The Whirl of Permutation: Blackness, Play, and the Problem of Chess

Abstract

In The Red, White & Black, Frank B. Wilderson III uses a chess analogy to describe the way in which blackness is positioned outside of the chessboard of the human subject, thereby granting shape and substance to its integral pieces. Thinking alongside this analogy, this article examines the life and games of Theophilus A. Thompson, a black chess problemist (a composer of chess puzzles) born into slavery in 1855. The article focuses on Thompson's 1872 book Chess Problems, which is comprised almost exclusively of board diagrams and conditions for solving each problem. The article reads Thompson's work as a philosophical and gamic critique of the prevailing logic that regards play as a space of consent and escape. Contrary to Eurocentric theories and commonsense notions that align play with leisure, the article examines the racial duress that shaped Thompson's extraliterary work and his authorial position as a problemist. Furthermore, the article brings the archival resonances of this duress to bear on Thompson's work with the self-mate problem, in which one's king (the invaluable object of competitive chess) is systematically put to the sword. The article frames these self-mate problems as a black theorization of play, rendered in chess aesthetics, that imagines both game and world radically undone.

Zugzwang

In chess, zugzwang is a catastrophic position in which one side's obligation to move guarantees defeat (fig. 1). It is a malaise in which all of one side's available moves deteriorate their position. For chess players, a zugzwang is a satisfying injury to inflict, as the opponent is hopeless, and resignation should follow. Tupac Shakur may have given the best exposition of this movelessness in “So Many Tears,” when he rapped, “My every move is a calculated step / to bring me closer to embracing early death.”¹ Afropessimist scholar Frank B. Wilderson III uses a chess analogy to explain that human capacity operates in absolute contradistinction to blackness, such that, if blackness were afforded movement on the chessboard of the human, the resulting position would be “no longer chess but something else.”² He maintains that the only way to grasp something akin to black in play is to destroy the game.³

This essay tarries with chess, play, and the creative and destructive possibilities of games alongside the work of Theophilus Augustus Thompson, a nineteenth-century black chess author, born into slavery, who published a book of puzzles entitled Chess Problems. Published in 1873, the book's foreword features a portrait of the author and some biographical details. Chess Problems comprises chess diagrams, conditions for solving each problem, and chess notation revealing the solutions.

In chess literature, the terms problem and puzzle are used interchangeably, but a composer of chess problems is called a problemist. The authorial position and aesthetic practice of the problemist are distinct from competitive over-the-board play. The problemist works as a chess composer rather than a chess player. Thompson engaged with chess in several ways during his life: as a spectator, student, and correspondence player, and chiefly as a problemist. The gap that separates play from problem reveals a rubric of racialized duress that structured his efforts of study and composition. This duress is evident in the foreword to Chess Problems, which notes that, during his first time seeing a chess match between white men, Thompson “dared not ask questions.” His subsequent work with chess problems circumvents the racial animosity that accrued to his presence in those places of play in which he dared-not. I argue that Chess Problems puts forth a critique of the concept of play from this racialized position of daring-not: a position beyond the thresholds of chess's neutrality as a cerebral and playful activity. Put differently, Chess Problems provides ways of thinking across race, play, and games that “desediment” the sacrosanct grounds of play that Johan Huizinga designated as its “magic circle.”⁴

While this turn to nineteenth-century chess crosses various disciplinary boundaries, its stakes intervene in ongoing conversations concerning blackness, the concept of play, and game studies. Scholars such as Kishonna Gray, TreaAndrea Russworm, Jennifer Malkowski, Samantha Blackmon, and Kyra Gaunt have offered critiques of and alternatives to white- and cishet-male-centered discourses of gaming and play.⁵ In Gaming Representation, Russworm and Malkowski claim that early game studies, ensnared in the binary of ludology (games as ruled objects) and narratology (games as a storytelling medium), codified questions of race, gender, and sexuality as inessential to rigorous study. In response, Malkowski and Russworm assert that “representation in game studies must be viewed as a system that functions as akin to—rather than as a distraction from—the discipline's more celebrated, hard-core objects of study.”⁶ Looking to the field of play studies as antecedent to game studies, Aaron Trammell's “Torture, Play, and the Black Experience” argues that “theories of play that see it as a constructive and positive form of leisure must work to reconcile this point with the fact that play is often hurtful [and] toxic.”⁷ There is some juxtaposition worth noting between the politics of silence in chess (which I will critique) and the implications of Blackmon and Russworm's piece “Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought,” which weaves together music, interviews, and critical analysis to assert black women's voices and experiences against the assumptive white maleness that pervades video games.

While discussions of race and games have considered the problematics of representation, empathy,⁸ and voice, Thompson's appearance in Chess Problems raises different questions as one who “dared not [speak].” I approach Thompson's silence at the chessboard as the locus of an irreconcilable problem for play and the project of its universality. This prohibition of black speech, combined with the fact that chess is an abstract board game (whereas discussions of race in game studies prioritize video games and narrative), makes Chess Problems a distinct object of study. However, the problem of Thompson's problems—that is, their opacity under the prisms of narrative, representation, and audition—suggests new ways to think about blackness in the study and design of games, even in the milieu of abstract and ostensibly “raceless” games like chess. To this end, I engage with Thompson's implementation of the self-mate problem (a problem that demands a forcibly losing sequence) as a modality that experiments with the destruction of the game/world of chess in the agonistic context of competitive play.

Intermezzo

Not much is known about Theophilus Thompson. I've gathered most of the facts about his life from Chess Problems and the Chess Drum, Dr. Daaim Shabazz's invaluable online resource for black chess history and current events.

Thompson was born on April 21, 1855, in Frederick, Maryland. Between 1868 and 1870, he was a house servant for William Higgins in Carroll County, before returning to Frederick. In April 1872, while present as a party at John Hanshew's house as a servant, Thompson witnessed his first chess match. Hanshew was a musician with training as a printer and had only recently learned the game, yet he would go on to establish the Maryland Chess Review two years after meeting the gifted black problemist. At the party, Thompson observed the contest between Hanshew and “Mr. S.” but “dared not ask questions for fear of annoying the players.”⁹ After the match, Hanshew recognized Thompson's interest in the game and provided a board, some instructions, and a few problems to solve. Thompson learned rapidly and began composing problems of his own. Within a year, his studies culminated in Chess Problems, which was published through John J. Brownson and Orestes A. Brown Jr.’s Dubuque Chess Journal.¹⁰

Beyond Chess Problems, there are records of Thompson and Hanshew playing correspondence chess against Charles H. Blood and a few others. The last recorded game appears to have been played in 1875. The extant games showcase Thompson's brilliance as a player. He had an attacking style, seizing the “initiative,” or the ability to gain time by making threats. Chess is a turn-based game and initiative is its strategic rhythm.

Thompson's chess activity disappears from the record shortly after the publication of Chess Problems, prompting speculation about his death.¹¹ Recent archival research uncovered that the October 1881 issue of the Frederick Examiner had reported his death by tuberculosis.¹² This notice recognizes Thompson's mathematical gifts and his achievements as a chess player and problemist. It also notes his participation in a Philadelphia chess event, most likely one reported by Gustavus Reichhelm, who was the chess editor for the Philadelphia Times. In an 1882 column, Reichhelm wrote of a “T. Augustus” who had visited the Mercantile Library in Philadelphia. He recalled the visit in what he described as an “amusing anecdote.”

In light of Reichhelm's report, it is generative to consider Chess Problems alongside W. E. B. Du Bois's critical framework: “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question . . . How does it feel to be a Problem?”¹⁴ In response to this “unasked” question, Du Bois offers “seldom a word.” The gap between the unasked question and nonresponse is the space in which Du Bois situates his complex engagement with race in the form of the problem. Nahum Chandler has theorized the “exorbitance” that is at stake in Du Bois's philosophy, its announcement of “a rift that opens within any philosophical premise on the question of essence.”¹⁵ He frames Du Bois's thought as a critique of difference and prevailing epistemological formations through the example of the “so-called Negro.” I seek to elaborate similar exorbitances (ambivalences, openings, rifts) within Thompson's story.

“He dared not ask questions, for fear of annoying the players.” The interval in which Thompson dared-not is a strategic assessment. It is not simply a reverent silence appropriate to the “seriousness” of chess, where the stakes and rigor of the contest cause the player to “forget he is only playing.”¹⁷ Alternatively, the daring-not is, even and especially in the absence of Thompson's testimony, a strategic assessment of the animus of white space and, on the part of the publisher, an indication of play's ambient terror. Thompson's first encounter with the playing of chess reveals its violence through the positionality of daring-not. The daring-not is a racialized position without movement or speech, an inoperativity that exceeds the protocols of chess as a gathering and spectacle. The daring-not conveys the violence of play that underwrites the edifice of its seriousness and delights—the very delights that Reichhelm, in his account of Thompson's Mercantile Library appearance, expressed as “amusement.”

“He went home fully determined to learn the game.” Home, as it appears, is not a zone of recognition or sanctuary. It is a placeless node on the continuum of Du Bois's “between me and the other world.” Thompson's turn toward home is an obligation produced by the protocol of play's dispersal (“the partie finished, he went . . . ”). The negotiation of this obligation to disperse without the capacity to render or inhabit place is the paradox that I read as Thompson's retreat—his strategic turn toward the problem of home that anticipates the study of problems.¹⁸ Home is the indeterminacy between the “capacity of [servitude]” and the flight of study.

Thompson's retreat approximates the “between” that holds Du Bois's unasked question and nonresponse in tension. In chess parlance, we might call this gap an intermezzo: an irregularity of tactical procedure with strategic ramifications.¹⁹ In one sense, the foreword of Chess Problems announces Thompson's silence to present it as a “pure” work of chess literature to which his status as “colored” is an inert curiosity. That is, the imposition of silence, and the confirmation of its proper reception that obtains in his daring-not, prefigures the white reader's unburdened access to Thompson's vault of “Caissa's . . . delights.” This marking of Thompson's silence at the precipice of his retreat frustrates the narrative because the termination of the game, the dispersal of the gathering, and the representation of home fall short of rendering the capacity through which unasked questions become problems. In between the place of play and black home, the concretization of these questions into the diagrams of Chess Problems is an irregularity that overwhelms causality, the positionality of Thompson's service, and Hanshew's assistance. Consider, also, the soundless space between Thompson's questions and Hanshew's “having heard of [his] ardent desire.” In sum, there are many silences that leave the production of Chess Problems opaque and unlikely, if not impossible, even within the language the text deploys to account for its production. These silences generate an intermezzo: an anomaly in the fact of the work that exceeds the demystifying power of narrative and the purity of the pleasures it associates with chess.

Perhaps, for Thompson, composing chess problems opened up exorbitances of chess thought (like the unremarked dimensions of Du Bois's problems) that could not be extrapolated under the rubric of play in which he is said to have dared-not. This strategic opening in Thompson's story, the intermezzo that shapes questions into problems, radicalizes the analytic of Chess Problems. Blackness produces a problem for play through chess, an intractable problem that expands in the making of more problems. His turn away from the place of play toward problem-making happens in a space-betwixt without resolved polarities: between the inscription of silence and the problems that elude the force of its inscription; between the “here” of white play and the “nowhere” of black home; between the dared-not and the questions that the text poses indefinitely. This diagrammatic expression of the chess move in the void and excess of the conditions of its playability is at the crux of Thompson's critique of play.

Permutations

Readers of Chess Problems will also note the photograph in the text (fig. 2). It provides a glimpse of Thompson at roughly seventeen years old. He is a dark-skinned young man with a hard-clenched jaw. Beneath his furrowed brow, a piercing gaze dares the reader to attempt his problems, which, according to the publisher, are “offered for perusal . . . with great pleasure.” As I have suggested, it is impossible to disentangle this pleasure from the violence that positioned Thompson's presence at the chessboard.

Chess is often viewed as the quintessential “brain game” and intellectual contest. Roger Caillois highlights chess as an especially pure example of “agôn,” or the competitive formulation of play. For Caillois, the meritocratic element of agôn requires the presumption of equality between players.²⁰ If conditions are somehow unequal (such as stark differences in playing strength), equality should be administered to guarantee the winner's superiority (by allowing extra time on the clock for the weaker player). Embedded within this idea of equality is the assumption that games like chess should not be concerned with the specificities of actual bodies. Markku Eskelinen's “The Gaming Situation,” featured in the inaugural issue of Game Studies, remarks that “it would be beside the point if someone interpreted chess as a perfect American game because there's a constant struggle between hierarchically organized black and white communities, genders are not equal, and there's no health care for the stricken pieces. . . . After this kind of analysis you'd have no intellectual future in the chess-playing community.”²¹ Eskelinen identifies both chess and Tetris as abstract games that show how the ontological study of games is compromised by provincial analyses of race, gender, and class.

How might a closer look at the body in chess, prompted by Thompson's photograph, recast notions of the game's purity that scandalize the intervention, the problem, of blackness? Is there more to chess than the tactics of captivity, the assumption of equality, and the board's magnetic pull? To address these questions, I will briefly turn to James McCune Smith's analysis of a famous 1857 chess match between two white players: Paul Morphy and Louis Paulsen. Smith views the match from his black perspective as “the Tria-mulattin who at present writes.”²² Importantly, he raises questions about Morphy's race and his movements on and off the chessboard that inform Thompson's position relative to the time and space of play. Like Thompson, Morphy retreats from the competitive field of the chessboard to probe its unruly possibilities, or what Smith identifies as its “permutations.”

Smith's piece, “Chess,” which appeared in the September 1859 issue of the Anglo-African, approaches chess as a test of “physical condition.” As a chess enthusiast and trained physician, Smith examines Morphy and Paulsen as players and bodies at the chessboard. He is especially attentive to Morphy, the young chess genius and son of a wealthy family from New Orleans. Smith reads Morphy through the lens of the Southern gentleman and the subtext of the Louisiana plantation:

In this account, the gentlemanly affair of chess gives way to the specter of the sexual violence of slavery and its corollary in the genealogical problem of blood. Smith collapses the playing of chess and the construct of Morphy's whiteness onto the violence of leisure: the systemic raping of the enslaved at a scale that Eric Baptist characterized as “a white man's sexual playground.”²⁴ By raising questions of the blood within the context of the Morphy-Paulsen match, Smith questions the apparatus of consent that identifies Morphy and Paulsen as players and the consensus of racial purity that affords them the spacetime of play.

The question of Morphy's physiognomy reveals an arithmetical itinerary of difference that plays on the One Drop Rule: note the “hekata” and “tria mulattin” designations and suggestive accountings of Morphy's blood. These approximations of difference allow it to be “counted differently.”²⁵ Smith commingles “objective” matters of chess, scenes of leisure, and sexual violence to recode chess history. In doing so, Smith dislodges what Sylvia Wynter terms the “biocentric” concept of Man, the Darwinian paradigm of the human in which the black occupies the position of the evolutionarily and socially “dysselected.”²⁶ Smith traces Morphy's whiteness back to the plantation to retabulate the racial calculus of play. Adjacent to Thompson's diagrammatic process in Chess Problems, Smith's revision takes the form of a numerical provocation, a “maybe one/maybe two” indeterminacy of the flesh that analyses the mechanics of its violence in ways that are improper to the consensual zone of play.²⁷ The final intervention, “God only knows how it got there,” maintains the opacity of race to critique the assumptive logic that undergirds the Morphy-Paulsen match.

During the match, Smith detected a “magnetism” between the players—that is, a posture toward and around the board that shows the physical aspects of chess. When Paulsen studied the board, he sat still and magnetized. He kept his eyes on the pieces, never letting them escape his visuospatial grip of his mastery. Paulsen was known as a strong defender, while Morphy was a gifted attacker. Paulsen knew this and perhaps held his attention as a bulwark against Morphy's assault.

Contrary to Paulsen's stillness, Morphy would move quickly and leave the board. He could not stand, for whatever reason, to be in that room; at least not in ways that held to the protocols of play and the seriousness of chess. He would “demagnetize” to the degree that he had to be called back to his opponent:

What the players felt, but expressed differently with their bodies, was a sensation that Smith named the “whirl of permutation.” While Paulsen held still, Morphy's calculations outpaced his opponent's ossified stare. Morphy's flights to and from the chessboard facilitated the feats of calculation that he would bring back from each dithering retreat. What the other spectators may not have appreciated is that this flight allowed him to “embrace” the exponential possibilities of chess. Morphy's virtuosic inattention, enacted in this embrace, was evidence of a mind that had the processing speed of a machine: “Addition, subtraction, [and] multiplication . . . are performed with the rapidity and accuracy of Mr. Babbage's machine. So that for any one less gifted in this peculiar power than Morphy to attempt to play with him, is like one man at the brake of a fire-engine, striving to play the same against another worked by steam.”²⁹ Smith notes Morphy's machine-like gifts and the concomitant mobility that his white-presenting body, always teetering in the artifice of whiteness, enjoys. Smith points up Morphy's defiance of the board and the space of play as he circumvents the stress point of its geometry.³⁰ Despite the transparency of chess—the fact that players and spectators can always see all playable moves on the board—Morphy's flight points to the wild spatiality and mathematics of chess across its seemingly endless branches of permutation.

Smith's reading of the match maintains the irresolvable differences between Morphy (the “steam engine”) and Paulsen (“the fire-brake”). We might say that the heuristic of Smith's “difference engine,” to extend his reference to Charles Babbage, negotiates the mathematics of chess and the travestied arithmetic of the plantation as read on and against Morphy's physiognomy. In sum, the gestures in Smith's essay leave the unasked question of Morphy's genealogy at the place of play vulnerable to the problems and permutations of blackness. This distinct idea of permutation, which extends the mathematics of chess to that of race, animates Thompson's intervention as a black problemist, lending force to readings of Chess Problems as an experiment in black thought and aesthetic practice.

Self-Mate

The selection of problems in Chess Problems adopt familiar types that persist in chess composition today. Some problems call for finding checkmate in a set number of moves. Others encompass multiple or even contradictory solutions. The index displays the solutions in the chess notational style of the era.

One problem that appears prominently in Chess Problems is the self-mate, which requires a sequence of moves that forcefully loses the game. More than playing badly, the self-mate is rigorously disastrous play. It compels the friendly king's death, and this compulsion entails the projection of an unwilling attacker.³¹ Self-mate problems bookend Chess Problems, suturing its beginning and end. Thompson did not invent the self-mate, nor was he its only specialist. Crucially, however, chess historian Walter Korn suggests that Thompson's book popularized the term “self-mate” in chess literature over “sui-mate,” which had been the prevailing term.³² In a key essay from the Chess Drum, Neil Brennan recognizes Thompson's specialization in self-mate problems and the praise his compositions received in an 1874 issue of City of London Chess.³³

Through the self-mate, Thompson's practices of problematization generate tactical motifs that efface the teleology of play. The self-mate throws the procedural locomotion of chess proper, the rigor of its play-to-win enterprise, into a disarray. It leverages the graphical and permutational plasticity of chess to promote uncommon scenarios that are germane to the problem. In this sense one might say that Thompson “anagrammaticalizes” classical chess.³⁴ He experiments with the nearly endless permutations of the pieces, their positionality and the conditions that delimit their movement, to reverse engineer the mechanics of chess as a game of agonistic striving, rigorous practice, and self-optimization. The sport of over-the-board chess gives way to the counterintuitive work of the self-mate problem as an asynchronous, para-playful excursion. Within the prism of blackness, the self-mate is an irreverence toward the field of play in which the black imago is problematized. More forcefully, it is an aberration to chess playing that imagines the game/world's destruction. Thompson's work reverses the agonistic reflexes of chess playing to instead put the central object of play (the king) and the main objective of play (checkmate) into a different framework in which the meanings, desires, and motivations of the game are interrogated and undone.

One notable example from Thompson's book is the frontispiece problem (fig. 3), which encompasses both checkmate and self-mate within a single puzzle. In doing so, the problem creates decisive sequences that are contradictory yet simultaneously available in the given position. On the one hand, this design makes salient the rules of chess that facilitate both solutions. On the other, it intensifies their differences by directly comparing the normative, play-to-win instinct of checkmate to its negation in the self-mate's play-to-lose, counterintuitive reflex. By compressing both outcomes into a single diagram, Thompson demonstrates their antipodal relationship through the chess problem. If this relationship is understood within the paradigm of Thompson's first encounter with chess—the dangerous scene in which he dared-not—then this problem's antipodal examination of chess tactics gives form to an oppositional critique of play and its structuring motivations.

The assumption of play's universality, its predicate of voluntariness and recognition, is bound up in the interdiction it holds against blackness as the absence of the “play spirit.” In Homo Ludens, Huizinga argues that a key aspect of play is its “spatial separation from ordinary life,” where space is drawn like the boundaries of a ritual in which the ritualists are incredulously credulous, or both serious and unserious in their devotion. Play is thus separate from the real world but “labile in its . . . nature,” such that the intrusion of real-world priorities (which Huizinga phrases as the world's “rights”) may bring about a “collapse of the play spirit”: the will, mood, and time that enable play.³⁵ The competitive spirit, within the Eurocentric context of play as civilized or developed activity, is the “daring” and persistent will of play that risks defeat in pursuit of victory.

This idea of play, however, has racial parameters that are evident in the daring-not that precedes Thompson's problems and the antiblackness that situates Reichhelm's amusement. In Repairing Play, Trammell argues that “by defining play only through its pleasurable connotations, the term holds a bias toward people with access to the conditions of leisure.”³⁶ Reading play and/as torture, Trammell notes that play discourse silences the experiences of racially marked and gendered bodies that are “played with.”³⁷ Reichhelm's recollection of Thompson's appearance in Philadelphia holds that white men who entertain black play have “[forgotten] themselves”; that is, they have forgotten their supraordinate place in the world and its topography on the place of play. Here, negrophobia sutures the fantastic memory and sacred place of play, revealing the racial contours of its spirit and the problems that frustrate its universality.

Chess Problems, in its complex circuitry of daring-not and making-problems, announces problems for play that experiment with its destruction, as such, via chess. Self-mate offers an aesthetic counterpart to this destruction.

A Deep, Dark Forest

Thompson assails the concept of play through the para-playful work of Chess Problems. Relatedly, Smith revises Morphy to explore the problem of racial difference during the Morphy-Paulsen match. Chess players often credit former World Chess Champion Mikhail Tal with the following quotation: “You must take your opponent into a deep, dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5 and the path ahead is only wide enough for one.”³⁸ In fact, Tal's words, as they appear in volume 2 of Garry Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, emphasize the permutational “density” of this forest over its darkness.³⁹ Still, Tal's mathematics resonate with the “maybe one/maybe two” variations Smith observed in Morphy's play and the game-breaking engineering of Thompson's problems. Perhaps there is a dark volition beneath the given question of play that troubles its spirit. Thompson's interventions, within the braid of Du Bois's notion of problem, reveal a black theory of play that anticipates the unthought registers of its study in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Notes

Works Cited