Star Trek and History (30 page)

Ironically, the way in which literary references appear in the
Star Trek
universe mirrors the way in which references from
Star Trek
(and other popular culture staples) crop up in our own discussions, although such references might make us as incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with
Star Trek
as the Tamarians are to the Federation. Those people who are not well versed in Western popular culture would be as baffled by conversations including “My day went by at warp speed” or “Make it so” as Picard is by the statement “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” It is intriguing that
Star Trek
characters do not use popular cultural allusions from movies and television shows of the twentieth century but from books that have already taken on historical significance in our own time period. Some of these allusions are far less familiar to many twentieth- and twenty-first-century people than lines lifted from our own popular media would be. Although some
Star Trek
characters, notably
Voyager
's Lt. Tom Paris and
Deep Space Nine
's commanding officer Benjamin Sisko, do have a fondness for our popular culture, the general absence of allusions to television or movies in favor of Shakespearean or other literary sources attests to the lasting power of the Great Books.

This power seems to live on even in dire circumstances, such as the post–Third World War era of 2063 when Lily Sloane admits she's never actually read
Moby Dick
, after calling Captain Picard “Ahab” to shock him into the best course of action in
Star Trek: First Contact.
Yet, even without ever having read the book, Lily is acquainted enough with the character of Ahab to know her jibe will galvanize Picard. Thus, the elements of the great texts of history are already woven into the fabric of life and experience, so it's no wonder that by the twenty-third century the process of embedding text into life has continued, with the revival of human culture bringing with it a new interest in books.

Beyond the characters reading actual historic books or using them for allusions in their conversations, the
Star Trek
adventures are frequently built upon the literary scaffolding of these texts, whether it's Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew
—which provides the framework for “Elaan of Troyius” (
TOS
)—or the Lewis Carroll–inspired parallel or “mirror” universe in which the Federation is a vicious empire and Spock has a beard. Such scaffolding usage is a staple of popular culture, and, with episodes such as “A Piece of the Action” (
TOS
) and “The Royale” (
TNG
),
Star Trek
frequently attests to the power of the written word to influence and even control our lives and cultures. In the world of
Star Trek
, the most intriguing literary scaffolding is actually a double scaffolding that reflects both competing ideologies and literary histories.

In
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
, Admiral Kirk and his old adversary, the genetically engineered “superman” Khan, are not only operating from the basis of conflicting moral and social codes but also from opposing literary backdrops. Kirk reads and quotes from the alchemical drama of Charles Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities
, while Khan spouts lines from the revenge tragedy of Herman Melville's
Moby Dick.
When Kirk asks Spock if there is a message in his old friend's choice of
A Tale of Two Cities
as a birthday gift, he is establishing this opposition of texts. He reads: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the novel's opening, the beginning of probably the best-written and best-known run-on sentence in all of literature, which includes seven paired opposites:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope. It was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
9

The number seven, of course, is one whose symbolism resonates throughout all of literature, but it also resonates in the world of
Star Trek
. The television series that were ended voluntarily were concluded after seven seasons, the core crew of each incarnation in three of the series numbers seven, and the cinematic transition from Kirk's generation to Picard's takes place in the seventh film. The pairing of opposites is also a central underpinning of the entire
Star Trek
canon, from the concept of a mirror universe and alternate realities to the pairing of unlikely characters in professional and personal relationships. Just as Dickens sets up London and Paris as foils for each other, Kirk and Khan function in opposition, and the texts they choose for their personal story scaffolds are notable for their contrast to each other not only in their contents but also in their individual publication histories.

Kirk's birthday present, the iconic novel
A Tale of Two Cities
, and his connection with the physical text is reflected in his internalization of the story. The novel was a roaring commercial success upon its initial release as a serial publication in 1859. Although interest in Dickens's work has, over time, waxed and waned with trends in criticism and taste, he was a popular and beloved author during his lifetime, with a fan following to rival that of a modern movie star.
A Tale of Two Cities
was a best seller, appealing to readers at both ends of the sophistication scale. It is also an alchemical drama, a story in which opposites, like those of the opening sentences, are resolved to create something new. One of the best-known literary examples of an alchemical drama is
Romeo and Juliet
, in which the children of two opposing families collide, are destroyed, and in their deaths, bring about the peace that has eluded Verona for so long. Dickens, who was a reader and admirer of Shakespeare, appears to have very deliberately crafted
A Tale of Two Cities
on the alchemical scaffolding used by the Bard: “Dickens is writing according to strict alchemical formula. . . . The famous opening announces that the book is about contraries and contrasts.”
10

Unlike Kirk's, Khan's literary scaffolding comes from a novel, and an author, with a far less stellar history. When Commander Chekov studies the scant bookshelf on the wreck of the
Botany Bay
on Ceti Alpha V, he sees the Augments' tiny collection of Great Books, including Khan's favorite book,
Paradise Lost
; this is the text he had quoted (to the bafflement of Montgomery Scott) fifteen years earlier upon his sentence of exile in the episode “Space Seed” and which includes the classic declaration, made by John Milton's Satan, that it is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. However, the obsessed Khan admires another book on his shelf, Herman Melville's
Moby Dick.
Widowed, marooned, revenge-maddened Khan Noonien Singh is no longer building his own story around that of Milton's noble and militaristic fallen angels, nor even around the publication history of
Paradise Lost
itself; rather, he has chosen a new template that reflects his changed circumstances in its publication history and narrative.
Paradise Lost
allowed John Milton to rise almost immediately from a blind, discouraged political pariah to what Alfred, Lord Tennyson called “a name to resound for ages.”
11
By contrast, the publication of
Moby Dick
nearly destroyed Melville's career, partly because it was originally published without the epilogue that explained that the narrator, Ishmael, survived the
Pequod
's sinking. Even with corrected later printings, the novel's genius was not recognized until well into the twentieth century.

Similarly, Khan went from a confident world dictator who viewed himself as rising to a new challenge to an egomaniac with only revenge fueling him. Khan, with his perceived genetically superior mind and body, is left with his followers on Ceti Alpha V, and he is now a bitter, broken captain who steps easily into the shoes (or one shoe and one ivory peg leg) of another captain, and he even steals some of his best lines. Khan repeatedly quotes Melville's Captain Ahab, referring to Kirk with Ahab's lines about the great white whale that evades him and whose pursuit destroys Ahab and his ship and all of his crew, except Ishmael, who is left alive to tell the tale. As he launches the Genesis device, presumably to destroy both himself and the
Enterprise
, Khan hisses out part of Ahab's last speech, made as he hurls his harpoon at his adversary and is tossed into the sea and to his death: “From hell's heart, I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

Like Khan, the text of
Moby Dick
is unabashedly dramatic, with blatant stage directions included in the chapter headings toward the book's end. Khan's bombastic, but ultimately appropriate, demeanor is thus a reflection of the book he has embraced.

Even if we didn't expect our heroic admiral to win the day, the choices of literary templates made by Kirk and Khan immediately set up the film's final outcome. Kirk, as popular and as accessible as the beloved Dickens, is made new by the sacrifice of his friend that, like Sydney Carton's in
A Tale of Two Cities
, has all the traits of an alchemical drama: the opposing forces of Spock's selflessness and Khan's selfishness collide, destroying them both, but in the process, it ushers in a new creation foreshadowed by false deaths and resurrections early on in the story, a technique also used by Dickens. Khan, like Captain Ahab, “manage[s] to kill everyone else” along with himself. He dies thinking he has taken Kirk with him, but he retains the grandeur that makes him one of the most enduring of all
Star Trek
villains: like “Ahab . . . mad though he is . . . is a grand figure.”
12
Denied the ultimate revenge (even Spock doesn't stay dead), Khan sets in motion an ongoing rejection of the Melvillian formula.

The conscious denial of the Melville template continues throughout the films.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
, with its whale motif, avoids any
Moby Dick
references except a silly question from a clueless tourist at the Cetacean Institute (although D. H. Lawrence, who is quoted, wrote on the literary merits of
Moby Dick
). In
Star Trek: First Contact
, Picard makes the clear choice to abandon Ahab's path while quoting him. Rather than, like Khan, blindly following a literary framework, Picard makes the choice to learn from literature and to choose to do better than its characters do.
13

This optimistic choice illustrates, perhaps better than anything else, why these historic texts are included in the world of
Star Trek.
Like the Great Books,
Star Trek
invites us to take part in “humanity's great conversation about the most important questions in life [on] subjects such as the existence of God, the nature of love and justice, the possibility of immortality, the achievement of freedom.”
14
Every
Star Trek
crew looks like an illustration of diversity in motion, yet many of the books that remain relevant in the hands of crewmembers of different races, genders, and even species are those of the Western canon, the Great Books, written by the notorious dead Europeans, who despite their whiteness and their maleness, seem to have something to say to everyone: “We need the provocative questions, images, and debates provided by the Great Books, for in these, as in nothing else, we are free to experience what is essential to our lives . . . they also teach us something about genuine and thoughtful human existence.”
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Like the Great Books,
Star Trek
asks those questions, promotes those debates, and makes us all, even the Klingons, a little more human.

Notes

1.
Some such studies are by David Reinheimer, “Ontological and Ethical Allusion: Shakespeare in
The Next Generation
,”
Extrapolation
36, no. 1 (1995): 46–54; Larry Kreitzer, “The Cultural Veneer of
Star Trek
,”
Journal of Popular Culture
30, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 1–28; and the numerous entries for specific authors at the
Star Trek
wiki, Memory Alpha,
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Category:Authors
.

2.
See Krietzer, “The Cultural Veneer of
Star Trek
.”

3.
Technically, Lewis claimed that the minority of readers, those who read great works, “will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.” C. S. Lewis,
An Experiment in Criticism
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 2. By extension, the great works are those that can engage readers on multiple reads.

4.
“To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,” in
The Harvard Classics: Vol. 40, English Poetry from Chaucer to Gray
, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910), 308–310.

5.
For a meticulous analysis of Captain Picard's Shakespeare books, including to which page the edition under glass is turned in specific episodes, see “Picard's Shakespeare Books,” by Jörg Hillebrand and Bernd Schneider at Ex Astris Scientia,
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/shakespeare_books.htm
.

6.
Leslie S. Klinger, “The World of Sherlock Holmes,” in
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes
(London: W. W. Norton, 2005), xxxii.