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Reading the Posthuman: Contemporary Fiction and Critical Theory

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Reading the Posthuman: Contemporary Fiction and Critical Theory Reading the Posthuman: Contemporary Fiction and Critical Theory by Luke Hortle BA (Hons) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania November 2016 11 Declaration of Originality This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material that infringes on copyright. Luke Hortle 18 November 2016 Authority of Access This thesis is not to be made available for loan or copying for two years following the date this statement was signed. Following that time the thesis may be made available forloan and limited copying and communication in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. 18 November 2016 iii Table of Contents Abstract v Acknowledgments vii Introduction. A Different Human Story: Novels of the Posthuman 1 Chapter One. Theorising the Posthuman: Theory, Fiction, Queerness 12 Defining the Posthuman: Posthumanism, Animal Studies, Disability Studies 14 Reading the Posthuman: Literature, the Anthropocene, Biopolitics 38 Queering the Posthuman: Difference, Intimacy, Futurity 52 Chapter Two. Condemnation and the Less-Than-Human: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 65 “I Condemn You”: A Less-Than-Human Speech Act 71 Failures of Recognition: Posthumanism’s Poor Creatures 86 Improper Love: Sex, Death and the Less-Than-Human 91 Chapter Three. Human Appetites and the Posthuman Body: Michel Faber’s Under the Skin 105 Under the Knife: Surgery, Sex, Species 110 On the Prowl: Hunting and Sexuality 123 Dangerous Beef: Meat, Cannibalism and Anxieties of Consumption 135 iv Atomised: Escaping the Posthuman Body 145 Chapter Four. After Human Extinction: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake 148 Refusing the End of the World: Human Extinction’s Impossible Witness 155 Flourish and Thrive: Nonhuman Life After Human Extinction 169 Beyond a Reproductive Future: Human Extinction and the Sexual Crisis of Man 180 Chapter Five. Queer Extinction: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods 191 The Lesbian Posthuman: Sexual Difference and Extinction 198 Love and Mutation: Sexual Indifference and Extinction 211 Island of Stone: An Ecology of Extinction 221 “Cast Out Farm”: A Queer Return to Nature 234 Chapter Six. Neohumanism and the Queer Posthuman: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 237 Meat Market: Human Consumption and Posthuman Sex 246 Neohumanism and Posthuman Futurity: Reading the Anthropocene 255 Conclusion: Inhuman Literature 271 Works Cited 278 v Abstract Reading the Posthuman: Contemporary Fiction and Critical Theory Representations of the posthuman in contemporary novels are of great cultural and political significance because of their capacity to expose and challenge attitudes to structures of human privilege and ideas of the future organised around the normative human subject. As a privileged site for the cultural construction of human identity, the novel is an ideal domain not only for examining those depictions of the human but also for breaking them apart. Through analysing the representation of the posthuman in contemporary novels, this thesis seeks to provide a clearer and more critical understanding of the human in novels at the start of the twenty-first century, and the role of fiction in both perpetuating and conspiring against dominant ideas of the human. The thesis mobilises recent theoretical debates about the posthuman and posthumanism as a conceptual framework to investigate the status of the posthuman in fiction. It then offers close readings of how five early twenty-first-century novels imagine the human differently, including Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). The posthuman has traditionally been shoehorned into a question for theory and, specifically, the critical framework of posthumanism. Posthumanist scholarship has often overlooked the posthuman’s proliferation in fiction and, in particular, how significant literary novels of the early twenty-first century have unsettled normative ideas of the human. Indeed, the central argument of this thesis is that the cultural and vi political “work” of the posthuman and posthumanism is carried out by both literature and theory. The thesis defends the position that reading novels is imperative to establishing a critical politics of the human, and argues that novels about the posthuman intervene in posthumanism’s theoretical project. In telling stories of radically decentred human subjectivity, these novels dramatise their own critique of the human and its ensconced position of privilege within the Western cultural imagination. Detailed textual analysis of the posthuman in contemporary literature illustrates the complexities and contradictions underlying culture’s attempts to rework the traditional human subject. In particular, this thesis analyses the persistent depiction of the posthuman as a queer figure in the selected novels and more broadly. In these queer manifestations, the posthuman is militant in its disruption of any normative sense of the human and its future. A reading of Never Let Me Go discusses language’s regulation of the posthuman and normative sexuality’s purchase on the human. An examination of Under the Skin considers the posthuman as a nexus of anxieties about anomalous bodies, sexuality and consumption practices. Analyses of Oryx and Crake and The Stone Gods demonstrate the posthuman’s significance to fictional thought experiments of human extinction, the Anthropocene and human reproductive futures. Finally, a chapter on Cloud Atlas addresses the failure of the posthuman to usher in any final dismantling of the human as the underlying term of Western culture and politics. These analyses emphasise that the posthuman imagination exists in a state of tension with a revivified and normative human exceptionalism, which surreptitiously re-enters posthuman fictions to restabilise narratives upon reassuring human scales. vii Acknowledgements This thesis was written with a great deal of support and encouragement. I would like to thank Lisa Fletcher and Hannah Stark for their insightful guidance, generous feedback and meticulous editorial input, and for allowing me to raid their bookshelves. Their individual expertise and enthusiasm for the project shaped this thesis in innumerable ways, for which I am immensely grateful. I am a better writer and reader because of their scrupulous supervision. For generously funding my travel to conferences in Switzerland and Malta, thank you to the University of Tasmania’s Faculty of Arts Postgraduate Research Support Scheme, the Graduate Research Office’s Conference and Research Travel Scheme, and the Environment Research Group. Thank you to the members of Off the Shelf: Theory Reading Group, for keeping alive the thrill of theory, for showing me what an academic community could be, and for truly sensational punch. Thank you to the Red Pen Bandits, for the cake and marginalia. Thank you to the occupants (past and present) of Room 557, for camaraderie and the busy quiet of writing. Thank you Robyn Greaves, comrade in arms and fellow delicate flower. Thank you Mim McGarry, for the podcast and Ali Smith. Thank you Erin Hortle, for discussing books, theory and writing, and for your eagle editorial eye. Thank you Grace Hortle, for the sparkling rosé and contractual exercise, and for always phoning in. Thank you Mum and Dad (and Molly and Gerald too), for viii your extraordinary support, for reminding me of the worth of what I was doing, and for showing me the way to books. And thank you Miloš Nikolić, for your patient understanding, your intelligence, care and cookery, and everything in-between. 1 INTRODUCTION A Different Human Story: Novels of the Posthuman Representations of the posthuman in early twenty-first-century novels are of great cultural and political significance because of their capacity to expose and actively transgress attitudes to structures of human privilege and ideas of the future organised around the normative human subject. As a privileged site for the cultural construction of human identity, the novel is an ideal domain not only for examining those depictions of the human but also for breaking them apart. Through analysing the representation of the posthuman in a selection of contemporary literary novels, this thesis provides a clearer and more critical understanding of the human in literature at the start of the twenty-first century, and considers the role of fiction in both perpetuating and resisting dominant ideas of the human. The thesis mobilises recent theoretical debates about the posthuman and posthumanism as a conceptual framework to investigate the status of the posthuman in fiction. It then offers close readings of how five significant early twenty-first- century novels imagine the human differently, including Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). These novels place the human under duress to make fascinating and sometimes surprising interventions in the project of posthumanist thought. Posthuman
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