonishing, than any … in the different accounts of mathematical recreations.57

This infectious tendency of Kempelen’s machine demonstrates the incapacity of the Turk to remain a passive object. Instead of sitting there, doing what it was told, and performing the role assigned to it by Kempelen, it generated new meanings and effects, casting a shadow over machines in proximity.

Spaces of resistance While the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue fulfilled the definition of virtuosic machines – their contexts of display and masking combined technical achievement, theatrical presentation, and self-promotion – such an image represented just one aspect of their cultural representations. Each also represented larger cultural anxieties, functioning as ‘convenient artefacts for displacement

94 Machines

of uncertainty about the future’, neatly packaged up.58 This cultural power was resisted in a number of ways and each strategy may be thought of as an attempt to push its target back towards passivity. Four ways of expressing resistance to the Turk and Deep Blue can be discerned, organised around Patricia McCorduck’s concepts, predominantly utilising the earliest reactions to the Turk printed privately in pamphlets, and through newspaper accounts of Deep Blue’s 1996 contest. Applied here to chess-playing machines and their cultural power, these expressions of resistance are, to reiterate, arguments that chess-play was essentially mechanistic, arguments denying the power of rational thought to existing machines, arguments that machines would always be incapable of thought, and arguments that machines should not be allowed to replace human reasoning. For Edgar Allan Poe, writing in 1836, proof of the machine’s human power came from its (rare) defeats. A fully mechanistic solution would never, he claimed, lose, on account of the mathematical perfection such a machine would bring to the game, suggesting a qualitative distance between the human and machine-brain, as well as the limits of the machine as a mirror of human intellectual abilities. ‘The Automaton does not invariably win the game. Were the machine a pure machine, this would not be the case. It would always win.’59 Poe’s thought-process tapped into a widespread nineteenth-century cultural conception of the machine, extending commentary concerning previous automaton technology and related technologies such as those of Charles Babbage – that is, machines that carried out their tasks with mechanical actions as a wheel is turned by a steam engine, via predetermined functions, not, as with machines such as Deep Blue, through fallible evaluation functions based on analysis of thousands of games. Ada Lovelace, Babbage’s collaborator, argued, in similar terms to Poe, that their Analytical Engine had ‘no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.’60 Poe’s argument hinged on the idea that chess-play was ultimately solvable and mechanistic. His arguments concerning the analytical powers required by chessplay discussed earlier in the context of literary detectives suggest that he felt no special motivation to defend the game, instead basing his opinion on existing mechanisms of the age. A similar line of thinking arose after Deep Blue’s emergence. Once a computer can do something, one commentator claimed, ‘that behavior no longer seems to require much thought’.61 Deep Blue’s brute-force method implied that one could pass the Turing Test – Alan Turing’s test of a machine’s ability to exhibit behaviour corresponding to that of a human without detection – without human-style intelligence at all and hence challenged the popular assumption that chess-play required uniquely human qualities. Along these lines, Bill Gates, then



Future shocks 95

CEO of Microsoft, denied that Deep Blue was anything but clever software, stating that, while ‘in the popular imagination, playing chess has become a proxy for human intelligence … in fact, it is not an approximation of human intelligence in any way’.62 Like Poe, Gates felt no special affinity for chess-play and no reason to defend its emotional and mental requirements. Regardless, the New York Times called the victory of ‘machine over man’ ‘unexpected’, while Time took a more scattered tone, perhaps embodying the uncertainty of what Deep Blue’s victory meant.63 ‘As was to be expected,’ it noted, ‘the end of civilization as we know it was announced on the back pages … The New York Times carried it on page A32 … Garry Kasparov … lost.’ Yet the article ended on a playful note and an acknowledgement of the ‘generation-gap’ that could not be bridged, the author noting his ten-year-old son’s lack of concern at a machine ‘we’ made ourselves. Nevertheless, the machine’s victory clearly tapped into the author’s perception that ‘thinking is our [humans’] speciality’. Having already created machines that could run faster, lift heavier weights, and see farther, the encroachment of machines into humans’ non-physical characteristics was unsettling, particularly, as with Deep Blue, since this was achieved through ‘brute force’, turning, as Kasparov stated, ‘quantity into quality’.64 This was a ‘scary’ thought, according to the article, in contrast to the fearless nature of Deep Blue, in the words of American grandmaster Yasser Seirawan.65 Indeed, Gates’s response, in evacuating the rational ground which chess-play was thought to stand on, can be considered less an act of resistance than an act of retreat. A second group of commentators were more sceptical of each machine’s superficial ability to play chess based on the belief that chess-play did require attributes only thought present in humans. Concerning the Turk’s reasoning powers, a variety of writers expressed their disbelief in the mechanistic nature of the Turk, instead suggesting human involvement. The ‘Oxford Graduate’s’ 1819 pamphlet, stuck in human-centric terminology, laid out the potential impact of the machine in suggesting that it seemed ‘to be a thing absolutely impossible, that any piece of mechanism should be invented, which … should appear to exert the intelligence of a reasoning agent … [It would be an] unparalleled instance of mechanical skill’ to work out the enormous possibilities of chessplay, which necessitated ‘the constant exercise of acute judgement required in anticipating the designs of an antagonist, or in frustrating those which cannot be foreseen’.66 Similarly, assuming an intellectual difficulty for chess-play beyond that of any machine, the marvellously forthright Philip Thicknesse, writing in 1784 in his exposé of the Automaton Chess-Player, straightforwardly stated his intention ‘to show the impossibility that any part of the [machine] is performed by mechanical powers, and that every part is performed by a living, but invisible human confederate’.67 His argument was based on the notion ‘that the ­success

96 Machines

of the game at chess depends wholly on address, and cautious movements of the chess-men, in various and undetermined moves’.68 That is, he could not comprehend machine-intelligence, and he would ‘sooner believe the Right Honourable Charles James Fox is only an automaton than that the [machine], could, without confederates, play a game, more complicated than was ever played by any man’.69 His solution proposed that the Automaton was controlled by a small child.70 Robert Willis’s An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton of Mr. De Kempelen (1821) also played on the intellectual reputation of the game and the limitations of mechanism, when he argued that ‘to meet the ever-varying circumstances of a game of chess’ was the ‘province of intellect alone’, and that, even if a machine could physically perform the moves, the problem would remain and ‘the main object will be still unattained!’, namely the issue of ‘where is the intelligence and the “Promethean heat” that can animate the Automaton and direct its operations?’ His conclusion was simple: ‘an intellectual agent must be provided’.71 The tag of deception which stuck to Kempelen was just one manifestation of a desire to (unsuccessfully) compartmentalise and contain the machine. Resistance to each machine’s cultural power predominantly consisted of arguments concerning why machines cannot be said to think, and provide a continuance between the chess machines.72 Eighteenth-century automata which functioned without human input, such as Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1739 ­charming duck, strengthened belief that mechanical means could replicate life’s outward appearance. Vaucanson, labelled a new Prometheus by Voltaire, claimed he had ‘dared to investigate the secrets of creation which … had been considered beyond the reach of mankind’.73 Yet while the expectations of technology may have become magical or mythical, there were limits to such expectations.74 Milbourne Christopher’s remark, as an historian of conjuring, that ‘most believed’ the Turk was a genuine automaton, at least initially, does not accord with the available evidence from the educated, sceptical audience.75 While every society believes in the capacity of its time to produce revolutionary ‘machines to match its intelligence’, the Turk was largely identified as being too good to be true from its earliest appearances.76 An early part of Kempelen’s presentation included a question-and-answer session with the audience, with the machine answering questions through a ouija-board-esque device. This aspect was removed because of concerns that it ‘undermined the illusion’,77 and, as Fraser’s Magazine reported, worries that the act ‘approximated a little too closely to the feats of the learned pig, Toby’, another popular performer of the day.78 Also questioning the possibility and, more subtly, the nature of machineintelligence, Kasparov noted that ‘I got my first glimpse of artificial intelligence on Feb. 10, 1996, at 4:45 p.m. EST, when in the first game … the computer nudged a pawn forward to a square where it could easily be captured. It was a



Future shocks 97

wonderful and extremely human move.’ Questioning whether the intelligence of an action is dependent on who or what makes it, this move, for Kasparov, was ‘human’, exhibiting ‘signs of intelligence’ but a ‘weird kind, an inefficient, inflexible kind’.79 This response seems particularly intriguing in light of the labels applied to Kasparov throughout his career as a force of nature who seemingly possessed transhuman potential in his play. What Kasparov saw was the machine as mirror. The monolithic Deep Blue, all smooth black sides, pushed attention away to the player as surely as the Turk drew it to its imitation of life. The question of what kind of intelligence IBM appeared to present occupied the thoughts of IBM’s own publicity. Their 1996 Research article highlighted the failure of traditional methods to emulate the human mind, a point which became more important to scientifically minded commentators after Kasparov’s defeat when people searched for an answer as to whether the machine was ‘intelligent’ or not. IBM was firm in its conclusion that the machine was not intelligent, stating: Deep Blue has no learning ability once its values are chosen by its programmers; it carries out exactly the evaluations hard-wired into it. So, in any dictionary definition, as well as in the eyes of its creators, Deep Blue has no intelligence at all. This point seemingly got lost in the media discussion of Deep Blue’s IQ.80

Calculational ability was viewed as a less-than-human characteristic. By contrast, Kasparov’s position was, as in 1997, defined, according to the New York Times, in terms of human qualities such as emotion – the hero who was no stereotyped nerd knight, stuttering and blinking away from the board … he talked better trash – the intellectual toxic waste of trash – than any body jock … He is intense and animated in conversation, his famous arrogance an engaging shtick. Dramatic, handsome and the champion for almost 11 years.81

The notion that machines should not be allowed to replace humans was largely unmentioned as a strategy of resistance in the case of either machine. Despite the seemingly assured literary resistance outlined and exemplified by Philip Thicknesse, Robert Willis, and others, the Turk resisted final analysis and remained a curiosity, even when the secret was, ultimately, divulged. Instead of ending the argument, the revelation appeared less as enlightenment than more false prophecy. Resisting any closure, considering the Turk as a ‘curiosity’ ensured that viewers remained largely unconcerned with matters of authenticity.82 Indeed, as J. Walker’s amusing play Modus Operandi (1866) commented, ‘as for saying that a man, a dwarf, or a child is concealed in it; all the better – that only increases curiosity. The beauty of it is, after all, they can never find him.’83

98 Machines

Other suggestions included the belief that the Turk was operated by magnetic influence, as expounded by Carl F. Hindenburg, a Leipzig University mathematician, in 1783,84 and repeated in 1819 by the ‘Oxford Graduate’ who aimed to ‘banish all suspicion from the most sceptical mind, that any living subject is concealed within any part of it’.85 By one measure there were roughly fifty explanations of how the Automaton worked, despite the consensus that ‘there could be hardly more than four forms of hypothesis broached by the spectators of the Automaton’, namely a concealed man or boy, confederacy with a person in another chamber, dependency on the floor or ceiling, or magnetism or electricity.86 Despite occasional dissenters, the majority of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pamphlets were of the correct belief that there was a person hiding within the machine. One believed that a person climbed inside the Turk costume, rather than hiding in the cabinet below.87 Others fixated on the idea of a mis-shapen operator. J. F. Freyhere in 1789 concluded ‘that a well-taught boy, very thin and tall of his age (sufficiently so that he could be concealed in a drawer almost immediately under the chessboard), agitated the whole’,88 while another 1785 Paris pamphlet explained how a dwarf player operated the machine.89 The ‘dwarf’ explanation perhaps also led to the development of the idea, reported as fact in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the magician Robert-Houdin’s autobiography, that a Polish amputee controlled the machine. Ultimately, the Automaton Chess-Player afforded ‘strong evidence of the fallibility of human judgement and human testimony’.90 Nevertheless, the majority of solutions were broadly accurate in general if not in particulars. More emotive arguments expressed disgust at the methods used in the creation of IBM and their efforts to ‘teach’ their machine. Anecdotes about ­engineers ‘feeding’ human chess games into the machine appeared disconcerting, highlighting Deep Blue’s apparent consumption of chess’s past and its ­similarity to a developing child. These arguments considered the machine ­anthropomorphically and monstrously. IBM’s press releases played on the idea of machine emotion. The tagline for one advert parodied this, with Deep Blue stating, ‘I am a powerful computer, Mr. Kasparov. I do not have emotions. Ah, what the heck, I love you, man.’91 Yet in the same advertisement, Kasparov’s ‘creativity, intuition and experience’ were contrasted with Deep Blue’s ‘crunching’ mathematical power, ‘breaking each problem into many pieces’, analysing 100 million chess moves per second. Again, the language of consumption and digestion is apparent. Popular accounts frequently utilised a similar dichotomy between Kasparov’s intellectual powers and the machine’s chess-playing bruteforce method, differentiating its approach as non-human. For example, by characterising the human vs. machine contest as ‘John Henry vs. the steam drill’, or



Future shocks 99

‘Dr Frankenstein vs. the monster’, or ‘Linda Hamilton vs. the Terminator’, or analysis vs. intuition, or ‘truth’ vs. ‘beauty’ as Time did, despite neither being mutually exclusive, the human approach to chess was given precedence and all other approaches defined as abnormal.92

Ambiguity The efficacy of strategic literary responses to the chess machines is questionable.93 In an age of smartphones and universal internet access, with voice-­ controlled computers and artificial intelligence controlling an increasing number of software tasks, the historical moment appears to have passed. For now, these acts of resistance will be left open, as halted connections between Man and Machine, to be returned to in a number of enlightening contexts in Chapters 5 and 6. These two chapters develop the underlying notion of resistance as an attempt to prioritise the human in human–machine encounters by representing the machine as a Gothic monster and as a statue. Both concepts reveal an underlying violence to this prioritisation. What can be said here is that both Deep Blue and the Automaton Chess-Player functioned as highly ambiguous cultural messages congealed in one object. As James W. Cook states, the transformations in the Automaton’s message were often dramatic, despite the workings of the mechanism remaining almost unchanged from 1769 to 1854.94 Its secret, even after decades of guessing and hypothesising, remained s­ ubjective and provisional – ‘the automaton’s ambiguous status, on the … b­ oundary between ingenious machine and clever imposture, remained thoroughly uncertain’.95 Kempelen’s primary concern may have been ‘to maintain clear epistemological distinctions between playful illusionism and the more truthful, morally productive work of Enlightenment’, but even before the machine’s journey to the USA under the control of Maelzel, the possibility of containing any meanings was shown to be untenable.96 Likewise, Deep Blue’s cultural representations, over its much shorter career, were characterised by a wide range of interpretations, providing authors and readers with a problem through which to discuss issues including the nature of intelligence, commerce vs. science, the nature of chess, and the importance of defeat. At the heart of these debates lay a more fundamental question, principally the gap between human and computer chess-players. Deep Blue served as the window through which commentators engaged with the issue of late-twentieth-­century technological development, remaining intertwined with its eighteenth-­century ­ancestor. The shadow of fakery inherent in any magical object cast itself over each technology. The lingering suggestion of human burial and violence

100 Machines

i­nherent in any statue was a pervasive one. Each machine resisted its definition as passive subject. God has created nighttime, which he arms With dreams, and mirrors, to make clear To man he is a reflection and a mere Vanity. Therefore these alarms.

Notes  1 J. L. Borges, ‘Mirrors’, in Dreamtigers, trans. M. Boyer and H. Morland (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 60.  2 S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 165. Artificial intelligence is a modern term which developed its meanings from the ambiguity of the words ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence’. While it would be anachronistic to apply it straightforwardly to the eighteenth century, discussions at this time did raise issues that continued to be grappled with in the same linguistic frameworks as the later term. See also C. Beardon, ‘What Does it Mean to be “Virtual”?’, in J. Berleur and D. Whitehouse (eds), An Ethical Global Information Society: Culture and Democracy Revisited (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), pp. 145–6, for a discussion of the evolution of the term artificial intelligence.  3 W. B. Hyman, ‘Introduction’, in W. B. Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 5.  4 Ibid., pp. 5–6.  5 M. Serres, Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, trans. R. Burks (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 1–4.  6 Ibid., p. 5.  7 S. During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 1.  8 R. A. Gilbert, ‘David Brewster’, in G. Budge et al. (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers, I (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), p. 144.  9 D. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (London: John Murray, 1832), p. 274. 10 S. Connor, ‘Feeling Things’, a paper delivered at Objects of Emotion, Wellcome Collection, 16 June 2012, London, p. 1. 11 C. Spooner, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 12. 12 R. M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (London: Vintage, 1989), p. 25. 13 See also J. Steinmeyer, ‘Conjuring Life and Death: The Essence of Illusion’, in N. Daniel (ed.), Magic 1400s–1950s (Cologne: Taschen, 2009), p. 54. 14 Ibid.



Future shocks 101

15 S. Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, in W. Clark, J. Golinski, and S. Schaffer (eds), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 126. 16 J. Riskin, ‘Eighteenth-Century Wetware’, Representations, 83 (2003), p. 117. 17 G. Walker, ‘Anatomy of a Chess Automaton’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 19 (1839), p. 718. 18 Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, p. 128. 19 Ibid. 20 S. W. Mitchell, ‘The Last of a Veteran Chess Player’, in D. W. Fiske (ed.), Chess Monthly: An American Chess Serial, 1 (1857), pp. 3–7, 40–5. 21 Public Ledger [Philadelphia], 4 December 1840, p. 2, quoted in J. W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 274. 22 E. A. Poe, ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’, Southern Literary Messenger, 2 (April 1836), quoted in Cook, Arts of Deception, p. 274. 23 S. T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 153. 24 F. Hsu, Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 143. 25 D. Shenk, ‘Toolmaker, Brain Builder’, American Scholar (Spring 2003), pp. 150–1. Presumably he meant Frankenstein’s monster. 26 R. Byrne, ‘After Another Stodgy Start, A Small Gamble Doesn’t Help’, New York Times, 7 May 1997; J. Coates, ‘Cold Comfort: It’s Only Math’, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 12 May 1997, p. 2; B. Weber, ‘The Contest Is Toe-to-Toe And Pawn-to-Pawn’, New York Times, 10 May 1997; D. R. Sands, ‘Singing Deep Blue Blues’, Washington Times, 17 February 1996; A. Trafford, ‘Dr. Blue Will See You Now’, Lawrence Journal-World, 27 May 1997, p. 9C. 27 Garry Kasparov, quoted in J. Burlingame, ‘“The Antagonists” Takes Bow Tonight’, Reading Eagle, 26 March 1991, p. 15. 28 D. P. Julyk, ‘“The Trouble with Machines is People”. The Computer as Icon in PostWar America: 1946–1970’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2008, p. 89. 29 M. Lockwood, ‘Man vs Machine’, Independent, 13 May 1997, p. 14; ‘Are Humans Now Obsolete?’, Atlanta Journal, 13 May 1997, p. A10; ‘Outwitted By Machine: Who’s The Master Now?’, San Francisco Chronicle, 13 May 1997, p. A20; B. Weber, ‘Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov’, New York Times, 12 May 1997, pp. A1, A14; ‘Cyberchess Victory – Even Kasparov Has Met His Match’, Lodi News-Sentinel, 14 May 1997, p. 4; ‘Deep Blue Takes A Byte Out Of Kasparov’, Telegram & Gazette [Worcester], 15 May 1997. 30 P. W. Taylor, ‘Are Humans Superior to Animals and Plants?’, Environmental Ethics, 6.2 (1984), p. 150. 31 Hyman, ‘Introduction’, p. 5 n. 11. 32 P. McCorduck, Machines Who Think (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979), p. 171. 33 J. Walker, Modus Operandi; or, The Automaton Chess-Player. A Play In Three Acts (London: T. H. Lacy, 1866), p. 9.

102 Machines

34 Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, p. 272. My italics. 35 R. Jay, ‘The Automaton Chess-Player, the Invisible Girl and the Telephone’, in R. Jay, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), p. 148. 36 K. G. de Windisch, ‘Letter II’, 16 September 1783, in K. G. Windisch, Inanimate Reason; Or a Circumstantial Account of that Astonishing Piece of Mechanism, M. de Kempelen’s Chess-Player (London: S. Bladon, 1784), pp. 20–1. A translation made into French, indicating the rapid movement of the information, was published in 1783: Lettres sur le joueur d’echecs de M. de Kempelen (Basle: C. De Michel, 1783). The original was published in German as Briefe über den schachspieler des herrn von Kempelen (Pressburg: A. Löwe, 1783). 37 P. Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 1. 38 Ibid., p. 178. 39 A. W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music: An Illustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Musical Box to the Pianola, from Automaton Lady Virginal Players to Orchestrion (New York: Crown Publishers, 1973), p. 56. 40 Jay, ‘Automaton Chess-Player’, p. 148. See also Walker, ‘Anatomy of a Chess Automaton’, p. 719; and M. Christopher, Illustrated History of Magic (London: Robert Hale, 1975), pp. 33–4. 41 See B. Leithauser, ‘Kasparov Beats Deep Thought’, New York Times, 14 January 1990, for discussion on round one of Kasparov vs. Deep Blue or Deep Thought. See M. Carpenter, ‘Computer Chalks Up Its Greatest Chess Win’, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 5 June 1990, p. 4; and J. Markoff, ‘No Headline’, New York Times, 5 November 1991, for discussion on how computers playing chess was markedly different to two humans playing. 42 Julyk, ‘The Trouble with Machines’, p. 88. 43 N. Ensmenger, ‘Is Chess the Drosophila of Artificial Intelligence? A Social History of an Algorithm’, Social Studies of Science, 42.1 (2012), pp. 5–30. 44 ‘World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov to Match Wits against IBM’s Deep Blue at the Association for Computing ACM Chess Challenge’, IBM press release, 9 February 1996, www.chess.ibm.com (accessed July 2014). 45 Ibid. 46 L. Dayton, ‘Stalemate in Battle between Man and Machine?’, New Scientist, 31.1785 (7 September 1991), p. 18. 47 ‘Ancient Game, Modern Masters’, IBM press release, 1 May 1997, www.chess.ibm. com (accessed July 2014). 48 ‘Deep Blue Sweeps Through’, IBM Research (1997), p. 3. See also ‘Watson’, IBM’s computer system which competed against and won a televised game of Jeopardy! against the two highest-ranked human players, discussed in D. A. Ferrucci, ‘Introduction to “This is Watson”’, IBM Journal of Research and Development, 56.3/4 (2012), pp. 1–15. See also ‘Deep Blue Castles’, IBM advertisement (1997), www.chess.ibm.com (accessed July 2014). 49 ‘World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov …’, IBM press release, 9 February 1996.



Future shocks 103

50 Windisch, ‘Letter I’, 7 September 1783, in Windisch, Inanimate Reason, p. 15. 51 Windisch, ‘Letter III’, 14 September 1783, in ibid., p. 26. 52 Ibid., p. 28. Another writer on the topic, the Revd Dutens (1770), stated that he suspected that the inventor controlled the device wirelessly; L. Dutens, ‘A Description of an Automaton, which plays at Chess. A Letter from the Rev. Mr. Dutens from Presburg (in Hungary), July 24, 1770’, Scots Magazine, 33 (January 1771), p. 19. 53 Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, p. 156. 54 See J. W. Cook, ‘From the Age of Reason to the Age of Barnum: The Great Automaton Chess-Player and the Emergence of Victorian Cultural Illusionism’, Winterthur Portfolio, 30.4 (1995), pp. 231–57; and Cook, Arts of Deception. 55 Jay, ‘Automaton Chess-Player’, pp. 151, 153. 56 Ibid., pp. 149, 153. 57 Windisch, ‘Letter II’, 16 September 1783, in Windisch, Inanimate Reason, pp. 12–13. 58 Julyk, ‘The Trouble with Machines’, p. 141. 59 E. A. Poe, ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’ (1836), in E. A. Poe, Complete Tales and Poems (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2002), p. 382. 60 A. Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, ‘Note G’, in L. F. Menabrea, ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage’, trans. A. Augusta, Scientific Memoirs, 3 (1843), pp. 666–731, in J. M. Norman, From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology, Volume 2 (Novato, CA: Nortman Publishing, 2005), p. 268. 61 J. Dibbell, ‘The Race To Build Intelligent Machines’, Time, 25 March 1996. 62 B. Gates, ‘A Computer Will Conquer Chess World. But It Won’t Think’, Deseret News, 17 March 1996, p. M1. See opinions from the readers in ‘Letters’, Time, 22 April 1996. 63 B. Weber, ‘In Upset, Computer Beats Chess Champion’, New York Times, 11 February 1996. 64 See also B. Weber, ‘In Kasparov vs. Computer, The Chess Scoreboard Is 1–1’, New York Times, 12 February 1996. 65 C. Krauthammer, ‘Kasparov: Deep Blue Funk’, Time, 26 February 1996. 66 ‘An Oxford Graduate’, Observations on the Automaton Chess Player (London: J. Hatchard, 1819), pp. 7–8. 67 P. Thicknesse, The Speaking Figure and the Automaton Chess-Player, Exposed and Detected (London: John Stockdale, 1784), p. 17. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 19. 70 Ibid., p. 11. 71 R. Willis, An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Figure of Mr. De Kempelen (London: J. Booth, 1821), p. 13. 72 McCorduck, Machines, p. 171. 73 Jacques de Vaucanson, quoted in M. Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), p. 32.

104 Machines

74 R. Stivers, Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational (New York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 1–2. 75 M. Christopher, Panorama of Magic (New York: Dover, 1962), p. 57. 76 F. Braudel, A History of Civilisations, trans. R. Mayne (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 19. 77 T. Standage, The Mechanical Turk (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 246. 78 Walker, ‘Anatomy of a Chess Automaton’, p. 720. 79 G. Kasparov, ‘The Day That I Sensed A New Kind Of Intelligence’, Time, 25 March 1996. 80 E. J. Lerner, ‘The Making of a Chess Machine’, IBM Research (1996), p. 28. 81 R. Lipsyte, ‘Backtalk: Kasparov, Major-League Knight’, New York Times, 21 April 1996. 82 Cook, Arts of Deception, p. 39. 83 Walker, Modus Operandi, p. 26. 84 Carl Friedrich Hindenburg, in J. Racknitz, Über den Schachspieler des Herrn von Kempelen (Leipzig: Joh. Gotll, 1783). 85 ‘An Oxford Graduate’, Observations, 17. 86 Ibid., p. 722. See also Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, pp. 249, 251–2, for some nice silhouette explanations. 87 Christopher, Illustrated History of Magic, p. 35. 88 Joseph Freyhere, quoted in Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, p. 247. 89 Quoted in ibid., p. 273. This refers to the work of H. Decremps in La Magie blanche dévoilée (Paris: H. Decremps, 1784). See ‘Chapter XXV. Section I. Orgue jouant de lui-méme, Serpens artificiels, Oiseaux méchaniques, Automates joueurs d’échecs’, once again demonstrating the continuum of computer, animal, and human on which the Automaton Chess-Player sat. See also H. Decremps, Supplément à la magie blanche dévoilée (Paris: H. Decremps, 1785) for further items grouped with the Automaton Chess-Player, including devices promising ‘Mouvement Perpetuel’. 90 Walker, ‘Anatomy of a Chess Automaton’, pp. 729–30. 91 IBM advertisement (1996), www.chess.ibm.com (accessed July 2014). 92 M. Krantz, ‘Deeper In Thought’, Time, 10 March 1997. 93 For more evidence of the man vs. machine rhetoric, which was well established by Kasparov in his 1989 match with Deep Thought, see B. Leithauser, ‘Kasparov Beats Deep Thought’, New York Times, 14 January 1990, and ‘The Chip versus the Chess Master’, Nova, Season 18, Episode 20, PBS, 26 March 1991. See also the film Computer Chess, dir. A. Bujalski (2013). Bujalski discusses computer programmers in a similar way to some portrayals of chess-players, ‘almost as a sect of monks … [T]he rest of the world must have seemed like so much noise and distraction to them. … something seems almost frightening about that kind of antisocial focus. I, of course, can’t help but admire it.’ 94 Cook, Arts of Deception, p. 34. 95 Ibid., p. 32. 96 Ibid., p. 260.

5 A haunted mind: Kasparov and the machines One old lady, in particular, who had not forgot the tales she had been told in her youth, crossed herself, and sighing out a pious ejaculation, went and hid herself in a window seat, as distant as she could from the evil spirit, which she firmly believed possessed the machine. It is now midnight, a time when churchyards yawn, and graves yield up their dead, at which hour you know those spirits are most intractable, I will therefore leave joking, and wish you a good night. K. G. de Windisch, 7 September 1783, on the Automaton Chess-Player1 And, whoa! Commentary for Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, 19972

Closer The cultural power of chess-playing machines was confirmed or denied by a variety of methods under the banner of resistance. Such readings denied any potential for the machine to escape the boundaries of secular magic. That is, they failed to acknowledge the way chess-playing machines function as examples of supernatural magic within culture, taking on aspects of science-fictional discourse and possessing an uncanny impact due to the mimetic qualities each device possesses. To acknowledge the chess-playing machine as a supernatural object or as an object that resists passivity is to recognise its status in culture as a part-historical and a part-imagined object, to wilfully get up close and personal with the machine, and to recognise it as an active player. By acknowledging these aspects of such representations, one acknowledges a substantial part of the monster’s power. In other readings of automata, Kempelen’s Automaton Chess-Player is omitted from historical analysis on the grounds that it was a deliberate hoax or a ‘fraud’, rather than a considered effort at replicating and representing human action by mechanical means. This places the chess-playing

106 Machines

automata outside traditional frames of reference and, in many ways, such exclusion is appropriate. Yet recently, Simon Schaffer, Wendy Beth Hyman, and Minsoo Kang have ambitiously grouped the Automaton Chess-Player under the larger field of ‘automata’. As the last chapter highlighted, the definition of automata encompasses a machine such as the Automaton Chess-Player with its hidden occupant as well as machines such as Deep Blue. By including the Automaton Chess-Player within the same analytical framework, these works have shown that the tensions apparent within the word automata can encompass historical subjects which play on the boundaries of human and machine, science and supernatural, and real and artificial. Reintroducing this often excluded object necessitates a coming-to-terms with a figure which threatens rational systems of knowledge, demanding a face-to-face meeting. It necessitates a comingto-terms with the idea that the above acts of resistance tried to ignore – engaging with the chess-playing machine as an object, to paraphrase Michel Serres and Steven Connor, in the world. The ambiguous ontological and epistemological status of the eighteenthcentury Automaton Chess-Player facilitated the construction of an enchanted discourse surrounding not just chess-playing machines but also the figure of the chess-player more widely. This discourse has been periodically revived as scientific development of automata, including the modern computer, continued. Most notably in the chess world, the enchanted properties of automata (and indeed all efforts at the mimesis of human form and action) have been seen in the context of IBM’s Deep Blue program which successfully produced a machine capable of beating a world chess champion under regular tournament conditions in New York City in 1997. This was a qualitatively different result in the eyes of some than Deep Blue’s one-off victory in February 1996. The physical location of Deep Blue’s 1997 victory over Garry Kasparov can be seen as a site of twentieth-century uncanny – a scientific experiment gone wrong. This chapter centres discussion of these topics around Vikram Jayanti’s documentary Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (2003) which revisits the contest and demonstrates how the ghost of Kempelen’s machine could infect and destabilise narratives of scientific progress, rational thought, and modernity (traditional themes of Gothic literature on automata). Further, by focusing on the head-tohead and close proximity of Deep Blue and Kasparov, one can see how human chess-players could succumb to the paralysing effects of the machine in specific ‘haunted’ locational contexts. Both the Gothic mode and the Enlightenment ideal of curiosity hinge on notions of relentless questioning. While traditional, ‘genuine’ automata sought to better illuminate the project of vitalism, showcasing engineering skill at royal courts across Europe, considering the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue



A haunted mind 107

as Gothic objects, with their vampiric and Frankensteinian aspects, suggests a parallel set of imagery.3 In emphasising ‘curiosities that beckoned enticingly, holding out the allure of a more nuanced understanding of the structures of modern, post-Enlightenment rationality’, one can identify, as suggested above, the hint that modernity and progress are mere sleights of hand or concealment.4 As de Certeau noted, ‘beneath the cultural displacements there survive original wounds and disorganizing impulsions still discernible in the thoughts that have forgotten them’.5 Such Gothic objects refashion a homely world, estranging its inhabitants and overturning domestic bliss. These supernatural objects – ­existing in parallel with the idea of the object embodying secular magic discussed above – belong, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, ‘to a realm or system that transcends nature, as that of divine, magical, or ghostly beings; attributed to or thought to reveal some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature; occult, paranormal’.6 The gap between secular magic and supernatural magic is often unclear. Enlightenment curiosity could easily descend into something less desirable, as evidenced by the human chess-player, a figure characterised as Gothic in its obsessive tendencies, alleged susceptibility to mental illness, detachment from Western conventions of materialism and domesticity, and automaton-like qualities. What is most intriguing about Jayanti’s film is its use of the apparatus of the Gothic to recontextualise Deep Blue’s appearance not as a symbol of progress or the future, but as a throwback to more familiar forms of anxiety. In particular, the liminal states created by corridors, surveillance cameras, locked rooms, black boxes, and windows, in their capacity to entangle states of access/no access and seeing/being seen, are used in Game Over to decentre Kasparov’s place within the match, a clear visual expression of the psychological states he reveals in interviews. In places, this tension between technological interconnectedness rises to paranoia. Kasparov demands access to his opponent and, when denied, can only fall back on the sense that something is being hidden. The access that the machine and the IBM team had to Kasparov’s chess-playing history and visually through surveillance, and to his mind and body, is not reciprocated. In narrative form, Game Over possesses a certain similarity to Little Red Riding Hood – a familiar place becomes a dangerous one when all around lurks the Big Bad Wolf. As the natural world assumes its estranged aspect to the wanderer in the wood, so the skyscrapers of modern New York turn on the urbane, sophisticated interloper. Game Over is also, like Walker’s trip to the Café de la Régence, a ghost story. Ghosts are liminal beings, out-of-time and out-of-place, but nevertheless present and presence. Although we see clips of the Automaton Chess-Player, from film and reconstruction, it is the spectral presence of the machine, its impact,

108 Machines

which is most keenly felt through the idea that a machine could beat a superhuman like Kasparov.

Exterior to interior: haunted houses Jayanti’s documentary centres on the idea of a hero chess-player defeating the invading presence of mechanised thought. The film’s conception of idealised machines is suggested in the documentary’s opening scenes of slow-paced Americana, showing the predictable freight train passing by, and further emphasising Deep Blue’s outsider status, deserving of conquest by the hero. As Newsweek stated on its front page, the match was ‘The Brain’s Last Stand’ and Kasparov was, as the hero, its representative. The enemy was the machine and ‘the future of humanity [wa]s on the line’.7 Kasparov’s defeat in 1997 sparked headlines proclaiming the death of the human mind. His flight from the chessboard when faced with the supernatural presence of the automaton, which generated the ‘and whoa’ reaction of one commentator, provided the defining image of the match. Jayanti makes substantial issue of the locational contexts of the encounter, emphasising how homely places (almost exclusively populated by white, middle-aged, middle-class males) were unsettled by the proximity, or even the idea, of the chess-playing machine. Kasparov’s high-tech encounter with Deep Blue was seemingly far removed from traditional locational contexts of the Gothic, common features of which include broken architectures, castles, and monasteries. On the surface, neither of the two locations that Kasparov occupied for the match – Room 423 in the Plaza Hotel near Central Park, New York, which advertised itself, appropriately under the circumstances, as ‘Timeless. Captivating. Unforgettable. A seamless fusion of traditional and modern’8 and the thirty-ninth storey of the nearby Equitable Centre, home to a number of financial institutions, where each game was played – seem suitable spaces for a Gothic tale. Neither are particularly old. Neither possesses a troubled history. Neither is built on the site of an old Indian burial ground.9 Neither is, in the literal sense, a home, yet both spaces were nominally, as Gaston Bachelard suggests, spaces of rationality; they are homes for Western civilisation, monuments, and expressions of its power over the natural world. Nevertheless, the skyscraper, with its ephemeral, shimmering surfaces and guarded reception, is an inherently dishonest building. Offering an illusion of safety and security, it itself appears on the edge of solidity. Similarly, the hotel’s fusion of the old and new was only skin deep – its antique furnishings only a veneer over cutting-edge technology. Both skyscrapers took on a more than passive role, with IBM playing the role of behind-the-scenes manipulator and, while the presence of Deep Blue



A haunted mind 109

was the central supernatural presence of each site, Kasparov and his associates also highlight the strange goings-on independent of the computer. The two spaces of Kasparov’s residence during his match were modern-day castles. The neo-Gothic haunted house, in the form of a spaceship, a skyscraper, or a modern medical hospital, a place with antiseptic illumination, drenched in light, sponsored and branded, clothed in modern materials, clean surfaces, connected electronically and with expensive security and surveillance technology, is where the living and the dead come together; where supernatural meets with science fiction. Both spaces were nominally safe spaces, yet Kasparov was quickly unsettled by the atmosphere of the contest. Revealing this in his interviews in Game Over, Kasparov stated, ‘When you are under such pressure, you know, you could look around and … you find that the most innocent object is posing a deadly danger for you’.10 It is clear that the New York locations attained a Gothic atmosphere in his mind, in which ‘objects acquire[d] a mind of their own that they do not have in the workday world … and subjects bec[ame] susceptible to dreams, hallucinations, and occult forms of knowledge beyond the reach of normal consciousness’.11 Everyday relationships were disordered and reconstructed in a paranoia-filled story and random connections and events reorganised into the expression of a single will – that of the machine. The process is not a novel one. Anthony Vidler, in The Architectural Uncanny, remarks how the uncanny has … found its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the intrusion of terror, and then in the city, where what was once walled and intimate … has been rendered strange by the spatial incursions of modernity … [I]t is … a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal … no one building, no special effects of design can be guaranteed to provoke an uncanny feeling.12

The phrase ‘the incursions of modernity’ summarises the effect of the machine on space. The Automaton Chess-Player functioned as the ghost within Kasparov’s encounter – it is a thing which summarises modernity more thoroughly than the skyscrapers themselves – the ghost as metaphor for ‘confrontation with unacknowledged and unresolved histories … a need to acknowledge what has consistently been repressed in the construction of everyday bourgeois culture and its environments’.13 What the Turk represented was the possibility of a successful machine, even when a hoax was acknowledged. Within Kasparov’s space, his comfortable world of human chess-players was destabilised by the idea of the computer chess-player and the pressure to take up the challenge. Space became infected. All conversation turned to Kasparov and how he would defeat the machine and restore order.

110 Machines

Interior: locked doors/open windows The incursions which Vidler highlights are shown by Jayanti in the form of surveillance cameras, windows stretching from floor to ceiling, harshly lit corridors, and access-controlled doors. This is the technology of the modern Gothic haunted house. Each is a liminal architectural device, facilitating Kasparov’s transition from confident hero to haunted wreck fleeing the scene. Through surveillance cameras, panoramic glass, blank corridors, and security doors, ‘the panoptic technology of power has been electronically extended’ and inhabitants of space are disciplined.14 Everywhere in Game Over Kasparov seems to be being watched, made to conform; watching and conformity made possible by the organisation of architectural space present within the modern city and within the modern skyscraper. Hence the interaction of space and power is a constant theme of Jayanti’s film which contributes to uncanny feelings, even before Kasparov’s match takes place. The doormen, familiar signs of life, are themselves reduced to technological puppets, serving the building, as much as the IBM lackey who moves the computer’s pieces on the machine’s behalf.15 Their access is only as good as their access cards. Kasparov’s anxieties around the building centred on the fragility of the illusion of domesticity and security. In a scene that offers a small parable on the perceived power relationships of the match, Kasparov returns to New York and meets Pete Murphy, the manager of the Equitable Life Building where his games were played, outside the looming skyscraper. Reminiscing, the manager remarks that ‘the world was able to watch CNN and all the broadcasts, because we were able to send that signal out … and there would be quick shots of you and the match’.16 This highlights the issue of the match’s status as a media success story and the modern nature of the commercial operation, yet Kasparov immediately turns the issue towards control of the building, stating that such control ‘could be used by IBM for other purposes. Connectivity of the building and all the technical equipment … was guarded by IBM … concerned about anybody penetrating their room’.17 Murphy half shrugs and half smiles. Owen Williams, Kasparov’s agent, similarly notes, on the theme of access, that IBM ‘broke the rules … they would keep us out of rooms. One day I was … locked out of his dressing room because I didn’t have the right pass.’18 The building, fifty-four floors, 752 feet tall, a typical New York monument to capitalism, is a part of this issue. IBM was, continues Williams, the ‘promoter, the financier, the organiser, the other player, the controller of the media, the keeper of the keys, the hirer of the hall, the security’.19 Yet epistemological uncertainty exists in these declarations of Kasparov and



A haunted mind 111

his team. Returning to the hotel room where his team was based for the duration of the match, for example, provokes an intense reaction from Kasparov, emphasised by the shaky camera work. Years after the match, Kasparov admits the lack of evidence concerning his claims that IBM mistreated him. ‘If we press the subject,’ he states, people will say, yeah, they got paranoid, people behind the stage helping Deep Blue, a camera or a telescope recording all the moves, rooms bugged … Some of them might be true, some not … I don’t have any proof … It just demonstrated the way people felt during the match.20

As both E. T. Hall and Bachelard noted, experience is rooted in the experience of space and the effects of space on its inhabitants, a synthesis of sensory inputs.21 Particularly pertinent is Hall’s idea that the study of any cultural phenomenon ‘in the proxemics sense is therefore the study of people’s use of their sensory apparatus in different emotional states during different activities, in different relationships, and in different settings and contexts’.22 Haunting emerged from the specific architectural traits of each building and Kasparov’s own past emotional state, which he now no longer inhabits. Indeed, Kasparov can barely remember, such was the unease and tension, hinting at the psychological violence of what happened. When trying to reconstruct the scene he states that ‘it’s very hard to reinstate these memories … probably, there’s a sort of mental block. You don’t want to remember, you don’t remember and it was quite a painful time. So that’s why I can hardly reconstruct the scene. The scene of the crime [laughs].’23 The stream-of-consciousness torrent of words turns the revisiting into a kind of catharsis; the scene becomes the scene of the crime, and Kasparov’s words form and slip. Continuing the theme of being observed, in his interviews Kasparov claimed that he saw a telescope in a building opposite, spying on his practice in his hotel room during the match.24 Psychological warfare aimed at destabilising the opponent has a long history in chess. As Frederic Friedel advised: when you notice that your opponent is deeply disturbed by something … [you] help him to invigorate this fear … [I]f he doesn’t like a member of the audience, he’s worried about that person, get that person up front, make that person stare at him. So you encourage him in his paranoid feelings … we had a feeling that somebody was doing this to Garry.25

Friedel continues that chess-players are often a superstitious group, who ‘tend to believe … that the opponent is using some forces against them. Today it’s very simple. It’s a computer. But in previous years, it was magnetic forces, it

112 Machines

was telepathic forces, or rays …’26 Both aspects of the issues of surveillance which concerned Kasparov – being conscious of observation and not fully knowing when one is being observed – suggest the panopticon-like nature of his ‘confinement’. This ‘sense of being observed … of being known and numbered’, as William Gibson put it, transformed the ‘human subject’ into, not the observer, but ‘the object of observation’ leading to ‘the abstraction of human identity’.27 Transformed into the man of the man vs. machine contest, Kasparov was also disconnected from his fellow human – the way the building-machine observed him was less spectacle than surveillance – ‘neither in the amphitheatre nor on the stage but in the Panopticon machine’.28 Certainly sight, or investigation through sensory investigation, is an integral part of comprehension, and when thinking about automata, the language of magic or stage conjuring quickly appears. Sight implies access, honesty, and truth. ‘Seeing is believing’ goes the phrase. Disturbing this access, in Kasparov’s encounter, were the mask of the machine and the locked room in the building in which the machine resided, suggesting an obsession with ‘bodily boundaries, transitional states, and epistemological uncertainty’.29 Kasparov’s actions after defeat were not the result of seeing the machine, rather they were a consequence in part of not seeing it. The machine’s physical description – a black, monolithic cabinet – evaded description, and the jargon-filled specifications – its thirty processors housed in two towers, with 480 computer chips optimised for solving chess problems, capable of calculating 200 million positions per second, up to ‘thirty moves ahead’30 – resisted comprehension. Isolation and observation of a different, but no less affecting, kind came from spectators. In Game Over, the observer and the ‘spectator’ are invisible. Instead, the match was ‘one of the first successful events where the Internet was the primary medium for coverage’.31 No spectators were allowed in the room, again emphasising Kasparov’s status as surveilled object in a laboratory of sorts, rather than a celebrity of spectacle. TV cameras were the only observers. A 500-seat (empty) auditorium was utilised, with giant TV screens and commentary, but the primary means of viewing the match was via a website, www.chess.ibm.com, which ‘registered more than 74 million “hits” from 106 countries over nine days … [equal] to more than 4 million visits by individual computer users’ according to an IBM spokesman. The last game registered 8.9 million hits and approximately 420,000 user visits.32 For the majority of observers, at a distance and invisible, this functioned as the window on the match. Each player remained a ghostly presence. For Kasparov, a distant gap in the moment of competition existed between players and spectators. Even when this bridge was virtually crossed, it only served to emphasise his isolation. Tim McGrew, a philosophy professor at Western Michigan University, noticed a Kasparov



A haunted mind 113

error in game two, in which Kasparov resigned when he should have earned a draw. Communicating his findings online to Kasparov’s team, the information ‘had a profound effect on the champion’s psychology and was one of the things he mentioned in his bitter remarks at the close of the contest’.33 Again, these are familiar themes of separation within the Gothic genre – particularly in connection with ‘male Gothic’ which ‘stresses the psychic costs provoked by the demands on men to achieve individuation and autonomy, namely extremes of alienation and isolation’.34

Fleeing the scene: mimetic technologies and intellectual proximity The two images that began this chapter described two people fleeing from the proximity of chess-playing machines. Both the Turk and Deep Blue were turn-of-the-century objects in their ability to summarise the advent of epochchanging technologies. Both were constructed at a time when science fiction was seemingly being brought to life, appearing, as suggested above, as objects ‘way ahead of their time – time that otherwise flowed along at a sluggish pace’.35 Both marked the logical conclusions of their respective projects – to simulate life or replicate it, whether masked within ideas of vitalism or artificial intelligence. Yet each conjured up a phantom – their powers were like ‘the lights and ­shadows thrown onto the magic lantern screen’.36 Their replication not of physical identity but of human activities ensured their status as products of modernity, as Enlightenment projects (outwardly) demonstrating the scientific progress of the age. Yet through their ability to generate uncanny ­feelings, these two devices, rather than distancing themselves from a barbaric past, become atavistic totems of it. Friedrich Kittler noted that ‘there is no ­difference between occult and technological media’37 and Fred Botting adds that the mimicry of devices which effect a spectralising habit such as automata manifest a tendency which threatens ‘individual uniqueness’.38 The Turk and Deep Blue were daguerreotypes of the mind combining two aspects of ‘the innate properties of things’: first, ‘the magical powers associated with ancient sculpture’, discussed further below; and, secondly, the magical life-imitating qualities of the machine, which so unsettled Kasparov.39 Both were representative of the scientific and engineering developments of their time, while retaining a sense of uniqueness resulting from their one-off status. In particular, the Turk became the collective symbol of any attempt to replicate chess-playing, disciplined by scientific explanation, only to escape into the imagined realm of the Gothic as a creature of the supernatural, demonic, and monstrous. In Kasparov’s kinetic reaction to the machine

114 Machines

we can see an echo of a variety of responses to the Turk and other mimetic technologies. Alan Trachtenberg describes how ‘The frisson of an encounter possibly with demons or magicians was often also felt in the experience of sitting before the daguerrean apparatus’ and recounts T. S. Arthur’s ‘melancholy tale of a frightened backcountry farmer whose visit to the city … brought him into a daguerrean parlour. Once he saw the machinery and the operator’s mysterious preparations, he “dashed down the stairs as if a legion of evil spirits were after him”’.40 This recoiling from modernity, and recourse to the most primitive human instinct (run!), foregrounds the violent interplay of such mimetic technologies between so-called nature and civilisation.41 A similar instinct motivated the ‘old lady’ discussed by Windisch above. In assessing the epistemological connection between Deep Blue and the Automaton Chess-Player, the spectral and mischievous presences which lie in wait behind superficially rational forms of modernity come to the fore. The automaton demonstrates ‘the paradoxical logic of the technological object which plays endlessly at not being itself in order to assert more effectively its own [extra-human] identity’.42 The uncertainty of such imitation in these ‘haunted media’ suggests an association with both the psychological and aesthetic uncanny.43 Alan Trachtenberg’s question regarding the daguerreotype – ‘How [much do] responses derive from and rehearse old superstitions and fears about the power of images, especially human likenesses, and how much is triggered locally by the surface phenomenon of the mirrored phenomenon’44 – is one which has already been considered in relation to the Turk and Deep Blue, positioning each in a genealogy of imitative technologies. Each can be or has been framed within structures such as David Brewster’s natural magic, outlined in his Letters on Natural Magic (1832) as a ‘system and rationale for imagining modern science and technology’,45 or Simon During’s secular magic, which emphasises more spectacular aspects. Moving beyond this, the machines became, like the daguerreotype, a supernatural technology. The chess-playing machines offered magical effect by natural and mechanical means, but these were conceived of in supernatural terms, sharing in this regard a conceptual frame with the daguerreotype of the ‘almost living image’, escaping rational analysis.46

And whoa! After his resignation in game six on 11 May 1997 and defeat in the match, Kasparov was noted as ‘walking quickly out of the playing room, waving his arms in distress’.47 The Washington Post recorded likewise that a ‘visibly upset Kasparov stormed out of the small match room’.48 In popular culture, this



A haunted mind 115

moment was interpreted in various ways and became a point of debate. When a chess-player flees the room after defeat something is usually amiss, and while Game Over portrays Kasparov’s psychological breakdown as a reaction to Deep Blue’s seemingly supernatural powers and the toxic atmosphere of the room, the action provoked a variety of interpretations in the popular press, from the ‘and whoa’ of the game commentator to those who saw it as a ‘blow against humanity’.49 Kasparov stated that he was ‘ashamed’ of his hasty exit50 and that he had ‘cracked under the pressure’ of playing.51 Others thought his response impetuous, which reflected positively on his humanity after his first ever defeat in a tournament match. One newspaper described Kasparov’s ‘refreshing emotional outburst’, noting that ‘the first farmer to lose a milking contest to a machine … had a lot in common with Kasparov. No doubt he tipped over some buckets in disgust on his way out of the barn.’ Kasparov’s reaction and outburst at the postmatch press conference, the newspaper continued, was ‘reason for celebration’ in that it ‘proved humans have two things machines never will – emotion and ego’.52 USA Today called the defeat a ‘glorious loss … not least because Kasparov acted like a child’,53 revealing himself as less than invincible, and hence human – more than just an intellectual shadow of the machine, but an emotional being. The idea of Kasparov as an ‘emotional’ being and of ‘emotion’ being a desirable and human attribute was also in evidence in game two. Commentators described Deep Blue’s play as human-like, in particular one move which was later described by Kasparov as a ‘hand of God’ moment.54 The accusation of cheating by Kasparov, implying human interference with Deep Blue’s programming during the match, can be understood as an attempt at rationalising a moment where human subjectivity seemed to be disturbed. It has been suggested that Deep Blue’s human-like move was due to a computer glitch, not emergent artificial intelligence, but this is beside the point and outside the immediate emotional and locational context of the move itself. In the moment, game two was the site of actions seemingly beyond scientific understanding, where the space was ‘disturbed by supernatural events’, despite the presence of characters ‘skeptical of the supernatural’. This scepticism generated the theme of ‘a clash of scientific and supernatural world views’.55 Any machine ‘mimicking natural and human forms and functions, too, assume[s] an uncanny aspect’.56 The psychological impact of game two on Kasparov was profound. Kasparov had once claimed that he would ‘never lose to a machine’, and defeat struck at the mythology he had constructed.57 As he stated, ‘game two was not just a single loss of a game, it was the loss of the match because I couldn’t recover … I felt it was unjust … It was not in the rules.’ As Stephen Levy noted, the match was ‘one of the more symbolic events of the twentieth century’ because beating a chess champion ‘was one of the things that computers were never supposed

116 Machines

to do’.58 Chess was supposed to be a human-only domain. Friedel highlights the importance of Deep Blue’s victory when he states that human beings are weaklings in everything. They can’t run, jump, swim as well as a dozen animals … But there’s one area in which we have been supreme for millions of years. That’s intelligence. Nothing has challenged us. Now for the first time in the history of our race, something comes and says, ‘Hey, I might be smarter than you are’, and it’s a machine.59

Wendy Hyman points out certain ‘limit factors’ which were once thought exclusively human. Chess-play is or was one of these limit factors. Hyman continues: as the limit factors that we once cherished as solely ours – movement, speech, creativity, reason – are made manifest in our mechanical brethren, the definition of ‘human’ begins to look uncannily like the diminishing residuum, or the photographic negative, of that occupied by self-propelled machines … the automaton is never merely a literary trope, but always a figure for that shifting ontological terrain occupied by the ‘human’, oscillating between matter and spirit.60

Accusations of cheating and deception against IBM can be seen as another ­strategy to ‘deal’ with the uncanny nature of Deep Blue. The face-to-face confrontation which impelled Kasparov to flee the scene of his defeat is the crucial moment in Game Over. Hyman’s fascinating image of the human (rather than the automaton) being considered as the photographic negative (or as Fred Botting stated, ‘hollow[ing] out the subject, making its workings visible’)61 of the more real imitation in particular is a point to consider when assessing the threat that both the Turk and Deep Blue posed, particularly in light of Jayanti’s use of Turk imagery in his film to embody this supernatural feeling. The relationship between the Turk and Deep Blue mirrors that of the photograph and the daguerreotype, which ‘haunts the world of the camera’. Both the daguerreotype and automata are ‘relegated to the prehistory’ of their succeeding technologies; both raised questions about representation and the difference between natural and artificial; and both technologies ‘lost much of their energy, buried, we might even say repressed’ as a consequence of commercial pressures and technological innovation, only to find new life haunting their successors. Daguerreotypes ‘lend themselves to a discourse in which atavistic fascination with images as magical replicas, as fetishes and effigies, mingles with sheer pleasures in undisguised technique, in the rigours of craft … a mixed discourse of science, technique, art, and magic’.62 Like a forgotten daguerreotype, the Turk was revived through Deep Blue’s victory. Sadikichi Hartmann’s 1912 story of rediscovering an old daguerreotype suggested that ‘The narrator has stum-



A haunted mind 117

bled upon something old and neglected … refuse of a generation past, shabbyseeming, host-like and ephemeral, yet strangely potent in its ability to “come to life again”’.63 The Turk too came back, long obsolete like the daguerreotype, as a one-off in the age of mechanical reproduction – a combination of science, technique, art, and magic, restored to the present.64

Interior and exterior: masks The commingling of science and the supernatural is a constant theme in Game Over. Deep Blue escapes from the discipline of scientific discourse and is confronted instead by the initial dismissal of a plausible scientific explanation, before raising primal emotions, and culminating in accusations of cheating. Kasparov’s nemesis circled around a peculiarly nebulous midpoint on the ontological continuum: between the living and the dead, between spirit and matter, between a thing capable of agency and will and a thing whose existence is merely ‘automatic’ … [suggesting that ] … the difference between human and automaton might be more of degree than kind, maybe even just a question of perspective.65

The awarding, for example, of United States Chess Federation membership to Deep Blue and its predecessor ChipTest established a form of parity between the human and the machine chess-player.66 A Weekly World News story added another layer to the machine’s characterisation, suggesting that, after victory, it would throw temper tantrums and disobey commands. The article continued, detailing how ‘the machine [wa]s spoiled, ill-tempered and high strung!’67 Deep Blue and the Turk’s keenly felt (non-)presences, and the intersection between Kasparov and the computer at the familiar chessboard, highlight how these three characters intertwined to produce a space where ‘familiarity and extreme anxiety [came] together’ and ‘where the passage of time [was] troubled’. This is suggested in Game Over by the doubling of Kasparov’s match against Deep Blue with the Turk’s encounter with Napoleon. The connection creates a sense of history, of searching for origin, and repetition.68 Even though the opening words of the documentary – which state that ‘from 1770 to 1825 Baron von Kempelen’s chess-playing automaton “The Turk” toured the royal courts of Europe. Napoleon himself played the Turk in 1809. He lost. He took it badly. He wasn’t used to losing. Napoleon never found out how this chessplaying machine could beat him. The mystery continues …’69 – are untrue (Napoleon was no genius chess-player and, as the previous chapter discussed, to

118 Machines

claim that the ‘mystery continues’ is somewhat of a stretch), a historical narrative is constructed that connects the machine favourably with figures of power and casts the Turk as a second ‘supernatural revenant which has passed between the worlds of the living’. It is supernatural because of the characteristics defined earlier, and a revenant because it is ‘returning’ or coming back from the dead to terrorise the living. It is a ghost, brought back to life by the whirrings and murmurings of Deep Blue, and because the Turk represents the ‘lingering presence of some’ thing which has been pushed to the margins, in this case machineintelligence, and is, hence, something disquieting.70 Deep Blue remained an almost unseen figure, a supernatural force which could apparently transcend the perceived natural order with its victory in the second game of the match. The documentary reflects Kasparov’s view of the machine as unknowable, as essentially supernatural, outside his conception of chess as scientific and emotional. As one writer has commented, ‘by placing the machine in a context outside of the human social experience, the documentary bestowed upon the computer an unprecedented power, which may or may not have existed in the “real time” version of the story’;71 but whether a post-game rationalisation or not, Kasparov’s comments reveal that the power of Deep Blue came from its evasion of understanding, illustrated by its non-presence and locked-room location, and emphasised by IBM’s refusal to allow Kasparov access to the computer logs and thus to Deep Blue’s mind and thought processes. Hence, we see the image of Kasparov after game two ‘as frustrated, confused, and helpless to understand the strange, erratic nature of the machine that he is up against. [Deep Blue] is presented as a force unto itself, literally a black-box technology that defies human understanding.’72 IBM’s refusal of a rematch, leaving Kasparov’s defeat as the last word, further closed off any way of understanding Deep Blue’s performances, and meant that ‘Garry could never redeem himself [or mankind] as the best human or computer playing in the world’.73 Deep Blue hence appears as a masked figure. Its absence was itself a cloaking. Kasparov’s attempt to unmask Deep Blue, to reveal its inner workings, was unsuccessful. Deep Blue remained ‘unseen’. Even at the end of Jayanti’s documentary, when an IBM employee attempts to open up the black monolith, he struggles for a second, turns and laughs. The machine is locked. The room containing Deep Blue during the contest was also, understandably, locked. Yet even this was a point of contention in the Kasparov camp. Discussion of the ‘locked room’ is juxtaposed with images of the Turk with not inconsiderable bluntness. To Kasparov, the location of Deep Blue was ‘like a Pentagon secret room’, and Frederic Friedel, Kasparov’s technical advisor, described how ‘the machine was in a very mysterious room. It was locked up.



A haunted mind 119

We weren’t even allowed to walk past that room. There were guards. What was happening in the room? There were lots of grandmasters sitting around.’74 The locked room held the protagonist apart from his opponent, excluding Kasparov from knowledge acquisition and understanding while ensuring that the machine remained a ghostly presence, unseen, and its chess moves disembodied. In the room all manner of events could take place, creating a mental space which Friedel filled with his questionings. Outside the room, Kasparov was trapped in the bounds of the scientific and modern. As Mark S. Madoff suggested, the dialectics of the locked room facilitate the generation of fantastic ideas – ‘Outside contains those actions and attitudes proudly called modern, civilized, enlightened. Inside is the ancient, barbaric, disorderly, passionate, indecorous place where the Gothic protagonist, like the reader, arrives only through apparently accidental transgression.’75 Deep Blue’s impact was, to return to Asa Simon Mittman’s quote, ‘not found solely in embodiment, location, or process, but its impact or its challenging of common knowledge’.76 It possessed human characteristics, but was not wholly human.77 Deep Blue was never seen in the room with Kasparov, remaining in the locked room, faraway, an invisible presence or non-presence controlled by a person following on-screen instructions – itself a disconnection between brain and movement that was the cause of significant suspicion. The cognitive dissonance it generated did not come from form alone or location. The monstermachine represented the unknown which cannot be solved or confronted or comprehended. When Kasparov stated that, ‘I felt like … we were a bunch of amateurs challenging … challenging … the terrible, faceless monster’,78 he was hinting at this unsolvability, the idea of a riddle, the problem of the unknown, the unquantifiable. The answer Kasparov and the film give to the problem of Deep Blue is that of deception, because any other answer would be, in Kasparov’s view, to acknowledge a magical object. Before the match, he had identified the biggest factor as being ‘I have no information about my opponent’.79 One could not look into the eyes of the machine, nor use its previous games as an indicator of its strengths and weaknesses in the same way IBM could view Kasparov’s past history. The question asked on the pre-match advertisements around New York – ‘How do you make a computer blink?’ – remained unanswered. One could not look into the eyes of the machine. Instead, the gaze was turned backwards. The result was a murder with no body. Hence, Deep Blue’s ‘mask’ went beyond appearance. It was not something idiosyncratic, but a monster created ‘from a shared vocabulary [shared with the Turk], [which took] on the contours of the location [place and time] in which the monster’s presence is felt. To the monster belongs a body [or a mind] both particular as well as transhistorical.’80 Emphasised by the documentary, ‘the monster arrives in the present yearning to

120 Machines

impart an old story, a narrative from the deep past … to recount a lesson in the complexity of temporality’.81 Deep Blue’s outward appearance masked its inward scientific achievement. Its monstrosity and identity were read on the surface of its skin – an impenetrable black outer shell, hiding a repressed acknowledgement of human technological progress. Its construction connects a number of themes in Kasparov’s experience related to ways of seeing. The shielded, flawless appearance of the machine suggested ‘nothing to see here’. Everything ran smoothly and without interference. Equally, Deep Blue’s seeming projection of infallibility at the chess table, of being able to predict ‘up to thirty moves’ ahead, of evolving and adapting to new challenges, suggested no capacity to ‘err’. In its monolithic shape, Deep Blue’s outward appearance deflected discussion of its internal workings back to its surface traits by its obvious referential artificiality and exaggerated menace. Part of this unknowability came from technical issues – another form of masking akin to speaking a foreign language – ‘the opaque linguistic mask of [technical] gibberish’82 – repeated emphasis on familiar statistics – ‘Deep Blue can calculate 200 million moves per second’ – and so on. Behind the mask, Deep Blue was not a static entity. Although Kasparov repeatedly asked for versions of the Deep Blue programme, IBM refused, as the contract stated they should. Joel Benjamin stated, ‘we thought, well, you know, if we did, he’s just going to be, he’s just going to be more upset later, because, you know, the computer is going to change’.83 After the first game, which Kasparov won easily, this was viewed as expected, a normal state of affairs. In a later interview, Kasparov said, ‘it played like a machine. “Lousy” is not the right word. It did exactly what everybody expects a machine to do … Look at game one. It’s a machine. At the end of the day, it’s stupid.’84 Despite such supposed advantages, in the second game Kasparov lost, ‘crushed’ according to Friedel, as the machine made human-like moves.85 Kasparov, struggling to rationalise the loss, argued ‘now it’s absolutely clear that game one and game two were played by different computers’.86 Kasparov certainly tried to resist the continuous, fluid boundaries established by the machine and his own chess-play (itself dependent on computers). For him, the machine was a machine, was stupid, was unchanging, and could never be anything but stupid and unchanging. Friedel stated, ‘it’s obvious. A human being plus a computer.’87 Kasparov continued the point: ‘we all knew that it was not kosher. We all knew that something happened in game two … there’s one explanation. There was the human operator behind the machine.’88 Elaborating on the mechanism for deceit, he constructed an intricate scenario to explain his idea, centred on the notion that ‘there was a human player … someone who has access to the screen’ intervening.89



A haunted mind 121

Endings The chess-player is a Gothic figure. Its human and machine forms became conjoined in Kasparov’s encounter with Deep Blue in the haunted houses of latetwentieth-century New York. Haunted houses affect the senses. Haunted houses are composed of liminal spaces and secret rooms. Haunted houses isolate their subject. Haunted houses allow for revenants of the past to make their presence felt anew. Haunted houses tempt the unwitting inside. An uncanny imitator, the spectral Deep Blue reflected back mankind’s intelligence and, even assessed as a scientific endeavour, generated hostile cultural feedback. Historicised with relation to the eighteenth-century Automaton Chess-Player, Deep Blue signified a returning past as well as a science-fictional future. Both chess-player and automaton wore masks, both were other, both were monsters. Kasparov was Man. Deep Blue was Machine. Kasparov was superhero, superhuman. Deep Blue was super-villain, supernatural. A compulsion to find the secret of the machine in Game Over saw Kasparov’s endeavour constructed as a (neo-)Gothic tale within the castles of twentieth-century New York. That Kasparov, who saw the event initially as a friendly scientific experiment, was denied access to the Deep Blue machine played heavily on his mind. His inability to see the machine, to see inside it, and hence to comprehend it paralleled earlier writing on the Turk which also associated seeing with believing. The boundary between internal and external represented a dehumanising but important threshold which could remove mystery and anxiety – a revelation not possible for Kasparov.90 His fleeing the room was an attempt to escape from the strictures of observational discipline and his own performance as hero. That Deep Blue rather than Kasparov, ‘a monster with a thousand eyes who sees everything’91 according to one famous description, is the monster of the film demonstrates the radical threat of Deep Blue, recasting Kasparov as powerless and fragile rather than as ‘genius or monster’.92 The violence of Kasparov’s play is missing. Instead, Game Over emphasises how the past is seen as an invader breaking into the present, fracturing the flow of time, uneasily linking the Turk and Deep Blue, man and machine.93

Notes  1 K. G. de Windisch, ‘Letter I’, 7 September 1783, in K. G. Windisch, Inanimate Reason; Or a Circumstantial Account of that Astonishing Piece of Mechanism, M. de Kempelen’s ChessPlayer (London: S. Bladon, 1784), pp. 15–16. The epistolary form provides a kind of literary déjà vu with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

122 Machines

 2 Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, dir. Vikram Jayanti (2003).  3 See a discussion of the conceptual limits of the ‘Gothic’, employing the rather exhausted Jorge-Luis Borges’s ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’ (1942), Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970), and the Encyclopedia Britannica, in W. Hughes, D.  Punter, and A. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in W. Hughes, D. Punter, and A. Smith (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Chichester: John Wiley, 2013), pp. xxxiii–vi.  4 D. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. xiv.  5 Ibid., p. xvi.  6 Oxford English Dictionary definition of supernatural, www.oed.com/view/Entry/194422 (accessed May 2016).  7 M. Ashley in Game Over, 00:58:59–00:59:00.  8 Quote on the Plaza Hotel, New York website, www.theplazany.com (accessed July 2014).  9 D. Bailey, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), p. 57. 10 G. Kasparov in Game Over, 00:57:16–00:57:27. 11 N. Armstrong, ‘Gothic Novel’, in P. M. Logan (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 371. 12 A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Homely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 11. 13 B. Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 10. 14 H. Koskela, ‘“Cam Era” – the Contemporary Urban Panopticon’, Surveillance & Society 1.3 (2003), p. 293. 15 See also Martin, Curious Visions, p. 104. 16 P. Murphy in Game Over, 00:23:58–00:24:09. 17 Kasparov in ibid., 00:24:10–00:24:28. 18 O. Williams in ibid., 00:25:30–00:25:41. 19 Williams in ibid., 00:25:14–00:25:27. 20 Kasparov in ibid., 00:56:14–00:56:42. 21 See also Martin, Curious Visions, pp. 90–2. 22 E. T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), p. 181. 23 Kasparov in Game Over, 00:04:05–00:04:26. 24 Kasparov in ibid., 00:56:26. 25 F. Friedel in ibid., 00:57:32–00:58:10. 26 Friedel in ibid., 00:53:48–00:54:20. 27 T. G. Rapatzikou, Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (New York: Rodopi, 2004), p. 164. 28 Michel Foucault, quoted in ibid., p. 163. 29 C. Spooner, ‘Masks, Veils, and Disguises’, in Hughes, Punter and Smith (eds), Encyclopedia of the Gothic, p. 421. 30 Sign next to IBM’s Deep Blue on display at IBM Headquarters, New York.



A haunted mind 123

31 Quote from Ken Clemmer of Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA, www.chess.ibm. com (accessed July 2014). 32 Quote from IBM, www.chess.ibm.com (accessed July 2014). 33 T. S. Mulligan, ‘Match Proves Internet Can Be King’, Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1997. 34 Maggie Kilgour, quoted in E. Brinks, Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy in the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), p. 146. 35 Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 165. 36 C. Spooner, ‘Technologies’, in Hughes, Punter and Smith (eds), Encyclopedia of the Gothic, p. 672. 37 F. Botting, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 86. 38 Ibid., pp. 86–7. 39 Martin, Curious Visions, p. 46. 40 A. Trachtenberg, ‘Likeness as Identity: Reflection on the Daguerrean Mystique’, in G. Clarke (ed.), The Portrait in Photography (London: Reaktion, 1992), p. 185. Arthur’s tale had appeared in an article in Godey’s Lady Book in 1849. 41 See also Martin, Curious Visions, p. 90. 42 W. B. Hyman, ‘Introduction’, in W. B. Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 4. 43 Spooner, ‘Technologies’, p. 673. 44 Trachtenberg, ‘Likeness as Identity’, p. 185. 45 Ibid., p. 186. 46 Ibid. 47 G. McCool, ‘Say Good Knight, Garry’, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 12 May 1997, p. 2. 48 R. Chandrasekaran, ‘Kasparov Proves No Match For Computer’, Washington Post, 12 May 1997, p. A01. 49 Unnamed reporter in Game Over, 00:05:34. 50 Chandrasekaran, ‘Kasparov Proves No Match For Computer’, p. A01. 51 McCool, ‘Say Good Knight, Garry’, p. 1. 52 ‘A Refreshing Emotional Outburst’, Deseret News, 13 May 1997, p. 6. 53 ‘Kasparov’s Deep Blue Funk: He’s Only Human’, USA Today, 13 May 1997, p. 13A. 54 K. Finley, ‘Did Deep Blue Beat Kasparov because of a Computer Bug?’, Wired, 1  October 2012, www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/01/deep-blue-bug (accessed October 2012). 55 Bailey, American Nightmares, p. 56. 56 Botting, Limits of Horror, p. 86. 57 Finley, ‘Did Deep Blue Beat Kasparov because of a Computer Bug?’ 58 S. Levy in Game Over, 00:20:10–00:20:26. 59 Friedel in ibid., 00:19:33–00:20:02. 60 Hyman, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.

124 Machines

61 Botting, Limits of Horror, p. 87. 62 Trachtenberg, ‘Likeness as Identity’, p. 173. 63 Sadikichi Hartmann, quoted in ibid., p. 174. 64 Martin, Curious Visions, pp. 59–60. 65 Hyman, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 66 F. Hsu, Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 72. 67 R. Jeffries, ‘World Champion Chess Computer Throws Temper Tantrums!’, Weekly World News, 8 July 1997, p. 15. 68 Curtis, Dark Places, p. 12. 69 Narrator in Game Over, 00:00:43–00:01:10. 70 Curtis, Dark Places, p. 10. 71 M. Loren, ‘Man vs. Machine’, 30 January 2012, http://imaginethenet.wordpress. com/2012/01/30/man-vs-machine-the-tragic-tale-of-a-grand-chess-master/ (accessed May 2014). 72 Ibid. 73 Narrator in Game Over, 00:02:42–00:02:48. 74 Kasparov in ibid., 00:27:25, and Friedel in ibid., 00:26:39–00:26:48. 75 M. S. Madoff, quoted in P. Eckhard, Chronotypes of the Uncanny: Time and Space in Postmodern New York Novels (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), p. 49. 76 A. S. Mittman, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’, in A. S. Mittman (ed.) with P. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 7. 77 C. Booker, The Seven Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 32. 78 Kasparov in Game Over, 00:05:02–00:05:07. 79 Kasparov in ibid., 00:28:51–00:28:53. 80 J. J. Cohen, ‘Postscript: The Promise of Monsters’, in Mittman (ed.), Monsters and the Monstrous, p. 451. 81 Ibid. 82 R. D. V. Glasgow, Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), p. 31. 83 J. Benjamin in Game Over, 00:28:15–00:28:22. 84 Kasparov in ibid., 00:32:01–00:32:07. 85 Friedel in ibid., 00:33:22. 86 Kasparov in ibid., 00:33:38–00:33:40. 87 Friedel in Game Over, 00:48:44–00:48:47. 88 Kasparov in ibid., 00:40:06–00:40:26. 89 Kasparov in ibid., 00:47:28–00:47:38. 90 By seeing inside something, identity is reshaped. Nina Jablonski describes a similar process with regard to hesitant anatomy students, who became more daring as they removed the skin of their subject and ‘the veil of personality and individuality had been removed’; N. Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), p. 4.



A haunted mind 125

91 D. Lawson, ‘Chess – Inspiration for a Generation’, Standpoint Magazine (October 2011), www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/4117/full (accessed May 2014). 92 J. Pittaway, ‘Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine’, 19 October 2003, www.chess​ base.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1250 (accessed August 2014). 93 See E. Selinger, ‘Chess-playing Computers and Embodied Grandmasters: In What Ways Does the Difference Matter?’, in B. Hale (ed.), Philosophy Looks at Chess (Chicago: Open Court, 2008), pp. 65–6, for a consideration of the match as humans vs. machines, humans vs. other humans, humans vs. themselves, and humans vs. nature.

6 ‘Everything was black’: locating monstrosity in representations of the Automaton Chess-Player Encounters Continuing the inquiry into the forms that these figures could take in cultural representations that attempted to resist the implications of a mechanistic intelligence, this chapter considers the idea of chess-playing machines as statues. While the statue shares some Gothic tendencies with the automaton, considering the chess-player in this way foregrounds a material presence in the world in a way the chess-player as automaton, or magical object (secular or ­supernatural), does not. ‘Statues are dead people cast in bronze’, remarked Katherine Verdery, immediately suggesting themes of violence, material presence, and representational issues.1 For Michel Serres, the statue similarly represents death and violence. Both alarming impressions suggest the fantasy of the animated image which shares the ‘strange complicities of the living body and the dead monument’.2 Both undermine the statue’s status as a passive object, mundane in its corporeal properties and relationship with space, instead highlighting aspects which may elude embodiment while harking back to a specific physicality.3 These aspects of the Automaton Chess-Player have most vividly been expressed within a range of science-fictional texts including Hannah Gould’s ‘Address to the Automaton Chess-Player’ (1832), Reginald Bacchus and Ranger Gull’s ‘The Automaton’ (1900), and Robert Löhr’s The Chess Machine (2008). Each of the three exhibits the qualities of the statue through Kempelen’s creation and its descendants. The sensory encounters in each tale between human and machine destabilise normal procedures of sociality through various forms of muteness and silence, further illuminating the uneasy boundary between human and nonhuman chess-player. Each contributes a dimension to the cultural image of chess-playing machines not yet considered.4 One can again raise the initial thought that the Automaton Chess-Player,



‘Everything was black’ 127

in popular culture, occupies landscapes of past, present, and future. Playing a 1500-year-old game, even older in some imaginings, emblematic of human rationality, fulfilling classical dreams of human-made intelligence, while pointing towards a posthuman destiny, the Automaton Chess-Player has been represented as an object both behind and ahead of its time. In responses to the object, the human chess-player often appears as a barometer of human status. Considering William Gibson’s illuminating and destructive image of the future as ‘the line of dawn rushing through desert causing stones to explode’,5 chess encounters between human and machine seemingly foresee a posthuman advent, representing something supposedly human-centric outside of the human mind and body, and recalling a prehistoric shock. Yet the line is not so clear. Indeed, the Automaton Chess-Player blurs the porous boundaries between human and machine, as surely as the human chess-player does between rational human and automaton player. These issues arise in the three texts: Gould’s ‘Address to the Automaton Chess-Player’, the first work by an American female author concerning chess, provides a personal commentary on the machine upon a first encounter, a vivid description of its appearance, and an emotional reaction to its status as a monstrous body, half-devil, half-machine. Meanwhile, Bacchus and Gull’s supernatural tale concerns a contest between the mysterious Mr Greet’s chess automaton, haunting the European chess community, and Stuart Dryden, the nominal hero and England’s strongest chess-player. In Löhr’s historical fiction, we see through the eyes of the man inside the automaton chess-player, inside his prison. Each emphasises the highly localised nature of monstrosity, its situational nature, and the way in which classifications of human and machine could become confused. By imitating the socially constructed mental faculties given the names reason and logic which are thought to be needed for chess, chess-playing machines, reordering the intellectual hierarchy, challenge common knowledge in the worlds of Gould, Bacchus and Gull, and Löhr. Gould’s and Bacchus and Gull’s works confirm a widespread and persistent notion that a successful chess machine would shake the foundation of human intellectual endeavour. As the possessor of a (human-centric) rational, intellectual reputation in the mid-tolate nineteenth century, devoid of chance, chess was a game which was seemingly especially vulnerable to mechanisation. Hence, automaton chess-players embodied an intellectual anxiety, functioning as omens of human obsolescence and warnings about the value placed on human activities, as well as performing wondrous spectacle, seemingly indicative of human scientific achievement. ‘By the apparent m ­ echanisation of rational analysis, the show of the Turkish automaton … broached the issues of determinism and free will’ – both obsessions of Enlightenment philosophy.6 Particularly since the shift in c­ ontemporary

128 Machines

c­oncerns solidified by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Automata’ (1814) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the non-human, awakened body has been ascribed a partly theatrical monstrosity, comparable to uncanny waxwork displays in its facsimile of life. If the non-human chess-player provoked nightmares and dreams, reflecting the Janus-like ambiguity the figure possessed, these three tales lean towards the former aspect.7

Transformations The original Automaton Chess-Player was, as discussed above, a wooden box concealing a full-size human, placed in front of a Turkish-looking human figure able to move chess pieces with its wooden hand. Constructed by the Hungarian virtuoso Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769, its chess ability depended solely on the occupant inside. In cultural representations, each of these factors could become provisional or suspended. The Automaton’s physical dimensions were stretched, its mannerisms redefined, its vocalisations altered, its origins mythologised or obfuscated, and its location shifted. The frontispiece, for example, of Johan Samuel Halle’s Fortgesetzte Magie (1790) presented the Turk in a languid pose, reclining calmly. Ambrose Bierce’s Moxon’s Master (1893) positioned the mechanical chess-player uneasily between machine and animal. Simon Schaffer’s comment that the meanings of automata were ‘established in the market and their value assigned through commerce’ applies equally to their place in literature.8 The Automaton Chess-Player, from the original stem of Kempelen’s creation, became a many-armed sign sprouting in many different directions. It reached beyond Kempelen’s motivations ‘to match his own virtues against the vulgar and the merely skilful’, appearing in fairs and theatres, which confirmed the machine’s ambiguous cultural role.9 Gould, Bacchus and Gull, and Löhr each consider their subject within the spiral of ‘authentic’ fake, performance, spectacle, and virtuosity, negotiating between the inward, strictly mental nature of the chess-player’s skill and the physical, outward appearance of the automaton. Exhibitions of mechanical magic were time-limited, geographically constrained curiosities. Audiences retained a distance from the spectacle, allowing them to safely ‘experience a curious machine, immerse themselves in its complexities and then leave when satiated’. The experience of viewing the Turk, providing an ‘activity of puzzling over and trying to penetrate the unknown or unseeable’, was neatly ‘packaged and sold in half-hour bundles’ to its audience.10 Even safely caged within fiction and poetry, automaton chess-players remained elusive creatures. Each of the three texts considered here breaks down the barrier of exhibition, through



‘Everything was black’ 129

narrative perspective and unusual circumstances, presenting unseen sides to the machines. Löhr’s text begins in 1769 Vienna, centring on the household of a semi-fictionalised Kempelen who unveils his unbeatable chess-playing machine, hailed as the greatest invention of the age, to the Habsburg Court. In this instance, the machine is secretly operated from within by the Italian Catholic dwarf Tibor Scardenelli, a social outsider and employee/hostage of the psychopathic Kempelen. A number of literary and critical texts have incorrectly perpetuated the belief that a child or small-sized person operated the historic machine, including Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which Löhr plays on.11 The machine initially receives acclaim, until a beautiful countess is killed in its presence. Popular opinion turns. The machine becomes the nexus of myth and paranoia. Intrigue, scandal, and dark deeds ensue. Modernity reveals itself as enchanted, superstitious space.12 As historical fiction, the story exists within a linear chronology of discussion, while stepping out of time, lurking in the shadow of history and displacing its subject. It is history written with the knowledge of both the future and what might have been, cascading together a science-fictional nature and theologically rooted anxieties on representational images. More so, The Chess Machine’s principal value is to remind us that its subject was a physical presence, with its evocative and atmospheric passages concerning the machine’s construction (birth), performance (life), and destruction (death), which foreground and locate the machine as a statue, as a body, and as a monster within the world, within man–machine ontologies, and within constructs of Enlightenment. The body and mind, their surface and image, all stand for something. The statue’s image stands for a thing’s mimetic ability to stand for, often too closely, the thing it is said to represent; its encasing stands for the veil of historical discourse; and the imprisoned power within chess-playing machines (as actual human or disembodied reason) stands for a repressed heterogeneity at the centre of modernity13 – in this case a ‘thinking machine that couldn’t think’.14 The statue, as outlined by Serres, demonstrates an elasticity of meaning, standing ultimately for the costly, virtuosic, spectacular, repetitive, and celestially oriented creation.15 Reception, appearance, and purposes of the statue can be imbricated with etymological origins of the word monster in the word men (an Indo-Iranian root) and hence memory, as well as, less relevantly here, from St Augustine, monstrare (to signify something out of the ordinary) and, from Cicero, monere (to warn),16 suggesting a relationship between the ‘deviant, transgressive, threatening and therefore horrible, terrifying, and tremendous yet also astonishing, marvellous and prodigious’.17 The statue and monster both foreground everyday experience. Their monstrous qualities do not stray too far from images of the human.

130 Machines

Constructions The statue’s body, surface, and image emphasise human resemblance. Emmanuel Levinas talks of the face-to-face encounter structuring sociality, compelling a relationship based on equality or responsibility.18 This manifests itself in the chess encounter when players playing the machine feel compelled to follow the rules and treat the machine as if it were a person, responding to its imitation of human gestures. The human form demands civility. The rejection of civility calls attention to itself. After a prologue in Löhr’s text, we, the reader, however, encounter the machine still under construction, before the face-to-face encounter is possible, experienced through Tibor, recently contracted by Kempelen to direct its chess-play. Tibor’s initial encounters with the machine – one in the dark evening and one in the morning light – present intertwined ways of considering the object through the lens of emotional sensory experience and via a ‘scientific’ detached frame of reference. Each pre-social encounter takes place in Kempelen’s residence, among the tools and ephemera of virtuosity, a hybrid space between workshop and anatomist’s operating room.19 In Kempelen’s workshop, the machine waits under a sheet, its shape outlined. Tibor first approaches the silhouette with care, ‘as if approaching a corpse’, and promptly ‘shudders’ at the sight of the machine sitting on a stool, at this point ‘no more than a mutilated skeleton’.20 ‘Most horrible of all’, he says, was ‘the chess player’s face, or rather its head, because there was no face at all’, only the horror of the lack of full presence. There was ‘the end of a tube where the mouth should have been, and instead of eyes, two strings end in the eye sockets like useless optic nerves. The skull in the shadows behind the sockets was empty.’21 The machine is blind, mute, and passive, monstrous because of the expectations to impulse and noise which human likeness demands, because stillness is taken as lack of life, and because of its provisional identity, with undetermined appearance, sex, or race. This initial reaction contrasts with Tibor’s second look at the machine in the light of the morning. Rather than a sense of unease, a lengthy technical description discusses the cabinet where the android figure sat, described as ‘four feet long, two and a half feet deep, and three feet high. There were casters on its four feet. It had three doors in front.’22 In this unemotional language, the senses are not overwhelmed but used to classify. Measurements give the safety of certainty. The embryonic statue loses its capacity to unnerve when not engaged with as a body.23 In parallel with the notion of the Turk as a source of musing, Gould’s poem describes its more sinister side as an uncanny creature, again occupying the foggy hinterland between human and non-human. It is not solely the appearance of the figure which motivates its uncanny nature, but its unseen essence, or lack



‘Everything was black’ 131

of humanity, something missing but also something extra.24 Initially suggesting that the operator could be Lucifer himself, with ‘cloven foot’ and ‘awful face’, fixed midway between ‘Old Nick himself, or a machine’, the chess-player provokes a violent response in Gould and ‘a sudden shuddering seize[s]’ her, ‘with feeling that defies a name, of wonder, horror, doubt and shame’ – her hair stands up, blood stands still, ‘curdled with a fearful chill’, in contrast to the fiery Lucifer.25 Further inversions occur when Gould suggests that observing the machine from within a group of spectators, with the gaze of ‘thousands and thousands’ upon it, ensures one’s safety, since the machine’s power is not concentrated on one person.26 However, when reduced to the face-to-face encounter, the gaze is reversed. Its inhumanity is contagious. She imagines that its touch could transform her into a displayed body and provide a fate ‘far worse than death’ as ‘thousands and thousands gaze on [her]’.27 Bacchus and Gull’s tale begins with news of the Automaton defeating Europe’s best players and its travels to England, sweeping through Birmingham and Manchester, before a challenge is issued by the proprietor of the Automaton, Mr Greet.28 Greet announces that he ‘would back his Automaton against any chess player in the world for £2,000 a side, the match to take place in the Theatre Royal at Bristol’.29 Who will take up the challenge? Enter Mr Stuart Dryden, ‘considered by most people to be the leading chess player in England’. As the nominal hero, or mystery solver, or saviour, Dryden accepts the challenge with no public display of his fears. As with the machine, outward appearances and inward secrets are separate. The public persona of Dryden is composure, in line with the late-nineteenth-century popular image of the chess-player as a rational, respectable gentleman. Professor Dryden, as he is also called, is a bachelor, living in London. ‘Between his little house and the St George’s Chess Club he spent almost the entire portion of his life’, arriving at noon and leaving at ten o’clock.30 By nature ‘a sullen man’, Dryden initially resists engaging with the machine, recognising its superior talents. However, professional pride, financial trouble, and peer pressure contrive to lead Dryden into battle. The distant Turk, however, looms over his life, becoming more and more threatening and increasingly invading his day-to-day existence.

Distance Negotiating the nebulous Automaton, the concept of distance is critical in all three texts. Most straightforwardly, the manner in which the monstrous object is represented and viewed shifts depending on one’s distance from it.31 Edmund Burke stated that ‘an erupting volcano may well induce terror in the mind of one

132 Machines

about to be engulfed by lava, but to the distant spectator the sight could be experienced as a form of delight’.32 So too, the chess-player. Traditional analysis has focused on physical distance. E. T. Hall discusses ‘proxemic analysis that defines perception based on zones of contact: intimate [6–18 inches], personal [1.5–4 feet], social [4–12 feet] and public [12 feet to the limit of visual range]’.33 When faced with a cultural practice such as chess-play, however, distance can include intellectual, morphological, and cultural distance, denoting levels of familiarity with the rules of chess; the extent of shared facial, vocal, and physical features of the players in association with these other factors; and degrees of cognisance with the practices of chess and chess-players. Othering discourses already discussed suggest the possession of esoteric knowledge, occupation of secluded social spaces, distance from various cultural norms, and association with abnormal mental ability on the part of the chess-player. The Automaton Chess-Player likewise embodies a whole host of monstrous qualities, hierarchies, and classifications, each at a distance from the normative spectator. A spectator like Gould could be physically close, but intellectually distant. A stone-faced, unsmiling, silent chess-player like Dryden playing against the Turk would be physically, morphologically, culturally, and intellectually nearer. The sense of almost human-ness which provoked terror in Gould and Tibor was, of course, by no means an original idea. Hoffmann’s ‘Automata’, with the Oriental features of the titular automaton, similar emphasised the uncomfortable nature of a machine which approximated the human appearance. Although Hoffman’s automaton is a fortune-teller not a chess-player, in calling the object the ‘Turk’ an obvious analogy to Kempelen’s creation and to Turkish mystery is made. Lewis, talking to his college friend Ferdinand, confesses, for example, that, ‘all figures of this sort … which can scarcely be said to counterfeit humanity so much as to travesty it – mere images of living death or inanimate life – are most distasteful to me’.34 Its essence, as Gould and Tibor suggest, not quite or not solely its appearance, is central. Lewis continues, again in words which can be considered in terms of distance: [S]carcely anyone talks, except in a whisper, in waxwork museums … it is the oppressive sense of being in the presence of something unnatural … [W]hat I detest most of all is the mechanical imitation of human motions … This … Turk will haunt me with his rolling eyes, his turning head, and his waving arm.35

Intellectual proximity The St George’s Chess Club in Bacchus and Gull’s tale is a modern, cosmopolitan affair, adding to the idea of Dryden being a representative not just of England



‘Everything was black’ 133

but of the world, and the idea of the machine invading formerly civilised ground. Despite being ‘certain’ of defeat, Dryden worked ‘ceaselessly at problems of the game, and studied with the greatest care the records of the matches that had been played against the Automaton, but he found it quite impossible to coax himself into the least degree of self-confidence’.36 The intellectual distance between the machine and Dryden causes discomfort. However, Dryden is compelled to accept Mr Greet’s challenge, encouraged by the players at the St George’s Chess Club, due to his means of support being severely reduced by the triumphs of the Automaton, which ‘pointed to a probable reduction in his income … [since] a mere contest between man and man fell tame after the almost supernatural strife with Mr Greet’s image’.37 Accepting his task, the contest is established, between the ‘soulless machine … a master of all the known gambits [that] seemed to play them with a supreme inspiration not granted to any living professor of the game’ and Dryden, the saviour of chess-players and humanity.38

Light/dark A good question might be which initial encounter of Tibor’s, Gould’s or Dryden’s is the more truthful to the machine’s being – the one in the light or the dark, in the crowd or alone, with Dryden’s knowledge or the uninformed confidence of his supporters? Of course, in this regard, no perspective should be privileged or thought more accurate. Gould wisely acknowledges the distorting influence of the crowd. Dryden’s status as the top human player isolates him, but is also marked by an arrogance which proves his undoing. Regarding Tibor’s encounters, instinctively we might think that his meeting in the daytime is the more informative, but, as with Dryden and Gould, a lack of information (one might call it darkness in each case) can prove useful in deciphering the wide variety of cultural images. Light reveals, it disenchants. It is associated, in theological terms, with truth and revelation or, in epistemological terms, with enlightenment and Enlightenment. Yet it also dazzles, homogenises, and deceives, preventing us from seeing what is truly present. We should instead talk of the illuminating power of darkness. The chess-player sits and resides in twilight, between the light of reason and the dark of madness, between presence and absence. This is not to speak of light and dark as synonymous straightforwardly with modernity and tradition, but certain objects are ‘not something to be seen in a brilliant light’, certainly not the dazzling light of the modern age. Objects with a mundane aspect in the light generate feelings of reverie, dreams, mystery, and trance in the dark. Junichiro Tanizaki, the Japanese novelist and cultural critic, noted that the golden flecks of Japanese lacquerware, or the

134 Machines

essence of Chinese jade, are visible only in the gloom.39 Darkness also contracts space. The sense of his own and the machine’s ‘aliveness’ which Tibor first feels when encountering the unfinished machine is not just a consequence of the thin line between the inanimate and the living – the body is always a metamorphic entity with the power to transform ‘into shapes of a different kind’ – but also because darkness highlights the machine as a statue whose occupation of space foregrounds its existence as a ‘body in space with us’.40 In Kempelen’s daytime workshop, the presence of the machine is always balanced by the statue’s stillness and silence in its pre-social state. Until Tibor becomes the controller of the machine, it remains essentially static, half-dead. Until its skin is finished and its eyes and its voicebox implanted, its body, surface, and image are incomplete. Twilight investigation causes Tibor to shudder at the sight of something being pieced together – as if in a state of undress. His dragging the drape off is an act of voyeurism – an act not bound by the rules of sociality which the Turk can never completely follow. Only when whole (with a face, clothed, and so on) can something be (sometimes only partially) accorded the properties of personality, or identity, even when that thing is an automaton which compels a human etiquette.41 At this point in Löhr’s novel, the automaton is almost complete, its performance practised and prepared. Tibor can hide inside and the appearance is of solidity.42 Beholding the machine becomes an unnerving ‘sculptural encounter’, but not always an encounter between equals, ‘a theatre of power relations between active [inquisitive, disgusted, polite] viewers and passive [and then not passive] statue’.43

Sensings To complete his invention, Kempelen visits Signor Coppola, a glassblower on the island of Murano, and a close relation, no doubt, of Hoffmann’s barometer seller in ‘The Sandman’ (1816). The occult power of the ocular is the perception that dead eyes both do not see and see more – ‘to see the things thou dost not’ says King Lear – characterised often by the shameless stare, the gaze that does not turn away, which signals a type of discipline and power over the receiver. By placing the dead eyes in the head temporality is also restored, which the machine, in a state of suspended animation, has previously seemingly effaced. The symbolic closing of the machine, by filling the head with the eyes, completes its imitation of a human, at once replacing one type of monstrosity (of the opened body) with another (a ramshackle imitation of human properties) which demands equality of behaviour with any observers. In each case, an atmosphere of not-quite-human-ness pervades. The second-century Christian theologian



‘Everything was black’ 135

Clement of Alexandria denounced this kind of sociality in statues, stating that ‘There is not a single living creature that is not more worthy of honour than these statues. Even though there are some living creatures which do not possess all the senses, these are better than those images which are entirely dumb, dead matter.’44 The worship of statues is hence the worship of the dead, the still, the blind, the mute, and the numb. There is some truth to this, yet, within the three texts, it is the grasping towards sight, towards humanness, towards being, which is disturbing. It is not simple representation which makes the statue creepy, but the attainment and acceptance of the mimicry of these human senses. Without skin, the body resists identity and personality. Without eyes, it resists engagement. Without a face, the completion of which confirms the statue as a being-inthe-world, it resists the request of sociality. As the machine becomes solid, we can no longer see through it, physically and figuratively. Enchantment follows, brought by the observer who truly completes the machine, merging it with civilisation. Bacchus and Gull’s ‘The Automaton’ places the titular machine within the same foggy hinterland between human and non-human as Löhr. Bacchus and Gull play on the idea of the monster as both shocking and wonderful, as repulsive but unmissable to its audience. The machine, described as a ‘large figure of wood, roughly hewn and painted to resemble a man’, exaggerates the real-life Turk’s dimensions, in that ‘it was about twice the size of a full-grown human being’, a giant rather than the smaller machine of the Turk itself. Its physical presence only adds to its powers of intimidation and distance from human likeness. Aside from this, and the crab-like ‘two long steel pincers that served it for fingers’, the ‘soulless machine’ is described as ‘quite motionless, except for the jerky movements of its arm … It made no sound save the one word “check”, that rasped out from its wooden throat, and the final “check-mate”, pitched in a higher and more triumphal key.’45 The effect is jarring in its simultaneous proximity to and distance from human qualities of speech and appearance. This challenging of common sense, akin to a dog meowing or a cat barking, speaks to the monstrous quality of Mr Greet’s machine. In this descriptive passage, the distance between player, public mind, and the Automaton Chess-Player is made clear. In appearance, the ‘narrow, bony sides’ of the automaton in Gould’s poem and the ‘large figure’ in Bacchus and Gull’s work present visual distinction. The wooden figure in the latter tale, and the unknown composition of the former’s brain, perhaps made of silver, gold, steel, silk, or leather, or human parts, present physical and textural otherness. The lack of breath and raspy ‘check’ are less than human attributes, as are the jerky movements and the crab-like pincers of Bacchus and Gull’s creature. Soulless, unfeeling, emotionless, the two Turks are morphologically distinct from their

136 Machines

observers yet also not entirely distinct. Gould strains to find points of similarity between herself and the machine. It is through these comparisons that monstrosity is articulated. Equally, the automata appear capable in Gould and Bacchus and Gull’s stories of generating remarkably human feelings beyond their shared ludic attributes. By describing the machine as performing independent actions, addressing it as ‘thee’ and ‘Sir Turk’ directly, Gould suggests the impression of a living player.46 Brought to life by Gould’s conversation, the poem ends with a request that the machine tell her the secret in confidence, and that the machine ‘just confide in me, and show or tell, how things within thee go!’47 Inverting the previous relationship between active observer and passive machine, of emotional spectator and rational construction, Gould promises that, should the machine tell her, she will remain quiet (like the statue should be) and not reveal the secret, demonstrating the fluid nature of the contrasts which the Turk embodied, of object and subject, human and machine, inward work and outward motion, organic and inorganic material, and friend and foe. In each case, the machine does not come to life like Frankenstein’s monster; the machine is brought to life by the acceptance of its human features, form, and gestures.

Performance/discipline In Löhr’s tale, the human gaze defines and controls the threat of the machine. Two scenes place the object under the gaze of Empress Maria Theresa, Kempelen’s patron (and something of a statue herself).48 The encounters emphasise the connection between power and enchantment. The gaze of royalty stares back at the gaze of the chess-playing machine, and the machine fails in both cases. In the first instance, when the empress encourages the court mechanician, Friedrich Knaus, to ‘defend the human race’, science is seen as the victor; the machine becomes the power of the state reified, its Turkish aspect reduced to a hollow threat, and its victories a testament to Austrian ingenuity rather than Eastern sorcery.49 Even as he presents a kind of science-fictional object – not because of its inherent impossibility but because of its existence out-of-time or ahead of time – Kempelen is a hero. In the second encounter, the machine fails to operate in the sweltering light and heat of the royal gardens, again under the enlightened gaze of patronage which is discipline itself, discipline manifest only by the gaze.50 The two performances are bisected by the murder of the beautiful Countess Ibolya – Kempelen’s nemesis mistress – after she, falling in love with the machine, accidentally discovers its secret at an elaborate evening soirée. We are initially led to believe that the machine itself is responsible.51 Again, the machine’s encounters with the empress and Countess Ibolya,



‘Everything was black’ 137

both under allegedly illuminating and Enlightened conditions, disguise a more unfamiliar aspect of the statue outlined by Michel Serres – as an object which reveals the ‘shadowy areas of archaic violence’ within society.52 Violence in the chess machine is seen in its ‘conflation of science, entertainment, and specular commerce’, involving a process of mutilation, expropriation, acquisition, and governance of knowledge.53 This relationship has been noted a number of times, recently by David Martin in the case of a stolen head of an indigenous Australian warrior. Although I speak of a different kind of ‘dead matter’ than a stolen head, the point still stands.54 The body, or head, always stands for something else – ‘sciences concerned with the living body are marked by the presence of the dead body from which that knowledge was constituted’.55 The rational, logical head of the post-Enlightenment chess-player (by one reading) represents Western knowledge. The body of the Turk – chosen by Kempelen on account of the Oriental origins of the game – represents a body of knowledge decentred. It is Eastern matter put to the service of reason and play, on display for the approval of imperial patronage.56 Orientalist logic marks the death of Eastern culture standing alone. The empress’s gaze itself is death. Foucault wrote, in some ways analogously, about how discipline has its own type of ceremony … the review, the ‘parade’, an ostentatious form of the examination. In it the ‘subjects’ were represented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifest only by its gaze. They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign body; they only felt its effects … on their bodies, which had become precisely legible and docile.57

By the gaze of the sovereign Empress Theresa, the chess-player is given political shape, yet its standing for reason is always performative and supplementary – an act and an acting out of Enlightenment society. Although the connections between the game and Enlightenment values may be in part proximal coincidences, formed within the café and given post hoc shape in texts such as the Encyclopédie, chess’s origins remain outside these structures, and the connection in the Turk of West and East remained a job worthy of Dr Frankenstein, leaving the seams and scars between the two parts visible. To restate, as noted in 1784 by Joseph Friedrich Freiherr zu Racknitz, an early commentator on the Turk, the machine was given its appearance because the Middle East was incorrectly assumed to be the birthplace of chess, and Eastern chess knowledge was perceived to be of a greater standard. Further, the region was ‘commonly associated with … magical powers’.58 The Turk, superficially, represented the fear of the Orient, especially in light of eighteenthcentury invasion threats from the Ottomans, and the supposed mystical powers

138 Machines

of an Eastern other, ‘a symbolic adversary existing outside of, and in opposition to, the dominant Christian-scientific ethos of the Enlightenment’.59 Automata had long been associated with the mysterious East and sorcery, re-entering Western society through East–West cultural contact in, probably, Islamic Spain and the Mediterranean. Yet to suggest that the Automaton Chess-Player’s primary power came from its appearance overstates the case, and a different set of measurements can be made to assess the impact of the machine in Gould and Bacchus and Gull’s work. Instead, the Turk appeared as the Orient confined and under control of a Western head. Indeed, Löhr, Gould, and Bacchus and Gull begin not with the Automaton Chess-Player’s appearance, but with its internal nature – its intellectual power and its ambiguous half-human/half-mechanical status. Questioning whether the machine was human-controlled and the failure of observers, including herself, with all their intellectual power, to view its nature correctly, Gould emphasised the singular, curious nature of the machine, which had resisted summation and categorisation. The subject ‘of deep research and cogitation, of many a head and many a nation’, Gould emphasised how a whole host of observers had ‘in vain … tried their wits to answer whether, in silver, gold, steel, silk or leather, of human parts, or all together, consists thy brain!’60 Yet although Gould dismisses the idea that a ‘little man resides between thy narrow, bony sides’ as ‘absurd!’, her question, ‘for what’s the human thing would lurk in thine unfeeling breast, Sir Turk, performing thus, thine inward work, and outward motion?’61 – e­ ssentially asking who would dehumanise themselves so – brings up the intriguing idea of man as machine, or at least a man imitating a machine, encoding the Turk as half-human and half-machine, as something akin to a hybrid – a combination of the two. The question is left unresolved and the Automaton, throughout the poem, hangs between two states.62 Likewise, in asking whether the machine’s brain is human, or silver, gold, steel, silk, or leather, with a ‘cold hand’, the gap between art and artificial is also highlighted, an attempt to find the ‘nature’ of the machine.63 Again, only ambiguity is found; the Turk remains ‘a living moving thing … devoid of breath’.64 Meanwhile, to return to Dryden’s encounter, the atmosphere is initially one of a circus. As the match approaches, however, the audience sense a greater importance. He competes as the supreme representative of humanity’s intellectual power against the machine. During play, ‘the public mind bec[omes] unpleasantly harassed’ and ‘the uncanny nature of the whole affair attract[s] numbers to the spectacle who did not even know the moves’ or intricacies of the game of chess.65 Their response comes not from knowledge of the game, but from a more universal anxiety – a cultural anxiety, rather than a straightforward matter of chess ability. As the best chess-player in the world, Dryden’s match



‘Everything was black’ 139

generates a more intense mood than previous games, and ‘the mood of simple curiosity with which former spectators had watched the machine’s triumphs … change[s] to an intense fervour of interest that threatened in many cases to lapse into hysteria’.66 Laughter and wonder cease. Further, if the effect of the machine on the spectator is stark, the effect on Dryden at the chessboard, much closer to the opponent, is starker still. The crowd watch with a degree of discomfort, but not the dread of Dryden, who finds the machine ‘immeasurably unpleasant’, making him break out in a cold sweat.67 For Dryden, physical proximity and intellectual proximity combine to create an atmosphere of terror. In preparation for his match, Dryden visits his colleague, the Revd Druce, in the countryside for pre-match advice. At this distance, the Revd demystifies the Automaton, in his pseudo-Eden of flowers and sun. In this ‘gorgeous setting of many-colored flowers’ and ‘hot quivering atmosphere’, the sun shining too brightly to look around, Druce pierces and explodes the uncertainty surrounding the machine, stating that ‘it appears to me that in London you have ceased in a measure to enquire into the reason for these wonders’ and that the machine has created its own uncanny atmosphere.68 He continues: surely, Dryden, you cannot think that steel hand is guided by any other than a human intelligence. It is absurd; you might just as well believe in magic and the black arts … it is quite plain to me that somewhere, either inside it, or close at hand, is a man.69

Presenting evidence that the brain of the Automaton is Philip Murray, a fellow chess-player, Dryden resolves to eliminate the problem and win the game.70 By (incorrectly) identifying his opponent as a human, the intellectual distance between his own skill and his opponent’s is narrowed and, by knowing his opponent, Dryden feels as if he can defeat the machine. A similar feeling is present in Löhr’s text, when a patron of the empress straightforwardly believes that the machine is a fraud, even though he cannot ascertain the nature of the deceit. Of course, Dryden is incorrect and his death follows.

Negative energy If violence created the spectacle of the Automaton Chess-Player, violence ends two of the texts here. The machine cannot be allowed to persist and attempts to end it provide a restating of the relationship between human and machine. It is this feeling which is most powerfully and clearly expressed in Bacchus and Gull’s ‘The Automaton’. By the denouement, it is Dryden who has become the emotionless, unsocial, maniacal individual, remorseless after committing murder and,

140 Machines

drenched by the rain, appearing to the crowd as vaguely comic. In his seclusion, Dryden has ‘conceived a hatred towards the automatic figure and its inmate that increased in bitterness as each day brought him nearer to the contest that he felt certain would prove his Waterloo’.71 His feelings are reflected in the ill-humoured weather. After viewing Murray entering the machine himself, Dryden endeavours to expose him – ‘his knowledge that within the painted figure his invisible rival was uneasily fearful, would lend a confident strength to himself’.72 After killing Murray when blackmail fails, Dryden’s transformation into an automaton is almost complete. His cold reaction to murder, of which ‘he knew no remorse’, mimics the detached, unemotional Automaton.73 Yet when he begins his match against the Automaton, the machine still plays! The creaking of the machine reveals that Dryden’s plan has failed. The roles of automaton and Dryden reverse. It is the automaton that moves, ‘the pincers of the hand unclasped’, while Dryden freezes and his ‘features take on those of a death mask … His heart st[ands] still and contact with the machine’ strikes him dead.74 Upon examining the machine afterwards, Mr Greet opens the panel only to find that ‘there was no one there!’75 In terms of the physical, cultural, and intellectual distance, one can see that the monstrosity of the Automaton faced by Dryden is a situational monstrosity, highly localised at times. Further, this monstrosity shifts around, at first appearing in the form of the machine, then, latterly within Dryden. Rather than viewing the monster as defined by its appearance or mode of operation, monstrosity is instead more fluid, more subjective, and more dependent on individual assessments. Likewise, Löhr’s The Chess Machine ends with a burst of deconstructive energy. When Tibor finally finds out his master’s secret – that Kempelen killed the countess – he confronts Kempelen who promptly poisons him and places him, tied up, within the machine. When Tibor wakes up, ‘Everything was black, black and silent, black and absolutely still … [T]here was no light and no sound … [A] coffin … [E]xtreme fear overcame him, but then he smelled metal and oil and he knew he wasn’t in a coffin after all.’76 The confinement is short-lived, as Tibor escapes easily and smashes the machine up in the dark of the workshop, linking the machine’s birth and death in space.77 Social responsibility towards it has seemingly broken down. The responsibility not to kill someone, or something, evaporates. The ending is strangely seductive and inevitable. How can this be considered? David Martin and Michael Taussig, providing some kind of explanation, talk appealingly of how ‘some representations have a “strategic, built-in desire to be violated, without which they are gapingly incomplete”, attaining their full and proper “brilliant illumination” only through an act of desecration and defacement’.78 Yet the breaking of surfaces is initially associated with the dissipation of the chess machine’s magic by Tibor, whose initially delicate touch provides an intriguing contrast with his savagery:



‘Everything was black’ 141

His fingers passed over its chin, mouth, and nose and reached the eyes … It was too dark for him to see its face. Tibor increased his pressure on the eye. There was a creak inside the Turk’s wooden skull. The eye socket finally broke, and Tibor pressed the eye into the empty skull. Like a marble, it fell through the hollow body, struck wooden ribs and wires, and finally dangled from its optic nerve. He pulled [both arms out, which snapped] like the hollow bones of a bird … He tore the caftan and shirt off … leaving it naked in the dark … tore off the head … knocked its face against the wall again and again … Tibor wished he could see it.79

Ultimately, however, by wishing to see what he has destroyed, Tibor acknowledges the machine’s power over him. The act of defacement and destruction ‘arouses within the defaced object “a strange surplus of negative energy” which animates the dismantled statue. In its destruction, it is the “broken or unfinished object that now bespeaks of life, precisely because it is broken; it exudes aura”.’80 Its brokenness is an acknowledgement of its once being-in-the-world. The monstrosity of the chess machine is here its expression of a disenchanted and halted modernity.81 Gould, Dryden, and Tibor all experience this intervention or invasion beyond the superficial curtain of rationality. If scientific knowledge inherently allies itself to the establishment of the homogeneity of phenomena, then the chess-playing machine, unwelcomingly, disturbs this mode of knowledge by introducing heterogeneous elements of violence, delirium, and superstition. ‘All magical objects are objects out of time’ and space, after all.82 To paraphrase, we find the machine’s monstrosity in its existence as an unstable object in the world rather than a passive one lying on the analyst’s couch or in pieces.83 The mask of reason falls quickly in the face of sensory experience.

Regenerations Decomposing the division between human and machine, these three sciencefictional texts demonstrate that the chess-playing automaton not only challenged ideas about intelligence but, as uncanny objects, also classifications of humanity, hierarchies of intellect, divisions between dead and living, and distinctions between the aesthetically pleasing and the hideous. These texts, experiencing the automaton as a culturally distant object, reveal the unwelcome nature of a chess-playing machine. Each ultimately segregates the automaton from society, all alone, on a distant stage, in a lonely workshop. Away from the stage or crowd, each automaton loses much of its cultural power. In intellectual terms, to the uneducated spectator the automaton generates a different impression than to the experienced player. At a closer physical and intellectual distance a kind of dread arises, showing how uncanny the machine can be, challenging rational

142 Machines

analysis that the machine contains a man. In Bacchus and Gull’s work, the supposed emotional superiority of human versus machine is reversed. Tibor questions his own human status. Both Dryden and Tibor become killers, the latter to regain his own human-ness, the former losing his, completing an emotional and intellectual inversion which the automaton represents. Offending Enlightenment sensibilities, the chess automaton in each is represented as an anti-modern totem – as Lucifer, primitive killing machine, or black box.84 Each seemingly fulfils Alan Turing’s claim that ‘if it looks like intelligence, it is intelligence’, revealing the surface, perspectival nature of this property.85 Juxtaposing reason with otherness, these three automata fulfil the idea of ‘interest in distant and exotic places and times, especially in the Middle East and the Orient’, through their Turkish nature, the social outcast status of their occupants, as well as ‘the celebration of the power of nature and the ineffability of nature’s essence’.86 The three texts highlight ‘the unity of disparate elements of good and evil, the hideous and the beautiful, the dead and the living’ as well as ‘the seduction of the primitive and wild …; the insignificance of human beings against nature; the existence of geniuses; the importance of individual experience; and … the emphasis on suffering, death, and redemption’.87 Taken as a historical object and an object of the imagination, the chess-playing automaton resides between classifications, between clear boundaries and hierarchies. As the object of a cultural history which attempts to describe and explain how society or individuals orientated themselves in relation to other individuals or groups or objects, representations of the man-machine indicate a profound level of unease around the figure. If the automaton’s monstrosity is a historically situated concept, ‘an embodiment of a certain cultural moment’, a reaction to a novel technology and to ambiguous entertainments, then it is also a universal concept.88 ‘The monster always escapes’, able to embody long-held fears and anxieties including the dethroning of the human from intellectual dominance and pointing towards a posthuman future.89 Its representations are an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place – but the underlying fears and worries that it generated were strikingly similar across distances, refreshed so that the links with the past and the present could be regenerated.90

Notes  1 Katherine Verdery, quoted in D. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. xvi.  2 K. Gross, Dream of the Moving Statue (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 7.



‘Everything was black’ 143

 3 That is, an ‘interlacing of physicality and representation in three dimensions’; D. J. Getsy, ‘Acts of Stillness: Statues, Performativity, and Passive Resistance’, Criticism, 56.1 (2014), p. 17.  4 Ibid., p. 1.  5 W. Gibson, Distrust that Particular Flavor (London: Viking, 2012), p. 182.  6 S. Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, in W. Clark, J. Golinski, and S. Schaffer (eds), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 128.  7 See G. L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), for the most intriguing recent work on the subject and for evidence that these feelings were both historically situated and universal.  8 Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, p. 128.  9 Ibid. 10 J. W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 41. 11 W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 253–64. 12 See ‘Introduction: Entombed Enchantment: Historiography and the Heterogeneous’, in Martin, Curious Visions, pp. xiii–vii, for more explanation of this and the crux of Martin’s contentions. See also M. Serres, Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, trans. R. Burks (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), in which Serres, in line with numerous others, asserts that ‘Modernity is defined by the face to face’ (p. 8); and S. Connor, ‘Introduction: Speaking of Objects’, in S. Connor, Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile, 2011), pp. 1–13. 13 Martin, Curious Visions, p. xviii. 14 R. Jay, ‘The Automaton Chess-Player, the Invisible Girl and the Telephone’, in R. Jay, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), p. 147. 15 Serres, Statues, pp. 1–5. 16 T. Kirk, ‘Monumental Monstrosity, Monstrous Monumentality’, Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, 40 (2008), p. 7. 17 Ibid. 18 M. L. Morgan, The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 183. 19 R. Löhr, The Chess Machine, trans. A. Bell (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), pp. 21–6. 20 Ibid., p. 22. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 25. 23 Getsy, ‘Acts of Stillness’, p. 2. 24 S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in J. Strachey (ed.), Sigmund Freud: Art and Literature (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 335–76. I only touch briefly on the concept of the uncanny here. See also Nicholas Royce, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 1–3, 24, 36–7.

144 Machines

25 H. Gould, ‘Address to the Automaton Chess-Player’, in H. Gould, Poems, I (Boston: Hilliard Gray, 1839), p. 81. 26 Ibid., p. 82. 27 Ibid. 28 R. Bacchus and R. Gull, ‘The Automaton’, in M. Ashley (ed.), Steampunk Prime: A Vintage Steampunk Reader (New York: Nonstop, 2010), p. 25. 29 Ibid., p. 26. 30 Ibid. p. 27. 31 A. D. Hood, ‘Material Culture: The Object’, in S. Barber and C. M. PenistonBird (eds), History beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 180, 183–4. 32 P. Shaw, The Sublime (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 6. 33 Hood, ‘Material Culture’, pp. 180, 183–4. 34 E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Automata’ (1814), in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), The Best Tales of Hoffmann (New York: Dover, 1967), p. 81. 35 Ibid. 36 Bacchus and Gull, ‘The Automaton’, p. 27. 37 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 38 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 39 J. Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. T. J. Harper and E. G. Seidensticker (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 18–19, 23–4. 40 Getsy, ‘Acts of Stillness’, p. 2. 41 N. Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), p. 4. 42 Löhr, Chess Machine, p. 40. 43 Getsy, ‘Acts of Stillness’, p. 1. 44 Clement of Alexandria, quoted in Getsy, ‘Acts of Stillness’, pp. 3–4. 45 Bacchus and Gull, ‘The Automaton’, p. 25. 46 Gould, ‘Address’, p. 82. 47 Ibid., p. 83. 48 Löhr, Chess Machine, pp. 59–77, 210–20. 49 Ibid., p. 66. 50 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1979), quoted in Martin, Curious Visions, p. 71. 51 Löhr, Chess Machine, p. 167. 52 ‘Translator’s Note’, in M. Serres and B. Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 205. 53 Martin, Curious Visions, p. 60. 54 Ibid., pp. 56, 60. 55 Ibid., p. 61. 56 Ibid., p. 60. 57 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, quoted in ibid., p. 71. 58 J. F. Racknitz, quoted in Cook, Arts of Deception, p. 43.



‘Everything was black’ 145

59 Ibid. 60 Gould, ‘Address’, p. 81. 61 Ibid., p. 82. 62 Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, p. 129. 63 Gould, ‘Address’, p. 81. 64 Ibid., p. 82. 65 Bacchus and Gull, ‘The Automaton’, p. 26. 66 Ibid., p. 40. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., pp. 31–2. 71 Ibid., p. 34. 72 Ibid., p. 37. 73 Ibid., p. 39. 74 Ibid., p. 41. 75 Ibid. 76 Löhr, Chess Machine, pp. 302–3. 77 Ibid., pp. 303–6. 78 Michael Taussig, quoted in Martin, Curious Visions, p. 108. See also C. F. Nicholai, ‘The Heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’, Paris Review, 30 September 2010, for an extract of Nicholai’s encounter with a sculptor of heads, mentioned in Löhr’s story. 79 Löhr, Chess Machine, pp. 305–6. 80 Michael Taussig, quoted in Martin, Curious Visions, p. 108. 81 Ibid., p. 190. 82 Connor, Paraphernalia, p. 201. 83 A mangling of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 2. 84 M. Ziegler, ‘Gothic Epidemiology? Or Gothic Historiography?’, Contagions (February 2012), http://contagions.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/gothic-epidemiology-orgothic-historiography/ (accessed January 2014). 85 S. T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 267–9. 86 F. M. Getz, quoted in Ziegler, ‘Gothic Epidemiology?’ 87 Ibid. 88 J. J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture: Seven Theses’, in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 4. 89 Ibid. 90 James Iaccino, quoted in S. Schneider, ‘Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror’, Other Voices, 1.3 (1999), www.othervoices.org/1.3/sschneider/monsters.php#Call_13 (accessed 6 June 2013).

Part III Monsters

7 Red, black, white, and blue: American monsters They [the media] constantly use the words eccentric, eccentric, eccentric, weird. I am boring. I am boring! Bobby Fischer1

USA, USA, USA The previous chapters have located the chess-player at the edges of culture, marginalised in unfamiliar spaces, where physical and intellectual distance holds apart player and spectator. This characterisation of the figure is not one located solely in the distant past, out of reach by the living. Strategies of representation found in images of the chess-player are constantly renewed. Certainly, the chess-player is deeply imbricated with its historical ancestors, yet new features could emerge and shape, sometimes controversially, the figure’s relationship with themes of utility and respectability. Part III considers the chess-player in the second half of the twentieth century within American popular culture, and its mutations, similarities, and shapes. This chapter and the one following consider the cultural images of Bobby Fischer, the American-born world chess champion (1972–75), while Chapter 9 takes an aspect of Fischer’s monstrous representation as superhero, and examines it within a quintessential American genre – the comic-book. The central aim of this chapter is to analyse the myriad ways in which the cultural ‘Bobby Fischer’ was represented before his World Championship victory, challenging the existence of any single Bobby Fischer identity, while applying the concept of monster to his popular image, which was abstracted to fit many competing narratives. Fischer was used to entertain, to engage with political anxieties, and to wrestle with the historical chess-player. His cultural image presents both a contemporary figure of the society from which he emerged, and something composed of the chess-players of the past, in constant communion with them, refusing easy categorisation. Examining

150 Monsters

Fischer’s life, from his appearance as a prodigy to just before his 1972 World Championship match with Boris Spassky, this chapter demonstrates how competing priorities and demands shaped his cultural image. Parallels with chessplayers of all kinds discussed in other chapters will be apparent and plentiful. Like the historical chess-player, Fischer became a repository of social power in which cultural anxieties were held, mostly safe and sound. In twentiethcentury America, these may have been a different set of anxieties to, say, those of nineteenth-century Paris, or the technologically infused New York City of Kasparov’s encounters with Deep Blue, but they were anxieties nevertheless. Drawing primarily from US newspapers, magazines, and fiction, this examination of Fischer’s cultural existence reasserts the blurry and fragmented definition of the cultural chess-player; its ever-shifting, but paradoxically stable, identity; the otherness of chess; and the elisions of time inherent in these ­representations. Fischer appeared as the entirety of chess and the centre of the chess world embodied within one person. As Daniel King, chess grandmaster and writer, states, ‘Fischer did not merely put chess on the map, he was the map’.2 He was the chess-player. Through his otherness, uniqueness, and distant nature, Fischer was both known and unknown in popular media. He moved beyond previous stereotypes of the chess-player, altering the image of the game. At other moments, he fulfilled popular conceptions and expectations of his profession. He remained a delimiting figure, stretching the boundaries of the cultural image of the chessplayer. This chapter stops just before Fischer’s World Championship victory in 1972. Its aim is to show how varied and contradictory Fischer’s cultural image was before his ultimate victory and, furthermore, to demonstrate the range of strategies used to categorise, label, and contain his cultural power.

Othering discourses A previous chapter considered how a strand of detective fiction portrayed chessplayers as exaggerated in physical appearance and mental ability, suggesting the stigma of chess ability as an intellectual disfigurement, while retaining a degree of cultural power.3 Fischer appeared in a similarly exaggerated form with a similar aura surrounding him even as a child. Representations often raised hints of his supernatural potential, his going-beyond limited drudgery, but such a characterisation was merely one of many shapes Fischer took.4 This chapter prioritises Fischer’s image as a cultural chess-player, framing its subject as, first, a literary figure, experienced primarily through the printed page or the chess column; secondly, as a haunting figure, reviving past chess-players; thirdly, as a historical figure, continuing the lineage and tradition of the chess-player; and fourthly, as



Red, black, white, and blue 151

a distant figure, operating in the othered space of chess. Outside the usual order of things, Fischer often appeared, to employ Garry Kasparov’s view of his rival Anatoly Karpov, as ‘representing something alien to the crowd’.5 Through his multiple identities, Fischer’s chess-play performed as ‘the abjected fragment that enables the formation of all kinds of identities – personal, national, cultural, economic, sexual, psychological, universal, particular’.6 Indeed, Fischer was represented as many various types, from child prodigy to intellectual genius, sportsman, victim, grizzled madman, ascetic, celebrity, monster, artist, professional, polite, ill-mannered, well-dressed, and scruffy. The representations of Fischer discussed here are not always realistic. They are constructed, intensely conceived types, and confirm that Fischer’s power resided not simply in appearance, location, or process, but through his impact or challenging of common sense.7 Bobby Fischer’s cultural status occupied a series of contradictory positions, able to exist within American society, within the chess community, within the celebrity world, and yet in opposition to, or outside, those spaces. As a series of self–other relationships, Fischer’s image can be considered threefold, as an alienated relationship within the individual (where Other is perceived as the perversion of reason, even madness); within the individual’s society (where Other is perceived as antisocial, breaking society’s rules, or nonsocial, going beyond society’s norms); or within the individual’s normal physical context (where Other is perceived as non- or super-natural).8

Regarding these relationships, three literary monster-pairs can help visualise these relationships; first, Grendel and Beowulf, with Fischer analogously as both monster-slayer and monster; secondly, Dr Frankenstein and his creation, with Fischer the architect of a new type of play and the product of chess past; and thirdly, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, exemplifying two sides of Fischer’s personality, with the latter side, as Gabriel Utterson remarked, bearing ‘an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation’.9 These literary monster-­ pairings remained on the page, just as Fischer did for the majority of Americans.10

Distant Chess was, for many Americans, a distant land. Strange but essentially harmless, Fischer may have been a monster, but, encased by chess, his power was limited to the confines of the board. One may compare the level of unfamiliarity with chess in American society to that found by George Walker in Victorian England in the 1840s and find similar undercurrents, traces, and tantalising beginnings

152 Monsters

which later erupted to the surface. The primary interface between Fischer and the public was through newspaper or television. As with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Café de la Régence, who attracted a crowd peering through the window, or spectators watching Kasparov versus Deep Blue via the internet, Fischer was experienced only at a distance – hence, the fascination and amusement he caused to some as a figure of mockery or fun. Any monster movie fan knows that the monster can be mocked, worried over, and dreaded so long as it remains confined on-screen, safely locked away in ‘clearly delimited and permanently liminal space. Escapist delight gives way to horror only when the monster threatens to overstep the boundaries.’11 Such a construction ensured that the chess-player’s power was highly focused and confined. Indeed, the distant land of chess was, to use Jacques Le Goff’s term, a mental horizon. As a cultural space, its unfamiliarity was ‘a blank canvas for uneducated writers … peopled … with exotic and fantastic creatures’.12 Chess functioned as a land ‘sufficiently distant to be exoticised’ in which ‘monsters serve[d] as secondary bodies through which the possibilities of … other social customs c[ould] be explored. [Strange creatures beckoned] from the edges of the world, the most distant planets of the galaxy.’13 Fischer’s story is both a peculiarly local one, reliant on the distance between chess and an American public generally ‘scornful of the royal game’, and a more familiar one, dependent on an assumed distance between chess-play and the general public.14 That is, a situational monstrosity was at play. Like the ‘ambiguously monstrous’ giant and pygmy Gargantua and Tom Thumb, who are ‘strange “here” but normal “there”’, the chess-player’s otherness in part depended on segregation.15

First impressions From his earliest public appearance as a chess-player to his death, Fischer challenged popular conceptions of what a chess-player should be and should look like. In particular, his physical appearance, his features and size, and his clothes were frequently of concern to parts of the popular press which sought a way to represent Fischer’s talent without technical explanation to a largely chessilliterate audience. In one of the earliest mentions of Fischer in Sports Illustrated, in 1956, concerning his success in the Manhattan Chess Club’s ‘A’ reserve tournament, Fischer’s appearance and youth (he was 13) were the primary features of the report, contradicting the writer’s expectations of chess experts with ‘bald heads and horn-rimmed glasses’.16 Fischer’s youth also contradicted Irving Chernev’s 1948 observation that ‘the average conception of a philosopher, mathematician and chess master is that he is a stern, serious individual,



Red, black, white, and blue 153

with never a frivolous thought’.17 Fred Waitzkin similarly observed that, before 1972, he ‘thought of chess as cerebral and boring’.18 Youthful chess prodigies were not unheard of. Samuel Reshevsky, eight-time winner of the US Chess Championship, had, from an early age, given simultaneous exhibitions and performed in public in the interwar period, playing with Charlie Chaplin, advertising chess pieces, and appearing with neat hair, a suit, shiny shoes, and perfect posture.19 However, Fischer, with his shaved head and casual clothes, did not conform to this civilised, respectable pattern. While the New York Times headlined a 1957 article about Fischer ‘Another Chess Prodigy’, its description was not that of an identikit replica of previous prodigies. Juxtaposing the claims of those who called Fischer a ‘genius’ with his appearance, ‘wearing sneakers, khaki pants and a T-shirt’ while drinking coke, simultaneously reminded the audience that Fischer was unusual due to his chess ability, his youth, and his sartorial sensibilities.20 Another brief note mentioned his ‘tongue-caressing’ as he considered a move.21 In 1958 the juxtaposition between physical impression and mental ability was again made, in both Newsweek and the New York Times, with the former highlighting Fischer’s brown corduroy trousers and black ski sweater, and his placid attitude. Under the sub-heading ‘Calm Play’, Newsweek noted how Fischer ‘occasionally bites his nails or rubs one finger against his forehead. More often, he sits calmly, his head resting on both hands.’22 Almost contradictorily, in the New York Times, Paul Underwood noted that Fischer was a ‘gangling boy … a tangle of arms and legs not quite under control’.23 The essential theme of otherness at worst and slightly amusing child at best remained. Was Fischer seen as a typical chess-player at this time regarding disposition? In some ways, yes. However, since he was a child, Sports Illustrated did not associate him with the other leading players of the age, a group, it noted, in a somewhat unflattering portrait, who were ‘a heady, temperamental, far-scattered and generally impecunious group of wizards … Most of them are filled with such obscure personal torments and such unpredictable hostilities toward officials, spectators and each other that businessmen generally find them baffling.’24 Fischer’s early position in this territory appeared somewhat unclear. The mentalité of the chess-player, assembled from these early articles, positioned him in a world paradoxically cerebral, civilised, but bad-tempered and full of obscure habits. Fischer in this landscape, seemed to challenge several of its assumed characteristics, representing something doubly other.25 Just as reading a written language is a matter of recognising what its words signify, so also reading someone’s character is a matter in part of ‘interpreting a set of personal and cultural signs akin to language – signs such as clothing, facial expression, gesture, demeanor, and voice’.26 In contrast to other sports, ‘chess

154 Monsters

cognition is mostly unconscious … [and] rarely linguistic’.27 Popular articles such as those in Sports Illustrated, the New York Times and Newsweek which were not aimed at a chess-playing audience took the view that there was an ontological link between outward appearance and inward nature, that Fischer’s appearance signified his character and could explain his personality and chess-play, and therefore attempted to measure impact through these features. Clothing was, hence, not superficial and, in this semiotic approach to material culture, was a sign and symbol highlighting an inner characteristic. This approach, as described by Daniel Miller, viewed clothing as an unspoken language that could be read. One’s clothing did not conceal, but revealed. Miller questions this superficiality, pondering where the self that clothes purport to represent is located.28 Yet this is how many popular images work. Fischer’s appearance, even as a child, contravened the profession’s internal conventions. The strict social rules of fashion deemed suits and shirts the standard uniform for the chess-player. Fischer’s casual dress sense was a small part of what provoked the Soviets to term him nyekulturni or uncultured.29 The contrast, as his biographer Frank Brady noted, ‘perturbed’ Fischer, and criticisms, whether explicit or inferred, ‘diminished him’, detracting ‘not only from who he incontestably was – a grandmaster and the United States Champion – but who he believed he was – the strongest player in the world’.30 Of particular importance was an article in the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade, ‘read by tens of millions’, which published a photograph of Fischer giving a simultaneous exhibition with the caption, ‘despite his rise to fame, Bobby still dresses casually. Note his dungarees and [plaid] shirt in contrast to his opponents’ business suits and ties.’31 Such representations of Fischer led him to dress more smartly, moving closer to the wider cultural image of the chess-player. That is, Fischer sought, and received to some extent, a degree of acceptance and respect. His changing appearance was, instantaneously, associated with an emerging maturity, shifting his identity from child to man, and had a striking effect on his opponents and supporters, again confirming the link between clothing and personality. By 1961, perhaps somewhat prematurely, Newsweek could report, under the headline ‘The Boy is the Master’, that Fischer was, at 17 years old, matured, contrasting his appearance and temperament in 1958 when he first won the US chess championship as ‘a shy, awkward, temperamental boy who wore corduroy trousers, ski sweaters, scuffed shoes, and unmatched socks’ with his 1961 image as tall and assured, w[earing] an olive-tinted, Continental-style suit, Italian shoes, and a pastel shirt and tie … His play has matured to match his clothes. Now, blended with the instinctive tactical brilliance he brings to chess, Fischer draws upon experience and finesse, two attributes born of competition against the finest players in the world.32



Red, black, white, and blue 155

Hence, clothing was used as an entry point into the Fischer-character and the Fischer-style of chess. A link was made between outward appearance and chessplay. Partly this can be attributed to the difficulty in explaining how Fischer’s skill had evolved. The metaphor of changing clothes suggested both a maturity and a self-awareness, replacing the need for chess jargon. Fischer’s sartorial change came as a surprise to some. His casual appearance had become associated with his attitude and all-round identity, suggesting a lack of interest in any other world outside chess. At the Marshall Chess Club, with its ‘sense of decorum’, Fischer’s casual clothes, ‘T-shirt, wrinkled pants, and sneakers’, were considered an ‘outrage’ by Caroline Marshall, Frank Marshall’s widow and the long-standing manager of the establishment. When Mrs Marshall told Fischer to dress smartly, he ignored her.33 Likewise, when someone at the Manhattan Chess Club asked a young Bobby what he would do if he were invited to a state dinner while in Moscow, ‘where he’d have to wear a tie’, he stated, ‘if I have to wear a tie, I won’t go’.34 However, by 1964, rejecting the past, he claimed that ‘I hate ready-made suits and button-down collars and sports shirts. I don’t want to look like a bum. I get up in the morning, I put on a suit.’35 In 1962 he had also made a clearer connection between appearance and ‘respect’, while confirming that he considered his new appearance akin to the assuming of an identity or armour, stating, I used to dress badly until I was about sixteen. But people just didn’t seem to have enough respect for me … and I didn’t like that, so I decided I’d have to show them they weren’t any better than me, you know? They were sort of priding themselves. They would say he beat us at chess, but he’s still just an uncouth kid. So I decided to dress up.36

While Brady states that ‘I don’t believe that the turnabout signified any real change in Bobby’s life’, others associated the change with the emergence of a ‘new Fischer’.37 If the casual Fischer had stood out and appeared different, then, equally, so too did his new appearance and his emphasis on how he looked which, in interviews, appeared to some as less a sign of maturity than another obsession and marker of otherness. Sports Illustrated, in 1961, remarking on this sartorial revolution, stated that for the first time since Fischer began winning championships, he was neatly groomed, wearing a suit rather than his customary sweat shirt and with his brown spiky hair neatly trimmed. All this finery disturbed his youthful admirers, many of whom could have fitted right into the cast of West Side Story without changing costume.38

156 Monsters

Prodigy These early descriptions of Fischer recall the discussions of chess prodigies as players possessing the qualities associated with advanced mental abilities, but accompanied by physical and, perhaps, emotional limitations. Fischer became an international grandmaster at the age of 15, an unprecedented achievement, claiming that ‘he just got good’ when he was 11.39 ‘Some biographers of Bobby’s early years,’ as Brady states, ‘seem vaguely disappointed that he was not recognized as a wizard from the moment that he first laid his eyes on a chessboard.’40 In reality, Fischer’s development as a chess-player took time. The well-known story of his early chess years does not contain any eureka moments. He was six years old when he first played chess with his sister Joan, recalling in a school essay that ‘at first it was just a game like any other … only a little more complicated’, before gradually becoming increasingly interested.41 In his first tournament at the age of 10, in 1953 at the Brooklyn Chess Club Championship, he finished fifth. Instead of raw genius, Brady notes the recollections of one grandmaster on Fischer at the age of 9, who stated, ‘I was impressed with his intuitive sense of the game and his swift thinking. His enthusiasm never flagged and he showed unusual concentration and willpower. He had chess fever early! … while his talent was obvious, I did not realise that I was playing against a future world champion.’42 Hard work and concentration, not flashes of untutored genius, created Fischer. Past chess-player prodigies such as Paul Morphy, Samuel Reshevsky, and José Raúl Capablanca provided ready-made structures in which to place Fischer, but the facts did not fit. Still, Fischer’s prodigy status placed him in between worlds. On the one hand, coverage in chess columns focused on his abilities, while in other types of coverage, the tension between his youth, school-life, financial demands, and chess was played out. One can also point out the discrepancy between his image abroad and in America. The New York Times reported, for example, that ‘International Master Finds He’s Just an Unusual Boy of 15 in His Own City – a hero abroad. Here, he is a hero only among chess players.’43 While publicity was forthcoming – headlines proclaimed ‘Bobby Fischer Hailed; Grandmaster, 15, Gets Watch at Marshall Chess Club’ and reported his being awarded a medal at Erasmus Hall High School44 – these events did not constitute international recognition, and when Fischer returned from an overseas tournament, coverage frequently focused on his school work. Again the New York Times, prefacing the phrase ‘chess expert’ with ‘boy’, noted how Fischer faced a ‘“Grind” to Make up School Work’ which ‘may be even more difficult brain work’ than chess.45 Almost every headline of this period mentioned his age or youth, for example ‘Brooklyn Boy’, ‘The Brooklyn Prodigy’,



Red, black, white, and blue 157

and ‘U.S. Schoolboy’.46 After his victory in the US Championship, similar headlines populated the press – ‘Fischer Captures Open Chess Title; 14-year-old Erasmus High Student Wins U.S. Crown’, ‘Youngest Player Wins Chess Title On Late Decision’, and ‘14-Year-Old Is Chess Champ’.47 Emphasising his outsider status, Fischer’s mother appealed for money on his behalf early in his career, sending letters to Sports Illustrated,48 and confirming that ‘chess [wa]s not a popular game’ in the USA.49 More relevantly, by juxtaposing Fischer’s schoollife and his chess, the activity that he shared in common with other children of his age and the activity that distinguished him, and by mentioning his mother, these articles sought to contain the impact of Fischer’s skill, framing it within familiar and familial boundaries, and reducing both the game’s relevance to his identity and his potential monstrosity.

Maturing? To reiterate some of the points made above, reading Jane Howard’s ‘One-Track Mastermind’ article in Life (February 1964), one finds a profound shift in the cultural image of Fischer, encompassing the themes of appearance, demeanour, and attitude towards others, from neat to tidy, angry to calm, and rude to polite. Subtitled, ‘cocky boy wonder of chess begins to grow up’, Howard contrasted a previous, undefined past with a present which had seen Fischer mature, from a time ‘when he antagonized just about everybody with his antisocial remarks’, to a state where ‘Bobby has mellowed some’. For example, stated Howard, he is much more tolerant of people who don’t know a queen’s pawn from a royal hock shop. He holds doors for girls, phones you back if you leave a message for him, grins and carries around with him, of all things, a … Bible. ‘No, it doesn’t help you with chess’, he admits, ‘but it makes you a better person.’50

This perception of Fischer’s growing maturity was echoed in other articles, although his sexist views on women, expressed in the same article, highlight the limits of this ‘Renaissance Man’ image. The New York Times in 1965 also pointed to an emotional and intellectual widening, recording an appreciation by Fischer of other interests than chess, a development from his childhood when he used to ‘cry when he lost a chess game’. Such an alteration in character was again reflected in Fischer’s change from ‘a poorly dressed tangle of arms and legs to a handsome, brooding young man who wore $200 suits and $90 shoes’, with the approving comment that ‘he now dresses conservatively and neatly, but not expensively’.51 Yet the effect in Howard and the Times’s comments was still that

158 Monsters

of describing an object or an unfamiliar creature, both through the repetition of Fischer’s name and random details such as ‘Bobby Fischer earns an estimated $12,000 a year’, ‘Bobby Fischer plays his pieces with quick and sudden movements. He never relaxes during a game, although he has been known to bite his fingernails’, or ‘when Bobby Fischer was 13 years old, he decided he could beat anyone in New York in chess, so he went to the Manhattan Chess Club and challenged all comers’.52 Fischer remained a kind of ‘wonder’, an eccentric, an ex-chess prodigy, still categorised and contained by the label.53 Perhaps the most pervasive and persistent representation of Fischer as an outsider was Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 article for Harper’s Magazine. While undoubtedly containing a sliver of truth, Ginzburg’s fabrication of certain images and elision of literary and historical chess myths makes this an important article in the cultural construction of its subject. Poised somewhere between fact and fiction, reporting on Fischer while, at the same time, playing up to the popular image of chess-players as something other and strange, the stated aim of ‘Portrait of a Genius as a Young Chess Master’ was to ‘find the clue to Fischer’s much discussed temperament’. However, as Brady states, ‘the result was disastrous, pathetic or funny, depending on your point of view’, presenting a view of Fischer ‘as a monster of egotism, scornful of everything outside himself and the game, while understanding nothing of what he scorns … a callow arriviste who, in attempting to delineate his notions of, and pretensions to “class”, convicts himself of an increasingly hopeless vulgarity’.54 The image presented was bitterly disputed by Fischer, who claimed that Ginzburg ‘twisted what he said and used his quotes out of context’.55 In presenting an image of Fischer as an eccentric (an image not entirely untrue), as a man out of time and place, and as other, Ginzburg portrayed the standard image of the chess-player in American ­culture. This image fitted Ginzburg’s ‘bent for sensationalism’ and contaminated future cultural images of Fischer and chess.56 The Soviet grandmaster Alexander Kotov’s complaint that ‘it is incorrect that Mr. Ginzburg should write in such a way about one of the strongest chess players in the world’ highlights how the target audience was one not involved with the game.57 Brady’s discovery that Ginzburg destroyed his research materials – an unusual practice – merely adds to the article’s artificiality. Beginning with the ‘painfully well-known fact’ that ‘never before has a young player aroused so much personal antipathy’, and quoting Horowitz’s notion that ‘the huge egos of great chess players are legendary’, key themes of Ginzburg’s article included Fischer’s apparent obsession with appearance, ironic considering the attention paid to it by several journalists. Turning up late for the interview, stating that women were ‘stupid compared to men’, that he was ‘the greatest player that ever lived’, that ‘if something doesn’t interest me or if



Red, black, white, and blue 159

someone bores me, or if I think they’re a phony, I just don’t bother with them, that’s all’, that he had to ‘get rid’ of his mother, that there were ‘too many Jews’ in chess, that he had no close friends, that he liked nice clothes, that he did not ‘eat in luncheonettes or Automats’, and aspired to be a European aristocrat – none of this helped Fischer’s case.58 Yet in focusing on personal quirks, not, for the most part, attributes directly related to Fischer’s chess-playing, Ginzburg merely highlighted his own chess illiteracy, failing to create a connection with his subject through the game. The article concluded with Ginzburg stating that ‘several things about him had become clear’: first, that chess for Fischer was ‘life and everything that happens off the chessboard is a distraction’; secondly, that Fischer was ‘not a genius in other respects’ than chess; thirdly, that though Fischer was 18 years old, he showed ‘some traits of much younger children, who behave that the world is centered around filling their needs’; and, fourthly, that Fischer did ‘not show malice’ but was concerned ‘with his own feelings, he is gentle, shy, almost timid’ despite his sweeping statements.59

Subhuman – everyman – supernatural Ginzburg’s article was, in one way, successful in portraying Fischer as an average American – an opinionated one, certainly, but one who could fit reasonably closely with other sportsmen of the era, somebody with the same personality quirks one might find every day. Ginzburg’s portrait even appears remarkably generous – a portrayal of a chess-player as a human – when compared to Brad Darrach’s portrayal of Fischer in ‘Bobby Fischer vs. the World’ (1974), which emphasised the ‘unattractive’ nature of Fischer. There is something in Darrach’s article that goes beyond mere personal dislike. Fischer appears here as a monstrous figure, almost uncanny, and both more and less than human. He represents something alien, full of emotion, but also emotionless. He is something dangerous, yet utterly fascinating to the author, someone unconcerned with automats and the New York subway. A chess novice, Darrach’s first impression of Fischer is of a man ‘tall and broad-shouldered; his face is clean-cut, masculine, attractive’. Yet this impression, on second glance, ‘dislocates into a number of odd parts’ and contradictions. An ‘amazing brain’ in a ‘small oval skull’, ‘his shoulders seem so wide his head looks “like a pea sitting on a ruler”, somebody said’. There is a ‘Neanderthal’ aspect to his jaw, a childishness about him despite his size, and Darrach sees a sense of danger about Bobby. When he is angry or confident his face is alert but unthinking, the face of a big wild animal that hunts for a living. His eyes are like a

160 Monsters

tiger’s, with the same yellow-green serenity and frightening emptiness. When he laughs, his wide, full-lipped mouth opens into a happy cave filled with white teeth. Most of his facial expressions are rudimentary displays of fear, hunger, anger, pleasure, pain, suspicion, interest – all the emotions, a man or animal. I have rarely seen him register sympathy, invitation, acknowledgment, humor, tenderness, playfulness. And never love.60

There is something primitive to this description, a contradiction to supposed chess genius, and the effect is to surround Fischer with a kind of ambiguity, reducing his chess-play to idiot-savant-type behaviour. Continuing, Darrach’s dehumanising also encompasses more physical aspects of Fischer. His movements seem robotic, ‘vigorous’ but ‘comically awkward’, ‘lurching side to side’. Most monstrously, Darrach states that Bobby functions like Frankenstein’s creature, a man made of fragments connected by wires and animated by a monstrous will. When the will collapses or the wires cross, Bobby cannot execute the simplest acts … Once, when I asked him a question while he was eating, his circuits got so befuddled that he jabbed his fork onto his cheek.

In terms of his thought processes, the Fischer here is purely logical, someone who seems to keep only one thought in his mind at once, and a simple thought at that … simple sentences that lead him where he is going like stepping-stones, and his voice is flat, monotonous, the colour of asphalt – the voice of man pretending to be a machine so people won’t be able to hurt him.61

By contrast, when Fischer played chess, it was akin to a ‘big dangerous cat slip[ping] into his skin’, although such a claim, apparently praise, only served to make Fischer seem inhuman, more animal-like and only interested in, and able to play, chess. Yet Fischer’s first appearances were those of a surprisingly normal-looking child, one of ‘us’, not one of ‘them’. He had, for talk-show host Dick Cavett, nothing in common with Vladimir Nabokov’s descriptions of ‘genderless piano prodigies with eye trouble, obscure ailments … something vaguely misshapen about their eunuchoid hindquarters’.62 Yet this deformity is precisely what Darrach saw. In a 1971 article he had already portrayed Fischer as somebody with ‘a head too small for his big body’ like a ‘a pale transhuman sculpture by Henry Moore’, and as an outsider, whose ‘information was factual, not emotional. It came from books, magazines, newspapers, television – the media he despises.’63 Darrach’s writing does, despite its exaggeration, reflect a tension



Red, black, white, and blue 161

in representations of the chess-player – contrasting the expectation of ‘a frail, bespectacled spook’, the supernatural encounter with ‘Bobby Fischer, Demon of the Chess World’, the physical appearance of Fischer as ‘a blond giant with an oarsman’s shoulders’, and the unexpected empty-headedness of ‘a big easy smile and eyes so open that a bird could fly in one and out the other’.64 Darrach’s line that he attempted to show ‘Fischer as superhuman, subhuman and normally human’65 – three themes that have recurred throughout this work – demonstrates not solely, as Burt Hochberg stated, Darrach’s capacity for fiction or his willingness ‘to sacrifice accuracy for a good line’,66 but a sense, however poorly executed, of what the public wanted to read when they read about chess-players. Brady is accurate when he describes some of Darrach’s work as a ‘hatchet job’, in particular his use of the overly employed terms idiot savant and enfant terrible.67 David Edmonds and John Eidnow’s use of the phrase ‘according to Darrach’ in their biography of Fischer highlights their scepticism about the author.68 Yet how could, as Yasser Seirawin asks, the press ‘write anything they wanted, both real and imagined’ about Fischer, if not because the impressions of Darrach communicated the perceived cultural essence of the chess-player?69 Viewing chess-players as a distinct ‘social group’ allowed the chess-player to be described in an allegorical, mutable, or theatrical way.70 A second aspect of Ginzburg’s article highlighted the way the chess-player could become tied up with historical and literary imagery. Elias Canetti’s Autoda-Fé, written in 1935, had discussed a chess-player with the similar name of Fischerele. The fictional character expresses a desire to win the World Championship, to dress well, and live in a house inspired by chess pieces. Fischerele states that he will ‘own new suits made at the best possible tailor’ and live in a ‘gigantic palace with real castles, knights, pawns’.71 Fischer, when interviewed by Ginzburg, excitedly claimed that he would, when successful, build [myself] a house … I got strong ideas about my house. I’m going to hire the best architect and have him build it in the shape of a rook. Yeh, that’s for me. Class. Spiral staircases, parapets, everything. I want to live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.72

While not the ‘astonishing coincidence … unique in literature’73 that Hochberg claims when introducing the piece in his chess anthology, since Ginzburg had read Elias Canetti’s book and probably suggested the idea,74 Fischer aligned himself with this highly contemporary form of American domesticity – to own a home – even if only as an aspiration. Meanwhile his life in his small Brooklyn apartment on the periphery of society attracted criticism. The comparison suggests that the chess-player is always a figure played for spectacle

162 Monsters

rather than character, a lesson rather than a life, blurring together all previous iterations. In contrast to Fischerele’s castle, Ginzburg noted dismissively that Bobby’s house was ‘located on the edge of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district where the homicide and general crime rate is among the highest in the city’, a fourroom apartment in a four-storey walk-up with ‘a barber shop and a candy store on the ground floor … The gutter was littered with pizza crusts, ice-cream wrappers, and empty beer cans.’ Within this world was Fischer’s chess existence, ‘a library of some two hundred chess books, piles of chess magazines, and an inlaid chess table made to order for him in Switzerland … three beds in the apartment, each with a chessboard beside it’.75 Darrach’s portrayal of Fischer’s hotel room in 1974 creates a similar impression. His room is a modern mad-­scientist’s den – reminiscent in some ways of the nineteenth-century description of a chess-player’s abode by ‘a tenth-rate chess player’, mentioned earlier. Darrach describes a room which ‘looked like a terminal moraine of bachelorhood. Bedclothes in tortured piles on the floor. Socks, underwear, bags, n­ ewspapers, magazines jumbled on the spare bed. Boxes stacked all over the couch, and on the floor between the beds a single graceful banana peel.’76 Within this mess, ‘the only clean place in the room was a small table by the window, where a set of handsome wooden-chessmen had been set up for play. Serenely an altar in the debris of battle.’77 Perhaps confirming that the physical location is less important than the ‘aura’ created by the chess-player, Darrach also describes the ‘uncanny’ nature of Fischer’s practice and the transformative impact it had on him, providing a place of meditation in which, ‘like a turtle he shrank into himself and gathered his world about him’.78 Preparing himself by turning on the radio and listening to ‘soft rock from London’, out came the Russian chess magazines. Eyes smoked with introspection, he played through 10, 15, 25 games at frenzied speed, slamming the pieces at the board like darts and muttering savage or mocking or fascinated comments under his breath. It was genius in full rage and it went on for almost an hour before he glanced up and remembered I was there … Then his eyes smoked again and he raced through a dozen more games.79

Physically isolated from others with ‘just a small circle of undemanding electronic acquaintances’, Fischer was portrayed as ‘a man alone in a monomania’.80 Both Ginzburg’s and Darrach’s articles suggest the world-within-world nature of Fischer’s existence, and the chess-player as a secluded, monk-like figure, studying obscure, hermetic knowledge, while portraying chess as a ‘secret ritual’.81 If Fischer was portrayed as physically other for a chess-player, then he was



Red, black, white, and blue 163

also ascribed a metaphysical power, a kind of supernatural intensity that affected those watching and playing him, which is hinted at by Darrach. Fischer as a ‘chess wizard’82 again brings to mind the secret, almost mystical nature of chess.83 Perfect scores in the 1963 and 1964 US Championship, where Fischer achieved a clean sweep, demonstrated that his progress from child prodigy to potential World Championship contender continued. His performance at the 1970 Interzonal tournament further emphasised the transfixing effect Fischer possessed, likened to Alexander Alekhine’s fierce gaze. With a score of 18.5 points, 3.5 ahead of his contemporaries Larsen, Geller, and Huebner, Fischer was far ahead of the competition. Wolfgang Uhlmann, a competitor in the tournament, stated that ‘there is a vitality in his games; the other grandmasters seem to get an inferiority complex. It should be remembered with what ease Gligoric and I lost to him, as if we had been hypnotized.’84 Brady comments on the growing atmosphere surrounding Fischer towards the end of 1970, noting that ‘it was becoming obvious that Fischer was beginning to establish an unmistakeable mystique. Alekhine had it, as did Tal; often their opponents would believe that some force was present at the board. Benko even wore sunglasses once to counter Tal’s “hypnotic gaze”.’85 Brady’s description of Fischer talks of an ‘unnerving’ force of spirit at the board, a singular focus on his own game, rarely leaving the table, sensitive to noise and disturbances around him – an artist in his workshop creating an ‘unforgettable’ impact, the ‘visual impact of a genius’, clear even to the ‘less sophisticated player’.86 In contrast to the on-board action, Brady, again confirming the above impression, noted that ‘unlike such vaudevillians as [Howard] Staunton … who histrionically roll their eyes, grimace, stroke their brows, and render audible sighs or comments concerning the agony of their forthcoming creations, Fischer is mysteriously silent, curt and impeccably courteous’.87 Yet it was his 6–0 victories against Mark Taimonov and Bent Larsen that confirmed Fischer’s extreme psychological impact on his opponents, which led to the title eliminator match with Petrosian and a World Championship match with Boris Spassky. Historically, Fischer’s shutout of his first opponent was almost incomparable; perhaps only the 1876 Wilhelm Steinitz 7–0 victory over Blackburne surpassed it. Despite one newspaper claiming that ‘the match with Larsen will not be as easy for Fischer as his match with Taimanov. At 35, Larsen is at the height of his creative and practical powers’, Fischer repeated his earlier score.88 This second consecutive 6–0 victory was unprecedented and his 19 straight victories surpassed Steinitz’s 16-match victory streak in Vienna in 1873. Sovietsky Sport declared simply that ‘a miracle has occurred’.89 One reader in Sports Illustrated worked out, with slightly suspect maths, that the odds of winning 12 in a row were 300,000 to 1.90 While some calculated odds, journalists

164 Monsters

compared the feat to pitching ‘19 no-hitters in a row’, and stated that ‘chess experts [were] groping for a parallel to make Fischer’s feat intelligible to nonplayers’.91 The variety of language used to describe this 19–0 streak hinted at the monstrous, the violent, the mechanical, the transcendent, the scientific, the religious, and the medical. One headline stated that ‘He Trains with Intensity of a Boxer’, another that ‘Chess “Machine” Wins’.92 The New York Times named ‘the strange malady called “Fischer-Fear”’,93 while stating that a ‘psychological factor’ had played a part in his victory.94 The Soviet grandmaster Yuri Averbach claimed that ‘there is some strange magnetic influence in Bobby’95 and that Fischer had ‘broken’ Petrosian’s spirit, partially justifying Fischer’s claims that ‘the Russians … are afraid of me. They have been afraid of me for years.’96 Larry Evans, writing in Sports Illustrated, supported this assertion, stating that ‘from the start of Fischer’s career the Soviet authorities have depicted him almost universally as an unoriginal and uncreative player … their emphasis on his flaws is a measure of their fear of Fischer.’97 The Soviet chess authorities had even, through the ‘All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Sports, which studied the psychology of sports … create[d] a secret laboratory … to analyze Fischer’s games [and] … to “solve” the mystery of Fischer’s prowess, in addition to analyzing his personality and behavior’.98

Complexity Bobby Fischer’s complex cultural image demonstrates the multifaceted, fragmented popular image of the chess-player. As child prodigy, as schoolboy, as genius, as anti-communist, as celebrity, as challenger to the World Championship, by 1972 Fischer represented, through his chess-playing, the outsider in American society; the outsider in international narratives of chess, challenging the Soviet chess machine while hypocritically becoming the embodiment of American values; and the outsider within American chess-playing circles, due to his spiky, Jekyll-and-Hyde persona and seemingly supernatural powers. There exists no single Bobby Fischer identity, despite the large number of works and articles that have tried to pin him down as ‘genius’, ‘mad’, or any other adjective. To restate, ‘the monster’s body is a cultural body … an embodiment of a certain cultural moment, of a time, a feeling, and a place’.99 Fischer became the most popular representative of chess, becoming the chess-player in American culture, embodying its perceived attributes – as varied as those attributes might be. To the American popular mind, chess was a mental horizon – an unfamiliar space where strange goings-on could occur, distant enough to be exoticised. Yet the cultural image of Fischer was also made to carry the burden of chess-



Red, black, white, and blue 165

players of the past, even if in doing so a number of contradictions emerged. The chess-player, a form suspended between forms and composed of other forms, located at the edges of culture, populating unfamiliar spaces, and linked with the weight of chess past, refusing easy categorisation, represented a contested space in which competing narratives with competing priorities produced variations on the same story, while being composed of geographic, bodily, and temporal components.100 This distance between chess and American journalists and authors such as Ginzburg produced works in which the distance between the literary chess-player and Fischer was not so clear, highlighting how, for most Americans, the chess-player was primarily experienced as a literary figure, through the newspaper article or within other forms of fiction. Fischer was, in these cultural representations, subhuman, everyday human, and supernatural transhuman. Such notions highlight the way that Fischer can be seen in terms of the concept of the monster. From the earliest reports, his youth placed him at odds with the common image of the chess-player – an image which relied less on reality than on easy clichés of intelligence. Attempts to contain and domesticate his chess-playing genius within the framework of childhood and schoolwork early on were linked with his unconventional appearance and clothing. By adopting the ‘uniform’ of suit and tie, Fischer moved closer to the conventional stereotype of the chess-player, yet even this change was used to demarcate him from other players – his overly tailored appearance meant that, for writers such as Howard and Ginzburg, Fischer remained on the margins of his own community. Indeed, he remained at a distance both from ‘normal’ society and other chess-players. Brad Darrach’s images of a Neanderthal, Henry Moore’s warped statues, and a devout monk placed Fischer at various distances from so-called norms but never at the centre. Fischer’s supernatural, hypnotic impact on his opponents further highlighted his otherness, becoming ‘a warning against exploration of … uncertain demesnes’.101 The hints of abnormal mental ability, anti-social beliefs, and behaviour pursued him, posing questions about American culture’s ‘assumptions about … [the] perception of difference’.102

Notes 1 Quoted in ‘Chess legend Bobby Fischer dies at 64’, BBC news, 18 January 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7195840.stm (accessed January 2008). 2 D. Johnson, White King and Red Queen (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), p. 123. 3 E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), pp. 1–40.

166 Monsters

4 A. S. Mittman, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’, in A. S. Mittman (ed.) with P. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 8. 5 Garry Kasparov, quoted in F. Waitzkin, ‘King Kasparov’, New York Times, 7 October 1990. 6 J. J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture: Seven Theses’, in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 19. 7 See also F. W. Hoffmann and W. G. Bailey, ‘Bobby Fischer and the Chess Craze’, in F. W. Hoffmann and W. G. Bailey, Sports and Recreation Fads (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 129–32. 8 R. Waterhouse, ‘“Beowulf” as Palimpsest’, in Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory, p. 29. 9 R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, quoted in ibid., pp. 28–9. 10 J. J. Cohen, quoted in Mittman, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. 11 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, p. 17. 12 Ibid., p. 18. 13 Ibid. 14 S. Rachels, ‘The Reviled Art’, in B. Hale (ed.), Philosophy Looks at Chess (Chicago: Open Court, 2008), p. 211. 15 A. L. Prescott, ‘The Odd Couple: Gargantua and Tom Thumb’, in Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory, p. 75. 16 ‘Pat On The Back’, Sports Illustrated, 30 April 1956, p. 68. 17 I. Chernev, The Bright Side of Chess (New York: Dover, 1965), p. 4. 18 F. Waitzkin, Searching for Bobby Fischer (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 11. 19 See 1921 appearance of Samuel Reshevsky and Charlie Chaplin, and advertisement with Samuel Reshevsky for Wm. F. Drueke’s chess pieces, www.peterspioneers. com/Chaplin.jpg and www.peterspioneers.com/Reshevsky.jpg (accessed July 2013). 20 G. Talese, ‘Another Child Prodigy Stirs Chess World’, New York Times, 23 June 1957, p. 173. 21 ‘Scoreboard’, Sports Illustrated, 26 August 1957, p. 6. 22 W. Nack, ‘The Kid’, Newsweek, 20 January 1958. 23 P. Underwood, ‘Yugoslavs Lionize Fischer, U.S. Chess Prodigy’, New York Times, 11 September 1958, p. 46. 24 ‘Events & Discoveries’, Sports Illustrated, 22 December 1958, p. 27. 25 See G. Koltanowski, ‘Chess: The Game Offers The Competitive Clash Americans Always Demand’, San Francisco Chronicle, 9 May 1948, p. 7L. 26 K. J. Hayes, ‘Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 56.4 (2002), p. 446. 27 Rachels, ‘The Reviled Art’, p. 214. 28 D. Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: PUB, 2010), pp. 12, 13. 29 ‘The Battle of the Brains’, Time, 100.5 (31 July 1972), p. 33. 30 F. Brady, Endgame: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Bobby Fischer (London: Pier 9, 2012), pp. 149, 150.



Red, black, white, and blue 167

31 Ibid. 32 R. Cantwell, ‘The Boy is the Master’, Newsweek, 16 January 1961. 33 Brady, Endgame, p. 73. 34 Ibid., p. 108. 35 J. Howard, ‘One-Track Mastermind’, Life, 21 February 1964, p. 100. 36 R. Ginzburg, ‘Portrait of a Genius as a Young Chess Master’, Harper’s Magazine (January 1962), pp. 49–55. 37 F. Brady, Profile of a Prodigy (New York: Dover, rev. edn, 1989), p. 35. 38 R. Cantwell, ‘The Genius From Brooklyn’, Sports Illustrated, 23 January 1961, p. 56. For another examination of clothing and chess-players, see H. E. Bird, Chess History and Reminiscences (London: Dean, 1893), particularly Chapter 2, entitled ‘Retrospect, and Habits, and Idiosyncracies of Chess Players: Temperament, Attitude and Deportment, Style, Stakes, Losing, Lookers-on, Oddities, and Patrons’. 39 ‘Faces In The Crowd’, Sports Illustrated, 22 September 1958, p. 15. 40 Brady, Endgame, p. 5. 41 Fischer, quoted in ibid. 42 Brady, Profile, p. 8. 43 E. Harrison, ‘Bobby Fischer, Chess Hero, Back To Realities of Brooklyn’, New York Times, 16 September 1958, p. 29. 44 ‘Bobby Fischer Hailed; Grandmaster, 15, Gets Watch at Marshall Chess Club’, New York Times, 19 September 1958; ‘A Medal For Bobby Fischer’, New York Times, 9 January 1959. 45 W. Phillips, ‘Boy Chess Expert Delayed Abroad’, New York Times, 14 September 1958, p. 44. 46 ‘Fischer Will Face Russians In Chess’, New York Times, 14 September 1958; ‘Fischer Defeats Romo In Chile’, St. Petersburg Times (AP), 4 May 1959, p. 6C; ‘U.S. Schoolboy In Third Place’, The Leader-Post (AP), 1 April 1959, p. 29. 47 ‘Fischer Captures Open Chess Title’, New York Times, 17 August 1957, p. 12; ‘Youngest Player Wins Chess Title On Late Decision’, Christian Science Monitor, 17 August 1957, p. 14; ‘14-Year-Old Is Chess Champ’, Youngstown Vindicator (AP), 17 August 1957, p. 2. 48 Mrs R. Fischer, ‘19th Hole: The Readers Take Over’, Sports Illustrated, 17 August 1959, p. 69; and ‘Mother Seeks Funds For Chess Prodigy’, Sarasota Journal (AP), 7 August 1959, p. 11. 49 ‘Mother Of Genius Has Difficult Job’, Lakeland Ledger (AP), 7 December 1958, p. 12C. For a rather different prodigy ‘origin’ story, see J. R. Capablanca, ‘How I Learned To Play Chess’, Munsey’s Magazine, October 1916, pp. 94–6, and Q. Reynolds, ‘One Man’s Mind’, Collier’s Magazine, 2 March 1935, pp. 19, 28. In the former, Capablanca, world chess champion 1921–27, explains how, improbably, he remembered playing his first game of chess at the age of four, in which he defeated his father. 50 Howard, ‘One-Track Mastermind’, p. 98. 51 ‘The Greatest Chess Player – And He Admits It’, Miami News [from New York Times], 29 August 1965, p. 7A.

168 Monsters

52 Ibid. 53 See A. Horowitz, ‘Chess: Pomar, Spanish Wunderkind, Is Grown But Still A Wonder’, New York Times, 22 November 1962, p. 26. 54 Brady, Prodigy, p. 46. 55 Brady, Endgame, p. 165. 56 Ibid., p. 164. 57 Ibid., p. 147. 58 Ginzburg, ‘Portrait of a Genius’. 59 Ibid., p. 55. 60 Brad Darrach, ‘Bobby Fischer vs. the World’ (1974), quoted in Waitzkin, Searching for Bobby Fischer, pp. 176–7. 61 Ibid. 62 D. Cavett, ‘Was It Only A Game?’, New York Times On The Web, 8 February 2008, www.chessbase.com/home/Tabld/211/PostId/4004440 (accessed July 2013). 63 B. Darrach, ‘Bobby Fischer Is A Ferocious Winner’, Life, 12 November 1971, p. 52. 64 B. Darrach, ‘Bobby Fischer, Demon Of The Chess World’, Life, 23 July 1971, p. 61. Fischer was described during a match in 1972 as possessing a ‘gangling body … his big head cradled in his hands’; E. B. Edmondson, ‘All The World’s A Pawn’, Newsweek, 31 July 1972, pp. 42–6. A year earlier, interviewed at home, he had ‘a head too small for his big body’; Darrach, ‘Ferocious Winner’, p. 50. Clearly, his head did not grow. The contrasting home and work environments influenced description. 65 B. Darrach quote, 23 February 1975, http://en.chessbase.com/home/Tabld/211/ PostId/4006837 (accessed July 2013). 66 Burt Hochberg article from Chess Life and Review (May 1975), pp. 299–300, quoted in Edward Winter’s Chess Explorations 52 (29 November 2010), http://en.chessbase. com/post/edward-winter-s-che-explorations-52- (accessed February 2017). 67 Frank Brady article from Chess Life and Review (December 1975), p. 808, quoted in Edward Winter’s Chess Explorations 52 (29 November 2010), http://en.chessbase. com/post/edward-winter-s-che-explorations-52- (accessed February 2017). 68 D. Edmonds and J. Eidinow, Bobby Fischer Goes to War (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 153. 69 Extracts from Y. Seirawin and G. Stefanovic, No Regrets (Seattle: International Chess Enterprises, 1992), quoted in Edward Winter’s Chess Explorations 52 (29 November 2010). 70 R. Chartier, ‘Histoire des mentalités’, in L. D. Kritzman (ed.), The Columbia History of French Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 56. 71 E. Canetti, ‘Auto-da-Fé’, in B. Hochberg (ed.), The 64-Square Looking Glass: The Great Game of Chess in World Literature (New York: Times Books, 1993), p. 139. 72 Ginzburg, ‘Portrait of a Genius’, p. 55. 73 Canetti, ‘Auto-da-Fé’, p. 133. 74 Brady, Endgame, p. 165. 75 Ginzburg, ‘Portrait of a Genius’, p. 55. 76 Darrach, ‘Ferocious Winner’, p. 50.



77 78 79 80 81 82

Red, black, white, and blue 169

Ibid. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. L. Thomas, ‘Bobby Fisher Is Brilliant’, Youngstown Vindicator, 5 January 1964, p. D16; and ‘20-Year-Old Wins His Sixth U.S. Chess Championship’, Ocala Star-Banner (NY, AP), 5 January 1964, p. 26. 83 Steiner refers to Fischer’s ‘eerie splendor’, and ‘peculiar force’; G. Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 29. 84 Brady, Prodigy, p. 179. 85 Ibid., p. 180. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 A. Kirshner, [Untitled], Toledo-Blade, 4 July 1970, p. 8. 89 Brady, Prodigy, p. 191. 90 ‘19th Hole: The Readers Take Over’, Sports Illustrated, 16 August 1971, p. 88. 91 R. Cantwell, ‘Maybe You Can Win Them All’, Sports Illustrated, 2 August 1971, p. 18. 92 A. Hencken, ‘He Trains With Intensity Of A Boxer’, Herald-Journal (AP), 12 September 1971, p. 3; ‘Chess “Machine” Wins’, Telegraph-Herald (AP), 9 August 1971, p. 2. 93 H. C. Schoenberg, ‘The Strange Malady Called “Fischer-Fear”’, New York Times, 14 November 1971, p. SM32. 94 A. Horowitz, ‘Chess: Psychological Factor A Spur In Fischer’s Winning Streak’, New York Times, 19 July 1971, p. 22. 95 ‘Fischer Through To Final’, Age (AP), 28 October 1971, p. 28. 96 ‘Russia Cheating at Chess, Says Bobby Fischer’, The Times, 16 August 1971, p. 1. 97 L. Evans, ‘Six Moves Toward A World Championship’, Sports Illustrated, 21 June 1971, p. 59. 98 Brady, Endgame, p. 191. 99 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, p. 4. 100 Ibid., p. 7. 101 Ibid., p. 12. 102 Ibid., p. 20.

8 Performance notes: absence and presence in Reykjavik, Iceland, 1972 Good guys and bad guys Bobby Fischer’s 1972 World Championship contest with the Soviet title-holder Boris Spassky, held in the Exhibition Hall at Laugardalshöll Stadium in Reykjavik, Iceland, formally began on 11 July and, after 21 games, ended on 31 August with Fischer victorious. His reign was short-lived. Failing to agree to a contest with the Soviet challenger Anatoly Karpov, he was stripped of the title in April 1975, and only returned to competitive play in 1992 with a parodic replication of his title match against Spassky. This was held in Yugoslavia, then subject to restrictions on commercial relations with the United States among other international sanctions, and played under the delusional banner of ‘The World Chess Championship’. Fischer’s reign was a short burst of spring in a Soviet winter. The spatially and temporally restricted nature of his championship performance in Iceland encourages a similar type of analysis to the chess adventures of George Walker at the Café de la Régence in Victorian Paris, and Garry Kasparov on the thirty-ninth storey of the Equitable Center, New York during his contest with IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. Each space encourages a dive into emotions, feelings, senses, and underlying tensions. Each space encourages a consideration of chess-play’s performance architectures, the objects and devices used to craft atmosphere and theatre. Each space encourages a return to the past, a resurrection of the historical chess-player, a haunting. There is a black-and-white photograph of a slightly bedraggled Bobby Fischer from July 1972, standing alone, looking out of frame, wrapped in a chequered blanket, hair damp, with stern-eyed expression, while mist from an Icelandic hot spring drifts over the air.1 The image highlights the unworldly dislocation and absence of Fischer and the site of his 1972 World Championship victory, as well as his physical presence in the world, weathered but alive. It reaffirms his cultural image as always the embodiment of a certain cultural time, feeling, and space, while dislocating him from those devices of chronology, emotion, and



Performance notes 171

geography by which one searches and finds.2 Before 1972 Fischer had appeared as a monster called up from the depths by the demands of popular culture, an adolescent Grendel rampaging on the margins of society, a ‘prowler of the borderlands’,3 a distorted form, ‘warped in the shape of a man’.4 In 1972 he became a Beowulf, ‘the mightiest man on earth’,5 embodying ‘the specificity of an individual claiming a genuine historical role and the universal values which mythological status allows’.6 Distant Reykjavik became the centre, like the other haunted houses considered above, of civilisation. Binaries of metropolis and periphery were distorted. By slaying the Soviet dragon, the culmination of a decade of anti-communist trash-talk, and rupturing the line of Soviet champions, Fischer gained a mythic quality as Hero,7 as someone who enters the world, ‘is victorious over giants and dragons … and becomes a king’,8 or, rather, a superhero, like Superman, ‘a product of the human imagination … our highest, kindest, wisest, toughest’,9 a kind of ‘spectacular immigrant … participat[ing] in the American dream’.10 Fischer occupied these roles even as, due to his temperamental behaviour, his battle came to be characterised as one ‘between the good guy and the bad guy’, the ‘cultured, literate, witty, handsome, well-mannered’ champion and the ‘petulant, secretive, inconsiderate, ungracious’ challenger.11 Themes of absence and presence have threaded throughout this book. The chess-player moves between being seen and not being seen, to invisibility, excess, and death – the gamester, playing chess instead of attending to his duties; the melancholic dissociated from everyday life; the obsessive neglecting behavioural customs; the virtuoso at the centre of attention; the virtuoso at a distance from his audience; the virtuoso playing ceaselessly, to death, playing themselves out of existence; the visitor to the spectacle stepping outside familiar social procedures; the automaton chess-player with its hidden secrets; the automaton chess-player inside a locked room; the automaton chess-player as a black box holding in a swirling violence of historical forces; the chess-player in isolation perfecting his craft; the chess-player in isolation losing his mind. This chapter takes up the issues of absence and presence once more within the context of Fischer’s 1972 victory.

Absence and presence Absence and presence are shared aspects of the three cultural images of virtuoso, automaton, and monster. Fischer’s participation in each of these three types can be seen in his actions during the match, which demonstrated that, in some ways, the limits of respectability are the limits of visibility. The two principal themes below, intermingled, concern Fischer’s drawing attention to himself

172 Monsters

and his attempts to become invisible. The transformation of the Exhibition Hall into a magical, silent theatre, wrapped in a political desire for display, a way to engage with but keep at bay twentieth-century anxieties, saw Fischer demand an unusual degree of control over matters of presentation, matters that generated specific feelings, emotions, or mental states. His subsequent disappearance from active chess until 1992 only highlighted any seemingly spectral qualities evidenced in Reykjavik. With his no-shows, disagreements, and complaints, he sought to submerge into total isolation at the board, and to disappear from sound, through complaints concerning the noise of the spectators, the building itself, and the electronic equipment in the room. He sought to disappear from observation, from sight, plunging the spectators into darkness and banishing the television cameras from his world, seeking both to become invisible, seemingly the negation of the virtuoso, and through his obsession over performance details to veil the outside world, while claiming a central, highly visible role as a Cold War warrior.

Preparations The selection of Reykjavik as the site of the contest was, unusually for World Championship chess, a matter of business, seemingly confirming Fischer’s ability to suck all aspects of the performance into his virtuosic sphere. Opened to bidding, the Icelandic authorities offered $125,000, or about 50 cents for every Icelander,12 to host the match, ‘a process which would in the past have been announced by FIDE [the World Chess Federation] at a neutral venue’ and ‘appeared as a one-inch item somewhere near the bottom of page 23 in your local newspaper’.13 Later estimates for the cost of the match were put at $200,000 (and losses at between $50,000 and $60,000 for the Icelandic chess authorities).14 Fifteen bids were received, from Colombia to Belgrade, from $40,000 to $152,000, a consequence, said the New York Times, of ‘Fischer magic’.15 Disagreement over the location and the requirement for neutrality led to an initial compromise by Dr Euwe, head of FIDE. It was agreed that the first half of the match would be held in Belgrade and the second half in Reykjavik. This arrangement was rejected by both parties.16 Regarding the financial aspect, Fischer described the initial offers as ‘not bad – they’ll have to do’.17 After an agreement was seemingly announced, Fischer decided against playing the second half of the game in Iceland, a manoeuvre perceived as an act of sporting mindgames by some, including the New York Times, which compared the pre-match dealings as akin to ‘the publicity build-up for an Ali–Frazier fight’.18 At the last minute, Fischer agreed, on the verge of disqualification, ‘to the terms already



Performance notes 173

set out by the federation’, only for Belgrade to withdraw from hosting any part of the match.19 Efforts to find a replacement venue for the match’s first half saw Paris mentioned, then Puerto Rico, then Australia, and the Netherlands.20 Eventually, the Soviet chess federation accepted Reykjavik as the site of the entire 24-game match.21 Fischer remained ‘incommunicado’ on the issue, but did at last agree to play the whole match in Reykjavik, ‘or anywhere else in the free world’.22 Lothar Schmid was appointed the match referee.23 Fischer’s insistence on television coverage being organised, and his complaints that the lack of technical facilities in Iceland made coverage difficult and could harm efforts to film the event, had been a factor in establishing the match’s location. His chief aim, Fischer claimed, ‘was to see that his friends in the Americas could for the first time see their representative play for the world championship’.24 This was Fischer in virtuoso mode – concerned about how he would be seen and where he would be seen, an ironic insistence in view of later events, projecting an image of the spectacle-lover, eager to augment his status as a representative of the ‘free world’, to attract new fans, and to maximise financial returns. Yet by being frustratingly silent or invisible during the negotiations – telling reporters to ‘shove off, I’m entitled to my privacy’,25 for example, and leaving communication until the last possible moment – his virtuosic motivations were seemingly subordinated to his sense of independence. Concerning television rights, Channel 13 planned a telecast of the game, outlining each move, to be carried by WNET/12 and offered nationally to the Public Broadcasting Service. Transmission from Reykjavik, via a telephone line for the maximum five hours of each match, totalled about $1,000 a day – a not insubstantial sum.26 The eventual coverage was led by Shelby Lyman, and allegedly gathered a million-viewer following.27 Concerning individual payments, Fischer received $78,125 for his victory and Spassky $46,875. Thirty per cent of the television and film rights were divided equally. Fischer also received an additional $125,000 to guarantee his participation from an English businessman. This later ‘appearance fee’ was seen as proof of Fischer’s vulgarity in some quarters, particularly the British press. A cartoon by Keith Waite for the Daily Mirror in July 1972, trapped between anti-communist and anti-Fischer stances, was captioned ‘Mind you, it will be a marvellous game if they ever get down to it.’28 In the image a table with a chessboard and two chess clocks sits between two empty chairs. The arena surrounding this arrangement is a high-sided barrel. The last spectators are leaving while a ringmaster, complete with top hat and whip, and a man wearing a tuxedo both stare up at the trapeze act which is ongoing above. Fischer and Spassky are swinging around while £50 notes flutter down. Another cartoon from the Daily Express portrayed a child playing chess with an older woman. The caption reads,

174 Monsters

‘I’d like to see this Bobby Fischer try his tantrums here – when Grandma says “play” – you play’, equating Fischer once again with infantile personality traits.29 Yet Fischer fans found a convenient fig-leaf in Cold War politics. If the Daily Mirror and Daily Express were more willing to highlight the money-grabbing aspects and put the blame on Fischer himself, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times followed a different path. The former praised Fischer’s financial acumen, stating, ‘Fischer … is … good box office and a prime piece of property’, and speculating on a million-dollar return match in Las Vegas.30 Another impression of Fischer, which appeared in Sports Illustrated’s year review, held him up as a model of sporting purity after his rejection of sponsorship from Kentucky Fried Chicken.31 Ironically, after 1972, one of the few tournaments Fischer did participate in was a tournament sponsored by the millionaire George Church – owner of a fried chicken franchise.32 The same article also recast Fischer, in all seriousness, as a figure of Nietzschean integrity … Bobby Fischer looms like some distant, unscaled peak. Other[s] … can be … controlled … by public opinion … the professional athletic Establishment … the pressures of the marketplace … but Fischer … does not endorse, he is not managed, he is not available.33

Matters of ‘Nietzschean integrity’ aside, when Newsweek commented that Fischer was ‘well-known’ for holding up sponsors for more money, they were closer to the crux of the cause of his delaying tactics and tantrums.34 As he stated, his gamesmanship was good for the bank account. I want to get some money together. Like take professional football. All these athletes making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Contracts, endorsements. If there’s room for all of them, there ought to be room for one of me. I’m a great goodwill ambassador for the United States!35

His use of the phrase ‘one of me’ rather than the collective noun ‘chess-players’ likewise suggests a personal motivation rather than a collegiate one. This grasping for cash was not a new occurrence. In 1962 he had criticised millionaire patrons of chess for their parsimony, suggesting that ‘they give a thousand [dollars] or two and they think it’s a big deal’.36 Frank Brady, Fischer’s biographer, saw all this from another perspective. ‘In a way,’ he wrote, ‘Bobby’s well-chronicled donnybrooks reflect his instinctive, nonverbal revulsion against the vulgarization of chess. “Chess is like playing a concert”, he once said. He considers it a private affair and wants to copyright his games.’37 The matter is not a simple one, but it takes a peculiar perspective to think that Fischer was not eager to see this ‘vulgarisation’ happen himself, to the extent that he benefited from it



Performance notes 175

and encouraged it, and an equally peculiar view to think that increased financial reward could come without increased media exposure, more visibility, and less control over the performance. What is characterised as vulgar here – spectators, ticket sales, and popular media attention – were hardly new features in any case. The implications of the virtuosic arrangement Fischer desired – more money but without an acceptance of the responsibilities of spectacle and visibility – played a critical role in the match. While Fischer would not have seen his demands for proper pay and media coverage as vices, his actions were certainly considered less positively by both the Soviet chess delegation, the Soviet press, and the citizens of Iceland. Fischer’s opponent, Boris Spassky, said that the challenger’s ‘interest in money reflects an effort to assert himself as a person. It may also be the importance that is generally attached in the United States to the size of fees.’38 More strongly worded criticisms came from the Soviet press, which ‘denounce[d] Bobby as some sort of money-hungry monster’.39 Tass, the Soviet press agency, suggested that Fischer was motivated by ‘a disgusting spirit of gain’.40 Other Soviet commentators suggested that ‘It is a money-grubbing society like [the USA] that produces a Bobby Fischer. If anything like this ever happened in the Soviet Union, the pressure of public opinion would never stand for it.’41 In Izvestia, a letter was published under the headline ‘How Much More Can Anyone Fuss?’ Sent by members of the chess club of Moscow’s Likhachev automotive plant, the letter suggested that Fischer had been ‘openly introducing into the game a spirit of sordid utilitarianism, money-grubbing and tactlessness’.42 Fischer’s apology to Spassky over the delayed start of the match – ‘I simply became carried away by my petty dispute over money with the Icelandic chess organizers’43 – suggested that he partly agreed (or at least agreed to get things moving again) with the divergent images of the game between Soviet and non-Soviet: ‘Russian chess [says Marxist-Leninist teaching], a reflection of the Russian people, is noble, daring, fertile, imaginative; Western chess is decadent, bourgeois, imperialist.’44 The release of Fischer’s ‘14 Points’ – his demands to the Icelandic organisers – including ‘a request for a private swimming pool, a private tennis court, a new car and more reading material’ hardly helped matters.45 Within this atmosphere, an old image of the chess-player was able to emerge when the newly ordained Lutheran minister, Revd Olafur Jens Sigurdson, preaching his first sermon, criticised both Fischer and Spassky. Fischer, he stated in a religious broadcast, was guilty of the ‘sin of greed’, referring to his demands for more money, and Spassky was guilty of the ‘sin of anger’, referring to ‘his threat to walk out unless he got the apology from Fischer’.46 Both the hint of sin or vice and the Soviet image of Fischer as ‘uncultured’ or nyekulturni persisted.47 Brady noted that ‘chess in Russia is part of the old intellectual tradition; chess masters like Tal and

176 Monsters

Botvinnik are men of the world, masters of several languages, highly educated, and Bobby’s indifference to such things irritated and disturbed them’.48 In prioritising money, seemingly at the expense of his own reputation and the game, he appeared doubly nyekulturni.

Exteriors: body and Reykjavik Fischer’s uncultured image was a point of some contention, particularly when his mental faculties were frequently presented in the context of an athletic, physical training programme. The New York Times and Life, among others, portrayed Fischer participating in sports and physical activities. Harry Benson’s photographs of Fischer in 1972 included images of Fischer underwater, nude in the shower, playing with horses, striding through fields, and participating in other displays of manliness.49 In parallel with the images of intense concentration at the board, they demonstrate a complex relationship to codes of American masculinity and mental superiority. Talk-show host Dick Cavett, after interviewing Fischer in 1971, suggested that his audience had expected ‘a frail little fellow with thick glasses and [were] … surprised by the width of [his] shoulders and the fact that [he looked] like an athlete’.50 Just as the coexistence of mental ability and physical prowess challenged a certain cultural image of the chessplayer, so Fischer’s individuality, praised by Sports Illustrated, also went against a trend towards teamwork and cooperation. One history has noted how, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, ‘Manliness … increasingly meant being a “team player”, a successful business man … It required men to cultivate a winning manner and to “dress for success” by wearing “power” clothes.’51 Fischer’s part in this is ambiguous and open to debate. As the previous chapter demonstrated, Fischer was willing to alter his public image to fit with the idea of what he wanted and what he thought he should be. In part, he appeared a throwback to a prewar form of rugged American individualism. Images of Fischer as a cowboy in Benson’s photographic history hint at this. Perhaps ‘Nietzschean integrity’ was not, after all, too far off the mark. What then of Reykjavik, the ‘land of Ice and Fire’, the ‘land where the sun departs in winter and the landscape has a lunar look’?52 Previous chapters on Victorian Paris and twentieth-century New York have shown that chess performance transforms, and is itself transformed by, specific spatial contexts. The Café de la Régence reflected back on to Paris as much as it reflected Paris; likewise for high-tech, alienated New York, haunted by technological ghosts. A pervasive aspect of the coverage in 1972 emphasised Iceland’s combination of the civilised and the stark violence of nature which, in a distorted feedback loop,



Performance notes 177

influenced coverage of the chess match itself, which in turn influenced readings of the landscape, and so on. The location’s principal characteristic appeared to be its hybrid nature. Alex Ross described ‘a charcoal sketch of an unfinished world’ which interlocked with a ‘fashionable modern place’.53 A place of mystery and mythology was suggested, a suitable place for boundary-pushing art and magic. A place where gods were sung of, a suitable place for the chess-player. The New York Times pamphlet on the match began with a short essay by Katharine Scherman, some fragments of which give the general impression: Some priests … wrote some sagas … a lot of volcanoes … no darkness in summer … rai[n] … a creation of the sea … ragged outline softened by snow … born of ocean … the product of a fault of the earth … uneasy turbulence … a new country … fire, ice and water … a place for those seeking solitude … away from … worldliness … nothing but ice … beautiful … a desert in the ocean … a land of singular peace and plenty.54

Willard Fiske’s Chess in Iceland and in Icelandic Literature (1905) further reminds one that Fischer’s match was in fact a return to a faraway place for the chessplayer. One legend described the islanders taking chess so seriously that losers at the game threw themselves over the high cliffs at Miogaroabarg.55 Mythologised or not, the cliff-top Icelandic chess-player is an important figure to keep in mind when considering Fischer’s actions in 1972, as he seemingly hurled himself towards oblivion.56

Interior: visibility and gloom Fischer and Spassky’s match took place in the Exhibition Hall of the Laugardalshöll Stadium. Their universe for the duration of the match was ‘a cavernous, domeshaped stadium (someone described it as a large Icelandic mushroom), with huge, white-covered sound baffles on the ceiling that resemble albino bats. The entire first floor was covered with carpeting to muffle the sound of entering and exiting spectators …’57 By July 1972 the two participants should have been ready to begin. However, Fischer’s location was somewhat ambiguous. In Iceland, the two most popular rumors were that he had arrived in the country about a week ago on a United States Air Force jet and was in hiding and that he had arrived, also about a week ago, in a Navy submarine, had been smuggled ashore in a rubber dinghy, and was in hiding.58

His worrying non-appearance at the opening ceremony proved more problematic, requiring an apology to start proceedings.

178 Monsters

In Walker’s Café de la Régence, sound and noise served as an immediate point of dislocation for the visitor who may have expected solemn silence. In 1972 the desire for silence (or muteness) overshadowed the entire match. Silence is romanticised on the one hand and thought terrifying on the other. Beneficial qualities of silence include peace, privacy, time to think, concentration, intensity, solitary existence, even independence. The ‘traditional’ idea of the chess-player proposed above was defined by ‘quiet’. Noise, conversely, is associated with sociality, communication, engagement with others, filling up space, and civilisation. Walker embraced cacophonous noise. Less positively, silence is associated with isolation, a vacuum, nothingness, positioned at the edge of sociability, and noise with overwhelming distraction, with clutter, confusion, and pollution, likewise at the edge of sociability. These emotional ­contexts of sound provide a starting point for a reading of Fischer’s match in terms of absence and presence. Fischer’s uneasy virtuosic stance was most apparent with regard to the television cameras which attempted to record the 1972 contest – cameras which Fischer, before the match began, had insisted on as a most important feature. Chess is not a television-friendly game. Its jargon, relatively high barriers to understanding, and lack of movement place a larger burden than for other games on the personalities of its practitioners and on off-the-board contexts. In agreeing to the conditions of the match, Fischer emphasised the importance of filming it so that American fans could see him. Yet throughout the 1972 match, he provided a lesson in how not to be seen – a lesson in how to turn invisible. After a delayed start, the first game took place, not on 2 July as originally planned, but on 11 July. At the last minute, Fischer complained about the television cameras above the stage, playing only when reassured that the issue would be dealt with the next day. In the first game he walked out for a while, after objecting to a television crew working from an aperture at the side of the stage.59 A Fischer blunder set the stage for a Spassky win. For game two, Fischer further demonstrated that his demands for perfect playing conditions would supersede any other factors, even playing. After complaining that he was being distracted by television cameras, he did not turn up.60 On 9 August Fischer again made a complaint to the match referee concerning ‘the excessive noise in the hall’. The Exhibition Hall, he had realised, was not designed for a chess match and had ‘very little acoustical treatment of the type required for such an event’. Suggesting some modifications, he proposed ‘the removal of at least seven of the rows of seats closest to the stage’, since the spectators were ‘so close, and so noisy, and the acoustics so poor’ that he could hear the opening of sweets, conversation, coughing, and laughing.61 In answer to these complaints, the Icelandic Chess Federation noted that ‘the [physical]



Performance notes 179

distance from spectator to stage was greater than in any previous chess match and that … the spectators were “the most quiet” [the grandmasters present had known] and the playing conditions by far the best they have ever witnessed’. Some rows of seats were removed, cellophane-wrapped food and sweets were banned, and children under 10 years old were kept out.62 The ‘folding seats were replaced with upholstered and consequently “soundless” chairs’.63 These were ‘clamped to the floor to maintain [a] mausoleum-like silence’.64 Many spectators had ‘high-powered binoculars with them’ with which to watch the match, such was the distance and their urge to close it.65 In short, every precaution was taken to accommodate the distancing between stage and spectator demanded by Fischer. ‘What do they expect him (Schmid) to do?’ asked one observer, ‘use nerve gas?’66 This extraordinary attention to sound prompted Arthur Koestler to label Fischer a ‘mimophant – a hybrid species: a cross between a mimosa and an elephant. … sensitive like a mimosa where his own feelings are concerned and thick-skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of others’.67 This regard for the performance architecture echoes a similar process in musical performance. The historical process of sacralisation occurred slowly through the process of shutting out external sound inputs and reaction, when ‘concerts began to take on cult-like aspects. The written score became a sacred object; improvisation was gradually phased out. Concert halls grew quiet and reserved, habits and attire formed’, and there arose ‘a general ban on applause’ during performance.68 Similarly, the Elizabethan theatrical stage had a riotous, colourful atmosphere compared to the theatres of today, where the audience is expected to sit politely and snooze.69 1972 brought similar aspects into focus regarding chess-play, whereby the audience was expected to be as serious as the player, silent, not eating, not laughing, not coughing, tip-toeing around like a fly in a spider’s web. The performance area extended to encompass the audience. Audiences responded with absence, expected to pay $5 per game or $75 for the whole match, with no reserved seats.70 On 5 August it was reported that ‘only the opening game came near selling out, and since then audiences have been averaging 600’, and were as low or lower than 350.71 Attendances did occasionally improve, however. Game sixteen, the largest audience of the match up until that point, was attended by 2,300 – a full house.72 For all Fischer’s concerns over money, both he and the Soviet delegation undoubtedly shared a belief in the cultural value of the game and all its aspects of performance. The non-arrival of Fischer at the first game – his non-presence keenly felt – signalled that he was willing not to compete if conditions were not perfect. Fischer as purist may seem a paradoxical reading to that suggested above, but the notion of the virtuoso, combining cash, performance, and skill,

180 Monsters

was based on the proper locational context of performance. As a non-referential activity, the chess matches relied upon exterior associations. Fischer’s activities can be seen as an expression of a belief – again one shared by the Soviet delegation – that the room and the objects of the chess performance should enshrine the ideas and philosophy of the performance; that the signifiers of a sign, in this case the chess pieces, the furniture, the relationship between spectator and player, should attune closely with what was signified, in this case the intellectual, cultural, and social superiority of the game. Consider for a moment a chess game played by Fischer on a bright pink board made of plastic, branded with Barbie logos and characters. What if each player were wearing a bright yellow suit? These would change the atmosphere. Other cultural performances highlight a similar connection between space and emotional context. Readings of other performances linked with space, such as the room of a Japanese tea ceremony, which embodies the spirit of tea which is aloneness and introverted, highlight the physical construction of appropriate states of mind.73 Each architectural or performance feature would ruin the effect if altered, incorrectly constructed, or done badly. The issue of how much attention should be given to playing conditions before actual play was considered in the letters pages of Sports Illustrated. Two perspectives were offered in letters in August 1972. One asked, What is this match for? The entertainment of the public or to establish the world chess champion? I agree Bobby Fischer should have thought over the consequences of selling the camera rights beforehand, but it is his privilege to have the cameras removed … If I were competing for the world title I would demand perfect conditions.74

Yet others thought that ‘Any athlete who is paid for a performance should … play to his utmost ability to please the spectators who support the game’.75 Intercutting this, a third letter linked Fischer’s demands with ‘his plan to outwit Spassky’76 – an action outside any visible virtuosic concern. Fischer’s movement between virtuosic stance and purist reflected his multiple identities. He had encouraged the ‘vulgarisation’ of the chess space, but also resisted it. Fischer’s attention to detail only grew throughout the match, encompassing more sensory disturbances and more objects within the space. To the silence demanded by Fischer was added the lighting and stage furniture of the performance area. As with the sound levels, ‘despite the considerable expense incurred by the sponsors who had installed special lighting and other equipment’, Fischer insisted on changes, seemingly in order to amplify his own visibility and strengthen his virtuosic status.77 To this end, the spectators were dimmed and the light increased in brightness on the stage before the contest



Performance notes 181

started, further exaggerating the division between spectator and player. Sports Illustrated compared the stage setting to something from 1984 in its combination of grey-coloured walls and muted, minimalist stage furniture, embellished only with six potted plants. Tension within the hall was ‘heightened by the pervasive gloom Fischer had insisted upon to help his concentration. Only the stage itself was lighted. A huge panel hung above the playing board to diffuse the waxen light from a bank of overhead lamps.’78 Green carpet covered the stage and there was an extra beige carpet under the table itself.79 By 14 July one newspaper report reckoned that ‘Fischer had complained about nearly every aspect of the match’, including the lighting conditions, the room temperature, and the chessboard and the table on which it was set. A compromise was reached concerning the temperature, the lighting was altered to Fischer’s tastes, the mahogany chess table altered, and the board fixed four times.80 Concerning these latter features, the chessboard was 300 pounds in weight and ‘made of inlaid marble by Icelandic artisans’. Initially, both players found the glare excessive, so acid was used to dull its shine.81 The Russian delegation had also complained and the glare was further reduced by making a new board, but the squares, 2⅝ inches square, were too large in relation to the chess pieces, disrupting sight lines and making it difficult to move the pieces.82 The board was remade again. The third board was constructed by Sigurdur Helgason, ‘an artisan who made his living cutting gravestones’ for a group of presumably less choosy customers. The new board, of light-grey Italian marble and green slate, was made into 2¼ inch squares, attempting to clarify the contrast between the squares and also reducing the overall size.83 The pieces, 32 hand-carved John Jacques & Son chess pieces, costing $300 from England, were not changed.84 Outside the hall, the movement behind-the-scenes inverted the stillness of the players: the exteriors were … reminiscent of Yankee Stadium … Even hot dogs were on sale … Downstairs there was a lecture room … crowded with Icelanders jostling each other and even standing on chairs in order to see and hear the analyses. There was much movement in halls and passageways, in sharp contrast to the solemnity within.85

The distinction between the spectators, clothed in darkness, and the visible, illuminated players on the stage was made more acute by Fischer’s recognition of the game’s showbiz qualities and a perception of his own role as entertainer. ‘That’s where it’s at’, he had stated. ‘Someday I’m gonna dress for a show – I mean, a game – like Tom Jones or Liberace.’ Indeed, he was fitted for a maroon and purple corduroy suit in Reykjavik that he did not wear.86 His confusion between the words ‘show’ and ‘game’ suggests an inherent perspective on chess

182 Monsters

performance as essentially spectacle. His increased attentiveness to stagecraft, flamboyant certainly but not unusual, confirmed his role within the framework of the virtuoso. Yet as he sought to draw attention to himself, to bring the chessplayer into the realm of showman, he also sought to return to the sense of the game which Walker did not find at the Café de la Régence, the ‘recreation of pensive solitude’87 and the space of ‘universal silence’.88

Invisibility The elements above suggest a heightened sense of wanting to be seen and a sense of not wanting to be seen, a desire for absence, for the maintenance of distance between the chess-player and the exterior world. Most obviously, by 1972, this remoteness was influenced by the Soviets raising chess to the status of national art.89 Fischer’s remoteness was less abstract, but also manifested in a desire for absence, evading spectatorship. Roy Blount, in Sports Illustrated, queried whether Fischer was simply uncomfortable on camera which, in its unceasing gaze, was often unflattering, suggesting that in one game he appeared to be trying to change his posture at the board.90 If correct, this again, as with his change in clothing style discussed earlier, suggests a submission to a form of power over his public image, a power that operated with no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself … power exercised continuously.91

Fischer’s actions during 1972, regardless of his Liberace aspirations, show a desire to avoid the spotlight as much as to be under it. In an explanation for his behaviour, his attorney stated that his client was ‘very sensitive to noise and distractions’.92 Fischer, ignoring his own role in the cameras being there in the first place, complained that ‘The organizers of the match … were more anxious to placate the “movie-camera gang than to provide playing conditions worthy of the world’s chess championship”’. Indeed, it was the mere presence of the ‘invisible and inaudible’ cameras rather than their audibility or visibility that was the issue – a hyper-sensitive issue of presence and feng shui.93 Sports Illustrated suggested that Fischer could only win when hiding from the public, after success in game three, played in a closed, private room normally used for table-tennis tournaments.94 Lacking the meticulously designed furnishings of the main hall, the room was long, narrow and bare, with a sloping ceiling. A



Performance notes 183

plain utilitarian oak table and board were used. Only closed-circuit television cameras watched.95 Vladimir Nabokov was sympathetic to Fischer’s plight, suggesting that he was ‘quite right’ in objecting to the cameras. ‘He can’t be subject to the clicks and flashes of those machines above him. It’s like a tennis player having tennis balls flung at him.’96 Despite this fantastic image, reimagining sound as projectiles, the claim does not hold. Some games certainly had no cameras present, such as game seven, and proceeded smoothly.97 Yet several instances show that Fischer’s fear was not solely the presence of the cameras but the idea of being seen more generally. Chester Fox, owner of exclusive broadcasting rights to the match, stated that ‘Fischer admitted that he could not see or hear the cameras but “said they bothered him because he knew they were there”’.98 After game two, he had indeed claimed that ‘the mere presence of the cameras was enough to unsettle him’. Modifications involved using only one operator at each camera, who ‘was not to wear shoes and not to carry coins or anything else in his pocket that might rattle or make noise’.99 With the sensitivity of nature documentary cameramen filming wild animals, the television crews aimed for invisibility. For game eight, the cameras were moved again to the projection booth and the balcony hall. The cameramen sat on the floor, hidden. Fischer still complained.100 His fury came only after learning that the game had been filmed, again highlighting the issue as not one of noise but of the idea of recording in general.101 Eventually the cameras were withdrawn, upsetting ‘the whole financial structure of the match’.102 Players, spectators, commerce, and cameras were inextricably linked. Upon the withdrawal of the cameras, one newspaper reported that ‘Fischer Wins Out – TV Network Stop Filming Chess Match’103 – as if the contest were with the camera crew and not Spassky. Fischer’s complaints about sound and vision sought to impose and maintain physical, auditory, and intellectual distance from the spectators. It could be understood as a taking back of control from those image-makers who had imposed and maintained this same distance in his earlier career. His focus on the behaviour of the spectators emphasised the less civilised aspects of their nature – eating, coughing, and laughing. Such behaviour was policed by the neon sign of POGN (silence in Icelandic), which ‘flashe[d] in angry, glaring light above the green-carpeted stage whenever a cough erupt[ed] or a squeaky footfall disturb[ed] the sepulchural silence’.104 After one of Fischer’s complaints, an inspection was made by the head of the Reykjavik Institute of Public Health, who found the sound level to be exactly the same with the cameras on and off.105 One class of observers remembered ‘championship chess being played in smoke-filled clubrooms or hotel lobbies with the onlookers breathing down the necks of the players, people coming and going noisily’. In 1972 the silence transformed a cough from the audience

184 Monsters

into an earthquake.106 Organisers oiled door hinges after a squeak was heard.107 Ticketholders tiptoed into the auditorium,108 demonstrating the capacity of an audience to ‘spontaneously attun[e] itself to the spectacular nature of the contest’,109 whatever the spectacle was – Fischer’s disagreements, his no-shows, or occasionally chess-play. Whatever the show, the spectators demanded their money’s worth regardless. In game two, ‘though there were no players, the audience remained dead silent. Fischer’s clock kept ticking away. A projection of it was shown on the closed-circuit television screen, and the audience could literally see the minutes slipping by.’ For this game, ‘less than half the capacity of the dimly-lighted hall – watched the two empty chairs for an hour, with a sort of mesmerized fascination. There was no talking … [Spassky] was given a standing ovation.’110 The temperament of Fischer was judged so jumpy that ‘the audience thought nothing of it when Spassky occasionally left his chair after a move and disappeared backstage. When Fischer did it, however, unmistakable suspense filled the room. Would he come back?’111

Being seen Spectacle. 1.a. A specially prepared or arranged display … or 2. A person or thing exhibited to, or set before, the public gaze as an object either (a) of curiosity or contempt, or (b) of marvel or admiration or 5.a. A means of seeing; something made of glass; a window or mirror. Obs. Spectacles a. A device for assisting defective eyesight. Mirror 3.a. A thing regarded as giving a true description of something else. or 4.a. A reflective surface, and related senses.112

Being put on a pedestal, Fischer demonstrated a desire for invisibility. Invisibility is stillness, absence, darkness, out-of-sight-ness, the vanishing of being. The various gradations of being seen and not being seen, the degrees of presence and absence, have been a constant theme of this book. So too did Fischer’s actions reaffirm these gradations, this hierarchy of visibility. Chess performance positions the chess-player body under the spotlight, making it appear as an exaggerated, hyper-sensitive site of cultural image-making and contestation. Attempts to escape from this spotlight seem absurd and counter-productive given the chess performance’s, and modernity’s, foundation on the face-to-face encounter, on the up-close-and-personal. Fischer’s drawing away from contest only heightened the intensity of the spectacle, the gaze, the stare – those imprecise methods of encounter, in opposition to reading, analysis, and decoding.113 The



Performance notes 185

disrupted performative architecture turned the everyday into the extraordinary. Mundane objects attained mysterious properties while mental abilities were reduced to their commercial value and bargained over. This intertwining is characteristic of the virtuoso’s performance – the individual who combines a high degree of technical ability, a commercial talent to promote him or herself and provoke others to promote him or herself, and performative skill. Fischer’s virtuosity reaffirmed the otherworldliness of the chess-player and the potential of the game to demonstrate extraordinary mental talent. Periods of calm erupted in a sea of dispute, disorganisation, and argument, paralleling the environment. Poised between nature and civilisation, the location reflected a distance possessed by the game from its general public. To see the game, one had to be there or rely on Fischer’s tolerance for television cameras. Despite this pushing away of the exterior and their idiosyncratic lives, both contestants were drawn into a Cold War contest. The masks they wore frequently slipped. The idea of the chess-player as part of ‘an exotic elite, a haughty game reserved in the popular imagination for mathematical wizards, cerebral Jews, archbishops, commissars, saturnine Serbs and members of the German general staff’ was confused.114 Fischer became ‘the most elusive and intriguing of all modern folk heroes’, at the stormy centre of the chess circus of the century.115 He would not compromise on the price of being seen.

Notes 1 ‘Bobby Fischer at a hot spring in Reykjavik’ (July 1972), in H. Benson, Bobby Fischer (New York: powerHouse Books, 2011). 2 J. J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture: Seven Theses’, in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 4. 3 Beowulf, trans. and ed. M. Swanton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 39. 4 Beowulf: A New Translation, trans. S. Heaney (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 95. 5 Beowulf, trans. and ed. Swanton, p. 15. 6 S. Barber, ‘History’, in A. Krossa (ed.), History in a Global Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 26. 7 R. Barthes, ‘The World of Wrestling’, in R. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 15–18. 8 K. C´apek, ‘Towards a Theory of Fairy-Tales’ (1931), and ‘Some Fairy-Tale Personalities’ (1931), in K. C´apek, In Praise of Newspapers and Other Essays (London: George Allen, 1951), pp. 49, 83. 9 G. Morrison, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (London: Vintage, 2012), p. xv.

186 Monsters

10 W. W. Savage Jr, Comic Books and America, 1945–1954 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), p. 5. 11 H. C. Schonberg, ‘But Is Boris Godunov?’, New York Times, 30 July 1972, p. E6. 12 R. D. McFadden, ‘Fischer and Spassky Match Draws High Cash Bids’, New York Times, 4 January 1972, p. 30. 13 ‘The Fischer-Spassky Go’, in R. W. Creamer (ed.), ‘Scorecard’, Sports Illustrated, 28 February 1972, p. 10. Fischer also appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated on 14 August 1972. 14 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Iceland, A Chess Land, Waits On Edge For Fischer’, New York Times, 30 June 1972, p. 37; UPI, ‘Fischer Is Still In Iceland’, New York Times, 5 September 1972, p. 41; H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fox Alone In Suit Against Fischer’, New York Times, 27 August 1972, p. 109. 15 McFadden, ‘Fischer and Spassky Match Draws High Cash Bids’, p. 30. 16 ‘Two Sites Chosen For Title Chess’, New York Times, 15 February 1972, p. 30; ‘More Consultations Due Over Site For Chess Match’, New York Times, 22 February 1972, p. 38; and ‘Soviet Union Accepts Belgrade And Reykjavik As Title Chess Sites’, New York Times, 5 March 1972, p. 56. 17 McFadden, ‘Fischer and Spassky Match Draws High Cash Bids’, p. 30. An equivalent bid for the USA would have been around $100 million; M. Gunmere, Santa Rosa, Calif, ‘19th Hole: The Readers Take Over’, Sports Illustrated, 3 April 1972, p. 108. 18 ‘Details Announced For World Chess’, New York Times, 21 March 1972, p. 38; ‘Fischer Reported Quitting An Accord On Site For Match’, New York Times, 26 March 1972, p. 33. 19 ‘Fischer Announces He Is Ready To Play For The World Title’, New York Times, 5 April 1972, p. 42; AP, ‘Yugoslavia Says No To Top Chess Match’, New York Times, 12 April 1972, p. 41; and L. Charlton, ‘Fischer-Spassky Games In Belgrade Canceled, World Chess Group Says’, New York Times, 14 April 1972, p. 40. 20 AP, ‘Spassky Said To Be Willing To Play Fischer In Paris’, New York Times, 20 April 1972, p. 42; ‘Reshevsky Wins In 3d Round’, New York Times, 28 April 1972, p. 37; ‘Australia Will Bid On Chess Title Play’, New York Times, 29 April 1972, p. 17; ‘Netherlands Ruled Out As Site For Title Chess’, New York Times, 18 April 1972, p. 31. 21 UPI, ‘Russians Accept Reykjavik For All 24 Chess Games’, New York Times, 5 May 1972, p. 38. 22 ‘Reykjavik Awarded Title Chess Series’, New York Times, 4 May 1972, p. 16; M. Illson, ‘Fischer Accepts Match In Iceland’, New York Times, 6 May 1972, p. 33. 23 AP, ‘Schmid Makes No Moves, But Rules Chess Match’, New York Times, 13 July 1972, p. 31. 24 Illson, ‘Fischer Accepts Match In Iceland’, p. 33. 25 M. Arnold, ‘Armed With “Big Red Book”, Fischer Trains To Meet Spassky’, New York Times, 1 April 1972, p. 25. 26 G. Gent, ‘WNET Plans To Simulate Plays In Fischer’s Bid For Chess Title’, New York Times, 15 May 1972, p. 71.



Performance notes 187

27 ‘TV Here Brings New Dimension To Chess Contest And Kibitzing’, New York Times, 12 July 1972, p. 26; M. Phillips, ‘TV’s Man On The Move’, New York Times, 10 August 1972, p. 71. 28 K. Waite, ‘Mind you, it will be a marvellous game if they ever get down to it’, Daily Mirror, 5 July 1972. 29 C. R. Giles, ‘I’d like to see this Bobby Fischer try his tantrums here – when Grandma says “play” – you play’, Daily Express, 6 July 1972. 30 R. Roberts, with H. C. Schonberg, A. Horowitz and S. Reshevsky, Fischer–Spassky: The New York Times Report on the Chess Match of the Century (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 197. 31 B. Gilbert, ‘Gleanings From A Troubled Time’, Sports Illustrated, 25 December 1972, pp. 34–46. 32 D. Edmonds and J. Eidinow, Bobby Fischer Goes to War (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 263. 33 S. Englund, ‘A King Takes Himself Off The Board’, Sports Illustrated, 15 July 1974, p. 50. 34 E. B. Edmondson, ‘All The World’s A Pawn’, Newsweek, 31 July 1972. 35 B. Darrach, ‘Bobby Fischer is a Ferocious Winner’, Life, 12 November 1971, pp. 50–2. 36 R. Ginzburg, ‘Portrait of a Genius as a Young Man’, Harper’s Magazine (January 1962). 37 L. Evans, ‘A Steamroller Ride to the Summit’, Sports Illustrated, 11 September 1972, p. 35. 38 T. Shabad, ‘Spassky’s Training Is A “Secret” As He Prepares To Play Fischer’, New York Times, 18 June 1972, p. 38. The Washington Post, in 1985, claimed that ‘Capitalism’s vice is that it turns everything … into cash. Communism’s vice is that it turns everything … into politics’; C. Krauthammer, ‘When Chess Becomes Class Warfare’, Washington Post, 1 March 1985, p. a19. 39 ‘Chess Puzzle’, New York Times, 1 July 1972, p. 20. 40 M. Arnold, ‘Chess World Argues Fischer’s Actions’, New York Times, 1 July 1972, p. 1. 41 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer Seeks A Postponement’, New York Times, 2 July 1972, p. 31. 42 T. Shabad, ‘Russians Disdain Fischer For Concern With Money’, New York Times, 6 July 1972, p. 31. 43 B. Fischer, ‘Text Of Fischer’s Apology’, New York Times, 17 July 1972, p. 14. 44 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Apology From A Knight Errant’, New York Times, 9 July 1972, p.E3. 45 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Spassky Resigns After Blunder’, New York Times, 21 July 1972, p. 1. 46 AP, ‘Minister Assails Contestants’, New York Times, 10 July 1972, p. 19. 47 ‘The Peacock vs. The Wren’, Newsweek, 18 October 1971. 48 R. Cantwell, ‘The Genius From Brooklyn’, Sports Illustrated, 1 June 1970, p. 58.

188 Monsters

49 See Benson, Bobby Fischer. 50 Bobby Fischer on The Dick Cavett Show, summer 1971, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MPIXC3M8hbg (accessed July 2013). 51 B. E. Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in B. E. Carroll (ed.), American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (New York: SAGE, 2003), p. 4. 52 H. Brainin, ‘The Pilgrims Keep Coming To Times Square, The Tarnished Mecca’, New York Times, 23 July 1972, p. 47; M. Wimsatt, ‘Chess Made A Name For Iceland, Which It Badly Needed’, New York Times, 10 December 1972, p. xxi. 53 A. Ross, Listen to This (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), p. 144. 54 K. Scherman, ‘Foreword: “Iceland”’, in Roberts, Fischer–Spassky, pp. 1–4. 55 A. Evans and J. Gottlieb, Iceland – the Bradt Travel Guide (Guilford: Bradt, 3rd edn, 2014), p. 362. 56 A contrast between violence and silence, calm and chaos was presented in coverage of Fischer’s contest, a contrast which the chess-player had always embodied – the static surface – the underlying eruptions. Recall, to take a momentary diversion, Agent Kronsteen in Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love (1957), an employee of SMERSH, an organisation dedicated to wiping out foreign spies. In the novel, he is described as the possessor of a ‘wide bulging brow … slanting black eyes’, his demeanour ‘deadly calm’, his face ‘a mask’. His head is described as ‘big’, his face ‘as malevolently inscrutable as a parrot’ with a look of ‘disdain’. A ‘wizard of Ice’, sitting ‘motionless’, and possessing a ‘cold brain’ uninterested in human beings – seeing life as a game of chess and his opponent as a bitter enemy – as confirmed by his icy reaction to the gracious, smiling opponent he has just beaten. Yet there is an internal violence to Kronsteen’s chess-play. ‘Behind the mask’, we read that ‘the blood was throbbing in the dynamo of his brain, and a thick worm-like vein in his right temple pulsed at a beat of over ninety. He had sweated away a pound of weight in the last two hours and ten minutes’; I. Fleming, From Russia With Love (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 55. These tensions saw echoes in Fischer’s tempestuous actions throughout his contest and in the Icelandic environment. 57 F. Brady, Profile of a Prodigy (New York: Dover, rev. edn, 1989), p. 241. 58 Arnold, ‘Chess World Argues Fischer’s Actions’, p. 1. 59 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer Walks Out, Comes Back, Loses’, New York Times, 13 July 1972, p. 1. 60 C. H. O. D’Alexander, Fischer v. Spassky, Reykjavik, 1972 (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 87. 61 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Spassky Seals Move No. 42 In 13th Game With Fischer’, New York Times, 11 August 1972, p. 26. 62 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Cliff-Hanger Chess Game Adjourned On 41st Move’, New York Times, 18 August 1972, p. 35. 63 Brady, Profile, p. 241. 64 Schonberg, ‘Iceland, A Chess Land, Waits On Edge For Fischer’, p. 37. 65 Schonberg, ‘Fischer Walks Out, Comes Back, Loses’, p. 1. 66 Ibid.



Performance notes 189

67 A. Koestler, ‘Introduction’, in H. Golombek, Fischer v. Spassky: The Inside Story of the World Chess Championship (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1973), p. 9. 68 Ross, Listen to This, p. 11. 69 S. Taylor, My Life with the Shakespeare Cult (Chicago: S. Taylor, 2015). 70 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Edge Is Given To Spassky In Adjourned First Game’, New York Times, 12 July 1972, p. 1. 71 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer Wins Again’, New York Times, 5 August 1972, p. 1. 72 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer And Spassky Draw 16th Game Of Title Match’, New York Times, 21 August 1972, p. 38. 73 D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 298. 74 B. McNitt, W. D. Siedlecki, J. Steele, D. Steele, and M. Steele, ‘19th Hole: The Readers Take Over’, Sports Illustrated, 7 August 1972, p. 68. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Roberts, Fischer–Spassky, p. 61. 78 Roy Blount Jr, ‘Boris in Wonderland’, Sports Illustrated, 24 July 1972, p. 15. 79 Schonberg, ‘Fischer Seeks A Postponement’, p. 31. 80 ‘Fischer Forfeits Chess Match in Camera Protest’, Sarasota Herald Tribune, 4 July 1972, p. 17A. 81 Roberts, Fischer–Spassky, p. 86. 82 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer Crushes Spassky, Takes Lead In Title Match’, New York Times, 24 July 1972, p. 1. 83 Roberts, Fischer–Spassky, p. 89. 84 Ibid., p. 63. 85 Schonberg, ‘Edge Is Given To Spassky In Adjourned First Game’, p. 1. 86 Evans, ‘A Steamroller Ride to the Summit’, pp. 35–6. 87 G. Walker, ‘The Café de la Régence’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 22 December 1840, p. 670. 88 ‘The Parisian Cafés’, London and Paris Observer [from Bentley’s Miscellany], 15 (1839), p. 11. 89 L. Auerbach and V. V. Smyslov, ‘Chess’, in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Michigan: Gale Group, 3rd edn, 1970–79). ‘Chess’, went one passage, ‘can reveal aspects of a person’s character and skills with striking accuracy’. 90 Blount Jr, ‘Boris in Wonderland’, p. 15. 91 Michel Foucault, The Eye of Power (1980), quoted and discussed in H. Koskela, ‘“Cam Era” – the Contemporary Urban Panopticon’, Surveillance and Society, 1.3 (2002), p. 292. 92 M. Arnold, ‘Counsel For Fischer Will Fight Forfeit’, New York Times, 14 July 1972, p. 29. 93 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer’s Appeal On Forfeit Falls’, New York Times, 15 July 1972, p. 22. 94 Blount Jr, ‘Boris in Wonderland’, p. 15.

190 Monsters

95 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer Presses His Lead As 3d Game Is Adjourned’, New York Times, 17 July 1972, p. 1. 96 ‘For Bobby Fischer, The Nabokov Defense’, New York Times, 21 July 1972, p. 32. 97 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer And Spassky Adjourn Tense Game’, New York Times, 26 July 1972, p. 16. 98 ‘Fischer Forfeits Chess Match in Camera Protest’, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, p. 17-A. See also ‘Iceland Chess Unit Tries To Curb News Coverage’, New York Times, 2 July 1972, p. 31. 99 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Fischer Stays Out, Forfeits 2d Game’, New York Times, 14 July 1972, p. 1. 100 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Spassky Drubbed: Now Trailing, 5-3’, New York Times, 28 July 1972, p. 32. 101 ‘A. B. C. Drops Plan For Chess Films’, New York Times, 29 July 1972, p. 22. 102 Richard Stein, lawyer for Chester Fox, quoted in ‘Fischer Forfeits Chess Match in Camera Protest’, p. 17-A. 103 ‘Fischer Wins Out’, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 29 July 1972, p. 14. 104 H. A. Mulligan, ‘Blinking Neon Sign Means What It Says’, Times News, 17 August 1972. 105 Roberts, Fischer–Spassky, p. 100. 106 H. Brainin, ‘“Bobby Lobby” Growing At Tourney In Iceland’, New York Times, 13 August 1972, p. 58. 107 H. C. Schonberg, ‘Spassky Plays To A Draw With Fischer In 4th Game’, New York Times, 19 July 1972, p. 45. 108 H. C. Schonberg, ‘15th Chess-Title Game Is Draw’, New York Times, 19 August 1972, p. 30. 109 Barthes, ‘The World of Wrestling’, p. 15. 110 Roberts, Fischer–Spassky, pp. 93–4. 111 Blount Jr, ‘Boris in Wonderland’, p. 15. 112 Oxford English Dictionary definitions of spectacle, n., www.oed.com/view/ Entry/186057 (accessed May 2016), and mirror, n., www.oed.com/view/ Entry/119110 (accessed May 2016). 113 Quoted in N. Mirzoeff, ‘What is Visual Culture?’, in N. Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2002), p. 5. 114 Edmondson, ‘All The World’s A Pawn’. 115 Ibid.

9 Kapow! The chess-player in comicbooks, 1940–53 Professor Spiderman Representations of Bobby Fischer demonstrate that the cultural space of postwar American chess was fertile ground for populating with creatures possessing exotic, strange, and unusual abilities. Considering the way in which Fischer’s play on the edges of respectability and domesticity was apprehended and defanged in his early career illuminates how the chess-player appeared as a figure outside everyday social existence, with unacceptable monstrous potential. In these images, the chess-player appeared to instruct or provide warning about behavioural and emotional norms. Continuing this theme, this chapter examines issues surrounding respectability and domesticity in the comic-book, the quintessential mid-twentieth-century American historical document, from the generation before Fischer’s first national appearances. The chosen texts favourably contrast images of the American male body with the chess-player and depict the punishment of behaviour deemed to be outside the bounds of respectability. In these tales, one also sees an intriguing recurrence of the signification of social hierarchy and the levelling power of death which constituted the principal didactic tropes of the chess game in medieval literature. Normative discourses within these texts are preserved. The stranger remains marginalised. The superhero always wins.1 Arrogance is punished. Transgression and excess are contained or reversed. Societal hierarchy is maintained.2 The chess-player within comic-books seems an apt context to end on. Various personas and attributes assigned to the chess-player frequently stretch beyond the seemingly possible and the common. No academic works have considered the chess-player in comic-books in isolation. This chapter does not remedy this absence entirely. It focuses on distinct aspects relating to the appearance and function of the chess-player and only considers comic-books from the USA within a short timespan. Comic-books communicate attitudes and images. They are useful in the history of otherness for their two-dimensional combination of word and

192 Monsters

image. Indeed, the comic-book remains both one of the most valuable cultural forms for viewing the raw, exposed vein of mid-twentieth-century prejudice, assumption, and anxiety, and one of the primary vehicles for the expression of ‘vernacular forms of male imagery’ in the post-war period.3 Matthew Pustz describes how Spiderman was one of his first history teachers, which is not to say that he was a good teacher.4 Spiderman’s pedagogical weaknesses may be used productively. Critical aspects of the past can be retrieved from the dashed-off, instinctive images which comic-books provide. The first thought is often the most revealing. One critic’s assessment of comic-books as ‘crude, unimaginative, banal, vulgar, [and] ultimately corrupting’ adds several excellent further recommendations for their study.5 A fully constructed cultural perspective of the chess-player, as our earlier forays into detective fiction, science fiction, and other marginal literary forms have demonstrated, must recognise that even the most unpromising of texts may reveal valuable insight. The comic-books chosen for discussion here include stories involving well-known figures as well as less familiar texts.

Otherness In opposition to mid-twentieth-century American norms of masculinity and domestic life, the comic-book chess-player has been made the centre of the abnormal and peripheral in a variety of ways. A cursory look at the titles of the selected texts here demonstrates the superficial linguistic, geographical, and behavioural senses in which this was accomplished, not to mention the wide variety of other markers, including appearance, bodily capability, nationality, gender, sex, race, and orientalist imagery.6 Recall Asa Simon Mittman’s idea that the quality of the ‘monstrous does not lie solely in its embodiment (though this is very important) nor its location (though this, again, is vital), nor in the process(es) through which it enacts its being, but also (indeed, perhaps primarily) in its impact’, or its challenge to common sense.7 No single aspect of these significations suggests otherness by itself, nor reveals its extent. In opposition to the American man and the American home, the image of the chess-player found in comic-books is the consequence of a specific orientation, in part dependent on the author’s and artist’s ‘position in a text with regard to the … material [the author] writes about’.8 In physical terms, we can think of ‘the physical positioning of one’s body in relation to the thing seen. Other contingencies, such as race, class, sexuality, and gender, also condition the way we orient an image.’ To these contingencies, this book has added cultural assessments of mental faculties and ability, which are qualities and categories of identity equally dependent on one’s ‘subject position’ and historical and cultural locations.9

Kapow! 193

To take this group of comic-book chess-players as a whole, what immediate features stand out? Following their appearance, often the first thing the reader learns about a character is a name. Names present an immediate means of orienting a subject in relation to ourselves, creating difference and containing it.10 Naming can prevent further investigation, halting it at the point of, and reinforcing visual, stereotype. We can derive something from the names given to the chess-players considered here, given in chronological order: Karno, the Chessman; Rathcone; Casova and Dr Wrath; the Curio Dealer and Dr Joust; Mr Myxztplk and Superman; Alan and Adrienne Baker and Sudi Lei; Guido Nicola, Krishhalad Hamid, and Jan Kovacs; Barry Archer and Darius Skalna; Wonder Woman and the Chequerians; Captain Comet and Pygr-Gar; and various manifestations of personified Death. In each case, the chess-player, one or each of the pairings, is designated as other. Over half of the named characters are directly stated or suggested as being from places other than the USA, with European aristocracy being particularly frequent.11 These tendencies are partly a reflection of genre tropes. Equally, when the American chess-player appears, it is as an image of the American nation at play (or chess-play at least), ‘thoroughly grounded in concepts of masculinity and whiteness’.12 The recognition in this book of the chess-player as both a continuous self, across time and space, and also a discontinuous cultural body, in which multiple versions of the self are in conflict with each other, informs the cultural contests present within these comic-books as (American) chess-player meets (non-American) chess-player. The portrayal of the non-American chess-player sits within a narrow set of bodily norms, frequently set against a red-blooded, American male who embodies physical strength and is associated with a respectable family, home, and job. This can appear as a contrast between physical strength and mental ability. The divergence between physical and mental abilities is traditionally reflected in physical markers concerning the body as a physical, cultural, and social object. The American body presented in the American mid-twentieth comic-book, including the superhero body, is a boundary against Evil. ‘Superhero bodies, despite their plasticity, are armored bodies, rigid against the chaos of the surrounding disorder’13 and ‘tough, powerful, disciplined bod[ies]’.14 Superhero bodies represent simultaneously, human frailty and endurance as well as the inscription of pain on the human body and transcendence of it … [T]hey are representative of multiple and paradoxical values, provoking in the viewer sensations of wonder, admiration, envy, and desire – but also fear and disgust … [They are figures] of both masculine admiration and homoerotic panic.15

194 Monsters

In their display, where everything can be seen, the representation of the comicbook chess-player also echoes illustrations of the Automaton Chess-Player (in which surface and interior were drawn at the same time) and caricatures of the appearance of chess-players such as Bobby Fischer in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s (in which the character of the chess-player could allegedly be read). The strategies of bodily representation of the comic-book chess-player were also made to reflect emotional and behavioural norms. In the selected tales, these norms related to the improvement of health, personal and national prestige, personal profit, and the promotion of right values – the same principles discussed earlier. These are frequently violated by the non-American comic-book chess-players and upheld by the American body. Repeatedly, the non-American chess-player is motivated by pride.16 These behavioural and emotional norms are linked with a specific form of masculinity and domesticity which, while historically and culturally rooted in post-war American culture, intersects with ideas discussed earlier in relation to medieval and early-modern codes of leisure and the values of rational recreation. While chess-playing is often framed as an acceptable form of behaviour, when it reaches an excess, in the form of the chess-player, it becomes a form of behaviour to be corrected and disciplined. The white, American male is always in these tales the centre of all correct and respectable forms of behaviour. Even when absent, this figure remains the one against which the main characters should be measured, whether old world European aristocracy, Eastern mysticism, or alien otherness. These stories could largely be summarised as ‘White men in power … [and their attempts] to justify their hold on power, to maintain their power, and to address challenges to their power’.17 Bodily, emotional, and geographic otherness is also expressed through proximal and spatial factors. The comic-book chess-player occupies a varied and diverse array of spaces, including a volcano base, a Nazi castle, a curio dealer’s shop, the British-American Club in Bombay, a mausoleum, and Pluto. The majority of these are unsurprisingly on the periphery of society or outside it altogether. That is, like Grendel’s occupation of the hinterlands, positioned far outside the cultural centre, the spaces of the outsider chess-player are defined in relation to the home or homeland of the American body. While one of the themes of this book has been how the mere presence of the chess-player can make even the most familiar sites or centres of civilisation strange, the more marginal sites here are, nevertheless, intriguing. They better illuminate the panoptical ambitions of the chess-player, tied to notions of control, power, and discipline, looking inwards towards the metropolis.18 They, often through the recurring visual symbol of the life-size chessboard and pieces, reorient the performance architecture, turning the chess-player into spectator and player simultaneously.

Kapow! 195

They demonstrate how the cut-off space of play, ‘hedged off from the everyday surroundings’, is broken open and instead transforms the world outside play into the playground, applying some of its structured rules but with none of the sociality, modes of behaviour, and emotion which re-entering the everyday world should entail.19

Home and seclusion To see how these othering strategies (naming/body/emotions/location) work in practice, the superhero comic (constituting about half of the selected texts), the site of the ‘armoured body’ and the boundary against wrongdoing, provides the most unambiguous presentation of these issues. Of the characters in these superhero comics, perhaps the most militantly normative, the most central to pop-culture displays of American masculinity in this period, is Superman, who appears as a chess-player in a contest with his impish tormentor Mr Mxyztplk from the ‘sixth dimension’ in ‘The Cross-Country Chess Crimes’ (1947).20 After causing some bother, Mr M complains, like a slightly too self-conscious child, that ‘mischief is losing its kick!’21 Superman, in his role as a father-figure, has the answer: ‘You’re bored because you don’t use your brains enough! If you want to be amused, play something intellectual – like chess!’ He adds, ‘Chess is the world’s most fascinating game.’ Superman here represents, as he did during the Second World War and throughout the Cold War, ‘manhood at its most conservative: clean-cut and muscular, politically neutral, respectful of authority, and a faithful worker’.22 Superman’s view of the game recalls accounts of it soothing the worst excesses of the brain, halting ‘extravagant impertinent thoughts’ in the words of Robert Burton,23 affirming its humanistic underpinnings as an ‘improving’ game, and its respectable connotations. Mr M visits the ‘World’s Championship Chess Tournament’, and watches a game between ‘Bugashlovsky’ and ‘Smith’. Rather than this quelling his mind, however, Mr M is inspired to construct a life-size game.24 He steals landmarks for the pieces – a knight from Metropolis Park, a statue of Empress Eugenie in Paris for the queen – and uses criminals for the pawns.25 The symbolic pieces substitute for displays of world-power.26 By setting up a life-sized chess game, Mr M alters the didactic purpose of the story, shifting it from the alleviation of boredom through mental stimulation to an allegory of control and panoptical urges. The natural order is disturbed. Resolution is swift. Superman challenges the imp to a game, moving it away from the USA to the empty Sahara Desert.27 He brings out a new piece, the KLPTZYXM (Mr M’s name backwards). By voicing it, Mr M is dragged back

196 Monsters

home.28 Superman highlights the game’s intellectual reputation even as Mr M makes it a plaything of his intellect. Yet, highlighting the unsuitability of the rules of chess to his mission of restoring order, as in Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles, Superman wins through cunning, not through his skill at chess. The whole event is a façade of intellect. The rules are followed and performance decorum observed only superficially. Order must be restored regardless. As ‘The Cross-Country Chess Crimes’ affirms the intellectual reputation of the game, it also suggests its unsuitability to real-world scenarios. This suspicion of intellectual superiority is further illustrated on the cover, where both Superman and Mr M are illustrated as chess pieces. Superman occupies the centre ground. He is in the process of knocking out Mr M with a mighty punch. Mr M’s hat has flown off and he is falling backwards. Seemingly negating any intellectual notions, the image of physical force, which does not appear in the story, is our first sight of Superman’s interaction with his opponent. Yet despite Superman’s illegal resolution, the chess-player could still, within these comic-books, represent something of an intellectual peak even when played by an American body. The chess game is frequently used to show the possession of a far-reaching intellect. In ‘The Cosmic Chessboard’ (1953), an Inter-Planetary Chess Tournament is convened on Pluto. Captain Comet is selected as Earth’s representative. While he is playing a Venusian opponent, the evil Plutonian Pygr-Gar has each player drugged and placed in a glass test-tube in order to ‘drain the[ir] brain power’ and charge his super soldiers.29 The chessplayer is the highest intelligence he can conceive of. Captain Comet escapes, and after a stand-off with Pygr-Gar, reiterating the space-cowboy aspect of his character, the two begin a chess match to decide their fate. Comet is an example of the best intellectual human qualities. He has a photographic memory. In his aborted match with the Venusian, he foresees a 278-move combination with a chance to surprise his opponent on the 279th move.30 He also possesses transhuman senses – too slow to escape the initial incapacitating gas but capable of emitting vibrations to shatter his glass prison.31 Against Pygr-Gar, Comet wins straightforwardly, but Pygr-Gar tries to shoot him, earning himself a satisfying knock-out punch, and emphasising Comet’s combination of brains and brawn. We see both the intellectual and the physical victory. While chess-play provides a tangible dimension to Captain Comet’s intelligence, despite its outsized aspects, something which makes it recognisable in its familiarity, the framing of this mental ability within a body of fantastic strength prevents it from becoming uncanny and strange. Isolated chess skill is frequently perceived either as monomania or the signification of excess. This combination of superior intelligence grounded within a superhero body is also evidenced in Wonder Woman’s ‘Chessmen of Doom!’ (1952). Chess skill

Kapow! 197

illustrates her superior intellect but is framed within a body possessing superhuman strength. The chess skill of Earth’s attackers, the Chequerians, meanwhile, serves to illuminate only the cold, calculating nature of the super-villain, taken, as it is, to excess and in isolation. The story concerns a solar-system-sized chess game as the emotionless Chequerians manipulate planets around their cosmic board. On Earth, a military intelligence conference is called after alien intervention causes an ocean to disappear and a mountain to move. Incongruously, and coincidentally, with Wonder Woman present, the scientist Professor Lane asks, ‘How about a game of chess? It will help us relax! I’ve gotten some of my best ideas while playing!’32 Playing two games simultaneously against Professor Lane and Steve, the soldier-boyfriend, Wonder Woman wins both, emphasising her parallel identity of warrior, ‘stronger than Hercules’, and possessor of wisdom, ‘wise as Athena’.33 Her victory sparks a trip to the supposedly lifeless planet of Chequerana, home of the Chequerians, who resemble the chess pieces of knight and king. The ancient civilisation is responsible for Earth’s predicament.34 Upon meeting the ‘eerie chess players’, the knight freely admits that Earth is the piece he has been using.35 The two Chequerians are the last of their kind, survivors of a chess-tournament-to-the-death. They explain that ‘human life means nothing’ to them and recount their story of an age when all disputes were settled by playing chess, with the loser being killed.36 They now use other planets rather than playing against each other. As soon as this exposition is over, Steve and Wonder Woman escape and, after some nifty lasso skills, the planet of Chequerana is destroyed.37 Again, physical strength is the key to victory. The Chequerians represent a familiar exaggerated intellectual ability, and distance from emotional and behavioural centres. Wonder Woman’s chess-playing highlights her intelligence, her combination of super-strength with analytical power, and provides a familiar reference point for the reader. Each of these comic-book stories fits snugly within ‘broader notions of ­middle-class manhood … emphasizing … family togetherness … the era of the valorization of home and family’.38 In each, Earth or the USA stands for home. What does home stand for? We might think of the remark of William J. Levitt, mass-producer of post-war American homes, that ‘no man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do’;39 or, in 1951, President Truman’s affirmation that ‘People who have jobs, homes, and hopes for the future will defend themselves against the underground agents of the Kremlin’.40 Home-ownership was a marker of the physical and mental health of a nation. For Gaston Bachelard, the house allowed one to American dream in peace and safety.41 Each character, Superman, Captain Comet, and Wonder Woman, demonstrates feats of strength alongside their intellect, presented in familial situations, representing and protecting their home. Superman plays the

198 Monsters

father-figure as Mr M acts like a spoiled child. Superman suggests new activities for him to try, carefully removes the USA from any danger by moving the contest to the Sahara Desert, and sends Mr M back home. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor are a wife–husband pairing. He is a Second World War veteran, an intelligence officer in the United States Air Corps, and a military hero, reinforcing his masculine credentials, even as he occasionally plays the traditional role of damsel-in-distress. Further confirming his heterosexual identity, he is attracted to Wonder Woman while being oblivious to her bespectacled, meek alter ego, Diana Prince. Wonder Woman appears as an example of motherhood, protecting her planet, as well as of feminine strength and intellect. Captain Comet returns to his Earth-bound crush, the entirely respectable librarian Lucy Torrence, to whom he loses at chess just after his heroics, his wits deserting him around her.42 Each of these pseudo-families acts as a surrogate American family – healthy, heroic, and strong, largely following traditional gender roles with pseudo-husband and pseudo-wife. Their chess-playing abilities are securely framed within these familial and familiar contexts. By contrast, the super-villains of the sixth dimension, Chequerania, and Pluto share an impulse for privacy, secluded spaces, and isolation, with a pervasive strand of the chess-player’s wider cultural image. They do not have families or homes in the sense of the American Dream. Their homelands are often elsewhere. Their missions are driven by pride and personal power. This pointed aversion to occupation of the metropolis by the chess-player, noted briefly here, is seen in two other comic-book stories of the era in Wonderworld Comics – ‘Karno, the Chessman’ (1940) and ‘Captain America and the Chessboard of Death!’ (1941). Karno the Chessman resides in a hollowed-out, still active volcano, where he tries to create a chess set with shrunken, real-life people. His scientific genius is also evidenced by his construction of a rocket-powered transportation device.43 After his capture, Dr Fung describes Karno as ‘too brilliant to be kept behind bars’,44 while declaring that his next stop will be a sanatorium – another subterranean institution, needless to say, defined by control and regimes of seeing. Likewise, in ‘Captain America and the Chessboard of Death!’, the enemy, Rathcone, a Nazi spy, sits in his castle-like home playing at a chessboard with life-like pieces and directing his subordinates to carry out assassinations of the upper echelons of the US military, thereby removing them from the board. His existence is a private one. He lives, like Bobby Fischer, in a ‘secluded part of town’, detached from the world, even as he seeks to extend Nazi influence to the United States and to become the ‘Fuehrer of the New regime’.45 At one point, his megalomania extending beyond his loyalty to Germany, he speculates that ‘at this rate I’ll even rule the Fatherland’.46 His instructions are conveyed via radio. Only as long as this seclusion holds does his

Kapow! 199

reign of terror persist. Able to enter this secluded existence, Captain America easily overpowers him. Collectively, these superhero comic-book chess-players demonstrate how home and homeland within American ideology were linked inextricably. A threat to one was a threat to all. The superheroes resolve the threat to home, whether the USA, the Earth, or the Galaxy. Although the scales are different, in each case the periphery attacks the centre and is resisted. The representations of the spaces which chess-players occupy, whether the Café de la Régence, the gas-lit basement, or the secret volcano-base, act as the surrogate historical-­ mythological body of the chess-player, filled with history, myth, and folklore. Isolation transforms the chess-player into something marvellous. Domestication attempts to turn the chess-player into something of a lesson, ‘transform[ing] mystical allegories into moral allegories and ultimately degrad[ing] them to the level of social satire’.47 Such attempts always prove futile. Brad Darrach’s articles on Bobby Fischer’s home, Vikram Jayanti’s film about twentieth-century New York, or George Walker on the Café de la Régence could not remove the mystique of the space and demystify their inhabitants, thus failing to remove their supernatural power. Depictions of the chess-player, both exaggerated and pathetic, which attempted to show its difference and familiarity, could never securely return the chess-player to domestic space, to the metropolis.

Pride These comics are populated by a happy bunch of superheroes. There is a clear distinction between Good and Evil. Another group of comic-books are more confrontational in their representations of the chess-player, with a Gothic strand to their story-telling. While each concludes with order being restored and transgression punished, Death and Evil are not permanently vanquished, nor do we always find a clear-cut ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’. The home is transgressed and domesticity permanently disturbed. The four ‘moralities’ considered here suggest that one cannot escape death and that to engage in the sin of pride, the original sin and the source of all other sins, which manifests itself in the chessplayer in conjunction with the idea of intellectual superiority, is to encourage punishment.48 Their evocations of the emotional world of the chess-player would not be out of place in medieval, early-modern, or Victorian texts which urged moderation and respectability in play. Equally, each remains rooted in the assumptions of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity in media representation, which, as stated, frequently tells us ‘more about what men are supposed to be than what they actually are’.49

200 Monsters

The following four tales were published before the introduction of the Comics Code in 1954 which, proscribing certain narratives, stated that every comic-book story had to end with the triumph of good over evil, and banned the words ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ from story titles.50 The Code further specified that ‘scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with, walking dead, torture … [and] ghouls’ were to be prohibited, demanding that ‘respected institutions’ should ‘never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority’.51 This effectively killed the types of story discussed below, which allowed for the presentation, although not the endorsement, of certain forms of behaviour and figures. Such a figure is the personification of Death, discussed here when summoned by an ‘oriental wizard’, or discovered in an occult bookshop, in a sterile hospital, and in the home of European aristocracy. By banning comics with ‘violations of good taste and decency’, the Comics Code took away the possibility of ambiguity, punishment, and consequences. Artists and writers were ‘forced to depict a world that was either a denatured view of American social reality or an overtly fantastic never-never land of superpowered Manichean fisticuffs’.52 In short, the Code allowed for the domination of the superhero within comic-books. Sometimes, these moralities appear straightforwardly. In ‘The Man Who Defeated Death!’ (1953), Roger Capar, naturally ‘the finest chess-player the world had ever known’, lies in a hospital where his heart stops during surgery.53 His spirit flies away and he goes to play a game of chess with Death. After a brief conversation they begin their contest and Capar miraculously wakes up. We assume that he has won. Convalescing, Death visits and Capar wins again, saving his life. Capar convinces Death, as a prize, to warn him when a friend of his is in trouble. Death does so, but it is too late. A second warning of a car crash involving his daughter leads Capar to pursue her, only to crash himself and plunge over a cliff. Even after this fiery end, Capar finds that he must play chess once more with Death. Capar can only groan and say ‘Death always wins – sooner or later!’54 His sin is to think that he is capable of evading death, and to put himself on an elevated plain of vision, where he can intervene to change the outcome of the lives of his family and friends. Even more macabre is ‘A Game with Lucifer’ (1952), which features Barry Archer as a 22-year-old darling of the chess world. We begin with Archer on a bridge, having been diagnosed with a heart condition and given only one month to live, highlighting the interplay between the simultaneous sense of intellectual invulnerability and bodily limits projected on to the chess-player within culture. The chess-player’s mind is always thought to exceed the limits of his or her body. Considering whether to ‘end it all’, Archer instead takes a stroll and enters an occult bookshop, where he discovers Devil’s Gambit by Darius Skalna, Hungary’s

Kapow! 201

great (and fictional) nineteenth-century chess master.55 The discovery again suggests the close connection between the chess-player, secret spaces, and secret knowledge. The book concerns, in Skalna’s words, ‘An account of my greatest match with the King of the Underworld against whom I played for my life’.56 The bookshop owner lurks in the shadows as Archer takes the book. He will be, says a hidden voice, ‘another moth to be caught in the flame’.57 As Archer reads the book, we read about Skalna’s defeat against the Devil. Archer thinks he could have done better. ‘Skalna lost,’ he says, ‘because he was a fool!’58 To add some narrative drive, it is revealed that ‘Tonight is the anniversary of his death!’ Midnight tolls, and Archer sees a ghostly Skalna and the Devil return to replay their last game. Skalna loses again, the flames rise around him, and fiery torment resumes. The protagonist steps forward, ready to make his play, despite the Devil’s ominous claim that ‘no one has beaten me’.59 Playing at the Skalna Chess Club, the Devil is only visible to Archer, yet none of the other chess-players present think his behaviour particularly odd, mistaking his game for practice with himself. There is almost a touch of admiration as he plays (apparently) solo, while everyone else leaves for the evening. Archer is victorious. Has he conquered Death? After he boards the Budapest–Rome express, the train crashes, yet Archer is the sole survivor.60 It seems he has won. But his victory is short-lived. Playing in the World Championship match, he is dominating, only to collapse and die at the board. From his hand, a piece falls – it is a carving of the Devil!61 What is normally invisible (mental abilities, the Devil, and the occult) comes to the surface and combats the normally visible (bodily abilities, death, and everyday life). What is absent becomes present. Archer, like the most acclaimed chess-players, becomes something beyond human. He defies his condition, defies death, and attempts to defy the Devil. But the transhuman state he attains is only temporary. Archer’s collapse at the board, ending the play-state, re-establishes boundaries of life and death, mind and body, and health and sickness. It is Archer’s certainty, his confidence that he has beaten death, which dooms him. At his moment of invulnerability, he is cast down. This moral lesson is expressed more clearly in ‘Strange Rendezvous at 17 rue Noir’ (1952). Guido Nicola is an arrogant man. We first see him standing, hands on hips, smirking at his opponent with his monocle in, the very image of the European aristocracy. His opponent is looking baffled. A ghostly figure observes and narrates, ‘Guido Nicola is a genius at chess. In fact, at this very moment, he has won the World Chess Championship from the famed Hindu master, Krishhalad Hamid. Proud, vain, selfish, egotistic, Nicola strides from the game room, the wild applause of enthusiastic admirers ringing in his ears.’ Outside, responding to a journalist, Guido declares ‘I knew all along I would win! … I may retire. I am bored

202 Monsters

p­ laying my inferiors!’62 Adding to this image, at home he declaims, ‘There is only one Guido Nicola! After me, there is nothing, nobody! All other players are mere men compared with a God! … They [callers congratulating him] bore me with their adulation! … I must attend a banquet in my honor at 10 p.m.’63 In this outburst, we see the insecurity of the chess-player in the contradiction between his assurance of his own superiority and his desire and need for recognition. As with the virtuoso Fischer, praise is a necessary part of his victory. Yet, as the observing ghost states, ‘Beware of pride. Arrogance has its price!’ A life-like chess set is left at Guido’s house anonymously. On the calling card is written: ‘To Guido Nicola … The world’s greatest chess player – but still inferior to me. 17 Rue Noir.’64 Guido retorts, ‘An egotistic beggar like that should be taught a lesson!’, before heading out to seek his challenger. Guido gets his inevitable comeuppance in a satisfying manner. He arrives at the address on the calling card – a mausoleum – to find that a contest has been arranged. Again, Guido remarks that his opponent ‘has enough arrogance for ten men!’ describing himself as ‘the greatest chess player who ever lived!’65 His opponent, however, wearing an executioner’s red mask, is the fifteen-yearsdead Jan Kovacs, ‘the great Croatian chess player’, who, displaying vanity every bit the equal of Guido, has returned from the grave having seen ‘the lavish praise heaped on a mediocre talent’.66 He ‘had to return to prove [his] superiority and destroy [Guido]’.67 Guido accepts Kovacs’s challenge on any condition. However, the board which Kovacs and Guido are to play on is one with living humans as pieces. A conscience of sorts arises in Guido as he realises that a human will die as each piece is lost. But Kovacs bellows, ‘all of life is a chess game: It is the survival of the fittest. The losers perish. The pieces understand this and are prepared to die! Are you?’68 Before the game begins, however, Fate mercifully intervenes and sends Kovacs back to the underworld. Guido returns home but he must also pay a price! The price of that deadly sin, vanity! … for this, Nicola, you must die! … Let the world believe that Guido Nicola perished of natural causes. For here lies a man who was too arrogant to survive! It is every man’s fate to pay the price of his own folly.69

Guido is struck dead. Another morality appears in ‘The Grim Reaper’ (1951), which promised a contest of ‘Beauty vs. Death’. Alan Baker is the new champion, having beaten the turbaned and moustachioed Indian world champion Sudi Lei. Annoyed at the disgrace of losing, Lei storms out and vows revenge. Lei’s appearance at Baker’s masquerade at his home in Westchester County, New York, represents

Kapow! 203

a violation of the American home by a foreign body. Although uninvited, and appearing as Death – clearly a wholly unsuitable character for the wedding celebration which the Bakers are enjoying – Lei is still, as a matter of courtesy and polite behaviour, accepted into the party. He further transgresses by challenging Baker to a game of chess. The champion backs out. The idea of bringing work back home is too much. The private and public sphere should be kept separate. His wife, Adrienne, in her domestic sphere, mistress of the house, instead accepts the challenge. Unbeknown to Mr and Mrs Baker, Lei switches places with Death, since, as he states, ‘in the orient we know’ ways of talking to death.70 Adrienne drags the game out and, as the sun rises, Death forfeits the game. But Death ‘shall not leave … alone!’71 Lei is found dead in the garden, still on the outskirts of the house, looking on from a distance. He cannot find acceptance within the confines of the home. Next to him lies a skull mask. The sudden vindictiveness of Sudi Lei and his eagerness to kill his opponent arises from his defeat, seemingly motivated as much by the nationality of his opponent as the loss itself. The wholesome Adrienne and the familiar masculine presence of Alan demonstrate the ideal couple of the American Dream who have success at work, a happy marriage, a social life, and a large house, in contrast with the mish-mash of foreign tropes found in Sudi Lei. He is an Indian chess-player in America who claims affinity with ‘the orient’ and has a direct line to Death. He is a vindictive outsider who comes to ruin the perfect American home. He is an arrogant mortal who tries to treat Death as an equal, only to be undone by his own self-confidence. The Western conquest of Eastern abilities, seen in Baker’s victory at the Bombay Chess Club, demonstrates that this victory is brought about not through overt methods of dominance, but through the fault of the Indian player. Sudi Lei is shown as emotional, spiteful, and vengeful. He does not simply seek revenge over the chessboard, but aims to destroy the perfect family life the Bakers have constructed. Like Guido, his pride overwhelms him.

Bodies One reading of the nineteenth-century chess-player, mentioned earlier, halfjokingly referred to characters with ‘abnormally developed foreheads … ­withered forms and sunken cheeks … and … lustreless eyes, shaded by green spectacles’.72 The tension present in such images of a failing body and those that portrayed a superior mind was repeated in the context of the American comic-book home and body. A healthy home and healthy body indicated a healthy mind. To reiterate some relevant concepts expressed above concerning the chess-player’s body, the body has often been regarded as ‘a source of

204 Monsters

i­nterference in, and a danger to, the operations of reason’. The body is commonly considered transparently – as fundamentally passive in contrast to the hidden, private mind.73 Cartesian dualism suggests that ‘the mind is often used to refer to and make possible those [cognitive] processes that allow us to think, reason, argue, reflect, debate and write’, while the body’s processes are ‘largely viewed as involuntary [and] subject to laws which govern and regulate’.74 Within this opposition, the chess-player possesses the inferior body and the (temporarily) transhuman mind. The superhero, by contrast, is the exemplary body and mind, as suggested above by superheroic chess-play. This distinction appears in these comic-books in several forms, contrasting able and disabled bodies, age with youth, and Western with Eastern costuming and mannerisms, while utilising other physical signifiers such as spectacles and grey hair. These images were supported by advertisements for muscle-gaining programmes advertised in comics of this time, further highlighting the physical ambition which readers should aspire to, inspired by the example of Charles Atlas from the 1920s.75 His advertisements asked ‘Are You a Red-blooded Man?’, suggesting that readers could become ‘self-dependent, powerful, and attractive to women just like their favourite superheroes’.76 The juxtaposition between super-body and super-mind is apparent in two comic-book stories: first, in the orientalist series Dr Fung in which we meet Karno, the Chessman; and, secondly, in The Gladiator, a side-story in the Blue Beetle comic-book, where we encounter the ‘Chess Killer’. In ‘Karno, the Chessman’, Dan, an American lawyer, is assistant to Dr Fung. While Dr Fung works on scientific experiments, Dan is seen using the gym and appears shirtless frequently, his physicality contrasting with Fung’s’s mental labour.77 The contrast is made more striking by their opponent Karno, who appears as a wheelchair-bound, volcano-dweller. His aim is to capture humans, shrink them down, and use them on his own personal chessboard. Karno, like Rathcone, appears as part-human, part-animal, lacking some essential human characteristic. He seems completely devoid of emotion while carrying out his plans. He conveys mechanistic intent and seeks panoptical control and knowledge. His intentions represent an invasion of the sphere of play. He possesses a ferocious aspect, and, like Rathcone, looks half-way towards a vampire bat in appearance. His teeth stick out menacingly. His eyes glare. But he is shown ultimately as merely a mind. One suggestive image shows Dan pushing Karno along as the volcano explodes, saving the villain. It is only through the physical strength of the audience surrogate – the wholesome American male, Dan – that Karno survives. The physical contrast between body and mind is also seen through the depictions of Dan’s colleague, Dr Fung. Initially Fung fights like the best comic-book hero, combining genius with some physical prowess. Later portrayals, however,

Kapow! 205

increasingly show a more caricatured oriental figure. His black suit and tie are replaced by a blue, floor-length robe.78 He acquires small, circular spectacles and a white beard. His speech patterns become broken, and he throws out ‘Confucian’ knowledge such as ‘many pebbles of one color sure to come from same beach’.79 He is described by one villain as a ‘chink’ – an offensive term for people of Chinese origin or ancestry. He is also described bluntly as old. Dan remains essentially unchanged. Each of the three figures of Dan, Karno, and Fung occupies a different place on a spectrum which, in comic-book discourse, places the able-bodied, physically strong, and intelligent-but-not-too-intelligent Dan at the centre. Karno and Fung, by contrast, are deviants. The chess-player is used to maintain demarcations of identity, of power, of masculinity, and of domesticity. We, the reader, are led to identity with the wholesome men of action. The ethnically ambiguous, limp-wristed villains Karno and Rathcone are unable to match American physical power. Their emasculation and defeat illuminate the specific cultural imperatives at work. These ideas are also visible in the elaborate ‘King of the Chess Killers’ (1942). We join another Dan – Dan Kenneth – art dealer and secretly the superhero Gladiator, walking with his secretary June Starr – again, the perfect couple – as he suggests they go together to a ‘chess tournament … at the physician’s club’.80 Dan is interested in chess, but not that interested, too busy to play frequently, indulging his interest through spectatorship rather than participation. His interest in chess sets is framed within his wider status as an art connoisseur. Dan and June arrive as Dr Wrath is beaten by Casova. Casova is widely praised and, it appears, quite modest. Arms aloft with jubilation despite his defeat, Wrath explains how Casova has developed an ingenious, complex gambit.81 After the match, Dan, June, Wrath, the psychiatrist Casova, and Dr Joust (also present at the contest) go to visit a curio dealer. Hearing Dan talk idly of ‘wrong moves’, the curio dealer rants against ‘criminal’ doctors.82 There is a physical hierarchy at work here, but also a mental hierarchy. The dealer is an elderly former chess champion with white hair, and, like Karno and Rathcone, sharp teeth. He wears gold-framed spectacles and we discover that he has been left physically disabled by a botched medical operation. He makes common cause with other nonconforming bodies, shouting after the group, ‘Doctors are nothing but criminals allowed to wield knives and make errors! Thousands and thousands of maimed bodies denounce you! … I’d have every one of you who makes a wrong move killed!’83 After the scene at the curio shop, Joust is accosted by unknown assailants. The encounter again unmasks a hierarchy of bodies, at the apex of which is Dan, the Gladiator. His costuming, or lack of it, when fighting as the Gladiator reveals an excess of masculinity, exemplified by his bare torso and a reversion to

206 Monsters

p­ re-modern weapons. The thugs are easily overpowered, the Gladiator’s physical prowess being displayed as he delivers a knock-out punch to each of them and drags Joust to safety. Upon their failure, we see the thugs explaining themselves ‘in a darkened room in another part of town’ to an unseen figure, later revealed to be Casova. After this, we cut to the curio dealer playing against the same figure who then brainwashes him into seeing Joust as an enemy. Visiting the recuperating but weakened Joust, the curio dealer plays chess with him at gunpoint. Joust dies after touching a piece.84 The curio dealer is able to do what the thugs could not, forcing Joust to play for his life at chess, and defeating him with the poisoned knight. His knowledge is exoticised and framed within the context of the past – he uses a Medici chess set as his murder weapon. Only the Gladiator and Dan possess both intellectual and physical talents in balance, their powers contained within the two identities. Finding a knight piece, Dan, employing his art knowledge, discovers that Joust was killed by a poisoned pin embedded in its base and recognises it as part of the Medici set at the curio dealer’s shop.85 He visits again and finds the chessboard with the Casova Gambit being played, implicating its creator in the crimes.86 Outside, realising the game is up, Casova kidnaps June. In the curio shop, Dan has changed the arrangement of the pieces and the dealer sees the board. Casova – the king – becomes his target. Confronting Casova at his castle-like mansion, the curio dealer is shot dead, fulfilling Casova’s claim that ‘All those who oppose the chess master die!’87 His motivations are convoluted. Joust was targeted because he opposed Casova’s plan to kill Wrath and control the money of Casova, Joust, and Wrath’s institution. After a quick struggle that lays bare the contrast between American muscle and intellectual indulgence, the Gladiator saves the day. Casova’s actions are attributed to his ‘mind ha[ving] snapped, under some intense concentration … probably in devising the chess gambit!’88 While the curio dealer seems fully able to physically dominate the other chess-players, knocking out Dr Wrath and fighting with Casova, there are limits to his capabilities. The Gladiator, however, easily overpowers Casova, punching him clean off his feet, as he hits ‘like an unleashed hawser’.89 The kinetic images, depicting the Gladiator’s movements and strength, highlight his physical dominance. Only the combination of mental abilities in Dan the art dealer, and physical strength in the Gladiator, can solve the puzzle and restore order.

Monsters and moralities The chess-player in these comic-books is portrayed in a variety of ways in relation to social norms, gender roles, physical and cultural geographies, and

Kapow! 207

normative body–mind discourse. The chess-player is figured as the outsider. The chess-player is absence and excess. The chess-player is set apart from the American male, as oriental, European, alien, or stranger. The chess-player is constructed as physically different. The chess-player possesses both mental weakness and strength. The chess-player is on the edge of respectability. The chess-player has villainous tendencies. The chess-player resides on the edges of society, locationally and behaviourally. The comic-book chess-player, therefore, is not fundamentally distinct from the cultural chess-player within other literary and visual forms. The same marginal inclinations are exhibited – the same tendency for virtuosity and monstrosity, the same desire for theatricality, for stage settings, for masks, for concealment of the self, for automaton-like detachment, the same desire for absence and excess, as deficient or limited in some essential aspect. With these representations, these comic-books demonstrate the moral messages surrounding deviation. The American comic-book chess-player frequently connects mind and body, masculinity and mental abilities, anticipating the portrayals of Bobby Fischer in the 1960s and 70s. These portrayals reaffirm the recontextualisation of chess from its Eastern origins through more violent processes than widely acknowledged, a recontextualisation, as noted earlier, involving mutilation, expropriation, acquisition, governance, and spectacle. The body of the chess-player represents knowledge acquired from the East, resisted in the victories of Alan Baker and Guido Nicola, voyeuristically observed by Roger Capar and Barry Archer. Each story marks an attempt to uncover secret knowledge, to demystify and conquer mystery, otherness, and foreignness with reason. Chess-play shows itself as a modern science, yet the chess-player, mental talent reified, is never convincingly and permanently a rational, respectable figure. Even as the chessplayer was marginalised and made other, its coming into the centre of society was achieved with caution and admiration.

Notes  1 G. Morrison, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (London: Vintage, 2012), p. xv.  2 M. Ferber, ‘Chess’, in A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 2007), p. 41. Ferber also quotes Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam and Cervantes’s Don Quixote where Sancho Panza states, ‘when the game is finished, [the pieces are] … stored away in the bag, which is much like ending life in the grave’.  3 E. Myers, ‘Art’, in B. E. Carroll (ed.), American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (New York: SAGE, 2003), p. 33.

208 Monsters

 4 M. Pustz, ‘Comic Books as History Teachers’, in M. Pustz (ed.), Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 1–2.  5 M. Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), p. xi.  6 See J. Binder, ‘Checkmate’, Mary Marvel, 25 (June 1948), p. 1, for a rare example of a non-superhero, female comic-book chess-player.  7 A. S. Mittman, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’, in A. S. Mittman (ed.) with P. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 6.  8 E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 20.  9 M. Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 21. 10 Jacques Derrida, quoted in N. Royce, Jacques Derrida (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), p. 3. 11 In the International Chess Olympiad, the USA came first in 1931, 1933, 1935, and 1937. The Soviet Union won all events between 1952 and 1974. 12 B. E. Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in Carroll (ed.), American Masculinities, p. 4. 13 Scott Bukatman, quoted by J. A. Brown, ‘Supermoms? Maternity and the Monstrousfeminine in Superhero Comics’, in M. Gibson, D. Huxley, and J. Ormrod (eds), Superheroes and Identities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 186. 14 Ibid. 15 D. Greene and K. Roddy, ‘Introduction’, in D. Greene and K. Roddy (eds), Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance: Critical Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), p. 8. 16 M. Huggins and J. A. Mangan, ‘Prologue: All Mere Complexities’, in M. Huggins and J. A. Mangan (eds), Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2004), p. xi. 17 Carroll, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 18 See, for example, Batman, 100 (June 1956), Strange Suspense Stories, 36 (March 1957), Man in Black, 4 (March 1958), and Justice League of America, 58 (November–December 1967), for four of many comic-book covers portraying chess but without a substantive chess-player element in their narratives. 19 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 19. 20 Mr Mxyzptlk is, in other stories, described as emerging from the fifth dimension. 21 J. Siegel and J. Shuster, ‘The Cross-Country Chess Crimes’, Action Comics, 112 (September 1947), p. 3. 22 T. Watts, ‘Superman’, in Carroll (ed.), American Masculinities, p. 448. 23 R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1621), pp. 346–7. 24 Siegel and Shuster, ‘Cross-Country Chess Crimes’, p. 4. 25 Ibid., pp. 4–6. 26 Ferber, ‘Chess’, pp. 41–2.

Kapow! 209

27 Siegel and Shuster, ‘Cross-Country Chess Crimes’, p. 9. 28 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 29 J. Broome and M. Anderson, ‘The Cosmic Chessboard!’, Strange Adventures, 35 (August 1953), p. 4. 30 Ibid., p. 3. 31 Ibid., p. 5. 32 C. Moulton, ‘The Chessmen of Doom!’, Wonder Woman, 55 (September–October 1952), p. 20. 33 Ibid., pp. 15, 20. 34 Ibid., p. 22. 35 Ibid., p. 23. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 26. 38 Myers, ‘Art’, p. 448. 39 William J. Levitt, quoted in N. Postman, ‘Philo Farsworth’, in D. Rather and W. Isaacson (eds), People of the Century: 100 Men and Women Who Shaped the Last 100 Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 243. 40 H. S. Truman, ‘Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union’, 8 January 1951, in Government Printing Office, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Harry S. Truman, 1951: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 1 to December 31, 1951 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1965), p. 4. 41 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 6, 65. 42 Broome and Anderson, ‘The Cosmic Chessboard!’, p. 6. 43 B. Powell, ‘Karno the Chessman’, Wonderworld Comics, 9 (January 1940), pp. 1–2. 44 B. Powell, ‘The Return of Karno’, Wonderworld Comics, 10 (February 1940), p. 8. 45 J. Simon and J. Kirby, ‘Captain America and the Chessboard of Death!’, Captain America, 1 (March 1941), pp. 1, 2. 46 Ibid., p. 6. 47 J. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 195. 48 Dorothy L. Sayers’s introduction to Dante’s Purgatory (1955), quoted in J. Brown, The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), p. 41, noted that pride was ‘love of self perverted to hatred and contempt of one’s neighbour’. 49 Carroll, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 50 ‘Comics Magazine of America Comics Code 1954’, reproduced in A. K. Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The Origins and History of the Comics Code, Volume 1 (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), pp. 166–9. 51 Morrison, Supergods, p. 56. 52 J. Witek, Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), pp. 49–50.

210 Monsters

53 B. Woolfolk and M. Gutwirth, ‘The Man Who Defeated Death!’, Beware Terror Tales, 7 (May 1953), p. 1. 54 Ibid., p. 10. 55 L. Cameron, ‘A Game with Lucifer’, Baffling Mysteries, 7 (March 1952), pp. 1–2. 56 Ibid., p. 2. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., p. 3. 59 Ibid., p. 4. 60 Ibid., pp. 5–6. 61 Ibid., p. 7. 62 K. Rice, ‘Strange Rendezvous at 17 rue Noir’, Hand of Fate, 9 (February 1952), p. 1. 63 Ibid., p. 2. 64 Ibid., p. 3. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., p. 5. 67 Ibid., p. 6. 68 Ibid., p. 4. 69 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 70 A. Carreno, ‘The Grim Reaper’, Eerie Adventures, 1 (Winter 1951), p. 6. 71 Ibid., p. 7. 72 ‘The Great Chess Match’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 25 January 1893, p. 8. 73 E. Grosz, ‘Refiguring Bodies’, in M. Fraser (ed.), The Body: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), pp. 50-1. 74 L. Blackman, The Body: The Key Concepts (Oxford: Berg, 2008), pp. 4–5. 75 ‘Add 3 Inches of Steel-Like Muscles To Your Arms’ [advertisement], Strange Suspense Stories, 36 (March 1958), p. 2. 76 F. Gardaphe, ‘Charles Atlas’, in Carroll (ed.), American Masculinities, p. 41. 77 For example, B. Powell, ‘Karno, the Chessman’, Wonderworld Comics, 9 (January 1940), p. 32. 78 B. Powell (as A. Dean), ‘The Pearl Diver Murders’, Wonder Comics, 2 (June 1939), p. 6. 79 Ibid., p. 4. 80 G. Rider, ‘King of the Chess Killers’, Blue Beetle, 11 (February 1942), p. 1. 81 Ibid., p. 2. 82 Ibid., p. 3. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., p. 5. 85 Ibid., p. 6. 86 Ibid., p. 7. 87 Ibid., p. 9. 88 Ibid., p. 10. 89 Ibid.

Epilogue Exploding heads and the death of the chess-player [W]e can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement for soap. Marcel Proust, The Captive and the Fugitive1

‘Ka-Boom! Chess-player’s head explodes during championship match!’ According to Ellis Ruth, correspondent for the Weekly World News – an underrated historical source – the chess-player Nikolai Titov’s head ‘suddenly blew apart’ during his May 1994 Moscow Candidate Chess Championship game with Vladimir Dobryin. The ‘brilliant chess expert’, said to suffer from a condition called hyper-cerebral electrosis or HCE, was the victim of, essentially, too much thinking. As Dr Anatoly Martinenko reported, HCE is a ‘condition in which the circuits of the brain become overloaded by the body’s own electricity’. Explosive results occur during periods of intense mental activity. Victims ‘are highly intelligent people with great powers of concentration … In a way it could be said they were literally too smart for their own good.’2 Although (hopefully) fictional, this yarn has the smallest sliver of plausibility. Ruth’s reporting, falling back on tropes of otherness, lack, and absence, reminds one of, and relies upon, a representation of extraordinary mental ability, embodied by the chess-player, as outside the usual everyday experience.3 From a twenty-first-century perspective, the chess-player, even in the Weekly World News story, appears an out-of-date and washed-up figure. Artificialintelligence successes by IBM and Deep Mind on the quiz show Jeopardy! and the Chinese game of Go have seemingly advanced machine ability further beyond human powers, while the first page of Google search results for ‘World Chess Championship 2014’ includes a clip of the current champion Magnus Carlsen falling asleep at the board during a victory largely ignored by the mainstream media.4 One BBC article even asked ‘Does anybody still care about chess?’,

212

A cultural history of chess-players

asserting that ‘rumours of its death are greatly exaggerated’.5 Yet even if the game is still played, the figure of the cultural chess-player has faded from view. Bobby Fischer’s death in 2008 only seemed to confirm this passing.6 The deindividuation of the chess-player, suggested by Deep Blue, and its cultural death as highlighted by Ruth only reaffirm the importance of the individual mind and body to the chess-player’s historical cultural representation. Deep Blue’s victory and its consequences confirms Stephen Jay Gould’s contention that ‘the aesthetic and ethical foundation of modern Western culture rests firmly on our belief in the distinctiveness of each individual’.7 Bodily distinctiveness is of the first importance in this regard. The gradual disintegration of the chess-player as a single body is a principal reason for its cultural decline. The chess-player has become collected information, hinted at in portrayals of Louis de la Bourdonnais as an automaton, strengthened by Garry Kasparov appearing as a cyborg reliant on books and computers, and confirmed by Deep Blue as the summation of all human chess-play: these and other images reveal that the body and mind of the chess-player are no longer singular. Humans no longer play artificial intelligences in the expectation of winning. The outcome is far too predictable. At times, the historical process of de-individuation has found the chess-player in the realm of the transhuman, a realm which has also served to reaffirm the body and mind as the site of reason and the ambition of the transitional human to remain human. Cognitive, behavioural, and emotional modification were considered in Chapter 1 in the context of religiously inflected attempts to regulate the practice of chess. Efforts to demarcate the game’s emotional applications and mental limits only served to confirm the human-ness and fallibility of those playing. Chapter 2 noted how the appearance of the virtuoso François-André Philidor marked a significant event in the relationship between the chess-player, the mind, and the body, and continued to examine the virtuoso and blindfold chess-players who displayed themselves, ignoring the demands of social etiquette, in Victorian Paris, ultimately failing to escape the constraints of humanness. The limits of chess-play as a tool for cognitive and behavioural modification were further considered in Chapter 3, made visible in the contrast between the relative utility of the chess-player and the literary detective in crime fiction. The body–mind distinction of the chess-player was seen in Chapter 4 as various strategies of resistance were considered to the challenge of the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue. The absent body of the chess-player was discussed in Chapter 5 in the construction of Garry Kasparov’s adventure with Deep Blue. Further discussion of posthuman chess-players was touched upon in Chapter 6, considering the machine and human as statue. Chapters 7 and 8 considered images of Bobby Fischer which sought to domesticate his performance, confining his talent and affirming his human-ness, in spite of his anti-Soviet superhero

Epilogue 213

status. The chess-player as superhero was further discussed in Chapter 9 in the context of comic-books which again, returning to a kind of beginning, displayed the chess-player’s power and social utility through didactic lessons and moralities. As has been demonstrated throughout this book, the chess-player has inconsistently aligned with the transhumanist ambition for ‘the continued evolution of human life beyond its current human form as a result of science and t­ echnology guided by life-promoting principles and values’.8 Specifically, these values include the application of reason and the use of technology, broadly defined.9 While accounts of Philidor and Fischer frequently lapsed into a language more associated with supernatural or transcendent ability, appearing unbeatable, the superior chess-player’s abilities and effects have also been viewed in terms of transhuman power. Humanistic projects, such as rational recreation, are not so distinct from outwardly transhuman efforts, particularly when each views the chess game itself as technology, and its teaching as an effort to shape human nature, cognitive abilities, and behaviour.10 Chess-play came to be regarded as an activity of this kind when viewed as a pastime that could restructure one’s mental architecture, a perspective seen particularly in periodicals such as the Chess Player’s Chronicle which, in line with editor Howard Staunton’s conception of the game, presented the chess-player as in the vanguard of self-improving, respectable Victorians.11 The transhuman aspect to the chess-player has frequently lapsed into unconstrained monstrosity. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen states, ‘we live in a time of monsters’.12 This book has argued that the cultural figure of the chess-player, through the bodies they inhabit, their supposed intellectual abnormality, and their occupation of socially distant spaces, has been represented in these terms, often when demonstrating transhuman potential. Stephen Fry’s idea of a chessplayer as a ‘pasty-faced creature in bottle-end spectacles’ playing a pointless game also fits into this cultural space, with the use of the word ‘creature’ both dehumanising and creating a sense of otherness.13 The monster, one who possesses monstrous qualities, can be thought of as of a different size, from or inhabiting a different land, possessing some essential differentiating characteristic, detected through its impact on and challenging of common sense, or a form possessing a multifaceted identity. This can be an excess of something or a lack of something, as Fry’s image and transhuman portrayals demonstrate. Attempts to understand the chess-player’s relative position in society and to limit this transhuman status through domestication, satire, and moralities around behaviour have also been a common feature in the chapters above. In highlighting contested natures of this kind, this book has attempted to demonstrate that the chess-player and chess possess no single cultural image and that any single image

214

A cultural history of chess-players

of this postmodern subject is a partial fragment. While the chess-player has been more commonly associated with notions of civilisation and civility, it possesses a more nightmarish undercurrent, with a wide variety of cultural practices collectively held together by the term ‘chess-player’. Most powerfully, this book has demonstrated that, regardless of the mask, the placid mask of reason, the straightforward ‘one who plays chess’, hungry piranhas lurk beneath the surface and twisting, tortuous lines of thought strain the mind. Impact, or challenges to common sense, produce reactions or coping strategies. Human and machine chess-players have historically been visualised and considered in often disfigured ways. While histories of ‘freaks’ and ‘monsters’ state that ‘people who are visually different have always provoked the imaginations of their fellow human beings’,14 a parallel provocation has been the presence of the anomalous mind which is then represented as visible abnormality. The body reflects the mind, externalising its power or the anxieties connected to it. A weak body has often accompanied a powerful mind. Likewise, a deficient emotional life is often paired, as with Bobby Fischer’s cultural image, with superior chess-play. Fascination with the ‘different mind’ has resisted efforts at going beyond the human, through domestication and recourse to the imposition of limits on the chess-player, who may be framed and trapped within discussions about clothing, social lives, school life, money-making, and the bounds of the everyday. Such attempts break down under the strain of constraint and analysis, revealing inconsistent or exaggerated efforts to humanise a subject which has already gone beyond human, as the chess-player sheds such attributes. These cultural images have provided a way for the chess-player to resist death, resisting de-individuation and contributing to it, creating the chess-player as a monument to its own past. Italo Calvino’s thought has almost come true. While the ‘dead outnumber the living … the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask’.15 The chess-player is a living, breathing thing, forever ‘new’, being a socio-cultural practice, as well as ‘old’, an accumulative process, the past forming an exoskeleton and growing in size. The process of cultural construction has reduced the chess-player to a collection of images, a box of photographs which occasionally spring to life. The interplay between old and new, alive and dead, marks the chess-player as a site of reflection on the present and a record of the past, where constructed ‘spiderwebs of intricate relationships’ seek a form, persistent even when the things that laid the strings have eroded.16 All representations are partially constructed from the pieces of chess-player past, and their creators function as the sometimes unsubtle, but also playful and self-aware, surgeons. The past does not die. Instead, the never-quite-dead nature of representations repeat and are reinvented. While

Epilogue 215

chess-player representations are subject to forgetting and decay, a form of memorialisation preserves these leavings of the past, and new life can emerge. The symmetry between past and present chess-players can be seen more clearly within the spaces of chess’s performance and practice. Consider George Walker’s hypnotic, mirrored impressions in the Café de la Régence, proving Cicero’s thought that ‘the life of the dead is in the memory of the living’,17 or the use of the haunting Turk in Game Over. The constructed nature of chess history in this context can again be compared with Gothic fiction, where revivals are a common occurrence. Like Frankenstein’s monster, such uses of the past reinvigorate what has gone before, rarely taking ‘exactly the same shape they possessed before’.18 Each image omits another aspect of the chess-player. The chess-player, as individual, cultural, or monstrous body, resists summation to a single word. Yet the term chess-player provides a form in which the individual and the historical can meet and be held as one, which can be grasped. Conveyed through historical items and settings and through projections of the physical, moral, and mental attributes of chess-player past on to chess-player present, the chess-player is a figure bound with its own history. No other pastime or leisure activity possesses the variety of forms nor the historical legacy that is maintained around the term chess-player. The cultural representations of the chess-player considered here depict a fragmented identity and fulfil a variety of functions relevant to the fears and curiosity of their respective readers and writers. The cultural chess-player has an underlying uncanniness which was highlighted as the normally socially distant game was carried through everyday life and paraded as spectacle. Embedded in a web of social and cultural crises, as historical figures as well as haunting figures, representations of this figure can be seen as attempts to negotiate these crises, as strategies of resistance to cultural bodies which simultaneously threatened, confounded, and entertained. Resisting homogenisation and presenting a multiplicity of meanings in diverse contexts and for diverse audiences, the chess-player was in part a literary creation. This is not to say that the cultural chess-player is a weightless cipher, but rather that it possesses a strong imagined aspect which threatened to, and frequently did, overwhelm the everyday encounter.

Notes  1 M. Proust, The Captive and the Fugitive (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 620.  2 E. Ruth, ‘Ka-Boom! Chess Player’s Head Explodes During Championship Match!’ Weekly World News, 24 May 1994, p. 15.  3 See also J. Berger, ‘Humans No Match For Chess-Playing Chimps’, Weekly World News,

216

 4

 5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

A cultural history of chess-players

19 January 1993, p. 6; and M. Bett, ‘Amazing Crab Plays Chess!’ Weekly World News, 15 January 2002, p. 20. See ‘IBM’s Watson supercomputer crowned Jeopardy king’, BBC News, 17 February 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12491688 (accessed August 2016); ‘Google’s AI wins final Go challenge’, BBC News, 15 March 2016, www.bbc.co.uk/ news/technology-35810133 (accessed August 2016); and ‘Chess Grand Master Falls Asleep During Game of World Chess Championship’, Yahoo! Sport, 20 November 2014, https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/world-of-sport/chess-grand-master-fallsasleep-during-game-world-chess-championship-155829484.html (accessed August 2016). D. Edmonds, ‘Does anybody still care about chess?’, BBC News, 28 November 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30006019 (accessed August 2016). ‘Chess legend Bobby Fischer dies at 64’, BBC News, 18 January 2008, http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7195840.stm (accessed January 2008). S. J. Gould, quoted in R. Jay, ‘The Automaton Chess-Player, the Invisible Girl and the Telephone’, in R. Jay, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), p. 146. ‘Part I: Roots and Core Themes’, in M. More and N. Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 1. M. More, ‘1. The Philosophy of Transhumanism’, in ibid., p. 3. More, ‘1. The Philosophy of Transhumanism’, ‘4. Transhumanist Declaration’, and N. Bostrom, ‘3. Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up’, in ibid., pp. 9, 14, 55, 29. A. Clark, ‘11. Re-Inventing Ourselves: The Plasticity of Embodiment, Sensing, and Mind’, and ‘Part III: Human Enhancement – The Cognitive Sphere’, in ibid., pp. 113, 111. J. J. Cohen, ‘Preface: In a Time of Monsters’, in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1996), p. vii. S. Fry, ‘Chess Piece’, The Listener, 24 November 1988, p. 23. R. Garland Thomson, ‘Introduction: From Wonder To Error – A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 1. I. Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 84–5. Ibid., p. 68. C. Middleton, The History of the Life of M. Tullius Cicero (London: E. Moxon, 1839), p. 255. C. Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 11–12.

Select bibliography Asma, S. T., On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Benedict, B. M., Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Brady, F., Endgame: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Bobby Fischer (London: Pier 9, 2012). Brady, F., Profile of a Prodigy (New York: Dover, rev. edn, 1989). Brewster, D., A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1819). Calvino, I., Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver (London: Vintage, 1997). Carroll, B. E. (ed.), American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (New York: SAGE, 2003). Cohen, J. J., ‘Monster Culture: Seven Theses’, in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3–25. Cook, J. W., The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Eales, R., Chess: The History of a Game (Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole, new edn, 2002). Eco, U., Misreadings, trans. W. Weaver (London: Picador, 1994). Fudge, E., ‘Introduction’, in E. Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 1–18. Getsy, D. J., ‘Acts of Stillness: Statues, Performativity, and Passive Resistance’, Criticism, 56.1 (2014), pp. 1–20. Hartmann, J., ‘Garry Kasparov Is a Cyborg, or What ChessBase Teaches Us about Technology’, in B. Hale (ed.), Philosophy Looks at Chess (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2008), pp. 39–63.

218

Select bibliography

Huggins, M., and J. A. Mangan (eds), Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2004). Huizinga, J., Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Hyman, W. B., ‘Introduction’, in W. B. Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Irwin, J. T., The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Jay, R., ‘The Automaton Chess-Player, the Invisible Girl and the Telephone’, in R. Jay, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), pp. 147–62. Jayanti, V. (director), Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (Alliance, 2003). Martin, D., Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Metzner, P., Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). Mittman, A. S., ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’, in A. S. Mittman (ed.) with P. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate: 2012), pp. 1–14. Murray, H. J. R., A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, facsimile reprint of 1913 edition, 2002). Oriard, M., Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Roberts, R., with H. C. Schonberg, A. Horowitz and S. Reshevsky, Fischer– Spassky: The New York Times Report on the Chess Match of the Century (New York: Bantam, 1972). Schaffer, S., ‘Enlightened Automata’, in W. Clark, J. Golinski, and S. Schaffer (eds), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 126–65. Serres, M., Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, trans. R. Burks (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Tanizaki, J., In Praise of Shadows, trans. T. J. Harper and E. G. Seidensticker (London: Vintage, 2001). Truitt, E., ‘From Magic to Mechanism: Medieval Automata, 1100–1500’, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2007. Walker, G., Chess and Chess-Players: Consisting of Original Stories and Sketches (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1850). Zielinski, S., Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

Index Note: literary and historical works can be found under authors’ names. Comic-books and films are listed under their title. ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. 17 rue Noir 202 see also ‘Strange Rendezvous at 17 rue Noir’ Abercromby, David (d. 1702) A Discourse of Wit (1685) 28 Adams, Jenny Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (2006) 4 agency 44–5, 51–3 al-Mas’uˉdıˉ (896–956) ix Analytical Engine 94 see also Charles Babbage; Ada Lovelace animal chess-players 28–32 apartment (of Bobby Fischer) 162 see also Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. Archer, Barry 200 see also ‘A Game with Lucifer’ Automaton Chess-Player, The (1769–1854) 83–121, 126–9 see also Kempelen, Wolfgang von explanations 98 Gothic technology 113–14 history 86 human-machine boundaries 127–8 physical description 86–7, 128 presentation 92 resistance to see resistance super-natural 105 virtuoso 86, 88–93, 96, 99 see also virtuoso Babbage, Charles (1791–1871) 94 Calculating Machine 85 Bacchus, Reginald (1874–1945) and Ranger Gull (1875–1923) ‘The Automaton’ (1900) 126, 128, 131–3, 135–6, 138–42

Bachelard, Gaston 108, 111, 197 Baker, Adrienne 203 see also ‘The Grim Reaper’ Baker, Alan 202 see also ‘The Grim Reaper’ Barrister, Dan 204 see also ‘Karno the Chessman’; ‘The Return of the Chessman’; Dr Fung Beaumont, Matthew 45 bedroom (of Philip Marlowe) 73–4 see also Chandler, Raymond; Marlowe, Philip Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940) Arcades Project 49–50, 53 see also blindfold chess-player Bierce, Ambrose (1842–1914) Moxon’s Master (1899) 128 blindfold chess-player 42, 44–5, 47–50, 53–4 Bogo of Clare (d. 1294) 22 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986) Mirrors (1960) 83, 100 Botting, Fred 113 Bourdonnais, Louis-Charles Mahé de La 52–4 brain function 24–5 imagination 24, 28–9 memory 24, 26 reason 24, 26, 28–32 Brathwaite, Richard (1588–1673) 30–1 Brewster, David (1781–1868) Letters on Natural Magic (1852) 85, 114 British American Club, Bombay’ 202–3 see also ‘The Grim Reaper’ Brooklyn Chess Club 156 Burton, Robert (1577–1640) 22 Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) 27–8, 195

220 Index

Café de la Régence 39–55 see also Walker, George Calvino, Italo 214 Canetti, Elias Auto Da Fé (1947) 161–2 Capar, Roger 200 see also ‘The Man Who Defeated Death!’; moralities ‘Captain America and the Chessboard of Death!’, Captain America (1941) 198–9 Captain Comet 197–8 see also ‘The Cosmic Chessboard!’ Carlsen, Magnus 211 Carr, John Dickson (1906–77) 66 Castiglione, Baldassare (1478–1529) The Book of the Courtier (trans. 1556) 29 Caxton, William (c.1422–c.1491) Game and Playe of the Chesse (1474) 5 cellar 69 see also Walker, George Chandler, Raymond (1888–1959) 69, 73–5, 79n.76 see also Marlowe, Philip The Big Sleep (1939) 73–4 The High Window (1942) 73–4 Chequerana 197–8 see also ‘The Chessmen of Doom!’ ‘The Chessmen of Doom!’, Wonder Woman (1952) 196–7 Christie, Agatha (1890–1976) 66, 68 The Big Four (1930) 68 Hercule Poirot 65–6, 68–9 Savaronoff / Number Four 68 Christopher, Melbourne 96 church 19, 23 Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215) 134 see also statue clothing 152–8 see also Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. Comics Code (1954) 200 see also moralities Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur (1859–1930) see also Holmes, Sherlock The Blue Carbuncle (1892) 64 The Final Problem (1893) 65, 75 Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) 64–5 A Study in Scarlet (1887) 43, 65 Connor, Steven 85 Cook, James W. 85 ‘The Cosmic Chessboard!’, Strange Adventures (1953) 196

Cotton, Charles (1630–87) The Compleat Gamester (1674) 19, 39–40 Games Most in Use in England, France and Spain (1715) 40 ‘The Cross-Country Chess Crimes’, Action Comics (1947) 195–6 cryptic crossword 73 daguerreotype 114, 116–17 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond (1717–83) 5 Damian, Saint Peter (c.1007–c.1072/73) 22 Darrach, Brad 160–1 ‘Bobby Fischer vs. the World’ (1974) 159–60 Death (as chess-player) 203 see also ‘The Grim Reaper’ de Balzac, Honoré (1799–1850) 46 de Certeau, Michel 107 de Couvrai, Jean-Baptiste Louvet (1760–97) 50 Deep Blue (IBM) 83–121 history 87 intelligence 88, 96–7, 120 Man vs. Machine 98–9 resistance to see resistance virtuoso 87–9, 91–3, 112 Deep Mind (AlphaGo) 211 de la Chambre, Marin Cureau (1594–1669) 31 see also animal chess-players de Legall, François (1702–92) 45 de Lucena, Luiz Ramírez (c.1465–c.1530) Discourse on Love and the Art of Chess (1497) 26 de Vaucanson, Jacques (1709–82) 96 Devil’s Gambit (‘A Game with Lucifer’) 200 Diderot, Denis (1713–84) 5, 33, 45, 60n.107 Digby, Sir Kenelm (1603–65) 30 see also animal chess-players Dr Fung 198, 204–5 see also ‘Karno, the Chessman’; ‘The Return of Karno’ Dryden, Stuart 127, 131–3, 139–42 Dupin, C. Auguste 69–70 automaton 66–8 During, Simon 84–5, 114 Encyclopedia Britannica 98 Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des art et des métiers (1751–66) 5, 33 see also Diderot, Denis; d’Alembert, Jean le Rond

Index 221

Equitable Center, New York 108–10, 112–15, 121, 170, 188–9 Exhibition Hall at Laugardalshöll Stadium in Reykjavik, Iceland 170–85 Febvre, Lucien 20 Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. (1943–2008) 149–65, 212 19–0 victory streak 163–4 animal 160 boring 149 Brad Darrach 160–1 Brad Darrach, ‘Bobby Fischer vs. the World’ (1974) 159–60 child prodigy 153, 156–7 clothing 152–8 compared to stereotypes of chess-player’s in 1950s USA 151–3 death 212 eccentric 149 Jane Howard, ‘The Boy is the Master’ (1961) 157–8 machine 160 monster 149–51, 158–60 physical descriptions 159–60 Ralph Ginzburg, ‘Portrait of a Genius as a Young Chess Master’ (1962) 158–9 relationship with public 149–51 self-other relationships 151 space apartment 161 castle 161 hotel room 162 supernatural 163–4 uncanny 159 young man 154–8 Fischerele see Auto Da Fé (1947) Fischer vs. Spassky (1972) 170–85 see Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. Arthur Koestler reaction to 179 attendance 179 commercial negotiations 172–6 complaints chess board 181 chess pieces 181 food 178 lighting 180 location 172 noise 178 prize fund 172 public reaction to 175–6, 180

seats 178 sound levels 183–4 stage furniture 180 television cameras 178, 183 temperature 181 Iceland 170 location 170, 176–7 ticket sales 179 Vladimir Nabokov reaction to 183 Fiske, Willard (1831–1904) Chess in Iceland and in Icelandic Literature (1905) 177 flaneur 43, 57n.29 Fleming, Ian From Russia With Love (1957) 188n.56 Foucault, Michel 45, 137, 182 Fourth Lateran Council (1215) 22 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–90) 26 Freeman, R. Austin (1862–1943) 66 Freyhere, J. F. (18th C.) 98 Friedel, Friedrich 111–12, 116, 118–20 Fudge, Erica 29 see also animal chess-players Fuller, Thomas (1608–61) 25 Fung, Dr see Dr Fung Futrelle, Jacques (1875–1912) 66, 70–3, 75 see also Van Dusen, Professor S. F. X. Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire (1906) 72 The Problem of Cell 13 (1905) 65, 71 The Problem of Dressing Room A (1906) 72 Gall, Franz Joseph (1758–1828) 25, 64 see also phrenology Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (2003) 106–21 ‘A Game with Lucifer’, Baffling Mysteries (1952) 200–1 see also moralities Gates, Bill 94–5 Gibson, William 127 Ginzburg, Ralph 158, 165 ‘Portrait of a Genius as a Young Chess Master’ (1962) 158–9, 161–2 Gladiator, The (aka Dan Kenneth) 205 see also King of the Chess Killers Go (Chinese game) 211 Gott, Samuel (1614–71) 27 Gould, Hannah (1789–1865) ‘Address to the Automaton Chess-Player’ (1832) 126, 128, 130–3, 135–6, 138, 141–2

222 Index

Gould, Stephen J. 212 Greco, Gioachino (c.1600–c.1634) 39 Green, Robert (15th C.) 25 ‘The Grim Reaper’, Eerie Adventures (1951) 202 see also moralities Gull, Ranger see Bacchus, Reginald (1874–1945) and Ranger Gull (1875–1923) Hall, E. T. 111 Halle, Johan Samuel (1727–1810) 128 Hamid, Krishalad 201–2 Hauff, William (1802–27) 32 The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves (1815) 32 see also animal chess-players haunted house 108–10, 121 heterogeneity 2, 7, 129, 141, 143n.12 Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1776–1822) ‘Automata’ (1814) 128 ‘The Sandman’ (1816) 134 Holmes, Sherlock 64–9, 71, 75 see also Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur automaton 67–8 home (of Alan and Adrienne Baker) 202–3 see also ‘The Grim Reaper’ hospital 206 see also ‘King of the Chess Killers’ hotel room (of Bobby Fischer) 162 see also Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. Howard, Jane see Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. ‘The Boy is the Master’ (1961) 157–8 Hoyle, Edmund (1671/72–1769) 40 Huarte, Juan (1529–88) Examination of Men’s Wits (trans. 1594) 28 Huggins, Mike 41, 49, 62 see also respectability humours 19, 25–6 choleric 27 melancholic 19, 23–8 phlegmatic 26, 45n.45 Hus, Jan (c.1370–1415) 23–4 Hyman, Wendy Beth 84, 106, 116 hyper-cerebral electrosis 211 Invisible Girl 93 Irwin, John 67 James I, King (1566–1625) 27 see also humours Jay, Ricky 93

Jayanti, Vikram see Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (2003) Jean-Eugène, Robert-Houdin (1805–71) 98 Jeopardy! (game show) 211 Joseph II, Emperor (1741–90) 92 Julyk, David 91 kaleidoscope 8, 85 Kang, Minsoo 106 Karno the Chessman 198, 204–5 see also ‘Karno, the Chessman’; ‘Return of Karno’ ‘Karno, the Chessman’, Wonderworld Comics (1940) 198, 204–5 Kasparov, Garry 87–8, 91–2, 95–9, 105–21, 151–2 Kempelen, Wolfgang von (1734–1804) 86–7, 89–93, 96–7, 99, 105–6, 117, 126, 128–30, 132, 134, 136–7, 140 The Speaking Machine 93 workshop of (in Robert Löhr’s The Chess Machine) 130, 134, 140 Kenneth, Dan (aka The Gladiator) 205 see also ‘King of the Chess Killers’ ‘King of the Chess Killers’, Blue Beetle (1942) 205–6 Kittler, Friedrich (1943–2011) 113 Knox, Ronald (1888–1957) 66 Koestler, Arthur 179 Kovacs, Jan 202 Kronsteen, Agent (in Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love) 188n.56 Lasker, Emmanuel (1868–1941) 66 Learned Pig Toby 96 Lei, Sudi 202 see also ‘The Grim Reaper’ Letter from a Minister, A (1680) 23 Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95) 130 Levitt, William 197 Li, D. Genealogy of Chess (1998) 1 liminality 88–9 Locke, John (1632–1704) Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692) 19 Löhr, Robert 136–7 The Chess Machine (2008) 126, 128–30, 132–8, 140–2 Lovelace, Ada (1815–52) 94 see also Babbage, Charles

Index 223

Magritte, René (1898–1967) La réproduction interdite (1937) 50 Manhattan Chess Club 152, 158 see also Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. Mannyng, Robert (1303) 21 ‘The Man Who Defeated Death!’, Beware Terror Tales (1953) 200 see also moralities Marlowe, Philip 69, 73–5, 79n.76, 196 see also Chandler, Raymond gamesmanship 74 Sam Spade 74, 79n.76 sportsmanship 74 Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) 33 Marshall Chess Club 155–6 see also Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. Martin, David 7, 137, 140–1 McCorduck, Patricia 89 see also resistance Metzner, Paul 43, 63, 85 see also virtuoso Miller, Daniel 154 see also clothing Mittman, Asa Simon 119 moralities (comic-books) 199–206 Morphy, Paul (1837–1994) 72–3 see also utility Munetto 32 see also animal chess-players Murphy, Pete 110 Murray, H. J. R. (1868–1955) 41 A History of Chess (1913) 1 Nabokov, Vladimir 160, 183 Nazi castle 198 see also ‘Captain America and the Chessboard of Death!’ Nead, Lynda 43 Nenna, Giovanni (16th C.) A Treatise of Nobilitie (trans. 1595) 29 Nicola, Guido 201–2 see also ‘Strange Rendezvous at 17 rue Noir’; moralities orientalism 32, 132, 137, 192, 200, 204–5, 207 Oxford English Dictionary definition of automaton 84, 106 definition of chess ix Oxford Graduate Observations on the Automaton Chess Player (1819) 95, 98

Parsloe’s Chess Club 53 see also Philidor, François-André Danican Peckham, John (c.1230–92) 22 Pelletier, Francois 90 Pettit, Edward (17th C.) 22 Pharmakon 26, 36n.44 Philidor, François-André Danican (1726–95) 39, 52–4, 63 photograph 8, 116, 154, 170, 176, 214 photographic memory 196 phrenology 62–4 Physicians’ Club 205 see also ‘King of the Chess Killers’ physiognomy see phrenology Pillefranc, M. 49 see also Café de la Régence Pillsbury, Henry Nelson (1872–1906) 64 see also phrenology Pluto 196, 198 see also ‘The Cosmic Chessboard!’ Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49) 62, 66–7, 69–71, 73, 94 see also Dupin, Auguste The Purloined Letter (1844) 75 Poirot, Hercule 65–6, 68–9 see also Christie, Agatha Pringle, Sir John (1707–82) 26 prostitute 43 psychological warfare 111–12 purgatory 200 see also ‘The Man Who Defeated Death!’ Racknitz, Joseph Friedrich Freiherr zu, (1744–1818) 137 Rathcone 198, 204 see also ‘Captain America and the Chessboard of Death!’ Ratis Raving (15th C.) 21 Reshevsky, Samuel (1911–92) 153 resistance (to non-human chess-players) 17, 20, 28–32, 83, 85, 88–9, 93–9, 105–6 respectability 40–3, 55, 62 ‘The Return of Karno’, Wonderworld Comics (1940) 204–5 Rhasis (Abuˉ Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyıˉ alRaˉzaˉ (854–925)) 27, 36n.47 see also humours Ritchie, Guy see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917) 68

224 Index

Room 423, Plaza Hotel, New York 108–12 see also Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78) 52 royal gardens of Schönbrunn Palace (fiction) see Löhr, Robert Ruskin, John (1819–1900) 73 Rypon, Robert (c. 1350–1421/22) 23

‘Strange Rendezvous at 17 rue Noir’, The Hand of Fate (1952) 201–2 see also moralities Strauss, Linda, 88–9 Superman 197–8 see also ‘The Cross-Country Chess Crimes’ Synod of Worcester (1240) 22

Sagacious Dog 32 see also animal chess-players Sahara Desert 195, 198 see also ‘The Cross-Country Chess Crimes’ St George’s Chess Club, London 131–3 see also Bacchus, Reginald and Ranger Gull 131–3 Savaronoff / Number Four (The Big Four) 68 see also Christie, Agatha Scardenelli, Tibor see Tibor Scardenelli Schaffer, Simon 106 Schechner, Richard 9–10 Schönbrunn Palace 90, 92 see also Kempelen, Wolfgang von Schönbrunn Palace (fiction) 136–7 see also Löhr, Robert secular magic see Simon During Serres, Michel 84–5, 106, 126, 129, 137, 143n.12 see also statue Seymour, Richard (18th C.) 40 Shannon, Claude (1916–2001) 91 Shelley, Mary (1797–1851) Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) 128 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) 75 Simon of Langham (1364) 23 Simpson’s Divan 53 see also Bourdonnais, Louis-Charles Mahé de La Skalna, Darius 200 see also ‘A Game with Lucifer’ Skalna Chess Club 201 see also ‘A Game with Lucifer’ sociality 126, 130, 134–5, 178, 195 Spassky vs. Fischer (1972) see Fischer vs. Spassky (1972) statue 7, 84–5, 126, 129–30, 134–7, 141 see also Michel Serres Staunton, Howard (1810–74) 41, 44–5, 51–2, 55, 72, 75 see also utility

Tanizaki, Junichiro (1886–1965) 133–4 Taussig, Michael 140–1 see also violence tavern 19, 23 see also Cotton Charles; Seymour, Richard; Hoyle, Edmund Theatre Royal, Bristol 131, 138–41 see also Bacchus, Reginald and Ranger Gull Theresa, Empress Maria (1717–80) 90, 136–7 Thicknesse, Philip (1719–92) 95–6 Thomas, Keith 30 see also animal chess-players Thomas, Scarlett The End of Mr. Y (2006) 65–6 Boy with the Gigantic Head 66 Tibor Scardenelli 129–30, 133–4, 140–2 see also Löhr, Robert Trachtenberg, Alan 114 see also daguerreotype Truman, President Harry S. (1884–1972) 197 Turing, Alan (1912–54) 91, 142 Turner, Victor 10 Twiss, Richard (1747–1821) 30 utility 44–5, 49, 53, 70–2, 75 Van Dine, S. S. (1888–1939) 66 Van Dusen, Professor S. F. X. 65, 69 see also Futrelle, Jacques criticism of chess-player 72 Dr Elbert 71–2 praise of chess-player 72 Verdery, Katherine 7, 126 see also statue Vermigli, Petyr (1499–1562) 25 Vidler, Anthony The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Homely (1992) 109 Vidocq, Eugène François (1775–1857) 63 violence 137, 139–41 virtuoso 2, 39, 42–3, 53, 63, 86, 90–2, 171–3, 179–80, 182, 185

Index 225

see also Paul Metzner; Deep Blue; The Automaton Chess-Player; Fischer, Robert ‘Bobby’ J. volcano base 198, 204 see also ‘Karno the Chessman’; ‘The Return of Karno’ von Windisch, Karl Gottlieb (1725–93) 89–90, 92, 105 Walker, George (1803–79) 42–3, 45, 51, 55 ‘Anatomy of a Chess Automaton’ (1839) 86 ‘The Café de la Régence’ (1840) 42–55 Chess, By a Tenth-rate Chess-Player (1871) 69 ‘Chess, Without the Chess-Board’ (1840) 42–55 ‘The Light and Lustre of Chess’ (1843) 40 ‘A Night in York – A Chess Adventure of 1842’ (1842) 40

Walker, J. (19th C.) Modus Operandi; or, The Automaton Chess-Player. A Play In Three Acts (1866) 97–8 Watson (IBM) 211 Weekly World News 117, 211 Wilkins, John (1614–72) 22 Willis, Robert (19th C.) An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton of Mr. De Kempelen (1821) 96 Wilson, Elizabeth 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951) 6–7 see also photograph Wonder Woman 197–8 see also ‘The Chessmen of Doom!’ workshop (of Wolfgang von Kempelen) 89 see also Kempelen, Wolfgang von Wycliffe, John (mid-1320s–1384) 23