Graham reminds us in Chapter 4 that a common, traditional Jewish reading of the Golem story is that the moral comes from the Golem’s defectiveness, humans must know that “while created in the likeness of God – possessing reason, speech and creative agency – humanity can never fully achieve the creation of life.” (89) We have been with Yod essentially from the start of his life to the end, have Malkah, Avram, and Shira achieved creation? How does Piercy interact with the traditional moral?
ENGL 360 | Future Perfect Human
Prof. Myra Seaman | Fall 2016
I think that both Graham and Piercy would agree that Malkah, Avram, and Shira do not fully achieve the creation of life. Like you say, in Chapter 4 Graham reminds us that in Judaism there is a “continuing speculation on the relationship between divine creation and human demiurgy” and traditionally, despite the accepted idea of the creation of an artificial man, Graham insists that it is understood that “humanity can never fully achieve the creation of life” (89). Essentially Graham is telling us that although Malkah, Avram, and Shira successfully create an artificial man, they do not successfully achieve creation of life because Yod is not fully human because Malkah, Avram, and Shira are not God.
I believe that Piercy would agree with this suggestion. In her novel, I think a major theme that is reinforced again and again is that technology, despite its great capabilities, is not the redeemer or even the protector of humanity. For example, if you are to consider several of the most major and catastrophic events in the novel—the Two Week War, the cyber-riots, the environmental devastation and the overall dystopic setting—they occur ultimately as the result of advances in science. Based on the way Piercy portrays technology and its contributing role in the degradation of humanity, it would make sense that, for Piercy, Yod does not symbolize a true creation of life in the same sense that God creates life, but rather the opposite. Yod is, as Graham suggests, a golem. He is an unfinished human because he has not been created in the likeness of God. So I would say that despite all urges that make us want to believe that Malkah, Avram, and Shira have created life in Yod, I think that Graham and Piercy would argue otherwise.
The concept of the golem and the many stories and examples used in chapter four of Graham’s book all point to different uses and reasons why the golem is created throughout religious and fictional texts. The essential theme that runs throughout all of them is that it is dangerous to play God. Piercy pretty much follows this same line of thought, that while it is intriguing to be able to create, one should not try to control life. To directly address the question of Malkah, Avram, and Shira, it appears they created life in the sense that Yod is a self-aware entity, but on the other hand as Malkah says, “Yod was a mistake. . . The creation of a conscious being as any kind of tool – supposed to exist only to fill our needs – is a disaster” (Piercy). They indeed achieved creation, but to the point of ethics and morality, should Yod have ever been created. The answer is always no, because at the base it always brings about ethical dilemmas. In this case Yod having to choose an unfair end, because he was created as a means to an end, that end being to succumb to his human creator’s purpose for making him, which was to be used as a weapon. As they state in the text they feel extremely guilty for creating Yod, as they should. This is simply another example of why we should not dabble in the creation of life, because it is in itself unnatural, and ultimately will always lead to immoral and unethical uses.
Piercy’s novel constantly reinforces the negativity of attempting to play God, from the Y-S multi always wanting to be in control to the creation of golems/cyborgs/robots. I believe that this novel emphasizes that the more you attempt to play God the less you actually achieve. I completely agree with Miller and James, in that 1. technology is not the protector of man (but a lot of the time brings about the destruction of man) and 2. Avam, Malkah, and Shira may have helped bring Yod to an acceptable level of humanity, but he is still not human (rather, he is both something more and something less). With the references to Frankenstein and the disaster of too much control, it’s a clear statement that humans should not meddle in the creation of life, as using technology to “one up God” never seems to turn out well.