Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

226Demonic Texts and Textual DemonsHe tries to call his wife, but an unknown woman answers. 110 This fantasticsequence has a surreal, threatening logic of its own; it has a strong resemblanceto the narrative situation in The Third Policeman (1940/1967) byFlann O’Brian. The hallucinatory visit to a police station in that novel turnsout to be a delusion created by the dying mind – or hell itself, depending onthe reading. Paranoia is often associated with the postmodern; Fredric Jamesonhas said that “conspiracy […] is the poor person’s cognitive mapping inthe postmodern age.” 111 The explosive increase of information makes itharder to form unified and clear-cut narratives and models for the situationof subject. The doppelganger police station goes beyond any reasonablestrategy a bunch of escaped robots might develop: it is, primarily, a manifestationof Deckard’s fears. Teeming with artificial policemen, this place is aninverse echo with mythical qualities – it is the land of the dead, a parody ofofficials walking the hallways of the real institution.After Phil Resch, another bounty hunter, has arranged Deckard’s escapefrom the Other Police Station they have to deal with the androids andwith the question of their real identity. Resch is able to kill prospective androidswithout hesitation; after Resch kills Luba Luft because she had accusedhim of being an android, Deckard insists that Resch himself has to betested. The question is, as Resch says, about Deckard’s faith in the humanrace. Empathy is the defining factor of humanity in novel’s world, and nowResch, the bounty hunter, seems to be lacking it. The general thrust of thenovel is to belie the reader’s expectations (sometimes even by stretching thelimits of plausibility); this principle operates in this case, too. Deckard isshocked to find that Resch is a human, after all. He is just incapable of feelinganything towards androids. And this is exactly what is expected from abounty hunter. It is Deckard himself who is beginning to trespass the limits;he is asking “irrational questions” (“Do you think androids have souls?”),and “acting irrationally” (he buys a book containing reproductions of EdwardMunch’s paintings for Luba Luft, and then burns it after Resch hadkilled her). 112 “So I was wrong,” Deckard ponders. “There is nothing unnaturalor unhuman about Phil Resch’s reactions; it’s me.” 113The exposure of Mercerism by androids does not change anything fromthe human point of view. Similarly, Deckard’s revelation about his own “unnaturalness”actually helps him to reconstruct a new conception of humannature, a new identity. As Isidore and Deckard, the human protagonists,need Mercer more, the fusion starts spontaneously – technology becomestransparent as the boundaries separating the natural and the unnatural begin110 DA, 98-111.111 Jameson 1988, 356.112Munch’s The Scream (1893) is adopted as an expression of the android condition(DA, 114); Fredric Jameson comments that this painting is “a canonical expression of thegreat modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation,a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety”(Jameson 1991, 11).113DA, 124.