| Galatea 2.2 | |
|---|---|
The cover of Galatea 2.2 incorporates the Raphael painting La fornarina. |
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| Author(s) | Richard Powers |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Harper Perennial |
| Publication date | 1995 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
Galatea 2.2 is a novel by Richard Powers. The novel is pseudo-autobiographical: the narrator is named Richard Powers and there is discussion of the four novels he wrote before Galatea 2.2 along with other references to his real biography. Richard Powers creates a version of himself for the novel that is not always flattering. It is not completely clear which specific events are true, and which are not, but it is clearly based on Powers' life.
Contents |
The main narrative tells the story of Powers' return to his alma mater — referred to in the novel as simply "U.", but clearly based on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the school Powers attended and teaches at as a professor — after he has ended a long and torrid relationship with a loving but volatile woman, referred to as "C." Powers is an in-house author for the university, and lives for free for one year. He finds himself unable to write any more books, and spends the first portion of the novel attempting to write, but never getting past the first line.
Powers then meets a computer scientist named Philip Lentz. Intrigued by Lentz's overbearing personality and unorthodox theories, Powers eventually agrees to participate in an experiment involving artificial intelligence. Lentz bets his fellow scientists that he can build a computer that can produce an analysis of a literary text that is indistinguishable from one produced by a human. It is Powers' task to "teach" the machine. After going through several unsuccessful versions, Powers and Lentz produce a computer model (dubbed "Helen") that is able to communicate like a human. It is not clear to the reader or to Powers whether she is simulating human thought, or whether she is actually experiencing it. Powers tutors the computer, first by reading it canonical works of literature, then current events, and eventually telling it the story of his own life, in the process developing a complicated relationship with the machine.
The novel also consists of extensive flashbacks to Powers' relationship with C., from their first meeting at U., to their bohemian life in Boston, to their move to C.'s family's town in the Netherlands.
The novel culminates with Helen being unable to bear the realities of the world, and "leaving" Powers. She asks Powers to "see everything" for her, and subsequently shuts herself down. Her exit from the world forces Powers to experience a rebirth. In addition, Powers realizes that he was Lentz's experiment: would he or wouldn't he be able to teach a computer? Through the transformation he experiences, he is suddenly able to interact with the world, and he can write again.
The central character of Richard Powers within Galatea 2.2 shares certain traits and experiences with the author; they are both novelists, for example, and the character's books are the same as those of the actual, living writer. However, as within any work of fiction, the character is not and cannot be a replica of the author. The character, having attained his thirty-fifth birthday, has managed to achieve maturity without any sense of permanence or structure in his life. He cycles through his previous journeys without ever moving forward, initially returning to U., the formative place of his youth, and later visiting once again every foreign place in his past through the slides he shows the intelligent Helen. The character of Powers, through the progress of the book, must learn to stop filtering reality—through writing, reading, computers, even the image of a particular woman—and to actually experience it. "Life," Powers realizes in the final pages Galatea 2.2, "meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive. The world's Turing Test was not yet over" (Powers 327). Powers is effectively reborn from his state of isolation and disconnection at the beginning of the work into a renewed awareness of his potential as a man—a participant in the world—and his ability to write, to transpose reality into fiction.
Lentz is the brilliant researcher lodged in the Center, whose sarcasm and witty but pointed comments annoy and periodically wound his colleagues, including Richard. He is an odd melding of the scientific and literary worlds, for though he is a scientist, his wife introduced him to literature and reading. Lentz carries his personal tragedy with him as a constant shadow, for his once-brilliant wife suffered brain damage and must live in a care facility and now no longer recognizes him. His creation of Helen is, in part, an effort to explore the workings of the human brain, to somehow discover how a mere biological accident could so destroy the woman he loved.
Helen is the creation of Lentz and Richard; Lentz builds her, and Richard educates her. She is a net, spread out over innumerable computers, and she is taught using the literary canon. Only when she is exposed to reality—the murder, rage, etc. that characterize daily news and the human world—does she realize fully that she does not belong nor does she wish to belong in this world. Helen is the catalyst that begins Richard's regeneration. While Helen is not human, and does not possess a body, through Richard’s teachings she seems to have human-like characteristics. One of the central arguments of the book comes from Helen and whether she has human emotions, or is simply simulating human emotion.
Diana, like Helen, teaches Richard a lesson. She has two sons, one a near-genius and one a Downs Syndrome child. Meeting that child, Richard recalls one of his former books, in which the female protagonist refuses to bear children for fear of birth defects. Chagrined, Richard views Diana with respect and admiration, but he does not fall in love with her. She is perhaps too real, too entirely founded in this world to easily attach herself to his illusions. In addition, Diana reminds Powers of the family unit, and what it means to belong to a family. It is another reminder of his lack of any real connections to the world before his rebirth at the end of the novel.
C., known only by that initial, is the girl-woman who haunts Richard's memories. Their lengthy love affair defined a number of the years of Richard's life, but at the end Richard was not able to accept her as a real being. He gave her love and pretty sentences in his letters, but no real news. Both Powers and C. attempted to deal with worldly problems through books, which did not solve any of the problems they face. It is another manifestation of Powers’ lack of connection to the world.
Having permanently lost C., Richard re-envisions A. as a somewhat newer and better C. Meeting her in the halls of the English building, he falls in love with the graduate student, and proceeds to invite her into the very active halls of his imagination. He does not know her, but her image is enough. Richard is still dependent upon the illusion, upon the created sense of a thing, rather than upon the thing itself. A., who is never in love with nor even attracted to Richard, realizes this, and correctly terms him desperate. She is, however, Richard's ideal of the perfect teacher, and it is she who is pitted against Helen in the essay contest. Richard and A. never develop a relationship, although A. does become a teacher.
Powers clearly uses the Pygmalion myth in this book. The relationship between the myth, that of Pygmalion and Galatea, and Powers' book is fairly clear. The humans—especially the characters of Powers and Lentz—stand in for Pygmalion, creating a modern Galatea who comes to obsess them. On one level, that of Lentz and eventually of Powers, the Galatea is analogous to Helen, the computer-net-artificial intelligence creation who forms a central part of the book. Created by man, the thinking net—Helen—does not complete the final stages of the Galatea / Pygmalion myth. She cannot bear the cruel reality of man's world, and by removing herself from it forces man—Powers—to become autonomous, disassociated from the fantasies and obsessions he has created.
For the character of Powers, however, there is another Galatea within the book—literature, and writing. Powers' books are themselves a different sort of Galatea. Created to fill a need, they become an obsession, and eventually a stand-in for the real world. When the book replaces the world, the character finds himself unable to write. It is only when Helen commands Richard Powers to "see to everything" for her that he is able to regenerate his creative powers and imagine himself writing again.
Richard may have thought he was Pygmalion or Frankenstein, but he was as much Galatea as the AI. Indeed, he finally "comes to life" again at the end of the novel: once liberated from his stolen first sentence, he finds himself with an idea for a new novel—which, we suspect, is Galatea 2.2.
- —M. Burnstein, State University of New York, College at Brockport
Galatea 2.2 contains no extraneous material. Each character has a role to play, and each sheds light on the central ideas of tuition and stratas of linguistic uncertainty. An autistic child is less functional than the computer H., but is it of more 'value' as a living being? The laboratory monkeys cannot speak, but is lobotomising H., by cutting through her subsystems, crueller than dissecting the animals?
- —Adam Baron, Spike Magazine
If some of Galatea 2.2 feels closed and airless, much of it soars and spins. The sessions with Helen gain more and greater urgency; every new line on the graph of her expanding consciousness is also a stake through what seems to be, impossibly, her heart. "I want Richard to explain me," she laments.
As Helen approaches her endgame—'I don't want to play anymore'—the various strands of Galatea 2.2 come together, and the novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty.
- —Robert Cohen, New York Times
In updating the Galatea legend, Mr. Powers has succeeded in writing his most satisfying novel yet: a cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, a lively tour de force.
- —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Richard Powers has staked out a unique place for himself, one that straddles our technological and our literary cultures. He may be the last humanist with a scientific competence, an invaluable thing when the notion that humans may be just another variety of complex system haunts our sense of ourselves.
In its strongest moments, Galatea 2.2 realizes the possibilities of that position splendidly. And with all of Richard Powers' autobiographical cards now so definitively on the table, I look forward to learning less about his self and/or meta-self and more in his next novel about the world in which we both must live.
- —Gerald Howard, The Nation
In the preface to his book Aramis, or the love of Technology, author Bruno Latour describes his book's genre as scientifiction. He adds that Richard Powers was "the master of scientifiction and author of Galatea 2.2, whose Helen is Aramis' unexpected cousin."[1]