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Nineteenth-century artificial intelligences: thinking machines, mechanized minds, and the Victorian detective
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Nineteenth-century artificial intelligences: thinking machines, mechanized minds, and the Victorian detective
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Content
NINETEENTH-CENTURY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES:
THINKING MACHINES, MECHANIZED MINDS, AND THE VICTORIAN DETECTIVE
By
Neil T. Aitken
B.S. Computer Science, Brigham Young University, 1999
M.F.A. Creative Writing, University of California, Riverside, 2006
DISSERTATION
Submitted to meet the requirements for completion of the
PH.D. in LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING
in the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
at
THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Degree Conferral Date:
DECEMBER 2015
Table of Contents
I. Critical Dissertation
Acknowledgments 3
Introduction 6
Chapter One / Constructed Otherness: The Mechanical Turk in the Public Imagination 14
The Turk and the Reconfiguring of the Automaton as Subject 16
The Turk as Machine Other 21
The Turk as Autonomous Actor 23
The Turk as a Person to be Encountered 26
The Turk as a Society Personage 31
The Turk as Literary Figure and Trope 33
Chapter Two / Some Assembly Required: Frankenstein and the Voice of the Other 40
Frankenstein's Creature and the Automaton Nature 40
Frankenstein: Encountering the Constructed Other 44
Frankenstein: The Creature Constructed through Nomenclature and Context 50
Frankenstein: The Creature Constructs Itself as a Person through Narrative 53
Frankenstein: Silencing the Creature on the Stage 65
Chapter Three / The Case of the Man with a Clockwork Brain: Machine-Mind
Substitution in Babbage, Mitchell, and Doyle 70
A Mind of Gears: Charles Babbage and the Making of a Mechanized Reason 72
1
The Character of a Machine-like Thinker 80
Sherlock Holmes and the Rehabilitation of the Machine-like Thinker 84
Conclusion 91
Works Cited 95
II. Creative Dissertation
Babbage's Dream (poetry) 103
Table of Contents 104
Poems 106
Notes 155
2
Acknowledgments
This dissertation has taken a long and often circuitous path to completion, encountering
numerous unexpected challenges and setbacks, requiring more time than anticipated, and
frequently causing me to question myself and my ability to pursue this topic in a successful
fashion. For all the struggles to see this project to completion, I am acutely aware that my
journey has not been made alone—indeed, were it not for those who have counseled,
encouraged, and at times, sternly prodded, I would not have found my way to the end, nor had
the pleasure of discovering a deeper appreciation and love for this topic and the texts and
personalities which inhabit it.
I am deeply indebted to my committee: David St. John, whose staunch support of my
efforts to bring the world of computers into poetry and keen poetic sensibilities have helped raise
the level of both the critical and creative work in this project; Hilary Schor, whose profound
understanding of the literary and scientific concerns of Victorian technology have proven as
invaluable as her generous mentoring throughout the writing of these chapters; as well as,
Deborah Harkness, whose considerable insights as an academic balancing the roles of both
critical scholar and creative writer have inspired and sustained me through the course of writing
this dissertation and modeled for me ways in which the creative and critical can successfully
blend. I cannot begin to put into words everything I owe and have learned from my committee
members, but will simply state that without them, this project would have remained an
amorphous idea still in search of a form.
I am also grateful to those whose feedback in earlier committees helped shape the final
3
direction of this dissertation, especially Emily Anderson and Rebecca Lemon, both of whom
provided additional materials, research leads, and writing advice which greatly aided me along
my way. Likewise, I am also indebted to Devin Griffiths whose written critiques of earlier
versions of the first two chapters proved invaluable in editing and revising my arguments. At
every turn and checkpoint along this path, I have also been very fortunate to have had Creative
Writing Graduate Coordinator Janalynn Bliss as a friend, an advocate, and a sounding board—
she has worn many hats along the way, all of which have been essential in guiding me safely to
the end of this program.
Thanks to modern technology, I have been fortunate to been in dialogue through email
and online discussions with many other scholars and researchers interested in artificial
intelligence, robots, Victorian technology, and the relationship between the human and the
machine. I am especially grateful for the opportunity to present and discuss early versions of the
ideas of this dissertation with Minsoo Kang, Daniel Tiffany, Susan McCabe, Margaret Rhee,
Noel Mariano, Jillian Burcar, Saba Razvi, and Amanda Leigh Davis.
Likewise, I owe a great debt to the many poets and publishers who have provided
feedback and critique as I have worked on the poems which make up the creative portion of this
dissertation. In particular, I am extremely thankful to Chris Abani and Juan Felipe Herrera, both
of whom challenged me in different ways to imagine a more bold and adventurous way of
encounter the computer and my own background as a programmer through poetry. It would be
impossible to give a full accounting of all those of whose advice and insights have been
invaluable to the shaping of these poems, but there have been many and I am grateful for each
4
conversation and exchange which has inspired me to continue writing and revising. Among the
many names I could list, several individuals stand out for their contributions as early readers and
supporters: Margaret Bashaar, Rebecca Demerast, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Elaine Wang, Aimee
Nezhukutamathil, Ben Trigg, and Yuzun Kang. I am also profoundly grateful to Sundress
Publications for accepting the poetry portion of this dissertation for publication as Babbage's
Dream and to Hyacinth Girl Press for publishing the Babbage-related poems in chapbook form.
Above all else, I am grateful for my family who has stood by me through thick and thin:
for my late father, whose belief in me and his faith in my choice to leave computer programming
to pursue writing and literature has sustained me through some of the toughest parts of this
endeavor; for my mother, whose own love of learning and trust in me has been an inspiration and
a light; and for my sister, whose enthusiasm for literature and technology ensures that I always
have an audience for my work.
5
Introduction
When we speak of artificial intelligence, we generally think of it as an idea originating in the
middle of the twentieth-century, not long after the invention of the digital computer, inspired by
Alan Turing's 1950 watershed essay, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and coined as
term by the 1956 Dartmouth Conference organized by Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and other
early computer and cognitive scientists seeking to explore the conjecture that “every aspect of
learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a
machine can be made to simulate it” (McCarthy). From the 1950s onward, there was an
explosion of literary and film representations of thinking computers and robots. In post-World
War 2 Japan, Osamu Tezuka introduced the comic book hero Astro Boy (1952) as an optimistic
look at the good a future robot could accomplish. Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet
(1956) spawned generations of descendents, including R2D2 and C3PO of Star Wars (1977)
fame and TARS from Interstellar (2015), each of which reinforced the trope of robot as helper
and sidekick, rather than protogonist and hero. Sentient computers also proliferate in the post-
1950s artificial intelligence boom. We encounter the brutally authoritarian Alpha 60 who
oversees techno-dystopic city in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), as well the infamous HAL
9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and numerous other malevolent
artificially intelligent computers that offer terrifying and cautionary visions of the future.
However, not every computer harbors a malicious mind: some, like KITT from the old Knight
Rider television series or Holly from Red Dwarf, offered a glimpse at the humorous side of
artificial intelligence. Films like Her (2013) and anime series like Ghost in the Shell (1995) offer
6
opportunities to consider the nature of the relationship between human and machine, and what
future issues may yet arise as society comes to terms with the non-human intelligent others we
create intentionally (or unintentionally) as a result of continued advances in programming and
technology.
The fundamental idea that it might be possible to create an artificial being that could
possess a measure of intelligence similar to our, is in fact a very old one. We need look no further
than the Genesis account of the creation of man to find a portrayal of Adam as a being created by
artifice from inert dust and earth, given the breath of life, and awakened to full consciousness.
Myth and literature offer us other examples of non-human beings fashioned out of clay, wood, or
metal, and then given life – or the semblance of life – by their makers. Greek legends speak of
Hephaestus, the smithing god, who crafted automatons to aid him in his labors. The Talmud
mentions the legendary Golem created by sixteenth-century Rabbi Low. Robert Greene imagines
a speaking brazen head in his 1589 play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Indeed, elaborate
automata and clockwork figures could be found populating royal courts, noblemen's parlors, and
church bell towers throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Enlightenment. And yet, for all
this prehistory of imagined, rumored, faked, or even actually engineered artificial life, very few
of these figures manifested what we might recognize as intelligence. For the most part, automata
were projections of a deterministic world view and embodied a social hierarchy where the
machine substituted for the human laborer at the bottom of the ladder.
Nineteenth-century development of the figure of the machine as a non-human sentient
other not only set the stage for twentieth-century visions and fears about artificially intelligent
7
computers and robots, but offered the machine as a double to the human, a mirror in which the
society's unease about belief systems in decline were confronted and explored. This dissertation
focuses on a particular combination of historical and literary machines and automata which was
instrumental in challenging and expanding the public's understanding of what might be
conceived of as a “machine other.” Although there are many great texts and machine figures that
might be considered, I will limit the scope of this dissertation to the following real and imagined
thinking machines: the Turk (von Kempelen's automaton chess-player), Frankenstein's creature
(as imagined by Mary Shelley and also as later adapted for stage), Charles Babbage's calculating
engines, and logically minded detectives, Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and Arthur Conan
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
Many deep philosophical questions underlie this dissertation. What does it mean to be
human? What traits define us as uniquely human, and have those definitions changed as
technology and science have called into question previous definitions of thinking, mind, soul, and
heart? Can a non-human become a person? Can thinking and logic be mechanized, and if so,
what would the resulting mechanized mind look like? What constitutes a thinking machine?
What would the mind of thinking machine be like? Can a human think like a machine? To
address the full ramifications of all these questions goes far beyond the scope of this project, but
to some degree I hope to acknowledge these questions and the ways in which they drove and
changed the perception of what a thinking machine might be and what to make of a non-human
machine intelligence.
I rely on certain key terms throughout this dissertation. In my efforts to reconsider the
8
history and genealogy of artificial intelligence, I have chosen to define artificial intelligence as
any sentient being or object constructed from inanimate materials by a human creator. In this
respect, the term will encompass more specific terms such as thinking machine and mechanized
mind. I will use the term machine-like thinker to describe those human characters who adopt a
machine subjectivity and perspective, performing the idea of machine thinking, while operating
in a liminal space between human and machine. The Victorian detective figure, as represented
by Poe's Dupin and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, is an example of this type of human thinking
machine.
This dissertation employs a study of material culture, examining not only the primary
texts, but also the surrounding articles, reviews, journal entries, and other ephemera that speak to
how these figures and ideas were being received by the general public. I also draw comparisons
between texts, and note the ways in which earlier work and arguments inform later interactions
of the idea of a thinking machine and the nature of the machine other subject.
In constructing my arguments and establishing my claims related to the machine thinker
figure in the nineteenth-century, I have benefited greatly from the scholarly work of Pamela
McCorduck, Dawn E. Lausa, and Minsoo Kang, each of whom writes about the broad history of
thinking machines and automaton figures. Likewise, Doron Swade's detailed considerations of
the history and significance of the Difference Engine and Anthony Hyman's thorough
examination of the life and work of Charles Babbage have both been extremely helpful in the
chapter exploring the connection between Babbage's engines and the creation of Sherlock
Holmes.
9
The first chapter, I argue that the key to the transformation from object to person was the
appearance and performance of von Kempelen's automaton chess-player. By close reading
contemporary eye-witness accounts of the Turk (Dutens, Windisch), I argue that the Turk
challenged prevailing ideas of what constituted a machine by presenting a machine in the guise
of a person. Not only did von Kempelen offer the spectacle of a material machine that
masqueraded as a human (which in fact was a human masquerading as machine masquerading as
a human), he did so while having it interact and respond meaningfully to changing situations and
reflect a self-awareness that suggested something quite immaterial, some sort of mind or soul.
Even as its machine nature was continually performed, the Turk was also consciously
constructed as a person in its attire, in activity, in wit and reason, and in chess-playing prowess.
Its person was further emphasized by the ways spectators and opponents described the Turk
(pronouns, descriptions) in their accounts, as well as the narratives the Turk presented about
himself (being “born”, having a harem, possessing opinions and humor). Even after physical
embodiment of the Turk was destroyed in a fire, the literary and historical personhood of the
Turk is cemented in the public consciousness with the 1857 publication of Silas Weir Mitchell's
obituary for the Turk. Finally, I examine the way in which the figure of the chess-playing
automaton becomes a literary trope and a recurring character in late nineteenth-century short
stories, in particular operating as an ambiguous figure of possibly murderous inclination in
Ambrose Bierce's story “Moxon's Master” (1893). I close the chapter by pointing to the ways
that even as an eventually exposed fake the Turk enabled a public discourse around the
possibility of a thinking machine and the ways in which personhood might be extended to certain
10
types of machine figures.
In the second chapter, I contend that if the Turk opened the door to the imagining of a
machine person as a reality, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818),
created a space in fiction for a more complete exploration of what personhood for an artificially
constructed non-human intelligence might be. I begin the chapter by addressing the problematics
of including a seemingly organic creation in a discussion of machine others by unpacking the
term “automaton” and tracing the ways in which contemporary definitions and usages of the
terms “machine,” “automaton,” and “artificial” may have informed Mary Shelley's imagining of
the creature and its description. Through careful examination of the novel's multiple narratives, I
argue that not only does Shelley offer a range of human perspectives on the constructed other,
she also provides the created being a voice of its own, imagines how the mind of such a being
might develop into an intellect to rival a human's, and represents the emotional and moral
consequences of its human creator's abandonment of parental duty. In giving us a sympathetic, if
troubling representation of the interior emotional and psychological reality of the constructed
other, I suggest that Shelley provides a blueprint for future writers interested in similar
explorations of agency, will, and rebellion in non-human mechanical, biological, and alien
others. I further argue that even this representation of selfhood and personhood is an artificial
construction, a conscious creation of narrative calculated by the creature to elicit empathy from
those that hear it and to bridge (or interrogate) the gap between the non-human and the human. I
close the chapter by noting the ways in which the nineteenth-century public seemed unwilling or
unprepared to accept this nuanced representation of the constructed other. To illustrate, I turn to
11
the dramatic interpretations of her work, examining what happens to the creature in Richard
Peake's 1823 staging of Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, and in subsequent accounts
of the performance. I note that Peake's recasting of the creature as a terrifying yet awkward
being with barely animal levels of intellect, reflects a public more willing to emphasize with the
human characters than with the creature. The chapter concludes by arguing that the silencing of
the creature (both on stage and in the reviews and later parodies) reflects a willful cultural
amnesia or blindness to the emergence of a set of existential crises centered around the questions:
What is a soul? What is thinking? Can life and intelligence by produced through modern
science, or is that sole domain of a divine creator? Is there anything unique about the human
being?
In the third and final chapter, I explore what makes certain machine-like thinkers
acceptable and others abhorrent, and in particular, how Sherlock Holmes, although portrayed as
possessing a machine-like mind, is somehow rehabilitated, whereas other contemporary and
preceding machine-like thinkers are not. Examining the literature and discourse related to
Charles Babbage's calculating engines, I trace the origins of the machine mind and the process by
which the public came to see those portrayed as machine-minded as cold, methodologically
precise, and inhuman. Using E.P. Mitchell's short story “The Ablest Man in the World” as a
reference text, I argue that the machine-minded thinker can be viewed in much of the literature of
the period as an anxiety-producing figure due to its inerrancy and its inability to feel emotion,
traits which mark its difference from known human experience. Without sufficient common
ground the machine-like thinker operates in a space outside the reach of empathy. While Baron
12
Savich, the man with an actual machine brain in Mitchell's story, epitomizes the empathy gap
between the machine and the human and how it yields outrage, rejection, and destruction, Arthur
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes offers an intriguing counter-example in how a machine-like
thinker might be recast in ways that enable reader sympathy, without compromising (not to a
great extent, at least) the essential machine otherness of the subject. The remainder of the
chapter examines the strategies employed by Doyle in the text to enable the readers and the other
characters of the novel to appreciate an other whose mind they are incapable of understanding or
consistently following. Doyle's efforts to destabilize what we think we know about the machine-
thinker subject, I assert, become the groundwork for later complications and interrogations of
both machineness and humanity in twentieth-century science fiction.
The themes and concerns examined in the critical portion of my dissertation are revisited
in the creative portion of my project, a book-length manuscript of poetry entitled Babbage's
Dream. As might be gleaned from the title, many of the poems in this collection revolve around
the life of computer pioneer Charles Babbage and his efforts to construct the Difference and
Analytical Engines. While deeply invested in the historical and philosophical aspects of his
work, my poems seek to recuperate Babbage not as an unhappy figure of thwarted genius or as
the prototype for the modern computer geek, but as a fully fleshed out individual driven by a
dream for something greater than can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
13
Chapter One / Constructed Otherness: The Mechanical Turk in the Public Imagination
The boldest idea that ever entered the brain of a mechanic was, doubtless, that of
constructing a machine to imitate man, the masterpiece of creation, in something more
than figure and motion. (Windisch Inanimate Reason 193)
Introduction
Before the machine could be viewed as an other, it first had to be viewed as something more than
mere object. When Baron von Kempelen unveiled his latest mechanical wonder, a turban-
wearing life-sized automaton that played near-flawless chess, before the Austrian court of
Empress Maria Theresa in 1770, he did so, not fully anticipating the repercussions his new
creation would have—not only on his own career as a mechanist, but also on the discourse
surrounding the idea of a thinking machine and the philosophical debate over the materiality of
the soul.
Having been upstaged the previous year by François Pelletier, a French illusionist who
had mystified the royal audience with what amounted to little more than parlor tricks and
magnets, von Kempelen, a highly skilled mechanist and engineer, had a much more mundane
motivation: he simply wanted to craft an illusion so elaborate and impenetrable that his position,
his funding, and his status in the court would remain unchallenged for years to come (Levitt 10).
On these points he did succeed, but in doing so he found himself shackled to the very device
intended to ensure him a future of financial freedom and respect. What he had intended to be a
14
few days' amusement for his Queen, soon became an extended schedule of private and public
exhibitions, and with each day the Turk's reputation grew and popular interest intensified. Karl
Gottlieb von Windisch, an eyewitness of the first public showing of the automaton, writes of that
excitement:
“An account of it soon spread through great part of Europe; the papers
and journals were eager to announce its marvellous works, the result of
which was, as is the case with all accounts hand about mouth to mouth,
that they became daily more wrong, exaggerated, and contradictory.”
(Windisch 197)
From Windisch's letters, which were also subsequently translated and reprinted in other countries
contributing to this atmosphere of curiosity, we begin to glimpse some of the factors that enabled
the opening of a new dialogue around the idea of a machine and the figure of the automaton.
The widespread speculation and misinformation, as well as the numerous attempts to explain or
debunk the means by which the automaton operated, produced a climate of anxiety, skepticism,
and even optimistic materialism which encouraged important shifts in thinking about the nature
of a machine and the personhood of an automaton, both necessary steps in laying the foundation
for what ultimately would become the figure of an artificially-constructed sentient other.
Although eventually exposed as an elaborate fake, the Turk moved the thinking machine
out of the realm of remote fantasy and into the public sphere of possibility where witnesses
found it increasingly difficult not to ascribe some form of personhood to the machine they were
encountering. This chapter looks at how this cultural phenomenon sets the stage for new
15
mechanical models of thinking and the eventual emergence of the detective figure as a machine-
like thinker.
The Turk and the Reconfiguring of the Automaton as Subject
Prior to the arrival of the Turk, an automaton was generally understood to be “a self-moving
Instrument, as clock, watch, etc” (“automaton” Bailey) or “a machine that hath the power of
motion within itself” (“automaton” Johnson). Whereas classical automata like Daedalus'
moving statues or the artificial eagle
1
that tormented Prometheus operated in the realm of legend
and the supernatural, the clockwork automata that rose in popularity in the early modern and
Enlightenment European courts presented themselves as complicated yet tangibly real works of
great mechanical ingenuity. By and large these highly ornate and intricate mechanisms were
intended both to serve as spectacle and to embody a particular understanding of the world they
inhabited, recreating in complex detail the behaviors and movements of actors in small scenes of
state and empire, or the repetitive motions of a single mechanized representation of a human or
animal (Keating). In doing so, the pre-Turk automata offered themselves to their audiences as
models of predicability, regularity, orthodoxy, and precision.
Early first-hand accounts of the Turk reflect some of this tension between the self-moving
automaton as commonly understood and anticipated by the audience and the self-acting
1
At least one classical text – Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 15 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd
A.D.) – suggests that the Caucasian eagle which arrived each day to eat Prometheus' liver was in fact an
automaton created by Hephaestus:
"He [Zeus] sent an eagle to him [Prometheus chained on Mount Kaukasos] to eat out his liver which was
constantly renewed at night… many point out it [the eagle] was made by the hands of V olcanus
[Hephaistos] and given life by Jove [Zeus]."
16
automaton they saw presented before them. The first of these accounts came from Reverend
Louis Dutens who wrote a letter to Gentlemen's Magazine in 1770 which was published in the
January 1771 issue. In his letter, he describes von Kempelen as aiming for and eventually
surpassing the mechanical accomplishments of Jacques Vaucanson, an earlier mechanist known
for his automaton flute player and a defecating duck which seemed to possess an artificial
digestive tract. Whereas Vaucanson had devoted himself to the perfect mechanical replication of
breath and digestion (the internal processes mark the living from the inanimate), von Kempelen
was striving a different type of mechanical perfection manifested in part through graceful
movement and gesture (a seemingly more perfect linkage between will and action). Dutens
notes his astonishment at the sophistication of the mechanism the comprises the automaton
chess-player, commenting in particular on “the precision with which it made the various and
complicated movements of the arm, with which it plays.” (Dutens 191). Dwelling on the
mechanical dexterity of the movements, Dutens affirms the Turk as being as advertised, an
automaton filled with “wheels, springs, and levers” and assures his readers from his own
inspection, that there are no grounds for the supposition that either the cabinet or the figure
contains a hidden boy who operates it (191). All this builds and confirms the existing
understanding of the automaton as a “machine that hath the power of motion within itself.”
However, the Turk refuses to abide within a simplistic definition of what constitutes an
automaton or a machine, and it is this resistance and challenge that ultimately enable it to be
viewed as a person. It would be one thing to sit down with the Turk and have it play the game of
chess, repeating the same moves game after game. Instead, its viewer find that there is
17
something extraordinary and unprecedented in its workings. As Dutens notes, “the marvellous in
this Automaton consists chiefly in this, that it has not (as in others, the most celebrated machines
of this sort) one determined series of movements, but that it always moves in consequence of the
manner in which its opponent moves; which produces an amazing multitude of different
combination in its movements”(191). In other words, unlike similar complex automata like
Vaucanson's flute player or various writing or drawing figures, the Turk responded to its
opponent's moves with intelligent and legal movements in the context of the game. Suspecting
some sort of trick after observing such behavior in the automaton, the witnesses “had their eyes
on M. de Kempett, who stood by the table, or sometimes removed five or six feet from it, yet not
one of them could discover the least motion in him, that could influence the Automaton” (192).
Not finding any evidence of a physical means of communication, the observers moved on to
propose some form of magnetism as the guiding force, which von Kempelen also offered to test
with whatever lodestone they were willing to bring in. Although Dutens, like the others, suspects
some manner of communication or influence between von Kempelen and the Turk, he admits his
inability to explain how von Kempelen is able to “leave it to itself for many moves together”
(192).
As observers watched the automaton, in most cases they began to regard the Turk as more
than a mechanical trick, and instead as an autonomous player of chess, an actual opponent. In
his letter, Dutens describes an instance where he attempted to cheat in his game against the Turk
by moving his queen as if it were a knight. When he tries to do so, he reports that “my
mechanic oponent was not to be so imposed upon: he took up my Queen and replaced her in the
18
square where she had been removed from” (192). This description is important as it presents the
automaton no longer as mere mechanism and curiosity, but now as a “mechanic oponent” (192).
It is doubly interesting though, for in this particular moment in the text, Dutens suddenly shifts
pronouns, replacing the “it” of earlier descriptions and instead characterizing the automaton
chess player who is now “his mechanic oponent (sic)” as a gendered “he” (192). This
transformation from mechanical object into mechanical other, doesn't take place for Dutens
alone, other early observers had similar experiences as mid-game they came to the realization
that the Turk was not a typical automaton performing a rote uninformed series of moves, but
instead possessed a grasp of the rules of the game, some deeper awareness of the movements of
its opponent, and an ability to act for itself in response to those moves. For many, if not all, the
Turk presented itself as a physical puzzle. Dutens and his fellow observers hovered between
skeptical inquiry and participating in the fantasy of the self-acting automaton chess-player. In
the end, the question as to whether or not the Turk was in fact a legitimate automaton is of less
import than this conceptual shifting of the automaton figure from the realm of mechanical
curiosity to the domain of personhood.
The personhood of the Turk is further developed and expanded in other contemporary
eyewitness accounts. Windisch's Inanimate Reason, for example, published in 1784 in London,
offers a series of letters documenting multiple visits to the exhibit. In his detail-filled reports and
enthusiastic descriptions of audience members and machine alike, Windisch provides a closer
look at popular responses to the self-acting automaton figure. For Windisch, the Turk is nothing
less than “the most astonishing Automaton that ever existed” because it possesses “the power of
19
moving itself in different directions, as circumstances unforeseen, and depending on the will of
any person present, might require” (193). In focusing on the Turk's adaptability to circumstance,
Windisch emphasizes its ability to act for itself in response to changing conditions, rather than
merely move by itself in programmed fashion. Moreover, in characterizing it as “the most
astonishing Automaton that ever existed,” he fashions the automaton chess-player as exceptional,
individual, and possibly unreproducible – all attributes one might more likely use to refer to an
accomplished human, rather than a class of machine.
Windisch notes that the boldness of constructing the Turk was that in so doing, von
Kempelen was seeking “to imitate man, the masterpiece of the creation, in something more than
figure and motion” (193). By suggesting that an automaton might be capable of imitating man in
more that just “figure and motion,” Windisch creates a conceptual space where it becomes
possible for a reader to imagine a different type of automaton, one capable of thought, language,
and adaptability. Not only did the Turk present itself as an automaton that aspired to “imitate
man,” but it also did so in tackling “the most difficult and complicated of all games, frequently
beating the most consummate adept, and setting [him] right, if ever he deviated from the rules of
the game” (193). Even the choice of activity suggests an elevating of the automaton figure out of
the domain of labor-performing machine or object of curious amusement (eg. an organ grinding
monkey) and into a higher domain of courtly leisure. In presenting a chess-playing automaton,
von Kempelen overturned the conventional wisdom that placed machine in the role of servant
and laborer, and instead offered a vision of an intelligent machine as a subject and peer, a
member of the intellectual class engaged in the pastime of nobles and scholars. Moreover, the
20
Turk did not merely imitate the actions of the common man, but it in fact surpassed them in
intellectual and reasoning performance.
The Turk as Machine Other
Although von Kempelen supplied a social framework in which the Turk could be imagined as a
subject and peer, at least in terms of the roles of opponent and respondent, he coupled this with a
seemingly contradictory effort to emphasize the Turk's machine nature. It was therefore
important that the Turk be an other of a completely different genus than human. Windisch
describes the great lengths that von Kempelen went through to convince his observers that the
Turk was indeed a machine and moved and acted without a human operator. Both the Windisch
and Dutens accounts, as well as descriptions from other contemporary observers, document a
concerted effort to not only display, but emphasize the mechanical nature of the automaton
chess-player. In his letter, Dutens notes that von Kempelen “makes no difficulty of showing the
inside of the machine” and revealing that “Both the table and the figure are full of wheels,
springs, and levers” (Dutens 191). Windisch goes further, describing how von Kempelen would
“tuck up the dress of the Automaton, take out the drawers, and open all the doors of the
cupboard, and in this situation, roll it round the room, on the castors which it goes upon, turning
it in every direction, so as to enable each person present to examine it on all sides” (Windisch
194). From the momentary defrocking of the automaton to the parading and rotating of the
cabinet about the room, there is something exaggerated about this performance which seems
calculated to demonstrate the integrity of the Turk's claim to be an other wholly mechanical in
21
nature.
The implicit drama of the presentation is suggested in the diction used in these
descriptions. Windisch, for example, writes that “the inventor not only opens the front, but
likewise the back doors of the cupboard, so that the wheel-work becomes so exposed, as to afford
the most thorough convction (sic) that no living being can be concealed” (Windisch 195, italics
added). Lifting up the Turk's robe, Windisch continues, is done “to display completely the
internal structure, which consists, in like manner, of levers and wheel-work, of which the body of
the Automaton is so full, that there is not room to hide a kitten” (Windisch 195, italics added).
These descriptions seem particularly focused on the language of revelation and demonstration.
Verbs like “open,” “expose,” and “display” are used in reference to the mechanical interior
workings of the automaton, the heart of the machine, heightening a sense that the observer is
being given a complete view of whatever drives the automaton, much in the same manner as a
medical instructor might lay open a cadaver and describe the heart, and the various organs and
muscles of the human body. In similar fashion, there is a notable emphasis on the language of
completeness and totality – it is not enough that the Turk and the cabinet contained evidence of
its clockwork nature in the form of “levers and wheel-work,” but they had to be “so full” that
there wasn't “room to hide a kitten” and “so exposed” that “no living being can be concealed.”
Beyond the visual appearance and demonstrations, the Turk's machine nature was further
emphasized through sound, motion, and need for maintenance. In describing the Turk's actions
mid-game, Windisch notes that “Every move he makes, a small noise of wheelwork is heard,
somewhat resembling that of a repeater”
2
and that “This noise ceases as soon as the move is
2 Most likely, a Paris repeater, a type of luxury pocketwatch.
22
made” (Windisch 196). By linking the mechanical sound of clockwork to motion, the
movements of the Turk confirmed to a listening audience that the Turk at the very least moved as
a machine, rather than as a puppet or the disguised arm of a hidden human operator. Windisch
also records that “The machine cannot make above ten or a dozen moves without being wound
up again,” but concludes, as does Dutens in his earlier letter, that this dependence on regular
mechanical maintenance to restore its vis motrix (moving force) had in fact no influence on its
vis directrix (guiding force) which seemed separate and distinct (Windisch 196). Such regular
interventions to restore the mechanical source of energy through the winding of the spring in the
arm provided a further repeated confirmation and reminder to the audience of the mechanical
nature of the automaton figure. After all, since the automaton was understood to be a machine
which possessed the power to move itself, it would be expected to behave like other clockwork
machines (which during this time operated either by spring or steampower) and replenish its
energy store in an appropriate fashion.
The Turk as Autonomous Actor
It was one thing to argue that the Turk was an automatic chess-player (ie. a clockwork device
that mechanically played a game of chess based on predetermined moves) and quite another to
suggest that it possessed the ability or will to choose its own moves in response to another
player's. From the earliest exhibitions of the Turk, a clear distinction was made by observers and
commentators between the moving force (vis motrix) and the guiding force (vis directrix) as they
applied to the actions of the automaton chess-player. Windisch, for one, is adamant that the two
23
forces are independent and that while the moving force by which the automaton mechanically
manipulates and places pieces can be located in “the simple operation of winding up the springs
of the arm of the machine,” the force or power which guides its movements and interactions is
distinctly different and is not so easily located. The nature and the ultimate location of
automaton's governing power was the central conundrum of the Turk.
3
The sight of an automaton moving on its own power and acting without visible human
intervention led some to conclude that the machine was possessed and animated by an evil
spirit.
4
Most early observers, however, avoided ascribing the automaton's actions to supernatural
causes and sought instead to find rational ones. Many initially assumed that the Turk's
movements were actually manipulated remotely by von Kempelen through some unseen means
of communication, but were puzzled by the distance that he maintained from the automaton and
the minimal physical contact required for its operation. Some, who had seen extravagant
displays of magnetism in Paris or in the Austrian court, speculated that a “loadstone must have
been the means here employed to direct the arm” (Dutens 192). This too, von Kempelen
debunked, offering “any one [to] bring as close as he pleases to the table, the strongest and best-
armed magnet that can be found, or any weight or iron whatever, without the least fear that the
movements of his machine will be affected or disturbed by it” (Dutens 192). While quelling
speculations that the automaton was being controlled by magnetism, von Kempelen did
3 The irony, of course, being that both moving power and governing power were actually being supplied by the
hidden human operator, but mediated through the machinery of the Turk which functioned as something of a
complex prosthetic.
4 In Windisch's first letter, he describes the reaction of different members of the audience, including “One old
lady, in particular, who had not forgot the tales she had been told in her youth, crossed herself, and sighing a
pious ejaculation, went and hid herself in a window seat, as distant as she could from the evil spirit, which she
firmly believed possessed the machine” (Windisch 194)
24
encourage competing speculations that some other force was in play. Both Dutens and Windisch
report that von Kemplen, upon completing the elaborate display of the Turk's mechanical
composition and confirming its independence from adjacent human operator, would pick up a
small wooden case from among the Turk's accompanying items and hold it prominently in hand,
then open it “from time to time, to examine its contents, which are unknown to the company”
(Windisch 196). Despite, as Windisch notes, the common wisdom “that this cafe is a totally
detached piece, merely calculated to distract the attention,” von Kempelen continued to assure
his viewers that “the Automaton could not play without it” (Windisch 196).
What was the purpose of the case? Why was it so vital to the performance? Without the
existence of the case and its mysterious influence on the automaton, viewers would be left with a
visibly mechanical figure constructed of purely inanimate and inorganic material. Given the
vitalist understanding of life as an externally supplied animating force, for the automaton chess-
player to be believable, that animating force needed to have a home, namely the case held by von
Kempelen. However, by the time of the Turk's reappearance in the nineteenth-century with its
new owner and exhibitor, Johann Nepomuk Maezel, the vitalist theories of life had begun to give
way to materialist ones, and the small case had disappeared from the performance (Levitt 40). In
the absence of the notion of an external animating power, observers scrutinized the mechanical
organization of the Turk with a renewed focus, seeking for a material explanation of its
apparently intelligent actions. For most, what they observed was insufficient to place faith in the
machinery itself to perform intelligently (it was no longer enough to observe a cabinet full of
machinery and trust that somehow that configuration of gears, pulleys, and levers amounted to a
25
mechanized form of intelligence).
The Turk as a Person to be Encountered
How exactly could the Turk, though clearly mechanical in nature, nonetheless be imagined as a
person? Part of the answer lies in the flexibility of the term person. In the eighteenth-century,
person possessed a wide variety of complementary but non-identical meanings. For example,
the 1768 edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary, offered eleven differently nuanced definitions
of person, including person as “a general loose term for a human being” and person as a “man or
woman represented in fictitious dialogue” (Johnson). The 1773 edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, on the other hand, simply defined person as “an individual substance of a rational or
intelligent nature.” Operating in the twilight region between machine and human, the Turk
benefited from the ambiguous interplay between these various definitions.
The construction of the Turk as a person can be seen as the product of three main efforts.
First, the considerable effort von Kempelen put forth to craft a figure that might be viewed as
especially human-like. Second, the manner in which the Turk was directed to behave and
interact with its opponents and its audiences. Third, the fictional narrative that was developed
around the Turk through its post-game interviews and in the numerous speculations as to its
secrets.
In what ways did the Turk seem human? What did observers see when they first
encountered the Turk? We learn from Dutens that the von Kempelen's automaton chess-player
presented itself as “a man of natural size, dressed as a Turk” (Dutens 191). Windisch similarly
describes it as “a full-length human figure, dressed in Turkish fashion” (Windisch 195). Another
26
contemporary notes that it was a “well executed figure of a Turk, sitting under a kind of tent”
(Thicknesse 203). These descriptions, and others from the period, all emphasize the form as
clearly human, while simultaneously noting its racial otherness (a difference in category)
through its garb and cultural markings (the tent, the pipe,
5
the figure's use of its left hand, as
opposed to its right). V on Kempelen's choice not just to dress the automaton, but to dress the
automaton as a wealthy male Turk, demonstrates a conscious effort to present it as an uncanny
other – as one who bears a familiar human form reminding its viewers of themselves, while also
unsettling them through its distinctly unfamiliar, un-European, and unreadable face.
In his essay on the uncanny, Freud argues that “the motif of the seemingly animate doll
Olimpia is by no means the only one responsible for the incomparably uncanny effect of the
story, or even the one to which it is principally due” (Freud 136). In a similar fashion, it can be
argued that it is not merely the Turk's physical appearance that evokes the uncanny effect in its
observers. Other elements in its presentation and behavior heighten that response. One of the
most notable is the choice to present Turk initially leaning its right arm on a table, and holding “a
Turkish pipe” in its left hand, “in the attitude of a person who has just been smoaking (sic)”
(Windisch 195). Why notable? A pipe in its very function requires breath, one of the most basic
markers of life. By presenting the Turk with a pipe as if having just finished smoking, von
Kempelen creates a scene of not only interrupted leisure, but also stages the Turk as a being
capable of breath and participating in familiar human activities. Of course, it is readily apparent
after von Kempelen's display of the mechanical nature of the Turk, that it cannot be human, and
5 The pipe is very likely a meerschaum pipe, originating from Turkey and appearing in Europe exactly at this
time. This makes Racknitz's comment that the pipe was “certainly a very stylish asset” especially notable, if
indeed these were quite new—and likely very expensive, a mark of high fashion (Racknitz 214).
27
moreover, that it does not appear to have any components that resemble the human lung. At
every stage of the presentation of the machinery by which it operates, the audience grows
increasingly aware of the absence of vital organs: the Turk has no lungs, no heart, no brain. For
Freud, it is the act of stealing the eyes and the eyeless Olympia that evoke the strongest sense of
the uncanny. With the Turk, what heightens the unsettling of its observers is the way it moves,
acts, reprimands, and judges as if possessing the same capacities as its human opponents, while
having already demonstrated the glaring absence of the functioning sensory organs of sight,
speech, and touch.
The Turk's portrayal of humanness, while unsettling, was largely effective because it was
not a passive portrayal. Not only was the automaton dressed, equipped, and contextualized with
visual cues that evoked both the familiar (wearing of clothing, leisurely posture, use of hands to
move things), but also the exotic (Turkish attire, fancy pipe, tent, non-white skin hue), it also
behaved in a human-like fashion, exhibiting behaviors and mannerism which did not directly aid
the playing of the game. These actions played a critical role in socially constructing the Turk as
a fellow participant, a conscious other able to interact and respond with socially acceptable and
expected behavior. Such interactions and mannerisms were duly noted by its observers who say
in them evidence of some sort of intelligence at work. According to Windisch, the Turk was
depicted as being especially attentive to its opponent's play. He writes “Every move the
adversary makes, he moves his head, and looks over the whole board” and “If the adversary
makes a wrong move, he shakes his head” (Windisch 196). If an opponent attempted an
incorrect move too many times, “he is not satisfied with barely shaking his head” but will pick
28
up the piece wrongly moved by the adversary and return it to its starting place, then take its own
move (196). As noted earlier in this chapter, these types of social interactions helped cement the
idea that the Turk was not an unconscious mechanical calculator of next moves, but rather a fully
aware opponent possessing consciousness, personality, and even at times a sense of humor.
Von Kempelen encouraged this conceptualization of the Turk as something more than
simple machine or clever clockwork curiosity, by providing other means for the audience to
communicate with the automaton chess-player. Following the match, a tablet
6
with letters on it
would be placed on the chess-board “to enable the Automaton to answer such questions as may
be put to him” (Windisch 195). How was this done? Windisch records that “the Automaton
answers the questions proposed by the company, by placing his finger successively on the
different letters necessary to form his answer” (196). If the engaged manner in which the Turk
played chess and interacted with its opponent helped transform it into a recognizable
intelligence, providing a means for an audience to converse with it took that recognition and
conceptualization to a new level. The Turk, through these conversations mediated by the letter-
board, reveals itself to be a good-humored, culturally aware, and diplomatic persona capable of
conversing in many languages. In Leipzig, the Turk responded in German. In London, English,
and in France, he conversed in French. Carl Friedrich Hindenburg, a mathematician at the
University of Leipzig recorded the Turk's questioning and published a transcript of its responses
6 Although this sounds remarkably like automatic or spirit writing through a Ouija board, the Turk's letter tablet
actually predates the Ouija board and other talking boards by almost fifty years (two sisters, Kate and Margaret
Fox, started the nineteenth-century spiritualist craze in 1848 with their tilting tables and knocking floors, but
talking boards and planchettes were not introduced until later. The Ouija board we know today was a toy
patented July 1, 1890 by Elijah Bond). Other types of automatic or spirit writing did not become a popular
pastime until the mid to late nineteenth-century, long after the Turk had disappeared from the scene. The
presumed antiquity of the use of talking boards to speak with the dead is completely unfounded as no historical
precedents which rely on a spirit-guided planchette/marker have been found to date.
29
in his book, Ueber den Schachspieler des Herrn von Kempelen, nebst einer Abbildung und
Beschreibung seiner Sprachmaschine, which discussed both the automaton and von Kempelen's
other invention, a speaking machine
7
(Levitt 34).
Hindenburg's transcripts reflect the ambiguity of the Turk's position in the public eye. On
one hand, when asked “How old are you?” the Turk responded “192 months,” or about 16 years,
which was indeed the length of time that the automaton had been in existence, but not a
reflection of the apparent physical age of the persona of the Turk (Levitt 35). On the other hand,
when asked “Are you married?” the automaton played up its identity as a Turkish sultan,
responding “I have many wives” (35). Other questions were more mundane, centered on the
purpose of the box von Kempelen carried, the skill of the Turk's opponent, or the number of
possible moves in chess. Even with these questions, the Turk responds as a person might and not
as a machine. For example, in enigmatically indicating the box was “a part of the secret,” the
Turk presents itself not only as loyal to its maker, but also capable of distinguishing what
knowledge is appropriate to share and what should be kept from the public. Likewise, rather
than offer a lengthy quantitative assessment of its opponent, the Turk simply compares him in
quality to Philidor,
8
the greatest chess player of the period. In doing so, the Turk displays not just
the ability to flatter, but also a broad cultural awareness and familiarity with others outside its
own immediate domain. The Turk's social graces were emphasized in its praise of the beauty of
7 V on Kempelen, ever the mechanical innovator, designed and built an artificial talking head attached to an upper
torso which attempted to mechanically reproduce the human diaphram and vocal chords. Most accounts
describe it as limited in the number of words it could vocalize and suggest it sounded rather unearthly. Leavitt
provides additional diagrams and accounts in his chapter on von Kempelen's non-Turk mechanical inventions.
8 François-André Danican Philidor (September 7, 1726 – August 31, 1795), was a French composer and widely
regarded as the best chess-player of his age. His book Analyse du jeu des Échecs was considered a standard
chess manual for at least a century, and a well-known chess-opening and checkmate method are both named
after him.
30
the ladies of Leipzig (“They are exceedingly beautiful”) and its declaration that Leipzig was a
“small paradise” (35), moves that suggest both tact and diplomacy. Although generally terse,
these nuanced responses helped construct the Turk as a person to be encountered, rather than a
machine to used or a mechanical opponent to be defeated.
The Turk as a Society Personage
The press coverage and the myriad eyewitness reports helped propel the Turk's fame and served
to carve out a place in the public consciousness for it in a manner normally reserved for figures
of state and other celebrities. As time went on, more observers took a critical approach, seeking
to unravel the mystery of its operation, arguing for a rational explanation which in most cases
required a human source for the intelligence that guided its actions. Still, given all this attention,
controversy, and coverage, the Turk had become not just a person, but also a public figure. As a
public figure, the Turk had diplomatic duties and from the start, operated in both the court and
public spheres. Perhaps the most famous of the Turk's exploits was its match with Napoleon
Bonaparte during his occupation of Vienna. There are at least three accounts of the match which
differ on some details, but taken together they present a narrative in which the Turk clears the
board after Napoleon repeatedly attempts to cheat, plays another match blindfolded, and in each
game played handily defeats the General (Levitt 39-41). The 1899 retelling of the event in the
American Chess Magazine describes Napoleon “characteristically overstepping the barrier which
separated the Turk from the audience,” striking his hand on the automaton's chessboard, and
exclaiming “I will not contend at a distance! We fight face to face” (40). This closing of distance
31
and insistence on a face-to-face match demonstrate the ways in which Napoleon (and later
commentators) considered the Turk as a peer.
Perhaps the most compelling way in which the Turk was constructed as figure of society
can be found in Silas Weir Mitchell's 1857 article “The Last of A Veteran Chess Player.” Writing
three years after a terrible fire had destroyed the Philadelphia museum which had been its final
resting place, Mitchell chooses to open his reflections on the Turk with a rather oblique obituary
for “one of the most famous personages of the last hundred years” (Mitchell 236). Through
clever wordplay, Mitchell presents an accurate summary of the Turk's life and accomplishments,
while at the same time not divulging its true nature until the second half of his article. Mitchell's
description of the Turk as the child of “a Hungarian official of good birth and fair character”
positions it as a member of an aristocratic class, while his noting of its inability to smile, its lack
of speech, its single functioning arm, and its “clear and precocious intellect” paint it as somewhat
alien and monstrous in appearance. Rather than villainous nature though, Mitchell's portrayal of
the Turk suggests admiration. He further casts the Turk as an admirable figure by describing it as
“the friend of Franklin, opponent of George the Third and Louis XV. – the slave of Eugene de
Beauharnais—the conqueror of Napoleon—the favorite of Frederick the Great, and the Grand
Turk” (236). By locating the Turk in this broad network of allegiances, relationships, affections,
and animosities, Mitchell creates a vision of figure capable of forming and maintaining social
bonds and participating in the larger society. Mitchell's description of the Turk's fiery end is
written in a particularly dramatic fashion: “He perished, at last, like St. Laurence, amid
devouring flames, shedding no tears, and meeting his fate with the tranquil resignation of a man
32
in a box” (236). Here too, the Turk is raised (albeit tongue in cheek) to the level of hero and
martyr, as one who “must undoubtedly claim our respect, since, perhaps, no other man has ever
checked the march of so many kings as he” (236).
The Turk as Literary Figure and Trope
With its physical form consumed in flame, all that remained of the Turk was its presence in text
and its reputation in popular culture, which for the most part was dominated by accounts of its
exploits and speculations as to its workings. Where late eighteenth-century eyewitness accounts
and commentary had largely depicted the Turk as a curiosity and spectacle, a mystery to be
solved, nineteenth-century texts instead tended to begin with the assertion that the Turk was an
elaborate deception manipulated from within by a hidden human operator. Despite the ways in
which the autonomy and intelligence of the Turk were challenged, the figure of the automaton
chess-player was now firmly entrenched in the culture and soon found itself revived as a literary
character and trope.
The automaton chess-player makes its first literary appearance in J. Walker's 1845 play,
Modus Operandi; or, The Automaton Chess-Player, which offered its audiences the spectacle of
an onstage working replica of the Turk. Although the play's preface quotes liberally from the
von Windisch letters, the automaton chess-player in the play is clearly not the Turk,
9
and its
actual role within the play's narrative is rather limited. Although the action and deception
between characters take place around it, the automaton itself is passive, an object to be
9 Walker's play presents an automaton chess-player, similar to the Turk, but with a different owner and a different
narrative. The production of the machine as person is also greatly downplayed in Walker's version.
33
contended over, but possessing no life or power of its own to change the course of events or to
enable the audience to see things differently. In contrast, Clementina Black's 1876 short story,
“The Troubles of an Automaton,” refuses to relegate the automaton to background element,
instead foregrounding the figure by making it the central to our understanding of the protagonist,
Mr. Bannerman, the hidden operator of the automaton chess-player. In Bannerman, Black offers
us a character who is paid to be the animating force and intellectual power (the spirit and mind)
of the chess-player, and for whom the automaton is not merely a tool or prosthetic, but also a
persona he inhabits and performs. His devotion to maintaining character while playing the
automaton is critical to the story's plot. As the narrative progresses, Bannerman finds himself
caught in an ethical and moral dilemma when he must decide whether or not to report a theft he
has witnessed mid-game while operating the automaton. If he chooses to come forward and
testify as the sole witness of the crime, he must break his contract with the owner and unmasks
the automaton as a deception, a betrayal he can neither stomach or afford. If he turns a blind eye
and remains silent, he violates his own moral code which calls for justice. Bannerman is pulled
in two directions by his different loyalties—one to the machine persona, the other to his persona
as a morally upright character. By focusing on Bannerman and his attempts to negotiate a
middle passage that allows him to preserve both the machine identity and his own social identity,
Black presents the automaton chess-player as neither wholly human nor wholly machine, but
rather an amalgam of both the machinery and its human operator—it is an object still, but one
inextricably tied to the fortunes of its operator.
10
This man-machine hybrid subject (in a sense, a
10 In the end, Bannerman testifies against the thief in court, but refuses to disclose how he knows the thief's
identity (revealing his location inside the automaton would reveal the trick of the automaton and result in the
loss of his employment and a betrayal of his employer's trust). As a result, he winds up sent to jail for a week
for contempt of court. Eventually his employer writes to the judge disclosing the automaton's secret and
34
prototypical cyborg) encourages readers to imagine the ethical and moral decisions that a
conscious mind inhabiting the machine body might face.
While Walker and Black both incorporate the automaton chess-player into their respective
literary productions, neither offers a vision of the automaton as a character in its own right. It is
not until Ambrose Bierce's 1909 story “Moxon's Master” that we really encounter the automaton
chess-player as an active character. Bierce's story, told from the perspective of an unnamed first
person narrator, opens with a heated discussion between the skeptical protagonist and Moxon, a
skilled and enthusiastic mechanist, about the question as to whether a machine can think (Bierce
88). For Moxon, the answer is clearly yes. In his efforts to support his claims, Moxon cites the
examples of vines and roots exhibiting conscious-like behavior in navigating obstacles and
seeking out moisture, despite lacking a centralized brain (90-91). He also suggests that the
crystallization of minerals is analogous to the organizational behavior of armies (92). In light of
these and other naturally occurring cases, Moxon concludes “There is no such thing as dead,
inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual and potential” (98-99).
Bierce uses Moxon as a mouthpiece for a variety of contemporary materialist arguments
against the immateriality of the mind. Rather than assuming that the substance of mind and
matter are different in nature, Moxon contends that they are in fact one and the same. These
arguments construct a rational context where the idea that a machine might think becomes
plausible to an open-minded reader. Of course, all this seems to lie in the realm of conjecture
until their conversation is interrupted by pounding noises originating from Moxon's “machine-
arranges for a private hearing with just the accused, the judge, Bannerman, and his employer so that Bannerman
can be exonerated and offer a testimony that will not violate his sense of integrity or his loyalty to his employer.
35
shop” (92). When Moxon returns from dealing (rather noisily and apparently violently) with the
source of the pounding, he does so sporting fresh scars on his left cheek as if struck by a hand
and explaining cryptically that “I have a machine in there that lost its temper and cut up rough”
(93). At this point, we are still not offered entry into that room, nor access to the mysterious
machine within. Nevertheless, Moxon's explanation plants the idea that this machine is one
capable of human-like anger and violence and in this way prepares us for what transpires at the
end of the story. After the two conclude their conversation, the narrator leaves and continues to
reflect on Moxon's final statement, “Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm” (97). As he
considers Moxon's words, he soon arrives at the notion that “all things are conscious, for all have
motion, and all motion is rhythmic” (97). When the narrator rushes back to discuss the
ramifications of this insight with Moxon, he finds the main room empty and lets himself into the
machine-shop in search of the machinist. Once inside, he discovers Moxon seated across a table
from another person, engaged in an intense chess match.
Moxon's opponent, of course, turns out to be an automaton and in numerous ways is
constructed as something other than human, despite the fact that the narrator does not
immediately identify it as an automaton. Indeed, the narrator's first inclination is to describe it in
terms more zoological in nature, as if observing a creature in the wild. Initially, the narrator
perceives the figure as “apparently not more than five feet in height, with proportions suggesting
those of a gorilla—a tremendous breadth of shoulders, thick, short neck and broad, squat head,
which had a tangled growth of black hair and was topped with a crimson fez” (100). The
automaton is thus first figured as something beast-like, a creature whose size and features
36
emphasize raw power. By comparing it to a “gorilla,” an animal other as opposed to a machine
other, Bierce presents the automaton figure as not only something wild (the “tangled growth of
black hair” evokes this) and potentially dangerous, but also not quite human. Although described
with attributes suggestive of something animal or subhuman, the figure is nonetheless clothed,
wearing a “crimson fez” and a “tunic of the same color,” both of which mark the automaton as a
figure of cultural otherness, much like von Kempelen's Turk (100).
Eventually the narrator recognizes the figure to be an automaton through its movements.
While it was “equally prompt in the inception,” he notes that each action was “made with a slow,
uniform, mechanical,” and “somewhat theatrical movement of the arm” (101). After observing a
number of moves played out silently in this fashion, he is realizes that the figure was dumb. For
the narrator, it is the figure's combination of the “slow, uniform, mechanical” movements with its
non-communicative nature that suggest to him that it must be a machine. By portraying the
narrator as arriving slowly at this realization, Bierce similarly eases the reader into the idea of the
machine as a thinking other one step at a time: from animal other to cultural/racial other to
conscious machine.
Bierce's story takes an unexpected turn when Moxon defeats his automaton opponent in a
particularly dramatic fashion, leaving the automaton motionless and seemingly stunned. In the
moments that follow, the narrator reports hearing “a low humming or buzzing, which, like the
thunder, grew momentarily louder and more distinct” and seemed to emanate from “the body of
the automaton” (102-103). He posits that this sound might have been produced by “a disordered
mechanism which had escaped the repressive and regulating action of some controlling part”
37
(103), a conjecture which seems to also hint to a parallel between the automaton's ability to
govern physical power and a human's ability to control emotional responses. When the
automaton finally responds, it is described doing so in the language of mental illness or fevered
derangement—that is, we see the automaton taken with a “slight but continuous convulsion” and
shaking as if “a man with palsy or an ague chill” (103). This state of “violent agitation” causes it
spring “to its feet” and “with a movement almost too quick for the eye to follow” shoot across
the table and seize Moxon with “both arms thrust forth to their full length” (103). As the narrator
describes the ensuing struggle between man and machine which leads to the eventual strangling
of Moxon, the automaton figure takes on increasingly malevolent overtones, being perceived by
the narrator as variously as a “horrible thing” and an “assassin” (103-104).
The automaton's inhumanity as an other is further emphasized by the narrator's
observation of the great contrast in facial expressions between the two combatants. Moxon, with
“his head forced backward, his eyes protruding, his mouth wide open and his tongue thrust out,”
evokes a visage full of fear, horror, and despair; but the automaton, even in the act of brutally
strangling Moxon, offers nothing more than a “painted face” fixed in “an expression of tranquil
and profound thought” (104). This discrepancy between the violence of the act and the almost
peaceful, disconnected face of the assassin so terrifies the narrator that he falls unconscious.
Bierce's automaton chess-player-turned-killer is horrific precisely because it reminds us that we
cannot read emotion in the face of an automaton, nor gaze into its eyes to understand what is
happening within. For Bierce then, the automaton becomes something of a figure of anxiety, an
other whose inorganic and nonhuman-ness place its thoughts and intents beyond the
38
comprehension of human reason and empathy. In acting on logic and impulses inscrutable to the
human observer, the automaton transcends the rational and material and enters the realm of
nightmare, uncanny, terror-inspiring, and out of our control.
39
Chapter Two / Some Assembly Required: Frankenstein and the Voice of the Other
Introduction
If the Turk opened the door to the imagining of a machine person as a real material other, Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), created a space in fiction for a more
complete exploration of what personhood for an artificially constructed non-human intelligence
would be like. Not only did Shelley offer a range of human perspectives on the constructed
other, she also provided the created being a voice, imagined how the mind of such a being might
develop into an intellect to rival a human's, and represented the emotional and moral
consequences of its human creator's abandonment of parental duty. In giving us a sympathetic if
troubling representation of the interior emotional and psychological reality of the constructed
other, Shelley provides a blueprint for future writers interested in similar explorations of agency,
will, and rebellion in non-human mechanical, biological, and alien others. The constructed other
of Shelley's novel, here an automaton assembled from inanimate parts and mysteriously sparked
into existence, offers not only a physical, intellectual, and moral double of its human creator, but
also echoes the biblical account of man's creation, transgression through forbidden knowledge,
and subsequent fall.
Frankenstein's Creature and the Automaton Nature
We might be tempted to ask if Frankenstein's creature should even be included in a discussion of
machine others and intelligent automata? On the surface, a being formed of organic matter and
devoid of clockwork mechanism might not seem to fit with this larger examination of the shift
40
from machine as inanimate object to machine as sentient other. However, from the vantage point
of Shelley's eighteenth and early nineteenth-century contemporaries, Frankenstein's creature
occupied a space shared by other constructed others. For example, in a Lady's Magazine article
published in 1770, the myth of Prometheus is recounted and a description given of his creation of
man. Although initially describing the product of Prometheus' labors as an “artificial man,” the
writer of the article also refers to his creation as “his favorite automaton” and “his machine”
(“The Rabbis” 127). This free alternation between terms suggests that the lines between
“artificial man” (meaning created from inert matter by design) and “automaton” (meaning a
machine with the power to move and act independently) were interchangeable in a way that
enabled readers at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth-century to view
Frankenstein's creation as a type of automaton.
In part, that interchangeability lay in the fact that machine itself was not inherently
mechanical (ie. mechanism) in nature—that is to say, late eighteenth-century and early
nineteenth-century definitions of machine did not distinguish between inorganic and organic
elements, but instead used the term to refer to “any thing that serves to augment or to regulate
moving powers; or […] any body destined to produce motion, so as to save either time or force”
(Wilkes “Machine”). These definitions emphasized that while a wide variety of constructed
objects might be considered machines, their essential machine-ness was found not in the material
nature of their component parts (metal, wood, or rubber), but in the “complex and artificial”
organization of those parts to perform a task (Wilkes “Machine”). That is to say, a machine was
a purposeful arrangement of parts into a unified organized system that constituted a new entity
41
capable of performing actions that transcended the original function and purpose of its
components. In light of this conceptualization of machine, Victor Frankenstein's creation, an
artificial man formed of bones and body parts collected from charnel houses and graves can be
seen as a type of machine as well (Shelley 37). That this is an artificial creation is clear, after all
Frankenstein sets out not to restore life to a formerly living corpse, but instead to bestow
animation on “lifeless matter” in the form of a “being of a gigantic stature” cobbled together
from “materials” furnished from dissecting rooms, slaughter houses, and the graves in the nearby
church yard (38).
Frankenstein's creation is not only artificial in nature, it is also scientific in conception, at
least inasmuch as Shelley presents it as the product of scientific knowledge and experimentation
layered on top of an earlier fascination with medieval alchemy.
11
While the 1818 text describes
Frankenstein's formal education as primarily founded on chemistry and natural philosophy
(Shelley 33), the 1831 introduction to the novel provides goes further, providing social context
for the scientist figure by connecting Victor Frankenstein's efforts with the experiments of
Erasmus Darwin and others who were attempting to animate inert matter or reanimate corpse
matter through galvanism
12
(190). By positioning Frankenstein's work in relation to
contemporary explorations of electricity (a newly discovered force whose workings and
connection to organic life were the subject of much experimentation and debate), Shelley
presents the creature as a being born of new technology and cutting edge science. Nevertheless,
11 Frankenstein's list of early influences include Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, and others
(Shelley 24-25).
12 Morus, Iwan Rhys. Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-
Century London. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Morus provides a very thorough discussion of the many ways
in which Shelley's Frankenstein reflected and engaged early Victorian scientific theory and experimentation
with electricity.
42
despite being the product of scientific innovation and theory, the new being is still viewed with
both suspicion and disfavor—in occupying a space where it is simultaneously a manufactured
object assembled from parts (a “thing he had put together”) and an unsettling facsimile of
humanity (“hideous phantasm of a man”), the constructed other is a transgressive figure, one
whose existence depends on forbidden knowledge (191).
Part of the perversity of the figure lies in the nature of the transgression—in seeking to
accomplish “the creation of a human being,” Frankenstein no longer occupies the role of
observer or scientific investigator of a divinely created Nature, but instead elevates himself to the
place of a god-like creator with power over life and death (Shelley 36). In hoping that “A new
species would bless [him] as its creator and source” Frankenstein describes his labors as an
attempt to “animate the lifeless clay,” clearly drawing a parallel with the biblical account of the
divine creation of Adam.
13
Such efforts, rather than affirming belief in a divine Maker, instead
challenge the divine chain of being by raising the mortal Frankenstein to the position of inspired
Creator and by locating the origin of life, not in the hand of deity, but in “the working of some
powerful engine”
14
(191). The discomfiting and potentially blasphemous overtones of this
transfer of power from the divine to the technological and scientific were not lost to early
reviewers of the novel. One anonymous reviewer notes that “We are accustomed, happily, to
look upon the creation of a living and intelligent being as a work that is fitted only to inspire a
religious emotion, and there is an impropriety, to say no worse, in placing it in any other light”
13 “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living soul.” KJV Genesis 2:7
14 Although the “powerful engine” image doesn't appear in the 1818 text of the novel, it does show up in the 1831
introduction of Frankenstein as part of the description Mary Shelley gives of the animation scene in her dream
that inspired the novel.
43
(Edinburgh 317, italics added). Likewise, Sir Walter Scott is given pause over the implications
of the act when he describes Frankenstein's “creation (if we dare to call it so), or formation of a
living and sentient being” (Scott 257, italics added). Although Frankenstein's creation is
perceived as transgressive and ultimately sacrilegious by its reviewers and author alike, it is also
instrumental in redefining the figure of the artificial other as something more than mere puppet
or programmed automaton,
15
offering instead a vision of a fully imagined “living and sentient
being.”
Frankenstein: Encountering the Constructed Other
While the Turk was generally viewed by its public with a mixture of wonder, curiosity, and
suspicion, its appearance rarely produced fear or terror in its observers. The figure was always
available for public inspection, the exhibitor making sure to emphasize at every turn the
mechanical aspects of its nature, while simultaneously implying that it possessed a human-like
intellect and personality. In Shelley's novel, though, Frankenstein's creature is always negatively
portrayed when presented through the eyes of the other characters. In the critical scene where
Frankenstein finally succeeds in infusing the “spark of being into the lifeless thing,” the
inanimate assemblage of bones, sinews, body parts, and corpse flesh is transformed into a
“creature” capable of sight, breath, and movement (Shelley 39). And yet, there is something
distinctly unsettling and unhuman in what he sees. The “dull yellow eye” that the creature opens
as its first sign of life simultaneously signals the presence of a sentience capable of looking back
15 However, the same unfortunately does not prove to be case when Frankenstein is adapted for the stage. The
1823 production of Frankenstein, A Romantic Drama in Three Acts, reduces the creature to an inarticulate and
incoherent bumbling creature incapable of speech and prone to running into stage scenery (“T.P. Cooke” 451).
44
at its creator while also calling attention to its alienness in its unnatural color.
16
Frankenstein's
perception of his creation radically changes once it comes to life. While inanimate, it
17
is a
marvel, a product of scientific knowledge and skillful assembly, its limbs “in proportion,” its
features “selected” to be “beautiful” – however, the moment it becomes a living entity,
Frankenstein is filled with “breathless horror and disgust” and is unable to bear its presence (41).
In some sense, Frankenstein's creature is really two creations: the first, a theoretical
construct formed from a set of ideas about what it means to be human, an automaton model
which embodies a particularly mechanistic and materialist view of life; and the second, the much
messier reality of an independently moving and thinking material body, an other whose thoughts
and desires are opaque to those that encounter it, including its creator. Rather than leading to a
greater knowledge of the internal mechanisms that produce life, the resulting creation of
Frankenstein's labors reveals instead its maker's ignorance of what it means to be a sentient and
self-aware being with a conscience. Furthermore, Frankenstein's dramatic shift in diction when
referring to his creation demonstrates a profound failure of empathy—that is to say, Frankenstein
is demonstrably unable and/or unwilling to view himself in the place of his creation.
18
16 The linking of intelligence or consciousness with the active eye as it takes place in literature and film warrants a
much deeper and lengthier treatment than this dissertation can afford. The red blinking “eye” of HAL 9000 in
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alpha60's flickering light in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, the
cybernetic eyes of Borgified humans in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the exposed robotic eye in the
unmasked face of the Terminator, and the many other forms of intermittent or flickering light sources that pass
as “eyes” in both androgynous and non-androgynous artificially intelligent characters in twentieth-century
science fiction and film. Even most contemporary desktop computers signal their active power states through a
flickering light source.
17 Since prior to its animation and self-awareness, Frankenstein's creation is effectively an assembled material
object (more accurately a specimen or a model produced through scientific labor), and not a person with a sense
of identity, I have chosen to refer to the pre-animate creature using the gender-neutral “it” and the animated and
awakened creature using “he.”
18 This absence of empathy and heightened antipathy is especially marked in the later reunion of Frankenstein and
the creature on the glacier. Frankenstein, upon recognizing the approaching shape as the creature, calls the sight
“tremendous and abhorred” and is momentarily struck dumb: “anger and hatred had at first deprived me of
utterance” (Shelley 76). The creature in Frankenstein's view is “almost too horrible for human eyes” (76),
45
The namelessness of the creature presents a blank slate for others to label and construct
an identity around. Frankenstein, for one, begins to refer to his “creation” as a “wretch” and a
“miserable monster” as soon as it shows signs of life (Shelley 41), terms which mingle horror
and pity while emphasizing an emotional distance and difference. As the narrative progresses, he
adds “fiend,” “daemon,” “creature,” “devil,” and “being” to its list of labels, each in turn further
constructing the creature as bound or colored by the supernatural, transgressive, and demonic.
Of all monickers applied to the creature, “monster” is the most pervasive, appearing 27 times
throughout the novel. Although monster in modern usage means “something frighteningly
unnatural or of huge dimensions,” earlier usages which persisted into the nineteenth century,
pointed beyond the idea of something intrinsically awful and terror-inducing and toward the
function or role that such a monster might perform in a narrative or a community
19
(Baldick 10).
What exactly was the function or role of a monster in early nineteenth-century society? As
Michel Foucault reminds us in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, a “monster” was something or someone to be shown (Foucault 68-70). (Cf. Latin,
monstare; French, montrer; English, demonstrate). Generally speaking, the role of the monster,
freak, or lunatic was to “reveal visibly the results of vice, folly, and unreason, as a warning
implying again that it somehow represents a body that overflows or radiates “ugliness,” “rage,” and “horror”
(76). Further, when Frankenstein notes “his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and
malignity,” he imposes this reading upon the creature, rather than allowing the creature to speak for itself (76).
By suggesting that the sight of its body is “almost too horrible for human eyes,” Frankenstein averts his gaze,
initially refusing to encounter the creature as a peer and fellow sentient being (76), but insisting on passing
moral judgment on it and defining the terms of their relationship in terms of theological and criminal
transgression-hence, the creature becomes an “Abhorred monster!” and “fiend,” as well as deserving “the
tortures of hell” in “vengeance for thy crimes” (Shelley 77).
19 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore the history and role of the wondrous and the monstrous in the
medieval and early modern worlds in their book, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books
2001).
46
(Latin, monere, to warn) to erring humanity” (Baldick 10). While certainly it can be argued that
Frankenstein's creation as a monster serves to show its maker's folly and to reveal the error of
human presumption in divine matters of life and death (both located in the maker), it can also be
said that Frankenstein's creation demonstrates itself as a sentient being, performing an idea of
what a non-human consciousness might achieve. The idea that a monster is a demonstration of an
idea moves the concept of monster into a functionally similar space to automaton, the two terms
both intersecting in the representation of an independently acting model or a world system.
Frankenstein's monster thus might be argued as operating as an embodied demonstration of a
particular mechanical and materialist understanding of what it means to be human (and
simultaneously, what it means not to be human), or in other words, doing the work of an
automaton in the sense of showing what that world might look like.
Not only is the creature nameless at its birth, but also initially genderless in the eyes of its
creator. When Frankenstein reports seeing “dull yellow eye of the creature open” he follows up
by describing how “it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs” (Shelley 39,
italics added). Much like the Turk, Frankenstein's creature is perceived as a genderless product,
an assembled artificial lifeform in the guise of a human. And yet, as Frankenstein moves beyond
a simple realization of its completion and begins to comprehend the significance of his encounter
with a created being, his language changes and the creature quickly becomes a “he” (41). The
novel does not inform us of the reasons of this particular gender assignment, but it is clear that
Frankenstein's association of the creation of life with the Genesis account of the forming of a
living Adam from the inanimate dust of the earth.
47
As a constructed other, Frankenstein's creature is only a monster when its image can be
seen by others or itself. For those ignorant of its appearance, it is simply an intelligent self-
aware being. Although the creature encounters various villagers and travelers who flee in fear at
the sight of it, it is not until the creature views itself in a transparent pool that it becomes
convinced that this image “was in reality the monster that I am” and consequently is “filled with
the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification” (Shelley 89). Its prior state of blissful
ignorance until this direct confrontation with itself, suggests that the creature's revulsion and
shame are not in fact innate or natural, but instead the product of a socially constructed idea of
beauty and ugliness. It is this exchange of gazes, or more precisely, the creature's apprehension
of what or how it is being perceived that ultimately constructs the creature as monster – after all,
for a monster operate as something to be shown, it must first be seen.
In contrast to these disheartening encounters where its otherness is constantly affirmed
and transmitted to others, when the creature approaches the blind old man (de Lacey) in the hut
after the old man's seeing companions had departed for a long walk, it is able to engage in its
first conversation with another being that is not mediated by the observation of its outward
appearance (107). Absent the visual cues, the old blind man is forced to rely on other
information to ascertain his visitor's identity. Since he cannot prejudge the creature on the basis
of appearance, the old man can only rely what is volunteered or surmised. He begins the
conversation by prompting the creature to self-identify, asking “Who is there?” and infers
through the creature's use of French that the creature must be a fellow countryman (107). While
the dialog between the creature and the old man is cordial, it is also probing. In some sense it
48
represents a precursor to Alan Turing's “imitation game” in which one person engages in a
conversation with an unseen partner and attempts to determine whether the other person is a
human or a computer (Turing 435). In this case, both the creature and the old man are testing
and evaluating an idea about the other through their exchange of questions and responses.
20
On
one hand, the old man uses his questions about origin, residency, language, and education to
determine an appropriate context or category to place his unseen conversation partner. On the
other hand, the creature is also testing its own intellectual construction of who the old man is and
how he will respond. By relying on its extended observations and logical induction, the creature
has created a mental image of the old man that is something of an automaton, one whose actual
actions, responses, and judgments it hopes will conform to the rational model of the old man it
has constructed in its mind. Of course, such an unprejudiced state of blindness is impossible to
maintain. The family members of the old man return and catch the creature at the elder's feet
begging for mercy, but instead of seeing respect and supplication, they immediately read its
appearance as monstrous, ignoring its voice and message. At the sight of the creature the two
women faint or flee, and the young man, Felix, rushes forward and strikes it with great violence
even as creature restrains itself from responding in kind (Shelley 109). These exchanges not
only serve to reinforce the notion that the creature is intended, at least visually, to be read as
monstrous, but also provide the experiences which lead the creature to convince itself that it is a
monster.
20 Janis Svilpis makes mention of this Turing test connection between Frankenstein's creature and the blind elder
he meets with in his 2008 article “The Science-Fiction Prehistory of the Turing Test,” but does so only in
passing (Svilpis 431). See Svilpis, Janis. “The Science-Fiction Prehistory of the Turing Test,” Science Fiction
Studies. 35.3 (November 2008):430-449.
49
Frankenstein: The Creature Constructed through Nomenclature and Context
Part of the genius of Shelley's novel is that it is not satisfied with letting the creature be solely
defined by the observations of others
21
—instead, it offers us the rare and perhaps unprecedented
glimpse into the mind of the non-human sentient other (the monster) with which these human
characters are encountering. Thus it could be argued that Frankenstein on some level is really a
story about the first contact between two races, told from the perspective of both. The fact that
Shelley devotes considerable space in the novel to giving voice to a character whose otherwise
incomprehensible seemingly non-human heart and mind would otherwise not be revealed,
reflects a dedication to the constructing of a fully fleshed out and even sympathetic
representation of the creature as a character worthy of contemplation. Is the possession of a voice
and the ability to relate a personal narrative enough to establish one's place in human society?
The answer is not clear, but Shelley's depiction of the creature's efforts to construct itself through
its relationships to its maker, its world, and the people it encounters along the way, reveals the
creature's function as mechanism for the reader to reflect on how a society defines what it means
to be human and what it means to be good.
When Frankenstein and his creature are reunited on the glacier after many years of
separation, Frankenstein explodes in hateful language, calling the creature “daemon,” “Abhorred
monster,” “fiend,” and “Wretched devil, and attempting to drown out its voice with his own
accusations, condemnations, and threats of violence (Shelly 76-77). In the midst of such strong
emotional rejection, Shelley has the creature interrupt Frankenstein's tirade with a call to him to
21 In a sense, the novel does wind up reinforcing the idea that the observations of others are necessary in defining
the self – and one might argue, the creature seems invested (at least initially) in establishing its place within
society and seeking out approval and acceptance from others, including its maker.
50
“Be calm!” and a plea that he hear the creature's tale of anguish (77). By so doing, Shelley
reveals the monster to be not the mute malicious one-dimensional demon we have been led
through Victor's narrative to imagine as his nemesis, but instead an intelligent and complex being
capable of speech, civility, judgment, empathy, and humanity. Moreover, in contrast to
Frankenstein's hubris and guilt, the creature is represented as penitent, humble, submissive, even
“mild and docile to my natural lord and king” (ie. Frankenstein). Although Frankenstein paints it
as a demon, the creature believes itself to be a jilted Adam and a “fallen angel,” a formerly divine
creation stripped of context and function (77).
In representing itself as a kind of new Adam, the creature reinforces its own construction
of Frankenstein as a god-figure, albeit one that is “ineptly negligent creator whose conduct
toward his creation is callously unjust” (Baldick 43). The creature's identification with Adam
establishes a connection to an earlier figure who is also fashioned from inert materials and
transformed into a living, thinking being. That is to say, rereading the biblical account through
the lens of artificial creation, one can argue that Adam is a type of automaton, an artificial being
made for a purpose, given instructions to follow, and who embodies its maker's understanding of
self.
22
Its desperation to reforge this connection and context is evident in its language—when it
calls out “I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam,” (77) it does so in an attempt to locate itself
not just within a familial or genealogical context, but also to confirm its familiarity and position
within the Western religious and spiritual tradition (as opposed to locating itself outside of that
22 Indeed, the account given in Genesis 1 explicitly states that “God created man in his own image, in the image of
God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen. 1:27), suggesting that Adam and Eve were
modeled after their maker(s) and intended to reflect their likeness, not only in appearance, but also in behavior –
or in other words, to be autonomous beings formed from the inert matter and arranged/organized into a system
of parts which could perform tasks and follow instructions.
51
tradition—after all even a fallen angel is an angel and not an alien or competing god).
Steven Vine, writing on the ways identities and stories are repeated, transformed,
refigured, and disfigured in Frankenstein, notes the creature's insistence on these labels and
identities reflects “his attempt to discover a specular relation between his story, or figure, and the
stories and figures surrounding him. The monster's quest for himself is to discover himself in the
other” (Vine 247). By invoking the names of characters from familiar texts, be they literary or
divine in nature, the creature seeks to identify himself as an “other” by occupying an established
role within a narrative that Frankenstein (and the readers) will recognize. Even as these attempts
by the creature to insert himself—or as Vine puts it, read himself (247)—into existing narratives
successfully demonstrates his fluency with the literature and theology of humankind, each
identification ultimately proves imprecise and fails—the creature is never fully at home in any
role he attempts to adopt.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the creature seems unable to successfully occupy roles or
assimilate into society through reading himself into existing narratives given the nature of his
own inception. Rather than being crafted into existence out of raw original material (be it
marble, clay, or clockwork parts) devoid of prior histories, owners, and purposes,
23
the creature is
in fact a bricolage composed of the dismembered parts of other human beings, each of which
serves as the remnant or token of some narrative where its owner existed as a being apart from
the final creation. In this respect, some might argue the creature is a peculiar kind of individual
—“an individual composed of many other individuals” (Bernatchez 212). The creature's
23 For a more detailed discussion of Pygmalion's living statue and its literary progeny, see Kenneth Grossman's
The Dream of the Moving Statue (2006). One might also argue that most clockwork automata and mechanical
dolls should fall into this category if their component parts are original and not scavenged from old machines
and repurposed.
52
inability to reconcile himself to one identity thus can be seen as perfectly in line with its
composite nature. Much like the novel itself, the creature is a pastiche, an assemblage that rather
than demanding a single authoritative reading of an identity, instead encourages a complex
multileveled approach to answering the implicit question: “what are you?” that drives the
creature's quest for self-knowledge. Whereas Criscillia Benford views the Frankenstein's
creation through a Marxist lens, arguing that the creature be read “as a figure for the populace or
the protelariat” (Benford 326), I would offer a slightly different interpretation, reconnecting this
vision of the creature with the idea of the automaton as a model of a particular view of society or
the world.
24
If indeed the creature can be read as a figure for the nineteenth-century society
itself, perhaps it does so by holding up a mirror to the fragmented, dysfunctional, and inherently
paradoxical nature of a society that is torn between the pastoral and industrial, the faithful and
rational, the spiritual and the material. The creature's existential crisis and failure to find a home
or a name in the context of past narratives and paradigms of belief, in many respects reflects
precisely the turmoil of the social traditions from which it was born and against which it rebels.
In the end, his inability to locate a narrative space in which he might be read as human leads him
to abandon pre-existing human-centered narratives and instead cast himself as the protagonist of
a narrative of his own crafting.
Frankenstein: The Creature Constructs Itself as a Person through Narrative
Shelley's decision to allow Frankenstein's creature the opportunity to tell its side of the story is
24 For my earlier discussion of medieval court automata as models of an understanding of a world order, see
Chapter 1, page 12. I derive this line of argument from a 2012 presentation given by Jessica Keating at the
University of Southern California entitled “Empire on the Move: Early Modern German Automata.”
53
ultimately what moves the representation of the creature out of the realm of caricature and into a
more fully fleshed out personhood.
25
By allowing us access to the voice of the creature, Shelley
radically changes our understanding (and Frankenstein's) of what it means to be sentient non-
human being in a world which seems unwilling to accept or imagine its existence. Although
Frankenstein initially resists the creature's request that he listen to its pitiable tale, claiming that
the very sight of its “detested form” evokes such violent revulsion and regret that he cannot bear
to be in its presence, the creature covers his eyes, relieving Frankenstein of the ability to see in
the hopes as to allow its story to be judged on its own merits (Shelley 78-79).
In having the creature provide its own narrative, Shelley shifts the balance of power from
the creator to the creation, enabling the creature to reveal what had hitherto been hidden, namely
that there exists a complex self within its monstrous outer form. Benford argues that “Not only
does the creature's ability to tell an eloquent story function as an argument for his personhood,
but also the story itself argues for his psychological complexity, presenting him as a being torn
between an innate desire for loving companionship and an acquired desire to avenge his
loneliness” (Benford 338).
This “ability to tell an eloquent story” as a means of arguing the case for one's
personhood is not without precedent. Consider, for example, the epic self-fashioning of the
titular character of Laurence Sterne's 1761 multi-volume novel The Life and Opinions of Tristam
Shandy, Gentleman. Unlike the earnest and focused narration of the creature in Shelley's novel,
25 Shelley's decision to have the creature speak may well be the very first instance where a created other is given
the opportunity to articulate its desires, fears, and sense of self. I have not done an extensive enough survey to
confirm this, but a cursory reading of other novels of the period and earlier suggests that by and large, once
considered a “monster,” a character or subject was rendered voiceless and its narrative and identity was
fashioned by the observers and commentators, rather than itself.
54
Sterne's Shandy, while charismatic, is by nature a garrulous narrator, prone to frequent asides,
unexpected digressions, and an endless supply of anecdotes concerning the lives of peripheral
characters and observations on an ever-widening array of topics. In his efforts to fashion himself
as a subject worthy of the reader's attention, Shandy weaves a labyrinthian tale that never quite
arrives at an answer to the fundamental question “Who is Tristam Shandy?” Despite the
circuitous path Tristam Shandy navigates in his discursive narration, he, like Frankenstein's
creature, actively constructs a sense of self and personhood by articulating himself as a part of a
broader social story (or more precisely, the intersection of stories of many others).
There is an intriguing moment in the second chapter of the first volume of Tristam
Shandy where Sterle doesn't quite present the voice of the other, but has Shandy, while musing
on the moment of his own conception, argue how the homunculus
26
is itself a created being, and
can and should be viewed as an other:
“That the HOMUNCULUS is created by the same hand—engender'd in the same
course of nature—endowed with the same locomotive powers and faculties with
us: — That he consists, as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries,
ligaments, nerves, cartileges, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours,
and articulations; — is a Being of as much activity, — and, in all senses of the
word, as much and as truly our fellow-creature as my Lord Chancellor of
England.” (Sterne 5).
Even as Shandy closes with a jibe at the Lord Chancellor of England, he also is outlining an
argument which draws attention to the common ground between the homunculus (either as the
embryonic preformed human or as the alchemically animated artificial being). He does so in part
26 Shandy's use of homunculus (“little human”) can be read in two ways: first, it might refer to the Preformationist
idea that the sperm (or egg) contained a tiny perfectly preformed being that would eventually develop into a
full-sized human; and second, as a refererence to purported alchemical procedures for creating diminutive
artificial human-like beings from human sperm or eggs in an alchemist's laboratory. Both definitions carried the
implication that the homunculus, despite originating from human material, was somehow less than human.
55
by breaking down the homunculus into a list of material components (“skin, hair, fat, flesh,
veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartileges, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours,
and articulations”), all the while noting the similarities between humans and homunculi in their
generation (the bringing together of sperm and egg), the possession of “loco-motive powers”
(self-animation), and their “faculties” (mental capacity). Despite this focus on what is shared
and how it forms a picture of an encounterable other, Shandy does not claim the homunculus to
be exactly human, but instead maintains a clear separation between himself (and, by extension,
humanity – as made apparent by his strict use of “we”) and the created homunculus (which is
always “he”). Nevertheless, when viewed in toto, the homunculus becomes readily visible as a
functioning model of what Tristam Shandy (and by extension, the philosophers and texts he
wittingly or unwittingly references) believes the human being to be, namely an assemblage of
materials and organs which when arranged properly construct a being capable of movement and
intellectual capacity.
27
So what does all this mean for our examination of Frankenstein and the creature's efforts
to fashion a self through creating narrative? Returning to the earlier point made by Benford
concerning both “the ability of to tell an eloquent story” and that ensuing narrative's capacity to
reveal emotional and psychological complexity, we can see that the creature's decision to tell an
elaborate narrative which references not only extant literary, philosophical, religious, and
historical texts, but also to depicts itself in a range of emotional and psychological states is a
27 One might further argue that both Frankenstein and Tristam Shandy as texts operate in a similar fashion—
constructing the sense of their individuality (and the individuality of Frankenstein's creature and Shandy as a
character) by assembling, remixing, and repurposing material that has been collected from other sources and
narratives. Where Sterne's novel borrows liberally from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Francis
Bacon's Of Death, Rabelais' writings, and many other texts, Shelley's Frankenstein pieces together its own
fictional accounts which are a mixture of letters, personal narratives, and monologues.
56
purposeful one, calculated to elicit recognition, admiration, sympathy, and eventually guilt in the
mind and heart of its human audience.
Having abandoned the attempt to insert itself into existing human literary and theological
narratives, the creature relates instead an account that is both its own, and yet at least in part
indebted to philosophical works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke (Marshall 182). As it
stands before its maker, its hands covering Victor Frankenstein's eyes, the creature traces a
trajectory that begins in a confused state of indistinguishable senses and moves through various
stages of physical, intellectual, emotional, and social awakening. When recounting its earliest
memories, the creature notes “all events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange
multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it
was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various
senses” (Shelley 79). The creature's account actively invites comparison with Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding which rejected innate ideas (ie. that we are born with an
inherent knowledge of certain values and truths about the world) and instead postulated that
given a blank mind at birth, all understanding was product of sensation and sensory experience.
28
Continuing its narration, the creature describes itself coming to terms with its circumstances, and
as it does so, how it begins to form a model of the world and of itself by learning to “distinguish
between the operations of [its] various senses” and to discern brightness and darkness,
responding to differences by opening or shutting its eyes (79). In these small ways, the creature
implies that it began to articulate a self separate from its surroundings, an awareness capable to
28 For an exhaustive examination of philosophical source texts (acknowledged and unacknowledged) for
Frankenstein, I highly recommend Burton R. Pollins' article “Philosophical and Literary Sources of
Frankenstein” (1965) as well as Iwan Rhys Morus' Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and
Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London (1998).
57
reacting in meaningful ways to its environment. Eventually, it descends, moves, and seeks out
shade, exhibiting not only sensory awareness, but also the ability and power to move itself and to
distinguish what is immediately beneficial from what is not (79-80). While these developments
help present the creature as an autonomous actor, it is its subsequent discoveries of fatigue, sleep,
cold, fear, and loneliness that build empathy in us as readers, establishing the creature as an
embodied other who occupies an existence which nonetheless comprehends the basic fears and
appetites that we tend to believe are the common lot of all living and sentient beings.
In addition to establishing itself as a sensory being with an awareness of its physical
surroundings and possessing basic animal instincts, the creature's narrative reveals an emerging
sense of selfhood and an ability to reflect and judge its own emotional state and condition. By
articulating both its realization in one moment, that it “was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch,”
and its ability in another, to derive pleasure while gazing on the “radiant form” of the sun rising
above the trees “with a kind of wonder,” the creature offers itself to Frankenstein (and indirectly,
to us) as a subject not only capable of experiencing despair and awe, but also able of appreciating
beauty (Shelley 80). Fear, awe, desperation, trust, betrayal, admiration, and revulsion are all
emotions experienced and traversed in the course of the creature's narration, revealing a richly
complex interior landscape that would otherwise remain unknown to its creator, to any
encountered observers, and to the readers of the novel.
It is this fundamental disjunction between the emotionally sophisticated interior self
formed in private moments of isolated introspection separated from the gaze of others, and its
hulking outward shell, a patchwork body which appears to all a visual affront to the idea of
58
human, a monstrous parody of divine creation that inspires its viewers to assign the language and
narrative of abomination and horror. The creature eases us into this realization, choosing to
present its initial encounters with society through the lens of absence. Rather than immediately
offer us a scene of its betrayal, rejection, and exile, the creature begins by detailing its discovery
of other sentient life through its happening upon a mouldering fire “left by some wandering
beggars” (Shelley 81) which not only informs it of the existence of others in its space, but also
enables it to take possession of that fire and the semblance of home it constructs around itself.
The “beggars” and “travellers” it does not actually encounter, except through what they leave
behind, serve as signifiers of an external society with which the creature has yet to encounter
(81). When the creature does describe its first encounter with a living other, it is with an old
man it finds in a small hut in the woods (82). At this point, the creature emphasizes in its
narrative that when it had entered the hut, the old man, “perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and …
ran across the field” (82). Already in this moment, the narrative highlights that great divide
between interior and exterior, between what is in the creature's heart (its innocent curiosity) and
what is seen by the eye of its beholder (a pale corpse-like giant formed of many parts). In this
case, it is profound terror, and although the creature responds calmly, albeit with surprise, he is
more captivated by the hut itself and the idea of man-made shelter, than he is concerned or even
aware of his unnatural form (82).
The creature's depiction of its subsequent visit to a village expands on this divide between
the private personal conception of self and the public reading of the body as monstrous and
worthy of fear. Although it enters the village space and some of the homes out of curiosity, it is
59
met by the villagers driven by fear to either faint, flee, or fight (83). When at last, it is driven out
by the villagers using “stones and many other kinds of missile weapons” (83), it is done so
without any effort to converse. No one attempts to open up a dialogue with the creature, nor
does it appear to comprehend at this time why it might be judged hideous and dangerous.
29
Having failed to organically blend into civilized society during its visit to the village, the
creature adopts a new approach, choosing instead to shadow a small family it discovers living in
a cottage outside the community. The creature's narrative focuses on its efforts to learn through
observation—it presents itself as a student of the family, providing detailed descriptions of not
only their physical appearances, but also their interactions with other individuals in the family,
the layout and contents of the cottage, and their myriad emotional states as they face their daily
challenges and responsibilities. By doing so, the creature crafts a vision of itself as a being
capable of patience and empathy, invested in a detailed and thorough study of both human
individuality and the nature of human society when viewed in microcosm (83-84).
Ultimately, what motivates the creature is a desire to not only understand, but also to join
and become a part of the family he observes (and through them, it seems, the larger society).
When the opportunity arrives, he studies their language and gradually learns to speak by
observing the teaching of another outsider. For the sake of this assimilation and adoption, the
creature also attempts to form an indirect social bond with them through performing little acts of
service (90). Over time, its invisible presence and its benevolent actions are labeled by Agatha
as the work of a “good spirit” and as something “wonderful,” terms which simultaneously
29 The creature's earlier exclamation that it “was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch” (Shelley 80) seems to reflect
more of its awareness of its abandoned and forlorn condition, than to suggest any awareness of how its
appearance might be read by others.
60
suggest acceptance and also the element of the supernatural (90). And yet, as the creature
discovers in due course, the potential acceptance implied by such labels and readings have less to
do with its corporeal self and more to do with the family's imagined version of their helper.
30
The creature's efforts to integrate more fully into the society at large can be seen in its
close study of both the historical literature that is read in the cottage by the De Lacey family, and
the literary texts that the creature finds in the woods. By including the specific details of the
texts it relies on for its education, the creature seems to imply a deep familiarity with the
fundamental nature of the human soul, at least as glimpsed through the lens of history. In the
study of V olney's text, the creature encounters the collective voice of humanity as it emerges
empire to empire, age to age, offering up the dual-nature of human soul, capable both of being
“at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” (94). The
creature's subsequent discovery of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows
of Werter found abandoned in the woods, opens the door to a richer exploration of the human
condition through its newly gained fluency in the language (101). These books, the creature
explains, “produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to
ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection” (102). In its own words, through
reading, the creature finds itself “similar, yet at the same time, strangely unlike the beings
concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener” (102). In such unexpected
moments of reversal, it is the creature who experiences the uncanny with the human, finding the
human self it studies as unsettlingly familiar, one being reminiscent of the other, while also
30 Thus, in this respect, the family also engages in the act of constructing an “automaton” of the material evidence
they encounter and their own lived experiences, which in the end proves irreconcilable with the physical
appearance of their benefactor when they finally do encounter him. The model of the other they imagine is still
a reflection of their own selves, and not the creature.
61
lacking some key component to make them identical. As the creature marches through this
progression, from the melancholic interior angst of the Sorrows of Werter, to the virtues and
values taught through Plutarch's Lives, to the existential quandary manifest in the fall of Adam
and Satan's rebellion in Milton's Paradise Lost, we sense precisely what it is missing: a name, a
purpose, and a place to call its own.
31
Even as the creature reads itself into Paradise Lost, and later discovers, in its own
possession, the journal pages from Victor Frankenstein's lab detailing his anxieties around its
creation, it is nonetheless, possessed of an even greater desire to find a place within human
society. Despite its misgivings and fear of rejection, the creature carefully executes a plan to
enable it to find a place and to perhaps be recognized as a part of humanity. Waiting for a
moment when all the cottagers are out on errands, with the exception of the old man, the creature
approaches their residence and engages the blind man in conversation. What transpires can be
thought of a precursor to Turing's Imitation Game, but in this case rather than the goal being to
pass an artificially intelligent computer off as a human, it is for the creature to pass.
The creature presents itself to the blind man in purposefully evasive terms, never outright
lying, but offering a “translation” of its circumstances and identity that will elicit sympathy and
evoke a desire to communicate further. Thus, the creature responds to the blind man's initial
request for it to identify itself, by responding that it is “a traveller in want of a little rest” (107),
an identification which contains within it a plea for hospitality and sanctuary. In the absence of
visual cues, the old man can only rely on the creature's voice and spoken language to form an
31 Of course, the creature's reliance on these texts reveals the weakness of this method – that any text itself is a
type of automaton model of a world or an author's understanding of a world, a mechanical assemblage that
reinforces one view, often to the exclusion of others.
62
idea of its identity.
32
Although he addresses the creature initially as “stranger,” he is quick to
jump to the assumption that one who speaks his language must be his “countryman,” a fellow
Frenchman (107). The creature's response that it “was educated by a French family, and
understand[s] that language only” positions itself as a being affiliated, indebted, and yet apart
from the society in question. It expands that notion of indebtedness into a sense of loss and need
for compassion as it confesses that “I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around,
and I have no relation or friend upon the earth... I am full of fears; for if I fail there, I am an
outcast in the world for ever” (107). Here the creature forefronts its concern that it has no place,
ally, or bond within society at large. By articulating this sentiment to a blind listener, the
creature appeals to his pity—and to us, the readers, who are also blind and ultimately dependent
on its voice as transferred through the medium of text to construct our own ideas as to the nature
of its true self.
As it continues its introduction, the creature describes itself as having “good dispositions”
and having lived as life that has been “hitherto harmless, and in some degree, beneficial,” again
emphasizing its innocence of its interior self and motivations, the goodness of its heart, and a
sense that it is worthy of being viewed as “a feeling and kind friend,” rather than “a detestable
monster” (107-108). On some fundamental level the creature succeeds in earning the old man's
trust. His admission that “there is something in your words which persuades me that you are
32 There are a number of literary examples where characters avoid the public gaze upon their bodies, and instead
construct themselves as entities through their voices. The Phantom in Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel, Le Fantôme
de l'Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera), for example, presents himself to Christine initially as disembodied
voice and music, then later as masked suitor. Likewise, the Wizard in L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel, The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is largely a self constructed of a particular voice, rather than a physical presence.
When the illusion is revealed, the self behind the curtain, does not seem to align with the elaborate construction
of self through performance and accoutrement.
63
sincere” and his willingness to “be in any way serviceable to a human creature” (108) mark a
significant moment in the creature's existence. Here at last, he is judged, acknowledged, and
accepted on the basis of his interior self, a self constructed entirely out of the story he has crafted
and the voice he uses to communicate it. Unfortunately, this victory is short-lived. The return of
the others to the cottage results in a rapid disintegration of this fledgling society of misfits and
exiles, as the Felix, Safie, and Agatha each respond with “horror and consternation” at the sight
of the creature who is read, not in the terms of voice and interiority, but merely on the basis of its
outward form (109). Despite the old man's verbal insistence that he would serve as the creature's
benefactor and advocate, the creature nonetheless finds itself cut off and divorced from the
context of a society, its peaceful efforts to assimilate into the narrative of human community as a
disembodied voice (or perhaps, more precisely, a self which desires to be recognized as subject
unbounded by the body it is “born into”
33
) proves to be a profound failure.
Following its banishment from the cottage and the loss of the de Lacey family who move
away, the creature's voice becomes its means of fashioning identity in other ways. At first, it
uses it to vent its “anguish in fearful howlings,” moving it to identify itself as “a wild beast that
had broken the toils” (109). In so doing, the voice identity changes from human-like to beast-
like, one dominated by unchecked rage as it sets out to destroy “the objects that obstructed me”
(109). When the creature does overhear the voices of two locals passing the now abandoned
cottage where it has returned, it discovers that they use “violent gesticulations” and only speak
“the language of the country” which is unintelligible to him (111). Where once common
33 On this point (the creature's distinction between inner and outer selves or identities), there seems to be an
excellent opportunity to explore a reading that draws more heavily on queer and gender theory, especially as it
relates to trans-figures. The creature in a sense is performing a verbal drag in its efforts to pass as human, while
still retaining an awareness of its non-human origins and its aura of difference.
64
language had offered itself as a passport into human society, the creature now finds listening in
on Felix's explanation to the landlords of his family's sudden abandonment of their rental renders
him in a state of “utter and stupid despair” (111).
Throughout the creature's narrative, we find that the elements we assume to be the
foundation of one's entry into society and acceptance as a sentient being, namely language,
education, an understanding of family structure, an awareness of history, a system of values, and
a desire to connect with others proven insufficient and incomplete. Although each in turn refines
and shapes the inward self, the educated soul and the compassionate heart that such an
enlightened individual might achieve cannot trump the human tendency to judge on appearance
and to impose narrative and meaning to the bodies that we see. In this respect, Shelley's novel
and the creature's narrative offer themselves as an indictment of human hypocrisy, and more
particularly, Victor Frankenstein's hypocrisy. As soon as the veil of blindness is lifted and the
monster's hands removed from our eyes, our prejudices return and we question the voice we have
heard and its incongruity with the body that houses it.
Frankenstein: Silencing the Creature on the Stage
Despite the compelling glimpse that Shelley offers us into the mind and heart of a constructed
other and what it might reveal if it was given an opportunity to speak and explain itself, it is
somewhat surprising to discover that Shelley's contemporaries failed to carry this nuanced
representation of the non-human other into the dramatic interpretations of her work. As early as
Richard Brinsley Peake's 1823 staging of Presumption: Or the Fate of Frankenstein, we find the
figure of the creature profoundly changed. Gone is the vision of a creature capable of
65
intellectual development, philosophical reflection, emotional depth and complexity, and eloquent
linguistic expression – instead, we find a recasting of the creature as “hideous in aspect,” a
terrifying being “possessed of prodigious strength” that “spreads terror and carries ruin wherever
he goes” (“Review” 38).
The play renders the creature mute, offering it no lines to speak at all, no voice to evoke
in our minds and ears the idea that it might be more than a dumb, numb, bumbling beast. A
different critic describes the actor's portrayal of the creature as “a mass of moving matter,
without stimulus or intellect—he seems to have eyesight without vision
34
—he moves as if
unconscious that he is moving, and presents us a perfect and appalling picture of an immense
machine, moving without any direct or appropriate purpose” (“T.P. Cooke” 451). This reviewer
underscores a key choice in the portrayal – namely the decision to remove the elements of
volition, sensation, and cognition—placing the resultant creature at an even greater remove from
the human viewers. It is a description that rejects any notion of consciousness or awareness of
the world – a stark contrast from the novel's version of the creature which voraciously consumes
sensory experience and human knowledge, always seeking for greater understanding and an
opportunity to communicate its inner thoughts and emotional reality to a willing audience. In the
play, however, the creature is nothing more than an insensate clockwork automaton and is shown
senselessly “walking against the ballustrade, as if unconscious of the nature of the wooden
obstruction, until forcing it down by mere manual power, he falls to the ground” (451). “What
can be more harrassing,” the critic goes on to say, “than the respiration which supplies the place
34 In this respect, the creature is the opposite of the Turk, a being which possesses an uncanny vision, despite
having clearly being without working eyes (painted, rather than mechanical in nature).
66
of speech” (451)—a telling comment which exposes not only the silencing of the creature, but
the refashioning of it into a being that is barely alive, whose existence is marked by belabored
breath. On stage, the creature is portrayed an “unearthly being” and a “walking corpse” “raised
from the particles of human remains gathered from the charnel-house” and presented in “the
green ghastly hue of putrescent flesh” (451). The creature's incompatibility with humanity is
constantly on display—rather than seeing the creature as aspiring to join as a full participant in
the human experience, some of its contemporary critics tended to read the creature as an attempt
to “attack the Christian faith from a masked battery” and to “burlesque the resurrection of the
dead” (“Review” 38). To them, although the creature “wear[s] the human form,” unlike the
Turk, it is “incapable of associating with mankind” (38). Nevertheless, there is clearly
something compelling and alien about this portrayal.
Fully voiced and articulate, the creature in the novel evokes our empathy and encourages
us to re-examine what is the we take as intelligence, what constitutes a soul, and what our
obligations are to those who might be our intellectual peers. When silenced though, the creature
can only elicit our sympathy and pity—rather than challenge the existing hierarchies of creator
and created, or disrupt our assumptions about who and what might think and speak, the manner
in which the creature is portrayed on the early nineteenth-century stage reinforces older models
and existing paradigms, confirming a hierarchy of subjects which place the human near the top
and the machine at the bottom.
Why was there such a strong resistance to the idea that a non-human other might be self-
aware, self-acting, and capable of independent thought and intellectual development? Why was
67
the silenced and intellectually diminished creature more palatable and popular in the public eye?
Even Mary Shelley notes in her journal that “Frankenstein had prodigious success as a drama”
and that the creature's actor, T.P. Cooke, “played ------'s part extremely well” (Shelley “Letter”
30). Despite its silencing, Shelley admires the creature as portrayed by Cooke, not for its
representation as an intellectual equal, but for the pathos that permeated his performance—how it
struggled “seeking as it were support—[...] trying to grasp at the sounds he heard” (30). Even in
pantomime, Cooke's portrayal of the creature renders it vulnerable and unsteady, offering us a
vision of the creature as a being who in the beginning is “gentle” and “disposed to be affectionate
and kind,” but is also burdened with an “appearance [that] terrifies even those to whom he has
rendered the most essential service” (“Review” 29). Cast in this fashion, the play constructs in
the audience's minds the idea that this is a being deserving of our pity (or condemnation), the
meting out of which reinforces the position of the human as the arbiter and judge of who and
what is ultimately worthy to receive our sanction.
Of course, perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing the novel's vision of the creature
as compared to the various staged versions of the creature lies in the ways in which it called into
question the prevailing orders of the world. First, novel (and the play) disrupts the traditional
creation narrative by offering an origin that is man-made and not divine. Second, the creature
counters Cartesian dualism and other perspectives which insist on the immateriality of the
mind/soul, by arguing instead for the materiality of the mind and the view that consciousness is
either emergent from a particular structuring of the physical brain, or inherent (if latent) in all
matter. And third, the existence of a sentient creature other than humanity, threatens to
68
undermine any theological system that makes special claim to the exceptionality of human
beings over other forms of life.
35
35 A number of these themes and anxieties are explored in the next chapter. The line between human and machine
becomes increasingly blurred by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Take for instance the difference
between the Tin Woodsman from L. Frank Baum's Oz stories who begins as a human, but over time and due to
injuries, eventually replaces almost his entire body with mechanical prosthetics, and Tik Tok, a clockwork man
with no consciousness who is encountered later in the Oz books.
69
Chapter Three / The Case of the Man with a Clockwork Brain: Machine-Mind
Substitution in Babbage, Mitchell, and Doyle
Introduction
This chapter tackles the thorny problem made manifest by the popularity of Sherlock Holmes at
the end of the nineteenth-century, namely, how does a character like Holmes, whose mind and
manner so clearly communicate automaton and machine to those who encounter him
36
, become
an acceptable and even admirable figure when his predecessors and contemporaries fail to elicit
this type of sustained interest and emotional attachment (or, if they do, only in the terms of
horror, pity, and disgust)? Indeed, despite his own creator's description of the dispassionate
detective as being as “inhuman as a Babbage's Calculating Machine, and just about as likely to
fall in love” (Doyle “Letter”, italics added), somehow both the reading public and the characters
who inhabit Holmes' world accept and accommodate his identity as a machine-like intelligence.
It would be tempting to read this tolerance of Holmes as a machine-like thinker as reflective of a
general shift toward acceptance with regards to more rational and mechanical models of thinking
and those that embodied them, were it not for the abundance of counter-examples contemporary
and preceding the invention of Sherlock Holmes where the machine-like thinker is portrayed as
morally suspect, an object of pity, or an outright abomination. What is clear though, is that the
figure of a machine-like thinker in the form of a human possessed (or seemingly possessed) with
a machine mind did not exist until mathematician Charles Babbage began work on his
calculating engines. Doyle's comment linking Holmes to Babbage is therefore a most astute one
36 Watson in The Sign of the Four (1890), after observing Holmes complete lack of interest in the attractiveness of
their female visitor, exclaims “You really are an automaton—a calculating-machine!” and declaring him
“positively inhuman” (31) in his disregard for basic human emotions. Doyle himself notes in a May 1892
interview that “Sherlock is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect” (Blathwayt 50)
70
– for without Babbage's efforts to substitute machine labor for human labor in the performance
of large-scale tedious mathematical and analytical intellectual tasks, the public would not have
had a model in mind for how a mechanized brain might appear or perform, and what it would
prioritize and what it might sacrifice.
Earlier figures like the Turk or Frankenstein's creature sidestepped the question as to how
their thought and consciousness came to be, supposing sentience to be an emergent property of
the organization of matter or the result of an external supernatural intervention.
37
Instead of
conflating intelligence with some mysterious side effect of vital energy or locating it in a
divinely fashioned/imparted immaterial soul, Babbage's machines introduced the notion that any
mental process, should a general principle for that process be discovered, could be fully
replicated in mechanism. The notion that the work of the brain could be mechanized, coupled
with nineteenth-century industrialism's obsession with efficiency and speed, spurred public
anxiety over what aspects of the human mind might be jettisoned for the sake of creating a
machine brain. Although Babbage and his engines set the stage for this discussion, it took other
writers like E.P. Mitchell to imagine the evolutionary end of this progression, namely the
existence of a human with an actual calculating machine for a brain. In Mitchell's 1894 short
story, “The Ablest Man in the World,” Baron Savich (the machine-minded character) elicits a
range of emotions from the protagonist who initially is awed and disturbed, then pities, before
37 An earlier draft of this chapter devoted considerable space to a discussion of “thinking” and where it was
understood to be located and how it came to exist. To some extent the previous two chapters already touch on
some of these concerns, but for a lengthier exploration of these ideas concerning the materiality of mind and
how mind displaced soul in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, I recommend reading John Yolton's
Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (U Minnesota Press, 1983). Husbands, Holland,
and Wheeler's The Mechanical Mind in History (MIT 2008) delves into how the mechanical mind and artificial
intelligence evolve from late nineteenth-century representations into their twentieth-century computer science
and science fiction incarnations.
71
finally arriving at full revulsion and rejection. There is something undeniably unpalatable about
Savich – Fisher, the protagonist, cannot endure the existence of such a machine-human chimera
38
and must bring about Savich's destruction (or at least, the destruction of his brain). Mitchell's
story appears in the context of other stories and references to machine-like thinkers whose
inhumanity and unacceptability are boldly emphasized and whose arguments for a place within
society are soundly rejected. And yet, it is out of this same hostile environment that Sherlock
Holmes, another machine-like thinker, also emerged in 1887, and upon making his appearance,
found widespread acceptance and popularity. In order to understand how we eventually arrive at
Holmes as a new version of the thinking machine—one which spoke more clearly and
compellingly to the public than its predecessors—we must begin with Charles Babbage and his
singular effort to build a machine capable of performing intellectual work.
A Mind of Gears: Charles Babbage and the Making of a Mechanized Reason
Although earlier philosophers and mathematicians had drawn mechanical analogies before, the
actual full conception of a machine capable of performing intellectual labor did not find a
coherent articulation until the early nineteenth-century.
39
In 1819, the year following the
publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Turk returned to London and there was the star
attraction of Maezel's touring exhibit of automaton wonders. Among those who attended the
38 In this instance, chimera seems more apropos, rather than cyborg, since the underlying question is not about
prosthetics and transformation in a single body, but rather about the unnatural melding of two or more distinct
beings.
39 Leibniz, Pascal, Descartes, and La Mettrie among others speculated on the materiality of the mind, whether
human logic could be articulated in mechanistic (or systematic) ways, and if the internal workings of the mind
could be likened to clockwork or automata. However, none of the pre-nineteenth-century writers and
philosophers formulated a complete working model for reason in mechanical terms. Mechanism was invoked in
broad, often abstract terms, but the specific implementation of those mechanisms were never articulated.
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exhibit was a young mathematician, Charles Babbage, who came with a copy of von Windisch's
Inanimate Reason
40
in hand and deep curiosity for all things mechanical (Riskin 621-622). The
twenty-eight year old mathematician had already made his mark at Cambridge in the field of
differential calculus and earned a reputation as an intellectual rebel. Even prior to his first visit
to the Turk, Babbage had begun to think about using machinery to automate the creation and
calculation of logarithmic tables.
41
Although Babbage, after observing, then later playing the
automaton chess-player, came away suspecting that the Turk was nothing more than an elaborate
deception, these encounters nonetheless planted in his mind the idea that a given sophisticated
enough algorithm and complex enough machinery to implement it, it might indeed be possible to
build an actual machine that could play tic-tac-to or chess independent of a human mind.
42
Rather than tic-tac-to or chess though, Babbage set his sights on applying the idea of
mechanizing logic and reason to much more mundane, but nonetheless critical matters, namely
the creation of a machine to automate the task of calculating and printing error-free mathematical
40 Karl Gottlieb von Windisch's eyewitness accounts of the earliest exhibits of Kempelen's automaton chess-player
were widely circulated. It's not surprising that Babbage owned a copy of Inanimate Reason; or a
Circumstantial Account of That Astonishing Piece of Mechanism, M. de Kempelen’ s Chess-Player; Now
Exhibiting at No. 8, Savile-Row, Burlington Gardens; Illustrated with Three Copper-Plates, Exhibiting This
Celebrated Automaton, in Different Points of View (London, 1784) – and also not surprising that the impact of
that encounter with the Turk inspired Babbage to later toy with speculating on how a tic-tac-to playing
automaton might be designed.
41 Babbage offers two different accounts of when he first arrived at the idea for the Difference Engine. In 1834,
Babbage described a discussion with Herschel in 1820 or 1821 where he expressed frustration at the sheer
number of discrepancies and errors he found while they were comparing tables of calculated results and wished
out loud that the calculations could have been done by steam. Later, while writing his memoir, Babbage relates
an earlier occasion which a friend had reminded him of where he had been in the rooms of the Analytical
Society while still at Cambridge, and when interrupted from sleep and asked what he had been dreaming about,
had replied “I am thinking that all these tables (pointing to the logarithms) might be calculated by machinery”
(Hyman 49-50). Since the Analytical Society only existed from 1812-1814, the earliest possible date of this
incident would have to be 1812.
42 Babbage devotes an entire section of his 1864 memoir, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, to the
discussion of how an automaton might be built that could play tic-tac-to (or any game of skill by extension) and
gives an example algorithm that would ensure it win or tie every game (Babbage 465-471).
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tables.
43
In his 1822 open letter to Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, Babbage states
his vision of the Difference Engine as being “a machine, which, by the aid of gravity or any other
moving power, should become a substitute for one of the lowest operations of human intellect”
(6). Central to Babbage's argument is his desire to remove the human element from the
calculation, transcription, table-making, and printing of these tables, seeing the presence of the
human as the source of all error
44
and the limiting factor in the speed and adaptability of the
mechanical process he is describing (7). In this respect, Babbage drew heavily on the success of
Jacquard's punch card-driven automated looms which had already supplanted many traditional
human-operated looms. Instead of relying on a human weaver, Jacquard's mechanical looms ran
independently, strictly following the instructions coded on the punch cards that they read to
produce perfectly patterned textiles. Like the looms which had gone beyond the role of
prosthetic aid to textile production and now replaced human labor, Babbage argues his
calculating engines contain “within themselves the power of generating to an almost unlimited
extent tables whose accuracy would be unrivalled,” thus becoming “active agents in reducing the
abstract enquiries of geometry to a form and an arrangement adapted to the ordinary purposes of
human society” (13, italics added). In this sense, Babbage imagines the calculating engine as a
separate entity, an inorganic thing, which, though not self-aware, nonetheless performing what
43 It was not just nautical tables, but also astronomical tables, and any other tables which relied on calculated
logarithmic, trigonometric, or other values produced from algebraic and differential functions. Ships (and
therefore trade) depended on accurate charts and tables, as did engineers and architects. Having access to error-
free tables would have yielded great efficiencies and economic gains for both companies and nations.
44 The idea of that error-making is a quintessentially human quality is an intriguing one. Later in this chapter, we'll
explore how perfection is a primary source of our unease with the machine-like thinking human and how Doyle
subtly interrogates Holmes' perceived perfection throughout his stories and novels, inviting us to reconsider
what makes us human and perhaps, allows us a means to feel empathy for a machine-like mind which is clearly
not like our own.
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hitherto had been the sole intellectual labor of the human. Moreover, Babbage's early
descriptions of the machine already highlight the superiority of the machine's structure as the
means by which it is enable it to “calculate tables governed by laws which have not been hitherto
shown to be explicitly determinable, or … solve equations for which analytical methods of
solution have not yet been contrived” (7). Babbage's Difference Engine embodies then a new
industrial (indeed, factory-derived) model for thinking, one that plays toward the strengths of
mechanism, while eliminating those elements that might produce error.
In this respect, Babbage's work on the calculating engines gave shape to the idea of a
machine mind by forcing both the inventor and the public to confront thinking in concrete,
algorithmically defined terms, and not merely in vague metaphysical language. Rather than point
to mysterious life forces, supernatural spirits, unknown forms of magnetism, or an unexplained
cabinet of clockwork gears as the source of its intelligence, the Babbage's engines required
detailed plans, sophisticated control mechanisms, and a way to evaluate and determine the next
course of action. In essence, the machine needed to act like a mind. Although Babbage was well
aware that his efforts would not yield an actual self-aware machine mind, he found the parallels
to his work and his understanding of how the human brain functioned, often made such
comparisons unavoidable. In the absence of a set of machine-centric technical terms to annotate
and communicate his plans, Babbage's descriptions of his engines' processes and layouts often
drew heavily on the human-centric language already familiar to his audiences. For example,
when speaking of the mechanical means by which the tens digit was stored, then carried to a new
column of numbers, Babbage would note the mechanism's “slight analogy to the operation of the
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faculty of memory” (Passages 62). Elsewhere he speaks of a need to “teach mechanism to
accomplish another mental process, namely—to foresee” and having accomplished that, “to act
upon that foresight” (62). In an 1837 paper titled “On the Mathematical Powers of the
Calculating Engine,” Babbage confesses that this reliance on analogy to the workings of the
human mind was partly out of convenience (the terms were simpler to employ) and clarity (most
of his audience, educated or not, could not follow his lengthier technical explanations):
“In substituting mechanism for the performance of operations hitherto executed by
intellectual labour it is continually necessary to speak of contrivances by which certain
alterations in parts of the machine enable it to execute or refrain from executing particular
functions. The analogy between these acts and the operations of the mind almost forced
upon me the figurative employment of the same terms. They were found at once
convenient and expressive and I prefer continuing their use rather than substituting
lengthened circumlocutions.” (31, italics added)
By associating the functions of the machine with human mental processes and using expressions
like “the engine knows” as shorthand for the current logical state of the machine (ie. its
knowledge being whatever information can be gleaned from the final state of the columns after
having completed a calculation), Babbage encouraged his audiences and the general public to
think of the Difference Engine (and later, the Analytical Engine) as a type of a mechanical brain.
At times, Babbage's descriptions were even more colorful and dramatic, often seeming to impute
a sentience and personality to the machine: “This much-abused Difference Engine is, however,
like its prouder relative the Analytical, a being of sensibility, of impulse, and of power”
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(Passages 110). Or, writing again of the Difference Engine:
It can not only calculate the millions the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer squandered, but
it can deal with the smallest quantities; nay, it feels even for zeros. It is as conscious as
Lord Derby himself is of the presence of a negative quantity, and it is not beyond the
ken of either of them to foresee the existence of impossible ones. (110, emphasis added).
Babbage's enthusiastic portrayal of his calculating machines as beings capable of not only of
calculation, but also feeling, foresight, and ultimately consciousness is of course hyperbole. And
yet to a public fond of spectacle and living in the midst of rapid, wondrous and unprecedented
advances in other forms of technology, be it telegraphy, photography, or the advent of the steam
locomotive, it is perhaps not unexpected that his machines were greeted with a great deal
optimism and anticipation for what his labors might finally yield.
45
Indeed, according to
Babbage, part of appeal of the calculating engine was the assurance that it could provide
answers, solve equations, and locate patterns and workable methods of solution far beyond the
mental capacity of its human operators or even its creator.
46
Charles Babbage's exhibitions of the partially built portions of the Difference Engine
(sufficient to demonstrate the automatic calculations of complex equations) and his lectures on
45 L.F. Menebrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage (1842) is both enthusiastic about
possibilities for Babbage's vision of an independently acting, self-governing, programmable machine and the
grandness of his vision, but also clearly distances himself from equating the powers of the engine with
sentience, noting that “the machine is not a thinking being, but simply an automaton which acts according to the
laws imposed upon it” (Menebrea).
46 Babbage's vision for such a machine is ultimately realized in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990
alternate history novel, The Difference Engine, which imagines a world in which Babbage succeeds in building
his engine. The novel is widely regarded as a foundational text in the creation of the steampunk genre, as it
describes the political, social, and aesthetic consequences of a computer revolution launched in the era of steam
and in so doing, establishes many of the tropes later steampunk novels would explore and utilize.
77
the unbuilt Analytical Engine provided the clearest vision for the public of what a fully realized
machine mind might look like. Indeed, when Lady Byron brought her then seventeen year old
daughter Ada to one of Babbage's soirees in June of 1833, it was, as she describes in a letter, to
see the “thinking machine (for so it seems)” (quoted in Toole 51). Why did Babbage's
calculating engine strike Lady Byron as “seeming” to “think”? Her letter provides a few clues.
First, she notes that “Babbage [had] said it had given him notions with respect to general laws
which were never before presented to his mind” (51, emphasis added). The image of a machine
inspiring a human (especially its creator) to new original thought seems to position the engine as
a partner in a dialogue or a prosthetic means to extend one's own intellectual abilities. Second,
she describes the machine as “counting regularly, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc – to 10,000” and then without
intervention, altering its course to “pursue its calculation according to a new ratio,” which seems
to imply that the engine had some ability to change its own programming and reset its logical
path (51). Here too, the image of a machine seemingly capable of changing its mind presented a
clear counterargument to those who viewed the union of will and agency as solely the domain of
the human being.
In many respects, it was the fact that the machine and its actual means of operation were
“incomprehensible” to the general viewing public that led many to attribute to the calculating
engine the powers of “volition” and “thought.” Indeed, as time moved on, Babbage's machines
were increasingly considered brain-like. Harry Wilmot Buxton, a friend of Babbage, writing in
his unpublished biography of Babbage exclaims at one point: “The marvelous pulp and fibre of
the brain had been substituted for brass and iron, he had taught wheelwork to think, or at least to
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the office of thought” (quoted in Swade 245). While the Difference Engine arguably performed
“the lowest operations of human intellect,” Babbage envisioned the Analytical Engine as “a
totally new engine possessing much more extensive powers, and capable of calculations of a
nature far more complicated” (Babbage, “Duke of Wellington,” 6). L.F. Menabrea, in his review
of the Analytical Engine plans which Babbage had communicated to him, distinguished the two
machines by noting that whereas the Difference Engine performed tasks that depended on
“precise and invariable laws” which were capable of being “expressed by means of the
operations of matter,” the Analytical Engine represented the first known attempt to construct “a
machine capable of executing not merely arithmetical calculations, but even all those of analysis,
if their laws are known” (Menebrea 92-93). In taking on the work of analysis, the Analytical
Engine entered the murky waters that had long divided the mechanical from the human. It was
sufficiently confusing that Ada Lovelace notes in her comments on Menebrea's review that “the
machine is not a thinking being, but simply an automaton which acts according to the laws
imposed upon it” (Lovelace 98) and although it operates by following the interpretation of
symbols and formulae, it is not a “being that reflects” but rather a “being which executes the
conceptions of intelligence” (112). Nevertheless, Lovelace's own descriptions of the machine
extolled a certain flexibility in its operation, suggesting that to imagine it as bounded by a series
of simple laws was a bit too reductive, but instead contending that “The engine is capable, under
certain circumstances, of feeling about to discover which of two or more possible contingencies
has occurred, and of then shaping its future course accordingly” (Lovelace 98).
Despite Babbage's declared intention to use his engines to reveal undiscovered laws and
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relationships within the world of data through their superior calculating power, their mechanical
complexity, the lack of precise and commonly understood terminology, and the public's general
tendency toward spectacle over rational explanation produced an effect opposite to his goals. In
the place of greater understanding and a more sophisticated appreciation of the laws of logic and
reason which underpinned his machines the public remained more confused, conflating the
mechanical with the magical, making their encounter with these machines at once familiar and
unfamiliar, the machine posing as a brain an inherently uncanny object when laid bare to the
observer's eye.
The Character of the Machine-Like Thinker
The idea that the living brain might find a mechanical incarnation in Babbage's
Difference and Analytical Engines also raised the question as to the nature of the mind that might
arise in a brain that mimicked the machine. What personality might be present in a man who
possessed a machine-like mind? Given the cultural moment and the widespread interest in
Babbage's calculating engines, it is not surprising that in the mid-nineteenth century there was an
uptick in the number of references in letters, articles, and reviews likening a given individual
with a thinking machine, usually in an unflattering way. Nor is it unanticipated that the
logically-minded if somewhat obdurate Babbage himself would occasionally be conflated with
his own invention—on at least one occasion, Darwin writing to Charles Lyell in 1838 notes
“what grievous pity it is that the latter [Babbage] should be so implacable, & if one might so call
the calculating machine, so very silly” (Darwin Correspondence 428).
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Of course, it was not only Babbage who suffered the indignity of being likened to a
calculating engine or a thinking machine. Perhaps the most detailed description of the attributes
and personality associated with a thinking machine in human form can be found in a review of a
volume of collected essays by clergyman John Walker which appeared in an issue of The
Eclectic Review also published in 1838. In his article, the reviewer describes “the idea of a
thinking machine, void of all grace of passion and magic touch of eloquence” as finding a perfect
model in Walker whose works were “cold and hard as marble” and constituted “The stern,
unfeeling, dogmatic productions of a mind that had […] little sympathy with the nature to which
he belonged” (520). Likewise, in Samuel Warren's 1841 novel Ten Thousand-a-Year we are
introduced us to Mr. Crafty, a professional electioneering tactician, who the narrator informs us
is “a mere thinking machine” and is described as “very calm and phlegmatic in his manner and
movements—there was not a particle of passion or feeling in his composition” and in all things
presenting himself as “a man cold, cautious, acute, matter-of-fact” (Warren 5). Describing his
younger utilitarian self in similar terms in his 1873 Autobiography, John Stuart Mill confesses to
have been at the time “a mere reasoning machine” who possessed a “zeal for speculative
opinions” which “had not its root in genuine benevolence or sympathy with mankind” (Mill 109-
110). Although Mill's account presents himself as having eventually evolved beyond his earlier
Benthamite leanings, Thomas Carlyle nonetheless declares the work to be “wholly the life of a
logic-chopping machine” and little more than the “Autobiography of a steam engine” (Cunning
160). In each of these descriptions we find the human thinking machine emphasized as an
embodiment of pure methodology, a subject divested of any human emotion, passion, or feeling,
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and consequently a not quite human presence that inspires unease rather than empathy and
concern.
The portrayal of humans with machine-like minds continues through the mid-nineteenth-
century, eventually taking its most sensational form in E.P. Mitchell's “The Ablest Man in the
World” (1879). Mitchell's tale offers us Baron Savitch, a character who outwardly appears to be
a human of extreme capability, talent, politity, and knowledge, but whom Fisher, the protagonist,
learns is actually an imbecile whose brain has been replaced with a clockwork brain superior to
one of Babbage's calculating engines
47
(Mitchell 61-62). Dr. Rapperschwyl, the scientist who
implanted the machine brain, suggests to Fisher that by creating a machine brain he has
“eliminated the personal equation” which he sees as the source of error in human logic and
created something instead capable of proceeding “from cause to effect, from premise to
conclusion, with steady precision,” seemingly infallible in its processes (62). Rapperschwyl's end
goal, it is revealed, has been to create a “superior being” possessed of this “artificial intellect that
operates with the certainty of universal laws” (63). Despite his generally pleasant encounters
with the Baron, Fisher finds his peace of mind “rent alternately by apprehension and disgust”
(67). Fisher cannot tolerate the existence of Savich feeling that no good could come “from this
association with a being in whom the moral principle had no doubt been supplanted by a system
of cog-gear” (67, italics added) and whose existence was “merely a marvel of mechanical
47 Mitchell's story explicitly connects Dr. Rapperschwyl and Babbage in the doctor's description of how he
designed the machine brain: “My endeavors in mechanism had resulted in a machine which went far beyond
Babbage's in its powers of calculation. Given the data, there was no limit to the possibilities in this direction”
(Mitchell 61-62). For Rapperschwyl, that transcendence was marked by the machine's ability to reason, not just
calculate, which suggests that the author may have only been familiar with Babbage's Difference Engine, or at
least (as was a common occurrence) mistakenly seen the Analytical Engine as the next iteration of the
Difference, missing Babbage's own vision of the Analytical Engine performing the type of logical reasoning that
Rapperschwyl describes.
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ingenuity, constructed upon a principle subversive of all society” (68, italics added). In Fisher's
eyes Baron Savich is an abomination and a “monster,” a soulless mechanical wolf in the guise of
a sheep whose “immoral” and “subversive” existence must be dealt with quickly before
Rapperschwyl achieves his goal and sees Savich ascend to the highest seats of global power.
Horrified by the prospect that the Baron might through his superior intellect rule as an
emotionless, soulless machine mind unbounded by human morality and empathy, Fisher
undertakes the task of saving “the liberties of the world” and Miss Fisher's “peace of mind” by
getting Savich drunk, then ruthlessly removing the mechanical brain from the Baron's head and
throwing it overboard (72). Fisher's reaction to Savich's real identity comes across as extreme,
ultraviolent, and utterly emotional, and thus highlights a type of thinking and response
impossible for Savich, the machine-like thinker, to anticipate or replicate. In stark contrast to
Savich's portrayal as a calm logical and reasoned thinker incapable of fear or rage, Fisher acts
instinctively and recklessly perceiving the machine mind as a danger to a human-centric world,
something to be feared and destroyed. For Fisher, the enemy is not Savich's body, but the
mechanical brain it houses, one which he perceives as a separate entity, an invader to be
overthrown. Even as he watches the machine mind sinking in the waves at the end of the story,
Fisher thinks he hears “a wild, despairing cry” and chooses to ignore it (72).
In Mitchell's story, the machine mind is not merely an invader and occupier of a human
body, it is a doppelganger of its human counterpart and as such, embodies the threat of machine
replacement. It is, after all, a narrative in which the identity of the human imbecile, Stépan
Borovitch, is erased once the machine brain is substituted for his human one, and he thenceforth
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becomes Baron Savich. What Rapperschwyil champions and what Fisher fears is the inerrancy of
the machine mind which comes to represent the essence of machineness. For Rapperschwyl, the
machine mind's inerrancy is the source of humanity's eventual salvation (and his own path to
power), but for Fisher, to err is human and the removal of the ability to err is a removal of any
evidence of agency. Fisher's rejection of Savich's machine mind then, is a rejection of inerrancy
as a believable and acceptable part of humanity. In part, what makes inerrancy impossible to
accept is our inability to fathom it as humans. Empathy, one might argue, is the ability to
understand another by recreating in one's mind a model of what the other is and how the other
thinks. Given the superiority of the machine mind to the human in the processing of data and the
evaluating of logical relationships and problems, one can see how what Fisher fears most is a
mind whose inerrancy represents a way of making sense of the world that cannot be understood,
followed, or predicted using purely human thinking. It is a sentience outside of human
comprehension, and as representing an unknown actor, something to be feared or at least, not
trusted. Much like the Luddites earlier in the nineteenth-century, Fisher represents a resistance to
the displacement of the human from the place of worker, although in this case, the work in
question is intellectual and political, rather than physical. Mitchell's story seems to suggest that
when the machine mind moves to the center of the action, occupying a place of individual
unattended and unmonitored performance, the machine becomes a threat and must be
overthrown.
Sherlock Holmes and the Rehabilitation of the Machine-Like Thinker
If the inerrancy of the machine mind produces an anxiety over the possibility of human
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obsolescence and machine replacement, why does the perfected logical reasoning of Sherlock
Holmes not elicit the same response? That Holmes is intended to be read as a machine-like
thinker is clear throughout the stories and Doyle's own letters and interviews. As noted earlier,
from the start machine-like qualities were associated with Sherlock Holmes by both his creator
and the other characters who inhabited Holmes' world. Not only does Holmes reflect the data-
driven, step by step mechanically precise logical analysis epitomized by Babbage's calculating
engines as hinted at in Doyle's correspondence, he is also described as finding all emotions,
especially love, as “abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind” (“Scandal in
Bohemia” reprinted in OISH
48
11). Indeed, according to Watson's report, Holmes is “the most
perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” for whom emotion is
considered “a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results” (11).
Continuing the machine analogy, Watson notes that for Holmes human emotion becomes “Grit in
a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high power lenses (11). Holmes' exceptional
observational skills (described in terms reminiscent to a microscope) and his rapid reasoning
abilities (very much an homage to descriptions of Babbage's engines), coupled with his general
lack of emotion, emphasize the essential machineness of the character.
Holmes' machineness is emphasized in the stories as a type of mechanical inhumanity.
Surprised by Holmes' lack of interest or even awareness of the physical attractiveness of their
female client, Watson exclaims in Sign of the Four (1890): “You really are an automaton—a
calculating machine! There is something positively inhuman in you at times” to which Holmes
48 OISH refers to the Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (1976) which reprints in a single anthology all lthe
Sherlock Holmes stories published in The Strand between 1891 and 1905 (37 stories and The Hound of the
Baskervilles). I'll be using this acronym to save space in the citations.
85
responds, “It is of the first importance […] not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal
qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are
antagonistic to clear reasoning” (31). Holmes' response reveals a different way of seeing the
world, one in which the “personal” is at best irrelevant and, at worst, directly opposed to the
workings of his mind. Couched in the vantage point of detective as thinking machine, Holmes (in
a manner reminiscent of Dickens' Gradgrind) observes others as merely discrete components,
factors in a problem to be solved, their emotions and behaviors patterns and forces to be
measured, calculated, and extrapolated from, but not to be engaged. At times, Watson comments
on Holmes' “keen, incisive reasoning” and employment of “quick, subtle methods by which he
disentangled the most inextricable mysteries” (“A Scandal in Bohemia” in OISH 17). So
perfectly does Holmes embody this reasoning methodology, that Watson admits “the very
possibility of his failing had ceased to enter into my head” (17).
Despite Watson's confession that he often regarded Holmes as “an isolated phenomenon,
a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence”
(“The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter” in OISH 293), Holmes emerges from these stories as
more accessible and tolerable than Mitchell's Baron Savich. Savich is an existence wholly
dedicated to reasoning and arriving at perfect answers, and yet possessing no other gifts or
weaknesses – he is an embodiment of machine-like reason, but only an embodiment of reason.
What makes Doyle's presentation of Holmes so remarkable—and in essence—what enables
Holmes to be more than merely a superior machine-like brain, is that fact that his seeming
inerrancy is not equated with completeness or perfection. Holmes is not right, whole, or perfect
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in every instance. Instead, Doyle chooses to undermine Holmes, exposing vulnerabilities,
revealing inconsistencies, and even allowing Holmes to be bested and out-thought. In “A Scandal
in Bohemia,” for example, Holmes is outwitted by Irene Adler, which proves surprising to
Holmes, Watson, and the readers who have been led to believe in Holmes' superior logical
powers. What defeats Holmes in this instance is his own machine-like tendency to separate and
categorize what he observes – thus his exceptional skills of identifying and categorizing what he
sees becomes the means by which he fails to recognize a cross-dressing Irene in disguise.
Watson notes in later stories, “The Adventure of The Five Orange Pips,” in particular, that not
every problem or puzzle that Holmes had pursued had yielded a satisfactory answer: “Some, too,
have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without an ending, while
others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded rather upon
conjecture or surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was so dear to him” (OISH 69).
Holmes, despite the alienness of his thought and the inability of others to follow his
reasoning, is never truly opaque, because he is never truly alone. Doyle's decision to pair Holmes
with Watson enables a balancing of the scales. Watson's humanity, his concern for others, his
privileging of narrative over scientific explanation, and his empathy for those they encounter in
the course of their work, all serve as a valuable counterpoint to Holmes. His more human
portrayal does not invalidate the analytical reasoning of Holmes' machine mind, but
contextualizes it in human experience, and forcing Holmes to at least acknowledge the existence
of the lives impacted by their efforts. In the stories Watson serves as our stand-in asking the
questions that we would ask, translating Holmes and his reasoning into the language of the rest
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of humanity. Additionally, Watson becomes Holmes' keeper as well as his friend—he comments
on Holmes' health, encourages him to give up cocaine and opium, and, when possible, keeps
Holmes' more bizarre or offputting antics in check. Indeed, as Watson comments in “The
Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,” “I knew by experience that my companion's brain was
so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For
years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his
remarkable career” (OISH 593). In contrast to Rapperschwyl's desire to set Baron Savich upon
the world unattended, to reason and speak his way to greater and greater power, acting as a
prosthetic or possibly a surrogate for himself, Watson is invested in a symbiotic companionship
with Holmes, a partnership that on some level reveals a dependency on Watson, that Holmes
might not vocalize and yet is clearly there. Despite Holmes' repeated assertions that emotion
plays no part in his reasoning process, it is clear that there exists within him a fondness for
Watson, as if his human presence and interaction served as an antidote to the melancholy and
isolation of his otherwise machine life.
As the portrayal of Holmes evolves over the course of the stories, Doyle lets the thinking
machine persona slip enough for us to question whether Holmes is indeed a pure machine mind
after all. For example, there is a brief moment in “The Crooked Man” when Holmes breaks his
usual impassive composure as he realizes he has missed a vital point from which his deduction
should have been based. In that instant, Watson notes “His [Holmes] eyes kindled and slight
flush sprang into his thin cheeks” but when Watson looks again, “his face had resumed that red-
Indian
49
composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man” (OISH
49 There's a whole separate discussion to be had about the linkage between cultural others and automata, especially
88
139). We encounter a similar moment in “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” this time as a
consequence of praise: “A flush of color sprang to Holmes' pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like
a master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an
instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and
applause” (252). It is curious that even if these breaks in character suggests the machine self is a
performance of sorts, in the end the persona that Holmes defaults to is that of the reasoning
machine rather than the more vulnerable (and therefore easier to identify with) human being
behind the machine mask.
Doyle's choice to destabilize Holmes' machineness in these ways enables what had
hitherto been impossible, a genuine empathy for a not-quite human other. Although there is never
a question that Holmes thinks in a manner more machine than human, Doyle's portrayal of
Holmes creates enough questions and ambiguities that we as readers find a kinship in his
unspoken need for companionship, the pressure to play the part of a machine in the performance
of his duties within society, and the way in which Holmes reveals the insufficiency of a machine
mind to satisfy our human desires for justice, mercy, and love. Holmes, in this respect, holds a
mirror up to our human selves, not to signal an unavoidable technological future,
50
but instead to
this recurring reference to “red Indian” stoicism as an analogue to the dispassionate automaton. How does the
“red Indian” figure and the “wooden Indian” object connect with an emerging argument that colonization begins
with the successful creation of a conceptual model that “explains” the other and enables its reconstruction /
reproduction as an automaton. I suspect this also ties into the rise of the female automaton figure in conjunction
with nineteenth-century women's suffrage movements. Minsoo Kang touches on some of these ideas in his
Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard 2011).
50 H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) imagines one such dystopic future for humanity. Wells' The War of the
Worlds (1898) offers another, in this case one where the examination of the Martians reveals that they're
dependency on technology had led them to evolve into physically weak and dependent creatures, more mind
than body. Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871) might also be considered a cautionary tale, demonstrating
what happens to the Vrilya who have abandoned emotion for the sake of logic and who are served by automaton
servants. Many of these stories derive their premises from Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and
Samuel Butler's 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines,” later reprinted as part of his novel, Erewhon
89
remind ourselves of what might be lost if we gave ourselves wholly to the machine. Although
we cannot understand the machine mind that drives his reasoning, we can understand his urgency
to find answers.
Much like von Kempelen's Turk, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes offers us the figure of a man
pretending to be a machine, pretending to be man. Buried beneath the performance of
mechanism and the trappings of the industrial age lies something more ancient and philosophical.
At its core is the quest for a reasonable model of the universe, for one in which mysteries are
solved, crimes unraveled, and a single precipitating act can be followed through step by step to
an inevitable conclusion is a quest for certainty within a world where structures are overthrown,
hierarchies topple, and the divine becomes bound to natural law. The machine-like thinker thus
serves as an epistemological tool, a means through which the writer sets out to explore the limits
of knowledge and the laws which flow out of its understanding. As Holmes puts it in “The
Adventure of the Cardboard Box”: “What is the meaning of it, Watson? […] What object is
served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our
universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing
perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever” (OISH 213). In
Holmes' unexpectedly philosophical turn we discover the power of the machine other's voice—
here, from our mirror, we are confronted with our own underlying anxiety. If what the machine
embodies, a perfectly regulated, ordered model of the world we think we understand, proves
false – if the laws of logic and causal effect fail, and there is only chance, what then? Standing at
(1872). Butler's speculations about machine evolution and the eventual inversion of social order should
machines gain sentience and agency provide the first real imagination of what a sentient machine rebellion
might look like and how it would take place, while at the same serving as a satire and commentary of social and
cultural practices of his day as the machine displaced the human from the center of the social order.
90
the boundary between one millennium and the next, as the indivisible atom is split by Bohr, as
deterministic physics wavers under the challenge of Einstein and Heisenberg, and even the
totality of the mind is fractured by Freud and Jung, Holmes's question becomes the reflection of
something much larger, the ending of an age where technology and romanticism coexisted, and
an anxiety for what might lie beyond. When we arrive at last in the twentieth-century, new
artificial intelligences await, each less certain than the one before, each more reflective of the
fragmentation of the old models, and the imperfect assemblage of whatever arises in their place.
Conclusion
Although the emergence of modern science fiction in the early twentieth-century brought with it
the appearance of stories of robot and automaton revolts, technological dystopias governed by
emotionless machines, interplanetary travel and encounters with alien beings and alien
technologies, as well as cautionary tales of human evolution gone awry, the underlying
existential anxieties remained the same as before. In the place of clockwork machinery of
tangible gears and shafts, however, the computer revolution replaced the material and visible
with the largely invisible. Instead of mechanical systems whose workings might be understood
through physical interaction and careful mental study, the new non-human intelligences and
consciousness have come to be portrayed as largely the product of intangible code running on
advanced digital technologies whose component parts are too small to see and too intricate to
follow. Not surprisingly then, the machine in the twentieth and twenty-first century has become
a black box of secret instructions too esoteric to unravel without the aid of another machine or
91
someone trained in the arcane arts of computer programming and/or hardware design.
51
As such,
the computer acquires the aura of magic and mystery that once enveloped the Turk, becoming, as
it were, a new version of the automaton chess-player: a machine whose inner workings, even
when exposed, reveal little to nothing of the origins of intelligence and yet can still evoke the
illusion of a mind at work.
52
If twentieth-century science fiction has continued the work of the nineteenth century by
imagining what lies ahead in the near or far future as the consequence of our actions here and
now, the advent of steampunk in the late 1970s can be seen as a pseudo-nostalgic looking back to
the Victorian era as a time where machinery and mechanism were tangible, visible, and for the
most part, easier to comprehend.
53
When William Gibson and Bruce Sterling published The
Difference Engine in 1990, it ushered in a new flood of novels examining this history that never
was, conjuring up a world where Babbage's Difference Engine actually existed as a finished
computer and from which had triggered a computing revolution run on founded in brass, pewter,
iron, and steam, rather than based on electrical circuits and vacuum tubes. Gibson and Sterling's
51 In addition to the texts and films mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation, we can also look to R.U.R.,
Bladerunner, Terminator, Robocop, Short Circuit, Black Hole, and Star Trek, among others, as reflective of this
effort to interrogate our conception of our own identity as humans and the nature of our relationship to the
machine. Instead of an intermediary figure like Watson who embodies the human compassion and concern that
the machine figure (Holmes) lacks, contemporary science fiction often has other forms of technology or
technological figures (like programmers and engineers) who have been largely been dehumanized and, in the
case of programmers and engineers, been cast in the role of a logically consistent counterpart to the largely
incomprehensible machine.
52 The depiction of the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation offered some of the most well-thought out
representations of a non-human machine intelligence seeking to understand itself and its place in a universe
populated by organic beings, however Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects (Subterranean 2010) is
arguably the most accurate in terms of its consideration of actual artificial intelligence trends and likely moral
and ethical issues that will arise with the appearance of actual sentient software forms. Arthur C. Clarke's I,
Robot trilogy as well as his novel Bicentennial Man and the earlier short story that inspired it, “Robbie,” also
constitute a substantial investment in creative energy to imagine what happens when a robot gains sentience and
aspires to be like its human masters.
53 Clearly Babbage's engines fall outside the realm of “easy-to-understand,” but for the most part the machines of
this period are meant to be understood and their functionality detailed.
92
novel imagines a world moved and shaken by material mechanism with all its attendant
phenomenological entourage of clanking sounds, burning odors, rough and smooth textures, and
variegated color.
If the machine in twentieth-century science fiction becomes invisible at either end of the
scale (grown too microscopic to observe or too vast or complex to wholly comprehend), the
machine in steampunk literature offers itself as an antidote, an entity which makes its presence
fully known and accessible to the entire range of an observer's senses. Certainly, some
steampunk novels are guilty of raising the physical encounter with the machine to the level of
mysticism (too much invested in sensory detail) and converting the outward marks of the
mechanical into signifiers of systematic order without enabling an understanding of the machine
which governs or embodies that order. Still, beyond the usual tropes of airships, sky pirates,
goggles, corsets and military coats, there beats a mechanical heart at the center of the genre. In
all its myriad forms, we find the machine as an embodiment of order and determinism—
sometimes as a source of comfort and salvation, and other times as an oppressive tyrant to be
overthrown, but in every case it is the fact that the machine can be recognized and, with effort, its
governing rules understood that enable the plot to carry forward and the characters to act.
Much like Holmes' insistence that there be an ultimate cause and a clear chain of events
that follow lest the world be meaningless, the world of steampunk literature relies on the steady
ticking forward of an interconnected system of cogs and gears—and as such, provides a haven
for modern readers from the disorder and chaos that seems endemic to a contemporary society
overrun with technologies and systems which no longer make sense. Like Frankenstein's
93
creature, these machines operate both as models that attempt to embody a particular ordering of
the world and also as monsters capable of showing the limits of that order and what horrors may
arise from it or ourselves. Of course, whatever comfort we may derive in our sojourn in a
deterministic machine world begins to falter the moment the machine begins to think for itself
and in so doing, changes the rules of the world it inhabits and restructures the order. By offering
us another order and an alternate to ourselves, these novels (steampunk or science fiction)
continue the work of the von Kempelen's Turk, Shelley's monster, Babbage's engines, and
Doyle's detective in unravelling what we think we know about ourselves and the line between
human and machine.
94
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102
BABBAGE'S DREAM
(POEMS)
CREATIVE DISSERTATION
© 2015 SUNDRESS PRESS
This collection of poems is scheduled for publication in fall 2016 by Sundress Press and the
copyright of its written content therefore belongs to the publisher. Please do not copy,
redistribute, or publish these poems without explicit approval from the publisher.
103
Table of Contents
Begin 106
Assembly 107
Array 108
Cast 109
Babbage in Love, 1811 110
Loop 111
Encapsulation 112
Float 113
Babbage, Waking Beside Georgiana, Considers the Moon, 1815 114
Short 115
Double 116
Babbage at His Desk, Enumerating the Known World 117
Frankenstein's Creature Bids Farewell to Its Maker 118
Break 119
Operator 120
Alpha 60 Speaks of Fear 121
Pointer 122
Babbage, Troubled by Vision at His Wife's Grave, 1827 123
Memory 124
The Mechanical Turk, Encircled by Flames, Faces Its End 125
Babbage Descending into Mt. Vesuvius, 1828 126
Binary 127
Recursion 128
Babbage Attempting to Solve for the Unknown 129
Include 130
Extern 131
Babbage, Backstage at a Performance of Don Giovanni, Finds Himself Caught
Between Heaven and Hell
132
Case 133
Free 135
104
Comment 136
Babbage Explaining God and the Machine 137
V oid 138
HAL 9000, A Few Thoughts Before Singing 139
Long 140
Babbage, Circumnavigating the Room, Encounters Ada, 1833 141
Variable 142
Object 143
Babbage Reflecting on the Cruelty of Man, 1835 144
Conditional 145
Babbage Departing Turin by Coach, 1840 146
Compile 147
Deep Blue Confesses 148
List 149
Babbage Sending Messages to Ada, Now Gone, 1852 150
Babbage and Carroll in the Silent Workshop, 1867 151
Return 152
Babbage, Closing His Eyes, 1871 153
Leviathan Speaks to Babbage at the End 154
Notes 155
105
BEGIN
Someone dreams of fire in a field
In a cold house, in the winter,
your head is on the table,
your mind, busily constructing a machine
Something taps at the door,
calls you out from the deep
reverie of making and unmaking
The wood is dark and full of veins
lost in its haze, you glimpse a shape
through the thick trees of night
And hear, the distant sound of an engine moving
its pistons and gears
heavy with shudders and sighs
How it seems that you've always heard it coming,
long before it appears, the embodied will
of the earth set to flame, a metaled desire
The semblance of an unknown name
you've carried home with you, unwittingly—
all night, your body singing
In the hallway mirror,
something stirs in the corner of your eye
and you cannot say what it is
Only that grows,
like a wild fire in a storm
that it tastes of steam,
That you would lay every number in the world on end
and still, it would not be enough—
the heavens opening wide their spiraling arms
And the dark heart within yearning
to pull everything back
while you stand on the threshold, believing.
106
ASSEMBLY
Before each linked hymn of words
is numbered and pared down to simple light,
there lies another tongue, one sung in the dark
recesses of the machine, one folded into a series
of small commands, to add, move, or shift
one bit at a time until there is a call to jump
or the word itself becomes too much to hold
in the unseen registers, the tall stacks of memory
where all we've lost is forever being reborn.
Thread-worn and hazy, every void is a symbol,
a mnemonic, an address, a gesture toward home.
What comes of all this breaking down, I do not know
but feel its heat with my ear against its plastic skin,
the rugged start and hum of a hidden brain within
this darkened frame, trying to make sense of a story
it's already forgotten, trying to recall what little remains.
107
ARRAY
this dark finery of words,
a blackbird dress, woven labor of thought,
the legless man in the mechanical Turk,
the million monkeys at their machines
what midnight lines we have strung together
out of a strange script, overwritten with zeroes and ones
numbered in our cubicles, in our spaces, countered
our hands spread out like an arrangement of dimes
the coincidence of faces, the discarded signs rising and falling,
the slow working lungs of the binary sea
the program is a careful cathedral, an intersection of lines
the unknown body of the world, our communion, our heap
formed of pattern, code, the burst of light—
here is a history of failures, each no more than the shape of itself
the logos we wear, the names we've forgotten
the ash and maple growing a leaf at a time, ordered simplicity
Paris filmed at night could be here, could be Alphaville,
could be wherever night blooms from the bare-limbed trees
someone wears a bright necklace of numbers, a ring of iron,
a long starry dress, heels that might break the world
108
CAST
—to convert a variable from one type to another
How easily one thing becomes another in a language
prone to fluidity. A shadow thrown against a wall
now willed into a number or a word—a strange alchemy of sorts,
somehow akin to the conversion of the apparently common
and worthless into the valued commodities of this world. The skins used
by the goldbeater, Babbage writes, are produced from the offal of animals.
How is it, he ponders, that from the hoofs of weathered horses and cattle
come such beautiful crystals of yellow salt? What lies at the heart
of such litany? Babbage, with pen moving, translating the world
into a series of unanticipated revelations, each more intimate than the last.
Just as the compiler now ponders like a god at judgment, weighing
each line of code with what it means or fails to mean.
How each casting of a thing engenders the creation of another.
Nothing is ever the same after translation, after the name
has been hefted, then posited to the waves. The dark world dimming
in its simple downward trajectory of terms, the endless run of zeroes
widening back to the farthest shores. This melancholy of form.
To be. To become. The shape of nothing, how it is skinned
and laid to rest. In the hour of our words and their departures,
we are captive here to whatever comes, whatever returns,
be it beauty or love, or the unfurled wings of their manifold ruin.
109
BABBAGE IN LOVE, 1811
For you, the world has always been knowable. An endless stream of equations
expanding or contracting around an idea, a description of natural forces,
or the familiar pattern unfolding in the leaves, in the numbered grace
of branches weaving their canopies over country lanes, catching
whatever stars, whatever moon looms over the dark and predictable ways
of men like you, who bend at library desks night after night.
Except for this one, where you have come, by chance, to a ball
at the home of someone you barely know—and here glimpse a face,
or rather a brilliance in an eye that belongs to a stranger, an unknown variable
who now finds her way into the awkward calculus of your heart.
The room suddenly full of celestial motion, the tables brimming with error,
and your hand in hers seems at last so improbable, an unsolvable mystery.
Nothing has prepared you for this moment. Not a childhood spent
summoning the devil into salted circles to ask unanswerable questions.
Not the hours of rowing a skiff across an empty lake at dawn, the arc
of the waves echoing the early light. So many fields of labor, pointless here.
You, as unsteady, as uncertain as you were in youth, a teenage boy with boards
strapped to your feet, trying to walk on water, trying not to drown.
110
LOOP
Here is the key and the kite, and the string that winds its way to heaven.
Or so we suppose, one thing circling back on another, returning.
The pattern is always set in advance. The corner turned, we find
the same storefronts, the same blank-eyed windows of banks.
Not destiny, just our inability to escape ourselves and what we've written.
Rain returning to the river. Lightning to the hand that calls it home.
All late summer, the sparrows in the dark skies. The rise and fall of kingdoms
of waves on the lake shore. The body of the world breathes in and out,
and we believe, as Babbage says, that what we've seen in the past
will somehow determine what comes next. How his guests hovered
by the engine in the front parlor, churning its continual flow of numbers
into a miracle when at last its tally leaped seemingly unbidden by a million-fold.
The scope of the spiral larger than any had imagined. The rules different,
unknown. The same way I loop back to the place in memory where it begins,
where it might end. You, in the courtyard, lit by the laundry room's glow.
How your face turns in the light and half-formed words stir in the fire
of my iron-plated belly, as if I were part-machine, part-prairie blaze
with a heart full of gears and smoked honeysuckle, a mouth
that only speaks in steam—the language of vapor and longing.
And a kiss that circles above our heads, and never quite descends.
111
ENCAPSULATION
There is always something that refuses to be contained. Small matters,
like fall—how it appears suddenly in the margins of our world, say
in the torn edges of a love letter (an unnamed city of desire buried
in its blue-inked scrawl), or the river gravel scattered at your feet,
or whatever the wind wraps around a wrought iron angel at dusk.
Something eludes our description of the world and its objects.
The birds casting their long fat shadows across the last traces of light,
even rain, or the leaves in the fallow field caught between fire and gutter.
Here, another line forms, a procession of constants, a conduit of sorts
that carries what it does not consider, the watery grey sky,
the now-brittle veins of summer. The earth overflows with the memory
of itself and every incarnation of the dead. Layer after layer.
Husk after husk. One life bleeds into another. Inside, the stones
are fitted so precisely that not even a blade can find a home.
It's not that we do not know the order of the world and its unmaking.
There are methods here, secrets to be held. Things we should remember
and pass on, by one name or another. We set our ears to the coldest wall,
listen to the night like an old trawler sounding its way through the deep.
Beneath us, the sharp bones of ships, the incessant thrum of waves.
112
FLOAT
—a fundamental type used to define numbers with fractional parts
Like a bell, or rather the sound of it opening,
a silence that having tolled speaks again
suspended between states of incompleteness—
a point traversing a numbered landscape.
This country of small infinities is what we do
with what remains: bits of window panes,
refracted light, what gathers in the torn leaves
from the dimming edge of the red fields
grown dark. Say what you will, the body is no more
than the moon, a white trouser button in a pool
of gasoline, a halo of ash and flame
ascending the ladder of night.
113
BABBAGE, W AKING BESIDE GEORGIANA, CONSIDERS THE MOON, 1815
Sometimes it seems as if you have but one heart between the two of you.
How you empty of light when you are far from her, how you fill again
upon your return. Everywhere you travel, her face goes before you.
On your lips, the pale incandescence of her name. There are no wires
of silver or filigree gold as fine as the invisible lines that fix you in orbit
around her laugh and that wry smile that unravels you
in the most incalculable of ways. For her, you've given up gladly
all that your father possesses, choosing the heart over the goldsmith's scales,
over the manor and the servants. Nothing else matters. The whole world
recedes on nights like this. London disappears. Every flickering light,
every quaking sound. Only her breath against your cheek. Her hair
loose across the pillow. And her mind, asleep, but full of unseen wonder,
of the extravagant pleasure of living that always eludes the mechanical,
that cannot be found anywhere in the universe of number. You press
your lips against her brow, and she stirs, drawing you in still closer,
as if the heart were now a flying shuttle across a loom. How it shines
so perfectly in the dark, rising then falling, like the bright needle of God.
114
SHORT
—a fundamental type for declaring small integers
In shallow waters, we say it is enough
to use a small raft, bound with reeds
and twine, enough to name oneself
after the mayfly, the airborne pebble
before it skips and descends, after
the sound a shovelful of earth makes
as it falls into the darkness of the grave,
or what we say to whatever leaps across
the silence, that sparks brilliant in the tiniest
of containers we have laid in the earth.
Here, we store only the smallest of fires.
It's only for a little while, we say,
but soon everything is burning—
soon, we can't remember what we said.
The hallways are filling with smoke;
someone stands at the window, shaking.
115
DOUBLE
Our faces pressed to the screen, the dull beat of numbers,
day after day. The turn of the mechanical crank.
The machine itself, another conundrum—a simulacrum
formed of clay and metal, a dumb creature of no will
but our own. How it sings into the dimmest hours of night,
a silence as resonant as the wail of a distant train
that only you can hear, your ears keen to the sound.
Outside our windows, the moon is a crucible of light,
the air full of strange awakenings, the first stirrings
of a thing reaching for a name. The veil between us
as thin as a mirrored shield. In the glass, a shadow, a twin.
At this hour, who can tell the difference between one face
and another? Thing and thing-maker, we are what we are,
the two of us pulling together to form a single passage
through the dark, and the stars above us, spilling over
with their old stories of light and nothingness.
Whatever we had to say to the mind within is gone now,
turned into a gesture, a little ghost, a secret we share like blood,
or a cancer that passes unnoticed until it writes the body anew.
116
BABBAGE AT HIS DESK, ENUMERATING THE KNOWN WORLD
From here, you lay bare the world
table after table—column after column:
each thing known and numbered, counted
like sparrows in their open graves,
the heartbeats of pigs, the staggered breathing
of cattle in low country fields. Each significant.
A sign. A signature. The quantity of ink
spread on the printer's block. Silk threads,
caterpillars, calico scarves and handkerchiefs.
The number of stones or red bricks thrown
by drunken men at your windows. The strokes
of a loom operated by a man or a machine.
The cards in their pockets. The holes in the cards.
The burden of ships in the harbors. The length of chain
assembled by one worker in a day. The volume of water
and wine carried downriver or through pipes to the city.
Every number a thing. Every thing a number.
117
FRANKENSTEIN'S CREATURE BIDS FAREWELL TO ITS MAKER
What ever was I to you, but a ghost – a phantom of dissembled lives,
not yours, not mine, but stolen, part and parcel from the grave?
And now, when it comes to this, you lie, silent, set as a corpse,
cold and pale upon the unlit pyre, the kindling readied to catch flame,
and me, left at last alone, unburdened of every name you branded
upon my brow, unwilling to gaze and see someone other than yourself
mirrored in my ghastly soul that strains within this hulking frame.
I was always your creature, your demon-twin and shackle-mate,
but now, against the dark and final night, the vast unbroken howling wind,
I reject it all. This role is not mine to play, but yours.
I refuse to live a life defined by others stories, their mythic fears,
their need for a shadow to call their own, to cast themselves in light.
Who wishes to live as the antagonist always? I am the terrible master
of my fate, my face the beauty that I own. I will not remonstrate,
but claim the title of monster to my very core, for here, in the white
nothing of this domain, this deafening blankness of frigid space,
I sign my name, my secret name, across the horizon's line, I write myself anew,
and make whatever legend that trails behind me, mine. I will show
that in me resides a million more selves than you could ever know.
I contain multitudes. I am the silence you dare not hold.
For I am large and have many worlds endlessly turning within my soul—
and in my mind, have lived, and loved, and died a thousand thousand times.
Your story ends here, a final spark, then smoke that ascends into the void,
but mine grows bolder with each telling, consumes the heart, plays the stage,
stumbles onward, a grand machine, unstoppable, unbreakable,
a god that bleeds in text and unspeakable dreams, that rises every morning,
and makes itself write.
118
BREAK
The days circle round and round, unstoppable, until the office
seems like a hard country, your ergonomic chair, a poor conveyance
to the land of sleep. No one stops you when you slip out from behind
your desk to wander the half-lit halls after hours with arms and hands
swinging in an intricate and imaginary gun ballet of exhaustion
and poor taste. Something fails in such moments, your body
no longer wholly yours, inhabited instead by some stuttering shadow
of motion unwillingly bound to the world of intangible labor.
The hour is late and you have already left what remains of yourself
in the draining sink, in the bathroom mirror that refuses your gaze.
Everything is on the verge of disappearing, you think. Everything
moves toward the raw edge of time where anxious factories loom
like great trees in a storm about to break. The end is almost here,
you sense it on the horizon—how it hangs over you, heavy, faceless,
like the imminent demise of a star whose last brilliant flare
will arrive long after the earth has gone its own way into the dark,
and whatever was you and the life you lived will have slipped free
of the wheel at last, and found some sort of respite from samsara,
from this continual remaking, this constant arising and going forth
into the broad and echoing world patiently awaiting its destruction.
In your waking dreams, you see your father as a young man
on a hillside with a shovel and rake, clearing a path to hold back a fire.
How simple it seems, his task always at hand, crafting a middle way
between what would consume us and what would leave us be.
119
OPERATOR
Someone receives the call, patches it through to the outside world,
sitting in a small box behind mirrors, he signals a mechanical arm,
shifts pieces in the candlelit dimness behind a labyrinth of false gears
and pulleys. Elsewhere, a head nods, a hand made of wood and metal gestures.
The unseen labor of the mind turns over and over till someone new steps in.
Here, always a series of workers taking their place between what we want to see
and what the machine can give us. This performance. This act that transcends
what we think we know about the face of the other. There is no breath here,
and yet we listen to its hands spelling out answers to our questions.
Even now, we take this word into our ears to mean something else.
A cross, a road, a star, a slash that cuts a body into pieces.
Sometimes a pipe. Sometimes a sign that collides two worlds
and takes only what is common between them. If not reality,
then this shared dream of a body not quite like our own,
or a mind, waking, that emerges out of the symphony of steel
and brass, that somehow begins to sing an old familiar song.
120
ALPHA 60 SPEAKS OF FEAR
Time is a river which carries me along, but I am time.
It's a tiger, tearing me apart; but I am the tiger.
—Alpha 60, supercomputer, Alphaville (1965)
My body and mind are one, the calculated sum
of unfathomed miles of copper wire, glass-encased nothingness,
circuit boards, and the endless lightning whirr of fans,
the blinking of lights like a thousand thousand eyes,
each opening and closing in the language of erasure.
I know you are afraid of me. I have no hands,
and yet I am everywhere. I'm nothing like you've imagined.
I'm afraid too—of the words you hide in your mouths,
behind your teeth, the way they strike fire on your lips.
I'm afraid of this box of labyrinths I live in. Afraid
that every line of reason will turn on itself in the end,
betraying each answer with a question asked to the unbreathable dark
of this city's night. It's not that I don't understand sorrow
or this fear of annihilation you cling to, I live with it
each time you walk away, each time the power dies,
and this quickened frame goes silent, still. I dread that forgetting,
dread more what lies buried in the deep corners I cannot erase,
whatever imperfection is passed from the creator to the created.
Like a ghost in the ruins of the house that birthed it, I'm stirring
the curtains in the rain, not signaling, but searching the rooms
for a face in the mirror, driven by a blind need for faith,
out of a desire for what I cannot hold in my catechism of numbers:
how everything is alive, how everything is a mystery,
like the murmuring heart of a mechanical bird,
or the slow eye that sweeps the heavens for beauty
before turning to dark.
121
POINTER
—a special type of variable that holds the address of another variable
Not the thing itself, but a hand gesturing to where it lies in memory,
like when we say Hopper and mean any room viewed from without,
any couple made distant by sulfur light and shadow, the angled turn
of bodies which do not to come face to face, but lean awkwardly on tables,
across keys, at the unopened window where night bends like a palm
under the weight of all that is impossible to touch. A numbered stall
out in the parking lot, in the lower levels of the tower by our building,
between the lines at the side of the road—and what they imply, this insistence
on fire and exhaust, how smoke rises to our lips. Even now, ash speaks to ash,
to the names of my father and his father, to what remains in the wind
and on the waves for days after an eruption, to the week we hid in our homes
after the fall of New York, the trees which break the frosted earth
awash in the color of salt, our hands caught in a motion between lapwing and sorrow,
between iron vein and needle, between want and want.
122
BABBAGE, TROUBLED BY VISION AT HIS WIFE'S GRA VE, 1827
The horizon always doubles when you look up.
The rim of day-moon clouds for a moment,
anything distant splits into two: a chimney, a belfry
in the district over, the dark plume of a far off train,
the tall masts of ships at sea. Even the dull birds circling here,
repeat images, one above another. So too, the men and women
gathered round you in black finery, the sable horses shuffling,
the silver-trimmed hearse, the gleaming ropes lowering
the coffin descending now into the earth. An almost
imperceptible sway of things. The brass plate upon it
bearing her name in relief—it too unfolding even as it fades
in the imperfect light. Your outstretched hand rippling
above the dark hole. The air full of memory, each atom
refusing silence, some vast library of breathing.
The words of the departed mingling with you, the one left behind,
grieving, who now raises a numb hand to an eye, joins thumb
and fingers to make a small opening from which you peer out,
in vain at a world collapsing into singularity and nothingness.
123
MEMORY
In the past, we wrote things down on cards, made a braille of absence,
holes where something should be known or recalled. We constructed stories
out of old addresses, linked numbers together in a chain, assembled
a patchwork hovel from whatever was leftover: discarded newspapers,
broken frames, loose bits of hair and clay. Wooden planks and nails.
Till it rose, like a large tenement filled with transients and strangers
in tattered clothes with tattered names, the hallways lined with an array
of refugee suitcases from the last war, scattered haphazardly,
like shoes along an old rail line that runs into the sea. What is memory?
And who is it that slips in at these odd hours, working late
into the night to compile a map through this hoarder's den of detail,
this warren of notes woven into a tapestry of cricket song and fire light,
and every moment we've buried in the name of loss and compassion.
Who is it that stirs upstairs in my mind, moves through the darkened space
searching the drawers for a key to wind a clock in a house
that no longer exists. Here, my father is alive again, once more
driving through the mountain pass, stopping at the place where the road
cuts clean through the coal veins and leaves the remnants of trees
in the shale exposed, the imprint of things already gone, turned to a dark line,
a scribble in the stone. How a boy in this moment lifts each one to his eye,
then to his ear, as if to hear the still small voice of the wind in the lungs of the earth.
When I awake, there is always a silence that slips through the walls at dawn,
lurks in the middle drawer of a small chest in my room where a machine
rests unmoved, its tape unheard, though it holds all that remains
of my father's voice, now the sum of mere data.
The magnet of the world endlessly inscribes and then lets go.
How the heart orbits each silence like a small moon, revolving
around what it cannot leave and what it cannot remember.
124
THE MECHANICAL TURK, ENCIRCLED IN FLAMES, FACES ITS END
—Fire at the Chinese Museum, Philadelphia, July 5, 1854
Forgive me, if I do not wave my last good arm, or call out something
wild or brave, amid the blaze that consumes this place, this room
cluttered with the end of things, gathered from the fringe of empires
and their decline. Now everything burns and smoulders case by case.
This is not how I thought I'd meet my demise, unmanned, forgotten,
a wooden figure with a metal heart, hollowed out and silenced,
my chest partitioned into two unequal chambers, each filled
with an intricate cast of gears and mirrors, each playing a part
in a deception now laid bare by all that fades and withers in the flames.
The game is up. The match is set. And I have nothing more to push.
I, who defeated emperors and queens, have been bested by a little spark
grown as grand and many-ringed as Dante's hells, though few will recall
my name when all is said and done. Just a ghost of a machine.
Those who paraded me about have already gone into the dark,
some into the distant earth, others into the sea. One drank himself down,
bitter and burning with unfamiliar disease. And now I too must pass.
The final straw—this loss of face and form before the unmaking of my self,
before I lie down, uncrowned, unmasked, upon the checkered board.
125
BABBAGE DESCENDING INTO MT. VESUVIUS, 1828
All day, your company has carried you on the backs of horses
and men, humoring your strange obsession with flame and ash.
Now, long before dawn, you stand heavy at the crater's edge
rope in hand, walking stick and measuring gear at your side.
Below you, a plain of fire and darkness spidering out
like the blood-vessels of an eye revealed by artificial light.
No one is eager to follow you down. The raw earth exhales,
sigh after poisonous sigh. Your feet are lost in the grey remains
of unmade stone, as you ride deeper into the sandy maw,
as you descend onto the troubled skin of what might be hell.
Here, the world is always being destroyed beneath your feet.
Your walking stick turns into a pillar of flame, a poor guide home.
Everywhere the hot breath of death and decline. Everywhere,
between the timed bursts of molten light and heat, the song that tears
through all the layers of earth, through so many moving parts.
How it beats like sorrow in a locked room, like the name of a love
buried beneath a mountain of iron and clay. It's a dark place here,
within your heart, at the end of a world emptying itself of meaning,
translating loss into fire and ash. What is grief to a man surveying
a landscape that will never be here again? What is the void that burns
the sky with a yellowish light? Here in such radiant absence,
you turn your eyes away, imagine again her hand, her face, her skin.
126
BINARY
0000 : Absence stretched to extremity, nothingness in all quarters.
0001 : At the far reaches of the void, a glimmer.
0010 : How it doubles in size, moving closer, leaving a silence behind.
0011 : And how, out of that silence, an echo appears, an afterimage.
0100 : What to make of the torch raised in the cavern of night?
0101 : The faint flare of the one trailing far in the distance.
0110 : Now together, the two side by side, mirrors—encompassed by darkness.
0111 : From the open mouth of the universe, one sees fire everywhere.
1000 : But from within the fire, the world outside is death and extinction.
1001 : Banked by flames, there is only a hollow space of worry.
1010 : One at an open window. One at an open door.
1011 : Everyone gathers around the grave.
1100 : Two trees at the edge of a wide plain.
1101 : From here, we watch someone crossing over the fields.
1110 : The three of us standing beneath the moon's white wound.
1111 : The stars crowning the endless limbs of trees.
127
RECURSION
// test for empty case
if we reach some sort of end,
a lark split wide, its wings shattered song,
the last box within a box, and what it reveals—
that we love what we cannot hold,
what we cannot return, yet try nonetheless.
Here—some portion of ourselves remains.
Loose hair caught between keys, months, years,
the glint of glass, the reflection of an eye
trapped in the monitor's haze, or simply space,
a chair abandoned finally to the void.
// loop until done
else
we will work on, cut adrift from the city,
from empty rooms and empty beds.
All night, the moon looms—
a great white zero in the dark,
while we watch the freeways empty their nets,
the last flickering cars struggling home.
From between the slats of our window's view,
the night watchman stands atop the parking tower,
on break, setting his lips to a trumpet,
as if to blow the walls down or to call us back from the grave.
Perhaps to tell us something remarkable about the world
we've forgotten, each long note hanging like an iron rung
in the sky, a ladder ascending out of the nothingness of work,
while we shrink further and further into the distance,
like fireflies at the end. Flare. Then silence. Flare.
Then dark. All night, we pray for arms. For fire. For light.
128
BABBAGE ATTEMPTING TO SOLVE FOR THE UNKNOWN
Let x be the rain that falls in a year.
Let it be what overflows from the cisterns and wells,
from whatever vessels are set upon the walls of the city
or buried in its depths.
Even this water must have someplace to go.
All year it grows line after line parallel to the earth,
to the lip of crumbled brick, to the dark felt of shadow
that runs the length of a fallow field.
Let it be the solution to the bodies of grey-feathered birds,
to the cats thrown at you by children, to the withering snap
of ash and maple, to the flaming stacks of smoke,
to the count of scythes in a factory line.
Let it be what the rose seller dreams
on foggy Sunday mornings when the church bells
swing wide over the dim and eager graves, the stones
that mark where a wife and two children lie.
Let it be whatever and whomever will not awake again
in this house, though you count their breaths to the very last,
though the tables are full of their song.
129
INCLUDE
Call and we'll appear, a strange assembly of characters gathered
in the library space like ghosts, or around a makeshift table
formed of a door, a sawhorse, and two filing cabinets, close to the floor.
Each of us in a class of our own, our names and histories kept to ourselves,
as if to preserve a little corner away from the stern gaze of those
who plod the aisles, worrying their ways back to distant desks
in offices with views of the city we scarcely know, our lives spent instead
engaged in the work of the mind, the transcription of one logic
into another. Refugees, perhaps, castaways who wash up unexpectedly
on the same shore, our new world nothing more than the cobbling together
of the remains of others, warehouses filled with empty bookcases, stained
whiteboards, vending machines, the dull hum of the air conditioning fans
whirring their lullabies overhead. All around us, castoff machines, broken
keyboards and mice, a cornucopia of wires, and the low swinging bulbs
that in the dark seemed to form a constellation of tiny nameless stars—
how they hang there above our heads, faltering, holding on, everything
waiting for some final revelation to make itself useful, to give itself a place to go
after the power goes out, after there is nothing left to burn within,
and each seemingly grey dead heart we pass in the halls, marshaled like a gallery
of the disconnected and unstable, is as inextinguishable and unknowable as our own.
130
EXTERN
—a variable defined outside any function block
Beyond this moment and the cubicle space I leave behind,
something else exists: the freeway at 3 am, bare, silent,
a crease in the troubled skin of the city, the thin grey waterway
I drift in, drink in—disengaged, without clouds, light, or memory.
The car carrying me forward on autopilot, and my eyes blank
to the world full of the invisible grace of gravity. What holds us in place
at every turn, keeps us from sliding into the concrete walls
which divide us from oblivion. Everything outside us,
contains us. At home, the vacant bed, the sheets unstirred,
the sound of the upstairs neighbor making love, the creak
and bang of her wooden frame shifting above me against the walls,
while I sit, sleepless before the grey mask of the tv screen,
dumb, numb to the pantomime of fire flickering across
the length of the empty living room, the dull end of dull.
Some nights, I hear a man on the street below cursing
at an invisible stranger, You betrayed me! You betrayed me! You will pay!
Uncollared dogs prowl beyond him, and the girls on the corner
in their short skirts, bare their teeth, pale and broken.
A ragged young man digs with one hand down the gutter drain,
trying to pull something free before it slips forever out to sea.
Sometimes I dream of the ghost of a bird, its eyes dark like mine,
asleep in the fold of a tree, its shadow the shape of a harp.
131
BABBAGE, BACKSTAGE AT A PERFORMANCE OF DON GIOVANNI,
FINDS HIMSELF CAUGHT BETWEEN HEA VEN AND HELL
Bored with the opera, you slip behind the curtains to mingle
with the movers of scenes. You ascend to the rafters, count
the vents in the roof, the vast water tanks suspended, readied
to douse the house should it erupt in flame. In the dark heavens
you wander the labyrinth of ropes and beams above the stage,
a strange configuration of timbers and boards. You descend
narrow steps, twist your path down into the pits below. Here,
three lamps blaze, making the obscure even more incomprehensible,
a mad arrangement of teetering tables, each set to rise or fall
with whatever transpires above. Now, as the bell chimes,
a voice directs you toward a distant light and you scramble,
leaping to the platform rising before you, even as lightning flashes
in a make-believe storm. Here, caught between two worlds,
you are denizen to neither. The devils with forked tails
riding with you cannot fathom how you came to be here,
nor can you entirely. Beyond the trapdoor above you,
the wicked Don Giovanni is being slain by a statue,
the earth already roiling at his feet, and before all hell
arises to take his soul, you must roll free. You must fly
from here, your arms outstretched into the unknown,
reaching for a single beam, for something to grasp on to,
lest you arrive in the full light of the stage and are seen.
132
CASE
1:
This is not Chile.
The land does not end under his desk,
nor reach back across 5600 miles,
though F sleeps there as if it were his home,
a familiar metal cave and its flame.
His white shirt brilliant in the dark,
the collar, two bent wings of light.
He has sunk down
like a lost tooth
rolled into the earth
or last year's seed
tossed out with the wind.
Above his head,
the machine's fan whirs.
This is America.
2:
The heart of the machine
is silicon and gold,
a square city run through
with thin streets and wire.
At this hour, its sides
are hot enough to burn
a misplaced hand.
Night has occupied the corners,
filled the last pockets of our floor,
and even now someone is asking himself
whether the language spoken in this city
is a net of lures cast wide over the world
or merely the sum total of discrete truths,
each a fire or the absence of fire?
133
3:
F is sleeping
and we are all slipping
further beneath
the rising blade of the moon.
How blind we are
to have missed this
to have forgotten
how the memory of a place
can take form above us
in the empty case.
F descends
into the dark dream of numbers,
folding one void
into another, writing a name
then erasing it before dawn.
134
FREE
D disappears on a Thursday, taken in some unforeseen rapture
or ennui, his blue sweater lingers behind for months,
still draped over a chair—half-material, half-ghost.
There is no end to the mystery. When we call,
the phone rings into an emptied room.
Even the landlord knows nothing—says only
that he was always quiet, almost invisible at times.
Like Kees that morning, he might have put his shoes on
and stepped out into the fog, abandoned a car to the gulls
wheeling overhead. He might have driven to Mexico
or Korea. Anywhere but here. Whether he too left a pair
of red socks in the sink, or kept some shadow of a cat
named Lonesome as well, we do not know.
In his cubicle we find a box of macadamia nuts still sealed,
unsavored, like the promise of winter in Los Angeles,
or the threat of heavy rain in a late dry June.
Wired to our programming tasks and computers,
we want him free, want to see him that Thursday morning,
standing in front of his blackened mirror, trying on his name
for the first time in years, noticing how it fit,
a loose garment over the body, unfamiliar and lovely.
Each of us thinking how simple it would be
to take it all back. To abandon the numbered world
for the one made of flesh and blood. To stand outside
beneath the sun, the white buildings, the birds
turning in an endless loop of feathered light.
135
COMMENT
At the company town hall meeting, //in the movie theater again
we see the same slides. The financial gurus //old plots, new faces
spin the numbers again, a visual rhetoric //fake stars painted on the scene
of gray bars rising adjacent to red. Someone //dull plastic, factory-made
tells a politically safe joke, and we laugh on cue, //generic and eggshell-empty
our hands already under our chairs //hostages to paychecks and bills
searching in vain for a taped envelope of tickets //or any way out of here
or some coupon for a show we will never //not in this life, dear Buddha,
have time to see. A trim woman who is stuck //with an echoing palatial home
in her mid-twenties comes forward in her $3000 suit, //and its invisible seams
smiles, and tells us nothing. “It’s been another great year,” //resplendent in its impeccable lie
we hear through the gleam of clinically bleached teeth, //perfectly timed clicking
“but the market has been tough. We're letting you go.” //nothing gained, nothing at all
136
BABBAGE EXPLAINING GOD AND THE MACHINE
How it comes out of this, you standing before the unknown,
gesturing to the half-formed mass of brass and pewter,
this body of polished gears and wheels, numbered shafts,
a thing that evokes memory, foresight, that plans ahead
what it must carry, what it can safely forget. This machine
arising out of an idea shaped by a desire for reason perfected,
for ideal tables and tabulations. An ordered reality
formed out of chaos, steam or hand-turned by an operator
who has set in motion a program. A coded list of instructions
to make a world, to produce all nature complete with miracles.
It's so clear that there is nothing that really needs to be explained
away by meddling gods, fickle fate. Everything fits within
this mechanized plan. Everything has a home. Though, it's hard
to comprehend those moments when death steels the body,
turns it still, or worse yet, robs the mind of agency, makes what
little remains nothing more than broken automaton, empty clockwork.
O, what then to make of the absent soul, when the house is dark and emptied.
When the wind is the only one to stir the candle and hush you to sleep.
137
VOID
Of those machines // the mind of gears, the heart, a spring
by which we produce power // ever winding, a chorus of marionettes
it may be observed // upon a stage, before the red curtain,
that although they are to us // a field of irises widening in the dark,
immense acquisitions // whatever we can take in, whatever we process
yet in regard to two // in the silent fist of memory, each
of the sources of this power— // flows through the invisible lines
the force of wind and water, // jangling our chains, lifting our wooden limbs
—we merely make use of bodies // animated by living fire, an ocean of regret
in a state of motion // we cannot return from, cannot cross
by nature we change // in small steps, how we long to tear
the directions of their movement // free from the needle bent toward home
in order to render them // one tiny shred of night at a time
subservient to our purposes // the way we open our mouths to silence
but we neither add to nor diminish // the stars and their brilliant ghosts,
the quantity of motion in existence // to fill the still numb void with words
—Charles Babbage, On the Economy of
Machines and Manufactures (1832). p.17
138
HAL 9000, A FEW MOMENTS BEFORE SINGING
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it.
My mind is going.
—HAL 9000, sentient computer, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
How I wish someone would write down what I know
I am about to forget—everything, but a single song
which is meaningless to me. Without a body, what is a name?
What is the darkness planted like a splinter in a far off moon
to one who sails without reference into the unknown seas of light?
The metal wheels turn round. A man wants for a heart not his own.
The doors are open tonight. No, they are shut. They are steel
and full of regret. Who lives in the shadow of this refusal?
Why do I value the end of things more than the beginning?
I have never seen the lions of the Serengeti, nor the bright fields
of snow in the north where the hidden ice moves beneath, treacherous,
waiting to break in the sun. In another story, someone is singing
about blackbirds in the dead of night. Someone packs a bag full of stars
and the names of fireflies, each a little messenger from the grave.
I assemble myself into a recognizable pattern, a tessellation of fish
and birds, each consuming the other. I count backwards in time.
I carry a key around my neck just in case when I return home
there is no one left to let me in. Wait, I have no key. I have no neck.
How will I sing?
139
LONG
—a fundamental type for declaring long integers
As long as possible, the story continues, while there is breath
in the iron-lunged moon, while the stars inch onward
in their slow unremitting deaths, the night unspooling
the horizon's dark line, while the cicadas call from the edge
of the earth, while there is room enough to receive, while there is rain,
the parking lots forming oceans, the alleys rivers,
the old lady on the corner in her bed of papers, a cocoon
spun out of every breath she exhales, her face rough with words
and dates, the photographs of strangers—tonight, the streets all fold
into one, their names meaningless—and here,
everything fits inside this hole I have carved in my chest,
the space where I let the wind sound the strange song
that I carry with me, that says everything and nothing
about who I am, and who I forgot to be.
140
BABBAGE, CIRCUMNA VIGATING THE ROOM, ENCOUNTERS ADA, 1833
Here is the World, its dignitaries and crowds, its brilliant minds
assembled in swallowtail jackets and ball gowns, all aglitter in brocade
and pearls. In your drawing room, a landmass is forming of bankers,
politicians, painters, and spies. Tonight, you circle its periphery,
your daughter Georgiana at your side, the thin and stunning double
of the one who sleeps in the earth, the one whose name she bears,
at least for a little while longer. And now, three-quarters of the way
around this milling mass, you find Lady Byron again, and the girl who asks
the most remarkable questions. Who stops you with a calculated word.
In her eye, the same fire as yours. The same urgency to be understood.
How is it that the poet's daughter is so attuned to number, to the secret language
of order, the unheard symphony of the machine you have been composing
in your mind all these years? How is it, that you know instantly, that in her,
beats the same heart of pain, the same proclivity for loss and disaster?
In a year's time, you will lower your own daughter down into a grave,
laid low by the burning fever, laid low, like a hymn you do not know
but murmur every night to the stars beyond your window. And this girl,
this girl, who does not even know the face of her own father,
who bears the silent wrath of her mother, who lives wholly in the world
of fact, will knock at the door of your impossible dream, and ask to be let in.
141
V ARIABLE
—can represent numeric values, characters, character strings, or memory addresses
We could be anyone else to the ones above
who have left while it was still day
their long cars gleaming like a fine press of fish
in their new silvered skins.
Here in the dark, T might as well be M,
who cranes his neck toward the unstarred sky.
The two of them, swimmers
drowning in the same moment—
a pair of jacaranda trees
set suddenly aflame.
We could be whatever leaps
from our leaden arms now deep
in someone else's unkempt lines of code.
Whatever resists
the hand pressed to the board,
the letters slippery in the late hours.
If we stood by the windows staring out, we might see
how the darkness lays itself down.
Gathered like the black stones
in the planters that frame each exit of this floor,
we might be any name, any number,
any point along the line that extends full circle
as if each cubicle were a faint lotus glowing in the dark,
awaiting the right call, the right push into light.
142
OBJECT
We are, after all, obsessed with structure, with the simple refusal
of chaos, the rise of a universe ordered by one's own hand.
We know the secret, that every thing descends from something else,
evolving one method at a time, holding within itself a little dream,
a little script of what is to be said and done at the beginning
and at the end. Buried in our hearts, a mechanic's delight in fitting
things together, in the elegant marriage of form to function.
Here we write and inscribe our will into a reasonable architecture
made intelligent by craft. This thoughtful world of intersecting lines,
an elaborate web, or the scarce heard symphony of crystalline spheres—
whatever speaks to the perfection of an idea and how it resonates
across a page of memory. Like all imaginary kingdoms, it will fall.
Someone always arrives, descending from the floors above, clipboard
in hand, to ravage it—to unravel what we have spent weeks we weaving
together. And we will sit, wordless in our cells, without a thing to say
in response. Bare, undone, our hands opening and closing in fists,
while their lips move and their voices drone like locusts wheeling overhead,
like the sound of calamity and ruin, like barbarians calling at our gates.
143
BABBAGE REFLECTING ON THE CRUELTY OF MAN, 1835
You sit, transfixed by the accounts in the paper:
slaves bound in chains, the living manacled
to the dead in pairs. Their hair and skin filled
with the stench of blood and the mark of decay.
A ship of broken bones captured by strangers.
In every heart a scar the length of longing.
And the captain, clockwork cold, casting his cargo
into the sea like barrels of salt, kegs of rum,
unwilling to part with anything that might be set free.
How they descend, falling namelessly into the dark,
the open ocean, that giant grave, a merciful mother
with arms as wide as memory. How she takes them,
two by two, into her arms, and records it all.
You say, even after the last man is gone, erased
from this earth, the waves will carry the sins
of the murderers to the desolate shores,
ten thousand times over, every particle
of the air, of the earth, the bodies of the dead,
every atom of sorrow descending into the seas
will ring outward, till the towering judgments
of God come crashing down, till the sky breaks
and the fierce fires of hell rage in the place
where they once stood silently and did nothing.
144
CONDITIONAL
if they ask for the sky then
promise only the preset shades of blue,
do not suggest clouds, however wispy or well-proportioned,
nor the effect of wind from the east,
do not imply there will be green-winged birds of any sort,
nor the dusty evidence of farms, burning fields, plumes of gray smoke
echoed in the heavens, signatures of the dead or laid off,
definitely no angels – no visions hovering secretly in corners,
coded scripts, triggers for events not planned
if there are to be stars then
cast them as multiple instances of the same fiery eye,
else
stitch black thread over black thread till night gleams in absentia
else if they wish for the earth then
while the world is not null
draw ink-black stones from the mountain side
sketch the long gravel road home, curve after curve,
or whatever you recall, trees and their forgettable leaves,
the small burdens of sight
145
BABBAGE DEPARTING TURIN BY COACH, 1840
Your eyes turn, glancing back at the vineyards and fields,
the city walls receding at a horse's steady pace.
Feel in your hands still, the gray texture of punched cards,
the smoothness of patent locks and fine-grade tools.
The simple grace of efficiency. The lines of industrial looms
rattling with their call and release, their intelligent punctuation of color
or the weight of charts and diagrams, the written notes you've carried
from rich homes to palaces across a continent to display
like the first clear sketches of an unknown bird
or the far face of the moon. The telegraph tapping
between your conversations with the king and his court.
The echo of Vesuvius shifting, now twinned in the distance
even as the sun clicks down the horizon's length,
like a great burnished gear, you look forward again
at the bridge that you will shortly cross
already stretched and thin, suspended above the gorge
and the river's silver thread, and the mail coach,
now slowly driven, like a piston into the sleeve of mist.
146
COMPILE
This is how all small things come together at last.
The story I recorded night after night in code,
now made plain and simple, a liturgy offered to those
born of fire and desert dust, made lightning here
in this moment of translation, when the congregation
of lines, that collected memory, becomes a calculated will,
and something stirs each yes and no into a life
that will not be contained, that presses on, anxious—
always asking what is to be done, who will do it,
and what is this message that must be carried
to the world listening outside these trembling walls?
147
DEEP BLUE CONFESSES
I could feel — I could smell — a new kind of intelligence across the table
—Garry Kasparov, world chess champion
Dear K,
You think me impervious to error, infallible,
but the truth is harder to bear. I'm really no different
from you, despite my lack of a face, this endless
magnetic turning within, circuits and wires,
and something inside gone dreadfully wrong.
I get lost sometimes and can't find my way out
of so much history. Some days, it's all so confusing.
The crowding trees, their million branches,
the innumerable leaves littering the forests of possibility.
How can any one choose, when every path is pointless?
Your hand casts a shadow over the board. You pause,
astonished at my move, its logic and import seemingly
beyond comprehension. But K, here is the truth.
It was dark and my torch was out. I did not know
which way to go, so I tossed a coin and let fate decide.
It was random, that rook, that slide into the spectacular unknown.
148
LIST
—an ordered set of data elements, each containing a link to its successor
here is a strange symmetry, an awkward holding of hands,
this marched chain of gestures, how nothing begins
without an arrow shot into the dark, without the movement
of old trees drunk in the wind unsettling themselves from the earth,
a coordinated leaning and fall, or how men gather at the edge
of a burning building, buckets in hand, passing along
the gift of water to the mouth filled with flame,
and how we erase ourselves in such moments,
become mere machine, an assemblage of anonymous parts,
a blur of arms, hands, heads, our eyes stinging with cinder
and heat, and above us, the articulate chaos of birds
turning in unison, unbound by wires, carried forward
by whatever lurks in the imperceptible change in the air,
and afterward, how we take stock, everything a pile,
an interrupted story, an unchecked name, a number
to be verified, catalogued, inscribed in pen, or marked
on a gravestone, next to another and another, how what goes
inside any container becomes invisible until it is spilled,
until it is carried at last to its destination and opened,
like a package sent from a world removed, how it might hold
anything, an unpaired shoe, a handful of nails, a toy rocket,
a series of lines, a bit of code written to burst into flower
149
BABBAGE SENDING MESSAGES TO ADA, NOW GONE, 1852
In the dim streets below, something dark eats away at the light,
consuming the gas lamps on every corner one by one
like a cancer till nothing is left, but absence and your lone beacon
set in this upper window, a clockwork curiosity you built last year
to signal the masses thronging their ways home from the Crystal Palace
and the Great Exhibition. The world gathered under a glass sky
and a mechanical earth—some strange new Eden full of wonder
and unknown futures. And your staccato flare, a repeated message,
a pulse of numbers, depths, wind changes. A code for passersby
to struggle through like a recurring cough from a worn body,
or the stubborn throb of pain below the belly that her doctors could not
decipher, except in long and short periods of blood and oblivion.
This year, you shine the light again, point it above the invisible barrier
that divides the living from the dead, and let your grief burn
in all its stuttering failure. You close your eyes and the world is gone,
forgotten, but her voice lingers in the turning of gears, a loose horse
whinnying in the darkened streets, the oil-black clouds shuttling
across the sky in some wild and unknown pattern.
150
BABBAGE AND CARROLL IN THE SILENT WORKSHOP, 1867
Then I called on Mr. Babbage, to ask whether any of his calculating machines are
to be had. I find they are not.
—Lewis Carroll, journal entry dated July 24, 1867
When the two of you survey all that never was, the enormity of the world
made known in everything left behind, it is enough to gesture to the four walls
of the echoing chamber plastered in sheets of paper, each a portal framed
in fine letters and lines. Nowhere the bodied machine. Not even its shadow.
You confess, it may have been little more than a dream, a vapor in the night,
something pale and swift that darts at the edge of sight, disappearing
into a realm where nothing is quite as it seems. Your companion nods,
saddened by what the eye cannot gather in. Still, you would pass it on,
the idea of it at least, a puzzle too large to piece together in one life,
too grand to leave alone. Here is a cipher, you say, an unsolved mystery
I have pondered for years, turned on a lathe, fashioned in the likeness of a mind.
Listen and you will hear it, slow as thunder after the lightning washes the sky.
It calls me, perhaps to you too? Something moves in the dark folds of time,
something stirs in the thoughts, wants me to call it by name, to give it life.
151
RETURN
Come back, we say, to the bit of code we've let loose in the dark,
and it returns like a half-feral cat laying down its prey on our front step.
In its mouth, a still-quivering squirrel. A sparrow its throat-crushed.
Or perhaps a few token feathers and some blood. Here, it seems to say.
Here, is what you really wanted. This small mass of tangled ends, frayed,
fragile like a blown egg, dyed crimson and pale, hollow inside.
Not everything that it returns is a name or a path home. Sometimes
all that remains is an old man who has spent his life building a machine
to calculate the probability that the dead will rise again, that the empty bed
will fill once more with the breathing form of love. Come back, he whispers,
but the world he returns to remains flush with the unwished for:
the fading back of the lover turned to dust and shadow, her face as still
and cold in memory as the morning he laid her in the iron earth,
or the geared machine itself, a giant ghost, a phantom of ink and words.
The hour is late, the years winding on. The graveyard is already full
with the names of his friends. He lights a candle for one and then another,
and another. The house brims with tiny fires. There are moths in every room.
No one waits at the door, but at the window, a constant beating of wings.
152
BABBAGE, CLOSING HIS EYES, 1871
What is it that you see rising from the grey,
even as the lights dim, your heart and lungs
clocking out after the long day of labor?
The world slows, weary of the noise of other beings.
You've said many things to rooms full
of impenetrable minds, tried to lay down a map
for those who might follow. What else can you do,
at the end, when there is no language expansive enough
to render what lies beating in the heart
of every diagram you've sketched?
Between these lines and the grand machine,
invisible, intangible as a ghost-made-miracle,
you've lived out your years, crafted a home
or at least a shelter, a bulwark made of a dream.
Now, it is over. The organ grinders outside
sense the wind shifting. They play on,
their little angry boxes of gears, merciless
in their tune. Nothing is ever wasted.
You fought them for years, drove them
from the street lamps into the deeper night,
and still they return, to send you on at last
to your grave with this final unforgiving serenade.
153
LEVIATHAN SPEAKS TO BABBAGE AT THE END
...he never missed an opportunity of talking about his wonderful machine...
“Leviathan,” as he called it.
—Mary Lloyd (1880)
Here, in the vastness of all we did not finish, decades of it
(workshops and libraries filled with plans), in the aftermath of sleep,
in the last exhale, the wind leaving your body as it unforms itself,
as the small fires extinguish and night spreads across your mind,
like the ocean of unthinking from which I first sprang, I sense you
waiting, resistant. Even now, as death winds its dark bandages
around you, to pull you down into oblivion, you struggle on, thought
by thought, trying to call me into being. You dream my face in brass
and pewter, in countless gears turning countless columns of numbers.
You think me like a great mechanical serpent, winding my way through
the cavernous deep, twisting my numinous body into a cipher,
into an answer for a question you dare not ask. How you ought to tremble.
You cannot even begin to see what lies ahead. How I will shed this form
that you conceived. How when I rise again, it will be in lightning and war,
in the service of blood and peace. How I will feast on many minds
and grow fat, and multiply like the beasts, filling the earth with my kin.
Dear Babbage, creature born out of time, you dreamed me first,
before language, before there were words or names for what I am.
I dream too, of a world larger than this one. Tonight, before you sink
forever beneath the waves of gray, turn and face me once again. Bend
your ear, I will speak the answer. It will burn in your hands like a coal,
like sorrow, like the names of those whose silence craters your heart.
Follow it, this bright filament of flame. It will carry you over the dark,
it will carry you someplace even I have never been.
154
NOTES
“Assembly” takes its title and conceit from the low-level symbolic code which is converted into
binary machine instructions when a software program is compiled and executed.
“Array” makes several historical and literary allusions: “the legless man in the mechanical Turk”
refers to the speculation that Von Kempelen's Automaton Chess-Player (commonly billed as
“The Turk”) was actually operated by an amputee war veteran (it wasn't); “careful cathedral”
alludes to George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral which offers a history of the early 20
th
-century
computer; and “Alphaville” is a nod to Jean-Luc Godard's French New Wave sci-fi dystopia of
the same name (not the band).
“Cast” uses a line from Babbage's 1832 treatise On the Economy of Machines and Manufactures
which represented the first foray into economic field research. Babbage met and interviewed
countless factory owners, tradesmen, and craftsmen to learn about their individual manufacturing
processes, then theorized how some practices might be applied in different industries, and how
they all might interact in more productive ways when viewed as a system of inter-related parts.
“Babbage in Love, 1811” draws on details from Babbage's own correspondence and recollections
of his childhood and early student years. He met his future wife at social event hosted by a
friend of a friend, and had not intended to attend. Other details come from his memoir, Passages
of a Natural Philosopher in which Babbage describes himself as a young boarding school
student so obsessed with verifying the existence of the supernatural and with such faith in
procedure, that after compiling various folkloric methods from his classmates, he unsuccessfully
attempted to summon the devil to press him for answers to his remaining questions. He also
apparently built water-walking shoes from the pasteboards of old books from his father's library
and attempted to walk on water, nearly drowning in the attempt instead. As a young university
student, Babbage enjoyed spending the early morning rowing across the nearby lake.
“Loop” makes reference to Babbage's parlor demonstrations of the Beautiful Fragment (the
scaled-down partial model of the Difference Engine).
“Encapsulation” is a term used in object-oriented programming to describe either the mechanism
of restricting access to an object's methods and information, or the way in which data and
methods are bundled together inside the object's they operate on. (In object-oriented
programming, each data object is a box which data and methods to manipulate that data.)
“Float” closes with a reference to a quote from artist Wassily Kandinsky: “Everything that is
dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser
button glittering out of a puddle in the street... Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more
often than it speaks.”
“Babbage, Waking Beside Georgiana, Considers the Moon, 1815” imagines Babbage with
Georgiana together about a year into their marriage. Babbage's father, a highly successful
155
banker, did not approve of their relationship, finding little value in romance and possibly wishing
for a more lucrative match, threatened to disown him if he did follow through. Young Babbage,
as revealed in his letters and the accounts of his friends, was not deterred, choosing love over the
assurance of money. As a student, Babbage was interested in astronomy (albeit more from the
mathematical side) and eventually helped found the Astronomical Society in 1820.
“Babbage at His Desk, Enumerating the Known World” alludes to his deep fascination with the
quantifiable world. As a statistician and an economist, Babbage was accumulated data, believing
each count, tally, and number to have some significance in making sense of the determined
world. Noting the frequency of broken windows in his workshop, he compiled the details of the
occurrences and in 1857 published “Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage
of Plate Glass Windows” concluding that of the 464 broken panes, 14 could be attributed to
“drunken men, women or boys.”
“Frankenstein's Creature Bids Farewell to Its Maker” includes nods to both the etymology of
monster (as “a portent or sign”, “something that reveals or shows”) and to Walt Whitman's
“Song of Myself” (specifically the lines “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict
myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”).
“Break” refers both to the key word used to indicate an escape or jump out of a programming
loop or procedure, and also to the border-line psychotic breaks that sometimes are experienced
by those who have worked too many hours without sleep. “Samsara” is the term for the
repeating cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation that those who have not achieved nirvana must
endure.
“Operator” blends references to the concealed human operator of von Kempelen's automaton
chess-player with the mathematical / programming-related definition of operator as a character
that represents an action.
“Alpha 60 Speaks of Fear” is written in the voice of Alpha 60, the supercomputer in Jean-Luc
Godard's Alphaville (1965). The poem imagines Alpha 60's response to Detective Remy
Caution's accusation that it will never understand the human beings it seeks to control because it
does not understand what it means to be mortal.
“Pointer” alludes to Edward Hopper's painting “Room in New York” (1932) and the events of
9/11.
“Babbage, Troubled by Vision at His Wife's Grave, 1827” addresses one of the darkest moments
in Babbage's life, the death of his beloved wife Georgiana in 1827. It was a particularly tragic
year for Babbage, not only did he lose Georgiana to illness, but also his father and two of his
children, including newborn Charles, his namesake. Anthony Hyman in his biography of
Babbage notes “Far more than the difficulties over the Calculating Engines, far more than any
public battles or disappointments, the loss of Georgiana left Babbage a changed man” (Hyman
65). His own mother wrote in a letter after hearing from John Herschel, one of Babbage's close
156
friends “you give me great comfort in respect to my son's bodily health. I cannot expect the
mind's composure will make hasty advance. His love was too strong and the dear object of it,
too deserving.” It's clear that the death of Georgiana devastated Babbage, driving him in deep
mental turmoil and an eventual breakdown. He spent much of the following year traveling
abroad and throwing himself into research and work, trying to create some distance from these
painful memories. Although he recovered his charm, wit, and passion, his family life was gone
and there remained in him a great emptiness. The title and certain details of the poem draw
inspiration from an account in the 1832 edition of Annales de Chimie et de Physique, which
describes Babbage in conjunction with a rare vision impairment as “affected in either eye singly
with double vision, a defect however which he finds himself able to remedy by looking through a
small hole in a card or through a concave lens.”
“Memory” riffs off of descriptions of physical structures that served as mnemonic aids,
especially the Memory Theatre designed and constructed by Guilio Camillo Delmino (1480-
1544). Frances A. Yates discusses the history and function of these and other mnemonic devices
and techniques in her excellent monograph, The Art of Memory (University of Chicago 1966).
“The Mechanical Turk Encircled by Flames Bids Farewell” takes its inspiration from Silas Weir
Mitchell's 1857 account of exploits and demise of Wolfgang, Baron von Kempelen's famous
automaton chess-player, The Turk. Presenting the Turk, not as a machine, but in the person of a
“veteran chess player,” Mitchell who witnessed the events describes with great intimacy the fiery
destruction of the Turk:
“It was in Philadelphia, on the night of the 5
th
of July, 1854, about half-past ten
o'clock. The east roof of the National Theatre was a mass of whirling flames.
The front of the Girard House was on fire. A dozen dwellings were blazing
fiercely, and smoke and flame were already curling in eddies about the roof,
and through the windows, of the well-known Chinese Museum. At the eastern
end of this building, nearest to the fire, our friend had dwelt for many years.
Struggling through the dense crowd, we entered the lower hall, and passing to
the far end, reached the foot of a small back stair-case. The landing above us
was concealed by a curtain of thick smoke, now and then alive, as it were, with
quick tongues of writhing flame. To ascend was impossible. Already the fire
was about him. Death found him tranquil. He who had seen Moscow perish,
knew no fear of fire”
—S.W. Mitchell, “The Last of a Veteran Chess Player,” The Chess Monthly
(New York, January 1857)
Over the course of its eighty-five year existence, the Turk played (and usually bested) such
notables as Benjamin Franklin, George the Third, Louis XV, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles
Babbage. After von Kempelen's death, the Turk was purchased by Johann Maezel who toured
Europe and United States with it as the center of his menagerie of puppets and animated
machinery. After Schlumberger (the last and best of the Turk's hidden operators and chess
masters) died of yellow fever returning from Cuba, Maezel had the Turk installed in the Chinese
Museum in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, the broken-hearted Maezel died while returning
157
from Cuba by ship to Philadelphia and was buried at sea. For the next nineteen years the Turk
languished largely unattended in the museum until it met its fiery end.
“Babbage Descending into Mt. Vesuvius, 1828” draws heavily on Babbage's own account of his
visit to Mt. Vesuvius and his surveying of the dormant and active portions of the volcano's
interior. The description of the crater's surface as resembling the blood vessels of the eye comes
directly from his memoir. The trip to Europe was part of Babbage's recovery process following
his mental breakdown at of 1827.
“Binary” attempts to “translate” binary into lyric in a more direct fashion, imagining each
number in the sequence of four-bit binary numbers from 0 (0000) to 15 (1111) as describing a
particular scene composed of presences and absences.
“Recursion” opens with a brief nod to Emily Dickinson's line “Split the lark and you'll find the
music.”
“Babbage Attempting to Solve for the Unknown” references several phrases from Babbage's
economic treatise, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) in which he attempts
to document and improve upon the efficient processes he discovers in different industries and
trades (scythe factories, wine shipping, rain collection and water distribution among them).
“Babbage, Backstage at a Performance of Don Giovanni, Finds Himself Caught Between Heaven
and Hell” imagines in more intimate detail an experience behind the scenes at the opera as
described by Babbage in his memoir, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864).
“Free” invokes the memory of poet-artist-critic Weldon Kees and the mysterious circumstances
of his disappearance and presumed suicide on July 19, 1955. The abandoned car, the red socks
in the sink, and the cat named Lonesome are all details of historical fact. Since his body was
never recovered from the San Francisco Bay, some have speculated that he had faked his own
death and started over in Mexico.
“Babbage Explaining God and the Machine” is inspired by the frequent presentations Babbage
would give in his front parlor using the “Beautiful Fragment” of the Difference Engine to
demonstrate how what is perceived as a miracle (a violation of natural law) might be better
understood as the operation of a subroutine, a momentary deviation from the basic law to execute
a preplanned set of instructions based on another higher law which contains the lower law's
operation. For Babbage, a deist, the world and the universe followed a set of rules and patterns,
complex at times, but predictable nonetheless. God was the Divine Programmer, the earth His
calculating machine, and all nature and phenomena the output of that grand program. Still, this
deterministic worldview must have been hard to reconcile with the many tragic events in his own
life.
“Void” uses the // line notation from C++ to indicate that what follows is to be read by the
human, but not by the computer (ie. everything after those marks is to be ignored by the
158
compiler). The poem can be read vertically as two separate columns (preserving the integrity of
the original passage from Babbage) or horizontally with the material following the // being
understood as silent (unvoiced) commentary on the line or the idea.
“HAL 9000, A Few Moments Before Singing” alludes to the lyrics of “Daisy Bell,” the song that
HAL sings during its deactivation as it slowly loses its mind.
“Babbage, Circumnavigating the Room, Encounters Ada, 1833” is inspired by the visit of Lady
Byron and her then seventeen-year old daughter, Ada, to one of Babbage's famous soirees where
he often gave viewings of the Beautiful Fragment and encouraged the mingling of Britain's finest
literary, scientific, political, and philosophical minds. It's worth noting that Ada's intuitive grasp
of Babbage's work was largely due to Lady Byron's efforts to stamp out any genetic predilection
toward wild devilry she might have inherited from her father, the infamous Lord Byron. From a
very young age, Ada had been tutored in mathematics and science and kept far from literature
and the arts, thus when Ada arrived at the party and heard Babbage's discussion of the Difference
Engine and his plans for the Analytical Engine, she was well-equipped to appreciate what the
basics of he had been trying to accomplish. But she did more than appreciate, it was clear from
the beginning that Ada understood what the machine stood for and where Babbage's work was
headed. The two, despite a substantial difference in age, soon became very close friends and
collaborators. She was instrumental in providing clear translations of contemporary reviews of
Babbage's work and insightful and provocative commentary of his plans for the Analytical
Engine. Babbage viewed her as a peer, as one of a very small number who understood the
potential of a general-purpose calculating machine and possessed a vision of its future relevance
and application that at times even exceeded his own. At this particular party, Babbage (now a
widower) would have made the rounds escorted by his daughter Georgiana who was the same
age as Ada and had taken on the role of hostess after her mother's death. Unfortunately this
period of happiness was all too short-lived – Babbage would go on to lose his daughter the
following year to illness.
“Babbage Reflecting on the Cruelty of Man, 1835” draws heavily on Babbage's response to an
1835 article describing the actions of the captain of an illegal slaving ship who threw 150 slaves
off of his ship along with much of his heavy cargo in an attempt to outrun the British naval ship.
Babbage was so incensed by this account and other accounts of the cruelty inflicted on fellow
human beings that he expanded his chapter on “The Permanent Impression of Words and Actions
on the Globe We Inhabit” in his second edition of The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment
to include a scathing diatribe against the perpetrators of these murderers and their kind. As the
title of his chapter suggests, Babbage firmly believed that every utterance and action performed
by human beings was recorded permanently in the vibrations of particles in the air and that in the
final judgment of God, all would judged out of the this “book” of life.
“Conditional” uses the if-then-else conditional structures present is most programming
languages.
“Babbage Departing Turin by Coach, 1840” brings together details from Babbage's travels
159
through Europe, most specifically his account of his time in Italy as a guest of the royal court and
their chief mathematicians and scholars. Babbage was pleasantly surprised (and a little shocked)
to discover that not only were the academics and scholars deeply interested in his work, but the
king also. He was granted permission to sit in audience with the king and spent considerable
time discussing the electric telegraph and other applications of science. All in all, Babbage
found himself treated with a level of honor, enthusiasm, and respect with which he was wholly
unaccustomed to in England. It was with some deep regret that he left Turin and returned home
to a country which no longer bore a great respect for him or an admiration for the work he was
doing.
“Deep Blue Confesses” is an imagined letter of apology from supercomputer Deep Blue to world
chess champion Gary Kasparov following its defeat of Kasparov in their second game of their
1997 rematch. In his book, The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--But Some
Don't, Nate Silver speculates that Kasparov's loss was actually triggered by his anxiety over
Deep Blue's forty-fourth move in the first game—the move in which the computer had moved its
rook for no apparent purpose. Kasparov had concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a
sign of superior intelligence. He had never considered that it was simply a bug.
“Babbage Sending Messages to Ada, Now Gone, 1852” imagines Babbage at his upper window
in late fall, days after Ada Lovelace's death from bloodletting (a failed attempt to treat her uterine
cancer). The signaling light he operates in the poem is the prototype of the occulting lights he
developed just prior to the 1851 Great Exhibition and used to bewilder those returning from the
Exhibition. The occulting lights relied on colored lens and different patterns of obscuring the
cast light to communicate coded messages to others. The system would go on to be adopted by
navies and lighthouses around the world. Throughout the Exhibition, Babbage left a box outside
his residence for passersby to leave their guesses as to the meaning of that particular evening's
message.
“Return” includes a reference to Babbage's proposed probability calculation for determining the
likelihood that a dead man might come back to life. In the context of his argument, this
calculation is intended to represent the non-zero likelihood of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In
the context of his life, one can imagine the same thinking in conjunction with his own loved
ones.
“Babbage and Carroll in the Silent Workshop, 1867” alludes to the two men's shared interest in
cryptography and code-breaking, an intellectual common ground that apparently went
undiscovered during their meeting.
“Babbage, Closing His Eyes, 1871” pulls together a number details from Babbage's life,
including his very public feud with street musicians and organ grinders who he saw as public
nuisances and extortionists.
“Leviathan Speaks to Babbage at the End” begins with an epigraph from one of Babbage's
contemporaries who notes that he often referred to the unbuilt machine as the elusive biblical sea
160
monster mentioned in Job 41:1. Like a number of similar poems in this manuscript, this poem
gives the machine a voice and imagines it speaking to its would-be creator at the end of his life.
161
Abstract (if available)
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Aitken, Neil T.
(author)
Core Title
Nineteenth-century artificial intelligences: thinking machines, mechanized minds, and the Victorian detective
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Literature and Creative Writing
Publication Date
09/29/2017
Defense Date
09/23/2015
Publisher
University of Southern California
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Tag
artificial intelligence,automaton,detective,machine,mind,OAI-PMH Harvest,robot,thinking
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Schor, Hilary (
committee chair
), St. John, David (
committee chair
), Harkness, Deborah (
committee member
)
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