Sometimes after visiting some friends in the north side of Chicago, I’ll drive home south through the city to get back to the south side. Often, I’ll take Lake Shore Drive, which–as the name implies–hugs the shore of Lake Michigan. As you pass through Downtown Chicago around midnight going south this way, there’s never any traffic. On your right is the city’s skyscrapers, blazing in light, and on your left is the lake, and with it, a relative abyss of darkness. It almost feels intimidating, as if you could be at the edge of the world given the juxtaposition you find yourself in.
I recently shot through Frank M. Robinson’s The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991), which explores that feeling of the dread of encountering the abyss. Without giving too much of the book’s plot away, I think I can say that this anxiety is the starting point from which many ideas bloom. Faced with the idea of crossing the void, characters must make a decision that becomes more religious than scientific. Since I’m reading Slavoj Žižek’s book on G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, my reading of this novel became imbued with a Hegelian tone that I found rewarding. Specifically, you could say that it’s the Hegelian notion of negativity as a driving force that is appropriate in The Dark Beyond the Stars. The characters traveling between stars fear that they will never find another living being in the galaxy, and yet they push on because they’ve never found another living being in the galaxy. Some fear the abyss of interplanetary space, while others believe that only by crossing that span will their efforts be rewarded. The idea of rebirth through death is another constant motif in the novel, forcing one to rethink the limits of selfhood and subjectivity, destiny and freedom.
Speaking of crossing great divides, a few days ago I crossed the Atlantic for the first time in order to attend a conference on Hegel at Birkbeck, University of London. I’ll post more on the conference later.