Monsters of the Century part 2

 

A chaotic blend

Of course for an artificial human to be realistic, to match the rest of us, it has to be a chaotic blend of right and wrong, to find its way by picking through the wreckage of its own bad decisions. Another recent example is the creature called the Whatitsname in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018. In war-torn Iraq in the early 2000s, a junk dealer called Hadi assembles a being from the body parts of people killed in the conflict. “I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a decent burial.”

But the Whatitsname goes missing, and sets about a retributive rampage, like the original Frankenstein’s monster. Saadawi’s vision is satirical, the blackest of comedy about tit-for-tat killings and the dehumanisation of people in war: the creature finds that as it avenges each death, its corresponding body parts fall off, so it has to kill more people to replace them. Eventually “he knew his mission was essentially to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why”. This most modern of monsters even gives a press conference to justify his actions and mock his creator, a child rebelling against his parent: “You were just a conduit, Hadi. Think how many stupid mothers and fathers have produced great men in history.”

For Saadawi, the monster is “the mirror image of us as a whole”, reflecting how people in Iraq “became either active participants in the killing or indifferent toward scenes of death”. Speaking to BBC World Service’s The Cultural Frontline, he said that “we like to see ourselves as victims and see others as aggressors, but in this case [the Whatsitsname] was both the aggressor and the victim” – much like Victor Frankenstein’s creation – and he represents the “monster inside everybody – not just in Iraqis but everywhere”.

The stitched-together creature, in other words, is a patchwork of our best and worst human characteristics. How could it be otherwise? In Frankenstein, the human society that rejected the monstrous-looking creature triggered his killing spree. Paul Braddon had this in mind too when writing The Actuality: “I do have concerns as to how we as humans would interact with such a class.”

Central to these stories is not only the relationship of the artificial human to their creator but also the purpose of their creation. Victor Frankenstein made his creature out of the noble spirit of scientific inquiry. (We never find out how Frankenstein made his monster, ostensibly because he doesn’t want anyone to emulate his mistake, though it handily absolved Mary Shelley from having to dream up the mechanics.) In The Actuality, on the other hand, the driving forces behind Evie’s creation are less honourable. No spoilers but “it all comes down to what motivates mankind”, says Braddon, “which could be reduced in the simplest sense to money, power and sex”. Can a woman be made by men? Can she consent to sex? Like all of us, Evie is constrained by the circumstances of her birth.

Sex, indeed, is something no human – or artificial human – story would be complete without, and Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein makes the most of it, with her typical boldness and wit. Winterson’s story splices the origins of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein with an alternative present where artificial humans are being built as sexbots.

Winterson, whose prescience means she was writing about artificial sex (“teledildonics”) as long ago as her 1992 novel Written on the Body, is not surprised to see humanity barrelling down the path she predicted. “Because we are profoundly stupid,” she has said, “we are going to share the planet with a self-created non-biological lifeform smarter than we are. Well done, human race!” But Frankissstein, perhaps uniquely among the AI novels featured here, is very funny. “The world is so dire at the moment, it’s important to make people laugh. It isn’t an escapist response, it’s a way of managing it.”

A more compliant non-human appeared on the bookshelves this month, as Kazuo Ishiguro published Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a quasi-human device created to prevent teenagers from becoming lonely. As with Evie’s story, Klara’s is written from the non-human viewpoint.

How did Ishiguro go about this? “Well,” he tells BBC Culture, “I just kind of plunged in rather recklessly to see what would happen”. He laughs. “But I’ve always been drawn to slightly oddball narrators.” As a narrator, he says, Klara has “a great advantage in being technically not human. So it puts these questions very naturally in the reader’s mind: What does it mean to be human? What do humans mean when they say they love somebody? So it’s a very good way of being able to ask those questions without seeming contrived or pretentious.”

This is all terrible news for artificial humans, but good for literature: it’s our moral uncertainty that makes not just these stories live and thrive. Creatures who are not quite like us can enhance our understanding of ourselves, even if the results aren’t always pretty. In fact in McEwan’s Machines Like Me, the android character Adam comments that in a world run by artificial humans, without emotional turmoil, without the eternal mysteries of the human heart, most literature would be irrelevant and superfluous. Just as well it’s not going to happen for around 30 years, really, isn’t it?