Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 144

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Popular Culture Review

of her heavenly eyes expresses more than any commonplace speech. Besides, how
is it possible for a child of heaven to confine herself to the narrow circle demanded
by wretched, mundane life?” (Hoffmann 1969:162.)
Without embarrassment, Nathanael thus loves a puppet which is dumb. He
loves it as a being which for him is quite symbolised and idealised. By means of its
very muteness and non-resistance this being shelters him from disappointments in
the form of beings of real closeness, in which there triumph the weight of life and
pain, the undisguised real, and the law of the day. To Nathanael, Olympia was an
unthreatening replica, a partner, who gives back only what he gives. Nathanael
prefers to hear only ”Uh, uh” to “Never more”, “I won’t”, “Nowhere”, and “No”.
His love for the mechanical synthetic being implies an intercourse which is gentle,
light, free of the leaden weight of the real; one plays with it or plays it. This
syntheticity, no doubt, implies that another, non-transmitted, non-symbolised and
non-virtualised reality, which can give the most painful and cruel feedback, is being
put into brackets. Choosing Olympia, the main character chooses mechanically
conveyed communication and a synthetic being (it is interesting here that he
discovers the beauty of his beloved through an interface, precisely, special
binoculars). This also implies relevance in the context observed by recent theories
concerning computer mediated communications, since the protagonists of life in
the net and through the net favour persons whom they approached through the net,
at the expense of real persons, i.e. those in their physical proximity; often they love
virtual clones more than real “proximate” people. Here at issue is again the fateful
re-orientation to artificial, cloned, virtual, often merely programmed constructs
and creatures, who could never be as dangerous and ‘difficult’ as are persons in
physical proximity. (This is an experience of communication in cyberspace. There
certainly are exceptions; even in cyberpunk novels, net connections are extremely
committing, often without the possibility of breaking communication up as one
pleases.) The contemporary user of the net, too, therefore often takes Nathanael’s
stand; in a given situation, even in the so-called cybersex, they come to desire a
partner in the form of Hoffmann’s Olympia.
The 1^''-century masters already raised critical and universally human issues,
but these can be articulated in a more expressive manner within the environments
of modern technosciences and advanced technologies, interfaces, and nets. Above
all it is contemporary SF (inspired by cyberpunk from the 1970s. and ‘80s.) that
pursues these environments. Therefore the characters in this particular fiction are,
as a rule, no supermen, although they may as well be quite successful in their
actions; rather, they are very vulnerable, let us simply say ‘soft’ characters. Their
existence is jeopardised, the environment of modern technologies draws them out
onto that clear space where they cannot simply steal away to avoid the major
alternatives of their own fate and direct confrontations with, conditionally speaking.