Simona Kollarikova
Professor Harper
ESem Sec 31: Human and Post-Human
November 12, 2022
Uncanny Valley and Trauma of the Post-Human
It is easy to empathize with other human beings, but gets harder if the being isn’t fully human. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein features a post-human subject, referred to as the Creature, which has a humanoid appearance but is huge, deformed and composed of animal parts. The Creature has eloquent and developed linguistic abilities. It is also emotional and empathetic. Its short life is filled with betrayal and pain, which causes the Creature severe distress and mental wounds, yet humans never treat the Creature with compassion. On the other hand, Ursula Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” explores through John Kaph Chow, an artificially bred human clone who loses his nine siblings with whom he was one, how trauma can lead to compassion. His fellow human companions take care of him throughout his grieving stage and greatly empathize with him. These two tales introduce the same concept of post-human beings going through trauma, but display different responses to said trauma from normal human characters. Literary critic Ida Marie Olsen from the University of Agder uses the lens of trauma studies in her essay titled “Do Androids Have Nightmares About Electric Sheep? Science Fiction Portrayals of Trauma Manifestations in the Posthuman Subject in Frankenstein, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and ‘Nine Lives’”, to claim that post-human subjects experiencing trauma undermine anthropocentrism and invite a reconceptualizing around the term human, as well as around trauma, traditionally understood as a primarily human experience. Masahiro Mori, a former robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, theorized that as a robot's appearance approached, but fell short of, being lifelike, a person's reaction to it would quickly change from empathy to repulsion. The uncanny valley is a term used to describe this plunge into unease. Combining these two theories allows for an interpretation of the trauma of the Frankentein’s Creature and “Nine Lives”’ John Kaph Chow and the diverging reactions they receive from regular humans. The grotesque Creature repulsing the people in the story and its trauma going completely unrecognized by them but the human-like John Kaph Chow being taken care of and his trauma treated by the other two ordinary humans proves that the more a post-human being succeeds to look like a normal human, the greater the chance of other humans empathizing with the being and tending to its traumatic experience.
The Creature is a large and extremely strong being composed of both human and animal parts, created by a mad scientist. Because of its eerie and monstrous appearance, the Creature is shunned by the normal humans and its trauma is unnoticed by them. According to Mary Shelley: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips. Now that I had finished my work, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley 42). The Creature’s appearance is described as scary and unsettling, failing to achieve the beauty Victor Frankenstein originally intended for it. He, the creator of the Creature himself, is repulsed at the sight of his creation and rejects it. Thereby, the Creature is shunned by normal humans due to its unsightly looks and its trauma is never recognized by them. Mary Shelley also says that “I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought, that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow” (Shelley 80). Upon meeting his creation again after it ran away, Victor is still disgusted by its appearance and is thus unable to sympathize with him, although he, in the end, consents to making a female partner for it, under the condition that the Creature gets somewhere far away from society. Precisely because of the Creature’s inhuman looks, Victor is unable to feel empathy for its traumatic life.
While the Creature’s trauma is never tended to by humans due to its repulsive appearance, John Kaph Chow is met with a different kind of approach from his fellow two scientists. John Kaph Chow is an artificially bred human clone, along with his nine siblings, which makes him a posthuman subject. But since John Kaph Chow looks completely human, his trauma is treated with sympathy by normal humans in “Nine Lives”. In the short story, Le Guin maintains that “They were all tall, with bronze skin, black hair, high-bridged noses, epicanthic fold, the same face. They all had the same face” and also that “They hummed and buzzed quietly, filled up all silences, all spaces with a honey-brown swarm of human presence.” (Le Guin 442). The ten clones, and therefore John Kaph Chow, are described as identical beautiful young men and women, most likely of Middle Eastern and Asian descent. She also labels their presence “human”, implying that they indeed resemble a normal human being, and an attractive one at that. Because of John Kaph Chow’s humanness coupled with beauty, one of the two scientists in the short story, Pugh, feels attracted to him (not sexually), which makes it easier for him to later empathize with his traumatic experience. According to Le Guin: “They were all him, he is all of them. They died, and now he's dying their deaths one by one”, and “He never had to see anyone else before. He never was alone before. He had himself to see, talk with, live with, nine other selves all his life. He doesn't know how you go it alone. He must learn. Give him time” (Le Guin 448). When John Kaph Chow suffers through one of the post-traumatic seizures, Pugh concludes that because those other nine clones were basically part of Kaph, he is experiencing their deaths due to the unique bond they shared. Pugh also explains to his colleague Martin that it will take some time for Kaph to learn to live without his clone siblings and interact with ordinary humans. Although Pugh realizes that Kaph’s relationship with the other nine clones is beyond his understanding, his sympathy towards Kaph allows him to at least assume what Kaph is going through in order to help him. John Kaph Chow's human-like appearance thereby allows him to be treated with empathy by normal people.