Galatea End

“It’s all such a verbal wanking off.”

The ending of this novel created a spawn of unsettling questions that have cause me to rethink to some degree the point of education and what is its active role beyond the analysis.

If this is true what is the real point of studying literature.  If education is an elitist form that traps those educated in  a bubble of their own theory, have we distanced ourselves from the reality of humanity? Have we thought that our analysis of the human condition and society given us the tools to recreate it?  And what does it mean to create something?

At the beginning of this novel when Lentz and Powers where planning on creating the prototype of the human cognition, and how it was supposed to be in some was the “perfect” replication of the human mind; I couldn’t help think about our own creation myth and what it really means.  The dominant creation myth of our society is that we where created in God’s image, and in this novel some how we are playing God.  Now this forces me to ask two questions.

If we are created in God’s image then as a replica of him does that make us in fact God?

And if we then take on the role of God as the closest manifestation of this being is everything that we create therefore some image of ourselves? War machines, Capitalism

And if according to Hutcheon, our modes of articulation, media, art, literature are all self reflexive are they two an image of us, and what does it mean to study our selves.  We even have different dominant ways in which to describe ourselves.

Through all of this self reflexivity  are we just recycling old ideas and notions the same ontological and epistemological questions that have plagued our idea of existence?