Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  There was agitated whispering among the elders. Ubu raised his bony emaciated hand, let it fall to his side again; he sank back weakly into his chair, shaking his head. He pointed to the motor which was attached to the maize grinder.

  “So,” he said. “Ah, so then. It has come. The bad things from the machines. I told him many times that they thought too much about machines in the cave—it is not good to let machines do everything, it breaks the habits of work and the young have too much time to dream what should not be dreamed. Men should grind their own corn and catch their own fish, it is better so. The machines have destroyed our peaceful village.”

  “No,” Rambo said, “not the machine. My father was aware of this danger too, he wrote some lines about it.” Again he flipped the notebook open and read: “‘March 7, 1973. Hopped over to Johannesburg today with Ubu, picked up some motors for the fishing boats in the village. The first step toward mechanization: it’s a responsibility, thought about it a lot before I decided to do it against Ubu’s wishes. Who was the early analyst—Hanns Sachs?—who wrote that excellent essay about man’s fear of mechanization? Point was that man hesitated to mechanize his work processes for many hundreds of years, until the eighteenth century, because of narcissism and because he was afraid of his machine turning into a juggernaut. (Because he was afraid of what he might do—to himself—with reinforced hands and feet?) Until then the machine was a thing of magic—as with the Greeks’ deus ex machina, the Romans’ automatic marionette theater, the holy-water slot machine in Egyptian temples—a worker of playful miracles, a thing to wonder at, a sideshow exhibit, a laughable toy, a creator of merriment. After the First Industrial Revolution, a steamroller. But the robot laborer is not in itself a steamroller: it becomes one only because men need the steamroller so much that they make it into one. Men shrink from the machine only at the expense of full humanness: until they free themselves from the backbreaking drudgery of primitive labor they have no time to carve skylights in the skull, only then can they begin to join history—without supplementary arms and legs, no budding prefrontal lobes, no anxiety, no anticipation. . . . In any case, we must not produce more Ford plants on this island. Nothing is worth that. But there are two ways to escape being steamrollered by the machine, granted the will to escape is there. One is to limit mechanization to the absolute minimum. The other: to make the machine laughable, as the Greeks and ancients did, to take the threat out of it. It is not so threatening when I can laugh at it, because the machine can’t laugh back. A hierarchy is established: “I” over “It.” What’s needed is a new mythology in which the machine, until now a bugaboo, becomes a buffoon. Not impossible to arrange. For there is something hilariously, outrageously funny about the machine. It’s a perfect man. . . .”

  Rambo stopped. A remarkable change had come over him in the course of the council meeting: he had begun with much stammering, his voice small and tight with immaturity; toward the end he had lost his trepidation, had shouted—too loudly, at times—his shyness yielding bit by bit to a forcefulness which lent new depth to his voice and incipient dignity to his intent adolescent features. Toward the end his finger, rigid with newly acquired pedagogic thrust, had tilted with quite impressive authority—almost charismatic and yet a little shy—at the circle of elders.

  But now he seemed to hestiate once more; his voice grew soft and unsure again, the forefinger drooped in a curl of diffidence, a puzzled look came over his bronzed face. He stooped and picked up the flame-arm he had demonstrated.

  “I do not know what these words mean,” he said quite without bombast, humble now. “My father saw there was danger in the machine—he also saw a way to lessen this danger. Laugh at the machine, he said. I do not understand about the laughter.”

  He held the flame-arm up—absurd object, limb of transparent plastic with things that lit up inside like fireflies, shaped like a human arm from shoulder down through elbow and almost to wrist, but then continuing much farther than a human arm does, out far beyond the hand, to flare up at its end into a mouth which belched fire for fifty feet because things nobody had ever seen, rumors called atoms, were breaking up somewhere inside. He looked at this arm that was not an arm, this machine shaped like an arm and also like a mouth, this fire-arm, and there was bewilderment on his solemn face. His lips curled at the corners—he was trying to smile, experimenting with a smile, but there was a tremendous gravity holding the smile back. He stood there gravely smiling, more grave than smiling but trying very hard, and he said, his voice very solemn, “Perhaps the machine is very funny. There must be some joke in the machine that we do not understand. I do not know. We must study more—the jokes too. Especially the jokes. History—”

  His lips twitched, searching for the joke: shy rehearsal of a smile. From a branch over the thatched roof of Dr. Martine’s hut a tarsier chattered, it sounded like a chuckle.

  Beyond the fire, on the outermost ring of the villagers, Ooda sat with her hands folded on her belly. She listened to Rambo’s voice. In one hand she clutched a wrinkled piece of paper, as she listened she pressed her belly with her fingers. The sound of Rambo’s voice as he talked about history, always about history, hypnotized her: it had started as a child’s shaky voice, suddenly it sounded exactly like his father’s only without the laughing—Martine without the laughing.

  Where was Martine now? Into what ears talking his talk about history and cerebrotone and jealousy and love and orgasm? She rubbed a finger over the piece of paper. She did not have to unfold it to see the words, she knew them by heart; every day since she had found the paper on his desk, right after he left, she had studied the words, the words he had written with his own hand, trying to find some answer in them to a question she did not know how to put.

  She knew the words by heart now: “Guess I’ll never be entirely without ambivalence in my feelings toward Ooda: there’ll always be a bit of a cuff in each caress, the genitals are never altogether without fangs. But she loves me, at bottom it’s good. She’s warm, she gives—too often I forget that. With enough to build on, with that much, a man’s gratitude might in the long run outweigh his savage resentment of his woman simply because she is a woman and therefore the mythic denying mother and therefore to be scorned and mistreated—to conceal the fact that secretly what he really wants is to be scorned and mistreated by her, to bolster his myth. (Haven’t thought in those terms for a long time: well over twenty years.) I haven’t been good enough to Ooda, been too much by myself. If I get back I must make things better for her. I must get back to her, because then. . . .”

  That was all. She knew all the words, down to the last “because then.” She did not know what they meant. She knew only one thing: he wanted to get back to her. No matter what thing had made him go away, he wanted to get back—to her. This was enough. It meant, to use the word from his peculiar language, that he “loved” her. From the time she had found the piece of paper and read the words and known, even without understanding all the words, that he “loved” her, that with her he was made “happy,” used himself up, was not “bored,” wanted to come back to her—from that time she had not smoked one cigarette of ganja. It was his wish. She was already too—somatotone, he had said. Then she would be less somatotone, try to be. If he wanted to come back, she wanted to be the way he liked. He had to come back. She wanted to lie down again with him. She would lie down with no other man, the thought sickened her.

  She listened to Rambo’s voice as it gathered strength, Martine’s voice. She pressed her belly, ran her fingers over the beginning bulge. When had he left? In May, the time he called May. Five months ago. When would the child be born? Four months more—what he called February. If he did not come back, some part of him was in her. Would it be a son?

  In seventeen years the son would look like Rambo, with the growing Martine voice. What would the village be like in seventeen years? in forty-five years he would look like Martine. Very cerebrotone, like Martine.

  What would the village be lik
e in forty-five years? Now with history working in it? Whose voices would ring out at the council meetings around the fire? What would they say?

  She tightened her hold on the paper, fingering the scrap of the past that ended in mid-sentence, rubbed the bulge of the future in her belly.

  The sun was sinking now, a bowl of blood: it looked like the cup of a Mandungaba’s skull, brimming with blood. Ubu still felt cold, he pulled his bark robe tighter around him. All night long, and all the following day, he had sat in the clearing on the mountain top, at the center of the doomed Mandunga Circle, the Circle that had become a noose, too upset by the council meeting to sleep. Here he had first met Martine, eighteen years ago: Martine had dropped from the sun directly into the cave, like a bolt of light. Now there was nothing but a vacuum stretching before him. Beyond the carpet of raffia leaves, beyond the saw-tooth cliffs, a cobalt vacuum with no hope in it; empty, and blue—as a baboon’s ass.

  He was tired, there was a pain in his chest. He should not have climbed the mountain, of course—without much care, prognosis unfavorable. But why take care? Everything he knew and believed in was going now, the machines were destroying the village, the cave was destroying the village, the village was toppling like Johannesburg, there was nothing left to live for. Martine had dropped into the cave like a bolt from the sun, and from the cave had come all the bad things—machines, science, logic, statistics, books, dreams, jokes; now psychiatry. And dy, dynamism. These things were good, Martine said. They meant that the Mandunji were joining history. But this joining history was not good: it made a man feel uncomfortable, people stopped eating tapioca and began to smoke ganja. When you joined this history each day was unlike the other days and there was no more soothing sameness—you did not know what to expect. Soon he would die, he could feel the prognosis in his chest. What would come after him? Only trouble. Dizziness. Shouting. People were beginning to shout: last night he too had shouted. He wished Martine had not gone away. Martine was good in time of trouble.

  The old man scrubbed his thatch of bristly white hair, searching for an itch that eluded fingers, bent down with a sigh and rubbed his aching feet through the cricket sneakers which had once belonged to the British naval attaché at Johannesburg. He listened to the hypertense sounds of the jungle, scowling. With envy he looked down at the untonused old ocean: good to be like the ocean, placid as tapioca. He wished he had some tapioca now.

  Then he gave a start: over to the west there, where the sun was collapsing in the smear of flame-tinged blue emptiness above the horizon, over in the direction of Mauritius and Réunion and Madagascar and all the toppled African cities, coming from the lands of cummerbunds and electroencephalographs, the source of history—something moving.

  He stood up, shielding his terrified-hopeful old eyes with a bony tremorous hand. A dark speck there, in the sky. Moving east, southeast. Not a bird: it glinted in the sun, this bird had aluminum feathers. He was sure it was moving this way, as eighteen years ago Martine’s metal bird had moved—heading unerringly from the sun like a poison dart from a blowgun, straight for the island that had never been charted on any map by any cartographer.

  “May war always stay on other side of river,” the old man whispered in English, without conviction. Immediately he corrected himself: “May the war always stay on the other side of the river.”

  What prognoses this day?

  THE END

  The activity of these people interested me only as an illustration of the law of predetermination which in my opinion guides history, and of that psychological law which compels a man who commits actions under the greatest compulsion, to supply in his imagination a whole series of retrospective reflections to prove his freedom to himself.

  —TOLSTOY

  Author’s Notes and Warnings

  A word about Mandunga. Over the centuries men have hit upon all sorts of ingenious ways to disfigure, or at least discomfort, themselves: bound their feet, stretched their lips into saucers, pierced their nostrils and cheeks and ears, filed their teeth, used swathings to taper their skulls into pyramids, circumcised themselves, castrated themselves to become choirboys or harem eunuchs, cut off fingers and toes and tore out hair in rituals of grief, branded and tattooed their hides, crushed their abdomens with corsets, gormandized themselves senile, grown gaunt and “furry as a hedgehog” crouching on flagpoles, poisoned themselves with nicotine and alcohol and other drugs, found a sartorial use for hairshirts and even sackcloth and ashes; the Amazons, determined to get into the self-lacerating act (equal rights forever!), lopped off their right breasts to make room for the bow. An endless fitful hacking away at the body. You don’t have to dig into the military record to prove that man, whatever else he may be, is certainly the self-maiming animal. In a sense, a voluntary amp.

  Lobotomy is presented in this story as yet another technique for destructive self-tinkering. (Not true unless it’s voluntary? But it often is voluntary. “The Operation of Last Resort,” in the Saturday Evening Post for October 20, 1951, gruesomely details how one man solicited such surgery. And the New York Herald Tribune for January 16, 1952, tells the story of Frank di Cicco, embezzler and forger, who, while serving time in an Ohio penitentiary, arranged to have a lobotomy “in an effort to rid himself of criminal traits.") I had thought, however, that the primitive version of lobotomy here called “Mandunga” was only a convenient storyteller’s fiction. No such thing: in these literally hair-raising fields the imagination is reality’s straggler. In April of 1951 a Peruvian surgeon named Dr. Francisco Grana announced before the Italian chapter of the International College of Surgeons (New York Times, April 30, 1951) that “he had examined 200 [American Indian] skulls in tombs and ruins, and found evidence of excellent brain surgery. The death rate from Indian surgery was about 30 per cent of all brain operations, the same as the present rate, he declared.” One skull which Dr. Grana placed on display, from the Fourth Century, A.D., had two perfect surgical perforations.

  This book is a grab bag of ideas that were more or less around at the mid-century mark. I would like here to list those writings from which I borrowed ideological materials with a free hand: often mauling them badly in the process: sometimes unintentionally.

  My debt to Norbert Wiener throughout is obvious. The concept of “charisma” is developed in the sociological works of Max Weber. The Mandunji tribe is patterned in part after the mild-tempered American Zuñi Indians, as described by Ruth Benedict in her Patterns of Culture; and, of course, her terminology of the “Apollonian” as against the “Dionysian” is straight out of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (the only book I know which says something about bebop).

  The writings consulted on neuro-surgery are too numerous to itemize; I should mention, though, that the fine quotation on page 48, from R. W. Gerard, is reproduced by Dr. Mary A. B. Brazier in her paper, “Neural Nets and the Integration of Behaviour,” in Perspectives in Neuropsychiatry. The novelistic possibilities of a non-Aristotelian society were suggested to me by a clever work of science fiction, A. A. van Vogt’s The World of Ā.

  A sickly shadow is cast over many of these pages by the first portion of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, that appalling anti-rationalist fulmination which has been called the great pathological document of the nineteenth century. But the sickness of this outrageous work goes beyond morbidity; Thomas Mann considers it “holy disease.” Of this section of Notes from Underground Mann has written (in his introduction to The Short Novels of Dostoevsky):

  Granted. . . . that it is hazardous talk in the strongest sense of the word, dangerously likely to confuse naïve minds, because it stresses skepticism against faith, and because it heretically attacks civilization and democracy and the humanitarians and the meliorists who believe that man strives for happiness and advancement while he is actually thirsting just as much for suffering, the only source of knowledge, that he really does not want the crystal palace and the anthill of social consummation, and that he wil
l never renounce his predilection for destruction and chaos. All that sounds like reactionary wickedness and may worry well-meaning minds who believe that the most important thing today is the bridging of the chasm that yawns between intellectual realization and scandalously retarded social and economic reality. It is the most important thing—and yet those heresies are the truth: the dark side of truth, away from the sun, which no one dares to neglect who is interested in the truth, the whole truth, truth about man. The tortured paradoxes which Dostoevsky’s ‘hero’ hurls at his positivistic adversaries, antihuman as they sound, are spoken in the name of and out of love for humanity: on behalf of a new, deeper, and unrhetorical humanity that has passed through all the hells of suffering and of understanding.

  That is the only justification I can think of for Martine’s sickly, tortured paradoxes a la Dostoevsky. But, to be sure, he is damned rhetorical about them—which may be the special pathology of the twentieth century.

  This book could hardly have been written, obviously, without the body of psychoanalytic literature now generally available. I have leaned especially heavily on Freud; for example, on his discussion of the “oceanic” in Civilization and Its Discontents and of the struggle between the forces of Eros and Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Indeed, this novel might be taken as the result of a too literal reading of Freud’s remarks, in the first-mentioned volume, about man and his machines: “Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times. However, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that this evolution will not come to an end in A.D. 1930. Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture. . . .”