SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Wednesday, November 3
INTD 105 17
Fall 2021
Prof. Doug Baldwin
(No.)
We see more of Turing’s life after the war and his homosexuality.
We learn more about his ideas about computers.
The act ends with Turing’s suicide.
Personality:
He is more self-assertive and self-confident about who he is than he seemed in Act 1, e.g., his words in the scenes with Ross (Scene 4), Smith (Scene 6), and Knox (Scene 2).
He’s also more reflective about who he is, e.g., in his conversations with his mother (Scene 3) and Pat (Scene 5).
Relationships with other characters:
He finally connects with his mother (Scene 3), and reconnects with Pat (Scene 5).
What do you think Whitemore is saying about why Alan Turing killed himself?
The final scene in which Turing actually eats the poisoned apple raises two questions: what’s the business about mind vs body, thought without a brain, and what’s the significance of the apple?
For thought without a brain, that’s something that has been a theme for Turing in one form or another throughout the play: in Act 2 Scene 1 (his talk about computers at Sherborne) when he speculates about whether machines can be intelligent; in Act 1 Scene 7 when Turing tells Pat about his reaction to Chris Morcom’s death and feeling that Chris’s thoughts survived after his death. Turing indicates in his soliloquy that he intends to answer the question experimentally, by killing his body to see if his mind continues.
The apple is most likely an allusion to Snow White, especially Turing’s “dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through,” and discussion of having seen the “Snow White” movie while waiting for his interview at Bletchley Park (Act 1, Scene 5). But it could also be interpreted as a reference to the Book of Genesis’s story of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden.
Following up the Snow White reference, perhaps Turing hopes in some way to find himself in a happy afterlife. What do you suppose that afterlife would look like for Whitemore’s Turing (note that I’m distinguishing Turing as Hugh Whitemore understands him and portrays him in the play from the historical Turing, since the play is an interpretation of the actual person).
For Whitemore, Turing’s afterlife looks a lot like the intellectual atmosphere at Bletchley Park, as suggested by Turing’s longing references to it with Nikos (Act 2, Scene 7) and John Smith (Act 2, Scene 6). And it probably includes Chris, or at least his mind, as indicated by Turing’s longing to continue that relationship (Act 2, Scene 7).
But is Whitemore’s Turing religious, liable to consider suicide a sin? Not in a conventional Church-of-England sense, as seen by his refusal to go to church, and denial of religious belief, to his mother and Pat (Act 1, Scene 7). But his interest in mind without a body reflects deep spiritual feelings of a less formal sort.
Turing’s contributions: Turing machines and what is computable.