The demiurgic power of natural and artificial languages in Galatea, by Emily Short

Abstract

 The Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, from which many intertexts in fine arts, drama, literature and audiovisual works derive, has crossed ages, languages and media in its potencies of meaning. Marked by themes as the love between creator and creature, the demiurgic power of artistic creation, and the motive power of desire, the story of the artist who falls in love with a sculpture to the point of giving it life is a recurrent motif in horror, sci-fi and in other genres that involve art and technology. Among other actualizations of this myth, special attention should be given to the electronic work of interactive fiction Galatea, by Emily Short (2000), as a computer program in which the reader/user interacts with a textual interface to converse with a character that stands for Pygmalion’s beloved one. In that process, each new input typed by the reader/user triggers an unexpected reply or action by the digital interlocutor. Thereby the statue comes progressively alive in this dialogue, as the desire to read the text also becomes the desire to see her move, answer, take stances. Considering this piece of interactive fiction, a genre of electronic literature that has still been little studied by scholars in Brazil, this paper aims to analyze the demiurgic power taken by natural language and programming code when, together, they give life to Galatea through dialogue. To do so, we herein use references on the relations between human and machinal semiosis (Hayles, 2005), on interactive fiction as a genre within electronic literature (Montfort, 2005), and on the role of natural and artificial languages in the creation of golems and other automata (Nazario & Nascimento, 2004).