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Wolf, Tim. "Adulthood's Beginning: From Centered Oneness to Centerless Manyness in Greg Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Vol. 8, No . 4 (1997): 78-98.

In every life there comes a time when childhood ends, but unfortunately there does not always come a time when adulthood begins. The weak or cowardly may lose the excuse of youthful innocence, yet cling instead to willful ignorance rather than face the painful psychological transitions required for the knowledge and responsibilities of adulthood. That's where humans are now. Our childhood is over, but we have not yet become adults, and it is not clear whether we will. In The Forge of God and its sequel, Anvil of Stars, Greg Bear explores this question within the ostensible framework of a plot in which humans lose the earth and so must journey to fight among the stars, but Bear deepens the exploration by making this physical journey to the stars expand into a metaphor for analogous journeys into adulthood in both the collective and individual human psyche. Bear unifies the analogy around the idea that all of these journeys share one feature. Like the spacefarer trading the earth for the myriad scattered stars, all journeys toward maturity require the pilgrim to trade a place of centered oneness for a realm of manyness that has no center at all. In the first novel, Bear emphasizes that this can be a difficult transition. It can painfully wrench familiar perspectives and destroy comfortable illusions. But in the second novel, Bear reveals that those who endure may attain the highest reward, the reward of becoming part of a true team. Yeats writes of our modern age, "Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold." In novels in which the earth itself falls apart sending humanity reeling among the stars, Bear replies that the moment when "the centre cannot hold" is exactly when civilizations and individuals can mature into team members with the universe--if they have the strength and courage to endure.

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The Forge of God begins with an inciting action that epitomizes the central metaphor. The protagonist Authur Gordon, a strong but sensitive astrophysicist, is having a family get together with relatives at his home in the country, while also taking time to glance at the stars:

But Gordon's contentment is pierced when he sees that Europa, Jupiter's sixth moon, has disappeared. The disappearance heralds the entrance into the solar system of an invading alien fleet of planet-eating von Neumann machines that will destroy the earth before the book ends.

This beginning is nicely done in terms of symbolism of maturity, the process of "others" invading our insular worlds and requiring us to grow. Gordon is having a contented get together with the "circle" of his family, when an "other" pierces the circle of the solar system (our planet family) and forces the human family into growth that, in its insular contentment, it never would have initiated on its own. Up to this point, the stars have usually seemed to Gordon not as true subjects of their own reality, but merely as flat objects, "lights on blue velvet" surrounding his world as if earth were their center. Gordon's attitude reminds us of both the infancy of our journey to the stars and the infancy of the individual child. In the Ptolemaic system during the infancy of astronomy, we thought of the earth as the center of the universe with the sun and all the planets orbiting around us, just as the infant child perceives himself as the center of the universe with others orbiting her/him--a condition that Erikson describes as infant narcissism (38-40). There is no manyness in this system, for the child or the earth occupy the only subject position, while other people or planets occupy merely object positions--not significant in their own right, but only in their relationship to the subject . During the Copernican revolution in astronomy, we had to learn how to give up our illusion of being at the center, and to see ourselves as just one of many planets orbiting the sun. In the same way, the maturing individual must learn to move the self out of the central position, grant subject positions to many others, and place the self among them. Both these transitions force decentering and move from oneness to manyness.

Both can also be challenging and painful, especially when they destroy illusions. Clearly the Copernican revolution caused pain, not merely Galileo's pain before the Inquisition in 1633 and his subsequent arrest, but the pain--or fear, sense of loss, confusion, disorientation--experienced by the masses as the earth began to move beneath their feet and the fixed perfection of the crystalline superlunary heavens shattered down upon their heads. The Inquisition was no more than an attempt to resist the pain of these shattered illusions through denial, similar to what Piaget in The Child's Conception of the World terms "child artificialism"-- a refusal to surrender familiar or intuitive or wishful concepts of the universe even when confronted with empirical evidence (350-53). In the same way, as both children and adults we often experience pain when we are forced to rearrange our conception of the universe, especially if it destroys our "magical thinking" about our place in the universe. For example, in Ego Development and Historical Change, Erikson warns that as the child loses her/his narcissistic illusions about her/his central place in the universe, s/he may experience extreme trauma to the point of falling into a despairing sense of worthlessness or valuelessness (38-41).[1] However, my own use of the term "narcissism" in this paper is looser than Erikson's precise psychological definition, and diverges from it in that where Erikson uses it to describe a special one-time transition in childhood, I use it more broadly to describe transitions that must be made over and over throughout life. Again, an analogy with the Copernican revolution illustrates the process, for although it decentered the earth, it gave humans a new center, the sun, and it took further transitions to realize that the sun was not the center of the galaxy, the galaxy was not the center of the local system, the local system was not the center of the universe. In the same way, I may surrender my self-centered infant narcissism enough to join my culture, but reinscribe that narcissism in jingoism--making my culture into a new center that I expect all "other" cultures to orbit or emulate. I would then have to learn to surrender that center as well, or in many ways remain childish, unfit for teamwork. In our journey from one level of maturity to another, we expand the orbit of our lives ever larger to embrace ever more people, animals, plants, and places in the sphere of our concern, willingly surrendering ever more self-centeredness to meet our responsibilities toward them. In addition, as we grow older and the mounting evidence of our own ultimate insignificance and mortal frailty wages a campaign against the god-like vanities of our youth, we must gracefully surrender more and more self-centeredness merely to see ourselves and our mortal situation clearly, without delusion or bitterness. Just as space travel could never have occurred if we had not first pursued the discipline of seeing the earth's position in space accurately, no matter how small and decentered the new knowledge made us feel, so does the individual or cultural journey into maturity --indeed, the survival of our species--depend upon our willingness to see our own decentered smallness clearly, without illusion or despair.

Each of these transitions can bring great reward when they are successfully traversed, but many of them can be painful, and this, of course, is why some people do not transverse them, remaining childish and self-centered into old age. Admittedly, not all people would agree that growing experiences need be painful, at least partially because of the very real truth that not all people experience growing transitions in the same way. However, Bear seems to be among those who feel that most individual or cultural growth involves pain, sometimes huge pain. Neither does the pain, in Bear's worlds, necessarily yield excitement or joy--merely survival and maturity. This is a very austere view of life, but it is absolutely seminal to the message that Bear is trying to get across in his novels--the human species must grow up if it wants to survive, and it will never grow up if it is not willing to face some hard painful realities about life and the universe. One might even say that Bear's novels are themselves a mission to try to help save the human species. By forewarning those of us who read them that pain is a part of growth, Bear hopes to forearm us to endure the painful truths we must face to operate as an adult civilization, and thus be among those who will help humanity survive.

In this way, the novel The Forge of God is itself somewhat like the invading aliens of its opening pages; that is, the austere novel can break through the "circle" of the reader's immature conceptions about the universe, in the same way that the aliens invade the circle of the earth's solar system and make humanity grow up. In The Essential Other: A Developmental Psychology of the Self, Robert Galatzer-Levy and Bertram Cohler review the many theories of how each level of self-centered immaturity is forced out of its contentment and into a transition toward greater maturity by the disturbing entrance of an "other" or "others" into the "world picture" of the self. For example, the need to find a mate disturbs solipsistic contentment but abounds with opportunities for transitions towards a larger inner life (209-10, 253-58).[2] The entrance of an "other" into the inner circle of our self challenges us to stop seeing the "other" as an object, but rather as subjects like ourselves--a move from oneness to manyness. The disappearance of Europa challenges Gordon to stop seeing the stars as "objects" but rather as subjects with a life of their own. In mating, the entrance of an other into the orbit of our life can seem very threatening, just like the Europa's disappearance scares Gordon. But, although threatening, the entrance can presage rich rewards. Bear hints at this in an odd plot twist later in the novel. He has Gordon learn that Europa was actually eaten by friendly aliens! These friendly aliens, called Benefactors, eat Europa as fuel while following the evil aliens into the solar system in an attempt to save the earth. In the end, although they cannot stop the earth's destruction, the Benefactors do manage to save some humans, including Gordon and his family. This helps emphasize the nature of the "other" as both threat to inner system and opportunity for growth, like the other we pursue for mating. The analogy is reinforced in the opening by the internal conflict of Gordon's young son, Marty, who is struggling with his first big crush on a visiting niece at the very moment his father spots the disturbance in our solar system! The oneness of insular solipsism versus the manyness of love, the oneness of immaturity versus the manyness of maturity, our small earth versus the scattered multitude of the stars--all these are joined in the novels opening pages.

After the opening, The Forge of God expands to study the ways other characters face the enemy aliens and the inner transition from centered oneness to centerless manyness that the aliens from the stars represent. Significantly, rather than face the pain of admitting that the human race is not the center of the universe, many religious characters in the novel (led by the President of the United States!) retreat to the easier comfort of displaced self-centeredness by deciding that the enemy invasion is the will of God, that the aliens are, as the book's title suggests, merely the forge of God to test, punish, and purify the earth. Since the religious characters conceive of an anthropomorphic God who is similar to themselves, this narcissistic displacement lets them project a representation of the self back into a central position: "Okay. Maybe I'm not the center of the universe, but there is a center, and there is someone at the center. Fortunately, He happens to look a lot like me, and I'm the center of His attention." This allows these religious characters to look right at the aliens and not see them; that is, not see a true being with its own subject position, but rather see an object created by God for human benefit. They can, in effect, look at the aliens and see themselves instead. The price of this immature delusion is death, since the earthlings who retreat to it cannot form an appropriate response to the alien challenge. "What! Fight against God Himself?" they say. "No. We must sit and accept His punishment."

Bear's reading of human nature is quite accurate. Throughout human history we have seen numerous similar examples of a retreat to "God's will" paralyzing the human will to resist tragedy and improve the human condition. Many people, it seems, would rather die than surrender the comforting delusions that shield them from hard realities. Consider, for example, the thousands of people each year who die from cancers that might have been curable if detected earlier. Many of these people avoided cancer exams because of "magical thinking"-- such as, "If I don't know I have it, I don't have it." Or, "It can't happen to me." In a very real sense, these people would rather die than confront unpleasant realities. Most examples are somewhat less direct, but potentially just as lethal. Consider the Tennessee legislature as late as March of 1996 attempting to pass a law hindering the teaching of evolution. These same (mostly) men would not hesitate to run to the doctor to seek the latest medical miracle made possible by genetic engineering, but by their own law they could slow scientific education enough to delay the very breakthroughs they need to survive. At it most basic, these legislators are saying that they would rather die than face that they are just one accidental creation among many others and thus give up the delusion of their central position in the universe made possible by a belief in an anthropomorphic God.

In fact, the President's denial of the alien's reality in The Forge of God is highly reminiscent of these political forces in our world still trying to deny the reality of evolution, and shows how cultures as well as individuals can mature only as they move from centered oneness to centerless manyness. The evidence for evolution stares our culture in the face as clearly as the alien stares at the President. To acknowledge the alien, the President would have to accept the manyness of the universe and surrender illusions about humanity's central place. To acknowledge the evidence for evolution would require our culture to surrender its illusion of humanity's status as the darling of the great Creator and accept instead that we just one among many many life forms that were created by the interplay of nothing more than many many chances. Both messages contain a warning. In The Forge of God, the aliens look the President in the eye with their message that earth is just one among many planets, in no way too special to have to fight for its survival, and in our world the evidence for evolution looks us in the eye with the message that the human lifeform is just one among many experiments, in no way too special to go extinct by chance or stupidity. In both cases, survival may depend upon seeing these hard realities clearly. But unfortunately, both the President in the novel and many in our own culture reject the unpleasant reality by turning to God--a cowardly act that threatens the survival of everyone.

By naming his novel The Forge of God, Bear makes a biting comment about this type of retreat to religion, for the title has an ironic double meaning. In a telling scene in the novel, the President of the United States asks one of the aliens if he believes in God. The alien replies, "We believe in punishment," but, bent on hearing what he needs to hear for his inner comfort, the president subconsciously deludes himself into mishearing, and announces that the alien believes in God. He therefore declares that the alien scourge is but the forge of God, and councils meek acceptance as God burns the earth in His forge. But the ironic double meaning of the title The Forge of God is that in reality it is not God doing the forging, but God being subjected to the forging. God is not burning out the earthling's sinful nature in a forge, rather nature is burning out the earthling's sinful belief in God in a forge. When the aliens burn up the earth, they are not operating as God's fire; rather, they represent the hard realities of the stars that will burn away the earth's delusions about God. One might even say that the book's title is self-reflexive, for the novel The Forge of God is itself a forge; that is, the book itself creates fiery troubling ideas in the reader's mind, ideas that test and burn away the reader's naive delusions about the universe, delusions epitomized in the traditional concept of an anthropomorphic God.

Yet, Bear's novels offer hope, for once humans have had their naiveté about their one central place in the universe burned out of them in The Forge of God, they can be pounded into courageous new shapes on the Anvil of Stars, an anvil that symbolizes the hard but wondrous material universe as it really is, an anvil as centerless and myriad as the scattered stars themselves. And, once reshaped, humans can become mature participants, team mates, with the rest of the adult universe. The vision is both frightening and optimistic--optimistic because it is transcendental, but frightening because the transcendentalism is materialistic rather than theological. The philosophy termed "theological transcendentalism" posits a god, a form of oneness, guiding humans to a destined transcendental end. In contrast, the philosophy termed "material transcendentalism" allows for humans to transcend to higher levels, but only as a possibility not as destiny, and it distinguishes that the possibility will be determined not by a god, but by the interplay of three forcesthe material universe, chance, and human choice, which are all forms of manyness. In materialism, not only do we lack a God watching over our future, but two of the three forces that do shape our future are totally blind to us. The material universe and chance do not care at all about the human journey, leaving us with human choice as our only ally.

The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars remain truer to this vision of material transcendentalism than several other notable examples of the transcendental expression in science fiction. In what is arguably still science fiction's supreme imaginative exploration into transcendence, Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon's hero searches though time and space for the Star Maker, along the way witnessing the struggle to mature into transcendence not only in his own species, but in the minds of species after species, galaxy after galaxy, and even cosmos after cosmos. In the early parts of the book, Stapledon presents the struggle quite materialistically. Some species make it, and some do not. When they do not, sometimes it is the fault of their own bad choices, and sometimes it is just bad luck despite the best choices and the most valiant efforts. To all this suffering the Star Maker seems to remain coldly indifferent, until the hero doubts that the Star Maker even exists. However, at the end of the novel Stapledon softens the materialism of his stance, discovering justifications for the Star Maker's managerial style to the point of making the Star Maker worthy of praise and adoration.

Similarly, in 2001 and in Childhood's End Authur C. Clarke depicts the human species transcending from childhood into a new form, but he softens the materialism of his vision by placing the transcendence of the human species under the guidance of another species or being that has already successfully accomplished transcendence. Though we might still envision a time before these guiding consciousness attained transcendence, a time when chance still might have gone in other directions, the device still pushes the materialism far into the background, for once these ancient consciousness have attained transcendence, the future of the human species is not much in question; in 2001 it is carefully planned well ahead of time, and in Childhood's End it is downright inevitable.

Even many of Bear's contemporaries soften the austerity required by complete materialism. For example, in the novel Earth, published in 1990, David Brin uses a device to precipitate the human species into maturity that is very similar to the device Bear uses in The Forge of God. Bear has an alien race shoot strings of matter and anti matter into the earth's core, exploding it from within, forcing it's fledglings from their warm nest into the cold manyness of the stars. Similarly, Brin has an alien race shoot a black hole into the earth's core, eating it up from within, forcing the earthlings to finally invent a technology to expel the black hole, a technology that coincidentally unlocks the secrets of star travel. Brin hints that it's no coincidence. A wise ancient priestess counsels the hero to think of the black hole not as evil, but as a sperm fertilizing an egg, and she is right . It turns out that a beneficent alien race has been watching the whole thing and it has allowed the enemy aliens to shoot the black hole into the earth only because it knew that the attack would precipitate earth into reaching the stars. Someone who likes us is watching over us, and will guide us to the next step.

As a primer about the maturing of the human species, the tougher materialism of works such as The Forge of God tend to promote more sobriety in the reader. We can feel that Bear is not pulling any punches. He does not downplay the pain and terror of the death-like endings that change can cause. In fact, he uses powerful literary devices to express the pain and terror. For example, we find objective correlatives for the despair and lost hopes of the doomed earth in the deaths of Harry Feinman, Trevor Hicks, and Edward Shaw. These deaths are allowed no redeeming qualities, no meaning. Harry Feinman is Gordon's best friend and an extremely "fine man," but nevertheless an inexorable cancer mercilessly eats him away in the same way that the matter anti-matter strings mercilessly eat the bowels of the fine earth. Trevor Hicks, one of several sub protagonists, is a courageous science popularizer who has one passionate vision--to see humans establish friendly communication with an alien race. But despite Hicks' courage and visionary fervor, he is killed before he attains that vision. A bomb shatters a window, blasting glass shards through Hick's eyes and killing him so fast that he does not even have time to realize that he will never see what he longed to see. So might chance destruction precipitously come upon any person or any species as they mature, blowing away the most noble hopes and plans like dust, without even a moment to say farewell. Edward Shaw, another sub protagonist, is a lonely gentle-hearted geologist who discovers the first alien von Neumann machine in the desert. In contrast to Hicks, he can see his death coming and has time to reflect on it. When he knows that the earth is about to break apart, he climbs to the highest strongest rocks in Yosemite, not in the delusion that he will survive by doing so, but so that he can watch his beloved earth longer as it rips apart. Finally even the solid rock of the mountain splits, but he continues to think and ponder even as he falls into the chasm. Shaw sees his death coming from afar, and dies thinking, perceiving, feeling to the very end, like a pitifully helpless thinking reed before the scythe, but his long thinking affords him no more answers, no more resolution, no more redemption than Hicks' abrupt toss into nothingness. Bear adds poignancy to Shaw's death by having earlier in the novel set up a precious romantic potential between the lonely Shaw and a stellar young woman named Stella Morgan. This is a potential marriage of true minds between two worthy, likable, brave and lonely people, but essential aspects of their own natures delay the romantic potential from bearing fruit, and the earth's destruction turns the delay into a never. Shaw and Stella are on opposite sides of the continent when the earth explodes. If Hollywood were revising this book, I am sure they would pencil in that at least Shaw and Stella should die together. Better yet, they should attain a moment of spiritual union before the earth explodes, a moment that would shine in eternal defiance against the loneliness and heartlessness of the universe. This would give the reader at least some sense of resolution and redemption. But Bear is writing the book, and there is no such moment. The way Bear writes it, there was a chance for something wonderful to happen, but it did not happen, and the chance for it will never come again.

These deaths and the unresolved love relationship make the reader feel a heart-breaking sense of incompleteness, of lost possibility. But in terms of the process of maturity, the pain Bear inflicts is honest, for as individuals we often reach moments when aspects of our childhood end forever, and they rarely occur when we are resolved and ready for them. Things end before we thought we were finished with them, the most lovely and beautiful of things before we have barely tasted the nectar, and then we either avoid acknowledging that these things have ended, circling and circling around the corpse of childhood, or we bear the type of pain Bear writes about, let the thing end no matter how unresolved, and strive to give birth to something alive and new. Each of us must face many such painful psychological deaths and rebirths if we are to grow from stage to stage in maturity, and so must civilizations and species.[3] The Forge of God is Bear's slap in the face to wake us into facing the coming realities of adulthood. The book is a bitter tonic that beneficially braces us to endure the pain of childhood's death and maturity's birth. Just as with Shaw and Morgan, the human species has a chance to do something wonderful, but we might not do it, and if we do not, there will be no cosmic Hollywood to pencil in a second chance. By continually making ourselves grow up as fast as we can, we increase our chances of attaining the prize, and Bear tries to help by preparing us to endure the pains of growth.

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In Anvil of Stars Bear continues to widen his metaphor between the journey towards maturity and the journey to the stars. While the characters in The Forge of God had to mature in order to contend with entities from the stars, the characters in Anvil of Stars must mature as they journey among the stars themselves. Within this journey, Bear employs a number of diverse symbols to represent the maturation process; yet, these symbols all share one feature--they express the transition from centered oneness to centerless manyness, and they stress that the reward of learning to operate in manyness is becoming fit to become part of a true team.

Many of the symbols in Anvil of Stars involve the novel's teen-age protagonist, Marty Gordon, as he sets sail on the starship Dawn Treader with an all teen-age crew to search for the home world of the aliens who destroyed the earth. For example, the ship itself is an interesting symbol of maturity and manyness. It has no one shape, but many possible shapes to meet different challenges. The crew forms these shapes by directing energy to create "fake matter;" a substance that is there and yet not there, a nothingness and yet something without which they could neither survive nor move through space. This "fake matter" is a symbol of the existential reality Marty (or any mature person) must learn to create for himself. Marty learns that his existential reality is but one reality out of many possible realities, that it is a not grounded on some truth "out there," but like "fake matter" is created and sustained by his own energies. This makes the reality no less crucial to Marty's survival, but it also frees him to change that reality to meet different challenges, just as the ship can change. Most importantly, Marty must resist despair or his reality will disintegrate, just as the "fake matter" of a sister starship to the Dawn Treader disintegrates when its crew succumbs to despair. The sister starship yielded to the despair of having to make a crucial but uncertain choice from among many equal possibilities, and this same type of manyness almost freezes Marty and the crew of the Dawn Treader into despair as well, until it matures beyond the need for the oneness of certainty.

Bear indicates that the physical journey to the stars aboard the Dawn Trader will involve also a journey toward maturity by having the males call themselves Lost Boys and the girls call themselves Wendys, after the children in Peter Pan who finally had to leave the land of eternal childhood and grow up. The teenagers constantly upbraid each other with phrases such as "We're not children any longer!" and "It's time we grew up!" Bear effectively uses the transformation of this young crew into a mature team to express the importance of teamwork in maturity. In maturing, an individual or civilization has three basic options, and only one allows the formation of a team. The individual can resist acknowledging the subject position of "others," or in another words fail to decenter the self and so regard others as only objects, and this would certainly preclude true teamwork. Or, the individual could accept the subject position of others but lose the sense of the value of her/his own subject position, or in another words succumb to despair and a sense of worthlessness, and this would also preclude true teamwork. The only way to have true teamwork is both to acknowledge the subject position of others but also to see the self as an equally valuable subject position. In perhaps the novel's most impressive expression of the rewards of teamwork, at the end of Anvil of Stars Bear has Marty mature to the point where he can "team up" with the manyness of the entire universe, and thus influence with his mind the very interrelationships between matter and energy--and this saves the lives of his team. Although such an event may seem to be at the extreme fiction end of science fiction, almost a type of magic itself, it actually expresses some of the precepts of quantum physics. For example, the well-known Princeton quantum physicist Jonathan Wheeler explains that since observation itself influences the quantum world, the mature view of the universe required by quantum physics precludes the scientist thinking of her/himself as an observer detached from the universe s/he is observing, as if looking at objects through a window:

In the uncertain, observer-influenced, probabilistic world of quantum physics, the physicist must see her/himself as a team member with the very phenomena s/he is trying to study, and thus surrender the claim to a central subject position surrounded by objects--indeed, must abandon any belief in a center, or "central mechanism," altogether.

Bear explores the challenges of the "manyness" of teamwork by comprising the crew of extremely diverse and fiercely individualistic members who furthermore pursue many different types of relationships, casual and serious, heterosexual and homosexual. As Marty painfully learns how to orchestrate these diverse individuals into a team, he comes to learn the value of their differences, and as he explores all the various types of relationships he similarly learns that there is no "one" right type. In fact, Marty's most extreme crisis of maturity occurs when his new-found lover, the one woman upon whom he believes he can center his life, dies in battle. The pain nearly kills Marty, but in time he moves on from the belief that she was the only "one" for him, and learns to embrace others, learning that "many" of these others can help him grow in ways he did not grow with the "one." Bear then redoubles Marty's challenge by introducing an entirely new species onto the ship--an allied alien species called "Brothers" with whom the human are ordered to team up for the final fight. Much of the crew must overcome fear and repulsion at the strangeness of these creatures as they learn to fight side by side as a team.

In fact, these alien creatures called Brothers are themselves an excellent symbol of teamwork, for they are an aggregate species in which each individual is comprised of a group of snake-like beings that weave themselves together like a braid. Each snake has something different and special about it, yet all cooperate to form the whole Brother. Occasionally, in times of severe stress a Brother might, to its embarrassment, literary "fall apart" into scattering snakes, and then without his friends to gather up the pieces and put them back together, the Brother would be lost. Sometimes a Brother might even have one of his snakes die, but the Brother goes on though somewhat depleted, and eventually a newborn snake will wriggle over to join itself with the Brother, making the Brother something that it has never been before. The Brother's thus serve as a humorous but suggestive symbol of the mature person, a person who allows all of her/his many inner selves to exist side by side, a person whose inner selves cooperate to form a shifting harmony of voices. Certainly, riding a shifting wave requires more energy, more aliveness and sensitivity to each moment, but the Brothers suggest that if the mature person occasionally falls apart from the stress, s/he will not be too ashamed to let friends help put her/him back together, for the mature person is not ashamed of teamwork in life's journey. Finally, like the Brothers, the mature person lets some selves die along the way, no matter how sad or painful or scary, and goes on, welcoming the birth of new selves no matter how hard the struggle.

Let me conclude this study of manyness and maturity with a somewhat playful flight into the fantastic, by proposing a theory that sounds bizarre yet is nonetheless no more than a logical extrapolation of all the ideas we have looked at so far. Namely, if all maturity involves a transition from centered oneness to centerless manyness, then perhaps the next step in human consciousness might involve a transition to a manyness within the individual psyche, not only the serial manyness of growing from level to level of maturity, but a concurrent manyness of selves within--a manyness without center. Some readers who feel strongly that the self is and must remain a unified "one"--that no matter how psychically complex the mind, a person naturally has, or should have, a sense that s/he is "one"--may try to replace the word "selves" with "aspects of the self." In this modified picture, the healthy expression of these aspects is orchestrated by an ego function that is not itself one of these aspects that needs orchestrating, but is rather a type of negotiator and coordinator--and thus a "one thing" that could be perceived of as a "center" of the "self." This rewrite turns my hypothesis into nothing more than the already prevalent psychological view.

In contrast, I am suggesting that the mature psyche could be comprised of many selves with no oneness other than the oneness produced by the cooperation of teamwork. Again, at first glance, the "oneness of teamwork" may seem little different from "aspects of the self coordinated by an ego," but there is a crucial difference. The ego is not one of the selves. It is different in kind rather than only in degree. It thus has a privileged position and can be thought of as a center for oneness. In contrast, in a teamwork of selves no one self is outside or above or at the center of the process. One of the selves might be strong enough to lead and negotiate among rest of the selves, giving an illusion of ego, but even that self is actually different only in degree, not in kind. If the other selves let that one self persist in the illusion that it is separate from and above the other selves--to persist in the illusion that it is the one and only Ego--the psyche can become like a community that has traded a flexibility democracy for the rigidity of a dictator who thinks s/he is appointed by God. The egoless "team" psyche can be represented by the team in Anvil of Stars. This team is not ruled by a god-like leader different from the team in kind, but is lead by a team member who operates in authority for a time by consensus of the team. When the crew of the Dawn Treader meets a new challenge, the team selects a new leader whose skills or personality best helps the team orchestrate for success.

This disturbing implication of these speculations would be that our modern sense of inner "oneness" is an illusion--and an unhealthy one at that. We are like rigid dictatorships inside, rather than flexible democracies. Or we suffer exhausting stress trying to maintain the illusion of oneness over the top of the reality of our shifting inner manyness.[4] Let me mention a few proofs that might make even this strange idea seem a bit plausible. For example, according to some scholars, the sense of inner self that we take for granted as natural today was not experienced in the same way in the past . In other words, the sense of self may be only a passing cultural construct, a passing humanist fad. In his study The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes suggests three types of culture-- bicameral, in which there is no sense of distinct inner self or even of mind (Jaynes posits the Mespotanians as an example) ; transitional, in which some sense of mind and inner self begins to emerge, but only with very concrete referents (Jaynes posits the Greeks); and the non-bicameral in which a sense of self and of mind are held as both totally real while also being completely abstract (modern culture). The bicameral cultures operate with a close interplay between left and right brain, the transitional cultures begin to restrict that interplay, and non-bicameral repress it severely; thus, it is only a culturally learned repression of this interplay that produces what we think of today as "consciousness." I will leave it to this reader to study and assess Jaynes' largely philogistic proofs for this thesis, but I will mention that some scientists, such as Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden, offer evidence that could help support Jaynes. Sagan goes in a slightly different direction, discussing not only the strange relationship between bicameral halves of the neocortex, but also between the neocortex itself as one brain, the limbic system itself as another brain, and the R-complex as a third. Certainly they all form one brain, Sagan accedes, but often much more like an uneasy cantankerous uncooperative gang than as a unit, each one fighting the others for its own expression (77-83). The individual looking inward might wonder which "one" s/he is as each brain fights for expression and supremacy. S/he might even try to kick out the R-complex from within by calling it a devil whispering to her/him from without, but Sagan suggests that the R-complex must have its day even if it has to put the other two brains to sleep at night to reign in dreams.

This projection of the inner R-complex onto an outer devil seems to be vestigial of what Catherine Belsey calls the "allegorical tradition" in medieval thought. In The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama Belsey studies the transition from medieval to Renaissance drama and concludes that the transition involves an actual transition in the conception of the self. Through a historical linguistic study reminiscent of Jaynes' studies of Mesopotamian and Homeric texts, Belsey argues that the medieval mind did not see itself as unified, nor even as having an "inside," but rather saw itself as a field upon which or through which outside entities or forces fought or passed. Renaissance drama shows a shift toward the formation of a sense of interiority and unity within the person, but not to the extent that we take for granted today. To oversimplify, today we think of allegorical figures like Greed, Remorse, or Mercy in medieval plays such as Everyman or the Castle of Perseverance as devices for showing what was inside a person, but a linguistic study suggests that they were actually perceived of as being outside the person. In the same way, the psychomachia of Renaissance characters such as Hamlet show only a partially formed sense of interiority and unity. Reminiscent of Jayne's complaint about modern readings of the Homeric texts, Belsey contends that when we perceive a medieval Everyman or a Renaissance Hamlet as having a sense of self much like our own, we do so only because we use our modern sense of self to gloss over linguistic elements of the texts that suggest a sense of self very alien to modern humanists assumptions:

Belsey also notes that even modern staging reflects this "unhealthy" transition from manyness to an "illusory" oneness. For example, the medieval stage was a circle viewed from all sides, not from any one "right" place, by an audience that itself became a part of the play, holding props and so on as the characters wandered among them--much as the quantum physicist must acknowledge manyness in seeing her/himself as part of the experiment s/he is conducting rather than as occupying a privileged place outside the experiment. In contrast, the perspective scenery of modern drama, which Belsey terms "illusionist drama," creates a single right place from which to view the action. It separates the audience from the actors, who are then viewed as if through a window--similar to the classical physicists conception of studying nature. This separation is but one element that shows that "the distinction between the physical and psychological properties is a modern one--the effect of the of the humanist isolation of the mind as the essence of the subject" (46). It is precisely this illusory "oneness" that Marty overcomes at the climax of Anvil of Stars to see himself not as a single mind surrounded by a universe that is an "other", but to break down the distinction between physical and psychological in order to "team up" with the universe and change the structure of matter and energy.[5]

* * *

It seems somehow appropriate to me to end a paper for publication in this journal with an idea like the one above, an idea that might be a bit "fantastic," but still, I hope, piquant, and it may also remind us that even in the austere adulthood suggested by Bear's novels, there is room for playfulness. However, whether the reader subscribes to the idea of "team self" or not, I am more concerned that the s/he sees in general how Bear uses the journey to the scattered stars in The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars as a metaphor for the transitions to centerless manyness that all individuals and cultures must make as they mature. It is a timely message, for modern society is surrounded by the challenges of centerless manyness. Frederick Nietzsche compared modern society to a man reeling through space without center or the hope of ever finding a center--the "geworfenheit" caused by the "death of God." Science has told us that even the physical structure of the cosmos has no one certainty--only "duality," "complimentarity," and the "manyness" of probabilities--a "God who plays dice with the universe." Nations are mixing, losing their homogeneity. Roles are changing, for each of us one old established role giving way to many choices never possible in the past. Some of these transitions can be quite painful and scary, but Bear does us the favor of showing us that although these transitions may be new in detail, they are old and timeless in essence; humans have always had to trade some type of centered oneness for scattered manyness in order to grow--we have done it before and we can do it again. This gives us courage. When we see a transition as part of a timeless natural process, we more confidently believe that we are equipped to survive it, and more patiently brace ourselves to endure it. Then, as we lose our fear, we can even start to think beyond it, to thrill at the possibilities and adventure. Fear gives way to excitement, reluctance to enthusiasm--we want to go forward! In conclusion, when we perceive how a child, a civilization, or a species must abandon the delusion of one special center and embrace the reality of centerless manyness in order to achieve adulthood's beginning--and when we perceive how in The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars Bear suggests that each of these maturities fundamentally resonates with shifting the gaze from the earth to space--then we might begin to understand the deeper significance of the urge that is welling up in so many of us earthling children these days, the cry so well voiced by Carl Sagan: "We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. It is time to set sail for the stars."

Notes

[1] Erikson writes: "In the later abandonment of or transformation of this narcissism into more mature self-esteem, it is again of decisive importance whether or not the more realistic being can expect an opportunity to employ what he has learned and to acquire a feeling of increased communal meaning" (39). This describes the move of self from the center, but the avoidance of despair by true participation within a team. [Go back]

[2] For a further discussion of the "other" in mating, see Erikson's study of "Intimacy versus Self-Absorption" in Identity and the Life Cycle, pages 100-103. [Go back]

[3] The traumatic nature of some of these transitions is reflected in their common names, such as the adolescent conflict or the midlife crises. However, not all people experience even these two transitions as particularly painful, and thus may not share Bear's austere conception of maturing process. Either way, both of the transitions mentioned above are examples of a decentering that moves the self further outward to join with "others" as a team. For example, what Erikson terms the "crises in the psychosocial development" of middle age, or what Havighurst terms the "developmental task" of middle age, is to step beyond self absorption to guide the next generation, as Erikson puts it, or to assume adult civic and social responsibility, as Havighurst puts it (Ripple 49-56). [Go back]

[4] Throughout history people have found ways to vent the manyness that they felt inside of themselves. The ancients created an array of wildly different types of gods who put wildly different types of thoughts into the human mind. Tribal cultures often create ceremonies in which individuals may don masks to become other selves, animal selves, selves of their ancestors. Today our belief in but one God, or even our insistence that we find the one self who we really are inside, has closed most of the avenues by which we can express our inner manyness. At the same time, American psychologists are reporting an unprecedented rise in the incidence of the mental illness known as multiple personality disorder, or split personality. Admittedly, English psychologists dismiss the rise as the self fulfilling prophecy of suggested diagnosis by their American colleagues, but if the trend is real perhaps it indicates that we must abandon our longing for one central self and learn to play amid our centerless manyness of selves, or we will make ourselves sick. This is exactly the premise that one of our several modern philosophical movements has made. The philosophy termed deconstruction or post-structuralism depicts human consciousness as no more than a shifting nexus of language--language speaking us rather than us speaking language--and depicts language itself as no more than an ever shifting interplay of manyness that refuses to fix itself in any one meaning. The urge to fix language into one meaning is, they argue, the urge to kill language rather than let it live, and since we ourselves are language it is also our own urge for death instead of life. Many of us in literary criticism find the deconstructionist approach disturbing, even infuriating in its amorphousness, but then we have noted in this paper that every transition from oneness to manyness can be disturbing and uncomfortable. [Go back]

[5] It is interesting to consider the frequency with which science fiction explore ideas about multiple selves through one device or another. As just two out of many possible examples, in his Great Sky River trilogy Gregory Benford uses the device of forcing his characters to carry up to a dozen "aspects"--that is, to carry the consciousnesses of dead clan members in their brains on silicon chips. And woe to the person who does not voluntarily give each of his or her aspects periodic times to express him or herself! He or she is in grave danger of falling into an uncontrollable "aspect fit"--like an attack of split personality. In Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon explores the idea through the device of fusing and blurring his hero's ego with an ever-growing collection of alien egos who travel though space as a single group mind. Beyond this, I am sure we can all think of many noteworthy examples of various devices that our best writers have used to explore the concept of a collective self. Since science fiction has often been prophetic, could the frequency of this exploration presage a paradigmatic shift in the way we will someday perceive our own consciousness of self--or selves? [Go back]


Works Cited

Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity & Difference in Renaissance Tragedy. New York: Methuan, 1985.

Erikson, Erik. Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959.

Galatzer-Levy, Robert MM. and Bertram J. Cohler. The Essential Other: A Developmental Psychology of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Herbert, Nick. Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics. New York: Doubleday, 1985.

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.

Piaget, Jean. The Child's Coinception of the World. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1929.

Ripple, Richard E., Robert F. Biehler, and Gail A. Jaquish. Human Development. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

Sagan, Carl. The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Development of Human Consciousness. New York: Ballantine, 1977.

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