Thus -S was a simple not-S, and -S, was the stronger anti-S; while —S was for Michel the skullcracking negation of a negation, either a neutralizing of the initial opposition, or the union of the two negations; in practice this often remained a mystery or koan; but sometimes it came clear, as an idea that completed the conceptual unit quite nicely, as in one of Greimas’s examples:
The next step in the complication of the design, the step where new combinations often revealed structural relationships not at all obvious on the face of it, was to build another rectangle that bracketed the first at right angles, like so:
And Michel had stared at this schema, with extroversion, introversion, lability, and stability at the first four corners, and considered their combinations. Suddenly everything had fallen into focus, as if a kaleidoscope had clicked by accident into a depiction of a rose. For it made perfect sense: there were extroverts who were excitable, and extroverts who were on an even keel; there were introverts who were quite emotional, and those who were not. He could immediately think of examples among the colonists of all four of the types.
When considering names to give these combined categories, he had had to laugh. Unbelievable! It was ironic at best to think that he had used the results of a century’s psychological thinking, and some of the latest laboratory research in psychophysiology, not to mention a complicated apparatus from structuralist alchemy, all in order to reinvent the ancient system of the humours. But there it was; that was what it came down to. For the northern combination, extroverted and stabile, was clearly what Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, Trimestigus, Wundt, and Jung would have called sanguine; the western point, extroverted and labile, was choleric; in the east, introverted and stabile was phlegmatic; and in the south, introverted and labile was of course the very definition of the melancholic! Yes, they all fit perfectly! Galen’s physiological explanation for the four temperaments had been wrong, of course, and bile, choler, blood and phlegm had now been replaced as causative agents by the ascending reticular activating system and the autonomic nervous system; but the truths of human nature had held fast! And the powers of psychological insight and analytic logic of the first Greek physicians had been as strong, or rather stronger by far, than that of any subsequent generation’s, blinkered by an often-useless accumulation of knowledge; and so the categories had endured and were reaffirmed, in age after age.
Michel found himself in the Alchemists’ Quarter. He exerted himself to pay attention to it. Here men used arcane knowledge to make diamonds out of carbon, and they made it so easily and precisely that all their window glass was coated in a molecular layer of diamond to protect it from the corrosive dust. Their great white salt pyramids (one of the great shapes of ancient knowledge, the pyramid) were coated in layers of pure diamond. And the one-molecule diamond-coating process was just one of thousands of alchemical operations performed in these squat buildings.
In recent years the buildings had taken on a faintly Moslem look, their white brick walls displaying equation after equation, all rendered in black flowing mosaic calligraphy. Michel ran into Sax, who was standing next to the terminal velocity equation displayed on the wall of the brick factory, and he switched to the common band: “Can you turn lead into gold?”
Sax’s helmet tilted quizzically. “Why no,” he said. “Those are elements. It would be hard. Let me think about it some.”
Saxifrage Russell. The perfect Phlegmatic.
The really useful part of mapping the four temperaments onto the semantic rectangle was that it immediately suggested a number of basic structural relationships between them, which then helped Michel to see their attractions and antagonisms in a new light. Maya was labile and extroverted, clearly choleric, and so was Frank; and both of them were leaders, and both were quite attracted to the other. Both being choleric, however, there was a volatile and essentially repellent aspect to the relationship as well, as if they recognized in each other exactly what they didn’t like in themselves.
And thus Maya’s love for John, who was clearly sanguine, with an extroversion similar to Maya’s but much more emotionally stabile, even to the point of placidity. So that most of the time he gave her great peace, like an anchor to reality— which then occasionally rankled. And John’s attraction to Maya? The attraction of the unpredictable, perhaps; the spice in his hearty bland happiness. Sure, why not? You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try.
Yes, there were a lot of sanguines in the first hundred. Probably the psychological specs for selection to the colony preferred the type. Arkady, Ursula, Phyllis, Spencer, Yeli . . . Yes. And stability being the most preferred quality for selection, there were naturally a lot of phlegmatics among them as well: Nadia, Sax, Simon Frazier, perhaps Hiroko— the fact that one could not even be sure about her tended to support the guess— Vlad, George, Alex.