Misc
Mid-semester feedback questionnaire.
Questions?
Breaking the Code
Discussion based on Act 2 (and Act 1).
Hand out Turing essay description.
What Happens?
Things that advance the central story line:
- Turing is tried and convicted of “gross indecency”
- John Smith reappears, warning Turing about shadowy concerns about his behavior
- Turing commits suicide.
But much more mainly establishes Turing’s personality and relations with others:
- Turing mends his relationship with his mother
- Turing comes out to his mother and brother
- Turing vacations in Greece with a young man (Nikos)
- Turing learns that Knox, his boss at Bletchley Park, was gay
- Turing and Pat reunite.
Turing’s mother’s total denial of his suicide, her claim that his death must have been accidental, seems to be a strange bit of denial. And yet that is what she really believed, and “accident” remains one of the minor theories about how Turing died (the other is the conspiracy theory, that Turing was assassinated out of fear he would give away British government secrets).
What Sort of Person Is Turing?
Passionate about his work, particularly the question of whether intelligence can exist without a live body. This drives his work with computers.
He seems to be maturing in his ability to see and reflect on the conflicts between his wishes and those of other people and society as a whole. Chronologically later scenes (e.g., his picnic with Pat, his reconciliation with his mother) show a more reflective Turing than earlier ones (e.g., the scenes with his mother in Act 1, his admonishment by Knox at Bletchley).
Yet his relationships are incomplete: his romantic ones are almost purely physical (even when he expresses his emotions and intellectual accomplishments to Nikos, it’s to someone who can’t understand English; Ron largely rejects Turing’s intellectual interests), relationships where he can make an emotional or intellectual connection are purely platonic (e.g., with Pat).
He seems happy in the scene with Nikos, e.g., in being able to fix Nikos’s radio, but at the same time embarrassed or shamed by Nikos’s reaction, and ultimately the end of the scene shows Turing’s inability to fully connect with Nikos.
Why Does Turing Kill Himself?
Out of a sense of isolation, both from society which has tangibly rejected him by subjecting him to hormone treatments, and intellectually, as there is no-one in the play who is really his intellectual peer.
The last scene also suggests that it is an experiment to see if his own mind/intellect can continue without his body. But this seems way out on a limb as the sole reason....
War and Peace?
What is the point of the references to War and Peace?
Maybe the conversation with Ron, in which Turing identifies with Pierre, the social misfit in War and Peace who survives, in contrast to Andrei, the conventionally successful man who doesn’t, is pointing out that Turing is also a misfit whose memory, at least, survives whereas memories of the more conventional people around him haven’t.
And maybe Turing simply sees himself as being like Pierre, as a social misfit but filled with love.
Next
Alan Turing’s mathematical and scientific contributions.