The Occupied Sleeper

While Graham slept, everyone built their Sleeper.

The old garrulous man in the dark has a Sleeper: a poor unfortunate with a playful woman, who died years ago and was replaced by a substitute. The Council has a Sleeper: a legal fiction, a property-holder, a legitimating symbol for their administration. Ostrog has a Sleeper: the lever that moves the revolution, the name that gives his coup popular sanction. The crowd has a Sleeper: a messiah, a king who will come in his own good time, Arthur returning. And Helen Wotton has a Sleeper: the man from a better age who might actually choose to rule well, who might hold Ostrog accountable.

None of these Sleepers is Graham. Graham is the man who wakes inside all of them, disoriented, unable to read the signs, trying to figure out what time it is.

The book is partly about the struggle to become a subject rather than a symbol. Graham is "Master of the Earth" in everyone's rhetoric and nobody's reality. He is used as a display object, trotted before crowds, made to speak one-sentence words. Lincoln manages his schedule. Ostrog manages his information. The Babble Machines tell the crowds what Graham has said and what Graham endorses and what Graham plans — usually without Graham's knowledge. He learns he is "sleeping peacefully" and "would devote his life to aeronautics" and "places absolute confidence in Boss Ostrog" by hearing the machine in the street.

His name has been circulating for two hundred years. The name accrued property, invested it, governed through proxies, became coterminous with the world's largest economic entity. And the person who bears the name woke up in someone else's apartment with someone else's clothes, into a history he didn't participate in, carrying inherited meanings he didn't choose.

The question the book asks without quite stating it: is it possible to become yourself when the world has already decided who you are?

Wells's answer is ambiguous. Graham never fully escapes the symbol. He gives the speech before the cameras, and it's Helen's emotion sustaining him, not his own convictions exactly — "things that he had long wished to believe, he found that he believed." He gives himself away in a speech that begins as his own but resolves into what the moment required. Even his final act — taking the aeropile, diving alone into the incoming fleet — is interpreted immediately as the fulfillment of the symbolic role. "He who takes the greatest danger, he who bears the heaviest burden, that man is King," the people quote him as saying. His suicide attack is immediately absorbed into legend.

And yet: it is the one thing no one planned for him. Ostrog didn't plan it. Lincoln didn't plan it. Helen didn't plan it. The Ward Leaders urged him not to do it. For about twenty minutes, falling toward an incoming fleet of aeroplanes carrying African colonial troops, Graham is genuinely himself — not the symbol anyone had built, but the actual person who couldn't stop thinking about the people in the under-city, who couldn't live under Ostrog's terms, who learned to fly specifically so he'd have this option.

He dies. The people win. The moment of self-possession is also the moment of destruction.

There's something Wells can't resolve: whether the occupied symbol is a tragedy or just a condition. Every public figure gets this done to them. Every idea does too. The Sleeper became a messiah without consent. The revolution happened in his name. The Labour Company existed as his property. These things happened to Graham because he was asleep, but they happen to most historical figures while they're fully awake and watching. You can't prevent it. You can only decide what to do with the self you find intact, once you understand what's been built around it.

Graham decides, eventually, to act. The act kills him. But it's his.

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