What happens when a character written in 1974 is heard as an automated voice in 2026?
A few days after the Luhmann Conference in Dubrovnik, Moira McMillan wrote to me about Ganymed, a play I had written more than fifty years ago.
She had read the English version and was already imagining a possible staging:
“When I read the play, to me, Zett sounded like an automated voice (no body). Maybe Siri-ish. Psyche figured as shadow, projected towards the background, with a human female voice. Ganymed, by default, could be a male (human). Not necessarily though.”
What interested me was not simply that her imagined production differed from the original one.
It was that her idea of Zett Stern made immediate sense to me.
And yet Siri did not exist when Ganymed was written.
The body Zett Stern once had
The original production was much more physical.
Ganymed wore something like a toga and was clearly recognisable as a Greek male figure. Zett Stern wore an ordinary suit and a hat. Psyche was clearly female, dressed in a flowing garment.
The stage itself was almost empty: crumpled newspaper, a hanging piece suggesting an abstract black-and-white landscape, and actors isolated by spotlights.
Sound was important. Part One began with music by Brainticket and included abrupt, rhythmic squeaking sounds — something like a bow, or Styrofoam on glass. Part Two opened with Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral. There was a kind of couch, glasses and a bottle. Part Three began either with Orff’s O Fortuna or Eis aiona! from Catulli Carmina — after fifty years I honestly no longer remember which — and by then only the couch remained.
So Zett Stern had a body.
He even had a hat.
And this is precisely what makes Moira’s idea of Zett Stern as a disembodied voice so interesting to me. This version is not closer to the “real” Zett Stern. Something else happens: one of the conditions under which we identify Zett Stern as a person disappears. There is still a name. There is still a voice. There is still a figure we call Zett Stern. There is still communication that can be attributed to him. But there is no longer a visible body to which these communications can easily be assigned.
Zett Stern does not become imaginary because his body disappears. Zett Stern does not simply become imaginary because his body disappears. The distinction between the real and the imaginary was already at work in the play. What changes is the way in which this distinction can be observed.
One person?
I never really thought of Ganymed, Zett Stern and Psyche as three psychological individuals. But neither can they simply be reduced to three aspects of a single personality.
The play itself resists such a stable assignment.
Zett Stern initially appears close to normality — to the average, the ordinary, the wish to be one among many, one like many. In Part One he says: “Perhaps I am insane … Or perhaps I am simply normal.” A little later, however, even this position begins to shift.
By the end of Part One, Zett Stern has moved remarkably close to Ganymed’s position. He speaks of being not only himself but also a part of himself and, at the same time, the whole. Ganymed immediately takes up the formulation, changing the I into a we.
This movement becomes even more striking in Part Three. Zett Stern takes over words and positions that belonged to Ganymed. Speech migrates between the figures.
And this changes the question.
But perhaps interpreting these shifts is not the most interesting thing we can do with them.
Perhaps the problem is not whether Ganymed, Zett Stern and Psyche are “really” three persons or one. Perhaps the more interesting question is what allows us to attribute a voice, a thought or a position to one of them in the first place.
Their bodies tell us that they are separate. The original staging reinforced this distinction: Ganymed in his toga, Zett Stern in his suit and hat, Psyche in her flowing garment, each isolated by light.
But the language does something else.
Positions move. Words migrate. The distinction between I, you and we becomes unstable.
This is what makes Moira’s idea of Zett Stern as a disembodied voice interesting to me. It does not reveal the “true” Zett Stern. Nor does it make him more abstract. It removes one of the devices by which the original production kept the figures apart: the visible body.
And once that body disappears, a question already present in the play becomes harder to avoid:
Whose voice are we actually hearing?
Psyche between times
Moira imagined Psyche as a shadow projected towards the background, accompanied by a human female voice.
Again, the image seemed strangely familiar despite never having been part of the original staging.
Reading the play today, I wonder whether Psyche might be something like a voice of what I called Zwischenzeitlichkeit — an existence not simply in time, but between temporal positions.
I hesitate to say that Psyche is Zwischenzeitlichkeit. That would turn an observation into a definition, and perhaps close precisely what the figure keeps open.
But the possibility is there.
Ganymed, by contrast, remains the most physical of the three. In the original production he was male almost by default. Today I see no reason why that should have to be prescribed.
The observer has changed
This is where the anecdote becomes more interesting to me than the reconstruction of an old theatre production.
If a character written in 1974 can be recognised in 2026 as something resembling an artificial voice, what exactly has changed?
Not Zett Stern.
Not the words on the page.
The observer has changed — and with the observer, the space of possible distinctions through which the character becomes visible.
In 1974, a bodiless conversational voice available at any moment was hardly part of ordinary experience. Today it is.
“Siri-ish” therefore does not merely describe Zett Stern.
It also describes 2026 observing 1974.
And this is precisely why I have returned to Ganymed after fifty years.
The question that interests me is no longer:
What does Ganymed mean?
It is:
What does Ganymed make observable?
Perhaps Moira’s reading of Zett Stern provides a small answer.
The play has remained almost where I left it.
We have not.
A stage fifty years later
Moira went one step further. If the Luhmann Conference returns to Dubrovnik in 2027, she suggested that Ganymed might actually be staged there — perhaps in the patio of the Inter-University Centre.
Her imagined production would be radically reduced: a physical Ganymed, perhaps; Zett Stern as a bodiless voice; Psyche as shadow or projection; light and sound defining presences that no longer necessarily require bodies.
I find the thought appealing precisely because I would not want to reconstruct the production of the 1970s. But perhaps interpreting these shifts is not the most interesting thing we can do with them.
A reconstruction would try to recover what Ganymed was.
A new staging could ask: What does Ganymed make observable?
In 2026, I presented Ganymed in Dubrovnik as an epistemic environment for observing meaning.
Perhaps in 2027 there would be no need to explain what it does.
We could simply let it operate.
