Everything is personal: Choice and Complementarity in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen

Rachel Funari BA Hons (University of Bristol)

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Monash University 2008

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Table of Contents

Statement _______________________________________________________________ iii

Synopsis ________________________________________________________________ iv

Acknowledgements ________________________________________________________ v

Introduction ______________________________________________________________ 1

Chapter 1 The electron: Heisenberg the ethical writer __________________________ 21

Chapter 2 The observer: Margrethe the just critic _____________________________ 35

Chapter 3 The measuring apparatus: Bohr the literary reader ___________________ 54

Conclusion ______________________________________________________________ 65

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Statement

I declare that this thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university, and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except when due reference is made in the text.

Rachel Funari

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Synopsis

This thesis is an essay about Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, which it reads as an exploration of the complementary nature of interpretation and ethical judgement when ethics is understood as a matter of transgression. As a text about scientists involved in the Allied and German bomb programs, who were also the fathers of the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics—comprising Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr’s concept of complementarity—Frayn’s drama explicitly uses the metaphor of quantum physical experimentation to determine the ethical intention of his fictional Heisenberg’s visit to the fictional Bohr in 1941. The convention of an interpretive discussion between three ghosts about a spoken ‘text’ also allows for the drama of interpretation to be metaphorised as a text being reread by a writer, reader and author. The thesis uses Bohr's own concept of complementarity as a theoretical device by which to interrogate the play and, in turn, frames this concept in relation to Roland Barthes's discussion of classical textuality and new criticism in S/Z and Jacques Derrida's discussion of the inability of reader and text to meet in his interpretation of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’. These two theorists rely on a classical understanding of the mutual exclusivity of antithesis, with transgression conceived as a refusal to choose between the theses on either side of the symbolic slash. I explore antithesis as complementary rather than opposed, through a symbolic reading of Copenhagen that proposes Heisenberg as a subject who must but cannot choose between antithetical desires.

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Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the encouragement of my supervisors, Dr Andrew Milner and Dr Chris Worth, and the sustaining friendships of Ann McCarthy (who generously read and commented on a full draft), Erin Dolan (who allowed Chapter 1 to be inflicted upon her and wrote ‘Don't you think it's funny that your character split and imploded while trying to split and implode an atom?’) and Dr Kirsten Maclean (who went through Chapter 3 with a fine-toothed comb). Thanks also to Dr Aron Paul, who looked over the Introduction. I would also like to acknowledge the lovely non-academic staff at Monash University, especially Gail Ward, who have treated me with care and warmth.

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Introduction ‘Brecht and his contemporaries pondered the nature of acting and character. They reflected on how the character—who does not preexist theatrical circumstances—is constructed in the play, which is above all a play of forces. We are neither in the realm of psychology nor in that of the hermeneutics of meaning, neither amid language games nor within the Parousia of the body. The theatre is a device for the construction of truths.’ – Alain Badiou, The Century1

In their analyses of Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ and Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, Roland Barthes in S/Z2 and Jacques Derrida in ‘Before the Law’3 begin with the respective titles. These titles are synechdoches for the enigma of their stories: Who is Sarrasine? What happens if you try to get access to the edifice of the law? Copenhagen is also a synechdoche, representing the question Michael Frayn asks in his 1998 play: What happened in Copenhagen between quantum physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during the meeting in 1941 that ended their famous friendship? This thesis will read Frayn's drama as a text structured so as to demonstrate the uncertainty of truth and judgement through the quantum physics theory of complementarity, a structure particularly suited to a work about the two physicists who formulated uncertainty and complementarity as a holistic interpretation of subatomic observations. As a scientist who worked on the German nuclear bomb program, the historical Heisenberg is ideally suited to fictionalisation for the purpose of exploring the relation of intention to ethical judgement. Frayn’s drama explicitly uses the metaphor of quantum physics experimentation to determine the ethical intention of his fictional Heisenberg’s visit to Bohr in 1941. I complement this metaphor with one of textuality, reading the play as a shared event of literary interpretation by a writer, reader and critic. I explore the structural relationship between these three subjects and the text through Roland Barthes’s discussion of classical textuality and

Alain Badiou, The Century, trans Alberto Toscano (Cambridege and Malden: Polity Press, 2007) 42. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans Richard Miller (New York: The Noonday Press, Hill and Wang, 1993. 3Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law,’ trans Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge (ed) (New York and London, Routledge, 1992) 181-220. 1 2

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new criticism in S/Z and Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the inability of reader and text to meet in his interpretation of ‘Before the Law’. I connect these views of literature to Frayn’s play through an understanding of transgression as a refusal to choose between one side of an opposition and its other. I label this sense of transgression classical and explore antithesis as complementary rather than classical through a symbolic reading of Copenhagen, which proposes Heisenberg as a subject who must but cannot choose between antithetical desires. The main chapters pair one of Frayn’s characters with a Barthesian literary figure: Heisenberg as writer, Margrethe as critic and Bohr as reader. I present each of these characters as using different frameworks of experience to interpret antithetical motivations amongst which Heisenberg must choose: psychological, interpersonal and political. Though Heisenberg can be classically accused of transgression, I argue that the text’s symbolic code rearticulates transgression as complementarity and shows that Heisenberg’s inability and unwillingness to choose is not transgressive but merely uncertain, and that this uncertainty traces the possibility of both ethical and unethical elements in his intention. The symbolic code’s absolution of the character Heisenberg makes Frayn’s text itself transgressive. Copenhagen, like S/Z and ‘Before the Law’, considers the nature of interpretation. The play questions whether the character Heisenberg intended to build a bomb for the Nazis and whether such a question can be answered through an interpretative process. Robert Butler4 writes that Frayn’s fictionalisation of the scientists’ meeting in 1941 was informed by the British Secret Service transcripts of conversations among detained German scientists, including Heisenberg. The release of the transcript of a conversation that took place the night the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima raised questions about the intentions of the German scientists: ‘Did the Germans not build the bomb because they thought it could not be done or because they tried to build it and failed? Or did they refrain from making the attempt? This last question raises two further ones. Did they consciously sabotage any efforts to build the

Robert Butler, ‘Introduction to the Student Edition’ in Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (London: Methuen Drama, 2003). Note: Butler’s introduction and Frayn’s post-postscript appear in the Methuen London edition of Copenhagen. All citations of the text of the play itself and Frayn’s postscript are from the Anchor New York edition.

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bomb or did they merely lack the zeal to pursue the science because, subconsciously, they didn’t want to?’5 If ‘Germans’ is replaced by ‘Heisenberg’ in these questions then they are those that Frayn’s play addresses. In the drama, these questions do not arise from the release of the Farm Hall transcripts but out of the contested conversation that occured during Heisenberg’s visit to the Bohrs. During its two acts, Copenhagen’s characters attempt to discover the fictional Heisenberg’s true intention in visiting Copenhagen in order to settle the question of his ethical grounding. To do this they remember and discuss past shared experiences and each character raises different possibilities for understanding Heisenberg’s motivations. In order to explore the difficulty of assessing intention, Frayn explicitly suggests through his character Heisenberg that the three protagonists be metaphorised as particles in an atom under observation during an experiment. ‘Copenhagen is an atom. Margrethe is its nucleus […] Now, Bohr’s an electron […] I’m a photon. A quantum of light. I’m despatched into the darkness to find Bohr. […] I manage to collide with him…’6 This collision is the 1941 meeting and the experiments are the reenactments of the meeting that Frayn’s fictionalised characters repeat as ghosts on a nearly empty stage.7 The different understandings that each character brings to the reenactments are finally found by the drama’s metaphorical structure of quantum physical experimentation to be aspects of complementarity, the theory developed by Neils Bohr in 1928 in response to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.8 Uncertainty states that the momentum and position of a particle cannot be precisely measured at the same time, thus understanding the subatomic particle as partially unknowable.9 Complementarity asserts that nevertheless both measurements

Robert Butler, ‘Introduction to the Student Edition’, xxiii. Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (New York, Anchor Books, 2000), 68-69. Hereafter all references to the play and Frayn’s postscript will be cited by page numbers in text and refer to this edition. 7Though the Copenhagen script includes no stage directions, the set of the original National Theatre performance comprised only three chairs. Other productions have utilised some combination of two or three chairs and a lighting or backdrop configuration suggesting the universe or world. 8The descriptions of complementarity and uncertainty in this thesis are synthesised from readings of several books (see bibliography for Bohr, Heisenberg, Plotnitsky, Gilmore, Frayn) and descriptions in various articles and books that do not appear in my bibliography. Nevertheless, I provide page numbers from the above books to support my descriptions. 9Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1959) 46-47. 5 6

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are necessary for full knowledge.10 Bohr writes that ‘evidence attained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects.’11 In order to gain a full picture of complementary circumstances, different experiments must be constructed. With each change of experiment a new possibility of interaction between phenomena and measuring apparatus will occur. Each of these possibilities must inform the overall definition of the phenomena being studied. Modelling the repetition required by scientific empiricism, Frayn’s characters recreate their 1941 meeting in the play until they can agree upon a judgement of Heisenberg’s ethical intention. (Complementarity will be discussed in fuller detail below.) In the Human Touch, his 2006 book of popular philosophy, Frayn details his understanding of the uncertainty of intention, writing that there is a ‘fatal indeterminability at the source of our actions. We tell ourselves stories about intention.’12 Copenhagen is Frayn’s story of the historical Heisenberg’s intention in visiting his mentor and colleague in 1941, and as such the conversation is also metaphorised as a text. This is made explicit when the character Heisenberg admits, ‘In my head is another communication that has to be delivered. The lecture is on astrophysics. The text inside my head is a more difficult one.’ (6) In the drama, the text Heisenberg remembers delivering to Bohr in 1941 is ‘Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the exploitation of atomic energy?’ (88) Why was this text offered? Like a literary work, it was constructed and purposeful, not merely a spontaneous utterance.13 The possibility of misinterpretation continues to haunt the characters Margrethe and Bohr until long after their deaths. Copenhagen can be understood through Barthes’s conception of literature. Frayn’s characters are rewriting a readerly text and spinning out symbolic systems to create a new text of unified meaning. Bohr and Heisenberg are not merely particles colliding in a quantum experiment but also a writer, Heisenberg, and a reader, Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 50. Neils Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’, in Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1958) 40. [Hereafter, Neils Bohr, Atomic Physics.] 12Michael Frayn, The Human Touch (London: Faber and Faber, 2006) 192. 13‘Heisenberg […] because my life was at stake, and I chose my words very carefully.’ (36) 10 11

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the one asking the other to understand. In the subsequent replayings of their meeting, writer and reader are joined by a critic, Margrethe, who reflects back and reinterprets their conversations, offering a range of meanings that offer answers to her initial question, why did he come? With each replaying of the fictional 1941 meeting new possibilities interact to inform the characters’, audience’s and readers’ understandings of the character Heisenberg. Frayn’s dramatic strategy of repetition connects the two metaphors of interpretation—scientific and literary—allowing for an exploration of how complementarity can be used as a model for textual interpretation. The metaphors are complementary to each other. The metaphor of the experiment leads to a classic determination of Heisenberg’s intention not to build a bomb and Bohr’s shared responsibility in this certain outcome. The metaphor of the text leads to a quantum range of possible meanings through which to interpret Heisenberg’s intention. Each gives an answer to a different aspect of the question: Heisenberg’s intention (position), to not build a bomb; and his reason (momentum), to be understood. Together they don’t make classical sense, for if Heisenberg had been ‘understood’ he may after all have built a bomb. This paradox hides an ambivalence—the darkness in Heisenberg’s head. Frayn’s drama ends on these lines: Heisenberg But in the meanwhile, in this most precious meanwhile, there it is. The trees in Faelled Park. Gammertingen and Biberach and Mindelheim. Our children and our children’s children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things. (94)

To view the play ‘complementarily’ is to understand this particular uncertain moment in Copenhagen as encompassing all the characters’ proposed hypotheses of intention, which are true to a degree, inseparable and together express a totality of what is knowable about Heisenberg’s intention. This unique exploration of the difficulty of interpreting, and thereby judging, intention using a model arising from the paradoxical and utterly surprising results of twentieth-century physics makes Frayn’s play so rewarding despite the attention it demands of its audience. 5

In order to understand the character Heisenberg’s enigmatic statement it must be more than imagined and overheard, more than remembered, more, even, than reread: it must be recreated. To do this is fiction, is drama. To hear what one cannot have heard, to reiterate what cannot be resaid, to interpret a text together with the author of his own words, to gain clarity from a witnessed reading, these are things that only ghosts can do. Yet imagined ghosts on a stage can have the effect of truth if they are the imagined ghosts of historical people. For scholars, scientists and others with emotional investment in the events of World War II, Frayn’s fictional Heisenberg is equivalent to the real person. Some critics were angry with Frayn for showing sympathy to Heisenberg and accused him of creating justifications for Heisenberg’s behaviour.14 Frayn’s Heisenberg not only attempts to convince the other characters that his intention in coming to Copenhagen was to halt the development of a nuclear bomb, but also claims that he represents the German nuclear team, who are tormenting themselves over the ethical problem of creating a bomb for Hitler, (38) and suggests that the Los Alamos team did not properly torment themselves because they had not had to live through a war.15 Other critics, such as Dasenbrock,16 feel that a sympathetic interpretation of Copenhagen is a misreading of Frayn’s text. Dasenbrock, in opposition to Thomas Powers’s17 article in the New York Review of Books,18 argues that Frayn is not particularly sympathetic to Heisenberg, accusing Powers of conflating Frayn’s and the character Heisenberg’s voices. The character Heisenberg’s metaphorical use of the uncertainty principle is, Dasenbrock argues, uniquely suitable as a defence against the appearance of Nazi collaboration, given that the principle developed by the historical Heisenberg in 1928 states that the full originating state of a subatomic particle cannot be precisely known.19 The characters Margrethe and Bohr, Dasenbrook asserts, pose Heisenberg’s

Frayn’s post-postscript responds to some of these accusations. Frayn writes, ‘The production in New York, however, opened up a much broader and more fundamental debate. A number of commentators expressed misgivings about the whole enterprise.’ (Michael Frayn, ‘Post-postscript, 135.) 15Heisenberg You never had the slightest conception of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities. Even conventional bombs. None of you ever experienced it. Not a single one of you.’ (43) 16Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Copenhagen: The Drama of History’ (2004) XLV(2) Contemporary Literature: 218-238. 17 Powers’s book Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb is one of the works that inspired Frayn to write Copenhagen. (98) 18 Thomas Powers, ‘The Unanswered Question’ (25 May 2000) New York Review of Books: 4–7. 19Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 44. 14

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circumstances of isolation and collaboration against his uncertainty defence;20 Frayn’s position is closer to that of the married couple but he leaves final judgement to the audience.21 Like Dasenbrock, I am not concerned in this thesis with the accuracy of presentation or possibility of judging the historical Heisenberg but with Frayn’s presentation and judgement of his own Heisenberg.22 Frayn’s response to his critics indicates, contrary to Dasenbrock, that the playwright does at least to some degree believe his character Heisenberg’s voice is a reflection of his own: ‘Let me make it absolutely unambiguous: my Heisenberg is saying that we do have to make assessments of intention in judging people's actions.’23 I believe Frayn’s presentation of Heisenberg is largely sympathetic, that Frayn does offer a judgement, and that Heisenberg’s final words in the play are a statement of agreement that the characters reach on stage—a judgement of sorts—and is characterised sympathetically through the symbolic coding of the play, a level of the text Dasenbrock does not engage with. This symbolic coding will be explored in a Barthesian context throughout this thesis to reveal stories of transgressions foisted upon a young scientist when the slash that separates the world of physics from that of politics disappeared in a flash of warfare. The lure of destruction, death and self-annihilation is never too far away, as shown in the stories of competition with colleagues, specifically Bohr’s cap-pistol battle and competition to throw stones at a mine, and Heisenberg’s one-legged balancing act atop the pinnacle of a pagoda in a high wind. (57-58) These stories represent the flirtation with darkness symbolised in Elsinore, the castle of literature’s most famous indecisive, Hamlet. The situation of war has turned such boyish flirtations with death into a temptation to power that may yet destroy the world. No longer does the beckoning of darkness involve a small-scale individual wager, but reckons with the

Reed Way Dasenbrock, Copenhagen: The Drama of History,’ 236. Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Copenhagen: The Drama of History,’ 229. 22Nor will this essay discuss the play as theatre or history. For a discussion of the play as mixed-genre, see Jan Golinski, ‘Copenhagen as History of Science Narrative,’ paper presented to the Copenhagen and beyond: Drama meets history of science conference, Copenhagen, 22-23 September 2001. Golinski explains how complementary aspects of genre enables the play to be a ‘dramatisation of the process of historical inquiry’. For a postdramatic analysis of Copenhagen, see David Barnett, ‘Reading and Performing Uncertainty: Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and the Postdramatic Theatre.’ (2005) 30(02) Theatre Research International: 139-149. 23Michael Frayn, ‘Post-Postscript’, 136. 20 21

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wholesale destruction of humanity, the force of which is symbolically contained in the small sphere of the nuclear bomb that is a product of both physics and politics. Physics, for the character Heisenberg, became no longer merely theoretical, its calculations no longer purely abstract, but the incarnation of a politics that denied antithesis in the real of life through the destruction of the Other. How might a man with loyalties to both physics and politics, his fellow Germans and his fellow scientists, his own small ego and his larger position in the world, react to such a situation when all barriers break down? When the world has enacted its own transgression, what kind of transgression is left for a man to make? This thesis looks at Frayn’s text from the point of view of these questions. Frayn answers some of the accusations levelled against his text by pointing out that intentions suggested in the play are all supported by research and in some cases first-hand documents. (95) However he also asserts that it is the prerogative of the playwright to explore what cannot be known. In response to Jochen Heisenberg’s comment that Frayn’s Heisenberg is more emotional than his real father, Frayn writes: This seems a chastening reminder of the difficulties of representing a real person in fiction, but a profoundly sensible indication of the purpose in attempting it, which is surely to make explicit the ideas and feelings that never quite get expressed in the confusing onrush of life, and to bring out the underlying structure of events.24

That Frayn’s imagined ideas and feelings might be the truth is what he feels is at the core of the criticism levelled against the play.25 That these feelings and ideas might bring a different moral judgement as to the nature of Heisenberg’s collaboration with the Third Reich is testament to the importance interpretation plays in judgements of justice. However it is not necessary to look at the play as anything more than fiction to discuss these implications, for its reference to reality makes clear that the ramifications of subjectivity as elucidated in the play cannot be disentangled from reality, which can never simply be truth. Bohr’s complementarity, which is a theory of ‘the underlying

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Michael Frayn, ‘Post-Postscript, 137. Ibid.

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structure of events’, theorises this entanglement. The principle of complementarity states: …[the] influence on the very conditions which define the possible types of predictions regarding the future behaviour of the system…constitute an inherent element of the description of any phenomenon to which the term ‘physical reality’ can be properly attached. …this description…may be characterized as a rational utilization of all possibilities of unambiguous interpretation of measurements, compatible with the finite and uncontrollable interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments in the field of quantum theory.26

This understanding that any definition of a phenomenon considered to be physical reality must be understood as encompassing the influence of the conditions of its measurement has a profound impact on the definitions of knowledge, objectivity, reality and truth,27 all of which are results of the structures of experimentation. Barthes and Derrida also understand that structure creates truth—meaning— that cannot equate with a signified placed outside the structure. Derrida’s ‘presence’, Barthes’s ‘author’ and Bohr’s ‘phenomenon’ all refer to a signified that philosophical, literary and scientific structures respectively represent. Instead of redefining the signified as a paradoxically conceptualisable and partially unknowable presence made unambiguously communicable by attention to the circumstances of definition28 as Bohr does, Derrida and Barthes absent the signified. Derrida understands Western thought as substituting meaning for the truth of being: ‘The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix…is the determination of being as presence in all senses of this word.29 Barthes also absents the signified—authorial consciousness—in order to account for indeterminability and multiplicity. For Barthes, the writing subject is not Niels Bohr, ‘Unity of Knowledge’ in Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1958) 68. [Hereafter, Atomic Physics.] 27‘Niels Bohr, ‘Unity of Knowledge’, Atomic Physics, 80-81. 28Neils Bohr, ‘Quantum Physics and Philosophy—Causality and Complementarity’ in Essays 1958-1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Suffolk: Interscience Publishers, 1963) 5-6. [Hereafter, Essays.] 29Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans Alan Bass (London and Oxon: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978) 279. 26

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‘an individual plenitude’ but a ‘void around which the writer weaves a discourse’ that ‘designates the absence of the subject’.30 Sarah Cain suggests that the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum physics, which joins complementarity with the opaque reality of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,31 gained popular acceptance over competing quantum physical interpretations because it was ‘derived from the Western metaphysical tradition demanding presence at the heart of reality—the God of Newton's natural philosophy replaced by the subject which becomes at the same time the object, and that metaphysics is intimately involved in this rescuing of human “presence”.’32 Using Frayn’s Copenhagen as an example, this thesis replies that whatever the metaphysical loyalties, complementarity ‘works’, accepting both classical and quantum interpretations of phenomena by understanding humans and objects as multiply presented within structures of relation. This thesis will discuss how Derrida reads Kafka’s story ‘Before the Law’ as an allegory for an encounter with the absence behind structure (as law/literature); how Barthes’s S/Z demonstrates the replacement of this absence with structural presence; and how Frayn allegorically demonstrates the same sort of encounter as does Derrida’s Kafka, but to find that structure is based on a rich presence that can be multiply interpreted (is complementary). ***

Frayn’s use of complementarity is best understood through the Copenhagen Interpretation. Don Howard argues that the Interpretation does not accurately

Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (ed) (London and New York: Continuum, 2004) 35. 31The popular uptake of uncertainty has led to an imprecision of definition in its non-physics usage and possible confusion with the undecidability of Gödel’s theorem. Frayn discusses the problems of translation as well as the fact that Heisenberg and Bohr used a few different terms to refer to the unknowability of the states of subatomic particles: Frayn cites ‘Unsicherheit’ (unsureness), ‘Ungenauigkeit’ (inexactness), ‘Unschärfe’ (blurredness or fuzziness) and ‘Unbestimmtheit’ (Frayn argues that ‘indeterminability’ would be the best translation) and seems to prefer these to ‘uncertainty’. (99-100). Arkady Plotnitsky is careful to distinguish between Gödel’s undecidability (preferred by Derrida) to quantum indeterminacy and argues that the differences between undecidability, indeterminacy and uncertainty reflect differences in theoretical approaches. (Plotnitsky,Complementarity, 206-7). In this thesis, I will use the terms uncertainty, and indeterminacy and undecidability interchangeably to refer to an inherent empirical inability to—and non-necessity of—choos(ing) amongst or between interpretations as fully describing reality. 32Sarah Cain, ‘The Metaphorical Field: Post-Newtonian Physics and Modernist Literature’ (1999) 28(1) The Cambridge Quarterly: 46-64, 59. 30

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represent Bohr’s complementarity and that such an unproblematic unification of Bohr and Heisenberg’s work was constructed in the 1950s by Heisenberg and other scientists.33 However, since Frayn works with the popular conception of the Interpretation I use the label in this thesis and it should be read as marking the connectedness of uncertainty and complementarity. Descriptions of both theories are taken from the works of Bohr and Heisenberg. Which scientist’s ideas are being described is noted in the footnotes. The Copenhagen Interpretation insists upon the problematic of experimentation in determining knowledge. Sets of mutually exclusive descriptive concepts that arise from different experiments to define the same object or event are complementary.34 Complementary concepts express reality only to a degree and determination must be made as to which aspect of reality is to be known. For example, in thought-experiments such as the double-slit a photon could appear to either pass through two slits in a diaphragm simultaneously (as if it were a wave) or to pass through only one like a particle, but never at the same time and always depending upon the conditions of the experiment. Complementarity recognises knowledge as choice: …it is only the circumstance that we are presented with a choice of either tracing the path of a particle or observing interference effects, which allows us to escape from the paradoxical necessity of concluding that the behaviour of an electron or a photon should depend on the presence of a slit in the diaphragm through which it could be proved not to pass. We…are just faced with the impossibility, in the analysis of quantum effects, of drawing any sharp separation between an independent behaviour of atomic objects and their interaction with the measuring instruments....35

A key assertion of complementarity is that the limits between complementary systems (such as wave and particle behaviours) cannot be precisely defined. The interaction between the measuring apparatus and the particle being measured blurs Don Howard, ‘Who invented the “Copenhagen Interpretation”? A Study in Mythology.’ (2004) 71(5) Philosophy of Science), 669-682. 34Niels Bohr, ‘Light and Life’ in Atomic Physics, 6. 35 Neils Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’ in Atomic Physics, 46-47. 33

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the very boundary between them, producing a determinate limit to knowledge.36 Such limits are taken to mean that the theoretical expression of a series of experiences leaves out what could not be integrated into the structure,37 and hence its nature as a theory or system or description rather than reality, nature or experience itself.38 Complementarity is an acknowledgement of a fundamental level of uncertainty, nonknowledge and relativity inherent in conceptualisation and communication. Despite this, meaning, knowledge and certainty can be communicated.39 Complementarity is based on the inseparability of knowledge and the ‘possibilities of enquiry’.40 Frayn recasts these theories as the interdependence of acting subject and observer, an entangled41 system through which the indeterminacy faced by and about the contemporary ethical subject must be interpreted and judged, not as a predetermined intention, but as the result of a communicative (observed) situation. Frayn expresses his sense of the equivalence between particle and person: ‘What the uncertainty of thoughts does have in common with the uncertainty of particles is that the difficulty is not just a practical one, but a systematic limitation which cannot even in theory be circumvented.’ (90) It is upon an understanding of similarity between the philosophical and scientific oppositions of flux and unity and materiality and idea; and between the changing understanding of the role of structure (relations) in philosophy (such as in Heidegger’s phenomenology42) and the humanities (such as Saussure’s linguistics43 and

Niels Bohr, ‘Unity of Knowledge’ in Atomic Physics, 72. This is more accurately Heisenberg’s conception of complementarity. (Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 95 and 139.) Bohr’s conception believes closed systems that cannot encompass all experience must be widened. (Niels Bohr, ‘Unity of Knowledge’ in Atomic Physics, 82.) 38Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) 6-7. 39Neils Bohr, ‘Quantum Physics and Philosophy—Causality and Complementarity’ in Essays, 6.) 40Neils Bohr, ‘The Unity of Human Knowledge’ in Essays, 12. 41Used scientifically, ‘entanglement’ refers to the seemingly infinite connection of subatomic particles with each other, which also describes nicely the relations between Frayn’s characters. Frayn explains entanglement as ‘where quantum-mechanical entities become involved with each other…they form states of affairs which continue to have a collective identity and behaviour, even though their components have physically separated again.’ (102) 42Being and Time describes Dasein and entities as structures of being-in-the-world. Section 29 alludes to the hermeneutic structure of symbolic discourse: ‘indications, presentations, symptoms and symbols have a formal structure of appearing, which is not-showing-itself and can never be seen. But it is indicated by showing that of something related—such as the symptoms of a disease.’ (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Cornwall: Harper and Row (Blackwell Publishing) 2004, 52.) 36 37

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Levi-Strauss’s anthropology44) and structure in physics that I apply the philosophical underpinnings of Bohr and Heisenberg’s quantum physics to Derrida and Barthes’s understanding of literature and law, limiting the scope of this comparison by Frayn’s text. While acknowledging that recent cross-disciplinary appropriations of theory in science and the humanities have been fraught,45 this paper seeks to demonstrate the fruitful potential of using the Copenhagen Interpretation as a metaphorical model to elaborate and critique Barthes’s and Derrida’s theories of textuality in a way that generates as much engagement as Frayn’s play itself. Arkady Plotnitsky has already explored the similarities of Derrida’s structure of différance and Bohr’s complementarity, understanding them both in terms of loss of representation. This loss leads to a lack of equivalence between knowledge and reality, so that meaning emerges from a system of general economy as described by philosopher Georges Bataille.46 Plotnitsky writes about general economy: That it must relate to irreducible losses in representation and meaning in any interpretive or theoretical process remains, however, a decisive determination of every general economy. This determination introduces a fundamental indeterminacy, a kind of structural “vagueness” or “more-orless-ness” within all (non)systems it considers. This loss and indeterminacy—and the multiplicity that results from them—would characterize any general economy—in philosophy, the human or social

Saussure uses economics to describe language’s structure: ‘both sciences are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders–labor and wages in one and a signified and signifier in the other.’ (Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (eds) (London: Albert Peter Owen Ltd, 1960) 79.) 44The Elementary Structures of Kinship is a treatise on the difference between elementary and complex structures of marriage regulations, the way these structures differently limit choice, the difficulty of clearly delineating such structures and how they elucidate the interrelationship of nature and culture (all of which is quite complementary). (Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.) 45Particularly exacerbated by the Sokal hoax (Alan Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’ (spring/summer 1996) 46/47 Social Text: 217-252. 46Bataille’s theory of general economy is detailed in The Accursed Share. (George Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol I., trans Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988) and Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol II & III, trans Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991.) 43

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sciences, literary or critical theory, or (in their theoretical aspects) literature or art itself, psychoanalysis, or the natural and exact sciences.47

General economy characterises Bohr and Derrida’s theories as anti-epistemologies that deabsolutise difference, conceiving language and knowledge to be radically differently useful and interconnected aspects of the communication of experiences of reality.48 Under the methodology of complementarity, knowledge and language—or representation—are not absolutely alterior to each other but the conditions for each other’s existence, allowing for a multiplicity of perceptions and interpretations that occur when the wave-like boundary between the two concepts shifts subjectivity and objectivity, potentiality and occurrence, from one side to the other. Though this thesis will discuss what I feel are significant differences between Derrida’s structure of différance and complementarity, it is not within my scope to directly address Plotnitsky’s comparison. I will demonstrate how the nature of literature, law and physics as conceptual structures realised in the texts compared in this paper, as well as the author, reader, scientist and person as subjects that confront such structures, enable a metaphorical equation of the text, the encounter with the law and the quantum physical experiment, all as relations between originating, interpreting and law-giving elements that realise meaning. Though Bohr’s complementarity is fundamentally a scientific theory of elementary particle phenomena, his writings engage with its overarching philosophical implications for understandings of reality, causality and completeness, the terrain that has traditionally enabled philosophers and scientists alike to assert an inherent truth independent of human subjectivity. Complementarity is a description of the nature of knowledge and how we attribute meaning to experience. The generality of the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘meaning’, their essentiality to communication, and the possibility of their non-correspondence enables complementarity to be applied to other disciplines. Using complementarity as a structural model of inequivalence particularly suits a study of Barthes’s literary analysis. Susan Sontag describes Barthes’s vision of thinking as ‘an insatiable project, endlessly producing and consuming “systems”, metaphor47 48

Plotnitsky, Complementarity, 21. Plotnitsky, Complementarity, 22.

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haunted classifications of an ultimately opaque reality…’: [and] interpretation as mythology, a process of creating and applying explanatory models.49 In this sense, my usage of complementarity can be seen as a mythology used to elucidate a systematic interpretation of Frayn’s Copenhagen. Though I was powerfully drawn to the play when I saw it performed in Canberra, I interpret it primarily as a text to be read, drawing on its tight and repetitive symbolic coding. Though it would seem that Frayn’s finely wrought interlocking thematic structures would be difficult to comprehend in the instance of performance, the genius of the play is that the intellectual importance of competing frameworks of judgement is elegantly realised in performance even if the nuances of Frayn’s literary workmanship cannot be fully appreciated without rereading. I classify this workmanship as an example of the Barthesian classic text so that the reading of Copenhagen offered here is also an exploration of how Barthes’s literary codes can structure subjective analyses of meaning. Copenhagen’s structure plays with the complementarity of event and observer. The characters Margrethe and Bohr influence interpretation and, indeed, Frayn’s Heisenberg himself, by observering and becoming part of a shared discourse. Makoto Katsumori’s description of the complementarity of being (space-time coordination) and causality indicates the naturalness of Frayn’s usage of theatre to dramatise Bohr’s philosophy: As regards quantum theory, we can see that space-time coordination, which involves an interaction between the object and agency of observation, has the character of being an “actor,” while the claim of causality, which excludes such an interaction, has the mode of being a “spectator.” As for psychological problems, it is as an "actor" that one has psychic experience, while it is as a "spectator" that one reflects on that experience. In this manner, Bohr conceives complementarity in different fields generally as a relation of contrast between the roles of “actors” and “spectators.”50

Susan Sontag, ‘Preface’ in Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) xx. Makoto Katsumori, ‘Complementarity and Deconstruction: Plotnitsky's Analysis and Beyond’ (Fall 2004) 12(3) Configurations: a journal of literature, science, and technology: 435-477. Heisenberg also refers to Bohr’s dramatic metaphor. (Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 57.)

49 50

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For Frayn, observation (spectating) is key to the play, for an observer or audience or interlocutor is perhaps the only means one has to explore one’s own intentions. This is Frayn’s explanation for Heisenberg’s visit, one that incorporates the multiple confusions, impulses and intentions that must have haunted Heisenberg, as well as the interpretations offered by historians, scientists, the historical Heisenberg and Bohr, and the characters of the play. Frayn writes, ‘To know what you're thinking yourself, you need a reaction from other people. That's why, in the end, Heisenberg goes to Copenhagen. To have an audience.'51 Frayn’s audience witnesses a series of conversations that take place on a stage with almost no set or props to guide distinction between the shifting moments of past enactments and present realisations. The structure of the play as a conversation between ghosts simulating an event that already happened explicitly situates the play as a postmodern or contemporary52 theoretically realised act of reconciliation that could not and possibly cannot be accomplished in the reality of human relations. The ghosts on stage are in a no-place and no-time of death when the past ‘becomes the present inside your head,’ (6) when before can be reformulated and after nonexistent, when Margrethe’s ‘But why?’ can finally lead to a reading rather than an imposition. The ghosts reinterpret a ‘text’ that was written and will be rewritten, is both ‘read’ and performed. With the blurring of the boundaries between past, present and future; reader, writer and critic; actor and audience; historical figure and fictional character, the three characters can exist in all times and encompass all roles. They not only receive Heisenberg’s text, but speak to each other of the conditions of its reception; they not only rewrite the text in these conditions of reception, but change the conditions. Each one can be both participant and observer, though it is most often Margrethe who plays this dual role of narrator and protagonist. It is often her interpretation through which we understand what is happening on the stage and why. She tells us when Quoted by Robert Butler in his introduction to the Methuen Drama edition of Copenhagen. Original citation: Robert Butler, Independent on Sunday, 20 September 1998. 52For example, Frayn’s spare stage can be seen as Baudrillard’s hyperspace of simulation where messages gain more meaning (Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Year 2000 will not take Place,’ in Elizabeth Grosz, Futur*fall: Excursions into Post-Modernity (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1986) 19) and Elizabeth Grosz’s time: ‘Difference and repetition may prove to be two linked names that stand in for the name of time itself.’ (Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Becoming… An Introduction’ in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) 7). 51

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Heisenberg or Bohr’s emotions go cold, when they can’t look each other in the eye, when silence befalls them. It is the spirit of Margrethe who opens Copenhagen with the questions, ‘But why?’[…] ‘Why did he come to Copenhagen?’ (3) Bohr gives her three possible answers: there is no answer to the question; Heisenberg wanted to talk; Heisenberg didn’t know himself. (3-4) For the real scientists Bohr and Heisenberg, classical physics is a tool by which quantum calculations can be verified through repetition and observation.53 Repetition and observation is precisely how Frayn’s characters verify various interpretations of Heisenberg’s intention. Margrethe interpolates the terms of the experiment—wandering particle, collision, momentary location of particle, flight back into darkness—as the three protagonists replay the meeting for a final time. (88) The collision that was the fictional 1941 meeting was necessary to pin down the character Heisenberg (the subatomic particle) for a moment, but what is discovered in such a collision is still not precise. Uncertainty states that the precise characteristics of the original state of the atom cannot be known because the quantum (discrete) nature of subatomic elements dictates that a change of state will occur upon any exchange of energy.54. Since all experiments to determine the state of a particle hits it with radiation, there will always be a state change.55 Aspects of the changed state that can be observed through the traces of experiments, such as the double-slit, are mutually exclusive. Wave-like behaviour produces an interference pattern56 resulting from a superposition of states57 when the possibilities of a stream of photons passing through left and right slits both happen. When the experiment is changed in order to determine exactly which slit any given Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 54. Niels Bohr,’ Light and Life’ in Essays, 6. 55Niels Bohr, ‘The Rutherford Memorial Lecture1958’ in Atomic Physics, 40. 56‘Interference…happens when amplitudes, or disturbances, from different sources come together, since they may add in some places and subtract or cancel in others. This will result in regions of intense or of low activity respectively….Interference requires extended, overlapping distributions. Classically particles are in one single position and do not interfere. (Robert Gilmore, Alice in Quantumland, (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995) 36.) 57‘When the thing that you actually observe could have come about in several different ways, then you have an amplitude for each possible way, and the overall amplitude is given by adding all of these together. You have a superposition of states. In some sense the particle is doing all the things which it could possibly be doing. It is not just that you do not know what the particle is doing. The interference shows that the different possibilities are all present and affect one another. In some way they are all equally real.’ (Robert Gilmore, Alice in Quantumland, 44.) 53 54

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photon travels through (because it is a particle and therefore should only pass through one slit rather than both) a traditional particle-like distribution pattern indicates which slit each photon travelled through. The interference pattern has disappeared. Superposition refers to the simultaneous but unobserved and unobservable happening of all potential possibilities and interference is the trace of this simultaneity. Superposition and interference are two important concepts for this thesis because they are the theoretical expressions of the effects of multiplicity. Superposition describes the undecidability of the unobserved quantum event due to the appearance of simultaneity. Interference is the interaction of simultaneous possibilities with each other. Frayn’s characters experience the interference of the multiple answers of superposed unobserved experiments in order to provide the framework for an observed experiment that determines the outcome they choose:58 the postulation that the character Heisenberg’s failure to build the bomb was due to the calculation of the diffusion of the uranium isotope 235 that he did not attempt and the fact that during their 1941 conversation the fictional Bohr did not ask Heisenberg about the calculation. (89) As read through the metaphor of Barthesian textuality, the rewritings of the character Heisenberg’s 1941 text are contextualised in a web of memory and myth that provide the symbolic frameworks through which each character will interpret Heisenberg. Bohr’s initial hypotheses consider Heisenberg’s motivations to stem from political considerations, such as the Nazis’ lack of scientists and equipment (17) and to their treatment of Jews and collaborators. (18, 20) Heisenberg’s interpretation of his own motivations are psychological, a need to see himself as heroic and exceptional (‘They will ask me whether to continue or not! I will have to decide what to tell them!’ and ‘If the Allies are building a bomb what am I choosing for my country?’ (41, 42) Margrethe offers interpersonally-oriented interpretations that focus on what she believes is The original stroll occurs before the play begins; the first replaying begins on page 31 with ‘Margrethe So, they’re walking again’ but is not witnessed by the audience; in the second replaying, beginning on page 87 with ‘Bohr And out we go. Under the autumn trees’, Heisenberg makes his statement but only Bohr’s horror and not his reply are shown on stage; the third repetition happens only several lines later when Bohr says, ‘Unless…yes…a thought experiment….’ and is a fully observable replaying of what did not happen during the stroll: the only observable repitition is the one chosen after the fact but that did not happen.

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Heisenberg’s guilt (he wanted absolution), pride (he came for acknowledgement) and sociality (he came to see an old friend).59 It is easy to see how these interpretations are complementary, each speaking to the others’ core needs: the German patriot who desires to honour his fatherland by being the first scientist to utilise nuclear power returning to Copenhagen to be pardoned for such arrogance; the lone exile faced with a heroic ethical decision that he simply cannot make without the help of his onetime fatherly co-conspirator; the uncertain dreamer who comes to Copenhagen to release himself from the necessity to choose between his own ambition and the destruction of the world. These interfering figures embody the conflicting intentions of a subject experiencing superposed loyalties. The conflict of the play centres around Heisenberg’s opposing allegiances and roles: to himself, to his scientific community, to his country, to Bohr; as son-figure, as ethical individual, as physicist, as German.60 The enigma of the play could be stated as: which figure did the character Heisenberg embody when he came before Bohr in 1941? Such an enigma characterises the drama as a work of literature if it is defined in the aspects identified in Derrida’s ‘Before the Law’ and Barthes’s S/Z. For both theorists, literature is the expression of an enigma, both in the particular context of a story and as a question of literature itself. Derrida writes that Kafka’s text poses the question of what happens when one tries to access the law but is also a question of literature’s very nature. For Barthes, S/Z poses the question of who is the mysterious Sarrasine, but this question leads to the thematics that all literature poses, which refers to duality (thesis/antithesis). Frayn’s text can be understood to pose the enigma of literature as a question of intention: why did the writer write this text?

This will be elaborated in Chapter 3. Other critics theorise the ethical dimension of Frayn’s drama through more strictly philosophical frameworks. For example David E Klemm views Copenhagen in terms of theological humanism, while Eduardo Velasquez defines the character Heisenberg’s ‘quantum ethics’ in terms of the complementarity of Cartesian and postmodern conceptions of the real. Velasquez also reads the presence of divinity in Frayn’s play, while Klemm characterises the three interpretative frameworks of the drama as historical, moral and theological. (David E Klemm, ‘”The Darkness Inside the Human Soul”: Uncertainty in Theological Humanism and Michael Frayn’s Play Copenhagen.’ (2004) 18(3) Literature & Theology: 292-307; Eduardo Velasquez ‘Quantum Physics Meets Quantum Ethics: Knowledge, Ignorance and Socratic Wisdom in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen.’ (2006) 35(3) Perspectives on Political Science,: 149-155.)

59 60

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What was Heisenberg doing? is only one of Copenhagen’s questions. Another is what did he want? Why did he come? Who is to say? These are complementary questions, providing interfering possibilities for answers to differing ways of framing the ‘object’ in question. They are also similar questions to those Barthes and Derrida ask of the relation among text, author and critic. This sense of the inability to precisely establish intention is akin to the inability to precisely establish the correct interpretation of a text, both notions arising from the understanding that the origin (of text, of action) is ultimately unknowable. It is this certainty of the unknowable that defines a ‘quantum’ theory. In answer to the question who’s to say what was Heisenberg’s intention in visiting Bohr in 1941, Frayn’s text answers that maybe (his) Heisenberg wanted many things and perhaps the possibilities were open until the fictional Bohr became part of Heisenberg’s text, rendering it not a predetermined trace but a present collision under observation (Heisenberg and Bohr were both under surveillance). A possibility, an outcome, was then chosen (determined). But when? By whom? Perhaps the outcome cannot be known until its original coordinates are separately measured, until the characters Bohr and Heisenberg become observers rather than objects, after the traces of the collision have dispersed and been gathered. This is the play.

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Chapter 1 The electron: Heisenberg the ethical writer Reading Copenhagen as an example of a classic, readerly1 text as defined by Barthes in S/Z is also to understand it as an example of the multiplicity of complementarity. To read the play in this manner is to understand it as expressing the difficulty of reading textual codes; the elaboration of attempts to rewrite a text; and the impossibility of deducing a singular authorial intention. Barthes’s notion of the classic literary text is as a particular example of the universal law of literature, which may be expressed as the ambiguity of the symbol. ‘The Science of Literature’2 describes the ‘operative’ order of the symbolic and its link to mythology as the source of meaning. S/Z elaborates on this by dividing up Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ and explaining ‘[l]arge and small units of discourse [that] obviously exist in a relationship of integration…but [which] are made up of levels which exist independently of description’.3 This independence of description is complementary in a similar manner to the way description and precision were seen as complementary by the historical Heisenberg.4 For Barthes, either a literary work can be described in the unitary manner of old criticism5 or its various meanings explored. This complementarity arises out of the twotiered structure of language that generates meaning for signification. The two levels are the connotative/symbolic/semiotic and the denotative/literal/linguistic. The symbolic level brings multiplicity to meaning, and the classic literary text utilises both systems. Because of the multiplicity of voices and connotations, there are many entry points6 to a text, and many ‘writers’.7

Readerly texts are ‘moderately plural (i.e., merely polysemous) texts’ for which there ‘exists an average appreciator which can grasp only a certain median portion of the plural, an instrument at once too delicate and too vague to be applied to univocal texts, and too poor to be applied to multivalent texts, which are reversible and frankly indeterminable (integrally plural texts). This modest instrument is connotation.’ (Roland Barthes, S/Z, 6.) 2Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 28-32. 3Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 31. 4‘Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 84. 5Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 5. 6Roland Barthes, S/Z, 12. 7 Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 4 1

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Another way of understanding Barthes’s denotative and connotative levels as ‘complementary’ is through Plotnitsky’s loss in representation: ‘It can be said that uncertainty relations connote a radical, irreducible loss in representation affecting—in advance, always already—any quantum system and ultimately making all such representations idealizations…Quantum statistics appears to result from a radical—irreducible—multiplicity…’8

The doubleness of language required is not because of an absence of representation, but a multiplicity of representations. It is a complementarisation of the representable and unrepresentable in a general economy of the text that relates them ‘in an interplay of

energies and forces within a given process.’9 The denotative is that which is definitely represented and the connotative is that which is unrepresentable—or only ambiguously representable through partial and exclusive systems of representation. This partial representation is indeterminate because the elements of the relation (signifier and sign) cannot totally represent the concept (signified) that is unrepresentable. S/Z demonstrates the impossibility of separating various operations of meaning within the text and the fruitfulness of their interpenetration.10 Barthes labels these operations ‘codes’, the play of which gives meanings to the unrepresentable through articulation of relations among a text’s various voices. Each code is organised temporally to create a work that ‘holds several meanings simultaneously, by its very structure…’:11 the Voice of Empirics (the proairetic12), the Voice of Science (the referenced cultural codes)13, the Voice of Truth

Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity, 8. Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity, 21. 10‘The unequivocal separation between such economic operations and the theories inscribing and processing them is, in fact, impossible in general economy, and the interpenetrations between them may be as theoretically productive as they are inevitable.’ (Ibid.) 11Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 25. 12‘In Aristotelian terms, in which praxis is linked to proairesis, or the ability rationally to determine the result of an action, we shall name this code of actions and behaviour proairetic (in narrative, however, the discourse, rather than the characters determines the action). (18). ‘…this voice is given power by the reading, which gives a transcendent name to a series of actions. These actions seem uncertain or probable and are the core of the structure that constitutes the readerly nature of the text.’ (204) (Roland Barthes, S/Z.) 13‘The cultural codes are references to a science or a body of knowledge; in drawing attention to them, we merely indicate the type of knowledge…’ (Roland Barthes, S/Z, 20.) 8 9

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(the hermeneuticsm),14 the Voice of the Person (the semes),15 and the Voice of the Symbol (the symbolic). In a classic text such as ‘Sarrasine’, the codes elucidate an enigma through the posing of a thesis/antithesis. The answer to the enigma is a moral judgement on the transgression of the / (barrier between the oppositional pair). The hermeneutic code unfolds the central enigma of a text and defers offering solution to the mystery. The symbolic code carries the images of antithesis, while the sematic16 code elucidates the ‘connotative signifier’, which is the elusive essence of the human characteristic that forms the subject of the story.17 Classic texts are the particular examples of these universal rules. In S/Z, Barthes identifies ‘Sarrasine’’s enigma as ‘Who is Sarrasine?’, the central antithesis as castrating/castrated, and castration and simulation as transgression. Sarrasine is the man who unwittingly transgresses the barrier between masculine and feminine by falling in love with a castrato, a simulated woman who is not wholly male. The castrato, La Zambinella, is punished by being neither woman nor man and Sarrasine’s transgression of loving La Zambinella is punished by death. Frayn’s text can also be read as offering a central enigma for the reader/viewer through a hermeneutic code, and snares, equivocations and partial answers18 to defer offering solution to its mystery. It proliferates the questions that lead from the general of the first question—Why did Heisenberg come?—to the specificity of the final question—Why didn’t he calculate the diffusion equation? In addition, on the level of the textual metaphor within the play, Frayn’s characters interpret a classic text: ‘Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the exploitation of atomic energy?’ (36) This is only one sentence but Barthes’s codes can all be found: the hermeneutic (‘if’—which formulates a question of truth); a seme (‘exploitation of atomic energy’— which connotes the bomb); the symbolic (‘moral right’ and ‘exploitation’—thesis and antithesis, i.e. can exploitation ever be a moral right?); the proairetic (‘work’—rational

‘Under the hermeneutic code, we list the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed…(Roland Barthes, S/Z, 19.) 15The sematic and symbolic codes will be discussed in detail below. 16 I use forms of my neologism ‘sematic’ to refer to Barthes’s semes. 17This is my attempt at an explanation of the role of the signifier, which Barthes calls ‘the signifier par excellence’ but then does not go ‘into further detail’. (Roland Barthes, S/Z, 17.) 18Roland Barthes, S/Z, 75. 14

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action); and a reference (‘physicist’—which indicates in what role Heisenberg is speaking). If Heisenberg’s statement is read through these codes, one might interpret it to be expressing several meanings: a conflict about whether Heisenberg’s position as a physicist changes the nature of his ethical choices, and a plea for help in negotiating this conflict (hermeneutic); a moral dilemma that is more than simply a reference to Heisenberg’s personal situation but is the question of ethics involved in innovation that can be simultaneously creative and destructive (symbolic and reference); a proposition to create a bomb (hermeneutic and sematic together—one would only have to ask such a question in regard to a bomb); and a desire to develop the bomb (proairetic). Here, then, is a nice example of the superposition and interference of complementarily uncertain but simultaneously possible meanings, as well as Barthes’s multiplicity of connoted meaning. What did the character Bohr ‘read’ when he initially heard the statement and was it what its ‘author’ meant? How do the subsequent readings reinterpret the text and how important is it that the text is reread in conjunction with its author? Bohr and Margrethe are open to the multiplicity of meaning inherent in Heisenberg’s allusive statement. They propose several meanings for it, but Heisenberg desires to limit his statement to reflect only one interpretation: that he came to Copenhagen in order not to build a bomb. He makes several assertions of his ethically good intentions: that he needed to remain in control of the nuclear program so that his Nazi rivals did not take over; (40) that he wanted reassurance that his decision not to build a bomb is morally right; (42) that he wanted the Allied scientists to choose not to build a bomb as well; (44) and that even though such a plan is doomed to fail it was worth a try. (44) Even after the character Heisenberg admits to Bohr that he did not really think Bohr would stop the Allied scientists nor would he himself have relinquished work on the German reactor; even after Margrethe accuses him of not knowing how to build a bomb, (79) Heisenberg still insists (‘Because I wasn’t trying to build a bomb.’) (86)

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Frayn’s text is almost a response to Barthes’s death of the author, which arises in Criticism and Truth as a response to his critics,19 classically-trained literary theorists. Frayn’s Heisenberg might be the personification of the all-powerful author that Barthes so roundly rejects, arisen from the dead in answer to the desire of his readers who ‘…want at all costs to make the dead person, or a substitute for him, speak’ so that he ‘can lay claim to the meaning of his work and can himself make that its legal meaning; from this notion flows the unreasonable interrogation directed by the critic at the dead writer, at his life, at the traces of his intentions, so that he himself can guarantee the meaning of his work…’20 This idea of textual meaning as authorial intention is threatening to Barthes because he feels old criticism’s belief in a predetermined meaning occludes the generative structure that makes multiple textual meanings possible. In order for this structure to be revealed the author must metaphorically die so the text can be ‘free…from the constraints of intention.’21 Just as the traces of a beam of photons cannot be read as a wave formation if it is observed to behave as a series of particles, a text cannot be read as a multiplicity if it is chosen to reflect the one meaning of a generative mind. The connotative text allows for a multiple set of simultaneous determinations that refer to readings rather than a writing.22 The multiplicity that can be generated by the connotative structure speaks through a shared mythology.23 Copenhagen is the realisation of the desire to hear the author speak, calling Heisenberg from the dead to examine the traces of his life. Because the Heisenberg on stage is not the real Heisenberg (neither the historical Heisenberg nor the one who spoke in a fictional 1941), because this Heisenberg is a construction by ghosts created to elucidate meaning, he is just as much myth as any notion of any author is, an object of the mythological projections of himself as well as the other two ghosts. Yet this mythological author does not guarantee a legal meaning but offers a structure in which to limit the multiplicity of possible interpretations.

Raymond Picard and ‘the journalists who had joined him in his criticism of the new French Criticism’. (Philip Thody, ‘Foreword,’ in Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, viii.) 20Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 30. 21Ibid. 22‘Roland Barthes, S/Z, 10. 23Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 30-31. 19

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Barthes may wish the author to ‘die’ upon any proper reading of a text, but he also absents the author upon writing. Barthes defines one role of literature as revealing the non-existence of the prediscursive subject, an illusion that literature cannot maintain.24 Frayn’s Heisenberg can be read in the manner in which Barthes describes this voided writing subject. As each of the Copenhagen replayings emphasises, the subject that spoke the text was not in control of his intention or his meaning, only of the style in which he chose to communicate his text.25 Barthes writes that literature only arises because of the absence of the writer’s delimited subjecthood: The recourse to the symbolic discourse leads, it seems, to an opposite belief: the subject is not an individual plenitude…but on the contrary a void around which the writer weaves a discourse…so that all writing which does not lie designates not the internal attributes of the subject, but its absence.…What carries the symbol along is the necessity of endlessly designating the nothing of the I that I am.’26

This is precisely what Heisenberg’s statement designates: the absence of a decision that would present the I as a resolute delimitable something. Heisenberg’s enigmatic statement is connotative because of the absence not only of decision but of the object that originates and represents the decision (the bomb) and the subject that must make the decision (Heisenberg). Yet the allusions point precisely to a very present subjectivity, one that is not void but multiplicity, interference, non-knowledge and uncertainty. It is this confused plenitude that defines the subject as one that has to choose (determine) and the character Heisenberg’s text expresses the absence of this choice.

Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 12. In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes allows style to be the mark and ethical choice of an individual writer. In her introduction, Susan Sontag summarises this: ‘For Barthes a language and a style are “objects,” while a mode of ecriture (writing, personal utterance) is a “function.” Neither strictly historical nor irredeemably personal, ecriture occupies a middle ground: it is “essentially the morality of form.” In contrast to a language and a style, ecriture is the writer’s zone of freedom, “form considered as human intention.” (Susan Sontag, ‘Preface’, xiii-xiv). 26 Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 35 – 36. 24 25

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The prediscursive subject, voided as origin but multiply present as construction, is not fully knowable, a presence of the past.27 The text, however, is the visible trace of his once-presence, connoting the (multiple) self that was there, allowing for resurrection by reader, critic and writer alike. All Frayn’s characters are ghosts, emergences from a text’s uncertainty. If the originating author is a ghost, there and not there, so too are the reader and critic. All exist equally in relation to the text, visible to each other and absent to themselves, as Margrethe well knows. (86-87) Frayn’s characters are the embodied interpretations that arise out of an original ambiguous intention. Connotation allows the no-one-thing of the imprecise I to be presented in the something of the text and located there however uncertainly, without precluding the generation of multiplicity. Connotation gives rise to a postdiscursive subject, who is as much a construct of the writing self as of the critic and reader, but as such is a choice and a viable trace of intention. Choice, subjectivity and intention are all forms of meaning that arise from Barthes’s sense of mythology as the grounding structure of representation. Connotation is a function that describes how the text can be understood as meaningful.28 The Copenhagen Interpretation understands the subatomic particle in a similar manner. The particle is not so much a void as a set of possibilities around which the scientist weaves a mathematical discourse.29 Neither writing subject nor subatomic particle actually exist as determinate entities. The nature of a subatomic particle as a wave is not a description of a particle’s material configuration but a function that describes its observed behaviour. The wave function has a mathematical expression but is also an image of this expression.30 Mythology provides a story, or image, of connotative relations. Thus, for both quantum physicists and the Barthesian critic, narrative originates interpretation. In Copenhagen, each character’s different answers to the hermeneutic question ‘why did he come?’ are represented by a central symbol that expresses one of the three symbolic systems that control the mythology and antitheses of the text. Heisenberg’s ‘Heisenberg All we possess is the present, and the present endlessly dissolves into the past. Bohr has gone even as I turn to see Margrethe.’ (86). 28Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 28-29. 29‘…an electron then is not so much a physical thing as an abstract encodement of a set of potentialities or possible outcomes of measurements.’ (Paul Davies, ‘Introduction’ in Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London: Penguin Classics, 2000) xii. 30Plotnitsky, Complementarity, 69 and Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 156. 27

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system is sematically described by darkness. Darkness connotes various forms of, and the urge towards, nothingness and the unknown, such as the ‘invisible other […] allenveloping presence in the darkness’ and the ‘flying particle’ that ‘wanders the darkness, no one knows where’. (88) Margrethe’s system is sematically described by silence, which the characters often return to, for example after their discussion of Heisenberg’s self-incarceration at Haigerloch with his nuclear reactor.31 Bohr’s symbolic structure is grounded by the image of the crevasse, the void of moral consequence that is too easily avoided: ‘The faster you ski, the sooner you’re across the cracks and crevasses.’ (25) The semes of these symbolic systems are grounded in the fictional scientists’ visit to Elsinore on their ‘great hike through Zealand’; (30) the story of the Bohrs’ son Christian, who drowned while on holiday at Tsivilde; and of skiing competitions at Bayrischzell. Similarly to Barthes’s reading of ‘Sarrasine’, which combines the superposed ‘routes’ of discourse, economy and castration, which all reveal a collapse caused by transgression,32 I have found in Frayn’s classic text that each symbolic system is a story of transgression superposed one on the other. The character Heisenberg associates himself at times with all the sematic characters—the beloved lost child, the young prince tormented by indecision and the competitive man racing himself beyond all detail. Yet as originating intention he brings to the text a different set of mythologies to the critic and reader. In Copenhagen, authorial history creates its own story, offered by the ghost Heisenberg, who articulates the first attempt to turn a series of approximations into meaning. Heisenberg says he came to Copenhagen to find out whether the Allies are building a bomb, ‘To tell them we could stop it together’. (44) Heisenberg’s story is of a man given an awful responsibility: to choose or not the deaths of thousands of people. He alone is burdened with this decision. But how can he choose? If he builds this bomb he could be saving the lives of his children, his fellow citizens. He knows what it is to be bombed. The Allied scientists do not. But how can he build a bomb that would destroy other children, other citizens?

‘Heisenberg Silence./ Bohr Silence./ Margrethe Silence./ Heisenberg And once again the tiller slams over, and Christian is falling. (52-53) 32 Roland Barthes, S/Z, 215. 31

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(42-43) He hopes his visit to Bohr will lead to communication with the Allied physicists, so they can agree not to build bombs. This is Heisenberg’s story and in it he is a hero. The story’s symbolic system is gathered and unified in the connotative power of ‘Elsinore’ and mythologically grounded in two stories showing that choice, whether deliberative or spontaneous, is in the end arbitrary. The single moment of choice when the ethical actor decides amongst his competing loyalties, deciding upon light instead of darkness, life instead of death, the human over the law, is a myth constructed from the character Heisenberg’s desire to locate choice in arbitrariness. The story that generates this capriciousness is his experience as a young boy guarding a prisoner to be executed in the morning. When that morning comes the boy Heisenberg ‘persuaded them to let him go,’ (94) thereby initiating the ethical adult that he presents to his harshest critic, Margrethe. This would appear to be a myth of the transgressive hero who disobeys the law under which he is expected to act in loyalty, in order to preserve the life of its enemy. According to the moral law that Margrethe represents, however, such an act would not be transgressive but ethical, a choice to obey the more fundamental law of a shared and sovereign humanity where ‘each soul [is] emperor of the universe, no less than each of us’. (94) Margrethe presumes that Heisenberg did not make this ethical decision but allowed his prisoner to die. Against this subjective plenitude that deliberates and chooses darkness, Heisenberg asserts a plenitude that makes a snap and unconscious swerve to light, choosing life over loyalty. Heisenberg’s choice to save the life of his prisoner establishes that he has the capacity to choose and has resisted the call of darkness. The story that closes this system is of the soldier who chose not to kill Heisenberg as a deserter when Heisenberg offered him a pack of Lucky Strikes. (92-93) This story illustrates that a commitment to life is no more premeditated than choosing darkness, that both temptations are a reflection of conditions of war, desperation and enforced opposition. Juxtaposed, these stories illustrate that the choice against death and darkness is an unpredictable response to the call of humanity. This is why Heisenberg considers himself in the same moral realm as the soldier who did not kill

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him. Both have been given the right to kill under the law of the worlds they inhabit and both unexpectedly respond to the opposing call of humanity with generosity. The symbolic code counters Heisenberg’s story, telling one of a proper transgression of moral law. This is the story of a man who would rather keep physics and politics apart, refusing to embody the choice that complementarity demands: he must see himself in one way or another, preserve one people over another. This choice is represented in the connotative power of ‘Elsinore’, the home of Hamlet: ‘Heisenberg We went to Elsinore. I often think about what you said there [...] Every dark corner there reminds us of the darkness inside the human soul...’ (31) The character Heisenberg thinks his choice is between which people may be condemned to death and which he shall save. The symbolic code of unexploded mines and wind-ravaged pagodas (57-58) explains Heisenberg’s real choice as between choosing and being because to not build the bomb is for the boy-wonder, the ‘greatest of them all’, (5) to choose to fail, to give up the power to destroy that so mightily reinforces the experience of being. To build the bomb is to betray his ethical self and condemn the colleagues whom he loves and who define him. The need to decide turns Heisenberg into a modern split subject as he attempts to respond to competing motivations: the desire to stop the production of nuclear weapons and to be the first man to achieve critical mass. This split subject can be understood through Plotnitsky’s ‘irreducible loss [that] leads to irreducible fragmentation.’33 The inability to represent full subjectivity leads to an uncertain subject fragmented into the selves that each partially represents his desire. Elsinore is the metaphorical place of moral uncertainty in the face of the requirement to act, where the mind shifts ‘endlessly back and forth between the two approaches’, (6) whether to hang oneself in a futile moral gesture, or to protect oneself in the small hope of offering a rescuing hand. This expression of the dilemma demonstrates the interference of the symbolic systems of Tsivilde and Elsinore, which both mythologise the choice to save a life: Heisenberg I can only say that it worked. Unlike most of the gestures made by heroes of the resistance. It worked! I know what you think. You think I

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Plotnitsky, Complementarity, 8.

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should have joined the plot against Hitler, and got myself hanged like the others. Bohr Of course not. Heisenberg You don't say it, because there are some things that can't be said. But you think it. Bohr No. Heisenberg What would it have achieved? What would it have achieved if you'd dived in after Christian, and drowned as well? But that's another thing that can't be said. (75-76)

The need and refusal to choose between the self-identical and ethical subject is the choice symbolised in Elsinore, home of the dark prince who also had to choose between an integrated self and a moral decision, between the thought of the familiar and the action of the unknown: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action….34

Both fragmented sons are confronted with a choice to act that threatens their very conceptions of self. Elsinore’s most harmless expression is in the formation of abstract games with straightforward rules that proclaims one man a winner over another, affirming his own existence with the symbolic death of his enemy. As Bohr points out, when they played table tennis together Heisenberg looked ‘as if you were trying to kill me.’ (23) This desire to win at its most black finally manifests in the decision to embrace the darkness, to feel fully free from the uncertainty of things and proclaim one’s self as the certain through the destruction of the Other. As Margrethe says of the

34William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed Philip Edwards (Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne, Madrid, Capetown, Cambridge University Press, updated edition, 2003) 159-160.

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deportation of the Danish Jews, ‘the great darkness inside the human soul was flooding out to engulf us all’. (81) The symbols of competition—table tennis, poker, chess, skiing, publishing papers35—sematically write a story of a man more comfortable with the abstraction of the game and the logic of mathematics (‘Mathematics is sense! That’s what sense is!’) (65) than the messiness of implications and consequences, (25) who finds that his cappistol has become a real gun and his skis turned into war-fouled running shoes.36 The decision to attempt the win that affirms for a moment the delimited self that has triumphed over another has truly become a wager with the darkness of destruction: to win the race to build a bomb is also to use it. It is physics that makes such a wager real. Until the discovery of fission and the outbreak of a savage war, it was possible to pretend that physics and politics, the abstract and the lived, could be easily kept on their own sides of the slash, with Heisenberg skiing over the implications of the real to achieve the abstract answer. Heisenberg refuses to accept the terms of the wager. By rending apart physics and politics, the character Heisenberg attempts to be simultaneously ethical and egotistical, attempting to save lives and build the world’s first successful nuclear reactor. If, as the character Heisenberg declares, the moment of decision was in not telling Speer about plutonium and choosing a nuclear reactor program over a bomb, (48) because of the divorce of physics (fission) from politics (bombs) this moment was actually one of non-decision. The character Heisenberg’s obsession with his nuclear reactor is a form of madness37 of pure abstraction split from a living context. Dasenbrock also focuses on this thematic: …This theme should be related to the political and ethical issues the play is concerned with, as the implication is clearly that it is Heisenberg’s willingness to stay in the realm of abstract mathematics that may have helped blind him to the moral implications of his wartime activities’.38

35‘Margrethe Yes, it works wonderfully. Within three months of publishing your uncertainty paper you’re offered [the chair at] Leipzig.’ (73) 36‘They’re puddles of molten phosphorus. It gets on your shoes like some kind of incandescent dogmuck—I have to keep scraping it off—as if the streets have been fouled by the hounds of hell.’ (43) 37‘Bohr My dear good Heisenberg, not to criticise, but you’d all gone mad down there!’ (50) 38Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Copenhagen: The Drama of History’, 225.

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The character Heisenberg’s madness manifests in his insistence on continuing with the reactor program despite the dangers. (39) To get a chain reaction going in the reactor, dragging it across Germany, is an exhilarating race to triumph as first at the finish line, a race devoid of purpose, situation or relation other than the obliteration of the real in the all-encompassing narcissism of the triumphant ego. (50) The real, the political, the situation, was what constrained Heisenberg to deliberation, but at the end of the war he is finally free to work in a situation of no observation, no constraints, no restraints, to sail over the crevasses as fast as possible. (51) Working like this was going to kill him. To attempt to split that which cannot be split—physics and politics, one’s conscience and ambition—is to transgress the order of things. Like Hamlet, Heisenberg appears to be mad, as his refusal to live in the real is slowly replaced by the abstraction of the nuclear fission that obsesses him. The symbol of music, of the beauty of Bach divorced from all worldliness, trails Heisenberg both past and future, in the sonata that allows him to propose to his wife (20) and the high culture of the rarefied Farm Hall. (45) It is most powerfully realised as a representation of the relinquishment of life, of responsibility for the basic moral conflict between self and Other, in the image of a man playing an organ, untouched in a monastery while a war wages all around him.39 Neither maths nor music, reason nor precision, any abstraction of structure can ever make the decision between being and doing. Margrethe […] Now it turns out that everything really depends on these rather large objects on our shoulders. And what is going on in there is… Heisenberg Elsinore. Margrethe Elsinore, yes. (76)

Heisenberg’s rejection of choice is embodied in his flirtation with death down in the nuclear hole, racing to achieve fission without care for precaution. His transgression is

‘Heisenberg I sometimes think that those final few weeks at Haigerloch were the last happy time of my life. In a strange way it was very peaceful. Suddenly we were out of all the politics of Berlin. Out of the bombing. The war was coming to an end. There was nothing to think about except the reactor. And we didn’t go mad, in fact. We didn’t work all the time. There was a monastery on top of the rock above our cave. I used to retire to the organ-loft in the church, and play Bach fugues.’ (52)

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that while ‘stuck in a little inn somewhere in the middle of nowhere, listening to the thump of bombs falling all round’ Heisenberg listens to the ‘Beethoven G minor cello sonata’. (51) His decision to abstract rather than choose ‘worked’ (the character Heisenberg’s own test to prove the rightness of a choice). It may have driven him mad but it led to his happiest time during the war. It also resulted in his failure to build the first nuclear reactor and to die for his transgression of the law of choice. Both Hamlet and the character Heisenberg are figures of transgression because they exist on the border of antithesis, letting time and chance decide for them. The behaviour of the madperson is the expression of this liminality. The character Heisenberg’s obsession with the nuclear reactor brings him close to the non-choice that is death. Hamlet is punished by death for his transgression but Heisenberg dies only symbolically, the favoured son and respected physicist no longer to return. Heisenberg is punished—with the rejection of his fellow scientists, the loss of his best friendship, the reprobation of the world and Margrethe: ‘If I had died then, what should I have missed? Thirty years of attempting to explain. Thirty years of reproach and hostility. Even you turned your back on me.’ (52) The character Heisenberg is physically saved by the

end of the war he is racing against, but he emerges as a loser on both fronts: neither the first to realise a chain reaction nor a hero who saves the world from a nuclear-armed Hitler. Each side of his self has been destroyed, moral and self-identical, conscionable and acting. Elsinore, then, is a meaning of Heisenberg’s text, the articulation of his attraction to darkness, his desire to exploit power and knowledge, even knowing it has the potential to render everything night. Heisenberg’s story of personal heroism presumes that he made a decision to resist this power and was coming to Bohr to enact this decision. But though his myths of the prisoner and the soldier contain a particular moment of decision—to let the man go or to kill him—Heisenberg’s story of bombbuilding does not actually have such a moment. The ability to deliberate, to not be forced to a decision in a moment of generosity, is paralysing in its lack of caprice. Heisenberg really goes to Bohr, perhaps, in order to force such a moment, a trading of one generosity for another (articulated in Margrethe’s interpretation of the meeting as

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a request for and response to friendship) (89); or to continue deferral of such a moment altogether, a transgressive act. It was, as Bohr points out, not to release the world from bomb-building. If Bohr had understood what Heisenberg was trying to say—that he wanted to halt all nuclear bomb programs in the face of the shared sheer difficulty of creating one, an entirely different outcome may have happened, one that honoured this other great desire of Heisenberg’s: to build a bomb for the Nazis, an outcome that, in 1941, happened in the character Bohr’s head simultaneously as it did not happen in the character Heisenberg’s.40 Not building a bomb was simply only one possible outcome of their collision. Even if Heisenberg’s proclaimed strategy ‘worked’ in the end it does not make any sense, as Bohr details before suggesting ‘another draft of the paper’. Bohr […]But you didn’t really think I’d tell you whether the Americans were working on a bomb. Heisenberg No. Bohr You didn’t seriously hope that I’d stop them. Bohr You were going back to work on that reactor whatever I said. (53)

Like the physicist Bohr shot in the cap-gun battle, the identify of which the scientists cannot agree on. ‘Heisenberg Both of them simultaneously alive and dead in our memories.’ (28)

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Chapter 2 The observer: Margrethe the just critic The character of Margrethe makes Frayn’s play extraordinary. She is the feminine presence, dwelling on the personal and living solidly in the social world, yet fully understanding of both the political and scientific situations and able to abstract. She is neither soft nor conciliatory; her unrelenting and impolite insistence takes Heisenberg and Bohr to task long enough for them to pass through their anger and hurt to reconciliation. It is she who begins the play, asking ‘But why?’ Through Margrethe’s insistence on the personal and emotional, pitted against Heisenberg’s desire for abstraction, Frayn demonstrates that it is psychological qualities that account for the unknown, the uncertain and the many answers that speak to our human intention and action. The second ‘draft’ of the replaying of the character Heisenberg’s text is Margrethe’s. Against the singular assertion of an authorial intention, Margrethe, like Barthes, questions the ability of a subject who cannot observe himself to speak accurately for that self. Such a subject speaks only inaccurately, occasionally understanding his intention as reflected in the faces of his observers. Why, then, look for answers in the authorial subject?: ‘So it’s no good asking him why he came to Copenhagen in 1941. He doesn’t know!’ (72) Margrethe does not relinquish the classical idea of an authorial point of origin, only that the writer has privilege to answers about his own intention. Though Heisenberg may be voided to himself because he is at the centre of his own universe and ‘the one bit of universe that he can’t see is Heisenberg,’ he is present to Margrethe. If the observer is the centre of the universe, then Margrethe can see Heisenberg, as well as Bohr. (72) She scathingly critiques what she sees. The first rewriting of the 1941 meeting articulated in the play determined that Heisenberg came to see Bohr to recapture something that defined their relationship: ‘And we shall speak together and understand each other the way we did before.’ (54) Margrethe shows that the hopefulness and warmth this implies is no more true than Heisenberg’s belief that he would end the nuclear reactor program pending the right

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words from Bohr (though it is also no less true). Instead of accepting memory-spun myths of joint scientific discoveries over long walks,1 Margrethe attacks the story of benevolent paternity: Heisenberg To something we did in those three years.… Something we said, something we thought.… I keep almost seeing it out of the corner of my eyes as we talk! Something about the way we worked. Something about the way we did all those things… Bohr Together Heisenberg Together. Yes, together. Margrethe No. (61)

They came up with both of their theories alone, Margrethe reminds the two scientists, and argued to the point of tears when they were together. (70) The reason Heisenberg cannot put words to what was once between himself and his father-figure is because this ‘something’ is also undecidable, both together and apart. Bohr and Heisenberg had a complementary relationship, discovery coming out of collaboration and solitude, generosity and selfishness, emotions that were felt in oscillation. What is not quite there, unsayable, is complementarity, the erasure of the impenetrable slash of difference. Tsivilde is the symbol of silence, the uselessness of discoursing about death. It originates in the myth of Christian’s death, with Bohr’s silence upon confronting Margrethe: ‘There’s Niels in the doorway, silently watching me. He turns his head away, and I know at once what’s happened.’ (30). This silence laces through the replayings, when the impact of death cannot be expressed, and always comes back to Christian. (14, 16, 29, 52, 76, 93) Silence is the erasure of the slash, a destruction of Derrida’s opposition between discourse and presence: in death and untalked of, Christian is no longer the absence that separates Margrethe from others, but a presence in her and in everyone. Discourse is presence: in the mass death of war, when there are no more people to discourse, there is no more difference, ‘no more decisions, great or ‘Heisenberg Walking, talking, for a hundred miles./ Bohr After which we talked more or less nonstop for the next three years./ Heisenberg We’d split a bottle of wine over dinner in your flat at the institute.’ (55)

1

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small, are ever made again. When there’s no more uncertainty, because there’s no more knowledge.’ (94) The same fear of erasure of the slash is represented in Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s parable of the law. In Kafka’s story a man from the country ages and dies in front of an open gate of the law, waiting to gain permission from the doorkeeper to enter. Derrida’s reading asserts the difference, or slash, between the law and the experience of the law; between the text and the reader. For Derrida, Kafka’s story of the law is analogous to the nature of literature, both evidencing the impenetrability of difference (différance).2 This difference must remain impenetrable or else the law and the supplicant, the reader and the text, the singular and the universal, might be found to be the same, or at least not completely separable. Separation is classically necessary to define the law and the text by the universality of truth against the singularity of the supplicant and the reader. These singularities may or may not be in accordance with universal truth and this is their difference from law and literature. The old critic, the law’s doorkeeper and Margrethe are representatives of the law that protects the slash. For Margrethe, people must be one thing or the other: good or evil, Nazi or Ally, someone who chooses or someone who does not. Copenhagen’s symbolic code, however, demonstrates the elusiveness of the slash and the destabilisation of the law, revealing the true transgression to be Margrethe’s when she relinquishes the law of choice grounded in the myth of her son’s death. In this origin story, Margrethe’s memory of Heisenberg’s presence at the Bohrs’ Tsivilde beach house is as merely a substitute for Christian, the ‘firstborn. The eldest son.’ (29) The always-felt loss of Christian originates her sense of the character Heisenberg as always ever a substitute, and ‘alien’ (4) to her family. Death represents the slash of difference for her. Christian is the true son, Heisenberg the false one, and the system’s other oppositions stem from this one: German versus Ally, friend versus enemy, colleague versus competitor. Reading the first presentation of the 1941 visit through this framework, Heisenberg appears uncouth, saying inappropriate things such as asking Bohr if he has been sailing in mined waters or skiing in the country of his occupier. (15) He seems

2

Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 191 and 211.

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unable to cross the barrier that divides him from his onetime friends who are now escaped Jews or occupied citizens. However, this barrier is merely Margrethe’s, and Bohr will later entertain the possibility that Heisenberg’s offensive suggestions were attempts to offer the Bohrs a chance at safe harbour, one that finally arrived in a fishing boat.3 The hermeneutic code opposes the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews4 to that of Christian’s death, generating the question that Heisenberg confronts Margrethe’s morality with: What would it have achieved if I had ‘got myself hanged like the others?’ She blames Heisenberg for claiming to be ‘a hero of the resistance’ when he is only giving the appearance of having chosen so, but remained undecided, ‘in more than one position at a time.’ (50) Margrethe is forced to relinquish her judgement when she accepts the possibility that the rescue of the Danish Jews was due to the fact that Jewish sympathisers remained in Germany. Heisenberg shows that what seem like stark choices—to jump in after a drowning son or get oneself hanged—can indeed be avoided. One can attempt to save the son, the world, and oneself at the same time. After all, it worked (for both Bohr and Heisenberg, if Heisenberg is considered a ‘son’ to Bohr). Margrethe cannot see this until she acknowledges that the essential difference between Heisenberg and her son is only her own construction. The semes of Margrethe’s system create Heisenberg as a son-figure, (52, 54) a child always competing to be the favourite. (58, 63, 73) For her, the darkness of the human soul is not an abstract attraction to the abyss of death, but a need to demolish one’s particular competitor, the one who threatens the self’s superiority. The war, the poker games, the physics papers are at heart events that assert the self in distinction to an Other: father, son, the better favoured, the more privileged. Margrethe opposes to the character Heisenberg’s heroic figure a lost little boy revelling in the imposition of a maturity he cannot embody. But it’s maddening to have this clever son forever dancing about in front of our eyes, forever demanding our approval, forever struggling to shock ‘Bohr Though perhaps there was also something I should thank you for. That summer night in 1943, when I escaped across the Sound in the fishing-boat, and the freighters arrived from Germany… (89) 4‘Bohr When the ships arrived on the Wednesday there were eight thousand Jews in Denmark to be arrested and crammed into their holds. On the Friday evening, at the start of the Sabbath, when the SS began their round-up, there was scarcely a Jew to be found.’ (89-90) 3

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us, forever begging to be told what the limits to his freedom are, if only so that he can go out and transgress them! (78)

More than that, she accuses Heisenberg of only pretending about this grand moral decision because he already knew he would fail to build the bomb. (75) She believes he had crossed the line that defines him as a moral agent when he worked for the Nazis, a choice made long before the 1941 meeting with Bohr. The character Heisenberg was simply too afraid to follow through because he might fail. ‘Please don’t try to tell us that you’re a hero of the resistance’, Margrethe accuses Heisenberg. (75) Margrethe calls before the law this fearful resurrected author so that she can observe him and judge his text by a seemingly universal literarity, like a Barthesian ‘old critic’.5 Barthes writes polemically against traditional French criticism, defending new criticism as able to accommodate the multiplicity of texts. Barthes attacks old critics for classically insisting on a literal, singular textual meaning, which they achieve by refusing to engage with the symbolic, which is informed by unconscious and subjective instincts and drives.6 Classical critics locate objectivity outside of the self, expecting literature to literally reflect an observable reality.7 In contrast, Barthes believes the voidedness of the subject gives literature the task of attempting to reveal the hidden reality of the subject, undermining the apparentness of the literal. Because the subject cannot represent itself, its task, through literature, is not to demand recognition from another, or from the law, but for both writer and critic to use language to formalise a sense of the subject’s relation to the world.8 The voided subject threatens the old critic by being uncontrollable and the new critic subverts bourgeois literary power by ‘…re-allocat[ing] the roles of author and

commentator and in so doing attacks the linguistic order’.9 This is the power of the symbolic—not to hide current relations of power in the commonly and certainly meaningful, or denotative, but to expose the effects of power relations in the individually uncertain allusive. The literal is an imposition of those in authority who ‘So long as criticism had the function of judging, it could not but be conformist, that is to say in conformity with the interests of the judges.’ (Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 3.) 6Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 14. 7Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 7. 8Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 12, 24, 25 and Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 14. 9Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 3. 5

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order the linguistic system to reflect their own conservative values.10 As such the ‘author’ appears to Barthes as a conservative construction of the bourgeois critic. Margrethe’s interpretation of Heisenberg as a certain subject is constructed by looking to the figure of Heisenberg she constructs historically through her own mythology. Margrethe pursues the authorial subject, not within his text, but in his past and his future. One of her proposals is a religiously moral interpretation of his intention—‘And now you want him to give you absolution’. (39) She has taken Heisenberg literally (‘Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy?’) and connects these words with other examples of Heisenberg’s language (instances when he referred to Bohr as ‘the Pope’), making a denotative reading of his connotative language and not paying attention to the symbolic. Though Margrethe begins the drama as the Barthesian old critic, by the end of the play her critical role has been transformed as she allows Heisenberg’s competing interpretation of psychological ‘elsewheres’11 to topple her belief in the law of the critic as sole originator of meaning, reversing the power structure between critic and text. Margrethe’s power is in part an assumption of ability to speak for the subject that cannot speak for himself. This subject she has observed past and present is the petulant son, and what’s inside his head is not Elsinore, but Tsivilde, the place where a son requires rescuing by his father. Bohr responds indulgently. Margrethe accuses the scientists of accepting each other’s theories in order to mutually advance their careers, and in the same breath tells Heisenberg he came to visit Bohr in 1941 to brag: ‘You came to show yourself off to us.’ (74) Tsivilde is the symbolic origin of a mythical system that privileges the interpersonal as the source of intention. Margrethe’s interpretations—that Heisenberg wanted absolution, that he came to show himself off, that the visit was about friendship (89)—are assertions of the demand for types of recognition: forgiveness, praise, understanding. All are potential responses to a visit that lets Bohr know that

Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 11. ‘… one cannot see how, once the forms have been laid down, one could avoid finding content, which comes from history or the psyche, in short from that “elsewhere” which old criticism refuses to have anything to do with…’ (Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 14.) 10 11

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Heisenberg is ‘in charge of some vital piece of secret research. And that even so he’s preserved a lofty moral independence. Preserved it so famously that he’s being watched by the Gestapo. Preserved it so successfully that he’s now got a wonderfully important moral dilemma to face.’ (75) This demand for recognition is the personal that underlies all else, defining the relationship between Heisenberg and Bohr, reader and author, and the electron and photon that spin away from each other after they are designed to collide and refer back the one to the other.12 The classic idea of a critic who reconstructs an author is based on a belief in the communicative nature of textuality. Derrida’s conception of the reader can also be understood as a demand for recognition, but the desire for a reader to have a relationship with the law/literature, though inevitable, cannot eventuate. Derrida’s ‘Before the Law’ is itself a hermeneutical text, posing an enigma (what is law/literature?) 13 and antitheses (law/subject, literature/text). Derrida reads Kafka’s story as an example of a reader’s engagement with literature, interpreting the nonconfrontation between the man from the country and the law as a metaphor for the opacity of the literary text. The man from the country’s demand for recognition is metaphorically similar to Balzac’s La Zambinella in confrontation with the law of the copy (the law of all art)14—or Balzac’s text in confrontation with Barthes’s literature—and the character Heisenberg in relation to Margrethe’s universalised moral law. Each character is a subject summoned as a singular manifestation of what is believed to be a universal law. It is only Derrida’s subject, Kafka’s ‘countryman’, that cannot establish connection with or reference between law (literature) as it is experienced and law as it is presumed to be applied to all. Frayn’s and Barthes’s subjects discover the ground of law is an illusion, while Derrida’s Kafkaen subject discovers nothing, leaving the law intact.

‘According to quantum mechanics, the system remains an indivisible whole in spite of the separation of the particles in space. Measurements performed on the particles simultaneously are predicted to show correlations that imply that each particle carries, in some sense that can be well defined mathematically, an imprint of the activities of the other.’ (Paul Davies, ‘Introduction”, XI.) 13Derrida’s essay asks a ‘double question’: ‘Who decides, who judges, and according to what criteria, that this relation [of narrative events] belongs to literature?’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’,187.) 14Barthes identifies what I call the law of the copy in ‘Sarrasine’ through the poetic entrance of the route of castration. Castration symbolises the interruption of the the chain of copies, (208) which Barthes finds in literature, painting, sculpture and even biologically (the beautiful DeLanty progeny), with each substitutive copy based on a Model or Book and Code that is ‘always anterior’. (73) (Roland Barthes, S/Z). 12

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Frayn’s Heisenberg has been judged guilty and is summoned by a representative of the law. Derrida’s subject presents himself to the law voluntarily but encounters instead a representative. If Kafka’s man from the country is considered to be the figure of the reader and the law the edifice of literature,15 then Heisenberg can also be understood as a text that appears before the law of literature, his task to prove his interpretability to the law’s doorkeeper. Margrethe is this doorkeeper, one of the ‘critics, academics, literary theorists, writers, philosophers [who] all have to appeal to a law and appear before it, at once to watch over it and be watched by it,’16 who in summoning a reader must also guard her own unexamined reading. For Derrida the open gate represents the possibility of the law to be read, while the doorkeeper who bars entry affirms its essential unreadability.17 The door that Margrethe and Kafka’s doorkeeper guard is the entry to a literature that is nothing,18 a law that has no essence.19 Literature as a category is nothing outside of the specificity of the individual text that is designated as its example and supplicant. That which can justify and define the text is absent and this absence must be protected: [the text describes itself only] in the unreadability of the text, if one understands by this the impossibility of acceding to its proper significance and its possibly inconsistent content, which it jealously keeps back. The text guards itself, maintains itself—like the law speaking only of itself, that is to say of its non-identity with itself. It neither arrives nor lets anyone arrive. It is the law, makes the law and leaves the reader before the law.’20

Margrethe guards her law and her interpretation from readability because the content of her interpretation is inconsistent and the significance that she imports Heisenberg’s text thereby undermined. The character Heisenberg’s text is not impossible to understand, but only appears so under the guardianship of a certain doorkeeper, who does not want the supplicant to reinterpret the text. She fears a reinterpretation would

Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 210-212. Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 215. 17Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 196-197. 18Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law,’ 209. 19Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law,’ 202. 20Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 211. 15 16

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not only exonerate Heisenberg but implicate Bohr, a reversal I will explain further below. Derrida wonders if a man from the country is one who cannot read, who doesn't understand that a text/law is 'not to be seen or touched but deciphered'.21 Though Derrida proposes this illiterate man is an everyreader when he equates Kafka’s story to the story of literature generically,22 Frayn’s Heisenberg is not an everyreader, nor is Margrethe a generic doorkeeper. Heisenberg does not discover that ‘reading a text…reveal[s] that it is…unreadable to the extent to which the presence within it of a clear and graspable sense remains as hidden as its origin.’23 Heisenberg knows how to read, knows that he can only decipher the law upon being able to touch and see it, and when he does so the origin of the law will no longer remain hidden, but be discovered to be subjective, singular and mythological. This discovery of her origin and sense is what Margrethe tries to guard both Heisenberg and herself from, because once the law is discovered to be readable—merely a structure spun from myth—it can no longer be said to be true or limited to a single interpretation. Compared to the richness of Frayn’s presentation of a subject before the law, Derrida’s presentation is unyielding. Derrida admits he will not provide an answer to his double question,24 and his reading subject will be simultaneously denied and promised experience of the law. Attempting to enter into relations with the law requires the supplicant to put a personal history before a law he believes to be ahistorical yet originated out of history.25 This paradox is derived from Kant’s sense of the inaccessibility of law. Derrida writes, ‘Like the man from Kafka’s story, narrative accounts would try to approach the law and make it present, to enter into a relation with it, indeed to enter it and become instrinsic to it, but none of these things can be accomplished.26 Heisenberg can accomplish these things because the law he confronts is not universal no matter how much its doorkeeper would like to believe. It is not

Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’,197. ‘…Kafka’s text tells us perhaps of the being-before-the-law of any text.’ (Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 215.) 23Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 197. 24Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 187. 25Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law,’ 192. 26Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 191. 21 22

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without a history. Margrethe has let herself ‘be tempted by the impossible: a theory of the origin of law, and therefore of its non-origin, for example, of moral law.’27 Freud’s invention of repression as origin of moral law is one such historicised non-origin. Freud, Derrida writes, wanted to tell the story of the origin of law but sensed that it could have no origin and no history. Because the law must appear ‘as something that does not appear as such in the course of a history’ it had to be presented as ‘the history of that which never took place.’28 Freud’s story of patricide,29 carried out so brothers would gain the privileges of their ruling father, originates moral guilt in the non-event. The brothers are unable to take their father’s place—‘The murder fails because the dead father holds even more power’—and morality is attributed to the feeling of failure.30 Derrida interprets the murder as ‘not an event in the ordinary sense of the word’.31 Nothing happens and yet murder and incest are instantiated as prohibitions, the law (as prohibition/prohibited) appears: ‘The present prohibition of the law is…a différance.... It is a mark, but it is nothing firm, opaque, or uncrossable.32 Derrida accuses Freud of clinging to the notion of a traditional event but insists that the originating murder is really ‘an event of nothing or a quasi-event.’ It has to be so because the origin of law must be ‘fiction’ and only ‘as if’33 in order for the law to remain inaccessible. Morality is thus originated in the non-event of failure rather than in the event of murder or in intention. The sons would not have felt guilty had they achieved the power they were after. Barthes’s, Kafka’s and Margrethe’s stories appear to attest to this interpretation. Sarrasine is guilty for failing to love and consummate his relationship with a real woman,34 La Zambinella is punished for being the non-origin of the image of femininity,35 Kafka’s doorkeeper punishes the man from the country by letting him know he failed to enter the law through the door meant for him, and Margrethe blames Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law,’ 192. Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 194. 29 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans James Strachey (London: Routlege Classics, 2001) 164-168. 30‘Now failure, Freud specifies, is conducive to moral reaction.’ (Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 198.) 31Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 198-199. 32Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 202-203. And yet the point of ‘Before the Law’ appears to be that the law is indeed uncrossable. 33Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 198. 34Roland Barthes, S/Z, 122. 35Roland Barthes, S/Z, 199. 27 28

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her figure of the boy Heisenberg who failed to build the bomb that he intended: ‘…[you don’t tell Speer that the reactor] will produce plutonium, no, because you’re afraid of what will happen if the Nazis commit huge resources, and you fail to deliver the bombs.’ (75) But these are all just stories, only as ifs, and as ifs can be interpreted complementarily, so that every non-event is also an event and every non-origin also an origin. The doorkeeper that prevents entry to the law is described by Derrida as ‘the observer, overseer, and sentry, the very figure of vigilance, or we might say of conscience.’36 The character Margrethe assigns herself this role, protecting the objectivity of a law that defines Heisenberg as a criminal. Margrethe guards a law of her own construction, grounded in a story she creates out of an idea of history, like Freud. It is a tale of a scientist who wanted to build a bomb. But because he did not, because there is no objective fact with a locatable event and site, she too must veil the ungroundedness of her judgement of Heisenberg in an origin tale of a scientist who failed. She asserts this story against the character Heisenberg’s protests. (212) Freud’s sons are judged for their failure to realise their intention to kill their father: ‘Thus morality arises from a useless crime which in fact kills nobody, which comes too soon or too late and does not put an end to any power; in fact, it inaugurates nothing since repentance and morality had to be possible before the crime.’ 37 Margrethe’s law also judges Heisenberg for a failure that is a non-event because it was not realised. Margrethe accuses Heisenberg for attempting to create a bomb that he did not drop, that murdered no one, that would have been invented too late and that did not put a stop to the Allied rise of power. In fact, Heisenberg’s unsuccessful play with nuclear alchemy inaugurated nothing because Heisenberg’s moral decision had to be deliberated before he began building the reactor. Margrethe guards her law because she cannot allow Heisenberg to reinterpret the originating myth of guilt from one of non-event that did not realise intention to one of event that did realise intention (preventing the Nazi development of a bomb). Because the myth of Christian’s death also originates the prohibition of son-

36 37

Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 196. Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 198.

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substitution that defines Bohr as good and belonging and Heisenberg as unethical and Other, Margrethe has more reason to present the origin of her prohibition as a nonevent that happened outside of any observable history. The pull of this myth also found a believer in another critic, Reed Way Dasenbrock, who locates Heisenberg’s guilt in undefinable moments, an indication, perhaps, of the desire for the law that judges Heisenberg to be universal. Dasenbrock writes: Margrethe is arguing that in the drama of life—as on stage—we may not get to the level of certainty about what people think or intend, but since we can know what people do, we can and must judge people for what they have done and what they have tried to do. We can see and therefore judge the tracks they leave, the external effects they have.38

It is ironic that the only external effect that can be observed is a non-event, the absence of a German bomb. All other traces are strictly unknowable, merely myth, and this is the point of Frayn’s play. Any trace that the character Margrethe believes indicates that Heisenberg has acted ‘in a way that sustained and supported the Nazi cause’39 is a construction from the memory of hearsay. A representative for the seemingly universal law by which so many judged the historical and fictional Heisenberg, Margrethe has to accept Heisenberg’s subjectivity in opposition to what she believes is her own objectivity. When she allows the restagings of the original conversation to penetrate the law she represents, which could be stated as morality is a determinable act of intention as evidenced by a chosen action, the paradox of a law based merely on myth is revealed. An origin-story interpreted as intentional event would present her law as paradox rather than hide it. Margrethe’s tactics of luring and barring40 the supplicant Heisenberg indicates that she already has an inkling of this paradox, one that allows her to judge her husband not-guilty and Heisenberg guilty according to the same law. She insists on Bohr’s innocence and passivity: ‘You’re not suggesting that Niels did anything wrong in working at Los Alamos?…The decision had been taken long before

Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Copenhagen: The Drama of History’, 227. Ibid. 40Doorkeeper Margrethe lures and bars Heisenberg with questions, both asking him to defend himself and presuming his guilt. ‘Because it had been done? Or because it wasn’t you who’d done it?’ (46) 38 39

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Niels arrived.’ (46) Margrethe determines her husband’s innocence on an absence of decision despite his choice to go to Los Alamos. Yet she determines Heisenberg’s guilt on a presence of decision that cannot be revealed in an actual event: the dropping of a bomb that he collaborated in making. Thus, Margrethe applies the law that exonerates Bohr inversely to Heisenberg. In order to resolve this paradox and find both Bohr and Heisenberg not guilty according to the same law, the relation of intention to action must be located in a fiction of event. To do this does not require a new origin story, or no origin story, only a recognition of its essential unknowability and complementarity, its ability to represent both event and non-event, guilt and innocence, failure and success: a recognition of the presence of the (fictional) origin and the multiple senses it unleashes when recognised. Freud’s origin myth is also a story of event. The resurrection of the father is an event that makes present the guilt of the sons, recognising intention as the source of morality. In contrast to Freud’s story, Heisenberg’s intention is unknown and this is what destabilises truth and law, not origin as absence but as undecidable. When the fictional 1941 meeting is decided upon as an evental implementation of a decision (to not build a bomb), then différance is also understood to originate in the singular subject and can thereby be manipulated: the difference between and limits around intention and action, event and non-event, choice and non-choice, are indeterminable. By interpreting Kafka’s story as a relation of a universal reading experience, Derrida figures the gate to the law as solid and untransgressable in all cases. The economy of reading is restricted, with the law and its supplicant forever opposed to each other by the slash of différance, which is nothing other than the fact of the supplicant’s barring. The effectiveness of the prohibition, the belief in the presence of that which is barred, means the reality of the origin-story is irrelevant: ‘Whether or not it is fantastic…this in no way diminishes the imperious necessity of what it tells, its law’.41 In its acceptability, such a fictive narration justifies the law/literature by being the ‘origin of literature at the same time as the origin of the law.’ This substitution for the absent origin (‘what must not and cannot be approached is the origin of

41

Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 199.

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différance’)42 generates meaning in place of the nothingness of différance similarly to the way, for Barthes, mythology generates meaning in place of the absent authorial consciousness. However, if the slash of difference is infirm and transgressible, it can be multiply rewritten and reoriginated in what I am calling a complementary manner. The law shows itself in a structure of text, doorkeeper, gate and supplicant. Because law is produced out of non-knowledge,43 any knowledge can define and ground it within the structure. To conceive law and literature as nothingness, merely an expression of a différance without origin, is to deny experience of penetration, play and change. If the law is revealed through the fictional presence of its mythological origin, then the supplicant can meet the law (with loss of representation) and generate its meaning through such a ‘collision’. The need to prove interpretability and interpretation turns out to be reversible in a text that is doorkeeper, supplicant, entryway and confrontation all in one44, the place where generic and specific meet.45 This is what Barthes believes makes the ‘old’ critics so angry. New criticism transgresses by reversing the role of law and subject, writer and critic. Copenhagen is also a transgression in its reallocation of the relationship between supplicant and law that allows the character Heisenberg’s position to be ‘reversible’ as individual law or universal supplicant. For Derrida’s Kafka the law requires to and cannot be interpreted by the supplicant. For Frayn, the individual supplicant also requires interpretation, which can eventuate to a large degree. Margrethe’s (and Frayn’s) transgression is in accepting the sameness and presence of law and subject as originating in but also external to the subject.46 This sameness does not negate the

Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 205. Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 207. 44‘The text would be the door, the entrance…’ (210); ‘This “I” of the doorkeeper is also that of the text or of the law, announcing the identity with itself of a bequeathed corpus…’ (211) (Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’.) 45Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 187. 46Both Heisenberg and Bohr are wary of the term ‘subjectivity.’ Bohr prefers relativity, which he feels refers not to a human subject that can influence objective experimental outcome but to the ‘extent which the description of physical phenomena depends on the reference frame chosen by the observer’ but allows for the formulation of ‘laws common to all observers.’ (Niels Bohr, ‘Quantum Physics and Philosoph: Causality and Complementarity,’ in Essays, 2.) I would point out that the law is still in relation to the human subject if not to a particular human subject, which Heisenberg emphasises. (Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 55 and 57.) 42 43

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différance between law and subject and, therefore, is complementary in the sense I am developing. This complementarity obviates the necessity to make law nothing in the face of the singular and present subject because law, which answers the demand for determination, is also ‘personal’: ‘everything is personal!’, Margrethe says. (73) To be

‘personal’ is a type of relativity: Bohr It starts with Einstein. He shows that measurement—measurement, on which the whole possibility of science depends—measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It’s a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from the one particular viewpoint of a particular observer.’ (71)

This ‘relativity’ allows an ambiguous origin story to be interpreted through the law it generates in antithetical ways depending upon its purpose. By the end of the play, Margrethe leaves her position before the law, admitting its ground in the non-event of Bohr’s failure to save his son, which masks her law’s subjectivity and historicity. Her story of Heisenberg’s failure echoes the story of Bohr’s, both of which are connotative expressions of the absence at her heart: the loss of Christian. The symbol that he becomes in death is not only personal to Margrethe, but interferes with the text’s other antithetical frameworks of choice as deliberative or spontaneous. Margrethe opposes Bohr’s thwarted decision to save his son47 to Heisenberg’s myth of Elsinore, which originates moral choice in an undeterminable moment. While the Elsinore system finds that choice can only be judged in a moment of action rather than any preceding intention, Margrethe’s law upholds the myth of deliberated intention. She imagines Heisenberg’s decision to continue working for the German government was made in a determinable moment like the moment she imagines in which Bohr made the decision to jump into the water after his son. However, these moments that reveal a judgeable prior intention can only be myth, unlocatable instances that Margrethe could never have been privy to. There is an edifice of law, but because universality does not allow for singular experience, to enter the supplicant must choose a manifestation of law he will become 47

‘Heisenberg You had to be held back, I know.’ (76)

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interior to. Once he does, perhaps the doorkeeper will step aside from the open gate made especially for him. Barthes understands this. The ‘evident truths’ of old criticism, deciphered by entering the law of structure as revealed through a thematic such as history or psychology, are ‘thus only choices. …And similarly for the other ‘evident truths’: they are already interpretations, for they imply a pre-existing choice of psychological or structural model…’48 The supplicant must already have chosen his relation to the law, his way of knowing how to read, before he can access the law and literature. The paradox of the law means that any judging subject must choose to locate law in the event or the non-event, in either intention or action. Heisenberg’s choice is different from Margrethe’s. Kafka’s text ‘names or relates in its way this conflict without encounter between law and singularity, this paradox or enigma of being-before-the law…’49 Frayn’s text relates the conflict with encounter that discovers paradox and enigma to be the condition of universal law’s encounter with singularity. Once the law is breached by the understanding that it must be made personal and singular, the exhibition of a generative site and event is revealed no longer as impossible, but multiply possible.50 Humanity’s narrative instinct continues to originate both law and literature, creating grounding events where there is no one. This continual assertion of singularity makes of law a very rich and present structure for which transgression can only be an interpretation rather than truth. Margrethe abandons the law of choice when she acknowledges that a nonchoice can also result in ethical action. By the end of the play the Heisenberg that appears is reversibly transgressive, ‘hero of the resistance’ and Nazi collaborator. Margrethe understand this when she learns that the young Heisenberg saved his prisoner, that he has been lawgiver as well as supplicant. Only then does she realise that the myth of the murderous Heisenberg, the loyal German Heisenberg, the boy Heisenberg who attempted to show off and then relinquish his decision to his fatherfigure is an empty construction, a myth without its complements. Heisenberg has Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 185. 50The non-event originates prohibition at the site of its failure but cannot appear as such: 'Historical research leads the relation toward an impossible exhibition of a site and an event, of a taking-place where law originates as prohibition.' (Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, 197.) 48 49

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asked for his failure to be his redemption rather than his charge, and Margrethe succumbs to his story, agreeing to equate him with her own lost children. Margrethe Silence. The silence we always in the end return to. Heisenberg And of course I know what they are thinking about. Margrethe All those lost children on the road. Bohr Heisenberg wandering the world like a lost child himself. Margrethe Our own lost children. (93)

Margrethe steps aside from the gate when she acknowledges the sameness of Heisenberg and humanity with her dead children, the essence of her interiority and the site of différance between her and the Other, the symbol of injustice, prohibition and law. When Heisenberg is allowed to replace the lost son in Bohr’s heart, the final replaying becomes another chance to save a son, to rescue Heisenberg from the darkness of his own temptation and preserve the scientist, the friend, the genius that Bohr has nurtured. And so it is there, the elusive relationship that Margrethe had critiqued, whether named Pope and seeker after absolution, father and lost son. Margrethe’s interpretation, though woven from her own framework of opposition, is, in the end, in tune with Heisenberg. The writer and critic are not after all opposing forces. When Heisenberg first replays his trip to Copenhagen he shows up at the Bohr’s door articulating the elements of Margrethe’s interpretation: ‘What am I feeling? Fear, certainly—the touch of fear that one always feels for a teacher, for an employer, for a parent. Much worse fear about what I have to say….Worse fear still about what happens if I fail.’ (10) In the end, Margrethe agrees with and supplements Heisenberg’s story: he did come to impress Bohr with his wonderful moral dilemma. And he did go back to Germany and fail to ask for enough money for his reactor program; he did keep the production of plutonium a secret—but only because he was afraid of failing. Heisenberg reluctantly admits that he had failed to calculate the correct amount of material needed to achieve critical mass, thereby being able to trigger a bomb.

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Heisenberg also admits he cannot see himself. Perhaps he came to Copenhagen simply because he had thought of it, a decision that made itself.51 Was that decision contextualised in a subject afraid of failure or had he already failed? Margrethe offers the interpretation that Heisenberg refused to make the choice to save the Jews, the Allies, the occupied, and that the evidence of his not building a bomb is merely an indication of his fear and failure, not of his decision. But after the law has toppled can this position still be maintained? Another draft.

‘Heisenberg […] I didn’t tell Speer simply because I didn’t thin of it. I came to Copenhagen simply because I did think of it. A million things we might do or might not do every day. A million decisions that make themselves.’ (77)

51

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Chapter 3 The measuring apparatus: Bohr the literary reader The characters Heisenberg and Margrethe acknowledge only one side of Heisenberg’s split subjectivity. Bohr, however, recognises Heisenberg as a subject with complementary instincts and desires. Like Margrethe, he erects a slash between Heisenberg the White Jew who continued to teach Einstein’s relativity (8) and Heisenberg the Nazi collaborator, the one ‘supplying a homicidal maniac with an improved instrument of mass murder…’ (39) He accepts the Leipzig professor who wouldn’t leave Germany because he wanted ‘to be there to rebuild German science when Hitler goes’ and rejects the head of the German bomb program who was ‘going back to work on that reactor whatever I said’.1 Bohr believes Heisenberg had to choose one or the other of these men. Bohr ignores Heisenberg’s personal need for recognition, focussing instead on the political motivation of human action. As a half-Jew living under Nazi occupation, Bohr interprets Heisenberg’s text-statement as accepting Nazi Germany and his reaction to Heisenberg in their fictional 1941 was the horror of a man whose friend has suddenly declared himself an enemy. To be a friend or an enemy, to build a nuclear reactor for the dictator who is attempting to occupy the world must be a decision. Bayrischzell, home to the ski-hut where Heisenberg and his colleagues would ‘ski down from the hut to get provisions’ and ‘make even that into some kind of race!’, (24) is the symbolic location of the mythology that originates Bohr’s law of choice. Whereas Heisenberg’s symbolic system dwelt on the internal nature of his decision and Margrethe’s on its origins and reasons, Bohr’s system focuses on how such a decision is to be made. Heisenberg […] Decisions make themselves when you’re coming downhill at 70 kilometres an hour. Suddenly there’s the edge of nothingness in front of you. Swerve left? Swerve right? Or think about it and die? In your head you swerve both ways…’ (25)

1

Both characterisations of Heisenberg are spoken by Bohr. (Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, 9 and 53).

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For the character Bohr, skiing connotes the choice of a man with divided loyalties who must nevertheless choose the side of the politically good. Margrethe and Bohr are appalled by the implication of the unthought swerve (itself the decision) (26) and both use the symbol of downhill skiing to pose Heisenberg as a transgressive figure who refuses to engage with moral complexity. Heisenberg skiis fast and unconsciously, while Bohr follows slowly behind, pondering the ‘capsized meanings and implications’ (25) that flow out behind Heisenberg. The abyss Heisenberg swerves around is the internal void where all possible choices are made simultaneously. Symbolic skiing poses another way of thinking the difference between action and thought as action and reaction. It originates this antithesis in the mythical remembrance of Bohr’s cap-gun battle with a fellow scientist in a richly superposed passage that symbolises competition as two duellers, subatomic particles, and publishing scientists, linking these images to that of skiing by concerning all with the seme of speed: Heisenberg Not as quick as me. Bohr Of course not. But compared with me. Heisenberg A fast neutron. […] Bohr However, yes, before his gun is even out of his pocket… Heisenberg You’ve drafted your reply. Margrethe I’ve typed it out. Heisenberg You’ve checked it with Klein. Margrethe I’ve retyped it. Bohr You’ve submitted it to Pauli in Hamburg. Margrethe I’ve retyped it again. Bohr Before his gun is even out of his pocket, mine is in my hand. (27)

This cap-gun battle is a duel for Bohr to prove a point, that it is not ‘always quicker to act than to react. To make a decision to do something rather than respond to someone

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else’s doing it.’ (26) Bohr wins the competition, proving that reaction is a quicker mode of operation. Reaction is a response to the moment that forces choice, precluding any delay caused by the sort of consideration involved in ‘doing seventeen drafts of each slalom’ while navigating ‘philosophical implications’. Heisenberg, the fastest of them all, is the reactor extraordinaire. Faced with an abyss and a decision he reacts so quickly it is unconscious, and Bohr accuses Heisenberg of not being able to know where he is at the speed he travels. (24-25) The heart of the character Bohr’s judgement is his belief that Heisenberg reacted rashly to the realisation that it may be possible to build a bomb. In the rush to build, Heisenberg failed to account for the damage such a weapon would create in Hitler’s hands, thereby incidentally deciding his loyalty to be with Germany. Bohr and Margrethe both assume that Heisenberg has not thought through the consequences of his decision to remain head of the Nazi nuclear program, and his blundering invitations to the ski hut in Norway and conferences at the German embassy seem to attest to this obliviousness. (20) When Heisenberg articulates his purpose in coming to Copenhagen as wanting to ask Bohr to consider encouraging the Allied scientists to put a stop to the development of the bomb, Bohr accuses him of ‘bold skiing’. (45) Bold skiing insinuates that Heisenberg actively refuses to acknowledge the implications of his decisions: ‘The faster you ski the sooner you’re across the cracks and crevasses.’ (25) Fast skiing is the transgression of the requirement to make a decision. Bohr accuses Heisenberg of making a decision to build the bomb by not making it, by simply reacting without deliberation. Counter to the fictional Bohr’s mythological skier, the character Heisenberg poses a real scientist who is unable to react, stuck in agonising deliberation. Talk about fast reactions in terms of cap-pistol duels and ski competitions is one thing, (45) but the situation of deciding to build a bomb during a savage war offers an unknowable competitor in place of a visible one. For the character Heisenberg, any quick reaction was stymied by non-knowledge, by the absence of the certainty of a stimulus to react to: ‘Bohr, I have to know!’, Heisenberg cries when Bohr makes it clear that asking for information about the Allied bomb program is inappropriate. ‘I’m the one who has to decide! If the Allies are building a bomb, what am I choosing for my country?’ (42)

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During the second replaying, Heisenberg attempts to convince Bohr that for once his reaction was deliberative. He has not skied quickly but deeply thought through the potentially disastrous ramifications of his actions for his fellow Germans as well as for Germany’s enemies. (42) By arguing this position, Heisenberg attacks Bohr’s moral law that puts good on the side of the Allies and evil on the side of the Germans. On both sides of the slash are people: Heisenberg You weren’t dropping it on Hitler, either. You were dropping it on anyone who was in reach. On old men and women in the street, on mothers and their children. And if you’d produced it in time they would have been my fellow-countrymen. My wife. My children. That was the intention, yes? (43)

How then is he supposed to choose? A way out of this dilemma is to not make an active decision to build the bomb but only to react to the Allies’ ability to develop one, allowing non-knowledge to prolong an ineffective deliberation. The difficulty of building the bomb, competing loyalties, his separation from Bohr, forced the character Heisenberg to ski slowly, almost uphill, allowing time to attempt a transgression by turning what should have been a moral choice into defensive posture, or else to defuse his dilemma altogether by getting the Allies to agree to suspend the nuclear program. His desire not to make an ethical choice is the meaning of his visit to Bohr. In this sense, Heisenberg’s 1941 text can be read as an example of Derrida’s différer: ‘Différer in this sense is to temporise, to take recourse, consciously or unconsciously, in the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfilment of “desire” or “will”…’ 2 To defer in such a way is a double transgression. It not only contravenes the law of choice but acknowledges the two sides of the slash—Germans and Allies—to be complementary rather than antithetical, peoples who are both enemies and citizens, both victims and aggressors of war. By ending the conversation in 1941, the character Bohr refused to condone this transgression.

2

Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 8.

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However, at the end of the replayings Bohr finds himself dismantling his antithetical slash by acknowledging his own moral responsibility in playing a ‘small but helpful part in the deaths of a hundred thousand people.’ (91) Both scientists have chosen and acted morally and immorally, reactively and deliberatively. Once Bohr has allowed the slash that separates them to be erased, he can let Heisenberg see that his transgression was rewarded as well as it was punished: the delay of action did achieve Heisenberg’s goal, his political affiliation did not result in mass murder: ‘Whereas you, my dear Heisenberg, never managed to contribute to the death of one single solitary person in your life.’ (91) This transgression is not that which the symbolic code is concerned with. The countering myth the symbolic system poses is the poker game in the Bayrischzell ski hut, when Bohr wins a hand with a ‘non-existent straight’. Heisenberg We’re all mathematicians—we’re all counting the cards—we’re 90 per cent certain that he hasn’t got anything. But on he goes, raising us, raising us. This insane confidence. Until our faith in mathematical probability begins to waver, and one by one we all throw in. (23)

The only way to gain insane enough confidence to make a decision is to ignore the vagaries of reality and believe what is necessary to follow through with the choice. Like the scientist who turns a point of potentiality into a wave simply by not observing its trajectory, Bohr creates a reality with all its attendant consequences upon a configuration of cards that cannot be observed to have existed. The intention to triumph is stronger than any mere reality, no matter how obviously probable. To maintain the illusion is to forget oneself, to be so carried away as to not verify one’s conceptions with the empirical world. The symbolic code proposes this happened to the character Heisenberg all those years ago. He constructed a story of impossibility to avoid having to make the decision to build a bomb. Heisenberg usually calculated: Bohr Assumed? Assumed? You never assumed things! That’s how you got uncertainty because you rejected our assumptions! You calculate,

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Heisenberg! You calculated everything! The first thing you did with the problem was the mathematics! (85)

Despite this proclivity, Heisenberg did not verify his story in this instance, did not recalculate the equation for critical mass to find out that he could just possibly build a bomb. The bomb remained an impossible abstraction. (84-85) Perhaps Heisenberg’s decision was after all an undeliberated race to avoid the abyss of an ethical minefield any attempt to build a bomb would have to swerve around. Perhaps this decision was also one not to build a bomb, based on a bluff. After all, such a decision speaks to all the protagonists’ beliefs and desires, allowing Heisenberg to be judged not guilty for a concrete choice. It works within the most philosophically resonant symbolic system of all posed: quantum physics. When a photon and an electron collide, the whereabouts of one can be deciphered from the whereabouts of the other. Frayn’s Bohr explains it thus: ‘If people can see what’s happened to you, to their piece of light, then they can work out what must have happened to me! The trouble is knowing what’s happened to you!’ (69) In Frayn’s 1941, Heisenberg is a speeding photon. He is here, there and everywhere. He collides with Bohr and is no longer on the same trajectory he was on the very moment before the collision. It is over nearly before it happens; all that is left the memory of a text and the new trajectories that continue to trace impacts indefinitely, uncertainly, unknowably. One of those traces (the failure to calculate the diffusion equation) locates the character Bohr in a certain intention to not build a bomb and this points to Heisenberg’s similar path. Heisenberg Yes. Thank you. Because he wasn’t trying to build a bomb. I imagine it was the same with me. Because I wasn’t trying to build a bomb. Thank you. (85-86)

Despite the quantum elegance of this description, it is not the answer either, at least not wholly. If the character Heisenberg unconsciously bluffed himself into believing he could not build a bomb then why come to Copenhagen? (86)

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This is a question of connotation. The denotative (collective and objective) meaning of the character Heisenberg’s question to Bohr about the right of a physicist to exploit nuclear energy is clear: it is a question of the ethics of nuclear experimentation. It is the connotative meaning that has been misread, the meaning of intention as revealed in the symbol that relates a signifier and signified through allusion rather than convention: ‘a feature which has the power to relate itself to anterior, ulterior, or exterior mentions, to other sites of the text (or of another text)…’3 The inability of a writing subject to express an indefinable intention within the confines of language makes allusion necessary. Barthes’s understanding of the relation between symbol and reader is like Bohr’s understanding of the relation between electron and observer: the plural nature of the object is limited and interpreted by different subjects according to the same laws.4 Just as Frayn’s Heisenberg is one example of a man from the country, Frayn’s Bohr is one example of a reader. When he first ‘read’ Heisenberg in 1941, Bohr jumped to conclusions, turning Heisenberg’s words to a closed text. This metaphorical closure is expressed literally by the text: ‘Bohr Heisenberg wants to say goodbye. He’s leaving.’ (31) Heisenberg has to again collide with Bohr in order for the older man to acknowledge that which is antithetical, the connotative meaning that arises from Heisenberg’s associations rather than Bohr’s own. What did Heisenberg want? The character Heisenberg has suggested that he wanted Bohr to contact their friends in America and ask them to not build a bomb, a speaking of the proairetic voice (taking action). Margrethe suggests that Heisenberg has come to feel validated, a speaking from the hermeneutic voice (acknowledging Heisenberg for bearing the responsibility of his enigma). Bohr’s initial ‘reading’ in 1941 was particularly attuned to the symbolic, postulating that Heisenberg came to enable the moral transgression of equipping Hitler with nuclear power. Bohr says he grabbed the central point, that ‘one way or another you saw the possibility of supplying Hitler with nuclear weapons.’ (38) He missed the proairetic and hermeneutic coding, the plea for help, the questioning of a moral position rather than the assertion of one. Heisenberg

3 4

Roland Barthes, S/Z, 8. Ibid.

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argues his point was not in the possibility of building bombs but in the possibility of not building bombs. The reader and writer are here connotatively opposed, each embodying one side of the symbolic antithesis: moral right (Bohr) and exploitation (Heisenberg). The failure of Heisenberg to calculate the right critical mass becomes the final question, a further step in the enigma that leads from the vague ‘Why did he come?’: Why did he come if he already knew he was not going to be able to achieve critical mass? (86) To answer this, one must decide whether to understand Bohr as a wave or a particle, (69) as a father figure or as political opponent. In which position was he when he found and changed Heisenberg? This position will define him, metaphorically, as a reader. Part of the mystery for the three protagonists is also the question of what Bohr replied. For Barthes, reading is a response to desire—wanting to be the text—a way of becoming the work by accepting the discourse of the work as one’s own.5 The desire of the reader acts as a limit to the uncertainty of the text, situating meaning within the practicalities of that desire.6 Bohr is the text, also a scientist who has the choice to exploit nuclear power. In order for the text to reflect Bohr’s own choice as ethical, he must pose himself against Heisenberg—not as a subject who didn’t choose, because he did—but as one for whom choice relates to a different subjective situation: ‘My dear, good Heisenberg, we weren’t supplying the bomb to Hitler!’ Bohr cries when Heisenberg suggests that Bohr did not properly torment himself over his decision to build the bomb. (43) He thus must see Heisenberg’s Germanness as the limitation to a text that opens the question of how guilt is to be decided. When the fictional Bohr cut off the 1941 conversation, when he ‘stopped dead’ in his tracks, ‘horrified’, in what role was Bohr horrified? In what role did he ask Heisenberg if he ‘actually thought that uranium fission could be used for the construction of weapons’? (36) It would appear to be in the role of a half-Jewish scientist

who has watched his colleagues pushed out of Germany and sees his once-protégé as a man who can destroy the world for the glory of the German people. Heisenberg

5 6

Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 40. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 27.

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recognises this when he says, ‘The bomb had already gone off inside your head’ (37) and remembers Bohr’s muttered response as ‘something about everyone in wartime being obliged to do the best for his own country.’ (39) Bohr also recognises the role he chose when he decides to replay the scene for a third time and to listen, agreeing to act as the spiritual father the German nuclear team wished to consult. In this replaying he puts his hand on Heisenberg’s arm to look him in the eye in ‘the most papal way’ and tell him not to build a bomb. Yet it appears that this ‘paternal role’ of controlled anger leads to a conversation about the calculation of diffusion, which in turn leads to ‘a very terrible new world.’ (89) Each of Bohr’s roles is antithetical, sending Heisenberg off on a different trajectory: a politically-oriented collision leads to a Heisenberg who proposed to but could not build a bomb, and a personally-oriented collision leads to a Heisenberg who proposed not to but in fact did build a bomb. In this way, the replayings find that, contrary to expectation, Bohr’s reaction as a political opponent honours Heisenberg’s intention by allowing him to continue on an uncertain path leading to failure. Complementarily, his role as father-figure verifies what Heisenberg believes was his intention (by not having happened). Neither role can be fully separated from the other and interference was the result of the collision. If Bohr is both a wave and a particle, a political enemy and judging father, then the certain and not fully knowable position of Heisenberg is as a man who was chosen by his interlocuter not to build a bomb in an unpredictable conversation. Against the classical law of choice, the symbolic code’s Heisenberg poses the quantum law of uncertainty. He does not know why he came to Copenhagen: ‘Why have I come? I know perfectly well. Know so well that I’ve no need to ask myself. Until once again the heavy front door opens.’ (86) This metaphor refers to the prediscursive subject. It is the act of discourse itself that effects the split in subjectivity. The attempt to communicate and be observed may be undertaken by a subject in full awareness of a particle-like definite intention, but as soon as he offers this subjectivity to the observation of another, this intention behaves as a wave, spreading into its superposed motivations that preclude any precise measurement of a centred wholeness. Once the field of intention is measured from multiple viewpoints, much of its interfering

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motivations will become obvious, tracing their way through a text constructed multiply, through different readers, critics and the myriad ghostly writers they raise from the text. It takes many readings to observe and specify Heisenberg’s diffracted thoughts. (86) These readings will find that no matter how uncertain, how multiple, how unknowing Heisenberg was, he made choices. He came to Copenhagen. He did not tell Speer about plutonium. He stayed in Germany. He built a reactor in a hole in the earth. As with the quantum mechanical experiment, choice is only a series of approximations made in a continuum of moments located in a trajectory of unconscious momentum. Any meaning attributed to these choices can only be mythological. If the symbolic system of Elsinore has defined choice existentially, locating it internally to the self; if the system of Tsivilde has determined it interpersonally, finding it between the self and its Other; then the system of Bayrischzell chooses the discarded possibilities of the other two systems and locates choice once and for all in the fully external Other, allowing Heisenberg to both avoid and pass off his decision while simultaneously making the decision to do so. Bohr’s reply turns out to be the moment of choice, the unconscious decision that allows Heisenberg’s transgression to honour his intention. Though Heisenberg’s avoidance of choice should be punishable, it is not. Instead, it works. He fails to calculate the critical mass, fails to explain himself to Bohr, fails to build a bomb and fails to murder thousands of people. Heisenberg’s uncertainty enables such failure and Bohr refuses to offer him certainty. Heisenberg’s visit both forced a moment of decision and avoided one. Margrethe, the observer (critic) of this collision between the scientists, offers a unifying interpretation of Bohr’s complementary roles: ‘That was the last and greatest demand Heisenberg made on his friendship with you. To be understood when he couldn’t understand himself. And that was the last and greatest act of friendship for Heisenberg that you performed in return. To leave him misunderstood.’ (89) Therein lies a Barthesian reading relationship, with an obscured writing subject and a reader to mirror and delimit this obscurity. Barthes describes reading as, like writing, an ‘internal experience’. The ‘truth of discourse’ is the voided subject7 and

7

Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 24 and 35.

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reading refers the symbol to the reader’s own self through identification of the reader with the writer’s discourse. Barthes does not believe the reader can verify the writer’s symbolic meanings but uses the text to delimit a range of ambiguities that reflects the reader’s own experience. For Frayn, these ambiguities can also be reflective of the writer’s experience. Shared history, discourse and culture enable Heisenberg and Bohr to delimit the same range of ambiguities that lead them to a shared truth. The truth— the enigma (why did he come?) and its answer (he came to talk)—can only be discovered when both reader and writer are considered in conjunction. Bohr and Heisenberg are both ‘correct’ in interpreting Heisenberg’s intention, for the hermeneutic code articulates an unresolved enigma. To build a bomb or (and) not to build a bomb. The truth and answer is the fact of the dilemma. Bohr’s original four hypotheses, those that arose from his first reading, are found to be all to some degree correct: Heisenberg may not have wanted to persuade Bohr that there was no German program, but he did want to persuade him that the program was or could be made ineffective; he did want to know if Bohr was in touch with the Allied nuclear physicists; he did want to recruit Bohr, not to the German program, but to his own program of nuclear non-armament; and finally, what was most important to be discussed was fission but it was precisely what he didn’t, couldn’t, ask.

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Conclusion Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen is beautiful in the way quantum physics is beautiful. It encompasses the mystery at the heart of things in a circular structure of colliding and separating intensities, spiralling out and in from one level to another while yet remaining tightly bound in a carefully delimited structure in which every last element is in its place. There is nothing extraneous, nothing missing. Possibly it is perfect. Its words are multivalent, serving to tell a story, paint a philosophy, convey an emotion and even give stage directions using only a small and exquisite, finely calibrated amount of energy to do so.1 The rhythm of poetry often takes over to voice the interfering waves of the superpositioning possibilities that human interpretation conjures. The play is a profound acceptance of the multiplicity of the spheres of human action, an understanding of the split subjects we all are, the choosing yet unknowing creators of our own contingent destinies. It refuses to debase any of these spheres, not the domestic, nor the personal, not the romantic nor the social. And it certainly refuses to elevate the political to a privileged position of abstraction above the irrational emotional. The subjective is revealed to be both obscuring and revealing, creating and deconstructing, intersubjective and solitary. It is never obvious and always potentially misremembered, missaid or misunderstood. Yet despite this, so much is remembered, said, understood. There is an originating intention behind the causality of action, one that by its nature is hidden but through its activity is traceable to multi-interpretable consequences of the strongly-felt emotions of only half-glimpsed desires. The specific originating intention that Copenhagen postulates is the ghost of a fictional Werner Heisenberg. The drama suggests that it is useful to think about Heisenberg’s 1941 visit to his long-time mentor Niels Bohr as a quantum experiment with an unpredictable outcome. This collision between two subjects is necessary to make Heisenberg’s intention real, which is to decide upon it. As a work of literature, For example, in the space between Heisenberg’s ‘Goodbye’ and Margrethe’s ‘Politics?’ (32) is an entire story: Heisenberg leaves the house and Margrethe can finally ask the question that she has suppressed in order to be polite. Perhaps Bohr breathes a sigh of relief as his onetime friend, son and colleague leaves, though his mind is still ticking over the implication of Heisenberg’s words. But none of this needs to be written. ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Politics?’ suffice.

1

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Copenhagen postulates that the I of Heisenberg is an incoherent superposition of possible intentions only some of which are sometimes conscious, until he is observed, measured and interpreted. Bohr He stands on the doorstep blinking in the sudden flood of light from the house. Until this instant his thoughts have been everywhere and nowhere, like unobserved particles, through all the slits in the diffraction grating simultaneously. Now they have to be observed and specified. Heisenberg And at once the clear purposes inside my head lose all definite shape. The light falls on them and they scatter. […] Margrethe The great collision. […] Margrethe Now at last he knows where he is and what he’s doing. (88)

Before the collision, the character Heisenberg who must decide is no more real than the physicist Heisenberg’s atom, which is only potentiality, a placeholder of possibilities until one possibility emerges as reality within the experimental conditions.2 The subject can be understood as a multiple of intentions, while an event or collision, a conversation or reading, is the actualisation of one potentiality. This actualisation is affected by context and justified through the measurement of an observer. Faced with a choice to develop a bomb or not, the character Heisenberg used Bohr as the instrument of measurement in an experiment to determine an outcome. Though it seems that Bohr refused to act as that instrument and ended the experiment, in the end of the play Bohr proposes that his interaction did in fact determine its outcome. Heisenberg could or could not have built a bomb for the Nazis, but it was the fact of Bohr’s intervention and their understanding that the conversation may have been observed (which limited what they said and how they said it) that ‘chose’ a final outcome from a range of complementary motivations. Heisenberg’s intention is only

2

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 159.

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one part of the event that lead to his failure to build a bomb, a factor that is in any case indeterminate. Equivalent roles and multiplicities can be traced by using the metaphor of a reading. In the beginning of the drama, Bohr suggests to Margrethe that they should know the reason for Heisenberg’s visit because he has explained himself time and again. Margrethe replies, ‘He explained over and over again. Each time he explained it became more obscure.’ (3) This is the problem of authorship—a problematic of Derrida’s différance, which is the mark and origin of the ontological difference between expression and intention. Like complementarity, différance is a word that refers to a structure based on the difference between the real and represented, truth and knowledge. It is a between-ness that allows each side to exist. Derrida describes différance as an order, a movement, a space, a slash-mark (the difference between S and Z): Here, therefore, we must let ourselves refer to an order that resists the opposition, one of the founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible. The order which resists this opposition, and resists it because it transports it, is announced in a movement of différance (with an a) between two differences or two letters, a différance…which is located…between speech and writing…occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two.3

The difference between the realised ‘text’ (what the character Heisenberg said) and what he meant opens his words to Bohr’s original (mis)interpretation that closed the conversation, and Margrethe’s and Heisenberg’s subsequent interpretations. Copenhagen is the site of a reading of an enigmatic text, and its critic, Margrethe, is haunted by what it meant. The character Bohr poses three possible meanings to answer the question of why Heisenberg came to Copenhagen: there is no answer to the question; Heisenberg wanted to talk; Heisenberg didn’t know himself. (3-4) The proposition that Heisenberg was unaware of his own intention can be read in a Barthesian context, an illustration of the writer as a subjectivity without control over

3

Derrida, ‘Différance’, 5.

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itself or its expression. Heisenberg’s text is the crystallised trace of the subject he was at the moment of collision with Bohr, a writer that, like the subatomic particle, exists not as a continuous unity but only a ‘series of approximations.’ (72) The particle cannot be seen but only known through the afterimage of what it was, a photograph of a momentary position that was not the same as it was before the experimental collision. Frayn’s characters’ repetitions of the meeting in 1941 are attempts to determine the paths by which Bohr and Heisenberg diverged, tracing the remembered afterimages of their fateful collision. Frayn’s Heisenberg has his own metaphor for this: ‘I start to think about what you’d see, if you could train a telescope on me from the mountains of Norway. You’d see me by the street-lamps on the Blegdamsvej, then nothing as I vanished into the darkness, then another glimpse of me as I passed the lamp-post in front of the bandstand. And that’s what we see in the cloud chamber. Not a continuous track but a series of glimpses—a series of collisions between the passing electron and various molecules of water vapour…’ (66-67)

The uncertainty multiplies at every level that knowledge is transformed from happening to interpretation, and yet the traces are there and they have in turn collided and multiplied and left burning memories. Though attempting to attain knowledge through the re-creation of faded impressions seems like absurdity, there is one trace that is still available, still the original mark that pinpoints Heisenberg’s action: the bomb that was never created. This trace is the one that leads back to Heisenberg’s particle nature, that can be observed and measured as representing a choice. Heisenberg’s wave nature locates his intention, a field of interfering motivations. The character Heisenberg must be considered both as his intentions and experience (the man who worked for the Nazis) and separate from his intentions and experiences (the man that worked for the Nazis). 4 One can talk either of Heisenberg’s intention or his

The historical Bohr wrote that any attempt to speak of consciousness as a whole requires a shifting split between subject (the ‘background loosely referred to as “ourselves”’) and object (‘content of our consciousness’) in order to allow for unambiguous distinctions between the ‘mutually exclusive experiences’ that are thoughts and sentiments. (Niels Bohr,‘The Unity of Human Knowledge in Essays, 1213.) 4

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actions. The collision must be repeated because any attempt to locate Heisenberg cannot measure both simultaneously. Though Barthes’s reading ‘I’ as described in Criticism and Truth constitutes the text, never meeting the absent author, for Frayn the literary text is the collision of the authorial and readerly subjectivities. Whether the author goes in search of the reader or vice versa, it is only the position of one that will allow interpretation of the other ‘within the limits determined by our relationship’. (72) The text that results traces the path to each position, but only inexactly. Frayn’s Heisenberg, in 1941, was not a strictly definable subject, whose uncertainty before the meeting reflects an ambivalence of ethical intention. Because of the meeting, he continued on a path towards realisation of the intention not to build a bomb. The conversation (text) that marks the point of collision between Bohr and Heisenberg cannot be precisely defined as either belonging to Bohr or to Heisenberg, nor can it be understood as an object separate from either. The blurriness of this slash between subject and text allows for the protagonists’ to offer many interpretations, none of which is wrong in itself, merely incomplete and working within different frameworks of understanding. Taken together, however, these complementary interpretations unify into a proposition about the intention of the Heisenberg who emerged from the text, spinning out from the collision: he came to Copenhagen because he was uncertain, which is also to say he did not build a bomb for Hitler because he was uncertain. The world is in light rather than darkness, populated rather than nonexistent because of ‘that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things’. (94) This conclusion views Frayn’s work of literature as quantum and classic. It postulates an I that coheres after speaking, without negating any of the possible descriptions of this I that the characters propose. Bohr’s three initial answers to the question of why Heisenberg came to Copenhagen are found in the end to all exist simultaneously because we cannot decide amongst them. However, the proposition that Heisenberg wanted to talk is Frayn’s correct answer—‘To know what you're thinking yourself, you need a reaction from other people. That's why, in the end,

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Heisenberg goes to Copenhagen. To have an audience.'5 It includes the other two (he already explained, he didn’t know himself), allowing for the possibilities that Heisenberg was not clear as to his own intentions and that those intentions can be postulated. For Frayn, observation is key to the play, for an observer or audience or interlocutor is perhaps the only means one has to explore one’s own intentions. The character Heisenberg is present to Bohr and Margrethe; his body and his words are the traces of the self he cannot see. Upon seeing him, the reader decides upon the author. Heisenberg’s intentions resolve into clarity for and because of his observers. This is Frayn’s explanation for Heisenberg’s visit, one that incorporates the multiple confusions, impulses and intentions that must have haunted the real Heisenberg, as well as the interpretations offered by historians, scientists, Heisenberg and Bohr themselves, and the characters of the play. If the text is a system under observation, then according to complementarity we can look at it as a revelation of the reader’s meaning or the author’s, but not both at the same time. However, when the results of the observation of both views are brought together, a fair estimation of the truth of the text can be made. That one aspect of this truth is uncertainty can be attributed in Frayn’s text to non-knowledge, as opposed to the Barthesian view of the subject as absent or the Derridian view of the origin as absent. Subject and origin are both present and unknowable. When Bohr proposes in the opening of the play that Heisenberg was unaware of his own intention, he is not proposing that there was neither intention nor intending subject, only that the intentions were not fully known to the subject they belonged to. There is no one answer to the question of what Heisenberg intended because Heisenberg both couldn’t decide and had decided and this is why he came to talk to Bohr: to avoid deciding, to seek help deciding and to determine his decision. To superpose and interweave these answers requires a masterfully constructed text, which Copenhagen is. There are no wasted words. Every sentence, image, explanation,

5Quoted in Robert Butler, ‘Introduction’. Original citation: Robert Butler, Independent on Sunday, 20 September 1998.

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repetition dances to the music of the theme, circling round the main question: who is to say? That the Copenhagen protagonists will decide upon a meaning for Heisenberg’s text by answering the question ‘Why did he come?’ attests to Frayn’s belief in the presence of the author. This question is about the author, not the text. Frayn’s acceptance of authorial intention as inherent to the text allows his three conversants to discover a plurality of intentions within the structure of Heisenberg’s discourse, though, contrary to Barthes, with the necessity for recourse to Heisenberg’s biography and explanations. This makes the interpretative process truly ‘old’ according to Barthes’s linkage of old criticism with a belief in the author as originating subjectivity. What complementarises the text, however, gives it a writerly or quantum nature, is the indeterminability of that originating subjectivity, a recognition that there is no one truth that Heisenberg’s text corresponds to, and that any understanding of Heisenberg’s intention can only come out of interactions operating in separate frames of reference and can never be complete. Heisenberg may operate as the subjective cause, but he is an ultimately unknowable one, with only the traces left from his interaction with Bohr as readable. Copenhagen can be read as a classic Barthesian text, in which the truth is the answer to the story’s enigma and has a different ‘name’ for each critical route, such as the anecdotal, psychological, symbolic and narrative modes, which in ‘Sarrasine’ name a referent, a misfortune, an enlightenment and a prediction. In any event, truth is the predicate at last discovered, the subject at last provided with its complement; since the character, if we grasped it merely on the level of the story’s development, i.e., from an epic viewpoint, would always appear incomplete, unsaturated, a subject wandering in search of its final predicate: nothing is shown during this wandering but snares, mistakes: the enigma is the predicative lack; disclosing, the discourse completes the logical formula and it is this recovered plenitude which afford the denouement of the drama…. The dramatic narrative is a game with two players: the snare and the truth. At first a tremendous indetermination rules their encounters, the wandering is wide of the mark; gradually, however, the

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two networks move closer together, co-penetrate, determination is completed and with it the subject.’6

Barthes’s description is a lovely way to describe what happens in Frayn’s play. The truth of Heisenberg’s intention is a different statement of psychological, scientific and symbolic modes (a choice, a collision, a transgression) that finally come together to flesh out the mythological author into an intentional subjective plenitude. The explanations that the three Copenhagen protagonists offer for Heisenberg’s visit are complementary, each supporting and limiting the other. Heisenberg desires absolution and to state that he will do nothing that requires absolution. Heisenberg wants to show himself off and announce his failure. These competing intentions render Heisenberg ultimately obscure, unable to decide upon and articulate a particular intention. Barthes decides upon the symbolic relations of Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ through three entrances. They reveal transgression of the Antithesis, collapse of the creative chain and the disappearance of fake currency.7 His rewriting is more extensive than the story itself. Frayn’s characters also explore such relations, rewriting Heisenberg’s original ‘text’ with explanations that guide their interpretations. Frayn’s protagonists articulate the symbolic through three separate thematic systems that articulate a language of a shared mythology: competitive games, dead children and impossible choices. Barthes unifies his three symbolic routes of transgression in the overarching symbol of the ‘human body.’8 The enigma is answered: Sarrasine is an artist who loved a castrato. Frayn, too, answers his question: Heisenberg came to Copenhagen because he was uncertain. This singular answer corresponds to an overarching symbol that unifies the symbolic themes of choice: the nuclear bomb. The bomb encircles three types of classical transgression: choice/ non-choice, individual law/universal law, thinking/doing. However, if the slash is complementarity, if it cannot be transgressed because it was always meant to be crossed and shifted, then what the symbolic code discovers is a transgression of the classical belief in the reality, certainty and verifiability of choice.

Roland Barthes, S/Z, 188. Roland Barthes, S/Z, 215. 8Ibid. 6 7

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Whether action or reaction, deliberation or unconscious choice, any decision as well as any interpretation must be based on a narrative abstraction from the real. Decision is a sort of madness in the face of variable, an imposition of the constructed upon the real, creating only a new set of traces to track a new text, a different reading, a deflected journey. Decision itself is transgression, an infliction on the real of that which is not supposed to be real: fiction, narrative. It is a unifying of that which is multiple and a choice amongst that which cannot be known. The bomb is the site of transgression and/or complementarity, joining living narrations with dead victims, physics with politics. The bomb symbolises the loss of meaning inherent in that which is silent, that which is dark, that which is unchosen void: Margrethe And this wonderful machine may yet kill every man, woman, and child in the world. And if we really are the centre of the universe, if we really are all that’s keeping it in being, what will be left? Bohr Darkness, total and final darkness. Margrethe Even the questions that haunt us will at last be extinguished. Even the ghosts will die. (79)

It is confirmed that transgression—joining politics and physics, the real and abstract, ego and death—can lead to destruction, to nothingness, to even the loss of transgression itself. The character Heisenberg insists, however, that he didn’t go so far. ‘I can only say that I didn’t do it. I didn’t build the bomb.’ (79) For now we are safe, transgression still something that only exposes the blur of the slash rather than destroys it altogether. *** Derrida interprets Kafka’s story ‘Before the Law’ as an allegory for reading. Barthes’s S/Z and Frayn’s Copenhagen can also be read as metaphors for the individual experience of reading. Each author summons a subject before literature to explore their author’s interest in the individual relation to the universality of literature. Frayn’s Heisenberg is a representation of a particular writer, Barthes’s is himself as critic, Derrida’s is the reader-in-general. Derrida describes what he believes is the only

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way a reader can appear before a text; Barthes provides a model for how to abide by the laws of the text; and Frayn explores how a writer can insist on his text. All three subjects are transgressive according to classical notions of literature, questioning the unicity, transparency and groundedness of the text. The Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus defines ‘transgress’ as ‘to break (a law, etc.)’ and ‘to go beyond or overstep (a limit).’9 For Barthes, literature is the story of transgression, which is the truth of the text, a desire multiply expressed through the connotative relations of both reader and writer to the text. Barthes understands the classic text as destabilising bourgeois laws of language and literature through revelation of the condition of uncertainty that generates multiplicity. This condition is voidedness, an inherent unknowablity present in that which is both subject and object (writer, meaning, and text). Thus, Barthes reads the classic text as a story of transgression of classicality itself. Copenhagen is one such classic text. It tells the story of classical transgressions and of the transgression of classicality. Through Copenhagen, I have explored an understanding of law as a command to choose, limitation as the barrier that separates one choice from another, and transgression as a crossing of the barrier that demonstrates its illusoriness. Under these definitions, transgression is a destabilisation of law, the exposure of mutual exclusivity as a construction rather than a reality, a denial of multiplicity and uncertainty. Copenhagen allows to stand the paradoxes inherent in an acceptance of meaning as complementary. The character Heisenberg was both paralysed by choice and chose. He did so both consciously and unconsciously. Even though his intentions were mixed and multiple, destructive and heroic, his actions resolved themselves into a demonstration of classical moral goodness: he was not responsible for creating a bomb. Frayn allows Heisenberg the possibility of being judged not guilty. This is his transgression. The Collins dictionary defines ’failure’ as ‘a person or thing that is unsuccessful or disappointing’ and ‘nonperformance of something required or expected’.10 For Derrida, literature is the story of failure—the disappointment of an attempt to have J M Sinclair (General Consultant), Collins The Times English Dictionary & Thesaurus (Harper Collins Publishers and Market House Books Ltd, second edition, 2000) 1268. 10J M Sinclair, Collins The Times English Dictionary & Thesaurus, 423-424. 9

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access to something desired—and law is unsubstantiated because arising out of an event that is a non-performance of intention. Through Copenhagen, I have argued that failure is not mutually exclusive to performance and success because intention can be thwarted or achieved in both action and non-action, event or non-event, choice or nonchoice. The character Heisenberg’s failure to build a bomb can be interpreted as a realisation of his intention. His failure to recalculate the critical mass of fission and Bohr’s failure to question Heisenberg about this calculation supports the idea that his failure to build an atomic bomb was more than a non-event, more than a carelessness of the mind, but an action of intention, an unconscious choice. Applied to Freud’s origin story, this logic overturns Derrida’s interpretation that the event of murder is really a non-event because it failed to achieve its intention. Even this failure can be read as an event, one that realised the sons’ unconscious love for their father. The father’s resurrection in power is the presence of guilt, the trace of the sons’ wrong choice. The absent German bomb is also the trace of conscience. The sons fail to kill their fathers because they didn’t really want to; Heisenberg fails to build the bomb because he really didn’t want to. Thus, absence and non-event can be present traces that make partially knowable an unobservable intention. Copenhagen describes literature as the story of the failure of transgression. Indeed, all three texts are stories of this failure: Sarrasine’s murder and the survival of his statue ensure that transgression never takes place and law remains intact; in Kafka’s story there can be no transgression because no law. In Copenhagen, transgression is effected by the one who creates and guards the law and thus the law is erased. From a classical point of view these stories, both fictional and critical, are transgressive, crossing lines between truth and fantasy, meaning and nonsense, undermining sexuality, literature and morality. From a complementary point of view, however, they are not examples of a scandalous crossing of the line, but merely enactions of a necessary blurring of the slash to enable the coexistence of multiple stories and multiple laws. Copenhagen’s transgression not only attests to the presence of a literature made multiple by its grounding in narrative or myth, but it also responds to Derrida’s and Barthes’s notion of the void. For Barthes the void of meaning resides in the author, for

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Derrida in the very notion of literature, but for Frayn any void found in a literary text is found in a reading. That which might be construed as absent is also an ever-present haunting of the connotative field, an all-too-present origin of interpretation. All three of Frayn’s protagonists come to understand that any rewriting of the story of Bohr and Heisenberg’s meeting cannot escape the symbolic silence of the dead Bohr son, which turns Heisenberg’s story into Bohr’s and Margrethe’s, a story of a shared and knowable void. To accept the knowable as that from which certainty can be decided is to understand the text and the atomic marks on a photographic plate as a series of traces this void leaves behind after it has collided with that which is foreign to its original state. These traces are interpreted causally, classically, determinately.

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