This is the type of weird shit you get when I'm a student in your bullshit grad lit class.
The Subversion and Celebration of Philip K. Dick in
Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days
Michael
Cunningham’s Specimen Days explores
the political, social and emotional aftermath of 9/11 through a meditation on
and exercise in genre, a work that manipulates reader expectations of genre
tropes and conventions to ultimately comment on the future of America following
the attacks of 9/11. Structured as a triptych of novellas, each dealing in a
different genre, Specimen Days
unifies its three sections into a singular whole through the use of reoccurring
character names, objects, themes and, perhaps most notably, the running thread
of Walt Whitman’s poetry that cuts through the center of the work. And while Specimen
Days’ first two sections, the gothic ghost story “In the Machine” and the
noir thriller “The Children’s Crusade”, manipulate and comment on their
respective genres in important and revealing ways, Cunningham’s third section,
the science fiction tale “Like Beauty,” ultimately serves as the delivery
device for the author’s thematic and moral statement on America Post-9/11. It
is through “Like Beauty,” and its open dialogue with and clever manipulation of
the tropes and themes of Philip K. Dick’s seminal science fiction work Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, that
Cunningham’s unified message about the modern political and social climate
ultimately surfaces. Indeed, by engaging so directly with Dick’s science
fiction masterpiece, Cunningham’s Specimen
Days is able to re-contextualize and subvert Dick’s Cold War-era themes of
paranoia, alienation and technophobia to deliver a surprisingly hopeful and
positive message about the fate of America and the human race following 9/11.
To understand just how Cunningham’s Specimen Days, and more specifically
“Like Beauty”, subverts and comments on Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for its own means, it is first important
to understand the thematic nature of Dick’s overall work as well as the
aforementioned novel’s significance to the Cold War-era science fiction genre. More
so than any other science fiction writer of his generation, Dick’s work is
deeply rooted in explorations of paranoia, which, in its simplest form, can be
understood as one’s unreasonable suspicion that other people and forces are out
to do one harm. Beyond simply rooting his work in the paranoiac climate of Cold
War-era America, however, Dick in real life found himself wrestling with the
same paranoid feelings – some real, some imagined – with which his protagonists
would so often grapple. In his essay “The Two Faces of Philip K. Dick”, Robert
M. Philmus details the bizarre overlap between Dick’s real-world and fictional flights
of paranoia, describing a relationship with the FBI that only recently came to
light with the release of FBI documents: “Yet until very recently, even most
students of Dick would have taken “contact” to be euphemistically vague way of
referring to a relationship thought to be wholly one-sided and largely on the
order of that between torturer and victim. During the era of McCarthyism, the
FBI evidently tried (once) to recruit Dick as an informer; and (quite)
otherwise, there is good reason to think (as Dick certainly did) that the
Bureau came to look upon him as the object rather than the means of
“investigation”” (Philmus, 91). Furthermore, not only did Dick find himself as
a target of the FBI’s oppressive Cold War-era policies, but he also fancied
himself at the center of a KGB-led conspiracy to discredit his work. As Philmus
writes, “ Dick saw or represented himself as the prime object of attention on
the part of a worldwide Marxist conspiracy whose far-flung operatives and
agencies included any number of academics interested in him along with various
publishing outlets” (93). It is these
paranoid thoughts – both real and imagined – that dictated both Dick’s life and
his fictional work, driving him to write such powerful meditations on
alienation and paranoia as Ublik, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly and, most important to
the sake of this paper, Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sleep? By paying homage to and engaging so directly with that
latter work, Cunningham’s “Like Beauty” seeks to call attention to the similar
feelings of paranoia permeating the Post-9/11 American landscape before
ultimately subverting them for his own, more positive and hopeful moral ends. Next,
however, a more in-depth look at Dick’s specific brand of thematic paranoia –
what we will call “object-based, technophobic paranoia” – is necessary to
understand just how Cunningham is able to pull off his effective subversion of
Dick’s work.
Carl Freedman, in his essay “Towards
a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” describes the
predominant theme of Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? as being “the practical difficulty of distinguishing
between human beings and one variety of objects” (Freedman, 15). Furthermore, Freedman
quotes Dick himself as defining “the ultimate in paranoia [as being] not when
everyone is against you but when everything
is again you. Instead of ‘My boss is plotting against me,’ it would be ‘my
boss’s phone is plotting against me.’ Objects sometimes seem to possess a will
of their own anyhow, to the normal mind; they don’t do what they’re supposed to
do, they get in the way, they show an unnatural resistance to change” (15). Nowhere
is this thematic motif more apparent in Dick’s work than in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
which casts protagonist bounty hunter Rick Deckard on a mission to exterminate
six humanoid androids that are indistinguishable from the human population
inhabiting a post-apocalyptic Earth save for their inability to feel empathy.
Cunningham’s most important and clever reversal of Dick’s recognizable motif of
the android-gone-rogue comes with the third novella’s critical reversal of the
trope: Cunningham casts Simon, a “Simulo” android with a striking resemblance
to Dick’s Nexus-6 models in that he too is a fugitive running from an
oppressive society determined to exterminate all artificial intelligences, as
his hero. By casting one of Dick’s antagonists as his story’s protagonist and
then detailing Simon’s journey to flee his would-be executors while gaining
empathic and emotional sentience, Cunningham turns Dick’s paranoia on its head,
asking us to sympathize with the very “object” Dick seemingly urges us to fear.
The dramatic and thematic effects of this reversal are profound and will be
detailed in more depth later in this paper. First, it is equally as important
to examine a popular fundamental misreading of Dick’s novel, one in which
Cunningham likewise calls to light by more subtle subversions of Androids.
Arguing against the popular critical
notion of Androids as a novel that
“registers its protest against the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracies and
technology,” Christopher A. Sims’ “The Dangers of Individualism and the Human
Relationship to Technology in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” puts forth a more nuanced and
important reading of the novel as one that “registers its protest against the
dehumanizing effects of individualism and demonstrates how technology can be
used as a means to reclaim the essence of humanity” (Sims, 67). The novel, Sims
argues, asks audiences (as well as its main character), to consider the
increasingly difficult-to-distinguish differences of the human and the
technological or artificial, asking the following:
“But does artificial intelligence qualify as
independent agency or is it merely a simulation of individual existence? Again
we arrive at the opposition of natural and artificial and the cultural
predisposition to value the natural over the artificial. Androids, I would argue, works at inverting this evaluation, or at
least at deconstructing it, by eroding the boundaries between the real and the
artificial, between humanity and technology…as the novel progresses, Rick
slowly loses confidence in the significance and morality of his work, because
he begins to realize that the androids themselves are not inherently dangerous,
but that the real danger stems from losing our human empathy by guiltlessly
enslaving the androids through the moral loophole of antiquated technological
hierarchies that privilege the user over the instrument (69-70).”
Sims’ appraisal
that the novel condemns a human lack of empathy towards technology rather than
condemning technology itself as dangerous is compelling, and Cunningham is able
to unearth and draw into sharp focus this reading of Androids by casting an empathic android as his lead. Whereas
Deckard rediscovers his own humanity through the interaction – both social and
sexual – with the Nexus-6 androids, Simon slowly realizes his own humanness –
in the form of newfound understandings of beauty and empathy – through the
interaction with living beings (a mutated human boy and an extra-terrestrial,
granted, but still living). Again, this inversion is critical to delivering Specimen Day’s final, hopeful message –
one that is only made possible through its dialogue with Androids.
Another fascinating link between
Sims’ reading of Androids and
Cunningham’s purposeful engagement with the text is related to Dick’s subtle condemnation
of individualism and human isolation. As Sims puts it, “the lonely isolation
inherent in [the human condition] is the essence of Dick’s novel. The problem
of humankind in this speculated future is not hatred or the dehumanization of
technology, but rather that humans have moved so deeply into their own
individuality that they no longer experience the reality of other humans (71).”
Like the rest of the human populace left behind on a war-ravaged Earth, Deckard
suffers from a deep loneliness, taking solace only in his job, a technological
“Empathy Box” that connects him with other humans in a religious ceremony, and the
meager companionship of an artificial pet sheep. However, it is that very job –
to hunt down and exterminate the Nexus-6 androids – that puts him into contact
with the artificial beings that will awaken his humanity and his need for
meaningful relationships. As Sims explains, “another fascinating aspect of the
treatment of the relationship of humans and androids in the novel is that it
supposes that not only is technology an utterly human endeavor that brings
humans closer to their essence, but that technology itself can become human (85).” Again, here the
similarities between Sims’ reading of Androids
and Cunningham’s “Like Beauty” couldn’t be more apparent, as it is Simon who
serves as the ultimate representation of humanity in the latter book, one who
facilitates relationships between other beings and discovers his own very human
appreciations of beauty and emotions.
At this point it is crucial to finally
underline the distinct and very purposeful parallels between Androids and “Like Beauty” to highlight
the ways in which Cunningham is in dialogue with Dick’s work. For starters,
both stories are set in a world ravaged by war – World War Terminus in the case
of Androids and an ambiguous series
of catastrophes in “Like Beauty.” In Androids,
the Nexus-6 artificial intelligences were created by the Rosen Association to
serve first as soldiers in World War Terminus and later as companions and
slaves to the human colonists of Mars, only to themselves flee Mars to find
solace and anonymous freedom in Earth amongst the surviving humans.
Cunningham’s Simulos are similar enough to the Nexus-6 to the point in which it’s
impossible to deny the purposeful parallels: like Dick’s androids, Simon is the
most advance form of the Simulos, bio-mechanical androids designed at first to
serve as soldiers and slaves before eventually being condemned as unnatural
abominations. Even the alien Catareen, Simon’s companion in flight, has
parallels to the Nexus-6, as she and her fellow Nebulans are also refugees from
the stars, forced to flee to Earth and serve as a labor force. The Nexus-6,
Simon and Catareen are all driven by a paranoid fear they will be discovered
and killed by their human oppressors, a paranoia that drives Simon and the
Nexus (and to a lesser extent Deckard) to seek out their creators in the form
of Emory Lowell and the Rosen Association, respectively. The important
distinction between the two works, however, is not just that Cunningham casts
his android as his hero, but also that Simon realizes emotional and empathic
sentience where the Nexus-6 ultimately fail. And it is with this distinction,
as alluded to before, that Cunningham reveals and delivers his ultimate moral
message of hope in the face of extinction.
As noted before, Cunningham’s bio-mechanical
Simon is arguably the most human character in his novel in that he eventually
dreams, hopes, loves and cares for others around him. Juxtaposed against the
first novella’s lead, Lucas, an autistic young boy who lacks social graces and
spouts Walt Whitman poetry like a nervous tick, and the second novella’s
protagonist, Cat, who struggles with alienation and naivety in New York
immediately following 9/11, Simon is the most fully formed character. It is
Simon, after all, who, through the vehicle of Whitman’s poetry and a growing
need to connect with others, leads his surrogate family across the desolate
wasteland of post-apocalyptic America towards happiness. In this regard,
Cunningham essentially undercuts the anti-industrialization, technophobic undercurrents
of “In the Machine” – a gothic ghost story that details a machine’s desire to
devour humans – to deliver a markedly more positive message about humanity’s
relationship with technology. In his essay “Uncanny Repetition, Trauma, and
Displacement in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days,” Aris Mousoutzanis
recognized this thematic reversal between “In the Machine” and “Like Beauty”
while also unknowingly connecting Cunningham’s depiction of Simon and Sims’
reading of Androids when he states,
“Neither is it entirely certain if a sustained critique of industrialization
may be carried through with an attitude that focuses almost exclusively on the
ill of technology and verges on the uncritically technophobic – especially when
one of the book’s last images of transcendence and rebirth, the departure of
Lowell’s group, is facilitated by technology” (Mousoutzanis, 139-40). Mousountzanis
further underscores the poignant message of Simon delivering the emotional
finale of “Like Beauty” and Specimen Days
when he states, “it is not [the encounter with his creator] that gives [Simon]
a sense of fulfillment but his evolving relationship with Catareen, with whom
he decides to stay till the last moment of her life and miss the departing
spaceship for another planet that Lowell, Luke and his followers embark on.” Again, whether one chooses to agree with
Sims’ reading of Android or accept
the popular reading of Androids as
paranoid and technophobic, Cunningham effectively reverses any notions of
technophobia to deliver a message of technology as a possible path to happiness
and a natural state in the wake of a modern catastrophe.
Mousoutzanis further illuminates the
importance of the thematic parallels between Androids and ‘Last Beauty’ in his examination of Simon as not only
Cunningham’s depiction of the technological-turned-human, but also as “the
other.” As he writes,
“Cunningham
chooses to turn to [the] complementary genre of science fiction in the third
story, ‘Like Beauty’ in order to rely on its metaphor of the alien to signify
themes of racial otherness, spatial displacement, and colonization…It is not
the alien, the ‘other’, that is technologically advanced colonizer, as might be
the case in conventional mainstream genre science fiction. It is the humans,
the ‘self’, whose project of space exploration turned into exploitation. The
general importance of ‘unhomeliness’ for the novel extends beyond its psychological
sense at this point and finds itself associated with discourses of colonization
and slavery” (136-37).
The above quote
reveals added depth to Cunningham’s subversion of Dick’s android-as-fugitive-and-outsider
trope to paint a picture that is simultaneously pro-technology and celebratory
of the “other” in a post-colonial landscape of post 9/11 America. Just as he recasts the paranoid android as
his heroic lead, so too does he recast the racial or colonial outsider as the
center of the new, Post-9/11 American landscape. Consider this passage, in
which Simon contemplates the ragtag group of aliens and outsiders who set out
to restart the human race in the stars:
“Crazy,
Simon thought. They’re all crazy. Though of course the passengers on the
Mayflower had probably been like this, too: zealots and oddballs and
n’er-do-wells, setting out to colonize a new world because the known world
wasn’t much interested in their furtive and quirky passions. It had probably always
been thus, not only aboard the mayflower but on the Viking ships; on the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria; on
the first convoys sent off to explore Nadia, about which the people of Earth
had harbored such extravagant hopes. It was nut jobs. It was hysterics and
visionaries and petty criminals. The odes and monuments, the plaques and
pageants, came later” (Cunningham, 293).
In his essay,
“Ghosts of Gotham: 9/11 mourning in Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days”, writer Robert Duggan illuminates the post-colonial
significance of the above excerpt when he states, “Cunningham re-evaluates the
great founding narratives of the nation as accomplished by unconventional but
hopeful people in very difficult circumstances” (Duggan, 390). Or, as
Mousoutzanis so succinctly puts it, “the very last image of the novel, where
Simon is riding off across the grass towards the mountains, may be also read in
this way since it indicates…that ‘the American myth of rugged individualism has
been handed to the outcast and shorn of its association with power’”
(Mousoutzanis, 138). This message, that
the future of America should be cast back into the hands of the “other”, is
just one hopeful thematic layer to “Like Beauty” made possible by its dialogue
with Dick’s Androids.
By engaging head on with the
paranoid, Cold War-era works of Philip K. Dick and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? in particular, Cunningham’s
Specimen Days and “Like Beauty” asks his reader to first consider Dick’s themes
of alienation and paranoia in a technophobic dystopia before then subverting
those themes for a more hopeful and positive ends. In Cunningham’s vision of
the Post-9/11 America, the all-inclusive mysticism of Walt Whitman meets a
future in which technology can be both the destroyer of worlds and the savior
of mankind, facilitating death as much as relationships and redemption. It is
through that technology, Cunningham argues, that we can return to our roots as
a nation of outsiders that are one with nature and each other. Or, as Duggan so
eloquently summarizes Cunningham’s message:
“[Specimen Days] span[s] genre boundaries
as well as temporal ones, particularly in Cunningham’s case with his use of the
thriller and science fiction. The cumulative effect is one of multivalent
presentations of suffering and disaster but also of hope and community in the
face of such catastrophes…the unknown future of Specimen Days ends up becoming the territory of a damaged but still
living America, and Cunningham develops the description of “the same old human
race: from his Whitman epigraph into a technically inhuman set of characters
who exhibit the same emotions and hopes and fears…Cunningham’s image of hope in
the face of disaster is aimed at the present moment and is brought into being
from both the past and the future. ..[it embodies[ the difficult but necessary
twin tasks of mourning the dead and evoking and conserving hope for the…future”
(Duggan, 382-92).
The present and
future may seem as dim as the tumultuous and paranoid landscape of Dick’s Cold
War-era America, but by engaging Dick’s work head on and then subverting its
message, Cunningham is able to paint a scene that it is also bright and full of
promise.
Works
Cited
1)
Philmus, Robert M. “The Two Faces of Philip
K. Dick.” Science Fiction Studies,
Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 1991): 91-103. Web. 12 August. 2014
2)
Freedman, Carl. “Towards a Theory of
Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (March, 1984): 15-24. Web.
11 August. 2014
3)
Sims, Christopher A. “The Dangers of
Individualism and the Human Relationship to Technology in Philip K. Dick’s “Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”” Science
Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (March 2009): 67-86. Web. 12 August. 2014
4)
Mousoutzanis, Arias. “Uncanny Repetition, Trauma, and Displacement
in Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days.” Critical
Survey, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2009): pp. 129-141. Web. 13 August. 2014
5)
Duggan, Robert. “Ghosts of Gotham: 9/11
mourning in Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen
Days.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
Vol. 46, No. 3-4 (June 2010): 381-393. Web. 14 August. 2014
6)
Cunningham, Michael. Specimen Days. New York: Harper
Perennial, 2005.
7)
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books,
1996.
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