Marge Piercy tackles a variety of subjects in He, She, and It, ranging from the constant sexual and violent undertones to the occasional barbs about how humans laid waste to their environment. The most prominent theme, and that for this week's discussion, was her inquiry into what is human. Using her parallel stories- the main storyline of the cyborg Yod created to protect the free town of Tikva and the historically told tale of the golem Joseph created to protect a Jewish ghetto- Piercy is able to confront multiple issues of what defines a human.
Shira Shipman integrates Yod into her family structure and wholly supports him as being just as human as her, but in a different way. Her reflections of Yod being programmed are always quickly followed by the logic that in a sense, humans too are programmed. This seems to be Piercy's primary justification for Yod being given the same privileges as the other citizens of the town and humans as a whole- that just as Yod is programmed to want to achieve certain goals, humans are programmed with goals such as those motherhood induce upon Shira. The golem Joseph has his own wants (his desire for Chava) but he is too obedient a creature to push the boundaries, or perhaps he is uncreated before he has a chance to. Are humans merely the biological equivalent of computers, programmed with our goals in our genes? It's certainly possible.
What I found most interesting were Piercy's gender roles. Truly violent tendencies are only attributed to male charactres- namely Avram, Joseph, Yod, and all of Yod's predecessors- while only female relationships are explored in depth. There are multiple female relationships explored, merely family as well as lesbian relationships and the entire colony of females living in The Black Zone. The clearest form of this opinion lies in the simple fact that Avram failed nine time with his cyborg projects because they were too violent and not personable enough. It was not until Malkah inflicted her female influence upon Yod's programming that the project was successful. Shira herself often speaks appreciatively of how feminine Yod's tendencies and goals were in their relationship.
Perhaps it is through this isolation of charactre traits- violence to men and relationships to women- that Piercy causes us to truly examine them and how all of these traits mesh to form humans.
I would like to note that Yod's one main un-human characteristic (technical specifications aside) is his complete lack of a need to further his species. Rather, he "feels" the complete opposite goal of needing to ensure his race does NOT continue. I found this intriguing.
2 comments:
I think that's built into the fact that he isn't really a race or a species -- his whole purpose is to emulate humanity as closely as possible. Since becoming human is the realization of that goal, there isn't much sense to the idea of "Yod's species". He wants to be human; further generations of cyborgs which fail to achieve humanity would most likely be stagnation, rather than progress, in his eyes. Which begs an important question: does Yod consider himself superior to us? Probably not. I'll explore this in my blog post.
At the same time, if he is trying to "emulate humanity as closely as possible," he would need to take on our motivations and drives because these are a major part of what causes us to act the ways we do. And even if he couldn't see how cyborgs could become more human at the time, he couldn't rule out future cyborgs becoming so close to human that no difference could be found, especially with humans containing more and more mechanized parts themselves.
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