Essay: On The Transformative Value of Androids

Can morals embedded in a work of literature influence our real-life behavior? The question becomes more complex when the work in question is fictional, with imaginary characters navigating imaginary dilemmas. When a work is set in a hypothetical future in a world governed by laws vastly different than our own, its links to our own reality become even further obscured. Philip K. Dick's 1967 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? presents a future in which Earth has been ravaged by nuclear warfare. Earth is populated by humans and androids, artificially constructed biological humanoid beings. Some androids kill their owners for a chance at a life of freedom. These are sought and killed by bounty hunters like protagonist Rick Deckard. 

The parallels to our own reality are quite transparent. The maltreatment in the novels of androids mirrors sexist and racist attitudes in recent Western history. Throughout the novel Rick grows to feel empathy toward these beings with which he had initially felt no kinship at all. This process of acquiring affinity can be said to echo a process which the work's author would like to see translated to our own reality: an acceptance of the "others" in his own society, such as non-Caucasians or women.

While the philosopher or the literary scholar may actively seek such parallels in fictional works for various reasons (cultural or historical research, etc.), for the lay reader the reading process is generally a more passive, less actively interpretative endeavor. The transformative value of a fiction, then, will reside not in the elucidation of its figurative and metaphorical meanings but, I propose, in the emotional response that a fiction can elicit in the reader. Identification of symbols in literature and their methodical translation to real-life applications is, of course, practicable. Marylin Gwaltney proposes that Androids can be used in just such a way, and that "thinking about the moral status of the android helps us to think about the moral status of different stages of human life" (219) such as embryos and infants. But such transformative abilities better characterize overtly rhetorical modes of writing, such as the essay. However, a work of fiction can bring about a change in behavior and attitude in a way that an essay cannot, through identification with the narrative's characters. Robert Gordon argues that "readers of novels often take on the roles of various characters in their attempt to understand what is going on" (86) and that "the very process of becoming a spectator [or reader], and of coming to regard myself as an other, changes me" (89). In a correct reading of Androids, identification with Rick Deckard can bring about a change in the behavior and attitude of a reader toward racial and other minorities.

Certain conditions, however, must be fulfilled in order for a fiction to be transformative. Somewhat trivially, the values contained within the work of fiction must be sufficiently distant from those held by the reader for the reader to be discernibly affected by the work. More pertinently, as Martha Nussbaum points out, "reading can only have the good [moral] effects … if one reads with immersion, not just as a painful duty" (43). The reader must temporarily discard his prejudices in order to be fully affected by a work of art, a practice which Samuel Coleridge termed "suspension of disbelief" or “poetic faith”. "In any successful reading they [its readers] will share all (or most, or the most important) facts and values of the implied author" (Booth 422). That isn't to say that a reader who shares values that differ drastically from those of the author cannot achieve a meaningful reading of a text; they will simply have to make a greater leap of “poetic faith” during his reading.

Richard Posner concedes that "imaginative literature can engender in its reader responses to experiences they have not had" (28). Wolfgang Iser, a phenomenological literary critic, analyzes the process by which a reader may undergo a change during the reading process. 

In the act of reading, having to think something that we have not yet experienced does not mean only being in a position to conceive or even understand it; it also means that such acts of conception are possible and successful to the degree that they lead to something being formulated in us. For someone else [the author]'s thoughts can only take a form in our consciousness if, in the process, our unformulated faculty for deciphering, also formulates itself. Now since this formulation is carried out on terms set by someone else, whose thoughts are the theme of our reading, it follows that the formulation of our faculty for deciphering cannot be along our own lines of orientation.

For us to react emotionally to an unfamiliar experience we must necessarily rely on our store of psychological associations; in a sense, we have experienced it for ourselves.

Androids, like most science fiction books, makes extreme demands on the imagination. The novel is written in 1967 but set in a hypothetical future. Not only must the present-day reader imagine a post-apocalyptic future in which androids abound, but they must assume the position of an American who is imagining such a future – fifty years ago. The reader will forgive missed technological predictions like the simultaneous existence of video telephony and telephone operators – "presently he had another operator on the vidscreen" (104) – remembering that these advances were plausible at the time of the novel's initial publication.

Just as the reader must accept the periodical and imaginative bases of Androids, they must allow themselves identification with characters in the novel and the values according to which they operate. Perhaps most challenging in Androids is the acceptance of empathy as the foremost value in the novel's fictional world. Empathy toward animals and humans is the distinguishing feature between humans and androids, to the extent that a being who lacks instinctive empathy toward animals and humans must be an android or a schizophrenic: it is a measure of personhood (Vint 225). Sherryl Vint rightly notes that most of the novel's readers would fail the Voigt-Kampff empathy test (227). In my own reading of Androids, I immediately rejected the centrality of empathy as a social construct peculiar to the post-war world of Dick's novel; Vint and I both dragged our real-world preconceptions into the novel's fictional world and sullied our reading experience with it. The moment we did, we failed to fulfill the role of the implied reader. Is this because we lack "the freshness and responsiveness of ordinary readers" (Nussbaum 43), or because Dick's imaginative demands of his readers are too great?

Whatever the case, acceptance of empathy as morality is central to a correct reading of the novel. At the beginning of the narrative, humans and androids are firmly positioned on polar ends of the empathy scale. When Rick's wife accuses him of being a hired murderer, he is enraged and denies ever having committed murder proper. "'I've never killed a human being in my life'" (3). Rick has, of course, killed androids; he does not consider them human. After "retiring" the first android Polokov, Rick is physically shaken but emotionally unharmed. "I'm on to something. A new type of android that apparently nobody can handle but me" (42). At this point the successful reader accepts the fictitious premise of the android as an inherently inferior Other, an attitude held by protagonist Rick.

Rick's encounter with opera singer Luba Luft marks the moral turning point in the novel. Just contemplating the killing of Luba induces doubt in Rick regarding his profession. "In a way, he realized, I'm part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates [androids] and I unmake" (44). He tries to justify the destruction of talent and beauty, reasoning that "Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed" (44). Soon after, he uses his own money to buy an expensive reproduction of Edvard Munch's "Puberty", a work of art which Rick found Luba admiring, as she ostensibly contemplated her own estrangement from the human experience. In doing so, Rick experiences his first feelings of empathy toward an android, thus breaching the human/android binary in the book. He begins to recognize that the Other may not be as remote from his kind as he had thought. "So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs … my feelings were the reverse of those intended. Of those I'm accustomed to feel — am required to feel" (65). Rick realizes that lack of empathy for androids is something he has been trained to experience, and not a byproduct of some natural hierarchy. It is at this point (and not earlier) in the narrative that the reader, along with Rick, is meant to realize that the moral code upon which the novel's humans have been basing their behavior is unsound and begin questioning its premises.

The remainder of the novel continues to break down the boundary between human and android. Gwaltney notes that Rachael experiences an identity crisis when she discovers she is an android (219), a realization that mirrors not only Luba Luft's meditations on puberty but Rick's uncertainty about his own existence. "What I've done [killing androids], he thought; that's become alien to me … I've become an unnatural self" (104). Similarly, after killing Pris and the Batys, Rick feels a hopeless resignation that he had been convinced only androids felt when facing death. "Luba Luft … had become resigned. Rick had seen that before in androids… the artificial life force animating them seemed to fail if pressed too far (60). Rick too feels "a poisonous taste resembling defeat; yes, he thought, that's what it is: I've been defeated in some obscure way" (105). All of these similarities lead Rick to realize the implications of the "similarity between an electric animal and an andy … the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal" (20). Rick's ultimate devotion to the artificial turtle is an indication of his acceptance of all artificial beings, including androids, as worthy of empathy.

The reader (if they have succeeded in immersion) will come to the same acceptance of androids as Rick. But can such tolerance for an imaginary Other in a world based on an alien moral code translate to tolerance for a real-life minority group? Will an antagonist of the Civil Rights movement gain respect for blacks through identification with Rick Deckard? If we accept Booth's, Gordon’s and Iser’s propositions that the reader sheds himself and his reality and assumes a new identity, it stands to reason that when the reading process is over, i.e., when the text ends, the reader repossesses himself and identification ends. The "something formulated in us" in the reading process of which Iser writes would seem to be nontransferable to the real world because, by definition, that something is the engenderment of an experience that was entirely alien to the reader and thus removed from reality. It would seem that only an active effort of extrapolation, like Gwaltney’s, from the fictional world to the real can lead to any insights regarding the reader's reality. 

Many a bookworm, however, will easily cite a favorite book that has “stayed with” them, even after they have completed the task of reading. Tzvetan Todorov proposes that every text is comprised of signified components – words and sentences – and symbolized components. Those components that are signified will be comprehended in exactly the same way by every reader of a given text. However, every text will also contain symbolized components, which call for interpretation on the reader's part. These symbolized components exist simply because an author, no matter how meticulous, can never succeed in describing every factual and psychological detail of the narrative. These gaps in signification necessarily demand activity on the reader’s part, even in a “correct”, immersive reading of a text. The reader must complete those images and ideas that are only partially supplied by the text. From this same subjective store of images and ideas also comes the reader’s emotional response. When we read about Rick buying Luba the book of paintings, our emotional response to Dick’s words is rooted in our own psychology. Our minds simulate a sensation of acceptance to a previously despised being.

If a former slave owner in 1880s America were to successfully assume the role of implied reader in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, he would experience feelings of acceptance toward Jim, a member of a race whom he considers to be inherently inferior to his own. As the distance between Huck’s imaginary world and that of the reader is small, the reader would be highly likely to carry his sympathy toward blacks into his present reality. Of course, the hurdle of realism would likely be too great for such a reader to overcome – he would reject the bond between Huck and Jim as implausible or perverse, and fail to step into the role of implied reader. Our slave owner might in fact be more likely to benefit morally (pardon the anachronism) from a novel like Androids. Nussbaum suggests that “literature of a carefully specified sort can offer valuable assistance … by both cultivating and reinforcing valuable moral abilities” (38). A racist reader of Dick’s novel will not reject the affinity between Rick and androids on moral grounds as he would Huck. Through identification with Rick he would experience pity, admiration and affection toward an Other. Androids, in its own way, could serve as a possible treatment for racism: it might foster a sense of tolerance in our Southerner and make a roundabout difference in his morality, whereas an explicitly egalitarian book wouldn't stand a chance.

Identification and transformation.

Image by Rhett Wesley

Works Cited

Booth, Wayne C. Afterword. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973. 401-58. Google Books. Web. 13 May 2012.

Coleridge, Samuel T. "Chapter 14." Biographia Literaria. 1817. Project Gutenberg. 3 Nov. 2002. Web. 13 May 2012.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Polvo Estelar. Web. 13 May 2012.

Gordon, Robert M. "Sympathy, Simulation and the Impartial Spectator." Print. Rpt. in Philosophy and Literature Unit Reader. By Moira Gatens. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2012. 74-89. Print.

Gwaltney, Marilyn. "Androids as a Device for Reflection on Personhood." Print. Rpt. in Philosophy and Literature Unit Reader. By Moira Gatens. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2012. 219-222. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. 274-94. Print.

Nussbaum, Martha C. "Against Ethical Criticism." Print. Rpt. in Philosophy and Literature Unit Reader. By Moira Gatens. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2012. 36-51. Print.

Posner, Richard A. "Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism." Print. Rpt. in Philosophy and Literature Unit Reader. By Moira Gatens. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2012. 16-35. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. "Reading as Construction." Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 151-64.Google Books. Web. 13 May 2012.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Pleasantville, NY: Reader's Digest Association, 1986. Print.

Vint, Sherryl. "Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?." Print. Rpt. in Philosophy and Literature Unit Reader. By Moira Gatens. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2012. 223-238. Print.