In Palamedes' Shadow | Robert Rawdon Wilson

In Palamedes' Shadow

R. Rawdon Wilson

In Palamedes’ Shadow could be described as an investigation into the status of literature, and more particularly of narrative fiction (exemplified by Renaissance narrative on the one hand and modern and postmodern fiction on the other), with respect to the polarities of the game-playing model of cultural behavior as a rules/move complex. Is literature (like) a game, in the sense that its moves are generated by known–defined or definable–rules? Or is it (like) play, a matter of rule-governed moves whose rules, however, tend to escape us, and to do so constitutively? In treating literature implicitly as a set of practices, Wilson is able to incline to the reasonable answer that some of its practices are game-like and others play-like; that literature, in other words, is in part gameful, as he says, and in part playful.

“But what makes his book such an engaging and interesting reading, what keeps the reader on his/her toes, is its own playful (rather than gameful) approach to theorizing–the unpredictable moves that are made, the frequent recourse to theoretical fables–especially in combination with a perhaps ‘perverse’ aspect of its project (but is there pleasure without perversity?). Approaching fiction through its analogy with games and under the aegis of Palamedes,the book inevitably presupposes the accessibility of a grammar of literary ‘rules’. But the author’s interest is inexorably drawn to literary phenomena that foreground literature’s ‘discursive’ status, its playfulness as a set of moves, so that it is seen to resist definition as a matter of game(s).” (Ross Chambers, “Rules and Moves,” Canadian review of Comparative Literature XIX: 1-2 (March/June 1992): 95-100)

The figure of the hero Palamedes looms over anyone who invents, plays, or discusses games. Within the compass of his shadow, elongated but obscure, stand all the human activities that can be called games or gamelike. (For the Western mind, all human productivity may be seen, as metaphor or as archetypal resonance, to stand within the shadow of some archaic figure: Dionysus casts his shadow over freedom and carnival as ell as drunkenness; Hermes over theft and literary interpretation.) Consider the following anecdote.

A few years ago a scholar returning from a conference in Australia found himself stranded in Fiji. The plane in which he had bene traveling had lost an engine and, after a relatively smooth landing, was forced to wait on the tarmac at Nadi until a new engine could be flown in from Sydney. The passengers were lodged in a hotel near the airport, but (since they were not told how long they might have to wait) they were confronted with an acute problem of how to occupy themselves. Restless, filled with anxiety, knowing that at any moment they might be called to board the plane, they wondered how to pass their time. One of the passengers observed that they were in the situation of sailors aboard a becalmed ship waiting for the wind to blow. The scholar reflected that, odd as it might seem, passengers aboard a 747 and sailors of a former time can have much in common and, as well, that a lost engine and an absence of wind both result in the need to occupy onself while all activities are open to instant truncation.

The scholar realized that there is a class of games which seems especially suited for stranded passengers and becalmed sailors: simple games that, demanding some skill and some concentration (but only some), are played with shells, pebbles, sticks, holes, and words. Since he knew a few of these games (relics of previous becalmed conditions), he found himself, almost inadvertently, teaching them to his fellow passengers. A group sat around the bar of the Dominion International Hotel and played, following his instructions, games of acrostics, anagrams, charades, crambo, mancala, nim, palindromes, puzzles, riddles, and many varieties of simple wordplay. When, more than two days after they had been forced to land, they received a brusque summons to leave for the airport, one of the passengers observed to the scholarly gamewright that he had been very resourceful–as resourceful, he reflected, as Palamedes must have been. (From In Palamedes’ Shadow. Chapter 1)

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Consider the following parabolic (double, biformed, irresolvable) distinction. First, literature is the body of stories that express a people’s history and culture. It is what defines them, helps to bind them together, and is part of their educational development. Literature possesses vast tentacular sociocultural functions. Second, literature is a large, though indeterminate, number of forms, techniques, and conventions that make possible the telling of any story. Literature is also an immeasurable, and equally indeterminate, elastic pool of motifs, of basic story materials. It is only the repertory of what Umberto Eco calls “intertextual frames,” that is, the immense replication of itself that makes further replication possible. Literature is what makes the human capacity for narrative actual, and it is always transnational. Any convention, any motif, will find its place, useful and fruitful, in any national literature. (From In Palamedes’ Shadow, chapter 4 “The Archetype of Bamboozlement”)

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Play is something worth thinking about reflectively; and keen players, of whatever games, do normally meditate upon their play and the happiness that it brings. Many players of such structured games as chess or bridge would probably agree with the nineteenth-century chess master Wilhelm Steinitz, who is reported to have said that chess, like love and music, has the power to make one happy. In one sense, all of In Palamedes’ Shadow has been an attempt to reflect deeply, if discontinuously, upon an obvious problem of human existence: play does take place; there is something that one may call a play element (in Huizinga’s term) in human culture; this does take on the shapes of games and does, indeed, seem to slide imperceptibly into fiction and textuality. Nonetheless, the twin phenomena of play and game, whether considered only as sociocultural or prototextual problems, have never been explored adequately across the entire range of their exuberant diversity. This book has not, of course, succeeded in accomplishing that much. The history of play/game remains to be written and the theory has been, even now, adumbrated only obscurely. Still, In Palamedes’ Shadow has tried to reach into the dark corners of play/game discourse, in particular the analogy with fictional texts , that have seldom seen much light. The book’s method has been both discontinuous and narrative: otherwise solid blocks of discursive analysis have been allowed to split open to incorporate narratives. The method may be called, in a phrase both descriptive and provocative, ficto-theory. (From In Palamedes’ Shadow, chapter 7, “(Para)lude”)

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