Author: staceymeeker

In recalling the history of Generative Anthropology and its intellectual grounding in the theories of René Girard and Jacques Derrida, Eric Gans says that he wanted to “add the element of paradox to the Girard-Derrida dialectic as the primary constituents to the originary hypothesis” (Gans 2020(a)). By thinking paradoxically, Generative Anthropology has been able to bridge some disciplinary and philosophical gaps. Thanks to the concept of the oscillation between the communal and individual scene, for example, the minimal hypothesis helps us think beyond the individual monadic mind. The scenic idea gives a helpful and concrete realization to the recognition that we are both inside and outside our minds, entangled with other minds. This inside/outside problematic is captured by other modern existential philosophers, such as in Levinas, under the guise of the Other, or as Mitsein (Being-With) in Heidegger’s existential philosophy, or through Sartre’s being-for-others.[1]

Another such disjunction that GA can bridge is that between the physical and the mental, or an action and its symbolic representation. This is made possible by the paradoxical phenomenon of desire. Exceeding that of animal appetite, which exists in the material realm of physiological mechanisms, human desire, through its paradoxical structure, opens up the space of freedom, where the first sign can appear. In a way, the fact that GA brings the physical and the mental together is self-explanatory, even tautological. That is what the originary hypothesis aspires to do, in the first place: if not directly “heal” the Cartesian divide between mind[2] and matter, at least bring the two together conceptually from an anthropological perspective. Indeed, GA theorizes that the material process of converting food to energy becomes sidetracked and results instead in an immaterial symbolic system. In other words, a limited energetic resource transforms into an infinitely reproducible system of signs. The paradox that connects the physical and the symbolic is that of mimetic desire. Expressed as a logical contradiction, the paradox of desire can be summarized by stating that the fulfillment of one’s desire is “possible only under conditions of non-fulfillment” (Gans, 1985, p. 28). In anthropological terms, we can say that the psychological tension of being both attracted to an appetitive object and repelled by its danger (experienced by pre-humans at the moment of mimetic crisis) is resolved by the invention of the sign, which “permits the sharing of the unsharable” (Gans, 2020 (a)). On the animal level of consciousness, this tension is not paradoxical. In fact, paradox does not exist on the physical plane—it is “a property of systems of representation” Gans (2017). The contradiction between desire and its renunciation is solved “on the next level,” so to speak. It is solved on the level of symbolic thinking, achieved through the exclusively human phenomenon of deferral. Instead of being more like a distancing arm, deferral achieves a Moebius-strip-like twist in orientation, which I would like to reflect on further in this paper.

The place where I would like to start my investigation is the notion of energy as a convenient abstraction from physics, which theorizes how something actually happens (energy is the ability to perform work). The energy of the appetitive instinct would have been spent on acquiring an appetitive object, which would have been converted to replacement energy for maintaining necessary physiological functions in the organism. By analogy, it would not be far-fetched to think of mimetic desire as having energetic potential: a desire, at least potentially, can result in physical action. Eric Gans has also talked about deferral in terms of energy while, for example, discussing the “creation of a sign-world outside the temporal experience of the life-world” and writing that language and representation are used “like any deferral of worldly action, to store up energy for the sake of future conflict” (Gans, 2015). When considering the aesthetic paradox (the experience of oscillation between the sign and its referent), Gans states that the “circulation of psychic energy between the original appetitive drive and the “deferred” scene of representation is the source of human creativity” (Gans 2020(b)). Is this just a way of speaking or should the implications of this figure of speech be teased out?

This phrase, namely, psychic energy, has strong historical associations with the psychoanalytic vocabulary, and perhaps we can take our cue from Freud, who has conceived his drives or instincts in energetic terms: “the mind . . . must be driven by an energy of some kind,” as summarized by Mark Solms in his article “Revision of Drive Theory” (1036). Although mimetic desire differs from Freud’s drives in that it crosses the barrier from the instinctual to the symbolic realm, they share the underlying conceptualization of being “engine”-like and supplying necessary forces for converting some kind of “inner pressure” to physical action. According to Freud, a drive “appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (qtd. Solms, 1034). The “mental” is not explicitly or even implicitly equated with the symbolic here: the question of representation is not thematized.[3] Another similarity between Freud’s drives and mimetic desire is that they both operate unconsciously. According to Solms, Freud held the view that drive energies are unconscious in themselves but, on the outer level of perception, they become accessible through affects, which we, however, can mistake, conflate, and misconstrue as to their energetic sources (1044). Mimetic desire, if we adopt a Girardian view, is also unconscious. According to Girard, it is a mechanism, not an act of volition, “a generative . . . principle which works unconsciously in culture and society” (Williams 294). Generative Anthropology, in opposition to Girard’s mimetic theory, puts a premium on the representational aspect of mimetic desire—and indeed, the reason we can talk about it and identify it is because we have conscious access to it, and our consciousness thinks in symbols—but for the sake of my topic, I would like to bring focus to the mechanistic part of it as something preconscious and energetic (as mechanisms are activated by energy).[4]

In what follows, I would like to discuss Freud’s idea of the death drive and the understanding of energy that it invites, not only in order to demonstrate its anthropological pertinence and hence Freud’s good anthropological instincts but in order to show how it can add more depth to our understanding of deferral and paradox. Freud’s death drive is a mysterious, anti-intuitive notion, Why would biological organisms, whose expressed purpose is self-preservation, be driven to self-annihilation? How could nature create such a suicidal impulse that goes against life’s celebrated tenacity in the face of natural challenges? My brief review of relevant literature reveals that the death drive, and the drive theory, in general, have been questioned or neglected (or attempted to be reconceptualised in the light of paradigm shifts in cognitive theory) by psychoanalysts, biologists, and cognitive scientists. For example, Andrew Holowchak and Michael Lavin write in their 2015 paper “Beyond the Death Drive: The Future of ‘Repetition’ and ‘Compulsion to Repeat’ in Psychopathology”: “Whatever the ultimate status of Freud’s final dual drive theory,[5] until it is reworked at length, it has ceased to have a central role in modern psychoanalytic theory” (663). Similarly, in his “Revision of Drive Theory,” Mark Solms insists that “All drives are self-preservative or preservative of the species; there is no death drive at work in the mind” (1033).

How was it then that Freud incorporated this seemingly anti-intuitive idea into his metapsychology? In their two articles (2018, 2020), Jessica Tran The et al. give an overview of Freud’s scientific background and commitments. In opposition to the popular French school of thinking, inspired by the ideas of Claude Bernard, who believed that physiology was an autonomous discipline ruled by physiological laws that are specific to it, Freud was familiar with the German school of physiological thinking, which was dominated by the ideas of physiologists with a physics background. As the authors put it: “Freud’s scientific landscape [was] entirely dominated by the physics elevated to the rank of an ideal science” (2018). What this meant was adherence to the strict deterministic model of natural laws as they were known at the time, implying that “all natural phenomena must be brought back to the movement of material particles endowed with invariant driving force, dependent only on their spatial locations” and “the physic-chemical functioning of the living organism is subject to the same laws as inanimate matter, and must be studied within the same terms” (Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, qtd. in 2018). Emil du Bois-Reymond, one of the founding members of the German school (despite the name), put this in very strong terms: “No other forces than the common physical and chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot currently be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical-mathematical method or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the forces of attraction and repulsion” (qtd. in Solms, p. 1035). In contradistinction to this, Bernard, who ostensibly disavowed the ideas of vitalism and affirmed “strict physico-chemical determinism of the vital phenomena,” did nonetheless admit “the existence of an undeniable singularity of the vital aspect amongst all other physico-chemical aspects.” (2018). In other words, in the German school, scientists believed that all complex physiological phenomena must be reducible to the most elemental physical laws; at the same time, the French school, while believing that such reduction was possible in principle, maintained that it is not necessary to perform it because physiological phenomena are subject to higher-level, physiological, laws. One could just leave it at that and not be compelled to pin down “the specific way or form of [the biological forces’] action.”

Interestingly, from our modern perspective, Bernard was closer to truth than the scientists of the German school and Freud. What modern science and scientific philosophy discovered, and what Freud and his contemporaries were not aware of, was the phenomenon of emergence. With the growth of complexity or some changing conditions, a system may develop new properties and behaviors described by new sets of regularities. What is also noteworthy is that this change does not occur gradually, but as an event—a jump or shift to the new level. Thus when there are too many cars on the road, the traffic will stop behaving as an atomistic phenomenon and may, in some cases, start obeying the laws of fluid dynamics, i.e. flow like a liquid. Emergent phenomena do not abolish the laws operant on lower levels. The laws of physics and chemistry are not invalidated on the level of biology, but their influence is not conceptually transparent and directly deducible: it would be very difficult to study the properties of blood circulation by following the behavior of individual atoms. In other words, Freud’s assumption that the laws of physics should be directly transferable to the level of psychic phenomena was wrong.

But it is this assumption that became one of the factors that contributed to his theory of the death drive. Another source is his patchwork (internally inconsistent, in my opinion) theory of energy that guides human behavior. He was influenced by Newtonian thinking,[6] specifically, by Newton’s First Law stating that an object that is not interfered with will stay at rest or, if moving, continue to move with constant velocity. In other words, it will move by inertia. Freud connected it to the “principle of neuronal inertia,” that is the idea that “neurons tend to divest themselves of [energy]” (qtd. in Tran The et al. 2020). There is no such concept of divestiture of energy in the Newtonian paradigm; this is where Freud’s curious blending of physical paradigms intervenes and causes conceptual confusion.  But for Freud, the mechanism of drives would be the discharge of excessive energy in order to maintain the organism in the state of equilibrium (we are talking here about psychic energy, which works by analogy with the physical energy). The reason a system tends toward an equilibrium is the economic “principle of constancy,” which maintains that a living system must keep its level of excitation constant and get rid of buildups of energy. The pleasure principle, which dictates that we experience displeasure when tension, and thus energy, accumulates, and, on the contrary, pleasure when the accumulated energy is discharged, works in concert with the principle of constancy. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud writes: “[the] pleasure principle . . . is a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation constant or to keep it as low as possible” (336).

The question that immediately presents itself is, which is it? “Entirely free,” “constant,” or “as low as possible” are three different things and presuppose three different energy-exchange models. Energy being kept constant sounds like the familiar model of homeostasis, which, applied to an organism, means that an organism strives to preserve itself within the right range of temperatures and monitors its energy stores in order in order to protect itself and preserve viability. When it is in a danger zone, it self-regulates. Ironically, the model is conceptually similar to Claude Bernard’s understanding of physiology on an autonomous level of analysis with its “singular vital aspect,” i.e., the life-preserving aspect. According to Tran The et al. (2018), Claude Bernard anticipated the concept of homeostasis, which came later. But the logic behind a homeostatic model is that of energy being depleted and replenished. In Freud’s model, there is excessive energy that must be released, and it is this excessive energy that is the engine behind drives.Freud seems to be working with two different, not easily reconcilable, models of energy circulation, one based of energy deficit, which triggers action, the other on energy excess, which does the same. If the economic logic of the principle of constancy is prevalent, and the energy must be kept within a certain range, and energy lost must be extracted from some outer source, where does all the excessive energy come from? Is it like saying that cars somehow get excessive energy that they must release? On the other hand, if the dominant operational principle of a functioning organism is that of the discharge of energy, one can similarly ask what prevents full discharge and feeds the homeostatic mechanism.

Another confusion comes from Freud’s suggestion that a system will have a tendency to free itself “entirely from excitation.” Freud later frames it as a so-called Nirvana principle, “which would be entirely in the service of the death instincts, whose aim is to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic life” (“The Economic Problem of Masochism” p. 414).[7] The death instinct is thus connected to the organic matter’s desire to return to the inorganic state. Thus Newton’s law of inertia becomes neuronal inertia, which leads to death. Here Freud’s mistake, to go back to the previous discussion, is in assuming that Newtonian concepts are transferable to the domain of the conservation of energy, to which the principle of constancy closely relates. This is, in fact, not so. Even though it is common to discuss Newton’s laws and laws of conservation in the same breath, and describe Newton’s Third Law (“action is equal to reaction”) as the law of the conservation of force, technically, this is incorrect. Newton’s laws encapsulate atomistic and local regularities about point masses. Thermodynamic laws[8] are statistical laws describing ensembles of particles. And even in their earliest, pre-statistical, formulations they adopted a holistic view of quantities. Temperature and heat exchange were considered in relation to enclosed containers and calculated for systems as wholes. Newton’s laws describe events that occur at isolated locations and involve individual objects, not systems. One cannot derive the law of the conservation of energy from the Newtonian paradigm.

Even though the death drive neither naturally follows from the energetic exchange model nor from Newton’s laws, Freud decided to include it as part of his dualistic idea of drives, the life drive posed in an opposition to the death drive. This dualistic presupposition is made on purely speculative, metaphysical grounds because there is no concrete empirical foundation to support it.[9] Influenced by the ideas of Hermann von Helmholtz, the leading figure of the German school, who believed that the paradigm for all natural laws is the antinomy of the two forces, those of attraction and repulsion (such as we encounter within magnetism) (Solms 1040; Tran The et al. 2018). Various instincts and impulses, such as libido, narcissistic tendencies, aggression and masochism, are commandeered by these two larger forces. Ideally, even the death drive will be co-opted by the life drive in the service of self-preservation, but it is not entirely clear. Another, seemingly irrational, behavioral phenomenon that led Freud to adopt the idea of the death drive was a behavior he observed in some of his patients, a compulsion to repeat certain actions or rehearse certain painful memories that appeared purely neurotic and not beneficial to the patients’ survival. In addition to reasonable instances, those pertaining to the repeatition of pleasant experiences, “we come now to a new and remarkable fact,” he writes, “namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 290-291). Mysteriously, “no lesson has been learned from the old experience of these activities having led only to unpleasure” and “the impression [some normal people] give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power” (292). In Freud’s mind, the cause of this strange phenomenon can be some fundamental destructive force. Thus the empirical phenomenon of repetition compulsion discovered by him is a major factor in convincing him of the reality of the death drive.

In spite of the irrationality of repetition compulsion, which could be seen as an outer expression of some underlying phenomenon, such as the death drive, the support for the existence of the latter has been shown to be flimsy. To recapitulate, the three reasons I offered for the problematic grounding of this hypothesis are the incompatibility between energy-as-deficit and energy-as-excess models, which are both mobilized in his drive theory; the incompatibility between the Newtonian and energetic paradigms, again, deployed seamlessly as one conceptual field, from which he draws the idea of inertia; and the metaphysical nature of his assumption of two fundamental opposing forces. But despite these and other doubts that the dual theory of the drives raises, due to which it has been abandoned by a number of researchers in the field, there has also been an attempt by some to resurrect it by aligning it with the theory of entropy, as expressed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.[10] The Second Law originated from an empirical observation that energy (the quantity used to produce work) does not convert to useful work in its entirety. Part of it dissipates as heat. Thus we can never use all the energy we have invested into a thermodynamic process (as fuel, for example): there is always some loss. This process is described as the growth of entropy, entropy being a thermodynamic quantity measuring how much energy cannot be converted to useful work. Associating Freud’s Nirvana principle, the desire to return to the inorganic, and the thermodynamic energy loss appears as a fruitful idea to some cognitive scientists and psychoanalysts.

There are several problems with this. To begin with, returning to our discussion of emergent orders of complexity and new levels of description, the thermodynamic principle of energy loss and dissipation exists on a different level than physiological descriptions of the functioning of an organism. Whether we understand the energetic economy as a homeostatic system that needs to maintain a minimum energy level by either replenishing depleted energy or getting rid of excess energy, we are talking about a coherent system that is built up by parts that coordinate with each other. But the loss of energy in the system and its eventual coming to a halt (reaching the inorganic state) is not itself part of the energy-circulation cycle. As mentioned above, the dissipation of energy is an empirical observation not adducible to a known law. It remains somewhat mysterious, its physical and causal nature not being fully understood.[11] As Thomas Rabeyron says in “Beyond the Death Drive”: “Biological organisms have to struggle against [the] tendency of matter towards disorganization, which implies an increasing degree of entropy that could lead them to death[12]” (880). In other words, the tendency to increase entropy belongs to physical matter and not to the homeostatic system as system. The relationship between the two is uncertain; entropic loss is not a property of the homeostatic system itself. We can certainly not equate this property of matter external to the functioning of the system with a fundamental drive forming one-half of the dual drive underpinning the workings of the psyche.

In connection with the attempt to explain the death drive through the physical notion of entropy, there is another connection that is being made, that between the death drive as entropy and a very popular “free-energy principle” by Karl Friston. Before I introduce it, I must mention that we are now talking about the level of explanation of dynamical, self-organizing systems. It will take too much time to give even a brief overview of the theory of self-organizing systems, and I will just say a few things to give some context to my discussion of the free-energy principle. In general, these are enclosed systems where order arises spontaneously from local interactions. In some contexts, they can seem as self-starting and self-perpetuating because the causal order goes in two directions: bottom-up and top-down (think of an example of physiology affecting the behavior of an organism in the bottom-up fashion while the environment affecting the way genes are expressed in the top-down direction). It is suggested by many neuroscientists that these self-organizing systems, of which humans are one example, interact with their environment in a predictive fashion.[13] This implies that instead of the older, more familiar model of an organism receiving signals and producing reaction, organisms’ thoughts, reactions, and behavior do not just respond to received signals but anticipate, predict, and forestall what is to come (an example would be a player who predicts the trajectory of a ball and starts running toward it in response to a feint). This type of programming allows us to learn. We want to make correct predictions and not be surprised by our environment so that we develop habits beneficial to survival.[14]

Karl Friston adopts this predictive model and combines it with a thermodynamic view, stating that because “the physiology of biological systems can be reduced almost entirely to their homeostasis,” it is important that they “must have low entropy”(127). “The free-energy principle,” according to Friston, “says that any self-organizing system that is at equilibrium with its environment must minimize its free energy,” which is what keeps the entropy low. This is a principle of self-preservation, which is based on a theoretical speculation, not an empirical observation that can be demonstrated. Just as Freud’s understanding of energy goes back to Helmholtz, so does Friston’s. For Helmholtz, there were two kinds of energy, bound energy that was not available for work and free energy that could be converted to work. Free energy, in other words, is a good thing: we want to have it. But in Friston’s work it becomes the opposite, the entropic energy that cannot be used and serves as the measure of disorder, and so you want to have less of it.[15] Friston writes that the “defining characteristic of biological systems is that they maintain their states and form in the face of a constantly changing environment” and thus there must be some resistance to “a tendency to disorder” (127).

It has become a common phrasing to talk about thermodynamic entropy as a measure of disorder. But, in fact, it does not measure disorder; it simply measures the quantity of energy that is not available to do anything useful with. Arieh Ben-Naim calls this phrase a metaphor when used in relation to entropy, and not a real description. And while many people think that equating entropy and disorder was first done by Ludwig Boltzmann, who gave a statistical interpretation to entropy, Ben-Naim says that this is not so (19-20). The statistical interpretation looks at distinct positions and states of molecules instead of holistic characteristics, such as temperature. But it does not tell you which of these individual configurations is more orderly than the other.[16] For this, you need context: something can be seen as more or less orderly depending on what is being measured. When we speak in terms of order or disorder, we are no longer seeing the world in terms of energy or Newtonian interactions; we are seeing it through the lens of “information.” And this is the question: can we seamlessly blend the theoretical apparatuses of the two domains, energy and information?  There is, in fact, such a thing as information entropy, which has a different provenance, coming from Claude Shannon’s measure of information, which is “a measure of the uncertainty of data in an information channel” (Kish, Ferry p. 1). This concept is indeed relevant to the paradigm of predictive processing. We want to know that our predictive statistical models are precise; we do not want to be uncertain or surprised. So it is true then, were we able to conflate the informational and thermodynamic entropies and treat them as two sides of the same coin, our problems would be solved. It would mean that we have found an elegant formalism that can accommodate both the mental aspect of prediction and the energetic “engine” of its underlying physiology. Unfortunately, we cannot. To be sure, it so happens that both quantities are described by the same formula, which leads to an easy substitution of terms when applying “a measure of disorder” to thermodynamic entropy. But some physicists point out that this is not correct. In addition to Ben-Naim, L.B. Kish and D.K. Ferry, in their vividly titled article “Information Entropy and Thermal Entropy: Apples and Oranges,” insist that “efforts to find general physical principles that interrelate changes in the information entropy and the thermal entropy in physical systems are invalid” (11). In other words, Friston’s free energy principle might not have solved the question of connecting the physical to the mental.

What remains is the question of whether his free-energy principle can be used as a foundation of Freud’s dual drive theory. Some psychoanalysts think this is the case.[17] In Solms’s estimation, “When Friston applied his free energy principle to the nervous system, he caused a revolution, the full effects of which have not yet been felt, at least not by nonspecialists, but it has resulted in his having become (objectively) the most influential neuroscientist in the world” (1956). Tran The et al. find in the free-energy principle a satisfactory explanation of the anti-intuitive notion of the death drive.

Based on these new ideas, the ‘death drive’ might be recast as a natural tendency of certain out-of-equilibrium systems to reach a steady state characterized by a minimization of free energy. Indeed, there have been attempts to connect Freudian notions of free (unbound) energy to the variational free energy that figures in theoretical neurobiology and statistical mechanics  (2020).

But if the death drive is simply a tendency to reach an equilibrium (and maintain, I presume, some homeostatic minimum of energy necessary for survival) then in what way is it a death drive? The paradoxical content of Freud’s life-denying death drive is thus lost. I therefore find attempts to rehabilitate Freud’s dual-drive theory by appealing to Friston’s free-energy principle unconvincing.

I have tried to show that the death drive has either fallen out of favor, been dismissed, or re-interpreted to fit the latest cognitive science models. My main objection when it comes to the latter is that these models are based on energetic and informational dynamical systems that are driven by the logic of self-preservation (to repeat, the destructive vector of entropy is not part of the homeostatic cycle, it is a property of the underlying matter). They are neither self-contradictory nor paradoxical, but are ultimately geared toward survival. Even the predictive conundrum mentioned in footnote (14) of two competing exigencies, that of predicting accurately and its opposite, that of making mistakes in order to stay adaptable, cannot be said to express a paradox but rather tension or a balancing movement.

There is one more candidate for the death drive mechanism that we must consider, that of addictive behavior. Addiction does appear like an irrational self-harming behavior that is in opposition to the natural biological goal of survival through self-preservation but also procreation (an addict cannot properly take care of his or her children). Neuroscience, however, can accommodate such maladaptive addictive habits without resorting to paradox. For example, Mark Miller et al. propose a theory of addiction that speculates that the brains of addicts are too sensitive, too precise at predicting.  They suggest that “addiction can prove harmful to the person because as their addiction progressively takes hold, the addict comes to embody a predictive model of the environment that fails to adequately attune them to a volatile, dynamic environment” (1). In other words, addicts are hyper-focused on predicting correctly what the next stimulus from the environment will be, and thus on eliminating prediction errors and developing an automatic and habitual way of responding. But if something changes in the environment and they start receiving unexpected signals, they will not be prepared for what life will throw at them, which might lead to harm or even death. Drugs can affect the brain in such a way as to deceive it about its prediction error rates. “Addictive substances make it seem to the organism as if error had been reduced but sadly for the addict this is just an illusion. The result in the long-run is almost inevitably a greater amount of uncertainty arising from a loss of sensitivity to the wider concerns of life” (9). The above analysis shows that addiction can be unproblematically inscribed into a schema of neural circuitry acting toward self-preservation. When the predictive mechanism misfires, it is the matter of simple miscalibration and error, not an underlying orientation toward death.[18]

But even though Freud’s metaphysical assumption about dual opposing drives is not supported by evidence, and the effort to incorporate it into recent theories of cognition is not satisfying, as I hope to have shown, I do not believe that it should be dismissed. The death drive as Freud theorizes it might not exist, but something like it must exist. He is completely correct, in my opinion, to intuit a paradox in human behavior that is not explicitly adaptive in biological and energetic terms, although it might be adaptive on a higher level of human existence as a symbolic species. One way it may express itself is in irrational behavior, masochism, self-harm, or self-sabotage. Changing direction, perhaps rather abruptly, I will now look at a short story where self-sabotage is foregrounded in a humorous way, and this will lead me to the final segment, where I will contemplate the anthropological foundations of the death drive in GA terms.

The story comes from the collection Ours (Nashi), written by a U.S.-based, émigré Russian writer, Sergey Dovlatov, an early practitioner of autofiction, published in English in 1989. This collection of stories paints literary portraits of his family members and their vicissitudes under communism. The story in question is called “My First Cousin” and tells the story of Dovlatov’s only cousin, the only child of his mother’s only sister, with Dovlatov being an only child as well. “Cousin” in Russian is often rendered as “brother,” so the Russian reader does not understand until later in the story that the main character is actually a cousin. This and the unique brother-like relationship between the protagonist and the narratee, both being only children of sisters without other siblings, emphasizes their mimetic-double relationship, which we discover as the story unfolds. The cousin, Boris, is a couple of years older than Sergey, and is supposed to be a role model because of his brilliance, which makes Sergey somewhat jealous.

He was an exemplary Soviet boy—a top student, a football player, and a collector of scrap metal. He kept a notebook in which he wrote down wise sayings. He planted a birch tree in his courtyard. In the drama club he always played the Young Guard.

I was younger but behaved worse. He was always being held up to me as an example. He was upright, modest, and well read. I was always being told, Borya does well in school, helps his parents, is good at sports. Borya won the school chemistry competition. Borya nursed a wounded nestling. Borya put together a detector receiver (to this day I have no idea what this is) (77).

After this lavish description, Dovlatov changes gears: “suddenly something unreal happened. Something beyond description. I almost have no words. To put it briefly, my cousin Borya pissed on the school director,” having climbed on a windowsill (77-78).

We never get a clear idea why he does it. He answers the narrator’s question by saying: “When I saw [the director] that day, I realized it was now or never!,” (78) and the reader is no wiser.

After the incident, Borya loses his chance to graduate with honors, but eventually his transgressions are forgotten, and he is accepted into a theater institute, where he studies the history of theater. Again, everything is going very well. During his studies, he has earned a reputation of being politically trustworthy.

An impeccable Komsomol dossier trailed after him: he worked on virgin-lands projects and commanded a construction unit; took an active part in a squad that assisted the police; was a terror to petit-bourgeois thinking and all vestiges of capitalism in the consciousness of the people (p.79).

His career continues to rise. Things go so well that

It was delicately suggested to him that he join the Party. He hesitated. It seemed to him he wasn’t worthy . . . And then, suddenly, my cousin once again distinguished himself. I don’t know how to put it any better. Briefly, Borya committed twelve robberies (80).

The reason for these robberies is not given very clearly either. It may be an opportunistic, not premeditated, crime. He and his friend have apparently robbed twelve tourist buses that transport foreign tourists and stolen valuable items that were in scarce supply in the Soviet Union.

Boris is given a sentence of three years. While in jail, he asks his cousin, the protagonist, to send him some self-improvement literature, such as “Teach Yourself French,” “Teach Yourself German,” or “Learn to Play the Guitar.” The Dovlatov character has, in turn, been getting reports from his cousin. “My cousin wrote that he had been appointed an orderly. Then a brigadier. And finally, chief administrator in charge of the bath house. . . As a career it was dizzying. And to be moving up in a labor camp was extraordinarily difficult” (82).

After he is released, he gets a job at a film studio as a light technician, but he does not stay in this position long. Again, he starts climbing a career ladder, and soon becomes an assistant director. His criminal past is forgotten. He is promised to be able to direct his own feature, and the studio’s communists beg him to join the Communist Party. Boris’s future looks very bright. But then again something happens. He inexplicably starts drinking and socializing with suspicious characters. During one drinking episode, he runs over and kills a policeman. He is sent to prison again. And so on…

In parallel with the cousin narrative (but somewhat in the background), we are following the story of the narrator.  Partly we already know his life circumstances from numerous other auto-fictional stories, and we just fill in some blanks. Pieced together, his story is much more “normal” than the absurd narrative of the cousin, for whom he serves as a foil. There are ups and downs, some humorous episodes of his own self-sabotage, but they are less extreme than those of his cousin’s. Overall, his life goes from worse to better, from being a dissident to being allowed to emigrate to the U.S. and becoming a somewhat successful writer. But partly we also learn new information about the narrator from this story. For example, while he was drafted into the military police as a young man, he was made to serve as a prison guard. And, ironically, one of his stints was as a guard of his brother’s prison camp. “So I was a guard. And Borya was a prisoner. And it even came about that I stood guard over my cousin. True, not for very long.  I don’t really want to write about it. Otherwise everything would come out sounding overliterary, like Mikhail Sholokhov’s Tales from the Don [civil war stories. M.L.]” (83). Their situations are now reversed. When they were kids, Borya, the older, would protect him and bring him sweets, but now it is the younger brother/cousin who is guarding the older. Recalling to mind the Biblical idea of being his brother’s keeper, which the narrator both ironically affirms and undermines, the story brings into focus the mimetic nature of their relationship.

But does the story demonstrate the operation of the death drive? I would say, yes, both thematically and narratively. First of all, all the acts of self-sabotage are violent or aggressive acts, from peeing on the principal’s head from a high-storey window, to robbing tourists, to killing a policeman. By the end of the story, “he had once again begun to drink and get into fights in restaurants. He was threatened with being laid off from work. It was as though he could live only in confinement” (97). This might be a stretch, but I would claim that even the genre of autofiction itself is a species of violence. In autofiction, you are narrating your autobiography but without the responsibility of telling the truth that a real autobiography would require. Instead, you claim the freedom of fictional writing by freely inventing biographical facts about characters who have real-life counterparts. Autofictional narratives frequently arouse ire from the people whose depiction takes too many liberties, and this is why the choice to write in the autofictional genre can be seen as an act that incites scapegoating and violence. In this case, we can say that the author scapegoats his cousin, making him a caricature figure. Despite the amusing nature of the story, it is written in a dark genre.

The motivations of the hero of the story remain obscure and somewhat mysterious, as mentioned before. He never justifies doing irrational, self-harming things. We can guess that the reason might be that he does not want to join the Communist Party, which a further rise in his career would necessitate (you could not reach a very high position in the Soviet Union without proving yourself to be “politically trustworthy”), and so he sabotages himself at every juncture. This interpretation is supported by the first sentence of the story: “Life has turned my first cousin into a criminal. It seems to me he was lucky. Otherwise, he would inevitably have become a high-ranking Party functionary” (75). But if so, there is no indication of Boris’ sabotaging himself consciously. In any case, we have evidence of a patently unconscious, self-destructive behavior that vitiates the injunction of thriving.

The story thematically captures something irrational about human behavior, some tendencies that are of no benefit to those that exhibit them. Although the action in the story is caricatured for comic  and political effects (to show the absurdity of life under communism), this phenomenon is also something we can recognize from everyday life— it is a real phenomenon that does not follow cognitive science models of the psyche based on self-preservation. To understand what it is, I suggest that we also look at the story not only through the lens of plot and theme but through that of narrativity as well, i.e., from the perspective of the telling, and not only the told. We know that stories are told retrospectively. The narrators already know what happens before they start their story-telling. Some narrative strategies produce the effect of an intrusive narrator, the narrator who “reads” with the narratee and anticipates the audience’s reactions, commenting on or preempting them. In this story, we happen to have an intrusive narrator, who is the authorial figure, Sergey Dovlatov. He sounds apologetic as he anticipates the surprise, perhaps shock, the reader will experience on learning what the hero of the story has done: “And suddenly something unreal happened. Something beyond description. I almost have no words” or “And then, suddenly, my cousin once again distinguished himself. I don’t know how to put it any better.”  Not only does he know what is going to happen, but he feels responsible: it is as if he and the main character, his cousin, are one, which would support the mimetic-double reading.

I propose to look at the narrator-narratee dynamic as a narrator-narratee “system,” in which the narrator and narratee are “coupled” with each other. This coupling, I believe, characterizes narrative thinking as a phenomenon that can be traced to the scene of origin. The participant who first withdraws his gesture of appropriation and converts it to the gesture of designation must foresee the potential outcome of a violent contestation for the desired object as the result of a breakdown of hierarchical order. The cognitive structures that make possible the issuance of the first sign are also necessary and sufficient for the origin of narrative thinking, where the split of consciousness between the “narrator” and “narratee” is thematized. The first ostensive sign that is understood by the entire community is a mini-narrative: it tells a cautionary tale about a potential violent future. The anticipating consciousness (of each participant, of a community as a whole) “returns” from the future, as it were, as the consciousness of the narrator, while a part of it stays in the present as the consciousness of the narratee. Indeed, story-telling is a communal phenomenon. Every story that we tell others we also tell to ourselves, turning ourselves into a narratee. And symmetrically, every time we listen to a story, we join the narrator by anticipating what is to come. This implies that we oscillate constantly between the perspectives of the narrator and narratee.

The coupling between the two creates the condition of compulsion. The narrator already knows what is going to happen, and so the future cannot be escaped. When Dovlatov’s narrator starts his story by revealing that “Life has turned my first cousin into a criminal. It seems to me he was lucky. Otherwise, he would inevitably have become a high-ranking Party functionary,” he imparts his knowledge from a retrospective point of view. Life is fate in this story, and fate is providential because it has already calculated what would be the best life path in this fictional world.  The compulsive aspect of narrative configuration and its Freudian echoes have been discussed by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, 1984. I addressed this topic in more detail in a couple of previous articles,[19] but I will briefly summarize it. There is a compelling aspect to narrating both from the narrator’s and narratee’s perspective. The narratee could be spellbound by suspense, by becoming deeply engrossed in the story because of other compelling aspects, such as characterization or language. But the narrator (surprisingly, perhaps) is also compelled to tell his story, obeying, as Brooks suggests, “the desire to be heard, recognized, understood” (54). This is one of the reasons it is difficult to refrain from telling secrets: a story formulated on our private scene is a story that simultaneously exists on the communal scene of representation and “demands” to be voiced. The narratee and narrator exist inseparably from each other in the performative moment of now.

The compulsion to tell and listen can be metaphorized as expressions of the death drive. The narratee caught in the suspense experience is in the grip of what Brooks calls “narrative desire,” which is paradoxical. This is “the paradox of narrative plot as the reader consumes it: [it is] diminishing as it realizes itself, leading to an end that is the consummation (as well as the consumption) of its sense-making” (52). In other words, the narratee wants to get to the end to know what happens but also does not want to come to the end because he wants to prolong his reading experience: “the ultimate determinants of meaning  lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end” (52). Put this way, narrative desire is the death drive. It is not some homeostatic condition it wants to go back to. It actually wants to come to the end of the reading experience—kill, extinguish it. Brooks uses a very helpful metaphor for this paradox to help our minds to grapple with it. It is the metaphor of Scheherazade and the sultan from One Thousand and One Nights. The double bind of wanting and not wanting to come to the end is represented as two characters, which temporarily lifts the paradox: Scheherazade will literally be killed once she finishes her narration, so she must keep talking; the sultan, invested in the narrative suspense, must keep listening; however, their final goals diverge. But in their compulsion to keep talking and to keep listening, they are coupled as two moving parts of the narrator-narratee system that belongs to narrative thinking, with Scheherazade representing the position of the narrator and the sultan, of the narratee.

It is interesting that Brooks talks about narrative desire in terms of “consummation, as well as consumption.” This phrasing resonates with the Generative Anthropology’s view of desire and its role in the originary event. The desire is sustained by the promise of consumption of the desirable object held in limbo through deferral, the originary GA category. My last point in this paper is to claim that deferral holds the key to the paradoxical drive toward death, which Freud was right about, but in contradistinction to Freud, we can explain it in anthropological-philosophical terms and not as part of some foundational metaphysical duality that governs the universe. First I would like to return to the “daemonic” repetition compulsion that led Freud to articulate his idea about the death drive, the adjective “daemonic” really stressing the compulsive and unconscious/uncanny aspects of some forms of repetition, plus the fact that repetition compulsion violates the pleasure principle. Holowchak and Lavin give examples of beneficial repetitions, such as encountered in game-playing and are connected to the pleasure of recognition, and consequently, learning. Another example would be repetition done with the beneficial goal of working through or mastering or coming to terms with something difficult. But there is also a variety of repetition compulsion that seems to serve no useful purpose and is often trauma-related, that does not advance mastering something and thus does not contribute to self-preservation. What kind of psychic force would pull one again and again to repeat some past behavior compulsively? Is it something related to the structure of memory? Holowchak and Lavin, who are critical of Freud’s theory of the death drive, nevertheless think that “Freud’s ideas on repetition and compulsion to repeat, as they developed over the years, have paved a path for much fruitful research on human memory and psychical dysfunction” (663).

I believe that we are not talking about some pathological memory but about the structure of deferral. What has been deferred must be returned to because we put a mental “bookmark” at the place where we digressed. If in the middle of a narrative, a narrator starts telling a story within a story, the outer narrative is expected to be resumed when the inner story is finished. Similarly, if a linguist is parsing a sentence and needs to jump off to process a subordinate clause, he or she must return to the main sentence once the subtask is done. Or to take the first use of deferral on the originary scene: the participants anticipate returning to the spoils of the hunt after violence has been postponed. We think of deferral as a future-oriented process, but in deferring, we create the opposite pull that is mechanical and drive-like in the way it acts on our thinking as we “wrap our mind around” the entire operation. This string-snapping-back property of deferral is empirically observable and does not need special demonstration or proof. But I am hypothesizing the existence of something like a retractive movement possessing a reverse, unconscious counter-logic, which must occur in order to make deferral conceivable in the first place. It is a rearward flow of operations that re-gathers the bookmarks, retraces the steps, and recombines the deferred bits. I call it the movement of consolidation. It is impossible for us to consciously embrace it because our thinking works forward, but we need to postulate it as a component of symbolic, and specifically narrative, thinking. It works backward, in a counterintuitive fashion, and this is why it is not directly accessible to our consciousness. One way of metaphorizing it is as a cause-effect flow that unfolds from the future point of furthest deferral toward the past. The end-to-front and front-to-end paths are coupled and take place at the same time. In some way, the reverse path, the path of retrieving the points of deferral, must be created—inscribed, programmed—simultaneously with the forward-oriented prolongation gesture of postponement. In my article “Hierarchical Thinking, Grammatical Structures, and the Originary Scene,” I work out a real example of code execution in an Artificial Intelligence language that operates through consolidation.[20] The fact that some AI programs work like this does not mean that it is implemented the same way in human minds; it just shows that the logic of consolidation is implementable on principle.

I want to reiterate that the reverse flow or the “snapping-back” action of deferral is unconscious because we cannot think backward. And it is in this Moebius-strip-like turning from the conscious to the unconscious, both forming a whole, I locate the human paradox. The reverse component of thinking may play a big part in the phenomenon we call the unconscious, but this is not the direction I am pursuing for now. A corollary to what I am claiming, however, is that deferral defers not just from the beginning of an individual life when a child is initiated into language but from the very first point of deferral, the point of the origin of language for the entire human community. And thus the return of deferral pulls us back not only to the early moment of our lives but to the moment of collective origin. This is what we mean when we talk about “going back to the source,” “longing to return to the origin,” or “being haunted by the past,” the sentiments accompanied by an existential sense of nostalgia. This zero-point of the birth of human consciousness is the collective beginning, the return to which would mean the erasure of the human species, the Nirvana-like restoration of the inorganic state. This, of course, is impossible, but the very first deferral exerts its abiding pull on the human psyche, the pull toward death. I hope thus to have demonstrated in this paper that Freud had a true anthropological intuition to isolate a paradoxical aspect of human behavior, which he theorized as the death drive. He was right that this death drive is, at least partially, unconscious and mechanistic. But rather than being a part of a metaphysical opposition between two fundamental universal forces, the death drive (we might want to rename it) is symbolic, not physiological. It came into existence with the origin of language and narrativity. Yes, it is real, but it is unlikely to take us back to the state of the inorganic.

Martin Fashbaugh is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the School of Arts and Humanities at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, where he teaches courses in British Literature and Literary Criticism. His research interests include Generative Anthropology, Romantic and Victorian British Literature, Girardian theory, and narratology.

Peter G. Goldman is Professor Emeritus at Westminster College in Utah and former president of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference. His main areas of research and teaching are Shakespeare and Milton, and he has published on a wide range of topics. A list of his publications can be found here: Goldman Publications

Marina Ludwigs is a Docent at the English Department of Stockholm University. She has published on Victorian, modernist, and contemporary literature, as well as film. Besides Generative Anthropology, her theoretical interests include Girardian theory, narratology, and philosophy of science. She is currently working on a project that studies the interrelationship between literary and scientific models.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. [. . .] For use almost can change the stamp of nature.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Simulation, in all its various senses, defines and dominates Philip K. Dick’s vision for the future of our species. In his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the androids are literally mimetic doubles of humans. The protagonist, Rick Deckard, owns an electric sheep—a persuasive simulation of a real sheep. In some of Dick’s novels, reality itself is discovered to be a simulation—a technological simulation (e.g., A Maze of Death), a drug-induced alternative reality (e.g., Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said), or by other means. To a large extent, simulation is a typical science fiction theme that reflects humanity’s advanced technological abilities. We have artificial intelligence (A.I.), artificial reality (A.R.), artificial organs, and functional replications of almost anything that humans want or need; science fiction extrapolates from this development with attention to the unintended consequences. The human species is distinguished by its talent for simulation, going all the way back to the cave-paintings of our Paleolithic ancestors and the pantomimes found in ritual, dance, and theater. Only humans create representational art. As Aristotle noted, tragedy is the mimesis of an action. A good novel creates a convincing fictional world in our imagination. While mimesis as technological simulation has been discussed in the scholarship on Philip K. Dick, mimesis in the anthropological sense has been neglected. My thesis is that the interplay between different senses of mimesis is central to Do Androids Dream at every level: plot, theme, and aesthetic effect.

Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation can be contrasted to my approach. Baudrillard claims that “reality” is an idea with no application anymore because all we have are simulations of simulations. He has invoked Dick’s science fiction in support of his thesis.[1] Both Baudrillard and Dick blur the line between reality and simulation. Baudrillard is fundamentally concerned with models of value during different time periods. For Baudrillard, the loss of reality as a touchstone of value is a historical development of postmodernity. But Dick’s androids belong to a long tradition of fictional doubles that is as old as myth.[2] Do Androids Dream expresses fears and hopes about our mimetic nature as cultural animals. In what follows, I’ll be drawing on developments in anthropology (Tomasello, Girard, and Gans) to support my reading of Do Androids Dream.

1. Dialing a Mood

The novel begins with a debate about the Penfield mood organ, a machine that can create seemingly any desired mood for its users, even whimsically specific moods such as the “desire to watch TV, no matter what is on it” (6). Rick Deckard uses the mood organ to wake up feeling positive and alert, while his wife Iran resists using it.

Humans are constantly manipulating their mood in various ways. We seek out situations and stimulations that make us happy or relieve boredom. But in the novel, as we’ll see, the practice of simulating a mood is problematic. What is special about moods that their mimesis is problematical? Is it simply the technology that is at stake here or is something more fundamental being expressed?

Strangely, Deckard’s wife Iran uses the mood organ to experience depression occasionally. She explains to her husband that she was watching TV one day when an advertisement she doesn’t like came on, “so for a minute I shut off the sound”:

“At that moment,” Iran said, “when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness [of the surrounding apartments] intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted in being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere [a desolate, post-apocalypse Earth], and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair. . . . So I put it on the schedule for twice a month.” (5)

We learn later that “absence of appropriate affect” is a distinguishing feature of androids as well as mental illness (including perhaps despair).

The novel suggests that users of the mood organ actually experience the chosen mood. For the user, the mood is real. But creating one emotion means not feeling another emotion. The user can use her intellect to recognize that the mood does not have the usual connection to the external situation. An environmental stimulus can cancel out the selected mood; when his wife is hostile to him, Deckard “felt irritable now, although he hadn’t dialed for it” (3). Despite being in a “382 mood,” Iran still senses the “emptiness . . . [and] absence of life,” and so she chooses to dial in despair, which is more appropriate.

Feelings are evolutionarily adaptive, guiding our actions in response to events. An experience of happiness stimulates us to seek out the situation that produces this feeling. So depending on one’s perspective one can correctly identify a Penfield mood as a simulation, the mimesis of a feeling, since the mood appears suddenly, unnaturally, and without the usual environmental stimulation. When Deckard uses the mood organ to wake up, “it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice” (3).

Deckard and his wife go back and forth on her using the mood organ, with Deckard giving her suggestions about which mood to dial for. When she says, “I don’t feel like dialing anything at all now,” he says, “Then dial 3.” She replies,

I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine. I just want to sit here and stare at the floor. (6)

The mood organ has the capacity to split its user against herself. Wanting to dial a mood (which can be dialed for) would be “the most alien drive I can imagine.” Becoming alien to oneself is an important theme of the novel. Feelings are central to identity. But what happens when one’s feelings are not one’s own? Deckard says late in the novel that he has become alien to himself (212). He’s driven by external forces, especially his job. To some extent, Dick is commenting on the alienation endemic to a dystopian, post-apocalypse world (and by analogy, 1960’s U.S.).

It seems ironic that Iran dials in “despair” occasionally since that seems to be her usual response to her situation. The novel suggests that she is no longer capable of a “normal” mood; even the normal must be simulated. Iran’s resistance to mimesis is futile; technology has emptied out the distinction between normal and artificial. The same is true for Deckard. Before leaving home, he dials for “a creative and fresh attitude toward his job, although this he hardly needed; such was his habitual, innate approach without recourse to Penfield artificial brain stimulation” (7).

Iran finally gives up the debate and lets her husband dial for her, and he chooses “594: pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters” (7). Later in the novel, he calls home and discovers that after he left she immediately canceled the mood he dialed for her, demonstrating the limits of the mood organ’s power (87). Individuals can choose to reject a mood imposed by technology. But the effect is not to show that individuals are really in control of their emotions. Choosing to be in despair, using technology to enforce the choice, shows nihilistic desperation rather than self-control.

The mood organ demonstrates how we rely on technology in perverse, counter-productive ways, in a world that seems beyond our control. The mood organ could work like an addictive drug, distracting users from productive action and positive change. The futuristic ability to simulate “a creative and fresh attitude” is an inadequate response to larger problems that are left unaddressed. One could make the same point about legal drugs that work on mood or the myriad electronic diversions of modern life. In the novel, the problem of mood (and its simulation) is symptomatic of technological modernity, but one could argue that such is the human condition. Blaise Pascal, in the seventeenth century, maintains that humans are essentially miserable apart from God, and we spend our lives distracting ourselves from this condition (106-114). One need not share Pascal’s religious perspective to agree that humans are constantly seeking diversion.

The problem of mood is not only a dystopian world and superficial technological remedies but actually part of our heritage as the only talking ape. Simulation is not limited to modern technology. Mimesis is central to our identity as humans. Aristotle observed long ago that humans are the most mimetic of animals. For Aristotle, our mimetic nature explains the delight we take in works of art that represent events or objects. He notes that we learn by imitation, and we enjoy learning new things (Aristotle 6-7). Aristotle was refuting Plato’s interpretation of mimesis as an inferior reproduction of the eternal “forms,” e.g., Beauty and Truth. For Plato, artistic mimesis leads us away from the Good and Justice, in contrast to the Socratic dialectic (elenchus). In Socrates’ examination of poetry and its role in society, he argued that it allows passion to overpower reason, which he believed is the only sure foundation of Justice.[3] Philip K. Dick’s novel continues the debate about the role of mimesis and supports Aristotle’s observation that humans are the most mimetic of animals. We are incredibly adept at imitating each other and learning by imitation. More importantly, humans have invented culture: symbolic and (at the same time) mimetic representations, including poetry, paintings, and human figures, of which robots or androids are a variety.[4] Children develop into adults through their facility at imitation, which is a virtually instinctual behavior for humans.[5] Our primate cousins share this mimetic tendency, but humans take it to a new level. There is considerable evidence that our mimetic propensity is the root of the development of language and culture, which distinguish the human species. Our facility for mimesis is originally instinctual, and this explains why it is so powerful, even though, to some degree, it comes under conscious control with language and art.

Michael Tomasello has researched the development of language among babies and children, demonstrating its mimetic basis. Before nine months old, babies pay attention to objects or people, a dyadic relationship between self and the object of attention. But beginning around nine months, babies learn to pay attention to what others are paying attention to, which is a triadic relationship: self, other, and object of attention (Tomasello, Cultural Origins 62). If a child sees me pointing at something, she can look to see what I am pointing at, a behavior not found among chimpanzees (Tomasello, Becoming Human 95). Tomasello calls this “shared attention.” Language is based on a scene of shared attention. We use signs to direct the attention of others to things or people. We imitate the attention of another by the medium of language or gestures.

The overall conclusion is thus that during the period from one to three years old, young children are virtual “imitation machines” as they seek to appropriate the cultural skills and behaviors of the mature members of their social groups. (Tomasello, Cultural Origins 159)

The ability of humans to identify with others is essentially mimetic. The consequences of this ability are profound. We retain the sensual perceptions of our primate ancestors, but our attention to the world is mediated by others, specific individuals but also our shared language and culture. Language is fundamentally social, intersubjective, and mimetic. Tomasello writes, “the fundamental social-cognitive ability that underlies human culture is the individual human being’s ability to and tendency to identify with other human beings” (Cultural Origins 90). Human self-consciousness and freedom depend on our unique connection to others. There is an underlying truth to what the character J. R. Isidore says, “You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all” (188). Psychological identification, as Tomasello describes it, is the condition of possibility for language. We may consider ourselves completely different from another person, but simply in order to understand what they say or do requires such identification.

Identification means that we understand other humans in terms of their intentions and thoughts. We reflexively anticipate what others are thinking and feeling, even to the extent that we sometimes attribute agency to inanimate objects, as with the religion of animism or by the literary trope of prosopopoeia.[6] Simply reading a novel involves attributing thought and agency to fictional literary representations. The representation of a person—whether by words or image or sculptural figure—can be animated by our imagination, which is a private yet still (in a virtual sense) shared scene of attention. Readers, including professional critics, commonly discuss the psychology of literary characters. We discuss them as if they were real persons while reserving knowledge of the fiction. Sometimes literature takes such attribution as its subject matter. Cervantes gives us Don Quixote, who understands the romance literature he reads as a history of real persons. In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, “The Sandman,” the protagonist mistakes a mechanically-animated doll for a real person.[7] Ernst Jentsch sees the reader’s “uncertainty . . . [about] whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” as the source of the uncanny (qtd. in Freud 227). When we unexpectedly encounter a dressed manikin we may experience such an uncanny feeling. The plot of Do Androids Dream is driven by precisely this ambiguity. The characters in the novel are uncertain whether the androids are really “alive.”

René Girard’s theory of mimesis is confirmed by Tomasello’s work. Girard argues that our desires (which he distinguishes from simple appetite) are mimetic, as when people want to buy a consumer good because a celebrity is shown using it. We imitate the desires of others, leading to conflicts over desired objects or persons (e.g., the classic love triangle). Insofar as we are cultural animals, desire is based on a shared scene of attention.[8] Eric Gans, building on Girard’s work, hypothesizes that language originates on a collective scene of shared attention for an object of mimetic desire.[9] Since the origin of language is a communal event, all language use is social, not only the actual exchanges between humans, but also virtually, in our memory, imagination, or interior monologue (which is really a dialogue with ourself). V.N. Voloshinov contends, “the speaking subject, taken from the inside, . . . turns out to be wholly a product of social interrelations. Not only external expression but also individual experience fall within social territory.”[10]

It follows from the above that our moods, emotions, and desires are not autonomous but rather social and cultural, rooted in a shared scene of attention. We all know that moods, like laughter, are contagious. The work of Tomasello and Girard suggests that the contagious nature of moods is not contingent and accidental but essential to their power for humans. Moods and desires are notoriously capricious and wayward, and this follows from their mimetic basis.

The moods produced by the Penfield mood organ, therefore, are mimetic in two senses. On one level, they are the reproduction of a mood by technology; but on another level, moods as such are inhabited by mimesis as identification. The dispute about the mood organ reflects a fear that we are not as independent as we might wish, that we remain subject to larger forces beyond our control, despite the seeming autonomy offered by technology.

Our feelings are very dear to us, central to our sense of self. Iran’s resistance to the mood organ expresses the desire to retain her identity in the face of external forces, forces that are to some extent modern and technological. Modern humans have unparalleled opportunities (and therefore pressures) to modify or stimulate our mood, using technology or by other means. But at the same time, moods are a problem that is typical for the human species because our experience of the world is mimetically conditioned by others.

2. Androids and Animals

The opening dialogue between Deckard and his wife illustrates some possible attitudes toward the androids. Iran, irritable at being woken up, calls her husband a “murderer hired by the cops” (3). Deckard points out, “I’ve never killed a human being in my life,” to which Iran replies, “Just those poor andys” (4). Deckard’s job hunting androids apparently has a negative effect on his relationship with his wife, not unlike how the animated doll in Hoffman’s “The Sandman” is the occasion for conflict among the characters.

Iran seems sympathetic toward the androids while Deckard claims they are not human. We don’t know how common Iran’s attitude is on earth, but it expresses at least one possible reaction. Having empathy is supposedly what distinguishes humans from androids. Feeling sorry for the “poor andys” is not exactly empathy, but it’s close. One of the questions in the novel is whether it is appropriate for humans to have empathy for androids, who are ostensibly not human.

Who or what exactly are the androids? Are they living creatures or not? Are they capable of empathy or not? J.R. Isidore, the radiation-contaminated “special” with impaired mental faculties, observes later in the novel, speaking to an android, “Actually you’re not alive,” and he is the human most sympathetic to androids in the whole novel (150). The android Rachael says directly, “I’m not alive!” (178). If the androids are not alive, then there is no reason to have sympathy for them. But readers soon find out that androids appear alive and human by almost any standard. Having empathy for animals, which are alive but not human, is considered by everyone on earth as a most important virtue. In terms of plot, empathy for androids is problematic because they are illegal on earth, and especially so for a bounty hunter since he has to kill them, but the prohibition of androids on earth is never really questioned much less justified within the novel. The androids are the doubles of the humans in the story; they are a mirror that raises questions about what it means to be human.

In order to understand the androids we must compare them with the humans in the novel. Deckard, for example, is apparently more concerned with owning a live animal than he is with his wife and marriage. Late in the novel, Rachael observes that Deckard loves his goat “More than you love your wife, probably” (185). Early in the novel, however, Deckard doesn’t have a goat. All he has is an electric sheep that he keeps on the roof of his apartment building. His neighbor has a rare and valuable Percheron horse, which happens to be pregnant, making it even more rare and valuable. Deckard is irritated when his neighbor boasts about his horse while he is forced to make do with an electric sheep.

Owning a live animal is a mark of status as well as moral probity. The religion of Mercerism emphasizes the virtue of nurturing live animals. Deckard and his neighbor pay lip service to Mercerism, but it’s obvious that their devotion to live animals is not motivated primarily by religion. Everyone on earth places great value on any living creature, from ostriches to insects, because they are so rare. The larger and rarer the animal is, the more value is attached.

Deckard expresses resentment at his neighbor having two horses, and his neighbor responds, “You have your sheep,” not knowing that the sheep is electric (10). When Deckard goes over to the sheep and exposes the control panel hidden in the fur, his neighbor says, “You poor guy. Has it always been like this?” (11). Deckard explains that he once had a live sheep but it contracted tetanus and died after getting scratched by a stray wire left on a bale of hay. His sorrow is not only losing his sheep but also the shame of letting it die through his negligence. He purchases an electric replica of his sheep as consolation and so that no one will know what happened. He says,

“It’s a premium job. And I’ve put as much time and attention into caring for it as I did when it was real. But — ” He shrugged.

“It’s not the same,” Barbour [his neighbor] finished. (12)

His neighbor suggests he get a live cat, which are relatively inexpensive. But Deckard responds, “I don’t want a domestic pet. I want what I originally had, a large animal” like a sheep or horse (13).

Deckard and his neighbor’s obsession with live animals seems comparable to the passion for muscle cars in 1970’s America or the imperative for the latest computing device today. Jill Galvan writes that live animals in the novel are “fetishized” as status symbols signifying the owner’s supposed empathy (415, 424).[11] But the fact that eighty-five million families in America (more than two thirds of American households) own a pet today suggests that owning a live animal has a deep meaning for many people. It’s intuitively obvious that nurturing a living creature is more rewarding and meaningful than maintaining an electric animal, no matter how sophisticated. There seems to be a fundamental human drive to care for an animal or child, for both men and women. But due to radiation, more and more of the few remaining people on Earth have become sterile. To some extent, then, we could say that the value placed on living animals in the novel expresses a displaced biological drive to reproduce. And clearly there is status involved; individuals, males in the novel, compete for the best animals. Certainly the rarity of live animals on Earth increases their value. But beyond all this, the people in the novel recognize that there is indeed something special about life, as any survey of the other planets in our solar system will confirm. The novel affirms the value of natural life, notwithstanding the questions raised by the existence of biological androids. There is something very touching about the scene late in the novel when Deckard finds what he thinks is a live toad, “The critter most precious to Wilbur Mercer” (217) and thought to be extinct. Despite Buster Friendly’s exposé, the novel takes Mercerism and the sanctity of life quite seriously. The epigraph to the novel is a Reuters news release about a 200-year-old turtle (actually a tortoise) regarded as a chief by the native people of Tonga Island.

The value placed on living animals acts as a kind of foundation for the speculative explorations of the rest of the novel. Do Androids Dream is not purely or simply deconstructive, although it does interrogate the binary oppositions that drive the plot, and it does call into question conventional definitions of the human. Some questions may be undecidable, but the value of life is a place on which we can stand. The existence of simulated life, however, in the case of biological androids, raises the question of what exactly constitutes life.

3. Humans and Empathy

The importance given to living animals in the novel implies that androids are in fact significantly different from humans, at least on one level. They are not born, do not grow up, and are incapable of reproduction (177). The androids, we find out, have no instinctive empathy for animals.

On the other hand, Deckard’s character calls into question the distinction of the human species. We’ve noted that he’s more concerned with owning a live animal than with his wife and marriage. When he arrives at his job, he is “chilled” to learn that his colleague, Dave Holden, the lead bounty hunter, is in the hospital “with a laser track through his spine” after an encounter with an escaped android (26). But Deckard and his boss are only concerned with the impact upon their work. Deckard realizes that his colleague’s incapacity means that he will have more opportunity for earning bounties on renegade androids:

He felt depressed. And yet, logically, because of Dave’s sudden disappearance from the work scene, he should be at least guardedly pleased. (33)

During a conference with his boss, he asks for Holden’s notes on the escaped androids. His boss, Harry Bryant, declines to give him the notes, saying,

“Let’s wait until you’ve tried out your [Voight-Kampff] scale in Seattle.” His tone was interestingly merciless, and Rick Deckard noted it. (37)

There’s no obvious reason why Bryant should withhold the notes without mercy. Deckard needs the information not only to do his job, to help him hunt androids, but also to protect his life, while Bryant apparently has other concerns. There are many examples in the novel when humans are pointedly represented as cold-blooded.

Ironically, while live animals are a widespread obsession on earth, radiation-damaged humans like John Isidore are universally despised. One of the main questions of the novel is how humans compare to androids in terms of their empathy and humanity.

Because the androids are biological creatures that look and act exactly like humans, identifying them presents a problem for a bounty hunter like Deckard. This problem is worsened by the introduction of a new, more advanced android called the Nexus-6. As an incentive for emigration, androids are allowed only on the off-earth colonies, where they work as servants, but occasionally they kill their masters, escape, and come to earth. Bounty hunters like Deckard are employed to hunt down escaped androids. Before killing them, however, bounty hunters are required by law to test the androids to establish their identity beyond any doubt, in order to prevent the inadvertent murder of a human. For this purpose, they use a test called the Voight-Kampff that measures a subject’s response to the verbal presentation of an emotionally provocative situation.[12] When he tests Rachael, he shines a “small beam of white light” into her left eye, and he places a “wire-mesh disk” on her cheek with a wire going to his test machine. The test measures her “eye-muscle and capillary reaction” to his questions. Her “verbal responses won’t count” (46). The idea here is that androids are able to learn how humans typically respond to certain emotional situations, and therefore they can easily simulate an appropriate response using their intellect. But humans will respond more immediately and instinctually. The test measures the response of the autonomic nervous system, which cannot be directly and immediately controlled. A lie detector or polygraph works on exactly the same principle. The difference is that a lie detector is looking for a reaction, while the Voight-Kampff is looking for the lack of a reaction. The plot of the novel is motivated in part by some problems with the test, both practical and logical.

The novel presents us with the thesis that humans are defined by their empathy for living creatures and horror at any violation of the sanctity of life. Now that robots have advanced to the point that they equal or surpass humans in intelligence, this is the only distinguishing factor left. Deckard thinks,

An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism – an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty. (29)

Fusion in Mercerism is aided by technology, the empathy box, and it involves the sympathetic communion with all other humans across the solar system using an empathy box at that point in time. The use of technology complicates the issue of empathy in fusion. But fusion, even aided by technology, depends upon a prior faculty for empathy. Later in the novel, Deckard experiences fusion with Mercer without the aid of an empathy box.

Early in the novel, Deckard reflects upon the basis for empathy: “He had wondered, as had most people at one time or another, precisely why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test” (29).[13] He thinks, “Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnids” (29). He reasons that humans’ special faculty for empathy must have an evolutionary basis: only herd animals, “herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet” would find empathy adaptive, while predator species would find it maladaptive (29). Empathy, Deckard believes,

would make [a predator] conscious of the desire to live on the part of the prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve. . . . the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. (29)

For humans, empathy would be adaptive, presumably, because as social animals humans depend upon other humans to survive. The downside, Deckard observes, is that the stronger animals would be dragged down to some degree with the weaker ones. But the species as a whole would benefit. He calls empathy “a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged” (29-30).

There are some problems with Deckard’s reflections here. He starts with the premise that only humans have empathy. But his speculations about the evolutionary basis of empathy suggest that all social animals should have some degree of empathy. Deckard’s distinction between predators and social species is also weak. Many predators like wolves are social species if not “herd animals.” Deckard thinks, “Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator” (30). But we soon learn that androids appear to be just as social as humans. Pris says that androids get lonely (139). At least one human, the bounty hunter Phil Resch, fits the description of a “solitary predator” better than any of the androids. And Deckard, in his job at least, is also a “solitary predator,” despite his revulsion for Resch. In fact, Deckard goes on to undercut his description of androids as solitary predators: “Rick liked to think of them that way [as solitary predators]; it made his job palatable” (30).[14] In other words, Deckard rationalizes his work simply to make it “palatable” to his conscience.

Deckard continues,

In retiring — i.e., killing — an andy he did not violate the rule of life laid down by Mercer. You shall kill only the killers, Mercer had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth. And in Mercerism, as it evolved into a full theology, the concept of The Killers had grown insidiously. In Mercerism, an absolute evil plucked at the threadbare cloak of the tottering, ascending old man, but it was never clear who or what this evil presence was. A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel emphatic joy for another life form’s success or grief at its defeat — that, for him, epitomized The Killers. (30)

The last sentence in this passage seems like a strong justification for killing the escaped androids. But Deckard undermines his own argument by noting that “it was never clear who or what this evil presence was” in Mercerism, and “a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit.” This line of reasoning suggests that Mercerites (including Deckard) could very possibly project evil onto an agent based on nothing more than a vague intuition, one that could be based on self-interest or prejudice rather than justice.

Empathy is a form of mimesis or identification, as Tomasello defines it. Empathy involves imitating the attention of another to their joy or sorrow, feeling what another is feeling and having sympathy for them. “Feeling what another is feeling” is a figure of speech, of course, a metaphor that describes a real experience. We cannot actually feel what another feels; we can only imagine what another feels based on common experiences. Dick makes the metaphor literal (a common technique of the fantastic genre) by having people inhabit or invade each other’s consciousness.[15] Empathy, therefore, is only one expression of what is arguably the most common topos in Dick’s fiction: the idea that our consciousness can be inhabited by an other or others, that the boundary between self and other is radically permeable. This topos can take a variety of forms depending on which novel we are discussing. In some novels, individuals merge their minds with several other humans, as happens in Mercerist fusion using the empathy box. We’ve seen how the Penfield mood organ can be understood as a figure for how moods are shared or imposed by identification. Sometimes the merging of consciousness with others may be more or less horrific, depending on the context. Late in the novel, Deckard finds himself “permanently fused with” Wilbur Mercer, and he “can’t unfuse” (215)—not a comfortable feeling. In Mercerism the experience of fusion involves suffering emotional and physical pain, although the fact that it is (usually) shared and voluntary makes all the difference. Iran comments, “Physical pain but spiritually together” (159). In Mercerist fusion, the individual does not lose their individual consciousness—they are aware of other individuals as such—but they become subject to larger forces, for better or ill. The individual shares consciousness with others in fusion, and while they collectively “ascend” they are subject to attack by evil forces. The physical wounds they suffer may seem like an anomalous element given the techno-realism of the novel, but they are comparable to (and derived from) the historical phenomenon of medieval saints suffering the stigmata of Christ.

Another variation of what I’m describing is when an individual’s consciousness is invaded by another individual.[16] In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, individuals who take the drug Chew-Z find their consciousness inhabited by Palmer Eldritch, who may or may not be an alien from interstellar deep space. After one takes Chew-Z, he invades their mind (and perception of the world) in more or less obvious ways, and he does not leave, even after the drug seems to wear off. His identity and purpose are unclear, but his ability to dominate one’s subjective reality is threatening. The invasion of consciousness may result in the complete rearrangement of familiar reality, as in Flow my Tears, The Policeman Said, when the world-famous celebrity Jason Taverner wakes up to find himself in a world in which he is completely unknown, with no record of his previous existence. In Dick’s novels, our anthropological specialty in sharing attention (“the empathic gift”) means that “reality” is thoroughly fluid and variable. In Do Androids Dream, an android may find that their memories are not their own—they may be simulated memories implanted by the Rosen Association. This is an especially threatening form of invasion, since one’s identity is defined by memories, and one could be an android without even knowing it.

Even without implanted memories, an android’s consciousness is not fully their own. As a technologically (and biologically) programmed creature, an android does not develop from a baby into an independent adult but is established by the design of the Rosen Association.[17] As it happens, however, the Rosen Association’s ability to determine the behavior of their androids is limited. An android can develop independence and reject its programming; Rachael admits that there are a “miniscule number of Nexus-6s who balk—” (42).  Significantly, one can see humans in the same terms, as governed by our biological programming, our DNA, which is never chosen but determined by the strict and impersonal principles of evolution.[18] Chance plays a role also in the transmission of DNA.

In contrast to these fantastical examples from Dick’s novels, empathy is a form of shared consciousness with which we are all familiar. But empathy is not always limited to its benign meaning. Feeling what another feels is not an unambiguous blessing. We are sensitive not only to the joys and sufferings of others but also their envy and hostility. Although this sensitivity may not be pleasant it is adaptive, helping us to anticipate the behavior of others, assuming we don’t misunderstand their intentions. The rampant paranoia in Dick’s novels reflects humans’ sometimes misplaced sensitivity to others’ thoughts and intentions.

Insofar as empathy is based on identification, it’s true that humans are distinguished by the capacity for empathy. The work of Tomasello suggests that identification is cultural and learned rather than purely instinctual. Gans would agree that shared attention is cultural but views this ability as a radical transformation, an overcoming or aufgehoben of a mimetic instinct shared by other primates.[19] Ultimately, identification is rooted in mimetic rivalry.

Humans often do feel what others are feeling, including (non-human) animals. We feel empathy for animals, even though it’s probably adaptive only in the case of domestic animals.[20] Animal rights activists insist that suffering is suffering, no matter what animal is feeling it, and the golden rule demands that we do all we can to minimize the suffering of all living creatures, or at least those under human care. There’s no doubt that many people suffer when they see an animal suffer. Friedrich Nietzsche broke down in tears at the sight of a horse being flogged, ran over and threw his arms around the beast’s neck to protect it before collapsing on the street.[21] The ability to feel what another is feeling is rooted in our mimetic instinct, which is both precultural and the continuing basis of culture. Not all humans suffer at the sight of an animal suffering, but we do see this behavior sometimes among children, especially sensitive and imaginative children. But we can safely assume that a child raised in a tribe that relies on hunting for food would not likely be distressed at the sight of their food source dying, say a caribou, bison, rabbit, or fish. Human empathy for another person’s suffering (especially a child’s suffering) has an instinctual element but is equally cultural.

We know that babies are born with an instinct to imitate those around them; they mimic the facial expressions of adults only hours after birth. But the ability for shared attention (hence empathy) emerges only when a baby reaches about nine months old, and this ability develops in depth and sophistication as children acquire facility with language. So while empathy has an evolutionary heritage that goes back millions of years, it undergoes an important transformation when an individual develops self-awareness, emotion regulation processing, and other cognitive abilities associated with language and culture.[22] Empathy as it is expressed in the human species is largely learned and cultural; if so, then the use of the Voight-Kampff test to identify androids, and the very distinction between androids and humans in the novel, become problematic, as we will see.

4. Testing the Androids

Deckard’s visit to the Rosen Association is his first direct contact with the Nexus-6 android, the latest and most sophisticated version. Harry Bryant reportedly wants androids with the “Nexus-6 brain unit” withdrawn from the market—he has asked the Russian police agency to join him in filing a written complaint (27). A more intelligent android has obvious advantages for colonists, but when the androids escape and come back to earth, the police are responsible for identifying and eliminating them. Bryant and the bounty hunter Holden are both concerned that the Nexus-6 might be able to escape detection by the Voight-Kampff test. Deckard, however, points out that the fact that Polokov lasered Holden when Holden was giving him the test should alleviate any concern, since if Polokov could pass the test, he would have no reason for trying to kill Holden. But Bryant is also concerned that schizoid individuals might not be able to pass the test because of a “flattening of affect,” a “diminished empathic faculty,” which is “specifically what the scale measures” (36). Because a schizoid person would almost certainly be institutionalized, Deckard considers it “A million to one odds” that he would ever have occasion to test such an individual (37). In any case, Bryant has asked the Rosen Association to include several humans, as a control group, along with their new androids for testing.

When Deckard arrives in Seattle and lands on the roof of the Rosen Association building, he is greeted by Rachael Rosen, who is not pleased to see him. She is worried that if the Voight-Kampff test is unable to detect the androids, “we’ll have to withdraw all Nexus-6 types from the market. . . . Because you police departments can’t do an adequate job in the simple matter of detecting the minuscule number of Nexus-6s who balk—” (42). If the Nexus-6 can pass the test, or if a human fails to pass, Deckard thinks to himself, “I can probably force them to abandon manufacture of their Nexus-6 types” (42-3, emphasis in original), which would threaten the viability of the Rosen Association as well as the colonization effort. When they arrive inside the building, Rachael unexpectedly requests that she be tested first. Eldon Rosen says they have “selected her as your first subject. She may be an android. We’re hoping you can tell” (45).

The first question begins, “you are given a calf-skin wallet on your birthday.” The apparatus shows her reacting immediately, and she says, “I wouldn’t accept it. . . . Also I’d report the person who gave it to me to the police” (46). The other questions involve a bearskin rug, a boy’s butterfly collection, a mounted stag head, boiling a live lobster, finding a wasp crawling on her skin, having an abortion, a bullfight poster, and eating a raw oyster or a boiled dog. In at least one case, the calfskin wallet, Rachael responds immediately, a typical human response. But in some scenarios, she doesn’t react as strongly as would a human. And in other cases, she fails to note the offending element at all. Deckard concludes that she is an android but the Rosens deny it. They claim to have invalidated the test and threaten to reveal publicly this information, which would embarrass the police agencies that rely on it. But Deckard shows her his leather-covered briefcase and claims it is “One hundred percent genuine human babyhide,” to which she responds appropriately but not immediately, with a fraction of a second delay (56). Deckard is satisfied that she is an android, and the rest of the novel confirms his judgment.

There are several questions raised by this scene. Deckard emphasizes that time is a factor. A delayed response indicates an android. But if androids don’t have empathy, why would they have any autonomic response, even a delayed one? Certainly they can recognize a taboo and respond externally as they know is appropriate, but why should they have any emotional response at all? When Deckard explains the Voight-Kampff test to Rachael, he describes for her the typical physiological responses of a human to the questions; she anticipates his conclusion, “And these [responses] can’t be found in androids.” Deckard agrees: “They’re not engendered by the stimuli-questions; no” (44)—a straightforward denial of any emotional, autonomic response to the test from androids. Rachael has a (delayed) emotional reaction to most of the scenarios, yet Deckard calls her response “simulated” (47), suggesting conscious deceit. As we’ve seen, Deckard has stated categorically that only humans have empathy (29), and he says later in the novel that androids are specifically designed as lacking empathy (170). A servant performing manual labor presumably has no need for empathy. But the novel notes,

Under U.N. law each emigrant automatically received possession of an android subtype of his choice, and, by 2019, the variety of subtypes passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s. (16)

The proliferation of subtypes suggests that androids do more than simply manual labor, which would hardly require the intelligence of a Nexus-6. Roy Baty has reportedly worked as a pharmacist (169), and some colonists have taken an android as their mistress (133). In fact, realizing that another person is similar to oneself is not really difficult conceptually. If androids can feel and are intelligent enough for language, then we might well ask how could they not have empathy? Empathy, after all, does not always equate to compassionate action. Human empathy has an essential cognitive component. To some extent, the plot wears thin here. But in the world of the novel, the Voight-Kampff test does effectively identify an android, even androids, like Rachael, that do not know they are androids. The plot premise is that androids lack the full degree of human empathy by design or because of an inability to program empathy. But we are still faced with the apparent contradiction between Rachael’s responses to the test and Deckard’s unqualified assertions that androids lack empathy.

One could hypothesize that not only have the androids learned the correct response, they have internalized it, that is, made it an element of their identity. Perhaps they want to become human. The android Luba Lyft says later in the novel that since she arrived on Earth, “my life has consisted of imitating the human,” which she considers “a superior life-form” (124). The androids are the bioengineered mimesis of a human, and in addition, they consciously imitate humans. So they sincerely produce a human response on the Voight-Kampff test, but it is delayed because of some limitation in their physiology. Although Deckard believes that the androids do not have the typically human responses to Voight-Kampff test questions, he notes, “biologically they exist. Potentially” (44). Deckard’s comment does not clear up all the questions about the androids’ potential for empathy, but it does support the idea that they could learn to be genuinely empathetic. Just as some androids have developed independence, they have also apparently developed a degree of empathy—and the two could well go together. Rachael says later that she identifies with the android Pris, and we’ve seen that identification is the basis of empathy (173). The novel is not completely consistent on this question, but there is substantial evidence that Rachel and the escaped androids have in fact mimetically assimilated to the human community, by identification, just as children imitate those around them—in which case an android’s answers to the Voight-Kampff test are not really simulated.

One could object that there are places in the novel where an android is pointedly indifferent to the suffering of a living creature: the androids cut off the legs of a spider, completely oblivious to its suffering as well as the empathic suffering of the witness Isidore.[23] While the spider is being dismembered, Roy and Irmgard go so far as to claim that empathy is just a “swindle” designed to justify discrimination against androids (193). Rachael kills Deckard’s goat by pushing it off the roof of his apartment building. These examples do not so much refute the assimilation thesis as suggest an incomplete assimilation. Moreover, one could point to examples of humans acting in exactly the same way, as when children pull the wings off a fly. In the case of Rachael killing Deckard’s goat, one could say that her desire for revenge is perhaps more typically human than the desire to prevent animal suffering. Revenge is the archetype of mimetic behavior, an eye for an eye. The capacity for revenge is the emotional flipside to the capacity for empathy. Humans have never conformed to ideal moral standards, whether in behavior or feelings, so why should we expect such from androids?

The Voight-Kampff test not only fails to account for an android’s ability to learn empathy, it also ignores that human empathy is largely a learned, cultural behavior, based on identification and shared attention—abilities that are distinctly human but also apparently possessed by the androids. Richard Viskovic notes that most contemporary readers would not find a calfskin wallet or a mounted stag head objectionable (174). These are taboos only because life has become so rare on earth, an exceptional circumstance in the history of the human species. The fact that the test involves the verbal presentation of a fictional situation also distances the response from pure instinct. Humans become inured to hearing about real tragedies in the news, and even more so fictional tragedies. To some extent, these are flaws in the plot of the novel. (Dick apparently subscribed to the Rousseauian notion that pity or empathy is a “natural” behavior[24].)

It’s possible that the problems with the test we’ve examined are meant to undermine the distinction between humans and androids. But Deckard is completely convinced, by experience, that androids cannot pass the Voight-Kampff test, and he is our authority on androids. Deckard changes his mind about androids during the course of the novel, but he doesn’t change his mind about the validity of the Voight-Kampff test for identifying androids and the capacity for empathy. When he wants to know if he feels empathy for androids, he relies on the Voight-Kampff apparatus. All in all, Dick wants to maintain the ambiguity surrounding androids, and the paradoxes of mimesis work well in this regard. One meaning of “imitation” is “fake,” but the reality of empathy, as we’ve seen, is rooted in imitation.

The Rosens initially explain Rachael’s inability to pass the Voight-Kampff test as a result of her being raised on a spaceship (50). They suggest that she hasn’t learned the correct responses because she was out of contact with the current situation on earth (although after Deckard proves that she is an android, Eldon admits that her childhood memories are implants and that she doesn’t know she is an android because “We programmed her completely” [56]). Deckard thereupon gives her the test again using the briefcase supposedly covered with “babyhide”—the idea being that while she may not be familiar with the current taboos surrounding animals on earth, the imperative to protect a baby goes beyond culture to instinct. Because Rachael supposedly grew up on a spaceship and ignorant of the current situation on earth, she might not react appropriately to a contingent historical taboo about a mounted stag head, for example. But any normal human, anytime or anywhere, shares an instinctive horror of killing a baby. So Deckard actually acknowledges that the taboos on calfskin wallets and so on are cultural not instinctual, which throws the whole premise of his testing out the window.[25]

Is Deckard right to assume that the reaction to the babyhide briefcase would be impossible to feign? Yes and no. It’s true that humans, like most species, have an instinct to protect their young. And in the novel, there is a visual stimulus, a physical briefcase, which would increase the likelihood of a reaction. But the claim that it is babyhide is presented verbally, and language is by definition culture; and Rachael would have good cause to question Deckard’s claim, since every situation so far has been fictional, and Deckard would not likely own a babyhide briefcase. So the briefcase example still falls into the realm of culture and thus fails to validate the Voight-Kampff test.

Rachael’s character in this scene also works to undercut the idea that she is in any way qualitatively different from humans. She is represented as quite passionate and emotional (as are all the androids) throughout the entire encounter with Deckard. First, she is offended that Deckard, a lowly police officer, has such power over their huge corporation. She thinks she is human because she has been given false memories by the Rosen Association, as Eldon admits. Later in the novel, however, she claims to have been friends with the escaped androids for two years (which would predate the testing episode) and working on their behalf knowing that she is an android (182). But the testing episode at the Rosen corporation gives no hint that she knows she is an android. Just the opposite. She is “pale,” and “nodded fixedly” (56) when Eldon confirms that she is an android (which she had already suspected from the test). We can presume that Dick wrote the scene with the idea that she doesn’t know she is an android until Deckard and Eldon reveal it to her. When he wrote the scene late in the novel I referred to above, Dick found it effective to have her working on the side of the androids, since it works as an important plot reversal. If he thought about the earlier episode, he could safely assume readers would not be bothered. In the scene at the Rosen Association, she is characterized as emotionally human. She is outraged when Deckard says she is an android after the first round of testing, because she would have been executed by the police if she had been stopped and tested at one of the numerous police checkpoints throughout the city. And she is mortified to learn that she is an android, as I mentioned above. She “flinched” when Eldon put “his hand comfortingly on her shoulder,” reassuring her that Deckard will not kill her (57). There is no hint that she is feigning her responses. And of course later in the novel she falls in love with Deckard when sleeping with him (178).

We must also consider that Rachael is presented and considers herself as a member of the Rosen Association in this episode. After the Rosens claim to have invalidated the Voight-Kampff test, Deckard thinks,

He could not make out, even now, how the Rosen Association had managed to snare him, and so easily. Experts, he realized. A mammoth corporation like this—it embodies too much experience. It possesses in fact a sort of group mind. And Eldon and Rachael Rosen consisted of spokesmen for that corporate entity. His mistake, evidently, had been in viewing them as individuals. It was a mistake he would not make again. (52)

Later, after he realizes that Eldon falsely claimed that Rachael is human and tried to blackmail him, Deckard muses,

So that’s how the largest manufacturer of androids operates, Rick said to himself. Devious, and in a manner he had never encountered before. A weird and convoluted new personality type; no wonder law enforcement agencies were having trouble with the Nexus-6. (57)

His view of the Rosen Association as possessing “a sort of group mind” is suggestive because the practitioners of Mercerism, while in fusion, also have a sort of group mind. Of course, fusion in Mercerism is based on sharing joys and sorrows, and working as a group toward the goal of redemption, while the group mind of the Rosen Association is “[d]evious . . . A weird and convoluted new personality type.” The common denominator of a “group mind,” however, is significant because it reveals the ambivalence of mimesis as identification.

Deckard thinks that it was a mistake to assume that his encounters with the Rosen Association would follow the norms governing interactions between individuals. In Deckard’s view, the Rosens find themselves, like cogs in a machine, acting only for the impersonal interests of the corporation. On one level, this exemplifies Dick’s anti-institutionalism. His fiction typically represents corporations and governments as sinister entities that infringe upon human freedom while evading any moral responsibility.

The escaped androids are actually in cahoots with the Rosen Association, and the novel suggests that they are united in purpose. Rather strangely, the Rosen Association seems to be working to save escaped androids (“protecting its products” as Deckard puts it [57]). Why else would they plot so deviously to undermine the Voight-Kampff test? As Rachael observes, it is in the business interests of the Association to validate the test (49). Once an android rejects its programming, it has no economic value for the Association; just the opposite, it becomes a liability. Later in the novel, we learn that Rachael has been working consistently to neutralize bounty hunters by sleeping with them, teaching them empathy for androids. One might think that she is working independently of the Rosen Association, but she says, “The association . . . wanted to reach the bounty hunters here and in the Soviet Union. This [her sleeping with the bounty hunters] seemed to work” (183). Rachael also notes, “We tried to stop you [killing androids] this morning” (182) by invalidating the Voight-Kampff test. Deckard says later that Rachael is a prototype “used by the manufacturer to protect the others” (203).[26] We can say that Rachael is, to some degree, assimilated to this “new [corporate] personality type.” Rachael is the “other” for Deckard because of her connection to the Rosen Association and because she is technically an android (although in practice a human). Her activities for the androids (and against the work of bounty hunters) are motivated by her membership in the Rosen Association and her identity as an android.

Michel Montaigne’s essay “On the Cannibals” is the classic work on the cultural “other.” The New World cannibals were feared as radically different from and hostile to the Europeans, but Montaigne shows that in some ways they were actually more civilized. Is it more barbaric to torture your enemy to death, or simply to kill and then eat him? Montaigne suggests that cannibalism, for both victim and sacrificer, was a ritual of revenge and honor, aristocratic values (239). When the “other” is demystified, they are revealed as a secret sharer, reflecting doubts and fears about ourselves: in the case of the cannibals, our own barbarity. Girard’s work on mimetic rivalry confirms Montaigne’s point. The mimetic double or other is threatening not because of their difference but their similarity, which makes them rivals, generating desire and creating conflict (Girard, TDBB 96). In Do Androids Dream, the androids’ status as doubles of the humans is uniquely motivated. Philip K. Dick’s novel provides a remarkable confirmation of Girard’s and Montaigne’s work.[27] The fear of the androids expresses the fear that we too are merely “imitation machines” (as Tomasello puts it, using scare quotes), that empathy is a simulation and justice revenge. Our actions can be seen as mechanical, animated by mimetic tendencies that resist conscious control.[28] Deckard demonizes the Rosens as “devious . . . A weird and convoluted new [corporate] personality type,” yet he finds himself driven by his job to “violate his own identity,” as he puts it later in the novel (164).

Supposedly Rachael lacks empathy, even though her responses fail the test on what is a mere technicality, a fraction of a second delay. As I noted above, she does in fact have an autonomic emotional response to the situations presented, even though they are fictional and only verbally presented very briefly. Deckard and Eldon in this scene are considerably more unfeeling than she is. Deckard compares, in his mind, an android with his electric sheep (40). He starts to think of Rachael as “it” rather than a person, despite her completely human behavior. Eldon uses Rachael as a bait in his attempt to blackmail Deckard. Both Deckard and Eldon are unconcerned with revealing to Rachael that she is an android, although we can imagine how devastating it would be for a person capable of believing themselves a human to learn that they are in fact not human.[29]

The fact that we are given consequential choices gives empathy a deservedly high moral value, but androids have choice too. They often act unpredictably, and there is no hint in the novel that they lack free will.

Many readers have noticed that the novel undermines the distinction between androids and humans—but without recognizing the underlying basis for their similarity, which is the process of mimesis, the defining characteristic of both humans and androids.

Several critics have approached the androids in the novel as reflecting anxieties surrounding modern technology. Klaus Benesch, for example, argues that “cybernetic representations in modern art . . . [have] come to function as the cultural Other of technological society” (381). Benesch emphasizes that cyborgs represent cultural fantasies about technology rather than its practical functions. Nevertheless, the fantastical representation of cyborgs, for Benesch, is the outcome of the increasing power of technology in our lives. They are a reflection of our “posthuman” identity as “fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (Donna Haraway, qtd. by Benesch 386). Jill Galvan, along the same lines, claims that the novel represents the progression of Deckard’s reluctant recognition that there is no stable boundary between humans and machines, that the destiny of humans is “to relinquish a self that has outgrown traditional human bounds—to be subsumed, in other words, into the posthuman collective” (428). The work of these critics suffers from a wholly inadequate understanding of mimesis as a constitutive element in human social identity—making possible our notable freedom and self-consciousness, as well as a constant temptation to destructive rivalry—the androids are emblematic of both sides of mimesis. The modern progress of technology may have been the historical occasion for Dick’s novel, but Do Androids Dream is not fundamentally about our relationship with technology but rather our relationship with ourself and each other, as informed by mimesis in all its senses.

Jennifer Rhee, in her analysis of the novel, draws on Mashiro Mori’s theory of the “uncanny valley,” whereby robots that approach too closely to human appearance appear uncanny. Rhee affirms that the androids in Dick’s novel are uncanny, as Mori’s theory would predict, and she also claims that the “uncanny confusions” between android and human serve to destabilize conventional definitions of the human and reveal our “deep inhumanity” (327), specifically the treatment of marginalized populations. Many critics have seen the androids as representative of oppressed human groups (or animals, in the case of Vint). By deconstructing the prejudice against androids, the novel certainly allows such a reading. But what all these scholars miss is the central and unique role of mimesis in the representation of the androids. The androids represent fears and hopes about our own ambivalent origin and nature; the application to oppressed groups is tangential. The novel’s androids are emblematic of the threat and promise of mimesis in human relationships and society.

5. Isidore, Mercer, and Androids

The episodes involving J.R. Isidore serve to explore further the ambivalence of mimesis. He is the most empathetic person in the novel and the most devoted follower of Mercerism, a religion of empathy. As such, Isidore highlights the power but also limits of empathy. For one thing, he fails to distinguish between a real and an electric cat in his job. He feels empathy even for electric animals, as the repairman Milt Borogrove observes (73). In his job as an “ambulance” driver for broken electric animals, he accidently encounters a live cat dying, but he assumes it is electric and tries to find the electrical connections. His employer, Hannibal Sloat, sees this as demonstrating not only his stupidity but also, in a sense, a failure of empathy, in not distinguishing true suffering from simulated suffering (electric animals are programmed to simulate disease when they break down). When empathy is not tempered with intelligence, it can be misdirected to inappropriate objects. One could argue that the value of empathy depends upon its ability to discriminate. What good is empathy when directed to a machine without feelings? The indiscriminate nature of Isidore’s empathy illustrates the mechanical nature of mimesis (as identification) when not supplemented by reason.

The same issues are raised by Isidore’s interactions with the androids Pris, Irmgard, and Roy. Isidore lives in a deserted apartment building in the suburbs, and one day he hears noises from another apartment indicating that he has a neighbor in the building. He knocks on the door of the apartment, and we get this rather remarkable description of the inhabitant, Pris:

The door, meagerly, opened and he saw within the apartment a fragmented and misaligned shrinking figure, a girl who cringed and slunk away and yet held onto the door, as if for physical support. Fear made her seem ill; it distorted her body lines, made her appear as if someone had broken her and then, with malice, patched her together badly. Her eyes, enormous, glazed over fixedly as she attempted to smile. (59)

On the one hand, she is described as doll-like, “fragmented and misaligned,” “broken,” evoking the idea of androids as merely puppets. Pris stands in stark contrast with the confident and efficient Rachael, who is her double in appearance and programming. Although Pris is a Nexus-6, the overwhelming initial impression of her is of a childlike waif. Despite being a literal double of Rachael, she is radically different because of her situation. She is sensitive, unlike a robot. So although she is described in mechanical terms as “patched . . . together badly,” the effect of the description reinforces her humanity. Pris is like a human in her psychological fragility, her dependence upon circumstance and community. If she were simply a machine, presumably she would be more impervious to circumstance.

As this scene develops, Pris gains in confidence as she realizes that Isidore is alone and mentally defective, posing no threat to her. Her capacity for rapid psychological change is another example of her humanity. She expresses contempt for Isidore when she discovers that he is a “special” and treats him coldly:

Now that her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say. (63)

The “coldness” is partly her attitude towards Isidore as a “chickenhead,” but it is also something that we find in other androids in the novel at various points, so it can be taken as a typical characteristic. The androids are “deplorable” because they represent a hubristic attempt to play god, to upset the natural order, to control nature through technology.[30] Philip K. Dick apparently found the literal fabrication of a human simulacrum horrific. In an interview, he said he conceived of the androids in his novel as “deplorable,” lacking empathy (Sammon 27).[31]  At the same time, the androids as represented are practically human, despite their “deplorable” origin in the Rosen Association. Their duality is ultimately symptomatic of humans, who are capable of love and empathy but who can also act with mechanical self-interest. Living creatures, on one level, are biological machines, programmed by their genes to survive and reproduce at any cost. The androids reflect the fear that this is all we are. They represent our fears about ourselves and other humans, who can act with utter impersonality.

At first Isidore doesn’t realize that his neighbor Pris is an android, although she treats him without any consideration of his feelings—which complicates his sympathy for the androids, since in general they treat him with very little empathy or concern. Irmgard is the only one who appreciates him at all. What value is empathy when it is not reciprocated? Later, when he figures out that they are androids, he doesn’t especially care and continues to value them as friends, despite knowing that they are using him for selfish purposes (188).

In his relationship with the androids, Isidore is a Christ-like figure, in the sense of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot.[32] On one level, Do Androids Dream is unambiguously Christian, albeit a tragic Christianity without any assurance of salvation. Mercer tells Deckard in fusion, “There is no salvation,” but we don’t know exactly what he means by “salvation” (164). We do know that Mercer saves Deckard’s life by warning him that Pris is approaching with a laser tube to kill him (203). The basic doctrine of Mercerism, recounted by Isidore, is, “Wilbur Mercer is always renewed. He’s eternal. At the top of the hill he’s struck down; he sinks into the tomb world but then he rises inevitably. And us with him. So we’re eternal, too” (71). Mercer tells Deckard that he exists “To show you . . . that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be” (164.) Humans have the continued presence and nonjudgmental devotion of Mercer/Christ.[33]

Mercerist fusion connects one to something larger than oneself, the community of people sharing the same faith. Interestingly, Roy Baty thinks that androids should be able to connect in this way to other androids, and reportedly he and his followers have tried using drugs to share such an experience, although with what results are not described (169). In any case, his followers regard him as a great spiritual leader (182). Their religious strivings are another example of their humanity.

The androids are uniformly hostile to Mercer. The popular TV and radio show host Buster Friendly (whom the androids disclose is one of their own, unbeknownst to bounty hunters [194]), often makes snide remarks about Mercerism. Isidore can’t understand why Buster Friendly is opposed to Mercerism, given its doctrines and the government’s approval. Despite his mental degradation, Isidore shows some creativity in conjecturing that the reason for Buster’s hostility is envy. Isidore concludes that Buster and Mercer are “in competition . . . for control of our psychic selves” (70). When he shares his theory with his boss, Hannibal Sloat, they have an interesting exchange:

Isidore said, “I think Buster Friendly and Mercerism are fighting for control of our psychic souls.”

“If so,” Sloat said, examining the cat, “Buster is winning.”

“He’s winning now,” Isidore said, “but ultimately he’ll lose.”

Sloat lifted his head, peered at him. “Why?”

“Because Wilbur Mercer is always renewed. He’s eternal. At the top of the hill he’s struck down; he sinks into the tomb world but then he rises inevitably. And us with him. So we’re eternal, too.” He felt good, speaking so well; usually around Mr. Sloat he stammered.

Sloat said, “Buster is immortal, like Mercer. There’s no difference.”

“How can he be? He’s a man.”

“I don’t know,” Sloat said. “But it’s true. They’ve never admitted it, of course.”

“Is that how come Buster Friendly can do forty-six hours of show a day?” “That’s right,” Sloat said.

“What about Amanda Werner and those other women?”

“They’re immortal, too.”

“Are they a superior life form from another system?”

“I’ve never been able to determine that for sure,” Mr. Sloat said. . . . “As I have conclusively in the case of Wilbur Mercer,” he finished almost inaudibly. (71-2 )

Hannibal Sloat’s perspective here is a little obscure, but the implication is that he has deduced that Buster Friendly is an android. Sloat is not distinguished by his empathy for Isidore or anyone else, nor does he display any sympathy for Mercerism. He says, “There’s no difference” between Buster Friendly and Mercer so we can presume his comment that he has “conclusively” determined whether or not Mercer is a “superior life-form from another system” is his ironic way of suggesting that he thinks Mercer is a fraud, as the TV show later confirms (at least on one level).[34] By equating Mercer and Buster Friendly, he suggests that they are both equally fraudulent. His comment that he’s “never been able to determine [Buster’s identity] for sure” is probably ironic, since it’s obvious in light of him appearing on TV and radio for “forty-six hours of show a day” with no repetition, according to Isidore, a devoted viewer/listener (69). (There are presumably two or more Buster Friendly androids, who are replaced when they wear out—one form of “immortality.”)

Since Mercer appears in person to Deckard (and perhaps Isidore) without any aid from an empathy box, it is safe to assume that Mercer actually is some kind of alien or supernatural life form dedicated to aiding humankind. Isidore repeats the claim of followers, “Mercer, he reflected, isn’t a human being; he evidently is an archetypal entity from the stars, superimposed on our culture by a cosmic template” (65).

We can regard the staging of Mercer’s ascent by an alcoholic two-bit actor as an accident of history irrelevant to the larger truth of Mercerism. Buster Friendly’s exposé only concerns the screen imagery of the empathy box; compare the sympathetic communion with Christ experienced by believers through medieval artistic representations of the Crucifixion (the model for Mercerist fusion); a host of contingencies may play a part in the creation of any artwork, even one of spiritual nobility. It’s true that in his conversation with Isidore, Mercer identifies himself with the “elderly retired bit player named Al Jarry” (197), but his identity is obviously not limited to Al Jarry, since he appears independently to Deckard and Isidore. Mercer apparently identifies with all humans and animals in their suffering. Mercer’s appearance as Al Jarry is a logical extension of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, whereby Christ was fully subject to all the frailties and contingencies of a human body. Christ appeared as Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee, and Mercer is manifested as Al Jarry, a bit player living in East Harmony, Indiana (191).[35] Mercer says to Isidore, “I don’t judge, not even myself” (198). He admits freely, “I am a fraud,” but with the important qualification, only “From their standpoint” (197):

Mercer smiled. “It was true. They did a good job and from their [the androids’] standpoint Buster Friendly’s disclosure was convincing. They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you’re still here and I’m still here.” Mercer indicated with a sweep of his hand the barren, rising hillside, the familiar place. “I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.” (198)

The androids’ objections to Mercerism are twofold. Buster Friendly speculates that Mercer is the invention of some “would-be Hitler” that wants to control people (193). Mercer is a myth designed to enable fusion for precisely that purpose. Irmgard, on the other hand, says that Mercer functions to propagate the lie that empathy is what distinguishes humans. She seems to believe that empathy doesn’t exist, it’s just something invented to prove the superiority of humans. The escaped androids apparently believe they don’t have empathy, despite their love for and efforts to help each other. Irmgard comments, after Buster Friendly’s exposé,

Isn’t it [empathy] a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing. How’s the spider? (193, emphasis in original)[36]

In light of the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of Mercerism, it’s rather strange that Galvan endorses Buster Friendly’s “heavy-handed” insinuation that

Mercerism and the ideology of empathy that is its mainstay, far from appealing to innate human characteristics, function merely as a means by which the government controls an otherwise unwieldy populace. (Galvan 416)

But the novel actually defends “the ideology of empathy” very effectively, and there is no evidence that Mercer represents anyone but himself. Isidore finds a live spider in the hallway of his building, an extremely rare experience on earth. He shows the spider to the androids, who are curious. They wonder why it has so many legs, and Pris says, “You know what I think, J. R.? I think it doesn’t need all those legs,” whereupon she proceeds methodically to clip the legs off the spider one by one. In response, “A weird terror struck at J. R. Isidore” (190). Pris comments earlier in the novel on the irony that “All life. Everything organic that wriggles or squirms or burrows or flies or swarms or lays eggs” is protected by law, while any android on earth must be hunted and killed (148). Roy notes that, for humans, “Insects . . . are especially sacrosanct” (149).

In this remarkable passage, Dick intertwines four different yet closely related narrative strands. On TV, Buster Friendly reveals the origin of the empathy box screen video in a television studio using a small-time, bit-part actor to portray Mercer. Friendly and his guests celebrate the exposure of Mercer as a fraud. Roy, Irmgard, and Pris, meanwhile, rejoice in Buster’s revelation that “Mercerism is a swindle” and “The whole experience of empathy is a swindle” (193). At the same time, Pris is clipping the legs off the spider, in response to which Isidore is rapidly sinking into panic, culminating in the disintegration of reality and a descent into the “tomb world.” (In case the reader thinks that Isidore’s empathy is misplaced, Dick reaffirms the sanctity of insect life when Deckard is envious of Isidore for finding a spider: “I’ve never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. Maybe it’ll happen someday to me like it did to him” [202].) The androids are insensible to the pathos of the spider’s fate and Isidore’s total identification with the spider’s suffering:

“Please,” Isidore said.

Pris glanced up inquiringly. “Is it worth something?”

“Don’t mutilate it,” he said wheezingly. Imploringly.

With the scissors, Pris snipped off one of the spider’s legs. (190)

After Pris snips off four legs of the spider, she comments,

“He won’t go. But he can.”

[ . . . ]

“It won’t try to walk,” Irmgard said.

“I can make it walk.” Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away. (193-4)

Not only are they unconcerned about the spider and Isidore’s misery, they don’t even comprehend it. They can only conjecture that Isidore is upset about the monetary value of the spider, and they reassure him that they will recompense him. Eventually Pris discerns the real source of Isidore’s suffering but says blandly, “he’ll get over it” (195). This passage is a literary tour de force, inspired perhaps by Flaubert’s ironic juxtaposition of Madame Bovary’s seduction with the events of Yonville’s agricultural fair. The effect is to contrast the indubitable suffering of Isidore and the spider with the seeming victory of Buster and the androids over the “myth” of Mercer and empathy. Empathic suffering is genuine. Buster and the androids’ cynical efforts to deny it are the real fraud.

Dick underlines the power of Isidore and the spider’s shared suffering when the androids too begin to experience the disintegration of the apartment walls and furnishings, despite their lack of empathy for the spider. At first the reader assumes that Isidore’s experience is purely subjective, but then Irmgard says, “What’s he doing? . . . He’s breaking everything! Isidore, stop—” (196). The dissolution of the apartment, however, is only temporary. Mercer arrives in the “tomb world” of Isidore’s experience, speaks to Isidore, and resurrects the spider, although the androids are unable to see Mercer (197-8).

At least one critic claims that Isidore goes “berserk” and is physically destroying the apartment himself in this passage.[37] There are several facts that controvert this interpretation. First of all, Isidore responds plainly to Irmgard, “I’m not doing it” (196), and the narrator never mentions Isidore actively breaking anything. Isidore may be mentally defective, but he is not insane, and he does not perceive himself destroying anything. Isidore is never portrayed as actually or potentially violent. The dissolution of the furniture, walls, and floor of the apartment, the emergence of dead animals and “mummified hands” etc. are the effect of the spider’s mutilation and Isidore’s Mercerist descent into the tomb world. Second, we know that Irmgard is sensitive to Isidore’s distress because earlier in this scene she says to Pris and her husband, “It makes me terribly upset, him just standing there by the sink and not speaking” (194) while the spider is dismembered. The disintegration of the apartment is physically centered on Isidore, as everything around him is devolving into the tomb world, and Irmgard recognizes the connection to Isidore, hence her comment. Her sensitivity enables Irmgard to recognize correctly that Isidore’s personal experience has somehow expanded out into the physical world of the apartment (at least partially), even if she has no clue how and why. Third, and most important, a narrative technique that Dick commonly uses in this and other novels is the oscillation between the psychological and the ontological realms;[38] for example, in Do Androids Dream, users of the empathy box while in fusion suffer physical wounds from the rocks thrown by the killers, even though fusion is a purely mental experience. The androids’ experience of the dissolution of the apartment is another example of such oscillation, serving to emphasize the power of Isidore and the spider’s experience.

Isidore views the opposition of Buster Friendly to Mercer as a battle for control of humans’ souls, which places this contest in a universal perspective. The novel is informed by a cosmic dualism of good and evil. Evil is sometimes expressed as entropy, reducing meaningful form into kipple. In Mercerism, evil is embodied by the anonymous killers—originally government agents—who oppose Mercer in his ascent from the tomb world.[39] Sometimes Deckard finds himself aligned with the forces of evil, as when he plans to kill Luba Lyft, the talented opera singer (91). Manichean dualism is a recurrent theme in Dick’s novels. Dick apparently believed in a cosmic opposition of good and evil, despite the ambiguity of its expression among humans. Humans are inextricably entangled in evil. As Mercer says to Deckard when he is reluctant to kill the remaining escaped androids,

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe. (164-5)

The mingled yarn of good and evil reflects the intrinsic ambivalence of human mimesis: the source of empathy but also rivalry; mechanical imitation yet also the enabling condition of human freedom.

6. The Uncanny as Mimetic Effect

As I mentioned above, the uncanny, according to Jentsch, can be produced by a reader’s “uncertainty . . . [about] whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” (qtd. in Freud 227). I’ve argued that the androids reflect our fears that humans may be automatons, compelled by mimetic instincts or simply the biological drive to survive and reproduce. Do Androids Dream is not primarily a novel of the uncanny, but there are certain episodes that produce this effect, notably the interviews with Luba Lyft and Inspector Garland.

Identity is fluid and unstable in the novel. Mimesis works to undermine the distinction between self and other. Dick creates uncertainty about the identity of Luba Lyft, which in turn reflects uncertainty onto Deckard. When Deckard confronts her in her dressing room at the San Francisco Opera House, she says:

“Who are you?” Her tone held cold reserve — and that other cold, which he had encountered in so many androids. Always the same: great intellect, ability to accomplish much, but also this. He deplored it.

“I’m from the San Francisco Police Department,” he said.

“Oh?” The huge and intense eyes did not flicker, did not respond. “What are you here about?” Her tone, oddly, seemed gracious. (93)

Luba’s tone not only “held cold reserve” but also “that other cold” that distinguishes the androids as inhuman in Deckard’s eyes. Yet the tone of her very next sentence, “oddly, seemed gracious.” The representation of Luba and the androids is deliberately contradictory, reflecting the paradoxical nature of humans, and designed to create an uncertainty about identity that kindles an uncanny affect.[40]

With uncanny insight or intuition, Luba turns all of Deckard’s concerns back upon him:

“Do you think I’m an android? Is that it?” Her voice had faded almost to extinction. “I’m not an android. I haven’t even been on Mars; I’ve never even seen an android!” Her elongated lashes shuddered involuntarily; he saw her trying to appear calm. “Do you have information that there’s an android in the cast? I’d be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?”

“An android,” he said, “doesn’t care what happens to any other android. That’s one of the indications we look for.”

“Then,” Miss Lyft said, “you must be an android.”

That stopped him; he stared at her.

“Because,” she continued, “Your job is to kill them, isn’t it? You’re what they call — ” She tried to remember.

“A bounty hunter,” Rick said. “But I’m not an android.”

“This test you want to give me.” Her voice, now, had begun to return. “Have you taken it?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “A long, long time ago; when I first started with the department.”

“Maybe that’s a false memory. Don’t androids sometimes go around with false memories?”

Rick said, “My superiors know about the test. It’s mandatory.”

“Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don’t know.” She smiled. As if inviting him to agree.

“Let’s get on with the test,” he said, getting out the sheets of questions.

“I’ll take the test,” Luba Lyft said, “if you’ll take it first.”

Again he stared at her, stopped in his tracks.

“Wouldn’t that be more fair?” she asked. “Then I could be sure of you. I don’t know; you seem so peculiar and hard and strange.” She shivered, then smiled again. Hopefully. (93-4)

The novel mentions several times that androids don’t care what happens to other androids, although there are many examples of androids taking great care for other androids. Rachael has dedicated her life to saving escaped androids. Pris’s face “dissolved in rapture” when she is reunited with her friends Roy and Irmgard (141). But when she finds out that fellow androids Polokov and Luba have been killed, “The joy which had appeared on Pris’s face at seeing her friends at once melted away” (143). Roy and Irmgard have married, presumably, to express their love for each other. And Roy certainly cares what happens to his wife, letting out “a cry of anguish” at her death (205). Although the androids reportedly are unable to experience fusion, their empathy for each other suggests otherwise. There aren’t any examples in the novel of an android being indifferent to the fate of a fellow android, although the humans believe this is typical. Humans don’t care about androids, yet they fault the androids for their supposed lack of empathy for each other.

Luba ingeniously suggests that perhaps Deckard is an android but doesn’t know, or that possibly he killed the real Deckard and is now impersonating him. When she observes, “you seem so peculiar and hard and strange,” she cannily turns the stereotype of the android back upon him. When she directly accuses him of being an android because he doesn’t care about androids, “That stopped him; he stared at her.” And when she suggests he take the test first, to assuage her doubts, “Again he stared at her, stopped in his tracks.” This is a decidedly uncanny encounter, as Deckard, along with the reader, must consider whether Deckard himself is an android with implanted memories.

Androids are supposedly distinguished by their lack of affect, but sometimes what we find is inappropriate affect. Luba’s affect in this scene is rather curious. She smiles at incongruous times, which is part of the uncanny effect of this scene. Why is she smiling and gracious, when she knows that Deckard is planning to kill her and that she must defend her life? Of course she is playing a role in this scene, pretending to be human. But there is also the sense that she is like a child who is not sure of the right attitude to take in an unfamiliar situation.[41] Luba is apparently not in control of her emotions, when “Her voice faded almost to extinction. . . . Her elongated lashes shuddered involuntarily, and he saw her trying to appear calm” (93-4).

Later in the novel, after she has been revealed as an android, she says, rather surprisingly,

I really don’t like androids. Ever since I got here from Mars my life has consisted of imitating the human, doing what she would do, acting as if I had the thoughts and impulses a human would have. Imitating, as far as I’m concerned, a superior life form. (124)

While she affirms the superiority of humans, in her efforts to improve herself (going from slavery to opera singer) she actually shows herself better than the humans in the novel, who sink too willingly into despair.[42] Deckard often accuses the androids of giving up too easily, but the humans on earth have essentially given up hope, while the escaped androids are actively working to improve their lives. Luba’s dislike for androids doesn’t mean betraying them but rather trying to be better than her origin, a very human aspiration.

The encounter with Luba is a turning point in Deckard’s attitude toward androids, because he loves opera and she is a great singer, comparable to the best singers performing or on record during Dick’s lifetime. Great opera singers, of course, are known for their ability to feel and communicate emotion in their song. So Dick chose her profession to contradict the stereotype of androids as lacking emotion. When Deckard hears her sing, “he perceived himself sub specie aeternitatis, the form-destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw here” (91-92).

After Luba calls the police, Officer Crams shows up and the uncanny affect kicks up a notch. Deckard calls his boss, who offers to help him by speaking to Crams. But when Crams goes to the vid-phone, the screen appears blank, and attempts to call Bryant again prove fruitless. The narrative is sending us contradictory clues here. Is Deckard living in some kind of alternate reality, as we find in many of Dick’s novels? Is he really a bounty hunter, or is the whole novel his psychotic fantasy? As Crams asks him, “What do you do, roam around killing people and telling yourself they’re androids?” (102).

“Maybe you’re an android,” Officer Crams said. “With a false memory, like they give them. Had you thought of that?” (103)

When Crams takes him to the San Francisco police station, they don’t go to the one that Deckard knows. Officer Crams tells him that the Hall of Justice building (police station) on Lombard Street, where Deckard usually reports, is “disintegrating; it’s a ruin. Nobody’s used that for years” (102). They soon arrive at the Mission Street Hall of Justice building:

the roof of which . . . jutted up in a series of baroque, ornamented spires; complicated and modern, the handsome structure struck Rick Deckard as attractive—except for one aspect. He had never seen it before. (104)

If Deckard has been living in San Francisco and working the streets, it seems unlikely that he has never noticed this renovated building before, which contains a fully staffed and functioning police station.

Inside the station, Crams reports that he found a body (Polokov) inside Deckard’s hovercar and that they are checking it out with a bone marrow analysis at the lab to see if it is an android (105). I want to discuss the representation of the androids’ bodies in death, which might seem like a digression but is actually relevant to the point I’m making about the uncanny ambiguity of the androids. Living androids, of course, are identical to humans, except for the results from the Voight-Kampff or Boneli tests, which are based on the android’s physiology and require expert application and interpretation. When an android is killed, the description of the body is rather strange. When Deckard shoots Polokov,

the .38 magnum slug struck the android in the head and its brain box burst. The Nexus-6 unit which operated it blew into pieces, a raging, mad wind which carried throughout the car. Bits of it, like the radioactive dust itself, whirled down on Rick. (86).

There is no mention of blood. And in fact, Deckard goes on with his job with the dead body in the car. Instead of a brain, the android has a “brain box . . . . The Nexus-6 unit which operated it.” Rather than blood and brain tissue, it explodes into “Bits” like “dust” that whirl around the car. Polokov’s body, in death, sounds more like a robot than a biological organism. Yet his body, even with its head split open, requires a bone marrow analysis to be identified as android. When Rachael says that she’s not alive, Deckard responds, “Legally you’re not. But really you are. Biologically. You’re not made out of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an organic entity” (181). The androids “wear out” in about four years because of a problem with “cell replacement” (181). Rachael reports that the development of a Nexus-7 will involve “modifications of its zygote-bath DNS factors” (174), which is technobabble, but “zygote” is a biological term for a fertilized ovum. So on one level, the novel wants to insist that the androids are 100% biological organisms. But in the description of an android’s death, of which Polokov’s is typical, they seem to be robots. This ambiguity comes up in Isidore’s experience:

Isidore, then, had a momentary, strange hallucination; he saw briefly a frame of metal, a platform of pullies and circuits and batteries and turrets and gears — and then the slovenly shape of Roy Baty faded back into view. Isidore felt a laugh rise up inside him; he nervously choked it off. And felt bewildered. (146)

This is described as a “strange hallucination,” but the ambiguity is typical regarding the bodies of the androids at certain points. The narrative effectively creates “uncertainty . . . [about] whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” (Jentsch, qtd. in Freud 227). But whereas the protagonist’s mistake in “The Sandman” is plainly an illusion (there’s no question that Olympia is really a doll, except in the fantasy of the protagonist), here Dick literalizes the allegory, as it were, creating an ontological ambiguity within the world of the novel and aesthetically for readers.

When Luba points a laser at Deckard, he is sure he is going to die; likewise, as he’s being taken to the police station by Crams he thinks to himself that he’s going to his death. But despite having ample opportunity and motivation for killing him, neither Luba, Crams, nor Garland do so. While this doesn’t make any sense in terms of plot, it works well to create doubts in readers’ minds about whether they are really androids or not.

At the police station, Deckard calls his wife, but a woman answers whom he has never seen before—was his whole previous life delusional somehow? Inspector Garland finds in Deckard’s briefcase a list of androids to retire, and Garland is next on the list, suggesting that Garland might be an android. Garland calls in their bounty hunter Phil Resch to check on whether Deckard is on Resch’s list of androids to retire. Garland mentions to Resch that they are running a bone marrow test on Polokov, and Resch says, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to run a bone marrow test on him” (108), suggesting that he thinks Polokov is an android, but raising the question of why they would not want to know this information. For both readers and characters, the motivations of the characters in this scene are extremely obscure. There’s no coherent sense of who is an android and who is not. Both Garland and Lyft accuse Resch of being an android, and his lack of empathy for androids seems to confirm this. But later in the novel he proves to be human, again calling into question the difference between androids and humans.

In his analysis of the uncanny, Freud argues that uncertainty about identity is not enough to explain the uncanny experience, and he invokes the return of the repressed (241). But uncertainty and the return of the repressed are not mutually exclusive explanations. In fact, they go together naturally. What has been repressed are fears about identity. Mimesis is central to what it means to be human, but that heritage is distinctly ambivalent. On the one hand, as Tomasello’s work suggests, mimetic identification and shared attention are the source of empathy, human identity and consciousness, allowing for the remarkable freedom and rationality of humans. But at the same time, imitation is by definition a mechanical process, and as Girard shows, in the form of rivalry it can lead to violence. The androids reflect fears about the dark side of mimesis; they are uncanny because they are doubles of ourselves.

Conclusion

There is an anthropological content to Deckard’s uncanny encounters. The similarities between androids and humans demonstrate that their (and our) status as conscious agents depends upon identification and shared attention, the scenic source of culture. Children must learn language (the distinguishing quality of humans), and androids share that ability. But we must immediately qualify this statement by noting that the novel, at the same time, insists upon the difference between androids and humans. The representation of the androids is  contradictory; one could argue, incoherent, except that it functions to create uncertainties that are central to the novel’s aesthetic and meaning. The mimetic and ambivalent androids point us back to our mimetic and ambivalent origin. As an “imitation” animal, a talking ape, mechanical yet free, empathic yet cruel, it is humans who are uncanny; and the representation of the androids reflects this anthropological insight.

I

James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which is the last story in The Dubliners, ends with the middle-aged and learned protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, gazing out his hotel window and imagining the entirety of Ireland enveloped in snow. He mentally traverses the Bog of Allen, the Shannon waves, “every part of the dark central plain,” “the treeless hills,” and, finally, “every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried” (242). Gabriel had just learned after a Christmas party that Furey was a young man whom his wife Gretta loved and who died after risking his frail health by running in the rain to see Gretta one last time before she moved east. After Gretta tells the story, Gabriel succumbs to jealousy and anger because he realizes that she never loved him as she loved Furey. However, after Gretta falls asleep, Gabriel’s rage diminishes, and the character gains a more objective view of the experience. He escapes his prison of self-pity by imaginatively drifting away from his hotel chamber and out over various Irish landmarks, eventually settling over Michael Furey’s grave in a churchyard somewhere in the west of Ireland. As I will show in this essay, Gabriel’s escape demonstrates Eric Gans’s concept of the deferral of violence through representation.[1] Of course, the violence Gabriel defers is not of the physical sort; it is not as if Gretta should soon become concerned for her safety now that she has revealed the secret she has harbored for the duration of her marriage. However, Gabriel’s muffled hostility would be damaging enough; it would add bitterness, resentment, and an increase in the emotional and psychological distance that has defined their marriage up to this point.

One point that I am making in this essay is that Gabriel’s renewed passion for Gretta, which had been intensifying before her shocking revelation, is mimetic, as René Girard would characterize it.[2] His discovery that Gretta harbors a romantic passion for a former lover leads to sexual jealousy and the epiphany that his life and marriage have been essentially passionless. Furthermore, this essay examines how Gabriel responds to this epiphany through the aborted gesture of appropriation, an act of deferment he sustains through imaginative flights of fancy on which he can re-enact the originary scene through the symbolic appropriation of Gretta and her former lover, Michael Furey. Furthermore, this paper argues that Gabriel’s deferral of violence in favor of symbolic appropriation is a spiritual and religious event that moves far beyond the personal. He symbolically appropriates not only Gretta and Furey but essentially the whole of Ireland, creating this feeling of oneness and inseparability which often grounds religious experience. I would add, however, that this transcendence is likely a tentative one, for the glorious vision of appropriating the entirety of the Irish “dead” suggests Gabriel is quite ambitious and prone to jealousy and feelings of inadequacy.

II

The first two-thirds of the story presents Gabriel as a self-conscious figure without revealing any mimetic rivalry that contributes to these occasional inadequate feelings. Mimetic desire reveals itself after the party when the guests are preparing to depart, and Gretta stands in the middle of the staircase, entranced by the song “The Lass of Aughrim,” sung by Bartell D’Arcy. Here is how Joyce describes Gabriel’s reaction to his wife, whom he does not recognize at first, standing near the top of the steps, “in the shadow also. . . leaning on the banisters, listening to something”:

There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in the attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (236)

It is reasonable to presume that the learned and erudite Gabriel has had plenty of experience viewing works of high visual art depicting women in such a manner. Gabriel is likely using an assortment of acclaimed painters as external mediators to serve as models for his artistic vision. It is also important to point out that Gabriel is simulating the aborted gesture of appropriation by declaring her, through the act of painting her (imaginatively, of course), as sacred; he immediately sees Gretta, after all, as a “symbol of something,” a sign of something sacred. As Gans has argued, this act of declaring something to be sacred and beautiful depends on abandoning the pursuit of that object to obtain appetitive satisfaction: “The ‘beauty’ of the sign, its closure as a formal entity, reflects the renunciation of its original appetitive goal of attaining its object, which it re-presents” (New Way of Thinking 12). While looking up at Gretta, Gabriel sees her as unobtainable, and this temporal act of renunciation enables him to render her as an aesthetic and sacred object of high art.

And while this sacralizing act is one of mimicking external rather than internal mediators, this rendering of Gretta as a symbol, nonetheless, creates a sexual longing in Gabriel for her. As they walk to the cab that will take them to their hotel, Joyce describes the nature of Gabriel’s passion: “The blood went bounding along his veins; and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous” (231). This passion continues to manifest in intense feelings and images as they board the carriage and as they enter the hotel and make their way to their room: “He longed to be alone with her. When the others had gone away, when he and she were in the room in the hotel, then they would be alone together” (232). It is interesting to note that none of this sexual feeling comes from an actual conversation he is having with her; it is the painterly image she projects on the staircase and subsequent mysterious behavior that enlivens his romantic interest in Gretta, and he is anticipating actualizing his desire to make love to her. His imaginary act illustrates Gans’s assertion that the aesthetic “mobilizes our desires for both appetitive satisfaction and further abortive acts of representation” (New Way of Thinking 207). Gans describes an endless oscillation between moving towards and moving away from appropriating the object, with each move influencing the other.

This romantic desire to appropriate, stimulated by his esthetic act of imagining a painting of Gretta, is transformed into anger when he learns the song that mesmerized his wife reminded her of an old beloved, Michael Furey. Even though Furey is dead, a song has brought him back to life to become a rival to whom Gabriel feels inferior: “Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him” (238). Gabriel is having the ever-common Joycean epiphany, which in his case is the sudden awareness that his life and marriage have been mostly passionless. Gabriel’s attention towards Gretta has shifted to Furey, who is, oddly enough, an internal mediator to whom he feels inferior. Gabriel is aware that he cannot return to the perceived originary scene of Gretta’s romantic passion; therefore, he cannot fight or possess the rival, Furey, and the young Gretta. He can, however, use his visual imagination to return to this scene he had never inhabited. Gabriel’s epiphany comes from both the realization of his inability to be at the scene and his ability to memorialize it. As Marina Ludwigs explains, an epiphany is “the oscillation between two images: those of the object as firstness, to which we no longer have access, and the object as a sign representing or mediating this originally lost firstness.” Therefore, epiphanies are “paradigmatic aesthetic moments, which produce a re-enactment of the originary scene.” Gabriel demonstrates Ludwigs’ claim that epiphanies involve the re-enactment of the originary scene, for what soon follows Gabriel’s epiphany is a reconstruction of the romantic (and tragic) scene of Gretta’s final departure from Furey, one that has left Gretta with a sense of unresolved sexual passion.

It is also worth pointing out that Gabriel’s epiphany results from an awareness of a rival; his realization of his passionless life results from this mimetic triangle involving himself, the dead Michael Furey, and Gretta. Joyce first directs our attention to the hatred and resentment that the competition with the rival brings. To remove these feelings of shame, Gabriel must now remove himself spiritually from the imagined center of conflict existing between Furey and himself. However, the renunciation he engages in will lead to much more than declaring Gretta, the object of his desire, to be sacred. As someone who feels alienated not just from his wife but, as we learn earlier in the story, his country of Ireland’s heritage and culture as well (reflecting, of course, Joyce’s self-imposed exile from the Emerald Isle), the triangular scene between Gabriel, Gretta, and himself is made into a sacred emblem of all of humanity, or, at least, all Irish society.

III

Gretta’s deteriorating emotional control helps to persuade Gabriel to remove himself from the mimetic scene as she begins to narrate the story of her history with Furey. She informs Gabriel of the time one early winter when she was about to leave her grandmother’s home in the west of Ireland to travel to Dublin. She pauses to sigh within the tale’s telling, which is one of the first clues of how emotionally taxing a story it is for her to tell. She must then abandon her narration soon after getting to the part involving the night before she left for Dublin, with Furey standing in the rain outside Gretta’s grandmother’s house and throwing gravel up against the window to get her attention: “She stopped, choking with sobs and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt” (240). Up to this point, Gabriel has been asking questions that force Gretta to continue with the story. However, Gabriel becomes “shy of intruding on her grief” and walks away to peer out the window. His growing awareness of his wife’s raw humanity makes him less assertive about acquiring additional facts concerning her early romance, let alone continuing the attempt to make love to her.

Gabriel is also experiencing a growing empathy for Gretta, which causes his resentment for her and Michael to dissipate as his focus shifts from his rival to Gretta. After Gretta falls asleep, Gabriel looks

for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-opened mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. . . It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. . . His curious eyes rested long upon her face and hair; and, he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. (emphasis added 240)

In sympathy for Gretta in her most vulnerable state, Gabriel seemingly loses touch with his resentment and is no longer troubled by the self-conscious awareness that he has been a poor, romantically challenged husband.  This resentment, one would argue, is not disappearing but is about to be transformed aesthetically into a series of visions. Soon after Gretta falls asleep, her revelations cause Gabriel to imagine what Aunt Julia’s deathbed scene might look like, with his “useless” words unable to console Aunt Kate. Gabriel has drawn a connection between his sexual impotence, brought on by Gretta’s revelation of her history with Furey, and his perceived inability to establish intimate relationships with family and, perhaps, friends. Next, Gabriel’s attention shifts, once more, to his wife and Furey: Gretta “had locked in her heart so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live” (241). Here, Gabriel constructs an originary scene of desire involving himself, Gretta, and Furey. Still, since the scene has already happened, Gabriel has no recourse but to abort the pursuit of his wife in favor of the creation of the sign for this scene.

Gabriel is now ready to leave the bitterness and resentment behind and transform the experience of hearing her story into images associated with Gretta’s past, as indicated in the story’s next-to-last paragraph:

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. (241-42)

Here, Gabriel appropriates by reconstructing the scene of Gretta’s last encounter with Furey when he stands under the tree in the rain. Rather than harbor rage over Gretta’s long-harbored secret, Gretta’s slumber allows him to back away from further pursuit of the details of her romance with Furey and, instead, transform the morbidly romantic scene from her past by assembling fresh mental images of it. Ironically but understandably, these images make him love Gretta, perhaps more than he had ever loved her before. He chooses to designate her and the scene with Furey as sacred, which transforms his jealousy into love, a transcendent feeling that takes him away from the hotel room and “out into a grey impalpable world.”

IV

This transformation from pursuit to representation nears its completion at the story’s end when Gabriel begins to imaginatively “set out on his journey westward” (242) and witness the snow falling over Ireland, across “every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried” (242). While tethered to the Furey story, Gabriel’s imagination is free to provide associative imagery that redirects his attention from the mimetic scene of resentment to Furey’s grave and sad images of barren Ireland he associates with his wife’s former lover. Gabriel’s imagination then soars beyond Furey’s grave as he envisions the other “crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.” In the story’s final and iconic sentence, the narrator describes Gabriel’s “soul” as swooning “slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (242). Here, Gabriel has an aesthetic, romantic, and religious experience due to this feeling of solidarity with Furey, nature, and seemingly all humanity. He is, as Gans would put it, experiencing an “esthetic ecstasy” that “derives its force from reexperiencing the birth of transcendence. . .” (A New Way of Thinking 15). Gabriel’s esthetic experience begins with envisioning Gretta and Furey’s last romantic encounter and then opens to the wider world and the originary scene of the birth of human culture by imagining the snow falling on all the living and all the dead.

The comprehensiveness of Gabriel’s transcendental vision is, one could argue, an expression to transform his resentment. Still, it is not farfetched to presume that it serves an end, to later redirect his energies towards strengthening his marriage. On one level, Gabriel’s decision “to travel westward” involves mental travel. Still, we could also take it literally to suggest that he has decided to vacation with his wife to the West of Ireland, which until now he had refused to do. Early in the story, Miss Ivors accuses Gabriel of being unpatriotic by traveling in Europe. She gives him a chance to redeem himself by inviting him and his wife to travel west for the upcoming summer. While Gretta is excited by the idea, Gabriel is not. At the story’s end, the narrator suggests that he is now ready to make this trip. This change of mind illustrates that the representation of the originary scene does not diminish desire; it can help stimulate the resolve to pursue the object with a renewed sense of purpose and a new strategy.

So, while Gabriel’s first reaction to the Furey story is jealousy and anger, witnessing his wife’s distress over revising the incident causes him to fall in love with her again, as the concluding paragraphs indicate. As mentioned earlier, Gabriel probably has never felt this passionately for his wife until now, ironically, when he realizes that his wife never loved him like she loved Michael Furey. From a Girardian vantage point, Gabriel’s passion is mimetic, derived from Furey, who risked his health to be with Gretta one last time. However, the way Gabriel channels his passion demonstrates Gans’s conception of the aborted gesture of appropriation. Rather than furtively striving to get Gretta to love him as intensely as she loved Michael, he can release his consciousness from the hotel scene, which links to the presumably originary scene of her romantic life. He aborts this gesture of appropriation and declares Gretta and Michael to be as sacred as the geographical parts of Ireland that Irish poets and artists have lauded for centuries. Gabriel’s sacralizing of the scene shows this move away from adulthood, navigating self-consciously through erudite, cosmopolitan circles in mainland Europe. By declaring both the object (Gretta) and internal mediator Furey to be sacred, Gabriel can spiritually remove himself from the originary scene he has constructed to take a mental journey across the country, identifying emblems of Gretta, Furey, and all of Ireland. However, as I noted earlier, this grand vision need not be interpreted as an emblem of Gabriel’s magnanimity. We could easily conceive the vision as sublimated violence that emblematizes the vastness of his ambition and ego. Nonetheless, it is also a vision that fulfills the ultimate purpose of art, which is to defer violence and keep the peace.