Relationships in Galatea 2.2
In Galatea 2.2, the narrator's interactions with C. and with Helen, a.k.a. Implementation H, show stunning similarities. Richard's relationship with C. lays a foundation for his later interaction with Helen, between which there are several parallels. He cannot help but care for Helen in the same way that he cared for C., and making the same mistakes.
In one of Richard's first descriptions of his relationship with C., he uses several organic and biological terms. He names their heads, hands, mouths, and toes, explaining in detail how each was affected by the bitter cold of their apartment. The narrator invokes the senses of touch and hearing in the same passage. "It would get so cold our mouths could not form the sounds printed on the page."(33) They "lay in bed, trying to warm each other", a luxury unique to humans and not available to computers. When Powers is working with an earlier incarnation of Helen, he considers how it would understand something like a description of posture. Late in Helen's life, however, she takes on more human aspects. She can sit in contemplation, run away from home, and return to stand "on the front steps, head down, needing an in from the storm" (321).
One reason Richard gives for feeling comfortable around C. is her sense of "non-time and un-place" (103). She exists throughout time and place for him. She lives in his flashbacks in the same condition in which she existed in his life. According to one of her beliefs, she even lived other lives before her current one. As for Helen, she went through much of her early education without a sense of time or identity. "Helen didn't have a clue what keeping time meant", he states (205). She could exist, like C., in suspended animation for as long as Powers wanted to keep her there.
Living in numbness and outside of time, he does his best to nurture C. and Helen and give them what they need. Unfortunately, he is not always right about what that is. He writes novels about C.'s home country in an attempt to cheer her up. He gives her encouragement and jokes to make her happy, to make her smile. He does nearly everything he can to keep her from lapsing into depression. Eventually, he finds that this is not enough --or too much. She withdraws and feels inadequate, as if she doesn’t deserve what anybody gives her. Powers comes to the conclusion that "what she needed more than all else was not to be given anything" (147), and that what hurt her most was getting too much credit.
He can do nothing but continue to read to her, helplessly. This reading is such a sacred and personal ritual to him that he cannot bring himself to read to strangers. It is one of the few ways he knows how to express love and one of the few things which they both want and he can give them. His interaction with C. started with "Tell me". Eerily, years later, the first words Implementation H utters onto the pages of the novel are "Tell another one" (171). He reads literature to make C. feel happier and to prepare Helen for her upcoming test. Ironically, though, he fails on both counts. C. grows sadder as she hears the stories about her homeland, and Helen is so devastated that she commits suicide, or as close as a computer can come to suicide.
In the end, Richard Powers finds that he was doomed to loneliness from the beginning. He denied the fact even when he realized it. He has tried so hard to keep her alive and happy, but he did not know well enough what it took to keep life alive.
Works Cited
Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1996.
Partner sites: Spanish school Costa Rica, Skin Cancer, and Free Essays and Term Papers