Is it possible that Virtual Confinement is nothing more or less than “real life” ?
We are all in a way prisoners inside our own heads. We long to escape this sometimes frightening solitude, and we try different remedies and avoidances — relationships, strong drink, religion, politics, challenging careers. These escapes can fail us, suddenly leaving us face to face with all that we are unconscious of about ourselves, that “rich and malicious and perilously loud” voice within (146).
This is not to say that we stop everything we are doing in the world to suddenly turn inward and contemplate our navels. As we go about our daily busy lives, we can either learn about ourselves and others, or refuse opportunities for such growth.How the refusal affects us down the line is anybody’s guess. Perhaps we become superficial, overly dogmatic and judgmental, stunted, ungenerous. Perhaps we end up with a vague discontent, a feeling that we have missed out on something important about being human.This is not Jackal's fate.
In Solitaire, Virtual Confinement makes literal what much literature concerns itself with in symbolic form, in those legends where the hero is on a journey and must slay the monster and gain self-knowledge in order to complete his quest. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the poet finds himself lost in a dark forest, he is compelled to descend into the lowest depths of hell before he can enter heaven. Many read this descent as a personal confrontation with the reality of evil, externalized in the Christian scenario, but in psychological terms residing within.
If you turn to the ancient epics of many cultures, you will find that the heroes, of course, are male. If a woman joins an epic quest, she must disguise herself as a man in order to participate. Or she appears to the hero as a helper, a goddess to advise or inspire him on his way, or perhaps a seductress who threatens to prevent him from completing his mission. But Jackal journeys as epic heroes do. Her ordeal proceeds by stages.
During her first year or so in VC,she attempts to maintain rational order in her life, the kind of routines we’ve read about in stories by or about prisoners denied human contact, or, outside a literal prison, the ways we all have of structuring our daily lives. And like many of those prisoners –- and as in “real life”—she has imaginary conversations with people who aren’t there. We all internalize images of the people we care about. These images live on in our minds and are available to us if we want to access them.
The turning point of Jackal’s VC experience is when the voice of Snow asks her: “How do you like being alone?” (146) Jackal gives an honest answer:“I try not to think about it too much. Sometimes I feel like I’m not really here, like I’m nowhere. That’s good, really. The time goes by fastest when it’s like that.” How many of us feel that way very often! But Snow’s voice chides her: “What’s the point? What good are you if you can’t face it, look it right in the eye and rise above it?” This voice has told her something important: she has not made the proper use of her time, simply hoping by her rational schedule that she can fill the years and tune out so that time will pass. But before she can “rise,” she will have to “fall.”
It is at this point that Jackal has “a bad thought” and asks “Who is this?” to be told the chilling answer “Puppy. Cow.”
This is a terrifying point in the narrative. The voice is no longer human. Solitude with no possibility of mitigation is dangerous. It leaves us subject to whatever is within. All people have a breaking point where unconscious contents can overwhelm them. Jackal is about toexperience this.
When we see her again about seventy-five days later, she is bruised and frightened. She realizes she has been fighting “unremembered battles” (150) against this monster who calls itself “the crocodile.” Each of us has an unacknowledged and unwholesome part of ourselves. Often we project this outward onto someone else, our worst enemy, a love-relationship gone wrong, a political or media figure, someone, something.
For Jackal, there are no projections. The crocodile is at her back. She prepares to die: "She had lost. She was lost. Oh, that was such a bleak thought. And she was so scared.” This time she does not black out into unremembered time: “But at least she would go down with her eyes open. She would see.” She admits her fear but confronts it as we all must in order to grow, and looking at the screen in her cell she sees her face “calm in a way that she had never felt, strong in a way that she had never seen in her mirror. Not fearless but not afraid. A face made from the inside out.” And perhaps that is the only way we can make our faces.
She realizes then that she has a choice. On one hand she can “lean back and rest in the jaws of madness.” But she does not. The image on the screen has presented her with an alternative: “She also wanted to be the face that she saw before her; and it was not a mad face.”
She opts for sanity. She hears behind her “an indrawn breath, a sound of preparation, a feel of motion in the air.” But she refuses to give in. “’I won’t let you,’ she yelled, ‘I won’t let you.’” She fights the monster and is victorious: “the crocodile voice was barking in anger, wailing in resistance, snarling, pleading, and then snap it was gone.” She finds herself on the floor. In the magic manner of myths, fairytales,and legends, the bruises are gone.
But her ordeal is not simple – as in real life. It isn’t just a matter of defeat the crocodile and everything will be fine. The journey toward wholeness and maturity is not linear. For a time she lives in fear of the crocodile’s return. In her quest to make herself “unbreakable” (152), she finds she can erase memories. “Some things were harder to wipe away, but she persisted. It was like a mental fast; she cleaned the impurities from herself until her mind ran like stream water, shallow and cold.” She erases everything from her past, even Snow. After this she is “clean and empty. When she looked inside, nothing looked back” (153). She has undergone a cleansing ritual like those symbolized by rites such as baptism or perhaps confession.
But even this is not enough: the memories are not entirely gone. They still surface to cause her pain, even though she tries to become “stone.” Finally she realizes that washing away all her memories would be destroying her very self and that becoming stone is not possible: “It was like killing herself, or something close to it. It was like finding a dark pit inside herself and pitching headfirst into it, when what waited at the bottom was not that much different from the teeth of the crocodile” (154).
After this her time is spent doing what every human being needs to do -- learning to be alone. Now she can see “just herself” without the context of Ko or her web. She realizes she is “so much less than she had ever thought” and wants to die from the shame of it until “a thought flared in her head, strong and compelling, like the second voice in an ongoing conversation that she had not been aware of until it said: So what? Do better this time”(156).
Unlike her previous experience, this is not really a voice, only “a thought” which is “like a second voice” (italics mine).Her self-examination has been permeated by references to Mirabile and the fall of the elevator now used as a metaphor for the fall into the unknown darkness that eventually becomes self-knowledge. She promises herself that she will do better and falls asleep. When she awakes she has forgiven herself, and she “is astonished to feel joy” (157).
It is only after this that she is able to finally kick through the walls of her prison and return to the place of her greatest happiness, Ko Island.
She has encountered the worst part of
herself, and after that seen her life as it is with all its faults and
failures. She has survived her own personal hell and can now enter a sort of
paradise.
But her journey to Ko is also part of her growth. Where before she was surrounded by people, now she experiences Ko Island alone and is able to fully come to terms with her past not just by thinking about it but by reliving the elevator fall as one of the victims, facing her fear of falling by experiencing it.
She has been able to edit VC, adding the missing component to the experience as she learned from a VC technician so long ago: “We need to give people the capability to improve their experience as they go along” (77). She was able to do so, fashioning an escape from her confinement, creating "Ko in her head":as the poet Richard Lovelace wrote in the 17th century:
Stone walls do not a prison make,Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
By the end of the section you read for last week, Jackal is settled in the NNA, found the Solo hangout Solitaire, made a few new “friends.” Once again she is the center of attention – sharing the spotlight not with her web this time, but with other Solos. It’s like the negative of a photograph – a reversal of her life as a Hope. Now she does not represent the potential for human goodness and achievement, but is stigmatized as a mass murderer. Ironically, Solos, like Hopes, are celebrities, with fan clubs of Solo groupies and websites devoted to their interactions.
But there is a
downside to the VC experience, the aftershock that catapults the solos back
into their cells. Self knowledge is not linear. Recidivism is
always a possibility. Jackal is increasingly drawn to the dangerously unstable
Lady Butcher, in spite of warnings to stay away. Estar and the two other people
in her life -- the gruff, weird Crichton and Scully, the damaged but empathic
owner of Solitaire -- are still largely unknown to her. And she has made her VC erasure of Snow literal
by a final email.