A cultural history of chess-players: Minds, machines, and monsters

Introduction

‘Of magic look and meaning’: themes concerning the cultural chess-player

Beginnings

This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images. The formation of these images has been underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess’s status as an intellectually superior and socially useful game, particularly since rule changes five centuries ago. Yet the chess-player is an understudied figure whose many faces have frequently been obscured. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess histories have retreated into tidy consensus. In particular, over one hundred years since the publication of Harold Murray’s A History of Chess (1913), the game’s chroniclers have diverged from that work’s twisting-and-turning literary form, which acknowledged the complex nature of the game. If Murray’s opus is, as some claim, unreadable, so too is the chess-player. Or, rather, the figure requires a different way of reading. In the spirit of Murray’s efforts, this work takes aim at the kaleidoscopic chess-player. It aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity, one looking forwards and backwards, lurking out of reach at the heart of modernity. To this end, this book is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject whose identity is used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to the mind, body, and society. This orientation necessitates a culturally focused, amorphous conceptualisation of the figure.

The modern chess-player has resisted disenchantment. A chess-player is not simply one who plays chess just as a chess piece is not simply a wooden block. Shaped by expectations and imaginations, the figure occupies the centre of a web of a thousand radiations where logic meets dream, and reason meets play. Questions of usefulness and value intimately connect the chess-player to the most basic philosophical questions of how an individual should live and occupy one’s time. The chess-player has both sat comfortably within the halls of civilisation, welcomed as a possessor of desirable intellectual power, and, in its tendency towards excesses and absences, appeared on the cultural edge, challenging common sense and cognitive, emotional, and behavioural norms. Attempts at comprehension have seen a series of relationships emerge in an attempt to label the figure, including respectable and disreputable (behavioural); human and machine (technological); human and animal (biological); individual and community (social); reason and insanity (cognitive); Western and Eastern (geographic); sighted and blind and vocal and mute (sensory). Within these paired meanings lie ambiguities, cultural preferences, double meanings, and a tension ‘lingering there at the very centre of Western scientific knowledge; something like a shadow of forgotten ways of knowing and being’.¹ The chess-player can hence appear as a heterogeneous element within society, a ‘curious vision of modernity’, deemed so due to its potential ‘unproductive qualities, such as violence or delirium or madness’.²

Whatever cultural work is accomplished by the chess-player has revolved fundamentally around the relationship between ocular perception (looking at and being looked at) and cognitive action. The history of the cultural chess-player is the representation of a peculiar and highly focused internal process made comprehensible in outward terms. It is a spectacle, a collision of tradition and recycling, which rejects the idea of the statuesque chess-player. Instead, the chess-player is a living, performing entity. Acknowledging its multi-sided nature, this inquiry moves from the Great Men to the Great Many, the particular to the general, ‘the extraordinary to the everyday’.³ Attempting to grasp the figure’s diversity, the following chapters are grouped under three expansive themes concerning the cultural image of the chess-player as mind, machine, and monster. Each figure covers a variety of ground. The chess-player as mind encompasses the figure of the virtuoso, ‘people who … excel in spectacle-making, technical skill, and self-promotion’, as well as those viewed exclusively or largely through the expression of mental faculties.⁴ The chess-player as machine encompasses the automaton, one with the power of spontaneous movement, or a human viewed materially, a mechanism with its motive power hidden, or an individual whose actions are mechanical.⁵ The chess-player as monster shares cultural space with ‘dragons and demons … vampires … giants … shape-shifters … ghosts … border-walkers and margin-steppers’.⁶ The term monster is also used here as an umbrella term for a variety of other chess-player forms, including the superhero, child prodigy, and transhuman.

Problem

While this study does not aim to be a comprehensive or definitive account of chess-players, mental faculties, or monsters, it does aim to trace an alternative approach to the cultural chess-player’s history, applying something of Murray’s approach. Readers are encouraged to investigate material in the notes for further information and, should they wish for a re-treading of Murray’s A History of Chess, to revisit the original work. This is not a work of synthesis nor a work which covers all aspects of the chess-player. It is not a work of straight lines. The smooth movement of chess’s global migration prioritised by recent works is merely one highly selective narrative giving primacy to national borders and chronology. The cultural chess-player slips between boundaries, between firm definition, and solid outline, unlike the lines on a map or a calendar. Certainly, the player is not a blank slate. Efforts to inscribe the chess-player’s mind and body with specific political, national, and cultural identities have contended with the legacy of historical change. Of more importance to this study, however, is the chess-player’s dexterous adaptability, able to take on new meanings and discard others. The chess-player is not just close to civilisation, as some might argue, but distant from it, a faraway body speaking a mysterious language, possessing uncertain coastlines, associated with mind-altering powers, hermetic secrets, and the occupation of secluded spaces.

Story-time

A standard history of chess – useful despite its selective inclusions and omissions – goes something like the following. Although clouded in mystery, the game is thought to have arisen in the ‘East’ and settled in the ‘West’. D. Li’s Genealogy of Chess (1998) alleges Chinese origins for the game, although India, Persia, and China all evidently played some part.⁷ As Harry Golombek noted, ‘where exactly, when exactly, how exactly, and by whom exactly the game of chess was invented we do not know’.⁸ This uncertainty has been used by some to add oriental mystique to the game, and codify a progressive narrative whereby the game was brought to and refined by European hands. Chess, originating roughly 1,500 years ago, is not the oldest known game, nor has it always been the most prestigious. Widely played in the Arab world by the ninth and tenth centuries, chess did not become a vehicle for intellectual effort beyond the efforts of early theorists al-‘Adli, as-Suli, and al-Lajlaj. Instead chess-problem collections became ‘more a literary form than a contribution to theory’, placed within the realm of story-telling,⁹ with the first two centuries of the ‘Abbāsid caliphate marking ‘the beginning of the vast literature of chess’.¹⁰ Nevertheless, much of Islamic chess is shared with other forms of the game, including the distinction between opening, middle, and end-game.¹¹ Similarly, the jargon of chess worked its way into language, proving ‘a very fruitful source of similes, metaphors, and word-plays for both Arabic and Persian poets’.¹² Further, players were ranked by ability, and the names of the chess champions from the years 800 to 950 are known.¹³

Around the beginning of the eleventh century, chess entered Europe, probably through Arabic–European connections in the Mediterranean. Much early terminology relating to the game derives from the Arabic language.¹⁴ By the twelfth century, chess had reached Bavaria, France, and England, and by the mid-thirteenth century it had reached Iceland.¹⁵ Ever since, Europe has been the cradle of the game’s development.¹⁶ The division widened between chess as a leisure pursuit and as a didactic cultural object employing allegorical descriptions of chess’s pieces and linking the game with the contemporary social condition and hierarchy.¹⁷ Moralising works ‘exercised a potent influence on the nomenclature of the pieces; they may have carried a knowledge of chess to circles where it had not penetrated before; they may have helped to break down the ecclesiastical prejudice against the game’.¹⁸ As Jenny Adams, whose Power Play (2006) provides a fascinating look at material relating to the political metaphors of chess-play, notes, ‘that medieval culture wanted to see itself in the game is most indicative in the changes Western players … made to the pieces and the rules’.¹⁹ By the mid-twelfth century, economic and political development, and the growth of education, made chess-play more compelling for the aristocracy and higher clergy.²⁰ While recognisable, this was culturally and socially a much different game than that played in the modern world, with different, perhaps greater, degrees of participation.

Rule changes in the late-medieval and early-modern period transformed chess-play. These new rules were motivated by a demand for less time-consuming leisure pursuits and provided the only major change to how the game was played in over a thousand years.²¹ Reforms included the adoption of new legal moves, such as the pawn’s extended first move, and the inclusion of the new pieces of queen and bishop. The changes ‘revivified chess altogether’ and ‘led to the great chess activity of the period 1550–1640 in Italy and Spain, during which the reform was completed by the addition of castling, the combined move of king and rook. The reformed game was then adopted in Europe generally.’²² Following this, chess was transformed gradually, partly by the seventeenth and eighteenth century, certainly by the nineteenth, into a Eurocentric, intellectual, rational game, played initially as an amateur pastime, then more seriously and as a profession. The reformed game was instantly recognised as more challenging and ‘reclaimed much of its earlier intellectual character’.²³ Furthermore, through the development of chess notation, the game became easily transmitted regardless of national borders. One of William Caxton’s first printed books, for example, was Game and Playe of the Chesse (1474) which detailed rules, allegory, and origin stories, although a new seriousness post-1530 saw analysis, not allegory, become the ruling motive in the literature of the game.²⁴ Old and new chess coexisted temporarily, and the period 1470–90 was a period of transition.

Following these developments, the span between 1561 and the mid-seventeenth century has been described as the heroic age of chess. ‘Romanticised and embellished’ tales of daring deeds appeared, of pirates, poisonings, oriental journeys, and golden treasure won at the chessboard, retold at gatherings of the new social chess clubs.²⁵ Chess’s intellectual reputation increased. In Germany, one commented, ‘it is necessary to pay more, and more diligent, attention, a skill which practice best gives and teaches’.²⁶ The possibility of the ‘Scholar’s’ or ‘Fool’s Mate’ also necessitated a modicum of study to avoid embarrassment. The eighteenth century saw chess radically diverge from its medieval inheritance, being played for ‘new reasons and in a new way … because of its intellectual and sporting qualities rather than its symbolic prestige’.²⁷ Intertwined with Enlightenment ideas, in an often ambiguous and contradictory manner, developing out of the cafés of France, Italy, and England, the new game, more complicated and considered ‘too serious’ by the older group of aristocratic players, was deemed a suitable pursuit by the new intellectual class. This period also saw the publication of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des art et des métiers (1751–66), and its lengthy assessment of the game provides an important document in recording its confused cultural image, as well as the potentially humanist and transhumanist potential seen within the chess-player. Spatial issues, concerning where chess was played, also became more relevant as social norms and notions of respectability demarcated space and time.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the development of a familiar cultural atmosphere surrounding the game, involving greater participation, the development of chess as a literary topic, and the emergence of celebrity players, such as François-André Philidor, the Automaton Chess-Player, and Paul Morphy.²⁸ This period saw the chess-player firmly established as a cultural figure, even a distinct cultural type. The game became viewed, in part, as respectable and embodying characteristics of a rational recreation as international tournaments were held and chess-play became spectacle. Twentieth-century chess appeared as something of a coda to the nineteenth. The era of ‘sports chess’ saw it supposedly develop into a ‘sedentary sport’ with ‘a new age of increased regulation and nationalistic rivalries. Soviet domination notwithstanding, chess resembles many sports in its general post-war history’ after 1945.²⁹ Aspects such as mass-media coverage, sponsorship, larger venues, merchandising, and money-making have become more central to the game’s identity. Two logical end points are the victory of IBM’s computer Deep Blue over Garry Kasparov, the then world chess champion, in 1997, and the death of the one-time world chess champion, Robert J. ‘Bobby’ Fischer, in 2008, which marked the most recent front-page events in chess’s history.

Underpinnings

This inquiry utilises the traditional history of chess as a foundation for alternate readings and re-readings of the cultural chess-player. The chess-player’s cultural image assessed here is one of virtuosity, automaton-like features, and monstrosity which comes from a combination of performance and performative features. It is the use, occupation, and transformation of space. It is the perception of individuals at play. It is the impact of encountering the unfamiliar. It is the interface between body and mind. It concerns the placement of the chess-player as the centre of various technological developments eroding the human–machine boundary. It is the imagined weight of a cross-cultural enterprise across time, an orientalism, an activity brought to the West, appropriated, exploited, and made to do the work of reason and progress (both looking increasingly disturbed). It is simultaneously absence and presence. It is the dehumanising effort to read the chess-player’s mind and body. It is an attempt to maintain the category of human (chess-player). These are the most prominent and important aspects of the cultural chess-player’s history. To grasp this diversity, inspired by J. J. Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses) (1996), seven methodological structures run through this work.

1 / blurry

The cultural chess-player is a blurry outline. Different representations suggest different understandings. The coherence of the game’s rules allows one to study the whole even as the many representations of its players present a more problematic object of study. Aside from this unified body of rules, within cultural representations of the chess-player ‘you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that … [S]imilarities crop up and disappear.’³⁰ Compared to the above history, all neat divisions and delineations, this concept of the chess-player is one with blurred edges. This is no disadvantage. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pertinently asked, ‘is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture with a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?’³¹ The chess-player is one figure but also many, defined differently in each age, spatially and temporally varied. The figure performs in dissimilar places and for dissimilar reasons under one name. Even as the problem of separating the responses to the game or player become problematic, the inextricable boundary between the two is advantageous in suggesting links between disparate images.

2 / body

The cultural chess-player is a living thing, an imagined space, and a historical space – a time-traveller. Part paper, part flesh, and part stone, its history is composed of interactions within written records and spaces. Like the statue, the cultural chess-player is conceived of (paraphrasing Katharine Verdery) as a dead person cast in bronze. As David Martin comments, one has to contend with ‘the chilling thought that within a statue, like a living soul of the corporeal, lies the captive body of the person the statue is said to represent … [T]he imprisoned flesh of the body is that of a repressed heterogeneity; its bronze casing is the discourse of history.’³² Within the body of the living chess-player also, this inquiry finds the captive body of the past, the dead matter of myth, mystery, and magic. Talk of an evolution of the chess image is misguided. Images bounce around like light in a hall of mirrors, repetition and reflection introduce distortions, and the breath of men long dead clouds and influences the present-day imagery of chess-players.³³ Repetitions and reiterations of this heterogeneous object appear within a history of ghostly and cloned events.³⁴

3 / fragments

The cultural chess-player is fragmented, a harmonious unity and a cacophonous plurality. To write a cultural history of the figure is to sift through these fragments discovered within the treasure-trove and rubbish-heap of the past. The historian’s task becomes that of the pearl diver.³⁵ Time melts together. The imagined is fused with ‘objective’ reality. Richard Eales claims that ‘press and media portrayals of typical chess players have now abandoned the once-popular stereotype of the eccentric old gentlemen … monomaniac or cold warrior’, instead ‘showing simply competitive people’; but cultural time moves slowly.³⁶ While the modern-day practice of chess has seen chess-players become sports professionals, representations have not adapted as quickly and are nothing like as monolithic or stable in any era. Regardless, to talk of a singular cultural ‘image’ is distorting and restrictive, particularly concerning a figure based partly within the imagined and fictive realm. What the chess-player connotes depends not on its ‘relation to the real but to other signifiers’, on its relation to the individual but ‘also from [its] multiple references to a wider culture’.³⁷ The stickiness of popular cultural memory carries the accumulated burden of the past. Chess and chess-player are signs with cultural dimensions, understood in relation to exterior cultural detritus. The chess piece, for example, is associated with an intellectual meaning and a cultural weight. The Holmesian magnifying-glass is another such object associated, to give one meaning, with superior intelligence. A human–object relationship governed by personal and cultural memory is evidenced.

4 / spectrum

The cultural chess-player is a kaleidoscopic subject of many forms, intentions, potentials, and effects. Of all technologies of seeing, the kaleidoscope most embodies fragmentation and ordering. The kaleidoscope is a device ‘for creating and exhibiting beautiful forms’, bringing fragments into focus around a central point.³⁸ In this inquiry, the chess-player is the central point of a kaleidoscopic history, around which the world reorientates and reveals multiple aspects of this figure, across media, time, and in different spaces. Other forms of seeing make allusion to the camera, microscope, telescope, and spectacles. Each technology has become associated with a model of historical writing, some taking macroor micro-historical perspectives, or attempting to freeze a moment for later analysis, in a photograph or on a glass slide. One can instead propose history as kaleidoscopic, as both a complex pattern (implying order) and chaotic (suggesting no order). The kaleidoscopic image tricks the brain, becoming the place where dreams free themselves from restraint, becoming one of the principal storehouses of imagination, a place of strange creatures.³⁹ Only when recognised as such can the contingency of the kaleidoscopic image be contended with. Before this point is beautiful, dizzying, dazzling entrancement.

5 / monstrous

Not all forms of the cultural chess-player considered in this book are mysterious or monstrous, but, considered collectively, monstrosity is evident as a persistent undercurrent. This condition intersects with a number of theoretical lines of thought, specifically the idea that physical monstrosity was replaced by the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries by a morality-based monstrosity. The transformation in how difference and otherness is perceived, categorised, and debated in general is not one considered here, however. Instead, the primary focus is the nature of how inward signs of otherness manifested themselves outwardly in literary culture. The mind and body are the battleground over which a conflict for identity is fought. Deviation from this abnormality by the chess-player can also itself seem abnormal. Accompanying the cultural chess-player’s formation has been a de-orientalising or rationalising tendency, but also the persistence of a lingering unease surrounding human status. Concerning linguistic and cultural differences between the terms monster, monstrous, and monstrosity, any reference to monstrosity or to the chess-player as a monster or possessing monstrous qualities below is as the identification of ‘a narrative on certain appearances or behaviours at particular times in specific social contexts’, measuring the impact of the chess-player, or its challenge to common sense.⁴⁰ This may go against a certain historical usage, although the recent Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012) has confirmed the broad, increasingly widening scope of the term and its malleability, which the present author welcomes.

6 / improving

The chess-player is a humanistic and transhumanistic subject. Such an image aligns with the emergence or remaking of the cultural chess-player within environments influenced by Enlightenment humanism, with its exclusionary, forgetful emphasis on progress, self-development, and the application of reason. Chess-playing machines and images of the human chess-player as automaton and cyborg also suggest a development beyond humanism which has involved the use of technology to overcome biological limits.⁴¹ The connection between the humanistic and transhuman chess-player and the application of reason highlights the wound at the heart of chess, namely its cultural appropriation, via cultural transmission in one sense, and its movement, from East to West and beyond. The transhuman chess-player appears as monstrous, ‘mis-known [or] unrecognized and misunderstood’, and as something seen and potentially domesticated.⁴² Yet if arrival only leads to domestication, then the chess-player never fully arrives. It remains on the point of invisibility, through its tendency to excess, presence, and absence. This state persists even in the face of an improving ambition, and places the chess-player within culture as a form of entertainment and edification, a willing, then an unwilling, virtuoso, a puppet and a mannequin, a statue and an idol, a god of reason and a creature, a glimpse of the future and of the past.

7 / performance

The chess-player is a performer of a kind of secular magic, sharing enchanted links with the conjuror and circus-performer. Richard Schechner finds seven functions of performance: To entertain. To make something that is beautiful. To mark or change identity. To make or foster community. To heal. To teach, persuade, or convince. To deal with the sacred / demonic.⁴³ Further, a partial outline of the features of performance by Victor Turner includes manual gesticulations, facial expressions, bodily postures, rapid, heavy, or light breathing, and tears (at the individual level), as well as gestures, dance patterns, prescribed silences, synchronised movements, and aspects of game-play and rituals (at the cultural level).⁴⁴ Each of these functions and features has contributed to the affirmation of the performativity of the chess-player, in its ‘reiteration of norms which precede, constrain and exceed the performer’, particular those concerning mental skill and intellectual superiority (by no means natural categories).⁴⁵ The chess performance hence becomes an imposition of boundaries on bodies and minds on stage.

Frameworks

Influenced by these seven structures, the present study recontextualises the chess-player as mind, machine, and monster within the traditional history outlined above. This provides reason enough to justify another look at the chess-player. In addition, several aspects of the aforementioned chronology are challenged, extended, ignored, or discarded as a consequence of this book’s focus on the player, not the game. The scope of this book, in geographic terms, is predominantly the English-speaking West from the medieval to the modern period, with more emphasis on the second half of this period. With this in mind, relevant source material, predominantly English-language, is varied and wideranging, including newspapers, films, cartoons, detective and science fiction, comic-books, and chess instructional manuals. The vast quantity of data available requires a somewhat abstracted view, a collective history rather than a personal one, where order and simplicity become apparent when groups and repetitions are the subject; yet to return to the idea of the historian as pearl diver, this study aims to blend the bird’s-eye view with the deep dive, combining broad historical panoramas with intense readings of individual items of interest.

This book consists of nine chapters divided between three parts. Part I, entitled ‘Minds’, introduces the cultural chess-player. Chapter 1 considers three lives of the chess-player as sinner (concerning behavioural and locational contexts), melancholic (concerning mind-bending and affective contexts), and as animal (concerning cognitive aspects and the idea of human-ness) from the medieval to the early-modern within non-fiction. Chapter 2, through the concept of respectability, considers an evening at the mid-nineteenth-century Parisian Café de la Régence, incorporating discussion of the blindfold chess-player, the chess-player as virtuoso, and as automaton. It redefines the café as a haunted house or repository of history and memory, an ethereal existence paralleling past and present. Chapter 3 considers the role of the chess-player in detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Raymond Chandler, contrasting the perceived relative intellectual reputation and social utility of the chess-player and the literary detective. Part II, entitled ‘Machines’, considers various chess-playing machines. Chapter 4 moves backwards and forwards in its considerations of IBM’s late-twentieth-century supercomputer Deep Blue and Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1769 Automaton Chess-Player, via the concepts of automaton and statue. Chapter 5 examines Garry Kasparov’s 1997 defeat to Deep Blue and how the spaces of the game, considered again in terms of a haunted house, were instrumental in transforming the encounter into a modern-day Gothic tale for the human contestant. Chapter 6 discusses emotional responses to the automaton chess-player within three science-fictional texts. Part III, entitled ‘Monsters’, considers the way human chess-players have been represented as monstrous in the twentieth century, touching on the concepts of the child prodigy, superhero, and transhuman. Chapter 7 considers Bobby Fischer’s early career in mid-twentieth-century American society. Chapter 8 examines Fischer’s 1972 championship victory over the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky and the way the performance space, a third haunted house, became surrounded by a peculiar atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, exaggerated by Fischer’s (anti-)virtuoso stance. Chapter 9 examines portrayals of the chess-player within comic-books of the mid-twentieth century, considering themes of monstrous bodies, masculinities, and moralities. An epilogue considers the chess-player from an early twenty-first-century perspective.

Notes

1  D. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. xiv.

2  Ibid., p. xv.

3  F. Moretti, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2007), p. 4.

4  P. Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 1.

5  Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘Automaton’, quoted in W. B. Hyman, ‘Introduction’, in W. B. Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 5.

6  ‘Acknowledgements’, in A. S. Mittman (ed.) with P. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. xxii.

7  D. H. Li, The Genealogy of Chess (Bethesda, MD: Premier Publishing, 1998).

8  H. Golombek, A History of Chess (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 10.

9  R. Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole, new edn, 2002), p. 37.

10  H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, facsimile reprint of 1913 edition, 2002), p. 169.

11  Ibid., p. 234.

12  Ibid., p. 183.

13  H. J. R. Murray, ‘Chess’, in G. Grigson and C. H. Gibbs-Smith (eds), People, Places, and Things: Things (London: Grosvenor Press, 1954), p. 89.

14  Eales, Chess, p. 40.

15  Murray, ‘Chess’, p. 89.

16  Eales, Chess, p. 39.

17  See also D. E. O’Sullivan, ‘Changing the Rules in and of Medieval Chess Allegories’, in D. E. O’Sullivan (ed.), Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A