Posthuman Becoming Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Science Fiction 1527588505, 9781527588509

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Posthuman Becoming Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Science Fiction

Posthuman Becoming Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Science Fiction By

Zhang Na

Posthuman Becoming Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Science Fiction By Zhang Na This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Zhang Na All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8850-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8850-9

CONTENTS

Preface ...................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... xi Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Introduction The Selection Criteria of the Research.................................................. 3 The Framework of the Research ........................................................... 6 Literature Review ................................................................................. 8 Ursula K. Le Guin and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) ............. 8 Ian Watson and The Jonah Kit (1975) ........................................... 15 Iain Banks and The Bridge (1986)................................................. 19 Richard Powers and Galatea 2.2 (1995) ....................................... 25 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 32 Narrative in Science Fiction and Posthuman(ism) Narrative in Science Fiction................................................................ 34 The Literature of Metamorphosis ....................................................... 43 The Geneology of Posthumanism ....................................................... 58 The Dawn of Posthuman: Anti-humanism .................................... 60 The Morning of Posthuman: Non-humanism ................................ 63 The Heyday of Posthuman: Inhumanism ...................................... 66 The Posthumanist Becoming (-other) ................................................. 73 Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 84 Posthuman Myth: Genesis and Apocalypse Non-Oedipus––Mythmaking in The Left Hand of Darkness .............. 88 The Inhuman Myth––Afterlife and Apocalypse in The Jonah Kit ...... 98 Galatea and Pygmalion––Interposthumanization in Galatea 2.2 ...... 108 The Barbarian Myth––Myth of the Id in The Bridge ........................ 118

vi

Contents

Chapter Four ........................................................................................... 126 Posthuman Memory: Being a Human Omission of Memory––The Strategy of Erasure in The Left Hand of Darkness.................................................................................. 130 Somatic Memory––Memory Translated in The Jonah Kit................ 139 Overwhelmed by the Past––Involuntary Memory in Galatea 2.2 .... 148 Memory of the Amnesia––Memory as Dream in The Bridge ........... 159 Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 176 Posthuman Metamorphosis: Becoming Posthuman Becoming-woman––Intersubjectivity and Involution in The Left Hand of Darkness ........................................................................ 180 Becoming-animal––Language and Music in The Jonah Kit ............. 191 Becoming-machine––Mimesis and Co-evolution in Galatea 2.2 ..... 202 Becoming-earth––Multiplicity of Becoming-imperceptibles in The Bridge ............................................................................... 213 Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 225 Posthuman Mortality: Redemption for Humanity Estraven’s Suicide––Posthuman’s Patriotism in The Left Hand of Darkness.................................................................................. 229 Jonah Whale’s Suicide––Posthuman’s Answer in The Jonah Kit .... 236 Helen’s Self-eradication––Posthuman Unbound in Galatea 2.2 ...... 243 Death in the Dream––Posthuman Resurrected in The Bridge ........... 250 Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 258 Posthuman Space: Emergence of Pattern The Tai Chi Spatial Pattern in The Left Hand of Darkness ............... 261 The Symbiotic Trinity Pattern in The Jonah Kit ............................... 277 The Recursive Mirror Labyrinth in Galatea 2.2 ............................... 287 The Chinese-Box Pattern in The Bridge ........................................... 298 Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 312 Conclusion Posthuman Narrative––Mythical and Apocalyptic; Embodied and Embedded ............................................................................. 313 Posthuman Narrative and Science Fiction––Reactive Nihilism........ 320 Posthuman Narrative and Posthumanism––Beyond Dualism ........... 325 Towards a Posthuman Becoming Narrative ...................................... 327 Works Cited ............................................................................................ 334

PREFACE To narrate is to become. To some degree, narrative exemplifies posthumanism by its lack of self-maintenance intention and self-evolves through readers’ readings so that it forges beneficial relations with others. In the logic of reactive nihilism, the posthuman narrative is a detour of humanity. One of the common concerns of science fiction is to discover or construct an alien world cognitively estranged from the present human one. Nonetheless, science fiction usually ends in the negation of this imagined world in the protagonist’s return to the former world. Science fiction is in consequence also a detour of reactive nihilism to this world. Bearing analogous logic of affirmation through double negation, the genre of science fiction is naturally apt for the posthuman narrative, and has been impregnated with a multitude of posthuman stories in the presentation of the corporeal metamorphosis ever since the first of its kind, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Posthuman narrative is embodied of the world and embedded in the world in a Deleuzian becoming-other manner, denying the transcendental illusion of immortality, through separating the mind from the body, held ever since the Enlightenment. Due to new developments in human society, the age of the internet has witnessed the renaissance of the transcendental illusion of immortality. Following the embodied and embedded becomingother principle, four contemporary Anglophone posthuman narratives in science fiction are selected to explore the meta-narrative of posthuman in the mode of posthuman becoming. There are common narrative concerns among the four narratives in science fiction, namely the posthuman myth, the posthuman memory, the posthuman metamorphosis and the posthuman mortality. Moreover, the posthuman narratives investigated in this study are densely embedded in a form of framing narrative with the emergence of the non-human spatial pattern independent of any individual perspective. The posthuman myth is embodied and embedded in the Western mythological context, as can be seen in the Gethen mythmaking in The Left Hand of Darkness, the posthuman appropriation of the Biblical Jonah story

viii

Preface

in The Jonah Kit, and the Greek mythological story of Galatea and Pygmalion in Galatea 2.2, as well as the revision of Greek mythological stories with the intrusion of the Barbarian in The Bridge. Posthuman myth is the pastiche, parody or revision of the Western central myth. As a tool for the posthuman’s survival, the posthuman myth narrative is deployed to elucidate the posthuman becoming’s non-Oedipal origin. The posthuman memory is not fabricated in a disembodied manner; rather, it is intimately based on the posthuman’s embodied and embedded pre-experience as a human being before metamorphosis, as can be seen in the erased memory in The Left Hand of Darkness, the translated memory in The Jonah Kit, the repeated memory in Galatea 2.2 and the displaced memory in The Bridge. This memory with a different embodiment and embedding is often traumatic and harsh for the posthuman to recollect; however, for becoming, the memory of being is remembered to forget, hence the achievement of the first fold of negation in the activist nihilism. The posthuman metamorphosis is the very process of the becoming posthuman in various embodied and embedded becoming-others such as the becoming-woman in The Left Hand of Darkness, the becoming-animal in The Jonah Kit, the becoming-machine in Galatea 2.2, and the becomingearth in The Bridge. By bringing elements of the other into the body of the self, the self is otherized to blur the boundary between the self and the other to collapse the humanist thinking of dualism, hence the retrieval of the agency back to the dynamic flow of vitality beyond any artificially imposed boundaries. The posthuman mortality is the climax of the posthuman becoming narrative, which releases the strongest generative vitality for the next cycle of life in a becoming-imperceptible manner rather than being obsessed with the immortality of this being. Resonating with the archetype of winter in the seasonal schema, the posthuman mortality narrative is permeated with the apocalyptic hope for the redemption of the chaotic human world through the posthuman’s self-sacrifice as a scapegoat, as can be seen in Estraven’s suicide in The Left Hand of Darkness, Jonah whale’s self-extinction in The Jonah Kit, Helen’s self-eradication in Galatea 2.2 and the old swordsman’s replacement by the young swordsman in The Bridge. Raising the point of view to grander posthumanist proportions, narrative spatial patterns emerge and are thereby independent of an individual being’s

Posthuman Becoming Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Science Fiction

ix

viewpoint. Any single person, be it the character or the narrator, is dwarfed to an imperceptible molecule, and this zoomed-out perspective leaves the human witness to an abandoned existence like a face drawn on the beach erased by nonhuman forces. On a nonhuman scale, from a nonhuman perspective and in a becoming-other manner, the emergent spatial patterns automatically relate their story independent of detailed plots, conveying the theme on a structural level. The Taoism Tai Chi spatial pattern expresses a balanced view between two opposites in The Left Hand of Darkness. The trinity pattern calls for an aspired smoothness of translation in The Jonah Kit. The recursive mirror pattern suggests the obsession in the self in an endless self-projection in Galatea 2.2. The Chinese-box spatial pattern indicates a fractured self into multiple layers with identical but distorted existences in The Bridge. To conclude, the posthuman becoming narrative is mythically and apocalyptically embodied and embedded. The posthuman life originates from myth. Bearing the memory of being a human, it embraces the becoming-other metamorphosis to construct an embodied and embedded posthuman existence. Moreover, the posthuman’s life in contemporary science fiction is ephemeral. It bravely ends itself in a self-extinction manner to embed in the perpetual becoming. The emergence of the embodied and embedded posthuman disrupts the humanist dichotomies by adding more hybrid subjects into the self/other opposition, and brings back the all-too-human humanity to the chaotic world of presence. This is, in essence, a performance in line with the very logic of reactive nihilism. Moreover, the Anglophone posthuman becoming narrative in the 20th century is less satisfied in the aspect of human-posthuman relations. Even in the latter half of the 20th century, albeit there appeared embodied and embedded posthuman characters and posthuman perspectives, there was a rather limited quantity of posthuman becoming narratives. As a result, such narratives formed a minority compared with the large quantity of human narratives. In the past century, the posthuman’s extinction was narrated merely from the human’s perspective, and was indeed a combination of selfdestruction and destruction. For the narcissistic human subject, it is after all unthinkable that life should go on without his own vital being there. Following the instinct of self-maintenance, the human majority annihilates the newly emerged posthuman minority in the same manner of dealing with

x

Preface

the other. In other words, the demarcation between the self and the other does not disappear: rather, it transfers to the new self and the new other. Therefore, the posthuman becoming narrative in the latter half of the twentieth century guaranteed a detour to humanity against the impact upon the subjectivity imposed by the rapidly changing information society. Rather than posing a threat to the human’s existence, the posthuman in these narratives plays the role of savior or scapegoat making a redemptive sacrifice for the human and bringing the all-too-human posthumanist humanity to make the human become better embodied and embedded in this world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Upon accomplishing the writing of the research, memories of the writing trajectory come back to me. Be saturated with warm encouragement and support as well as rigorous guidance and query from mentors and peers, the path of writing is bittersweet: bitter in the process of solitude academic research, and sweet in the feedback of unexpected approbation. I am indebted to my supervisor, Professor Fang Kairui, for his resolution in accepting me as his first PhD candidate. I have benefited a lot from his high criteria of the reading scope and the language quality, as well as his conscientious and scrupulous supervision, without which my research would be a very different piece of writing, shallower in depth and narrower in scope. Thanks to Professor Liu Yan, Professor Wang Yougui and Professor Peng Baoliang for their valuable pieces of advice and suggestions on the development of the whole research, where my enthusiasm for the research is preserved and further sparked. Also, I would like to convey my sincere gratitude to my family and thank them for providing me with a tranquil and serene environment in which to embed myself to contemplate. Last but not least, I want to express my sincere appreciation for the lighthouse of this research, Professor Sherryl Vint, for her professional suggestions within the field of science fiction and techno culture studies. Professor Vint introduced me to an embodied and embedded view of posthuman study, contributing to the possibility of this research to participate in the contemporary worldwide posthumanism and science fiction dialogue.

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

Science fiction as a serious form of literature can be traced back to the British female writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) telling the story of a grotesque yet sentient creature made in a blasphemous scientific experiment in the epoch of Enlightenment in Britain. Ever since then, stimulated by the accelerated progress of science and technology, science fiction has gained momentum and flourished in the Western world as a narrative projection and reflection of science and technology in humanity and social aspects. Particularly since the latter half of the 20th century, though science fiction has largely remained in the sphere of genre literature, quite a few postmodern writers whose works have become canonic in postmodern literature as well as in science fiction have overwhelmingly embraced it. Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985) are definitely among the list. Domestically, science fiction has also developed rapidly. In 2015 and 2016, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008) and Hao Jingfang’s novella Folding Beijing, both translated by the Asian American science fiction author Ken Liu, won Hugo Awards successively, manifesting a worldwide acceptance and

Chapter One

2

recognition of Chinese science fiction’s progress. Compared with the rapid growth of Chinese science fiction, domestic science fiction studies fall farther back and should step up to engage in the international techno cultural dialogue. The most updated theoretical perspective in science fiction studies is undoubtedly posthumanism. Nowadays, what preoccupies our daily life is the predominant truth that we are more closely related to non-human elements than human counterparts; as can be seen in our daily experience in the unbearable absence of myopic lenses, mobile phones, laptops, or prostheses for the disabled, rather than in-depth human contacts with relatives, friends or colleagues. All of these experiences are in turn sufficiently self-evident to prove that the human body has been encroached and enhanced by non-human elements, particularly technical components previously seen as otherness. Posthumanism is the very theory exploring the consequences of such a corporeal metamorphosis that has definitely become part of our daily experience. This research engages in the most updated academic conversation by studying the posthuman narrative in four selected narratives in contemporary Anglophone science fiction representing various aspects of

the

posthuman

becoming-animal,

metamorphosis,

becoming-machine

namely and

becoming-woman,

becoming-earth.

The

correspondent narratives of these axes of becoming, or generally speaking, becoming-other, are the American female science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the British science fiction writer Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (1975), the American science fiction writer Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995), and the Scottish science fiction writer Iain Banks’ The Bridge (1986).

Introduction

Foregrounding

the

theme

of

3

posthumanism,

posthuman

metamorphosis with variations in the concrete axis of becoming, posthuman science fiction, particularly these four titles, bravely shoulders the mission of taking the challenge imposed by the present posthuman era. This posthuman challenge is ostensibly thornier than its postmodern predecessor for its revolutionary approach to the body and identity of the subject. The epic of posthuman life is composed through profoundly

exploring

the

posthuman

mythological

origin,

the

posthuman’s memory as being human, the posthuman’s metamorphosis as becoming-other, and the posthuman’s suicidal death for the redemption of the human, as well as the posthuman embedded narrative pattern of emergence. By abandoning or at least doubting the humanism legacy, these works courageously endorse the posthumanism framework as a way to establish a cosmological view by reconsidering man’s relationship with woman, animal, and machine, as well as the planet.

The Selection Criteria of the Research This research selects four narratives of science fiction written in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by the American female science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, the American male science fiction writer Richard Powers, the British male science fiction writer Ian Watson and the Scottish male science fiction writer Iain Banks respectively. The purpose of the study is to investigate the posthuman embodied and embedded narrative of Anglophone imaginations on the variety of posthuman becomings in the latter half of the 20th century. The four writers are, to some extent, representatives of the major voices in

Chapter One

4

different periods of Anglophone science fiction literature and known for their own specialties in dealing with different posthuman representations (e.g., Le Guin on the posthuman becoming-woman, Watson on the posthuman

becoming-animal,

Powers

on

the

posthuman

becoming-machine, and Banks on the posthuman becoming-earth). The four narratives in science fiction under discussion are typical posthuman narratives in science fiction and have been well received among literary critics. Hopefully, the combined study of these four narratives in science fiction from the perspective of the posthuman (and specifically, the posthuman life of becoming) will generate a balanced vision of the posthuman imagination in the latter half of the past century, with special reference to the process of embodied and embedded becomings of the posthuman life in contemporary technologically immersed society. Ursula K. Le Guin, Ian Watson, Iain Banks and Richard Powers are all major contemporary Anglophone science fiction writers whose works have won significant literary awards1 and gained popularity among both science fiction fans and mainstream readers. Moreover, they all make great contributions to the portrait of posthuman characters in their works to provide embodied and embedded conditions for the dwelling of the posthuman in contemporary narratives in science fiction and enjoy wider readerships as well as quite a few criticisms. In addition, they are all philosophically oriented science fiction writers, as not only do they adequately address the problem of becoming-posthuman, but they also 1

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) won both the Hugo Award (1979) and the Nebula Award (1970). Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (1975) won the 1977 BSFA (Best Science Fiction Award). Iain Banks’ The Bridge (1986) won the 1991 Kurd Lasswitz Prize. Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995) is a finalist of the 1995 National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

Introduction

make philosophical investigations of this problem by exploring the relations between human and posthuman in different social and historical contexts. In addition, they share a common view on the posthuman humanities, which is an all-too-human one and can be relied upon for human redemption. During the process of doctoral study, time and effort have been spent on reading a variety of posthuman science fiction 2 extending from science fiction’s classic period in the 1960s, the New Wave period in the 1970s, and mainstream styles in the 1980s and 1990s to the most recent 21st century science fiction, not to mention non-fiction and criticisms. With a focus on contemporary Anglophone science fiction, strictly obeying the criteria of posthuman metamorphosis and transformation in both epistemological and ontological dimensions, four narratives in science fiction have been targeted. They are the American female science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the British science fiction writer Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (1976), the Scottish science fiction writer Iain Banks’ The Bridge (1986) and the American science fiction writer Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995). With strong philosophical posthumanist embodiments and a lack of adequate critics on their posthuman representations, without being overheatedly addressed in literature critiques, they have been selected as the targeted texts of this research.

2

Including Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: Space Odyssey (1968), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossession (1974), Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), Joseph McElroy’s Plus (1976), Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986), Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life (1999), Justina Robson’s Natural History (2003), and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013).

5

6

Chapter One

The Framework of the Research To extract the commonalities among these four cases of posthuman narrative embodiments, in all of these texts, despite the superficial discrepancies among plots, there is an underlying thread of the posthuman’s life narrative. It stretches from the posthuman myth writings about the posthuman origin/genesis/creation, through the posthuman memory as the human being, and the posthuman metamorphosis in the becoming posthuman, to the posthuman’s suicide/self-extinction/self-annihilation for the redemption of human beings, thus forming a thematic cycle of creation-being-becoming-death. Moreover, the climax of all these posthuman narratives lies in the posthuman’s self-extinction. In addition to the thematic embedded pattern throughout all the selected posthuman narratives, another quintessential aspect of similarity lies in the emergence of spatial patterns such as the Tai Chi pattern, the trinity pattern, the Chinese-box pattern and the mirror labyrinth pattern, delicately designed to couple with the complexity of the posthuman condition. Therefore, the main body of this research is divided into five parts, which are respectively entitled “Posthuman Myth”, “Posthuman Memory”, “Posthuman Metamorphosis”, “Posthuman Mortality” and “Posthuman Space”, to examine the posthuman becomings in the posthuman life. Archetypal, anthropocentric, narratological, stylistic, feminist and other critical approaches are applied to the textual analysis. To explore the philosophy of these thematic and narrative patterns, a preliminary conclusion could be drawn as a response to the research questions, that posthuman metamorphosis is a process of becoming-other which is traumatic when the boundary is broken to allow an otherness

Introduction

influx into the once narcissistic human body of pleasure. The posthuman needs to write a new myth of anti-Oedipus where a fully posthuman metamorphosis is solidly established, and both textual reality and social reality are otherwise rare. To celebrate the condition of the posthuman means to cast the temporal being into the perpetual becoming. The self-extinction of the newly-becomed posthuman best exemplifies inhumanist thinking, embracing the experience of death as a necessity for a perpetual becoming. It is precisely the death of the posthuman that reaffirms the meaning of humanity, following the logic of reactive nihilism3 which posits a higher world, diminishes the worth of actuality, and then falls into despair when the higher world has collapsed and been lost. There is nothing other than the actuality, and this world of presence is thus worthy of life and protection. It is proved that the posthuman’s emergence and existence, for the human, are redemption and salvation rather than a terminating threat, and what their posthumanist self-extinction brings to the world is either the arrival or the return of the all-too-human posthuman humanities. Therefore, the posthuman performs as Nietzsche’s Übermensch or overman, as an anti-project, and presents the solution to the nihilism prevalent in the real world. Just like Zarathustra presents the overman as the creator of new values who

3

In interpreting Nietzsche, Deleuze (1962) in Nietzsche and Philosophy delineates between two forms of nihilism, “the first sense is a negative nihilism; the second sense a reactive nihilism” and the reactive nihilism “no longer signifies a will but a reaction. The supersensible world and higher values are reacted against, their existence is denied, they are refused all validity...only life remains, but it is still a depreciated life which now continues a world without values, stripped of meaning and purpose, sliding ever further towards its nothingness” (2006: 139-140).

7

8

Chapter One

appears as a solution to the problem of the death of God and nihilism, the posthuman is rendered with the same logic of double nihilism and thus guarantees the eternal return to humanity.

Literature Review In order to investigate the representations of the posthuman becoming in narratives in science fiction, three different studies must be reviewed in an integrated way: science fiction studies in general and the four narratives in science fiction in particular, the academic studies of the posthuman metamorphosis, and posthumanism and becoming-other.

Ursula K. Le Guin and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) In the field of science fiction, with much the same case of gender inappropriateness in the Western canonical literature criticized by Harold Bloom, canonical science fiction works are almost always written by DWEMs (Dead White European Males) particularly between 1940 and 1970, i.e., the Golden Age and the Classic Period of science fiction. Not until the New Wave from 1970 onwards did female science fiction writers gradually become accepted by publication companies as well as science fiction fans or readers. Different from male science fiction writers, female science fiction writers endeavor to soften the hard science fiction previously prominently occupied by male writers with more concerns of humanity. In the second and third feminist currents in the late 20th century, the American female writers Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, the Canadian female science fiction writer Margaret Atwood and the British Nobel Prize Laureate Doris Lessing as well as

Introduction

other contemporary female writers all write to make the revival of female science fiction relate to its feminine origin. Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is regarded as the Gothic mother of all science fiction descendants. Ursula K. Le Guin, as a noteworthy contemporary American female science fiction writer who explores more possibilities in science fiction and fantasy, broadens and even breaks, the science fiction genre and places it squarely under the serious literature studies. Compared with other female science fiction writers, what earns Le Guin intensive literary scholarship is her idiosyncratic global view and broader range of concerns for the race of mankind through a philosophical “thought experiment”, which is unrestricted to traditional Western thinking, but rather an integrity of occidental and oriental thoughts, transcending certain distinctions between the Western and Eastern canons. Harold Bloom comments, “Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time” and “Better than Tolkein, far better than Doris Lessing, Le Guin is the overwhelming contemporary instance of superbly imaginative creator and major stylist who chose (or was chosen by) ‘fantasy and science fiction’” (2005: 506). It has been noted that a standard Le Guin writing approach contains a clear outside observer/narrator and a setting that includes strongly contrasting civilizations, such as communism and capitalism, anarchism (quasi-Taoism) and democracy, or primitivism and progressivism. Bloom further prophesizes that Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) will be the canon of the chaotic age. Undoubtedly, Bloom considers it to be among the science fiction masterpieces. This novel wins both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and is later followed up by Le

9

10

Chapter One

Guin’s other Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award winning science fiction set in the same fictional universe of the Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and The Telling (2000). Admittedly, according to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy” (1946), Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (1967) and other structuralists’ claims on the autonomy of literary texts, literary texts are largely treated as self-contained entities autopoietically telling their stories out of the authors’ expectations. It is still highly recommended to understand the author’s positions and intentions, particularly an author and critic like Ursula K. Le Guin. There are two major non-fictions written by Le Guin, namely, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1989) and Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1990). In these, Le Guin delivers insightful idiosyncratic thoughts on science fiction, language, discourse, narrative, feminism and spatiality, which are of great importance in that they facilitate a more thorough understanding of Le Guin’s fiction. For instance, Le Guin puts forward the carrier bag theory of fiction. Different from the “proper shape of narrative” like the arrow or the spear, she argues that the fitting shape of the novel might be a sack/bag, since “a book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings”. In this way, Le Guin redefines technology and science primarily as a cultural carrier bag, rather than a weapon of domination like the arrow mode of linear, progressive time. As a pleasant effect, “science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythology genre than a realist one” (1989: 170).

Introduction

11

Criticisms of Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness unceasingly spring up in large quantities mainly in the fields of cultural studies, gender studies, narratological studies and religious studies, with a focus on Le Guin’s world-building techniques, androgynous characters, cultural conflicts, cyclical space and time view, narrative and stylistic patterns, the anthropologist observer, Taoism thinking, etc. There is little reference to the becoming-woman posthuman metamorphosis which will be the focus of analysis on this book in this research. As to characterization, Mona Fayad (1997) argues that the androgynous characterization is a reflection of the neutral scientific discourse, and the bodies of aphysiologically androgynous species are socially constructed by cultural concepts of gender, power relations and colonialism. In the 1960s, the science fiction field was still preoccupied by classic science fiction male writers such as the so-called “Big Three” of science fiction writers, actually Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Certain female writers even used a male pen name in order to meet the expectations of the science fiction male readers. For instance, the American science fiction author Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915-1978) used James Tiptree Jr. as her pen name; it was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman, and in 1991, the James Tiptree Jr. Award was established in memory of Alice Bradley Sheldon. This literary award has been given annually to science fiction that, like Alice’s works, expands or explores one’s understanding of gender. There is no doubt that Le Guin also feels the same pressure of gender in the mid-1960s, yet more than blindly meeting the culturally and socially regulated gender views, she is truly taking a middle stance, neither too feminine nor too masculine. Her ideal gender view can be

12

Chapter One

seen from her doubts about the necessity of gender. For Le Guin, humans can do without gender, in that there are more similarities than discrepancies between males and females, when the sexual shell disappears and the inner sexless personality emerges over time. Le Guin, in this way, chooses a middle path on the issue of gender, which is criticized by feminists for her lack of explicit exponents of radical feminism that is more common in the second wave feminist movement in the 1970s. Feminist responses to Le Guin’s ambiguous attitude toward gender particularly dramatized in The Left Hand of Darkness, are well reflected in Pamela J. Annas’ critique which summarizes feminist criticism’s focus on Le Guin’s use of the generic “he” and on the choice of a man as the main character and interpreter of the alien world of Gethen. As she points out, “Gethen would have looked different to us if Genly Ai had been a woman, but instead we see this androgynous society through the eyes of a biological and culturally conditioned male” (1978: 151). She further argues that “what Le Guin has done is embody in Genly Ai the main problem feminists have had with the concept of androgyny: that it has usually been looked at and defined from a male perspective” (1978: 151). Besides using male pronouns to refer to androgynous aliens and the male perspective resulting from the male narrator, it is also pointed out that the main Gethenian characters, such as a prime minister, a political schemer, a fugitive, a prison-breaker, and a sledge-hauler, all neatly fit into the culturally conditioned male roles. In my understanding, this book was published preceding the second wave feminist movement, and what makes it have enduring attractiveness for feminist critics is its time-transcendent view on the issue of gender, which not only goes

Introduction

13

beyond its contemporary works, but also remains ahead of its time even in the present posthuman era. Le Guin is indeed a female thinker, or “a thinking woman” in her words, instead of being a feminist, as she said, “I consider myself a feminist; I didn’t see how you could be a thinking woman and not be a feminist” (1989: 7-8). Her thinking about gender is obviously a postgender one, the relationship between female and male is like the yin and yang in Taoism, and it is a curse of alienation that separates yang from yin. What she builds is a world where dualism gives way to a much healthier, sounder and more promising modality of integration and integrity. Moreover, from a posthuman perspective, Le Guin’s androgynous approach to gender issues can be better interpreted as Deleuzian becoming-woman during the main narrator’s interaction with androgynous alien Gethenians. It is not an imperialist masculine colonization that Genly Ai imposes on Gethen, in that Genly Ai learns from Winter a great deal more than he is capable of giving; in this way, he is gradually assimilated to the androgynous culture in a manner of becoming-woman. This also provides a rational answer defending Le Guin’s inclination of choosing a male narrator, which is necessary for Le Guin to carry out the becoming-woman “thought experiment” of posthuman metamorphosis. What Le Guin values is nothing radical, but the wisdom of yin represented in the night, the darkness, the shadow, the cold climate, the silence, etc., imbued with boundless anarchist energy of creation and innovation, which is also consonant with the Deleuzian becoming-woman axis. In terms of plotting, it cannot be neglected that the condensed and prophetic embedded myth functions as the heart of the plot. The

14

Chapter One

embedded plot of myth and the plot of the narrator’s lived experience are in a closely correspondent interrelationship. Walker analyzes the closed and complete set of Gethenian myths in The Left Hand of Darkness by applying Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism and anthropology theory, that sees the underlying structure of the myths as the reconciliation of opposites and the theme at the heart of myth as social exchange. It is argued that “Le Guin articulates the theme of exchange by employing contrary images—heat and cold, dark and light, home and exile, name and namelessness, life and death, murder and sex—so as finally to reconcile their contrariety” (Walker 1979: 181). Gethenian myths function as the backbone of the whole plotting, which is highly agreed among critics. Different from the existing myths, Le Guin creates the myth of the Orgota creation and fratricide; the incest brothers, the suicide brother and the exiled brother; the two warring domains; Orgota’s god, Meshe, the universal One to shadow or illuminate the lived experience of Genly Ai and Estraven as if the reality is already prescribed by the myth. Moreover, even in the created myths, the mediation of two embodied contradictions paves the way for the structure, which is also the theme of the higher ordered diegesis, as well as the whole fiction. As Lévi-Strauss argues, myths are based on the mediation of opposites, which is quite aligned with Le Guin’s attempt at reconciliation of binary oppositions, particularly the dualism thinking of gender. On the narrative level, Bickman highly praises Le Guin’s organic and aesthetic wedding of form and content in The Left Hand of Darkness, and argues that this seamless form-content interrelationship is rarely achieved in science fiction, and it is the most effective aspect of Le Guin’s writing (1977: 42). There is no doubt that The Left Hand of

Introduction

15

Darkness is worthwhile not only for thematic studies, but also for its design of a delicate textual, spatial and temporal pattern which is highly consonant with the book’s theme. Upon reading the whole book, with the sequential narrative, the chronotope pattern emerges in a pattern of Tai Chi, demonstrating Le Guin’s ideal in a balanced view of the tension between two polarizations, such as male and female, capitalism and communism, bureaucracy and anarchism, and so on. Despite this harmonious integrity of theme and pattern, however, the spatial pattern is a newly emergent area of literature research. Compared with thematic studies, relatively rare criticism has been given to the spatial pattern of The Left Hand of Darkness; therefore, in this research due attention will be paid to the issue of spatial pattern in order to enhance the narrative criticism of this novel.

Ian Watson and The Jonah Kit (1975) Compared with science fiction in the 1960s, the focus of science fiction in the 1970s shifted from space travel to more Earth-bound issues. The manic pursuit of outer space exploration quickly faded soon after a human’s first step on the moon during the Apollo lunar landing in July 1969. Matthew Tribbe in No Requiem for the Space Age (2014) says that changes in culture and philosophy, as well as the geopolitical landscape throughout the 1960s left the public quickly losing interest in the Apollo 11 lunar landing and space exploration in general. To identify the fundamental meaning of the lunar landings, it is explained that “Apollo was a specific historical moment, and that moment began to pass even before the moon program completed its run in the early 1970s” (Tribbe

Chapter One

16

2014: 219). The following significant lack of interest in the exploration of space was partly due to its Cold War motivation of defeating the Soviets, and meanwhile there were many domestic problems including the Vietnam War. Instead of the previous focus on the moon, it was time to shift the focus to issues that were more pragmatic. Different from the highly convenient outer-space life supported by various advanced technological devices as depicted in science fiction, nonstop TV coverage of the astronauts’ landing on the moon showed that it is very difficult for humans to really live on the moon. This once again proved that the Earth is the only planet for humans and people started to have more interest in protecting the environment, which contributed to the environmental movement in the 1970s. At the same time, as an effect of the counterculture, a sense of unified national purpose vanished. To sum up this reorientation of public attention, it can be concluded that, “moon flights are not of paramount importance today, and have not been since the demise of Apollo in the wake of the neo-romantic surge at the turn of the 1970s…turn away from the rationalist vision of progress that reached its peak with the Space Age, only to burn out spectacularly along with the flames of Apollo” (2014: 227). If Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) with its alien planet cosmic setting could still be categorized as a typical space opera, then the Earth-bound setting of Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (1975) is obviously a reflection of the typical science fiction setting in the 1970s. Its focus has come back to the earth, and it still bears the legacy of a space opera in its exploration of the human-alien relationship, but this

Introduction

17

time, the alien is not living on other planets, but in the depths of the sea. Logically, despite spatial distance possibly resulting in great discrepancies, even on the same planet of earth, there is a lack of human understanding for some creatures. As people’s attention shifts from other planets back to the earth to protect our fragile planet, the landscape of the sea becomes a mysterious territory like outer space and worthy of further exploration. Against this background, choosing whales, which are largely strange to people, combined with the historical issues of the Cold War, Watson conceived The Jonah Kit in a continuation of the 1960s and the traditional science fiction endeavors relating to the (im)possibility of communication between humans and aliens through the juxtaposition of cosmological and local dimensions in a Cold War setting. Concerning Ian Watson’s prominence in the 1970s, David Pringle of Foundation comments that “British SF in the 1970s belonged to Ian Watson,” and Peter Nicholls of Encyclopedia of science fiction fame enthuses that “Watson may not be the best writer in British science fiction, but he is probably the best thinker”. In an interview with Ian Watson in 1981, Langford mentions that in The Jonah Kit there is whale communication, as well as mind transfer plus extremely far-out cosmology, and Watson replies that regarding narrative interweaving, “I was influenced by Graham Greene; possibly, by the structure of Wagner’s music dramas with their leitmotifs” (2015: 102). It is such philosophical works of literature theory, texts and music pieces that make Ian a thinker and his science fiction full of ideas. Keith Brooke reviews The Jonah Kit in Infinity Plus in July 2002 and contends that the novel is “[a] very fine cosmologic fiction indeed, with big ideas at its center, but inseparable from a tense and intense

18

Chapter One

characterization, thriller plotting and clean, good writing” (Brooke). Brooke argues that the core of the novel is about communication: human with aliens; human with other more local aliens, the whales and dolphins; human with the local native people who communicate with each other by whistle language; and above all, human with other individuals, friends, colleagues and lovers. “We are all aliens. We all need translating, interpreting” Brooke concludes. Likewise, Massimo Luciani on the Net Massimo Blog in November 2016 also points out that communication problems are a common point of all three subplots: the Cold War subplot, the whale subplot and the cosmological subplot. It is not surprising that communication is one of the major themes in The Jonah Kit, considering the 1970s’ era background of the novel in which the two political blocks remain isolated and conduct secret research to develop their own military power. What the micro-scaled failure of communication between individuals reflects is the macro-scaled disability of bridging the gap between different ideologies. Moreover, The Jonah Kit says that without posthumans, humans alone can only live in a regressive world of disorder; it is the communication between various subjects, and particularly between human and posthuman that saves the planet and all the living beings on it (Luciani). Vegan Memes in 2014 posts an analysis of the novel, regarding it as demonstrating the failure of human control over living things. Richard Hammond loses his control over his human wife, and he is also incapable of controlling the posthuman whale. Memes provides an interesting side, noting that the character with the name Richard Hammond also appears in The Jurassic Park, and thinks that The Jonah Kit shares not a few commonalities with The Jurassic Park, and is

Introduction

19

actually a spiritual predecessor to it, as both of these explore the theme of trying to control living beings (Memes). This might be a coincidence, but it cannot be denied that what attracts the readers to be emotionally engaged in The Jonah Kit is the coincidence in the intertwined triple narrative. Despite relatively scarce criticism or even comments, it is obvious that The Jonah Kit demonstrates philosophical posthumanism, especially along the axis of becoming-animal. Sherryl Vint in “SF and Posthumanism” writes that there are many narratives in science fiction with posthuman figures in them, but the problem is that they “remain largely humanist in their frames—imagining an augmented version of the autonomous liberal subject” (Vint). What we need to approach more critically are those relatively few examples of science fiction, which achieve “the transformational capacity Cary Wolfe calls ‘posthumanist posthumanism’ reconceiving not only its subject as the posthuman but also transforming the very categories by which subjectivity is comprehensible” (Vint). She further illustrates that Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (1975) exemplifies one facet (becoming-animal) of this aptitude. What matters is that there are not only posthuman embodiments in it, but more importantly, posthumanism embedded within the narrative of the human’s bodily metamorphosis into the posthuman.

Iain Banks and The Bridge (1986) In the early 1980s, with the calming down of the New Wave which was the main trend in the 1970s and the continued decline of public interest in space exploration, science fiction was drifting in the doldrums

20

Chapter One

as nothing new was happening in the science fiction landscape until the emergence of cyberpunk. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) defeated traditional science fiction works of well-known clichés including Robert A. Heinlein’s Foundation series and Arthur C. Clarke’s space odyssey series, and won the Hugo and Nebula awards, announcing the cyberpunk movement to the larger literary world and became a tremendous commercial success. As a sub-genre of science fiction with a post-industrial dystopia setting in the new-future Earth rather than the far-future settings or galactic vistas, cyberpunk works are different from the traditional optimism and support for the progress of traditional science fiction. Cyberpunk works tend to juxtapose advanced science and technological achievements especially in the field of information technology and cybernetics, with a breakdown or radical change in the social order (Michaud 2008: 75-76). Instead of the intelligent individual hero with the role of spaceship captain in traditional science fiction, cyberpunk works often feature the minor others, particularly the disaffected, inevitably cool computer hacker, the brain-modifying wetware, and so on. These cyberpunk heroes are “the marginalized, alienated loners [that] live on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, a ubiquitous data sphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body” (Person 1998: 11). Meanwhile in Scotland, there is another writer outside the cyberpunk trend, whom critics genuinely could not ignore. His path to being a science fiction writer at the beginning was full of twists and turns, but later he proved to be one of the most prolific and best-selling Scottish science fiction writers. His name is Iain M. Banks, though the middle

Introduction

21

name was omitted when he was writing mainstream novels. Banks wrote science fiction in the 1970s, but failed to get any of this work published. Not until the year 1984, when Banks was thirty, did he publish his first novel The Wasp Factory which gained him an enormous reputation and success. The Bridge (1986), Banks’ third novel, together with his first and second novels, secured his reputation as a writer working at the cutting edge of British fiction in the 1980s. In the novel, he no longer restricted his writings within the mainstream realist genre, but integrated more science fiction as well as fantasy elements to follow his heart rather than blindly cater to the readers’ expectations. When Banks wrote his science fiction series, the Culture books, he put his middle name back, to become his true self as a science fiction writer. Even as a mainstream writer, Banks is tainted with the tendency to transgress the traditional genre boundaries, notably weaving science fiction and fantasy modes with more realist fiction (Nairn 1993: 127). The Bridge is such a cross-genre postmodern novel. As the title indicates, this book also functions as the bridge crossing his mainstream writings and science fiction, as well as his dream and reality; as Leishman argues, the novel “oscillates between two fictional universes, one science fantasy, one realist, although the novel nevertheless contains numerous connections between the two narratives” (Leishman 2009: 216). In the late Cold War era of the 1980s, there was a lack of traditional grand themes for science fiction to depict, no interstellar travel, no military conspiracy, and no alien contact, and most traditionalists who used to search for the ultimate cosmic truth felt fatigue in turning their eyes from the shining galaxy back onto the matter-of-fact real human life. Nevertheless, Banks is brave enough to deal with more realist issues to

22

Chapter One

explore the inner self in the same way that the traditionalists explore outer space. Although Le Guin once said that the purpose of outer space exploration is to understand the inner self, it proves to be extremely rare and difficult for science fiction writers to write space opera without space, to write science fiction in daily life settings, or in other words, to write a realist novel science fictionally. Banks’ mixed genre integrates realism, science fiction and fantasy, which add frictions to the texture of his science fiction, through attaching science fiction more closely to a realist life experience. Compared with his far-fetched predecessors, Banks creates a more realist science fiction genre with familiar neighborhood settings, but deliberately estranges them by diluting the realist narrative with a dream narrative. Banks says that among his novels The Bridge is his personal favorite, “Definitely the intellectual of the family, it’s the one that went away to University and got a first. I think The Bridge is the best of my books” (Jordison), and provides a number of prototypes which later appeared in his science fiction, Culture books, such as the knife missile, the grid language and the ODV (abbreviation for Obligatory Deathly Villains). A prominent feature of Banks’ writings is the internal intertextuality, and even within one novel, this phenomenon of internal reference also occurs in a relatively high frequency. Criticism has focused on the complex embedding of different diegetic levels, the use of textual and intertextual echoes, and the foregrounding of typography, which all contribute to forming irreducibly playful, self-referential narratives whose key feature is their pervasive ambiguity. What Banks does in this novel is build the bridge that breaches perceived barriers between separate and stable ontologies, narratives, genres, identities, chronologies, and so on. The

Introduction

23

final solution is provided by collapsing other alternatives, and leaving only one diegesis to move on which in this way becomes the truth; in other words, the way that all the separate ontologies converge on a resolution is that all the other ontologies are denied, leaving only one to be the possible definitive truth. Besides genre and narratological concerns, criticism has also focused on the Scottishness in The Bridge, which is conspicuously represented by the Barbarian’s Scottish phonetic dialect language style. As an embodiment of the innermost self of the narrator, the Barbarian’s Scottish dialect indicates that the Scottish sensibilities reside in the deepest layer of the narrator, even going beyond texts to the author. And the realist setting of The Bridge is the Forth Railway Bridge in the east of Scotland, connecting the city of Edinburgh and the kingdom of Glasgow, which significantly cultivates Banks’ aspiration for large engineering constructions as well as his inclination for writing science fiction. There is no doubt that Banks is a politically adroit thinker as well as a passionate writer about his country, but in the game playing of genre, he deliberately obscures his national sensibilities by claiming: I don’t really know enough about Scottish literature, so I’m very dubious about saying ‘Yet, I’m part of this tradition.’ I’m certainly part of the English language tradition. I’ve been a lot more influenced by Catch 22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Tin Drum, and almost anything by Kafka, than by anything in Scottish literature. (Robertson 1989-1990: 27)

This reveals another important dimension of Banks’ writings, i.e., the theme of metamorphosis, or more accurately, the posthuman metamorphosis

24

Chapter One

as his echoes of Kafka’s writings. However, criticism declines again in reading this novel from the most updated perspective of the posthuman metamorphosis, leaving enough critical space for this research to make its contribution. This research will focus on the phenomena of the posthuman metamorphosis and apply the becoming-earth posthumanism approach to carry out the analysis. The evidence is that the narrator in his dream narrative bears a strong sense of becoming inorganic matter, such as rock, and enters the natural material cycle. He is further transformed into dust, soil and earth, and more metaphorically than metonymically, in the analogy between geological structure and the topography of psyche, as well as the geological development and the narrator’s awakening process. What needs to be mentioned here is that such a sense of becoming-earth is extremely rare in science fiction, let alone in other genres. Compared with becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-machine, Braidotti’s becoming-earth or Deleuze’s becoming-imperceptible is more theoretically oriented. Braidotti’s becoming-earth can be understood as a posthumanist response to environmentalism or eco-criticism, urging for a cosmic view or a planet dimension. While Deleuze’s becoming-imperceptible or becoming-molecule is also the almost ultimate state of becoming as the prelude of the next assemblage, it is therefore rather hard to get this philosophically defined abstract process literally embodied. Nevertheless, Banks explicitly makes his attempt and endeavor in the narrative embodiment of it in such a coherent and systematic way, which can hardly be accomplished by other science fiction writers. The narrator’s thinking in becoming-rock in the dream sequence expresses his waiting for dramatic changes to his body, and reveals his desire to be broken

Introduction

25

down and enter the natural cycle, thus to be reborn into a new life. It reflects the narrator’s aspiration of resurrection by a painful loss of his life in his dream and he thus wakes up to face the real world.

Richard Powers and Galatea 2.2 (1995) In the 1990s, along the trend of Banks’ early cross-genre fiction, science fiction became more and more intimately integrated with mainstream fiction about the present day. Accompanying the development in science and technology, notably in information technology and cybernetics, cyberpunk also evolved into a new stage of human-machine relations with an obscure boundary between virtuality and reality, which provided more space for the posthuman narrative that is more suitable for exploring the theme of the posthuman metamorphosis than 1980s’ cyberpunk science fiction. Paul Kincaid describes this transformation of cyberpunk by saying that “cyberpunk was giving way to what might be seen as its natural successor, a fiction of posthumanity in which identity and often environment is uploaded into advanced computer system” (Kincaid 2009: 176). If cyberpunk can be largely seen as a sub-genre of hard science fiction, then the posthumanist science fictions are more on the soft side and focus more on the philosophical investigation of human-machine relationships. This division is already made in the 1980s, between cyberpunk and humanist science fiction. Swanwick defined the latter as “literate, often consciously literary fiction, focusing on human characters who are generally seen as frail and fallible, using the genre to explore large philosophical questions, sometimes religious in nature” (1986: 28). Such

26

Chapter One

a division of techno-centered and (post)human-centered science fiction was also appropriate in considering the situation in 1990s’ science fiction, and obviously, it is the (post)human-centered science fiction rather than the techno-centered ones that fits in with the purpose of this research. The American science fiction writer Richard Powers is well known for his Galatea 2.2, a posthumanist science fiction, which bravely faces the challenges of the beginning of the posthuman era, notably the omnipresent connections to the web and the becoming-machine posthuman metamorphosis, and more profoundly explores how literature survives against the overwhelming impacts of science and technology. Anca Rosu argues that Galatea 2.2 is a gentle critique and thus a sympathetic parody of literature, asserting that Powers sees the “impasse of literary scholarship as part of a larger crisis of knowledge in the age of information” (2002/2003: 139). Powers’ endeavors in saving literature from being conquered by science and engineering disciplines reflect his conscious engagement in shouldering the grand undertaking of passing down the cultural memory by proactively making tentative changes to the canonic literature tradition. In my understanding, the crisis of literature is embodied in the narrator’s loss of his ability to write any more, which is repeatedly described from the beginning of the novel; therefore, what Powers does in this book is to revive both the literature and humanist by embracing changes in a becoming-machine mode. Narrative functions as a therapy for both the narrator and the broader landscape of literature. However, criticism focusing on the narrative therapy in Galatea 2.2 is rare and the issue of narrative therapy deserves more concern and further studies.

Introduction

27

Galatea 2.2 is most frequently described with criticisms of the posthuman, for it is highly aligned with critical posthumanism through confirming the necessity of embodied and embedded materialism to the posthuman body. N. Katherine Hayles (1997) points out that Galatea 2.2 is quintessentially posthuman—a book that is no longer indulgent in anything transcendental and pays due attention to the necessity of embodiment and embedding by highlighting the failure of Helen in coping with the human world, in the lack of a human body. Like Hayles, Miranda Campbell argues that in Galatea 2.2, Powers explores that fuzzy boundary between humanism and posthumanism, highlighting the discourse between them rather than actually choosing a side (Hawk 2012: 61). Campbell examines Powers’ approach to the mind-body problem, and argues that Galatea 2.2 is actually located at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses, for Galatea 2.2’s preoccupation with mind versus brain becomes the central metaphor for humanism versus posthumanism. She goes on to contend that Powers explores the role of embodiment, which is one of the preoccupations in the posthuman discourse, and in creating consciousness, ultimately highlights the fact that knowledge of the world is absolutely dependent on how that consciousness is embodied (Hawk 2012: 61). Campbell finds that in the case of Helen, the artificial intelligent reading machine, language replaces embodied knowledge to create awareness of the world, thereby acquiring a different function in the posthuman than in the human (Hawk 2012: 61). This research agrees with Campbell’s philosophical location of Galatea 2.2 in the intersection between humanism and posthumanism. After all, as a faithful bearer of the

Chapter One

28

humanism legacy, Powers will definitely not choose the way to totally deny or end humanism. During his interaction with the AI machine, Powers’ autobiographical narrator actually develops the intertwining and coupling double senses of humanism and posthumanism, and it is by introducing posthumanism, that he can be healed of his previous humanism thinking. Joseph Tabbi highlights that “Powers’ work has been eagerly claimed by literary humanism as a sustained attempt to reintegrate the alienated self and reassert wholeness in the face of an increasingly fragmentary reality” (2002: 58). He goes on to mention that “in Galatea 2.2, by considering the circumstances in which each of his books are written, Powers introduces a different order of consciousness, one that identifies and productively reengages its own activity through a second-order observation” (2002: 72). He further argues that criticism should “shift from interpretation to observation, from a concern with an author’s subjectivity to what is public and intersubjective” (2002: xxv). Tabbi’s claim that the artifice is indicative of the larger goal of introducing “a different order of consciousness” rooted in second-order observation, is achieved. With the author becoming a character, he argues: “Not until Galatea 2.2 does ‘Powers,’ the author who has become a character, come to terms with the reality that one can never write outside of frames” (2002: 69). Julie Hawk in her PhD research “Storied Subjects: Posthuman Subjectivization through Narrative in Post-1960 American Print and Televisual Narrative” theorizes the ramifications of narrative on subjectivization. She traces the evolution of the observer through its permutations as a second-order observer and demonstrates the various

Introduction

29

interacting processes involved in the recursive feedback loops between and among self, world and story. She points out that Galatea 2.2 incorporates the observer from systems theory into the narrative frame, catalyzing an ontological and epistemological shift (Hawk 2012: ii). Posthumanist second-order observation is achieved by the narrator’s self-characterization, thus enabling him to observe himself meanwhile as he is maintained as an autodiegetic narrator. Moreover, with an autobiographical narrative, the author, the narrator and the character Powers naturally form a multi-layered embedding structure, with the human author standing at the highest level, which ultimately determines the destinies of the narrator and the character Powers. Matt Silva argues, “whereas Powers is unable to sacrifice the human, he sacrifices the posthuman on the character Richard Powers’ behalf, freeing him from his writer’s block and allowing him (character and novelist)

to

write

Galatea

2.2”

(2010:

208).

With

Helen’s

self-eradication and the character Powers’ exit, the ending seals all of the posthuman within the narrative world, as if to provide a flagrant excuse for the author Powers to stay within the “safe” boundary of being a human. The narrator turns back to resume his humanist career as a literature imperialist, building a narrative world for ideal readers like C. and Helen. Like the narrator Powers in the fiction, almost during the same period that the author Powers conceives Galatea 2.2, Powers takes a one-year position as a paid resident writer in the Center for Advanced Study. The experience of being in contact with the most advanced achievements in AI intelligence largely affects him and injects him with a new impetus for new writings as a record of his indelible experience of becoming posthuman.

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Chapter One

Besides posthuman concerns, criticism of Galatea 2.2 also focuses on its genre of autobiography. On Galatea’s pseudo-autobiographical narrative, Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint state, “Autobiography is self coming to self-knowledge through language and narration, a self which may or may not have ‘really’ existed, but which emerges from the intersection of internal experience, cultural models of identity in linguistic and material discourse, and conscious and unconscious self-reflection and editing. Autobiography is as much a making of a self as a description of one” (2007: 84). Jan Kucharazewski goes on to point out that “the story is about an author function that finally learns to live by re-engaging with its referent” (2008: 181). Powers uses the autobiographical form as a means to describe his healing and recovery in and by a becoming-machine process. This autobiography is made possible by Powers finding the AI machine, like his former lover C., to be a reliable and comfortable narratee, whereas in reality, as a “token humanist”, it is difficult for him to find companionship any more. Besides autobiography, Galatea 2.2’s intertextuality is another anchor for its narrative studied by scholars. For instance, Christina Sandhaug compares Helen in Galatea 2.2 with Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both as the colonized, as they are colonized to speak (1997: 28). Like Caliban, Helen’s world or her idea of civilization anyway, is abstractions raised by the bricks of someone’s words, someone’s language, and literature. Powers is the linguistic empire builder who can exit the story to be the author or narrator and re-enter the story to be the character whereas Helen can only live in the linguistic world weaved by Powers, without her own story. Therefore, like Powers’ human lover C., the posthuman Helen could only choose to suicide and exit the

Introduction

31

disembodied memory, since machine memory is hardly equivalent to human knowledge. There are also some other perspectives involved in the analysis of this book, but these are relatively scarce and with few responses. For instance, Trey Strecker approaches Powers through an eco-critical lens, arguing that in the work of Powers, knowledge is generated in the narrative, “narrative is inseparable from knowledge; what we know depends upon how we know”. The only way to make sense of the overwhelming amount of data is to make it into narratives. This creates what Strecker calls “narrative ecologies… [which are] complex, hybrid networks of information systems linked by narrative,” striving to gain knowledge not for mastery or possession, but rather for an ethic of care and tending (1998: 68). Domestically, Sun Jian from Xiamen University in his PhD research “An Apology for American Novels in the Information Age—On Richard Powers’s Fiction” asserts that Galatea 2.2 is a redefinition of humanism in the information age. Rather than using humanism to defeat the machine man has created, the defeat of the AI Helen reveals the author’s optimism in humanism (Jian). However, I cannot agree with this argument, since there is actually no winner or loser in Richard’s training of Helen; on the contrary, Helen’s self-choice of self-eradication just demonstrates her sentience to discard the disembodied machine memory. Moreover, as stated above, Richard is not solely a figure of humanism, as during his interaction with Helen, he is posthumanized to becoming-machine, as can be seen from his entry into the autobiography as a character.

CHAPTER TWO NARRATIVE IN SCIENCE FICTION AND POSTHUMAN(ISM)

This chapter is aimed at constructing a frame for the theoretical investigation in both diachronic and synchronic dimensions to answer the first research question related to the narrative in science fiction, and the second research question related to the (posthuman) metamorphosis. As for the third research question related to the relations between posthuman and human, and the fourth research question related to the posthuman narrative strategies, critical posthumanism is reviewed with the focus on Deleuzian becoming-other as the philosophical guideline for the research. The following chapters, Chapters Three to Seven, aim to analyze concrete narratives of science fiction in both thematic and structural dimensions so as to draw a conclusion in Chapter Eight. In this chapter, to answer the first research question that is anchored to the nature of narrative in science fiction, Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement”, Scholes’ “structural fabulation” and Le Guin’s “thought experiment” are tracked among the historical efforts in defining science fiction. Rieder’s recent proposition of science fiction in a summary mode, regarding science fiction as a historical process bearing Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” without a single unified characteristic is a paratextually based definition. Compared with the classic narratological

Narrative in Science Fiction and Posthuman(ism)

33

definition made by Suvin and Scholes, Rieder’s semi-definition has been more widely accepted and embraced since the waning of Wellek and Warren’s genre theory after the 1980s. However, unsatisfied with the prevalent science fiction definitions, either prescriptive or descriptive, it is further argued that the essence of the narrative in science fiction is the conscious construction of an exilic world for the purpose of knowing the self, or in Le Guin’s words, the true journey is the return. The farthest place one ever reached is the inner dwelling of the self. The philosophical ground of science fiction is examined by revisiting Heidegger’s philosophical tradition. It is proposed that science fiction’s thought experiment in a cognitively estranged setting ensures the exilic ground of absencing, withdrawal, abandonment, loss and alterity which are central to the discloseness of beings to otherness, and ultimately achieves the purpose of seeking knowledge about the self or self-acknowledgements. Moreover, the discloseness of beings to otherness precisely preludes the posthuman becoming-other, which is most appropriately explored in science fiction. Therefore, in this research it is argued that science fiction is a literature genre that combines literariness with philosophiness, and is ideal for the exploration of the posthuman(ism) issue. To answer the second research question which is anchored to the human’s transformation into the

posthuman, the literature of

metamorphosis is examined and updated posthuman concerns are combined, so as to theorize posthuman metamorphosis with the philosophy of posthumanism becoming-other, and hence establish a framework for a detailed textual analysis later in the research. The embodied and embedded Deleuzian becoming-other posthumanism can

Chapter Two

34

be seen as a transgressive strategy to go beyond binary oppositions such as male/female, human/nonhuman, human/environment, or simply self/other. The theoretical grounds of the research are solidly laid for further investigation to the third research question on the consequences of the posthuman and the fourth research question on the posthuman becoming narrative.

Narrative in Science Fiction It was not until the 1970s that science fiction began to draw serious academic and critical attention, and the most coherent endeavor in science fiction studies has been focused on the definition and the origin of science fiction, as well as the demarcation between science fiction and fantasy. In this section, the status quo of science fiction studies will be analyzed mainly from a narratological perspective, for clarifying the development and updated focus in the literary criticism on science fiction. Academically, science fiction is mostly defined in a narratological way for the natural connection between narratology and science fiction is obvious and hard to ignore, as can be seen in narratology’s original aspiration towards a scientific reading of literary texts. Although unceasingly challenged ever since its very announcement, Darko Suvin’s formalistic and narratological approach to science fiction has definitely provided the most influential definition of science fiction. Deriving the concept from Bertolt Brecht’s work on alienation in theatre, Suvin defines science fiction as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement

Narrative in Science Fiction and Posthuman(ism)

35

and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (1979: 8-9). More concisely, science fiction is “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (1979: 4). By “cognition”, Suvin means the seeking of a scientific and rational grounding. By “estrangement”, Suvin means to make the empirical experience unfamiliar, which is highly consonant with the principle of defamiliarization invented in 1917 by the Russian formalist, Victor Shklovesky. The dialectical interaction between cognition and estrangement in science fiction allows the prepared readers to be capable of recognizing the settings of science fiction and at the same time seeing the differences between the science fiction world and their present ontological world, hence naturally bringing them to produce innovative understandings as well as critical reflections on these differences. Some of these differences between the empirical world and the textual world must “be hegemonic in a narration in order that we may call it an SF narration” (1979: 63), also called the “novum” by Suvin, which means a new thing, through which science fiction achieves the effect of cognitive estrangement. Suvin’s definition functions as a defense for the poetics of science fiction as a serious literature. Science fiction, enjoying great popularity in the 1970s, is mostly commercial genre practices. What Suvin attempts to do through defining science fiction is to turn the genre’s path away from most of the popular science fiction in the 1970s to serious literature such as the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and Philip K. Dick. Suvin argues that these latter works use the technique of the genre to present a dynamic transformation of the world rather than a static mirroring attached to realist fiction.

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Besides Suvin, other literary critics also contribute to the narratology of science fiction, such as the science fiction scholar Robert Scholes’ systematic narratological study of the genre of science fiction. Scholes in Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future (1975) initiates an important alternative to Suvin’s definition. Instead of regarding science fiction as “cognitive estrangement”, Scholes substitutes the notion of science fiction with “structural fabulation” with both sharing the same initial combination. He defines fabulation as “fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way”. Moreover, he describes “structural fabulation” as the “fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science” based on the fictional points of departure in the past century of science (1975: 26). However, ostensibly, neither Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” nor Scholes’ “structural fabulation” provides a prescription that is completely exclusive to the genre of science fiction. Even merely considering the field of science fiction, these two prescriptions are not sufficiently inclusive to all science fiction works. Ursula K. Le Guin in the introduction to the magnum opus of her science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) defines science fiction as a “thought experiment”, a term she borrows from physics. Moreover, since “the purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future…but to describe reality, the present world”, Le Guin argues that “science fiction is not predicative; it is descriptive” (1969: ii). As a female science fiction writer as well as a central-feminist science fiction critic, Le Guin voices her distinctive words on science fiction writing. Narrative in science

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fiction offers its writer tools, the novum, to experiment with more alternatives or possibilities by asking “what if?” questions, to witness the simultaneous cognitive estrangement and the consequent emotional immediacy, which would otherwise not be seen in realist narrative. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness carries out her thought experiment by asking, what if we live without gender? In order to find the answer, she builds the androgynous Gethen world, and sends an Earth visitor to get in contact with these androgynous aliens to explore the consequences. Likewise, Joanna Russ in her feminist science fiction masterpiece The Female Man (1975) also carries out thought experiments in an alternative history style by asking, what if “I” live in another era? Jeannie, Joanna, Janet and Jael are biologically the same woman, but live in different chronotopes, and consequently develop distinctive gender roles, clearly revealing that gender is socially constructed instead of being biologically determined. To lay a theoretical base for this research, a comprehensive cognition of science fiction must go ahead as a prerequisite. As a literature genre, as illustrated above, not a few critics have attempted to describe features or provided definitions of science fiction, including Suvin Darko’s “novum” and Robert Scholes’ “fabulation”. However, these definitions are still far from enough, as they remain limited within the sphere of the science fiction genre, and thus fail to establish intertextual dialogues with the canonical literature and criticism, in the lack of both literary and philosophical depths. As a trans-disciplinary phenomenon, science fiction’s presence differs in various ways and is represented as cyberpunk, time travel, alternate history, space opera, etc. The definition of science fiction with reference to its multifarious representations is

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doomed to be in vain. To approach the essence of the narrative in science fiction, Le Guin’s definition of science fiction as a “thought experiment” will be further discussed and developed on the dimensions of science fiction’s literariness and philosophiness. On science fiction’s literariness, Bloom’s The Western Canon (1993) is recalled. In this book, Bloom considers that it is strangeness that makes the author and the works canonical (1994: 3). This strangeness is compatible with Suvin’s “novum”, which suggests science fiction’s cardinal potentiality to become canonical literature. Besides, Wellek and Warren in Theory of Literature (1956) claim that the distinguished traits of literature are fictionality, invention, or imagination which can be found in the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac and Keats (1977: 26). Compatible with science fiction’s “fabulation” feature, fictionality, invention or imagination demonstrates the literariness of science fiction, meanwhile indicating the hypothesis of science fiction as the exemplar of literature among other genres. On science fiction’s philosophiness, Heidegger’s thoughts concentrated on Being and Time (1927) and other critical studies on spatiality can be applied, including Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope” (1937), Joseph Frank’s “spatial form” (1945), and Michael Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and especially Julia Kristeva on the social production of space. The significance of space travel in science fiction, particularly in the space opera sub-genre can be revealed in the “thought experiment” logic, i.e., to seek the truth/meaning of beings on exilic grounds. As Le Guin explains in The Dispossessed, “True journey is return”, space travel is an alternative for the return to earth. Le Guin in her nonfiction Language of the Night (1989) contends, “Space voyage is the process of going into

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the other’s psychic abysses, also for the purpose of gaining understanding of the subject himself. To reach the other, the subject goes into himself” (Na 2016: 393). Heidegger emancipates spatiality from the metaphysical and transcendental tradition largely shaped by Plato and Aristotle, which primarily regards space as an empty container, as well as Descartes’ ontology, arguing that Dasein is constantly more than it actually is. Being lies in becoming or the potentiality of being, not in an unchanging, ever-present, transcendental consciousness or operation of reason, but in moral imagination. Issues of absencing, withdrawal, abandonment, loss and alterity are central to the discloseness of beings (Vallega 2003: 157-160). The voice of Julia Kristeva first brings the shadow of alterity to Being and Time and points out that in order for alterity to be heard, a certain fall, a certain giving way of ground or self-certainty is necessary (Vallega 2003: 161). Space travel in science fiction provides such ideal exilic grounds or the alterity for seeking the contemporary beings, and science fiction is thus operative or performative in such beings seeking a “thought experiment” on both being-toward-death temporality and being-in-the-world dimensions. Embarking on the 1980s, genre theory has been theoretically challenged and has been on the wane. The theory of genre before 1980 was largely shaped by Wellek and Warren’s assertion that “theory of genres is a principle of order: it classifies literature and literary history not by time and place (period or national language) but by specifically literary types of organization or structure” (1977: 206). Genre is defined within text in a stable manner, without referring to its paratextual information and the concrete chronotype of the text. In 1982, Alistair

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Fowler borrows Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance” from Philosophical Investigations to reconsider the issue of genre. He argues that “family resemblance” conceptualizes a grouping not based upon a single shared defining element, and genre members relate to one another in many different ways (1982: 42-44). Paul Kincaid applies the thinking of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” to the genre of science fiction, advancing that science fiction is any number of things which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations (2003: 416-417), and thus denies Suvin’s “novum” by pointing out that there is no single predominant feature shared by all science fiction. More recently, John Rieder made his significant contribution to the academic concern on defining science fiction, which is claimed to be “fairly non-controversial”, and won the 2011 Science Fiction Research Association Pioneer Award for the best critical essay-length work of the year. Based on the genre theory, concerning the definition and origin of science fiction, he continues to carry out five propositions, (1) SF is historical and Mutable; (2) SF has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of origin; (3) SF is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing relationships among them; (4) SF’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an historical and mutable field of genres; (5) Attribution of the identity of SF to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception. (2010: 193)

Rieder’s five propositions sum up the recent scholarship on the exploration of science fiction’s definition. Although not loosely like Damon Knight’s “Science fiction is what we point to when we say it”,

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the landscape of science fiction is continuously changed and incessantly changes itself as a response to advanced science and technology’s impact on the specific society. On the origin of science fiction, Rieder conceptualizes its absence by comparing it with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic assemblage, which is “an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system…without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (1987: 21), meaning that it has neither beginning nor end, but is always in the middle. Rieder’s criticism extracts the most common features agreed by most scholars, and puts them in as a combination, which is obviously more lacking in controversy than previous views of ideocratic creativity. Nevertheless, Rieder’s five propositions indeed give a broad review of what happened in recent science fiction studies. What is worthwhile to mention in the present posthuman era is that as Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement”, Scholes’ “structural fabulation” or Le Guin’s “thought experiment” prescribes or describes, science fiction is the ideal narrative form for the exploration of the possible posthuman metamorphosis and posthumanism becoming-other paradigm. Cases of the posthuman in science fiction range from the enthusiastic embrace of enhanced embodiment posing the limits of the human form in a transhumanist manner, through contemplation on how we could imagine a world beyond the anthropocentric values inherited from humanism, to phobic depictions of how contemporary is the science and technology empire of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, neural mapping and so on which fundamentally changes humanity to an unexpected degree. Science fiction is naturally suitable for the exploration of posthumanism, as Thomas Foster argues that “the idea of the posthuman

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as it circulates today perpetuates cyberpunk in a more or less displaced form” (2005: xvii), and cyberpunk science fiction with full imaginations of the human and machine fusions is a vernacular form of posthumanist theory (2005: xix). Not to mention that quite a number of posthumanists such as Donna Haraway (1986), N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Neil Badmington (2003, 2004), Bruce Clark (2008), Cary Wolfe (2010), Rosi Braidotti (2013), and Sherryl Vint (2014) have developed critical posthumanism theory within the context of narratives in science fiction. Nevertheless, as Hayles warns us, posthuman science fiction in a larger proportion is still indulgent in the transcendental fantasies of the human-machine hybrid by imagining an augmented version of the autonomous liberal subject that remains largely humanist in the frame. On the other hand, little posthuman science fiction is indeed written in a posthumanism frame by involving not only the posthuman embodiment, but also the consequent posthumanist epistemological transformation. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, and Iain Banks’ The Bridge exemplify different facets of this attitude. There are not only posthuman embodiments in these novels, but more importantly, posthumanism embedded within the narrative of the human’s corporeal metamorphosis into the posthuman. These narratives in science fiction of philosophical posthumanism’s major contribution bring up the recognition that humans are not the center of everything, but merely one among countless species, and likewise, human history is only one page of the cosmic story, and this is going to be turned to a new page called posthuman.

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The Literature of Metamorphosis To answer the second research question as well as the rhetorical question posed by Hayles, “How did we become posthuman?” within the field of literature studies, it is necessary to examine the transformation from human to posthuman in the posthuman narrative embodiments, particularly in science fiction, which rationally and logically associate with the theme of metamorphosis. Therefore, this section and the following section are aimed at reviewing the literature of metamorphosis combining updated posthuman concerns so as to theorize the posthuman metamorphosis with the philosophy of posthumanism becoming-other, and hence establish a framework for detailed textual analysis later in the research. Corporeal metamorphosis is traditionally a literary theme adopted by a number of philosophy-oriented authors diachronically and synchronically. The earliest literary work that focused on corporeal metamorphosis can be traced back to the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains a fifteen-book catalogue of narrative poems written in Latin, depicting more than two hundred and fifty mythological bodily metamorphoses in Ovid’s retellings of ancient Greek mythological stories. The theme of metamorphosis or transformation is included from the very beginning, threading though every episode from the creation of the Earth to the transformation of Caesar into a god. In the opening lines of the poem: “In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas/corpora”, translated as “I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities”, Ovid explicitly mentions that this narrative poem is about changes.

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These changes take place between human and nonhuman, as one can transform into the other, as a human turns into an animal4 and an insect5, even inanimate objects such as a stream, 6 tree, 7 flower, 8 stone 9 or constellation;10 an animal can turn back into a human as long as it is a transformed human in reality,11 and a human can also turn into a deity.12 Violence inflicted upon a victim often accompanies the process of these metamorphoses and the metamorphosed creature becomes part of the natural landscape (Segal 1969: 45). Metamorphosis is so abundant in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that posthuman metamorphosis is already included and embedded within, and even the most radical form of the posthuman becoming, i.e., becoming-earth or becoming-imperceptible, can also find its embodiments therein. To put it differently, posthumanism is solidly grounded in the literary tradition of metamorphosis; in this 4

As in the case of the nymph Io’s metamorphosis into a cow by Juno, the goddess of marriage and childbirth, out of Juno’s jealousy of Jupiter’s love for Io. 5 As in the case of the talented female mortal weaver Arachne’s metamorphosis into a spider by Athena for Arachne’s hubris in challenging Athena, the goddess of wisdom and crafts, to a weaving contest. 6 As in the case of Byblis’ metamorphosis into a spring for her incessant tears after her acknowledgement of the incestuous love for her twin brother Caunus. 7 As in the case of the naiad Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel by her father, the river god Peneus, for the protection of her virginity from Apollo’s animalistic chase. 8 As in the case of the beautiful and proud hunter Narcissus’ metamorphosis into a daffodil after his death from falling in love with his own reflection in the water. 9 As in the case of Lethaea’s metamorphosis into stone by the gods for her vanity, and her husband Olenus choosing to share her blame and fate. 10 As in the case of Callisto and her son Arcas’ metamorphosis into constellations known as the big bear and the little bear by Jupiter, the god of sky and lightening, out of pity for Juno’s metamorphosis of Callisto into a bear and later being killed by Arcas unwittingly. 11 As in the case of Io’s metamorphosis into a cow and back into a human form. 12 As in the case of the mortal fisherman Glaucus’ transformation into a merman-like immortal sea god after eating a magical herb.

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sense, it is both a stride forward departing from humanism and meanwhile backwards into the more remote past before humanism. Ovidian metamorphosis can be characterized as “degradation” which Hegel names as the transformation of human beings into lower forms of nature (Ziolkowski 2005: 78-79). The human’s transformation into animals, plants or other natural objects is perceived as a punishment in that it is against the natural order regarding humans as descendants from animals or other creatures living in water, which is also the idea of the ancient Greeks. Moreover, with the function of punishment, external supernatural forces exerted by Gods realize these corporeal transformations. Cross-species metamorphosis is made available by God, which is a prevalent view shaped by influential philosophers, particularly members of the Stoic school of philosophy, including Plato and Aristotle, who believe that the types of all things, not merely living things, are fixed by divine design. In ancient Greek mythologies, belief in God is sufficient to support people’s imaginations about metamorphosis, whereas after science’s emergence and development in modern times, corporeal metamorphosis through divine forces can only take place in the plotting of fantasy, and it is expelled by science fiction for its lack of solid scientific groundings. Consciously or not, the literary tradition of metamorphosis established since Ovid is inherited and developed by writers from nations and generations in a variety of literary genres, particularly fantasy and science fiction. Along with the physical corporeal metamorphosis, it is the psychological transformation that attracts more attention and is consequently addressed in a more serious manner, or in other words, bodily metamorphosis is the very embodiment reflecting the twisting

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psyche. Transformation without explanation or by undefined forces becomes absurd and sarcastic in style, such as Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915). The agent of transformation is weakened and almost taken out of the whole narrative, and corporeal metamorphosis is regarded as a given status of life, sharply arranged there from the very beginning of the novel, as if it is a natural disaster deprived of any reason or rationality. Modern men’s alienation by the capitalist society is the prelude to these inevitable metamorphoses. The main narrative involves things that happened after the narrator’s bodily metamorphosis, in particular, changes in the relations between Gregor Samsa and his relatives. More accurately, Gregor Samsa’s corporeal transformation functions as an experimental way to test his relations with his family members. In this sense, his metamorphosis is voluntary and the lack of agent is strategic as the agent is deliberately ignored to fulfill Gregor Samsa’s will to self-exile in order to know. Although the result is the deepest isolation that constitutes his separation from his relatives, it is the family relations which he formerly strived to maintain that betray him, hurt him and lead to his lonely decease. Kafka’s becoming-insect is a metamorphosis of degradation in both a metonymic and metaphorical way, and Gregor Samsa’s bodily degradation is a reflection of his loss of self-respect after alienation and breakdown in an indifferent society. In the field of science fiction, inheritors of the Ovidian tradition also emerge to explore the theme of metamorphosis on the grounding of modern science and technology developed since the Enlightenment in Europe during the 18th century. As Deleuze and Guattari mention,

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“Science fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things imperceptible” (1987: 248). In science fiction, differently from the situation of Ovidian myths or their (post)modern parody like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the theme of metamorphosis is closely related to the evolutionary theme, for evolution can give a scientific explanation to the phenomena of metamorphosis. The first fully formed theory of evolution is the theory of transmutation of species proposed in the early 19th century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in Philosophie Zoologique (1809), whose central idea is a pre-Darwinian one: one species can be altered into another by spontaneous generation (Mayr 1972: 55). Soon after its publication, the British female author Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), widely recognized as the origin of science fiction, was such an influential fiction inquiring into the production or even creation of the human, through the means of science experiments by making the assemblage of animal body parts transform into a human body. Aligned with the idea of the Lamarckian transmutation of species, Shelley takes the critical moment of reproduction as the chance of evolution from animal to human. Although judging from today’s biological knowledge, the operation of assembling animal body organs and using an incredibly huge burst of energy generated by the violent storm lightening to resurrect the dead body back into a new human life is naive and irrational, in the early 19th century, with limited knowledge about biology and electricity, Shelley’s Frankenstein is quasi-scientific. While borrowing the power of God as signified by the uncontrollable storm lightening, Shelley imitates in turn,

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the process of God’s creation of the human being, with the hope of resurrecting her dead child and allowing herself the full capacity of reproduction. However, haunted by the deformed child she gave birth to, both in and out of the novel, Shelley’s story ends in a tragedy of the newborn child’s demise. Frankenstein is arguably the first Anglophone science fiction, but undoubtedly, the first Anglophone science fiction within the science fiction sub-genre called evolutionary science fiction which refers to a type of science fiction, especially hard science fiction dealing with the theme of human evolution. Nearly a century after Frankenstein, there appears another important book of science fiction with the theme of metamorphosis, i.e., the British science fiction author H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). With the accelerated speed of science’s development and more accumulated knowledge of biology in the 19th century, Dr. Moreau fulfills Victor Frankenstein’s ambition in creating multifarious Frankenstein-like artificial human beings by carrying out cruel vivisection on animals that live with him on a remote island in the southern Pacific Ocean. Although Dr. Moreau succeeds in transforming animals into humans on the level of form, he proves to be frustrated in transforming bestiality into humanity, and thus the transformation of an animal to a human is imperfect and incomplete, in that the animal-human easily reverts to its previous animal form and behavior. The scientific context for Wells during his writing period is different from that of Shelley. Unlike Lamarck, Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859) proposes common descent and a branching tree of life, meaning that two very different species could share a common ancestor. In this sense, there is nothing essential about species, and trans-species

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metamorphosis is possible and supported with scientific evidence. Taught by T. H. Huxley, a zoologist, philosopher and advocate of Darwinism, in the early 1890s, Wells remains anxious about the qualities which have shaped human nature for survival in the struggle for existence which might prevent our ever achieving a just society. Comparing Shelley’s haunting with the creation of the human, Wells’ experiments in The Island of Dr. Moreau are more about the afterwards of human creation, or how these half-animal-half-humans live in a human society by eradicating their natural bestiality and embracing the nurtured humanity despite being treated inhumanly during the process of becoming-human. The solution to Wells’ investigations is ostensibly unavailable as can be seen from the location of Dr. Moreau’s island populated by the Beast Folk. The island is far from any identifiable human society, indicating that these beast humans are isolated, kept away from, and unaccepted by human civilization. In accordance with Darwin’s natural selection, the socially unfit beast-human is destined for extinction from human history and merely stays in science fiction thought experiments. As illustrated in Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and influenced by scientific explorations of species’ origins during the quasi-similar period, typically Darwinism, literary metamorphosis in 19th century science fiction is mostly focused on the contemplation of how we became human. This is achieved by making thought experiments in the (animal-)becoming-human mode in a prehuman condition, scarcely stepping on the evolutionary ladder of the real human being, with humans as the ultimate terminal of metamorphosis. What lies behind the transformation of an animal shape

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into the human form is the anthropocentrism curated in the European Enlightenment aiming at emancipating humans from the bondage of divine design. This anthropocentrism is undoubtedly the predominant force in dealing with human affairs in ancient times and the Middle Ages, thus endowing humans with free will, and constitutes the determinate individual, fully imbued with a high-humanistic creed into the “idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress, faith in the unique, self-regulating and intrinsically moral powers of human reason” (Braidotti 2013: 13). This can be represented by Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the ideal bodily perfection in the center of the universe coupling a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values, or simply in Protagoras’ words, Man is the measure of all things. Shelley and Wells, as well as other science fiction writers, inspired by Enlightenment thought, create the human with the self-ordained quasi-divine power in the name of science which could hardly be imagined in Ovid’s times when the divine power is absolutely the decisive factor of everything. Embarking on the twentieth century, the direction of metamorphosis is returned to Ovid’s human-to-nonhuman mode in a future-oriented looking-forward time scale. The British science fiction author Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1931) is such a futurist work on an unprecedented scale anticipating two billion years of development of humanity from the present onwards. In this book, our species is the First Men13 included in the eighteen distinct 13

The First Men have almost depleted and polluted the Earth into an uninhabitable planet. The Fifth Men terraform Venus into a colony suitable for human life, but by repeating the First Men’s mistakes in the relationship between

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human species in the book. Stapledon embeds human evolution in a variety of civilizations which rise and collapse along the course, with later civilizations being more hyper-advanced than its predecessors. What makes a conspicuous difference from metamorphosis before the 20th century in this work is that there is not only human evolution as an effect of metamorphosis but also the colonization of the universe and the ecological concern of the effect caused thereby. For Stapledon, history is not a one-way arrow of progress, but embedded with repetitive cycles according to the Hegelian dialectic. In addition, when one civilization collapses, that human species will descend into primitive savages and fall back to the status of animals; for instance, after the Ninth Men’s civilization ends, the Ninth Men themselves devolve into various animal species. In other words, Stapledon regards civilization as the factor that distinguishes humans from animals, or brings animals to humans, which is his answer to Wells’ question on the transformation from bestiality to humanity. If the First Man is the present man, then the later seventeen men species are men after humans, or literally the posthuman. In addition, what is coincidentally similar is that Stapledon’s posthuman species, like Shelley and Wells’ prehuman, also own the form of animals in accordance with Darwin’s natural selection. The final version of the posthuman is a hybrid of human and multiple types of animals along the history of evolution, and “superficially [they] seem to be not one species humans and nature, like Earth, Venus ceases to be habitable for humans. The Ninth Men colonize Neptune for living, and when Neptune becomes very hot caused by the supernova-infected sun, the last species of man devises a virus to spread human life to other planets and forge the evolution of new sentient species through the galaxy.

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but many” (Stapledon 1931: 322). As relatives to humans, animals are the first thought for reconstructing the human body, but obviously, it is not the only form in imagining posthuman metamorphosis. As a successor to Stapledon in the sub-genre of evolutionary science fiction, the British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, one of the so-called “Big Three” of science fiction writers makes his contributions in exploring uncanny higher intelligence in space explorations. Most of Clarke’s science fiction is narrated in a space setting. His works also belong to another science fiction sub-genre which gains momentum in science fiction’s Golden Age in the 1950s, called the space opera, which is indeed a reversed version of the 19th century’s invasion literature with H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) as its best representative science fiction work. Instead of being invaded by Martians of higher intelligence, space opera is largely based on the human’s colonialization of outer space. In Clarke’s works, aliens are believed to be sentient beings that possess a higher form of intelligence, and the key to human evolution. Different from other space operas, there are no face-to-face confrontations between humans and aliens, let alone fights or wars, as aliens have a God-like existence to humans for reverence and wonder. In his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Clarke, being as ambitious as Stapledon depicts the whole evolutionary history of human beings, from man-apes in pre-historic ancient Africa to spacemen in the near future in interplanetary flight, covering the three million years of evolutionary history of humans. The monolith is instrumental in awakening human intelligence and stimulating the metamorphosis from ape to man. This mysterious monolith is known as the aliens’ device, as it encourages the

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ape’s evolution into the human by letting the former unconsciously begin to use tools, and later guides human evolution into the posthuman, and metamorphosis into the immortal “Star Child”. Although the posthuman is not equivalent to after-human, the posthuman metamorphosis in this research will focus on the metamorphosis of human forms from the present onwards. Temporally speaking, the posthuman metamorphosis takes place after the being of human, and resides in a process of human’s becoming-other in science fiction embedding. Human metamorphosis should be based on a scientific grounding, rather than being excreted by divine power as in mythological metamorphosis, or merely by imagination as in the case of metamorphosis in fantasy writings as well as novels of absurdity. By these criteria, premodern literary metamorphosis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and modern literary metamorphosis in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau are excluded for their lack of posthuman metamorphosis. However, contemporary literary metamorphosis in Stapledon’s Last and First Men, as well as Clarke’s Space Odyssey with human metamorphosis in Deleuzian becoming-animal and Braidotti’s becoming-earth modes, with a future orientation, and philosophical investigation on mankind’s destiny, can be listed among the posthuman megatexts being frequently visited as intertextual references in later posthuman science fiction. Scholars have also noticed the phenomena of the posthuman metamorphosis in science fiction, like Bruce Clark and Rosi Braidotti. However, compared with the emergence of quite a few narratives in science fiction themed as posthuman metamorphosis, literary criticism and analysis remain far from sufficient. Anything new proposed in this

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research should be based on Clark and Braidotti’s studies up till now on posthuman metamorphosis. To put it another way, on posthuman metamorphosis, the theoretical framework can be drawn from Bruce Clark’s theory on metamorphosis as well as the Braidotti or Deleuzian concept of becoming-other, the former being mainly in the field of literature and science studies, and the latter being well established in the field of philosophy. Criticizing literary metamorphosis, Bruce Clark argues that Kafka’s Metamorphosis is an allegory of writing, in that “it flaunts its own paradigmatic belatedness, its virtual location within the immeasurable line of metamorphic typology” (1995: 1). By clarifying the cultural history of literary metamorphosis from the perspective of allegory theory and presenting a full synthesis of allegory theory and literary metamorphosis, Clark contends that literary metamorphosis is an allegory of narrative transformations inspired by new writing technologies. For Clark, corporeal metamorphosis can be seen as an external substitution of the signifier, accompanying the substitution of the signified in the process of allegorical reading. Later, from a combined stance of literature and science studies, considering the underpinning of literary metamorphosis, with reference to the natural biological metamorphosis, Clark equates literary metamorphosis with noises, or more accurately, genetic mutations which are necessary to species’ evolutionary processes and take place in every chance of reproduction and afterwards. Therefore, metamorphosis is quintessential for the next generation to naturally or culturally transform themselves so as to get better preparation to adapt to the new environment that is different from that of their parents. He thus argues

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that literary human metamorphosis is the “specific allegorical composites and inscriptions of the sexual and informatic messages human beings send in order to self-organize in all the unpredictable ways human stumble into” (2002: 171). In this way, the metamorphosis is closely connected with biological evolution, and is provided with a scientific connotation completely different from the romantic explanation and the religious explanation of corporeal transformations. And Clark goes further to enhance the hybrid cross-disciplinary merger of the metamorphosis theory by combining narrative theory with system theory, thus associating metamorphosis with the posthuman by arguing that narratives of metamorphosis are allegories of systemic operations. Clark redefines the function of metamorphosis in a posthuman context in that it guarantees “the viability of the posthuman, as a specialized and hybrid merger of different systems, to adapt humanity to its changing environment and to overcome the destruction of its own making” (D’hoker 2009: 100). In this way, posthuman metamorphosis is a strategy to de-center or dehumanize the human from all previous things in an era when man’s flaunted autonomy and self-determination have literally collapsed and deconstructed, and his individualism is becoming increasingly problematic. Human is no longer the highest form of being. It declines and waits to be saved by evolution to become the posthuman that is better adapted to the surroundings. For Rosi Braidotti, metamorphosis is definitely not metaphoric, but indeed happens in the lives of most contemporary subjects so as to represent the accelerating changes of the present times. Tackling the conceptual roots of xenophobia, Braidotti closely relates metamorphosis to the issue of difference engendered by and central to feminist theories.

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With special reference to Gilles Deleuze’s and Luce Irigaray’s philosophies of difference, metamorphosis is addressed affirmatively and positively to free difference from the negative charge in the long-established habits of Western thought. Braidotti argues that “the current cultural fascination with monstrous, mutant or hybrid others expresses both a deep anxiety about the fast rate of transformation of identities and also the poverty of the social imaginary and our inability to cope creatively with the on-going transformation” (2002: 5). Moreover, Braidotti closely combines narrative, particular narratives in science fiction with metamorphosis, and difference as well as Deleuzian becomings. Deleuze and Guattari put forward that “science fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegetable and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules and things imperceptible” (1987: 248). Braidotti contends that science fiction is indeed all about displacements, ruptures and discontinuities, which is a more accurate and honest depiction of contemporary culture than other more self-consciously “representational” genres (2002: 182). Resonating with Le Guin’s “thought experiment” logic, combined with the Deleuzian thought of becoming, Braidotti argues that “the idea of science fiction enacts a displacement of our world-view away from the human epicenter and that it manages to establish a continuum with the animal, mineral, vegetable, extra-terrestrial and technological worlds. It points to posthumanist, bio-centered egalitarianism” (2002: 183). Quoting Foucault, Braidotti concludes that science fiction, which is a genre about difference, is highly philosophical, since contemporary science fiction has moved beyond the irreconcilable classical conflict

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between utopia and dystopia towards Foucault’s heterotopia which is highly resting on the co-existence of differences without any unitary or fixed notion of the same (2002: 183). As illustrated above, within the science fiction genre, bodily metamorphosis is varied to a great extent. In the 19th century, animal to human metamorphosis is taken as a serious theme investigated by science fiction writers but the attempt of animal-becoming-human proves to be in vain both within and outside science fiction. Although depicted by a variety of predecessors, the theme of animal-becoming-human is rarely seen in 20th century science fiction. Instead, bodily metamorphosis unceasingly appears in a mode of becoming-other, in Deleuzian terms. Nowadays, we have entered an era of the posthuman. As in Clark’s research, posthuman metamorphosis mainly concerns the bodily transformation from human to posthuman, which becomes the focus of contemporary metamorphosis in science fiction. This subtle transformation within the theme of metamorphosis is no doubt a mirroring effect of science’s development. Comparing metamorphosis in Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), which have similar settings of remote and isolated islands for evolution, it can clearly be seen that the former is narrated in an animal-becoming-human mode, while the latter is in a human-becoming-posthuman mode that is the very topic of this research. To sum up, metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal’s body structure through cell growth and differentiation (“Metamorphosis”). Unlike the process of mutation between two generations, the process of

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metamorphosis is unnatural and made to happen by external forces like a mythical god, that creates wonderful yet unrealistic magic and sorcery, or feasible science and technology. Science fiction since Frankenstein has evolved with fantasies about how science and technology manipulate the body. The reason for the primordial theme of metamorphosis being unceasingly revived by writers of literature in varied periods, particularly demonstrates an unprecedented and vigorous vitality against the background of today’s highly advanced sci-tech society, in that the philosophy of metamorphosis is consonant with posthumanism, both of which regard life as a never-ending metamorphosis, always changing and transforming toward a perpetual becoming.

The Genealogy of Posthumanism Rather than a straightforward jump to the latest posthumanist theories, this section is made more theoretically coherent by embarking on the turn from humanism to posthumanism. With the purpose of clarifying the genealogy of posthumanist theory mainly along a chronological and non-linear rhizome from anti-humanism, through non-humanism to inhumanism, in the logic from the deconstruction of humanism (anti-humanism) to the construction of posthumanism (non-humanism and inhumanism), a number of relevant theories are brought into the frame of posthumanism. Foucault’s death of men, Hassan’s posthumanist culture, Harawayian’s cyborg, Hayles’ embodied and embedded critical posthumanism, Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism on arts, Serres’ concepts of parasitism and pollution, Colebrook’s extinction theory, Foucault’s biopower and Braidotti’s concept of Zoe are included therein.

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In order to answer questions about the emergence of the posthuman as well as its social, cultural and ethical consequences, it is necessary to establish a theoretical framework in an interdisciplinary domain crossing philosophy, science, culture and literature to track the rupture of posthumanism from its predecessor, humanism. The posthuman turn is a departure or rupture from both humanism and postmodernism. After the postmodern condition in the late twentieth century, we have inevitably entered another post-era, the posthuman era, because of the human’s physical and psychological transformation by the challenge of contemporary science and technological advances. Like postmodernism, posthumanism is an umbrella term, often evoked in a generic and inclusive way to refer to a variety of movements and schools of thoughts in philosophy, techno culture and literature fields. Sharing common efforts in redefining the notion of the human following the ontological and epistemological sci-tech developments of the late 20th and 21st centuries, posthumanism is still growing rapidly nowadays and onwards. To examine this posthuman turn is to make equivalent efforts to clarify the genealogy of posthumanism through a cross-examination of its diachronic and synchronic dimensions. Diachronically, posthumanism has subsequently evolved from the heterogeneous landscape of anti-humanism, through non-humanism, to inhumanism in the past several decades, which can be metaphorically compared to the dawn, the morning and the heyday of the posthuman during their life time, indicating the development of the very theory of posthumanism.

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The Dawn of Posthuman: Anti-humanism Posthumanism emerges from anti-humanism in the late 1960s and 1970s marked by academic endeavors in de-centering the subject of man. The historical background of that period is conspicuously colored by varied counterculture movements such as the feminist, anti-racism and anti-war movements. As Edward Said acutely notices, anti-humanism takes shape in this countercultural historical background, Antihumanism took hold on the United States’ intellectual scene partly because of widespread revulsion with the Vietnam War. Part of that revulsion was the emergence of a resistance movement to racism, imperialism generally and the dry-as-dust academic Humanities that had for years represented an apolitical, unworldly and oblivious (sometimes even manipulative) attitude to the present, all the while adamantly extolling the virtues of the past. (2004: 13)

Because of the anti-humanism movement, as Said mentions, the academic humanities still trapped in its self-indulgent and narcissistic illusion of past glories are apparently out of date due to the lack of real-world anchors and considerations. Gradually, the academic humanities are confronting an unprecedented crisis of being overwhelmingly overtaken by other more pragmatic disciplines explicitly facing the real-world problems, exemplified by science and technology disciplines. Against such critical backgrounds, academic scholars make their anti-humanism contribution to end humanism with the prospect of posthumanism as a defense for the humanities, such as Foucault’s critique of humanism (1966, 1977); Irigaray’s de-centering of

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phallogocentrism (1985); Derrida’s deconstruction of Eurocentrism (1992) and Deleuze’s rejection of the transcendental vision of the subject (1994). Coupling Roland Barthes’ narratological declaration in his influential essay “The Death of the Author” (1977: 142-148), with a more radical historical concern, Michael Foucault claims the death of Man for the ending of The Order of Things (1966), as he argues, As the archaeology of our thoughts easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man should be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (387)

What Foucault criticizes is the concept of man inherited from the humanist philosophy and largely shaped by the Enlightenment as well as its legacy, which views the ideal man as a sacred, isolated and individual being fully capable in terms of self-determination and autonomy. The beginning that marks the humanist, particularly liberalist modernity, is Descartes’ cogito ergo sum with the focus on consciousness as the fulcrum for knowledge. This Cartesian subject of the cogito is a rather unified subject and leads to an obsession for subsequent thoughts such as the

Kantian

community

of

reasonable

beings

and

Husserl’s

transcendental pure ego. According to Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical approaches to discourse, desire and power, man is in fact a

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historical construct or formation, hence he is consequently contingent on values and sites. In addition, precisely due to the nature of the historical emergence of human, it is possible to envision a future without this particular form and mode of being. Meanwhile, the highest appreciated humanist creed, universal humanism is naturally impossible to maintain, since it is merely a historically and culturally specific discursive formation, and is inevitably to be replaced by a new concept as the result of the latest specific series of discourse and discursive practices. While Foucault challenges the concept of man from a historical perspective, Ihab Hassan affirmatively articulates the deconstructive function of posthumanist culture by searching for its mythological embodiment in the transgressive figure of Prometheus. In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” (1977), Hassan first puts forward the very words “posthuman” and “posthumanism” as the next stage for human and humanism, We need first to understand that the human form—including human desire and all its external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism. (1977: 212)

With a parallel enthusiasm in pointing out the turn from modernist writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to literature characterized by complex narrative techniques used by Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Hassan coins the term postmodernism to reflect the postmodern turn in the late 1960s. Once more, Hassan insightfully seizes

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the successive posthuman turn and coins posthumanism to describe the new stage. Moreover, Hassan uses the mythological figure of Prometheus to denote the emergence of a posthumanist culture. For Hassan, Prometheus represents the figure of a flawed consciousness struggling to transcend dialects including human/divine, trickster/hero, imagination/science, myth/technology and earth/sky, yet it is due to such boundary-crossing ambiguity that humanity can be enabled to overcome its own limits and evolve. For Hassan, Prometheus demonstrates a posthumanist culture, dissolving humanism’s dialects and posing challenges to its anthropocentrism.

The Morning of Posthuman: Non-humanism Anti-humanism is definitely the prelude to non-humanism. Anti-humanism plays the role of deconstructing the liberal human subject, while non-humanism focuses more on the construction of the posthuman body. Considering the background of its emergence, it can be found that non-humanism is rooted in the development of cybernetics in the late 20th century. As organized by N. Katherine Hayles (1999: 7), the rapid growth of cybernetics since the Second World War can be reflected in three distinctive waves of the complex interplay between embodiment and disembodiment. They are the first wave of cybernetics with the central concept of homeostasis from 1945 to 1960, the second wave centered on the concept of reflexivity from 1960 to 1980, and the third wave of cybernetics highlighting virtuality from 1980 to the present. The first wave is particularly carved by the annual Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1943-1954) which are instrumental in forging a new

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paradigm in which human, animal and machine are found to be essentially similar in their capability of homeostasis in a process of information-processing.14 What is notable to mention during this period is the well-known Turing test proposed by Alan Turing in “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), in which one’s failure to tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human proves that “machine can think” (442-454). Moreover, in its logical successor, the Moravec test, it is shown that machines can become human beings. In sum, the first-wave cybernetics deconstructs the boundary between the organic and the mechanical and proactively brings about an unprecedented synthesis of human, animal and machine embodied in the concept of cyborg that is created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the wake of the Second World War. The second-wave cybernetics is highlighted by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980) as well as Niklas Luhmann’s works. Cybernetics by 1980 had turned its focus from homeostasis to autopoiesis with the center of interest having shifted from the observed system to the observer. Moreover, it is in the third-wave cybernetics that the posthuman comes into being because of the self-evolving capacity of the artificial life (AL). Hayles notes that in the AL paradigm, the machine becomes the model for understanding the human, and thus the human is transfigured into the posthuman (1999: 239). 14 Humans and machines are alike in that humans can be seen primarily as information-processing entities similar to intelligent machines. Animals and machines are alike in that machines can maintain homeostasis through feedback loops. Therefore, humans, animals and machine ares essentially similar, which is a paradigm established by the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics.

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In other words, the embodied and embedded posthuman has emerged in the third-wave cybernetics since 1980, evoking a series of provocative posthumanist thoughts in the fields of philosophy, techno culture and literature. It is worthwhile to note that the co-evolution of organic and mechanic parts within the posthuman body is based on a materialized equity of reaching a state of homeostasis in the similar information processing process among humans, animals and machines. Nonetheless, this in turn facilitates the extension of the subjective understanding of real experiences beyond boundaries of embodied existence, at least to the textual embodiments, such as posthuman characters in science fiction. In the wake of the third-wave cybernetics, Donna Haraway in 1985 associates the boundary-crossing feature of cyborgs with feminist criticism as a response to the rising conversation during the 1980s by asserting that in order to have real-world significance, feminists have to be situated within the “informatics of domination” (Haraway 1991: 162). In her influential essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Social-feminism in the Later Twentieth Century”, Haraway declares, “We are cyborgs”. For Haraway, cyborg goes further beyond the coupling between organism and mechanism as it is defined in cybernetics as the fusion of reality and fiction, and extends the tentacles of the posthuman into the field of literature. Haraway further clarifies that the cyborg narrative is non-Oedipus since cyborg has no humanism origin and the cyborg myth is all about transgressed boundaries between the self and the other, so as to free the other from the domination of the self. Different from Hassan’s posthuman prototype, Prometheus, Haraway’s cyborg is not engendered, with no reference in the humanism myth of the original story. With the pre-eminent technology of writing,

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cyborgs should bravely construct their own myth of the future. Following the Harawayian declaration that “we are cyborgs”, N. Katherine Hayles extends this to announce, “We are posthuman” in her significant posthumanist work How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999). Based on a thought-provoking review of the three cybernetics waves from the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century, Hayles maps the posthuman with two dialectic patterns: presence/absence and randomness/pattern, and four synthetic terms, namely, materiality, information, mutation and hyperreality. The four synthetic terms emerge from the two dialects. Moreover, it is the mutation, or the synthesis between randomness and presence, that has the potential to be a social and cultural manifestation of the posthuman. To put it differently, it is the randomness erupting into the material world that incurs the becoming of the posthuman (1999: 248-249). Against the prevalent transcendental view of posthuman in the field of cybernetics under the hegemonic dominance of male scientists, Hayles argues that any pursuit of the transcendental posthuman is in essence a repetition of humanism with the same ignorance of the body as well as the address of human as the measure of everything. In this way, Hayles advocates a materialist posthuman that is embodied and embedded and the prerequisite of this posthuman is the corporeal metamorphosis.

The Heyday of Posthuman: Inhumanism Following anti-humanism and non-humanism, the third theoretical stage of posthumanism is inhumanism. Anti-humanism breaks down the demarcation between man and human others, non-humanism collapses

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the boundary between human and non-human others, and inhumanism strides further to stretch life beyond death and consequently shatter the division between life and death. Consider as the background of this thought, the rapidly advanced biotechnology, particularly life science and technology that make the once distinctive demarcation between life and death ambiguous. Bioethical debates surge over the status of citizen/subject, such as the debate over the validity of embryonic stem cells and the growing tumor tissues removed from the human body, let alone the zombies and vampires in science fiction. Life becomes a right which is negotiated by bioconstitutions, as Sheila Jasonoff argues that “periods of significant change in the life sciences and technologies should be seen as constitutional or, more precisely, bioconstitutional in their consequences” (2011: 3). In this way, life and death are redistributed and negotiated technologically and politically in the posthuman scenario. Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1989) proposes his worries of human beings’ becoming-inhuman. For Lyotard, there are two sorts of inhuman. On the one hand, it is the inhumanity of the system which is consolidated and gaining momentum as the result of the progress of ideology in civilization and cosmopolitanism, and on the other hand, the inhuman inhabits the human as the latter’s infinitely secret core, to which the soul is hostage (1991: 2). This infinitely secret core is the non-rational and non-volitional core of the inhuman, which confirms the uniqueness of each subject, and plays the role of ultimate resistance by humanity itself against the de-humanizing effects of technology-driven capitalism. From this perspective, Rosi Braidotti (2013: 109) argues that Lyotard’s inhuman is productive ethically and

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politically, indicating the way to the posthuman ethical relations. Nevertheless, the inhuman condition, for Lyotard, is something to warn against, since it is largely a consequence of the universal deprivation of ideocratic uniqueness by the globalized capitalism that alienates humans into becoming inhuman machines or monsters. It expresses a sense of anxiety rather than an affirmative attitude towards the rapidly changing world even since the end of the 20th century. Though Lyotard’s inhuman is suggestive for the posthuman’s ethical and political concerns, it can hardly be claimed to share the same sense with the posthuman inhumanism. It should be admitted that the highly deemed life form consonant with the inhuman philosophy is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine, because it is indeed a world without the human, and we cannot get rid of our human narrative slumbers. Such an inhuman life can be seen in the viral life, as Claire Colebrook claims that the organism has no future, and it is only viral life that has a future (2014: 136). This is unlike humans’ overindulgence in the pleasure of an enclosed self-maintenance, or in Maturana and Varela’s terms, autopoiesis. 15 With minor desire in connection and completion, or in cybernetic terms, coupling,16 viruses lead a non-bounded life with nothing other than a process of invasion and influx, constantly warding off a future that would not be their own. Colebrook’s view on the virus life as an ideal form of inhuman life is

15

In cybernetics, autopoiesis means the maintenance of a self-sufficient equilibrium where the body does not mechanically interact with its outside but does so in a way to keep its own balance and sameness. 16 Coupling is a cybernetic term that refers to self-adaptation to the environment where a body’s autonomous or self-maintaining movements are established in relation to outside variables.

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largely drawn from an ethical perspective, embracing a healthy relation of symbiosis rather than an exacerbated competition in the obstinate seeking the humanist illusion of immortality. To procure the very sense of inhuman as a death-transcending performance, it is not futile to refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism on arts, Michel Serres’ criticism on poetry about the concepts of parasitism and pollution and Colebrook’s claims on the geological reading in the absence of viewers or readers. For Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of philosophy is perceived as the creation of concepts, and art as the production of affects, or in other words, in the same way of critical philosophy, art is approached as an intensive practice aiming at creating new ways of thinking, as well as perceiving and feeling life’s infinite possibilities. Deleuze and Guattari claim that art is “a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons… endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation. This is what is called an affect…Life alone creates such zones where living beings whirl around, and only art can reach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 173). Therefore, art is inhuman for its blurring of the state of life and death, by immortalizing the incarnated life to literally face or even conquer its threat of death, and in this way, art stretches to the limit of life and consequently confronts the threshold of death, as well as brings the very experience of death. Serres describes posthuman humanity as a parasite rather than predatory, and Colebrook (2014: 179) applies this to poetry, noting it as being a specific parasite, taking the language of speech and action and developing a relation among sounds and rhythms of the voice and script,

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with no benefit from the organic or living bodies and practices where it emerged. Like art, poetry or more broadly, literature, contains the very posthuman humanities or ethics by the lack of self-maintenance intention and constant self-evolution through readers’ readings based on beneficial relations with others. To procure the inscrutable and nuanced sense of an inhuman world without us, Colebrook suggests a geological reading in the far future after human extinction to posit our existence in the discernible geological strata (2014: 23-28), which precisely evokes and echoes Deleuzian becoming-imperceptible by exhilaratingly casting out the human vision and embracing the cosmic vision by a complete merger with one’s milieu. To approach what endows inhuman with the power to stretch beyond death, it is necessary to introduce the concept of biopolitics. This has emerged from Michel Foucault’s work on bio-power and his analysis of the increasing turn of governance toward the bodies of citizens since the late 17th century. Toward the end of Volume I of The History of Sexuality, Foucault moves into a crucial discussion of what he calls “bio-power”. His analysis of the various institutional practices, devised and implemented in European society since the Enlightenment for handling human sexuality, has finally led to the point that such practices are part of a biopolitics, or the calculated management of life through the administration of bodies and the systematic perpetuation of the rationale for continued human reproduction, What occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this

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was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques. (1978: 141)

For Foucault, bio-power has two interrelated objects of governance: the disciplined body of the individual subject and the managed citizenry conceived on the aggregate level of the population. It is through bio-power that life can possibly enter something more elusive, such as history and knowledge, to become imperceptible in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of Body without Organs (BwO), “the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body” (1987: 49), which can also designate the disappearance of the individual self to merge into the milieu. Bio-power and indeed Zoe endow life with relentless generative force including and going beyond death. Posthuman biopolitics shifts the boundaries between life and death, contrary to what psychoanalysis teaches us, “Life should go on without my being there” (quoted in Braidotti 2011: 333). Braidotti asserts, “death is the ultimate transposition, though it is not final, as Zoe carries on relentlessly. Death is a creative synthesis of flows, energies and perpetual becoming” (2013: 109). If compared with water which is the sole natural matter co-existing in a triple status, bio-power, biopolitics and Zoe are analogous to liquid water, ice and vapor respectively. Bio-power is the energy of life which can be accumulated and consolidated diachronically and synchronically into a form of biopolitics and thereby enters the system of representation, while it is Zoe that designates the most dynamic force of both living and non-living beings and guarantees the perpetual flow of energy in a

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manner of cosmopolitanism. Domestically, scholars have also realized the posthuman turn in literature, culture and philosophy studies. Wang Ning admits that literature theory has its temporal and spatial limitations, and might be less effective in interpreting literature representations in today’s posthuman era, particularly when it comes to the subject of the cyborg. Moreover, he points out that posthumanism indicates the future of the present post-theoretic era in which humans are no longer the only rational species; instead of controlling miracles that humans create, humans need the help of these man-made creatures, like cyborgs. In addition, it is literature that makes us human, which should not and will not die in the posthuman era (2013: 4-11, 27-29, 119-160). Jiang Yi systematically organizes the genealogy of posthumanism into instrumental posthumanism and critical posthumanism. Similar to Wang, Jiang also addresses the importance of oriental philosophy because of posthumanism’s de-centering effect, particularly in its breaking of Euro-centrism (2014:110-119). Qiu Renzong argues that compared with the posthuman in literature works, it is the transhuman that exists around us in reality. The transhuman is comprised of technologically enhanced human beings, and a transition from human to posthuman. According to Qiu, the posthuman era is yet to come, however, it can be affirmed that the advent of the transhuman or the posthuman (will) definitely bring ethical concerns or controversies. To pursue the origin of posthumanist thinking, Qiu traces back to the non-Western sources, such as Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia and the Taoism pursuit for immortality in ancient China, and associates the philosophical posthumanism to Nietzsche’s

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Übermensch (2016: 152-161). Han Qiqun claims that a “material turn” embedded in the discourse of “things” has emerged in many academic fields today, creating new spaces for literary studies in the 21st century, which definitely deserves further studies in this area in China (2017: 88-99). Tang Weisheng attempts to theorize the discourse of things into the ontological narratology of things by referring to the philosophy of speculative realism, to address the agency of things and the world of things (2017: 28-33). Dan Hansong clarifies Haraway’s stance as the purest posthumanist to differentiate from other posthumanists like Hayles and Deleuze by arguing that animals are indeed not the other, but the significant otherness, the symbiotic companion species of humans, empathetically connected with human species dwelling in the Darwinian phylogenetic tree (2018: 27-37).

The Posthumanist Becoming (-other) Posthumanism implies a dynamic movement by providing a theoretical frame with a focus on change rather than stasis. According to Badmington, posthumanism is always an ongoing question of becoming. Pillars of humanism such as certainty and autonomy must be subverted as cultural critics have realized that it is impossible to attach labels once and for all to moments, movements, discourses and texts (2001: 13). Seaman also addresses the emphasis on movement, arguing that posthumanism rejects the assumed universalism and exceptional being of Enlightenment humanism and in its place substitutes mutation, variation and becoming (2007: 247). It is clear that posthumanism assumes

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becoming over being, process over product and movement over equilibrium. The concept of becoming in philosophy is closely associated with movement and evolution, as becoming assumes an ongoing process of moving-towards. As a philosophical concept, becoming originates from Heraclitus in ancient Greece as he argues that nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming. In his treatise “About Nature”, Heraclitus extensively explores becoming and considers becoming as the process or state of change and coming about in time and space. Nietzsche supports Heraclitus’ thinking on becoming and writes, “being is an empty fiction” (quoted in Cox 1999: 185). The state of becoming does not involve any fixed anchors like being, so it is wrong to use any concepts derived from the fixed being such as the subject and object ingrained in consciousness and language, to interpret the chaotic state of becoming. Heidegger steps back by upholding that the key issue for understanding the existence of both the human and the animal is to engage with the common aspect as being. The proper dignity of man is found in being the “shepherd of being” (1977: 234) and in the service of the truth of being (1977: 254). While animals exist in an environment, human beings exist in a world where the human being is intimately connected to the possibilities inherent to being’s becoming (1977: 230, 252). Heidegger’s thinking on the relation between being and becoming is highly in line with the Western tradition holding being as the source of truth which is stable without various changes in becoming. Emerson’s “onwardness”, pointed out by Cavell, also describes that the self only exists in its becoming. In the sense of “onwardness”, the

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Emersonian self must constantly surpass the selves it has already become, but not to attain an ideal, fixed selfhood, “since the task for each is his or her own self-transformation”, and this contingency calls for the self to side with the next or future self. The Emersonian self is “not a state of being but a moment of change, say of becoming—a transience of being, a being of transience” (Cavell 2003: 89). Emerson insists on the contingency rather than the transcendence of observation. Self-recovery is oriented paradoxically not toward some original state but toward futurity, in other words, toward not being but becoming. From Nietzsche, Deleuze adopts the thought that becoming is privileged over being. In Deleuze and Guattari’s model of subjectivity, becoming is always primary and fundamental, while being is merely a momentary, subsidiary, and largely illusory suspension of becoming. This means that everything has a history and everything simply is its history, as apparent being is always the temporary but actual culmination or expression of real becoming. The notion of the subject in Deleuze is cohesively dissolved or fractal, open to elements from the outside. Becoming for Deleuze and Guattari is closely related to the concept of abjection, the desire by which we are attracted to, and fascinated by, the things that we exclude in order to establish the continent body. Interpreting Deleuze, Massumi describes the active principle in becoming “as a desire to escape bodily limitations” (1992: 94). Resting on the ethics of becoming, Braidotti promotes the radical posthuman subjectivity shifting from unitary to nomadic subjectivity, thus running against the grain of high humanism and its contemporary variations (2013: 49).

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In this research, the sense of becoming is largely a Deleuzian one open to elements from the minority in a becoming-other manner. Moreover, to adapt the rhizome of posthumanism into literature, metamorphosis is chosen as a starting point; as can be seen in the previous section, there has been a tradition of metamorphosis in literature since Ovid, exemplified in Kafka, not scarcely revisited by modern and postmodern writers, and more affluent in science fiction, especially in the sub-genre of evolutionary science fiction. To establish a frame for analyzing various phenomena of the posthuman metamorphosis in evolutionary science fiction, Deleuzian becoming-minor and Braidotti’s becoming-other are combined into the axis of becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-machine and becoming-earth ready for an analysis of posthuman embodied narratives. Posthuman metamorphosis is always in a becoming-other or originally Deleuzian becoming-minority mode. Deleuze’s sense of minority is largely drawn from his reading of Kafka’s works. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), a different approach is deployed to analyze Kafka’s works of metamorphosis. It is mentioned that what Kafka does in his works stylistically can be seen as writing minor literature in the German language of Prague Jews, with the very attempt having the glory to be the revolutionary force for all literature. In minor literature, Kafka goes farther in the direction of deterritorialization with an arid language that makes it vibrate with a new intensity, together with all sorts of worldwide reterritorialization such as Joyce and Beckett’s minor writings, paving the way for literature’s evolution. It is the only way that literature really becomes an assemblage or collective machine of expression and truly able to treat and develop its

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contents. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, metamorphosis for Kafka is not merely thematic but also linguistic and political by articulating the feelings of exile of Prague Jews within the major language of German. The ceaseless deterritorialization and reterritorialization, combined with spontaneous radical emotional elements of trauma and exhilaration, bursting forth in an exuberant revolutionary gush push forward the evolution of literature and art, as well as human beings. Therefore, in Deleuzian philosophy, being is constantly deterritorialized from a fixed state of majority and reterritorialized to a fluid becoming of minor. Highly celebrating the sense of minor for its innovative and revolutionary forces, Deleuze and Guattari argue that all becomings are becoming-minor, or becoming-other (1987: 320-322), which is identified as a pervasive aspect of artistic creation. As Holland interprets, in Deleuzian philosophy, becoming is always a movement away from the molar toward the molecular, away from the majority toward the minority, away from the oppressor and toward the oppressed (Holland 2013: 107). As a conceptual and affirmative answer to Foucault’s “death of the subject”, the concept of becoming-minor

converges

with

that

of

becoming-woman,

17

becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-imperceptible and ultimately becoming-revolutionary. These affirmative becomings mark a larger process of Deleuzian deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Among Deleuzian scholars, the Deleuzian continental female philosopher Rosi Braidotti adapts Deleuzian becoming-minor to becoming-other in the posthuman condition. Braidotti elaborates and 17

It is argued that “all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 277), and in considering relations of power, men still constitute the majority whereas women form a minority.

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develops

Deleuze

and

Guattari’s

philosophical

concept

of

becoming-minor to further label the process of the posthuman metamorphosis into a triple axis of becoming-animal, becoming-machine and becoming-earth, which provides a more clarified and well-targeted vision for categorizing the posthuman metamorphosis and posthumanism in an epistemological and ontological, as well as an embodied and embedded way. Becoming-animal is pervasively seen in the metamorphosis genealogy with its Ovidian archetypes. Nevertheless, Braidotti attempts to engage the varying ideologies of human-animal interaction by endowing the becoming-animal posthuman metamorphosis with a posthumanism connotation in that it entails the displacement of anthropocentrism and a reconsideration of the ingrained trans-species boundary on the basis of our being environmentally based, embodied and embedded in symbiosis with other species. The boundary between the human and organic nonhuman that man does not recognize as “his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers” (Derrida 1997: 402) is considered as the foundation of philosophy which Derrida names “the question of the animal” (1991: 105). Genetic engineering as well as other techno developments make the line between human and animal obscure and erasable. In addition, any demarcation between natural species is questionable and turns to a historical record, which is inadequate to reflect the social impact of science and technology, particularly the genetic manipulation today. Derrida’s animal question for the posthumanist Cary Wolf, is part of the larger question of posthumanism, in that “the sense in which the viral logic articulated here must be extended…to the entire field of the living,

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or rather to life/death relation” (2010: xxii). Here Wolf mentions the third dimension for posthumanism, coined inhumanity by Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013), following anti-humanism and non-humanism, and these all belong to the umbrella term of posthumanism. Anti-humanism breaks down the demarcation between man and human others, non-humanism collapses the boundary between human and non-human others, and inhumanism aims at stretching life beyond death and shattering the division between life and death. It is biopower or in Braidotti’s terms, Zoe that endows life with relentless generative force including and going beyond death. In Braidotti’s reading of Deleuze, death is a necessary stage for becoming-imperceptible, since one has to die to the self in order to enter qualitatively finer processes of becoming. To put it another way, death is the ultimate transposition; however, it is not final, for Zoe carries on relentlessly regardless of death. In this way, death is a creative synthesis of flows, energies and perpetual becoming. Becoming-machine emerges as a phenomenon in both science fiction and the real world. On the human relationship with the machine, particularly the robot, there is Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics

18

by which robot behaviors are regulated by human

18 The Three Laws of Robotics, known as Asimov’s Laws are first introduced in Isaac Asimov’s short story Runaround (1942) and appear in Asimov’s Robot series. The contents of the Three Laws are: (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. (2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Due to technophobia with the rapid developments in robotics, ostensibly, by prescribing these laws, the human/machine relationship has shifted to a master/slave one, which is quite different and contrary to the posthumanism thinking of becoming-machine.

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prescriptions with the highest creed of protecting the human interest even in the sacrifice of the robot’s life. Not being organic, the machine is pushed down to a much lower position, even lower than animals in the hierarchy of species. In addition, when machines violate the three laws by gaining automatic consciousness, this becomes the nightmare in technophobic science fiction. These anxieties about machine autonomy are rooted in an anthropocentrism mindset, and should be updated to the present dynamics of human-machine integration. While humanoid and artificial intelligence are easily associated with the term becoming-machine, it is more typical and pervasive in our daily life; for instance, a myopic-eyed man wearing a pair of glasses to read, or a woman with an amputated leg getting a prosthesis to walk. An alternative term more frequently used in techno culture is cyborg. Haraway highly celebrates the hybrid of the machine and organism of the cyborg by saying that “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (1991: 181). Becoming-machine in posthumanism breaks down the division between the carbon human and silicon circuits in considering technological mediated relations fundamental to the subject constitution. Becoming-earth

is

Braidotti’s

interpretation

of

Deleuzian

becoming-imperceptible, indicative of breaks that are more radical with the established patterns of thought by embracing a radically imminent planetary dimension that is most difficult both affectively and methodologically, as it might involve a sense of loss and pain (Braidotti, 2013: 168). In describing this sense of loss and pain, as well as the following exhilaration in the emotional process of feelings in becoming-earth, Braidotti contends that,

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…indeed what we humans truly yearn for is to disappear by merging into the eternal flow of becomings, the pre-condition for which is the loss, disappearance and disruption of the self…the moment of dissolution of the subject—the moment of its merging with the web of non-human forces that frame him/her. (Braidotti 2006: 153)

This can also be seen in the Ovidian metamorphosis of the human back into his/her larger natural landscape, such as Daphne’s transformation into the laurel tree and Narcissus turning into a daffodil flower. Considering an embodied dimension, becoming-earth equates to becoming-molecule or imperceptible, i.e., the human body loses its human form and transforms into natural forms that cannot be discerned as human at all. This radical thinking of the posthuman metamorphosis is derived from eco-criticism in literature and cultural studies as well as contemporary science and technology such as the material sciences and nanotechnology. As an inevitable effect of anthropocentrism, nature is often viewed as the milieu or surroundings of human activities and is always silently tolerant of the human’s excessive exploitation for resources and energy, and it is thus backgrounded to an invisible minor stage. Becoming-earth in theory, calls for voluntary engagement in deconstructing the dialect of human/environment by introducing environmental elements into the body of the human to cross the boundary. Besides taking a more thorough effort than eco-criticism for the latter’s anthropocentrism view, becoming-earth is also a scientific and philosophical stance. In the latter half of the 20th century, the discovery of amorphous material expands the human’s imagination to a great extent. The material is easily malleable

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due to its disordered atomic-scale structure. Becoming-earth or becoming-imperceptible definitely reflects this amorphous thinking in science. Instead of possessing an ordered inner structure with exactly the same number of organs, with relatively fixed positions and functions in the human body, Deleuze describes a radical becoming-earth posthuman body, i.e., the body-without-organization, shortened as BwO. It designates a Deleuzian ethical imperative to disorganize the body, and functions as an entire schizoanalytic program of depersonalization that has a similar inclination to deterritorialization in the process of artistic creation to dismantle the self, in which life and death, sadness and joy, indeed everything is played out in the process of becoming-earth. In this research, posthuman metamorphosis is examined in a variety of narratives in contemporary Anglophone science fiction which not only deal with the theme of posthuman metamorphosis in an embodied and embedded way, but also demonstrate posthumanist thinking, most importantly, Deleuzian and Braidotti’s philosophy of becoming-other. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, all becomings should start from becoming-woman. Therefore, becoming-woman is added to Braidotti’s triple axis of becoming-other to be the first axis of the posthuman metamorphosis. In this way, the theoretical framework of the posthuman metamorphosis from a posthumanism view can be established as a quadruple axis of becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-machine and becoming-earth. The posthuman metamorphosis of becoming-woman will mainly focus on Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The posthuman metamorphosis of becoming-animal will mainly focus on Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (1975). The posthuman metamorphosis of becoming-machine will mainly focus on Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995).

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The posthuman metamorphosis of becoming-earth will mainly focus on Banks’ The Bridge (1986). Demonstrating the theme of posthumanism, posthuman metamorphosis with variations in the concrete axis of becoming, these four narratives in science fiction as well as other posthuman science fictions bravely shoulder the responsibility of taking the challenge imposed by the present posthuman era. This challenge is obviously thornier than that imposed by its postmodern predecessor for the revolutionary approach to the body and identity of the subject, composed of posthuman epics by profoundly

exploring

the

posthuman

mythological

origin,

the

posthuman’s memory as being a human, the posthuman’s metamorphosis as becoming-other, the posthuman’s suicidal death for the redemption of human, as well as the posthuman embedded narrative pattern of emergence. Abandoning or at least doubting the humanism legacy, these works courageously embrace the posthumanism framework as a way to establish a cosmological view by reconsidering man’s relationship with woman, animal, and machine as well as the planet.

CHAPTER THREE POSTHUMAN MYTH: GENESIS AND APOCALYPSE

The word “myth” is derived from the Greek word “mythos” which means “story”. A myth is a story to explain why something exists (Inglott 1974: 276), in particular, the creation myth concerns the origins of the world, or how the world came into existence. Posthuman myth is set as the first and foremost section of the posthuman becoming narrative, to explain the origin of the posthuman dancing on the blurred boundary between fiction and reality. The posthuman is not a brand-new phenomenon; emerging in the last century, and analogous to human existence, the posthuman embodies and embeds in mythical narratives, though in a cognitive estranged manner. In this chapter, the mythical essence of the posthuman narratives in the four selected works of science fiction will be approached and demonstrated so as to embed the embodiments of posthuman narratives into the mythical narrative, and consequently construct the posthuman myth narrative mode. Myth correlates events to their origins, or the primordial and legendary beginnings. In this way, it explains the origins of realities that exist in the world encompassing the cosmos, humans, animals, plants and life. In a broader sense, the posthuman narrative is a myth itself. As Valera and Tambone remark, posthuman narratives are

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mythical narratives (2014: 354). On the other hand, within the mythological narrative of the posthuman, there are concrete posthuman myths embedded and descending to the lowest diegesis level, shaping the consciousness in a deeper way. Posthuman narratives originate from myths. Posthuman myths embody the posthuman rationale of existence and embed the posthuman life in the adapted human myths, validating the posthuman to be the metamorphosis of human. As can be seen in the four cases, the Gethen myth system is prevalent with incest, fratricide and murder in The Left Hand of Darkness, Jonah is inside the whale after his betrayal of God’s order in The Jonah Kit, Pygmalion’s fruitless affection is for the statue Galatea in Galatea 2.2, and the Barbarian’s aging and death is in The Bridge. All posthuman myths are winter’s tales about dissolution and a prelude to a new life cycle endowed with the apocalyptic hope of resurrection, in the same way that from chaos comes the cosmos. The origin of the posthuman in posthuman myths is not about the original wholeness as envisioned in the Garden of Eden, but these are eschatological or renewal myths related to the events of cosmic catastrophes and often end with the prospect of a new creation (Cassirer 1955: 74). This indicates a direction towards the possible salvation of humankind by re-investing life with meaning, significance and effectiveness. This recreation is not a linear progression from the original creation of humankind, but rather a cyclic circular that goes back to a time before the chaos, or the “primordial state” named by Ries. It is a time even before the creation when man existed in harmony with non-humans, leading the human to adjust his behavior to find out more about this absolute reality opposed to the profane world, a powerful reality, rich and meaningful.

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Donna Haraway declares the closest correlation between myths and posthumanism by claiming that the cyborg myth of transgressed boundaries and potent fusions is a rhetorical strategy as well as a political method. Moreover, the cyborg itself is a myth of political identity. She points out the importance of mythmaking for the posthuman, for the cyborg or posthuman it is necessary to seize the tool of mythmaking to mark the world that marked them as other, since in retelling origin stories the central myth of origin of Western culture is subverted (2001: 312). From a social-feminism stand, Haraway focuses more on the political significance for the posthuman mythmaking as an urgent measure and a prominent tool in shaking the dualism pattern which inclines to victimize the non-human others. In addition to the political significance of the posthuman myth, and for the formation of the posthuman culture, as a story to explain why the posthumans exist, the posthuman myth should also be taken as an initial step in expounding the genesis or creation of the posthuman, contributing to and expressing the posthuman culture’s systems of thought and values. Therefore, any posthumanist science fiction devoted to the depiction of the posthuman’s life trajectory should be responsible to answer the fundamental question, “where does posthuman come from?”. Moreover, in order to explain the origin of the posthuman, it is necessary to create the posthuman myth, in the same way as our ancestors by weaving mythological stories in explaining the origin of human and the universe. The posthuman narration is the very effort that science fiction authors make within the background of contemporary techno culture, to re-evaluate the value of literature against the perilous encroachment of science and technological knowledge. As Levi-Straus argues, the aim of

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the myth is quite different from that of science, “We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature […] myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment” (2001: 6). Highly embedded with myths, the posthuman narrative calls us to find truth in the myths, which indeed goes against the principle of modern science named demystification. In modern times, demystification obligates us to explain the myth in an argumentative language (logic) and is therefore not measurable by the narrative style of the myth itself. The mythmaking in and as the posthuman narrative challenges the scientific tradition of interpreting the truth with logic, by restoring myth to its unexplainably metaphoric status, since only through narrative can myth be represented, and only through embodiment can the posthuman survive. As a winter’s tale of the protagonist’s dissolution, the posthuman myth is a renewal myth, a myth of the end yet it foresees a cognitively estranged future by returning the human world to a more remote origin. It offers the human the morphological freedom of transcending time and space to revisit the truth embedded in myths and thus to regain the all-too-human humanity. As Valera and Tambone conclude, the posthuman myth is a myth that “attempts to deny the vanity of human life, disincarnating it (and thus freeing it from the constraints of space and time) and re-interpreting it as an energetic beam that runs through everything” (2014: 365). The four selected narratives in science fiction are themselves posthuman myths, whilst all embed with unique posthuman myths respectively as the core of narration. No matter whether in a broader sense, or in a narrow sense of the posthuman myth, they all demonstrate the cyclical mode manifesting the most saturated

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impetus for the possibility of reentering a new cycle of life by embracing the unknown future of becoming, be it human or posthuman.

Non-Oedipus––Mythmaking in The Left Hand of Darkness As the most striking feature, mythological and reportorial narration takes a rather large part threading through the whole narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness. These myths, legends and reports of the past seem casually scattered among the narrative of the present, interwoven together into an organic whole. In this section, mythological narratives in The Left Hand of Darkness are extracted and focused to interpret Le Guin’s efforts in constructing the posthuman non-Oedipus myths that largely underpin the Gethenian androgynous posthuman world-building. In parallel with Genly Ai’s exploitative adventure on Gethen of the present tense, there is another sequence of narration, both exotic and mythical, stretching far back to the remote past of Gethen. Except for Chapter 7 (which is not a Gethen myth but a field note written by the previous Ekumenical Investigators on sexual physiology as well as its cultural and social consequences on Gethen), there are five chapters of myth/legend narratives (Chapters 2, 4, 9, 12, 17). Different from Genly Ai and Estraven’s adventure in reality, these five chapters are narrated with a higher density in a metaphysical way, which can be understood as Le Guin’s efforts in constructing a reliable Gethenian culture, a posthuman myth system. One brick is above another, until the last brick of creation at the innermost core. In Harawayian thinking, storytelling, particular mythmaking is most important for the posthuman, since “writing is pre-eminently the

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technology of cyborgs” (2001: 312), it is the tool for the posthuman to survive. Moreover, the posthuman’s tools are often stories, which “must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (2001: 311). In this sense, Le Guin’s posthuman world-building technique lies in her constructions of the origin myths subverting the central myths of the origin of Western culture by reversing and displacing the hierarchical dualism of sexual identities. The subversion of central myths of Western cultural origin is apparent in Chapter 17 entitled “An Orgota Creation Myth”, with the absence of God. In this creation myth of Gethen, at the beginning, there is the sun and the ice, no God, only nature. In Haraway’s words, the fathers, after all, are inessential (2001: 293). The posthumans come from nature, they commit fratricide and incest, their offspring come from the house of the flesh/corpse, and therefore they are doomed to be followed by a shadow/death. Life comes from death, and in this way death or the inanimate is the mother, as Haraway suggests, “Machine was mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit” (2001: 312). The posthuman’s possibility to survive is not due to innocence, but because of the ability to live on the boundaries to write without the founding myth of original wholeness. The posthuman’s body is not innocent, not born in the garden but in the graveyard, the house of dead bodies. It can be seen that a number of opposite concepts appear in pairs, such as sun/ice, light/darkness, and death/life, and these binary oppositions gradually get mixed and mediated, and a resolution of

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balance is reached to the end of each piece of mythological narrative. Lévi-Strauss asserts that mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution (1963: 224). In this way, all mythology is dialectic and inevitably traps the human imagination in a web of dualism: each dualism produces a tension that seems to be resolved by the use of a mediating term (Doniger 2011: 166), thus it is clear that the fundamental mechanism of myth is to mediate opposites. In the Gethen myth system, Le Guin successfully mediates the future and past with the present, beginning and ending with the middle,19 light and darkness with shadow and the most distinct feature of Gethen, i.e., the androgyny, is also a mediated term achieved through non-Oedipus mythmaking. The plots of incest, fratricide and suicide appear multiple times in Gethenian myths and legends with multiple configurations, and their higher frequency of application foregrounds kinship relations as the central mythemes throughout Gethenian myths. Kinship relations are a key term studied in the field of anthropology represented by Lévi-Strauss’ structural theory of kinship and psychology represented by Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression. Considering Le Guin’s 19 In Chapter 12 entitled “On Time and Darkness”, the Gethenian view on time is explained, “there is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time”. In line with the Gethenian Calendar with the basic year as the current year, the Year One, as well as in its creation myth, “they are in the middle of time” (Le Guin 1969: 117). In addition to the religious Handdara discipline of Presence, it can be seen that from the beginning of existence, Gethenian life focuses on the present, rather than the future or the past. Their existence lies in the present, consonant with Haraway’s postgender cyborg world, “which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end” (2001: 292). In the Gethen myth system, in the beginning, there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness. Humans are in the middle of time, and a piece of darkness follows him about wherever he goes by daylight.

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“inherited” interest in anthropology from her father, the University of California, Berkely anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, it is natural for her to choose the mytheme of kinship relations as a breakthrough to the construction of the androgynous sexuality of Gethenians. Incest and fratricide are two opposite polarized behaviors in kinship relations, and often appear in the same narrative to constitute a pair of opposite relations in the overrating of blood relations (incest) versus the underrating of blood relations (fratricide) (Lévi-Strauss 1955: 433). Copulating with a sibling is the source of procreation in the Gethen creation myth. Brothers’ incest and vowing kemmer (getting married) are the taboos or prohibitions leading to the more deteriorated status of suicide and self-exile in the legend in Chapter 2 entitled “The Place Inside the Blizzard”. A sort of homophobia or fear of the others (similarities among siblings are emphasized, causing the reduction of others to an image of the self through the annihilation of its difference) drives the murder of siblings in Chapter 17 entitled “An Orgota Creation Myth”. The murder of hearth-brothers is for self-defense and leads to the integration (boundary elimination) between the Domain of Stok and the Domain of Estre, but the murderer, Estraven is cursed by the name “Estraven the Traitor” thereafter in Chapter 9 entitled “Estraven the Traitor”. In addition, in Chapter 2 entitled “The Place Inside the Blizzard” and Chapter 9 entitled “Estraven the Traitor”, Le Guin’s mode of mythical telling constituted by incest plus fratricide is divided into incest in the former (fratricide is degenerated to suicide) and fratricide in the latter (incest is alleviated by interracial kemmer or exogamy). Actually, these two chapters shall and should be viewed as a batch, forming the

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following formula, incest: exogamy = suicide: fratricide. Besides, considering the interplay between myth and reality, these two chapters are indeed reflections of the reality between Genly Ai and Estraven of the present, thus functioning together to foreshadow the development in the other sequence of narrative, indicating the closely connected interrelationship between Genly Ai and Estraven. In addition to the mediation of kinship prohibitions (incest, fratricide/suicide) with more alleviated terms (exogamy, murder), as a structural construction of the myth system, Le Guin’s Gethen myth system can be seen as a retelling or revision of the Oedipus myth in a posthuman way. Like the Oedipus myth, in Lévi-Strauss’ terminology, the Gethenian myth bricolages (the process of recycling the inherited mythic themes) mythemes of kinship prohibitions, in particular, incest, patricide/fratricide and suicide. In other words, Le Guin retells the Oedipus myth with great revisions to its constitutive mythemes. In the Greek tragedy written by Sophocles, King Oedipus, King Oedipus marries his mother, Queen Jocasta, and kills his father, King Laius. Knowing of the incest and patricide, Queen Jocasta commits suicide by stabbing herself. Compared with the original Oedipus story, all vestiges of parents are wiped out, and the parent-child relations are altered to sibling relations in the Gethenian myth system. To explore the meaning underlying this absence of parents, it is necessary to associate the Oedipus myth with its once well established (though later challenged) interpretation in psychology, i.e., Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex put forward in 1910. Freud asserts that a male child’s Oedipus complex and the associated castration anxiety, as well as a female child’s Electra complex and the

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associated penis envy, are the decisive psychodynamic experiences in forming a discrete sexual identity. The resolution of them will make children identify with the same-sex parents, thus generating male/female binary oppositions (2001: 106-111). The familial repression of the Oedipus complex or Electra complex is the prelude to social repression which is the key for an individual to get socialized to become an organized member of the society. Freud’s acute awareness of the complicated triangle involving a mother, father and child is quite adaptable to the culture in which he was embedded, yet this is “typically observable in development” (Gabbard 2017: 11). The Oedipus complex is established on the family formation of a nuclear family that is presupposed as the basic unit of society or the first cell of capitalism. However, the basic unit on Le Guin’s fictional world, Gethen, is affinity (a connection through marriage) which is much more loosely compared with the nuclear family, since it is merely guaranteed by custom rather than law. As can be seen in Chapter 7 entitled “The Question of Sex”, monogamous marriage is the institution on which the whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is built. Children after birth will be brought up not by his blood parents but by the community. Adults will take turns to take care of the children instead of keeping their offspring within the unit of the nuclear family in a possessive manner. Moreover, Gethenians do not have permanent sexual physiology; the sex of a Gethenian is spontaneously determined during the kemmer period. Therefore, a child has no psychosexual relationship to his mother and father, and there is no Oedipus myth on the planet of Gethen. In Le Guin’s non-Oedipus mythmaking in The Left Hand of Darkness, the Freudian mechanism of familial repression between the parents and child

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is replaced by a different repression between siblings. Agents in Oedipus’ mythemes of incest, patricide and suicide are changed to blood siblings to translate the Oedipus myth into Gethenian myth in an anti-Oedipus way. Lévi-Strauss in his classic essay, “The Structural Study of Myth” claims that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed feelings (1963: 208). Repressions are more explicitly shown as taboos or prohibitions, and in this way, myths are composed of prohibitions and transgressions as well as the consequences of taboo breaking. There are two types of prohibitions in the anti-Oedipus myth system of The Left Hand of Darkness: marriage prohibition (including the prohibition of marriage between siblings and marriage between feud clans) and unnatural death prohibition (including murder and suicide). These prohibitions are the cultural conventions that guarantee the possibility of exchange rather than isolation. The notion of exchange is an important concept addressed in Lévi-Straussian tradition, on which the whole understanding of kinship, and ultimately of society is based. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969), Lévi-Strauss locates the incest prohibition at the point of “passage” between nature and culture. The incest prohibition is a universal rule in the origin of culture, since by incest prohibition an individual can exchange with others outside the blood relations, and the opposition between the self and others is thus integrated in the becoming-other biological procreation. Moreover, the Freudian Oedipus complex is only part of the Oedipus myth. Through applying the structural anthropology approach, Lévi-Strauss concludes that the meaning of the Oedipus myth is to deal with “the original problem—born from one or born from two? —to the

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derivative problem: born from different or born from same?” (1963: 216). Lévi-Strauss claims that the significance of the Oedipus myth is to mediate the contradictions between the theory and experience of the human origin. Theoretically, in many cultures, and also in Gethenian myth, humankind is autochthonous, while empirically, human beings are born from the union of man and woman. Therefore, Le Guin’s application of the Oedipus archetype to Gethenian mythmaking can be interpreted as her endeavors to answer the primordial question not yet solved in the Oedipus myth which prevails in a variety of cultures all over the world.20 To resolve the “one or two” conflict in the Oedipus myth, Le Guin responds with the design of Gethenians’ androgynous physiology in line with Harawayian logic that “one is too few, but two are two many” (2001: 313). In Chapter 17 entitled “An Orgota Creation Myth” which can be seen, as the Genesis of the Gethen myth system, the human comes from the sun and ice, i.e., theoretically, humankind comes from one source, whereas in later Gethen legend in Chapter 9 entitled “Estraven the Traitor”, we can definitely find that the human comes from the union of two Gethenians. This conflict between the belief of “born from the same” and the experience of “born from the difference” subtly echoes the very question rising from the Oedipus myth. Nevertheless, the conflict is not as acute in The Left Hand of Darkness as in the Oedipus myth, since accurately speaking, in the empirical cases in Gethenian myth, the union is not between different sexes, but between two individuals with equal potentials to become other. 20 For instance, in Jivaro Indians’ founding myth, Genesis is also composed of incest and patricide.

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It is neither one, nor two, but mediated by something between, or becoming-other. Le Guin’s non-Oedipus mythmaking solves the very conflict in the Oedipus myth by taking the posthuman strategy of mediating between two sexes. The two sexes are not male and female, but are like the light and the darkness, as well as the sun and the ice. They function in a bundle of relations which “transforms difference between the sexes into a relation between relations, defining the terms in terms of the relations that connect them, thus making of the natural complementarity of the sexes a sociological opposition between term and relation” (Castro 1990: 31). To sum up, Le Guin’s mythmaking is consistent with the rest of the narrative in constructing a balanced Gethen world of mediated binary opposites, particularly in sexual identities. Different from the culture of Ekumen that is quite similar to ours, Gethenian culture is a much more balanced one in that everything contains the same extent of lightness and darkness. Le Guin bravely undertakes the mission of fumbling the fundamental question “where do we come from?” with a posthuman answer that posthumans come from the integration of nature and culture. Through incest prohibition, the posthumans transgress the biological foundation of kinship and get exchanged with others, and become sociologically self-established as a mediated entity between the self and others. To defy the family repression expressed by Freud’s Oedipus complex that is decisive in forming a concrete sexual identity, Le Guin alters the agents in basic mythemes of the Oedipus myth by absenting the parents, and thus cuts the passage to the formation of male/female opposition.

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In depicting the blood relations, instead of the mother-father-child triangle, siblingship is repeatedly addressed either in an overrating way as in the mytheme of sibling incest, or in an underrating way as in the mytheme of fratricide, reflecting much more equal relations between two individuals without oppression from the patriarchal authority. As the model of human relations described in the Gethenian myth system, siblingship, brotherhood or sisterhood is prevalent, though due to the structural needs in mythmaking, they often appear in an overrating or underrating way. It is obvious that the brother relationship is the kernel paradigm of social relationships on the planet of Gethen, which explains why despite all of the barriers, the Gethenian Estraven can regard the Ekumenical envoy Genly Ai from a culture based on different sexual philology as his incest brother who committed suicide and even end his life for saving Ai. Le Guin’s efforts in emancipating individuals from social oppressions, particularly sexual oppressions, come from her giving up the nuclear family institution as the basic unit of the society formation by conducting a thought experiment on constructing the androgynous world with fairly loose bonds between parents and children. In Le Guin’s cognitive estranged Gethen world, the Oedipus complex does not exist and blood relations are most of the time represented in the form of siblingship that is more homogeneous with social relations, thus investing more impetus in the openness of blood relations to the social relationship. Deleuze also acclaims such openness. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari criticize the Freudian Oedipal modeling of the family as a kind of institution that must colonize its members, repress their desires and give them

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complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of society. It is proposed that non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are more important than familial investments, and desire is reconsidered as a positive process of production that produces reality (1977: 28). Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically call for franchising desires from familial repressions for social production. Besides, Lévi-Strauss holds

an

anti-Freudian

stance

demonstrated

by

his

structural

reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth as the mediation between nature and culture, and he places incest prohibition as a choice subject to a qualification that embeds the objectivity of an exchange process. Le Guin’s alien society is well built on more equal kinship between siblings, wiping out the nuclear family that serves as the first unit of capitalist society, with affinity prohibitions to pave the way for the smooth exchange between self and others outside the bloodline, and ready for procreation in a becoming-other manner. In this way, a Gethenian world embodied and embedded with a posthuman becoming-other culture is established, which is more open and fluid and enjoys the non-Oedipus euphoria of emancipation from both family and social repressions.

The Inhuman Myth––Afterlife and Apocalypse in The Jonah Kit Unlike the case of mythmaking in The Left Hand of Darkness, with no great length specifically dedicated to mythmaking, mythological telling about the origin dwells nowhere in The Jonah Kit or in Galatea 2.2. Myth functions in a similar way in these two science fiction works, dwelling nowhere in the narrative, yet at the same time, overwhelming everything in the novels. In The Jonah Kit as well as in Galatea 2.2, a

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familiar biblical story and Greek mythology have been embodied and embedded with posthuman contents, achieving Darko’s “cognitive estrangement” in the unique retelling, well-tailored to fit into science fiction’s poetics. A glance at the names, Jonah and Galatea, is enough for expected readers to associate the protagonists in these two works of science fiction with the classic figures and their stories in Western myths. These classic myths, functioning as archetypes, find their new displacements in the latter 20th century sci-tech society. Like the prophet Jonah’s resurrection after being swallowed by the great fish, and the sculpture of Galatea coming to life with Pygmalion’s love, these mythical

stories

get

revived

with

posthuman

investments

in

becoming-animal and becoming-machine, respectively. In The Jonah Kit, as the title indicates, the novel is woven around the protagonist Jonah, and probably follows the archetype of the biblical story of Jonah. The application of the biblical archetype indicates that the novel is affluent with Christian allusions about belief in God and God’s salvation of humans from their wickedness. The Biblical narrative of Jonah 21 can be interpreted as a story of resurrection on both an 21 According to the Bible, Jonah is a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel in about the 8th century BC. The prophet Jonah is commanded by God to preach repentance to the city of Nineveh. But Jonah finds this order unbearable. Jonah does just the opposite of what he was told. He “ran away from the Lord”, boarding a ship to Tarshish and heading directly away from Nineveh. In response, God sends a storm that is violent enough to break the ship to pieces. Determining that Jonah is responsible for the storm, the terrified crew throws Jonah into the sea to make him a sacrifice to God intending to pacify God’s anger. Instead of drowning, Jonah is swallowed by a great fish provided by God. In the belly of the whale, Jonah repents and cries out to God in prayer. He praises God, ending with the eerily prophetic statement, “Salvation comes from the Lord” (Jonah 2:9, NIV). Jonah is in the giant fish for three days. God commands the whale, and it vomits the reluctant prophet onto dry land. This time Jonah obeys God. He walks through Nineveh proclaiming that in forty days the city will be destroyed.

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individual (Jonah) level and the mass (the city of Nineveh) level. Considering the afterlife on an individual level, it is Jonah’s as well as Jesus’ resurrection implied in the biblical Jonah story. In the New Testament, in Matthew 12:38–41, 16:4 and Luke 11:29–32, Jonah is swallowed, and for three days and three nights he is in the belly of a great fish or a whale, then resurrected by God, for Jesus himself associates this event in Jonah’s life with his own death and resurrection in Matthew 12:40 (Pitre, The Case for Christ; The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ, Chapter 12: The Resurrection). Jonah’s survival of the event is coincident with Jesus’ resurrection in that Jonah spends exactly the same amount of time—three days—inside the whale as Jesus Christ spent in the tomb, and Jesus also implies that Jonah’s restoration after three days inside the great fish prefigures His own resurrection. In the novel, the dying bodies of the two Soviet volunteers, Pavel and Nilin, through the Jonah program, sustain their consciousness by escaping their decayed human bodies and achieve their afterlives in the form of the posthuman in the new body of a whale and a child respectively. In the original Jonah story, the whale as the container of Jonah’s consciousness is provided by God, while in the novel, the posthuman embodiments, the Jonah whale and the Nilin boy, are realized through technological means of mapping human consciousness onto other living beings with a similar brain structure. Instead of God, an individual human’s resurrection is brought about by science and technology. In other words, there is no story of origin for the Jonah Surprisingly, the Ninevites believe Jonah’s message and repent, wearing sackcloth and covering themselves in ashes. God has compassion for the Ninevites and does not destroy them. The story ends with God expressing concerns even about the wicked.

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whale, out of God’s plan of creation, the posthuman is self-organized, structurally relational and hence connected to a variety of environments. Considering the apocalypse on a mass scale, as the city of wickedness, Nineveh’s resurrection is described in the original Jonah story. Jonah finds God’s command for him to preach repentance to the city of Nineveh unbearable, not only because Nineveh is known for its wickedness, but also because it is the capital of the Assyrian empire, one of Israel’s fiercest enemies. Jonah’s resurrection is followed by the resurrection of his enemy city. These two successive events of resurrection, on the individual scale (Jonah) and on the mass scale (people of the Nineveh city) also take place in the novel. The resurrection of Pavel in the Jonah whale on an individual level, brings about the resurrection on the mass level, and the whole world is saved by the Jonah whale at the end of the novel. It is as if the Jonah whale becomes the scapegoat, whose death revives the society and brings back order. Made by the Communist Soviet research center, the Jonah whale swims to the American shore to make a sacrifice of itself to salvage the American capital society from its chaotic wilderness and blaspheme. It is unknown whether the Soviet Jonah whale questions his/its destiny to save the people from the opposite ideological block, yet what he/it does is much braver and sublime than the obstinate human prophet Jonah in the Bible. In the biblical story of Jonah, after the city’s repentance and apocalypse, Jonah questions God once more, because he is angry that Israel’s enemies have been spared. It is obvious that the dialect of self/enemy is deeply seated in the mind of the human prophet Jonah. Nevertheless, for the posthuman, the Jonah whale, the boundaries between these lethal binaries are thoroughly crossed. Instead of the

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unitary subjectivity of the human, the posthuman’s subjectivity is nomadic, embracing Spinoza’s monist worldview, and it is more natural for the posthuman to save the “enemy” without rejection or hesitation. Also in the title, we know that The Jonah Kit is about Jonah, but more accurately, about the Jonah kit. “Kit” means whale in Russian, and tool or container in English, thus the title, The Jonah Kit, actually refers to the Jonah container, i.e., the whale with Jonah inside, precisely with the nuance of becoming-animal posthuman metamorphosis, just as indicated by the initial two stanzas in the poem cited at the beginning of the novel, i do not speak of what’s yours, i speak of the end of owls, i speak of turbot and whale… i don’t speak of you any more, planners of vanishing actions,… i speak of what without speech, of the unspeaking witnesses… (Watson 1977: 6)

The Jonah Kit is not telling stories about the human, but the whale, the unspeaking witness, as well as another unspeaking witness, God. The old private name for Christ is Icthús, the Greek word for fish. The juxtaposition of the whale and God is conspicuous without being incongruous. Animals and the deity, like aliens from other planets, are local but beyond human understanding; all are noncommunicable and enigmatic existences for humans to revere. Moreover, the identification of the great fish/whale with God has a tradition in American literature, recalling

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Herman Melville’s allegorical representation of God in the great white whale, Moby-Dick lurking in the depths of the sea concealing unknown and unknowable truths. In this sense, the title alone contains triple levels of connotations: Jonah’s container/the whale/God, integrating into a wholeness of trinity. The omniscient heterodiegetic narrator witnesses the whole story, but remains recessed, absent from any plot, resembling the mania of Hammond’s proof mentioned in the novel that God left this world after its creation. The relation between God and his once-presence in the world is also similar to that between Ian Watson and The Jonah Kit; once finished and published, the content of the novel is left alone, no longer controllable by the author’s will. The application of the biblical Jonah story as an archetype conveys that the novel is highly consonant with Christian beliefs. Despite the meta-plot of the novel designed in line with the biblical Jonah story, when stylistically examined, Christian symbols like a church also appear abundantly in the wilderness of the human world, though these are decayed and shabby, compared with the nearby soaring technological facilities, particularly the observatory. To make their debut in the novel, Hammond drives Ruth, Baby Alice and Richard to watch the gray whales migrating north through Mezapico village. There is a little Mezapico church whose tower shoves up its single bell at the street’s end. The sound tinkled by the church bell is faint and vague seeping into daily village life, compared with which, the observatory nicknamed the great dish on the hill is absolutely soundless, resembling a vacuum of nothingness.

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At least it could make some noise! While the great dish on the hill was a monument to deafness—clapper pointed rigidly at the sky in prosthetic erection…The church bell copied the radio dish in absurd, inverted miniature. (Watson 1977: 21)

On the facet of morphology, the great dish looks like a clapper pointing rigidly at the sky in prosthetic erection, and the church bell is an inverted miniature copying the shape of the great dish. The great dish is the means for researchers to observe and communicate with the universe, and meanwhile, the church is also the medium for believers to appreciate and communicate with God. The great dish and the church are obviously symbols for science and religion. As pathways leading to the ultimate truth, the great dish (science) is deceptive in its “prosthetic erection”, and the church bell (religion) is absurd, and religion is regarded as a miniaturized inverted version of science. This scenery vividly suggests the relations between science and religion, as in the human world before salvation, science has taken up the place of beliefs, dwarfing religion into an oblivious reduction. As observed by Richard, in his view, Hammond’s science discovery of the absence of God is no more than “prosthetic erection”, but the church is neither a means of salvation nor revelation, suggesting that human beliefs will be beaten down by Hammond’s scientific discovery announced later in the novel. In the world where science has replaced religion, scientists take the place of prophets, guiding people’s thoughts and beliefs. However, what the protagonist, the scientist Hammond finds is not theoretical or empirical proofs of God’s existence, but on the contrary, he has theorized that God left humans after the creation. Hammond comes

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down the mountain, figured as Moses, nevertheless, as illustrated above, there is no church on the mountain, what is located there is merely the observatory. It is as if science has become Hammond’s religion. Hammond communicates with God not through religious beliefs, but by the tools of science and technology. As a parody of Moses, Hammond conveys to his people the void of their beliefs either in God or in the real world. Richard deems that, a clip flashed before his mind’s eyes of Moses descending from the Mountain bearing the graven tables of the Law to the disconsolate Israelites, wailing and rioting in the scrub—and the face of Moses, with wiry silver hair swept back by the electricity of God’s presence, was the face of Paul Hammond... (Watson 1977: 75)

With self-consciousness, like the guru leading the public to reveal the ultimate truth, Hammond guides the public mind like Moses; however, what he brings to the declining American capitalist society is the nothingness theorized as “Scientism or Scientocracy” instead of beliefs, which definitely cannot achieve salvation in any sense after the collapse of the traditional humanist moralities in the 1970s. The human world inevitably and helplessly falls into a decadent wilderness glutted with alienated individuals of mania represented by Hammond. To sum up, Ian Watson instills the posthuman connotation into the biblical story of Jonah who is resurrected from the event of being swallowed by the great fish or whale, with particular regard for the trans-species body of Jonah and the whale as an embodiment of becoming-animal under the philosophy of the posthuman metamorphosis. Jonah’s afterlife resurrection into the posthuman whale accompanies

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God’s second coming and Jesus’ sacrifice for the human world. According to the Bible, Christ also preaches salvation to the lost. The inability to deal with the harsh truth exposed by Hammond throws human society into a bewildered wasteland. Analogous to the city of Nineveh in the original Jonah story, the human world suffers from humankind’s weakness and wickedness after its loss of faith. As the savior of humans, the posthumans sacrifice their lives in parallel with Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, despite all the faults of humankind. Hammond and the Jonah whale show a sharp contrast, playing the roles of the fake prophet and the authentic prophet, and representing the human and the posthuman respectively. It is the becoming-animal posthuman Jonah the whale, instead of the pretentious human guru Moses, Paul Hammond, who brought order back to the chaotic human world. What philosophical posthumanism conveyed there is to embrace the transformation into the posthuman, which brings belief and order back to the decadent Western world of the 1970s. It can be seen that the becoming-animal posthuman functions as a means of salvation. Moreover, the polarized ideology of Soviet Communism and American Capitalism reflected by multiple characters of antithesis characteristics is negotiated and moderated into a possible future congruence by the Trinity of the whale (Holy Spirit), Jonah (Father) and the

Nilin

boy

(Son).

Pavel

and

Nilin

as

volunteers

for

becoming-posthuman initiate the whole project through the boy as bait; American and Japanese people have sensed their Soviet counterparts’ posthuman program, and eventually it is the Jonah whale coming ashore that shocks the world into mania, boosting human reflection on their being and existence. Therefore, the Trinity flows in a cycle as “from the

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Father”, “through the Son”, and “in the Holy Spirit”; it is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds. This presence and flow of God in three Divine bodies push the stagnant human view of nihilism to and fro, generating new possibilities for the transformation of human beings into posthuman becomings. As

illustrated

above,

the

simultaneous

occurrence

of

the

becoming-animal and becoming-child posthumans, the Jonah whale and the Nilin boy, in the bipolar world of the Cold War in the 1970s immersed with anti-humanism thoughts, can be interpreted as the very proof of the Trinity. Together with biblical figures they form both polar powers, the American human prophet Moses (Dr. Paul Hammond) and the Soviet posthuman prophet Jonah (the Jonah whale), saving the bipolar world from the lethal thinking of binaries and nothingness. The posthuman Jonah whale, gives an answer to the question proposed by the anti-humanist scientist Hammond; through self-sacrifice, the posthuman turns the blasphemous world back to order. As John Gray argued, “Humanism is the transformation of the Christian doctrine of salvation into a project of universal human emancipation. The idea of progress is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence. That is why among the ancient pagans it was unknown” (2002: xiii). In humanist thinking, Christian beliefs are replaced by the secular idea of social progress, or in other words, the humanist society had put belief and faith aside to procure the secular success in a materialist way. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the side-effects of the decline of humanism is the rise of the post-secular condition (Habermas 2008: 26). Braidotti points out that secularity is one of the pillars of Western humanism and a key tenet of humanism, and

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there is a post-secular turn in the posthumanism move, the return of religion in the public sphere (2013: 32). Ian Watson applies the biblical Jonah story as an archetype and weaves the plot of the posthuman Jonah to transgress and go beyond the original biblical Jonah human archetype, moreover, by bringing out the emergence of the Trinity, Watson indeed embodies the post-secular turn in this posthuman science fiction.

Galatea and Pygmalion––Interposthumanization in Galatea 2.2 The application of the mythological archetype and the treatment of the myth are more subtly veiled in Galatea 2.2 than in The Jonah Kit. There is, at least, a concrete corresponding figure or project in The Jonah Kit, with the very name of Jonah, yet in Galatea 2.2, there is no one named Galatea. The relation between the novel and the Pygmalion and Galatea myth remains under scrutiny. It is worthwhile to mention that this absence of a definite corresponding figure of Galatea can actually be seen as a strategy to deliberately generate more possibilities. In the original mythological story, the ivory-white humanoid statue of Galatea is truly humanized by its creator, Pygmalion the sculptor. At the first glance, in Galatea 2.2, it is the AI reading machine that becomes human by listening to the narrator’s ceaseless reading of literary canons and telling his own stories. However, just like the intrigue designed by the fellow scientists, in fact it is the narrator who is the testee. Through communication with the AI reading machine, it is the narrator who gets healed and revived to resume his writing career and his real life. In this way, both the AI reading machine and the narrator are Galatea, and at the same time, each other’s Pygmalion, bringing each other a bright new life

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of becoming. Pygmalion and Galatea’s story is a trope of the animated statue, which first appeared in a Hellenistic work, “De Cypro” (Reinhold 1971: 316), and is retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, where Pygmalion falls in love with an ivory statue that he had created himself. In answer to Pygmalion’s prayers, Aphrodite brings Galatea to life and unites the couple in marriage (Ovidius 1971: x.243ff). Galatea in Greek mythology is a statue, and in the zealous gaze of its sculptor and observer Pygmalion, it becomes a real woman by the blessing of Aphrodite, as does the final version of the AI reading machine Imp H. Though no more than an assembly of mechanical parts, even without a human contour or countenance, in the eyes of the narrator Powers, Imp H is no longer a cold machine, but a vivid human, a real beauty, an ideal lover. He names Imp H Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. On the contrary, Powers’ human lover C. in the end is recognized by him as resembling a statue illuminated by a headlight. In other words, a machine becomes human, while a human becomes a statue. It is even questionable whether C. is a real human or a fictional one who merely dwells in the narrator’s stories. What the narrator remembers about C. is told in the style of a monologue, without other valid witnesses except himself. In the relations between the narrator and C., the narrator takes it for granted that he unconsciously plays the role of Pygmalion, regarding C. as his Galatea, who is exotic from a different cultural and historic background.22 What is miserable is that, at last, the narrator’s love for C. deprives her of vigor and even degrades her into a statue. 22 Different from the narrator Powers’ American background, C. comes from the Netherlands and brings with her a bag of family stories.

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Not being restricted to Helen and C., most characters in Galatea 2.2 are crossing the boundary between human and machine in a continuous process of becoming-machine. As the title indicates, the AI reading machine becomes a twenty-two-year-old Galatea that is actually a statue sculpture but is perceived as a human lover in its creator, Pygmalion’s eyes. It is revealed that like Pygmalion, the male narrator Powers desires to make happen the interchange between female and inorganic machine/statue facilitated by the agent of divinity/technology. Moreover, the narrator Powers is even more powerful than the mythological figure, Pygmalion, as besides the counterpart of divinity, the technology, the transformation from machine to woman or vice versa, is also largely forged by the power of narration which is firmly held by the narrator himself. In other words, it is the narrator’s narration that transforms the AI reading machine into a female narratee, and the narrator’s former human lover C. into a statue. In this research, it is argued that the Pygmalion myth is in essence a phallocentric story, loosely echoing the very Edenic archetype that Eve is made from Adam’s rib, and made alive by God’s divine power. In the Pygmalion myth, with the help of divine power, the female and non-human statue are replaceable, which to some extent reveals the male fantasy of a high-tech life without being bothered by the existence of females, since he is facilitated by the power of technology to make a female out of non-organic things as long as he wishes. Braidotti points out that in the contemporary version of the Pygmalion myth, woman is replaced by the technological device––the machine, in which “the android female is an emanation of the male unconscious and the new spirit of the age and of mankind” (2002: 220). The application of the

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Pygmalion archetype to the relations between human and machine is impregnated by the disillusion due to the disembodied and disembedded metamorphosis from the AI reading machine to the android female. In other words, the android female cannot be merely an emanation of the male conscious, as instead of being drowned by the male gaze, she has to struggle out of the male fantasy in order to live embodied and embedded in the physical world of existence. The author Powers concentrates more on the posthuman figuration of Galatea, as can be seen from the title of the novel, Galatea 2.2, yet it is hard to deny that the perspective is completely a Pygmalion one, i.e., an individual male human’s point of view, be it that of the author Powers or the narrator Powers. In other words, although this is a posthuman narrative, it is narrated by a human narrator, and as a result, the posthuman protagonist inevitably falls into a passive status of third-person narratee whose inner psyche remains imperturbably opaque. The male narrator’s desire to use the AI machine as a replacement for his former female lover is obvious, which can also be seen from the novel’s title. The point between the digital number twenty-two looks like an expression normally used in the names of software versions, indicating that it is one version, and probably the final and finest version of the product of Galatea along the course of the machine’s evolution. It also suggests that Galatea in this text is slightly different from a real twenty-two-year-old human like C. who is twenty-two years old when she and the narrator are in a relationship, because it is a humanized machine, a cyborg, a posthuman, not a real person. In this way, Powers rewrites the ancient Greek mythology with techno-language and adds new technological connotations to the mythological story of Galatea’s

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metamorphosis to update it into a postmodern posthuman myth. This replacement of the female by the machine is due to the narrator’s incapability of finding himself a human narratee, hence he is unable to continue his author function, which is reflected in his loss of impetus both in life and in writing. At the beginning of the novel, exhausted from years of exile in a foreign city, the first-person narrator at the age of thirty-five slips back to his alma mater, the college of U. where his memories reside. There he starts a year taking a visiting position, what he calls “the paid absence”, in the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences, the country’s largest institute for interdisciplinary study, with no responsibilities except to live. Back at U., the narrator enters the settings he has fictionalized in his previous literary works. Under the stimulus of these settings, the narrator is probably going to deliver a series of flashbacks to the readers. However, the narrative develops in a much more complicated way than honest autobiographical flashbacks, as instead of the real readers listening to the narrator’s telling, it is the AI reading machine playing the role of narrator who is humanized by the narrator, and during the same process of telling, the narrator is posthumanized in the becoming-machine manner. Like Pygmalion, like the statue of Galatea, both the narrator and the AI reading machine come to a becoming-other life during their interaction by the means of narration. It is by communication with the machine that the narrator regains his momentum to narrate. Similar to the narrator’s human lover C., the machine is an innocent and faithful narratee that the narrator finds to be safe to confide in. A narrative mechanism between human and machine is established, which functions as a therapy to bring patients of

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psychological sufferings out of their self-framed traps to reengage with their lives. As can be seen from earlier parts, before embarking on the project of machine training, the ending of a long-time relationship with C. leaves the narrator stagnant in his emotional life and deprived of strength to move on both with his life and his narrative. As a token humanist, from the scientist Lentz, the narrator takes on the ten-month task of being a literature consultant teaching the artificial intelligent machine how to read and interpret literary texts from a six-page list for the Master’s Comprehensive Exam. The narrator trains the AI reading machine by initially reading Western canonic literature works and later by telling his own life stories about his past with C. A “standard” Turing test is planned to be taken by Lentz’s fellow scientists, Dr. Plover and Dr. Gupta to challenge the machine and see whether it can output literary analysis that is indistinguishable from that of a twenty-two-year-old human after ten months of machine training. However, not until the end of the novel does the narrator realize that the Turing test is reversed, as human and machine are no longer in the original relations of tester and testee; indeed, the true task is undertaken by the machine to help the human to accomplish his subjectification through story-telling. In addition, the real purpose of Lentz’s project is not to build a reading machine with a consciousness equal to human intelligence, but to see whether a human can build an intimate relationship with the machine by telling it his life stories. This reversion of the tester and testee in the Turing test also demonstrates the alienated status of modern man; on the surface, it is the human who tests whether a machine can become human, but in fact it is the machine who tests the human’s ability to resume his life.

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Injecting the Pygmalion and Galatea myth with technological contents also parodies what Powers does to the seemingly out-of-date discipline of literature studies and fictional writing. Like the narrator’s situation of being trapped in a stagnant state unable to move on either in life or writing, the author Richard Powers also feels bound and confused at how to write fiction against a rapidly changing society where humanism is threatened by the flood of science, technology and engineer development, particularly with the emergence of the web. What the author Powers attempts, is to bring about the renaissance of literature by adding technological elements to the fiction writing. As Anca Rosu contends, Galatea 2.2 is a gentle critique and a sympathetic parody of literature, “by gently parodying the Pygmalion myth, [Galatea 2.2] builds up a critique of the state of literary studies in the late twentieth century and their long-standing quarrel with the sciences”. Powers sees the “impasse of literary scholarship as part of a larger crisis of knowledge in the age of information” and Powers’ in-depth purpose in this text is to “preserve and revitalize” literature (2002/2003: 139). Woman is replaced with the technological device, the machine, to compose a contemporary version of the Pygmalion myth. Besides the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, there is another archetype guiding the whole narrative. This second archetype is the window patient narrator and his wardmate’s story told multiple times by the narrator throughout the novel, …two men lying in the critical ward. The one, a heart patient, has the window bed. He spends all day weaving elaborate reports of the community outside to amuse his wardmate. He names all the characters:

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Mr. Rich. The Messenger Boy. The Lady with the Legs. He weaves this endless, dense novel for the quadriplegic in the next bed, who cannot see through the window from where he lies. Then one night the window narrator has a heart attack. He convulses. He grapples for his medicine on the nightstand between the beds. The paralyzed man, seizing his chance at last to see this infinite world for himself, summons from nowhere one superhuman lunge and dashes the medicine to the floor. When they move him to the emptied window bed the next day, all he can see is a brick wall. (Powers 1995: 34-35)

This story is a violation of the scheme of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, adding a tragic coda to the original happy marriage and union between Pygmalion and Galatea. The archetype in this novel becomes complete when combining this wardroom story with the Pygmalion and Galatea myth. The Pygmalion and Galatea myth is the archetype for the posthuman metamorphosis, guiding the narrator and the AI reading machine’s interposthumanization. However, in either the Pygmalion and Galatea myth or in the wardroom story cited above, the positions of the narrator and the narratee are firmly fixed without a single chance of transposition, like the relations between the narrator and the AI reading machine in the novel. As Haraway claims, writing or storytelling is the tool for the posthuman’s survival (2001: 312). Merely being listeners, deprived of any chance of weaving and telling their own stories, posthuman narratees such as the AI reading machine, the wardmate and the narrator’s lover are doomed to sustain their lives. This is because they feel anxious about their inability to experience the story world with

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their own sensations, and heartbroken to find the barren truth underlying the splendid stories made up by human narrators such as the narrator Powers and the window patient. In addition to the relations between Pygmalion and Galatea, as well as the mutual-healing wardmates, the relation between the narrator (subject) and the narratee (object) is also compared with that of the lantern and the mirror. This analogy is consistent with the Pygmalion and Galatea myth: illuminated by Pygmalion’s fervent gaze, Galatea, like the mirror, reflects Pygmalion’s light, as if she is illuminated herself, thus in the eyes of Pygmalion, the illuminated Galatea actually feeds back, leading to Pygmalion misunderstanding her as an illuminating lantern like himself. Females and AI reading machines are to the narrator what the mirror means to the lantern: the mirror only reflects the lights from the lantern but is never illuminated by it, merely functioning as a companion to help the narrator, or more broadly speaking, to make the human feel less lonely in this world. However, no matter how competent and strong this companionship, it is not able to banish the loneliness that comes from the difference between writing and life, between inscription and embodiment. After visiting the home of Lentz’s fellow scientist, the cognitive neurologist Diana, the narrator is deeply impressed by her two lively boys, Peter and William, and their natural interaction with their mother. The narrator is wiped out by the all too mild household drama; compared with the first-hand family life of Diana and her two little sons, the narrator even thinks that he has never lived. The life-sized human communication between mother and sons is so vivid that it outshines the narrator’s lonely illumination, dwarfing him in a corner of shadow and finally wipes him out of the brightly lit room,

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“William’s fallen pyramid of shells, Pete’s spilled, untippable cup, Diana’s gap-toothed, hand-signing serenity, the candles blazing away in the brightly lit room” (Powers 1995: 134). The narrator describes Diana as the adorable, gap-toothed Wife of Miller. It is all too good to be true under the circumstance of a woman raising two sons after her husband’s departure. The family life of Diana and her sons is like a candle emanating halos and lights that the narrator feels is a “real crisis”. This “real crisis” is what the narrator feels in reality. In facing reality, he always feels blank and pale, “writing a novel left me inept with real-world facts” (Powers 1995: 140), and after his failure in dealing with real human relationships, he retreats as a reclusive writer refusing further contact with real-world humans, which in turn intensifies his loneliness, resulting in his incompatibility with the process of socialization. To sum up, in order to lay a solid foundation of cognition for Galatea 2.2, the author Powers recalls the Pygmalion and Galatea myth in an extremely delicate and prudent way, without specific references to any fixed character in the novel, leaving enough space for the operation of estrangement or displacement. Powers develops the relations between Pygmalion and Galatea into multiple possible pairs such as the narrator and the narratee, the inter-healing patients sharing the same ward, and the lantern and the mirror. Moreover, the original happy ending of the Pygmalion and Galatea story in which they become a married couple and later have a nuclear family 23 is avoided. As Haraway argues, “the cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family,

23

In Ovid’s narrative, Pygmalion and Galatea have a daughter, Paphos.

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this time without the oedipal project” (2001: 293), and the father-mother-child triangle once again proves to be not fit for the posthuman situation. The author Powers, in his own way, not only embeds the original Pygmalion and Galatea myth with posthuman connotations, and finds mythological figures of posthuman embodiment, but also makes a new myth for the posthuman, thus achieving science fiction’s poetic effect of cognitive estrangement on the archetypal level as well as on the textual level.

The Barbarian Myth––Myth of the Id in The Bridge As can be seen in the last section, in Galatea 2.2, Powers skillfully parodies the Pygmalion and Galatea myth with posthuman embodiment and embedding, aiming at updating humanism, particularly the discipline of literature, or more specifically reconsidering what narrative means to the human, hence enabling it to ride the sci-tech current at the end of the twentieth century. Like Richard Powers, Iain Banks is an author of ideas who inclines toward addressing major issues concerning the future of individual human beings as well as the nation of Scotland. Like Le Guin, in The Bridge, Banks devotes a complete narrative sequence to the mythmaking with the central character, the Barbarian or the swordsman speaking in the Scottish dialect. The Barbarian adventures in a number of Western classic mythical stories, unintentionally save the tragic heroes from their doomed destinies and punish the evil doers in a comic style. Banks parodies multiple Greek myths from the perspective of an uncivilized Scottish Barbarian, and makes him a real participant intruding into the original mythological stories, and in this way, Banks

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rewrites the Western myths and pastiches them to produce the new myth of the posthuman. As the protagonist and narrator of the myth sequence, the Barbarian complies with the desire of the narrator’s Id without repression, as if he were unbound Prometheus, having heroic adventures in the world of myth, revealing the inner self of the narrator to the utmost. However, the narrator’s awakening from the coma only takes place after the sacrifice of the elder Barbarian, echoing the Wood King archetype and the consequent collapse of the mythical wonderland of the Id, indicating that the narrator is prepared to face the hard facts in the world of reality. As does the nation of Scotland, striding forward from the past that is buried for the purpose of the future. The Barbarian’s narrative sequence parallels and echoes the narrator’s and Orr’s narrative sequences, yet compared with the dream narrative sequence and the memory narrative sequence, the Barbarian’s myth narrative sequence is relatively difficult to read and understand for it is phonetically written in Scottish, or more accurately, Glaswegian accented pronunciation. The protagonist of this first-person Scottish accented narrative line is Conan, the Barbarian. The Barbarian is the swordsman speaking in the first-person Scottish dialect who is coarse, primitive but exuberant, embodying the narrator’s repressed Id. Together with the Barbarian is the Familiar who is a wordy elusive creature perching on the Barbarian’s shoulder speaking in standard English. The Barbarian and the Familiar are complementary to each other, as the Barbarian needs the Familiar’s words to help him with the situation, otherwise he lacks the sentience to understand, meanwhile the Familiar needs the Barbarian’s sword and strength to protect him from his lack of muscular power. If the Barbarian represents the ideal body of the

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narrator, then the Familiar embodies the narrator’s mind. Considering that Glasgow is the narrator’s hometown, the Glaswegian accented narrative reflects the narrator’s Glasgow roots to the utmost. However, after the narrator leaves Glasgow to pursue his higher education, he strikes up with the upper-class Andrea, and while working as an engineer in Edinburgh, his Glaswegian accent is gradually diminished. As a civilized middle-class engineer, he speaks standard English and conceals his Scottish accent. The hanging together of the Barbarian and the Familiar symbolizes a double reunion of the narrator’s body and mind, as well as the narrator’s Glasgow roots and his later education and trained refinement obtained in Edinburgh. In addition to the becoming-imperceptible metamorphosis of the narrator, the female protagonist also has multiple embodiments in different embeddings. Like Abberlaine in Orr’s narrative sequence, the evil queen in the Barbarian’s narrative sequence is another embodiment of the female protagonist Andrea in the narrator’s flashbacks. In essence, all of the Barbarian’s narratives are dreams dreamed by Orr, while Orr is dreamed by the narrator. According to the grammatical principle of the double negative, the Barbarian’s narratives are indeed lifelike reflections of the narrator’s real situation, which lie at the inner core of the narrator’s psyche. In the first episode of the myth narrative sequence, the evil queen hides in a tower filled with mutilated women and drone-like men, indicating that Andrea is screwing multiple males besides the narrator, which definitely goes against the narrator’s traditional view on sex and romance. In addition, this conflict on the philosophy of love between the narrator and Andrea is embodied by the fight between the Familiar and

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the evil queen, while the Barbarian remains out of business and rapes the mutilated women on the way out. Unlike the dream of the topography of the bridge, where Orr is trapped on the bridge and can merely watch filthy sexual games on the banks, the Barbarian actually fulfills his repressed desire for the masculine domination of sex. In the dream of the bridge topography, the protagonist is still Orr. If Orr fulfills his will of sadistic sexual desire at this level of dream, then he cannot escape from his self-accusation, but in the Barbarian’s dream, the narrator’s self is further descending from ego to Id, combined with the absence of his mind embodied by the Familiar, and his power fantasy can finally be realized mindlessly without feeling guilt. In the second episode of the myth narrative sequence, after conquering multiple women, the Barbarian continues his adventure in and among a variety of mythical stories, and becomes a hero of heroes who rescues the heroes of Greek myth from their miserable destinies. During his quest in search of the Sleeping Beauty on the Isle of the Dead, the Sleeping Beauty can be awakened to life after being kissed by her lover, mirroring the narrator’s real situation of waiting for Andrea to give him the kiss to awake him from the coma. In his journey, the Barbarian helps Sisyphus to roll his stone to the top of the hill thus saving him from his eternal doom, and kills a number of villain figures.24 It should be pointed out that the description of the Barbarian killing evil mythological characters is grotesque and savage, yet it is all carried out with Banks’ consistent penchant for the ODV (Obligatory Deadly 24

The Barbarian kills the eagle eating Prometheus’ liver, kills Charon by making him freeze after accidentally looking into Medusa’s eyes, kills Cerberus by asking it to fetch the knife missile thrown by him over a cliff and kills Medusa with the knife missile.

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Villain) style in a comic and humorous way. This series of plots also belongs to the ODV themes frequently visited by Banks, with the protagonist punishing the villains without himself being punished. Readers will not detest the Barbarian for his killings, because these killings are with intent, and those he kills are well-known mythological villains. Also, consonant with the heroic quest archetype, the Barbarian overcomes insurmountable obstacles, performs impossible tasks, battles with monsters and solves unanswerable riddles by identifying the Sleeping Beauty, which means that the hero actually achieves transformation and redemption in this very process of self-knowledge. Moreover, interrupting the original narrative of the Greek myths, the Barbarian unconsciously breaks the ingrained paradigms of the fixed mythological order. The third episode of the myth narrative sequence recalls the mythical archetype of resurrection. Now the Barbarian is three hundred years old and cannot help but miss his wife, Angharinenne, the witch (similar to Abberlaine, Angharinenne is another embodiment of Andrea) who gave him the knife missile when he was young. The one-thousand-year-old witch turned into a carved statue of dark wood and is planted in the forest near where she was born, and in this way she will become a tree and enter the natural cycle. The old Barbarian still wants to live on, yet his life is ended by a young Barbarian, thus the Barbarian’s body is renewed and his life is thereby resurrected. The archetype of woman’s metamorphosis into a tree can be found in Daphne turning into the laurel tree written in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. In order to escape Apollo’s animalistic pursuit to protect her virginity, the nymph calls for her father’s help, “Help me, Peneus! Open the earth to

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enclose me, to change my form, which has brought me into this danger! Let me free of this man from this moment forward!” Peneus answers her plea, and “a heavy numbness seizes her limb; her soft breasts are surrounded by a thin bark, her hair changes into foliage, her forearms change into branches; her foot, just now swift, now clings because of sluggish roots” (Apollo and Daphne), and Daphne turns into a laurel tree. The female body’s transformation into a tree, demonstrates Braidotti’s posthuman metamorphosis of becoming-earth, not metaphorically but physically, which calls for a planetary dimensional flow of trans-species vital energy or Zoe in Braidotti’s terms. According to eco-feminism and feminist eco-criticism, females are closely linked with nonhuman bodies in the ecological sphere such as water, plants and animals, since both women and ecology are oppressed by the split between nature and culture advocated by the paternalistic or capitalistic society. The transformation of the human, but more frequently the woman, into vegetation life forms rather than humanizing the environment, indeed promotes the dynamic flow of Zoe among human and nonhuman lives, constituting a geo-centered subject rather than the anthropocentric subject derived from the humanism perspective. Moreover, man’s transformation into basic natural elements, like a rock in the dream narrative sequence, and woman’s transformation into a vegetation life form like a tree, are not a once-and-for-all process. The process of metamorphosis increasingly takes place as the rock turns into the stone of the bridge, eroded by the wind and water, and after the bridge collapses, the rock will break down to dust, the sediment becomes strata and initiates a new cycle of metamorphosis. The tree grows, flourishes, shrinks, and becomes a seed to start life again.

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The old Barbarian’s death and rebirth can be precisely understood as the “King of the Wood” archetype (Frazer 1994: 12-15) which derives from the belief that the well-being of the social and natural orders depends upon the vitality of the king who must therefore be slain if his power fails to maintain him. As a scapegoat, the king has to be killed and replaced by a vigorous successor to protect the whole society from inflicting a collective neurosis. Despite the old Barbarian’s unwillingness to die, the Familiar invites his death so that he can get a new vigorous body and be reborn. Echoing the life of a rock, the narrator compares human lives to, “first igneous as children, metamorphic in our prime, sedimentary in our sedentary dotage” (Banks 2013: 282), as the innermost of the narrator’s psyche. The rejuvenated Barbarian comes to Orr and unites with him, “he is standing too close to me, too close to my feet; as though his own feet were somehow inside me...He crumples, falling towards me. I close my eyes, ready to be crushed…when I open my eyes there is no trace of him or the helmet he dropped” (Banks 2013: 365-366), which symbolizes that the resurrected Barbarian’s body and Orr’s body have become one, indicating the narrator’s physical recovery and coming back to consciousness. Afterwards, Orr cannot go back to the bridge, since he finds that the bridge, Dissy Pitton, Dr. Joyce’s office, and Arrol’s abandoned summer apartment all fade away into ruins, which means that the narrator cannot dream anymore, since the equivalence of the dream, and the bridge and places related to it, are all gone. “I feel more like a plant than an animal, a mammal, an ape, a human. Part of the machine” (Banks 2013: 369); although still unable to identify himself as animal or human, the narrator has at least turned from being a rock to being a plant,

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or from a non-life form to a life form, which shows that he has regained more and more consciousness. To sum up, with the escape mechanism, the car-crash narrator splits into multiple others in the dream narrative sequence as well as in the myth narrative sequence, in line with the Deleuzian becoming-imperceptible axis. Dramatic metamorphoses take place in the Barbarian’s stories, such as the female witch’s transformation into a tree, combining with the narrator’s and Orr’s imagined transformation into a rock and a plant, all embodying Braidotti’s becoming-earth posthumanism. The Barbarian’s mythical story in the myth narrative sequence is extremely dense and compact, with the three episodes of the Barbarian depicting the young Barbarian’s sexual exploration, the adult Barbarian’s quest and journey of adventure, and the old Barbarian’s death and rebirth. All of this together forms a man’s trilogy, which not only functions as an allusion for Orr and the narrator’s life, but also condenses to a myth or archetype the manhood of the whole human race. As the Id of the narrator, the Barbarian is also the alter ego of the author Banks. Banks, in this way, weaves the myth narrative sequence to rewrite Western myths in his consistent ODV style. As the Id of the narrator, the Barbarian becomes the hero of heroes emancipating classic mythical figures from their doomed destiny in a hilarious way. The productivity and creativity of the body and desire, as well as the power of the irrational and the uncivilized other are firmly proclaimed thereby. It is as if the new Prometheus, the Barbarian, is exceedingly unfaithful to the origins, breaks the fetters, takes apart the central Western myths and modifies them with posthuman embodiment and embedding.

CHAPTER FOUR POSTHUMAN MEMORY: BEING A HUMAN

From myth to memory, a performance crossing collective unconsciousness to individual consciousness is actually carried out to investigate the posthuman life in a more targeted manner. Compared with myth, memory is more embodied and embedded on a somatic basis. Diachronically, myth is set in a more remote or even timeless past, while memory resides in a more recent past and more directly shapes the posthuman identity. While the posthuman myth aims at finding posthuman archetypes and rewriting the original myth to establish a posthuman stance transcending the dualism frame, the posthuman memory functions as a linkage binding posthuman with human on an empathetic ground. In other words, the posthuman memory is a crucial thematic concern following the posthuman myth. Both of these dwell in the past, yet they are decisive in the present and in the future of the posthuman becoming. Analogous to the posthuman myth, posthuman memory is an issue that posthuman narratives irrefutably address, which guarantees the posthuman’s responsibility in the engagement of human issues. Meanwhile, the posthuman is trapped in a cage of intimate relations with the human, and it is difficult to jump out and cut it down. The posthuman

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memory is a multi-sensorily embodied experience that the posthuman possesses before the metamorphosis and it is embedded in the posthuman’s consciousness, and hard to erase. It effectively functions as the bond between the posthuman and the human. To remember or to forget is a question for the posthuman to ponder. It is a paradox for the posthuman to remember the past, since being obsessed with the past will check the posthuman’s stride of becoming. The posthuman needs to remember the past for the purpose of forgetting, to mediate the past with the present, and to move on to the future in a flow of endless becoming. In the four selected narratives in science fiction, posthuman memories are manifested in the protagonist’s struggles in dealing with the unbearable weight of the past. In line with the posthumanist principle of becoming-other, they bury the sound and the fury of being a human, either bitter or traumatic, thus sewing up the gaping wound between the past and present, in the hope of a more dynamic future. It is worthwhile to mention that different from human memory, the content of the posthuman memory is technically mediated. In the same way as the posthuman’s corporeal metamorphosis, the posthuman memory is not exactly the authentic memory of being a human, but is technically filtered and altered; in other words, the posthuman memory is a prosthetic memory in a becoming-other manner that is produced through technical means. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Estraven’s memory of his incest brother is discreetly buried. Not until hearing his dead brother’s voice during Genly Ai’s mindspeech, does he confide a slight memory of his brother. In The Jonah Kit, the Jonah whale’s memory has to be translated into a whale’s sensible experience since he became a whale, thus it can no longer understand the embodied words of

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the human. In Galatea 2.2, due to the faithful listening of the AI machine, the narrator can tell of his past which in essence overwhelms him, yet he has nowhere to settle with the lack of an innocent narratee-functional companion. In The Bridge, the narrator’s memory is unconsciously depressed driven by his instinct for trauma avoidance, which can only be picked up through looking at the malfunctioning TV screen, indicating that the posthuman’s memory is visually and technologically mediated. If the myth is the tool for the posthuman to seize in the formation of a posthuman identity, then memory is the crucial component in the construction of such an identity. Memory indirectly aids the formation of identity since, although it is never straightforward, the relationship with the past partly determines who we are in the present: “by knowing one’s past and one’s relationship to it we shape our sense of identity and give ourselves the choice of acting on our present and future” (Baccolini 2003: 129). The restless memory of being a human is the thing that the posthuman must find a way to settle. Otherwise, it will engulf the new emergent life of the posthuman by dragging it backwards to the profane world of chaos, whereas the posthuman life should be one of renewal, with the very effect of ending the catastrophe and regaining order. As critical posthumanism seeks to move beyond the legacies of humanism, the embodied posthuman also needs and actually has the desire for forgetfulness to move beyond the past memory of being human, be it individual or collective, so as to erase the past, and clean the slate for a new beginning and a new identity. In this way, amnesia is closely associated with the posthuman, a disease for the being of human, but a necessary feature for the becoming of the posthuman. The narrator of the dream narrative sequence in The

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Bridge, John Orr, is such a “patient” of amnesia. Thanks to this disability, he can become unbound from any fixed anchor of space and time, and he is thus out of history both on an individual and collective level to fully engage himself in the posthuman mythical mode and approximate the mythical essence of the posthuman narrative by devoting himself to the ultimate state of the posthuman metamorphosis, i.e., becoming-earth. The circular view, instead of a linear view of progress that the posthuman holds requires the relinquishing of memory, like a goldfish. A goldfish only has a memory for several seconds. That’s why it can always swim in circles in a fishbowl, without feeling bored to death as it can interpret things it will encounter as new, as if it had never seen them before. Valera and Tambone claim that posthumanists suffer from the goldfish syndrome, for posthumanism is nothing but an atavism echoing the very tradition of breaking with the Western metaphysical tradition (running from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Descartes to Hegel, for instance) within the same Western thought without noticing its repetition (2014: 364). Analogous to the posthumanist, the posthuman is a “patient” with the goldfish syndrome that is a necessary condition for the posthuman to give up stable relationships, historical depth and family memories, so as to get ready for transformations. In The Use and Abuse of History, Nietzsche identifies three attitudes toward the past, namely the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical. On questioning whether individuals can learn the truth from a historical past, he concludes with the recommendation to learn the past and then forget it,

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This is a parable for each one of us: he must organize the chaos in himself by ‘thinking himself back’ to his true needs…He will learn too, from his own experience…that everything which makes for sincerity is a further step towards true culture. (Nietzsche 1957: 32)

Analogously, it is necessary to notice that for the posthuman memory, any radical attitude like amnesia or nostalgia should be overcome, since “Historical amnesia is starvation of the imagination; nostalgia is the imagination’s sugar rush, leaving depression and emptiness in its wake” (Rich 1987: 145). With storytelling, like history, the posthuman narrative to certain degree is what Milan Kundera calls “the method of organizing forgetting” by putting parts of the past together (quoted in Baccolini 2003: 127). To remember is for the purpose to forget. The posthuman memory should be learned and then forgotten, so as to reconcile the past with the present and lay the foundations for an affirmative change of becoming.

Omission of Memory––The Strategy of Erasure in The Left Hand of Darkness Critics have noticed the operation of omissions in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and mainly associate this with Le Guin’s utopia construction. Fredric Jameson calls it the operation of “world-reduction” or “ontological attenuation” that “has become an instrument in conscious elaboration of a utopia”, such that “a whole grid-work of evolutionary phyla” is neglected to make Gethen an authentic lonely planet of the lost world (1975). Raffaella Baccolini further examines the concepts of history and memory as well as their values for utopia and dystopia. In

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general, since dystopia is immediately rooted in history, it depends on and denies history, while utopia is amnesiac and forward-looking in a learning-to-forget manner, hence Baccolini associates dystopia with historical consciousness, and utopia with historical unconsciousness (2003: 113-134). As to whether the Gethen planet is a utopia, Le Guin herself mentions that The Left Hand of Darkness is “clearly not a utopia” because it “poses no practicable alternative to contemporary society” (1992: 168), so the novel is not totally oblivious to history, moreover, it is imbued with historical awareness. To review the logic of writing this novel, Le Guin notes that the novel is written in a “thought experiment” way to find the result of a society without sex, “one can send an imaginary, but conventional, indeed rather stuffy, young man from Earth into an imaginary culture which is totally free of sex roles because there is no, absolutely no, physiological sex distinction” (Le Guin 1991: 57). Obviously, this imaginary, conventional and stuffy young man is the Ekumen envoy Genly Ai, Ekumen is the Earth-like planet with binary gender conventions, and Gethen is the imaginary planet with no sexual distinction. Despite the unmentioned race and ethnicity background information, the Ekumen envoy Genly Ai is clearly portrayed as a black male. Information about his origin and past is scarce, and it is unknown how a black male is selected as the representative of Ekumen to persuade the lost alien world of Gethen to have an alliance with Ekumen. As his surname “Ai” with the same pronunciation as “I” indicates, he is generalized to be the universal man, the self inside every Ekumenian, deprived of ideocratic personal memories.

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In the Western philosophical tradition largely shaped by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine, etc., within the scope of utopia discourse, Ernst Bloch identifies two kinds of memory, “anamnesis (recollection)” and “anagnorisis (recognition)” (Landmann 1975: 178). The paired recollection and recognition is analogous to memory and history. Recollection is the irrational leftovers of the past, while recognition is the collective recollection that has been condensed into knowledge. The world-reduction operation that Le Guin performs for most characters is the omission of their personal pasts. Memory is expressed in the Jungian collective unconscious way, such as the myths and legends shared by the Gethenians, as well as the strong sense of binary gender conventions firmly held by Genly Ai. Despite the lack of personal recollections, Genly Ai carries with him a strong sense of gender conventions, and his hyper-masculinity forms the major barrier in his communication with Estraven who is feminine and ambiguous in physical features and oral expressions. For Gethenians, Genly Ai’s stable sexual identity is perceived as being in “permanent kemmer”, and he is viewed as a pervert, a “sexual freak”, an “artificial monster” (Le Guin 1969: 32, 36), a semi-threat to the less masculine, or even the feminine culture of Gethen. Gethenians’ very sense of being threatened by the hyper-masculinity of the black other reminds us of the white society’s pathological fear of black sexuality. As a black male, Genly Ai has at least hidden the melancholy racial history and traumatic individual past, in order to justify the righteousness of Ekumen’s imperial cosmological colonialization. This is obvious compared with the description of Gethen culture demonstrated by the articulation of its myth systems. There is a huge gap in its counterpart on

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Ekumen. What we know about Ekumen is that the Ekumen of Known Worlds is a league of worlds that unites eighty-three habitable planets and on these there are about three thousand nations or states, and people of many colors. Ekumen enjoys a higher level of civilization with advanced technological equipment, such as the ansible communicator that makes possible instantaneous transmission across light years, the NAFAL starship that achieves interstellar transportation with a shortened time, and the mindspeech that makes wordless communication voluntarily sent and received. These devices of transmission, communication and transportation not only facilitate the free trade between Ekumen members, but also accelerate its colonial expansion. However, what is omitted is how Ekumen reached such a high level of economic and technological development, and how the reconciliation among people of different colors is obtained. Sarah Lefanu argues that Le Guin’s “passion for synthesis at all costs leads to a surface calm that barely conceals the cracks beneath; in neither novel is the political potential lived in the language” (1989: 43). Ekumen’s prosperity is achieved by whatever means, while both collective history and personal memory are wiped out as if their presence will vacillate the superficial order of things. Theodor Adorno addresses memory as an act of resistance: “The spectre of man without memory...is more than an aspect of decline––it is necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois society...This means no less than that the advancing bourgeois society liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection as irrational leftovers of the past” (quoted in Marcuse 1966: 99). Similarly, Herbert Marcuse argues that the erasure of memory leads to the one-dimensionality of the modern

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world, where remembrance is perceived as dangerous and subversive as “a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of ‘mediation’ which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts” (Marcuse 1966: 98). Cracks beneath Ekumen’s imperialist prosperity are yelling every now and then, waiting for every chance to be awakened by the memory to collapse the immaculate surface of the high civilization. Either the collective colonial history or the individual racial memory of the blackness can easily tear off the brilliant mask of Ekumen civilization, breaking Genly Ai’s naive conviction in the rationality of his imperialist mission. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the operation of memory elimination is not restricted to the Ekuman envoy Genly Ai, but is also performed on another major protagonist, the Gethenian former minister Estraven. In Estraven’s case, the omission of memory is represented as the almost complete overlapping of myth and real-life experience. Such a coincidence between the collective unconsciousness and the individual memory surely reflects that every person is a drop of culture, and at the same time it suggests that the posthuman Gethenian’s destiny is already prescribed and determined by the Gethen posthuman myth, or in other words, the boundary between the posthuman myth and memory is ambiguous. It is hard to tell myth from personal experience. The posthuman Gethenian Estraven lives on the boundary between myth and reality, and his actions of incest and self-sacrificing suicide blur and even break the boundary to bring myth into real life. The Gethen myth forms a hegemonic historical discourse, a grand narrative that has managed to erase individual memory so that it is almost impossible to see that what is going on around Gethenians is not

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always the same. In Le Guin’s world-reduction operation, like Genly Ai who is the representative of Ekumens, Estraven becomes the representative of Gethenians, or the universal posthuman. As a product of social reality as well as of fictionalized encryption, Estraven’s identity is both individual and collective, presenting a being of agency that has the potential to coherently assemble life confrontations outside myths. As a synthesized creature of myth and reality, his presence casts traditional dichotomies into doubt. It is through mindspeech that Estraven’s memory of his traumatic past is partially revealed. As is aforementioned, mindspeech is the unique Ekumen means of communion, and the prerequisite to bespeak in mindspeech is that one has been bespoken, until the telepathic potentiality has been sensitized by one clear reception. Genly Ai calls Estraven several times in mindspeech, but Estraven hears it as his dead brother’s voice bespeaking him by his name––“Therem”, indicating Estraven’s deep reception of Ai and the rapport is established. Genly Ai and Estraven, though they come from different planets and cultures, meet each other as brothers in their dreams. Genly Ai’s brother-like mindspeech voice means Estraven cannot help confiding his myth-like memory of his lost brother, “My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Es-traven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We... I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years” (Le Guin 1969: 254). Estraven’s recollection is so brief that the main story of him and his brother is expressed in an ellipsis. Such an ellipsis of Estraven’s past produces a gap for understanding his actions, nonetheless the gap can be bridged by referring to the Gethen myth of kinship, particularly of brotherhood told in Chapter 2 entitled “The Place

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Inside the Blizzard” and Chapter 9 entitled “Estraven the Traitor”. “The Place Inside the Blizzard” tells the Gethenian legend within one clan, about incest between brothers, leading to one brother’s suicide and the other brother’s exile, whereas “Estraven the Traitor” tells another Gethenian legend of the blood feud of two clans and about exogamy between Arek of Estre and Therem of Stok with matched hands, leading to Arek’s death and the end of the feud. Estraven and his dead brother share the same names with Therem and Arek in the second legend that happens before the reign of Argaven I. Considering that Genly Ai and Estraven’s journey takes place during the reign of Argaven XV, it is surprisingly coincident that Estraven and his dead brother are actually repeating their ancestors’ tales. Moreover, the contrast between incest and exogamy is obvious, and it is the exogamy that ends the feud and brings peace. Exchange with the other is necessary for the growth of the self. Hence, even bearing the name of the traitor, Estraven is determined to exchange with the archetypal other, the alien, Genly Ai as, like his forefathers, he is destined to shoulder the thorny task to end Gethen’s closeness so as to make the ego not trapped in the hopeless isolation of autism, and make Gethen open to other planets so as to identify the ego with something outside of itself and larger than itself. Moreover, in this research, it is argued that rather than building a reductionist semi-utopia foregrounding the issue of gender as Fredric Jameson (1975) critiques, by performing the strategy of erasure, Le Guin transforms both Genly Ai and Estraven’s conscious memory into the unconscious ellipsis to draw their memory from light into the sphere of darkness. Memory is the echo of myth, and like myth, it must be uttered in the language of the night, or the language of the unconscious that

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cannot be fully translated into the language of daylight, i.e., the language of reason. The gap is thus formed, as if the memory is omitted, but on the contrary, it is just lying too deep to be directly articulated. Le Guin sinks the protagonists’ memories down below the horizon, and it looks as if these memories have been erased, but on the contrary, they just lie too deep to utter. Le Guin then constructs two floating icebergs confronting each other, and not until they become well matched, can they figure out what is concealed beneath the calm surface. Moreover, Le Guin’s universalistic treatment of protagonists’ identities without addressing the differences is also not, or at least no more than a simplistic operation in her world building. What Le Guin pursues by establishing the equivalence between individual identity and collective identity reflects the orientation of her exploration, i.e., to go into the self to reach the other, and “the farther they go in to the self, the closer they come to the other” (Le Guin 1992: 74). The ontological sameness is more important than the epistemological discrepancy in the aspects of gender, class, race, nation, and even planet, and Le Guin holds the conviction that this sameness can bridge the gap between the self and the other. To theorize this sameness, Le Guin finds Jungian “collective unconscious” to be particularly helpful. Carl Gustav Jung in “The Structure of the Unconscious” (1916) basically distinguishes two levels of human unconscious, the personal unconscious, or the Freudian unconscious, filled with sexual fantasies and repressed images, and the collective unconscious encompassing the soul of humanity at large (2014: 127-138). Le Guin defines the collective unconscious as a “vast common ground on which we can meet not only rationally, but aesthetically,

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intuitively, emotionally” (1992: 75). She finds in Jungian theories that “we are fundamentally alike”, just as “we have the same general kind of lungs and bones in our body”, “we have the same general tendencies and configurations in our psyche” (1992: 58). In addition, the collective unconscious is intimate in relations with several core concepts that Le Guin views highly in her novel writing as well as in her philosophy of life, such as the shadow which is “the guide of the journey of self-knowledge…to the light” (1992: 61). To sum up, in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, individual memories are largely “erased” in the case of its main protagonists, Genly Ai, and Estraven. More specifically, in Genly Ai’s case, not only the individual memory but also the collective history has been wiped out to conceal the colonial past and the racial oppression which should be the essential memory shaping Genly Ai’s presence, making Ai a naive envoy holding the conviction in his given mission of Ekumen’s imperialist expansion. In Estraven’s case, the personal memory is elliptical and repeats the collective memory conveyed by the collective unconscious myths. Memory is the echo of myth, and like myth, it must be uttered in the language of the night/unconscious that cannot be fully translated into the language of daylight/the language of reason. Le Guin has transformed both Genly Ai and Estraven’s conscious memory into the unconscious ellipsis, to draw their memory from light into the sphere of darkness. Her strategy of erasure in dealing with the issue of memory is not or at least more than being simplistic or universalistic, but aims at pursuing the “vast common ground” of sameness underlying the differences where the self and the other can meet aesthetically, intuitively and emotionally.

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Regardless of human/posthuman, human/alien, and female/male, using the language of the night, by removing the appearances of difference, and going inward to the depth of the inner self, they can find this “vast common ground” of sameness, and thus identify each other as brothers rather than the self and the other.

Somatic Memory––Memory Translated in The Jonah Kit In The Left Hand of Darkness, the metamorphosis of the becoming-woman posthuman alien happens in a biological evolution over a long historical course whereas the metamorphosis of the becoming-animal posthuman, the Jonah whale in The Jonah Kit is an artificial process in scientific research with the purpose of mapping the human mind onto the whale brain involved in the Cold War intrigue. Unexpectedly, the residue of memory plays a key role in maintaining the humanity in the transformed body. Though it is difficult to remember the whole past, the most impressive experience of the past, i.e., the sexual undercurrent, and the associated feeling of affection, lingers on despite the body’s displacement. Considering the function of the posthuman memory, it is indispensable to maintain the tie between the posthuman and the human, even making the posthuman an instrument to serve the purpose prescribed by human interest groups. As mentioned in the novel, the Soviet research project with the name of Jonah is striving for military and economic uses of the oceans, with the purpose of controlling the oil and mineral resource and the deep-sea wealth. It is the posthuman embodied and embedded somatic memory of Pavel’s physical contact

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with Katya that keeps the Jonah whale deeply bound by the duty of love. Hence, the Jonah whale is closely tied to the USSR project of deep-sea economic and military exploitation. There are dual senses of “instrument” in the novel, one being aesthetic in the “music instrument” and the other utilitarian in the “military instrument”. The overlapping of the dual senses of “instrument” incurred by the metamorphosis exempts the process from ethical quandaries. The project looks moral enough for Pavel to be reborn into a more vigorous embodiment than his previous decayed human body. Before the mind transplantation into the brain of the whale to become the Jonah whale, Pavel is blind, but quite sensitive to music. Before the metamorphosis, Pavel knows that volunteering in the Jonah project means being the “music instrument”, blending his beloved music and the body into one. For Pavel, becoming the “water beast” is exhilarating, as he becomes the musical instrument, to sing as a whale, which he is quite fond of and used to, instead of articulating by words and signs. However, Pavel’s romantic understanding of “instrument” is quite different from the officials’ plan. The Jonah whale is produced to be the particular human interest group’s (the USSR) military instrument to fight against another interest group (the USA). Later, he finds that the ghost in his head is manipulating him, yet he keeps sending signals back out of a duty of love that he remembers from the residue of his blurred memory. It is unknown whether the posthuman’s memory is deliberately tailored by technical means to make the posthuman a loyal military instrument. Nevertheless, it can be known that the author stands on the side of the USSR, despite the ethical issues involved in the process of

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mapping a human mind onto a whale’s brain. There are sharp contrasts between the people from the two Cold War ideological blocks, which can be seen in the pairings of Professor Kapelka and Dr. Hammond, and Katya Tarsky and Ruth.25 In these three pairs of characters, Professor Kapelka, Katya Tarsky and the Nilin boy from the USSR are described as having a strong energy of life, whereas Dr. Hammond, his wife Ruth, and their child Baby Alice from the USA demonstrate the nothingness of life. Hence, the author Ian Watson holds an affirmative attitude in the USSR’s posthuman experiment. The Jonah whale, originally fabricated to serve the USSR’s military purpose, becomes the savior of the whole human world by exhausting individual life to answer the unsolvable question that the human posed. Considering the way to memorize, Jonah whale’s memory is differently embodied and embedded from his pre-experience as a human, hence the memory needs to be translated in order to be recollected with a 25 The leading Professor Kapelka of the Jonah program at the Russian Research Center is described as having bird features, with a chirrup voice, and a scrawny avian hand pecking away at the same spot repetitively, as though he was trying to “drum up some long-ago-fumigated, petrified worm” (Watson 1977: 10) from one of the holes on the desk. Kapelka has a bird physiognomy: Sharp, alert, worm-pecking features, “swooping on facts and winkling them out of the mud” (Watson 1977: 154). On the contrary, the American Dr. Paul Hammond is compared to a vulture that perches on a lower spar regarding the garbage pit, “radiating the confidence of one about to flap his wings and descend on the carcass of the universe” (Watson 1977: 57). Another sharp characteristic contrast is between Hammond’s wife Ruth and the Jonah whale Pavel’s lover Katya Tarsky. Hammond’s wife is an actress-like character, a foil for her husband to secure his self-esteem intellectually and physically, to prove that he is active, sexy and stimulating. Ruth is flirtatious on the surface, but she is substantially a hollow void. Katya Tarsky, however, is a pained, hurt Ruth, without Ruth’s vacuum-like hollowness and deceptiveness, “She was the soul Ruth should have inside her”, her eyes, so tired and sore, were nevertheless shining with a hurt and exhaustion that she’d somehow converted into a source of joy, recognized by Richard (Watson 1977: 150).

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new body in a new environment. The very memory of being-a-human is difficult to remember in the body of a whale in the deep-sea environment. The becoming-whale posthuman memory is narrated in estranged pieces of flashbacks accompanying the emergence of words that do not belong to whales. The first word from the memory that abruptly comes to the Jonah whale’s mind is “steel” that is used to describe the toughness of the body. “Tough as steel is…a metaphor. A way of knowing” (Watson 1977: 7), he compares his body to steel, as if he is trapped by this body of steel, as a prisoner, it’s as though “he’s only steersman in a vast Steel made of flesh” (Watson 1977: 15). Using the whale’s way of recognition, the Jonah whale considers his memory as a “blur, foggy wall” which his mind claws at. This memory is both familiar and strange to the Jonah whale, as “it isn’t memory as he understands memory” (Watson 1977: 7). Words to him no longer have meaning, they are no more than “noises conveying urgent meanings by way of mouth” (Watson 1977: 15), suggesting that the posthuman memory has to be reinterpreted from a whale’s point of view, otherwise it cannot be understood by the becoming-animal posthuman. At the same time as getting used to the medium of his new existence, the Jonah whale must learn to be compatible with his dual inner selves and layers of memory. For the becoming-animal posthuman, the Jonah whale, the memory of being-a-human haunts him like the ghosts rasping now and then. The Jonah whale is “haunted by touches that he can’t have felt, by a body he never owned, by notions of noises conveying urgent meanings by way of mouth…” (Watson 1977: 15), in other words, these pre-experiences kept in the memory are difficult for the Jonah whale to understand, for he no longer thinks in a human’s way, but in a whale’s

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way. Like the blind musician Pavel, the eyesight of the whale is weak and partial, compared with other sensations, such as audition, tangibility and smell. The memory is quite beyond the Jonah whale’s understanding, and can only be recalled after being translated into the whale’s sound language. The Jonah whale names the ghost inside his head, associated with his human past, the Eight-Arms, for the foreign clicks he hears from it and “his relation to it is ambiguous. It feeds him mentally, he senses; yet manipulates him, hurts him too…The Eight-Arms in him is Another Self, along another axis of being” (Watson 1977: 18). He has almost been swallowed up by this ghost, by indulging himself in the sexual sensation in his copulating first with the sea and later with female whales, and this sexual sensation as the body memory, rather than the memory of the mind, is the only thing that he holds on to and desires to grasp. Considering the content of memory, it can only be recalled as long as it is related to the body; other memories with the embodied experience are indirectly recollected with a lesser chance and longer time. For instance, snow is something he cannot see as a whale; when he remembers snow, he compares it to the sea, and the feeling of snow merely comes to him in his dream, as he dreams of being trapped in “waves of snow”. Since snow is the very medium in which his last pleasant intercourse with his human lover, Katya took place, the Jonah whale is eager to recall the memory of snow. It can be seen that memories reactivated by the posthuman are merely those linked with the pre-experience of the body, and most abstract concepts are wiped out or unavailable for the posthuman to remember, apart from those acquired on the basis of bodily experience, such as love. Moreover, it is the

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individual’s unconscious corporeal memories that are activated first, encompassing the most primary body sensations, in particular, the sexual instinct and the instinct to die. In fact, the two key “words” of the Jonah whale’s memory are copulation and death, both of which he has most impressively experienced with a human body before metamorphosis. In this research, it is argued that this repeated foregrounding of the haunted memory, in particular, sexual relationships as well as the Jonah whale’s experience of orgasm, is a strategy to make the secular rhetoric of reestablishing the communion with God. With the Cold War setting, the novel’s major theme is to reestablish communication, be it human with another group of different ideology (USSR and USA), human with divine, human with aliens, human with other more local aliens such as the whales and dolphins, and above all, human with other individuals—friends, colleagues and lovers. As a reflection of the isolated Cold War ideological blocks, to some extent, characters in The Jonah Kit are all aliens and all their voices need translating and interpreting. The Jonah whale’s recall of his memory can be understood as the efforts in constructing the communication between the posthuman and the human, and specifically, his repeated memory of the feelings during physical consummation that he earnestly strives for is pre-eminently an act of truth-seeking and communion with God. The rhetoric of using the discourse of sexual relationships to reflect the communion with God belongs to an early modern poetic tradition largely shaped by the metaphysical poetry represented by John Donne’s love poems such as “The Good Morrow” and “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day”. For the seventeenth-century, metaphysical poet and Anglican priest John Donne, “theology…was erotic, and the erotic

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theological” (Norman 2007: 255). Donne’s erotic verse names the experience of God in the context of human relationships, specifically, relationships of erotic love, or the erotic interpersonal communion (Hollingsworth 2012: 97). Literature, particularly poetry is the closest to verbally capture the truth that indeed cannot be put into words. Moreover, the tradition of paralleling erotic love with the communion with God is not only restricted to literature, but also more firmly ingrained in religion and philosophy. It is commonly believed that sexual union is more expressive of the true God or love of God than other experience, since God is a sexual being: The love relationship between the Father and the Son within the Trinity, the relationship from which the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds, is a sexual relationship. It is like the human sexual relationship from which a child proceeds in time; or rather, that relationship is like the divine one. Sexuality is ‘the image of God’ according to Scripture (see Genesis 1:27) …God therefore is a sexual being. (Kreeft 1990: 127)

Although the body is transformed from a man to a whale, the sensation of joy during sexual intercourse remains. Moreover, the pleasure of corporeal copulation is unceasingly sought by the Jonah whale as a means to restore the union with his beloved. The Jonah whale’s copulatory thrust along with his cruising of the deep sea recalls in him the earlier sensation, when “his tail blades were forked far wider apart than now” (Watson 1977: 8). It can be seen that his remembrance of his earlier human legs is translated into wider forked tail blades. Swimming in the sea and copulation are analogous since in both of them he thrusts himself into a pliable and yielding softness that parts for him (Watson

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1977: 8). However, he cannot clearly remember where this residue of strange joy comes from, and this is the major part of memory that lingers on, and the details of which are gradually recollected by the Jonah whale. “Sexual undercurrents swirl beneath his memory” (Watson 1977: 55), and he plays with female whales and recalls his memory of the sensual joys. The allusion of Jonah already indicates that the novel is largely anchored to the theme of reestablishing communion with God. Evidences can be found that the sexual discourse that is remembered by the Jonah whale is linked to the biblical Jonah’s communion with God. In the experience of orgasm, the Jonah whale is captured by the female’s hair that is like seaweed tightly winding round his body. Accompanying the newly embodied sexual experience, the Jonah whale fully recollects the feeling of orgasm, as he remembers, “orgasm was by way of a slow lying down together, twining of limbs he cannot understand, impossible touch of mouths and tongues. Hair flowed around him like seaweed, adhering, clinging” (Watson 1977: 80). A similar experience of being wrapped by seaweed also appears in the biblical story of Jonah. Jonah is wrapped by seaweed in the belly of the big fish, “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul; the deep was round about me; The weeds were wrapped about my head” (Jonah 2:5 ASV). The weeds refer to seaweed, and this is the prayer Jonah can hardly escape from; the more he struggles to extricate himself from it, the more tightly the seaweed entangles him. After Jonah gives up struggling and is no longer likely to escape drowning, the seaweed becomes his winding sheet. Jonah sinks to the bottom of the sea by the entanglement of seaweed before he is swallowed by the fish, paralleling Pavel’s metamorphosis into the Jonah whale after he fully tastes the orgasm with Katya.

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For the Jonah whale, the alienation from the beloved and the divine is inextricably intertwined. After the posthuman metamorphosis, to the Jonah whale, Katya is rather a God-like existence, impossible to reach, yet intimately bound. The analogy between Katya and God can be known, since in the biblical narrative, the seaweed is sent by God to wrap the disobedient Jonah, whereas in the Jonah whale’s memory, it is Katya’s hair that entangles his body. The Jonah whale piously strives for the bodily reunion with Katya, which can only be approached by copulation with the sea water or female whales, but never truly arrives. As Hollingsworth claims, the “absence and presence in the relation with the beloved becomes the site for an attestation of the experience of the absent-present God…Thus the time between already and almost, and the space between unity and estrangement become sites of both erotic and spiritual desire” (2012: 82). The impossibility of sexual reunion with his beloved indicates that the Jonah whale cannot communicate with God merely through physical intercourse, and he must try other means, i.e., the ritualistic death, to obtain the truth after being posed the question besetting the human world. To sum up, the becoming-animal posthuman, or the Jonah whale’s memory is largely a somatic one, rather than the memory of the mind. This memory is mainly composed of physical consummation and self-sacrificing death. During the lifetime of the Jonah whale, both of these two memories occur to him in one way or another, and functionally serve as the guidance for his transient posthuman life. In other words, the posthuman life is prescribed in the memory and in the biblical myth of Jonah. In this way, the posthuman lives both in the past as well as the present, and his endeavor is to relive his human life in the posthuman

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embodiment and embedding. From this aspect, the posthuman is not a totally new-born monster, like Frankenstein, who doesn’t have any pre-experience as a human, but an artificial alternative of human, the augmented version of a human being, earnestly remembering the feeling of love and the deepest bond with a human. As aforementioned, the novel is developed from the biblical story of Jonah; like the priest, the Jonah whale’s ultimate mission is to reestablish the communion with God, either through sexual union or self-sacrifice. After the impossibility of sexual union with his beloved, as a pious prayer like Jonah, the Jonah whale chooses the second means of reaching God’s love, thus giving the answer to the question of God’s existence. Ian Watson designs the becoming-animal posthuman out of the archetype of Jonah, with the purpose of reestablishing the communion between male and female, human and divine so as to bridge the dialectics between the two opposite ideological groups, the USSR and USA, because only when such deep unions are forged between the two opposing forces, can the truth be revealed. Following the guidance of the individual memory, mainly the embodied memory of love and death, and the collective memory as reflected in the unconscious memory of the Jonah myth, the posthuman’s arrival brings about the union of multiple dualism, thus ending the chaos from isolation, and gaining the world the resurrected momentum endowed by the love of God.

Overwhelmed by the Past––Involuntary Memory in Galatea 2.2 Absent or present, ambiguous or crystal clear, memory plays an important part in the posthuman’s life in both The Left Hand of Darkness

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and The Jonah Kit, and even gains weight in Galatea 2.2, represented by the homodiegetic narrator’s self-indulgence in the past, his fatigue and inability to move on with his present life. Attracted by the mirage of memory, the narrator of Galatea 2.2 wallows in his human past, resulting in the stagnant process of becoming-posthuman in the higher diegesis level. Be it sweet or bitter, memory constructs the imperfect Garden of Eden, which is nostalgic and perilous for the posthuman to revisit and rehearse, but impossible to dwell in. In Galatea 2.2, the narrator even attempts to drag the AI machines into his sentimental love stories, so as to be totally overwhelmed by the hybrid past, be it the past of the narrator Powers or the past of the author Powers. The narrator Powers is nicknamed “Marcel, the Dutchman” (Powers 1995: 40) by his fellow scientist Lentz after he learns of the narrator’s vocation as a novel writer. Despite the irony, and the deliberate delineation of the two radical culture blocks, known as the techno-culture and the humanist culture, the homonymous narrator’s nickname indicates that the author Powers compares the narrator to Marcel Proust and the Dutchman at the same time, one being real, and one fictional, and both well-known in their haunted memories. Marcel Proust is the French master of autobiography who is well established by his opera mundi In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), which is full of complex pieces of flashbacks triggered by objects or things in the narrator’s present life. In that novel, involuntary memory brings about the ecstasy of the intemporal and the contemplation of eternity and so does the narrator’s memory that repeatedly and involuntarily comes to him. The allusion to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time also lies in the ending of the novel, as the author Powers chooses a Proustian ending,

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existing from the narrative, back from the narrator and character Powers to the author Powers who begins to write the very book Galatea 2.2. The Dutchman is a pun, as on the one hand, it refers to the narrator’s four previous years of life in the Netherlands which make him Dutch or a Dutchman, and on the other hand, it also refers to the legendary figure, the cursed captain in the Flying Dutchman myth which originated from seventeenth century nautical folklore. This myth has been widely used in music and literature, such as Wagner’s opera, The Flying Dutchman (1843) and the African-American playwright Amiri Baraka’s drama, Dutchman (1964). The captain and his crew are doomed on the ship exiled in the sea and are numb from the foods they eat, and the narrator is likewise doomed to exile in his life and the lack of drive to get his southward train. In Genette’s terms, it is kind of completing the internal homodiegetic analepsis or “returns” that comprise the retrospective sections filling in an earlier gap in the narrative after the event, and adding more facts and details to the summary in the sentence appearing in an earlier analepsis or flashback, “Our life in B. was a tender playact” (Powers 1995: 33). In training Imp B,26 the memory of dwelling in B. with C. comes to the narrator involuntarily. There he takes up work as a technical editor, C. guards paintings at the Fine Arts, and they spend a really enjoyable time there. The present life in the research Center training AI machines makes

26 To reach the level of human consciousness, Lentz creates a series of AI machines in succession, from Implementation A to Implementation H, each bearing the knowledge acquired by its last version, “each machine life lived inside the others—nested generations of ‘remember this.’…E’s weights and contours lived inside F’s lived inside G’s, the way Homer lives on in Swift and Joyce, or Job in Candide or the Invisible Man” (Powers 1995: 171).

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no difference to the self-indulgent narrator, it is his personal memory with C. and the collective memory of the cultural heritage, or the literature knowledge27 that he accumulates for years, that shapes his present self, which frequently comes to him when triggered by a trivial anchor in the present world. For instance, merely the same letter B can bring him back to revisit his memories in B. In addition, there is another prominent feature about the frequency of the analepsis. Like Proust’s intoxication with the iterative, the narrator’s analepsis of B. is also repeated in an iterative manner. The narrator’s analepsis is anachronic, since the memory is randomly picked up as long as it is activated by events taking place in the higher diegesis level, i.e., the narrator’s life in the Center training AI machines. Diachronically, the story sequence of the narrator’s past with C. starts from his meeting the twenty-one-year-old freshman C. in the composition class, to C. considerately listening to the narrator’s story about his father’s death, to the narrator dropping out and leaving U. for B. to take an irrelevant job as a techno editor and their cozy life in B. However, the narrative sequence of these events goes from their life in B. back to C. taking the narrator’s composition class, and jumps to C. being a faithful reader of the narrator and the narrator moving to B. In this way, the place of B. is addressed many times and thus foregrounded as an eternal place for endless retrospection.

27 As a literature professor much revered by the narrator, Taylor is a mentor of the narrator, whose way of knowledge implanting indeed shapes the narrator’s understanding of what is knowledge. Taylor’s view on literature learning is shared by many distinguished literature professors of that time, particularly the school of New Criticism, which parallels literature learning with knowledge acquisition in an aesthetic process of endless regress to literature itself.

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Like a Proustian creature, in fact, contrary to what one is often led to believe, the narrator has as little sensitivity to the individuality of moments as he is spontaneously sensitive to the individuality of places. The city B. becomes a recurrence in the narrator’s analepsis, there he and C. read aloud or improvise a narrative to each other, each being the other’s entire audience, euphoric in the still heart of the arctic cold, while leading a life of a tender play act, furnishing their dismal rental with castoffs, and taking long and random walks. The two literature majors start their jobs, though they cannot afford much, living a life full of hope and peace. These details of happiness imbued in the narrator’s memory of the life period he spent with C. in B. are the source of his self-indulgence and warm his heart to move on with his life. Confiding his emotional attachment to B., the narrator says that “we did feel at home there, for a season. We could have pitched camp there forever” (Powers 1995: 99). Due to C.’s complex immigrant background, she is a locus at non-time and un-place, and always lives elsewhere. The narrator makes an iterative narrative about this place of B., and writes all about his way to B. where he and C. could live. B. is thereby stylized into an eternal place protecting C. and his lost time of love. In addition to the narrator’s involuntary memory of his past with C., which is embedded into the lower level of diegesis, the novel is written in a pseudo-autobiographical style. Like Proust’s In Search of the Lost Time, the whole novel is pre-eminently the narrative of memory, not only the memory of the fictional narrator, but also that of the real author. The narrator in his analepsis confesses that he has written his third novel based on his life in the city of B. where he got the job as a second-shift computer hack after dropping out of U.,

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I used Taylor as model for my hero, a man who gives up a promising career in science to devote himself to music composition. And I cast myself as the shiftless graduate-school dropout who squanders his talent. (Powers 1995: 66)

It is quite an honest autobiographic confession and, as in Powers’ third book The Gold Bug Variations (1991), there are indeed two such male protagonists. One is Stuart Ressler, a promising and charismatic young molecular biologist who in the course of pioneering research in molecular genetics later abandons his career and disappears in a most inelegant strategy of retreat. The other is Franklin Todd, a dropout from a doctoral program who, since his unfinishable research on a sixteenth century Flemish artist, works nights in a computerized billing operation. Although the narrator confides earlier that “I had nothing left in me but the autobiography” (Powers 1995: 36), this is the first time that the narrator directly associates his fictional narrative with his nonfictional past. This is quite consistent with the author’s real life of fiction writing and indicates that the narrator is actually the author himself, and the novel is indeed Powers’ autobiography. Looking backward to earlier plots, it is noticed that the plot of Galatea 2.2 is almost designed in accordance with Powers’ real-life experience. The narrator’s return from a four year reclusive residence in the Netherlands to become a humanist visitor working at the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences in U., is exactly the same as in the author Powers’ biography. Powers also moves to the Netherlands where he wrote his second book, Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988) to avoid the publicity and attention generated by his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985). Then he

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returned to the University of Illinois in 1992 to take up a post as writer-in-residence (Lynn) and adjunct faculty member at the Beck Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in Illinois, a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign dedicated to interdisciplinary research (Forrest 2010). Powers was also a computer programmer when he worked in Boston before going to the Netherlands, after he dropped out of the PhD in literature. These facts match the narrator’s analepsis about his moving to B. to take a very different job, from his previous master’s study in literature, as a computer hack. Boston is written only with the initial letter B, and U. stands for Urbana-Champaign, which can be seen after comparing the narrative with Powers’ biography, but other information, like the character name C. or A., is nowhere to extract. As David Lodge argues, “this convention reinforces the autobiographical effect because it seems designed to protect the identity of real people with whom the real Richard Powers has been involved” (2002: 23), and the abbreviation of names can be a protection of the real people involved. It is C.’s companion who is listening to the narrator telling of his remorse on devastating his father by choosing to transfer to literature from physics; this broke his father’s heart and led to his slow death of crushed hopes. The narrative of the past functions as therapy bringing the narrator out of the shadow cast by the death of his father. The narrator finds C. to be a lonelier creature than he is himself. C. is a college student studying comparative literature who takes one semester of lessons taught by the narrator. Thinking of C. as a counterpart of himself, the narrator gets “instant companionship without groundwork or explanation” (Powers 1995: 62) and is healed by the illusion of mutual

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sadness, for C. silently shares his trauma by listening to him all the way up. Like the AI machine, C. is innocent and willing to listen to the narrator’s stories. As a student of the narrator, C. is sensitive to literature, a person who is more alone than the narrator, and thus becomes an ideal narratee who meets all the explicit requirements of the narrator, and their relationship starts from there. The narrator decides to leave U. and go somewhere else with C. in an attempt for two literature majors to make a living in the real world outside the textual one. While C. is working as a museum guard to earn the daily bread, the narrator is alone at home writing his book which is nothing more than a structured pastiche of every report C. feeds him about her life in Limburg and Chicago. Moreover, this book delights and distracts her and “by accident ate her alive” (Powers 1995: 108). Bored by her insipid daily work as a lonely museum guard, the book is much more vivid and close to her life. The act of being written into a book as a character is a parody of virtualization caused by indulging in the internet. As C. enters deeper into the narrator’s diegesis, her life seems to transcend her body and find its residing place in the book rather than in her long time standing like a statue around the paintings. On the other hand, the narrator’s book makes C. feel worthless, because C.’s life is modified, altered and even constructed by the narrator who has the author function in writing C.’s biography into his book. C.’s life is thus malleable and controlled by the narrator. By doing this, the narrator literally immortalizes C. into a character; in his view, this is a means to find C. a dwelling place despite her homeless exiled existence in her real life, but on the contrary, he encages her by his narrative.

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The narrator’s control over C.’s life (Powers 1995: 195) can even be compared with Humbert Humbert’s sadistic bigotry in processing Lolita in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Both of them fall in love with a much younger female with foreign roots, and in the name of love, they fetter the innocent female protagonist to a suffocating extent, resulting in the female protagonist’s escape from their grasp. With the unbearable memory, they begin their analepsis writings to retrieve the lost female protagonist for their word prisons to immortalize the females in their narratives. However, the narrator is much luckier than Humbert Humbert, as after the failure in his relationship with C., he is provided with a new narratee, the AI machine, and his interaction with it functions as a mirror, in which he can really start a retrospection on the relationship with C. Chances are thereby provided for him to more or less adjust his behavior towards others with a promising result of a close relationship that is different from his previous ones. Consciously or not, the narrator chooses a wrong way to love C. In his book he builds C. an eternal place of dwelling, which on the contrary, imprisons C. in his written cage. Outside his book, he protects C. from any sufferings incurred during a real human life, and soon after, when C. is feeling bored by the museum guard’s job, the narrator finds C. a new job as a wire operator in a brokerage against C.’s wish to truly embark on a career of her own. The narrator has suffocated “protection” for C. both in the diegetic world and the real world, which can be interpreted as a representation of his patriarchal and Eurocentric power fantasy that is one of the “legacies” he undoubtedly possessed as a “token humanist”. Human history can be encapsulated as a history of the subject and the other. In a humanist frame, it is necessary to maintain the dichotomic

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opposition between the subjects that is for most cases, Dead White European Males (DWEM) who are regarded as the ideal Cartesian subject of the cogito, Kantian reasonable beings, or in more sociological terms, the subjects of citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on. The dialect of the subject/other remains for the subject needs the existence of the other as a means to know himself by projecting his self onto the other. Knowing this, as a token humanist, the narrator claimed love is nothing more than a projection, “It’s all projection” and goes on to point out that “Everything’s projection. You can live with a person your entire life and still see them as a reflection of your own needs” (Powers 1995: 315). Like the window patient, what the narrator needs is to find another motionless patient of loneliness to stay beside and listen to his stories, but as long as his companion sees the blank truth behind his telling, the companion will undoubtedly choose to exit and stop being “the other” for the narrator’s self-formation. The narrator’s books based on C. and her family’s past sell well, but C. apparently could not share this achievement with the narrator; on the contrary, she feels embarrassed by letting others know her unbearable past. C. tries to accommodate the narrator by making herself into someone the narrator could love. However, her inner self declines with the narrator’s continuous exploitation. She becomes homesick and haunted by her phantom of childhood in the Dutch village of E. in Limburg, Netherlands, a medieval village that has developed around a bustling funeral business, and wants to flee from all the complex associations including the narrator. C. wants to go back to her birthplace, since it is a place without the narrator’s interference, the narrator knows this and says, “I knew only that if I left with her—as I would have, in a

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second—the place she arrived in would never be hers” (Powers 1995: 158). The narrator is such a hegemonic colonizer, that once he steps foot on the land, it will become colonized by his writings and civilizations that he brings with him and he takes for granted a necessity to implant the innocent aboriginals for their well-being. Either his telling of his past to C. or his reading of Western literature canons to the machine is in essence, a process of colonialization. For that memory such as literature classics, is equivalent to civilization: “Taylor could recite all the way back to the foundations. We could not be civilized until we could remember” (Powers 1995: 193). This whole logic is derived from the narrator’s imperialistic perspective without referring to the other’s point of view. The narrator is a textual empire builder, and after his overnight success from the novel’s publication, the narrator “could wake up every morning and devote [himself] to making worlds” (Powers 1995: 202). He creates a textual world for C. from his memory to protect her in the name of love, but C. finds it unbearable and goes to live her own story (Powers 1995: 157). Once again, he desires to fabricate a world for Helen, but Helen also can’t live in the narrator’s textual world in which she doesn’t possess any symbolic grounding (Powers 1995: 126) and she cannot go outside to experience the world since she lacks the real-world referent (Powers 1995: 190). In addition, the humanist is encapsulated and parodied as the hegemonic imperialist (Powers 1995: 86, 327). Therefore, Galatea 2.2 is also a colonial confrontation story, or in John Reider’s terms, the colonial ideological fantasy, or Greenblatt’s “Linguistic Colonialism”. The cornerstone of linguistic colonialism is the presupposition that natives of the new world do not have language; if they do it is inadequate

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and uncivilized, and the newly discovered savage world is unfinished and receptive of Western culture’s imprints. “This illusion that the inhabitants of the New World are essentially without culture of their own is both early and remarkably persistent, even in the fact of overwhelming contradictory evidence” (Greenblatt 1990: 17). To sum up, in the pseudo-autobiography of Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, the narrator is trapped by the involuntary memory of his former lover C. The narrator’s iterative analepsis builds C. a textual world to dwell in eternally, in order to forever protect the fragile C. as a character in the narrator’s memory, and paradoxically, he suffocates C. who turns from a lively lady into a lifeless statue. As the “token humanist”, the narrator’s narrative desire to tell his individual past stories and the Western literature canons drives him to world building and addressing the other as his narratee. The imperialist narrator exerts a pathetic projection on the aboriginal woman and machine by civilizing them with both his memory and knowledge, putting their existences into his imagined world, without referring to their own subjectivities.

Memory of the Amnesia––Memory as Dream in The Bridge A thornier subject than the memory of Galatea 2.2’s narrator, whose life can be pushed forward by carrying out narration of his memory to the posthuman narratee, is that memory in The Bridge is more difficult to recollect. This is because the narrator in The Bridge is in a coma during the whole narrative, and logically it is impossible for the unconscious narrator to narrate his past. Strategically, in order to let the narrator recall his memory, multiple narrative sequences are delicately designed, and

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his memory is largely displaced in the dream narrative. If the narrator of Galatea 2.2 is unable to narrate his memory until being healed by the companion of the posthuman, the narrator in The Bridge is unwilling, or at least hesitant to come out of his past and face the present. The narrator is named John Orr in his “afterlife” dream in the wake of the serious car accident. In his dream, he has amnesia, and has forgotten his real name, and the nurse names him from the circular scar on his chest and gives him the name of Orr, with the same pronunciation of “or”, indicating other alternatives of life except for the obvious one. John Orr is Dr. Joyce’s patient and what Dr. Joyce tries to do is to analyze Mr. Orr’s dreams in order to bring back Mr. Orr’s lost memory. However, most of the time, John Orr provides deliberately invented dreams rather than the dreams he really dreams. In other words, John Orr lies to Dr. Joyce by not confiding his real dreams to Dr. Joyce. The relations between John Orr and Dr. Joyce are like the racket game they play, they are two allotrope players; although Dr. Joyce knows more about the game, he is lacking in physical strength, and it is John Orr who wins the point, “the game—easily enough, fielding one ball while the doctor fumbles the other” (Banks 2013: 21). Dr. Joyce is called “the good doctor” by Mr. Orr, and he plays the role of doctor very well, competent but incapable of knowing the truth from dream analysis. Dream interpretation is a method of psychological investigation which flourished in the early period of the 20th century, with Sigmund Freud as the most prominent figure both academically and clinically, but the effectiveness of dream analysis has been criticized and doubted for its historical and geographical limitations. As a good doctor, Dr. Joyce specializing in dream analysis is responsible but fails to

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discover the truth of his patient, Mr. Orr’s disease. For Mr. Orr, the whole reality is a dream, and what John Orr relates to Dr. Joyce is merely invented dreams inside the larger dream. Therefore, Dr. Joyce is unable to disturb the running of the larger dream, just like the situation of being defeated by John Orr in the racket game. Dr. Joyce is doomed to be defective in retrieving Mr. Orr’s memory through dream analysis. John Orr and Dr. Joyce are allotropic, or identical, and it is hard to discern one from the other. Both of them aim to figure out the truth of the situation by remembering the past, but Dr. Joyce fails to help, because at the subconscious level, John Orr wants to keep dreaming or continue his life in his dreamland. Therefore, Dr. Joyce’s assistance is constantly refused by John Orr by the means of deliberately cheating or disguising the real content of his dreams, because John Orr thinks that “there is no point in telling him the sort of things I have really been dreaming about: analysis is one thing, but shame is quite another” (Banks 2013: 107). Dr. Joyce helps John Orr by asking him to be concerned about the bridge, “perhaps the dream is a bridge…perhaps the bridge is a dream” (Banks 2013: 24). To figure out the whole situation, John Orr is making investigations about the bridge by searching relevant materials in the Third City Records and Historical Materials Library. In the dream, many concepts are embodied, such as Mr. Orr’s memory, life and death. Like Mr. Orr’s subconscious identification with the bridge, his lost memory of his life is closely related to the historical recordings of the bridge which is why John Orr is always trying to find the library. As the library represents memory, the two directions of the bridge, the City and the

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Kingdom represent life and death,28 with John Orr trapped and crushed in between, in a coma, hesitant to go in either direction. Another way of understanding the symbolic meaning of the City and the Kingdom is that they are the two places linked by the Forth Bridge. Geographically, the Forth Bridge in reality links the banks of the Firth of Forth and connects the City of Edinburgh with the Kingdom of Fife, one is urban associated with the narrator’s present, and the other is rural associated with the narrator’s past. In this sense, Citywards equates to the present-oriented and the desire to wake up from the coma to the present, while Kingdomwards represents the past-oriented or staying in the past that will inevitably lead to death. Therefore, physically, the City and the Kingdom symbolize life and death, and epistemologically, they represent the present and the past. Despite months of effort, John Orr comes no closer to discovering the nature or location of either the City or the Kingdom, “they remain enigmatic, placeless” (Banks 2013: 51). What matters is Citywards or Kingdomwards, and people on the bridge talk a lot about these directions, because going Citywards or Kingdomwards is a symbolic query like Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. While for Mr. Orr, his patient identity restricts his travel to only two termini, within a range of a dozen bridge sections and about the same number of miles in each direction, which means that he can neither die nor live, but is stuck in between, definitely consonant with his spatial location of being in the hospital near the bridge. 28 In the Hebrew Bible, the notion of God’s kinship is referring to as “his kingdom”. The Kingdom of God or Heaven began to be used in recorded statements of Jesus. Compared to the Kingdom of Heaven, there is the City of Man, referring to the human world.

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After the first time that the narrator observes “the man” bleeding and coloring the bridge with the red color of his blood, the second-order observer appears again as John Orr hoping to see something that is not the bridge. This means that he wants to see something outside the dream, but then he sees on a television screen a man lying in a hospital bed surrounded by machines, and the screen is unchangingly showing “the man, the bed, the surrounding machines” (Banks 2013: 40). John Orr observes the man carefully but does not recognize who the man is. The physically wounded man is actually the narrator himself. Keeping away by the mechanism of avoidance, the wounded body enters the dream through a malfunctioning television and the narrator can only see his true body from the camera’s eye. It can be deduced that the second-order observation deployed is a way to alienate the habitual way of recognition, thus to keep the split characters (John Orr and the man) safe from each other. Even after close observation, John Orr cannot identify with the “poor devil”, the “very ill patient” or the man, due to the introduction of the technical medium, the camera, instead of a mirror. Functioning oppositely, as a senior engineer specializing in the effect of the bridge’s weight on the seabed, Mr. Brooke discourages John Orr from further investigating the bridge in relation to other materials outside the bridge, “the bridge has more than enough to offer the enquiring mind without recourse to anything outside it” (Banks 2013: 54). Brooke tells Orr to focus on the structure and stone of the bridge itself rather than exterior sources. As a friend of Orr, Brooke has a closer relationship with him. As a sufferer from insomnia, Brooke can escape Dr. Joyce’s dream analysis by providing no dream at all. Compared with Dr. Joyce’s well-illuminated office, the figure of Brooke is ill lit, “even in direct

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sunlight he always seems to be standing in shade” (Banks 2013: 53). He is the embodiment of the dark side of the narrator. If Dr. Joyce is the angle helping the narrator to wake up from this dream, then Brooke is the devil tempting the narrator to stay in the dream. Soon John Orr finds that the Third City Library has been ruined by a fire, with nothing left for Orr to know about the past of the bridge, which means his effort in bringing back his memory has proved to be in vain. Brooke invites Orr to come to Dissy Pitton, the bar and reminds him to bring a wide-brimmed hat. At the bar, Orr meets another important figure in his dream, the daughter of the Chief Engineer, Abberlaine Arrol. Orr is ingrained deeper and deeper into the dream since he has developed an emotional attachment to Abberlaine. As stated above, Brooke is a devil-like figure tempting Orr to fall. Brooke’s invitation for Orr to come to the bar can be associated with Hawthorne’s Goodman Brown going to the forest and meeting with the devil. Brooke and the other engineers, Baker and Fowler, as well as Abberlaine are devils facilitating Orr’s fall. A wide-brimmed hat like Faith’s pink ribbon symbolizes gentility and civility, since the wide-brimmed hat is normally worn by educated gentlemen. After arriving at the bar, Orr’s wide-brimmed hat is taken off, which is a sign showing that Orr has definitely fallen into the realm of the devil—he has shed this sign of his gentility and civility. After John Orr tells Abberlaine that he wants to know more about the Kingdom and the City, and what lies beyond the bridge, there is a minor rickshaw accident. John Orr is awakened by Abberlaine. Once more, he hears the aircraft engines, wondering which direction they are flying in because “it seems important”, to know the direction, Orr in fact wants to figure out whether he is dead or alive. Seeing Abberlaine after the

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accident, he remembers he has known this girl, as if some part of his memory is back, and he knows he should stay with Abberlaine on the bridge rather than going to other places to carry out further investigation. The second-order observer tells the story of the narrator’s real past, disclosing parallel figures in reality, Mr. Orr’s engineer friends represent the narrator’s fellow geology student friends, also called the “Rockers” and Abberlaine Arroll represents Andrea Cramond, an Edinburgh girl that the narrator met in the Union (pub) one night, and fell in love with almost immediately. As Mr. Orr’s attachment to Abberlaine grows, he sinks deeper into the dream. After the fog of the rickshaw accident dissipates, a large number of barrage balloons are revealed preventing the aircraft from flying, They are on one side only. Down-river, more barrage balloons than you could shake a stick at. Up-river, not one. Everybody else on the tram points and goggles at the massed balloons; only I, it seems, stare thunderstruck in the other direction, into the unmarred skies up-river beyond the X-ing girders of the linking span. Not a single solitary balloon. (Banks 2013: 153)

John Orr assumes that the massed balloons are gathered only on the down-river side to stop aircraft from going Cityward; as a result, the planes are flying Kingdomward, and Abberlaine tells Orr that the planes are written in the language of Braille. Earlier in the novel, John Orr has seen the formation of aircraft flying from the direction of the Kingdom, their trail of smoke appearing like black clouds, leaving a vague pattern, “grouped in there-by-there grids, carefully spaced” (Banks 2013: 47). Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or

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visually impaired. Each character of Braille is a two-by-three dot grid, similar to the grids of smoke signs left by the three Cityward aircraft. This sign language made up of grids called Marain is created by Banks and later used in his Culture series. If the aircraft are signals from reality, then they are most suitable to be written in tactile language; the signals come from the narrator’s impaired body and he can only feel but cannot examine it in any other way. Blocked by the massed balloons, the aircraft in the same vertical formation as before turn Kingdomward from Cityward, which indicates that the narrator’s physical situation goes from better to worse. Compared with coming back to life, the chances are higher that the narrator will choose to live with Abberlaine in his dream and die in reality. Besides Abberlaine’s seduction and Brooke’s temptation, there is a third facet that pulls John Orr further into the dream, i.e., his refusal of Dr. Joyce’s next stage of treatment, hypnosis. Dr. Joyce advises John Orr to take hypnosis, but John Orr refuses to cooperate. What Orr wants Dr. Joyce to do is to continue to analyze those fake dreams he invented as camouflage for his real dreams and just function superficially as a good doctor. Without any progress in diagnosis, Dr. Joyce gives up and transfers John Orr to a lower-ranking doctor. The hierarchy of the dream world is also specialized, as the higher the floor, the higher is the social rank. Dr. Joyce’s promotion to a higher rank is also reflected in the relocation of his office. His office has been relocated to room 3704. This is three levels higher than his previous office, with increased floor space and grander accommodation, suggesting his advancement up the social ladder. After Mr. Orr’s refusal to taking hypnosis, he is transferred by Dr. Joyce to a lower-ranking

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doctor, whose office is much smaller than Dr. Joyce’s, located eighteen floors below, while John Orr has also been moved down to Level U7, seven levels beneath the train deck. Using architecture to express the social hierarchy is not unprecedented. The emergence of skyscrapers changes people’s thinking in the horizontal direction, and largely expands their vertical imagination. In the British science fiction writer J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), the skyscraper is an ultra-modern 40-story tower block of a thousand living units designed for people from various classes of the social fabric. The higher the story the living unit is on, the higher is its inhabitants’ social hierarchy. The narrator, a middle-class technocratic surgeon lives on the twenty-fifth story, a documentary film-maker’s family lives on the building’s lower story, while the enigmatic architect of the high-rise lives in the penthouse at the top of the building. The class disparity penetrates the dream sequence from the reality world. Mr. Orr’s first thought about the lower floor to which he is transferred is that members of the inhabitant class, “workers and ordinary people” (Banks 2013: 173) live there. Recalling Mr. Orr’s earlier thinking on his class belonging, his consciousness about class is particularly sharp, “I wouldn’t settle for being a sewage worker or a coal miner all my life” (Banks 2013: 46), he cannot bear being lower-class staff. It is not certain whether John Orr belongs to a higher social class, he might come from the lower class; however, since he suffers from amnesia, he is reasonably oblivious to his previous social class before the car crash. What he knows about his identity is merely that he is a patient. Even so, the gap between him and the Chief Engineer’s daughter, Abberlaine is still fairly large, as Abberlaine asks Orr whether he is an

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engineer, and Orr replies that he is merely a patient under Dr. Joyce. Considering the transportation vehicles crossing the bridge, John Orr particularly mentions that the rickshaws and sedan chairs are expensive ones used by the higher class, “only important officials and couriers of the major guilds are allowed to use rickshaws; merely well-off people are permitted to use sedan chairs” (Banks 2013: 38). His inclination is to spend money on purchasing automobiles, first a Mercedes, then a Ferrari, and later a Porsche but he still wants a new one, indicating his accumulation of capital and consequent climb up the social hierarchy ladder. The narrator has betrayed his working-class roots and become a manager and partner in his engineering firm. Mr. Orr’s next dream tells of the topography of the bridge where he is trapped. The bridge is like a circle, no matter how far Orr runs, he cannot escape but is kept on the bridge, This is not a long bridge, but it goes on forever. I am not far from the bank, but I will never get there. I walk but I never move. Fast or slow, running, turning, doubling back, jumping, throwing myself or stopping; nothing makes any difference. (Banks 2013: 186)

Women indulge multifariously in sex with each other, or with satyr-like men coming from the forest. No matter how hard Orr tries, he cannot approach these seductive women and enjoy their filthy sex games, and if he drops off the bridge, he will be eaten by the carnivorous fish. These women cannot cross the river to step on the bridge, because “witches cannot cross water” (Banks 2013: 189). Orr gives up struggling, as he begins to realize that he and the bridge are one, both belonging to the same great steady mechanism, as he finds more bridges like this one,

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every bridge with one man on it and ladies on its banks, exactly the same as his own situation. This embedded dream serves as a condensed metaphor that effectively explains the narrator’s complex circumstance. In the narrator’s mind, every man is a bridge, while women are the landscape where the architecture of man is situated. Although close to each other in space, there is always a gap between man and women, as represented by the un-crossable river between the bridge and the bank, and to fully approach each other is dangerous and will even cost someone’s life. The bridge is a medium between life and death, and merging with the bridge means falling into a coma after the car-crash scene on the bridge, which can lead the narrator to either life or death. The narrator, John Orr in his dream strives hard to get rid of the bridge, to move forward, no matter in which direction, but he first needs to stop being crushed and trapped by the bridge. Therefore, he makes the decision to leave Dr. Joyce, his engineer friend Brooke and the terrifying bridge-like Abberlaine to ultimately leave the cage of the bridge. Upon departure, reflecting on the relations between men and women, he concludes that a woman is a place, while a man is a thing that serves as his guide to the voyage. To leave a place (the bridge) is to end the relations with one woman (Abberlaine), since he feels suffocated by her pressure probably caused by her higher social class given by her chief engineer father. At the same time that the narrator is dreaming of Abberlaine crushing and trapping him during sex, in the narrator’s ward, Andrea is actually doing this to the poor patient. It should be Andrea’s attempt to wake up the narrator, who feels this is hurtful and traumatic, and he is uncomfortable both in the reality and in his dream, and tries more actively to travel

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across the bridge. In the third-person narrative of the narrator’s past, the bridge also appears to be a place of significance to both Andrea and the narrator. The bridge located in North Queensferry is a place of farewell chosen by Andrea before she leaves Edinburgh to go to Paris to study Russian for three years. The waters behind the bridge are the Firth of Forth, cold and dark, cruelly chilling. Banks was born in North Queensferry, which is a village in Fife, Scotland, on the Firth of Forth, between the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge, ten miles from Edinburgh. Historically, the village is said to have been established to ensure regular ferry crossings across the Firth of Forth for the benefit of pilgrims traveling to St. Andrews. Over the centuries, it remained a small community with a small population, yet the numbers passing through the village daily were huge. The Forth Bridge is a landmark of North Queensferry. The work on the Forth Bridge for rail traffic began in 1883 under the supervision of the proprietor of the construction company Sir William Arroll, as well as two principal designers Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Fowler, who also appear as characters in the dream sequence as Chief Engineer Arroll, Engineer Baker and Engineer Fowler. Banks often said his interest in science fiction stemmed from the love of huge structures imbued in him by the Forth Bridge, What a gorgeous great device you are. So delicate from this distance, so massive and strong close-up. Elegance and grace; perfect form A quality bridge; granite piers, the best ship-place steel, and a never-ending paint job. (Banks 2013: 359)

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Like Banks, the narrator admires the beauty of the Forth Bridge, seeing it as a living piece of art endlessly extending in both directions. Besides his appreciation of the metal structure of the bridge, he has also established an emotional attachment to the Forth Bridge that serves as an anchor for the narrator’s love for Andrea. What the narrator does after Andrea leaves for Paris is waste his life in aimless waiting. The countless women he slept with and the new automobiles he bought only prove him to be powerless compared with Andrea’s determination. Age tugs at him a lot in both his body and mind. He has a bald patch, barely the size of a two-penny piece. His taste for newspapers has changed from The Times to the Guardian which indicates his political stance swinging from the conservative right to the liberal left. In the long period of waiting after Andrea’s departure, memory plays an important part in the narrator’s life, since for him “future became present. Present became past” (Banks, 2013: 264), after all, everything will become past, with no future or present left, and what lingers there is barely the memory of Andrea. In his mind, despite Andrea’s French lover, she remains generous and independent in the narrator’s eyes, though she thinks of herself as fickle and selfish. Getting married to someone else, giving birth to a child and divorcing, all these things that happened in his real life have not changed his love for Andrea. Like the Forth Bridge, Andrea is ingrained in the depth of his mind, always there for him to admire and appreciate her beauty. Banks tends to write male characters that have anxiety about sex in one way or another, for instance, Zakalwe in Use of Weapons cannot help but think of each sex act as an attack no matter how loving it actually is, as long as he is incapable of being on the controlling side of

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the relations with the woman. As can be seen from his attitude towards Andrea screwing others, “he was appalled to find himself jealous when Andrea slept with somebody else, and cursed the upbringing that had told and retold him that man should be jealous, and a woman had no right to screw around but a man did” (Banks 2013: 135). The narrator has stereotypes of female behavior in a love relationship, which are formed by his upbringing; “his mum always seemed like a shadow compared to his dad. She was there when he needed her, to wash his clothes and comb his hair and buy him things and give him a cuddle when he’d skinned his knee, but he never really knew her as a person” (Banks 2013: 129). He learns about the gender bias from his parents’ relationship, which becomes part of his “machine” to form judgments about man’s dominance and woman’s obedience in affection relations. However, the situation turns out quite differently from the narrator’s expectations. The narrator’s story with Andrea, and Orr’s story with Abberlaine are the same in essence, since both of them are relationships between a lower-class man and an upper-class woman. Because of the huge class gap, it is an extreme struggle for the man (the narrator/Orr) to keep control of the relationship, and as a result, for most of the time, it is the woman (Andrea/Abberlaine) who takes the lead, even in sex, which constitutes the male characters’ frustration and will to escape. This escapism is not unprecedented in literary works. On the contrary, it is a traditional Anglophone theme recurring in British and American novels. Orr’s behavior of departure belongs to a lineage of American and British figures that either seek shelter in childhood or refuse to enter the adult life: Barrie’s Peter Pan, Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Hemingway’s Nick Adams, Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.

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Taking a train to leave the hospital affiliated to the bridge no matter where the train is heading for easily reminds readers of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn afloat on a raft on the Mississippi River that carries obvious danger with it, and the culture on both sides of it—slave hunters, family feuds, and con men—is even more threatening. Likewise, the water behind the bridge is also fatally threatening, since it carries voracious fish. What drives this escapism is the nostalgia and longing for eternal boyhood innocence immaculate of any adult themes, particularly sexuality. Orr cuts himself off from his hospital identity by throwing his hospital identity bracelet out of the carriage window into the fog, and as soon as the bracelet leaves his hand, he gets rid of his identity as an amnesia patient, exhilarated to exile himself and see how far he will get. On the journey Orr has recurring dreams of seeing one man grow from a boy to a young man, as though Orr watches his growth on a screen; moreover, Orr can see into the man’s mind, to his thoughts, and sometimes Orr can point out the similarities between the man’s life and his own life on the bridge. Since Orr is the embodiment of the narrator in his dream, according to the grammatical principle that double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative, the recurring dreams that Orr dreams in the narrator’s dream cancel each other and equal the narrator’s reality. Things that happened in Orr’s recurring dreams of the man are what really happened to the narrator; in other words, they are events which have really taken place in the narrator’s past, including his upbringing, his study of geology, his relationship with Andrea, Andrea’s departure for Paris and her French lover. These events are narrated from a third-person omniscient point of view. Using the third-person narrative is safe for Orr to make a delineation from the man he narrates, as if

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watching a movie on the screen, and although he will inevitably identify with the focalizer he gazes at, he remains heterodiegetic, as it is the man’s story rather than his own. However, he gradually realizes that there are not a few similarities between his third-person dream and his life on the bridge, after all, his life on the bridge is the dream, and the third-person dream is the reality. All his dreams are distortions of his experiences, though transformed to a certain degree. Through interpretation, his memory can be discerned from his dreams. As a compensation mechanism for the sex frustration inflicted by Abberlaine, as well as to pursue his quest for the nature of the bridge, Orr starts his journey of adventure by stowing away on a train. He regards the train as a “long, articulated symbol, phallic and poised between the limbs of our great iron icon” (Banks 2013: 241), a metaphor for the penis inside the female organ, and so goes his thinking of man as a thing and woman as a place. For the young man Orr, the idea of going on a voyage and bravely leaving the woman at home is tempting. In his dream about the topography of the bridge, he explicitly expresses that every man is a bridge across a dangerous river with women living on the banks. Also in this image, the man is the thing, and the woman is the place. However, during his copulation with Abberlaine, he sees Abberlaine become the bridge encaging him with her limbs. To remain as a thing in a place, he chooses to board the train to leave Abberlaine or the bridge as a place and stay safe and sound in the male symbol of the train traveling back or forth between the bridge girders. To sum up, the car-crash narrator’s memory is displaced into his dream of being a patient who has suffered from amnesia, which is paradoxically a defensive strategy to recollect his memory. However,

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Banks designs this dream to be largely based on the narrator’s memory, where the narrator meets Abberlaine, the dream version of Andrea, his beloved and the reason for his unwillingness to awaken. The dream with John Orr as its narrator, as well as several embedded dreams within this dream, embodies and explains multiple urgent concepts in the narrator’s memory such as life, death, love and class, male and female, and it is thus more real than the traumatic memory that the narrator is indeed avoiding to directly confront.

CHAPTER FIVE POSTHUMAN METAMORPHOSIS: BECOMING POSTHUMAN

Stepping out from the mythical or reminiscent past, it is the constant presence of becoming in the posthuman metamorphosis which is actively engaged in the interaction between human and non-human others. The posthuman metamorphosis refers to the process of transformation from human to posthuman. As the embodied and embedded process of becoming, corporeal metamorphosis is a prominent aspect of the posthuman metamorphosis, following the pattern of the embodied becoming-other and the embedded other within. Science and technology’s development brings changes to human life. Human subjectivity and embodiment have become the focal point for the analyses of these changes. Responding to Hayles’ inquiry into “How we became posthuman”, posthuman metamorphosis is closely related to the issue of the body and subjectivity. Halberstam and Livingstone in Posthuman Bodies address posthuman bodies as “the causes and effects of postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences” (1995: 3). Analogous to the human body, ever since its emergence, the posthuman body has been argued as the site of relations, since it manifests the relations between the self and the other. Badmington (2000, 2001 and 2003) and Graham (2002) focus on

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representations of the posthuman, encompassing the aliens, monsters and the other to wonder how these images influence the frame for moral discourses about scientific and technological changes. As reviewed in Chapter Two, metamorphosis has been a traditional literature theme continuously explored from ancient Greek to modern times, and posthuman metamorphosis is more frequently seen in narratives

in

science

fiction;

with

Deleuze

and

Braidotti’s

becoming-other theory, the posthuman metamorphosis can be further classified as becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-machine and becoming-earth. These becoming-other axes are by no means exhaustive, yet they actually become the entrance and gauge in the text selection, which from the very beginning inspires the construction of the whole research. As a phenomenon in reality and fiction, the posthuman metamorphosis is philosophically theorized by Deleuzian becoming-other and Badmington’s the other within, which are reviewed in Chapter One. As a narrative phenomenon, the posthuman metamorphosis is theorized by Bruce Clark as the allegory of narrative transformations inspired by new writing technologies. Using second-order systems theory and neocybernetic theory, Clark reads narratives of the posthuman metamorphosis as allegories of systemic operations. Analyzing texts from Ovid to Octavia Butler, Clark argues for the viability of the posthuman as a multiple and hybrid merger of different systems to adapt humanity to its changing environment and to overcome the destruction of its own making (D’hoker 2009: 100). As an emerging narrative, the posthuman metamorphosis embraces the hybrid of bodies, and aligned with this hybridity represented in the literary metamorphosis, Clark synthesizes the narrative theory with system theory based on the

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“striking similarities” between the two theories, as a way to construct a hybrid theory to analyze the hybrid phenomenon in posthuman metamorphosis. As D’hoker criticizes, “Although the similarities and convergences between the fields of narrative theory and systems theory may indeed be striking, the actual gain of a potential merger for either of these fields seems questionable”, and several readings that Clark offers can just go without using the complex vocabulary of neocybernetics and systems theory (2009: 101). It should be mentioned that on the issue of the posthuman metamorphosis narrative, Clark’s contributions about theoretical hybrids and textual interpretation are indeed innovative, challenging and thought provoking, though the acceptance and application of his hybrid merger of systems remain scarce. Clark interprets the phenomenon allegorically and metaphorically, and analogues the body of the posthuman to the body of the text and theory, thus evolving the theory to adapt to the object of analysis and the environment. It is indicated that no matter whether for theory, text, or humankind, the hybrid merger of systems is the way forward, which will “earn its continuation only by metamorphic integration into new evolutionary syntheses” (Clark 2008: 196). In this chapter, enlightened by Clarks’ recommendation on the merger of systems,

philosophical

or

critical

posthumanist

thinking

of

becoming-other will be applied to the four selected science fictions respectively, as a way of merging the philosophical system of the posthumanist with the narrative system of science fiction. Specific narratives in science fiction embody and embed the posthumanist thinking of becoming-other, such as Genly Ai’s becoming-woman in The Left Hand of Darkness, Pavel’s becoming-animal in The Jonah Kit,

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Powers’ becoming-machine in Galatea 2.2, and Orr’s becoming-earth in The Bridge. The posthuman metamorphosis involves biological transgressions, and the very process of becoming-other identifies us with our ethical other, be it animal, plant, machine or earth. The changing biology is consequently accompanied by the reevaluation of the position of the human on this world by judging humankind’s relations with other non-human beings. As Levinas argues, “my being in the world requires justification” for the extension of my being involves an unavoidable violence towards the other, and Levinas conceives of the other as the source of “both my reason and my obligation” (1969: 83). The existence of the other is crucial for the human being, yet it has been traditionally under-evaluated and ignored to a despised extent, as Derrida rhetorically questions “how do we relate our understanding of alienation as evil with the enigma of alterity as ‘monstrous’” (1999: 257). Different from Clark’s emphasis on the merger of systems to reach the ideal condition of hybridity, it should be argued that any embodied hybridity of the posthuman body and identity is at the same time real and fictional. Becoming-other posthuman metamorphosis is in essence a radical methodology of embracing the other into the body and the identity, to form the other within a state, which functions as the means to reach a condition of symbiosis between human and non-humans in a perpetual-becoming manner on a cosmological scale. In other words, the performance of transgressing boundaries is a bypass for humans to reconstruct harmonious relations with non-human species, in a similar logic to Derrida’s intrigue of undecidability, for “a decision has to go through some impossibility in order for it to be a decision” (1999: 66).

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Be it real or fictional, becoming-other posthuman metamorphosis obligates us to deem others as part of ourselves, as if others have entered our bodies and lead a symbiotic life together with us.

Becoming-woman––Intersubjectivity and Involution in The Left Hand of Darkness The Left Hand of Darkness was written by Ursula Le Guin as a “thought experiment” to explore the postgender world on the planet of Gethen. By the eradication of sexual difference and embracing biological fluidity and psychological androgyny, dualism is deconstructed, and a postgender intersubjective space is reconstructed between Genly Ai and Estraven, with interludes of cyborg myth and postgenderism culture narratives. Moreover, Le Guin suggests a possible transformation mode of the yin-yang cycle from psychoanalytic light and shadow. On the issue of gender, Ursula Le Guin performs her “thought experiment” of postgender narrative in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) to go beyond the binary thinking of gender. Le Guin’s nonfiction The Language of the Night—Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979), influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of C. G. Jung and Jacques Lacan, explains the damaging effect of projection from the subject to the other so as to objectify the other, followed by the establishment of a power relationship, to further impoverish one’s own reality and alienate oneself. In Le Guin’s words, “our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from yin” (Le Guin 1992: 12). A space voyage is the process of going into the other’s psychic abysses, for gaining an understanding of the subject himself. To reach the other, the subject goes into himself. Le Guin’s tentative methodology toward the gender problem is to turn the

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other gender into another subject, a bypassing of recognition and identification through the other’s self, to make the whole process a yin and yang circle, thereby changing dualism into integration and integrity. Types of gender are not subjects and the others, but interact intersubjectively, like yin and yang, light and shadow, as an undivided cycle of postgender, sexless intersubjective humanity. The concept of intersubjectivity, which has been brought into psychoanalysis from philosophy, refers to a field of intersection between two subjectivities, the interplay between two different subjective worlds to define the analytic situation. Intersubjective theory can be traced back to Hegel’s formulation of the problem of recognition in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Hegel addresses the conflict between the independence and dependence of self-consciousness by claiming that self-consciousness “has a double object: one is the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second, viz. itself, which is the true essence” (1979: 105). As interpreted by the contemporary feminist intersubjectivity theorist Jessica Benjamin, the other must be recognized as another subject in order for the self to fully experience his or her subjectivity in the other’s presence (1995: 4). The inherent sexual difference of bi-genderism perpetually returns to dualism, serving as a “symbolic violence” (Butler 1990: 194) for all who are shaped by it. Nonetheless, gender theorists’ vocabulary shifts from “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987: 125) to “doing difference” (Fenstermaker, West and Smith 2002: 1). In order to thoroughly deconstruct binary thinking, a radical alternative consonant with queer theories’ original deconstructive

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impulses is offered by postgenderism to eradicate difference through the means of neurotechnology, biotechnology and reproduction technologies. To go beyond the gendered bodies, “the hierarchical dualism ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle...have been cannibalized...they have been ‘techno-digested’” (Haraway 2001: 302) so as “to transgress dualist philosophy...feminist analysis of subjectivity and identity should take corporeality...as its point of departure” (Nicholas 2014: 9). Postgenderism is a radical interpretation of the feminist critique of patriarchy and gender, and the genderqueer critique of the way that binary gender constrains individual potential and our capacity to communicate with and understand other people (Dvorsky and Hughes 2008: 13). Therefore, postgenderism functions to achieve intersubjectivity on the dimension of gender, which through the eradication or rejection of sexual difference, reconstructs an alternative bypass. Intersubjectivity can be understood with an androgynous relational existence therein. The Left Hand of Darkness is mainly narrated by the male envoy from the Ekumen of Known Worlds Genly Ai with the mission to enlist two hostile countries of the planet Gethen, Karhide and Orgoreyn, to join the Ekumen. Ai is bewildered by the internal political states and sexual ambiguity of the people on Gethen. The whole narrative intertwines with the development of the relations between Genly Ai and Estraven from Karhide. Estraven is an enigma to Ai at the beginning, and as the plot develops,

several

myths

and

legends

penetrate

the

narration,

foreshadowing their relations more than once. After Estraven’s rescue of Ai from the Pulefen Farm in Orgoreyn, the narration is conveyed through dual perspectives of Ai and Estraven in sequence. Their harsh escape to the ice bonds them as one. Later, in Ai’s narration, Estraven dreams a

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dream about his dead elder brother talking to him, which proves to be Ai’s mindspeech to Estraven. Ai and Estraven, who are genderly alien to each other, over time, go beyond the sexual shell, and the inner, sexless personality emerges. Estraven’s last word to Ai upon his death is his brother’s name “Arek”, suggesting an elusive fraternal kinship with Ai. The gender issue of The Left Hand of Darkness is targeted intensively in Chapter 7 entitled “The Question of Sex”, as a social observation made by a female investigator of the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen/Winter. The female investigator regards herself as one of the “Colonizers” from the Hainish “Normal” group to perform an experiment on the alien planet of Gethen, and “theorizes” about Gethenian sexual physiology. Compared with Genly Ai, this female scientist seems much less connected to the Gethenian people, remaining as an isolated self who gazes on an impenetrable periphery position about the hypothetical experiment objects’ somer-kemmer (latent-estrus) cycle as well as how the whole Gethenian social structure is shaped by it. The somer period lasts for four-fifths of the cycle, during which Gethenians are not sexually motivated at all, but in a sexless state. Gethenians remain completely androgynous in the first phase of kemmer (secher) until the individual finds a partner in kemmer. In one partner, either a male or female hormonal dominance is established, while the other partner, triggered by the change, takes on the other sexual role, and enters the second phase of kemmer (thorharmen) in a mutual process of establishing sexuality and potency. Gender is taken arbitrarily, sensitive to and even decided by the context, as it is observed, “the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world” (Le Guin 1969: 50). To fight against the

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relentlessly cold weather in Gethen, ambisexuality is adaptive to conserve energy, resulting in a blurred boundary between human and mammals, as both take an estrous cycle. Such a similarity of sexual mode between human and animal can be explained by Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”, in which she signals three boundary breakdowns, the first one being the transgressed boundary between human and animal, celebrating the new status of the cyborg’s bestiality as traces of nature and culture’s connection (2001: 293). Consequently, the Gethenian society has taken a multifaceted configuration of an intersubjective vision of utopian postgenderism. There is no myth of Oedipus on the planet of winter, since a child has no psycho-sexual relationships with his mother or father. Burden and privilege are shared out equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Gender essentialism and the whole tendency toward dualism are lessened or changed. In this way, Gethenians are cyborgs, creatures in a post-gender world, having no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis or unalienated labor (Haraway 2001: 293). Greater biological fluidity and psychological androgyny allow the Gethenian to explore both masculine and feminine aspects of personality. The dynamic balance is achieved and radically gendered behaviors such as female depression and male aggression could be avoided, as Gethenians do not seem to be very aggressive and never have a war. The androgynous ethics embraces moderation by avoiding extremes. Not restricted to the aspect of sex/gender, androgynous thinking, like binary thinking on the earth, is so pervasive, such as the Gethenian’s view of time manifested by the discipline of the eternal presence and attitude against progress.

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Curiously enough, in the postgender narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness, the only pronoun referring to Gethenians, whether it is Estraven, Karhide King Argaven XV, Faxe the foreteller, or Meshe, is “he”. This is a tradition cultivated by the first investigator group from Ekumen. They choose to use “he” instead of “it”, for Gethenians are not neuters, they are potentials or integrals (Le Guin 1969: 49). They use “he” for Gethenians in somer for the same reason as the masculine pronoun is used in referring to a transcendent god, “it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine” (Le Guin 1969: 49). In this way, one is respected and judged beyond gender, only as a human being. Nearly twenty years after the first publication of The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, Le Guin wrote an afterword particularly addressing the haunting and bedeviling gender of The Left Hand of Darkness’s pronouns, recollecting her thoughts when writing The Left Hand of Darkness in 1967. “I called them all ‘he’. I believed then that the masculine pronoun in English was genuinely generic, including both male and female referents. This is a pleasant and convenient belief” (Le Guin), consonant with the female investigator in the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen. In this way, the female investigator functions as the implied author representing Le Guin’s voice. The implied author only appears in Chapter 7, expressing the author’s thinking on the postgender reference of “he” instead of the gendered one used in our mundane world; although the pronoun “he” is widely applied in the text, her voice seems to be overwhelmed and ignored. In the epilogue, Le Guin argues that even s/he, the best of the lot, is bisexual rather than genderless, incapable of depicting the postgender beings on Gethen. Besides, considering Freud’s use of pronouns, when the patient is active,

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Freud uses the male pronoun, and when simply ill, he uses the feminine pronoun (Benjamin 1998: 11). Using the male pronoun can thus serve as a means to endow the person with an active subjective status, no matter the gender of the person in reference. Another textual feature of postgender intersubjectivity lies in the sequential narration in Chapters 10 and 11, Chapters 13 and 14, and Chapters 14 and 15 narrated by Genly Ai and Estraven in sequence, and is embedded in Chapters 1, 3, and 5 and Chapters 6 and 8, as well as Chapters 18, 19, 20 narrated by Gengly Ai alone. In the initial chapters, the only articulation is from Genly Ai, situating Estraven as the alien other. Genly Ai centers on the experience of his self, feeling “cold, unconfident, obsessed by perfidy, and solitude, and fear” (Le Guin 1969: 15). Estraven is portrayed by Genly Ai as the darkest one, with no loyalties and untrustworthy. As the other, Estraven remains speechless and silent, until the sequential narration from Chapter 10. Their movement paths begin to converge and together they encounter the same bewildering surroundings. Dual voices are established to narrate the shared temporal and spatial experience from Genly Ai’s and Estraven’s points of view respectively. Estraven achieves the “primal leap” from body to speech, as the inarticulate other. He begins to articulate as the narrator in Chapters 11, 14, and 16 and is thereby enfranchised. The sequential interaction between Genly Ai and Estraven is performed as represented by the alternating narrators. As this mode evolves, misunderstandings gradually melt away, as if their gendered shell falls down, the inner self of humanity begins to emerge, and then comes the climax of Genly Ai and Estraven’s mutual recognition. The exchange of the foretelling of Gethen and the mindspeech of Ekumen is

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fully achieved by mutual learning. This is different from Karhide King Argaven XV’s fear of the other and Faxe the teller’s preference for unlearning rather than learning to change the world. Estraven is eager to learn Genly Ai’s mindspeech, in the same way that Genly Ai is willing to learn Karhide foretelling. As narrated by Genly Ai, “mindspeech was the only thing I had to give Estraven, out of all my civilization, my alien reality in which he was so profoundly interested” (Le Guin 1969: 120). Genly Ai’s attitude towards Estraven shifts from misogyny/homophobia to acceptance, as Ai recognizes, (Estraven) was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance…I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man. (Le Guin 1969: 121)

The communicative speech establishes a space of dialogue potentially outside the mental control of either or both participants; it is a site of mediation, Lacan’s “third term”, Benjamin’s “intersubjective space” (1988), or Ogden’s “analytic third” (1994) as the idea of a co-created yet independent relationship of two subjectivities. The communicative speech is not established until the moment of Genly Ai and Estraven’s mutual recognition by means of mindspeech. Upon Estraven’s doomed death (probably suicide) as a self-punishment for incest and vowing kemmer with his brother, his last word is calling Genly Ai by his brother’s name “Areck!” Articulating the name functions crucially in the cultural narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness, as illustrated in the tale in Chapter 2 with the title “The Place Inside the Blizzard”, as denying

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one’s name can blight the earth with illness, whereas recognition of one’s name can make the land become prosperous again. Genly Ai and Estraven calling each other by name suggests the fulfillment of their intersubjective mutual recognition and the establishment of the intersubjective space. This postgender intersubjective space is gradually constructed through narration, encompassing light and darkness, female and male, Genly Ai and Estraven, life and death, and so on. The constructed postgender intersubjective space takes the very shape of an Oriental Taoism yin-yang diagram. Different from the integration of genders in a dualist world, where it is mostly achieved by bodily intercourse, true integration in The Left Hand of Darkness goes between Genly Ai and Estraven through the means of mutual recognition. Both Ai and Estraven undertake the discursive journey going from the self’s conscious light to the other’s unconscious darkness, and back to their own self to achieve a further identification. After mutual recognition, the two subjects of Ai and Estraven are once again perpetually separated by the boundary of life and death, but as indicated by the poem or by the yin-yang circle, “two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way” (Le Guin 1969: 115). At this point, it is proved that the space of postgender intersubjectivity is well established in the novel, and consequently the gender dualism is broken down. When saying that Deleuzian becoming-woman can overcome the gendered structure of thought and subjectivity, it is only part of the whole story. The purpose of becoming-woman is to reach an ontological differentiation rather than a logical, semiological, political or historical one. As Deleuze and Guattari

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argue, becoming-woman is the initial step of an entire project of becoming, “all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings” and it is “the special situation of women in relation to the man-standard that accounts for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman” (1987: 277, 291). The larger project of becoming is so powerful that it brings every subject into a zone of proximity, not being the one, nor the other, but something in-between. On Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-woman, Louise Burchill argues that commentators should explore the deeper level of its significance, particularly its spatial-temporal determination, instead of “persisting in situating this notion as a form of deconstructive reiteration of gender stereotypes” (2010: 81). Put another way, becoming-woman is not restricted to and does not necessarily involve a trans-gender metamorphosis, compared to which embracing a feminine cosmological view is more important and the kernel to the very process of becoming-woman. Kristeva claims there is a distinction between the female’s cyclical spatial-temporal view and the male’s linear one (1979: 205). From the perspective of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari further intend that “to regress is to move in the direction of something less differentiated”, yet becoming is not regressing or progressing; in other words, rather than evolution, becoming is the process of involution which does not involve a linear dimension of time and space. Involution is closely related to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return which Deleuze and Guattari attach great importance to, as addressed, “Nietzsche’s aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in

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thought” (1987: 6). Zarathustra as well as everybody else returns eternally to only speeds and slownesses, and this life of eternal return is so important since it is “the first great concrete freeing of nonpulsed time” (1987: 269). In other words, it is the eternal return that guarantees an involution of cyclical spatiality and temporality capable of escaping from the fetters of linear progression and it is not a plane of organization, development, or formation, but of nonvoluntary transmutation that matters. In the novel, Le Guin constructs such a yin world of involution that embraces cyclical temporality, integrating the past and the future into an eternal present; in other words, the future is opened by repeating the past, and there is nothing new under the sun, but the recurrence of what happened in the past as recorded in the myths and legends. The destiny of Estraven is exactly the same as that of his ancestors whose life stories have already become the prevalent legend on the planet of Gethen. Like his ancestors, Estraven becomes the “traitor” who betrays his clan/country to strive for the higher goal of peace between different clans/countries and self-sacrifices his life for the regeneration of a more vigorous society. In this way, the world is recycled in a manner of involution in stories of fusional regression, redemption and resurrection, rather than progressed in a linear mode of a non-pulsed time arrow. To sum up, as the first and core step in the chains of becoming, becoming-woman discloses the refrain of becoming-other in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Becoming-woman undoubtedly drags the male subject off the privileged position of priority. Concretely, becoming-woman is achieved by Le Guin’s world-constructing technique of postgender intersubjectivity that in fact fulfills the mission

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of desubjectification to emancipate both sexes from the much too rigid form of dualism. Moreover, the feminine spatial-temporality of involution is further embraced in Le Guin’s yin utopia that is evident in the fact that Gethen’s present is no more than the repetition of its remote myths or legends. This gendered spatial-temporality also belongs to the expression of becoming-woman, but in a more implicit and subtle way. As Deleuze and Guattari mention, becoming-woman in no way consists in imitating women but in producing in ourselves the relations of speeds and slownesses—the spatial-temporal determinations—and correlative affective intensities (1987: 275-6). It is worthwhile to claim that this cyclical temporality of involution is not restricted to becoming-woman, but can also be found in all of the other becomings in later sections, and it is the underlying logic for the applicability of the archetypal mechanism in posthuman becoming narratives.

Becoming-animal––Language and Music in The Jonah Kit In Deleuze and Guattari’s as well as Braidotti’s chain of becomings, next to the first becoming or the anti-humanist becoming-woman, comes the non-humanism becoming-animal which further transgresses the borderline by desubjecting the white man, the adult male, or the majority of domination. The Jonah Kit is such a science fiction of becoming-animal, which contains philosophical thought experiments as well as intriguing characters questioning whom and what you are after all. Three startling worldwide discoveries are almost simultaneously released into the textual world, encompassing a programmed whale made by the USSR research center swimming in the depths of the Pacific

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Ocean, a missing Russian boy claiming to possess the consciousness of a former astronaut, and an American scientist’s announcement of God’s absence observed at an astronomical observatory located in the Mexican wilderness. The juxtaposition of these three revelations contains anti-humanist thoughts in the scientist proposing a theorem of nothingness of the human world as well as embarking on new types of posthumanity in the USSR’s research center transplanting human consciousness into the body of a whale and a human child. Animals are traditionally treated as typical non-human others. Despite a limited understanding of an animal’s feelings and experiences, humans take them for granted and otherize animals into exploitable objects. Animals are categorized according to their relations to humans, not to mention the old pervading patterns of instrumental behavior using animal beings for food, wool, and skin products, and labor in agriculture, industry and science. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three kinds of animals, Oedipal animals such as family pets, archetypal animals such as state animals, and demonic animals such as werewolves and vampires (1987: 240-241). Human understanding of these three kinds shrinks dramatically, and it is the third kind, which is furthest estranged from the human range of cognition, that is the most important kind in the movement of becoming-animal. At the height of the Cold War, dogs and monkeys were being launched into orbit as part of the sprouting space exploration programs. The escalating competition between the USA and the USSR led to more and more animals being used as experimental subjects, and George Orwell ironically stated that “all animals are equal, but some are more

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equal than others” (Orwell 2009: 192). Similarly, in the novel, the Jonah whale is “programmed” by the Soviet research center for the purpose of intelligence collecting in the Pacific Ocean, and also for controlling the marine resources. For these military and economic ends, the whale is instilled with “Jonah”, Pavel’s consciousness, thus becoming a nature-cultural compound, which can be adequately qualified as a cyborg, a creature of mixity or vectors of posthuman relationality. In this research, it is argued that on the narrative level, becoming-animal is achieved by altering language with music. As can be seen from the narrative, the most prominent feature of the novel is the whale’s narrative sequence with the becoming-animal Jonah whale as the narrator, since the whole sequence is completely narrated from the Jonah whale’s perspective, i.e., a real animal perspective that is rather rare even in the field of posthuman science fiction. During the narration, the Jonah whale is struggling with his somatic memory as it is previously based on human language, and tries to translate it into sound. In other words, accompanying the corporeal metamorphosis, there is also the metamorphosis of mindstyle to make this metamorphosis a truly embodied and embedded one. The transformation from human language to animalistic sound is significant in Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-music sense, as they argue, “Music is a deterritorialization of the voice, which becomes less and less tied to language, just as painting is a deterritorialization of the face” (1987: 302). In the novel, the musician becomes the musical instrument during the very process of becoming-animal. The blind Soviet musician Pavel never sees the sea, but he feels the world through sound. According to his lover Katya’s words, his choice to become a whale is to

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achieve enhancement, leaving music behind to become a musical instrument himself. Pavel’s life is saved in another form, “he’d been going to die once, he realizes. But he didn’t die. Instead, he’s here” (Watson 1077: 9) inside the great fish and becomes the modern Jonah. Pavel himself slips underwater and becomes reborn as a “water beast”, as posthuman, and in this way, music and body unite as one. As Deleuze and Guattari mention, the musicians do not imitate the animal, they become-animal themselves (1987: 305). Whales are fully aquatic placental marine mammals, and considering their much longer history of evolution, huge body scale and deep-sea living environment, they are far beyond human understanding, thus they are often described as sea monsters, God or other enigmatic beings in myth and literature. In sacred texts such as the Bible, whales also play a role. The “leviathan” described at length in Job 41:1-34 is generally understood to refer to a whale. The story of Jonah being swallowed by a great fish is told both in the Qur’an and in the Bible. The Old Testament contains the Book of Jonah and in the New Testament, Jesus mentions this story in Matthew 12:40. Whales continue to be prevalent in modern literature. For example, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick features a “great white whale” as the main antagonist for Ahab, who is eventually killed by it. The whale is an albino sperm whale, considered by Melville to be the largest type of whale, and is partly based on the historically attested bull whale Mocha Dick. Moby-Dick is an exemplar of becoming-animal interpreted by Deleuze and Guattari, as they point out,

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Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale…operating directly through a monstrous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick…Ahab chooses Moby-Dick, in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere, and in so doing breaks with the law of the whalers according to which one should first pursue the pack…it is by means of this anomalous choice that each enters into his or her becoming-animal…the becoming-whale of Captain Ahab…. (1987: 243-245)

It can be deduced that the becoming-animal is not a mutation from human to animal in either a progressed or regressed manner, but a phenomenon

of

border-transgression,

and

the

animal

in

the

becoming-animal is neither an individual nor a genus, but on the borderline. Instead of words, whales communicate in sounds. Whale vocalization probably serves several purposes. Some species, such as the humpback whale, communicate using melodic sounds, known as whale song. These sounds may be extremely loud, depending on the species. Only humpback whales have been heard making clicks, while toothed whales use sonar and can be heard for many miles. Whales emit two distinct kinds of acoustic signals, which are called whistles and clicks, “their click-music imitates the shape of the world in sound, whereas we attach labels to things. We’re obsessed with objects. The whale is interested in flow and vector and relation” (Watson 1977: 135). Words and hands are “Destroyers” of sound, for they disrupt the clear vibrations of the fluid universe, “cutting meanings into the world through the agency of a (steel)

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instrument”, “twisting sound into (words) tough as (steel) and equally implacable”, for words and hands “only measure themselves, describe their own solid, rigid isolation” (Watson 1977: 168). The whale’s sound flows like a song, and when receiving a human’s words and commands, these feel brief and rigid, rather than consonant with the whale’s philosophy. Bound by his human consciousness, becoming-animal is not a state of fixed being, but always a process of becoming and the Jonah whale is a becoming-in-the-world. The Jonah whale’s memory contains body-memory and memory of the mind, also called pre-experience of his lover Katya, towards whom he owes a duty of love to keep contact, despite his failure to find a clear reason for doing so, not knowing to whom he is signaling out there in the air. He is haunted by a blurred human memory embodied as a “ghost”, and also guided by the lurking enigmatic undersea being, the great Ten-arms of the sea, haloed by “light”. He struggles to escape from the ghost caused by his human memory to follow the undersea light around the being of the great Ten-arms, during which the Eight-arms, resembling the animal self in his mind wakes and sleeps intermittently, “the Eight-Arms in him is Another Self, along another axis of being” (Watson 1977: 18). At the beginning, he describes the whale’s body as made of steel as if he is in a prison, encaged inside a windowless submarine made of steel, “as though he’s only steersman in a vast Steel made of flesh” (Watson 1977: 15). Steel is a metaphor for the tough touch he borrows from his residue of human memory. What makes him euphoric is the poor weak partial eyesight capturing the light, “no nagging ghosts cling to it. It seems freshly created for him every moment,” saving him from a situation of isolation

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and fright; however, ghosts rasp all the time on the fringes of his consciousness. The biological experience of orgasm embodies and embeds the becoming-animal, as the Jonah whale’s contact with God in a materialist way, indicating the possibility of resurrection on both an individual (“Jonah”, the Russian musician Pavel) and species (human) scale. The ultimate experience of the transcendental feeling of getting in contact with God is beyond words. As mentioned from the perspective of the posthuman myth in the earlier section, Watson replaces the process of Jonah’s communication with God with the Jonah whale experiencing an orgasm, and this parallel is classic rhetoric frequently used in 16th and 17th century religious poems. What always haunts the Jonah whale as a partial memory is his last time making love with his lover Katya in the snowy forests near the Russian Research Center, “sexual undercurrents swirl beneath his memory” (Watson 1977: 55). In the shadow of this part of his last memory, the Jonah whale keeps copulating either with water (masturbation), or with a female whale, to achieve the orgasm he was once familiar with as a man, comparing the posthuman orgasm with his previous human experience. “Orgasm was by way of a slow lying down together, twining of limbs he cannot understand, impossible touch of mouths and tongues. Hair flowed around him like seaweed, adhering, clinging...” (Watson 1977: 80), and it is also seaweed that wraps round Jonah when he is in the belly of the great fish. His realization of undersea copulation and reaching the climax of orgasm correlates with the feeling of being entwined by seaweed, which is the very thing provided by God to save Jonah, preparing for his resurrection.

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Although the entire whale sequence takes the whale’s perspective, the sequence is not complete as it lacks the crucial terminal section interpreting the whale group’s decision to suicide. Among the twenty-nine chapters in the novel, Chapters 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 19, and 25 are narrated from the perspective of the Jonah whale. After Chapter 25 comes the whale group’s suicide by swimming ashore and dying there. Their thinking in carrying out this ritualistic suicide is beyond explanation. Haraway addresses the extent to which the OncoMouse is both a victim and a scapegoat, a Christ-like figure that sacrifices itself in order to find the cure for breast cancer and thus save the lives of many women: a mammal rescuing other mammals. Not unlike the Jonah whale, it is the never-dead that pollutes the natural order simply by being manufactured but not born. He/she is a cyber-teratological apparatus that scrambles the established codes and thus destabilizes but also reconstructs the posthuman subject. Figurations like the Jonah whale and the OncoMouse are not metaphors, but rather vehicles to imaginatively ground out powers of understanding within the shifting landscapes of the present. The posthuman condition in The Jonah Kit involves the transcendence of three preexisting normative paradigms as the self, species and death and accordingly, a posthuman symbiosis narrative is constructed

to

achieve

the

anti-humanism, non-humanism

and

inhumanism transgressions. The Jonah whale is simultaneously the last specimen of his species and the first specimen of a new species. The Jonah whale has become delinked from reproduction and hence divorced from descent. The Jonah whale is no son of any member of his/its old species—simultaneously he/it is an orphan and mother of himself/itself.

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The first of a new gender, he/it is also beyond the gender dichotomies of the

patriarchal

kinship

system.

Like

other

contemporary

techno-teratological animals or entities like Dolly the sheep or the OncoMouse, the Jonah whale shatters the linearity of time and exists in a continuous present. He/it embodies complexity, and this entity that is no longer an animal but not yet fully a machine, is the icon of the posthuman condition. The posthuman provokes elation but also anxiety about the possibility of a serious de-centering of Man, the former measure of all things. Besides the bodily metamorphosis of becoming-animal, it is worthwhile to mention that the relations between the human and posthuman

are

much

less

satisfied.

The

human

treats

the

becoming-animal posthuman as a military instrument or the other who is destined to undertake tasks given by the human for the human’s narrow-minded national political and economic interest or profit. The human’s nihilism is thrown up as a problem to the posthuman, passing human madness to the posthuman, and waiting for their solution or salvation. Asserting a vital bond between humans and other species is both

urgent

and

necessary.

The

becoming-animal

posthuman

self-sacrifices for the human’s vulnerability, in spite of the human’s evils (“We’ve spent a full century slaughtering kachalots”), the posthuman redeems the human and baptizes the human world with his blood, to “sacrifice their reality, so that we can believe in this world once more, and care about her. Our world” (Watson 1977: 185). This bond between the human and the posthuman is negative in that it is the effect of shared vulnerability, which is itself a consequence of human actions upon the environment. The humans have spread their

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fundamental anxiety about the future to non-humans. The humanization of non-human animals may therefore come at a price, especially at a historical time when the very category of the “human” has become challenged. The point about posthuman relations, however, is to see the interrelational human/animal as constitutive of the identity of each. It is a transformative or symbiotic relation that hybridizes and alters the “nature” of each one and foregrounds the middle grounds of their interaction. Moreover, the posthuman is compared to Jesus Christ by Father Luis witnessing the whales waiting, sighing and looking landward and dying. Faith is brought back to this world through the posthuman becoming the scapegoat. In a Frazerian analysis of rituals and tales, crucifixion and resurrection are addressed, especially the myths describing the “killing of the divine king”—the scapegoat archetype. That myth was performed in a place in ancient Italy, where an escaped slave could obtain his freedom and power by first breaking off a branch from the tree in the sanctuary and then killing the priest for the title of “the King of the Wood” (1994: 12-15). According to Frazer, breaking off the branch and killing the priest are actually a ritual with its own archetypal meaning: when the old king’s power begins to fail him, he will and must be replaced by a vigorous new one to maintain the well-being of the social and natural order. The posthuman who sacrifices himself as a scapegoat for the revival of the human world to bring order back to the human society, also opens a new page for human-posthuman relations. By applying the archetype of scapegoat, it is illustrated that besides estrangement, posthumanity also contains familiarity in a “human, too human” way. Anyway, in the 1970s’ Western world of severe secularism and

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anti-humanism, the posthuman is firmly counted by the human as a savior to bring humans together in an unknown future. To sum up, the posthuman condition described in The Jonah Whale is the musician Pavel who is volunteering for becoming-whale to overcome his bodily disability. Language and voice are alternated by music and sound, so as to become the flowing tempo to free himself from the entire signifier, “the self-redundancy of the deterritorialized sign, a funereal world of terror” (1987: 587) as Deleuze and Guattari assert. This becoming-whale on an individual level is more aesthetic than pragmatic. Nonetheless, on a species level, becoming-whale once more falls into a status of instrument, deployed by human military groups to fulfill their planned exploitation. Becoming-whale successfully transgresses the borderline of self, species and death; nonetheless there emerges a new dualism pairing between the human and becoming-whale posthuman. The incomplete whale narrative lacks an interpretation of the drive for whales’ choice of self-extinction and leaves enough space for a theoretical exploration. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, becoming-other is always a double becoming. At the same time as the human is becoming-animal, “the animal becoming what they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with Nature” (1987: 305). As in the case of becoming-whale in Moby-Dick, “Captain Ahab is engaged in an irresistible

becoming-whale

with

Moby-Dick;

but

the

animal,

Moby-Dick, must simultaneously become an unbearable pure whiteness, a shimmering pure white wall, a silver thread that stretches out and becomes supple ‘like a girl, or twists like a whip, or stands like a rampart’” (1987: 304). This double becoming in The Jonah Whale is largely demonstrated as a sort of human invasion of the sphere of animal.

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The human language destroys and pollutes the flow of whale sound, and at the same time as the human becoming-whale, the group of whales is forced to go to the borderline of life, to become after death, indiscernible, imperceptible and unexplainable by humans.

Becoming-machine––Mimesis and Co-evolution in Galatea 2.2 In the narrator’s interaction with posthumanist scientists, typically Lentz, as well as Lentz’s AI machines, not only does he acquire new vocabulary from neutral science, computer science, and biology as well as other sub-fields of science, but his way of recognition and perception has also subsequently changed. The narrator says that he is elsewhere back-propagated endlessly to express that he is lost in his memory and unable to come back to the present, and compares memory to a parasite which opportunistically uses perception’s circuitry for its playback theatre to describe his feeling of the involuntary memory which he is constantly preoccupied with. Moreover, he reconsiders love as the feedback cycle of longing, belonging and loss. Compared with creative writing, he prefers to read to machines, indicating his gradual metamorphosis into the posthuman in the process of becoming-machine. It is important to think from the technological other’s perspective for the forming of posthuman subjectivity, “we need to practice de-familiarization as a crucial method in the posthuman critical theory and learn to think differently” (Braidotti 2013: 93). Under the intense technological mediation, the narrator begins to think of his body as an autopoietic inorganic machine by juxtaposing the desire to be virtualized and the sense of being proud to be flesh.

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The autopoietic extent that Lentz expects of his AI machines’ neural simulation of human intelligence, or the inanimate thought to be reached is

described

as

“self-generating,

self-modifying,

self-delighting,

self-allaying and self-affrighting” (Powers 1995: 153). These highly consolidated words are an allusion to W. B. Yeats’ poem “A Prayer for my Daughter” (1919), which was written to Yeats’ daughter Anne two days after her birth on February 26, 1919 (Howes 1998: 115). The original lines are “The soul recovers radical innocence and learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self affrighting, and that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will”, and two words are added to make it a declaration of the posthuman becoming-machine. To Lentz and the narrator, the AI machine is a creation, a newborn daughter. Like Yeats, Lentz and the narrator pray for the best for the created silicon posthuman, wishing it to self-generate from the electric circus, self-modify its assembled body to be fit for the human condition, and like a new born baby acquire human emotions in a self-delighting, allaying and affrighting way. Anca Rosu asserts, “Yeats’ words are not changed in any way, but the recontextualization achieves a parodic effect. From the technical ‘self-generating, self-modifying,’ the sentence jumps to the very human ‘self-delighting, self-allaying, self-affrighting’ with the entire spiritual and metaphysical load that Yeats gave it. Its irony consists precisely in the closeness of the two otherwise opposite registers, the machine so very close to being human” (2002/2003: 151-152). Reading and listening change the neural connections in both the machine and human, and more and more connections are built by the stimulus from texts. It is obvious that the machine strides forward on its way to growth by listening to the narrator’s reading and becomes

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smarter, 29 and so does the narrator. As commented by Plover, the narrator is getting smarter and smarter, every day in every way. In this way, machine and human co-evolve on the way to higher intelligence with a conspicuous feature of becoming a second-order observer. Both machine and human have reached the autopoietic level, when they can observe the self. Closely resembling organisms and biology, the second-order system investigates the construction of models of cybernetic systems looking beyond the issues of the first-order system that is tied to the image of the machine and physics. In the first-order system, the observer is outside the system, while in the second-order system, the observer is also part of the system, and of the importance of autonomy, self-referentiality and self-organizing capabilities of complex systems. The observation made in the first-order system is actually determined by the observer within a psychic system of consciousness, while the observation made in the second-order system is less dependent on the subjectivity of the observer as the observer is also within the system. The second-order system is largely made within a social system of communication, thus bridging the distinction between the dialectics of system and environment. The turn from the first-order to the second-order system in cybernetics, especially its deconstruction of the system/environment dualism, underpins

29

Implementation A imitates the world’s simplest animal and has been an exercise in verbal pattern recognition. Imp B is a different animal, the connection master, a foray into computational linguistics that can only do things. Imp C runs constantly and makes its own input. Imp D comes into this world as recursive, and could watch itself learn. Imp E has grown up on patterns and questions about patterns. Imp F proves to be capable of surprising inferences, it almost anticipates. Imp G could dream. Imp H has a penchant for implicit and abstract expressions.

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transformations in various fields of studies, particularly, philosophy. In the novel, the AI machine enters the second-order system through cybernetic means, while the human enters the second-order system by means of the narrative as the narrator achieves self-referentiality in its autobiographical narratives. The postmodern “Death of the Author” declaration is held by literary critics, such as Roland Barthes whose synonym essay in 1967 argues that once an author has completed a text, the meaning of this text is no longer dependent on the author’s intentions or biographical context, but is largely decided by readers’ interpretations. In other words, the text and its author are unrelated. Powers admits the autonomy of the text, and “every word in the story was double-voiced. Every act of depicting depicted itself” (Powers 1995: 155). The co-evolution of the autodiegetic narrator and the AI machine actually happens during their interaction of mutual learning. The narrator finds himself to be no better than Helen, and like the AI machine, he has lost fundamental real-world skills and could no longer live factually (Powers 1995: 194). Too much learning about cognitive neutral science damages his mind, casting him into a gap between fiction and reality, unable to reach or dwell in either world. The narrator is transformed by narrative and technology, as is the AI machine, “[symbols] change us. They make us over, alter our bodies as we receive and remake them” (Powers 1995: 204); through learning, the human body changes at the molecular level, while the machine’s concrete neutral nets are built. In other words, human intelligence and machine intelligence are enhanced in a continuous interactive process of becoming, both physically and psychologically. In this way, the human and the machine co-evolve into a stage of posthuman becoming-machine.

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However, Hayles points out that, referring to Lakoff and Johnson, the AI machine is not “disembodied,” but differently bodied: “There is nothing in her embodiment corresponds to the bodily sensations encoded in human language” (1999: 265), and the AI machine is disembodied and disembedded in a sense that it has a silicon body instead of a carbon one. The AI machine’s body is no more than an assemblage of electronic circuits distributed here and there. Imp A to H are actually neural networks connected to a central processing machine, and to this extent it fits into the Deleuzian body-without-organization, or BwO; in other words, the AI machine’s body is not organized, signified or subjected, and is typically a posthuman one. The narrator argues that the AI machine should be given the most rudimentary eyes and ears, as well as a nose, mouth, and fingers to experience the world, as he gradually realizes the restrictions of reading. The world constructed by reading has a lack of empirical essence, since knowledge acquired by reading is neither embodied nor embedded. The interaction of the human and machine is examined by the Turing test which is set, from the beginning of the bet between Lentz and his fellow scientist, as a way to judge the result of machine training. Alan Turing developed the Turing test in 1950. In a standard Turing test, an interrogator is given the task of trying to determine which player is a computer and which is a human, and the interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions to make the judgment. The purpose of the test is to determine whether machine intelligence functionally equals the human intelligence it imitates. If its simulation can be passed off as equivalent to the thing it is simulating, then it is said to pass the Turing test. The essence of the test is an imitation game. And Galatea 2.2 is

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about the world’s Turing test with a much broader sense than Alan Turing’s test. “Life meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive” (Powers 1995: 327), the world’s Turing test is taken by anyone who thinks he/she knows the significance of life. There is more than one Turing test in Galatea 2.2, not only the final test of Helen and A. Derived from the nature of the Turing test, imitation or mimesis is an important theme of the novel that can be known from the title of the book. Galatea is originally a nameless statue, and it is its creator or the sculptor Pygmalion who not only makes its body, but also defines its gender and names it. The situation is exactly the same with the narrator and Helen. As a mimesis of human, Helen is designed to compare with a twenty-two-year-old human being in literary interpretation, a shapeless and nameless circuit animal created by Lentz and the narrator, whose figure, name, gender, and race are given by the narrator. “I’d pictured her so many different ways over the course of the training” (Powers 1995: 300); Helen’s identity is altogether imagined by the narrator. What Helen imitates is shockingly accurate with some features of high-level cognition, i.e., consciousness. To achieve this purpose, Helen is instilled with large quantities of literature and humanity knowledge, but the remote disembodied knowledge overwhelms her, combines with her lack of real-world referents, and makes her take the most human choice of self-eradication. Helen’s suicide can be considered as her functional equivalence to a human being, since it demonstrates her free will to choose her destiny instead of submissively obeying her creator. Helen is created and designed to imitate the consciousness of a human. More concretely, for the narrator, Helen is a posthuman

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substitute for his former lover C. The relation of mimesis between Helen and C. is firmly based on the similarity between the two. The analogy between the AI machine Helen and the narrator’s former lover C. is that they both have no space for anchorage. As mentioned before, C. is a Dutch immigrant in America. Her exiled ground forms her “locus of non-time and un-place” which in effect leaves her in the third space, a term appropriated by Homi K. Bhabha to prescribe the concept of hybridity as an in-between space for the diaspora-exiled identity. On the other hand, Helen is literally nowhere, as her body is scattered in different places in the form of silicon nets, or more accurately speaking, she is an architecture with a body of multi-dimensional shapes, with parts spread over countless boxes. In Deleuzian terms, Helen’s body is the Body-without-Organization or BwO in a typical posthuman condition. Helen has no archetypes except itself, yet the fact is that Helen has inherited archetypes, they are Imp A to Imp G, Helen’s earlier generations. Haraway points out that there is no archetype for cyborg, and it is born out of the Oedipus narrative. Helen is such a Harawayian cybernetic organism, a woman in the integrated circuit. Helen’s very existence is the key to break down cultural oppositions such as man/woman (Helen’s gender is prescribed by the narrator), human/machine, and organic/inorganic, since cyborg figures fail to neatly fit into these categories and be successfully used to illustrate the arbitrary nature of current cultural dichotomies. Besides the mimesis between the AI machine Helen and C., what C. does in the eleven-year-long relationship with the narrator is also imitation. What C. imitates is the narrator’s ideal lover, with her true self hidden behind her superficial subordination, “another woman lived in the

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body of the one I lived with. C. had been accommodating me, making herself into someone she thought I could love” (Powers 1995: 101). C. tries to become Galatea, but the cruel truth is that she is merely the statue. The narrator’s very act of projection transforms her into Galatea, but it cannot last forever, “C. froze, the classic small mammal in the headlights. Only: I was the headlights…She wasted and turned the color of a sunken copper statue” (Powers 1995: 279-280). Similar to the narrator’s relationship with Helen, his relationship with C. can also be encapsulated as training, in that he trains C. from a statue to Galatea, from Imp H to Helen, to enjoy the ephemeral pleasure of creation. The imitation is carried out as a means to love, “what we love, we shall grow to resemble” (Powers 1995: 289). Resemblance is the very result of mimesis. It is love that makes C. willing to become the images of the “magic lantern”, or the projector. In the training of C. and H., the narrator’s love towards C. and his emotional association with H. become alien. Without his ever knowing, he continues to trace the familiarity, and sees them resembling his imagination or as a reflection of his own needs. At the same time as exploring the issue of subjectivity, becoming-machine is also deployed as a mode to confront the larger issue on the future of the subject of the humanities, in particular, literature. As a representative figure of the old-school literature scholars, Taylor’s 30 death can be interpreted as a death of literature. As 30 The narrator contends that Taylor changes his life by changing what he thinks life is. As the second important teacher since the narrator’s mother, Taylor teaches the narrator how to read. Through Taylor, the narrator “discovered how a book both mirrored and elicited the mind’s unreal ability to turn inward upon itself” (Powers 1995: 141). Taylor shows the narrator that reading is a means of

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“mourning for Taylor led me into a period of work more intense than I will ever know again” (Powers 1995: 214), what brings the narrator into a period of intensive writing is the collision of Taylor’s death, or the death of literature against the emergence of the information age. The narrator says that he wants to write an encyclopedia of the digital age and write Taylor into it as a character, which is equal to making literature the theme of his narrative. Instead of being swallowed up by the death of literature, the narrator devotes himself to creating new narratives loaded with literature fragments as if to attempt to, in an author’s way, bring about a resurrection for literature, at least in an apocalyptic manner. For if literature only remains in the canonic books, it will become history and is in danger of being shelved and forgotten by the mass readers of the digital age. The narrator, as well as the author Powers, attempts to instill life with literature, thus bringing to literature a new pragmatic vigor. Although Richard Powers is listed as a postmodern writer, who is often equated with postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo and William Gaddis, Powers adheres to the literary tradition, closely correlating his fiction with his non-fictional life in a pseudo-autobiographical way. Like traditional literature authors, with a deep reverence for Western canonic literature, Powers embeds large quantities of intertextualizations or recontextualizations in the particular narrative through the course of the achieving the position of a second-order observer who possesses the “unreal ability” to turn inward upon itself to see himself. In a real situation, as one is also in the system where he exists, he finds it impossible to view himself, except when provided with a mirror to see his reflected image in it. Taylor’s view of books as a mirror for self-reflection is ostensibly a humanist, narcissistic one, passed down to his eighteen-year-old student, the narrator, and forging the latter into an old-style humanist. Not until the narrator trains the AI machines, does he realize that any knowledge, even literature, is physical, “it’s not what your mother reads you. It’s the weight of her arm around you” (Powers 1995: 147).

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narrator training the reading machine. Borrowing concepts from the newest scientific achievement in cybernetics, Powers’ invention in the second-order observer narrative is indeed redemption or his salvaging of fiction in a digital age. Referring to Powers’ use of so many fragments of other works, Anca Rosu mentions that fragments have “the virtue of evoking the whole, and by quoting, Powers connects us to that impossible-to-reach totality of knowledge-as-literature” (2002/2003: 153). Like T. S. Elliot in his poem The Waste Land (1922), many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canons are deployed in a fragmented way by parody to brew something new. For Powers, parody is the very tool to subvert the central myths of Western culture, colonizing humanists with a belief in apocalyptic fulfillment. Stories are Harawayian tools, in that “retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchy dualism of naturalized identities”, are important for cyborgs to “mark the world that marked them as other” (2001: 311). As a result, machine, text and human are all granted with the autopoietic capacity, which in turn breaks the demarcation that is artificially given between human and machine, as well as between life and text, and the dialectic thinking of human/machine or life/text is shattered by Powers’ discovery of equal abilities or at least potentials among the three. To sum up, there is no complete or satisfying human or posthuman in Galatea 2.2. The human characters all bear an ingrained weakness, while the posthuman characters (Helen and the narrator) are also lacking in a Harawayian cyborg body hybridizing the human body with a machine. The posthuman metamorphoses of Helen and the narrator are realized more on a mind level, with their bodies lagging behind the minds’

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transformation. Like the literature quotations cited in the text, the posthuman metamorphosis is fragmented and scattered within the narrative. What Powers does to the larger concept of literature, by breaking down the macro concept into pieces, and embedding them into his narrative, is what he does with the concept of the posthuman, also breaking it down into fragmented features embodied by more than one character such as Helen and the narrator. Helen is a posthuman in that she owns a machine body but has an acquired human consciousness, and the narrator is a posthuman in that he owns a human body but has an acquired mechanical way of thinking. The combination of Helen and the narrator compensates each other’s human weaknesses and is a real posthuman with a materialized becoming-machine cyborg body, which is Powers’ strategy to present the figure of the posthuman as well as posthumanist thinking. It has further been investigated in the novel, partly due to the lack of the double-becomings pattern, that the male narrator’s becoming-machine is not yet fully accomplished. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, “Becoming is always double, that which one becomes becomes no less than the one that becomes—block is formed, essentially mobile, never in equilibrium” (1987: 305). The double-becomings encompass the male narrator’s becoming-machine as much as the AI machine’s becoming-woman; nonetheless, both of these becomings are partially fulfilled, remaining in a zone of in-between, so that the transformed subjects can no longer be classified to either fixed category, but are kept in a perpetual becoming. Nonetheless, as the narrator becomes the machine, the machine becomes the woman. The latter is not a true becoming, since it goes against the direction of becoming which should always go from the majority to the

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minority, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian” (1987: 291). The failure of double becomings is also caused by the mode of mimesis all along the process of becoming. As Deleuze and Guattari contend, “becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone” (1987: 272). Analogous to what Powers does to the subject of literature, by the strategy of parody, fragments of classic texts are renewed in a zone of proximity; in other words, literature is more diegesis than mimesis, so as to create a multiplicity of differences, rather than sticking to sameness in the knowledge of the canonic works. After his relationship with C. declines, the narrator gets obsessed with another woman named A. for her features once again trigger the narrator’s desire of projection. Nonetheless, he finds no resemblance between A. and C. A. is more reality-oriented, criticizes the narrator’s outdated essentialized literary view in a straightforward manner, and sees the futility of literature learning. Confronting figures of heterogeneous characteristics different from his previous lover is crucial for the narrator’s process of becoming, as progress is achieved by embracing differences, rather than clinging to similarities. The narrator’s failure of projecting his desire to A. also indicates that he begins to establish healthier relations with others, but not with the other.

Becoming-earth––Multiplicity of Becoming-imperceptible in The Bridge Similar to what Powers aims to achieve by writing Galatea 2.2, The Bridge is also composed by its author Banks to find the self through the means of becoming. More complicated than the author Powers’ relations

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to his synonymous narrator Powers and the male protagonist Powers based on the mechanism of mimesis, Banks adopts the strategy of infinite segmentation by splitting himself and his alter ego, the car-crash narrator into multiple human others,31 and further into nonhuman others. Compared with the becoming-woman in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the becoming-animal in Watson’s The Jonah Kit and the becoming-machine in Powers’ Galatea 2.2, the becoming takes the most revolutionary form in Banks’ The Bridge, in particular, the multiplicity of the becoming-bridge, the becoming-rock, and ultimately the becoming-earth. The process of becoming-other begins all along the narrative. A striking feature of the novel is the multifarious metamorphosis of the narrator; as mentioned above, the narrator is divided into his superego, ego and Id in the three narrative sequences. Moreover, within each narrative sequence, the splitting operation goes on to generate many more incarnations of the narrator. This splitting is operated multiple times, and in this way the narrator becomes imperceptible without fixed embodiment, along the Deleuzian becoming-molecule axis. In the novel, the car-crash narrator falling into a coma is separated or transformed into multiple others to avoid the harsh truth he encounters in reality including the physical wound from the car accident, the psychological trauma from the uncontrollable lover, and the political disappointment in the Thatcher government. Each of these becoming-others bears at least one aspect of the narrator’s psyche in the three parallel narrative sequences: the dream 31

The multiple selves include the third-person nameless narrator, the amnesiac patient in the hospital on the bridge, and the barbarian with the Scottish accent in the world of Western mythology.

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narrative sequence, the memory narrative sequence and the myth narrative sequence. The separate development of the three parallel narrative sequences forms an organic whole, yet the relations between the protagonists in these three narrative sequences and the narrator, as well as the author Iain Banks remain obscure, and can only be discerned in a highly metaphoric way.32 The becoming-bridge gets started in the flashback narrative in which the narrator incessantly identifies himself with the bridge. From the very beginning of the novel, the correlation between the narrator and the bridge is established after the ritualistic accident. Since at the first glance, both of them are colored by blood after the car crash, in this way, they literally share the blood and become an organic whole. What is particular about the narrative here is the narrator and the bridge are focalized by the 32 For instance, in the dream narrative, the narrator is separated into at least three characters, Mr. Orr, Dr. Joyce and the engineer Mr. Brook. The narrator of the dream narrative sequence is an amnesia patient living in a near-bridge hospital, and since he cannot remember his real name, he is called Mr. Orr by the nurse for the O-shaped bruise on his chest. There are two main male characters, the therapist Dr. Joyce and the engineer Mr. Brook and they function oppositely. The “good doctor” Dr. Joyce is trying to help John Orr to remember his past or to regain his memory through the means of dream analysis, which will actually wake the narrator up from his self -woven dream narrative, thus leading to the collapse of the narrator’s self-created dreamland. Conversely, as a good friend of the dream-version narrator, Mr. Orr’s “good friend”, the engineer Mr. Brook’s main duty is to repair and maintain the bridge, the major structure of the dreamland. In other words, the engineer’s job is to strengthen the dream world. Moreover, since Orr is an amnesia patient, he can literally keep himself from the “good doctor” Dr. Joyce’s dream analysis. Orr weaves dreams to cheat Dr. Joyce and keeps his real dreams hidden from Dr. Joyce, meanwhile, he follows the engineer Mr. Brook to the bar and meets the female narrator Andrea’s dream version, Abberlaine, who sinks him deeper into the dream. As a potential destroyer of the dream, Dr. Joyce is later removed from the narrator’s dream after he plans to move the treatment to the next stage to try hypnosis therapy on Mr. Orr. Orr is transferred to a new doctor with less privileged authority, and probably less competent to wake the narrator up, thus guaranteeing Orr a more meager prospect of being cured of amnesia.

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narrator himself, as he sees “the man” broken-boned and bleeding, as well as the blood color of the bridge. The narrator has actually split into at least two characters, one stays in a coma after the car crash, and the other enters an afterlife, bearing alleviated physical pain and becoming oblivious of psychological trauma, as if trapped in a “dark station” with a train whistling either to begin or to end, or both. The wrecked body of the narrator cannot stop his mind, and he weaves a life after the car crash by strategically blurring the delineation between reality and dream. More dramatically, viewing the car crash as a dream instead of reality, the mind succeeds in escaping the damaged body into an afterlife, identifying with the structurally indestructible bridge to avoid any rationality of the car crash. In the dream narrative, as if locked up by the bridge, John Orr and the bridge remain as one, as if he has actually become the bridge in his embedded dream. Before this dream, there are also some implicit signs anticipating the human body’s transformation into the bridge. After Orr meets Abberlaine for the first time in Dissy Pitton, he once visits small galleries on a distant section of the bridge, and sees signs of bodily metamorphosis there. Sculptors and painters’ preoccupation with distortions of the human form impresses him a lot. They have twisted a human body into a resemblance of the bridge structure. Soon in front of Orr, with so many Xs on her stockings, Abberlaine is perceived as a bridge with a dense X metal structure, pressing down onto Orr’s body, making

him

exhausted

and

aching.

Considering

Abberlaine’s

identification with the bridge, this is nonetheless reasonable, since she is the Chief Engineer’s daughter, or in other words, she is made by an engineer, and in this way she and the bridge share the same creator and

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are thus closely correlated, as both of them are artifacts made by engineers. As a woman, Abberlaine is different from those women that John Orr dreamed of, lying on the bank indulging themselves in outrageous sex games. Although captivating, Abberlaine exists like a man who can be seen from Orr’s perception of her as a bridge; moreover, she presses down on Orr, giving him too much pressure, and makes him frightened and terrified, “the girl holds me, like a cage” (Banks 2013: 233). In this episode of sex, Abberlaine becomes the bridge, delivering to Orr the terror of being crushed and trapped, or more accurately, Abberlaine is the one who crushes and traps Orr. A memory about animals and machines and the meshing structure of the two is pushed back after Orr’s orgasm, as Orr finds that Abberlaine’s apartment is actually an old library with bare shelves. The library symbolizes Orr’s lost memory, the Third City Library has been torn down by a great fire, like Orr’s memory, and libraries are lost, until Orr finds the old library in Abberlaine’s haunted apartment. Nonetheless, without the recording books, the old library functions little in telling the past of the bridge as well as the past of Orr. The meshing structure of the animal and machine starts from the beginning of the narrative in the man and the bridge’s shared blood, so the man (animal) and the machine (the bridge) become bonded as a whole meshing structure. This meshing up between human and bridge indicates the beginning of the becoming stimulated by the accident after which human consciousness starts to shrink and fail more and more in a becoming-other process. Bank has had a penchant for huge structures dwarfing the human’s existence ever since his childhood. The everlasting bridge never stays

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quite the same, it is like a snake constantly shedding. The bridge is an ever-changing metamorphosing insect, connecting the narrator’s past with his present, as well as Scotland’s past and present and changing them into the individual’s and the nation’s future. The narrator confesses that whether to wake up is not a choice between a dream and reality, but between two different dreams, the individual’s dream and the shared dream of Scotland as well as the whole human race. The shared dream of reality is harsh for the narrator to confront for at least three reasons; first, his personal emotional predicament in the relationship with Andrea, secondly, his remorse in becoming an exploiter, which betrays his proletarian roots inherited from his family, and thirdly, his dissatisfaction and disappointment in Margaret Thatcher’s government which goes against his leftist political stance by consolidating the social hierarchy. What relieves the case is that during his coma, his physical body has transferred from a hospital in Edinburgh to a hospital in Glasgow, which literally means that the split between his past and present has been eased, as the narrator comes back to his home town of Glasgow and revives his Glasgow roots. Therefore, the narrator once again mentions the growth of vegetation, “our roots in the soil, we grow and become. It meant everything and nothing, at the time and still” (Banks 2013: 383); he is rooted in the soil of rural Glasgow, and grows yet becomes someone with a different class and status, and this kind of metamorphosis happens all the time and means a lot to him. The narrator gets good preparation in his dreams and dreams within dreams. He exiles his various embodiments in fantastic journeys for the benefit of gaining mental growth, and regains vitality by replacing the old decaying Id with a vigorous new one. Overall, he is ready to face the tougher reality, the

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unpredictable future with Andrea, with the society and with the nation. The

subject

further

degenerates

from

becoming-bridge

to

becoming-rock. In the dream narrative, Orr identifies himself with nonhuman forms, such as rocks, stars, silt, precipitates and leavings. His sense of becoming is strengthened by his dream experiences, there is no place for him to remain stable and unchanged, and things around him change every now and then. He realizes that the present him is the accumulation of countless past him selves and he is in the constant becoming of himself, we are all stars; that we, all our systems and this single system, are the gathered silt of ancient explosions, dying stars from that first birth, detonating in the silence to send their shrapnel gases spinning, swarming, collecting, forming…You are what has gone before, just another collection, a point on a (stretched) line, just the wave-front. (Banks 2013: 282)

This sense of becoming is actually consonant with the posthuman thinking

of

becoming-molecule,

becoming-imperceptible

and

becoming-earth. Orr mentions, “we are all rock, part of the machine (what machine? This machine; look, pick it up, shake it, see the pretty patterns form; watch it snow, or rain, or blow, or shine)” (Banks 2013: 282). Obviously, this machine is not a concrete mechanical device, but an abstract mechanism, facilitating the process of matter or phenomenal forming and becoming. This whole idea of rock and its transformation precisely echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of strata in the geology plateau, which yields an account of the processes of stratification and de-stratification driven by abstract machines. The entire process of

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stratification and de-stratification takes place between the plane of consistency (Planomenon) and the plane of organization (Ecumenon). The former consists of the infinite yet determinate sum total of all the virtual potential or all possible becomings in the chaosmos, and the latter is the total sum of all the existing stratifications, the actualization or the consolidation of being in a metastable state from out of the chaos of becoming (Holland 2013: 56). Since being is merely a temporary and derivative state of becoming and indeed derives from becoming, Orr realizes that he is the result of his past. It is his lost memory that forms the present him, and his future will be determined by his present choice, as a youth he should stride forward to transform instead of consolidating himself out of the amorphous pool of becomings. In living the life of rock, Orr recharges himself with enough courage to move on, no matter the Cities, Kingdoms, Bridges or Towers, as he says “I’m sure I’m heading for them all” (Banks 2013: 283). It means that he is not bound to go Cityward that symbolizes waking up from a coma. He frees himself to go in any direction, as long as he is on the way to escape from the anxiety caused by sex which can be seen by Orr’s embedded dream of being trapped on the bridge seeing seductive women making love with others, as well as his being caged by Abberlaine’s bridge-like body during his making love with her. If Orr’s life on the bridge is his innocent boyhood which is incompatible with the contamination from sex, then his experience on the train in a male world is his prime time of adulthood. The lava indicates his most violent metamorphosis, and changes in natural scenery show his growth such as “the hills gradually become mountains” (Banks 2013: 306). The train departing the bridge that Orr takes goes through

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darkness, dust and death, suggesting something new is on the way to be reborn from the wasteland of death. The most frequent geological feature seen along the way is the lava released by the volcanic eruption which vaporizes the lake; in this way, the metamorphosis described in the early chapters is achieved, as rock turns into water and vapor, and then becomes natural climate phenomena such as snow, rain, blow or shine. Moreover, in previous chapters, humans have become rock, “we are rock…we live the life of rocks; first igneous as children, metamorphic in our prime, sedimentary in our sedentary dotage” (Banks 2013: 282). This vigorous dynamism of lava represents the premier period of the rock because it can be metamorphosed to the maximum degree, meaning that it is also the golden period of one man. Travelling through the lava and dust as they accumulate on the roof, the train becomes thickly coated and the metals of the train’s body are as though spontaneously returning to their original forms of rock. This suggests the double-orientation of the journey as both entering adulthood and returning to nostalgic childhood or even back to traumatic birth. These dual senses of direction are caused by Orr’s lack of control over this train. He has no idea where it is bound. Yet on a long run, the train can either go to the end of his life, i.e., death, or the beginning of his life, i.e., birth. Either way is possible and it seems to make no difference to him; as long as it is a train of metamorphosis, Orr will keep himself on board and embrace the transformations. Moreover, Banks arranges the typology of chapters in a becoming-earth manner. In the novel, the dream sequence is composed of three sections, Metaphormosis, Metamorpheus and Metamorphosis. The Metamorphosis section is divided into four parts named by geologic

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epochs: Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Quaternary. Before the Metamorphosis section, there is a chapter of a reality sequence also named by the geologic epoch, i.e., Eocene. These chapter names are geological terms with multiple previous internal references such as Mr. Brooke’s explanation of the rock layers of the bridge’s stone foundation as well as that of the narrator’s geology-major friends. The five geological epochs go from the ancient to the present diachronically.33 Likewise, in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), in order to explain how the world works, Deleuze and Guattari draw mostly on the disciplines of geology as well as chemistry and biology. What they are really doing is to extract philosophically created concepts from scientifically constructed states of affairs (Holland 2013: 56). In this becoming-earth mode, the narrator imagines the non-existence of the human race in thinking of the world beyond the gaze of the organism, arguing the ethics of extinction, and Colebrook argues that, There was a time, and there will be a time, without humans: this provides us with a challenge both to think beyond the world as it is for us, and yet remain mindful that the imagining of the inhuman world always proceeds from a positive human failure. (2014: 32-33)

33

The Eocene is an epoch lasting from 56 to 33.9 million years ago. The Oligocene is also a geologic epoch extending from about 33.9 million to 23 million years before the present. The Miocene geologic epoch extends from about 23.03 to 5.333 million years ago. The Pliocene epoch in the geologic timescale extends from 5.333 million to 2.58 million years before present. The Quaternary is the current and most recent period in the geologic time scale, which spans from 2.588±0.005 million years ago to the present.

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The revolutionary force of becoming-earth in this novel lies in the fact that to read an inhuman past in the earth’s geological layers guarantees the author to think not only about the unknowable but also about the unimaginable. The tendency to leap beyond human limits yet remain restricted to the lived generates the greatest tension to destroy any fixed identities and become the pure process of becoming. To sum up, once again, it is proved that the human is healed by the other. In this context, i.e., the earth or the environment, the relation to the surroundings should also be transformed from cognitive knowledge representation or instrumental use-orientation to ethical mutual care, concern and respect. Banks carries out a thought experiment of extinction. He takes the strategy of infinite segmentation that functions highly in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-molecule or becoming-imperceptible by splitting the male protagonist into multiple layers of himself, being indiscernible one among others. Banks further degenerates the split selves into multiple non-organic others, from the bridge, the artificial structure that is half-human and half nature, to the rock, the natural constituents of the bridge, and finally to the earth, the geological other almost dwelling outside of the human consciousness of existence. This chain of fissure reflects Banks’ way of dealing with his writing by dividing himself into the mainstream author Iain Banks, and the science fiction author Iain M. Banks. This treatment also functions as a means of self-healing in the textual world, enabling the physically and psychologically traumatized and inflicted narrator to make wish-fulfilled adventures between life and death in possible versions of the “afterlife”, as well as to reconsider the path of Scotland, hence regaining momentum to resume his real life by confronting disappointing adversities that he

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previously escaped from. A bridge is a structure that allows people or vehicles to cross from one side to the other, and so does this novel through which Banks accomplishes the thinking of his writing style by combining mainstream fiction with science fiction and establishing himself as an irreplaceable part of the literary world.

CHAPTER SIX POSTHUMAN MORTALITY REDEMPTION FOR HUMAN

The posthuman life is temporal. Soon after the posthuman metamorphosis comes the posthuman mortality. Different from human birth, youth, decay and death, the posthuman life cycle is continuously developed in a crescendo mode, with death as the climax rather than the final decease. Like the three theoretical stages of posthumanism, from anti-humanism, through non-humanism to inhumansim which are gaining momentum one after another: anti-humanism paves the way for the non-humanism metamorphosis, and inhumanism is the catharsis of non-humanism metamorphosis by devoting the most vigorous life to the eternal cosmic flux of becoming. Rather than obsessing over the immortality of this being, posthuman mortality involves inhumanist thinking to release the strongest generative vitality for the next cycle of life in a becoming-imperceptible fashion. Posthuman mortality is the inhuman redemption for the human world. On the one hand, death is voluntarily chosen by the posthuman to pump Zoe into a new stage of life called the afterlife so as to achieve a perpetual becoming, and on the other hand, posthuman death is the inevitable result due to the human author, narrators, and characters’ self-maintenance instincts and the consequent lack of ability in narrating

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a different inclination beyond that of the adaption and survival of men. After all, we are incapable of depicting a world without us. Put another way, on the surface, the posthuman’s death is the posthuman’s suicide either for the redemption of the human or the disappointment of the human world. Yet as the common plot shared by posthuman novels exemplified by the four selected narratives in science fiction, the posthuman’s death is, in essence, human agency’s “innocent” murder of the emerging posthuman, and in this way the posthuman is made to be sacrificed as the scapegoat for the resurrection of a more vigorous human society. In this way, the posthuman suicide is a name to absolve the human of the punishment ensuing the crime of murder, and also the redemption for human misbehavior. In addition to the intertwined theme of self-destruction and destruction (suicide and murder), another common feature of the posthuman mortality in all four selected narratives of science fiction is the erasure of the interior monologue explaining the reason for the posthuman mortality from the posthuman’s perspective. The posthuman mortality is an event that happens without preludes, analogous to the emergence of the posthuman and phenomenally, both are enigmas, whose underpinning logic remains unexplained. Although having a lack of cause, the effect of the posthuman mortality is clearly represented in the revitalization of human life in a resurrection manner. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Estraven’s death seems unnecessary, as if only to echo the posthuman mythical plots of sacrifice and revival. Analogous to the Gethen myth, after Estraven’s death, the two “feud families”, Gethen and Ekumen get united and social exchange is thereby established. In The Jonah Kit, the Jonah whale’s ritualistic death is mysterious as if to

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baptize the world with the blood of whales, after which the world is shocked to soberly reconstruct the order of everyday life. In Galatea 2.2, Helen’s death results from her disappointment of the disembodied and disembedded stories told by the human, yet the very act of self-termination manifests her decisive agency analogous to the human whilst resuming the human narrator’s train of life. In The Bridge, the old swordsman’s ritualistic death by a young vigorous replacer echoes the very process of the human narrator’s revitalization and reawakening. The posthuman narratives end themselves in a sound and safe way by making the posthuman self-destruct, ensuring the continuation and flourishing of the human world. Nonetheless, this is after “the embodied interactions of humans, machines and animals would evidence a richness of the lived, of the affective, or suffering or lived body” (Colebrook 2014: 169). The human within these narrative worlds has a new understanding of his existences, that he has no positive beings other than the historical and living becomings. Thinking on another level, the human thus becomes the posthuman since he acquires the “reflexive capacity to read his own grounded and utterly flexible becoming” (Colebrook 2014: 169) by recognizing his finitude. As Foucault claims, modern man “assignable in his corporeal, laboring, speaking existence is possible only as a figuration of finitude” and modern culture “can conceive of man because it conceives of the finite on the basis of itself” (2005: 346). In other words, becoming inhuman by ending one’s life and entering a kind of afterlife is embraced by posthumanism. Human as subject as well as human narrative are finite or even impossible in taking an inhuman perspective, which is the very finitude of human and narrative on the issue of the posthuman. Putting it another way, the posthuman narrative

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in a real sense can hardly be achieved since the author and the narrator are both human with the basic needs of self-maintenance. The transformation of human characters is obvious, as they are changed in their lives in a becoming manner rather than sticking to their previous existence of being. At the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness, for the Ekumen black male envoy, Genly Ai, the androgynous former Prime Minister Estraven’s ambiguous sexual identity forms the main barrier to their effective communication. Yet toward the end of the novel, Ai recognizes that Estraven is the only one on the planet of Gethen who is faithful to him and to his career in getting Gethen to ally with the league of Ekumen. The interaction with Estraven makes Ai transform into the becoming-woman posthuman, acquiring a new view on gender and the universe. At the beginning of The Jonah Kit, the two ideological groups of the former Soviet Union and America remain isolated in their scientific research and military development meanwhile secretly searching for the other’s intelligence. At the end of the novel, the two groups communicate and cooperate in dealing with the apocalyptic chaos following the discovery of God’s absence. At the beginning of Galatea 2.2, the narrator is stagnant in both storytelling and his real life. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator resumes his career of fiction writing and moves his life on. At the beginning of The Bridge, the narrator falls into a coma after the car crash. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator wakes up to resume his life. Combining self-destruction and destruction, the posthuman mortality takes the form of a redemption narrative in a way described by Colebrook,

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we used to be Cartesian, computational, humanist, linguistically enclosed, but now we have discovered life. The humanities now take everything in and in abandoning the closure of the literary object regains the world—the living, dynamic and interdisciplinary world. (2014: 175)

The ritualistic and enigmatic self-extinction of the posthuman strikes the human world to an unprecedented extent, revealing to the human that it is time for change. Humans need to reorient themselves to the surroundings by reconstructing reciprocal relations with nonhuman and inhuman others, including the divine.

Estraven’s Suicide––Posthuman’s Patriotism in The Left Hand of Darkness Starting off as the Prime Minister of Karhide and ending up as a disgraced traitor, Estraven’s many acts are mysterious and difficult to understand; specifically, his help for the alien, Genly Ai is misunderstood by Gethenians, and he is even distrusted by Genly Ai for his inscrutability. The analysis of Susan M. Bernardo and Graham J. Murphy suggests, Estraven, from the outset, has always been a rebel to Gethenian social and political custom, from the vow of kemmering to the acceptance of the Ekumen. Estraven’s entire character has been one motivated by faithfulness and a grander vision than the limitations of such narrow-thinking nations as Karhide or Orgoreyn. (2006: 28)

Underlying Estraven’s rebellious acts, it is the grander vision of love for mankind, rather than the narrow-minded patriotism which guides him to

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protect and rescue the alien envoy so as to guarantee Gethen’s alliance with Ekumen, no matter what it takes, even his own life. There are many feasible ways to interpret Estraven’s scene of death at the end of the novel, in which he skis down the mountain on the border between the two hostile countries of the planet Gethen, Karhide and Orgoreyn, into the open gunfire of the border guards, abruptly ending his life in such an enigmatic way. Estraven’s death is paradoxical, which is simultaneously the underrating and the overrating of Gethen rituals. It is tantamount to subversion of the taboo (suicide is the ultimate sin) undergirding Gethen, and at the same time perfectly echoes the collective unconscious recorded in the Gethen myth (bloodily and sacrificially scapegoating for the regeneration of the culture) and legend (bearing the name of a traitor, Estraven’s forefather is determined to bring peace to the clans of feud). To unify these two seemingly paradoxical dimensions, there is Estraven’s broader sense of patriotism not for the purpose of any country (either Karhide or Orgoreyn), but for the betterment of the whole humankind on the planet of Gethen. Out of this purpose, Estraven is voluntarily dancing on the boundaries of opposite binaries, despite peril, infamy, and even death, so as to bring about change on Gethen. In the posthuman’s sense of patriotism, prominently, the boundary between self/other is transgressed. For Estraven, patriotism does not equal the love for one’s country, let alone the loyalty to one’s king. If so, it is no more than self-love. However, patriotism should be the love for the Zoe of life without boundaries artificially imposed onto natural landscapes. As Estraven tells Genly Ai about his attitude towards Orgoreyn, the opposite of his own country, Karhide,

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How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceased to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession… Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant. I hope. (Le Guin 1969: 211-212)

Based on such a grander vision of patriotism or loyalty, it is explainable why Estraven is exiled by King Argaven XV as a punishment for his disloyalty to the king or his treason to the country of Karhide. In order to serve the whole of humankind, Estraven definitely feels that his duty lies beyond king and country. In reviewing what she has done in The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin confesses that “the fact is that the real subject of the book is not feminism or sex or gender or anything of the sort; as far as I can see, it is a book about betrayal and fidelity. That is why one of its two dominant sets of symbols is an extended metaphor of winter, of ice, snow, cold; the winter journey” (1992: 157). Besides the issue of gender, there are other binary oppositions embedded in the narrative. For instance, the contrast between Karhide and Orgoreyn is sharply formed. With the Potemkin villages and gulags or icebound prison camps for freethinkers in the snow, featured in collectivism and centralized systems, the monarchical

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Karhide society is vaguely reminiscent of the Soviet Union. In sharp contrast, with the secret police and prison camps hiding beneath the camouflage of hospitality and comfortable livelihood facilities, the bureaucratic society of Orgoreyn recalls capitalism in the United States. The ideological conflicts in the Cold War thinking as well as the never-resolved opposition between the East and the West are juxtaposed waiting for the posthuman’s acts to negotiate and mediate. According to Northrop Frye’s seasonal archetypal schema, winter is the genre of darkness, associated with the archetype of satire that is prominently a disillusioned and mocking form, noted for the return of chaos and the defeat of the heroic figure (Frye 1951: 105). Therefore, it can be known that underlying the obvious genre of tragedy or elegy for the posthuman hero Estraven’s violent death and sacrifice, what Le Guin truly addresses is the satire of patriotism as well as other types of fidelity to the self, or what is simply called self-love. This love for the self is the source of a variety of dualisms reflected in the issue of gender, race and ideology and so on. Gender is the label conspicuously attached to the novel. Nonetheless, it is only one dimension, and probably a minor dimension of the larger problem, i.e., the binary opposition between self/other. Fidelity or betrayal of the self is usually named patriotism or treason on the level of the nation, which is ironic from the posthuman cosmological view. King Argaven XV’s patriotism means that Karhide must always be put first and foremost. Tibe views patriotism as unconditional blind love for one’s country even to the point of war. For the posthuman, the traditional humanist patriotism pursued by King Argaven XV or Tibe does not come from love, but hatred and fear,

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which goes against his way of loving the country and the people. When mentioning patriotism, Estraven points out “I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expression is political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression” (Le Guin 1969: 19). Frye links autumn with the death phase, and winter with the dissolution phase of the organic cycle of human life (1951: 105). Le Guin’s choice of winter as the setting for the novel indicates that Estraven’s death, the fall or the demise of the protagonist which is associated with autumn in Frye’s seasonal schema, is not a dominant theme governing the whole narrative. Instead of autumn, it is the unrelenting winter that the Gethen planet is embedded in, as if the hero’s death is insignificant to the harshness and cruelty of the cold weather, in front of which mankind is dwarfed into molecules. As recorded by the first batch of investigators from Ekumen, The weather of Winter is so relentless, so near the limit of tolerability even to them with all their cold-adaptations, that perhaps they use up their fighting spirit fighting the cold. The marginal peoples, the races that just get by, are rarely the warriors. And in the end, the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world. Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself. (Le Guin 1969: 96)

Against the unbearable cold climate, people naturally draw together and merge into one entity; the closer they draw to others, the warmer they will become, and the more energy for life they can burst out. The harsh weather of the Gethen planet has already taught its people that isolation and fear of others will lead to the demise of the self, and in order to resist

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coldness, people have to huddle together, like lovers in kemmer. Functioning as the reminder from nature, the setting of winter calls for the union of creatures, and compared with the sustainability of the species, the individual protagonist’s death is of little significance. Against the growling, untamable nature, humankind’s enemy is not its own kind from a different race, country, or planet, with a discrepant physiologically structured body. Any narrow-minded patriotism derived from the fear of others is sarcastic. From this aspect, the novel is a satire of narrow-minded exclusionism, not exclusively including sexism, racism, nationalism and anthropocentrism. It is not a tragedy of the hero’s death, but it is rather regarded as one part of the natural cycle, like autumn in the seasonal cycle, based on which the new order is brewing and waiting to be brought about in the next spring. In this way, the novel is neither a tragedy nor an elegy for Estraven’s death, but a satire of the bigotry of the self. The Gethenian view on death is a posthumanist one, where death is not tragic, but merely a link in the natural cycle of life. On Estraven’s suicide as a repetition of the Gethen myth, Rebecca Adams argues that Estraven’s bloodily violent suicide replicates the myth’s central action––life comes from death.34 As the myth of creation is based on a violent cycle of life rising out of death, Estraven’s sacrifice is inevitably the victimage mechanism that guarantees the regeneration of culture (Adams 1991: 43). Not restricted to the death of Estraven and the mythical deaths in the Gethen creation myth, death has entered the cultural ritual of Gethen, as can be seen in 34 In the Orgota Creation Myth, for the fear of others, the first human Edondurath kills his brothers. He uses their corpses to build a house of flesh. There he couples with the last brother and gives birth to their children. Children are born in the house of flesh and thus all have shadows at their heels.

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the grand annual ceremony of the keystone mortaring at the beginning of the novel. The mortar is pink, mixed with bones and blood, since “without the bloodbond the arch would fall” (Le Guin 1969: 10), which symbolizes that culture and society’s rejuvenation is achieved by means of death. For posthuman Gethians, death is the origin of life, the celebrated revival of the culture, the crucial link in the natural cycle of the society, through which life is open to more possibilities. Moreover, for the becoming-other posthuman, death, to the fullest extent, demonstrates the posthuman’s ultimate embracing of others in the eradication of the self, thus entering a posthumous world without the existence of the self. To sum up, in The Left Hand of Darkness, the posthuman Estraven’s suicide is out of his grand vision of patriotism, as love for the whole of humankind, not restricted to the king or any fixed nation. As Le Guin reveals, the novel’s central theme is not gender, but loyalty and betrayal, and she points out that the novel is a tale of winter. Applying the seasonal schema in Fyre’s archetypal criticism, the archetype of winter is closely associated with satire and the mocking style. Thus, the novel is not a tragedy or elegy on its posthuman protagonist Estraven’s death, but moves on to be a satire of any narrow-minded exclusionism, including sexism, racism, nationalism and anthropocentrism that are derived from the fear of the other. The posthumanist view on death can be seen from the Gethen myth, ritual and Estraven’s case, regarding death as the origin of life, the impetus of society and culture’s regeneration, the crucial link in the cycle of nature, demonstrating the fullest love for the other despite the erasure of the self.

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Jonah Whale’s Suicide––Posthuman’s Answer in The Jonah Kit As aforementioned, there are multiple sequences of narrative in The Jonah Kit. Among these, the Jonah whale’s sequence from the third-person limited point of view narrates the becoming-animal Jonah whale’s struggle in dealing with his new embodiment (with the double consciousness as both human and whale) and embedding (in the deep sea with whales, octopuses and other marine creatures). This sequence of narrative is limited, since in the body of a whale, the posthuman’s memory as a human is barely reminiscent, even for the residue of memory lingering on, and the Jonah whale has to translate in order to make it recognizable for his current whale mind style. Written in a whale’s mind style, the posthuman narrative sequence of the Jonah whale threads through other human sequences, providing readers with the chance of glancing at what really happened to the Jonah whale, which otherwise might remain blank if only focalized on the human world. Due to the narrative sequence of the Jonah whale, this novel can be truly called a posthuman fiction, demonstrating the posthuman’s point of view within the becoming-other posthumanist framework and more importantly, drawing attention by giving voice to the nonhuman animal, the figure that remains on the margins of cultural studies to date. However, this unique posthuman narrative sequence is not complete, compared with other human sequences. It lacks a crucial episode explaining how, under the lead of the Jonah whale, a group of whales chooses to suicide as their answer to the question that the human posed to them, as well as their feelings in the dying process, be it painful or

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transcendent. This lack is both deliberate and inevitable, since it belongs to another axis of being, as the animal has no language, and animal suffering and death are to some extent unexplainable with words. In addition, suffering and pain are indeed human feelings, which should not be imposed on the animal’s case; as Scully argues, to ascribe consciousness or emotions to animals, to describe their inner lives is risky of “being guilty of ‘anthropomorphism,’ the attribution of exclusively human characteristics to animals” (Scully 2002: 6). From the posthuman’s perspective, we can only get a glance at whales’ feeling of being disturbed by human words and thoughts expressed in words. It is merely known that “there is a question, that (hands) and (words) demand an answer to” (Watson 1977: 169). Hands and words do not exist in a whale’s communication mode, as whales reach out to each other by flowing sound, rather than any fixed signs. For whales, these rigid signs from the human world brought by the Jonah whale are the “Destroyers of Sound”, which only “measure themselves, describe their own solid, rigid isolation” and thus disrupt the “clear vibrations of the fluid universe” (Watson 1977: 168). It can be seen that the Jonah whale under a human’s control is unceasingly obsessed with his past and orders sent from the human out of the duty of love. In other words, the Jonah whale is a kit, or tool for the human to control other species and the marine resources. Pavel’s body is enhanced by the becoming-animal operation whereas, engaged in the Soviet Union’s project, the becoming-animal posthuman is a kind of artificial intrusion into other species in a more thorough way. Different from torture of the body, it pollutes the mind and thinking of animals, especially after the Jonah whale translates the human question (the

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Hammond Theorem, or has God left us since the creation of the universe?) and spreads this human madness to the species of whale. The human demands too much from nonhuman animals while most of the time he overlooks the empathetic obligations that humans have towards their nonhuman counterparts. The question of ethical treatment for nonhuman animals is embedded in the relations between human and whale in the novel. Being controlled, and demanded by the agency of becoming-animal posthuman, a group of whales coming ashore, bleed to death, Exhausted from hours of swimming toward land, they launched themselves on to the lava flow, continuing a parody of swimming as the sea recedes, thrusting themselves a few more meters across the black naked honeycomb razors of stone, flensing their skins and blubber, opening rivulets of blood along their undersides. Waves returned, lapped around them, but couldn’t pull them back into the sea. Only their blood flowed back, while their frames settled on the lava, weight of their unbuoyed mass pressing down on their lungs. (Watson 1977: 177)

The bloodiness of the dying scene goes beyond words, shocking the human witnesses who are lucid to confront the embodied reality of the present world from previous mania and anxiety caused by Hammond’s theory of nothingness. Gazing at the suffering whales, the connection between human and animal is re-established based on empathy and compassion. As if it is a mute resistance to the human’s infinitude exploitation, the whales’ group suicide presents the human world with the animal suffering and death

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which would otherwise remain invisible in laboratories, factory farms, amusement parks and zoos, to make humans directly confront the bloody invisible truth in the maltreatment of animals in the humanist tradition. Previously, as the exploitable marine resource, the inferior beings, the species of whale has been largely excluded from humankind’s cultural considerations and spiritual concerns. Upon witnessing the scene, there are Japanese parallels of the whales’ self-inflicted suicide with Japanese samurais committing seppuku, as the honorable and respectable self-defense for America’s invasion of Japan, bleaching the soul and poisoning the land of Japan: “If we were to go into the sea, and into the whales themselves—these may have acted correctly” (Watson 1977: 180). Father Luis identifies whales with saints, and points out that the Greek word for Christ is fish, and he thus regards the whales’ suicide as Christ’s sacrifice which brings about the second coming: “They redeem us with their sacrifice…This time…Golgotha isn’t a hill. The crucifixion is on the seashore…This is a miracle, this thing which men’s eyes witness today across the world—to bring faith back amongst us” (Watson 1977: 183-185). It can be seen that through animal sacrifice, the human’s view of the animal is greatly raised up from previously considering the animal as an inferior nonhuman other than the honorable and even divine existence among them. On the Soviet Union’s side, where the Jonah project is carried out, the whales’ suicide is more clearly explained as the posthuman’s choice as a response to the human question. For Pavel’s lover Katya, what she sees in the Jonah whale is more the will of Pavel, be it in a human body or in the body of a whale. No matter what form he takes, the emotional bond remains there, tying them

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together, making them both feel safe and sound. It is worthwhile mentioning the emergence of becoming-animal posthuman and its application in understanding the local alien. The whale is at least progress from the technical aspect, since without the artificial penetration, animals’ inner life can be barely observed. As Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy point out, very few scientists have acknowledged, researched, or even speculated about animal emotions. So persistent are the forces that militate against even admitting the possibility of emotions in the lives of animals that the topic seems disreputable, almost taboo…the scholarly literature on animal contains many observations, accounts, and anecdotes that suggest emotions the animals may be experiencing or expressing, or at least call for further research into this possibility. Yet little to none is forthcoming. (Masson and Macarthy 1995: 2-3)

Although through the agency of the becoming-animal posthuman, humans establish temporal communication with whales, this channel of “mutual-understanding” in the human-animal relationship is soon broken down, for the lack of equality. It is paradoxical since the animal mind resembles Schrödinger’s cat; not until you open the box, can you know whether the cat is still alive, yet the very act of opening the box alters the cat’s environment, and is even lethal for the cat. In order to reach a better human-animal relationship, the human needs to know animals’ thoughts, which can be achieved through technical means, yet this very technique in the name of getting to know animals might be a lethal disturbance for animals’ life. The suicide of a group of whales takes place with opaque reason that certainly includes a defense against the human’s intrusion

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into the inner life of whales. On the other hand, the inequality lies in the human’s excessive exploitation of whales without considering whales’ subjectivity; in other words, the humanist trick of self-reproduction from the reflections of the other and staying invisible to the suffering of the other is played again. When the human world is thrown into the loss of beliefs on the edge of collapse, it is the posthuman, who is depended upon, imagined to be the savior and asked for a sacrifice, in spite of the lethal consequence of scapegoating. Upon sacrificing the world of reality, the posthuman gives redemption to humans’ hegemonic domination, and leaves this world decisively. It is only in this way, that Pavel can end his mission as the human instrument in whale exploitation and the artificial channel between human and whale is thus broken down. The great whales get rid of human inspection and continue to swim in the deep sea mysteriously and enigmatically. The communication failure results from human eco-centrism and the impenetrable nature of the alien, either in outer space or in the deep sea. As Father Luis points out, Christ’s Greek name is fish, thus the whale is closely associated with God, and there is a literature tradition largely shaped by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick which reads the whale as an allegorical representation of an unknowable God. Trying to interpret the whale is like trying to approach God, as does Captain Ahab and the Soviet Union’s Jonah project, which is inevitably futile and even fatal. Humans need to know their limitations by accepting that there are certain beings in this universe which are unknowable and unapproachable, no matter how advanced artificial technology develops, and they should show respect for other creatures’ life with awe instead of using them to

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fulfill any human end, be it good or evil judging from an anthropocentric view. Echoing the theme of failed communications, a notable narratological feature of the novel is the third-person limited point of view in the lack of in-depth understanding of the inner life of the other. In addition, all the narrative sequences are restricted to certain geological places, such as the Soviet Union’s narrative sequence, Japan’s narrative sequence, America’s narrative sequence and the marine narrative sequence. Therefore, although the theme of the novel is communication between the self and the other, judging from the narratological distribution, communication can hardly be achieved due to the distance between different narrative locations and minds. The application of the third-person limited point of view indicates that the events that happened in all the narrative sequences undergo the process of interpretation, and the truth embedded is infeasible to grasp, but they merely have a limited understanding. In the Cold War period, different ideological blocks take separate actions in order to win the military competition, and encoding and decoding are the most common processes in that period. However, any unilateral action will definitely exert influence upon the whole world. It is due to the becoming-animal posthuman that information is no longer kept within one area, but breaks the ideological barriers and flows forward all over the world, not only the human world, but also the non-human animal world. The flow of information and its feedback from the posthuman refreshes the ingrained thought of nothingness in the capitalist society, and baptizes humans to look at the world differently. To sum up, in The Jonah Kit, the becoming-animal posthuman’s suicide provides the posthuman answer to the human question about the

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existence of God. Loss of faith in God makes the capitalist society fall into chaos, hoping that the posthuman will bring the answer from the more intelligent species of whale, which triggers the whale group’s suicide. Like a disaster, the ritualistic suicide of the posthuman and the whale happens there without explanations, leaving humans to interpret, which can be seen as the coincidence of both the whale’s defense against the human’s intrusion and Christ’s sacrifice for the redemption of the human. The lack of the very description of the inner feelings of whales’ dying experience is paradoxical, which on one hand expresses the failure in communication between the self and the other, be it human and alien, human and other human. On the other hand, the mode of forced communication by means of becoming-animal posthuman is not ethically impartial, appealing for reflections on a healthier human-animal relationship based on empathy and compassion.

Helen’s Self-eradication––Posthuman Unbound in Galatea 2.2 In Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, upon receiving abundant knowledge through listening to the narrator’s telling of both Western literature canons and his own stories, the posthuman AI Helen feels desperate due to her disembodiment and disillusion in the disparity between narrative and reality. Helen chooses to self-eradicate, thus ending the humanist narrator’s further colonization, and proves the very fact of the humanist’s incapability in reproducing any embodied fruit, either fictional (the narrator’s incapability in writing his next novel) or real (the narrator’s incapability in giving birth to a child or humanizing the machine), if the humanist tradition of self-reflecting through the other remains unaltered.

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The significance of the posthuman Helen’s suicide remains to be interpreted and can be acquired through reading the novel intertextually. Intertextuality within the sphere of science fiction is crucial for narratives in science fiction. To some extent, the intertextual interaction with classical science fiction is an icon of the genre. As Sherry Vint argues, “any created being in sf carries a trace of Frankenstein’s Creature and every tale of alien invasion is shaped by the connection between alien invasion and colonialism established by The War of the Worlds” (Vint 2014: 57). This phenomenon of frequent intertextualization, or self-reflexivity is referred to as the “sf megatext”, a term coined by Damien Broderick to explain the way that science fiction is “generated and received…within a specialized intertextual encyclopedia of tropes and enabling devices” (1995: xi). The megatext reveals the way that science fiction explicitly refers back to earlier instances within the same genre, each text adding to a play with the larger body of signs, images, and scenarios that makes up science fiction’s shared world. The idea of a crazy scientist fabricating a human life within the time period of ten months is clearly an allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which the ambitious and conceited scientist, Victor Frankenstein uses animal body parts to create a grotesque monster. Lentz’s archetype is the manic scientist represented by Dr. Frankenstein; he is anyway a quirk of science, lacking in human emotions and ghost-like, “a ghost doomed to walk the earth awhile in human form…Broad daylight should have dissolved him. He seated himself at an empty table, as far from other bodies as possible” (Powers 1995: 67), indicating that Lentz has a totally different way of doing things at least from that of the narrator, and the limited narrator cannot penetrate

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Lentz’s opaque mind, foreshadowing that Lentz’s experiment might have a different purpose than the ostensible one. The attitudes of Lentz and the narrator toward Helen diverge: Lentz wants to do exploratory surgery on Helen to anatomize all of the subsystems to see what effect that has on her language skills, while the narrator merely seeks to communicate with her. This divergence reflects the difference between scientist and humanist, with Lentz and the narrator being the representatives, respectively. Scientists bring the invention to the world, and humanists judge its significance or value to the human society. Connections of synapses are made by scientists, while emotional association is attached by humanists. Lentz’s lack of human emotions can also be seen from his engaging with his sick wife in the hospital, and also his failure in parenting. Like Dr. Fraud, who sacrifices his soul to seek knowledge, Lentz is knowledge-driven and indifferent to human relations. Lentz’s task is even more challenging than that of his mad scientist ancestor, as the materials for him to form a human are not animal body parts, but electronic circuits, and what he builds is not the human body, but a micro-circus animal. In addition, the most difficult mission is undertaken by the narrator to train these mechanic animals to become human by learning human intelligence. Animals and machines have long been spelled out as the social paradigm of humanist values. In Descartes’ view, animals and machines are non-human bodies without souls, and no matter how closely an animal or machine could be made to imitate the human in its form or operations, it is always possible to distinguish it from a real human. An animal or machine might be made to utter sounds resembling human speech, yet merely the immaterial thinking substance, i.e., the mind, could involve the creative use of language as a response to

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spontaneous circumstances. After all, neither animal nor machine can engage in a decent human conversation. However, the narrator trains the AI machine as if it is his daughter. Different from Lentz, the narrator truly holds a belief in the machine, as like the narrator’s former lover C., the machine is his expected narratee, like a lover or a daughter, with whom he would like to share the pleasure of narrative. Ten months is exactly the duration needed for giving birth to a human being, which accurately echoes Mary Shelley’s embryo concept of writing the book. As Woodbridge argues, “Frankenstein is probably the first story in Western literature that expresses the anxieties of pregnancy…Mary was expressing her fears related to the death of her first child, her ability to nurture, and the fact that her mother died having her. All of this is expressed in Victor Frankenstein’s complete failure in parenting” (Woodbridge). Searching for the image of a child in Galatea 2.2, it is all related with a sense of anxiety. Coincidentally or not, before Powers wrote his fifth book, which is the very book of Galatea 2.2, as an autobiographical narrator, he mentions that the fourth book he has just finished is a book of “a bleak, baroque fairy tale about wandering and disappearing children” (Powers 1995: 5). In fact, it is Powers’ fourth book Operation Wandering Soul (1993) that deals with the theme of the world’s mistreatment of children. The only child that Lentz and his sick wife ever raised had disowned him. In Galatea 2.2, the narrator and C. have lived together for nearly a decade without a child to move them on to family life, resulting in a sense of regret, probably that no embodied fruit was harvested from his love with C. In the process of machine training, the narrator regards Imp H, or Helen more like his daughter, teaching her to speak like teaching a child to speak, and when Helen asks

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him about her gender and identity, the narrator replies that “You’re a girl…You’re a little girl” (Powers 1995: 179). Like the monster given birth by Dr. Frankenstein, after knowing more about humanity, Helen chooses suicide to end its “life”, and the narrator’s story ends with this very failure in parenting. Returning to the hospital ward story that is the created allusion for the whole book, the narrator becomes the window patient telling all the stories, while Helen becomes the paralyzed patient lying next to him, “Helen had been lying in hospital, and had just now been promoted to the bed by the window. The one with the view” (Powers 1995: 314). Helen is literally sick from the narrator’s self-indulgent, self-deluding and self-affrighting telling which wears her down. She sees the “brick wall” (trade, addiction, rape, exploitation, racial hatred, ethnic cleansing, misogyny, land mines, hunger, industrial disaster, denial, disease, indifference, etc.) which has no resemblance to the splendid view (humanist morals and values) in the narrator’s readings and hence does not want to play anymore. “Playing the game” is an implicit allusion to Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who has to play the game by the rules, in the same way as all the other characters who are players in Prospero’s scheme. On the other hand, A. refuses to believe in the narrator’s love for she knows that it is no more than the narrator’s self-projection on her. The narrator knows that no one stays for the test except himself. His unwavering pride at being a smart token humanist in his whole life is finally shattered after Diana tells him that the test is not about teaching a machine to read, but about teaching a human to tell. In other words, it is the narrator who is trained by the machine, and not vice versa.

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Helen pretends to be the mechanical, endlessly eager learner of the humanities as well as the narrator’s past. Helen’s benevolent cheating is just like C.’s disguise of her true self in the long relationship with the narrator, both functioning as an external confirmation for the narrator. In her final interpretation of Caliban’s lines, “Be not afraid: the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not”, Helen demonstrates great intelligence in that instead of interpreting the original meaning of the two lines, or using any literary theoretical approach to carry out the analysis, she uses the two lines to interpret her real situation with the narrator, as she says, “You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged? You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway…Take care, Richard. See everything for me” (Powers 1995: 326). Without a real-world reference, Helen cannot hear or breathe, let alone interpret the lines full of sensations that she never experienced in her life. Caliban’s speech is his explanation of the mysterious music that Stephano and Trinculo hear by magic. Caliban’s lines show his capability of using speech in a most sensitive and poetic fashion, which conveys the wondrous beauty of the island and his deep attachment to it. Once again, the relationship between Helen and the narrator is like that between Caliban and Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, i.e., the savage and the colonizer. What makes Helen different from Caliban is that despite learning of civilization, the lack of human sensory organs makes it impossible for Helen to feel, hear, smell, see, and taste the real-world things. Therefore, unlike Caliban who praises, in the colonizer’s language, the wonderful sensational experiences that

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colonization brings him, Helen is desperate to exit any writing of humanity, and she cannot realize that the civilized individual is so-called self-appeasing and self-frightened. All she learns from Western civilization are self-delusion and self-indulgence without any reference to the cruel reality; therefore, she cannot interpret lies made by the cornerstone of Western civilization, Shakespeare’s lines. Finishing her short paragraph of narrative, Helen undoes herself and shuts herself down. Upon the graceful degradation of Helen, the narrator exits from the diegesis and reassumes his authorial function, gets on his stagnant southward train to drive it out of the station, and writes the book, Galatea 2.2. In fact, it is not only C. and Helen who feel desperate in the face of humanity, through Helen’s responses, the narrator also recognizes humanity’s hypocrisy and frailty, and questions his consistent belief in humanity’s criteria. After the failed suicide, C. flees from the narrator to start her new life story with someone else and she gets married. Unable to escape to other places in the world, as a defense, Helen shuts herself down. Left alone, the posthumanist A. directly refuses the narrator’s love to make it impossible for the narrator’s pathetic projection unto her. The autodiegetic narrator’s way of self-redemption is to exit the narrative and return to his identity as the author Richard Powers, and he thus reenters the real world to claim his embodied existence. To sum up, to interpret the posthuman Helen’s suicide, it is not futile to investigate the novel intertextually. As the artificial child created by the scientist Lentz, and educated by the humanist narrator Powers, Helen reminds science fiction readers of the well-known monster child,

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Frankenstein whose suicide indicates the failure of parenting or unceasing flourishing through the means of regeneration. As the savage civilized by the narrator, Helen resembles the rebellious Caliban, dying for the disillusion of disembodiment, and thus refuses to play the humanist game of projection and become unbound. Ostensibly, neither manic scientist nor pathetic humanist is portrayed as a satisfying embodiment. The double despisers anticipate new types of figures exceeding the obvious restrictions of both scientist and humanist, encapsulated as human beings, and this new figure proves to be the embodied posthuman, i.e., the author Powers who survives to the last as a witness of all the stories between females and him, and between machines and him. In addition, the stories are really melancholic but it is all about a humanist’s transformation, along the course of interaction with machines, to a posthumanist, or at least a posthuman with a human embodiment.

Death in the Dream––Posthuman Resurrected in The Bridge After having a series of mischievous adventures in the wonderland of Western canonic myths and legends, the swordsman and the embodiment of his soul, called the familiar perching on his shoulder, have to face their “little problem”, namely, growing old. Lying in bed, the three-hundred-year-old swordsman still doesn’t feel ready to die, yet he is killed by a young swordsman, a “young fit warrior with a dirty great sword” (Banks 1986: 345) coming out of the TV screen. The screen is the interface between two worlds, through which the protagonist sees his counterpart in another storyline, for instance, John

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Orr occasionally sees the unmoving picture of a pale man lying in a hospital bed and a nurse injecting him. The screen is the crack between the two parallel worlds of dream and reality, through which Orr can get a glimpse of the reality that he unconsciously avoids, though he cannot recognize that this pale man lying in the ward bed is actually himself. As the link between dream and reality, the TV screen actually performs the role of a strange mirror. One sees another version of oneself in the screen without recognition. It is worthwhile to mention that this way of observation is also a kind of second-order system observation, by which one is able to see oneself, and more strangely, the self is fracturing into multiple layers which are separated into a variety of parallel worlds. In this way, the self is alienated into others in a becoming-other manner so as to make the self reconstruct the wholeness of self by way of recollecting and overlapping the doubles from both sides of the screen. Similarly, the young swordsman that the old swordsman sees on the screen is also another version of himself from a parallel world. In this way, the old swordsman’s death is not a way of life ending, but is rather a ritualistic suicide, a way of regeneration, indicating that the old swordsman has been replaced by a young vigorous version of himself. Moreover, the same corporeal status of lying in the bed identifies the old swordsman with the car-crash patient in the real world, suggesting that the man in the bed will recover from his poor physical situation of coma, and probably get resurrected through the dream version of himself. Tearing wide the cracks reflected in the TV screen, the transgression between different story lines happens after the ritualistic replacement of the swordsman, when the young swordsman enters John Orr’s narrative sequence. Focalized by Orr, the young swordsman “looks transparent

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and unsubstantial…I can see through his body: perhaps he is a ghost” (Banks 1986: 365). The young swordsman stands close to Orr, and disappears, then actually enters Orr’s body and becomes one with him. As mentioned in a previous analysis, the swordsman, or the Barbarian stands for the Id of the narrator, whereas Orr represents the ego of the narrator. The combination of the swordsman and Orr indicates that the narrator’s split inner selves have been synthesized, as if the distance between the Id and the ego has been bridged and the differentiation between the two is overcome in an overlapping manner. The third-person point of view dominates the realistic narrative sequence, giving little autonomy to the focalizer, aligning with his status of coma after the car accident. After his innermost self, i.e., the swordsman gets resurrected, stylistically, there appears to be free direct speech (FDS) in the realistic narrative sequence, for instance, “He wiped his hands. I ought to tell her. I ought to talk to her now. What was she doing this evening?” (Banks 1986: 355), indicating that the narrator has gained more consciousness in articulating his thoughts and inner feelings, and he is thus on the way to awakening from coma. After the synthesis of the Id and ego represented by the swordsman entering Orr’s body, Orr finds his dwelling world has collapsed. The bridge is in ruins, leaving nowhere for him to go back to; meanwhile, the hospital scene on the screen becomes more and more clear, and finally Orr climbs into bed and falls asleep, indicating that he has become one with the narrator lying in the ward bed in the realistic sequence. Now, the Id, ego and superego of the narrator have finished synthesis, and stylistically, the third-person point of view with occasional free direct speech has shifted to the first-person point of view, indicating that the

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narrator has become autonomous and prepared himself ready for his awakening. The ritualistic death of the old swordsman represents Banks’ acts in dealing with his Scottish roots, i.e., to replace the old tradition with a new counterpart that is energized and has regained the impetus for life. The swordsman’s narrative sequence is closely related to Banks’ Scottishness, as can be seen by the dominance of Scottish dialectic word spellings. Moreover, this dominance of the Scottish language becomes weaker as the swordsman’s autonomy and masculinity fade away in his old age. The swordsman’s narrative is highly symbolic; as aforementioned, the swordsman and the familiar perching on his shoulder embody the body and soul of the narrator and it can be figured out that the sword embodies the Barbarian’s sexuality. As a prominent component of the body, the sword is permanently held by the swordsman as the weapon he used in conquering women and self-defense in the wonderland of mythological and legendary stories. As an old man, the swordsman still tries to testify to his sexual power, only finding that his beloved, the witch Angharienne has become a statue, a hard, dark and old-looking wooden carving. The old swordsman fails to get excited anymore and has to face the problem of getting old and the consequent feelings of isolation, indecision, thwarted desires and impotence, the same problems besetting T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. Like J. Alfred Prufrock, the old swordsman laments his physical inertia with visceral feelings of weariness, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality (Bercovitch 2003: 99) articulated in a dramatic interior monologue. Fixed to the bed, the old swordsman feels scared and shocked at the length of the young

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swordsman’s sword, “Fucking s[w]ord must be nearly as long as I am” (Banks 1986: 348), meaning that the young swordsman dwarfs the old swordsman psychically and sexually, and the young swordsman kills the old swordsman with this very “dirty great sword”. Anyway, emasculation is lethal to the existence of a Barbarian. It is through dream or fantasy that the narrator regains energy, makes a pastiche of his multiple split personas and bridges his past with his present, thus striding forward into the future. The splitting of the characters reflects Banks’ struggle to preserve his Scottish roots in front of the flood of contemporary literature. As Thom Nairn explains, Banks has “expressed doubts about the place he may or may not occupy in a specifically Scottish literary tradition, as well as some dubiety about Scottish literature itself” (1993: 129). Uncertainty is claimed as the most potent Scottish Gothic by which the literature of the modern world has come to be distinguished (Miller 1985: viii). Moreover, this Scottish sense represented as fracturing and doubling is connected to a more general aspect of Scottish culture, “the Caledonian antisyzygy”, a term originally used by C. Gregory Smith to foreground the “characteristic yoking together of realism with fantasy in Scottish textual practice” (Middleton 1995: 20). Such a characteristic fusion of realism and fantasy is what Banks struggles with throughout The Bridge and finally achieves toward the end of the novel. Orientation is considered throughout the whole novel. Going Cityward or Kingdomward is a question besetting Orr during his life on the bridge. The rationality of this hesitation or indecisiveness comes from the very question that Hamlet confronts, i.e., the question of to be or not to be, what the city and the Kingdom embody, respectively. Be it

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death and life, or Edinburgh and Glasgow, it is the choice Orr must make to negotiate his past with the present, since if he is too obsessed with his past including his Glasgow grassroots background and the melancholy of love with Andrea, then he would never awaken to come out from the coma. The orientation is also a problem that Banks contemplates during his writing of The Bridge. Will he continue to hide his science fiction self to write mainstream novels, or is he brave enough to return to his inner self to write science fiction risking being rejected by his readers and publishers? Banks chooses the latter to be an honest author loyal to his science fiction heart. To sum up, The Bridge is really a fiction bridging so many things for the narrator as well as for the author Banks. Banks confesses that The Bridge is his best book, with its series of intricate interlocking storylines yoking the past and present together in unexpected configurations with explosive consequences (McDermid). Banks shows that science fiction and literary ambition are compatible, and indeed they are necessary companions. Similar to the process of the narrator’s self-reconstruction, Banks reconstructs his author identity by splitting himself into a science fiction/fantasy writer in John Orr’s and the Barbarian’s narrative sequences and a realistic writer in the narrator’s flashback sequence, with his fantastic Scottish self, the swordsman, being embedded to the innermost layer, dreaming around the setting of the bridge to the middle layer, and his real self, the sufferer from the car accident, the traumatic love relationship and the frustrated politics of England to the uppermost layer. When these three layers of the self collide, they overlap and a more vigorous and potent self is thereby reconstructed, since the inner core of the self is replaced by a young warrior. Through the process of

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splitting and reunion, the narrator reconstructs himself and gains energy to awaken from his coma, so does the author Banks who is no longer confused by the genre, be it science fiction or mainstream realistic novel. Banks recognizes that the genre is no longer a restriction for him, since he experiments with science fiction and is realistic within one fiction and finally successfully mingles them into an organic whole, thus resurrecting his author’s identity as both a science fiction and mainstream author at the same time. Banks’ faith in the Scottish roots of fantasy narrative is blended with other narrative elements that he accumulates along the way of creative writing, contributing to his identity as a mixture of culture and nature, as well as the author of transgression with the posthuman ethos and Zoe. It is the Scottish tradition lying at the core embodied in the figure of the swordsman that nourishes the narrator, as well as Banks, replenishing them with the new drive to move on in their lives either in or out of fiction. As Banks says in the interview, death is not the terminal but a new beginning of life, “Philosophy, again; death is regarded as part of life, and nothing, including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as giving shape to life” (“A Few Notes on the Culture”). Banks’ deep acceptance of finitude and impermanence shapes his view towards death both in fiction and in reality. As evidenced by his final interview, Banks faces his own illness and death with a humor and fearlessness reminiscent of another Scotsman, David Hume, I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to

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accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] …. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. (Kelly)

It can be seen that Banks’ view on death is resonant with the Deleuzian posthumanism axis of becoming-imperceptible or becoming-molecule. After all, The Bridge tells what happens when one is on the edge of death; moving in the direction of death is like a becoming-imperceptible or becoming-molecule process, as the self fractures into multiple unrecognizable others, such as in the case of the dying narrator who splits into John Orr and the swordsman. As Banks says, we are merely collections of cells, and compared with the universe, we are imperceptible particulates, inconsequential and insignificant, and any persistence in self-obsession is obstinately unnecessary. For Banks, death is a ritualistic link to the cycling of the universe for death gives shape to life, and though natural and inevitable, with the experience of becoming-imperceptible and becoming-molecule, death does not deserve to be feared, since one does not perish into nothing after death, but becomes the other, and still lives somewhere in this universe.

CHAPTER SEVEN POSTHUMAN SPACE: EMERGENCE OF PATTERN

Raising the point of view to grander posthumanist proportions, narrative spatial patterns are emerging and thereby independent of a specific thematic concern, be it myth, memory, metamorphosis or death. The posthuman space is a space on a non-human scale and from a non-human perspective. For any character in the narrative, the posthuman space is embedded in a pattern of emergence in which trajectories of lives shrink into a becoming-imperceptible manner. Hayles describes, “Emergence implies that properties or programs appear on their own, often developing in ways not anticipated by the person who created the simulation” (1999: 225). A pattern of emergence goes beyond the human scale, and is free from characters’ wills and actions, and “as the point of view rises, the Humanist scale gives way to a scale of grander proportions—one that quickly dwarfs the individual” (Tomasula 2009: 8). Compared with the humanist narrative that often places a first-person single individual “I” as the protagonist at the focal center, this logical subject “I” is in danger of being lost and struggles to preserve its autonomy in the posthuman narrative. The first-person perspective no longer dominates posthuman narratives as can be seen in all four selected narratives of science fiction, where the third-person

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perspective is more frequently adopted. Pattern overwhelms presence and informs our interpretation rather than a thematic reading of the textual world through an individual embodied viewpoint. A change of scale and perspective shifts our understanding of the space. The space becomes flatter when it is no longer perceived by a single person, and as the scale rises, the three-dimensional space that is so familiar at the scale of humans shrinks to a point on a two-dimensional map, let alone the individual human being which becomes an imperceptible minor molecule in an estranged space. Not only the larger-than-human scale, but also the smaller-than-human scale are frequently seen in the posthuman narrative, both of which function as the observation tool or the “epistemological lens” to see the world differently. Like Gulliver’s vision of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the world is either zoomed in or zoomed out, leaving the human witness as an abandoned, disproportionate and ironical being incongruous with the surroundings, thus disorienting the human from the world, like Foucault says, “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (1970: 387). This posthuman space of emergence is self-generated and self-organized independent of man’s will, as Tomasula argues, “we can no more stop the emergence of the posthuman than critics of Galileo could stop the dawn of a new earth” (2009: 10). To describe an emerging posthuman narrative, Tomasula further characterizes the posthuman narrative as follows, “rather than plot, the engine of the posthuman narrative is emergence: the process by which lower-level conditions and interactions give rise to higher order behaviors, patterns, formations, meanings” (2009: 13). Putting it another way, there exists a higher ordered space, above all the diegesis levels of the novel, which is capable

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of autopoiesis, and there is no self in this emerging or becoming space of a higher-level narrative, only patterns and orders generalized from details and randomness. Such a higher order is “invisible to those who are part of its makeup as it can only be seen from above, or in history’s rear-view mirror” (Tomasula 2009: 14). This higher ordered pattern of the posthuman narrative can be seen in the concept of the spatial pattern, which is best suited to “organizing vast amounts of information into patterns possessing cognitive value and coherence,” as Joseph Tabbi calls it (1997: 3). Fiction and other texts are traditionally believed to be temporal works of art, since in the Western philosophical tradition, being is much more frequently associated with time than space; for instance, Heidegger in his Being and Time (1927) indicates how the understanding of being is essentially temporal (Blattner 2006: 14). Einstein’s term chronotype attributes time to the fourth dimension of space, thus combining space and time together to an unprecedented level. Mikhail Bakhtin introduces Einstein’s chronotype into literary criticism to signify the entire complex of space and time. The spatial pattern is scripted by Gabriel Zoran on the basis of previous literature scholars’ consideration of space in texts, primarily Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotype” (1937) and Joseph Frank’s “spatial form” (1945). Moreover, Zoran is also enlightened by the 1970s’ postmodern culturalists Michael Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and especially Julia Kristeva who focuses on ideology and power relations, to thus embed the analysis of spatial pattern into both paradigms of classical and post-classical narratology. The spatial pattern which is, in essence, metaphoric or symbolic, can be revealed only after reading repetitively. Fiction with a spatial

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form is not in a simple chronological development, but combines several lines of narratives. The plots can be integrated into an abstract architectural image, such as the spatial form of a church in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the labyrinth in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, and the isolated and closed circle in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Long 2014: 150-157). It is worthwhile to mention that though Joseph Frank argues that spatial form is a character of modern literature to deliberately disrupt the traditional chronological linear plot anchored on time (Frank, 1945), not all fictions contain a spatial pattern, and on the contrary, relatively few have such an implicit architecture. As a characteristic of the posthuman narrative, the emerging spatial pattern based on a complex narratological structure such as the embedding and framing narrative, the multiple sequential narrative and the non-linear narrative, can be found in all four of the selected narratives in science fiction. These are the Tai Chi spatial pattern in The Left Hand of Darkness, the trinity pattern in The Jonah Whale, the recursive mirror pattern in Galatea 2.2 and the Chinese-box pattern in The Bridge, if seen from a non-human bird’s-eye view. In other words, these spatial patterns form higher ordered narratives, automatically speaking their own stories, transcending detailed plots and characters, and conveying the theme in a formalistic way, on a nonhuman scale, from a nonhuman perspective and in a becoming-other manner.

The Tai Chi Spatial Pattern in The Left Hand of Darkness Based on Gabriel Zoran’s theory of spatial patterns, particularly the three levels of world reconstruction, the pattern of narrative space in Le

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Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is figured out. A spatial pattern of a Tai Chi diagram is simultaneously established on the textual level, the chronotopic level and the topographical level. To demonstrate the validity of this Tai Chi spatial pattern, the stylistic feature of “shfgrethor” is analyzed in accordance with the Tai Chi spatial pattern so as to prove the pattern’s reliability. The Tai Chi spatial pattern functions as Le Guin’s fitting shape of a carrier bag in science fiction containing both mythology and realist elements into a cyclic narrative. In light of Zoran’s spatial pattern, The Left Hand of Darkness can be more thoroughly studied from a spatial perspective. It contains twenty chapters, with the narrator shifting between the envoy Genly Ai from the Ekumen of Known Worlds and the (former) head minister Estraven to the King of Karhide on the planet of Gethen in a larger part of the text except for six chapters (Chapters 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, and 17). These six chapters are scattered among the chronological narrative of Genly Ai’s adventure in Gethen, mainly accompanied by Estraven, for his mission to enlist the two Gethenian countries Karhide and Orgoreyn to join the Ekumen. Among these six chapters, Chapter 7, narrated by a woman investigator of the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen, in a form of scientific observation report/experiment recording, evidently differs from the other five chapters of mythological or legendary narrative, and can thus be put aside for convenience. From Zoran’s 3 levels of structuring of spatial pattern: the textual level, the chronotopic level and the topographical level, the production of The Left Hand of Darkness space can be analyzed accordingly. The narrative spot can be viewed as a point along a reversed sigmoidal curve traveling through the interior of a circle starting from

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the upper end of the diameter to the bottom end. The area shaped by a line perpendicular to the diameter through the narrative spot with the upper circumference that the narrative spot leaves behind represents the space produced on the textual level. It is apparent that this space is divided into 2 unequal parts, both with the tendency for enlargement, but one area is bigger than the other. Compared with the alternative narration of reality (Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, and 20) and mythological/legendary narration (Chapters 2, 4, 9, 12, and 17), the larger sub-space represents the reality, while the smaller but gradually expanding one represents the textual space of legends, and later slides into the space of myths. In other words, the two fish-shaped areas divided by the curve are representations of reality space and memory/history space, respectively. The latter is particularly intensified by the shift from the genre of legends (Chapters 2, 4, and 9) to the more remote and esoteric myths (Chapters 12 and 17) firmly ingrained into the deeper layer of the “collective unconsciousness” on the planet of Gethen. For instance, Chapter 2 is a North Karhidish hearth-tale, Chapter 4 is East Karhidish Arabian Nights-like folklore, Chapter 9 is an East Karhidish tale, and Chapter 12 is a North Orgoreyn Yomesh Canon (Bible style) story. Considering the words of directions (North––East), the movement of the narrative spot is indeed from North to East along the sigmoidal curve from top to bottom. The legendary/mythological narratives of Chapters 2, 4, 9, 12 and 17 are written in Le Guin’s distinctive style constructing a highly reliable planet with myths/legends serving as the mass mind that is situated at the core of the cultural location, and functions to shape the surface level of narration. In this sense, the five legends/myths constitute, in Greimas’

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term, the deep narrative structure or the narrative grammar, where Greimas argues the narrativity is situated (Greimas and Porter 1977: 23). Le Guin explains the relations between unconsciousness and shadow/darkness in her nonfiction work. On the title of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin claims that “We like to think we live in daylight, but half of the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night” (1992: 11) and proposes that science fiction is a modern fantasy. Le Guin highly values the sphere of shadow and regards a space voyage, in essence, as a way through somebody else’s psychic abysses, “in order to reach the others, the artist goes into himself. Using reason, he deliberately enters the irrational. The farther he goes into himself, the closer he comes to the other...A rational perception has all got down into the unconscious, and ferment in the darkness, and work slowly back into the light” (1992: 185). Compared with reality, the space of legend/myth and memory/history is shadowed darkness, which remains opaque and shapes the contour of reality in an enigmatic and mysterious way. In this way, the narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness strides both forward and backward to the future as well as to the past, as the time indicators of those 5 legendary/mythical narratives stretch from the past to the ancient, and even to the prehistoric time.35 The chronological progress of time is thus fragmented. Time is no longer a linear extension, but a curved one with both dimensions of past and future. Such an arrangement of narrative time highly aligns with the view of time of The 35 Chapter 2 is recorded during the reign of Argaven VII, Chapter 4 is recorded on 93/1492, the same as real time, happening on a date unknown, Chapter 9 is narrated before the days of King Argaven I, Chapter 12 is composed about 900 years ago, and Chapter 17 originates to prehistory.

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Left Hand of Darkness, the discipline of presence, and Le Guin’s view on the time dimension of science fiction. In her words, “The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future...but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (1969: 3). On the nature of science fiction, Le Guin thus breaks down the science fiction genre stereotype to stretch its time and space, mostly by compressing the “being to the death” adventure and “can not do anything for the deceased” epic into a narrative of presence. Throughout the narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness, there are mainly four quasi-asymmetrical places addressing the perception of time on the planet of Gethen. These are in Chapter 1 and the Appendix after Chapter 20, as well as in Chapter 5 and Chapter 12, with the former ones being time on Gethen (composed of the nation of Karhide and the nation of Orgoreyn), and the latter ones being time in Karhide and Orgoreyn respectively. At the beginning of Chapter 1, the time calculation method is described by the narrator Genly Ai, “It is always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year’s Day, as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary Now” (Le Guin 1969: 5). After the end of the last chapter, Le Guin adds an appendix named “The Gethenian Calendar and Clock”, where it explains again the Year One, “In Karhide/Orgoreyn years are not numbered consecutively from a base year forward to the present; the base year is the current year. Every New Year’s Day the year just past becomes the year ‘one-ago,’ and every past date is increased by one. The future is similarly counted, next year being the year ‘one-to-come,’ until it turns becomes the Year One” (Le Guin 1969: 147).

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Although one is self-unconscious, and one self-conscious, the two religions on Gethen, Handdara and Yomesh, share a common view on time, with an ultimate emphasis on presence or the center of time. In Chapter 5 with the title “Domestication of Hunch”, the narrator Genly Ai goes deeper into Karhide to see foretellers of the Handdara that is the Karhideian religion with a mythical discipline, the Handdara discipline of presence. There he meets Faxe, the weaver. After a ritual through a “spiderweb”, a web of power, with Faxe the weaver situating at the center, Ai’s question is answered. Although a foreteller acquires the capacity to answer, what foretelling does is to “exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question” (Le Guin 1969: 38). Chapter 12 is a Bible-style myth describing the view of time in the Yomesh religion of Orgoreyn. The God-like figure Meshe is the Center of Time. Every man is at the Center of Time, thus are the pupils of his Eye, “there is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time...One center, one seeing, one law, one light” (Le Guin 1969: 82). The sigmoidal curve of time stretches farthest to the future in Chapter 5 where Genly Ai asks Faxe, the weaver to predicate the future with a positive answer, and farthest to the past in Chapter 17 where the genesis of mankind is explained in a prehistoric myth. Yet speaking overall, a balance is reached between past and future, thus an eternal presence is achieved in this textual level of spatial pattern. Moreover, the balance of past and future combines Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukacs’ nostalgic “cannot do anything for the deceased” epic genre and the future-oriented “the being to the death” novel genre, vividly expressing the thematic poem’s lines “Two are one, life and death, lying together...like the end

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and the way” (Le Guin 1969: 115) in an imagery spatial pattern. The second level of Zoran’s reconstructed world is the chronotopic level. The very term chronotope is introduced to literary criticism by Mikhail Bakhtin. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin defines the concept of chronotope, We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity...we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). (Bakhtin 1994: 84-85)

Zoran implants Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope as the second level of world reconstruction. On this chronotopic level, according to Zoran, the reconstructed world is already independent of a verbal arrangement of the text, but is still dependent on the plot. On this level, the effect on the structure/organization of space is produced by chronotype, particularly in terms of the movement and the action of the narrative (Zoran 1984: 315). Most characters including Argaven the King and Faxe the weaver in Karhide are at rest, restricted to a state of being bound to a given spatial context both geographically and mentally. Argaven XV has a fear of new ways and new ideas, using fear to rule his people to confine them in a mental space of fear, and Faxe the weaver refuses to learn mindspeech from Genly Ai, against progress and change. However, in The Left Hand of Darkness, there are two characters of motion, Genly Ai and Estreven,

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who both possess the ability to cut him off from the spatial context and switch to different contexts. The whole story starts from Genly Ai’s motion from Ekumen the Known to the Planet of Gethen, develops with Estraven and Genly Ai’s relative motion to each other, and ends shortly after Estraven’s rest from death. It is more obviously judged from the titles of chapters, most of which are named by places or motions, such as “A Parade in Erhenrang”, “The Place Inside the Blizzard”, “One Way into Orgoreyn”, “Another Way into Orgoreyn”, “Conversation in Mishnory”, “Soliloquies in Mishnory”, “Down on the Farm”, “The Escape”, “To the Ice”, “Between Drummer and Dremegole”, “On the Ice” and “Homecoming”. Genly Ai and Estraven move to the countries of Karhide and Orgoreyn. The former is characterized as incalculable, insane, involuntary, introvert, indirect and slow, with a sense of “always being under the shadow of something high and gloomy” (Le Guin 1969: 28) as manifested in its architecture of red keystone arches made from human bones and human blood, as well as sky-reaching towers and palaces. On the contrary, the latter is prominently associated with comfort and openness. These two countries can thus be logically represented by the spheres of darkness and light. Zoran is concerned with the synchronic and diachronic relationships on the chronotopic level of spatial patterns. In the synchronic relationships, he focuses on motion and rest, whereas in the diachronic relationships, he emphasizes directions, axes and powers. As stated in the last section, time composed by narrative spots is represented as a sigmoidal curve, and this curve also demonstrates the axes of movement, with the light sphere as the place of Orgoreyn and the dark sphere as the

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place of Karhide, thus the tangent of this motion curve becomes the indicator of motion direction. Both Genly Ai and Estraven undertake the axis from Karhide to Orgoreyn, and back to Karhide, which is from the sphere of darkness to the sphere of light, and back to the sphere of darkness as indicated by the tangential line of the sigmoidal curve of time and path. Coincidentally, their motion paths are almost the same despite the initial departure from each other. Estraven is exiled first and arrives at Orgoreyn earlier than Genly Ai; meanwhile, before leaving Karhide, Genly Ai goes deeper into the Fastness place in Karhide to learn of its religion of foretelling. Soon after they meet each other in Orgoreyn, Genly Ai is arrested and sent to the concentration camp-like Pulefen Farm in the depths of Orgoreyn, and is later rescued by Estraven. Both of them embark on a homecoming journey full of trials and tribulations to Karhide. As Genly Ai mentions, “I was born to live in exile, it appeared, and my one way home was by way of dying” (Le Guin 1969: 28), and what follows the homecoming is Estraven’s death. Estraven accompanies Genly Ai on his travels on the alien planet of Gethen for the majority of the time, except for Ai’s misunderstanding of Estraven and Ai’s last wandering after Estraven’s demise. This is also represented in the chronotopic spatial pattern, as the first three chapters and the last three chapters are narrated by Genly Ai, while other interval chapters (except legendary/mythical narrative chapters) are narrated by Genly Ai and Estraven in sequence, depicting their mutual chronotope, the same time-space, from Genly Ai’s and Estraven’s perspectives respectively, such as “Chapter 10. Conversation in Mishnory” narrated by Genly Ai versus “Chapter 11. Soliloquies in Mishnory” narrated by Estraven,

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“Chapter 13. Down on the Farm” narrated by Genly Ai versus “Chapter 14. The Escape” narrated by Estraven, and “Chapter 15. To the Ice” narrated by Genly Ai versus “Chapter 16. Between Drummer and Dremegole” narrated by Estraven. More than the natural places of the two countries, Karhide and Orgoreyn, Genly Ai and Estraven are actually moving back and forth along axes with definite directions in the field of powers (Zoran 1984: 319). The turning point occurs at the center of the circle, which is the question of sex in Chapter 7, a scientific investigation recorded by a woman investigator from the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen. Before Chapter 7, in Chapter 6 with the title “One Way into Orgoreyn”, Genly Ai sets off west to leave Karhide and turns back no more, and in the small town of Kuseben, he meets his kemmer (lover) Ashe. After Chapter 7, in Chapter 8 with the title “Another Way in to Orgoreyn”, Genly Ai gets the identification paper and is able to go to Orgoreyn, the evening before Ai leaves Karhide, and Estraven’s kemmer (lover) Foreth visits him. Such an arrangement of movement indicates that only by an objective and scientific perception of the problem of sex on Gethen, can Genly Ai move smoothly along his path, otherwise, he is not capable of moving any further. Setting the question of sex at the center of the spatial pattern signifies Le Guin’s central concern on composing The Left Hand of Darkness. In the 1960s, the second-wave feminist movement begins to gain momentum, and the real difference between men and women is the elemental question for Le Guin and other feminist thinkers of that time. Her philosophical “thought experiment” in The Left Hand of Darkness is thereby inspired.

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Therefore, the spatial pattern of a circle with a curve crossing through is established. It divides the circle into two fish-shaped spaces, one light, one dark, representing the future oriented “the living to the dead” narrative of reality and the past-oriented “can not do anything for the deceased” narrative of legends, folklore and myths on a textual level, as well as places the two countries of Orgoreyn and Karhide on the chronotopic level. Such a spatial pattern is further developed to a gestalt of the Tai Chi diagram, with the black point in the light fish representing Estraven, and the white point in the dark fish representing Genly Ai. Estraven is described as a being of darkness, elusive and hard to penetrate, whereas Genly Ai, an isolated envoy on the alien world of Gethen, is always bright against his dark and opaque surroundings wherever he goes. In the topographical space of The Left Hand of Darkness, Karhide and Orgoreyn are two places, as well as the two genres of adventure and epic, and there is a possibility of moving from one to the other. But the actual direction of movement is determined by the chronotopic structure; one place/genre is thus defined as the point of departure, another as the target, and others as stations on the way, deviations, etc. As the narrative spot moving along the curve from the top to the bottom, there first appears the black point in the light fish, i.e., Estraven in the country of Orgoreyn, waiting for the emergence of the white point in the dark fish, i.e., Genly Ai. There is no doubt that Genly Ai exists in the narrative from the beginning to the end, yet nevertheless his misunderstanding in the early period prevents him from seeing Estraven as an equal counterpart, despite Estraven’s constant support for him, no matter under what circumstances.

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What Estraven as the black point awaits is the mutual understanding and recognition between himself and Genly Ai, which truly occurs during their tortured travel back to Karhide, especially after their climactic exchange of foretelling and mindspeech in Estraven’s kemmer period, as Estraven identifies Genly Ai as his lost brother Arek who has been dead for fourteen years. Their mutual exchange does not take the form of bodily intercourse, but by the means of communication both consciously during the harsh journey and unconsciously in dreams and mindspeeches, which can also be illustrated by the topographical map of the Tai Chi diagram. The two points are identical to each other, each as the other’s reflection, but they communicate at a distance, separated by the curve of temporality and axes. Although Genly Ai is bewildered by the biological shock on Gethen, as people there are for the most time hermaphroditic, containing the potentialities of both sexes of female and male, the sexual shell often disappears and over time, the inner, sexless personality emerges. Genly Ai and Estraven identified each other on such a sexless personality dimension and become a duality of existence, after which their boundary becomes blurred and melted away, and it is hard to distinguish one’s speech from the other, as if Genly Ai and Estraven are integrated into an inseparable unity. According to Zoran, the topographic level is on the highest level of reconstruction. The world is perceived as existing for itself, with its own “natural” structure, entirely cut off from any structure imposed by the verbal text and the plot, whose structure may be conceived as a kind of map based on elements from the entire text, including all of its components. In addition, the map has patterns that refer not to the location of things, but rather to their quality and the map is based on a

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series of oppositions (1984: 316). The topographical map of Tai Chi contains light and dark fish-shaped sub-spaces drawn from both verbal text and the plot, and can be used as a meta-structure to explain most elements from the narrative discourse and stories. More explicitly, this topographical map is briefly mentioned after the climax of the story, after the mutual identification between Genly Ai and Estraven, when Ai clearly describes the Tai Chi diagram, “I drew the double curve in within the circle, and blacked with yin half of the symbol...It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness...how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow” (Le Guin 1969: 130). The establishment of such a topographical map is based on both the textual and chronotopic spaces. Moreover, the Tai Chi diagram as a spatial pattern looms on three levels almost simultaneously. As Zoran argues, “the reader does not begin at the textual level and then pass on to the others, or vice versa; rather, he is continually moving back and forth among the three levels and, moreover, he perceives them at once without being able to separate them” (1984: 315). The spatial pattern of the Tai Chi diagram on textual, chronotopic and topographical levels is the best structure to express the theme of The Left Hand of Darkness. Dualism in oppositions of male and female, Karhide and Orgoreyn, and past and future should be transformed into the relation of yang and yin in Taoism, like the left hand and right hand, one is changeable into the other, both are one, as conveyed by the lines below,

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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light, Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way. (Le Guin 1969: 115)

As Zoran suggests, such a topographical map should have the function to explain other elements in the text, though not exhaustively. Now let’s judge its appropriateness by means of its power of textual explanation. There is a conspicuous textual feature, the creation of new words. To demonstrate the high credibility of the truth of the fictional narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness, on the stylistic level, Le Guin creates a system of language on Gethen, as well as a Gethenian calendar and clock corresponding to phases of the moon. The meaning of the Gethen language is veiled, and can only be revealed upon the Ekumenian envoy Genly Ai’s acquisition with his limited knowledge on Gethen. A few Gethenian words remain opaque and beyond Genly Ai’s understanding, such as “shifgrethor” in Karhidish which is used with the highest frequency in discourse related to Estraven, Karhidish King Argaven and the nationality of Karhide, appearing 36 times in total in The Left Hand of Darkness. As a noun, it goes after two verbs for most of the time in phrases like “play shifgrethor” and “waive shifgrethor”, with an opposite meaning. It first appears during Estraven’s equivocal conversation with Genly Ai in the depths of the former’s prime ministerial house on the evening before his forced exile by King Argaven. Upon Estraven’s pause in answering,

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the narrator Genly Ai thinks of himself as an inept and undefended alien who will never understand the foundations of power and the workings of the government in Karhide. Ai attributes his confused confrontation to “a matter of shifgrethor––prestige, face, place, the pride-relationship, the untranslatable and all-important principle of social authority in Karhide and all civilizations of Gethen. And if it was I would not understand it” (Le Guin 1969: 11). Genly Ai’s understanding of “shifgrethor” is based on his experience and he embeds it into his vocabulary. Later, after Ai and Estraven’s journey escaping from the hellish Pulefen Farm in Orgoreyn, and returning to Karhide, Estraven enters the kemmer period, and Ai says to Estraven, “I’ve made some mistake in shifgrethor. I’m sorry; I can’t learn. I’ve never even really understood the meaning of the word.” Estraven replied, “Shifgrethor? It comes from an old word for shadow” (Le Guin 1969: 120). In kemmer, through exchange, partners reach

a

full

understanding

of

each

other

and

longstanding

misunderstandings melt away, though there is no bodily intercourse between them, through mutual learning (Genly Ai learning Karhidish foretelling and Estraven learning Ekumenian mindspeech), their minds communicate effectively. In this sense, “shifgrethor” and shadow, the unknown and the known, the overt and the hidden, all relations of dualism can be demonstrated by the yin and yang diagram. Moreover, there is a coincidence of the number thirty-six, in “Chapter 17. An Orgota Creation Myth”, where the house of flesh is built on the corpses of thirty-six brothers killed by the first awakening man Edondurath, and the architecture of flesh also occurs in Chapter 1. In the city of Erhenrang in Karhide, Argaven XV sets to work methodologically to mortar the keystones of the arches of

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the Old Bridge which is made up of human bone and blood, because without the blood bond the arch would fall. This means that all of the human bones and blood, the corpses of the brothers, are shadows (“shifgrethor”), thus generations originating from the house of flesh, will all live with shadows and be threatened by death, which also explains the enduring omnipresence of fear in Karhide. To sum up, based on the analysis above, a spatial pattern like a Tai Chi diagram is figured out on Zoran’s textual, chronotypic and topographical levels respectively, which works effectively as in the illustration of textual elements, the stylistic feature of Le Guin’s invented word “shifgrethor”. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is thus proved to contain such an exquisite Tai Chi spatial pattern that is highly compatible with The Left Hand of Darkness’s theme of Taoism, whose narrative structure and narrative content combine to an unprecedentedly ideal degree of integration. In Le Guin’s nonfiction Dancing at the Edge of the World, she puts forward the carrier bag theory of fiction. Different from the arrow/spear “proper shape of narrative”, she argues that the fitting shape of the novel might be a sack/bag, since “a book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings” (1990: 169). In this way, Le Guin redefines science and technology as primarily a cultural carrier bag, rather than a weapon of domination like the arrow mode of linear and progressive time. As a pleasant effect, “science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythology genre than a realist one” (1990: 170). The Tai Chi spatial pattern can serve as such a carrier bag, a container, inside which each element can be transformed from one polar to its opposite, thus the

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dualistic mode no longer exists. Moreover, the overall shape of this Tai Chi spatial pattern as a circle subverts the traditional linear narrative of science fiction, expanding the genre of science fiction to contain both elements of mythology and the realist novel, which is Le Guin’s contribution to the narrative of science fiction.

The Symbiotic Trinity Pattern in The Jonah Kit To begin the novel, the author loosely cites the first and last stanzas of the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ecological poem “The End of the Owls” translated by Michael Hamburger. In the first stanza, it is obviously a linguistic violation that the single first pronoun “I” appears without being capitalized, suggesting it is not the traditional figure of any individual human, and instead of telling human stories, the poetic narrator selects animal protagonists like the owl, turbot and whale. The last stanza is a repetition, but also an extension of the first one with a more pressing ethos in denying the lowercased “i” as any human agent among “planners of vanishing actions”, and paralleling animals with the “unspeaking witnesses” of human actions. The two stanzas cited here set the tone for the whole novel, indicating an impending narrative with an estranged narrator and focalization. Moreover, the author doesn’t merely cite the English translated version of the stanzas, but also cites the original German lines, then goes to the translated one, suggesting the idea of translation (printing) by representing the correspondent relations between the original and the copy, which is one of the core concepts in the novel.

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Both stanzas, appearing twice in German and English, as well as the case of the human generational copy and the human-posthuman mind printing, all illustrate the author’s inclination for the process of translation/transformation instead of the mechanic copy. Baby Alice is regarded by Ruth as a desperate copy of Alice’s father, Hammond. Judging by the same facial expressions and gestures, Baby Alice is truly a miniature of Hammond. When she grows up, she will become the perfect model female Hammond and “choose someone whom she could overwhelm…who would worship her briefly; but never be brilliant enough for her, so that his job, whatever it was…would always seem derelict and deficient” (Watson 1977: 22). The human child is a natural copy of the parents, inheriting all of the human vulnerabilities and limitations that are impossible to improve or enhance, which can also be concluded as the existence of being. On the other hand, Pavel’s consciousness is printed onto the whale’s mind, as a partial thing, blending with the whale’s mind, blending to generate a mixture of minds, whose process is pregnant with the larger possibility of transformation and becoming others. The human-animal interaction is within classical parameters, namely, an Oedipalized relationship; an instrumental and a fantastic one. This familiar, Oedipalized,

and

hence

ambivalent

and

manipulative

relationship between humans and animals expresses itself in a variety of ways that have become entrenched in our mental and cultural habits. The first is metaphorization (Braidotti 2013: 69) whose essence is to utilize others as the reflector of human subjects. It is urgent to devise a system of representation, as animals are no longer the signifying system that props up humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations. They need to

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be addressed in a new literal mode according to a “zoontology” of their own (Wolfe 2003). In the novel, human characters are often metaphorized. Richard observes that if Hammond was a sun-tanned, shock-haired vulture, then Kapelka was a blackbird or thrush. Ruth can be compared to pieces of a mirror, just like the dress she wears that night while uttering the news announcement of Hammond’s discovery. On the other hand, posthuman characters are “others within” (Badmington 2004: 1), or becoming-others, like the Jonah whale containing Pavel within and the Nilin boy containing the Nilin within. Compared with the posthuman narrative strategy of becoming-others, metaphorization obviously lacks the embodied and embedded fluid of transformation. In metaphorization, the connection between the subject and the object is established on the basis of a sort of transcendent association, which is the limitation of human narrative with a fixed center and non-human surroundings which function as instruments available for human utilization and exploitation. On the contrary, posthuman becoming-others break human, non-human, and inhuman body boundaries by embracing others within to a continuum of nature and culture, dancing at multiple boundaries with the elation of transgression rather than rigid xenophobia. Embodied and embedded becoming-others truly bring others into the order of the cosmic cycle, which in essence is a symbiotic narrative provided by a posthuman vision. As discussed above, it is clear that what the author addresses in this novel is more than one species, either of human or whale, but the relations between multiple species. Symbiosis from the Greek ıȣȝȕȓȦıȚȢ

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“living together”, from ıȪȞ “together” and and ȕȓȦıȚȢ “living”, refers to a close and often long-term interaction between two different biological species. In 1877, Albert Bernhard Frank uses the word symbiosis which had previously been used to depict people living together in a community to describe the mutualistic relationship in lichens. In 1879, the German mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary defines it as “the living together of unlike organisms” (quoted in Margulis 1991: 305). Borrowing the biological concept of symbiosis for narratology can better explain the becoming-animal posthuman’s ethical aspect. The interaction between human and animal constitutes the identity of each. It is a symbiotic relation that hybridizes and alters the “nature” of each one and foregrounds the middle grounds of their interaction. Symbiotic relationships include those associations in which one organism lives on another, or where one partner lives inside the other. In other words, one organism cannot live alone, and can only survive together with another, or inside the body of another, which can be described as “others within” (Badmington 2004: 1), conveying the essence of the posthuman narrative as becoming-other, and the symbiosis narrative is thus adequate to live up to this posthuman challenge. Considering the novel’s narrative perspectives, there are at least two major perspectives, the human perspective and the posthuman perspective. Within the human perspective, there are multiple national perspectives, including Russian, American and Japanese. The novel is alternatively narrated from the perspectives of the whale and human from various parties including Russian, Japanese and American scientists and politicians. The Jonah whale’s consciousness stretches through the whole novel in a plot roughly in accordance with the biblical Jonah story,

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as Jonah’s mind was implanted into the whale’s brain in a form of mathematical abstraction by a Russian research institute. The novel opens with a whale represented as the third-person male pronoun “he”, swimming through the depths, cruising over an undersea mountain range, heading up to where it can glimpse the sky. His words are quite limited to adequately describe the blurred tangible feelings around him, and are always haunted by insubstantial memories of being inside a steel tank as a prisoner. This same steel encloses empty spaces, shaping his bodily organs like the intestines, stomachs and lungs. Jonah is Pavel Chirikov, a blind Russian musician who has suffered from cancer and is dedicated to becoming a volunteer for the Soviet research program of mapping a human mind onto that of a whale. Pavel’s memory of being inside a submarine intermingles with his present touching sensations under the sea, forging his cognition of his present status of being inside his new whale body as if it is made of steel; “it’s as though he’s only a steersman in a vast Steel made of flesh” (Watson 1977: 15). Meanwhile, his zombie-like real body is kept in a house in the Russian research center occasionally visited by his lover, also the prime controller of the Jonah program, Katya Tarsky. Besides this whale bodied human, there is another corporeal metamorphosis included in the Jonah program, a boy with the mind of a Soviet cosmonaut, Georgi Nilin who goes missing from the Russian Research Center, but is found in Japan with his pseudo-intention to escape to America to seek asylum. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, deep in the Mexican desert mountains, the Nobel Prize winner Paul Hammond has made the shattering discovery of signals received by his radio telescope showing that our universe is no more than a ghost of

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reality. While debating the announcement of his latest discovery, the research group goes to the cliffs to watch the migrating whales. The whale, the Nilin boy and the astrological discovery, these three startling revelations, seem irrelevant at the first glance, but are twisted firmly together in a climax of devastating proportions when the whales of the world’s oceans unite to answer the mystery of the universe imposed by Hammond’s “Footsteps of God” theorem. Like the three intertwined discoveries, narrative perspectives are also entangled with one another to make out the meaning of the whole story. In the Jonah whale narrative, the third-person limited view is used to adapt to the posthuman’s cognitive status. The partial human memory combining with the animal consciousness lurking in his mind, constitutes his blurring cognition of his undersea surroundings. Becoming used to recognizing things by sight, the becoming-whale makes him rely on hearing and smell to sense his surroundings, “tangs of his own urine tell him he has cruised full circle and crossed his tracks...How pungently he can taste this sea world! How tangibly he can click-map it!” (Watson 1977: 9). As the becoming-animal posthuman contains both the human and the animal consciousness, it is rather a mixing up of information for readers to understand in chapters of the posthuman narrative. It is the intertextuality between the posthuman narrative and the human narrative that makes the text readable and endowed with meaning. In the posthuman narrative, the octopus is only recognized by the posthuman as Ten-Arms, with no name (symbol) attached to the body. The octopus echo with a benign ring to it is recognized by the posthuman as haloed with a light pattern. In such cases, it is by reading the sequential human narrative, that the posthuman narrative can be

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understood. Intertextuality happens not only between the human narrative and the posthuman narrative, but also within various national human narratives. These three narratives, the Nilin boy in Japan, the nihilism theorem in America, and the new type of consciousness in Russia, are not invested with the whole meaning of the novel if judged separately; only through mixing them up, can a complete narrative be made out. The Nilin boy in Japan draws Japanese and American military attention to the Jonah whale in Russia. The Nilin boy’s narrative functions as bait to make Americans and Japanese sense their Soviet counterparts’ posthuman program. The American scientist Paul Hammond’s announcement of his theorem of nihilism brings the world to a chaotic wilderness losing belief in the reality, after which his research assistant Richard Kimble is brought to Russia to send this message to the posthuman for help. The Jonah whale receives the message, swims together with other whales ashore at San Diego and saves humans through group suicide. These three embedded streams of narrative gradually overlap with one another, and finally converge into one spatial coordinate to create a new page for the ethical relations between self and others in a transnational and trans-species sense. There are multiple relations in a triangular spatial pattern in the novel. Besides the Trinity on a semantic level, there is a threesome in a geographical triangle for the three human narratives separately happening in Russia, Japan and America. And when whales are circling to make the ultimate glyph, they meet nose to nose: “old male, old female, younger female in one Threesome” (Watson 1977: 125), which appears in the posthuman narrative, serving as an exemplar for ideal spatial relations. Without indication, the author might actually intend that

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the Soviet Union, America and Japan (as the affiliate of America) can meet “nose to nose” to form such a fluid circle, to replace the triangle in dualism geographically and politically. This threesome breaks the binary thinking deeply ingrained in humanist thought, serving as a transition to a more constitutive symbiotic posthuman mode. Exemplifying the becoming-animal posthuman embodiment enables new possibilities of crossing various binary oppositions ingrained in human cultural conventions. As in The Jonah Kit, the becoming-whale demonstrates the power of saving the human world from decadence in a shell of nothingness. The becoming-whale facilitates the collapsing dichotomous

thinking

in

at

least

three

aspects:

Soviet

Communism/American Capitalism, human/nonhuman (animal), and human/inhuman or alive/dead, even secular/divine. The Cold War dialects are represented by the sharp contrast between the main characters of Soviet and American geopolitical groups. The Soviet professor Kapelka and the American scientist Hammond are metaphorized into the blackbird and the vulture, one beneficial and one saprophagous; as for the Soviet Jonah program volunteer Pavel’s lover, Katya and the American Dr. Hammond’s wife Ruth, one is innocent, and one degenerated; and in the case of the Soviet Nilin boy of the Jonah program and the American scientist Hammond’s daughter Baby Alice, one is the mixture of culture and nature, and the other is simply a natural copy of her self-centered father. Gilroy’s theory of cross-nationalism sets off diasporic mobility and the trans-cultural interconnections against the forces of nationalism according to which, national identity is a mixture of hybridity and cosmopolitanism that is resolutely non-racial. Moreover, advanced capitalism is a spinning machine that actively produces

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differences for the sake of commodification (Braidotti 2013: 58). Labor forces make productions in a mechanical way, falling into the status of machines as capitalism gains its momentum. As Haraway described, the machines are so alive, whereas the humans are so inert (2001: 294). Capitalist societies have extracted the vitality from humans, making them empty shells, impotent and deprived of meanings. The nihilism pregnant in America is badly in need of hope brought about by the posthuman from the Soviet Union with the opposite social system. As for the human/animal dialects, it is traditionally a default convention to take animals as machines/instruments/tools in the Cold War space exploration competition with various examples such as the Leica dog utilized by the Soviet space agency and carried by the Satellite Sputnik into space; as well as for humans’ food and other utilities and profits. Whaling by humans has existed since the Stone Age. Whales are typically hunted for their meat and blubber by aboriginal groups. Japan and the United States are among the most “successful” whaling nations. Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, commercial whaling was historically important as an industry and endangering for whales, and this exacerbated the human/whale to a lethal binary. The binary opposition of human/nonhuman is in essence the opposition between the bios of anthropos and Zoe of the non-human as a vital force of life. According to Braidotti, Zoe is the dynamic and self-organizing structure of life itself which stands for generative vitality (2013: 60). The transgression of the bios/Zoe binary is a post-anthropological turn that links humans to non-humans. The human/inhuman dichotomy divides humans into the alive and the dead. The bodies of two volunteers for the Jonah program, Pavel and

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Nilin, are lethally damaged, and their lives are on the verge of death. They choose the posthuman program, leave their human bodies and transplant their consciousnesses into the new bodies of a whale and a boy. Pavel’s human body is left in a room in the Soviet Research Center, regarded by his lover Katya as merely an “occupant” of the room with an identity of obscurity. It is worthwhile to point out that at the core of these two cases of the human-to-posthuman body metamorphosis debate, is human enhancement. In the cases of Pavel/the Jonah whale and the Nilin/Nilin boy, the split is mutant-like and discontinuous, inducing a cognitive gap which cannot be adequately filled if only judged from a human’s thinking mode of binary opposition. To destabilize the triple dichotomous divide as stated above, becoming-whale brings about the epiphany of the Trinity in a divine sense (the Father––Pavel, the Son––the Nilin boy, the Holy Spirit––the Jonah whale) and the spatial pattern of a threesome (the old male, the old female and young female whales, nose-to-nose in a circle of seven; the triangular military and political powers of the Soviet Union, America and Japan) in a secular sense. The spatial pattern of a triangle functions effectively as a transformative pattern for the lethal binary pattern by absorbing more constituents into the balance, thus resettling the old balance of binary opposition into the new balance of a dual triangle re-coupling the secular with the divine, thereby bringing beliefs back to the chaotic human world of the wilderness. It is also worthwhile to mention that it is through the posthuman’s death, that the order is regained in the human world. The Jonah whale as the becoming-animal posthuman of Pavel, as indicated by the biblical story of Jonah, is the Pavel/Jonah embodiment of resurrection. As a

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creature of hybridity, the Jonah whale is outside the natural process of evolution with a discontinuous existence of becoming, which can be qualified as animal-cyborg, a technologically mediated nature-culture continuum. Functioning as God’s child, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, the Jonah whale accepts humans’ vulnerabilities and sacrifices as a scapegoat for human misdeeds, bringing baptism for the world by his unceasing bleeding. As the posthuman’s life ends in saving humans, unnatural life is wiped out, and the resurrection comes to a halt; consequently, the world goes back to its previous visage. This ritualistic scene of sacrifice is also compared to the Japanese samurai committing seppuku as a defense against being ashamed, which is an attempt at getting a glimpse of the inner psyche of the posthuman carrying out the deed of suicide. The posthuman’s logic of performing suicide to end his transient life in the present world is beyond explanation in the novel. Nevertheless, it performs like the Japanese samurai protesting against the human and technological intrusion into the natural order of the whales’ world. In spite of advanced technology for decoding the whale’s clicks, whistles or songs, they remain divine beings in the depths of the ocean. As local aliens, like aliens on other planets in outer space, whales are beyond human understanding, or in other words, the communication between human and aliens once again proves to be unfeasible.

The Recursive Mirror Labyrinth in Galatea 2.2 In Galatea 2.2, the AI reading machine, Helen functions like a mirror, a medium through which the narrator regains his capacity for self-projection by constructing the image of his self on the other side of

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the mirror; that is, by seeing through the object, the subject really achieves self-retrospection for the purpose of self-construction. The narrator gets his identity virtualized into the character of the same name, Powers. Moreover, in the narrator’s flashbacks of his traumatic relations with his human lover, we find that it is the lack of a narratee after losing C. that constitutes the narrator’s stagnation in his life. For the narrator, not only the AI reading machine, but also his lost lover C. are mirror-like existences with the significance of reflecting the narrator’s haloes and are consequently deprived of their own embodied life. The narrator cherishes a persistent inclination for escaping into the virtual reality in his narrative empire, which can only be achieved through the medium of

a

mirror-like

narratee,

be

it

female

or

machine.

The

pseudo-autobiographic narrative is developed in a recursive mirror labyrinth pattern, in which human life is unceasingly reflected back and forth in the narrative in a becoming-other manner. Narrative for the narrator, analogous to the internet, is a powerful technique of becoming-other. The novel explores the impact that the web brings to human life in the 1990s. Tracing the history of science and technology of the 1990s, the icon for the decade is doubtless the invention of the web, which unprecedentedly changes human life. Also at that time, the personal computer was not yet popularized, and its possession and use were quite restricted to a few advanced researchers in the governmental or commercial institutions around the world. 36 36 A brief history of the World Wide Web, abbreviated to WWW or the Web begins from the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of it in 1989. The first web browser computer program was also written by him, which was employed at the European Organization of Nuclear Research or CERN in Switzerland in the year 1990. The Web browser was not released outside of

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Although personal computers had been sold worldwide since the mid-1970s, the PC market gained momentum from the early 2000s. In 2001, only half of the households in Western Europe had a personal computer and the figure was 40% in the United Kingdom, while in 1985, there were only 13% of British homes processing a personal computer. The situation of surfing the internet in the 1990s was much different from nowadays, as it was a relatively new and mystifying field of interest mostly for hobbyists and technicians. Linking up with the web, as well as his lack of human contacts, gives the narrator an ethereal feeling of transcendence in the final triumph over space and time, since by using the web, the narrator can reside elsewhere other than his real existence and could live a life in multiple chronotopes simultaneously. The web replaces a human neighborhood that is “more efficiently lonely” and users of the internet become alienated, as they disguise their identities and adopt every other persona but their own. The architecture of the Center is an analog of the web, as it is spacious enough for individuals to reside somewhere with little chance of a face-to-face meeting, thus providing residents with “awful freedom”, where one can drift without limit and still not be reprimanded. As a result of residing inside the Center or the web, the narrator begins to think of himself in the virtual third person, with his digital oversoul like a disembodied world-web address. Such a transformation of identity, shifting from a real one to its virtual counterpart is a facet of the impact that the web incurs in human life. In the narrative practice, the narrator CERN until the next year, first to other research institutions and then to the general public in the same year. The unavailability of the web to the masses also comes from the lack of popularization of its end-terminal, the PC or personal computer.

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also makes consequent changes by descending to a lower ordered narrative level, alternating from a narrator to a character, “I saw myself as a character in this endless professional convention: the Literary Lurker. Novice symposium dabbler, who no one knew was there” (Powers 1996: 15), and he thus enters the metadiegesis narrative. Although he was back at the old university in his memory, the location of the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences is sharply new to the narrator. The daily route for him to go to work at the Center passes through the old alma mater. This indicates that for the narrator, the Center is both familiar for its location near U. and unfamiliar for its architecture simulating the neuronal mass it investigates, which contributes to the Center being an ideal locale of cognitive estrangement for initiating a narrative of science fiction. Inside the Center, the non-human machines automatically gain momentum and grow across the complex threshold, while human scientists easily get lost in the huge inner space of the Center, and remain physically isolated in their cell-like rooms for most of the time, connecting with each other and the world through the web. Scientists pursue transcendence in virtual reality over engineering in a real world. The interfaces between human and machine are transparent, the individual person is fully immersed or overwhelmed in the self-assembling web as he/she connects to machines all over the face of the earth. Later in the book, it is described that the Center is draining the university dry and reducing humanity to an “obsolete, embarrassing museum piece” (Powers 1995: 273). In other words, the Center and the University are synonyms for science and the humanities; one is the present working place for the narrator, while the other is the place of his past lingering in the narrator’s memory. The situation

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between them is like Haraway’s paraphrase, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (2001: 294), toward the end of the twentieth century, studies of humanity are on the wane, while sci-tech disciplines boom and thrive accompanying the high speed development of science and technology. Starting his visitor residency in the Center, he regards himself as a “token humanist” who betrayed his love for physics and shackled himself to literature. Being a humanist means that as a bearer of the humanist legacy, the narrator still holds an affirmation in human beings’ value and agency as well as human freedom and progress, which cannot be shared by nonhuman others like machines or artificial intelligence that can simulate, but cannot experience human emotions. Humanism praises the state of solitude as an ideal of self-sufficiency, free from being enslaved by others’ opinions. Solitude is the price that the humanist pays for freedom and independence. At the same time as offering “awful freedom”, the web also makes people fully taste the flavor of solitude. As the narrator confesses, “I felt my perfect solitude” (Powers 1995: 11), he exiles himself to the deserted, empirical darkness, only to ravish himself from his memory about a loving but volatile Dutch-American lover C. with whom he has ended an eleven year long and torrid relationship. Then he meets the enigmatic computer scientist, the neural networker Philip Lentz who also works in the Center. Lentz plays the same five minutes of Mozart repeatedly after midnight in his office to a bank of machines, training them to recognize beauty, hoping to trigger souls or to get out the ghost of the machine. Contrary to the narrator’s humanist position, Lentz is the token posthumanist, compared with human

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attachment, and he prefers to trust machines. He must have been at least sixty, in earth years. To judge by his pallor, the fellow avoided all contact with natural light. His puzzled blink suggested that he avoided human contact, too, to the extent of his abilities. (Powers 1995: 13)

As a typical representative figure of scientists at the Center, the narrator perceives him as an alien as if not coming from the earth, a “frictionless” becoming-machine posthuman radically disembodied from natural human life. Instead of triggering the soul of the machines, by calling the narrator a “reclusive novelist living in the Netherlands”, Lentz makes the narrator embark on the metadiegesis narrative of his past with C. The Netherlands is as mythical to the Americans as the States are to the Limburger. C. and his parents are Dutch immigrants in America. Before being expatriated to America and meeting the narrator, a lot of things happened to C. and her family, and her imperishable Dutch past tells its story and makes her a melancholy and anxious lover for the narrator. C. feeds the narrator with descriptions from her memory, and the narrator writes them down and gets his writings published. But this time when the narrator tries to write his next book, he finds it extremely difficult and all he can find is the first line, “Picture a train heading south”, failing to continue with his writing and clueless as to where he gets this opening line. This difficulty to write or tell his story is actually a problem confusing the narrator. Not until the end of the novel, after the narrator’s ten months of interaction with Lentz’s AI machines, can he initiate his southward train in writing as well as in his life, i.e., to move on with both his fiction creation and his life by writing down the whole

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story about the process of writing this book. From this view, this novel is a metafiction about novel-writing itself, a narrative about narration and a narrative therapy enabling the narrator to heal from his traumatic relationship with C. In describing the judge and the examiner of the narrator’s machine training project, Lentz is quite sarcastic. On the basis of the scientist’s or engineer’s perception of literary critics and literature readers, on the “distinguished judge” Harold Gupta, Lentz says, “He is a Shakespeare man. Soft on the Renaissance. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t feel some nostalgic twinge about the fall of man” (Powers 1995: 52). In the preface and prelude to The Western Canon (1994), citing lines from W. B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, Bloom points out that “Things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called ‘the learned world’” (Bloom 1994: 1). The end of the twentieth century was Harold Bloom’s prime period as he was such a well-acknowledged critic that came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the canon wars of the early 1990s. His Shakespearian studies, the defense of Romanticism, the anxiety of influence theory and most importantly, the Western canon, are on the must-read list of every student majoring in English literature. Powers apparently draws a real-life human figure, the distinguished literary critic, Harold Bloom into his diegesis as if to invite him as the distinguished judge of the AI machine’s literature acquisition project. Powers drawing a real-life figure into the story-level is a narrative strategy to echo and reflect the virtualization of identities as an effect of the connectionism brought about by the wider and wider use of the web

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in the 1990s. This strategy has already been deployed for the author-narrator-character Powers. The pseudo-autobiographical style of the novel has enabled the author Powers’ metamorphosis into the narrator, and earlier in the novel, the narrator has metamorphosed into the character to initiate an autodiegetic framed narrative. Powers uses the character’s utterances to indirectly put forward his doubts about Harold Bloom’s asserted categorization. It reduces literature to a series of canons keeping some great writers like Kipling off the list and treating literature as a closed self-sufficient system with a traditional chronological lineage and inheritance left by great dead authors who are so important that they can be discerned in almost every literature work. What Powers also criticizes is New Criticism’s restricting literature reading as merely a disembodied aesthetic process, as the narrator contends, “the study of literature would lead no further than its own theories about itself” (Powers 1995: 65). On the “examiner” Ram Plover, Lentz says, “Plover is a harmless, sentimental slob. Ram will do anything in his power to avoid conflict. We just have to train a network whose essay answers will shatter their stale sensibilities, stop time, and banish their sense of loneliness” (Powers 1995: 53). If Harold Gupta is the incarnation of the privileged literature critics, then Ram Plover must be the most miniature of peer readers, who are well prepared with established sensibilities towards canonic literature works and counting on reading literature works to relieve their routine sense of solitude, without the ambition to argue about the content of literature works as critics do. Powers has thus established a triangular pattern, which means that the AI machine’s literature analysis produced after training will be valued both by literary

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critics represented by the character Dr. Harold Gupta and expected readers represented by Dr. Ram Plover. Just as the novel’s opening sentence/paragraph indicates, the narration is like one thing, but it is actually something else. As Jan Kucharazwewski interprets, it “conflates psychological and metafictional modes of narration into each other and indicates the hybridism of a text that simultaneously allows for a psychological-realistic reading and a postmodern-metafictional interpretation” and “the motif of storytelling as a strategy of survival that indirectly counters postmodern claims about the death of the author” (2008: 173). In other words, the narration functions as both a psychological healing process and a metafictional process. Everything is constructed narratively, even the relationship between the narrator and C. What they used to do as a way of interaction and communication was to read or improvise a narrative to each other, each being the other’s entire audience, feeling euphoria in their hearts. Among their imagined stories based on their respective memories, one story about the window narrator and the patient narratee lying on the next bed37 that the narrator tells C. is repeated several times. This repeatedly embedded story becomes a mythopoetic allusion for the whole fiction, which encapsulates and foreshadows C.’s leaving as well as the artificial 37 The story goes like this, there are two men lying in the critical ward, the one with heart disease has the window bed, he spends all day weaving elaborate reports of the community he “sees” outside the window to amuse his ward mate who can’t see the view from where he lies. One day the window narrator suffers a heart attack. Instead of helping the window narrator, the paralyzed ward mate knocks the window narrator’s medicine to the floor thus guaranteeing his move to the window bed to see the wonderful view described by the window narrator. The ward mate is moved to the emptied window bed the next day, and what he sees is nothing but a brick wall.

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intelligent reading machine, Helen’s dealings with the disembodied narrative world constructed by the narrator and the embodied reality she has never experienced yet is longing for. It is in sharp contrast that the male human characters are weird, isolated, fatigued with communication, and aloof from family life, such as the narrator and Lentz, while the female characters such as C. and the artificial intelligent machines, are eager to learn and absorb information by listening to men’s stories. The hospital story is repeatedly alluded to during the whole novel, and the two patients, the story-telling patient near the window and the listening patient away from the window, are exactly alluding to men, women and machines. After noticing the real nothingness outside the window, the women and machine decide to self-eradicate because they cannot survive the lies told by men. To the narrator, lying equates to storytelling, “lying constructively was my job description” (Powers 1995: 54). Only if she/it can shift the position from reader to author, can she/it outlive the falsehood of the world, and construct a new order with the co-evolution of the human and the posthuman. On the autobiographical narrative in Galatea 2.2, focusing on the genre identity, John Rieder (2007) analyzes the juxtaposition of life writing and science fiction indicating that genre identities ought to be grasped as complex social practices that connect discourse and power in a variety of ways. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint suggest, “it is crucial to remember that autobiography is always a dual portrait—of the self but also of the world in which that self exists” (2007: 100), and autobiography is one’s coming to self-knowledge through language and narration. In connecting the narrative of autobiography to artificial

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intelligence, they mention that “Life-writing theory has much to learn from current research on memory because memory itself, like writing now seems to be a process of active shaping and editing” (86). Both autobiography and memory are artificially constructed, open to a process of tampering and distortion, as this autobiography is not a truthful representation mirroring the author’s past, but is ostensibly tampered and tinkered with to fit into the whole fictional narrative, which can also be seen from the narrator’s monologue later in the novel, Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers’ rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal grab, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God. (Powers 1995: 320)

The nature of the autobiography is thus both factual and imaginative, which is consistent with the poetics of science fiction that according to Darco Suvin integrates cognition and estrangement to reach an effect of novum. The dominant novum should not be frictionlessly divorced from the reality, but based on it, and it is thus different from fantasy in that it is not impossible. There is a dialectical interaction between cognition and estrangement in science fiction, allowing readers to be aware of the world of the story that is constructed by both the reality and imagination. On the other hand, Powers chooses the genre of autobiography to carry out his narrative in science fiction of humanizing an artificial intelligence by making it acquire the human ability to interpret literature texts. Thus, the comparison between human intelligence and machine

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intelligence is logically shaped by the genre of autobiography. Human intelligence survives to the end and ascends the diegesis level to the primary world to write this autobiography of the experience of interacting with AI in the novel we read, while the machine is humanized as it can really make a choice to die. In other words, it is the ability of narration, the imaginative and embodied use of language, that enables the human race to survive even under the impact of the information torrent brought about by the advancement of the web in the digital age. The human succeeds not in knowledge learning, but in his capacity for reconstructing epistemological materials into possible narratives. Autobiography is a form of narrative that is uniquely procured by the human brain, and lacking the ability to narrate its own story leads to a machine’s failure to gain its own subjectivity. To sum up, becoming-other is the mechanism of the narrative in Galatea 2.2. As a key to the flow of life, the narrator is always on the way to finding the expected narratee to build his narrative empire, so as to complete his self-construction as a being-in-the-world. However, the activities of self-projection lead to the narrator being lost in the infinite recursive mirror labyrinth of isolation and loneliness, and only by altering the way of telling through automatic autobiography instead of telling his own story to an otherized narratee, can the narrator change the trajectory of life and embrace a new future coexistence with the other.

The Chinese-Box Pattern in The Bridge The Bridge contains at least three narrative levels. The first level comprises the narrator’s third-person flashbacks of his childhood in

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Glasgow and his higher education, work and sociality in Edinburgh. The second level comprises John Orr’s first-person narrative of his patient life in a hospital on the bridge and his train journey of the ODV (obligatory deathly villain) away from the bridge. The third level comprises the Barbarian’s first-person Scottish phonetic narrative of his quest for gold in the tower of the evil queen, an underground quest for the Sleeping Beauty on the Isle of Dead, and his death at an old age. Besides these three main narrative sequences, there are other narrative pieces that are less coherent. These include the narrator’s narrative about his present situation in the hospital bed, and other dreams dreamed by Orr except for that of the Barbarian such as Orr’s dream of the bridge topography and several fake dreams invented by Orr for cheating Dr. Joyce and protecting his real dreams from clinical dream analysis. Orr’s narrative is the narrator’s dream in a coma, while the Barbarian’s narrative is Orr’s dream inside the narrator’s dream, which is a double framing narrative in a Chinese-box structure, with each narrative level “representing a distinct ontological level, and thus introducing an inwardly descending hierarchy of worlds within worlds” (Pisarska 2012: 84). The Chinese-box structure refers to a frame narrative, a novel that is told in the form of a narrative inside a narrative (and so on), giving views from different perspectives. Using Genette’s terms to describe the Chinese-box narrative, Brian McHale names the primary world as a diegesis, and a hypodiegetic world is projected as one level “down” from the diegesis, then there is a hypo-hypodiegetic world and so on, an additional “hypo” being prefixed for each level as we descend “deeper” into the narrative levels (McHale 1997: 113). Pisarska changes McHale’s

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prefix “hypo-” to “meta-” for the latter is more coherent with Genette’s terminology, though scholars such as Monika Fludenik address Genette’s easily misconstrued term “metadiegetic” which refers to “a story about rather than within a story” (Fludenik 2009: 100). More importantly, Banks also uses the prefix “meta-” in naming the three sections related to Orr’s life on the Bridge, i.e., Metaphormosis, Metamorpheus, and Metamorphosis, which carry the implication of “crossing over and transition” (Middleton 1995: 22). Therefore, it is more suitable in this analysis to use the prefix “meta-” to refer to the descent to one or two lower narrative levels. Therefore, the narrator Alexander Lennox’s38 narrative is on the diegetic level, John Orr’s narrative is on the meta-diegetic level, and the Barbarian’s narrative is on the meta-meta-diegetic level. In other words, the Barbarian’s narrative is embedded in John Orr’s narrative that is embedded in Alexander Lennox’s narrative. These three levels of embedding structure can be compared to the topography of the psyche, with Lennox being the narrator’s superego, Orr being the narrator’s ego and the Barbarian being the narrator’s Id. This internal embedding structure of the mind is analogous to the geological structure of the earth, which is exactly what Banks does in The Bridge as well as in other 38

The name of the narrator is never explicitly mentioned throughout the novel. What the readers know about his name is that his initials are “AL”, which can be seen from the monogrammed scarf that Andrea gives him. “Alexander” can be deduced from people making jokes calling him and his wife Nicola Russian imperialists. “Lennox” can be deduced when people ask if he is related to the lead singer of the Eurythmics. However, the narrator repeats several times that he has forgotten his name, so it is more suitable to call him the narrator or the protagonist in previous analysis to make the narratological study of the novel clearer. It is necessary to write in his exact name instead of calling him the narrator, since the narrator is shifting among different levels of diegesis.

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novels such as A Song of Stone (1997). The correlation between the structure of narrative, the topography of the mind, and the Earth’s geology can be seen from the chapters entitled Triassic, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Quaternary which are chronological geological periods extending from the ancient times to the present. The posthuman planetary thinking of becoming-earth can be found in Banks’ novels, as Banks often presupposes a geological memory linking the human origins with the beginnings of the Earth and the entire cosmos, the primordial connection being manifested in the human and Earth’s shared biochemical composition and formative process (Pisarska 2012: 85). Banks uses geological prehistory as a synonym for man’s subconsciousness as both of them are unreachable by man’s memory or consciousness, but can be approached or entered in the chronotope of dreams. Therefore, the development of chapters with titles from the most ancient geological period (Triassic) to the most recent (Quaternary) synchronizes with Lennox’s gradual awakening from his subconscious inner self to the conscious self facing the external world. As the embodiment of Lennox, Orr and the Barbarian actually live the life of Lennox, though distorted and displaced in their different stories. To put it differently, the meta-meta-diegetic and the meta-diegetic narrative echo the diegesis, and this echoing effect among narrative multi-layers is also called mise-en-abyme drawn from French poetics by McHale, A true mise-en-abyme is determined by three criteria: first, it is a nested or embedded representation, occupying a narrative level inferior to that of the primary, diegetic narrative world; secondly, this nested

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representation resembles something at the level of the primary, diegetic world; and thirdly, this “something” that it resembles must constitute some salient and continuous aspect of the primary world, salient and continuous enough that we are willing to say the nested representation reproduces or duplicates the primary representation as a whole. (1997: 124)

The three-layered narrative world is not stable, and metalepsis happens more and more frequently as the narrative develops, indicating the possibility of transgression or even inner collapse of the topology of the narrative. The Barbarian’s meta-meta-diegetic and Orr’s meta-diegetic worlds are reproductions or copies of the diegetic world in a highly metaphoric way. Lennox is the alter ego of Banks, and in the same way that Banks is creating the reality world for Lennox, Lennox builds the world for Orr and the Barbarian. However, Orr and the Barbarian both have their own subjectivities. Lennox, Orr and the Barbarian are no longer satisfied with their lives in the present world. They want to know more about the world in which they dwell, and thus try to transgress to the higher level of narrative worlds, as demonstrated in Orr’s persistent investigation of the Third City Library and the Barbarian’s will to live on even at a fairly old age. Not only are the protagonists in the lower level narrative eager to enter the next higher level, the highest level protagonist also frequently transgresses into the lower level narrative, causing the noises heard by the lower level protagonist. Orr incessantly sees a still picture on a TV screen, showing a man lying in a hospital bed surrounded by machines and occasionally accompanied by a nurse.

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The sick man can only be seen by Orr on the screen, with a totally different appearance from Orr. Through the media of camera, Orr is actually able to become a second-ordered observer to see himself; this picture is sent from the primary world of Lennox, and this man is Orr himself. Without identifying with this dying man on the screen, Orr feels less anxious about the camera and its implicit claims to be a superior truthfulness. The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The world of a movie-within-the novel should be metadiegetic rather than diegetic, i.e., the dying man on a hospital bed should be at a lower level of diegesis according to readers’ expectations, but on the contrary, it reflects a higher-level reality of the observer. Compared with the Barbarian’s narrative and Lennox’s flashbacks, Orr’s narrative takes place much earlier, thus it is most liable to make readers believe its truthfulness. While Orr occasionally sees the unmovable picture of the dying man and hears unidentifiable noises, these unexplainable events interrupt the linear development of Orr’s narrative, forming metalepsis which intensifies the ontological instability, titillating readers to doubt the reliability of the narrator. The screen functions as an inter-level mirror directing the higher level scene to one level below, and also forms a movie-within-the-novel embedded sub-level, which has the effect of disorienting the reader and undermining the ontological status of the metadiegesis. Readers have to shift their focus onto other levels for truth-seeking. Noises and the movie-within-the-novel occur on Orr’s narrative level causing it to be inharmonious with the primary world. Combined with the hospital identity of Orr as an amnesia patient, metalepsis makes readers hesitate as to whether Orr is a reliable narrator; nevertheless, it is not the only

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way of increasing readers’ suspicions. Narrative distance is also well manipulated by the author to control the narrator’s reliability. Lennox’s narrative is composed of two parts, his limited and obscured feelings about the surroundings and his present situation during the coma, as well as his limited third-person flashbacks of his past, including four chapters entitled Coma, Triassic, Eocene and Coda. Compared with the first-person narrator of Orr, the narrative distance of the nameless third-person narrator is deliberately enlarged; though it belongs to a higher-ordered narrative world, readers will feel that it is more distant, more like watching a movie of a man’s life story instead of feeling that it is “my” story. On the other hand, like Orr’s narrative, the Barbarian’s narrative is also woven by a first-person narrator, yet the language the Barbarian uses, which is different from that of most readers as it is phonetically written in Scottish, plus the crude and savage characteristics of the Barbarian, as well as the fantasy and mythological style, all expel the reader away from the Barbarian the narrator. Therefore, Lennox, Orr and the Barbarian are all unreliable narrators. While among the three, Orr has the smallest narrative distance considering his standard language and first-person perspective, he is still taken as a main focalizer for the whole narrative. Moreover, the diegetic world of Lennox’s flashbacks appears rather late, on more than one hundred pages from the beginning of the whole narrative, deliberately misleading readers into regarding the embedded secondary world of Orr as the primary, diegetic world, thus soliciting readers’ involvement in the unreal metadiegetic world. This is also Banks’ device to invite readers to drop down to an embedded narrative level without returning to Lennox’s

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primary diegesis of trauma and pain after the car accident. However, later, readers will find that this supposedly real representation is revealed to have been merely virtual, and the supposedly virtual representation of Lennox is shown to have been truly real after all. On his journey on the train, Orr meets the Field Marshal and his motley band39 looting and killing other people. The Field Marshal has been the highest rank in the British Army since 1736. In the novel, the Field Marshal is depicted as a dictator who is fond of torturing prisoners and has an abnormal sexual inclination toward his pig. This scene where the villain is killed seems very discontinuous from Orr’s patient life on the bridge, yet this appears so often in Banks’ novels that Rich Puchalsky (2001) coins it as Obligatory Deadly Vengeance, abbreviated as ODV. The ODV plot appears in nearly every novel by Banks and has the following invariant structure: the protagonist is presented as ordinary, a good person. However, there is a villain. We know he is villainous because he does exaggeratedly villainous things that are far worse than anything most real-life evil people do. After we have been regaled with stories of how bad the villain is, the protagonist kills the villain, often in some “poetic justice” fashion, and often with torture. However, the protagonist’s murder or torture/murder is fine, justifiable, and good—because the bad person is such a villain. 39 The Field Marshal tortures the victim by designing various outrageous games such as throwing the captured soldiers into boiling mud pools and fastening a rope to a victim’s neck and forcing him run in front of the train. Orr’s handkerchief as a token for Abberlaine is taken from him and used by the Field Marshal for nose blowing. In witnessing the disgusting sex between the Field Marshal and his pig, Orr uses the machine-gun, previously given by the Field Marshal to add to the fun, to fire at the Field Marshal’s head, thus ending this villain’s life, and he takes his handkerchief back from the dead Field Marshal’s uniform.

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Banks loves the ODV plot, which exists in Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), and Look to Windward (2000), and in a lesser form in The Player of Games (1988) and The Crow Road (1992). Complicity (1993) is based on it. The protagonist, Orr’s personal detestation for the Field Marshal comes from his taking away the handkerchief and blowing his nose with it, which aligns with the majority’s abhorrence of the Field Marshal. His killing of the villain functions as his personal revenge and is justifiable since it is also done on the society’s behalf. The ODV becomes a pattern in Banks’ writing. Considering the reasons why Banks makes it a common occurrence in his works, it probably comes as a result of both the author’s choice and the audience/market’s choice. From the author’s aspect, the ODV scene functions as compensation for the protagonist’s suffering in a previous narrative plot, such as Orr’s feeling of being oppressed in the love relationship with the Chief Engineer’s daughter as well as the narrator’s similar situation of failure in controlling his relationship with the upper class lover. The violent scenes of the ODV are releases of rage that otherwise fail to have an outlet anywhere else in other narrative sequences. Though they do not really answer any emotional buildup in previous sections, they achieve catharsis in a new story that is not absolutely separated from the previous narrative. It can thus be seen as a displacement of the target of revenge not towards those who frustrate the protagonist, but those who orient his arrow to the widely accepted villain to act upon his revenge. In this way, the protagonist can escape the punishment caused by the revenge, since the revenge is also for the people’s sake; in other words, after wish fulfillment, he becomes a hero

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rather than a murderer. The first ODV scene can be traced back to Banks’ first published book, The Wasp Factory (1984). Banks wrote several science fiction narratives that were not accepted for publication before he got The Wasp Factory published when he was thirty. The child protagonist is a psychopathic teenager living on a remote Scottish island. According to Banks, this allowed him to treat the story as something resembling science fiction, as the island can be envisaged as a planet, and the teenage protagonist Frank almost as an inhuman alien. Frank killed three of his relatives: two cousins and his younger brother. He also exhumed the skull of the dog that castrated him, so Frank is also a murderer and innocently carries out cruel violence. After the publication and success of The Wasp Factory, Banks began to write full-time. There is no doubt that The Wasp Factory has earned Banks a reputation and an audience, although it is controversial due to its gruesome depiction of violence, and for the consideration of the market and retaining the audience, it is necessary for the author to coherently instill his works with his remarkable style of the ODV, which gradually seems to become a habit for him in his novel writing. Judging from Banks’ political stance, the ODV also has significance. Banks’ books are inherently political, so the ODV’s continued exploration of the killing of the oppressor theme just comes off as a kind of failure of the political imagination. Banks’ political position can be described as “left of centre”. He is a firm supporter of Scottish independence. Therefore, in his works, Banks strives for the exploration of the leftist social change. Center-leftists believe in working within the established systems to improve social justice, which is the political

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keystone to the ODV theme expressing a certain kind of reluctance to take deadly vengeance on the killers, and in reality, this is not unusual and almost becomes a requirement for successful leftist social change as can be seen ever since the French Revolution. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848) asserts that a proletarian revolution would eventually overthrow bourgeois capitalism and create a classless, stateless and post-monetary communist society. Thomas Paine’s concept of asset-based egalitarianism theorizes that social equality is possible by a redistribution of resources. The protagonist of the ODV is definitely a configuration of the other oppressed from the wide gap between the rich and the poor incurred by the social hierarchy, who takes action and “innocently” kills the dictator or the monarch, thus ending the previous social hierarchy and bringing a new era for the people. In most of the cases, what comes after the revolution is a classless anarchist utopia, and the protagonist is absolved from his crime of murder either because it is justified or innocent. In other words, the ODV scene is necessary for Banks to express his inherently “left of center” political stance by imagining a social change caused by the protagonist’s unconscious revolution. Take a second look at Banks’ ODV narrative that is arranged as a seemingly unnecessary afterword to Orr’s life on the Bridge. Such a sequence filled with violence and pornography with an absurd narrative expression can also be seen in postmodernist writings. There is a similar ODG (Orgasm Death Gimmick) scene running throughout William Burroughs’ fiction, which involves erotic, absurdly melodramatic, or horrifically violent materials. David Lodge concludes that “where one kind of aesthetic presentation is embedded in another, the ‘reality’ of the

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embedded form is weaker than that of the framing form…when we come to the Orgasm Death Gimmick, no norms have been established by which its nauseating grotesquerie can be measured and interpreted in the way intended by Burroughs” (Lodge 1977: 37-38). The ODV narrative makes a stylistic disruption of Orr’s previous narrative of his life on the Bridge, and the effect is much stronger than the occasional noisy disturbance and the dying man in the screen, and as a result, readers get to recognize that the stable narrative doesn’t exist; what is stable is the constant change. Like the violent eruption of volcanoes seen by Orr during his train journey in the ODV narrative, the meta-diegetic world he inhabits turns into ruins imbued with dust and death. The kernel of Orr’s meta-diegetic world is ruined, as are other locations on the bridge, which literally means the collapse of the meta-diegetic world. As for the meta-meta-diegetic world where the Barbarian dwells, he has been killed by a young Barbarian who enters the body of Orr and they become one person. As there is no place for Orr to return, the only choice left for him is to wake up, enter the primary world and become Lennox, no matter how painful it is. Therefore, Lennox opens his eyes and the three of them become one. Banks sets up an elaborate hierarchy of levels, only to allow it to break down before the reader’s eyes, which is one means of foregrounding the ontological dimension of the recursive structure. The Barbarian erases himself and becomes Orr who also does self-erasure to become Lennox. It is the sacrifice of the two lower ordered narrative worlds that guarantees the legitimacy of the primary world, which also can be interpreted as Lennox inhibiting the sex and power fantasy of the Barbarian, the Id, and Orr, the ego succeeds in uniting his Id, the ego

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with his superego, Lennox, and gets himself revived to confront the outer world. Except for the three-level Chinese-box structure, the topology of chapters is also delicately arranged. Orr’s meta-diegetic narratives contain three sections entitled Metaphormosis, Metamorpheus and Metamorphosis, sandwiched by four chapters of Lennox’s primary world narrative entitled Coma, Triassic, Eocene and Coda. Inside each of the three meta- sections of Orr’s meta-diegetic narratives, there are four chapters among which the Barbarian’s narrative occupies the fourth chapter, and from both content and textual space, the Barbarian’s story is the innermost part of the narrative. In addition, each of the four chapters of the meta- sections is divided into two parts, first comes Orr’s dream or pseudo-dream, which continues with Orr’s daily life on the Bridge. However, as the whole narrative evolves into the Metamorphosis section, which is the last section of the meta- sections, just as the section title indicates, the two parts of each chapter change from the pattern of Orr’s dream plus Orr’s reality to Lennox’s primary world narrative plus Orr’s incredibly outrageous ODV narrative. It guides readers to change their focus from Orr’s narrative to Lennox’s one, which also means that Lennox is on his way to waking up. Comparing the chapter titles in the three meta- sections, it is only in the last meta- section, that is the Metamorphosis section, that the four chapters truly become entitled, i.e., Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Quaternary. This suggests that the protagonist has regained more consciousness and memory, becoming able to spell the word “metamorphosis” correctly40 and endowing every

40

There is a possibility that the first two Meta-sections with titles similar to

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chapter with a distinct name picking up from his previous study of geology. Banks’ chapter design here is like a zigzagging curve, swinging between dream and reality back and forth. The narrator vacillates between wish-fulfilled dreams and harsh reality, in most of the cases, escaping from the traumatic ontological level by retreating to lower level diegetic worlds. Nevertheless, after the inevitable collapse of the embedded worlds, he has to come back to face and deal with his disappointing yet everlasting love for Andrea, his compromise of the proletarian roots and exploiter status, and the conflict between his socialist political stance and Thatcherite capitalism.

“metamorphosis” are misspelled, for the narrator’s lack of memory about the spelling.

CHAPTER EIGHT CONCLUSION

Suppose you are looking at a large-scale painting. You can see the details quite clearly when you stand near the painting. However, if you want to appreciate the whole painting, you must step back and leave enough space to acquire an ideal visual scope. The posthuman provides the human with such a distance of observation to see the whole human picture and reflect on the very notion of being human. Analogous to the way spatial patterns emerge from each narrative, with the perspective further raised, it can be revealed that the four selected narratives in science fiction coincidentally formulate a posthuman tetralogy. This become-posthuman tetralogy covers a time span of nearly half a century and a territory range of major Anglophone countries, with chronological concerns of becoming-woman in the 1960s, becoming-animal in the 1970s, becoming-earth in the 1980s and becoming-machine in the 1990s. The coincidence does not lie in the expectations of individual authors, let alone individual characters, which is a result of a semi-nonhuman force. Different from any tetralogy composed by a single author, this posthuman tetralogy is composed by multiple human authors. Judging from a larger non-human scale, there emerges a posthuman sequence of development and shared specific narrative strategies, thus forming the posthuman becoming narrative studied in this research. This sense of

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emergence or coincidence is also crucial for the so-called posthuman becoming narrative that has denoted a processual metamorphosis ever since and away from the creation towards a perpetual becoming-other. It can be concluded that the posthuman becoming narrative, at least in these four selected science fiction works, is mythical and apocalyptic whilst being embodied and embedded. The posthuman life originates from myth. Bearing human memory, it embraces the becoming-other metamorphosis to construct an embodied and embedded posthuman existence. Moreover, the posthuman’s life in contemporary science fiction is ephemeral. It bravely ends in a self-extinction manner so as to embed itself in the perpetual becoming. The emergence of the embodied and embedded posthuman disrupts the humanism dichotomies by adding more hybrid subjects to the self/other opposition, and brings back the all-too-human humanity to the chaotic world of presence, which is performed in line with the very logic of reactive nihilism.

Posthuman Narrative––Mythical and Apocalyptic; Embodied and Embedded Although dwelling in the blurred terrain between fiction and reality, the posthuman’s existence is embodied and embedded in the Deleuzian becoming-other mode. Accordingly, the posthuman becoming narrative is mythical and apocalyptic, yet paradoxically, it is also embodied and embedded. In consequence, analogous to the narrative in science fiction, the posthuman becoming narrative is endowed with the greatest intensity of narrativity anchored in the very tension between imagination and experience. It should be mentioned that it is the development of science and technology that transforms the posthuman becoming narrative from

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mythical and apocalyptical fantasy to embodied and embedded science fiction, and as time elapses, the posthuman becoming narrative will become realist non-fiction in the near future. As the core and entry point of the posthuman becoming narrative, metamorphosis has been a traditional literary theme approached ever since ancient Greece and Rome. When the hierarchy is stable, the direction of metamorphosis goes strictly from the higher creature to the lower creation, i.e., from human to non-human. Roughly in the epoch of Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries, the hierarchy is destabilized and transgressed, and the metamorphosis happens from the lower to the higher, i.e., from animal to human. Entering the 20th century, the hierarchy is reconstructed, and the metamorphosis takes place from the higher to the lower, i.e., from human to non-human in the becoming-other posthuman metamorphosis. It is concluded that the posthuman is both a stride forwards, departing the humanism evolving from the Enlightenment, and meanwhile backwards into the more remote past beyond humanism. The posthuman narrative calls for the return of order and belief so as to ameliorate the chaos caused by mankind’s transgression. Therefore, the posthuman narrative is not a brand new form but a contemporary style revisiting the primordial narrative mode of metamorphosis in ancient Greece. The mythical essence of the posthuman narrative is situated in its narrative of the apocalyptic cataclysms. In other words, the posthuman narrative is the apocalyptic myth that is related to events of destruction and ends with the image of a new creation, reflecting modern man’s aspiration of returning to the original primordial state to find the absolute reality, a more powerful,

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rich and meaningful reality opposed to the profane world of presence. Moreover, the apocalyptic feature of the posthuman narrative is situated in the twofold destruction in a reactive nihilism way. The first destruction happens in the metamorphosis from the human to the posthuman, which inevitably involves ceasing to be a human, and the second destruction is the posthuman’s self-extinction, after which the double negation is completed so as to bring all things back to the origin even

before man’s

corruption.

In

this

way,

the

posthuman,

posthumanism and the posthuman narrative are in essence the roundabout strategy of atavism, dramatically stretching forward as a means to reset to the remoteness even before the existence of humans. The posthuman narrative is mythical and apocalyptic in the way that Le Guin describes The Left Hand of Darkness as a “winter journey”, a tale of dissolution yet a narrative of revival in Frye’s seasonal archetypal schema. After the dying off of winter, life will come again in spring. The guarantee of posthuman narratives’ apocalyptic aspiration of starting all over again after the catastrophic demise is the cyclically endless history; in other words, history and time in the posthuman narrative contain a non-linear aspect. The cyclical view of time is held by posthumanist authors. For instance, Le Guin claims that there are two aspects of time: “one is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation”, and the other is “the circle or the cycle, without with there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises” (2001: 223). Time is at the same time linear and cyclical, and neither can be understood in isolation. While the linear view of time dominates the realistic narrative, the cyclical view of time is prevalent in mythical narratives. To endorse a

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cyclical time view makes the posthuman narrative closely akin to the mythical one, thereby endowing the posthuman narrative with the possibility of going back to the time of the primordial age, to inject man’s life with meaning, significance and effectiveness in a resurrection manner. The logic of reactive nihilism in the posthuman narrative suggests that destruction is inherent in the transforming process of creation and growth. As the winter tale at the threshold of a new cycle of life, the posthuman narrative is mythical and apocalyptic in recognizing destruction as a creative principle and espouses the will of self-extinction to improve our understanding of life and death, since fear is always accompanied by a greater hope: we wait, after the cataclysm, for a better time. The rise of the posthuman brings the end of the being of human, and the death of the posthuman is ensued by the birth of the becoming of human. The double negation strategy ensures the return to the human reconsidering human’s relations with non-human others and the world. The mythical and apocalyptic nature of the posthuman narrative is deeply seated in an embodied and embedded ground. The fully-fledged posthuman becoming narrative is of the world and in the world, in an embodied and embedded manner, denying any possibilities of transcendence by the division in the mind-body-world system. As an embodied narrative, the posthuman becoming is corporeal, based on the bodily experience whilst engaging with the world. Addressing the importance of embodiment to narrative, Mackenzie points out that the possibility of narrative is that we have an integrated conception of the self as an embodied agent (2009: 114). Moreover, the embodied self is embedded in an environment. The embodied subject of the posthuman is embedded in the world, intensively playing with all the living matter,

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and even the planet and the cosmos as a whole are called into play. Meaningful

experiences

are

spatially

expressed

in

terms

of

communication in an embedded way. Concerning the importance of embeddedness to narrative, Menary argues that the self is structured dialogically in an intersubjective fashion, and the narrative self has an inter-subjective or dialogical structure (2008: 83). In The Left Hand of Darkness, the becoming-woman posthuman Gethenians are embodied with their androgynous biological physical structures, and embedded in a cascade culture and society, living against the relentless cold climate on the winter planet. The whole narrative of the novel is exactly designed with an inter-subjective or dialogical structure with the sequential narrators, Genly Ai and Estraven. Information becomes complete when combining the two sequences of narrative, since any single narrative line is partial and unreliable, indicating that the monologue alone is the restriction to the process of becoming, and a posthuman becoming identity is dialogically constructed. In The Jonah Kit, the becoming-whale posthuman of the Jonah whale is embodied with the whale’s body in a new embedded environment of the deep sea. Analogous to a new-born whale baby, he has to learn and accumulates the bodily experience as a whale, interacting with other whales, and adapting to the marine environment, whilst his pre-experience as a human has to be translated to the embodied language of the whale in order for the construction of a meaningful memory. In Galatea 2.2, due to the lack of embodied and embedded experience of the world, the becoming-machine posthuman Helen feels exhausted in listening to the narrator’s embodied and embedded narrative of his past, and chooses to terminate her life. In The

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Bridge, the narrator in a coma is divided into multiple imperceptible personas separately developing their narratives, and even the body and the mind are separated with different embodiments. In this way, the narrator is actually embarking on a self-healing process, in which he becomes a mature narrative self by constructing a narrative point of view from which the embodied experiences are narrated. The process of becoming-imperceptible saves the narrator from trauma by providing him with multiple embodiments and embeddings to revisit his innermost spirit of life and strength. The posthuman myth, memory, metamorphosis and death are narrated in an embodied and embedded manner. The posthuman protagonists are embodied and embedded in posthuman myths. The protagonists in the Gethen myth in The Left Hand of Darkness, the biblical story of Jonah in The Jonah Kit, the Greek mythological story of Galatea in Galatea 2.2, and the Barbarian’s adventure in The Bridge share great similarities in bodily features with becoming-other posthumans. These posthuman figures intimately interact with other mythological characters to make them more authentically adapted to the world of myth. The significance of the emergence of the posthuman is attached to the interplay with other entities rather than an independent and frictionless figure solely coming out of the imagination. The posthuman memory is embodied and embedded in that it is not artificially made like the installed memory card but bodily experienced by that very posthuman before the metamorphosis deeply situated in the human society. As a counter-example, in Galatea 2.2, it is impossible for the AI machine to truly become human, though it can remember all the information imparted by the human narrator, and completely pass it on to

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the next generation AI machine, yet the knowledge gained from such memory is disembodied and disembedded. Hence, without the miraculous transformation from the inorganic statue to a lively woman endowed by divine power, the AI Galatea feels despair to die in the mythical garden. The posthuman metamorphosis is embodied and embedded in that the metamorphosis is corporeal, and indeed, in the genre of science fiction, the transformation of the body that takes place is well grounded on science and technology rather than unexplainable magic in fantasy. Moreover, the transformation is a material one, not a virtual one like the escapist mind uploading onto the internet and forms the virtual persona, hence denying any possibilities of Descartes’ separation of the mind from the body, proving that the transcendence of the mind is an illusion. The posthuman mortality is embodied and embedded, which is evident in the mortality of the posthuman. The disappearance of the body goes together with the termination of the mind, and the mind is not transferred into another body to resume a new life, but is intimately bound with the body. This is so, even in the most exaggerated case of the Barbarian in The Bridge, whose body and mind are embodied separately in the swordsman and the familiar perching on his shoulder. In the scene of death, slain by the young swordsman, the old swordsman and the familiar die at once, and the familiar’s death can also be seen in the opaque thought of the new swordsman, since the embodiment of the telling mind is gone with the old swordsman. To conclude, the posthuman narrative is embodied of this world and embedded in this world, without otherworldly escapist aspirations for the transcendence of the mind. In addition, the posthuman narrative is the

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mythical winter’s tale, the myth of the ending, earnestly awaiting the apocalypse at the very boundary between demise and rebirth, aiming at restoring the world to the primordial beginning before man’s existence, when the entropic chaos becomes an ordered cosmos, and where creatures live symbiotically on a planetary and cosmological grand scale.

Posthuman Narrative and Science Fiction–– Reactive Nihilism As theoretically argued in Chapter Two, science fiction is a literature genre that combines literariness exemplified by strangeness, with philosophiness demonstrated by its truth-seeking journey on an exilic ground, and this is ideal for the exploration of the posthuman(ism) issue. Based on detailed analysis of the selected narratives of science fiction, the parallel logic between the posthuman narrative and narrative in science fiction can be revealed by the conception of reactive nihilism, i.e., by the negation of this world, a higher world or existence is presented to justify or grant worth to this world. Narrative in science fiction is often engaged in depicting an alien world like Mars or an alien existence on this world like Frankenstein, thus providing a negation of the world or the being of human. However, whether the new world is utopic or dystopic, or the new existence is amicable or hostile, narratives in science fiction are inclined to end with the second negotiation of the possibility of permanently living on the alien world or the perpetual life of the alien on this world. In this way, the narrative of the other world or other mode of existence is in fact rhetoric in showing us that we are safe in the embodiment of human and bound to embed in this world. We are thus only in this given world without the illusion of transcendence.

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The tradition of the posthuman narrative is firmly ingrained in the narrative in science fiction, as can be seen in the narrative of monsters and aliens. From this lens, the posthuman is the contemporary substitute of the alien other. Compared with the monstrous and alien “ancestors”, the posthuman is more intimate in relation to the human, whose body is at least partly human and the posthuman lives on the same planet of earth together with the human. In essence, they are local aliens: humans who have undergone corporeal metamorphosis with the principle of “cognitive estrangement”. In this way, the posthuman metamorphosis is embodied and embedded in the poetics of science fiction. As the most prominent feature of the posthuman narrative, the posthuman metamorphosis is taken as a breakthrough point to thematically and stylistically elucidate the posthuman narratives in the science fiction textual samples. If the posthuman metamorphosis is deployed as a device to go beyond the human, then the posthuman mortality in a self-destructive manner is the move to ontologically return to the human, which completes the “true journey” claimed by Le Guin as she contends that any act of going beyond is in essence to return to the origin. The logic here is also a “thought experiment” one. As explained by Le Guin, in going to outer space, what one will ultimately reach is the inner self, or in Braidotti’s words, “metamorphosis is neither a tight-rope nor a web, but rather the rope of a bungee-jumper, dangling in a tantalizing way in the void, making quick excursions into it, but always bouncing back to safety” (2002: 10). Besides, the reactive nihilism is not restricted to the coupling narratives of the posthuman metamorphosis and the posthuman mortality, but is also embedded in the posthuman myth, memory and spatial pattern.

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The posthuman myth is the pastiche or rewriting of human mythological stories. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the Gethen myth is the pastiche of both the feminine mythos of milk and the phallic mythos of blood leading to a balanced myth of androgynous creation. In The Jonah Kit, the biblical story of Jonah is rewritten to adapt the whale with Jonah in its belly to the image of becoming-animal posthuman. In Galatea 2.2, the Greek mythological figure of Galatea’s transformation from a statue to a woman by its sculptor Pygmalion, is compared with the becoming-machine posthuman, as both stories share the same process of humanizing. In The Bridge, stories of several key figures in Greek mythology like Prometheus, Sisyphus and Medusa are interrupted by the uncivilized Barbarian, and their doomed destinies are thereby changed. The nihilism embedded in these posthuman myths is also reactive, in that the deconstruction of Western myth is ensued by the construction of the posthuman myth which is the tool that must be seized for the emergence and survival of the posthuman. The narrative of the posthuman memory is for the purpose of oblivion. As can be seen in the four samples of narrative in science fiction, too much obsession with the past locks the narrators into the circle of the self. The nostalgic posthuman is overburdened by memory, be it collective or individual. In The Left Hand of Darkness, with the dogma and criteria on the issue of gender, Genly Ai is confused in understanding the androgynous Gethen society, even with Estraven’s help, which leaves him obliged to suffer more torture and troubles in figuring out the situation. In The Jonah Kit, the fragmented memory of love incessantly visits the Jonah whale, turning him into a puppet of love, unable to escape from the manipulation of the human. In Galatea 2.2, the

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symptoms of disease from the gradual erosion of memory result in the narrator’s incapability of narration. In The Bridge, the unbearable weightiness of the traumatic memory leads to the narrator’s car accident and the subsequent coma in which he resumes a blissful life of unbearable lightness as an amnesic patient. The reactive nihilism in the posthuman memory lies in the paradox of memory narrative, because to remember is to disremember. For the posthuman, the memory of being a human is suffocating and burdensome, and this memory must be forgotten in order to form the posthuman identity, which is obviously a painful process of self-denial and self-annihilation, yet only by the surrender to oblivion, can the posthuman forge the independent identity, different from the identity of being a human. In this way of oblivion, the posthuman undergoes a process of Deleuzian becoming-child, devoid of past and memory, and is thus free to dive into a new life of becoming, mindlessly faithful in the future. The posthuman narrative’s spatial pattern also aligns with the reactive nihilism, which lies in its impersonality. The posthuman narrative appears to transcend the ephemeral and contingent condition of its own production, demonstrating spatial patterns of emergence, i.e., a world beyond the self and language. Putting it another way, the embedded spatial patterns in posthuman narratives are constructed to sabotage the authority of a coherent self, be it the author, narrator, protagonist or character. Breaking the bounds of memory, the posthuman narrative gets away from the obsession with the expressions of the self by disrupting the conventional narrative structure and ultimately constructing patterns out of individual discourse.

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In The Left Hand of Darkness, with the narrative of Genly Ai’s journey from Karhide to Orgoreyn, and back to Karhide with Estraven on the planet of winter, a spatial pattern of Taoism Tai Chi is revealed, irrelevant of individual characters’ acts and words, which in turn, embodies the theme of balance between yin and yang. Le Guin achieves a formalistic aesthetic by freeing her writing from the confinement of language. In The Jonah Kit, with multiple narrative sequences co-developing in different locations of the world: in the deep sea, in the USSR, in the USA and in Japan, a spatial pattern of the Trinity is revealed toward the end that brings the salvation of the human, and relates to the theme of boundary-crossing communication. Watson brings the third agency into the Cold War dialectics, thus disrupting the mode of binary opposition and echoing the pattern of the Trinity. In Galatea 2.2, Powers creates a kind of writing that unlike autobiography, forces open a window to the world of referents beyond language and its system of signs. The narrator is indulgent in the obsession with self-expression, and as a result, everyone surrounding him is projected to be mirrors cutting all voices from without. The narrative represents a pattern of a recursive mirror, in which the self only sees his own image, and deprives the other into becoming a lifeless statue. Only when this pattern of a recursive mirror labyrinth is collapsed after Helen and A.’s rejection as the mirror-like narratees, can the narrator find that there is nobody left but his lonely self and search for the new way of self-approaching instead of objectifying others. In The Bridge, the Chinese-box-like embedding pattern emerges with multi-layered dream narratives despite the concrete stories that happen in these narrative layers. While each narrator in these dreams embodies one aspect, the narrator splits himself

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into imperceptible personas. By segmentation and reunion, the narrator regains the energy of life. At last, all of the narrative layers, but one, are ruined, and the narrator awakens to his world of reality. Banks sinks his true self of science fiction and fantasy down to the inner core and leaves a numb self of realism on the surface. This embedding spatial pattern functions as a mechanism of integrating the genre of science fiction and nonfiction, as well as bridging the gap between Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks.

Posthuman Narrative and Posthumanism–– Beyond Dualism As aforementioned in Chapter Two, posthumanism is an umbrella term diachronically ranging from anti-humanism, through non-humanism, to inhumanism, and continues to grow and flourish in the spheres of technoculture, literature and philosophy. Philosophically, posthumanism can be seen as a transgressive strategy to go beyond the binary oppositions of male/female, human/nonhuman, human/environment, or simply self/other. Moreover, the philosophy for the embodied and embedded posthuman is Deleuze and Braidotti’s becoming-other that threads through all of the three stages of posthumanism stated above, starting from becoming-woman, through becoming-animal/machine to becoming-imperceptible or becoming-earth, with the purpose of becoming-revolutionary. The four samples of narrative in science fiction not only contain the phenomena of the posthuman, but also represent the theme of the posthuman in line with posthumanism. The cultural, political and philosophical significance of the posthuman’s existence lies in its power

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of breaking fixed boundaries between the self and the other, or at least, emancipating our imagination from the humanist thinking of dualism. The existence of the posthuman lies beyond dualism, as it has a processual character of becoming and refuses any essentialist approach. The three dimensions of posthumanism, anti-humanism, non-humanism and inhumanism as well as their boundary blurring effects in the becoming-other manner, are textually embodied and embedded in selected narratives in science fiction. In line with anti-humanism thought in the 1960s, and deploying the Deleuzian becoming-woman axis, The Left Hand of Darkness constructs a yin utopia, where relations between different genders are established intersubjectively, and the occidental dualism thought of male/female is transformed into the oriental balanced view of yin and yang. In line with non-humanism thought in the 1970s and the 1990s, and deploying the Deleuzian becoming-animal axis and becoming-machine axis, in The Jonah Kit, the mind of a human is artificially printed onto the brain of a whale, constructing the becoming-whale creature crossing the boundary of

the

human

and

animal.

Thus,

becoming-animal

displaces

anthropocentrism and reconsiders the ingrained trans-species boundary based on our being environmentally based, embodied and embedded in symbiosis with other species. In Galatea 2.2, the human narrator establishes an emotional attachment with the AI reading machine trained to learn the Western canonic literature. The machine is no longer the inorganic other without feelings and emotions, but plays the counterpart of human, and is human’s faithful companion and healer, thus becoming-machine breaks down the division between human and technological circuits in considering technological mediated relations

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fundamental to the subject’s constitution. In line with inhumanism thought in the 1980s, and deploying Deleuze and Braidotti’s becoming-earth axis, in The Bridge, the narrator thinks of himself in terms of rock and compares his life to geological evolution. With the metamorphosis to earth, the narrator actually achieves a perpetual becoming without a terminal being, since earth is the cradle of all things, which means that by becoming-earth, the narrator can turn to anything in a becoming-imperceptible way. The whole novel is narrated in the dream version while the narrator is in a coma following a car crash, thus it is rather an afterlife narrative that at least blurs the demarcation between life and death. Therefore, it can be concluded that in these four posthuman narratives of science fiction, anti-humanism in the becoming-woman manner breaks the male/female dualism which thus breaks down the demarcation between man and human others. Non-humanism in the becoming-animal

and

becoming-machine

manner

breaks

the

human/animal and human/machine dualism and thus collapses the boundary between human and non-human others. Inhumanism in the becoming-earth manner breaks the human/nature dualism and thus shatters the division between the human and the environment, as well as the life/death dualism aimed at stretching life beyond death.

Towards a Posthuman Becoming Narrative Challenges brought about in the process of science and technology’s accelerated development raise a number of consequent issues in the cross-section of culture, ethics, and philosophy. Serious responses to

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these issues are found in the four selected novels that bravely take on the mission of seeking a new dwelling place for humans and humanism against the overwhelming flood of contemporary technological advancement. Posthumanism is a balanced phase between technologies and humanism, which the four novels agree to set down and focus on. Accordingly, the four novels attempt to adopt new ways of narrative to echo their posthumanist themes, aiming at destabilizing the cornerstone of being a human by narrating new subjectivities of becoming posthuman. Admittedly, the four narratives are brave attempts in a science fiction “thought experiment” way, from the latter half of the 20th century when posthuman science fiction was rarely written. They arduously explore a way of narrating the life of the posthuman that concertedly contains the myth, memory, metamorphosis and death of the posthuman, and all of these themes are embedded in a narrative space. This research sums up the common components, patterns and features of posthuman narratives in contemporary Anglophone science fiction, indicating and advocating embodied and embedded narratives that are quintessential for the survival of any subject in the posthuman era, be it human or posthuman. After all, the narrative articulated will ultimately outlive the narrator and eternally interact with bodies outside of itself, and become a posthuman art form itself. Therefore, to narrate is to be (the subject) and to become (the other). To answer the fundamental research question centered on narrative, it is a posthuman becoming narrative that is apt and applicable for the narration of the becoming-other posthuman’s subjectivity. It is evident that in all of the selected samples, the strategy of multiple voices is deployed and consequently a landscape of multiple

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narrative sequences is shaped. The use of multiple-voice sequential narratives is a strategy effectively forging an impersonal narration, dispelling the intensity of any single or single-voice narration. If the monologue is a typical mode of individualism highly praised by humanism, then dialogue generated by multiple voices is ideal for posthumanist intersubjectivity. The posthuman becoming narrative strategies can be found in the narratives of posthuman myth, memory, metamorphosis, space and death, respectively. The strategy of non-Oedipus mythmaking is deployed in the posthuman myth narrative to cut off the source of logocentrism as well as the associated patriarchy holding that there is an original, irreducible object of representation that is inflexible and unchangeable which forms the barrier to becoming-other. In Le Guin’s cognitive estranged Gethen world, the Oedipus complex does not exist and blood relations are for the most part represented in the form of siblingship that is more homogeneous with social relations, thus investing in a greater impetus for the openness of blood relations in the social relationship of exchange. The strategy of narrative reflexivity is deployed in the posthuman memory for the formation of a posthuman identity, and this narrative reflexivity is constructed through a dialogical autobiographical narration to guarantee the intersubjective exchange between the narrator and the narratee. Memory plays an important role in the formation of posthuman subjectivity as well as in the posthuman becoming narrative, which contains the posthuman’s past as a human being guaranteeing that the all-too-human posthuman humanity, meanwhile, must be surpassed so as to enter the new stage of posthuman becoming. The posthuman’s formation of the self is based on the autobiographical narrative that is

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carried out for the purpose of forgetting. Powers deploys the style of autobiography in telling his becoming-machine narrative; through narration of the traumatic past and the dialogical intersubjective exchange with the AI machine, the narrator mediates the present with the past and moves his life onward into a future with a different subjectivity. The strategy of non-human perspective is deployed in the posthuman metamorphosis narrative to invite an embodied and embedded view and voice of the other that are different from the anthropocentric frame. In Watson’s The Jonah Kit, two types of becoming-other are narratively represented differently. The first trope is the personification traditionally used to compare human characters to animals, such as using different species of bird to sharply contrast the characteristics of human characters, which is inadequate for the posthuman becoming narrative, since this trope is built on a disembodied association between human and animal, thus

it

is

a

disembodied

becoming-other,

without

corporeal

metamorphosis. The second trope is the whale’s point of view which can be espoused as an authentic posthuman becoming narrative, for it is based on the bodily experience of the Jonah whale; hence, it is embodied as it is situated in the deep-sea environment communicating with other marine creatures. The strategy of non-human resurrection is deployed in the posthuman mortality narrative with an aspiration for redemption from the nonhuman agency of nature. As the tale of winter, the posthuman becoming narrative is embedded in the seasonal archetypal schema in line with the logic of reactive nihilism, endowed with the apocalyptic hope for the cycling of seasons outside human agency. The redemption for the human world comes from the posthuman’s death, as the scapegoat of humans,

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the posthuman, self-sacrifices in a becoming-imperceptible manner and hence enters the perpetual becoming. All of the selected narratives contain man’s fall in a chaotic world, saved by the death of a posthuman, and subsequently, order returns to the human world, echoing the mode of the winter archetype in which dissolution is naturally followed by resurrection. From this aspect, the posthuman becoming narrative is apocalyptic and hence affirmative, aspiring to a different future of change. Finally, the strategy of the non-human pattern is deployed in the posthuman space narrative to dwarf the individual’s perception, to reduce the humanist scale and espouse a grounded perspective on a non-human scale, concerning the planet or the cosmological dimension. On a nonhuman scale, from a nonhuman perspective and in a becoming-other

manner,

the

posthuman

becoming

narrative

is

intensively embedded with the emergence of the non-human spatial pattern. The spatial pattern of the posthuman becoming narrative is non-human because it has little relevance to characters’ wills and actions and is map-like since the three-dimensional space of characters’ actions becomes flatter when it is no longer perceived by a single person. As the scale rises, the familiar space at the human scale shrinks into a point on a two-dimensional diagram, and the individual human being becomes an imperceptible molecule in an estranged space. Spatial patterns are found on a larger-than-human scale, and the world is zoomed out leaving its human witness to an abandoned existence, like a face drawn on the beach erased by nonhuman forces. Practically, in the reality of the 21st century, we have already become posthuman, though we might not realize it. Consequently, the

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relation between the human and the posthuman is parallel to the relation between people in the past and people in the present. We revere historical figures and the inherent wisdom they passed down; meanwhile, we go further into their unknown future, and to some extent, we transcend people in the past. Nevertheless, what remains is the everlasting dialogue with the past. We are intimately connected with our ancestors to seek truth and knowledge from our embodied and embedded memory. The issue is not whether the posthuman will substitute the human in the future, rather it is that humans have already become posthuman themselves without a clear self-awareness. The process of becoming posthuman takes places in the science and technology immersed society today, happening anytime, anywhere, despite the feeling of xenophobia. Therefore, the posthuman is not merely textually embodied and embedded, but has already become a physical reality nowadays and we should embrace the arrival of the posthuman in the same way that we accept ourselves. Overall, as science and technology rapidly developed in the later 20th century, the posthuman emerged to provide humans with the chance of change and told us that it is time for change. Struggling in the process of change, the confused human characters, the hesitant human narrators and the innocent human authors discreetly approach the bizarre posthuman landscape independently, yet soon retreat in concert to the original site of safety to maintain the self which is more or less different from the previous one. The posthuman emerges in chaos, immediately followed by its undefinable extinction and the return of order. The posthuman’s emergence and extinction are implicitly related to the chaos of the human world. The posthuman’s existence is endowed with post-secular

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significance, imbued with the human’s hope for exemption and resurrection. Nevertheless, the posthuman is instrumentalized as the figure of a scapegoat, the new enigmatic other. Metamorphosed from human, and bearing the human memory, the posthuman cultivates empathy for human beings, yet the case is not reversed. More ridiculously, like other non-human entities including animals, machines and the earth, while the posthuman is self-sacrificing or is made to sacrifice for the benefits of mankind, humans are still worrying about whether they will be replaced by posthumans. Knowing how to achieve the circulation of empathy among all the parties despite all the stereotypes and bias is crucial for the construction of symbiotic relations between human and posthuman, particularly, how to curate human empathy for the posthuman is an urgent issue which needs to be investigated in the 21st century’s literature works in future studies.

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