Galatea 2.2
Encyclopedia
Galatea 2.2 is a novel by Richard Powers
Richard Powers
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.- Life and work :...

. The novel is pseudo-autobiographical: the narrator is named Richard Powers and there is discussion of the four novels he wrote before Galatea 2.2 along with other references to his real biography. Richard Powers creates a version of himself for the novel that is not always flattering. It is not completely clear which specific events are true, and which are not, but it is clearly based on Powers' life.

Plot summary

The main narrative tells the story of Powers' return to his alma mater
Alma mater
Alma mater , pronounced ), was used in ancient Rome as a title for various mother goddesses, especially Ceres or Cybele, and in Christianity for the Virgin Mary.-General term:...

— referred to in the novel as simply "U.", but clearly based on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

, the school Powers attended and teaches at as a professor — after he has ended a long and torrid relationship with a loving but volatile woman, referred to as "C." Powers is an in-house author for the university, and lives for free for one year. He finds himself unable to write any more books, and spends the first portion of the novel attempting to write, but never getting past the first line.

Powers then meets a computer scientist named Philip Lentz. Intrigued by Lentz's overbearing personality and unorthodox theories, Powers eventually agrees to participate in an experiment involving artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

. Lentz bets his fellow scientists that he can build a computer that can produce an analysis of a literary text that is indistinguishable from one produced by a human. It is Powers' task to "teach" the machine. After going through several unsuccessful versions, Powers and Lentz produce a computer model (dubbed "Helen") that is able to communicate like a human. It is not clear to the reader or to Powers whether she is simulating human thought, or whether she is actually experiencing it. Powers tutors the computer, first by reading it canonical
Canon (fiction)
In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...

 works of literature, then current events, and eventually telling it the story of his own life, in the process developing a complicated relationship with the machine.

The novel also consists of extensive flashbacks to Powers' relationship with C., from their first meeting at U., to their bohemian
Bohemian
A Bohemian is a resident of the former Kingdom of Bohemia, either in a narrow sense as the region of Bohemia proper or in a wider meaning as the whole country, now known as the Czech Republic. The word "Bohemian" was used to denote the Czech people as well as the Czech language before the word...

 life in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, to their move to C.'s family's town in the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

.

The novel culminates with Helen being unable to bear the realities of the world, and "leaving" Powers. She asks Powers to "see everything" for her, and subsequently shuts herself down. Her exit from the world forces Powers to experience a rebirth. In addition, Powers realizes that he was Lentz's experiment: would he or wouldn't he be able to teach a computer? Through the transformation he experiences, he is suddenly able to interact with the world, and he can write again.

Characters in Galatea 2.2

Richard Powers:
The central character of Richard Powers
Richard Powers
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.- Life and work :...

 within Galatea 2.2 shares certain traits and experiences with the author; they are both novelists, for example, and the character's books are the same as those of the actual, living writer. However, as within any work of fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...

, the character is not and cannot be a replica of the author. The character, having attained his thirty-fifth birthday, has managed to achieve maturity without any sense of permanence or structure in his life. He cycles through his previous journeys without ever moving forward, initially returning to U., the formative place of his youth, and later visiting once again every foreign place in his past through the slides he shows the intelligent Helen. The character of Powers, through the progress of the book, must learn to stop filtering reality—through writing, reading, computers, even the image of a particular woman—and to actually experience it. "Life," Powers realizes in the final pages Galatea 2.2, "meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive. The world's Turing Test
Turing test
The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...

 was not yet over" (Powers 327). Powers is effectively reborn from his state of isolation and disconnection at the beginning of the work into a renewed awareness of his potential as a man—a participant in the world—and his ability to write, to transpose reality into fiction.

Lentz:
Lentz is the brilliant researcher lodged in the Center, whose sarcasm and witty but pointed comments annoy and periodically wound his colleagues, including Richard. He is an odd melding of the scientific and literary worlds, for though he is a scientist, his wife introduced him to literature and reading. Lentz carries his personal tragedy with him as a constant shadow, for his once-brilliant wife suffered brain damage and must live in a care facility and now no longer recognizes him. His creation of Helen is, in part, an effort to explore the workings of the human brain, to somehow discover how a mere biological accident could so destroy the woman he loved.

Helen:
Helen is the creation of Lentz and Richard; Lentz builds her, and Richard educates her. She is a net, spread out over innumerable computers, and she is taught using the literary canon. Only when she is exposed to reality—the murder, rage, etc. that characterize daily news and the human world—does she realize fully that she does not belong nor does she wish to belong in this world. Helen is the catalyst that begins Richard's regeneration. While Helen is not human, and does not possess a body, through Richard’s teachings she seems to have human-like characteristics. One of the central arguments of the book comes from Helen and whether she has human emotions, or is simply simulating human emotion.

Diana:
Diana, like Helen, teaches Richard a lesson. She has two sons, one a near-genius and one a Downs Syndrome child. Meeting that child, Richard recalls one of his former books, in which the female protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...

 refuses to bear children for fear of birth defects. Chagrined, Richard views Diana with respect and admiration, but he does not fall in love with her. She is perhaps too real, too entirely founded in this world to easily attach herself to his illusions. In addition, Diana reminds Powers of the family unit, and what it means to belong to a family. It is another reminder of his lack of any real connections to the world before his rebirth at the end of the novel.

C.:
C., known only by that initial, is the girl-woman who haunts Richard's memories. Their lengthy love affair defined a number of the years of Richard's life, but at the end Richard was not able to accept her as a real being. He gave her love and pretty sentences in his letters, but no real news. Both Powers and C. attempted to deal with worldly problems through books, which did not solve any of the problems they face. It is another manifestation
Manifestation
Manifestation may refer to any one of the following:* Manifestation of God, the prophets of the Bahá'í Faith* Avatar, manifestation of God in Hinduism...

 of Powers’ lack of connection to the world.

A.:
Having permanently lost C., Richard re-envisions A. as a somewhat newer and better C. Meeting her in the halls of the English building, he falls in love with the graduate student, and proceeds to invite her into the very active halls of his imagination. He does not know her, but her image is enough. Richard is still dependent upon the illusion, upon the created sense of a thing, rather than upon the thing itself. A., who is never in love with nor even attracted to Richard, realizes this, and correctly terms him desperate. She is, however, Richard's ideal of the perfect teacher, and it is she who is pitted against Helen in the essay contest. Richard and A. never develop a relationship, although A. does become a teacher.

Galatea & the Pygmalion myth

Powers clearly uses the Pygmalion
Pygmalion (mythology)
Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.-In Ovid:In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a...

 myth in this book. The relationship between the myth, that of Pygmalion and Galatea, and Powers' book is fairly clear. The humans—especially the characters of Powers and Lentz—stand in for Pygmalion, creating a modern Galatea who comes to obsess them. On one level, that of Lentz and eventually of Powers, the Galatea is analogous to Helen, the computer-net-artificial intelligence creation who forms a central part of the book. Created by man, the thinking net—Helen—does not complete the final stages of the Galatea / Pygmalion myth. She cannot bear the cruel reality of man's world, and by removing herself from it forces man—Powers—to become autonomous, disassociated from the fantasies and obsessions he has created.

For the character of Powers, however, there is another Galatea within the book—literature, and writing. Powers' books are themselves a different sort of Galatea. Created to fill a need, they become an obsession, and eventually a stand-in for the real world. When the book replaces the world, the character finds himself unable to write. It is only when Helen commands Richard Powers to "see to everything" for her that he is able to regenerate his creative powers and imagine himself writing again.

Reviews and critiques


Richard may have thought he was Pygmalion or Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...

, but he was as much Galatea as the AI. Indeed, he finally "comes to life" again at the end of the novel: once liberated from his stolen first sentence, he finds himself with an idea for a new novel—which, we suspect, is Galatea 2.2.
—M. Burnstein, State University of New York, College at Brockport




Galatea 2.2 contains no extraneous material. Each character has a role to play, and each sheds light on the central ideas of tuition and stratas of linguistic uncertainty. An autistic child is less functional than the computer H., but is it of more 'value' as a living being? The laboratory monkeys cannot speak, but is lobotomising H., by cutting through her subsystems, crueller than dissecting the animals?
—Adam Baron, Spike Magazine




If some of Galatea 2.2 feels closed and airless, much of it soars and spins. The sessions with Helen gain more and greater urgency; every new line on the graph of her expanding consciousness is also a stake through what seems to be, impossibly, her heart. "I want Richard to explain me," she laments.



As Helen approaches her endgame—'I don't want to play anymore'—the various strands of Galatea 2.2 come together, and the novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty.
—Robert Cohen, New York Times




In updating the Galatea legend, Mr. Powers has succeeded in writing his most satisfying novel yet: a cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, a lively tour de force.
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times




Richard Powers has staked out a unique place for himself, one that straddles our technological and our literary cultures. He may be the last humanist with a scientific competence, an invaluable thing when the notion that humans may be just another variety of complex system haunts our sense of ourselves.



In its strongest moments, Galatea 2.2 realizes the possibilities of that position splendidly. And with all of Richard Powers' autobiographical cards now so definitively on the table, I look forward to learning less about his self and/or meta-self and more in his next novel about the world in which we both must live.
—Gerald Howard, The Nation




In the preface to his book Aramis, or the love of Technology
Aramis, or the Love of Technology
Aramis, or the Love of Technology, was written by French sociologist/anthropologist Bruno Latour. Aramis was originally published in French in 1993; the English translation by Catherine Porter, copyrighted in 1996, ISBN 9780674043237, is now in its fourth edition . Latour describes his text as...

, author Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...

describes his book's genre as scientifiction. He adds that Richard Powers was "the master of scientifiction and author of Galatea 2.2, whose Helen is Aramis' unexpected cousin."

Awards and nominations

  • Finalist, 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award
  • Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, 1995
  • New York Times Notable Book, 1995

Publication history

  • Galatea 2.2. NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux. London: Little, Brown / Abacus, 1995. Designed by Fritz Metsch; jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye. 329 p. (ISBN 0374199485)
  • Galatea 2.2. 1st Harper Perennial ed. NY: HarperPerennial & HarperCollins Canada, Ltd, 1996. 336 p. (ISBN 0060976926.)
  • Galatea 2.2. Books On Tape, 1996. Performed By Michael Kramer, Nine sound cassettes, 810 minutes, Single Reader, Full Length. (ISBN 0736633499)
  • Galatea 2.2. London: Abacus, 1996. 329 p. (ISBN 0349107718 (pbk) .)
  • Galatea 2.2. Netherlands: Uitgeverij Contact, 1997. 365 p. (ISBN 9025406203) Translation into Dutch by Niek Miedema and Harm Damsma. Cover design: Jos Peters; cover photo: Zefa.
  • Galatea 2.2. Germany: Amann Verlag, 1997. Jacket design by Wolfsfeld Design Factory. Translation into German.
  • Galatea 2.2. France: Editions du Seuil, 1997 Translation into French
  • Galatea 2.2. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1997. 370 p. (ISBN 8439701454) Translation into Spanish by Cristóbal Pera. Design: Graficas Huertas, S.A
  • Galatea 2.2. Galatea 2.2. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000. 459 p. (ISBN 3596142768) Translation into German by Werner Schmitz.
  • Galatea 2.2. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 2001. 403 p. (ISBN 4622048183)<
  • Galatea 2.2. Roma: Fanucci, 2003.393 p. (ISBN 88-347-0929-2) Translation into Italian by Luca Briasco.
  • Forthcoming editions in French (Editions du Seuil); Hebrew (Am Oved); Portuguese (Nova Fronteira)

External links


Sources

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