Intertexuality and Star Trek: DS9

Intertexuality in Star Trek: Deep Space 9

Star Trek as a franchise belongs to the tradition of those frequently derided, brightly-painted monthly science fiction magazines and their descendants, weekly space opera television shows like Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon. The writers of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, more so than any other Star Trek series, were aware of the pressures of genre and canon on the show and the need to play to the audience to build and sustain success. This was especially true after the writers brought on board characters from earlier series who required careful attention in characterization for the sake of the fans, such as the beloved Lieutenant Worf from The Next Generation, but from the start DS9 catered to its audience of Trekkies, Trekkers, and people who just like sci-fi by providing viewers with “a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world” (Eco, “Casablanca” 199). From the first episode, “The Emissary”, Deep Space 9 displays a close knowledge of Star Trek history and careful attention to detail that gives each major character a role in the recent history of this future. However, no DS9 episode reaches so far into Star Trek and science fiction history as does “Far Beyond the Stars”, which manages to intertextualize science fictional history from the boom of genre magazines in the postwar period onward to the creation of Star Trek itself while still managing to pay homage to ‘traditional’ science fictional tropes such as time travel in the midst of a metanarrative about science fiction.

“Far Beyond the Stars” features the usual cast members of Deep Space 9, albeit in new guises, “to remind the reader that mediation/representation [as] the name of the game [is], in itself, nothing new” (Delany 223). In this case it is the viewer rather than the reader who comes to realize that who and what is present on the screen is infinitely transmutable into new forms and interpretations and that Star Trek is by its science fictional nature open to altering characters and changing actors in order to have them represent whatever it is the story needs. DS9 in particular is exemplary for reusing actors in a multitude of roles. Actor Jeffrey Combs plays a major villain in the series, but reappears under heavy makeup as a number of other characters not only in DS9 but in other areas of the Star Trek franchise such as The Next Generation and Enterprise. He shows up in “Far Beyond the Stars” playing ‘himself’ as Weyoun in addition to portraying a violent, racist police officer who brutalizes Avery Brooks’ Benny Russell. Other actors double their roles in the episode as well, playing both characters fans recognize from the show and new ones created just for the episode’s story. Doubling the actors’ performances like this brings the viewer’s attention sharply into focus on the narrative and highlights not only the natural intertextuality of the episode’s toying with established Star Trek canon, but also jars the viewer into recognizing that what the viewer is seeing is, after all, a televised science fiction show. Samuel R. Delany calls this textual mediation, and claims that “textuality is mediation per se. To experience textuality for moments as invisible is to confirm mediation’s strength—not to deny it” (221). However, the audience never escapes the text, even when as a reader or viewer the text seems most obvious in its rhetoric of self-referencing, nor are they meant to in works like “Far Beyond the Stars”. The self-references are part of the story and an integral element in building the narrative around the idea of the episode being Star Trek as Star Trek and science fiction as science fiction. The audience at some point will begin to recognize the textual building blocks of the episode, regardless of how many viewings it takes, and at that point the episode transforms from a simplistic space adventure to a more complicated story about space adventures and the people who create them.

To experience textuality as visible likewise confirms the strength of textual mediation by giving the audience a significant amount of room to interpret the episode. According to Umberto Eco, audience members can be divided up into two categories- the first level of readers or viewers simply enjoy the episode as it is written and the second level of audience members who get the jokes and bring into their viewing a background which allows them to put the show in context. Eco does not push the idea that either level is necessarily a ‘superior’ method in which to read a text or watch a movie, though he does explain that “the first-level model reader wants to know what happens, while the second-level model reader wants to know how what happens has been narrated” (Eco, “Intertextual Irony” 223). To become a second-level reader one must have been a first-level reader, perhaps for a long time in order to accumulate the sort of knowledgeable background a text may need for a second-level reading. “Far Beyond the Stars” is no exception. It is perfectly possible to watch the episode as merely a progression of plot- aliens make Captain Benjamin Sisko hallucinate he is an African American science fiction writer in post-WWII New York, and in addition to deciding which reality he belongs to he must come to grips with his responsibilities in the ‘real’ world as a space station captain. Taken this way, the plot is rather campy but still an enjoyable watch, even if the viewer fails to recognize Sisko’s fellow writers as being stand-ins for genre greats like Issac Asimov and Leigh Brackett, not to mention that the characters are played by other members of DS9’s main cast, adding another layer of complication and self-awareness for the alert viewer. Eco’s second-level viewer, however, would bring to the table a working knowledge of the early magazine history of science fiction as well as familiarity with Star Trek canon, especially that of the series in question. In theory, this viewer would notice and understand the show’s many references to the shoddy pay and disrespect given to early magazine writers, and perhaps make the jump to thinking about how genre fiction and those who create it are treated now, especially by more mainstream readers and critics. This reader would perhaps recognize the allusions to Bradbury, Sturgeon, and Heinlein and probably the namedropping of W.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright as well. Perhaps some viewers would even have had direct contact with the works of some of these authors and could delve deeper into the literary heritage this episode has to rifle through so quickly. Though these references have little to do with the main storyline of Sisko’s struggle and are not strictly necessary to a viewer’s first-level interaction with the episode, those viewers who do carry with them this body of knowledge will have a very different experience than those who come to the text empty-handed, looking for straight-forward entertainment that involves green alien women, disruptor blasts and warp-core breaches.

In addition to classifying and defining readers, in discussing the fragmentation that often creates cult hits such as Star Trek Eco defines his own breed of modernized intertextual archetypes which some contemporary writers make use of in order “to indicate a preestablished and frequently reappearing narrative situation, cited or in some ways recycled by innumerable other texts” which “can belong to a rather recent textual tradition” (Eco, “Casablanca” 200). Star Trek is a model example of this complex incorporation of a multitude of literary work, including itself. Star Trek: The Original Series calls on famous works ranging from Hamlet to The Bible in order to legitimize its place in storytelling and literature, and every subsequent series has followed suit. The Next Generation turns to Melville’s Moby Dick to explain Jean-Luc Picard’s obsession with the Borg, and DS9 repeatedly calls on poetry from both World Wars to make a case for universal peace. Meanwhile, Captain Benjamin Sisko can no more escape the shadow of one James T. Kirk than Sisko’s analogue Benny Russell can hope to buck the racial and artistic codes of his day. Both characters played by Avery Brooks invoke a particular ‘new’ archetype here. Sisko retains echoes of those Star Trek captains who have gone before him in the canon, namely Kirk and Picard, and hybridizes Kirk’s swaggering captaincy with Picard’s intellectual leadership into his own blend of rough-and-tumble adventurism and thoughtful humanism. Benny Russell epitomizes the ostracized Sensitive Artiste who suffers grandly for his creative vision in a conservative society that is simply not ready for his groundbreaking masterpiece about race relations in a utopian future. Both characters are meant to “[provoke] in the addressee a sort of intense emotion accompanied by the vague feeling of déjà vu” that hopefully keeps the audience coming back for more adventures of Sisko and his crew (Eco, “Casablanca” 200). In Sisko, audience members are supposed to see both the captain they would want to have and the captain they would want to be, while Benny seems to more closely represent the audience members as they are. He’s the quiet nerdy type who likes stories about extraterrestrials and ray guns, and is trying to make a living through writing science fiction. His character is clearly aimed at garnering sympathy from the literate audience member who is presumably well read in science fiction and perhaps interested in producing more of the fiction he or she finds so intriguing. Any of these representations are also generalizations, all of which play off of stock characters, situations, and concepts that can be found in the best and the worst of not just genre fiction but literary works of all stripes. These intertextual archetypes are not meant to be mythic in scale, but are merely intended to characterize a person or situation the audience will recognize and respond to, presumably due to earlier encounters with similar representations in other works. Every audience member who meets DS9’s Captain Sisko will remember his notorious predecessor due to his ubiquitous presence in contemporary pop culture. Watching Star Trek: The Original Series is not a prerequisite to understanding Sisko as a Star Trek captain when Kirk is so well situated in his own archetypical role as The Captain.

Eco’s idea of intertextual archetypes ties in to his concept of the intertextual frame, which differs from what he calls ‘common frames’ by representing scenes and situations drawn from literary traditions rather than real-life experiences. Naturally, Sisko’s alien-induced hallucination falls more into the science fictional tradition than into what most people would consider reality or realistic fiction. However, it’s not such a strange idea for audience members who are familiar with such science fictional concepts as aliens, time travel, and the role-playing of historical and fictional characters. That isn’t to say that DS9 viewers, even those most thoroughly seeped in Star Trek lore and science fiction history, believe what they are seeing is true or based in some kind of reality outside the text and those texts preceding it. Rather, the episode is tailor made to invoke those earlier literary works, either indirectly by having Sisko ‘time-travel’ to postwar New York or through characters on screen directly referring to H.G. Wells and his science fiction involving time travel. Not only do these invocations amuse and interest viewers who can relate them to their experiences with these earlier texts, but by referencing science fiction’s traditional works the episode actually explains its own plot. The episode’s straight-forward evocation of H.G. Wells is a perfect example of such a draw on literary canon. Even non-readers of science fiction have been exposed to Wells’ socially far-reaching work, either by children’s storybook editions of his more famous tales or through any of the multiple movie adaptations, including several remakes in recent years. Many viewers of DS9, even those who aren’t habitual watchers of science fiction, probably know The War of the Worlds and, here more importantly, The Time Machine. Wells provides the framework to understand one of the trickier parts of the episode’s narrative, that of scientifically improbable time travel, simply by being the H.G. Wells who provided so much literary material for later modern science fiction to build upon. The point viewers are to take home after the episode isn’t that time travel is impossible, it’s that within the tradition of Star Trek and science fiction at large there exists a narrative language that seeks to accomplish and explain the impossible within the texts themselves.

Star Trek comes from a rich background of literary history encompassing a huge range of legitimate speculation and fanciful misapplication of science and reason, and the show itself has used this background to inform its own growth, sometimes even turning to feeding on itself when its storylines demanded it. This maze of self-references and cross-references to other texts have kept fans busy since the show first aired over a quarter of a century ago, and every subsequent series, movie, book or comic adds yet another twist to the labyrinth. Fans have kept the show alive to this day because of their love of Star Trek’s free use of trivia and information. Alternate histories, alternate futures, alternate universes, and holodeck illusions merge with legitimate scientific inquiry and exploration to entertain and inform multi-generational audiences. Episodes such as “Far Beyond the Stars” up the ante on the monster-of-the-week episodes that characterized The Original Series and strive for a more inclusive view not just of overreaching storyline but of the genre as a whole by incorporating the literary traditions that gave rise to the show in the first place. There is no question that Star Trek owes a great deal to the Golden Age science fiction magazines and the writers and editors who built the genre from the basic building blocks of rationalism, modernism, and romanticism, and there’s no doubt that Star Trek has in turn influenced later works of science fiction, not least of all itself. The writers of DS9 would have written a very different show if H.G. Wells, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury had never written science fiction and if Gene Roddenberry had never dreamed of making the world a better place through space exploration. If the goal is to seek out new life, Star Trek has succeeded by giving new life to old and new literary forms alike.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel R. “Sex, Race, and Science Fiction: The Callaloo Interview.” Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994: 216-229.

Eco, Umberto. “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.

---. “Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading.” On Literature. Trans. Martin McLaughlin. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2004: 212-235.

“Far Beyond the Stars.” Star Trek: Deep Space 9.Writ. Ira Stephen Behr and Hans Beimler. Dir. Avery Brooks. Paramount, 1998. DVD.