LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.
Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut
In the two months since my February blog, my primary engagement with universals has been my response to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s influential argument against emotion universals. I articulated this response in a plenary talk I delivered remotely at a conference on “Predicting Emotion.” I refer interested readers to the recorded talk, which is available via Youtube at https://youtu.be/lA8TBF908PU ; the section on Barrett begins about ten minutes and fifty seconds into the talk and continues to the end.
In addition, there are two topics that I have not been able to research myself, but that perhaps one or another reader will be able to take up. The first concerns automata. In preparation for a conference on Artificial Intelligence, I was reading Artificial Intelligence For Dummies by Mueller, Massaron, and Diamond, when I came upon the following passage: “You find examples of automata in Europe throughout the ancient Greek civilization, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modern times. . . . Automata weren’t exclusive to Europe. In the Middle East, many designs were created by the mathematician and inventor Al-Jazari (see tinyurl.com/e7yjh557 for details) and in Asia, China and Japan also developed their own versions of automata” (226-227).
I suspect that every cultural tradition has included at least some people—often, the majority—who have drawn a conceptual distinction between the body and the soul, positing an immaterial being that constitutes the “self” in addition to the material being that is somehow housing that immaterial self and in some manner expressing its intentions. Moreover, as injury and death apply most clearly to the body, I would imagine that all cultures also include some people who view the immaterial self as immortal, and therefore as separable from the body. If this is true, then it should not be surprising that both the immaterial and material components of the person can appear and exist on their own. In other words, once it is possible to have ghosts, it ought to be possible to have zombies also.
Of course, automata are not precisely zombies, though both are purely material beings, lacking a soul. I take it that the difference is that zombies are bodies that have arisen naturally (i.e., through human sexual reproduction), though the continuation of some degree of animacy (however minimal) without a soul is definitely unnatural. Automata, in contrast, are inventions, mechanical imitations of humans, created by humans. (They may also require empirically ascertainable, physicalistic causal sequences explaining their behavior, if we wish to exclude magically animated human creations—such as Golems—from the class of automata.) Logically speaking, automata may imitate human souls as well as human bodies, which is to say, they can apparently manifest intentions (such as trying to be helpful) as well as more obviously (merely) mechanical—or robotic–behaviors (such as walking). In other words, they may be taken to manifest a soul (i.e., a subjective self—think HAL in 2001).
In connection with the last point, Lalita Hogan reminds me that, in his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud quotes the “undoubtedly . . . correct” observation by Jentsch that “In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” (132). Freud goes on to stress, instead, the castration complex and, what is more promising, the idea of the “double” (the topic of an earlier blog at this site, available here), as well as other, standard psychoanalytic motifs, and residual, childhood attitudes to death. In addition to the doubtful character of psychoanalytic explanation, a problem with Freud’s essay is that he relies so heavily on his own intuitions as to what counts as uncanny. I see this as a problem because I am unsure that Freud has isolated a genuinely singular or unified phenomenon. Despite this, some of his inferences are quite plausible, even illuminating—for example, the idea that we have an “uncanny” feeling when we encounter some coincidence that appears to verify a childhood superstition that we think of ourselves as having outgrown (but are still inclined to accept), or the observation that even when we are certain that a story has elicited a specific emotion for us, we do not automatically and infallibly know just what aspects of the story gave rise to that emotion.
It is striking that, decades after Freud’s essay, Masahiro Mori published some informal observations and hypotheses on automata, maintaining that people’s sense of affinity with an automaton increases with increases in the human-like appearance of the automaton—until a point when the resemblance becomes “uncanny.” (Mori was writing in Japanese and presumably did not intend to allude to Freud.) At this point, people’s sense of affinity plummets. It then increases again as the automaton becomes virtually indistinguishable from a living person. Mori conjectures that this entire phenomenon is due to the uncanny automata resembling the dead rather than the living, our affinity for a corpse normally being much less than our affinity for a living person. Mori maintains that this reduction is intensified when the corpse (or some non-living part of a body, such as a prosthetic hand) moves in a way that we expect only living beings to move. In keeping with these points, Mori identifies automata with zombies at the nadir of the “uncanny valley” (as he christens the decline in affinity). There is an extensive literature on the “uncanny valley” hypothesis, both theoretical and empirical, with some writers supporting the claim and others disputing or modifying it. On the whole, however, the evidence for an effect along these lines seems strong and some version of the hypothesis appears to be widely accepted.
The cross-cultural interest inspired not only by souls, but by zombies and automata, raises several empirical questions about the distribution of these properties, which some reader may wish to explore, possibly setting out his or her findings on this website. These questions would include the following (confining ourselves to genetically and areally distinct traditions, though also allowing for the qualifications enumerated in the article on “Areal Distinctness,” available here):
1) How widely attested is a belief in soul-body dualism?
2) How widely attested is a belief in ghosts?
3) How widely attested are zombies (in the sense given above)?
4) How widely attested are automata (also in the sense given above)? (This may be split into two questions if the automaton/golem distinction seems significant in light of the data.)
5) In traditions where ghosts and/or zombies and/or automata (and/or golems) appear, do they regularly appear in a certain order historically (e.g., ghosts, then zombies, then automata) or with characteristic frequency (e.g., a lot of ghosts, but few zombies and very rare automata)?
6) Are there particular historical or social conditions that increase the likelihood that one or more will appear in the relevant cultural tradition?
7) What sorts of stories are told about each group (e.g., are zombies always threatening and automata routinely ambiguous as to whether or not they have inner, subjective experience)?
These and other questions could potentially serve as the basis for an engaging and informative research paper or even part of a dissertation, if only there were some students and faculty in relevant disciplines who had some interest in what makes people similar, instead of focusing all their attention on how groups (putatively) differ.
After reading an earlier version of this blog, Nigel Fabb reminded me that Pascal Boyer had addressed the issue of ghosts and zombies. As Boyer points out, “Zombies are animated corpses,” who do not have “intentions and goals” (Minds Make Societies 94-95). Boyer’s particular focus is on how such imaginative creations preserve all the default properties of the corresponding real objects, except for the one that is explicitly denied. Thus, zombies have all the properties of people—they are solid objects, located in a single place at any one time; they walk in (about) the way people walk, and so on—except they do not “control their own actions” (Religion Explained 73). These points are certainly valid and interesting. But they leave aside the issue of the relative frequency of such imaginative creations as zombies. They also do not touch on the issue of whether the narratives in which such imaginations appear diverge in some systematic way, telling different types of stories. In short, Boyer’s insights raise questions about the functional significance of zombies—as well as ghosts and automata—questions that, like the questions raised by Freud, Mori, and others, may be clarified and perhaps even answered, at least in a preliminary way, through literary study.
A second topic for possible research is the Medea revenge motif, where a mother kills her children to punish their father—a motif most famously associated with Euripides, but which has fascinated later European artists from Seneca to Lars von Trier, as well as postcolonial and minority writers such as Cherríe Moraga (see her 1995 The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea). I was intrigued to read of the motif recurring in Chikamatsu’s Kagekiyo Victorious, despite the fact that “Chikamatsu never read a foreign play, and he knew nothing of the theater outside his country [Japan]” (Keene 1). Does this motif turn up elsewhere? If so, what might explain this?
When we first put together the Literary Universals Project, I had hoped that the website would foster these sorts of suggestions for future research. Finally, I decided that instead of complaining—okay, in addition to complaining–that no one was posting possible topics for research, I would post a couple of possibilities myself.
Works Cited
Boyer, Pascal. Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2018.
Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion. Ed. Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper& Row, 1958, 122-161.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Emotion Elicitation, Prediction, and Anti-Universalism: Some Prolegomena to Emotional AI.” Plenary presentation for the Conference on Predicting Feeling: Literature, Neuroscience, and AI. Claremont McKenna College, 21 February 2025. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8TBF908PU .
Keene, Donald. “Introduction.” Major Plays of Chikamatsu. Trans., Donald Keene. New York: Columbis UP, 1990.
Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Trans. Karl MacDorman and Norri Kageki. IEEE Spectrum (12 June 2012). Available at https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-uncanny-valley .
Mueller, John, Luca Massaron, and Stephanie Diamond. Artificial Intelligence For Dummies. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2025. Kindle Edition.