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Introduction: Memory after Humanism

In ‘The Preserving Machine’, an early Philip K. Dick story published in 1953, an unnamed narrator pays a visit to his friend, the rather implausibly named Doctor Labyrinth, who, ‘like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome’. At the dawn of the nuclear age, Labyrinth is concerned that the human race is about to annihilate itself, and that all the documents of civilization, the great works of art and literature, and especially music – ‘the most perishable of things, fragile and delicate’ – will be lost. If only there were some way to make music more resilient, better equipped to fend for itself. ‘If music could be transformed into living creatures’, Labyrinth says to himself, ‘animals with claws and teeth, then music might survive. If only a Machine could be built, a Machine to process musical scores into living forms.’ The only hope for the preservation of beauty and art after the collapse of Western civilization is to transform culture back into nature. Having at last found a laboratory willing to build his Preserving Machine – most are ‘much too busy with war contracts, of course’ – Labyrinth proceeds to feed the works of the great classical composers into it, transforming them into a series of outlandish creatures: a graceful Mozart bird, a ‘stern and dignified’ Beethoven beetle, a flock of golden Bach bugs ‘obtained for the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues’, and several others, including the silly, sheep-like Schubert animal, which soon falls prey to the fearsome Wagner animal. Evidently, not all of the animals are equipped to fend for themselves, and as Labyrinth quickly realizes, he has no control over the results: ‘It was out of his hands, subject to some strong, invisible law that had subtly taken over, and this worried him greatly’.