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

228Demonic Texts and Textual Demonscerites. In yet another swell of expectations that the narrative creates andthen disappoints (thus “linking” with an empathic reader), Deckard-Mercerfinds a toad in the desert (toad and ass are extinct animals, and symbols forMercer’s love for the humble forms of life) – and then, as he brings it hometo his concerned wife, it turns out to be an artificial toad. But Deckard’s attitudetowards the traumatic division line between “real” and “artificial,”truth and deception, has gone through a subtle but profound change: “Thespider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too.But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as thoselives are.” 119Dick’s androids are inheritors to the demonic otherness of Frankenstein’smonster: to be “united by no link to any other being.” Yet, the qualityand necessity of this linking, and the critique of the subject inherent init is directed towards different concerns, as compared to those of MaryShelley. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics orbehaviour to machines and other inanimate objects has often been regardedas a feature of “primitive” or magical thinking in our scientific century;Dick was aware of this, but he made the counterargument that a certainamount of “magical” quality in our relation to our surroundings, to otherpeople, and to ourselves, is necessary.A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose,a life, that is actually within himself; once these childish projectionsare withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead and that life resides solelywithin himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to beeither mature or sane. Or scientific. But one wonders: Has he not, in thisprocess, reified – that is, made into a thing – other people? Stones androcks and trees may now be inanimate for him, but what about his friends?Has he now made them into stones, too? 120Scott Bukatman writes in his Terminal Identity (1993) that in the“postmodern, post-alienated future posed by Philip Dick, the movementinto a state of alienation is simultaneously both regression and progression;a crucial ambivalence which avoids any reification of the ‘natural,’ butwhich also rejects the unequivocal embracing of the instrumental reason ofa new technocratic order.” 121 Dick eyes technology with suspicion, but becausehe is able to perceive the reciprocal intertwining of “artificial” and119 DA, 214. – In “The Android and the Human” Dick develops this idea: “the differencebetween what I call the ‘android’ mentality and the human is that the latter passedthrough something [suffering, empathy] the former did not, or at least passed through itand responded differently – changed, altered, what it did and hence what it was; it became.”(1995, 203.)120 Dick, “The Android and the Human” (1972; Dick 1995, 183.) – A modern anthropologist,Madronna Holden, makes an analogous but more moderate argument:“Whereas civilized society commoditizes its persons, primitive society personalizes itscommodities” (Holden 1995, 3).121Bukatman 1994, 52.