Anyway, great post! You covered a lot in here and I really like your point about Helen and the fictional pieces vs. the news segment. We hadn’t talked about that (that I remember anyway), but it’s interesting that she knew the difference between the two. I was impressed throughout the novel with how much she picked up on and your point about her awareness with the news only reinforces that. One of Helen’s weaknesses is that she can’t handle the harsh reality of our world so she shuts down, setting her apart from humans because we continue (most of us, anyway) to go on and live our lives even after something horrific has happened.

As you so nicely put it:

Powers was constantly feeding Helen literature, some of which had to contain tragedy of some sort. But this has no effect on Helen, this is the brand of transhistorical party which is contained by some sort of literary device, thus making it more acceptable. However, when Helen gets fed the stories of actual human behavior, like the road rage incident, this horrifies her because it is not contained in a story, but is actual human behavior.

As I interpret what you’ve written, this speaks directly to the pomo examination of the inaccessibility of reality through literature. Something about its manufacture – at least in the traditional canon read to Helen – insulates the neural net from the reality of our species’ horrific tendencies. This makes me wonder if, subconsciously, narrative was initially devised with limitations in mind, designed NOT to be real. Using the imagination to work out human issues through fairytales and myths eliminates the repulsion.

This idea contradicts aspirations of modernism to perfect the form and access the real, yet culture always seems to shift from that which is mastered toward that which is not. Once story is perfected in its non-reality, cultural desire moves toward capturing the real. We’ve moved from the myths of creation to historical and scientific documentation – believing that real. From there, in our failure to access reality, we are left with the postmodern examination of fictive form.

So, where does Helen’s deadly literature in form of journalism fall within the grand scheme of things? I would say it is historical documentation, which we know, regardless of factual reporting, is always limited in presenting all sides. A recent and popular example would be the pictures of blacks “looting” supermarkets in Louisiana after Katrina, as described in actual publication captions, is a far different interpretation than whites performing the same actions in the name of “survival.” I suppose this would mean that Helen, the machine, cannot interpret the difference, somehow taking the journalism as access to the real while we understand that it is not. In this very moment, I think I finally determined for myself the difference between human cognizance and mechanical processing.