Listen to an Audio Recording of “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe
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The Raven, by Alan N. Shapiro
Seven of Nine is an apprentice member of Voyager’s crew who has “brought back” precise skills and efficiency from her long experience with the Borg. But she is a poor consumer. She does not know how to relax or enjoy, to participate in activities which are not directly productive. Captain Janeway “mentors” her in Leonardo da Vinci’s Holodeck workshop. She teaches Seven about the “imagination, creativity, and fantasy” of clay sculpting and programming one’s own virtual reality simulation. But Seven of Nine is preoccupied with other appearances. She is transfixed by surreal mental images or the waking hallucination of the inside of a heavily damaged Borg ship, which seems to have crash-landed on a planet years ago. The vessel’s interior infrastructure is rusting and covered with dust. The air is hazy. The chimera is first provoked by looking at Leonardo’s model of a flying machine, the design for an airplane centuries ahead of its time, suspended from the ceiling in the workshop. Borg voices are menacingly heard, and a tell-tale heart thumps loudly. As in a recurring bad dream, Seven of Nine runs hard and gets nowhere. She is being chased in a corridor by two Borg drones. The Raven is in the nightmare, with its imposing beak in closeup, its focused yellow eye darting in all directions, hauntingly facing the camera. “You will be assimilated… you will be assimilated,” recite the Borg voices. “Resistance is futile. Your distinctiveness will be added to our own.” The black raven flies at us, its immense half-meter wingspan spread wide. It shrieks. Seven of Nine is terrified. In an alternate version, The Raven’s shriek emanates from the mouth of a Borg drone.
The Emergency Medical Hologram hypothesizes that these “flashbacks” are occurring as a result of the reassertion of Seven of Nine’s human physiology, a kind of “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Captain Janeway concurs with the diagnosis, stating that Seven has been through an “intense prolonged trauma.” The younger woman disagrees, explaining that she was raised by the Borg and “was not traumatized.” The starship’s newest crew member inexplicably steals a shuttlecraft and goes off into B’omar space. Her deviant action threatens the delicate negotiations underway between Janeway and the fastidious B’omar to receive permission to travel through their space. The punctilious species has stipulated that passage can only be granted if Voyager refrains from exploration of any kind while in their territory.
The ship’s senior officers contemplate the possibility that Seven of Nine is being summoned by a Borg homing device. On the Holographic Doctor’s instructions, Seven goes to the mess hall to begin ingesting solid and liquid nutrients. The Talaxian Neelix welcomes her with a serving of his steamed Chadre-Kab, and leads her to a table. She tries to learn how to use a fork, and to chew and swallow. A star-shaped Borg techno-nodule suddenly reemerges from under the skin of her arm. Seven of Nine knocks down Neelix violently and heads towards the shuttle bay. She attacks three crewmen on Deck Two. The Borg voices continue to call to her. She sees Voyager duty guards who are trying to capture her as drones. Her phaser fire-absorbing Borg shields reactivate, as do her ability to move through security force fields and her capability of blocking technical systems commands with encryption codes. To get past the powerful force field surrounding the shuttle bay, she punches in commands at a wall panel and beams herself onto the shuttlecraft. She uses Borg technology to remodulate the shuttle’s harmonics, mask its ion trail, and put it into hyperdrive.
From the data of Seven of Nine’s transport, the Emergency Medical Hologram determines that the dormant nanoprobes in her bloodstream “have reasserted themselves” and are growing new Borg implants. Something has reactivated them. The hot spots on the matter conversion graphic denote areas of high concentration of Borg tissue organelles. Ensign Harry Kim, who has been studying the Borg Language, deciphers Seven’s Log entries. They contain “descriptions of bizarre images” and the nightmare of The Raven. The Holographic Doctor devises a “genetic resequencer” to stop the resurgence of the Borg nanoprobes in Seven’s body, loaded as a cartridge into a hypospray. Lts. Tuvok and Tom Paris are sent in a second shuttlecraft to find Seven of Nine, inject her with the hypospray, and bring her back. To do so, they must violate the wishes of the B’omar, who, angered by the scene of Seven’s taking off with the shuttle which they witnessed, have enjoined Voyager from coming within five light-years of their perimeter grid, and announced their intention to locate the “rogue Borg” themselves and kill her. Seven breaks into open space after smashing through a barricade of five ships of the B’omar Sovereignty.
In the smaller of the two Voyager shuttlecrafts, Tuvok and Paris pursue Seven of Nine. After coming within range, Tuvok beams over to the shuttle Seven has absconded with. A scuffle ensues, and the former Borg drone renders the Security Officer unconscious with a Vulcan nerve pinch to the neck. She sequesters him in a force field-cordoned area in the back of the vessel. After Tuvok reawakens, Seven explains in reply to his queries that she left Voyager responding to a Borg signal or homing beacon. “Every Borg ship is coded to emit a distinct resonance frequency to guide drones who become separated from the Collective.” Seven is convinced that it is a Borg ship that is summoning her. This contradicts the findings of Voyager’s crew, who have scanned the entire region and found no Borg vessels. The Raven continues to shriek in Seven’s never ending hallucinations. She is hiding under a console on the crashed ship, curled up like a child. “Seven of Nine, Grid nine-two of subjunction twelve. You will be assimilated.”
The shuttlecraft enters orbit around a moon of the fifth planet of a dwarf star. The episode’s surprise is that it is the Federation spaceship U.S.S. Raven, attacked by the Borg while on a scientific mission eighteen years earlier, that is signaling Seven of Nine. Tuvok expresses his willingness to accompany her to the lunar surface, even though she believes that the Borg are waiting there, and will assimilate the Vulcan on sight. “You don’t need to go alone,” he tells her.
After beaming down, Seven of Nine and Tuvok move slowly along rocky terrain under a heavy sky. They see the crash-landed ship, which has only been partially assimilated. They carefully venture inside the wreckage. The interior is in shambles. There is thick dust in the air. Harsh rays of sunlight fragment the devastated bridge. Seven has a sensation of familiarity. A horizontal console is flashing and beeping. She realizes that this is the signal “that’s drawn me here.” She reaches down and turns it off.
The young human girl Annika Hansen, played by Erica Lynne Bryan, born at the Tendara Colony, was assimilated at age six, along with her parents, Magnus Hansen, played by David Anthony Marshall, and Erin Hansen, played by Nikki Tyler. Annika’s parents were noted scientists and Borg specialists. In their small vessel The Raven, they set out from the Omega Sector Deep Space Four station to the uncharted Delta Quadrant on an exobiological and ethnographic research expedition. After a long voyage of work and conducting experiments, the ship was attacked and boarded by the Borg. While the process of hardware assimilation was underway, The Raven crashed on a class-M moon in B’omar space.
The waking images experienced by Seven of Nine become less symbolic, and more of a flashback state where she relives her repressed memories of what actually happened. Annika’s father screams while being dragged away by a Borg drone. Her mother implores her to hide somewhere. “Papa, help me!” Annika-Seven cries out. Seven crawls under a bridge console and sits tightly in a bent posture. It is the same frightened position that Annika Hansen was in eighteen years earlier. She was taken by a drone who transported out with her moments before the ship crashed.
Lt. Tuvok shakes Seven of Nine out of her trance. “It happened here,” she says with a new realization. “This is where I was assimilated.” She brushes away dust from a wall plaque to reveal the chiseled words THE RAVEN. “This was our ship.” She recalls her lost childhood with profound sadness. “I had my birthday here. My cake had six candles on it.” “And one more to grow on” which never came. The Raven’s Borgified resonance signal has been broadcasting all these years, picked up by Seven’s implanted homing receptor when Voyager passed within range.
The Raven is suddenly rocked to its foundation and on the verge of structural implosion. The angry B’omar have arrived in the vicinity, and are firing at the grounded vessel. Voyager and the shuttle piloted by Lt. Tom Paris are not far behind. Tuvok and Seven of Nine move forward towards the largest hull rupture. They work together, digging through the debris that blocks their way. They dislodge a massive fallen beam enough to sneak through a small opening to the outside. As they escape, the ship collapses behind them. Tom Paris transports them to the smaller shuttlecraft and returns quickly to Voyager’s shuttle bay. Fleeing an assembling B’omar armada, the starship disappears at warp factor eight.
Back in Leonardo Holodeck workshop, Seven of Nine contemplates the flying machine model. “What if my parents and I had not encountered the Borg,” she asks Captain Janeway rhetorically, “what would our lives have been?” Janeway offers comforting words. There is much information about Seven’s parents available in the master Federation database.
The repressed memory of her childhood abduction by the Borg is incited towards consciousness for Seven of Nine by the flying machine in Leonardo da Vinci’s Holodeck workshop, and the Borg homing signal. In her mind’s associations, the small aviation model transmutes into a bird with wide wingspread, then connects as image to word with the name of the spaceship, The Raven, on which the overdetermined trauma of the kidnapping took place when Seven was six years old. In the primal scene of her psychic wound, there is a constellation of unresolved issues for Seven of Nine: her effective abandonment by her parents who exposed her to this dangerous situation by taking her so deep into the unexplored Delta Quadrant; the terror of being taken by the vile, intimidating strangers; and the interruption of life that was replaced by a kind of living-death after the brutal act of assimilation.
In the aftermath of her “liberation” by Voyager and Captain Janeway, having regained some degree of control over her own life, there are many questions that Seven of Nine might ask of this mysterious constellation of her complex biographical destiny. But the Star Trek industry tells us that Seven’s trajectory is that of being reinstated to liberal humanist individuality. Which avenue should one pursue? Should one accept the endlessly repeated answer that is already known of Paramount Pictures and many of the mediocre recombinant episodes – protection of Janeway as maternal superego, partnership of Chakotay in heterosexual romantic love, training in stereotypically infantilizing and sexualizing female gender roles, injunction to enjoy, entry into consumerism, and cutting out of eighteen years of existence – of becoming human? Or should one pursue the interrogation, the posing of the question, that is Becoming-Borg? The challenge of Seven of Nine is that of the recovering Borg who, despite the official ideology, cannot become a pure individual or simply “human” again.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, published in 1845, the answer is always already known, and it is always the same. But the answer is not meaningful. There is no point in interpreting when a ready-made answer is available, and meaning is not. Nevermore.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore–
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door–
Only this and nothing more.”
I was a serious scholar engaged in the exegesis of obscure tomes of literature and philosophy. It was an hour forboding change. The work was dry and boring. Star Trek? What was that? Just television, entertainment. The “meanings” of these stories were well known, or could be easily derived using the measuring rod of an external meaning-system.
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door–
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door–
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then the ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore–
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth The Raven, “Nevermore.”
The Raven, as Poe himself wrote in the 1846 article “The Philosophy of Composition,” is the “bird of ill-omen.” In the poem, it is a “non-reasoning creature capable of speech.” (Poe 1846) The visiting corvine bird is often said to symbolize death, or the narrator’s grief and sorrow for his lost beloved Lenore. In our context, the repeated utterance of The Raven emblematizes the standard answer that stands in for genuine questioning of a constellation of concerns that resists interpretation. The bust of Pallas on which The Raven comes to perch symbolizes “wisdom.” Pallas Athena is the goddess of wisdom and the practical arts in Greek mythology. Do the bird’s responses have a relation to wisdom? This hope of the narrator and reader is met with an ironic and mocking retort. When asked for its name, The Raven replies “Nevermore,” which we will soon learn is merely coincidental sense.
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore–
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never–nevermore.’”
The narrator discerns that “nevermore” is The Raven’s “only stock and store.” It absorbed its mantra about an ending from an unfortunate and lonely master whose speech came to revolve around the incessantly recited lamentation or pledge.
But The Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore–
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking, “Nevermore.”
Despite knowing that The Raven’s word of response is a pure signifier without denotation, and that it can only bear a “mystical” relationship to the queries that he interposes, the narrator pulls up a chair and undertakes to fathom the meaning of the “replies.” He will formulate a series of questions, and “link” the successive interpolation and rejoinder steps into a cumulative sequence of deepening signification. He makes interrogations that are more and more affectively important to him and “close to his heart.”
And The Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadows on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted–nevermore!
The Raven, in spite of all negative connotations and demonic associations, is welcome to stay. Wisdom has gone faint. Poe claimed in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the poem culminates in the narrator’s taking up permanent residence in “mournful and never-ending remembrance.” But what his perpetual condition seems to be, in the vocabulary of contemporary social psychology, is the inability to mourn. His dejection is a deep state of melancholy and gloom, too tortured to be ever able to process what has happened and “move on.” He will never sense in a real way the passage of time or that events have occurred, that “that was then and this is now.” Instead he constructs a dialogue with a deaf respondent to preserve his profound pain.
If Seven of Nine, or any empathetic viewer, halts her inquiry with the official explanation of becoming human, then her biographical situation of past and future, with respect to the tragedy and destiny of Becoming-Borg, will never be processed. It is not sufficient to bring the “repressed memory” to awareness. This privileging of the moment of recollection risks presenting the trauma as the solution. What is really the trauma is labeled the solution. The really lived biographical experience is misidentified as the trauma. It is easily downgraded, in the “life excludes death” dichotomy, because it was living-death. The exclusive focus on recall avoids the complexity of the constellation of issues, and the real personal engagement needed for understanding and growth. The “psychoanalysis” of remembering, in its various forms, is only one component of the process of genuine change. The narrative structure of the Voyager episode The Raven reinforces the misleading emphasis on “the trauma as the solution.” The superficial assumption for most of the story is that Seven of Nine’s behavior of stealing the shuttlecraft is accounted for by her being summoned by the Borg. Then the unfolding “detective work” of psychological and technological connections leads to the “key explication” that Seven has been recalled to the lunar wreckage site of the spaceship U.S.S. Raven by the until now suppressed memory of her childhood spent with her parents and her “human origins.”
For Seven of Nine, Captain Janeway is the incarnation of the “maternal superego” who formally replaces the absent father’s vanished authority, without any real process of “working through” years of difficult experiences having occurred. It is a mere “changing of the guard.” “You’ve gone through an intense, prolonged trauma,” the Captain tells the new crew member. Janeway automatically misidentifies the living-death of Seven’s eighteen years with the Borg as the trauma, and total recall of her earlier time with her parents as the solution.
In his studies of Lacan and popular culture, Slavoj Žižek elaborates his concept of the maternal superego as marking a regression of parental authority in the liberal-permissive society. The decline of patriarchy does not pave the way to liberation. It instead gives way to a power system that imposes the obligation of consumerist “choosing” on a less coherent ego structure. The new master punishes failure to perform one’s duty of enjoyment with an “unbearable and self-destructive anxiety.” (Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture) The diet soda that one orders with one’s burger, French fries, and onion rings is the “supplement of minimal difference” that enables the “no longer guilty conscience” to engage in the mandatory-permitted activity of consuming junk. A German brand of low-fat cold cuts and dairy products is appropriately named “Du darfst!” — “You may!” (Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, 1999)
