The theme of love – and especially love for the android – is ubiquitous. Think of Pygmalion and Galatea, where the technology is sculptural perfection that improves on nature. The point: we become enamoured of our own creations and project an inner life onto them, unaware that this is the work of our own psyche.
Certainly Buzzati had two instances of android fiction in mind as he wrote: The Future Eve (1886) by the French symbolist writer Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (he also invented the term “androide”). The second one is a 1923 novella The Last Eve by Massimo Bontempelli, the main writer of Italian magical realism. (Capek is credited with inventing the term “robot” in 1920.)
In Future Eve, the inventor Thomas Edison (sic) creates for his friend Ewald an android who is a perfect physical replica of Alicia, a woman whose appearance has stolen Ewald’s heart despite the fact that she is mind-numbingly dumb in his view. Unlike Alicia, the android Hadaly is brilliant and Ewald is cured of his despair. But an unexpected turn happens when Hadaly “reveals” to Ewald that she is not really an android, but endowed with the mystical spirit of Edison’s assistant, Sowana. Previously, Sowana had been a mysterious disembodied voice, as though emerging from a gramophone or a telephone; now, she is elated to have a body. In the end, though, the ship bearing Ewald and Alicia/Hadaly/Sowana to England sinks and they die. [Phonograph, 1878; improvement to telephone microphones, 1876; telegraph and Menlo park lab, 1876-1886).]
Central to this story is the question of the soul and how it is different from the body and yet imprisoned in it. The demand for a better harmony of body and soul – a resolution to mind-body dualism – calls for the replica Lord Ewald desires. Edison is the inventor because electricity – at the end of the 19th Century – was thought to be the hidden “juice” or life force that keeps the body alive and the brain functioning: Edison represents the technology that will infuse inert matter with life. He represents a scientific – if fictional – counter to late 19th-C materialism and reductionism. His androide (Hadaly) is superiorly alive, endowed with a soul he has created. And yet his creation escapes him, and specifically her soul escapes him; she is other than he thinks. She is Sowana, the soul of the voice in the airwaves. And she dies. Edison has not captured her life force. In other words, though this is a love story, at its core love expresses a spiritual question: in the modern material and scientific world, do we have souls, and when we love, do we love an immortal essence and not only a mortal body?
Now let’s consider The Last Eve – Bontempelli, 1923. Evandro keeps Eva in an abusive relationship, where ironic criticism and abandonment alternates with sudden declarations of love. Supposedly to cheer her up, he gives her the Pinocchio-like puppet Bululù as a companion. [Collodi, 1883] Bululù comes to life because he wants to help Eva feel less alone; but time and time again Evandro cruelly reminds them both that he is the one controlling the puppet’s strings. Yet Bululù continues to become more human and Eva sneaks him outside to rush around a tree in the forest and prove there are no strings. Despite this magical moment, Evandro forces Bululù back into his puppet nature and it seems Eva was deluding herself. But in one last reversal, Eva realizes everyone is moved by strings, and that Evandro in particular is himself a puppet. So she leaves him.
In this story, love is not so much about your spiritual essence, and much more about your moral personhood. The question at the core here is: what does it mean to be a moral agent? Looming around this question is the disaster of WW1 which “made men into animals,” but also by 1923 in Italy, the rise of Fascism. Evandro’s misogyny and the gender reversal in this story – the android is male, the lover female – is a critique of bourgeois and Fascist masculinity. Think here of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927 (based on Thea von Harbou’s 1927 novel). And think also of the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, where disanimated marionettes are what humans become under totalitarian rule. Technology dehumanizes us, and we live out a series of social personas that turn us into automatons. In a remarkable reversal, Bululù the wooden puppet from the world of fables, is the only one capable of compassion. Treated like a truly humane moral agent by Eva, he becomes one for a brief moment, and he makes her escape possible. I like that Bontempelli transforms Eve’s temptation or fall into sin into a humanization or even resacralization of the world. But Bululù is lost in the end, and may never have come to life in the first place. We end up wondering whether Eva was mistaken, or deceived herself into thinking love was possible at all in the world of surveillance and propaganda she lives in.
So finally to The Singularity or Larger than life (Reed, 1962). Buzzati keeps the more stereotypical gender roles of early android stories, which trade on male desire to animate nature specifically in order to animate a love object. As in Villiers, we see that his mad scientist Endriade is bereft, this time literally, but in both cases it is about seeking to immortalize the elusive soul of the loved woman through scientific creation. The name Laura of course also refers to Petrarch, who convinces himself that he immortalizes his beloved by his verse, which is in the end remarkably solipsistic. As in Bontempelli, but now in the post World War II version, the story is also about how technology dehumanizes us morally and in this case does so through the creation of the atomic bomb, which is presented as something like an entity out of human control, and indeed the mysterious creation at the center of this novel – Numero Uno – is not even an atomic bomb but is some sort of other mysterious and unfathomable weapon. Like Eva in Bontempelli, Endriade in Buzzati deceives himself into thinking love is possible in the world of Cold War standoffs, spying, and noir crime that he lives in. No one in this world is a moral agent and these scientists appear to work on something whose purpose they don’t even understand.
Here we start to grasp Buzzati’s originality. It is not incidental that for most of his life he was a newspaper reporter who covered violent crime. In this world, murderous impulses lurk in the shadows everywhere, and we are again puppets, but not of a totalitarian power, or at least not of a personalized misogynistic totalitarian power. There is no one in charge here except perhaps the military industrial complex, which no one can understand. No one in this world seems to have agency and in fact the powers that be who set in motion this grand experiment are entirely absent. The professor himself does not seek spiritual truth or moral agency, both of which are seemingly irrelevant in this context, but only the reassuring possession of a woman who is depicted again and again as a frivolous object, a fetish. Endriade, whose name is a near-anagram of androide, can only be the inventor of an impoverished life. At bottom then, for Buzzati, our creations can only reflect our own limitations, and therefore we find that his android is deceptive, jealous, and even murderous in the end, as well as profoundly irrational.
Now, concerning language,I will go more quickly. This is where we see that when we project sentience onto technology it is important to keep in mind that the medium is the message as McCluhan famously asserted in 1964. The form of the technology is fundamental. Let’s consider how our various androids communicate. In Future Eve the technology is the production of a disembodied voice or at least that is the form of electricity – the gramophone – in Villiers. Technology is a soul that needs a body. In the Last Eve, the technology is surveillance. We inhabit a theatrical Panopticon space, a fable gone wrong. Technology is a puppet that needs moral agency. In The Singularity we have something quite remarkable: the android does not speak a natural language but a conceptual one or perhaps it would be better to say that it communicates information and its raw form. I find it interesting that this language can be deceptive, that Laura can create a false identity for herself and hide her murderous impulses. Given that she speaks in pure information it would seem that the deception and the murderous impulses can only be in the listener, the person who observes the information. Laura’s language of pure ideas suggests the platonic philosopher who has ascended outside of the cave but Buzzati warns us that such a language is inhuman, a truth so pure it is applicable to nothing and ultimately deadly. Technology is a knowledge that needs a situation, a situatedness, a phenomenal world.
Finally, my last point, about the body. Buzzati is quite striking in this case too. His android does not have a humanoid body, unlike all of the preceding examples, and pretty much all of the following ones too. She is instead made up of a series of buildings that seem to inhabit the landscape in a rather uncanny way, as though making a portrait that you could only recognize from a vast distance, as the title of the novel suggests. No doubt he was inspired by the actual super computers of his time, which would’ve taken up many buildings and a lot of space. I think, though, that Buzzati’s lifelong practice as a mountain climber is more important here. A close friend died in what he called a stupid climbing accident when he was in his early 20s. I suspect from this that Buzzati was well aware of the dangers of personifying the mountains. In the novel, we are told multiple times that the landscape in this strange and isolated place bears an uncanny resemblance to Laura, even though the resemblance is impossible to pin down. If early android fiction is about our tendency to project sentience onto animated objects that appear human in some way, we discover with Buzzati that we can project sentience on just about anything. We fail to see the world for what it is because we imagine it in our own likeness. This starts to create a feedback loop that anticipates the paranoid world of Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (the origin of Blade Runner) or also of the Matrix: maybe there is no world and we are imprisoned in a projection of our own minds. In this context, it is interesting that the android is jealous of physical and sensuous embodiment – murderously jealous. She longs to have legs and fur coats. She seems to think there is a world out there and she wants it. This is quite a reversal from the traditional case where androids are physically more perfect and an improvement on nature. But we shouldn’t be deceived: this is not a celebration of the natural woman or of some kind of primitive return to the body. If you think of the scene where Olga bathes naked scandalizing her husband and ultimately attracting the rage of the android, it is profoundly cinematic. She stands silhouetted against the sky on a hill seen from below, in a description reminiscent of the films of Antonioni or Visconti. Think Ossessione remade as The Postman Always Rings Twice. It is a celluloid body the android dreams of. Buzzati seems to have intuited how our immersion in information can come to disembody us. We long for something that we no longer know directly through experience just like his Laura. Once again we are caught in a feedback loop: maybe there is nobody here and we are only celluloid images, Laura’s projections.