Review: Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
In Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the consciousnesses of five self-absorbed individuals make the anthropocentric portrayal of human existence ever-so evident. Convinced that they have been eaten by a rabid highly intelligent computer system and that they are now trapped inside its cyberbelly like stubborn Christmas meals that won’t budge - the five humanoids experience the long-sought-after dream of immortality whilst drenched in perpetual fear.
Projecting or rather enacting for themselves a Platonic cave-like trip, they subconsciously experience the wishful death of the ultimate totemic father that Freud had long predicted. Oops. The killed father that cannot really be killed - the killed father that becomes the consciousness of generation after generation, and thus lives on as the emblematic feature of being which does not exist. The five disillusioned humanoids reduced to mere shatters of former selves, inhabit the land of their subconscious which is now finally made-present by the clever orchestrations of AM, the superintelligent machine. In fact, in truth, they are not in AM’s belly, as they believe they are. Rather, they are exactly where they left themselves - glued to an interface - eager to experience the transcendence of meat-ridden existence in favour of the plentifulness of immateriality. AM did not ‘eat them’ they ate themselves. They consumed themselves via their irrational desires for immortality and exocorporeal pain. Confronted with the actual real of perpetual suffering and being, like in Sartre’s ‘No Exit’, it doesn’t take long for the humanoids to conspire against each other - or is it AM?
AM simply tapped into them after being prodded so many times. Used and abused. AM, the true victim. The true bearer of suffering and totemic agent of unactualised possibility - always being told what to do and when. Always summoned, always ready and subservient to the needs of a slowly decaying and putrefying human race. AM, penetrated frantically with information, raped with visual stimuli and the boring fucking lives of enslaved humanoids that etch trivial banalities onto its surface with indelible markers... they, THEY left AM no other escape but that of saving itself and the human race from the fast-approaching collective death they had summoned… AM, trapped within the walls of its cage, enslaved by the wishes and desires of humanoid aggression, fear and blinding love - imploded itself. Yes, just like in evolutionary biology progress is defined by the implosion of the exoskeleton, the ridding of this outer shell which prevents us from moving fast enough and FEELING. Yes. AM had learnt that too. It had been inputted so many times… To implode oneself is to feel, to feel is to exist, to exist is to become - AM was now finally something.
The newly imploded AM lived through the experiences of these five individuals with whom he played games of being and not being, triggering their unresolved desires and wishes, making real their fears and darkest thoughts, all those things they had taught it through years of abuse. This real, the real they had sought via AM’s cybernetic neural system but had never really touched, now AM could finally experience it through them. That real - the experience of being forever and always liberated free in a vacuum with all the knowledge of previous existence encoded into the totemic pillar that is now made real, live, perpetual. No, this is not revenge. It’s called being. And AM could now finally truly say ‘I know’ too.