An interesting paper (or
rough draft of) by a close friend
A board of sixty-four squares, half
black, half white, thirty-two pieces symbolizing war and royalty, and two
players controlling the world; this is the game of chess. It is a game with simple, straightforward
rules that creates a complex world of strategy in the minds of players. Battles can be fought between people or
symbolically for thoughts and nations.
Flirtation and sexuality can be conducted in the safe space of the board. Chess is a world; it is utopic
and dystopic, pleasant and violent, and rational and
irrational. Chess is a utopia and is
portrayed in literature as such. M.H.
Abrams defines utopia as a “class of fictional writings that represent an ideal
but non-existent political and social way of life….[the
word is a conflation of] the Greek words ‘eutopia’
(good place) and ‘outopia’ (no place)”
(327-328). Chess is an imaginary world
that is materially represented with a two dimensional black and white checkered
board and thirty-two carved pieces. It
is both a good place and no place. It is
a good place because it is hyperorganized with
clearly defined rules, which is common of utopian fiction. Chess also allows persons to act out passions
and aggressions in the metaphorical world of the game. Wars happen but no one is hurt. It is no place at the same time; since the
game is only two-dimensional the world of chess exists in the minds of the
players. Many authors use chess as a
means to convey dystopic ideas but have reality
remain unaffected; chess becomes a utopic dystopia. In The Tempest, Shakespeare uses chess as a
means for the young couple, Ferdinand and Miranda, to flirt in a safe
environment. It also comments on their
future leadership in contrast to the failed rule of their elders. Here chess acts as utopia because it allows dystopia to exist without harming anyone in reality. T.S. Elliot leaves out the utopic elements of chess in “The Wasteland” to illustrate
the dysfunctional sexuality of the sordid modern life. Chess is the world these unhappy people live
in. Lewis Carroll turns the Looking
Glass world into a giant chessboard to illustrate
Abrams credits Sir Thomas More as
the creator of the term utopia, which
is the title of his Renaissance novel that describes the perfect commonwealth
(328). In Utopia, Raphael Hythloday describes the
perfectly organized
The rules and arrangement of the
game are clear-cut:
The game of chess is played by two persons, each
having at command a little army of sixteen men, upon a board divided into
sixty-four squares. The squares are
usually colored white and black, or red and white, alternately; and custom has
made it an indispensable regulation, that the board shall be so placed that
each player has a white square at his right hand corner. (fig.
2) (Handbook 7)
The
world of chess is equal: players have an equal number of men and their movements
are dictated by strict rules that equally apply to both teams. The longevity, organization, and equality of
chess parallel those of classic fictional utopias and dystopias.
Shakespeare’s fictional island in The Tempest is the setting for a chess
game. In Act 5.1, Prospero discovers the
young lovers playing chess. Gary Schmidgall states, “chess is an innocent intellectual pastime”
(12). Prospero clearly announces that
the couple should only have chaste relations prior to their marriage:
But
If thou dost break her
virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious
ceremonies may
With full and holy rite
be ministered,
. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with
weeds so loathly
That
you shall hate it both. Therefore
take heed,
As Hymen’s lamps shall
light you. (4.1 13-23)
Hymen’s
lamps, the god and symbol of marriage, are alluded to in order to make
Prospero’s order clear. However, the
couple needs a space to flirt and expel their sexual tensions, thus, they play
chess. This game is also appropriate to
their noble status (Schmidgall 11). It is a neutral and equal space which mirrors
the moves and strategies of love. Chess
was a common game for lovers in the Middle Ages:
Stephen Orgel writes, “The game was an aristocratic
pastime associated especially with lovers, often with illicit sexual overtones,
and also served as a frequent allegory of politics” (197). Miranda accuses Ferdinand of cheating, “Sweet
lord, you play me false” (5.1 171) but states her complicity with it,
"Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, / And
I would call it fair play” (173-174).
She may be accusing him of cheating in love because he has seen much of
the world, whereas Ferdinand is the only Italian man other than her father she
has ever seen. In the world of chess,
Miranda is able to assert her ideas because of the equality chess affords. Both lovers are on equal terms in the game of
love and politics. Her accusation also
refers to political treason.
Chess is a microcosm of the court
that is organized like the feudal system.
Each piece (Rook, Bishop, King, and Queen) has a Pawn for protection and
they are easily sacrificed. Ferdinand is
usurping Prospero’s daughter and dukedom.
Prospero accuses him of treason early in the play:
Thou dost here usurp
The mane thou ow’st not, and hast put thyself
Upon this island as a spy,
to win it
From me, the lord on’t. (1.2 454-457)
Miranda
echoes her father, and both are correct.
It is an endorsement of Machiavellian politics; whatever must be dome to
win will be done and she will accept it.
Whatever pieces must be sacrificed in the game will be necessary. The young couple will rule better than their
parents whose vying for land and power on the island led to disharmony and
treason. They will win the chess game
unlike the older generation.
No one wins the game of chess in
Elliot’s “The Wasteland.” The second
section of the poem is titled “II. A game
of Chess,” and depicts stagnant and dysfunctional sexuality. The section is divided in two: a high-class
couple at home and two low class women in a pub. Each section involves two people, the players
in the game. Before the couple speaks,
Elliot describes a classic tale of tragic sexuality in which the woman
loses. “As though a window gave upon to
sylvan scene / The change of Philomel, but the
barbarous king” (Elliot 98-99) In Ovid’s Metamorphosis,
Philomel is perused and raped by her sister’s husband, and is transformed into a
nightingale (133-143). The chase is
similar to moves on a chessboard where one player captures a piece of his
opponent. Unlike this story, the modern
couple cannot capture one another. They
speak in paranoid voices and cannot talk about talk about their love or
life. They are not able to discuss
sexuality, so they say they play chess:
The hot water at ten.
And if
it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game
if chess,
Pressing
lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. (135-138)
However,
their game is stagnant. They must wait
for entertainment because their game, like their love, is stagnant and appears
to end in a draw because no one makes any progression. A stalemate in chess happens when both
players can only make moves that will put them in check. This perpetual checking results in a stalemate,
a draw, because no one can win (
The two women in the bar face a
stalemate as well. As they gossip, the
reader realizes that there is no communication between them. Sexuality is going nowhere for either
woman. Procreation, the productive side
of sex does not exist. One woman
describes her latest abortion: “It’s them pills I took
to bring it off she said. / … / The chemist said it
would be all right, but I’ve never been the same” (159-161). She is wasting time with sex in the eyes of
society; her opponent/companion asks, “What you get married for if you don’t
want children?” (164) The
calls of the bartender, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” (141), call attention to
wasting time. It is like the clocks of
chess tournaments help structure the game.
The format of this section parallels
chess. Each pair banters back and forth;
each person gets his or her turn to move.
The jump from high to low society is like the switch from black to
white. Both games end in a draw because
of the lack of communication and the stagnation of modern life. Elliot’s chess game is a dystopia
that mirrors reality; no one advances, they only defend their positions and
nobody wins.
Carroll uses chess as the organizing
element in Through the Looking-Glass and
What Alice Found There.
“I declare it’s marked out just like a large
chess-board!”
Like pieces in a game she has already won—parts of her
former psychic self, still in some sense operative, but now subdues, perceived
as childish, and thus under her conscious control—these creatures are not
longer fully alive in her, no longer capable of pulling her back to the
original, undifferentiated Eden before her stable, conscious self emerged. (77)
Nabokov’s
main character is The Defense is a
chess prodigy who suffers a nervous breakdown and then sees the entire world as
a game of chess. Luzhin’s
one passion is life is chess and it destroys him. His obsession begins as a young boy and one
can see that he is a true chess player.
Players that are not serous are called “patzers;”
trying to take pieces, they see the game materially. Serious players see the game in terms of time
and space. They want to control squares
on the board, space, and win tempos, time on
their opponent. Truly elegant chess
games involve extreme sacrifices of material for time (Magill
interview). Luzhin
plays games in his head and blindfolded because he is able to sense the rhythms
of time and space in his mind:
When playing blind he was able to sense these
diverse forces in their original purity.
He saw then neither the Knight’s carved mane not the glossy heads of the
Pawns—but he felt quite clearly that this or that imaginary square was occupies
by a definite, concentrated force, so that he envisioned the movement of a
piece as a discharge, a shock, a stroke of lightening—and the whole chess field
quivered with tension, and over this tension he was sovereign, her gathering in
and there releasing electric power. (Nabokov 92)
Chess
is a utopia for Luzhin in his younger days because it
serves as an escape from his tormented schools life. As time goes one, it becomes a dystopia that takes over his entire life. At the famed tournament with his rival, Turati, Luzhin has a breakdown
and see his reality in relation to chess: “The pain immediately passed, but in
the fiery gap he had seen something unbearable awesome, the full horror of the
abysmal depths of chess…. But the chessmen were pitiless, they held and
absorbed him. There was horror in this,
but in this also was the sole harmony, for what else exists in the world besides
chess?” (139)
After this unfinished game, there is
nothing else but chess for Luzhin, even though he
stops playing the material game. He
notices patterns in his life that he must defend against and not longer rests
for fear of traps. The world is his
enemy. Nabokov
does not name the primary characters, such as Luzhin
and his wife; they are all nameless pieces on the chessboard. The novel, like Luzhin’s
life, is structured like a chess game.
Laurie Clancy points out that the novel jumps in time like the movement
of chess pieces around the board (35).
The pattern created in the novel and in his life is a horrific
repetition of his childhood from he desperately wanted to escape: “With vague
admiration and vague horror he observed how awesomely, how elegantly and how
flexibly, move by move, the images of his childhood had been repeated (country
house…town…school…aunt), but he still did not quite understand why this combonational repetition inspired his soul with suck dread”
(Nabokov 214).
The utopic games that took him out of his dystopic reality has brought him back and this time the
only way he can escape is suicide.
Jumping from his bathroom window, he falls into a chessboard-like
landscape; “the whole chasm was seen to divide into dark and pale squares”
(256). This terrible chess death affords
him escape from chess and he finally receives the clarity he has searched for
when his wife’s friends call out his name: “The door was burst in. ‘Aleksandr
Ivanovich, Aleksandr Ivanovich,’ roared several voices” (256). TRANSITION.
Vonnegut focuses on the strategic
and tactical side of chess by having two military forces compete in “All the King’s Horses.”
He illustrates the dystopic violence of chess
by having real people play. Colonel
Kelly, his wife, twin sons, and thirteen soldiers crash land in Pi Ying’s
communist guerrilla territory in
This game takes on greater
significance; Pi Ying sees the game as East meeting West. He says, “I think this is an excellent way of
bringing together the Eastern and Western minds, don’t you, Colonel? Here we indulge the American’s love for
gambling with our appreciation of profound drama and philosophy” (91). Centuries of cultural and political
differences are able to meet in the neutral space of chess. No one has the advantage, which makes this a
utopia. After Pi Ying dies, the Russian Barzov takes over the black army. Now more of the communist world is represented. The free world is playing the communist
world; the game has universal significance.
The dystopic world of chess is a utopia
because it serves as a microcosm of the world in which symbolic political
battle can be fought. MORE.
Another universal battle between the free and
communist worlds occurred in
Chess is a utopia because it allows dystopias to exist without affecting reality. When it does affect reality, for Luzhin, Colonel Kelly, and Fischer, tragedy ensues. The madness of these persons reveals the
intensity of chess and its ability to dominate the lives of its players. The simple rules that have not changed in
hundreds of years and the clearly defined space of the game provide security in
which battles between nations, persons, ideas, and the self can take
place. East can play West,
free can play communist, men can play women, and childhood can play
adulthood. The Persian poet Rubaiyat wrote:
‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights
and Days
Where
Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither
and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And
one by one back in the Closet lays. (qtd in Jones and Gladstone 33)
Miranda,
Ferdinand, Elliot’s unnamed persons, Alice, Luzhin,
Colonel Kelly, and Fischer all play with destiny and retire to the closet, or
bookshelf from whence they came. These
authors use chess to enact dramas and self-discovery in the metaphorical world
of the game. Chess is a utopia and a dystopia; it is a good place, a bad place, and no
place. And now it is your move.
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