To Be a Machine?
Harriet Armstrong, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
Les Fugitives, 250pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781739778361
reviewed by Brynn Valentine
Who has more ease? The robot or the human? In her debut novel To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, Harriet Armstrong returns to this question again and again. The book — the longest release yet from Les Fugitives’ ‘quick brown fox’ collection, a line of English-language originals from a press known for French translations — brilliantly focuses on what it means to simulate emotions vs. to feel emotions. To live with the messy and the nuanced or to find solace in the scripted and rule-based. The story hinges on a first love–come–unrequited romantic experience, as the unnamed narrator — who describes herself as ‘a third year doing some vague multidisciplinary social science courses’ — quickly becomes fixated with the boy down the hall. This asymmetrical power dynamic, rooted in devotion, sets the novel on a path of relational uncertainty, emotional restraint, and an ongoing tension between mechanical detachment and human vulnerability.
In the early moments of meeting Luke, we learn that he’s undertaking a master’s in computer science. He therefore spends the majority of his time intimate with algorithms, computational analysis, and automation. To this, the narrator scoffs, unable to understand how this human, someone she has placed so high on a pedestal, would choose to spend his time studying something so restricted. This perception weaves throughout the novel. While working on the quantitative portion of her dissertation, plugging numbers into a program, she notes that computers seem ‘. . . stupid to me and even dull, they seemed very limited’.
Ironic — as, pages prior, she confessed that she and her best friend Anna were drawn to each other as they both feel like robots, ‘acting on [their] environments robotically, without real emotion or any kind of organic desire to engage’. That is, they feel unavoidably mechanical and methodical. Time and time again, the narrator’s analytical mind replays social interactions until they lose all meaning. As though ground down into a dull buzzing sound, impossible to interpret. Her approach to university mirrors this. With ease, she takes grand academic theories and dismembers them into bite-sized lessons, of which the reader enjoys the run-offs. She consumes knowledge as though her first language were binary, as if any information can be typed into her brain using the base-2 numeral system.
She is a smart girl. A capable girl, one who does not flinch at the thought of exams or essays. To her, they are formulaic, and if she just follows the patterns all will be fine. It’s the act of flirting, or the recognition of flirting, and the need to be familiar and expressive, that spirals her out of control. Her relationship with her body feels fragmented, too. Perhaps best described as somatic. She pokes and prods at the fleshy edges of herself as if it were a foreign object to study, rather than something to feel from within. Although it’s never fully declared, she seems to struggle with vaginismus — a medical condition that, like so many conditions linked to female health, is miserably under-studied, and consequently misunderstood. Does it stem from physical issues? Psychological stress? A mix of both? For the narrator and many women at large, we may never know. But I’m left with a lingering sense that she feels locked out from a part of herself.
In response, digital interfaces become integral to our narrator. They support her in overcoming shy thoughts and sexual inexperience. First, they function as a confessional. In one scene, she and Luke sit side by side in a dorm room, taking turns showing each other songs. At one point, she types into his phone artwork by Louise Bourgeois. The image of the piece matches its title, reading ‘I love you do you love me’ in red ink. Luke looks down at this, screenshots the work, and slides the phone back into his pocket. The words linger. She doesn’t bite down on their value. He doesn’t acknowledge their double meaning. She uses the computer to say what she cannot. This is the closest she’ll ever come to an overt declaration of love. The use of screens — in particular through dating apps — also proves helpful to exploring her relationship to sex. It doesn’t seem to really matter who the boy is to her; they are tools in the methodical process. Date after date is set up with a single goal: to lose her virginity. Safety, familiarity, and organic connection fall by the wayside. It’s a complicated process, born of frustration and naivety. As it unfolds, it feels like watching an athlete limp toward the finish line. When she finally stops running, we wonder if all the pain she’s unknowingly accumulating will be worth this ‘victory’.
It’s hard to say if this reliance on computers does her more harm than good: the words are left unsaid; the sex remains unsatisfying. And above it all is the sharp irony that, although she believes computers to be very dull and limited, they are the primary way in which she attempts to connect with people. Is this why she dislikes computers: because they mirror back what she rejects in herself? They’re a mechanical echo, like her declaration of love via a screen; they are calculated, automated, predictable and precise. All of which make for a very good worker in modernity. But where does that leave her in love? To claim she hates computers for their simplicity or limitation feels as though she’s claiming to hate her own mind for its inability to read between the lines.
So what is the solution to connecting with others? While computers speak in binary, humans speak in natural language. A person who feels like a robot needs a translator to bridge this gap. A computer scientist like Luke might decode impenetrable binary into readable text, into natural language. He does similar for our narrator, turning her dispassionate code into passionate sensation. His descriptions of love and devastation set her nerves on edge, as though she is experiencing them for herself. Before him, and without him, she declares: ‘I cannot feel.’ Under this relationship, life transitions from being an object to observe into something tactile in her mind.
In the process of creating a narrative of experiences through Luke, she projects an image of his selfhood in her mind. It’s a solitary practice. One in which she sits alone, conjuring up scenario after scenario about him. His feelings, anxieties, inclinations, and desires — but never outright asking him for his truth. It’s something many people are guilty of doing, myself included. The object of fixation becomes an instrument for self-flagellation, rather than a breathing person to know and to love.
In the closing pages, when so much of her and Luke’s intimacy has unravelled, the narrator declares: ‘We would never know each other. We would never reach each other.’ He was in many ways a tool to feel closer to the fleshy, intimate social world: an interpreter to find common ground. But when he is gone (dodging text messages and missing calls), the access he gave her vanishes too. It’s as though there is no decoder to bring the narrative to heel. She is returned to that still moment in life, before the translator came along and she has yet to learn the language.
In the early moments of meeting Luke, we learn that he’s undertaking a master’s in computer science. He therefore spends the majority of his time intimate with algorithms, computational analysis, and automation. To this, the narrator scoffs, unable to understand how this human, someone she has placed so high on a pedestal, would choose to spend his time studying something so restricted. This perception weaves throughout the novel. While working on the quantitative portion of her dissertation, plugging numbers into a program, she notes that computers seem ‘. . . stupid to me and even dull, they seemed very limited’.
Ironic — as, pages prior, she confessed that she and her best friend Anna were drawn to each other as they both feel like robots, ‘acting on [their] environments robotically, without real emotion or any kind of organic desire to engage’. That is, they feel unavoidably mechanical and methodical. Time and time again, the narrator’s analytical mind replays social interactions until they lose all meaning. As though ground down into a dull buzzing sound, impossible to interpret. Her approach to university mirrors this. With ease, she takes grand academic theories and dismembers them into bite-sized lessons, of which the reader enjoys the run-offs. She consumes knowledge as though her first language were binary, as if any information can be typed into her brain using the base-2 numeral system.
She is a smart girl. A capable girl, one who does not flinch at the thought of exams or essays. To her, they are formulaic, and if she just follows the patterns all will be fine. It’s the act of flirting, or the recognition of flirting, and the need to be familiar and expressive, that spirals her out of control. Her relationship with her body feels fragmented, too. Perhaps best described as somatic. She pokes and prods at the fleshy edges of herself as if it were a foreign object to study, rather than something to feel from within. Although it’s never fully declared, she seems to struggle with vaginismus — a medical condition that, like so many conditions linked to female health, is miserably under-studied, and consequently misunderstood. Does it stem from physical issues? Psychological stress? A mix of both? For the narrator and many women at large, we may never know. But I’m left with a lingering sense that she feels locked out from a part of herself.
In response, digital interfaces become integral to our narrator. They support her in overcoming shy thoughts and sexual inexperience. First, they function as a confessional. In one scene, she and Luke sit side by side in a dorm room, taking turns showing each other songs. At one point, she types into his phone artwork by Louise Bourgeois. The image of the piece matches its title, reading ‘I love you do you love me’ in red ink. Luke looks down at this, screenshots the work, and slides the phone back into his pocket. The words linger. She doesn’t bite down on their value. He doesn’t acknowledge their double meaning. She uses the computer to say what she cannot. This is the closest she’ll ever come to an overt declaration of love. The use of screens — in particular through dating apps — also proves helpful to exploring her relationship to sex. It doesn’t seem to really matter who the boy is to her; they are tools in the methodical process. Date after date is set up with a single goal: to lose her virginity. Safety, familiarity, and organic connection fall by the wayside. It’s a complicated process, born of frustration and naivety. As it unfolds, it feels like watching an athlete limp toward the finish line. When she finally stops running, we wonder if all the pain she’s unknowingly accumulating will be worth this ‘victory’.
It’s hard to say if this reliance on computers does her more harm than good: the words are left unsaid; the sex remains unsatisfying. And above it all is the sharp irony that, although she believes computers to be very dull and limited, they are the primary way in which she attempts to connect with people. Is this why she dislikes computers: because they mirror back what she rejects in herself? They’re a mechanical echo, like her declaration of love via a screen; they are calculated, automated, predictable and precise. All of which make for a very good worker in modernity. But where does that leave her in love? To claim she hates computers for their simplicity or limitation feels as though she’s claiming to hate her own mind for its inability to read between the lines.
So what is the solution to connecting with others? While computers speak in binary, humans speak in natural language. A person who feels like a robot needs a translator to bridge this gap. A computer scientist like Luke might decode impenetrable binary into readable text, into natural language. He does similar for our narrator, turning her dispassionate code into passionate sensation. His descriptions of love and devastation set her nerves on edge, as though she is experiencing them for herself. Before him, and without him, she declares: ‘I cannot feel.’ Under this relationship, life transitions from being an object to observe into something tactile in her mind.
In the process of creating a narrative of experiences through Luke, she projects an image of his selfhood in her mind. It’s a solitary practice. One in which she sits alone, conjuring up scenario after scenario about him. His feelings, anxieties, inclinations, and desires — but never outright asking him for his truth. It’s something many people are guilty of doing, myself included. The object of fixation becomes an instrument for self-flagellation, rather than a breathing person to know and to love.
In the closing pages, when so much of her and Luke’s intimacy has unravelled, the narrator declares: ‘We would never know each other. We would never reach each other.’ He was in many ways a tool to feel closer to the fleshy, intimate social world: an interpreter to find common ground. But when he is gone (dodging text messages and missing calls), the access he gave her vanishes too. It’s as though there is no decoder to bring the narrative to heel. She is returned to that still moment in life, before the translator came along and she has yet to learn the language.