La freccia e il cerchio
anno 1, numero 1, 2010
pp. 191-195

7.
Eric S. Rabkin
The Nature of Character:
Science Fiction Speaks of the Soul

Introduction: Love Machines

   Victor Frankenstein would be god, or at least god-like, reanimating (from the Latin animus, meaning “soul” [OED]) human body parts to create a new life. The very title of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, acknowledges her eponym’s hubris. Shelley draws her epigraph from Paradise Lost, the great epic John Milton prayed would “…justify the ways of God to men” (I.26).

Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay
To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? – (X.743-5)

   Like Adam, we hunger for some justification to make tolerable a god, or at least our common human fate, that shaped us from mere matter without our consent and placed us in a world from which, despite its infinite potential delights, we must “surely die” (Genesis 2:17). We do not identify with God in Paradise Lost, or, I think, with Victor in Frankenstein. We identify – treat as the same as ourselves (from the Latin idem, “same”– with the made creatures, with Adam and the monster, which is to say, in some sense we understand ourselves and our fates better by inhabiting in art the lives of those unruly yet suffering characters. But what are they, or any characters, that they can ease or enlighten our lives? What is the nature of character? This essay attempts to explore that question, beginning with three science fiction examples.
   Philip K. Dick opens Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the source novel for Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner) thus:

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised – it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice – he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again. “You set your Penfield too weak,” he said to her. “I’ll reset it and you’ll be awake and –”
“Keep your hand off my settings.” Her voice held bitter sharpness. “I don’t want to be awake.” (p. 9)

   Any knowledgeable science fiction reader contemporary to this novel’s 1968 publication would have understood that “Penfield” referred to Wilder Penfield, the pioneering American-born Canadian neurosurgeon whose electrical explorations of the surgically exposed brains of epileptics led to the understanding that particular parts of the brain could be reliably tweaked to recall memories – even memories no longer available for conscious recall – and to induce specific moods. Penfield, in other words, implied that even within the sanctum of our skulls, we are machines. Dick – a name which itself, unfortunately, is “coarse” slang for an objectified body part (OED) – focuses here on the layered possibilities of man as a machine one could assemble or disassemble. A healthy young man, awakening from a long night’s sleep, would quite likely think of something quite unlike an electrical device as the referent of “mood organ”; rather, he would imagine an unbidden erection sometimes called, in today’s slang, “morning wood” (Wikipedia). Wood. Not flesh. The fact is, whether stimulated by an appliance like the fictional Penfield under our own control or by the pressures of a bladder filling through the night, our bodies do respond like machines. And while some of us, like Deckard, although surprised, may try to make the most of it, others, like Iran, resent it. If a wife who sleeps in a separate bed were to begin her day’s discourse by addressing her risen and stretched husband with the angry words, “Keep your hands off my ,” how would you fill in the blank? Not with “settings,” I am sure. But the morning coffee, which some claim indispensable before becoming tolerable company, merely provides its devotees chemical settings.
   At the opening of this novel, for whatever reasons, Deckard responds positively to a “merry little surge” while Iran, seeing him, has “unmerry eyes.” His pajamas are multicolored, yet her eyes are gray. He is surprised to be awake but trying to make the best of consciousness; she resists it all. No wonder they sleep in separate beds. One does not have to credit the reality of the Penfield mood organ to identify with at least one character in this situation. And both, I think, ultimately deserve some sympathy. Even those who may want to be unhappy, Dick implies, seek that self-corrosive condition through no fault of their own. We are what we are, mere corruptible matter, a recognition that drives many, like Hamlet, to wish for sleep (III.1.60).
   John Varley sets Millennium both in our time and in a future so polluted that it has effectively sterilized most of humanity. Through no fault of her own, Louise Baltimore, our protagonist, knows she will die by thirty and along the way lose body parts like a fast-forwarding Biblical leper, yet she is fitter than most of her future contemporaries and so has a coveted job as a body snatcher. Using advanced physics and great piloting skill, technicians from the future open doorways into the past through which the body snatchers race to steal people from our time in an effort to put healthy germplasm to work saving humanity in their time. So as not to cause time travel paradoxes, they open doorways only into situations that have no survivors, like fatal jetliner crashes, and the snatched people are replaced before disaster by corpses from the future so that the snatch will cause no net change in our time. The doorway can stay open for only a limited time, the physics dictates, and it must be kept in perfect alignment with, say, the bathroom of a doomed aircraft flying at 500 miles per hour. The snatchers, disguised as flight attendants, quickly tranquilize the passengers and crew and make the switch. Louise, more cyborg with every passing year, during these frenzied operations loves the chance to breathe thick oxygen, smoke a mouthful of cigarettes at once, and drink in the beauty of hundreds of people with barely blemished skin, full heads of hair, unexamined vigor. In the key snatch of this novel, Louise finds herself moved by the sight of a child, a child she will snatch but could never bear. Back in the future, she is despondent. Her housemate, her sex partner, the tender Sherman “carried me to bed and stroked me gently for a while, then left me alone.” Louise is bitter at her barrenness yet grateful for Sherman’s attention. “That fucking machine is the best friend I ever had” (53). Suddenly we realize, sharing Louise’s acid irony, the double meaning of that vulgarism. How complex, how automated, need a dildo become before one can call it not a machine but a man? How many prostheses – eyeglasses, artificial limbs, morning coffees – need a man rely upon before we call him a machine? What part of us is truly us? What do we mean by “part”?
   Jean-Claude Forest drew humorous cartoons of a spacefaring sexpot named Barbarella. In one we see what is evidently a post-coital moment in some vaguely-defined environment, perhaps a life pod floating in the darkness of space. On the artificial floor lies Barbarella, the sheet across her open legs drawn up only to her hips, her hands gently hiding the nipples of her impossible Playmate breasts from our view, her mane haloing her head, her longlashed eyes closed in satisfaction and her pouty lips parted. Sitting up beside her, knees drawn chestward and the same sheet covering him nearly to the waist, is a sad-faced robot. “Diktor,” Barbarella exults, “you have real style!” “Oh! Madame is too kind…” he replies. “I know my shortcomings… There’s something a bit mechanical about my movements!” Here, I think, we identify not with the happy Barbarella but the hapless Diktor. His very name is ironic. “Diktatur” is German for “dictator,” in the sense of ruler, and “diktieren” means “to dictate,” as a boss would to a secretary (Betteridge). Diktor is neither Diktatur nor dictator but more like the butler, with Barbarella the boss, a “madame” not in the sense of providing prostitutes for men but in the sense of taking what she wants for herself. And what teenage boy, fantasizing about the chance to couple with a sex object like Barbarella, wouldn’t, were he honest, realize, first, that he’s out of his class and, second, that even if she were to claim he was good, it would not be enough. He was not a lover, much less a love, but only someone – some thing – with style. And had he the stamina of a machine and the programming of all the sex experts in the universe, to a voracious voluptuary he could, at best, go through the motions, never achieving the recognition of selfhood, existing always as object himself. How sad. And sad, of course, not merely for the fictional robot Diktor, the towering dick, but for any boy who would entertain the fantasy of being a stud (from the Old English for a “prop, support,” meaning a “post” [OED]).
   From Frankenstein’s monster onward, science fiction offers us characters yearning for love. How bitter that Iran will not allow it. How terrible for Louise Baltimore that her best friend is “only” a machine. Or might that be true for – and of – all of us? Are we all machines, predisposed to trade away some illusory sense of a soul, however dear we hold it, if only we can discover just the right number on our Penfield? In the deepest sense, what does it mean to give oneself in love? To give one’s self in love? Would not Diktor be more comfortable, and our fantasies more comforting, if we could simply accept our mechanical natures? In the domain of science fiction, more than any other, we confront, and have the opportunity to assess, ourselves as love machines.
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