C 2008 Laura A. Diehl ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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c 2008 Laura A. Diehl ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ESTRANGING SCIENCE, FICTIONALIZING BODIES: VIRAL INVASIONS, INFECTIOUS FICTIONS, AND THE BIOLOGICAL DISCOURSES OF “THE HUMAN,” 1818-2005 by LAURA ANNE DIEHL A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program of Literatures in English Written under the direction of Harriet Davidson And approved by _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2008 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Estranging Science, Fictionalizing Bodies: Viral Invasions, Infectious Fictions, and the Biological Discourses of “the Human,” 1818-2005 LAURA ANNE DIEHL Dissertation Director: Harriet Davidson In 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein causes science and literature—two different discourses, two different signifying systems, two different realities—to collide. As it addresses the givenness, or “naturalness,” of “the human,” Frankenstein reimagines the putative boundary between the human and the nonhuman, a fictive border made perceptible by contemporary scientific investigation. Catalyzing a new genre, science fiction, Shelley estranges the enlightenment discourse of “reason,” revealing it as a highly regulative structure through which societies are forged and bodies governed. “Estranging Science, Fictionalizing Bodies: Viral Invasion, Infectious Fictions, and the Biological Discourses of ‘the Human,’ 1818-2005, posits a mutually infective relationship between science and literature. It both exposes the logic of purification that delimits “modern” forms of knowledge as discursively distinct (science v. literature) and considers how this distinction informs the evolutionary/philosophical shifts in how we think about the possible, the human, and the novel. Since literature plays a significant role in the history of science and science a significant role in the history of literature, the dissertation uses each imaginary technology to interpret the other. In so doing, it ii defamiliarizes and recontextualizes not only individual texts, but entire literary histories and scientific discourses that are rarely thought of as science fiction. Finally, the dissertation argues that the question of “the human,” of what we invoke when we invoke “the human,” emerges most powerfully through an interpretive matrix of science and literature, genre and the novel. Though radically different methods of shaping those narratives that concern us all, science and literature both emplot the process by which novelty enters the world and affects our experience of the self and the relatedness of bodies. The epistemological—and epidemiological—encounters the dissertation explores make possible a whole range of new entities, properties, and kinships that connect through unfamiliar evolutionary and intellectual bonds. “Human nature” emerges as neither essential nor unchanging, random nor inevitable. iii Dedication For my parents, Dorothy and Wendell Diehl, for everything iv Contents Abstract ii Dedication iv Contents v Introduction I. Science/Fiction and the Problem of the Human 1 II. Teratology and Methodology 32 Notes 51 Chapter One: Science/Fiction and the Victorian Vampire I. A Science/Fiction Hermeneutic 56 II. The Pre-Modern Vampire 61 III. The Modern (or Post-Modern?) Vampire: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and the Emerging Science Fiction Body, or, Masturbation, Sexual Inversion, and the Vampire 78 IV. Pre-Modern Bodies and Sub-Human Biologies in the Late Victorian Life Sciences 92 Notes 123 Chapter Two: Puppet Masters, the Starchild, and Men Like Gods: Alien Contact and the Evolutionary Significance/Future of the White Male Body I. The Science/Fictions of Microbiology, Immunology, and Evolution 135 II. Alien Invasion and Evolution: The War of the Worlds and the Century of Speculative Biology 146 III. “Is that man next to me an inhuman monster?” or, Horror Autotoxicus: Pod People, Puppet Masters, and the Viral as the Undead 151 IV. The Starchild and Men Like Gods: Evolution by Transcendence in Early to Mid Twentieth-Century Science Fiction 163 v Notes 179 Chapter Three: Evolutionary Hybridization and Symbiotic Kinships in Contemporary Science and Fiction I. Infective Bodies and Posthuman Biologies in the New Science 188 II. “For he was a man and he was alone:” Invulnerability and Stagnation in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend 194 III. Viral Being and Becoming in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark 200 IV. Evolutionary Hybridization and Symbiotic Kinship in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” 207 V. Consciousness Evolution (An Atomic Point of View)—Disembodied Information or Radical Incorporation?: The Case of Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Joan Slonczewski’s Brain Plague 215 Notes 232 Chapter Four: Heredity, Kinship, and Immortality in Genetics and Science Fiction I. The Immortal Gene 238 II. Eugenics and Genetic Engineering 243 III. Polluted Genes, Impure Species, and Alternative (Evolutionary) Kinships in the New Genetics 250 IV. The Hybrid Immortalities of Octavia Butler: The Xenogenesis Trilogy 258 V. Conclusion: Nature, Kinship, and Culture: Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and the Anthropology of Impure Blood 275 Notes 280 Bibliography 288 Curriculum Vitae 305 vi 1 INTRODUCTION Interpreted in a certain way, contemporary biology is, somehow, a philosophy of life. —Georges Canguilhem, Etudes We become self-conscious through self-observation; by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process. —Humberto R. Maturana, Biology of Cognition I. Science/Fiction and the Problem of the Human Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the Vitalist/Materialist Debate To account for the origin and historical trajectory of modern genre fiction, we must revisit the famous ghost-story competition between Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori which produced the first, and perhaps most important, science fiction novel ever written—Frankenstein—and gave birth to a new and very modern genre. Another progeny of that infamous week in 1816 was the literary (as opposed to the folkloric or mythological) vampire. Byron’s fragment of a vampire story written at Villa Diodati but never completed was turned into a novella by his private doctor, John Polidori, and published as The Vampyre in 1819. Two wildly popular creatures (and genres) disgorged out of a gothic, heady mixture of madness and perversion, the metaphysical and the material. More importantly, modern genre fiction arose out of the most heated and controversial scientific debate of the day, the vitalist/materialist debate. The seemingly intractable argument over the origin of life itself (its “purposiveness” or its mechanics) had smoldered for centuries but reappeared with a vengeance at the turn of the nineteenth-century—and in monstrous garb. The hideous progeny unleashed at Villa Diodati were spawned out of the clamorous 2 arguments between materialists who reduced all matter animate or inanimate to physics, and vitalists who refused to believe life could be degraded to nonlife. Vitalists were certain that an ineffable force infused the human being at birth and took leave at death; in other words, life could never be created by (Franken)science. Shelley’s creature and Polidore’s vampire were fantastic responses to contemporary scientific and philosophical debates over the origin and essence of life. For the vitalists, a living being was imbued with a vital principle that distinguished it from a nonliving thing. Life was neither reducible to nor derived from mechanical properties, and the nature of the living principle was beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Contrary to the vitalists, the materialists argued that there was no immaterial principle in the human, and that even the mind was merely matter complexly organized. If you took an organism, no matter how evolved or intelligent, and opened it up and broke it down into its constituent parts, you would find matter and only matter.1 In Frankenstein, Shelley engaged these debates in shocking fashion, and came down squarely on the side of the materialists.2 Neither created by God nor infused with immaterial Spirit, the creature was dead matter stitched together and animated by science alone. Significantly, Polidore, himself a scientist, was the first to animate the undead into English literature (after all, as a doctor he probably, even routinely, bled his patients). Both Frankenstein and The Vampyre registered the shift from a religious to a materialist worldview (where the monstrous warned not of spiritual apostasy but of material degeneration), and the emergence of a strange new biological epistemology, a vision of science’s prerogative to discriminate nature from artifice, life from nonlife. For those who chose to believe in a 3 world without God, the philosophical problem was man’s responsibility for the production of knowledge and what it meant to be human. The uncanny body of the undead dramatized the sense that, in the modern period, biology rather than theology was the key to explaining existence. The discovery of the importance of the future (see Malthus’s On Population) and of biology as the engine of civilization’s advancement (see Gobineau’s Inequality of the Human Races) fed the conviction that