I’ve recently been rewatching the classic TV series The Twilight Zone from the 1960s, and I felt like commenting on one episode that speaks to the storytelling tendency of the human mind, a subject addressed by Finnegans Wake: “The Lonely” (Season 1, Episode 7). This is also a timely episode because it comments on artificial intelligence and human “companionship” with robots.

Read on for my thoughts, with an awareness that there will be spoilers for this episode. You may want to hunt it down and watch it first before reading.

The premise of “The Lonely” is that in the future, criminals are punished by solitary confinement on distant asteroids, millions of miles away from the earth. As with a lot of Twilight Zone stories, it doesn’t pay to think too deeply about this premise. Why would society start to punish all (?) murderers by solitary confinement? And if they did decide to do that, why would they send criminals so far away instead of confining them in a prison on the earth?

Oh well. Let’s not get hung up on questioning the details. This idea is just a backdrop for the episode’s thought experiment. We are introduced to James Corry, a convicted murderer on one of these asteroids. Four times a year, he receives supplies from a spaceship. The captain of this ship, Allenby, takes pity on Corry because he believes Corry’s insistence that he only killed in self defense. Allenby has already kindly brought him various things to keep his mind occupied (such as the parts of a car that Corry could assemble), and on one fateful visit, he brings him the most wonderful gift of all (which he brings secretly and conceals from his own crew): a robot companion in the shape of a woman. Named Alicia, this robot provides companionship to Corry; though he rejects her as a mere thing at first, when he sees that she has the ability to cry, he accepts her as a person.

His voiceover narration is significant:

Alicia has been with me now for eleven months. Twice when Allenby has brought the ship in with supplies I’ve hidden her so that the others [that is, Allenby’s crew] wouldn’t see her and I’ve seen the question in Allenby’s eyes each time. It’s a question I have myself. It’s difficult to write down what has been the sum total of this very strange and bizarre relationship. It is man and woman, man and machine, and there are times even when I know that Alicia is simply an extension of me. I hear my words coming from her. My emotions. The things that she has learned to love are those things that I’ve loved. But I think I’ve reached the point now where I shall not analyze Alicia any longer. I shall accept her here simply as a part of my life — an integral part.

What interests me most is the part I’ve bolded. Like people today who form “relationships” with AI programs, Corry engages in a kind of projection and self-deception. He calls this robot an extension of himself who echoes back to him his own words, emotions, and interests. But even with this awareness, he chooses to accept the robot as a way to ease his loneliness.

Now, I realize that there’s an ambiguity built into the episode. We’re supposed to wonder whether this robot might really be a person. There are other episodes of the Twilight Zone that hinge around the audience being horrified at the treatment of sentient robots, and even “The Lonely” depends on the audience feeling like Alicia is, or at least may be, a person. The ambiguity allows the moral dilemma at the end to really be a dilemma: after Corry has bonded with Alicia, Allenby unexpectedly brings word that Corry has been granted a pardon and is allowed to go back to earth. But the catch is that he must leave with the ship immediately (within 20 minutes of being informed of the pardon) or else, due to meteor storms, the ship might not make it back to earth. And the ship can only hold enough extra weight for Corry to come himself: he must leave Alicia behind.

At the climax, as the deadline to board the spaceship rapidly approaches, Allenby shoots the robot in the face to break the spell it has over Corry, to show him that it’s just an artificial thing, a machine. “All you’re leaving behind, Corry, is loneliness,” Allenby assures him. In shock, Corry replies, “I must remember to keep that in mind.”

Despite the ambiguity — the fact that we wonder if we have witnessed a murder on this asteroid — the episode struck me primarily as a fable about the power of people to create stories and project them onto machines. Even the narration at the close of the episode refers to “Mr. Corry’s machines, including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete.”

I’ve been thinking lately about the storytelling function of the human mind, how we imbue objects, locations, and even other flesh-and-blood people in our lives with importance by weaving them into our stories — the tales we’re narrating to ourselves all the time — and, in a sense, building up ideas of them that are, at least to a degree, in our own image. We give life to all aspects of our lives.

There was a comment that the Wakean Joseph Campbell made in one of his interviews as part of the series The Power of Myth: it was along the lines of “As I get older, I realize more and more that we haven’t lost people who have passed away. They’re always with us.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s the gist of it.

I remember being young, maybe not even a teenager yet, and watching this interview with my father, who turned to me upon hearing this line and said, with some mild frustration, “What does that mean?” And I remember that I could feel Campbell’s meaning, but knew I couldn’t articulate it. Now, as an adult, I know much more precisely what Campbell’s idea there means to me, whether or not it’s exactly what he meant. The value that people and things have to us is largely in the stories we tell ourselves about them, and those stories (which are the products of parts of our own psyche) are always with us, whether or not the people or things remain. In a sense, everything is changing all the time. Even if the people we love are still alive, they’ve changed in countless ways over the years. What remains, and what is meaningful to us, is what they mean to us, in our minds. There’s a sense in which our loved ones are “made” by us and are therefore always with us.

What that means in the specific case of James Corry is that in leaving his asteroid, and leaving behind the broken machine that was once his companion, he hasn’t lost her at all. She was always a part of him, something he projected onto that machine and something he takes with him back to Earth. He can always relive his memories and stories, but — more important — he can always project the same parts of himself onto new people and things he experiences. In a sense, it is literally true that all he’s leaving behind on the asteroid is loneliness. Alicia will always be part of him.

If we want to get Jungian about it, she’s a manifestation of his anima, the feminine part of his psyche. For Jungians, the anima is what a heterosexual man projects onto all of his female partners. He discovers parts of his own psyche in his relation with others, noticing and accentuating those aspects of each partner that resonate with his own anima. Each partner highlights different aspects of this piece of the psyche — or, rather, it is the stories he constructs about each partner that underscore and bring out different aspects of his own anima. The individual partners come and go. The stories, and the motivating part of the psyche behind those stories, endure.

As I write this, I’m thinking more and more of Finnegans Wake and its idea that its characters each have many manifestations throughout history and literature and life, in all the tales told. The specifics change and pass away. What remains are the archetypes that continue to weave through history.

Almost any part of the Wake could be used to illustrate this point, but let’s take II.1, where the word “robot” appears. [Incidentally, the pronunciation of the word “robot” in The Twilight Zone — “ro’-butt” — often amuses me]

Chapter II.1 is the children at play, engaging in games that are the conflicts and wars of all history. The beginning of the chapter frames their games as a play (in the sense of a dramatic performance), called The Mime of Nick, Mick, and the Maggies, that they are putting on for their parents (recall HCE being described as attending the theatre in I.2). A cast of characters is introduced, beginning with a form of Shem the Penman:

GLUGG  (Mr Seumas McQuillad, hear the riddles between the robot in his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues’ gallery)

These “riddles” recall Shem’s “first riddle of the universe,” which is repeated throughout the book and will be the subject of an upcoming post. The riddles are positioned between a robot and “gagster.” The robot is associated with the theatre’s dress circle (the most expensive seats) and the gagster with the gallery (the least expensive).

I’m tempted to attribute this pair to Shaun and Shem, so that Glugg’s riddle is that which comes between and joins together the contrary forces of the universe. Since his riddle is about HCE and himself/his other — “When is a man not a man?” — it’s appropriate that it should be referenced as being between the two contraries. The robot is a laborer (which is what “robot” means in Czech), associated with the earthy world of Shaun (who is associated also with money, and thus with the most expensive seats), while the gagster is both jokester (gag-ster) and criminal (gangster), much as Shem is the outcast jokey writer who is always broke (and thus who is associated with the [rogues’] gallery).

If we imagine James Corry from “The Lonely” as Glugg — which is appropriate, since Glugg is lonely — then his riddle, his question about the humanity of Alicia, is caught between his robot in the dress (Alicia herself) and the gangster who shoots her (Allenby). Obviously Joyce couldn’t have intended this, but it’s a fun exercise to attribute other things to Finnegans Wake, and it’s often insightful and productive of personal meanings attached to the novel. Like Corry, Glugg suffers a separation: he has been “divorced into disgrace court” — separated from his love — for the reason that “he knew to mutch.” [He knew too much and he knew that he should match himself with a woman — I’m thinking here of how Corry matched himself with this automaton even though he knew too much about the fact that she was his own projection]

Like Corry, Glugg leaves the girl — running off after he fails in their game, but always returning to the girl. He leaves her behind but continually discovers her because she is a part of him.

Glugg frames this process not as him leaving but as being “jilted” by Izod and her Floras (forms of Issy), who abandon him for Chuff (Shaun). From Issy’s perspective, Glugg has left her alone, and she has found a new love, a new version of the same. Chuff/Shaun “wrestles for tophole with the bold bad bleak boy Glugg […] until they adumbrace a pattern of somebody else or other.” That is, they battle each other until they embrace each other and adumbrate the pattern of HCE, resurrecting him by forming into a new version of him. One brother is replaced by another and both brothers, after a battle, are replaced by the father, until this new version of the father falls and is replaced by versions of the brothers again, and the whole cycle continues ever.

The specifics pass away, but the stories remain, and behind them the archetypes live forever. The characters here, and throughout the book, show us that the loss of love is never a loss ultimately. The specific loved one leaves but the love remains to assume new forms, new stories; and ultimately all stories cash out as the archetypes HCE and ALP.

The Wake emphasizes this pattern of continuity within replacement. Issy mourns the lost Glugg, but the narrator tell us that he will be replaced by a new love who is ultimately what Glugg was: a manifestation of Issy’s animus (the male counterpart to the anima), and ultimately a manifestation of the archetype HCE. In a sense, she carries with her a love that she will renew. The only thing she’s left behind is loneliness:

Poor Isa sits a glooming so gleaming in the gloaming; the tincelles a touch tarnished wind no lovelinoise awound her swan’s. Hey, lass! Woefear gleam she so glooming, this pooripathete I solde? Her beauman’s gone of a cool. Be good enough to symperise. If he’s at anywhere she’s therefor to join him. If it’s to nowhere she’s going to too. Buf if he’ll go to be a son to France’s she’ll stay daughter of Clare. Bring tansy, throw myrtle, strew rue, rue, rue. She is fading out like Journee’s clothes so you can’t see her now. Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks. And among the shades that Eve’s now wearing she’ll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow. Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline’s to be. In the Dee dips a dame and the dame desires a demselle but the demselle dresses dolly and the dolly does a dulcydamble. The same renew. For though she’s unmerried she’ll after truss up and help that hussyband how to hop. 

This time reading this, I’m captivated by “she’ll meet anew fiancy.” This means both that she’ll meet a new fancy (in the sense of imagination: a new story about a new fiancé, someone new to fancy); and she’ll meet her fancy anew (again). She meets the old story again in new forms.

Issy called Shem in I.6 her “pepette,” her puppet (or pet or “young girl,” feminizing him). Here, she has a “dolly” she will dress up in new clothes and make do a dance, and in this way she will get a husband (a hussyband, one who will be tempted by dancing hussies, as HCE was and will be…girls that are her own manifestation and that she therefore teaches to dance or help to hop).

She hasn’t lost her pepette. She’ll dress it in new clothes and keep playing dolls and playing with hussybands. One doll, many forms. The same renews.

And ultimately, they “adumbrace” the pattern of HCE, who wakes from sleep.

Why wilt thou erewaken him from his earth, O summonorother: he is weatherbitten from the dusts of ages? The hour of his closing hies to hand; the tocsin that shall claxonise his wareabouts.

His whereabouts are his “wareabouts”…cause he’s a salesman, get it? A klaxon is a kind of loud horn, and a tocsin is a “alarm-signal sounded by ringing a bell,” according to the annotations. So these are like the trumpets at the end of the world. “Tocsin” also suggests to me sin and the fallen world from which eternity has stepped into clock time (tick-tock).

*

A last thought on this subject. The Shaunish professor of Question 11 in I.6 declares near the end of his speech,

My unchanging Word is sacred. The word is my Wife, to exponse and expound, to vend and to velnerate, and may the curlews crown our nuptias! Till Breath us depart! Wamen. Beware would you change with my years. Be as young as your grandmother! 

He identifies his anima, his wife, his feminine portion, with the Word (logos) of Scripture, and more generally with reason itself. This is all appropriate for hyper-rational, moralizing, egotistical, priestly Shaun. But at the same time, perhaps he unwittingly reveals to us a truth that he does not fully grasp: that his anima is language itself. It is unchanging because it is active at all times, speaking to the grandmother and granddaughter at once (as in a passage in II.2 where an elder ALP teaches a young ALP about love).

Within all of us is the Word in this highest, secular sense: language, which is simultaneously self and other, which constitutes us and speaks through us. We are its temporary manifestations, just as the changing circumstances of our lives are a temporary and fleeting flux through which archetypes move and on which we construct our stories.

It is suggested at various points in Finnegans Wake that Humphrey Earwicker — or some versions of him, anyway — is divorced or a widower or otherwise separated from his “wild goose” who has flown (he “mourned the flight of his wild guineese” as he is locked in his home/coffin suffering insults in I.3). Perhaps she is gone, in one sense, but she will never leave him. Always the Word is his wife.