Scraps of Research

The Grand Inquisitor in Star Wars

The Grand Inquisitor is a character within a story or poem told in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1879-1880), but he is also in the animated TV show Star Wars Rebels, appearing first in 2014. I'll admit I have never seen him at work. I have seen images on the Internet, though. I'm struck by a similarity to the cover illustration of The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man that I showed the other day, namely, the nearly monochromatic scheme of each but with bright red highlights: the original Grand Inquisitor has a red serpent tongue, while the Star Wars character has red facial markings, a red light saber, and red background lighting. Like his namesake, he's bad but more obviously bad. He's also bald and has sunken, though shining, eyes. A great difference: the Star Wars saga takes place in a more or less amoral universe. The original parable of the Grand Inquisitor is of course one of good versus evil. I should add that the other red highlights in the cover illustration for The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man are the stigmata of Jesus Christ.

The Sith

Speaking of Star Wars, I was reading The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin by Brian Attebery (1980) when I ran across a word I had heard before but not in the same context. Mr. Attebery was referring to a folkloric creature in his writing. It's a new one for me. The creature is called a sith, and it's in Scottish folklore. There is the Cat Sith, the Dog Sith (or Cu Sith), and the Baobhan Sith, a female vampire. Darth Vader is of course the Dark Lord of the Sith. We didn't know what that meant in 1977 but it sounded cool. I'm not sure that George Lucas knew what it meant either. He is, after all, renowned for his retroactive changes to his original creation. I think Mr. Lucas drew concepts and inspiration from lots of different sources, but I have never read that his word sith comes from the Scottish original, even if Star Wars is something of a fairy tale. 

"I Am Not a Number, I Am a Free Man!" 

I have written a lot about We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924). To me it is an essential book. I would urge everyone to read it, especially because of what we're facing right now.

We is narrated by a character called D-503. Over the course of the book, he falls in crazy-love with a woman called I-330. I started thinking about those numbers, and so I said to the Internet, "Hey, Internet, is 503 a prime number?"

The Internet's answer?

"Yes, 503 is a prime number."

But, wait, there's more. According to the website Find the Factors, 503 is the sum of the cube of the first four prime numbers (2, 3, 5, and 7). And more still: "503 is the smallest prime number that is the sum of consecutive cubes of prime numbers. 503 is also the sum of three consecutive prime numbers: 163, 167, and 173."*

Is any of this significant? I don't know. As Doctor McCoy might say, I'm a writer, not a mathematician. But it seems to me that D-503, a mathematician driven by the need to bring about a mathematically perfect happiness among men, has an alphanumeric designation of some significance.

So, 503, a number, applies to a mathematician and an instrument of the United State. And what of I-330? Well, I is not significantly a letter but a word: I, signifying the individual in recognition of her identity and individuality.** Her number, 330, is composite--being a woman and a rebel against the State, she has manifold aspects and is made up of manifold things.

In traditional culture, numbers were made into words: deuce, trey, dozen, score, gross. You might say they migrated from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. In the nineteenth century--the first mass century--words, that is, people's names, made the return trip and were made into numbers, at least in literature. From The New Utopia by Jerome K. Jerome (1891):

"Oh! there was so much inequality in names. Some people were called Montmorency, and they looked down on the Smiths; and the Smythes did not like mixing with the Joneses: so, to save further bother, it was decided to abolish names altogether, and to give everybody a number."

I can't say for sure, but I imagine that was the first use of alphanumeric designations in the literature of Utopia/Dystopia. Here is a list of a few more instances, the first edition of the Internet Dystopian Fiction Alphanumeric Designation Database (IDFADDb):

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (novel, 1924)
• Anthem by Ayn Rand (novel, 1938)
• The Prisoner, created by Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein (TV show, 1967)
• Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (novel, 1967; film, 1976)
• THX 1138, directed by George Lucas (film, 1971)

By the way, in Anthem, I is the word that the rebels discover once they have fled from the control of the State. Before that, each calls himself or herself we and the other they. The State prefers the plural to the singular, the collective to the individual, We to I, Unity to Individuality, Rebellion, and Dissent. Some things never change.

Of course we have numbers now, too, and are tracked and monitored by them. Numeric or alphanumeric designations might be a little old-fashioned, though. I don't know much about these things, but it seems to me that they are being or soon will be replaced by graphinumeric (my new word) designations: bar codes or UPC codes, matrix codes or 2D barcodes, Quick Response or QR codes, etc. And what is facial recognition software but the conversion and reduction of the face--the visage of the living, ensouled, sacred human being--into soulless binary code, all for the purposes of the State? There is something saving us right now: facial recognition technology is essentially racist. Once that problem is taken care of, though--and it will be--we will all be in greater peril.

*A note in revision, January 30, 2021: It occurs to me now that 330 is the sum of two of these three consecutive prime numbers: 163 + 167 = 330. It follows then that 330 is the difference between 503 and the third: 503 - 173 = 330. So is any of this significant? I still don't know.

**A second note in revision, February 10, 2021: In the English version of We, her designation is I-330. The I- prefix is no doubt significant. But what is the prefix in the original Russian? Is it я, the equivalent personal pronoun in Russian? Is it in fact І, a letter eliminated from Russian orthography in the first years of revolution, 1917-1918? Or is it something else? I think the answer is significant, but I think it would take the work of a Russian scholar to figure these things out.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley