Questions

What do you do when you realize that your whole life, your whole identity, has been a lie? This seemed to be one of the central themes of Moon, but it was a theme that the movie, to me, left unresolved. Obviously, the most immediate answer is to uncover the whole truth, to fight back against the force that had created those lies, and to escape from their influence to reveal the truth to others. As Moon proves, those struggles make a very compelling movie. However, as I watched, I couldn't help thinking about what would happen after the action ended. What happens after the immediate problems have been solved, and you have to go on living the rest of your (albeit short) life, your head full of false memories and emotions, considering the idea that your very existance is a copy, or a lie?

Did Sam do the other clones a favor by restoring a live-feed to Earth? On the one hand, the clones deserve to know the truth. They should not have to live out their short lives in isolation, supported by lies of a family and a future, but is there any actual benefit to knowing the objective truth of the situation? Although the clones of Sam lived a lonely and repetitive existance, they still lived to some extent: they had powerful memories, a friendship with Gerty, love for (and seemingly from) a family, and the expectation that, after his three year contract ends, he will return to normal life. Once the live-feed to Earth is restored, however, the Sams are left with nothing. Their lives, their memories, their expectations, all prove to be a lie, and once the 6th Sam has revealed the operation to the rest of the world, they also have no mission, no new goals, to fill this void. Would they be happier if they continued to live under the lies provided by Lunar Industries? Does happiness based on false perceptions count as actual happiness? Does expected happiness have anything to do with this dilemma? The 5th Sam seems to die with much greater contentment than the previous Sams, because he both knows the truth and knows that the 6th Sam has escaped and will attempt to "make things right," but the later Sams cannot get this sense of satisfaction. The dramatic discovery and escape plot can only occur once. Later Sams must take a more passive approach to accepting their existance.

The movie also leaves the fate of the other hundreds of unactivated clones unanswered, and I think this raises another important moral issue. What should happen to those clones? Should they be left "unactivated"? If they are destroyed, some might consider it to be murder. However, what life can they lead if they are awakened, all of them full of the same memories, love for the same woman, believing that they are, in fact, the same person?

Yet all of these questions might be moot, as the final lines of the movie suggest that many individuals on Earth doubt the 6th Sam's story. Anyone who saw the clone storage facility would be unable to doubt, and so one must wonder if Lunar Industries killed the 7th Sam and destroyed all the remaining clones (or just killed the 7th Sam and reestablished the block on live feed) in order to cover up their secret. In such a situation, did the 6th Sam do them a favor? Is it better to live a lie, or to not live at all?

Moon therefore did not end with a period for me, but with many question marks.

It does not do to dwell on dreams, and forget to live

In The Book of Martha, Octavia Butler presents what she calls her "utopia story" (214). The only place utopia can occur, she suggests in the story and in her afterword, is "in everyone's private, individual dreams" (214). However, I was troubled by this "utopia," as it suggests that true happiness must come at the cost of reality. Martha decrees that everyone "would have their own personal best of all possible worlds during their dreams" (203), but if everyone has their "best possible world" handed to them in dreams, what can possibly motivate them to make a better world in reality? How can society progress, or even survive, when its inhabitants are wrapped up deep in their own imagination?

"Each person will have a private, personal utopia every night" (204), Martha suggests, but the words "private" and "personal" here suggest that this "utopia" is actually very isolating. Each person can play in their ideal fantasy world, but they cannot share it with others. They will make friends, fall in love, have adventures, but always alone, always with figments of their own imagination. God's comment, "Everything is real. It's just not as you see it" (208) and Martha's power to shape God and Heaven (or whatever we want to call the place in which she finds herself) to her own specifications suggests that this loneliness is intentional, that everything in life is both real and a dream, constructed by what a person "sees." "Reality" is formed by each person's perspective, and therefore is always to some extent a figment of their imagination, always a somewhat isolated experience, separate from the experiences of others. Is Martha's suggestion therefore little different from the "reality" that she already inhabits, improved to allow people to taste their own idea of happiness?

"If only I could wake up," Martha whispers, at the start of her story (189), but by the end, she only wants "to forget" (213). From one perspective, Martha therefore undergoes a great change during the course of the story, moving from a desire to experience truth, to the desire to escape it. However, a second perspective suggests that Martha is always filled with the desire to escape unwanted reality. When she whispers, "If only I could wake up," she is aware that her experience is real, but wishes it could be a dream so that she could escape it and return to her more-familiar life of before. Although the desire is framed differently each time, Butler therefore suggests that Martha is always eager to "forget" the unwanted, and turn to a more comforting experience of almost-reality.

Yet will Martha's solution even provide everyone their own private utopia? Her idea relies upon the idea that people know what they want, and will be happy when they get it. Indeed, one might consider Martha's own experience with God as her own dream; as an author, she finds herself able to play God, to shape the world to her liking, to allow people to experience their fantasies. Yet Martha finds that she hates this power in "reality," and ultimately wants to forget the experience. If we consider Martha's experience in this story as one of the dreams that she creates, experiencing "whatever people love to do most... whatever grabs their attention, whatever they desire" (204), it seems that having "whatever you desire" might ultimately be a negative experience, that too much power and influence, even within your own private world, is terrifying. Will Martha's "utopia," like many before it, therefore crumble into dystopia, even in people's dreams? Is total happiness impossible, even when it is lived as a figment of one's imagination? What happens when one's desires are not bounded by reality?

Why the Stuff?

As much as I appreciated the glimpse into Gethenian life with the archival chapters, I found these chapters to be somewhat puzzling. Why were they there in the first place? Part of the work these chapters do within the text is to pull back from Ai's perspective, which is, after all, just another archival document (Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2, if you want to be specific). The narrative that dominates the text (in terms of page numbers), Ai's extended struggle both to survive and to incorporate Gethen into the Ekumen worlds, is but one primary source document. Ai's story can never dominate the reader (in terms of being the only perspective).

I am somewhat reminded of Atwood's essay, "My Life in Science Fiction", where she discusses the importance of the perspective shift that moves the narrative into the past. She poses the essay on Newspeak at the end of 1984 and the epilogue of her own Handmaid's Tale as historically distancing elements that turn these dystopic worlds into "merely a subject for academic analysis" (Paragraph 35, here). Similarly, the narrative form of the (if not really epistolary then somewhat epistolary) Left Hand of Darkness, made up of various archival documents, troubles the dominance of Ai's personal narrative. There is another narrative that can only appear when all of the chapters are read in concert. Sure, it would be easy for Le Guin to publish an edition of this text where the only chapters are Ai's journal, where the text is another first-person narrative of betrayal, redemption, and loss and success--but it isn't. Why isn't it?

Perhaps the biggest change that happens with the introduction of these other materials is, rather than a perspective shift, a perspective loss. Instead of Ai being the avatar of the reader (author!) in the text, guiding our reading and providing the necessary information, he is one of the voices competing shrilly for our attention. We read this not as friends, but as historians, sifting through primary source documents and piecing together the narrative of a conflict that is bigger than Ai and Estraven and the Ekumen worlds. (Okay, sure, you could read it as a friend... *waves hand dismissively*) Though two of the myths and legends are recorded by Ai ( judging by the "G.A" in the subheadings of chapters 4 and 9), they are not integrated into his own journal, but set aside from it. He does not introduce these chapters, and his narrative breaks off cleanly at the end of the previous chapter.

So who has compiled this book, if not Ai? The narrative suggests a historian in the future, perhaps working with a mass of primary source documents, picking out the ones that deal with Gethen and with the question of gender duality-gender binary. The narrative suggests a historian from one of the Ekumen worlds, writing at a time when Gethen seemed to always have been part of the Ekumen, but curious about when it wasn't. Why these documents in particular? Why documents at all? And why not a map? (At least not in my edition; Seth's link to Le Guin's site suggests the same lack.)

I think Ai comes close to answering these questions when he opens the narrative:

"The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact that you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story." (1)

When he says, "you can judge better", he is asking the reader (of his journal) to provide the totalizing narrative gaze that he cannot provide. He is asking the reader to distill from the various elements of the tale a vision of the world in which this tale took place, and what that world means now for the reader.

Reading as Remote

Perhaps because I just read the story last week, I drew many connections between E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” “The Sandman” tells the story of a man who falls in love with an automaton, grapples with a variety of father/creator figures, and destroys the doll and himself in the process. From a superficial level at least, these basic plot points correspond well with components of “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” Delphi is repeatedly referred to as a doll, and she certainly shares many qualities with one – a lack of agency and real life – but I’m also interested in drawing out the connection a little further to gain a different perspective on Tiptree’s work.

In the Gothic literature class (COM 372/ENG 303) in which we read “The Sandman,” we focused on “The Uncanny,” which Freud describes (using “The Sandman” as one of his primary examples) as the experience of something that is simultaneously familiar but foreign, which leads to discomfort. Freud focuses on the Uncanny in relation to “the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes,” which is represented in “The Sandman” by repeated eye loss imagery stemming from the male protagonist’s traumatic (and possibly imagined) experience of a father’s friend attempting to blind him. Reading back through “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” I found a lot of imagery of the eye or obstructed vision, going back to the beginning of P. Burke’s story. Her initial description includes the note that when she smiles, her jaw “almost bites her left eye out” (44), and the characters conclude that Delphi has died by observing her eyes (77). Ayse hinted at the fact that Delphi doesn’t speak with her own voice. Once she commits to living remotely through Delphi, P. Burke cannot see the world through her own eyes, either.

While “The Sandman” focuses on the perspective of the man who falls in love with a an automaton, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” instead provides the perspectives of the “doll” herself and shows the limitations on those perspectives, also reflecting the reader’s narrowed view. We experience the world of the story by proxy as well. I think this idea of a shifted, obstructed point of view moving from the male world to female one can also bring out some themes within the work. I don’t agree with all of Freud’s explanations, but it’s interesting to note that he connected the fear of losing ones eyes to a fear of castration. This idea is complicated when the character losing the power of sight is a woman.

I was particularly interested in moments in which the language suggested a duality of perspectives. For example, when P. Burke emerges from the transformation process that allows for her connection to Delphi, the narrator explains, “And here is our girl, looking – If possible, worse than before” (47). That pause in the middle of the sentence allows readers to imagine P. Burke as someone who looks and is looked at. She has a perspective as well, one that changes when she becomes fully engaged in her Remote.

This ability to look through someone else’s eyes comes at a cost – P. Burke must end her own life in most senses of the word. Though this story deals with it very directly, I noticed the theme of seeing beyond the limitations of one’s own life throughout the works we read this week. From a pessimistic perspective, many of the stories deal with the inevitability of death from the beginning. As Seth mentioned, “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” is certainly a foreboding title. Even before the opening sentence of that story, a sense of ending pervades. “The Girl Who was Plugged In” is also narrated by someone speaking to people who are already presumably dead, telling tales of a future they won’t quite live to see. I think the use of the term “zombies” is particularly apt here. Through the act of narration, and the taking on of a different perspective, the readers become, in a sense, undead. It ties into last week’s discussion of reading as a form of time travel that can take us further than expected. Reading becomes a means of creating a Remote – gaining access to a world we otherwise wouldn’t see.