Posthuman Gothic 9781786831064, 9781786831071, 9781786831088, 1786831082, 1786831074

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Post/human/Gothic
Part I: Organic
1. Zombie Apocalypse and the Conundrum of Posthumanity in David Wong’s Novels
2. Of Crakers and Men: Imagining the Future and Rethinking the Past in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
3. Of Posthuman Vampires: Science, Blood and Becoming-With
Part II: Undead
4. ‘Lovie – is the vampire so bad?’: Posthuman Rhetoric in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend
5. Coexistence and Hospitality: The Gothic Utopian Vision of True Blood
6. Forging Posthuman Identities in Dominic Mitchell’s In the Flesh
7. More than Human: Reading the Doppelgänger and Female Monstrosity in Television Vampires
Part III: Evolving
8. There’s Something in There: The Posthuman Gothic Mind/Body Divide in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake
9. Still Alive: Understanding Femininity in Valve’s Portal Games
10. Patchwork Girls: Reflections of Lost Female Identity in LouiseO’Neill’s Only Ever Yours
Part IV: Reimagined
11. Being Virtual: The True (Posthu)man Show
12. The Posthuman Monstrous can only be Gothic, or Screening Alien Sex Fiends
13. Gothic Inhumanism: Prometheanism, Nanotechnology, Accelerationism
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

POSTHUMAN GOTHIC

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SERIES PREFACE Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories. SERIES EDITORS Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi EDITORIAL BOARD Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia David Punter, University of Bristol Chris Baldick, University of London Angela Wright, University of Sheffield Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

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Posthuman Gothic

Anya Heise-von der Lippe

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2017

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© The Contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-106-4 eISBN 978-1-78683-107-1

The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham

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Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction: Post/human/Gothic   Anya Heise-von der Lippe

1

Part I: Organic 1 Zombie Apocalypse and the Conundrum of Posthumanity in David Wong’s Novels   Micheal Sean Bolton19 2 Of Crakers and Men: Imagining the Future and Rethinking the Past in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy   Antonia Peroikou36 3 Of Posthuman Vampires: Science, Blood and Becoming-With   Lars Schmeink54 Part II: Undead 4 ‘Lovie – is the vampire so bad?’: Posthuman Rhetoric in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend   Chris Koenig-Woodyard77 5 Coexistence and Hospitality: The Gothic Utopian Vision of True Blood   Erica McCrystal93 6 Forging Posthuman Identities in Dominic Mitchell’s In the Flesh   Maria Alberto109

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7 More than Human: Reading the Doppelgänger and Female Monstrosity in Television Vampires   Maria Marino-Faza125 Part III: Evolving 8 There’s Something in There: The Posthuman Gothic Mind/Body Divide in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake   Amalya Ashman and Amy Taylor145 9 Still Alive: Understanding Femininity in Valve’s Portal Games   Dawn Stobbart161 10 Patchwork Girls: Reflections of Lost Female Identity in Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours   Donna Mitchell177 Part IV: Reimagined 11 Being Virtual: The True (Posthu)man Show   Dennis Yeo199 12 The Posthuman Monstrous can only be Gothic, or Screening Alien Sex Fiends   Evan Hayles Gledhill215 13 Gothic Inhumanism: Prometheanism, Nanotechnology, Accelerationism   Aspasia Stephanou231 Bibliography249 Index265

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Acknowledgements

This volume would never have been possible without the fantastic input from the contributors and I would like to thank all of you for your dedication to this project and for sharing your brilliant thoughts on the posthuman Gothic. I am very grateful to the series editors, Andrew Smith and Benjamin F. Fisher for giving me the opportunity to publish this volume as part of the Gothic Literary Studies series at the University of Wales Press and I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone at UWP for making this a smooth and easy process for me – most of all the infinitely helpful Sarah Lewis. There are quite a number of people without whose help and support this tentacled creature would never have hatched in the first place: I am grateful to Russell West-Pavlov for his early encouragement of this publishing project and his support in pursuing it. Daris Jayyusi was of great help with the formatting of the first version and Alexandra Leonzini’s highly astute last-minute proofreading skills helped me submit the manuscript on time. I am immensely grateful to Gina Wisker, Isabella van Elferen and Regina Hansen for their encouragement of my work and their friendship. I am also grateful for the opportunity to test out some of my ideas on the posthuman in the form of conference papers at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts and I would like to thank my ICFA peeps for countless interesting conversations and for their general nerdy awesomeness. Last but not least I would like to thank H, my own personal cyborg, for putting up with my frequently erratic ravings about the monstrous and the posthuman. I know it’s an acquired taste.Thank you for always being there (and for helping me sort out the bibliography).

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The University of Wales Press gratefully acknowledges permissions granted for use of the following materials: Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2013). Excerpt from MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 2013 O. W. Toad Ltd. Used by permission of the Author. Published by Doubleday/Random House in the United States; McClelland and Stewart/RHC in Canada; and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London:Virago Press, 2013). Excerpts from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 2003 O. W. Toad, Ltd. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 2003 O.W.Toad Ltd. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Louise O’Neill, Only Ever Yours (London: Quercus Publishing, 2013). Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill. Copyright © Louise O’Neill (Quercus, 2015). Reproduced by permission of Louise O’Neill c/o Georgina Capel Associates Ltd, 29 Wardour Street, London,W1D 6PS.

viii

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Notes on Contributors

Maria Alberto is an adjunct instructor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches first-year and Honours courses in writing and editing. Her research interests concern cultural memory and canonicity as represented by intersections between literature and sociocultural change. She is especially interested in how audiences receive and repurpose such texts across different media, since these practices represent a fascinating co-evolution of genre and readership. Amalya Layla Ashman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kyujanggak Institute, Seoul National University, South Korea. She writes about issues of gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on symbolic forms of socially prohibited relationships, such as incest and bestiality. She also specializes in cultural trauma in contemporary Korean cinema and the application of cultural complexes to post-Jungian theory. Micheal Sean Bolton received a PhD in American literature in 2009 from Arizona State University. He teaches literature and composition at Santa Fe College in Florida. His field of research is in United States experimental fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His publications include articles in The Flannery O’Connor Review, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory and Aeternum:The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. Evan Hayles Gledhill is a PhD candidate in the English Literature department at the University of Reading, UK.Their thesis explores depictions of embodied identity construction in Gothic fiction, focusing on the interrelations between concepts of monstrosity, normativity and the family. Their research interests more broadly include the construction of masculinity, critical disability perspectives on monstrosity and intertextual audience engagement. Anya Heise-von der Lippe is an assistant lecturer in English literature and cultural studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her

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research and teaching focus on monstrosity, non-normative corporeality and posthumanity – especially on the intersections of corporealities and textualities. She has published on hypertext rewritings of Frankenstein, post-apocalyptic dystopias and hauntology in the work of Toni Morrison, Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood and is currently working on several publications on posthuman zombies, Cybergothic and the posthuman Gothic in contemporary popular culture. Chris Koenig-Woodyard is an award-winning teacher, who lectures on eighteenth- to twentieth-century literature at the University of Toronto, with a focus on fantasy, the Gothic and science fiction. Co-editor of Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of American, British, and Canadian Literature, 1767–1867 (Pearson Longman) and ‘Sullen Fires across the Atlantic’: Essays in British and American Romanticism (Romantic Circles), he is a contributing editor to The Broadview Anthology of British Literature and co-editor of a forth­ coming issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly on ‘Monster Studies’. He has published on British, American and Transatlantic Romanticism, the pedagogy of literary studies, the digital humanities and the Gothic, and has an article on David Mitchell, the bildungsroman and the Anthropocene forthcoming in David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury). His current research focuses on Posthumanism and Monster Studies, and he is the Director of The Monster Studies Lab (monsterstudieslab.com). Erica McCrystal earned her PhD from St John’s University where she focused her research on Gothic supervillains in urban multiverses, specifically fin de siècle London and Gotham City. Her research interests include Gothic crime and aesthetics,Victorian fiction and popular culture. Erica has published articles on nineteenth-century Newgate and detective fiction and has written and given talks on the Gothic nature of Gotham City. Maria Marino-Faza is a lecturer at the University of Oviedo. She specializes in early modern and Gothic literature as well as Cultural Studies and her research lines focus on the representation of the supernatural in literature and the media. Some of her publications include ‘Constructing Ideology in Twenty-First-Century Supernatural Romance’, Building Interdisciplinary Knowledge: Approaches to English and American Studies in Spain (2014); ‘Flesh and Blood: Reading x

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Notes on Contributors

Monstrosity and Desire in the Twilight Saga and The Vampire Diaries’, Monsters and the Monstrous Journal, 4/2 (2014);‘The Weird Sisters and the Circean Myth of Femininity in Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth’, The Grove:Working Papers on English Studies, 23 (2016). Donna Mitchell received her PhD from Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in 2014 and now works there as a post-­ doctoral teaching fellow in English. She is a regular book reviewer for the University of Stirling’s The Gothic Imagination website and is co-editor of Fantastika Journal. She is currently writing her first monograph, entitled The Gothic Doll, for the Palgrave Gothic Series. Antonia Peroikou is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Cyprus, in the field of Animal Studies.The aim of her PhD thesis, titled ‘Of Jews, animals, women and cyborgs: writing beyond “man” from Kafka to Malamud’, is to examine the centrality of the question of animality not only in philosophical but also in literary discourse. Lars Schmeink is professor of Media Studies at the Institute for Cultural and Media Management, Hamburg, president of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (Association for Research in the Fantastic), and editor of the Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung. His research interests include genre film, science fiction and horror, reception of global media events, and contemporary visual and virtual media. He recently published Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Aspasia Stephanou is an independent scholar working in the fields of Gothic literature, media and cultural theory. Stephanou runs a small publishing house, Aporetic Press, based in Cyprus. She is currently writing her second monograph, Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media (London: Routledge, 2018). Dawn Stobbart completed her doctorate at Lancaster University. She has a BA (Hons) in English Literature and an MA in Contemporary Literature, and is currently focusing on how video games function as a carrier for horror. She has an interest in contemporary literature, especially the way this translates to video games. Within video-game studies, she has published on Gothic fiction, narrative studies and folklore, primarily focusing on how video games construct narratives for these genres. xi

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Posthuman Gothic

Amy Taylor is a Melbourne-based writer, researcher and film critic. She is currently completing her doctorate at RMIT University. Dennis Yeo has taught at primary, secondary, junior college and tertiary levels in a teaching career spanning over two decades. His positions include subject head (Literature), head of department (Pastoral Care & Career Guidance) and vice-principal of Pioneer Junior College. He lectures at the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include film, popular culture and pedagogy.

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Introduction Post/human/Gothic Anya Heise-von der Lippe

 ‘I was not even of the same nature as man . . . Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?’1 Abandoned by his creator and outcast from human society, Mary Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’2 expresses the terror of finding oneself outside of the human(ist) paradigm, on the margins usually reserved for the monstrous Other – ‘difference made flesh’.3 Frankenstein, both Gothic meta-text and emerging science fiction narrative, offers a unique starting point for a discussion on the posthuman Gothic. With its complex system of embedded narratives it accentuates the perspective of the man-made, posthuman ‘creature’ which the text both (re)creates and revolves around: ‘a monstrous conjunction of otherness linking’, as Fred Botting argues, ‘mob, woman, nature and writing itself ’.4 Such a productive ‘integration of the various subjects in the novel with the machinery of the texts’5 is a defining element of the posthuman Gothic, which often combines a foregrounding of the aesthetic/technological aspects of textual production with a thematic focus on human-technology interfaces. Moreover, by juxtaposing the creature’s tale with that of his creator, the novel draws attention to the monstrous Other as an eloquent, rational individual, an ‘I’ which offers a foil for identification and the contemplation of otherness.The creature is not only a productive narrative instance in itself, but also foregrounds the conflicting

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Posthuman Gothic

representations of the human and its Other(s) in the text, thus undermining its creator’s anthropocentric stance. By distributing the task of representation and interpretation to various narrators and readers inside and outside of the text, Frankenstein also draws attention to the discursive construction of monstrosity. The creature is not monstrous in itself; it becomes so in the eyes of a society which defines it as an Other to its position of ‘humanity’: ‘Indeed, it is only in terms of a masterful position that otherness is linked in the form of monstrosity.’6 As Stefan Herbrechter points out,‘[t]he posthuman monster à la Frankenstein thus poses the question to “us”, as representatives of an imaginary humanity: Why have you created me like this? And in doing so it vents its scorn:“So you think you are human?” ’7 The monster at the centre of the text is a ‘harbinger of category crisis’8 – that is, of a state of epistemological and ontological unease,9 which challenges the basic paradigms we10 associate with being human, and as such is a representative of the posthuman Gothic. Frankenstein’s monstrous aesthetic, however, raises just as many questions as it provides answers. Most prominently, it draws attention to the conceptual difficulties of adopting a posthumanist perspective. As Herbrechter and Ivan Callus argue, we can not simply step out of an ingrained humanist perspective to adopt a posthuman point of view. Rather, for a ‘posthumanist reading’ these moments in which humanism is threatened and the posthumanist other is unleashed need to be taken seriously (maybe even ‘literally’) and forced back onto the texts. In fact it is a kind of ethical demand that confronts texts with their own liberal humanist conservatism.The aim is not in any way to ‘overcome’ the human but to challenge its fundamental humanism, including its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings and allies (e.g., anthropocentrism, speciesism, universalism).11

It is this humanist baggage which ties Western thought to an anthropocentric perspective often perceived as universal, even if, as Rosi Braidotti points out, ‘[n]ot all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at 2

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Introduction

previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history.’12 In this ‘rhetorical crisis for the humanist’, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston argue,‘[t]he privilege of blindness to these contradictions is part of the arrogance of entrenched power’.13 This is a kind of human(ist) privilege which allows us to maintain a belief system whose pillars have long been challenged. In fact, the posthuman does not exist outside of and unrelated to humanism and the human – as Herbrechter and Callus point out with Neil Badmington, ‘posthumanism “inhabits” humanism: . . . it is always a repressed possibility of and inside humanism’.14 The ‘post’ in ‘posthumanism’ does, consequently, not refer to an entirely temporal relation but rather suggests a close engagement with and a challenging of the critical paradigms of humanism. Cary Wolfe’s definition of post­ humanism as ‘a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore’15 also suggests that this is an alternative critical framework which ‘points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms . . . a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon’.16 There is something distinctly disturbing about this necessary paradigm shift, as our posthuman predicament confronts us with the instability and ultimate unsustainability of our most basic ontological category – the human – and challenges the tenets of Enlightenment humanism in the process. The involvement of the Gothic in these matters, consequently, goes beyond a mere aesthetics of representation: born out of the immediate reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, the Gothic is no stranger to the exploration of ontological states before, beyond and alongside the humanist subject and has always been aware that both the sleep and the dream of reason create monsters.17 In a context that is frequently described as post-theoretical18 – not least because posthuman exigencies have destabilized the rationalist basis of traditional Western scientific and philosophical thought – popular narratives of the posthuman offer an opportunity to explore such paradigm shifts and possible cultural scenarios. David Roden refers to this as ‘speculative posthumanism’ – the ‘philosophical claim that [posthuman] successors are possible’.19 It would certainly be 3

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problematic to rely on theoretical explorations alone in a context in which the very foundation of the humanities – the concept of Enlightenment humanism – is at stake along with our understanding of what it means to be human. As such, the fictional contemplation of posthuman possibilities does not arise out of a need for entertainment alone, but also out of the necessity to come to terms with the ubiquity of a posthuman Other which is also a part of ourselves. The obvious site for narrative explorations of the posthuman is, of course, the science-fiction genre, and the intersections between critical posthumanism and science fiction are numerous. Herbrechter, for instance, argues that ‘[c]ontemporary cultural criticism is . . . well advised to take science fiction seriously, not in the sense of its factual “realizability” but rather on the basis of its cultural influence’.20 The ties between posthumanism and the Gothic may seem much more tenuous on the surface, but, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, they are far from that. While Gothic criticism frequently incorporates readings of the dark aspects of the posthuman, the Gothic has made only sporadic appearances in posthumanist critical discussion since the 1990s,21 and seems curiously absent from recent posthumanist theory (most prominently Wolfe, Herbrechter and Braidotti).When room is given to the discussion of Gothic fiction within posthumanist discourse – as in Pramod K. Nayar’s Posthumanism (2014) – the focus is often on the analysis of individual narratives, viewing these texts through the lens of posthumanist theory rather than as instances of the posthuman Gothic. Nayar’s characterization of Doris Lessing’s ‘posthuman vision’ in The Fifth Child (1988) as ‘species Gothic’22 suggests a useful broadening of the posthuman as a concept, which often focuses on human–technology interaction rather than fusions of the human with other species, but its explicit discussion of the posthuman Gothic seems curiously isolated within critical posthumanist discourse. It is conceivable that the lack of recognition of the Gothic’s involvement with the posthuman stems from a general reluctance in contemporary criticism (outside the immediate context of the Gothic) to see ‘Gothic’ as anything other than ‘an anachronistic term’, referring to a historical literary genre or ‘a buzz-word in literature and culture’.23 This disconnection between posthuman 4

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Introduction

and Gothic criticism may also be based on the genre’s recalcitrant playfulness – Gothic texts are, in fact, often purposefully camp and over-the-top, to the point of alienating more ‘serious’ readers – and to acknowledge this underlying facetiousness may be crucial to an understanding of the genre in the broader context of cultural theory. Botting’s revision of his definition of Gothic as a form of writing signifying ‘excess and transgression’,24 to ‘a negative aesthetics’25 in the second edition of his highly influential introduction in the New Critical Idiom series reflects this crucial difference in common critical conceptions. Gothic texts often seem to be considered lacking in theoretical substance, seeking the cheap titillation of horror by exposing their reader to ‘excess and transgression’, rather than a genre reflecting cultural issues and anxieties through a frequently metatextual ‘negative aesthetics’. Herbrechter, for instance, while drawing on the essentially Gothic figures of the ‘monstrous’, ‘the nightmarish, the haunting’ to discuss the post­ human, does so under the caveat that these ‘need to be taken more seriously than some purely aesthetic, “dark romanticism” ’.26 Braidotti, while eloquent on the subject of the anxieties provoked by the posthuman as well as its ‘gloomy connotations’,27 does not interrogate the sources of the Gothic imagery she is borrowing from in these instances. The tendency to use Gothic terminology and metaphors to describe the anxieties surrounding posthuman developments is, however, an essential part of the Gothic’s ‘negative aesthetics’, which is based on a profound ‘association between Gothic fictions and technical innovations’28 as well as the cultural theories framing such developments. As Botting argues, ‘[n]ot only is the genre repeatedly described as being mechanical in form and effect, its various manifestations in different media – fiction, drama, photo­ graphy, film  – suffuse those media with ghostly associations’.29 Steeped in human fears and desires, the Gothic is always already there, recording and engaging with the horrors of new techno­ logies at the very forefront of their becoming reality, or imagining them before they have been developed, and serving as an aesthetic framework to explore these posthuman tendencies. In this capacity it is not only closely linked to but also engages with the same ontological and epistemological questions as the posthuman, which 5

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as Wolfe argues, comes ‘both before and after humanism’: it comes before the human, in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture) . . .30

This is why ‘Gothic fictions cannot be put down as merely mechanistic, formulaic and low cultural aberrations, despite the critical reiteration of mechanical metaphors to describe the effects of romances on undiscriminating readers whose minds work mechanically’.31 Rather, in spite of its frequently formulaic genre conventions, the Gothic also comes with a metalevel of theoretical paradigms and a deep involvement in contemporary culture and various subcultures. Coupled with postmodern concerns over identity constructions, it has become an important mode of cultural production to reflect these concerns.32 The use of Gothic imagery in critical posthumanist texts is, thus, no coincidence but a direct consequence of the genre’s position in culture and theory. The posthuman Gothic makes us aware that the monstrous Other is not only lodged within, but an essential part of our (human) identity construction. Posthuman monstrosity is an inherent feature of how we establish and discursively construct our humanity in a world that no longer allows us to perceive ourselves as whole and wholly untouched by the effects of our own (bio)technological involvements. As Micheal Sean Bolton points out, in the posthuman Gothic ‘a sense of horror emerges from the internal dread that the technological other already inhabits the human subject, that the subject is betrayed from within. The monstrosity of these interfaces has as much to do with the human component as with the techno­ logical’.33 The posthuman’s decidedly uncanny connotations are rooted in the subject’s incapability to abject its monstrous/posthuman features in the process of trying to establish a coherent identity narrative  – a discursive feat that is, moreover, highly problematic after postmodernism. 6

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Introduction

It is possible that this Gothic part of the posthuman is not easily visible from a normative perspective because it is the most truly Other aspect of the posthuman – the part signalling intersections of the heteronormatively male, white, ‘model human’ with all its possible Others – the female, the subaltern, the sexually different, the sick/disabled/prosthetically altered or enhanced, etc.The posthuman is scary: as Kim Toffoletti points out, ‘the posthuman inhabits a space beyond the real where time and history defy linear progression’; it disrupts ‘origin stories, contest[s] understandings of being, and create[s] the potential to configure the subject outside of temporal narratives of evolution and progress’.34 By disrupting the human’s ties to its/our own history, the posthuman draws attention to the meaning of these ties in our identity construction. As Herbrechter and Callus argue, drawing on the uncanny,‘posthuman­ ism is a discourse which in envisaging the beyond of the human opens onto openness itself. It is the unknowable itself, the unthinkable itself.’35 The posthuman, thus, makes us face our closets full of skeletons and madwomen in the attic in a rather Gothic manner – not as a literal ‘return of the repressed’ but by undermining and challenging familiar origin stories and drawing attention to how this ‘anxiety over the loss of humanity as human memory is externalized and interfaced with technology’.36 As Halberstam and Livingston argue in one of the earliest attempts to conceptualize posthuman bodies in the 1990s, ‘the rough beast that now slouches towards the next century is not monstrous simply by virtue of its status as a non-species’37 in the sense of Jacques Derrida’s definition of monstrosity as ‘that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized’.38 Beyond this concept of monstrosity as the unknown, Halberstam and Livingston see ‘posthuman monstrosity and its bodily forms [as] recognizable because they occupy the overlap between the now and the then, the here and the always’.39 This is one of the intersections between the Gothic and critical posthumanism, as the former has always been aware that the past was treacherous, a monster lurking in the shadows. So, as ‘[w]e struggle . . . to articulate a present laden with the debris of inert pasts’,40 the Gothic is not just a fictional reflection, but rather at the forefront of the struggle to come to terms with the emerging horror of faltering ‘masternarratives about humanity’.41 Instead, 7

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Halberstam and Livingston offer ‘someness’: ‘The search for origins stops here because we are the origins at which imagined reality, virtual reality, Gothic reality are all up for grabs.You’re not human until you’re posthuman. You were never human.’42 Beyond their period-specific celebration of the multiple/diverse posthuman this is remarkably similar to Braidotti’s more recent approach, which raises an important set of questions about the future of humanity and the planet: posthuman theory is a generative tool to help us re-think the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as ‘anthropocene’, the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet. By extension, it can also help us re-think the basic tenets of our interaction with both human and non-human agents on a planetary scale.43

Recent work on the posthuman generally approaches it as a set of discourses and theoretical frameworks rather than an ontological category. The central arguments posthumanist critics like Wolfe, Herbrechter and Braidotti explore draw on conceptions of bio­ politics, monstrosity, liminality and the contested boundaries between the human and its Others.What is at stake in the recent theoretical reflection on the posthuman, monstrous Other, ‘is the transgression of boundaries with its associated risks and pleasures’44 – among others, the one between life and death: posthuman vital politics shifts the boundaries between life and death and consequently deals not only with the government of the living, but also with practices of dying . . . Bodily politics has shifted, with the simultaneous emergence of cyborgs on the one hand and renewed forms of vulnerability on the other.45

Gothic criticism, frequently concerned with ways of dying and liminal, undead creatures dwelling on the boundaries between life and death, can make useful contributions to this debate: ghosts, vampires, zombies and reanimated/technological monsters are expressions of cultural anxieties similar or frequently identical to those evoked by the posthuman. In the first comprehensive attempt 8

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at defining the posthuman Gothic to date, Bolton, who also contribu­ ted to this volume, argues that the posthuman Gothic ‘finds instances of terror and horror arising from the interfaces and integrations of humans and technologies’.46 In an attempt to come to terms with ‘the continued existence of the human subject reconstituted as posthuman’47 the posthuman Gothic’s main source of dread, ‘lies not in the fear of our demise but in the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change’.48 The contributions in this volume explore a number of ways in which these (post)human anxieties of an internalization of the Other permeate posthuman Gothic texts, also extending their discussion to textual examples in which human–technology interfaces remain below the surface or are merely hinted at – without making the text any less posthuman or Gothic. As Herbrechter and Callus have pointed out, it is not only a possible, but a necessary critical endeavour ‘to envisage a posthumanism without technology’. Such a critical reconsideration, they argue, would force ‘what has been attached to an “ism” to be formulated anew . . . renegotiated in the very open modes of the unthought and the unbroached, the untried and the forgotten’49 – effectively taking posthumanism back to its origins in monstrous becomings. Frankenstein perfectly illustrates these human anxieties of becoming posthuman. As various adaptations of Shelley’s novel – from Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to Kenneth Branagh’s film version – highlight, the fear of becoming Other and retaining a residual memory of one’s previous humanity is already latent in the Frankenstein myth.The monster itself, a (technologically) reanimated being constructed from human and animal body parts, can be read as the prototype of later posthuman creations. Moreover, Victor Frankenstein’s use of ‘materials’ from graveyard ‘vaults and charnel houses’50 references common resurrectionist practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which turned dead bodies into a commodity for anatomists and physicians studying the human form. While these practices may seem crude to the contemporary reader, their use of the human body as a commodity finds its repetition in the global ‘necro-political’51 exploitation of bodies and organs in the twentieth century, which has a definite component of body horror. As Braidotti argues with Achille 9

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Mbembe, ‘[c]ontemporary necro-politics has taken the politics of death on a global regional scale’52 and ‘the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference (woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable bodies of the global economy’.53 Posthuman paradigms offer new ways of framing these global necro-political connections as well as contemporary culture’s distinctly forensic interest in these matters, and, in doing so, often inadvertently rely on Gothic aesthetics and imagery. The posthuman Gothic as a frequently subversive, metanarratively aware form of textuality seems to offer a unique starting point for the exploration of these issues across various contexts and media platforms from narrative fiction, to film, television and video games. This collection aims to offer a structured, dialogical contribution to the discussion of the posthuman Gothic in different media, forms and critical contexts. Each of the volume’s four parts provides a different thematic angle, which connects the chapters and aims to provide an opportunity for the contributors to engage with key Gothic and posthumanist theoretical positions (most prominently those discussed in this introduction),54 as well as explore new avenues of discussion. Part I – ‘Organic’ – focuses on recent destabilizations of the human by means of posthuman Others (the vampire, zombie and the genetically modified posthuman). The contributors map the territory of representations of the posthuman Gothic in literature and film and offer a dialogical introduction to the posthuman Gothic in the process. In Chapter 1, Micheal Sean Bolton draws on his own definition of the posthuman Gothic by bringing the Ship of Theseus problem to the discussion of posthuman destabilizations of human identity constructions in David Wong’s novels. He argues that the texts – framed as zombie narratives – generate dread from processes of transformation that occur as human subjects interface with the monstrous Other and have to negotiate what remains beyond these processes of transformation. Combining posthuman theory and Gothic criticism in her reading of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Antonia Peroikou shows in Chapter 2 how the liminal presence of the genetically modified posthumans in the novels draws attention to the discursive 10

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construction of categories like the ‘human’. She reads the posthumans in the text as representatives of a future that is both utopian and dystopian, as it reverses the stakes on humanity, turning ‘us’ into the Other, to a more sustainable group of posthumans. Lars Schmeink’s Chapter 3 uses critical posthumanism as a framework to interrogate medical and genetic discourses in recent vampire films (Blade II, I am Legend and Daybreakers), arguing that the vampire’s liminal status makes it an ideal metaphorical figure to explore posthuman transformations and the necessary renegotiations of categories in posthuman contexts. Part II – ‘Undead’ – continues this discussion of the undead as posthuman in vampire and zombie narratives, tracing the (attempted) domestication, necro-political exploitation and frequent reinventions of the undead in different media and genre contexts. Chris Koenig-Woodyard’s Chapter 4 reads Richard Matheson’s I am Legend as a seminal text in the history of (posthuman) vampire fiction. Highlighting discursive and narratological strategies, which support the confrontation, he argues that the genetic, aesthetic and cultural friction between human and posthuman in the text offers a foundational treatment of a posthuman vampire that informs later representations. In Chapter 5, Erica McCrystal continues this discussion of the vampire as posthuman by drawing on theories of hospitality to read the US television series True Blood as a posthuman utopia. The treatment of different posthuman and human characters in the series, she argues, can be read as an attempt to soften the boundaries between human and monster in a liminal, essentially Gothic world. Maria Alberto’s Chapter 6 focuses on ambiguous posthuman identity constructions in the British zombie television series In the Flesh. She argues that the show draws on critical concerns regarding agency, mutation, individualism, rationality, and monstrosity to show how the undead characters in the series shake the boundaries of human identity and identification. In Chapter 7, Maria Marino-Faza concludes this part with a critical reading of female monstrosity in the US television series The Vampire Diaries. She argues that the representation of the posthuman as monstrous Other and female body in the series not only reflects contemporary posthuman anxieties and concerns, but offers 11

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new insights into twenty-first-century gender constructions and the paramount importance of the medium of television in the transmission and reiteration of these discourses. Part III – ‘Evolving’ – brings together three chapters which read the posthuman Gothic as a structuring principle in multilayered filmic, ludic and literary narratives. In Chapter 8, Amalya Ashman and Amy Taylor bring a feminist approach to a reading of visual narrative means in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. Reading cultural anxieties over becoming posthuman as a regression to the animalistic, they argue that the human subject is divided in this text between the fragmented mental and the bodily experiences of sexual trauma.The narrative’s ‘return to nature’, they argue, can be read as an example of the Antipodean Gothic’s location of the Other in the landscape which mirrors the protagonists’ psychological struggles. Dawn Stobbart’s Chapter 9 focuses on Gothic themes permeating the setting and characters of the video game Portal, which interrogates the genre’s tropes of femininity through its embedded narrative of death, imprisonment, escape and reconciliation. The game itself, she argues, is haunted by and is inhabiting the Gothic and the posthuman through gaming technology, which allows a practical realization of posthumanism while simulataneously drawing attention to the fact that the identities assumed within the game are reiterations of a posthuman construct. In Chapter 10, Donna Mitchell offers a reading of the genetically constructed ‘eves’ in Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours as posthuman Gothic entities. By reading the novel in the context of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – a metacritical hypertext adaptation of Frankenstein – she highlights the text’s critical potential concerning issues like simulation and monstrous fragmentation, arguing that their representation interrogates concepts of ‘natural’ female identity and the artificial construction of the female according to a techno-patriarchal gaze. The three chapters in Part IV – ‘Reimagined’ – move further beyond the traditional scope of Gothic narratives to open up new avenues of discussion of the posthuman Gothic. Dennis Yeo’s Chapter 11 offers a reading of The Truman Show (1998) as a posthuman Gothic text. As Yeo argues, the next step in the ongoing evolution of humankind is the technologically mediated 12

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Introduction

human – the panoptical subject of The Truman Show. By using various metalevels of representation, he argues, the film aptly reflects today’s televisual cyberworld – a global panopticon of representation, control and paranoia as well as a culture of spectacle, narcissism and voyeurism that is indicative of the posthuman Gothic in contemporary media. In Chapter 12, Evan Hayles Gledhill addresses the concept of the monster and the human as cross-referential categories of subjectivity in the Alien films and Star Trek. They read Star Trek’s Borgs and the aliens through the lens of theories of monstrosity in the work of Canguilhem and Foucault, arguing that the multiple constructions of the human, posthuman and monstrous in these narratives are interconnected by the concept of transgressive embodiment – the promise of monsters, which signals the end of the humanist paradigm and its continuation in the posthuman. Aspasia Stephanou’s Chapter 13 concludes this volume with a discussion of a number of contamination-centred biohorror texts in the light of theories of prometheanism and accelerationism. She introduces the term ‘Gothic Inhumanism’ to theoretically frame narratives like Frankenstein – and its contemporary descendants – which focus on anxieties surrounding the fusion of technology and the human. Nick Land’s discussion of ‘CyberGothic’, introduced in the final chapter of this volume, also harks back to Shelley’s nightmare of becoming posthuman. He draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the monster as a ‘Gothic avatar’, a constant revenant, ‘a decadent Western dream of immortality, producing a corruption of the atmo­ sphere wherever something refuses to die’.55 The monster, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues, always escapes,‘ready to stalk again in another bigger-than-ever sequel’.56 There will be a ‘moment of relief ’, of course:‘[y]ou had thought the goreflick effectively over, the monster finished . . . when suddenly, it reanimates; still locked on your death. If you are going to scream, now is the time.’57 What the posthuman Gothic’s shift of focus from human fears of the Other to a posthuman destabilization of human identity constructions does, then, is create a discursive space to contemplate these issues by urging us to rethink our treacherously safe human subject positions. After all, in this context, who is the monster and who is screaming now? 13

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Notes Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; New York: Norton, 2012), p. 83. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 169. 3 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 7. 4 F. Botting,‘Flight of the Heroine’, in Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz (eds), Postfeminist Gothic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 175. 5 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 13, makes this argument about Mark Z. Danielewski’s paper-based hypertext novel House of Leaves (2000). 6 Botting, ‘Flight of the Heroine’, p. 178. 7 Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 89. 8 Cohen, Monster Theory, p. 6. 9 See Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 88. 10 For want of a better term, I use ‘we’ here to signal both ‘humans’, as a species, and critics trying to frame posthuman developments. 11 S. Herbrechter and I. Callus,‘What is a posthumanist reading?’, Angelaki, 13/1 (2008), 100. 12 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 1. 13 Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 9. 14 Herbrechter and Callus, ‘What is a posthumanist reading?’, 102. 15 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xv. 16 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, pp. xv–xvi. 17 The Spanish title of Francisco de Goya’s etching El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797–99) evokes this ambiguity of the monster as either a product of reason’s sleep or a consequence of the dream of reason. 18 See Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 4. 19 David Roden, Posthuman Life (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 5. 20 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 117. 21 See Halberstam and Livingston’s discussion of ‘gothic reality’ and the ‘gothicization of a body’ for instance, Posthuman Bodies, pp. 8, 14. 22 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 116. 1 2

14

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Introduction Maria Beville, Gothic-Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), p. 7. 24 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 1. 25 Fred Botting, Gothic (2nd edn., London: Routledge, 2014), p. 1. 26 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 86. 27 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 5. 28 Fred Botting, The Limits of Horror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 105. 29 Botting, Limits of Horror, p. 105. 30 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xv. 31 Botting, Limits of Horror, p. 108. 32 See Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 1–2. 33 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 5. 34 Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls (London: I. B.Tauris, 2007), p. 5. 35 S. Herbrechter and I. Callus, ‘Critical Posthumanism’, Subject Matters, 3/2–4/1 (2007), 16. 36 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 3. 37 Halberstam and Livingston, Posthuman Bodies, p. 3. 38 J. Derrida, ‘Passages – from Traumatism to Promise’, in E. Weber (ed.), Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 386. 39 Halberstam and Livingston, Posthuman Bodies, p. 3. 40 Halberstam and Livingston, Posthuman Bodies, p. 4. 41 Halberstam and Livingston, Posthuman Bodies, p. 4. 42 Halberstam and Livingston, Posthuman Bodies, p. 8. 43 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 5. 44 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 86. 45 Braidotti, Posthuman, pp. 111–12. 46 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 2. 47 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 2. 48 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 3. 49 Herbrechter and Callus, ‘Critical Posthumanism’, 15. 50 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 32. 51 See Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 122. Her discussion is drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics (see A. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Popular Culture, 15/1 (2003), 11–40). 52 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 123. 53 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 111. 23

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Posthuman Gothic  hile all efforts have been made to avoid over-repetition of critical W quotations across the chapters, some redundancies will be inevitable for the chapters to still make sense in themselves. 55 Nick Land, ‘CyberGothic’, in Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (eds), Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Truro: Urbanomic, 2011), p. 349. 56 Cohen, Monster Theory, p. 5. 57 Land, ‘CyberGothic’, p. 349. 54

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Part I Organic

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1 Zombie Apocalypse and the Conundrum of Posthumanity in David Wong’s Novels Micheal Sean Bolton

 Writing of the emergence of the posthuman, Stefan Herbrechter observes: ‘[t]his time it really seems the “end of all ends”, not – as during the Cold War – the self-annihilation of some more or less abstract notion of “humanity”, but the end of humans as biological species and the dissolution of human “nature” ’.1 This statement seems an apt description of the zombie apocalypse as depicted in a growing number of zombie narratives across diverse media since the turn of the millennium. Certainly, the figure of the zombie makes for a great symbol of the posthuman: it is the undead remainder that continues after the human dies. But more significantly, these narratives are increasingly more concerned with the transformations of the survivors. The real issue of the zombie apocalypse is that of how the survivors, the uninfected, retain or relinquish their humanity in the face of the chaos that their world has become. Dramatic tension in narratives such as Z Nation (2014) and The Walking Dead (2010) arises less from the fight for survival and more from confronting changes to human values and the resultant changes to human behaviour – those characteristics that are assumed to define human nature. The posthumans in such narratives are among the uninfected; the zombies simply provide the catalyst for the transformation into posthumanity. Audience members are challenged to contemplate the distinctions between

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human and inhuman survivors and to more deeply consider what defines our humanity. An increasingly prevalent area of posthuman studies, ‘critical posthumanism’, interrogates assumptions that such distinctions between humans and non-humans continue to be valid, and questions whether definitive characteristics of humanity exist at all. Pramod K. Nayar writes that ‘critical posthumanism seeks to move beyond the traditional humanist ways of thinking about the autonomous, self-willed individual agent in order to treat the human itself as an assemblage, co-evolving with other forms of life’.2 Placing particular emphasis on the Other in ‘other life forms’, he sees critical posthumanism as standing in opposition to liberal humanism’s anthropocentrism and speciesism. Herbrechter and Ivan Callus similarly see critical posthumanism as a method of posthumanist reading ‘enabled by the deconstruction of the integrity of the human and the Other, of the natural and the alienable’.3 Most zombie narratives, though troubling the waters, ultimately uphold the distinction between humans and non-humans, extending the division even to those uninfected who behave in monstrous, inhuman ways. However, a few works move in the direction of critical posthumanism, challenging not only conventional definitions of humanity, but the very existence of any essential human qualities that might mark a distinction between humans and non-humans. Among these works are David Wong’s novels John Dies at the End (2009) and This Book Is Full of Spiders (2012). Wong’s novels are somewhat unique among zombie narratives. One of the most striking differences between these novels and other zombie narratives is the nature of the zombies themselves. Wong’s zombies are not animated by means traditional to the genre, such as sorcery, radiation or viral infection. The dead are resurrected by parasitic, extra-dimensional beings  – often after being killed by the same beings. In John Dies, beings that the narrator names ‘shadow men’ take possession of humans either directly or through the use of worm-like creatures that move in swarms from one victim to the next.The characters of Justin White and Fred Chu are respectively possessed by one of these swarms, which names itself ‘Shitload . . . because there’s a shitload of us in 20

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here’.4 Later in the novel, a local sportscaster and then David Wong (Dave),5 the narrator/protagonist of the book, are possessed directly by a shadow man, though this form of possession seems to be rare. Though the shadow men also appear in Spiders, possessions of humans are accomplished only through spider-like parasites that enter their victims through the mouth or the anus, and are essentially invisible to detection.6 All of these parasitic beings amount to what Fred Botting characterizes as ‘bodysnatchers, beings that penetrate, possess, and control human bodies’.7 The resulting zombies are hybrids, neither fully human nor fully monster. Many, in fact, not only appear as humans but also behave as humans, albeit always carrying the potential for monstrosity. The ambiguous quality of the zombies allows the novels to raise issues common to critical posthumanism. Central to critical posthumanism’s questioning of essential humanity are problems of identity and transformation. In order to address these issues, both of Wong’s novels feature versions of the Ship of Theseus problem in their explorations of identity, humanity and monstrousness amidst the threat of apocalypse. The problem of the Ship of Theseus was first posed by Plutarch as follows: The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.8

Subsequent versions of the problem posit that the materials of the ship are gradually replaced while the ship is at sea, and question whether the ship that Theseus departed on is the same ship on which he arrives at the end of his journey. If it is a different ship at the end of the journey, then what is the nature of that difference and at which point of the journey did the change occur? If it is the same ship, then what is the essential quality that remains as all of the materials are replaced? 21

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Craig Derksen and Darren Hudson Hick extend these questions to the issues of human identity and moral responsibility raised by zombie narratives, writing: The central question of personal identity is: what is it that makes you the same person today that you were yesterday, or a year or a decade ago? After all, if you aren’t the same person that you were yesterday – if the two of you are distinct persons – it seems we can’t reasonably hold you responsible for that person’s acts.9

Derksen and Hick are addressing not only the transformation of humans into inhuman zombies, but also the moral problems surrounding zombie killing, particularly of zombified loved ones. In fictions of zombie apocalypse, such as 28 Days Later (2002) and the aforementioned The Walking Dead,10 the questions extend to the killing of non-infected humans who have, in some way, lost or forfeited their humanity. In the world of the zombie apocalypse, it is no longer clear which actions should still be considered immoral and which have become acceptable; ie. notions of humanity and inhumanity have destabilized.When Walking Dead protagonist Rick Grimes takes a bite out of the neck of a survivor who threatens to rape and kill his son – an emulation of the human-flesh-eating ‘walkers’ – has he crossed the line into inhuman monstrousness? What does it mean to be human in such a world? And what signals the transformation to the non-human monster? Though narratives like these challenge assumptions that viewers/readers might bring to these issues, the division between humanity and monstrosity continues to be upheld. Grimes’s humanity, for example, is repeatedly reaffirmed, often by contrast to the show’s truly monstrous characters. Wong’s novels, on the other hand, take the further step of questioning the validity of this distinction. Early in each of the novels a version of the Ship of Theseus problem is employed to set up this critical posthumanist approach. John Dies opens with a version of the problem that asks the reader to imagine being in the act of using an axe to behead ‘a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue’;11 in effect, a human monster.The axe handle breaks during the beheading and is afterward replaced. Later still 22

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the axe head is also broken and replaced. A year later the monster returns, now undead with his head reattached. As you, the reader, brandish the twice-repaired axe, the monster declares, ‘That’s the same ax that beheaded me!’12 The narrator challenges the reader to consider whether this statement is true. Spiders offers another variation of the Ship of Theseus problem when Dave’s therapist, Dr Tennet, opines on the troubling nature of Star Trek’s transporter technology. He explains that what is sent via the transporter is not the person, but the information needed to reconstruct the person at the arrival point: ‘what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby . . . an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead.’13 Unlike the Ship of Theseus, the replacement in this case is not gradual and incremental but instantaneous and complete. Yet the copy is still regarded as the same person. Furthermore, as Dr Tennet points out, it is not simply a copy of the original person but one several generations along. Each crew member and his/her copies undergo the process numerous times.14 The disturbing question raised is whether the body’s blueprint really represents the essence of the person, that which remains unchanged regardless of the number of reconstructions. Is the essence of a person merely a set of physical properties? Does the Ship of Theseus maintain its identity simply because it was reconstructed in the same physical form? Indeed, as Derksen and Hick note, ‘[p]roponents of the bodily-­ continuity perspective contend that you are the same person today that you were yesterday because you are a continuation of the same body’.15 However, this perspective becomes complicated by instances of abrupt body alteration, such as injury, cosmetic surgery and prosthesis. Occurring early in each novel, both the axe anecdote and Tennet’s monologue serve to introduce challenges to readers’ assumptions about identity and humanity. These brief thought experiments announce the central issues that recur throughout the books: those of the unstable nature of identity and of the problematic distinction between human and monstrous Other. In most zombie narratives, zombies represent the abject of humanity and, as such, become that against which humanity is measured. As Kyle William Bishop notes, ‘the zombie directly 23

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manifests the visual horror of death: unlike most ghosts and vampires, zombies are in an active state of decay’.16 Zombies are literal manifestations of the posthuman, persons that transform into non-persons,17 their humanity continually receding before our eyes. In Spiders, Dr Marconi declares them ‘[o]ur culture’s most perfect creation – an enemy you are absolutely morally correct in killing, because they are already dead. Why, you are doing them a favor by smashing in their skulls’.18 In fact, the killing of zombies is most often considered to be a moral act, releasing a former human from its now wretched state. Seen as objects of pity as well as horror, zombies are an expression of what we can stand to lose versus what must be fought for. A passage from Dr Marconi’s book – one of many instances of embedded narratives in Spiders – explains, ‘[t]he zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark’.19 In other words, zombies are devoid of some essential quality that defines humanity, the loss of which has turned them into monsters. ‘[G]lobal zombie apocalypse’, argues Peter Dendle,‘continues to serve as the crucible for heroism and the testing ground for human values.’20 But what these defining qualities or values are remains unclear. According to Cory James Rushton and Christopher M. Moreman, it is ‘the cardinal virtues (love, kindness, cooperation) [that] lead to survival – or rather, that the lack of these virtues leads to death and, inevitably, to undeath’.21 And not only are the zombies defined by the lack of these virtues, those survivors who abandon the virtues are also identified as monsters. But the question remains as to when the line between humanity and monstrosity is crossed, and under what conditions virtue can be abandoned while humanity is maintained. Botting suggests that the defining human quality might lie in the struggle for survival itself: ‘the trace of will, resistance, spirit, the small element remaining when everything else – body, mind, freedom – has been taken away’.22 But if that ‘small element remaining’ has to do with humanity, then we need to ask what distinguishes it from the monstrous. After all, monsters also struggle for survival in their own way. The distinction appears to be ill-defined, if not arbitrary. Perhaps, as Nayar suggests, ‘[h]umanity survives by constructing modes of exclusion, and the monster’s ontological 24

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liminality enables domination, persecution, incarceration/containment, exhibition/display, genocide, displacement and elimination of certain forms of life’.23 Humanity is, in this case, defined in opposition to what is subhuman and, thus, deficient. His suggestion that the very notion of humanity is contingent upon a process of abjection – of inventing monsters for humans to outcast and to destroy – arises from a posthuman complication of the human-­ monster binary. Nayar points out that ‘the human is what it is because it includes the non-human’.24 And in fact, ‘[c]ognitive ethologists and biologists have demonstrated that those features we take to be uniquely human  – altruism, consciousness, language  – are also properties exhibited by animals’.25 From a critical posthumanist perspective, the recognition of ourselves in the monstrous Other may be precisely what makes it so repulsive. Upon Dave’s first encounter with the spider-parasite in Spiders, his terror initially arises from its abject monstrousness: ‘The sight of the thing froze me. That awful, primal, paralyzing terror that only accompanies an encounter with something completely alien.’26 However, his sense of horror heightens when he recognizes something familiar: ‘Two lips parted and I saw with revulsion that it had a pink tongue, exactly like a human’s.’27 The revulsion is more severe with the appearance of something recognizably human within the monstrous. And the true horror of the parasite becomes clear when it begins to inhabit and control – in effect, to zombify – a human. This moment represents one of the many ways in which Wong’s novels will challenge the distinction between human and monster. As noted above,Wong’s ‘zombies’ do not take the form of corpses infected by a contagion or reanimated by radiation, but of humans invaded by and playing host to ‘bodysnatching’ spider-like parasites. Certainly the infected are in some sense undead. As Dr Tennet explains,‘the parasite completely breaks down and effectively rewires the victim’s brain tissue . . . these are nothing more than people, who, after death, are able to remain mobile, dangerous and infectious’.28 However, the parasite–host relationship complicates the binary of human vs. zombie. The human victims to varying degrees share existence with the parasites. The first victim of the parasites, police officer Franky Burgess, seems to remain conscious, though without 25

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control of his body. Well into his possession, he tries to warn Dave of the danger of the infection. Dave states, ‘I realized he was trying to talk through his parasite, and struggling to do it.’29 Clearly, the possession is more a posthuman interface of the monster and the human than an annihilation or consumption of the human. Dave further realizes, ‘[t]he spider was a part of Franky now. Maybe the spider was Franky at this point’.30 The dividing point between monster and human is no longer clear.The infected creature is both parasite and host, and something else entirely. Botting explains that such ‘bodysnatching aligns itself with fears of technological modernity, of industrial processes and regimented mechanisms turning humans into soulless, depersonalized, automated mechanisms’.31 When the character of Amy first appears in John Dies, she is the victim of such bodysnatchers: I turned, and where Amy had been sitting there was now a humanshaped thing with jointed arms and gray rags for clothes, legs sticking stiffly out in front. Like a department store mannequin crafted by a blind man.The red hair looked to be made of copper wire. A hinged jaw clamped shut and the snoring sound was clipped immediately. Two seconds later the jaw yawned wide open again and the enormous snoring sound poured forth – a sound that was more mechanical than human. Artificial.32

Her humanity is later restored but this vision of Amy as an inhuman, mechanical thing corresponds with Dave’s initial, and ultimately erroneous, perception of the girl as disabled because she is missing her left hand. Nayar writes that ‘an impaired body is reduced to its impairment: impairment is the individual’s primary identity’.33 And ‘[i]f animals and monsters are invariably reduced to matter and bodies, so are disabled people whose bodies are seen as ugly, threatening and constraining/ impaired’.34 Therefore, Dave at first sees only Amy’s abnormal body and he supposes that she might also be mentally deficient, since they first met in a special education class. Amy’s impairment is, for him, a lack that marks her as Other. As Dave gets to know Amy and care for her, his perspective changes: 26

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Organic The crash took her hand and her parents, and left her with chronic back pain and an implanted titanium rod in her spine. She refused to get a prosthetic hand because she thought they were ‘creepy’. But in my mind, between the titanium spine and a robot hand, she’d be like 10 percent of the way to cyborg, an idea that I found more than mildly arousing.35

By this point, Dave and Amy have become lovers, and the passage indicates a change in his attitude toward her impairment. He now knows her to be capable, intelligent, even sexy. Amy’s former status as monstrous Other was not determined by some essential quality of humanity that she lacked, but was merely a matter of an incomplete and erroneous perspective. This understanding may also be what later allows Dave to accept the infected character of Anna as more a frightened little girl than a dangerous tentacled monster. Nowhere is the indeterminacy of monster–human status more apparent than in the characters of Carlos and his daughter Anna. Dave (and readers) first encounters Carlos through warnings given by his fellow quarantine inmates at a hospital that has been converted to essentially a prison. Carlos is an unseen monster that attacks his victims from underground tearing their entrails from their bodies through their anuses. Dave and other new inmates are warned not to sit on the grass where they are vulnerable to Carlos’s attacks. Carlos manifests the ultimate in monstrous terror: an undetectable and completely alien predator utilizing a horrific means of killing its prey. However, Carlos later turns out to be less monstrous than initially represented. Dave, John and Amy encounter him physically when he steps in and seemingly saves them from his daughter, Anna. In her monstrous form, Anna – who normally appears as an eight-yearold girl – has sprouted tentacles with which she is grabbing and squeezing Dave and Amy. Just as John raises a shotgun to kill the monster, Carlos intervenes and calls Anna off, rescuing Dave and Amy. Carlos appears here as a saviour rather than a predator, an odd representation for a monster. We subsequently learn that all of Carlos’s victims have been infected by the parasites, which he can detect ‘as easy as telling man from woman’.36 Though he is infected as well, he has not lost control to the parasite. He informs Dave: ‘I 27

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can control it.The parasite, it whispers in my ear but I can overcome it.You just got to have the will, to put that cockroach in its place.’37 In this host–parasite interface, the host maintains control and can behave in ways that might be regarded as human-like. But, if he is not entirely monster, Carlos is certainly not entirely human either. Speaking of Dr Tennet, he states: ‘[h]e’s not a man. And maybe neither am I and maybe that doesn’t mean anything anymore.’38 More than just challenging the definition of humanity, Carlos confuses the distinction between human and monster. He is admittedly monstrous in his predatory actions, but his humanity is also evident in his affection and care for his daughter. Anna complicates monster-human indeterminacy even further. Though capable of monstrous transformation, she is very much a little girl. Unlike her father, ‘[s]he won’t hurt you. She hasn’t hurt anybody.’39 Upon her transformation, however, Dave refers to her as ‘the Anna thing’, and states that the form of the tentacled monster is ‘its true form’.40 He sees only the monster and dismisses the form of the little girl as an illusion. But he begins to understand his error after Carlos calms her: ‘Now Anna, you scared him.You turned and you scared him.’ ‘I didn’t mean to! The lights went out and I c-couldn’t h-help it . . .’ . . . She flew at me, and threw her arms around my neck. She pressed her wet face against mine and hugged me. She said,‘I’m sorry I scared you, Walt.’41

In contrast to Carlos, Anna’s behaviour is never anything other than human. She is only ever monstrous in appearance. Even her ‘attack’ on Dave and Amy is simply the action of a frightened little girl reaching out to hold on to an adult for comfort and safety. She is infected but seemingly retains characteristics expected in a human child: innocence, trust and a degree of helplessness and fear in the face of danger. The characters of Carlos and Anna exemplify the novels’ continual questioning of easy distinctions between the human and the monstrous Other, whether through appearance or action. The most prominent challenge to zombie fiction’s traditional division between human and monster comes from the main 28

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character and central narrator of the novels, David Wong. In addition to challenging the monster–human binary, Dave’s character also represents something of a reversal of the roles of monster and hero. Near the end of John Dies, we discover – along with John, Amy and Dave himself – that Dave has been killed and replaced by an exact replica possessing all of Dave’s memories, and that much of the heroic action in the second half of the novel has been carried out by the replica. Upon discovery of Dave’s corpse, John immediately regards the replica as a monstrous Other and names it ‘Monster Dave’.42 Even the replica Dave, previously unaware of his status, thinks of himself as ‘an unholy monster impersonating a human’.43 Despite Dave’s heroic and ‘human’ actions up to that point, both he and John assume that Dave will eventually transform totally. Dave warns Amy, ‘[w]hatever happens, whenever it happens, we know one thing – that I won’t be able to control it’.44 Clearly John and Dave do not subscribe to the view that the blueprint of Dave’s body constitutes identity. For them, not only is the replica distinct from the original Dave, it is a monstrosity. The novel, however, does not support such an easy distinction between the human Dave and the monster replica. Even as John points out to Amy that she has only ever known the replica, he complicates the issue:‘[w]hen we showed up at your house that was Monster Dave and it was Monster Dave thereafter. And I’ll tell you what, whatever you think, he’s a lot nicer now than he was before.’45 John’s observation reminds readers that the human Dave, prior to replacement, displayed more potential for monstrosity than has his replica. For example, during a violent encounter with a human possessed by parasitic worm-like creatures, Dave reflects:‘I felt electricity inside, the buzz of the violence, sparks raining down inside my skull as if from a blown fuse. Too familiar.’46 Later in the novel, we find out that this familiarity with extreme violence is due to an event from Dave’s adolescence. After suffering an attack by bullies – the details of which, Dave states, ‘I’ll never, ever tell you’47 – he cuts out the eyes of one of his attackers with a knife.The initial reaction of readers may be to excuse Dave’s action as being relative to the monstrosity of the acts committed against him. This sort of rationalization is, after all, common to zombie narratives wherein normally inexcusable acts of violence are justified 29

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given the extreme conditions of the zombie apocalypse. However, Dave amplifies his own monstrosity as he relates to Amy his feelings upon hearing of his victim’s suicide: When I heard, I felt nothing at all. I thought I would. I didn’t. The guilt just wasn’t there because I’m not that type of person. And that’s what I’ve been saying, that’s why you’re in danger here. I don’t think those things, those bits of walking nothing [the shadow men] can use you, but I think they’d know me as one of their own.48

Interestingly, his warning to Amy seems to be echoed in the later warning quoted above, even though he is not yet aware at this point that he is a replica. He considers himself every bit as much a monster before the transformation as after. Though the replacement of the original, human Dave marks a transformation of sorts, there is no clear point at which the change from human to monster occurs, or any indication that a distinction can be made. Furthermore, the novel makes a point of offering no clear answer as to whether the replica Dave should be considered human or monster. In John Dies, Dave follows the assertion, ‘I’ve never turned into a monster at all’, with the qualifier ‘[a]s far as I know’.49 The qualification indicates that he is not entirely certain where the distinction lies. Spiders also raises this question repeatedly. When a police officer asks John if he is worried that Dave is in danger from the infected Franky, John replies, ‘[d]ude if you don’t get over there, and fast, Franky is the one that’s in danger’.50 We would normally expect a human to need protection from a monster, not the reverse. John’s comment points to Dave’s potential for monstrousness, whether or not he is human. And later, when Carlos questions whether they can be certain that Dave has come out of quarantine uninfected, John matter-of-factly notes, ‘[e]h, he wasn’t all that clean before’.51 Again, Dave’s status is indeterminate. Much like Carlos, and unlike Anna, he has committed acts of extreme violence before, and he always has the potential to transition from human to monster in behaviour if not in essence. For each of these characters, the question of their humanity or monstrosity is a matter of perspective.They are human or monstrous Other depending on the point of view of whoever judges them. 30

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Spiders prepares readers for this state of indeterminacy early on in an anecdote related to Dave by Dr Tennet. Tennet tells of a time when his wife called him convinced that something ‘unnatural’, ‘massive’ and ‘alive’ was preparing to ‘burst forth’ from the walls of their home.52 Tennet investigates and discovers that there is a hive of bees living in the walls and kills them with insecticide. He asks whether Dave understands the point of the story and Dave replies: ‘ “Yeah, your wife thought it was a monster. Turned out to just be bees. So my little problem, probably just bees. It’s all bees. Nothing to worry about.” ’53 And Tennet responds: ‘ “I’m afraid you misunderstood. That was the day that a very powerful, very dangerous monster turned out to be real. Just ask the bees.” ’54 The shift of perspective that Tennet makes here is very similar to that which Nayar attributes to critical posthumanism and animality studies, writing, ‘animal studies suggests that we rethink the categories of “animal” and “human” and recognize the anthropocentric construction of these categories’.55 In order to recognize the monstrosity of his action, Tennet must be able to view it from the point of view of the non-human Other. From the perspective of critical posthumanism, ‘previously taken-for-granted categories of the human/non-human are now subject to sustained, controversial examination’;56 and ‘[w]e have to see the self as multiple, fragmented and made of the foreign’.57 The characters of Carlos, Anna, Amy and Dave all represent such multiple, hybrid selves.They, like Nayar’s posthumans, ‘are multiples, fluid, networked and capable of morphing into, or connecting with, some other body/ies as never before’.58 They are posthuman, not because they have ceased to be, or to behave as, humans, but because they are no longer fully distinct from the monstrous Other. And perhaps the same could be said of all of the parasite-infected ‘zombies’ of the novels. Indeed, at the end of Spiders, it is possible that many infected humans have survived and will reintegrate into society as human– monster hybrids. And, like Dave and Carlos, they might always carry the potential to transform. The novels, as critical posthumanist Gothic texts, employ themes and characters familiar in zombie apocalypse narratives in order to confront and to challenge issues of humanity and monstrosity from a posthuman perspective. More than simply raising questions about 31

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the humanity or monstrosity of their characters, the novels challenge the notion that such a distinction between human and non-human can be made at all. John Dies encapsulates its troubling theme of the monster inside with a question that Dave poses to the reporter, Arnie Blondstone: ‘Do you ever go in the bathroom at night, Arnie, and for a second, just a split second, you glimpse something in the mirror other than your reflection? Then you turn the light on and, of course, everything’s fine again. But for just half a second, maybe while you’re leaving the room, you see out the corner of your eye that it isn’t you in the mirror. Or maybe it’s you, only changed? And what’s looking back at you is something completely different? Something not very human?’59

The passage raises an issue that is central to Wong’s novels: that the monstrous Other is a threat that resides inside of us as well as outside. If the zombies are just ourselves post-humanity, then maybe they were always a part of us waiting to emerge. Perhaps the parasites that seem to transform humans into zombies are simply interfacing with and awakening the monsters already within us. Notes Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 25. 2 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 3–4. 3 S. Herbrechter and I. Callus,‘What is a posthumanist reading?’, Angelaki, 13/1 (2008), 96. 4 David Wong, John Dies at the End (New York: Thomas Dunne Books / St Martin’s Press, 2009), p. 122.The characterization of the infecting agent as a swarm may be a nod to Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry’s characterization of the zombie horde as ‘a swarm where no trace of the individual remains’: S. J. Lauro and K. Embry,‘A Zombie Manifesto’, boundary 2, 35/1 (2008), 89. 5 The protagonist of the novels shares his name with the author, one of many challenges to the notion of stable identity offered in the novels. 1

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Organic  ave and John are able to spot the parasites due to having ingested an D extra-dimensional drug called ‘soy sauce’ that allows them to perceive normally invisible entities from the dimension of the shadow men. 7 Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 145. 8 Plutarch,‘Theseus’, The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/ theseus.html (accessed 7 January 2015). 9 C. Derksen and D. H. Hick, ‘Your Zombie and You: Identity, Emotion, and the Undead’, in Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (eds), Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), p. 17. 10 Here I am referring to the television series rather than the comic books, though this scene occurs in both. 11 Wong, John Dies, p. 1. 12 Wong, John Dies, p. 2 (italics added for emphasis). 13 David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin’s Press, 2012), p. 54. Tennet’s description of bodily teleportation here echoes that of early cybernetics theorist Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 109: ‘The individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, is that of a form rather than that of a bit of substance.’ 14 Wong, Spiders, p. 54. 15 Derksen and Hick, ‘Your Zombie and You’, p. 17. 16 Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), p. 21. 17 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 136, in fact, characterizes the process of dying as a transformation into the post­ human. She equates death with ‘the inhuman within’, which ‘marks the becoming-imperceptible of the subject as the furthest frontier of the processes of intensive transformation or becoming’. 18 Wong, Spiders, p. 297. 19 Wong, Spiders, p. 127. 20 P. Dendle,‘And the Dead Shall Inherit the Earth’, in Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (eds), Better Off Dead:The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 160. 21 C. J. Rushton and C. M. Moreman, ‘They’re Us: Zombies, Humans /Humans, Zombies’, in Moreman and Rushton (eds), Zombies Are Us, p. 5. 6

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Posthuman Gothic Botting, Gothic Romanced, p. 190. Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 84. 24 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 2. 25 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 3. 26 Wong, Spiders, p. 19. 27 Wong, Spiders, p. 21 28 Wong, Spiders, pp. 339–40. 29 Wong, Spiders, p. 82. 30 Wong, Spiders, p. 82. 31 Botting, Gothic Romanced, pp. 145–6. 32 Wong, John Dies, p. 320. 33 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 105. 34 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 104. 35 Wong, Spiders, p. 14. Though the appearance of the ‘cyborg’ here is clearly meant for humorous effect, Wong’s renderings of female characters in general suggest an interest in representing the sort of complex, hybrid subjectivities theorized in Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg. 36 Wong, Spiders, p. 345. 37 Wong, Spiders, p. 346. 38 Wong, Spiders, p. 346. 39 Wong, Spiders, p. 345. 40 Wong, Spiders, p. 342 (italics added for emphasis). 41 Wong, Spiders, p. 344. Note that Anna refers to Dave as ‘Walt’ throughout the novel, due to initially confusing ‘Wong’ for ‘Walt’. 42 Wong, John Dies, p. 428. 43 Wong, John Dies, p. 420. 44 Wong, John Dies, p. 438. 45 Wong, John Dies, p. 429. 46 Wong, John Dies, p. 122. 47 Wong, John Dies, p. 332. 48 Wong, John Dies, p. 334. 49 Wong, John Dies, p. 441. 50 Wong, Spiders, p. 72. 51 Wong, Spiders, p. 347. 52 Wong, Spiders, p. 12. 53 Wong, Spiders, p. 13. 54 Wong, Spiders, p. 13. 22 23

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Organic  ayar, Posthumanism, p. 98. N Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 3. 57 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 63. 58 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 55. 59 Wong, John Dies, p. 79. 55 56

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2 Of Crakers and Men: Imagining the Future and Rethinking the Past in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy Antonia Peroikou

 After the emergence of postmodernism as a global aesthetic style in the late 1970s, related to the broader transformations of modernity, the resurgence of Gothic forms and figures seemed probable, if not inevitable. In Gothic, Fred Botting identifies the Gothic as ‘an inscription neither of darkness nor of light, a delineation neither of reason and morality nor of superstition and corruption, neither good nor evil, but both at the same time’.1 Equally ambivalent are the sentiments most associated with Gothic works, as what provokes horror, terror, revulsion and convulsion simultaneously evokes fascination, curiosity and attraction; as he asserts, associations ‘between real and fantastic, sacred and profane, supernatural and natural, past and present, civilised and barbaric and rational and fanciful, remain crucial to the Gothic dynamic of limit and transgression’.2 This is primarily the reason many critics have attempted to formulate different subgenres of the Gothic in their efforts to address contemporary works. In Gothic-Postmodernism, Maria Beville associates the emergence of the new and distinct genre of the postmodern Gothic with a ‘blurring of the borders that exist between the real and the fictional, which results in narrative self-consciousness and an interplay between the supernatural and

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the metafictional’.3 The sublime effects of terror and the Gothic thematic of haunting are linked to the ‘unrepresentable’ features of subjectivity and reality and are interrelated with a counter-narrative function. Botting suggests that the moment of intersection between the postmodern and the Gothic appears with ‘[t]he loss of human identity and the alienation of the self from both itself and the social bearings in which a sense of reality is secured’, manifesting ‘in the threatening shapes of increasingly dehumanised environments, machinic doubles and violent psychotic fragmentation’.4 Interestingly enough, instead of addressing external fears of faceless terrorists, alien Others, or technological and cybernetic annihilation, some contemporary Gothic literature seems to focus on threats that come from within. Micheal Sean Bolton, for instance, argues that, ‘while a sense of terror arises from the external fear of being transformed into a machine-creature, a sense of horror emerges from the internal dread that the technological Other already inhabits the human subject, that the subject is betrayed from within’.5 In an effort to address and explore this shift, one needs to examine a specific form of Gothic literature: Gothic posthumanism.The term presents itself as a ‘distinct generic mutation in literature’ and communicates the extent to which two diverse literary ideologies, the Gothic and the posthuman, ‘have come to be intertwined into a controversial mode of writing that could be referred to as a literary monster’.6 Cary Wolfe’s definition of the posthuman starts with the rather paradoxical construction of: ‘both before and after’ (humanism). 7 The preposition ‘before’ is used in the sense that posthumanism names ‘the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world’. The ‘after’ is employed in the sense that it names ‘a historical moment in which the decentering of the human’ becomes ‘increasingly impossible to ignore’ and a historical advancement that highlights the necessity of new theoretical paradigms – while at the same time thrusting them towards us.What Wolfe envisions here is a new way of thinking ‘that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon’. Nowadays, the philosophical and theoretical frameworks that humanism has employed throughout the years 37

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highlighting the importance and agency of human beings appear to be inadequate since they set the ground for discrimination against non-human animals and the disabled; thus, posthumanism cannot be seen as an extension of humanism to include others within the concept. In other words, although most people would agree that animals should not be treated with cruelty and that people with disabilities should be treated with equality and respect, the theoretical and philosophical frameworks employed by humanism to ‘make good on those commitments reproduce the very kind of normative subjectivity – a concept specific of the human – that grounds discrimination against non-human animals and the disabled in the first place’.8 Thus, it is impossible to simply identify the posthuman as a culture or era that comes as an extension of humanism, since the notion of such a passing depends on a humanist projection of historical change. Rather, since history and culture can no longer be viewed in reference to the concept of humanism, posthumanism should be seen as a major change or a radical mutation of the concept of the human that is, according to R. L. Rutsky, ‘ongoing’ and ‘always already immanent in the processes by which both material bodies and cultural patterns replicate themselves’. 9 This mutation is rendered as a ‘pre-existing, external force’ that serves to introduce an alteration to a ‘stable pattern (or code) and into the material world or body as well’. Evidently, the posthuman becomes the site of a mutational, a viral or, better yet, a parasitic way of thinking that calls for the necessity of a different logic and ‘infects and mutates through the very structures, privileged terms and discursive notes of power on which it is parasitical’.10 At the same time, posthumanism needs to be understood as that which dwells within humanism, that is, as the repressed possibility of and inside humanism.Therefore, the ability of Gothic texts to offer, in a limited fashion at least, ‘some kind of liberation from restraints, freeing classes, sexes and desires from the manacles of ideology’ could enable the discovery of other ‘new and affirmative renderings of different sexual and racial identities behind the veils of monstrosity’, prefiguring modes of posthuman life.11 Whereas subgenres that bring together the postmodern and the Gothic often elicit terror and/or horror from the threat of the extinction of humankind through the development of monstrous technologies, 38

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Gothic posthumanism ‘finds instances of terror and horror arising from the interfaces and integrations of humans and technologies’. More specifically, ‘the inevitability and exigency of these unions as a matter of the continued existence of the human subject reconstituted as posthuman’12 enable the creation of the provocative mode of writing that is Gothic posthumanism. This chapter focuses on a Gothic posthumanist reading of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, consisting of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. With detailed analysis of the figures of the Crakers, a species of herbivorous human-like creatures with human and animal characteristics bioengineered by Glenn aka Crake, a posthuman Gothic reading focuses on the instances of horror and terror that arise from inexorable and uncanny amalgamations of human subjects and technological advancements, as well as the posthuman Gothic’s main source of fear – ‘the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change’.13 The Crakers are precisely the monstrous figures that embody these fears and hopes for the future. Essentially, Atwood’s trilogy constantly questions the boundaries between utopia and dystopia and disrupts the rigidity of such classifications by oscillating among the following: there is first the technologically dystopian near future where humans abuse nature to the fullest with the creation of gene-spliced animals, the establishment and perfection of eugenics as a science and the extinction of most known species. Secondly, the novels present Crake’s vision of a utopian future where the Crakers would be the sole survivors of the pandemic, living in perfect harmony with each other, nature and even their human custodian Snowman the Jimmy. Finally, the novels introduce the post-apocalyptic present with its shifts in narrative perspective. Of Crakers . . . It becomes evident early on that the narrative is wreathed with strong biblical allusions, especially ones that refer to the book of Genesis and Adam’s naming of the animals. Firstly, Crake acquired his nickname from a stimulation game called ‘Extinctathon’, ‘an interactive biofreak masterlore game . . . Monitored by Maddaddam. 39

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Adam named the living animals, Maddaddam names the dead ones’.14 In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben attempts to explore the significance of that moment in Genesis for the man/animal relationship, since he too believes it to be the most pivotal moment in the definition and formation of the boundary between the two. In that originary moment, history and philosophy come together in order to decide upon, and hence also produce, the concept of ‘Man’ and delineate his relationship with the rest of creation. Agamben, in the chapter ‘Cognitio Experimentalis’, recalls a passage from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica that bears the significant heading, ‘Whether Adam in the State of Innocence Had Mastery over the Animals’. Aquinas describes the relationship between man and animal in terms of a ‘cognitive experiment’ that took place at that very moment of creation. He asserts that in ‘the state of innocence, men did not have any bodily need of animals’, neither for food, clothing nor for transport. However, ‘man needed animals in order to have experimental knowledge of their natures. This is signified by the fact that God led the animals to man, that he might give them names expressive of their respective natures.’15 This cognitive experiment does not only concern theology and philosophy but also politics, ethics and jurisprudence, since all are ‘drawn and suspended in the difference between man and animal’.16 Essentially, what is at stake in this ‘cognitio experimentalis’ is the ‘hominis natura’, i.e. the production and the definition of the very nature of Man. ‘When the difference vanishes’, according to Agamben, ‘and the two terms collapse upon each other – as seems to be happening today – the difference between being and nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic also fades away, and in its place something appears for which we seem to lack even a name’.17 This something that for Agamben remains unnameable could be the curious figures of the Crakers, who seem to belong to an era before Man and to a time after Man. Originally inhabiting Paradice Dome, the Crakers construction clearly alludes to a prelapsarian innocence that has disappeared from humanity. To begin with, what is truly amazing about the Crakers’ design is the fact that Crake and his team were able to alter the ‘primate brain’ and eliminate those features that they thought responsible for ‘the world’s current illness’. Essentially, the scientists were able to eliminate 40

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racism, or ‘pseudospeciation’, as it was referred to in Paradice, by ‘switching the bonding mechanism’ that enables the registration of skin colour. Furthermore, they removed the neural complexes that would have created hierarchy and, ‘since they were neither hunters nor agriculturalists hungry for land, there was no territoriality: the king-of-the-castle hard-wiring that had plagued humanity had, in them, been unwired’.18 The fact that their diet consisted strictly of grass, roots and the occasional berry meant that food would always be plentiful and available to them and they wouldn’t need to covet, steal or lie. Atwood explains:‘Except that they don’t need commandments: no thou shalt nots would be good to them, or even comprehensible, because it’s all built in. No point in telling them not to lie, steal, commit adultery, or covet.They wouldn’t grasp the concepts.’19 Undeniably, one of the most interesting and amusing attributes of the Crakers is their mating habits: once every three years, the female would be in heat, obvious ‘from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen’ and inspired by the physiologies of baboons. Once the males catch a ‘whiff ’ of the happening, they present the females with flowers – just as male penguins present females with round stones, or male silverfish present sperm packets – and burst into song, like songbirds. Then, ‘their penises turn bright blue’ and they engage in ‘a sort of blue-dick dance’ with their members erect, waving back and forth in harmony, reminiscent of the ‘sexual semaphoring of crabs’. Even though the female chooses only four flowers, the sexual appetite of the other candidates disperses immediately ‘with no hard feelings left’. Then, the quartet would find a private space and ‘go at it’ until the woman gets pregnant; ‘and that is that’.20 With one fell swoop, an artful brushstroke, Crake has eliminated jealousy, prostitution, sexual abuse of children, rape and so many other crimes related to sexual competition; sex is no longer a cryptic rite but an ‘athletic demonstration, a free-spirited romp’.21 At the same time, the Crakers seem to also belong to a time after Man, after humanity has managed to self-destruct. Agamben, in the first chapter of the same work entitled ‘Theriomorphous’, embarks on a discussion that revolves around a miniature illustration of a narrative from a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible of the last day of the history of humanity. On that day, under the shade of 41

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paradisiacal trees and in the sound of hymns played by two musicians, the righteous will be presented with a messianic feast; they, however, like the musicians, are not presented with human faces but with animal heads. Agamben concludes that the theriomorphous depiction of the righteous might refer to a ‘shadowy kinship between animal macrocosm and human microcosm’ and a reshaping of the human/animal relationship at the end of days. He goes on to support his argument with the following well-known messianic prophecy from Isaiah 11: 6: ‘the wolf shall live with the sheep, / and the leopard lie down with the kid; / the calf and the young lion shall grow up together, / and a little child shall lead them’.22 It is therefore possible and quite probable that the miniature illustration might imply that ‘on the last day the relations between animals and men will take on a new form and man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature’.23 This messianic end of history, the philosopher suggests, with the righteous depicted with animal heads, ‘defines a critical threshold’,24 whereby the distinction between humans and animals, which has been so pivotal for our culture, threatens to disappear. The relationship between humans and animals ‘marks the boundary of an essential domain, in which historical inquiry must necessarily confront the fringe of ultrahistory which cannot be reached without making recourse to first philosophy’.25 In other words, the question of the border of the human/animal relationship is not merely one question among others; it is rather an essential metaphysico-political function that has enabled philosophers and theologians to define and produce concepts such as ‘Man’ or ‘subjectivity’. Agamben suggests that, if humanity and animality could be superimposed perfectly, then notions such as ‘Man’, ‘animal’ or even the ‘divine’ would be unthinkable. As figures of the posthuman, the Crakers are hybrid creatures, embodying both human and animal characteristics while belonging to a time before and after humanity. This ontological and existential ambiguity is only one of the ways in which Atwood’s trilogy seems to immerse itself in the Gothic tradition.The debt to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein runs deep, with Crake playing the part of a postmodern Victor Frankenstein, manufacturing an entirely different species of creature, the Crakers, using an ambiguous method consisting of chemistry, biology, 42

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engineering and, in a way, alchemy. In ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, a work Cary Wolfe described as the ‘locus classicus’ of posthumanism,26 Donna Haraway also dwells on the boundaries between human and non-human and argues not only for pleasure in their confusion and erosion, but also for responsibility in their construction. ‘The stakes in the border war’, she argues, ‘have been the territories of production, reproduction and imagination’.27 The philosopher further suggests that the breakdown of the human/ non-human boundary inevitably results in the erosion of other boundaries, such as the border between physical and non-physical and the ‘leaky’ distinction between human-animal (organism) and machine. At the point where this boundary is transgressed, the cyborg appears in myth, so the ‘cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work’.28 The cyborg, therefore, a kind of ‘disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self ’,29 threatens the entire humanist edifice, since, on the one hand, a cyborg world is about ‘the final imposition of a grid of control on the plane’ and ‘about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war’. On the other, ‘a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’.30 The political struggle, she asserts, is to attempt to view the world from both perspectives at once, ‘because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point’. With cyborg unities being considered ‘monstrous and illegitimate’, in our present political conditions, ‘we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling’.31 As liminal figures themselves, the Crakers challenge established borders between the sciences; they are the product of biological and chemical engineering with both human and animal genetic material and their presence is accompanied by feelings of fear and aversion. In ‘Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs’, Nina Lykke suggests that ‘the mixture of human and non-human dimensions is what constitutes the monster’s [and, by extension, the cyborg’s] monstrosity’,32 but, most importantly, renders their elimination necessary for 43

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the restoration or maintenance of the status quo. ‘A conspicuous characteristic of the great modern divide between human and non-human’, she asserts, ‘is that its construction is accompanied by strong hostility to monsters and hybrids in their capacity as boundary figures which adhere to neither the human nor the non-human sphere.’33 Interestingly enough, in Atwood’s narrative, there are many instances where Snowman expresses his concern over the fate of the Crakers if they come into contact with others with ‘extra skins’ (i.e. clothing) holding ‘noisy sticks’ (i.e. guns), allusions that are reminiscent of the persecution of Frankenstein’s monster by the villagers, ‘grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons’.34 The possibility of an eminent threat towards the Crakers becomes evident with Snowman’s realization that he, himself, isn’t the only human survivor of the pandemic, contrary to Crake’s aspirations: On the other hand, these new arrivals could easily see the Children of Crake as freakish, or savage, or non-human and a threat. Images from old history flip through his head, sidebars from Blood and Roses: Ghenghis Khan’s skull pile, the heaps of shoes and eyeglasses from Dachau, the burning corpse-filled churches in Rwanda, the sack of Jerusalem by the Crusaders. The Arawak Indians, welcoming Christopher Colombus with garlands and gifts of fruit, smiling with delight, soon to be massacred, or tied up beneath the beds upon which their women were being raped.35

The threat becomes even more substantial, especially since among the survivors of the pandemic are a group of violent criminals, emotionally hardened by a lethal version of paintball, ironically called Painball, that has turned them into modern-day gladiators, killing each other for public entertainment. Representing the worst of humanity, these criminals indulge in acts of extreme violence and cruelty, such as torture, murder, rape and even cannibalism; as Atwood writes, ‘Anyone who’d survived Painball more than once had been reduced to the reptilian brain. Sex until you were worn to a fingernail was their mode; after that you were dinner. They liked the kidneys.’36 In ‘What is a posthumanist reading?’ Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus suggest that ‘what makes “us” human is the capacity 44

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for murder’.37 Murder, however, is more than a crime, a sacrilege for humanity, one that the philosophers assert is ‘necessary’, since, as they assert, a person ‘is most (abjectly) human in the moment of annihilating another human’.38 Nonetheless, the Crakers have no understanding or fear of the danger that the Painballers present and possess no means of defending themselves against them; ‘The Crakers wouldn’t understand murder because they are so trusting. They’d never imagine that anyone would rape them – What is rape? Or slit their throats – Oh Toby, why? Or slash them open and eat their kidneys – But Oryx would not allow it!’39 Indeed, in order to achieve his utopian vision for the Crakers and the future, Crake thought he had to eradicate human emotions and all cultural foundational elements, rendering them inoperative for his new world since they are the building blocks of human nature; according to Herbrechter and Callus, ‘culture, ironically, is precisely that which is designed to guarantee human “nature” ’.40 Thus, Crake tried to eliminate fear, lust, hatred, jealousy and even history and religion. Named after major historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Sacagawea and Empress Josephine, the Crakers are completely unaware of the historical significance behind their names since, for their community, they are merely empty signifiers; ‘Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the after-life, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.’41 The Crakers, however, are figures that not only alter the idea of human nature, but represent an alternative potential of what human nature can be. . . . and Men Atwood’s trilogy does not only negotiate the physical and/or ethical boundary between the human and the monster but also, according to Chung-Hao Ku, ‘makes a far bolder leap’.42 There are several good reasons as to why, even nowadays, Frankenstein tends to be mistaken for his monster. One would be film history with different adaptations of the book naming the unnamed 45

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monster ‘Frankenstein’ after his creator. Another reason might be the idea that by the end of Shelley’s narrative the scientist is so consumed with rage and revenge that he has become a monster himself, indistinguishable from his creature. As Anne Mellor asserts, ‘Victor has become his creature, his creature has become his maker; they are each other’s double. Hence naming the creature “Frankenstein” – as popular folklore would have it – uncovers a profound truth within the novel’s narrative.’43 Similarly to Victor, Crake is presented as a radical extremist who almost wipes humanity out only to repopulate the planet with his creations, proudly named ‘Crakers’. However, as Ku notes in ‘Of Monster and Man’, ‘[m]onstrosity may be synonymous with either corporeal grotesquery or ethical transgression in the nineteenth-century imagination’, but Atwood’s trilogy, ‘while no doubt inheriting, modifying and critiquing the “mad scientist” stereotype of Frankenstein, further questions – if not totally confounds – the fine line between humanity and monstrosity with respect to their biological morphology and immanent hierarchy’.44 In essence, while Romantic and Victorian monsters are eventually controlled and ‘held in check’, the Crakers do not only outnumber the remaining humans while still reproducing constantly but also begin to challenge their dominance in various ways. As bioengineered creatures that fit into natural environments effortlessly, adapt to different living conditions and cohabit with other living beings in complete instinctual harmony with the passing of time, the Crakers, still, seem to flourish. According to Ku, the Crakers successfully disrupt the (human) self/Other (non-human) binary: the ‘superhuman Crakers now take priority as the favoured human subjects on this side of the grand “self ” ’ and ‘the non-­ bioengineered Snowman, even if more human in the traditional (organic) sense, now becomes the “other” ’.45 As a ‘word person’ – compared to ‘numbers people’46 like Crake – and one of the main focalizing characters in the novels, Snowman has become the reluctant ‘prophet’ of Oryx and Crake, responsible for providing the Crakers with a simple narrative about the creation of the world, Crake, Oryx and, most importantly, themselves. However, Snowman always seems to be keeping an ironic distance from the Crakers, unable to really connect with them. He lives alone in a tree, further 46

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away from the Crakers’ encampment, wraps himself in an old sheet, excludes himself from their festivities and scavenges supplies from the remnants of human civilization. Ku asserts that, even though he is morphologically the same, genetically he is much more primitive than the Crakers, ‘thus making of him a sort of monstrous outcast or freak’.47 Reeking ‘like a walrus-oily, salty, fishy’,48 Snowman mourns for the dissolution of the only thing that still connects him to humanity, language: ‘Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate.’49 As the narrative continues, Snowman starts viewing himself as a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts:‘Why am I on this earth? How come I’m alone? Where’s my Bride of Frankenstein?’50 With his mental and physical condition deteriorating to such an extent that he constantly experiences hallucinations, Snowman, Ku asserts, likens himself to ‘an intruder, a pervert, a leper, a specter, an animal, and even a monster in contrast to the Crakers’.51 Internalizing these images, he holds a whistle ‘like a leper’s bell’ to inform others of his arrival; ‘all those bothered by cripples can get out of his way’.52 Initially having adopted the name ‘Abominable Snowman’, a hybrid creature that lies on the border,‘existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints’,53 Snowman ends up seeing himself as a phantom, a ghost, slipping in and out of existence: ‘I’m your past, he might intone. I’m your ancestor, come from the land of the dead. Now I’m lost, I can’t get back, I’m stranded here, I’ m all alone. Let me in!’54 His eventual death only solidifies the view that in this post-apocalyptic world, the future belongs to the superhuman clan of the Crakers and, as Melissa Roddis asserts, that ‘there is no room in this posthuman, postnatural utopia for the human’.55 Thus, the all-too-human Snowman becomes a relic of the past, a Frankenstein’s monster that needs to be forsaken. As J. Brooks Bouson asserts, ‘in the post-Darwinian and eugenicist belief system of Crake, the radical solution to humanity’s ills in a twenty-first-century world of global, social and economic decline is the destruction of humanity’ and the repopulation of the planet with the Crakers, ‘noble savages that are environmentally friendly, peace-loving and socially and economically egalitarian’.56 47

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In MaddAddam, however, the final book of the trilogy, Atwood also presents readers with another possible version of the future, one that presents a group of survivors from the pandemic living in harmony with the Crakers, creating their own hybrid community. By presenting ‘two competing visions of humanity’, with Blanco and his companion Painballers, who ruthlessly hunt down, kill and mutilate Oates and take captive and sexually torture Amanda and Ren, side by side with the story of Toby’s fierce acts of bravery and loving acts of human compassion and of Ren’s acts of loyalty, love and forgiveness,57 Atwood’s narrative entrusts the defence of the Craker community primarily with these women. Contrary to Snowman’s distance from the Crakers, Toby’s more compassionate and sympathetic stance, caring for them and teaching them how to read and write, has eventually rendered her their ‘guardian’. Aside from the obvious allusions to the necessity for female empowerment and the creation of a community based on gender and racial equality in her post-apocalyptic world, Atwood highlights a further link between female bodies and the Crakers, that of biological reproduction. In ‘Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt’, Rosi Braidotti asserts that behind fears and anxieties regarding the conception of monsters ‘are at times extreme versions of the deep-seated anxiety that surrounds the issue of women’s maternal power of procreation in a patriarchal society’.58 Praying that their pregnancies are the results of their intercourse with the Crakers, rather than of their rape by the Painballers, the women give birth to a new form of hybrid children. A mixture of Craker with human genetic material, the new green-eyed Craker hybrids, Jimadam, Pilaren, Medulla and Oblongata, are destined to inherit the world and encompass the possibility for a different utopian future. Thus, by opening up a space for the possibility of a utopian future in the midst of a radically dystopian present, Atwood rekindles utopian hopes and desires even as she issues a grim warning that, if humanity continues along the same path of destruction and exploitation, its very survival might be at risk.

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Conclusion In the introduction to her iconic Gothic novel, Shelley writes that she would write a story that ‘would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart’.59 To evoke this horror and terror, according to Karen F. Stein, Shelley builds upon the theme of ‘the power and danger of science and technology’.60 Almost two hundred years later, Margaret Atwood refers to her works as ‘speculative fiction’, in order to ask ‘what if ’ and embark on an exploration of ‘the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them fully up and running’; of ‘the nature and limits of what it means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the envelope as far as it will go’; and, most importantly, of ‘proposed changes to the social organization’ by showing the ramifications of living in a utopia, or a dystopia.While speculative fiction negotiates what is ‘past and passing’, it primarily discusses ‘what’s to come’ through the ‘realms of the imagination’.61 Bouson, therefore, rightly asserts that Atwood ‘voices a deep fear that has long plagued Western society and that has found expression, over time, in utopian hopes and their related dystopian fears: that scientific advances will lead not to a progressive utopian future but instead will result in humanity’s reversion to a savage dystopian (even pre-human) past’.62 Thus, following Shelley’s footsteps, Atwood’s trilogy offers a fascinating and intriguing view into the ‘consequences of the misuse of biotechnology and genetic engineering on human nature and the human imagination’.63 At the same time, while the trilogy becomes an ‘admonitory satire’ discussing ‘the violence and greed of a contemporary culture driven by rampant consumerism and environmental and social exploitation’, Atwood also presents readers with the hope that the shabby group of human survivors might mingle with the Crakers in order to restructure society and ‘set up a new social-political utopian enclave among the dystopian ruins of the old order’.64 Whereas one of the essential functions of the Gothic, as Ruth Bienstock Anolik observes, is to denote ‘the fearful unknown as the inhuman Other: the 49

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supernatural or monstrous manifestation, inhabiting mysterious space, that symbolises all that is irrational, uncontrollable and incomprehensible’,65 the posthuman Gothic forces readers to envision a future where this Other is no longer inhuman but posthuman. In attempting to read the humanism that lies within texts that question and explore the limits of humanism – such as Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy – a critical Gothic posthumanist approach attempts to expose readers to alternative possibilities that do not succumb to the restraints of humanism as a system of values.The Crakers, therefore, who represent the lab-created, hybrid and, at times, monstrous figures of the Gothic posthuman, force readers to rethink presupposed modes of human experience by decontextualising them ‘in terms of an entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of “bringing forth a world” ’, ways that constitute part of the ‘evolutionary history and behavioural and psychological repertoire of the human itself ’. At the same time, they assert that the specificity of the human is exactly what renders him/her a prostheting creature that has evolved alongside certain forms of ‘technicity and materiality’, which are fundamentally not-human, but have nonetheless made the human what it is.66 Hence, the Gothic posthuman subject presents itself as an amalgamation of diverse constituents, a creature whose borders undergo continuous construction, deconstruction and reconstruction, provoking both fear and anticipation, horror and longing for the future to come. Notes Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 6. Botting, Gothic, p. 6. 3 Maria Beville, Gothic-Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), p. 18. 4 Botting, Gothic, p. 102. 5 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 5. 6 Beville, Gothic-Postmodernism, p. 16. 7 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. xv–xvi. 8 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xvii. 1 2

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Organic R. L. Rutsky,‘Mutation, History, and Fantasy in the Posthuman’, Subject Matters, 3/2–4/1 (2007), 110–11. 10 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xix. 11 Fred Botting, The Gothic (Cambridge:The English Association, 2001), p. 4. 12 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 2. 13 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 3. 14 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London:Virago Press, 2013), p. 92. 15 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), p. 650. 16 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 22. 17 Agamben, Open, p. 22. 18 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 358. 19 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 426. 20 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 194. 21 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 195. 22 Agamben, Open, p. 2. 23 Agamben, Open, p. 3. 24 Agamben, Open, p. 21. 25 Agamben, Open, p. 21. 26 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xiii. 27 Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 8. 28 Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, pp. 12–13. 29 Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, p. 23. 30 Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, p. 13. 31 Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, p. 13. 32 Nina Lykke, ‘Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs’, in Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (eds), Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace (London: Zed Books, 1996), p. 16. 33 Lykke, ‘Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs’, p. 15. 34 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; New York: Norton, 2012), p. 73. 35 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 425. 36 Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2013), p. 9. 9

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Posthuman Gothic S . Herbrechter and I. Callus,‘What is a posthumanist reading?’, Angelaki, 13/1 (2008), 103. 38 Herbrechter and Callus, ‘What is a posthumanist reading?’, 103. 39 Atwood, MaddAddam, p. 27. 40 Herbrechter and Callus, ‘What is a posthumanist reading?’, 101. 41 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 420. 42 C. Ku,‘Of Monster and Man:Transgenics and Transgression in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Concentric, 32/1 (2006), 109. 43 A. K. Mellor, ‘Making a “monster”: an introduction to Frankenstein’, in E. Schor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 23. 44 Ku, ‘Of Monster and Man’, 109. 45 Ku, ‘Of Monster and Man’, 112. 46 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 28. 47 Ku, ‘Of Monster and Man’, 116. 48 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 7. 49 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 305. 50 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 199. 51 Ku, ‘Of Monster and Man’, 115. 52 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 181. 53 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 8. 54 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, p. 123. 55 M. Roddis, ‘ “Someone Else’s Utopia”:The Eco-Posthuman “Utopia” of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Writing Technologies, 5 (2013), 30. 56 J. Brooks Bouson, ‘ “We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 16/1 (2011), 16–17. 57 Bouson, ‘ “We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone” ’, 22. 58 Rosi Braidotti, ‘Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt’, in Lykke and Braidotti (eds), Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs, p. 139. 59 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 167. 60 K. F. Stein, ‘Problematic Paradice in Oryx and Crake’, in J. Brooks Bouson (ed.), Margaret Atwood:The Robber Bride,The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 143. 61 Margaret Atwood, ‘Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context’, PMLA, 119/3 (2004), 515. 37

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Organic  ouson, ‘ “We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone” ’, 16. B Stein, ‘Problematic Paradice’, p. 142. 64 Bouson, ‘ “We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone” ’, 23. 65 Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ‘Introduction: The Dark Unknown’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (eds), The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination (London: McFarland, 2004), p. 1. 66 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xxv. 62 63

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3 Of Posthuman Vampires: Science, Blood and Becoming-With Lars Schmeink

 In her discussion of technoscience, Donna Haraway draws upon the vampire to represent the ‘vectors of infection’ that infuse current ‘bioscientific constructions of universal humanity’.1 The vampire provides the ideal imagery to describe the transgressions, transformations and constant renegotiations of categories that haunt the posthuman existence of the technoscientific age. And indeed, vampires have ‘the power to move between and undo borders otherwise holding identities in place’, Erik Butler claims. Their ‘affinity for rupture, change, and mutation’2 makes them posthuman creatures in more than one sense. Today the posthuman has taken centre stage in several areas of debate in mainstream culture. As Rosi Braidotti points out, it is inherent in discussions of ‘trans-humanism and techno-transcendence’, when technological progress questions the essence of human nature by pushing against the ‘boundaries of perfectibility of the body’.3 It is present in globalized capitalism, when the ‘commercialisation of planet Earth in all its forms’ normalizes the ‘genetic code of living matter . . . [as the] main capital’4 of posthuman transactions. And it is present in the ‘necro-technologies’ that govern our societies and ‘have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today’.5

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It thus stands to reason that a figure as protean as the vampire would also inhabit this realm of the posthuman. As Jeffrey Weinstock argues, the vampire ‘is invariably an overdetermined body that condenses a constellation of culturally specific anxieties and desires into one super-saturated form’,6 and one such cultural anxiety is the posthuman.7 Nina Auerbach, in her study of the cultural changes the vampire represents, has observed that ‘no fear is only personal: it must steep itself in its political and ideological ambience, without which our solitary terrors have no contagious resonance’.8 Our vampires are becoming posthuman as much as we are becoming posthuman. They are blending into the cultural climate of our times – they are ‘everything we are, while at the same time, they are fearful reminders of the infinite things we are not’.9 As such, these posthuman vampires stand in the tradition of the postmodern, or rather, the posthuman Gothic. As Micheal Sean Bolton points out, the postmodern Gothic is concerned with ‘the integrity of human subjectivity’, the Gothic connecting with ‘the postmodern fear of the disintegration of the human subject’10.This is essentially a posthuman position, understanding life as ‘a process of becoming through new connections and mergers between species, bodies, functions and technologies’,11 viewing human life as ‘becoming-with’ – a term appropriated by Pramod K. Nayar, Braidotti, and other critics to describe a posthuman, hybrid and flexible subject position.12 Any anxiety about becoming-with, of transgressing the category of the human, is consequently part of the posthuman Gothic, as fear is not externalized but arises from within when humans interact/interface with technology.13 In the following, I will analyse cinematic representations of the posthuman vampire that negotiate these issues not just as mere window dressing but engage in the critical cultural potential of the figure.The vampire, in these films, has become a screen onto which to project posthuman Gothic negotiations of biotechnological transgressions and their disintegrating potential for human nature. Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007), the third film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, introduces a variant form of vampirism as a consequence of modern medicine and genetic engin­ eering. The new race of Darkseekers represents the posthuman in the dual sense of having been created by technoscientific means, and 55

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of being a hybrid species: human life becoming-with the contagion of the Krippin virus. Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002) builds upon the trilogy’s already present genetic explanations for vampirism in order to negotiate the posthuman and its relation to technoscientific progress. The film intervenes in the prevalent discourses of science, technology and eugenics by enacting a conflict between the pure Vampire Nation and the genetically engineered Reaper subspecies of vampires. And lastly, the Spierig brothers’ film Daybreakers (2009) conflates vampirism and hyper-consumption to demonstrate the posthuman use of necro-political power in capitalist societies. In the film, due to a scarcity of resources, the genetically devolved Subsiders are excised from society and reduced to a life of bare survival. Since all three films have different emphases in their use of the posthuman vampire figure, I will analyse them separately and in sequence. Nonetheless, many aspects and features of the films correlate with each other and I will highlight similarities, if and when appropriate. Furthermore, it is important to note that the posthuman vampire represents a deviation from most other vampires because it is aligned with both the genre of science fiction (sf) and that of horror. As such, posthuman vampires are not cultural representations of the past but of the future – they are not found ‘pining for a lost past in a world that has passed its prime’ but instead are ‘mediat[ing] between a fictional future and the reader’s present reality’.14 In terms of its sf-modality, the monstrous figure of the posthuman vampire lends itself to comment on sociopolitical shifts and technological changes, revealing a cautious view of technoscience that is usually found in dystopian narratives. In their depiction of the posthuman vampire, the films presented here function as warning calls against technoscientific progress, combining the social dimension of science fiction and the intensive feelings of terror and revulsion connected to posthuman Gothic and horror. Animalizing the Other: I am Legend From its earliest moments, Francis Lawrence’s film I am Legend draws upon the dystopian potential of scientific progress, specifically genetic engineering, to shift the vampire figure into the realm of sf. The film opens with images from a news program, introducing a 56

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‘miracle cure’ for cancer in an interview with scientist Dr Alice Krippin (Emma Thompson). Krippin explains that she has engin­ eered the ‘measles virus . . . at a genetic level’ to attack cancerous cells instead of healthy ones, in order to cure cancer. The film then cuts to black before opening onto a sequence of shots depicting the lifeless, abandoned city of New York, overlaying the first shot of a flooded car tunnel with the intertitle ‘Three Years Later’.The contiguity of the images and the narration verify that humanity has been almost completely wiped out by the cancer cure, which has turned into the deadly Krippin virus (KV). With a ‘90 per cent kill rate’ and only ‘1 per cent immunity’ – according to the film’s protagonist, military virologist Robert Neville (Will Smith) – KV triggers the mutation of the remaining 9 per cent of humanity into Darkseekers, a new species that feeds on the surviving humans.The film portrays Neville as the ‘last man on earth’, fending off and studying the Darkseekers in order to create a vaccine to cure KV and bring humanity back from viral contagion. In contrast to classical definitions, the vampires of I am Legend are not undead creatures and do not suck the blood of humans, even though they burn when coming into contact with sunlight; indeed, as they feed upon the flesh of humans, some reviewers have read the creatures as zombies. It is important to note, however, that within the film itself, the creatures are only referred to as Darkseekers, mentioning neither ‘vampires’ nor ‘zombies’. In contrast, the original novel by Matheson refers to the creatures as vampires, establishing a precedent for the inclusion in this terminology.Weinstock argues that vampires exhibit three different epistemological states,‘the three branches of the vampire family tree: the natural vampire (separate species or a result of some natural process), the unnatural vampiric psychopath or viral host, and the supernatural vampire monster’.15 Darkseekers belong to the unnatural branch, as they are created by a ‘human manipulation of nature’, which recasts the vampire as a ‘naturally occurring or scientifically created pandemic that must be battled through scientific means’.16 It is their creation (and subsequent potential destruction) through science that defines the vampires as posthuman creatures of techno­ science. Interestingly though, their hybrid existence is enacted in the theatrical release of the film not as a moment of posthuman 57

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becoming-with but instead as devolution towards the inhuman.The Darkseekers are dehumanized and depicted as wild animals, a strategy that similarly applies to the other two films’ posthuman vampires, Blade II’s Reapers and Daybreakers’ Subsiders. In all three, the posthuman vampire’s skin is translucent, their bodies are muscular, wiry and predatory; they have (almost) no hair; their mouths or jaws feature prominently, emphasising their animalistic, even monstrous urge to feed. When hunting, they snarl, growl, or in the case of the Darkseekers, roar – a shot of the creatures unhinging their jaws to rip them open beyond human capacity is repeatedly shown. All three species of posthuman vampire display animalistic traits such as the Reapers’ massive, expandable jaws with their tentacle-like stingers that extract blood, or the Subsiders’ leathery bat-like wings. In the case of the Darkseekers, these animalistic traits are more subtly displayed in an increased speed and range of movement, and a rapid breathing that resembles that of a dog’s panting. As Steffen Hantke notes, this fast-paced rhythm of breath is present even when the Darkseeker is sedated, and thus gives the creature ‘a sense of . . . barely suppressed aggression’ that combines with their inhuman movement to characterize them as monstrous:‘They emanate menace, and their sight causes disgust. They are unambiguously not human.’17 The film further enhances this inhumanity by relying on the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in order to bring the Darkseekers to life. This suggests a cinematic correspondence to their origin in technoscience, as Stacy Abbott points out for Blade II, but which applies to all of the films: ‘This reconception of the vampires through the language of biological science is enhanced by their visual reinvention through computer-generated effects.’18 Darkseekers especially are categorically separate from humanity, being fully computer-generated, not human actors enhanced by CGI (as in Blade II), complicating viewer affect and denying any recognition of humanity in the creatures. Made possible by the animalism and CGI-origin of the Darkseekers, Lawrence portrays them as utterly devoid of human social order.The first encounter with a ‘hive’ of Darkseekers happens during daytime in an abandoned, darkened building. Neville searches for his dog Sam, who has run into the building. The scene begins with the frantic movements of Neville in the dark corridors and 58

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spaces, illuminated by his flashlight. The claustrophobic darkness, the fast-paced cuts, and the shaky camera evoke a feeling of threat and suspense. Neville discovers the hive in a flash sweep of the room with his light, immediately averting the beam, leaving a ghostly after-image of the creatures. The creatures stand in the dark, with down-turned heads and seemingly unmoving, except for their rapid breathing. The next shot is presented from within the circle of Darkseekers, at a low angle and against the flashlight’s beam, revealing the creatures in silhouette, as if from the perspective of a surrounded victim on the ground. Only after Neville finds Sam, are the Darkseekers fully shown. One of the creatures sits on top of an old desk, ready to pounce, and roars before being shot mid-jump. The scene ends, after a fast-paced chase, with Neville jumping onto the sun-lit street. A Darkseeker, caught in the momentum of the chase, also falls into the light, thrashing wildly, hitting its head on the pavement repeatedly, and howling with pain before dying. Lawrence’s treatment of the Darkseekers does not allow the audience to sympathize with them – the suspenseful scenery of the closed quarters and the oppressive darkness, the alien behaviour of the group, the shot that positions the audience ‘at the mercy’ of the creatures, the animal roar of the attack, and the violent reaction to sunlight work together to unsettle the viewer and build up to the increasingly more violent encounters between the Darkseekers and Neville, the hunter/scientist, that are to follow. The film supports the diegetic position of Neville, who captures, studies, and eventually slaughters the Darkseekers, believing their ‘social de-evolution’ to be ‘complete’. Especially revealing is the final attack scene, when the Darkseekers find Neville’s house and charge to attack him and two other survivors (a woman and a young boy), who had rescued Neville shortly before. At the end of this scene, Neville finds himself in the basement, surrounded by Darkseekers relentlessly attacking a glass barrier behind which the three survivors have sheltered. At this moment he realizes that he has created the cure, hands it to Anna (Alice Braga), hides her and the boy in an old furnace and kills himself together with the attackers by triggering an explosion. The cinematic presentation of the Darkseekers is in concert with Neville’s view of them as a hive – casting them, as Hantke argues, ‘as an evolutionary form of life even 59

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lower than predatory mammals, their numbers come in waves, swarming like insects’.19 The Darkseekers know no fear of death, attacking to the last, ignoring any attempt at communication, and in the end deserve to be blown up. The overwhelming mass of Darkseekers attack the house for no apparent reason (other than killing) and are reminiscent of the biblical plague of locusts which descended upon humanity as punishment. In this reading of the film, which hinges on the ending as presented in the theatrical release, the Darkseekers as posthuman vampires come to represent a reactionary fear of the Other, positioning them as the ultimate evil opposite the forces of good (i.e. Neville), and suggesting them to be deserving of eradication. The aesthetics of the Darkseekers, with their tattered clothing, the grey-brownish hues of their dusty skin, and the incomprehensible otherness in behaviour, as well as the ruinous landscape of Manhattan, all evoke images of the attacks of 9/11 – the film thus rallying behind the ideology of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ and its agenda of national defence against a vaguely Middle-Eastern/Muslim threat of terrorism. This fear of the Other is central to a conservative reading of the film undertaken on the theatrical release that reworked the original ending intended for the film. The alternate version, comprised of the original ending and two scenes which enable a revised impression of the Darkseekers, is more in line with the novel and suggests a motivation for otherwise incongruent scenes. In this version, Neville slowly realizes that the Darkseekers are not de-evolved, but exhibit higher brain functions and social behaviour, going so far as to explain the attack on the house as the alpha male’s search for his captured lover. This explains several scenes throughout the film that defied the logic of the theatrical release. When Neville captures a female Darkseeker with an elaborate trap, the alpha male sets up an exact copy of that trap with surrogate-human bait in order to capture Neville. The knowledge of the trap’s mechanics, as well as the psychological value of a specific mannequin as surrogate, are important markers of the cognitive abilities of the Darkseekers, as is the motivation of the alpha male to seek to rescue his lover from torture. In fact, the scenes present Neville and the alpha male as doubles, a notion which is later taken up by the mise en scène, as the alpha and 60

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Neville mirror the movements of the other through the glass barrier in the final confrontation in which both try to save their own ‘kind’. Neville announces that he has a cure and, when following the alpha’s gaze, realizes the emotional bond, and sets the female free. When the other Darkseekers start to advance, the alpha calls out and they stop, suggesting a social hierarchy. In a direct showdown between Neville and the alpha, an averted line-of-sight shot from Neville reveals the board of test subjects, hundreds of Darkseekers captured, experimented upon and killed in the process of finding the cure. At this moment Neville feels remorse and surrenders to the creatures, but they retreat. This alternate version reveals a critical posthumanist subtext, undermining the obvious ideology of the film as well as its depiction of otherness, and hints at the potential of a posthuman becoming-with. Throughout the film, the Darkseekers are presented as inhuman by the film’s continuous use of Robert Neville as the focalizer, whose perception of the creatures should be read as unreliable due to his prolonged isolation and maniacal need to fix things. His fragile psyche is revealed in his need for companionship and communication. The Darkseekers use this psychological need to trigger a schizophrenic breakdown in Neville. He is portrayed as traumatized by the loss of his family, driven to a single-minded, scientific rationale that allows him to retain the illusion of control. He needs to construct the Darkseekers as inhuman in order to keep experimenting, to stay the course, and fulfil the promise of finding a cure. It is only the appearance of Anna and the boy that forces him to break out of his delusions and to re-evaluate the situation. Anna’s perspective, influence and doubts about the abilities of the Darkseekers (in the two additional scenes) are the catalyst for him to form an alternative hypothesis and once more become a rational, neutral observer. In addition to this changed perspective, Neville has never come face to face with a non-sedated Darkseeker before, and has thus never been able to gauge their interactions. The basement scene is resolved through Neville’s realization of the nature of what the Darkseekers represent. When the alpha tries to break through the glass, Neville recognizes his suffering, and thus makes a first step towards acknowledging a need for ethical treatment of the other. 61

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As Jacques Derrida has argued for animal rights: ‘[T]he question is not to know whether the animal can think, reason, or talk, something we still pretend to be asking ourselves . . . The first and decisive question will rather be to know whether animals can suffer.’20 The social structure of the Darkseekers, which the film now openly portrays, might be read as a reminder of their residual humanity, but serves mainly to allow the audience to finally sympathize, though be it somewhat shallowly, with the creatures. At no point is a possible cure mentioned again, no attempt at communication or negotiation is made. Instead, the three remaining humans leave New York to the dominion of nature and the posthuman species. The theatrical ending buries any chance for change under ideology and thoughtless action. But a critical posthumanist reading allows for a Darkseeker subjectivity as zoe-centric, highlighting the distinction between life as bios (‘subjective’ and purposeful ‘human’ life) and zoe (raw and ‘objective’ life of all beings). Here, a posthuman hybridity emerges, a becoming-with of human and virus that has a much stronger claim on the future than the remaining humans. As Aspasia Stephanou claims (about the novel, but relevant here too): ‘[w]hile the anomalous multitude germinates potentialities, the novel shows that [posthuman] vampire biopolitics absorbs difference.’21 In contrast to Neville’s actions and judgements, the Darkseekers claim no retaliation for their losses; they do not need vengeance, and accept the humans’ difference, allowing them to leave. The utopian hope of a future for humanity, threatened in this dystopian vision of techno­ science by uncontrolled and hubristic genetic manipulation of life, is found in the potentialities of zoe-centric hybridity of the posthuman vampire and not in the biocentric reclamation of a pure humanity. Visions of the Future: Blade II In Lawrence’s I am Legend the vampire-like Darkseekers are an accidental by-product of misled science, a mere side effect of humanity’s hubris to harness the powerful tool of genetic engineering.The Blade series, in contrast, centres entirely on a scientific rationale, thus revealing the depth of both anxieties and fantasies our society has about the potential of scientific inquiry.22 The film series focuses 62

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especially on what Weinstock refers to as the cyborgian nature of the vampire, defining the vampire through technology, in which the films ‘function as referendums on the inadequacies, perils and promises of modern science and technology’.23 Already in the first film, Stephen Norrington’s Blade (1998), the series establishes science as the central discourse with which to read vampirism. In an early scene, vampirism is explained to be a genetically transformative disease which changes the host’s DNA. A cure, therefore, is possible in the form of ‘gene therapy’, able to ‘rewrite the victim’s DNA with a retrovirus’. Vampirism, thus, becomes a virus, which, in keeping with the scientific rationale of the film, can be detected, analysed, understood and cured. Blade II builds upon this: in a confrontation with overlord Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann), the old vampire refers to vampirism as an ‘arbovirus’ that ‘spreads through the human bloodstream, creating new parasitic organs’, to which Blade offers the comment ‘like cancer’, suggesting possible treatments following from this scientific comparison. And, indeed, the film series suggests a plethora of scientifically created/enhanced weapons to battle the vampiric cancer – as action movies, the films revolve around the arsenal at the hunter’s disposal. In Blade, aside from a garlic spray and UV lamps, an anti-coagulant is filled into projectiles that lead to vampires exploding. In Blade II, UV light is delivered via bombs, detonating and spreading light as a form of radiation treatment against the vampiric cancer; silver nitrate is fashioned into bullets or injected in concentrated doses via blades as a form of vampiric chemotherapy. In Blade Trinity (2004), the hunters create a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets and destroys vampire DNA. As Weinstock remarks, the Blade films revel in a ‘technological sublimity of advanced weaponry’,24 convincing the audience that science will be able to cure or eradicate any disease. Similarly, both I am Legend and Daybreakers focus on science as holding the potential to solve the problems at hand. In I am Legend, the Darkseeker virus is both caused and cured by scientific creation, and in Daybreakers, the main character is a haematologist, searching for a cure for vampirism, setting up clinical trials, and working in a laboratory. All three centralize the idea of science, attaching risk and reward to it, providing a view that revels in the 63

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potential of science as a tool (ie. a weapon to fight vampirism) while simultaneously warning against its abuse (ie. to play god). Blade II, in particular, can be read as a warning of scientific inquiry as a threat due to the ‘Reaper’ strain, an aggressive mutated form of the vampire virus that is immune to its respective chemotherapy. ‘Like cancer with a purpose’ is Damaskinos’s retort to Blade’s insult, perfectly revealing his intentions: the strain is no natural mutation but instead a genetically engineered variant, an experiment that has grown out of control. Damaskinos created it to make vampires more resistant, to boost the species’ chance of survival, and as such, unlike I am Legend, the Blade series presents the vampires as not only products of science, but simultaneously as users of science.25 In the hands of the wrong people (ie., vampire overlords) with the wrong intentions (ie. genocide, eugenics), science becomes a weapon turned against humanity. When confronted with the decline of vampires, Damaskinos engages in experimentation to eliminate any ‘hereditary weaknesses’, as he claims, resorting to ‘recombining DNA’ in order to create a ‘new, pure race’ of super-vampires. His choice of words is revealing, as Stephanou points out: ‘[b]iomedicine and genetic engineering are portrayed . . . as scientific tools that will sculpt and define human [and vampire] selfhood; in particular, they address questions of blood and science in relation to race.’26 Damaskinos’s attempt at purifying a flawed race is thus strongly reminiscent of the eugenics discourse surrounding genetic engineering and the creation of an enhanced human race. But in a competing environment, the genetically enhanced ‘race’ (über-vampires) will dominate the unchanged ‘race’ (normal vampires) and in the end force them into extinction. Underneath Damaskinos’s wish to create that super-race of vampires, we find a desire to create an everlasting legacy – eternal life, not literally but evolutionary. Science, the film suggests, has the potential to determine the future of a species by allowing the individual with power to eliminate flaws and any genetic divergence deemed unwanted or unnecessary.The fascist overtones of racial purity and eugenics are undeniable. In my reading, the film projects societal anxieties about science’s role in determining the worth of life, and raises the question of who exactly has power over such decisions. It is important to note 64

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how these anxieties are expressed visually.The original script refers to the laboratory as ‘Eugenics Chamber’: ‘[w]e are in a vast, multitiered, temperature-controlled chamber – equal parts 21st century medical facility and Hammer House of Horror.’27 In the film, the room is metallic, with blue-grey lighting, catwalks lining the room, which has glass floors, metallic girders and tubes with red liquid running through. The initial shot shows Blade from above, lying unconscious on the floor, the camera tilting to reveal him in front of a liquid basin, over which towers a contraption with red tubes that feed the basin.The ‘Hammer House of Horror’ effect is evoked in the scene by the red bubbling liquid in the pool: ‘[t]he operation looks not unlike a small-scale water purification plant, or perhaps a futuristic distillery. Only in this instance, the liquid churning within the cask is HUMAN BLOOD.’28 The connection between science and Gothic, laboratory and torture chamber, is made throughout the film. It is introduced when Blade and his companions enter the Vampire Nation sanctum and meet Damaskinos. The hunters arrive by helicopter, the camera tracking a shot from the air on a building complex with sharp geometrical forms and cold exterior; two massive concrete towers dominate the entrance.The name of the complex, Caliban Industries, evokes the closeness of horror (Caliban, the Shakespearean monstrous half-breed; or a distorted acronym of cannibal, hinting at vampire eating vampire) and science (in its corporatized form of ‘Industries’). Inside the building, a massive door folds out of the concrete wall like a drawbridge, revealing the overlord’s lair, which contrasts with the exterior by resembling an ancient fortress. Rough stone walls, soft warm light illuminating the room, religious statues and artworks can be seen as decorations. In the background a computer array is visible but Damaskinos is hunched over an ancient handwritten tomb in front of a room-filling astronomical clock.Whatever experiments Damaskinos is working on, the film certainly evokes images of dark magic and alchemy rather than scientific rationality. The connotation of magic and Gothic is most present in the ‘scientist’ himself. Damaskinos does not fulfil scientific clichés, but rather evokes the ancient and aristocratic vampire – flowing black robes, white, translucent and marble-like skin with dark blue veins, long fingernails and fangs. His motivation for experimentation is 65

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not scientific inquiry but a drive for aristocratic hegemony. He is willing to do anything to remain in power, to shape not only his present but also a future for the vampiric race. Here the film clearly demarcates the conflict with his son as one of class struggle, where science becomes a weapon of hegemonic power. Damaskino’s son, Jared Nomak (Luke Goss), is visually associated with the homeless, as this is how we see him in the first scene of the film. He is dressed in rags, layers of dirty clothing concealing his body. His skin looks sickly pale (not shiny and polished like his father’s) and he coughs, while sitting in a blood bank waiting his turn. He travels through the sewer system and feeds upon the homeless. The blood bank scene further emphasizes that the Vampire Nation systematically exploits the homeless for food and genetic testing – Nomak resists this, and violently undermines this exploitation by turning everyone at the blood bank into Reapers. With a clear connection made between the Reapers, homelessness and drug use (one of the vampires compares Reapers with crack addicts), Ken Gelder has stated that these new vampires are like ‘a hyperbolically conceived, AIDS-era (or post-AIDS) gay plague’.29 In contrast, I believe the portrayal of Damaskinos and the Vampire Nation as hegemonic, aristocratic and involved in technoscience and its industrial exploitation hints at another reading. Gelder is correct in assuming that the Reapers are ‘seen as equally disposable and exploitable by the vampires and the police’,30 but he overlooks the economic factor and the film’s insistence on ‘racial purity’.The Reapers are by-products of a hegemonic design enacted to eugenically shape the aristocratic Vampire ‘Nation’. Damaskinos is ruler and engaged in biological design, and as Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, ‘[w]here is design, there is waste . . . When it comes to designing the forms of human togetherness, the waste is human beings. Some human beings who do not fit into the designed form nor can be fitted into it . . .’31 Bauman describes these wasted beings as those excluded from law and their sovereign nation, later extending this category under capitalism in a consumer society to all those not consuming, those seen as ‘feeding parasitically on the social body’.32 This describes the homeless, the sick, the drug addicts, and in the context of the film, the Reapers. Consequently, a critical post­ humanist reading sees the Reapers not as threats produced by genetic 66

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engineering, but rather as the natural by-product of the industrialization and corporatization of science; of an exploitative strain of capitalism that extends its biopolitical hegemony over all life, creating and deciding who is unwanted and superfluous, deciding which life is worthy and which life is wasted. In a sense, through the creation of the Reapers the film makes clear that whoever controls science has the biopolitical power to control life, to categorize it, and declare it expendable. Capitalism and Vampirism: Daybreakers Vampire films can be social critiques of possible dystopian futures – but whereas an ancient, out-dated nation state with an aristocratic ruler is presented as wielding biopower in Blade II, Daybreakers transports the concept to capitalist consumer society. Whereas the Vampire Nation remains at odds with contemporary society, its hybrid of ancien regime rule and modern military-industrial apparatus enacting a generational struggle, Daybreakers’ transnational corporation Bromley Marks – a mixture of international bank and military research facility – is the full-on embodiment of neoliberal capitalism and its necro-power: power not merely over any and all aspects of life but also over the domain of death and dying. In the film, the largest part of humanity has become vampires, turning the logic of vampire films upside down, making vampires the dominant species and shifting humans into the category of natural resource, preciously sought after by a growing number of consumers. As Gelder points out, in the film’s vampire society, human blood has become a ‘base commodity, like oil, or water’33 and, in fact, the film is explicit in the corporatization of this commodity. With the posthuman logic of necro-politics, multinational corporations such as Bromley Marks have established a global hegemony through the exploitation of human life and death. Humans are hunted by the company’s paramilitary forces, sporting hardened full-body cover, camouflage gear and enforced Hummers, and then herded into storage facilities, where their slow death is commodified. Bromley Marks functions as a bank, storing humans in suspended animation, keeping a personal blood supply for their wealthy 67

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customers and managing their ‘portfolios’. At the same time, the company researches the creation of a blood substitute to increase its market and to avert the natural decline in blood production, as without human reproduction there is no new supply. In the conflation of the banking system with biotechnology, capitalist necro-power is laid bare – the corporation is sovereign over life and death. Old capital and new technology merge.The blood bank’s vault, as all other locations inside Bromley Marks, is visually coded as technoscientific: metallic, industrialized and cold, with reflective surfaces and blue lighting. The first shot of Bromley Marks shows haematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) entering the building. A cut to Dalton’s perspective reveals elevator doors sliding open on a large picture window behind which indistinguishable human forms hang in large apparatuses. Dalton’s reflection is noticeable in the window, suggesting his closeness to the humans, his deviance from the vampiric capitalist system. The next shot tracks him stepping out of an elevator into a hallway. Behind the picture window, machinery dominates the room evoking a factory floor; thousands of bodies are stacked like merchandise. The camera tracks an eye-line shot, revealing what Dalton sees: machinery loaded with bodies. Then the camera tracks a medium-close up on one apparatus with two bodies – pale skin, blue from the artificial light, their breathing heavy. Another cut shows a close-up of a male chest, heaving noticeably, veins showing under bruised, translucent skin. Then a shot of the man’s head in a metallic frame, holding syringes in place. Finally, an extreme close-up of a syringe penetrating the main artery, tubes allowing for automated ‘withdrawal’ of blood, a trickle of which runs down from the entry wound. The scene ends with Dalton exhaling loudly, as if he had held his breath while taking in the image. He then turns his head in resignation and walks to his office with slumped shoulders. The focal shift from the many to the individual as the scene develops reveals Dalton’s morality and the grotesque treatment of human life. The allegorical connection of human blood to venture capitalism is shocking, but also in keeping with a posthuman necro-politics as described by Braidotti. She argues that the kind of ‘bio-genetic capitalism’ portrayed here ‘reduces bodies to their 68

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informational substrate in terms of energy consumption’, effectively turning humans into a commodity for the same ‘logic of insatiable consumption’ that has used animal bodies for sustenance and work power for centuries.34 Corporations and banks, indeed capitalism itself, are shown to be exploitative of life, becoming not metaphorically but literally ‘dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’35 as the film progresses.The elites in the film literally exist by sucking out the life of the masses – not only the humans, as they are hunted and farmed for their blood, but also those members of vampire society who cannot keep up with the cost of sustenance and are consumed during the escalating crises of the film. The film stages neoliberal globalization as a cycle of privileged consumption, allowing for an extreme escalation of the inequality politics which Bauman warns about.When the blood supply dwindles, the deprivation of food results in the mutation of vampires into Subsiders, which the film equates to the homeless and outcasts of capitalist consumer society. In a doubled scene, the fluidity of the boundary between vampire society and Subsiders is illustrated. In the first occurrence of the scene, white-collar workers are standing on a subway platform on their way to work, buying coffee laced with blood. In the scene lies familiarity: the commute, the consumption of coffee-to-go and the mundane behaviour of the commuters (making phone calls, flirting, waiting) all establish normalcy. The only disturbing elements are their glowing amber eyes in the dark, visible when the train passes – other than that, the vampires are representative of humanity. The camera moves downward to reveal the girder beneath the platform, littered with refuse, wind sweeping through. Two tattered, animal-like creatures with wings, hanging from the ceiling, attack each other with screeching noises – barely visible for a few seconds before the scene cuts to black. In a foreshadowing move, the scene thus reveals where society is headed by providing a glimpse of these ‘wasted lives’,36 who cannot afford to partake in consumption. In its second occurrence, the order of events is switched: the scene starts with a view of Subsiders in a basement, searching for food, growling with hunger, before the camera moves upward onto a view of the city and a train rushing by.The news reports on rising 69

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prices due to the global blood crisis, the inability of many citizens to afford the commodity, and the resultant Subsider ‘epidemic’.The normalcy on the platform has evaporated – instead of boredom, commuters now exhibit anxiety; a man is arrested, a woman is shifting nervously as if experiencing withdrawal. At the coffee-to-go place, a fight breaks out between customers after a mandatory reduction of the blood-to-coffee ratio. During this fight, a hungry customer assaults the vendor and rips open the blood bag, leading to a feeding frenzy, customers screeching with violence, lapping up blood from the floor, while police troops storm in.The film reveals the consequences of consumer capitalism, when social inequality grows. As Bauman states, everyone that is not able to keep up with the swift and complex changes of consumer society is prone to become human waste: ‘the dividing line has been moved up the social hierarchy . . . The world, it seems, has made another leap, and yet more of its residents, unable to bear the speed, have fallen off the accelerating vehicle.’37 The doubling of the scene emphatically shows how swiftly that dividing line can move. As Stephanou points out, ‘[t]he dystopian vampire society reflects the present financial crisis and ecological disaster, and is a world that is moving towards an extinction event’.38 The scientific solution to vampirism, valorized in the Blade series, would, in the political allegory of Daybreakers, effectively stand for the end of capitalism. It is no wonder that sovereign Charles Bromley (Sam Neill) openly opposes a cure, and instead pushes further consumption: ‘[i]t’s never been about a cure, it’s about repeat business . . . and besides, what’s to cure?’ Not realizing that the blood of rehumanized vampires like Dalton is itself the cure for vampirism, he drinks Dalton’s blood and becomes human again, in turn falling victim to his own troops as a source of blood for vampiric consumption. The showdown of the film stages military units feasting on ‘cured’ vampires, before being ‘cured’ themselves, and then falling prey to more vampires: ‘a slo-mo splatterfest of feasting, an eternal cycle of consumption is played out, potentially without end’.39 In terms of the diegesis, the cure is rejected by a society in full dissolution. Were it not for the final scene, the film would inadvertently promote the indestructability of consumer capitalism, yet Dalton and two other humans ride off into the sunset in their Firebird. 70

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Here, the film clumsily disseminates the message through symbolic representation that a different path is possible.The voice-over consequently addresses the audience and not the diegetic vampire society: ‘[w]e have a cure, we can change you back. It is not too late’ (emphasis mine). The film uses posthuman vampires to illustrate contemporary society’s predicament. As Stephanou highlights regarding the vampires of the film, and ourselves by extension, ‘[a]s blood is increasingly commodified, desacralized and separated from one’s body, so does the vampire resemble more and more the capitalist and the passive, apolitical and indifferent consumer. Contemporary vampire narratives are reactions against the inhuman­ ity and voracity of postmodern capitalism and against the objectification of humanity.’40 Daybreakers unerringly makes this clear: that as a willing part of the cycle of consumption, it is impossible to break free.The Subsiders, however, are a stark reminder that we all run the risk of standing on the opposite side of the dividing line, of becoming human waste. Conclusion: Posthuman Vampires The posthuman vampires of the presented films are hybrid creatures of technoscience, perched on the boundary of their Gothic past and their science-fictional future. Hadas Elber-Aviram has referred to their narratives as opening up a ‘space for “future memory” ’ that allows them to point towards the future without the ‘present misuse of science and technology’.41 In their depiction of genetic engineering, eugenics, virology and necro-politics, the films reveal society’s anxieties about biotechnological transgressions of human subjectivity and posthuman development within technoscience. As such, these posthuman Gothic narratives literalize the personal, individualized fears of becoming inhuman or posthuman, combined with the social dimension of racial and class politics. But at the same time, the films suggest the possibility of change. They are warning calls that negotiate all possibilities of technoscientific progress – and they call out to us: ‘It is not too late.’

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Notes  onna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ D Meets_ OncoMouseTM (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 214. 2 Erik Butler, Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film (Rochester: Camden, 2010), p.1. 3 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 2. 4 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 7. 5 Braidotti, Posthuman, pp. 9, 40. 6 Jeffrey Weinstock, The Vampire Film (New York: Wallflower, 2012), p. 13. 7 As Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 2, points out, posthuman discourse ranges from transhumanist celebration, through technoscientific neutrality, over careful academic critique, to ‘anxiety . . . about the possibility of a serious de-centring of “Man”, the former measure of all things’. 8 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 3. 9 Auerbach, Our Vampires, p. 6. 10 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 2. 11 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 30–1. 12 Understanding the posthuman self as relational, Braidotti, Posthuman, pp. 66–7, proposes a post-anthropocentric view allowing transformations, ‘becoming-animal, becoming-earth and becoming-machine’, extending the posthuman into categorical enmeshment with animals, environment and machines, revealing subjectivity as ‘embodied, embedded and in symbiosis’. 13 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 2. 14 H. Elber-Aviram,‘Constitutional Amnesia and Future Memory: Science Fiction’s Posthuman Vampire’, in S. Bacon and K. Bronk (eds), Undead Memory (Oxford: Lang, 2013), p. 110. 15 Weinstock, Vampire Film, p. 15. 16 Weinstock, Vampire Film, pp. 60–1. 17 S. Hantke, ‘Historicizing the Bush Years: Politics, Horror Film, and Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend’, in A. Briefel and S. J. Miller (eds), Horror After 9/11 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), p. 170; see also Weinstock, Vampire Film, p. 65. 1

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Organic  . Abbott, ‘Final Frontiers: Computer-Generated Imagery and the S Science Fiction Film’, Science Fiction Studies, 33/1 (2006), 102. For a discussion of the CGI in I am Legend, see Hantke,‘Historicizing’, p. 170. 19 Hantke, ‘Historicizing’, p. 170. 20 J. Derrida,‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28/2 (2002), 395–6. 21 A. Stephanou, ‘ “The Last of the Old Race”: I am Legend and Bio-Vampire-Politics’, in C. Mathews and J.V. Haedicke (eds), Reading Richard Matheson (Lanham: Rowman, 2014), p. 17. 22 A. Mousoutzanis, ‘ “Death is Irrelevant”: Gothic Science Fiction and the Biopolitics of Empire’, in S.Wasson and E.Alder (eds), Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), pp. 57–72. 23 Weinstock, Vampire Film, p. 15; see also Rob Latham, Consuming Youth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 1–20. 24 Weinstock, Vampire Film, p. 70. 25 Abbott, ‘Final Frontiers’, p. 102. 26 Aspasia Stephanou, Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood: Bloodlines (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 111. 27 David Goyer, Blade II [film script], http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/ Blade_II_David_goyer.html (accessed 1 August 2015). 28 Goyer, Blade II. 29 Ken Gelder, New Vampire Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 112. 30 Gelder, New Vampire Cinema, p. 112. 31 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 30. 32 Bauman, Wasted Lives, p. 41. 33 Gelder, New Vampire Cinema, p. 131. 34 Braidotti, Posthuman, pp. 62–3. 35 Karl Marx, cited in Latham, Consuming Youth, p. 3. 36 Bauman, Wasted Lives, p. 41. 37 Bauman, Wasted Lives, p. 14. 38 Stephanou, Reading Vampire Gothic, p. 136. 39 Gelder, New Vampire Cinema, p. 132. 40 Stephanou, Reading Vampire Gothic, p. 137. 41 Elber-Aviram, ‘Constitutional Amnesia’, p. 106. 18

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Part II Undead

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4 ‘Lovie – is the vampire so bad?’: Posthuman Rhetoric in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend 1

Chris Koenig-Woodyard

 Set in a Gothic posthuman world in which a vampiric contagion transmogrifies humanity, Richard Matheson’s novella I am Legend (1954) explores the fear of the viral. In a nod to the epistolary form of Dracula (1897), one of the last surviving humans, Robert Neville, learns that the vampire population has plans to establish an entirely posthuman world. The vampire Ruth writes Neville a letter: We are infected . . . What you don’t understand yet is that we’re going to stay alive. We’ve found a way to do that and we’re going to set up society again slowly but surely . . . And, even though I pray otherwise, we may decide to kill you and those like you . . . Forgive me for having to lie to you about so many things. But please believe this: When we were together in the darkness, close to each other, I wasn’t spying on you. I was loving you.2

Ruth’s letter marks a striking moment in the novella and in the history of vampire literature, standing as one of the earliest incarnations of the paranormal romance that has come to dominate modern vampire narratives. The posthuman world postulated in Ruth’s letter reveals, as Donna Haraway argues, that ‘vampires are

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vectors of category transformation in a racialized, historical, national unconscious’.3 Since the 1980s, theorists have argued that ontological fluidity infuses such a posthuman figure; the ‘posthuman subject [is] polymorphous, fragmented, multiple, transcending the dichotomies of organic and inorganic, human and animal, male and female’.4 In the novella, Matheson meditates on the human dread of and resistance to the heterogeneous identity and the transformative agency of the vampire through the development of a posthuman rhetoric. Rooted in the conglomerate generic framework of the Gothic and science fiction, I am Legend portrays Neville’s isolated existence in Los Angeles, after a pandemic has vampirized humanity.The story opens in January 1976, at which point Neville has not had contact with another human for nine months, and concludes with his capture in January 1979. For three and a half years, Neville’s nocturnal activities in his fortress-like house are motivated by an insistent cultivation of domestic comforts and cultural pastimes: he listens to classical music, watches movies, reads books, drinks wine, cooks from a large supply of stock-piled food and decorates his house with murals. His diurnal energies are devoted to efforts to restock and refortify his house, and to track down and systematically vanquish vampires with ever-refined killing techniques. He meets Ruth in June 1978, by which time his early vampire-slaying techniques (driving wooden stakes into the heart, and exposing the vampires to sunlight) have become more lethal: he induces fatal haemorrhages by cutting the vampires’ wrists. An example of the ‘last human on earth’ genre, I am Legend sees Neville progress through three psychological phases during his prolonged isolation: the frenzied, the hermitic and the legendary. His ‘frenzied period’ depicts a trauma that is characterized by depression, anxiety, grief, paranoia and alcoholism.5 This phase comprises a narrative of Gothic solitude that Matheson shapes as a psychomachia; Neville frequently converses with himself as one side of his personality relentlessly questions the sanity and emotional stability of the other. Neville meets Ruth during his ‘hermitic’ period, when he is emotionally and psychologically content but is a devastatingly effective killer.These hermitic and frenzied phases form the thematic centre of the novella as well as what Matheson contends is the 78

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tropological heart of his corpus: ‘the individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive’.6 The final, ‘legendary’ phase develops steadily but off-page in the novella, and readers gain a complete sense of it only with the text’s conclusion. Although Neville does not self-anoint as a ‘legend’ until the final scene, Ruth’s letter offers readers a hermeneutic lens through which to glimpse his increasingly legendary (and lethal) stature, inviting us to re-read the text and view him from a vampiric perspective. This perspective is spelled out forcefully in the closing sentence denouement of the novella, ‘I am Legend’; Neville hints at a posthumous narrative in which he will be mythologized, gothicized by the vampires as monstrous.7 Neville’s encounter with Ruth reveals that, despite her human appearance, she is a member of a new world order of vampires who have been surveilling him and now seek to exterminate Neville because of his increasing lethality. The revelation that her vampire society seeks Neville’s death also represents an important gothi-zoological demarcation in the novella. The vampire genus has two species: a posthuman species (the new world order variety, of which Ruth is one) and a zombie-like species – whom Neville describes as ‘robot-like creatures’.8 The ontological multiplicity of the vampire in Matheson’s text is characterized by Elana Gomel in Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism (2014) as the process by which the ‘trope of alien infestation literalizes the cultural disintegration of “man” in the plot of the transformation of a human subject into a post/inhuman entity’.9 Ruth occupies the posthuman position of alterity and multiplicity as an ethical and emotional inhuman creature who loves; she is, to adapt Gomel, ‘simultaneously contiguous with humanity and thus speaks in a human voice’ and ‘is also radically Other’, with an alien and vampiric ‘voice [that] is a counterfeit, a simulacrum, an insincere and flawed imitation’.10 Ruth’s compassion for Neville reveals her as a ‘sympathetic’ vampire – a human-inhuman amalgam  – and her appearance offers an early glimpse of the human-loving Gothic creature that has populated the paranormal romance genre for the last twenty-five years.11 Matheson’s posthumanizing of the vampire plays a foundational role in the development of the twenty-first-century ‘vamp-romance’. 79

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Milly Williamson, for instance, argues for the emergence of the ‘sympathetic’ vampire in a historical series of interconnections between gender and genre, from the Romantic Byron-like figure of John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819) to John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (2004). She observes that ‘the inspiration for this figure is to be found in the pre-Dracula sympathetic vampires; not a figure of monolithic evil, but one where the relationship between the vampire and its human “victim” is pivotal’.12 For Williamson and other critics, the portrayal of the sympathetic vampire evolves as authors draw on a range of literary genres (including the Gothic, amatory fiction and the novel of sensibility) and engage cultural modes of gendered social and biological identities embedded in the patriarchally constructed ‘separate spheres ideology’. The gentlemanly vampire of the nineteenth and early twentieth century is reconfigured in the 1970s and 1980s with a new aesthetic algebra that focuses on extreme emotionality. This Gothic demystification of the inhuman vampire is examined by Jules Zanger, who argues that the ‘very narrow range of interlocking emotions’ of ‘hunger, hate, bitterness [and] contempt’ that Dracula displays toward humanity reverses with ‘the new vampires’ of the twentieth century.These new ‘socialized and humanized’ vampires can be ‘art lovers or rock stars or even police detectives, and this communal condition permits them to love, to regret, to doubt, to question themselves, to experience interior conflicts and cross-impulses – to lose, in other words, that monolithic force possessed by Dracula, his unalterable volition’.13 Critics concur. A special issue of the journal Gothic Studies focuses on the ‘Sympathetic Vampire and its Monstrous Others’, and includes readings of the humanized, emotional vampire.14 In one essay, Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman offer an analysis of vampires and zombies that extends Zanger’s reading of the transformation of Dracula’s pertinacious malevolence toward humanity. They observe that vampires, ‘once defined [by] their monstrosity’, are ‘no longer terrifyingly parasitic’, but ‘often (sym)pathetic, or even palliative’. Their realigned multidimensional characterization includes a ‘conscience that mitigates their monstrosity and makes them the objects of human love and admiration’.15 In I am Legend, Ruth embodies this progression from 80

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the monolithic inhuman to the palliative posthuman in compelling generic and rhetorical terms. Ruth’s epistle is both a love letter and a warning about Neville’s imminent death. Although she has suffered greatly at Neville’s hands (he killed her husband), Ruth confesses: ‘When we were together in the darkness, close to each other, I wasn’t spying on you. I was loving you.’16 The early mutual attraction between Neville and Ruth ends, however, once he learns her true identity. She and Neville are not like the vampire Edward Cullen and human Bella Swan in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels (2005–8). In I am Legend, a Gothic being never seeks the approval of a human as Edward does of Bella when he asks: ‘You don’t care if I’m a monster? If I’m not human?’17 Matheson’s novella resists the necro-romantic – a romance in which the undead and the living, the inhuman and human, are erotically and sexually engaged and can potentially produce posthuman offspring. This resistance echoes the fear of vampiric colonization that Jonathan Harker expresses in Dracula about the propagation of a vampire population in England, where Dracula will ‘satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-­ demons’.18 John Allen Stevenson argues that the governing fear in Dracula is the ‘deracination’ of the human species: ‘Dracula’s threat is not miscegenation, the mixing of blood . . . [rather] he gives his partners a new racial identity’, demonstrating the ‘trans-’ agency that Haraway and Gomel argue the posthuman possesses.19 Although Ruth’s warning comes after she and Neville have had sex but before he learns she is a vampire, I am Legend ultimately militates against an interspecies union – and the dynamics of the posthuman Gothic romance that facilitate it – through a paradigm of ontological paranoia toward the posthuman. Throughout the novella, Matheson develops this posthuman resistance at the level of language, discourse and rhetoric. He employs ellipses to mark the Gothic as a force that disrupts the human. Indeed, ellipsis – which appears ninety-two times in the novella  – functions as a kind of necro-romantic punctuation. Describing Ruth and Neville’s night together, Matheson writes: ‘Neville had awakened then. They had embraced, they had . . .’20 Like many of the instances of ellipsis in the novella, when Matheson’s 81

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use of free indirect speech positions readers as observers of Neville’s unfolding ideas and emotions, here we are invited to complete his thought. If, as Theodor Adorno argues, ‘inconspicuousness is what punctuation lives by’,21 in I am Legend, ellipsis is the ‘punctuation of inexpressibility’, as Anne Toner argues in Ellipses in English Literature: Signs of Omission.22 In ‘the Gothic novel’,Toner contends, ellipses represent the ‘condition of anguished non-expressibility in extremis’.23 In elliptical moments, we complete Neville’s thought in a hermeneutic process of syntactic entelechy, realizing the process of necro-romantic resistance and suppression. Matheson also employs ellipses to build suspense, marking moments of partial or incomplete detail and description that leave us speculating alongside Neville. Ellipses often mark deconstructive gaps as Matheson delays Neville’s (and in turn, readers’) understanding of physical action in the text. They furnish readers with interpretative sites in which we become active participants, postmodern scriptors. In the gap of ellipsis, we observe Neville’s resistance to the posthuman and his disdain for gothicized sexuality. The elliptical aposiopesis of ‘they had . . .’ stems from his association of any bodily and sexual desire with the failure to maintain a humanity in which the intellectual civilizes the sexual. Thus, we speculate on Neville’s deliberately silenced thought as suppressing his sexual desire just as he repeatedly curtails any engagement with the erotic nature of the female vampires, as he does in the fragmented final sentence of chapter one: ‘And the women . . .’24 Similarly, during a flashback in chapter nine, Neville recalls the return of his deceased wife Virginia as a zombie-like vampire. First, Matheson employs ellipses to build atmosphere as Neville hears someone struggling to open the unlocked front door of his house: ‘ “who . . .” he murmured, unable to go on’.25 As he opens the door, Virginia speaks with the fragmented rhythm of the Gothic: ‘Rob . . . ert’.26 The ellipsis, as a mark of posthuman agency, fractures Neville’s name – and, symbolically, his humanity. Etymology functions in the novella in a manner similar to ellipsis. The warning in Ruth’s letter, and her description of a future vampire society, ironizes Neville’s surname – a Norman derivation of the French neuf for ‘new’ and ville for ‘town’ – and foretells his dwindling chances of surviving in this future posthuman world. 82

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Neville’s surname also reveals, in miniature, a key societal and demographic tension in the novella: Neville is the old ‘new’ – ‘the last of the old race’, as Ruth says late in the novella – threatened with extinction by the new ‘new’  – a posthuman society of vampires.27 In his classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero transliterates I am Legend in form and content – from page to screen and from vampire to zombie – and reflects upon Neville’s precarious status as a unique species. Romero argues that Matheson’s novella deals ‘on an allegorical level with the idea of a new society stepping in and devouring the old’ – to which Matheson responds: I don’t know how allegorical it got. Obviously what I had in mind was that the only way the society could go on was to completely eliminate what had gone before and start all over.The mutations who were still afflicted with the vampiris bacillus realized that they could go on, they could contain it, but the older ones, the really bad ones would have to go.28

In I am Legend, then, Matheson depicts the neoteric devouring the palaeoteric – the posthuman, new world order vampire annihilating humanity and the zombie-like vampires. He develops the tension of human and inhuman social (and sexual) dynamics through a dialectics of the posthuman; the novella is structured with and around pairs, doubles, dualities and oppositions – binaries that abrade internally, potentially expanding to a dialectic that ultimately yields a new third ontological space between the two poles: the posthuman. Matheson’s portrait of Neville is characterized by an intense and increasing resistance to the inhuman, his humanity standing in binary opposition to the vampiric. Days after the death of his wife Virginia, Neville is overcome by grief: [He] looked toward the clock. Two in the morning. Two days since he’d buried her. Two eyes looking at the clock, two ears picking up the hum of its electric chronology, two lips pressed together, two hands lying on the bed. He tried to rid himself of the concept, but everything in the world seemed suddenly to have dropped into a pit of duality, victim to a 83

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Posthuman Gothic system of twos.Two people dead, two beds in the room, two windows, two bureaus, two rugs, two hearts that . . . His chest filled with night air, then pushed it out and sank abruptly. Two days, two hands, two eyes, two legs, two feet . . .29

Neville’s dualistic emotional state highlights the normative, heterosexual and monogamous humanism of the novella, in which he ‘[clings] to the hope that someday he would find someone like himself – a man, a woman, a child, it didn’t matter. Sex was fast losing its meaning’30 (the ellipsis in this passage, it is worth noting, signals a psychological and hermeneutic gap that connects to Matheson’s development of the posthuman vampire). In the course of his efforts to research vampire biology and bacteriology, he fantasizes about ‘the day the library was shut down’ and how ‘some maiden librarian had moved down the room, pushing each chair against the table’: He thought about that visionary lady. To die, he thought, never knowing the fierce joy and attendant comfort of a loved one’s embrace. To sink into that hideous coma, to sink then into death and, perhaps, return to sterile, awful wanderings. All without knowing what it was to love and be loved. That was a tragedy more terrible than becoming a vampire.31

The subject of Neville’s fantasy is anthropologically telling: a human female who embodies both his natural and heterosexual identity, and his desire to maintain the civilized and intellectual side of his humanity. Her occupation as a librarian is thematically apposite with Neville’s bibliographical identity; he reads constantly, and observes that books ‘are the residue of the planet’s intellect’.32 Books link Neville to humanity. This fantasy, however, reveals his struggles with a kind of Gothic Cartesian mind–body division: his aspirations to a mode of cultural civility (his refined aesthetic and artistic pursuits) that he believes define his humanity conflict with his base sexual impulses. Early in the novella, Matheson notes that Neville had ‘made a peephole in the front window and watched’ the vampires: ‘[b]ut then the women had seen him and had started striking vile postures 84

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in order to entice him out of the house . . . the women pos[ed] like lewd puppets in the night on the possibility that he’d see them and decide to come out.’33 Neville feels a sexual attraction to the inhuman and, in turn, is angered by his inability to control a reflexive bodily desire: Deep in his body, the knotting heat began again . . . He knew the feeling well and it enraged him that he couldn’t combat it . . . He felt the muscles of his abdomen closing in like frightening coils. He picked up the book and tried to read, his lips forming each word slowly and painfully. But in a moment the book was on his lap again . . . The realization made him sick. It was an insult to man. All right, it was a natural drive, but there was no outlet for it any more. They’d forced celibacy on him; he’d have to live with it.You have a mind, don’t you? he asked himself. Well, use it.34

Neville rejects the necro-romantic.The book on his lap is presumably meant to cover his sexual arousal (and to avert the insult to the intellectual dignity of his humanity), highlighting his refusal to accept the posthuman. In another early scene in the novella, Matheson deploys the free indirect speech that often shapes Neville’s sexual, emotional and psychological turmoil throughout the novella. Neville acknowledges his sexual arousal and the vampires’ erotic appeal, but promptly abnegates the possibility of posthuman passion: ‘[h]e lurched up and started pacing. What am I going to do now? Go through the routine again? I’ll save you the trouble. Readingdrinking-soundproof-the-house – the women. The women, the lustful, bloodthirsty, naked women flaunting their hot bodies at him. No, not hot.’35 This passage captures the Gothic Cartesian conflict between Neville’s body and mind – his struggle with the necroerotic. His instinctive physical arousal, the urge to gratify his sexual desire, necessitates a moment of palimpsestic erasure that, in turn, informs his view of the vampires as ontologically and zoologically illegitimate. Their species transgress social codes and institutions of anthro-civility. They reproduce outside of the anthro-centred systems of politically, culturally and ideologically sanctioned unions. As he values ‘his mother’ for teaching him to ‘appreciate’ classic music, 85

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he views the vampires as ‘filthy bastards’ who need to be decimated – as he rages: ‘I’ll kill every mother’s son of you before I give in!’36 Neville’s dread of the necro-romantic and the posthuman vampire is, perhaps, illustrated best during a drunken tirade in his frenzied period, when he offers a treatise on the vampire as an imperiled, disenfranchised demographic group: Really, now, search your soul; lovie – is the vampire so bad? All he does is drink blood. Why, then, this unkind prejudice, this thoughtless bias? Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? . . . No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence. Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt. Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one? He shrugged.You got me there, buddy, you got me there.37

The empathetic force of Neville’s plea – his desire to tell the shadow story of the marginalized vampire – is undermined by his inebriated, Parliamentarian polyvocal performance. The irony and sarcasm of the scene are underscored by his refusal of the necro-romantic. Neville’s necro-romantic resistance operates according to a dialectic of the posthuman – with the posthuman occupying a synthetic position between the thesis and antithesis of, respectively, the human and the inhuman (the key binary that informs the narratological scaffolding of any vampire story). The intersection of the two positions creates an ontological friction between species; Neville’s resistance to the posthuman resonates with a kind of Lovecraftian dread of all zoological and extraterrestrial Others and things. Such a sense of ‘dread in the posthuman Gothic lies not in the fear of our demise but in the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change’.38 In I am Legend, Matheson explores both human and inhuman subjectivity (and their coalescence) as Neville struggles, immediately, with his sexual arousal for the vampires and, ultimately, with the posthuman society that Ruth imagines. In so doing, Matheson addresses the interlinked questions that Jean-François Lyotard raises in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988): ‘what if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of, constrained into, 86

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becoming inhuman (that’s the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is “proper” to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?’39 Matheson’s novella explores these intertwined and shifting subject positions: a human intersection – and integration – with the inhuman and the movement from the human to the inhuman. This inter-gression emerges rhetorically as a Gothic chiastic structure, revealing the novella as an example of a post­ human Gothic subgenre: Pramod K. Nayar’s ‘species Gothic’.40 After his attempts to distil and weaponize the essence of garlic (allyl sulphide) fail, forestalling any further improvement in his vampire-slaying techniques, Neville rages drunkenly about the Gothic state of the world: ‘World’s gone to hell. No germs, no science. World’s fallen to the supernatural, it’s a supernatural world. Harper’s Bizarre and Saturday Evening Ghost and Ghoul Housekeeping.’41 Imagistically, this scene connects to Neville’s librarian fantasy: both are structured around literature and books. As Neville sarcastically itemizes a bibliography of periodical literature for the discerning posthuman vampire, Matheson’s use of the rhetorical figure of antimetabole sheds light on Neville’s dread of the posthuman. The chiastic heart of antimetabole (the repetition and inversion of ‘world’ and ‘supernatural’ to ‘supernatural world’) rhetorically and thematically fits the binaries that structure the novella as a whole. In the novella, antimetabole is connected to the rhetoric of a binary structure that explores the tension between the pairs of oppositions that have historically shaped vampire narratives: prey–predator, vampire–human, natural–supernatural and living–dead. Antimetabole performs in mise en abyme the methodology of posthuman tension in the text. Neville wants no place in such a supernaturalized world – a world in which binaries bisect and, at the point of intersection, generate the posthuman. This chiastic (and binary) Gothic structure shapes the dialectic architecture of the posthuman in the novella. In chapters three and twenty-one, Matheson frames Neville’s three psychological phases with a posthuman dialectic in the figure of a dispersed Gothic chiasmus that, unlike the antimetabole of ‘world-supernatural’ / ‘supernatural world’, is not confined to one sentence. In chapter three, Matheson depicts the process of Neville’s Gothic ratiocination as he comes to terms with the scientific and the 87

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superstitious elements of the vampire. After dismissing Dracula as ‘a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera clichés’, Neville acknowledges that the vampire has figured in numerous narratives as ‘a tenuous legend passed from century to century’: ‘[a]nd, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything’.42 Here and throughout the novella, chiasmus embodies complex cultural dynamics, as Anthony Paul and Boris Wiseman comment in the introduction to Chiasmus and Culture: the rhetorical figure ‘is a generative principle, an aesthetic idea, a method of composition, a tool of ideological manipulation, a matrix of social interaction, a philosophical problem, a metaphor, [and] an elemental image or sign’.43 Chiasmus rhetorically performs, in miniature, the crossing of wires that comprises the deconstructive, posthuman circuitry of I am Legend.That is to say, as we read Matheson’s Nevillecentred narrative, Ruth’s letter reveals a secondary story – one that remains in the shadows, that is off-page. When we read the shadow story of the vampires and view Neville through their eyes, he emerges as monstrous and murderous – as a lethal ‘legend’. Chiasmus and antimetabole structure the opposed propositions of the posthuman dialectics: the binary of a thesis (human) and an antithesis (the inhuman and vampiric) that potentially synthesize to form the posthuman. As Matheson utilizes chiasmus to capture the dialectics of posthumanism in the novella, chapter three forms the first clause in a diffused chiastic construction, the second clause of which is repeated in transposed and slightly altered form in chapter twenty-one. In chapter three, after the antimetabole of ‘legend-science’ / ‘science-­ legend’, Neville reflects upon vampire fiction and mythology. As Matheson concedes that the geography of the vampiric imagination is well explored by many writers, Neville ironically conjectures that ‘vampires are prejudiced against’: ‘[t]hey are loathed because they are feared . . . At one time, the Dark and Middle Ages, to be succinct, the vampire’s power was great, the fear of him tremendous. He was anathema and still remains anathema. Society hates him without ration’ (emphasis added).44 In ‘fear-anathema’, Matheson offers the first clause of an antimetabole that he completes in the concluding chapter of the novella. In the final chapter of the novella, Neville has been captured by the vampires and will be executed unless he commits suicide with 88

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the poisonous pills that Ruth has covertly given to him. He looks out the window of the institution where he is being incarcerated and sees a crowd of vampires. When they notice him, Neville observes ‘awe, fear [and] shrinking horror’ in their faces and realizes that he is ‘the abnormal one now’ – ‘a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with’: Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. A coughing chuckle filled his throat. He turned and leaned against the wall while he swallowed the pills. Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.45

The self-aggrandizing catalogue of abjection that Matheson ascribes to the now-monstrous Neville is the very language that Neville repeatedly employs to portray the vampiric as inhuman throughout the novella. It also chiastically closes the first part of antimetabole of ‘fear-anathema’ in chapter three with Neville’s self-description as ‘anathema’ and ‘terror’. In chapter nineteen, the glimpse that readers have of Neville through the hermeneutic lens of Ruth’s letter becomes a more complete portrait through the completion of this extended antimetabole that frames the dialectic centre of the text. The chiasmus of ‘science-legend / legend-science’,‘world-supernatural / supernatural-world’ and ‘fear-anathema’ / ‘anathema-terror’ (and to a lesser degree, ellipses and etymology) structures the posthuman dialectics of the novella.46 The vampires and Neville become equally and interchangeably fear-inducing and anathematic during this phenomenological shift of reading perspectives: diegetically and generically, the vampires are terrorizing, as they prey upon human beings through the history of vampire literature.Yet in I am Legend, the inverse is true if readers follow the posthuman rhetoric of the chiastic and read the novella intradiegetically through the eyes of the vampire. This shift in reading perspective highlights the 89

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posthuman as a synthetic position in the dialectic between the human and inhuman that Neville resists. The terms that Neville employs to describe the vampires are the very ones (Neville imagines) that the vampires apply to him, and such a vampiric discourse registers the completion of Matheson’s reversal of the conventional roles of protagonist and antagonist, human and inhuman in the vampire narrative: in the eyes of the vampire, Neville is a monster, is the ‘invisible specter’ who leaves ‘for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones’.47 Neville’s perception of himself as an anathematic ‘legend’ entices readers to re-read the novella with a deconstructive eye that scrutinizes Matheson’s inversion of this traditional predator–prey, vampire–human paradigm. In doing so, such a re-reading diverges from a Neville-centred plot trajectory. Rather, readers deconstruct the off-page narrative; we query the gap opened by Ruth’s announcement of a posthuman vampire world. Readers are left to wonder: who are these vampires? How many are there? How long have they been watching Neville and planning their new vampire society?48 Such a reading is itself vampiric: in narratological terms, the diegetic yields to the intradiegetic.The primary narrative of Neville’s world that Matheson offers readers insinuates a secondary shadow story. It is a story that inhabits the margins of the novella, one that invites us to contemplate Neville the legend. Notes  n early version of this essay was presented as part of a panel that I A organized on ‘The Vampire and the Posthuman: Following a Migrating Literary Form’ for the International Gothic Association’s Biennial Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia in July 2015. I am grateful to my fellow presenters, Grace Cameron and Elizabeth Way, and the conference attendees for many stimulating conversations about vampires. I am grateful to Adrienne Koenig-Woodyard, Daniela Janes and Stephanie Vega for their feedback on drafts of this essay. 2 Richard Matheson, I am Legend (1954; New York:Tor, 1995), pp. 154–5. 3 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouseTM (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 214. 1

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Undead Elana Gomel, Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 20. 5 Matheson, Legend, pp. 80, 92. 6 Richard Matheson, Collected Stories (Colorado Springs: Gauntlet, 2003–5), vol. 1, p. 3. 7 Matheson, Legend, p. 170. 8 Matheson, Legend, p. 120. 9 Gomel, Science Fiction, p. 97. 10 Gomel, Science Fiction, p. 97. 11 For a more complete discussion of the paranormal romance genre, see Joseph Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic? (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014). 12 Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 35. 13 Jules Zanger, ‘Metaphor into Metonymy:The Vampire Next Door’, in Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (eds), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 22. 14 See Lindsey Scott’s survey of sympathetic vampires in films: Lindsey Scott, ‘Crossing Oceans of Time: Stoker, Coppola, and the ‘new vampire film’, in Sam George and Bill Hughes (eds), Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 113–30. 15 A.Tenga and E. Zimmerman, ‘Vampire Gentlemen and Zombie Beasts: A Rendering of True Monstrosity’, Gothic Studies, 15/1 (2013), 76. Other significant readings of the ‘sympathetic’ vampire include C. A. Senf ’s ‘Blood, Eroticism and the Vampire in Twentieth-Century Literature’, in Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (eds), The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1987), pp. 20–30; S.Tomc, ‘Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire’, in Gordon and Hollinger (eds), Blood Read, pp. 95–113. 16 Matheson, Legend, pp. 154–5. 17 Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Atom, 2008), p. 184. 18 Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; Peterborough: Broadview, 1998), p. 84. 19 J. A. Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula’, PMLA, 103/2 (1988), 144. 4

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Posthuman Gothic Matheson, Legend, p. 156. T. Adorno and S. Weber Nicholsen, ‘Punctuation Marks’, The Antioch Review, 48/3 (1990), 305. 22 Anne Toner, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 89. 23 Toner, Ellipsis, p. 108. 24 Matheson, Legend, p. 10. 25 Matheson, Legend, p. 75. 26 Matheson, Legend, p. 65. 27 Matheson, Legend, p. 167. 28 Matthew R. Bradley, Richard Matheson on Screen (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), p. 120. 29 Matheson, Legend, pp. 75–6. 30 Matheson, Legend, p. 10. 31 Matheson, Legend, pp. 78–9. 32 Matheson, Legend, p. 67. 33 Matheson, Legend, p. 19. 34 Matheson, Legend, p. 19. 35 Matheson, Legend, p. 33. 36 Matheson, Legend, pp. 16, 17, 30. 37 Matheson, Legend, p. 32. 38 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 3. 39 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 2. 40 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 116–18. 41 Matheson, Legend, p. 93. 42 Matheson, Legend, p. 29. 43 Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul (eds), Chiasmus and Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), p. 1. 44 Matheson, Legend, p. 31. 45 Matheson, Legend, pp. 169–70 (emphasis added). 46 Matheson, Legend, pp. 28, 93, 169–70. 47 Matheson, Legend, p. 169. 48 I pursue these questions in a companion article on Matheson’s text in a 2018 issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly devoted to ‘Monster Studies’: ‘The Mathematics of Monstrosity: Vampire Demography in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend’. 20

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5 Coexistence and Hospitality: The Gothic Utopian Vision of True Blood Erica McCrystal

 One popular trope of Gothic fiction involves the invasion of a foreign threat that raises awareness to barbarism in the real world. Bram Stoker’s Victorian urban Gothic novel Dracula establishes its title character as an Other who threatens the lives of innocents, lending commentary on both capitalism as a threat and the Other as threatening capitalist ideology 1 in the Victorian age. The tra­ d­itional rendering of the vampire in popular fiction and media casts it as a Gothic foreign Other. Mark Neocleous finds the vampire ‘disrupts the usual rules of interaction, occupying an essentially fluid site where despite its otherness it cannot be entirely separated from nature and man’.2 In modern media, the vampire has resisted its subjugation to find its place in the world it shares with humans. An acceptance of this sharing by both human and Gothic Other and a wilful effort toward coexistence has become a goal within much twenty-first-century vampire media. Coexistence between all beings in vampire fiction would achieve a posthuman Gothic utopia, a world in which the foreign or unknown, particularly that which causes fear, can exist harmoniously with humans who have felt threatened. Michael Hauskeller defines utopia as the dreams of ‘a perfect world, with perfect human beings – or, at least, human beings that are as perfect as they can be in a perfect (social, political, or

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technical) environment’.3 He argues that a posthuman utopia would ‘promise us a better future’4 and include all beings, not just humans.5 The vision of such a world puts pressure on the present to realign itself to progress toward the utopia. José Esteban Muñoz’s theories on queer utopias are also temporally concerned, as he argues that such a hermeneutic involves ‘the work of not settling for the present, of asking and looking beyond the here and now’.6 He also argues, ‘a turn to the past for the purpose of critiquing the present . . . is propelled by a desire for futurity’.7 A posthuman utopia that looks toward the future through the lens of the past would align with the Gothic, which typically draws upon the past. In this way, the posthuman Gothic finds the uncanny an integral part of a utopian future. The utopian vision would not eradicate the Gothic but soften potential terrors by making the sources (such as vampires) acceptable. Utopian perfection also need not challenge a Gothic atmosphere that encourages liminality, especially regarding seemingly polarized dichotomies. For Alexandra Warwick, ‘Gothic can no longer proceed from the margins, because there is no marginality, it is where everybody wants to live. Normality is Gothic and Gothic is normal.’8 If Gothic is normal, then it can be found in a utopia. Muñoz’s queer utopia pushes for an idealism that remains hopeful despite the pressures of normative society.9 However, if the margins are integrated and non-normative becomes the new norm of the future, then Others can exist placidly within the utopian space. Such an occurrence would embrace the Gothic rather than reject it. In such a sublime potential universe, the future is unpredictable, with endless possibilities for relationships between beings, new political and legal structures and social ideologies. For Robert Miles, ‘the meaning of Gothic . . . differs, depending on the context’.10 Because the Gothic is so malleable, defined by critics11 through its ‘mobility and continued capacity for reinvention’,12 a Gothic utopia would be a place that draws upon Gothic traditions but also pushes toward a new version of the Gothic in which a posthuman balance may exist between human and monster and where excess and transgression13 are necessary components to the survival of all beings. Considering a utopia as a space that encourages posthuman existence where hierarchies between beings are dissolved, this chapter 94

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seeks to establish how a Gothic posthuman utopia may be made possible through hospitality. In such a space, monstrosity may still exist in the world but not where it was traditionally found. Alan Ball’s television series True Blood seeks to soften the boundaries between different types of beings and abolish the association of monstrosity with vampires. In the show’s account of history, vampires have been living alongside humans for centuries before making their presence known.Their ability to glamour humans has allowed them to survive on human blood while keeping their existence secret. The goal of their recent public mainstreaming effort is for mutual understanding between vampires and humans. Since they have already been living side by side, the objective now is to exist with broader social awareness and create relationships based on reciprocity. In this way, True Blood tries to achieve a posthuman Gothic utopia by combatting threats of dissenters and using hospitality to unite beings. This chapter approaches hospitality through Emmanuel Levinas’s focus on social responsibility as well as Jacques Derrida’s positioning of hospitality in contrast to hostility. Hospitality, in these contexts, can serve as the means toward reconciling traditional disjunctures between humans and other creatures in order to offer a posthuman utopia that still maintains its Gothicity. The rendering of a utopia within a Gothic work breaks from traditional domestic and urban Gothic trends of mysterious and labyrinthine spaces that evoke terror in the imagination; instead, it encourages an environment that embraces opposing forces and rethinks monstrosity, thus bringing the Gothic into a posthuman present. According to Jamieson Ridenhour, in the Gothic, ‘the progressive present is haunted by the primitive past, whose presence threatens the stability of the modern situation’.14 Throughout the show, tension exists between the past (vampiric secrecy) and present (human-dominated society); but accepting the past, as Roman (the leader of the vampire Authority) requests, would move present society into a posthuman balance. Roman says,‘It took me centuries to realize that humans are not just talking meat. They’re our ancestors. None of us would be here without them.’15 Humans and vampires share history; thus, they are bound together by their ancestry, despite the disparate opposition between the beings.This tension fuels the plot of the show while also offering a hope for reconciled 95

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amelioration. Ultimately, the Gothic utopia can be achieved by eradicating tensions between opposing forces and allowing the Gothic mode to evolve with posthuman society. Popular criticism of True Blood often examines the hierarchical power structures of supernatural beings and humans. For Bruce McClelland, vampires assume superiority over humans, who are regarded as ‘the inferior race, despite their capacity for warm devotion and family bonding’.16 Ariadne Blayde and George Dunn share this argument, claiming,‘equality seems like it would be quite a step down’ for vampires,17 but also suggest that humans can claim moral superiority because, according to the Fellowship of the Sun, the vampires ‘certainly aren’t persons capable of moral conduct’.18 With these arguments, there seem to be different types of power echelons that the show simultaneously promotes and threatens. Physicality and morality may appear to promote positioning of particular beings; yet, separation and categorization become complicated when humans try to dominate the vampire race and when vampires demonstrate moral sentiment. Throughout the series, vampires who are against the mainstreaming effort make arguments of hierarchical distinctions between themselves and humans. For example, in Season One, the Magister argues, ‘humans exist to serve us.That is their only value.’19 Later, in Season Three, vampire rebel Russell Edgington says, ‘Why would we seek equal rights? You are not our equals. We will eat you. After we eat your children.’20 These vampires claim a superior biological position over humans rather than consider existing on an equal plane. Humans who are also against vampire mainstreaming, like the members of the Fellowship of the Sun, seek to eradicate vampire existence so that humans can dominate and control society. The series explores methods of doing so, including advanced technology and weaponry and pathological destruction through the spread of the fatal virus Hepatitis V. Many humans are also prejudiced in their behaviour and attitudes toward vampires, which many critics see as reflective of racial relations and stereotyping of Others in modern society. Blayde and Dunn argue: True Blood lets us see what it would be like to be a member of an exploited species. In so doing, it asks us to reexamine our prejudices 96

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Undead about what constitutes the value of a living creature and perhaps reconsider whether our ‘civic duties’ might reach beyond the boundaries of our own species.21

Crossing such boundaries would help to eradicate the power echelons and allow all beings to coexist on an equal plane. The show includes both human and vampire dissenters of mainstreaming in conflict with its supporters. By positing the oppositions in perpetual conflict, the show insists on confronting extant power relations as well as notions of humanity. In consideration of morality, the posthuman Gothic utopia that True Blood seeks to achieve contains vampires who are moral and humane rather than the vicious monsters that members of the human opposition perceive them to be. For vampire Bill Compton, ‘most of us, vampire, human or otherwise are capable of both good and evil. Often simultaneously.’22 This claim suggests that biological constitution does not regulate morality, as both humans and vampires can be monstrously evil or morally good. For coexistence to work, though, both parties need to share a moral code. Roman argues that mainstreaming is the only way to live: ‘coexistence with humans is not an option. It is a necessity. It is merciful; it is just; it is final.’23 Mercy and justness are part of an ethics of morality that the vampire race needs to adopt in order to live peacefully among humans. For some vampires, this is not an effort that demands change, as they have stopped feeding on humans to show that they can coexist without being a threat to human life. Additionally, some vampires are seen to have an innate sense of humanity that is reflected in their behaviour. Sookie Stackhouse notices Bill’s ability to love, as she tells him, ‘You have a heart, whether it beats or not.’24 His inherent compassion is not affected by his physical differences from the human race. The eradication of social hierarchies, intended to provide peaceful coexistence of supernatural beings with humans, is indicative of a posthuman society. The Gothic utopian vision that True Blood promotes follows Pramod K. Nayar’s definition of posthumanism, which ‘sees the human as an instantiation of connections, linkages, and crossings in a context where species are seen as coevolving, and competition is rejected in favour of cooperation between life 97

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forms’.25 In the show, supernatural existence can no longer continue in isolation from humans. The ‘coming out of the coffin’ of the vampire race establishes a line of creatures who share many human attributes and who realize that in order to coexist, they must physically share space with humans. Efforts made for peaceful coexistence are based upon the vampires agreeing to drink TruBlood, rather than human blood, in exchange for equal rights. The ‘connections, linkages, and crossings’ can be seen at a foundational level through the necessitated sharing of physical space between humans and vampires and the mutual agreements that will ensure the progress of both races. McClelland notes, ‘True Blood does not redefine the vampire’s habits or needs, but instead refocuses the vampire community and the politics of its interaction with the human community.’26 Such interaction requires mutual understanding of each being. Vampire spokeswoman Nan Flanagan uses politically charged rhetoric to make arguments for vampire rights: ‘We’re citizens; we pay taxes; we deserve basic civil rights, just like everyone else.’27 While the vampire Authority has established laws for vampires, the show presents a past where vampires have been living among humans and passing as humans for centuries and, in doing so, following human laws. Yet, with their public disclosure, in order for both species to continue to live harmoniously, vampires need not only civil rights but also civil welcoming. Civil treatment alone cannot satisfy harmonious coexistence; humans and vampires must also share with one another.Yet, critics of the show argue that vampires need to ape humans to fit in human society. Jennifer Culver claims that the assimilation of vampires is required in a human-centred society: To be human in our sense of the term requires participation in a way of life shaped by the rules of human society. Vampires are expected to mimic the customs, manners, emotions, and behaviours of the human beings around them. As human culture changes over time, vampires must adjust.28

Nina Auerbach calls this adjustment ‘supreme adaptability’.29 However, this designation does not align with posthuman existence. A potential posthuman Gothic utopia, as encouraged in True Blood, 98

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requires that vampires work together and share physical space with humans rather than mimic their behaviour. This may come with vampires abiding by human laws, but it also requires humans to adjust their way of life to accommodate the vampires. Both parties working cooperatively presents the mutualistic relationship that could potentially achieve a posthuman utopia. Support for vampire mainstreaming and an adjusted society that allows for coexistence comes with reconsidering designations of beings. Timothy Morton’s ontological analysis of naming creatures presents a mindset that considers relationships rather than separateness.30 Rather than distinguishing groups, Morton considers individual bodies as involved in pre-existing social relationships that have not yet been named. Morton’s logic connects social beings, which, in the case of True Blood, would allow for posthuman peaceful coexistence between humans, vampires, and other supernatural creatures. True Blood introduces faeries, shapeshifters, werewolves, werepanthers, spirits and hybrid characters – all within the homely Bon Temps community. The hybrids, like Sookie (who is half-­ human, half-fae) and Warlow (who is half-vampire, half-fae), are illustrative of shared attributes within a single body.Warlow struggles with duality, as he cannot reconcile his light and dark sides, whereas Sookie realizes by the series finale that her hybridity is integral to her identity. Sookie’s body represents an achieved posthuman balance through the coexistence of supernatural and human that, though difficult at times, remains self-defining. The array of supernatural beings in the show presents a melting pot that can only progress by eliminating violent threats and uniting in shared space. Rather than supporting criticism that ‘successful mainstreaming for vampires depends on how well they can play the game of being human’,31 I argue that effective mainstreaming depends on a reciprocal relationship between all beings and that Gothic utopian coexistence in True Blood can be possible only through hospitality.The show adopts a Levinasian notion of hospitality that first revolves around social responsibility:‘since the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard, his responsibility is incumbent on me. It is responsibility that goes beyond what I do.’32 Such social ethics involves reciprocity in treatment of all individuals. Because all beings 99

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on the show share the physical attributes of a human face, there is an initial relationship that begins simply through face-to-face interaction, which, according to Levinas, ‘makes possible the pluralism of society’.33 Seeing an other who shares a similar face allows for beings to engage in social relationships with that other that revolve around responsibility. In True Blood, different beings actually become responsible for one another’s survival.The mainstreaming of vampires intends to end the feeding and killing of humans, but in return, the humans must not hunt vampires. Officer Andy Bellefleur says, ‘We assaulted a prisoner today! Now, Joe Bob’s a son of a bitch, but it is my job to protect son of a bitches, too, and vampyrs and shifters and werechickens and whatever the fuck else is out there!’34 It is not only Andy’s job but also his social responsibility to protect individuals, whether human or Other, from violent threats. The most recognizable demonstration of a hospitable human/ vampire relationship is through welcoming into the home, which is also reflective of Levinasian hospitality:‘I welcome the other who presents himself in my home by opening my home to him.’35 Vampires in True Blood, the Levinasian Others, cannot enter a human’s home without being invited in and are required to leave if the human later rescinds that invitation. Hospitality unites beings in the home, while rescinding the invitation keeps the vampire an outsider, unwelcome to the domestic space, and disrupts the attempts for a posthuman Gothic utopia that requires hospitality. The home, then, functions as a space to either separate or unite different beings.The victim/aggressor relationship of vampiric folklore can be eradicated as vampires share the same space as humans. This can occur only if the human is willing to open up his or her home. Aside from some instances where vampires glamour their way into a human’s home, the hospitable human behaves according to what Derrida calls ‘welcoming of the face’,36 in which two beings that share a human face, may now also share an intimate space that has been previously private for the human. Parties, mixers and repasts are situations the show offers for different beings to come together amicably, as individuals are invited to unite in shared space. After Alcide’s death in Season Seven, Lafayette and friends help to organize a party at Sookie’s house. Lafayette tells Sookie, this party is ‘so we can say fuck you to death and hello to life. 100

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And that’s what we’re doing.We are motherfucking celebrating life.’37 The celebration of life becomes an opportunity for all different beings to come together to remember those who have died and enjoy the company of those who are present. Bill later tells Sookie that she has achieved successful mainstreaming in hosting this party. Sookie’s hospitality allows for a night of bliss and union, offering a glimpse of a posthuman Gothic utopia. Similarly, in the season finale, Bill hosts Hoyt (human) and Jessica’s (vampire) wedding at his house.38 Here, unity between beings occurs in the vampire’s domestic space. Andy, officiating the ceremony, mentions that the United States may not acknowledge their marriage as legal but that God does, and that ‘love is love, plain and simple’.39 In the domestic space, a vampire and a human form a binding relationship and share their unity with members of different species who have come together to celebrate. The show also promotes hospitable social relationships through notions of ownership. Levinas says, ‘In order that I be able to free myself from the very possession that the welcome of the Home establishes, in order that I be able to see things in themselves, that is, represent them to myself, refuse both enjoyment and possession, I must know how to give what I possess.’40 When inviting a vampire into the home, the host renounces ownership by stepping down from an assumed superior role of owner to approach the guest as an equal. Invitations, at times, also create relationships between humans and vampires that are bound by rules of ownership. As vampires declare a particular human ‘is mine’, no other vampire may feed on that ‘owned’ human.The vampire code of possession keeps order amongst vampires, which allows vampires and humans to maintain a reciprocal relationship. Ownership becomes a way in which vampires can protect humans. Sookie’s brother Jason tells her about his relationship with vampire Violet: ‘I’m hers now. Yeah, its fuckin’ weird but Sook, I think I feel how you felt way back with Bill, like someone has my back.’41 The human/vampire relationship based on possession is hospitable and comforting. Vampires who protect their humans engage in posthuman practices where possession is not territorial or animalistic but intended to ensure safety and a positive relationship between beings. In the show, the literal giving of a home also becomes a way for vampires and humans to gain mutual understanding. Bill cannot 101

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will his property to Jessica, so he asks Andy, who is the rightful heir to the Compton estate, if he will allow Jessica and Hoyt to rent the house for one dollar, which they may conveniently forget to pay each month.42 Ownership of space may legally be in the hands of humans, but Andy’s acceptance of this plan establishes a hospitable, mutual arrangement that allows Bill to bend legal rules in order to pass down his house to his progeny. Possession is further complicated when vampire Eric Northman buys Sookie’s home after her disappearance into the faerie realm for a year between the third and fourth seasons. Because Eric now owns Sookie’s home, though she still lives there, there is shared ownership of what had previously been her private space. However, with hospitality and trust comes a better understanding of identity and place in the world. Eric understands Sookie’s internal struggles with her identity:‘There are two Sookie Stackhouses. One who still clings to the idea that she’s merely human, and the other who’s coming to grips with the fact that you are better than that.’43 Eric realizes that Sookie grapples with understanding where she belongs but sees a future for her beyond ‘normal’ human existence. If hospitality, in part, depends upon ownership, Sookie fluctuates between welcoming and mutually possessing, as she struggles throughout the series to figure out where she belongs and who she belongs with. Engaging in romantic relationships with vampires, werewolves and halflings, Sookie realizes that a ‘normal’ human relationship is not possible for her. In fact, in the posthuman world of True Blood, the Gothic condition has become a new normal. In ‘Let’s Boot and Rally’, Bill and Eric, sitting in Sookie’s kitchen, ask for her help in catching Russell Edgington. Sookie submits with sarcastic acceptance to life as permanently associated with the supernatural: I just keep thinking that if I make the right choice, all this madness will end and my life will go back to normal. But it’s not gonna end, is it? Is it? It’s not gonna change.You say goodbye, and the next thing, you guys are back in my house, and a 3,000-year-old vampire wants to suck my blood. Must be Thursday!44

Sookie eventually realizes that the supernatural is a fixed part of her life. She has the opportunity to lose her ‘light’ as a faerie but chooses 102

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to keep it, saying to Bill, ‘this is who I am. It’s part of my truth, just like Jason’s my brother and my parents are my parents.They’re a part of me, whether I like it or not. And you, Bill, you’re a part of me too. And you always will be.’45 Sookie cannot go ‘back to normal’ because her light, her human family and her vampire friends are intrinsic components to her identity. Her ultimate acceptance of this fact represents the embodiment a unification effort that may achieve a posthuman Gothic utopia in which a liminal world that houses multiple creatures has become the new normal. The Gothic, in being normalized, remains part of the future vision of the world. While the hospitality of the home and notions of possession allow for beings to be united, True Blood suggests that blood is the most powerful offering of hospitality and unification. When Levinas says, ‘I must know how to give what I possess’, he is explaining the reciprocal nature of a hospitable relationship. In True Blood, ‘what I possess’ is blood. Humans who voluntarily give their blood to a vampire enter into a relationship based on nourishment because giving their blood allows for the vampire’s survival. In return, vampires may also give their blood to humans for medicinal purposes. An additional effect of drinking vampire blood is that the vampire will always sense when that human is in danger and can then come to the human’s aid. Bill tells Sookie,‘I’ll always be able to feel you. I’ll be able to find you fast.’46 Likewise, Sookie can feel Bill within her body even long after they have broken off their romantic relationship:‘I can still sense Bill, his smell, maybe, his presence when he’s nearby . . . even when I hate him, he’s in my blood.’47 The sharing of blood unites the two beings, where they not only provide each other with nourishment and medicine but also feel one another when apart.There is oneness among the different beings, a posthuman relationship dependent upon reciprocity and mutual giving of what one owns. Further, this unification does not have to be exclusive. In Season Four, Eric offers Sookie his blood, saying,‘We will be one!’48 Yet, being one with Eric does not mean that Sookie is disunited with Bill.The power of blood hospitality is that it can be given and received to any being, uniting races rather than just individuals. Ultimately, the survival of society depends on blood-sharing hospitality. The finale of Season Six and majority of Season Seven 103

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depicts Bon Temps and other communities under attack by aberrant, diseased vampires. Mayor Sam Merlotte’s solution for protection is for a healthy vampire and a human to team up together.The vampire will feed on the human’s untainted blood and, in turn, protect the human.49 Survival of both beings, Sam argues, depends upon this hospitable, reciprocal relationship. Most of those who resist Sam’s plan are ultimately killed, as they cannot protect themselves alone. The partnership plan depends upon a relationship of a Levinasian understanding of responsibility for another. Those individuals who refuse to engage in such a relationship do so due to fear, prejudice or lack of control. Fear and prejudice are the result of social influences, while control depends upon the strength of the individual. Throughout the series, many characters, both human and vampire, express bloodlust. Some vampires feed on and kill humans, while some humans are addicted to the hallucinogenic powers of vampire blood.Those who do not treat blood as something to be given and, rather, take it without consent, are criticized for disrupting the opportunities for co­ existence. Roman and the Authority have a mission for coexistence to work. He preaches: The question before us is, are we willing to share this world? As vampires, we have committed crimes against humanity, crimes for which we must now atone . . . Are we willing to extend the promise of Lilith and her bountiful mercy to all humanity and live as equals? . . . If we are slaves to our bloodlust, if we let our hunger surpass our common decency, we doom our souls to damnation.50

Blood must be willingly given in order to maintain a positive relationship between humans and vampires. Paola Marrati observes that ‘[a] situation arises then where both vampires and humans are killed for their blood, while others willingly give or exchange it in a trade where the limits between desire and commodities are constantly blurred – just as in everyday life’.51 To be faithful to the coexistence effort, bloodlust requires self-control and consistency of behaviour that is stimulated by moral values. A safer method of vampire nourishment is drinking TruBlood, which has been created by synthesising human blood. 104

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Vampires criticize the taste of TruBlood, so there is some sacrifice that comes with abstinence from human blood. The vampires also have to demonstrate incredible self-control over their instincts. In doing so, they prove to be committed participants to the mainstreaming effort and the hope for reciprocity. The science behind blood dependence also becomes a major part of the plot’s progression. In Season Six, Bill wants faerie blood synthesized in order to save the vampire race from the ‘Hep V’ outbreak.While his plan works to save some of the vampires, a more globally effective way of saving vampires ultimately comes from a human’s blood. After drinking the antidote for ‘Hep V’, Sarah Newlin’s blood is synthesized and distributed to gradually cure those with ‘Hep V’ and vaccinate those who are not infected. Blood synthesizing, therefore, proves to be a resource for vampires that could allow them to change their traditional image as monstrous threats to beings seeking to survive through non-violent means. While the oppositional forces to the mainstreaming effort in True Blood fuel the series’ continued conflict, the series promotes a Derridian notion of hospitality as opposed to hostility53 through the suggestion that the only way for coexistence to prevail is to combat resistance to it. This will also eradicate Gothic tensions revolving around fear of the Other and allow the Gothic to evolve and achieve a mutualistic existence between diverse beings. True Blood leaves us with this hope for the future of society, illustrating the Gothic utopian possibilities for coexistence and the power of those who unite and engage in reciprocal relationships to successfully overcome any threat to such a posthuman existence. In the series finale, individuals of all kinds join together to celebrate Thanksgiving, passing food around the table and sharing time and space together. In such a hospitable and sociable scene, the series ends with the image of a posthuman Gothic utopia, offering hope to viewers who may feel that social tensions create insurmountable barricades to 105

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civil unification. When the vampire is no longer an Other, he or she transcends traditional subjection and finds a new place in a post­human world that promotes harmony. The vampire’s presence suggests that the Gothic still exists in this world, as the past still surges into the present, but the eradication of boundaries makes for a posthuman Gothic. The posthuman utopia is achieved through mutualistic, hospitable relationships; thus, the vampire, though trad­ itionally represented and perceived as a Gothic threat, is required to create a harmonious balance between diverse beings. Notes S ee Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 92–4, which simultaneously considers Dracula as a figure of monopolization and the destruction of the efforts of industrialization and Dracula as reflective of the rich sucking dry the poor. M. MacLellan, ‘The Burden of Metaphor: Marx’s Vampires, Populist Politics, and the Dialectics of Capitalist Abstraction’, in Todd Dufresne and Clara Sacchetti (eds), The Economy as Cultural System: Theory, Capitalism, Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); M. Neocleous, ‘The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires’, History of Political Thought, 24/4 (2003), 668–84, also offer critical readings of the vampire figure and capitalism. 2 Neocleous, ‘Political Economy’, 673. 3 M. Hauskeller, ‘Reinventing Cockaigne: Utopian Themes in  Transhumanist Thought’, The Hastings Center Report, 42/2 (2012), 40. 4 Hauskeller, ‘Reinventing Cockaigne’, 44. 5 The concept of posthuman utopia used here is also reflective of M. F. Bendle’s approach through technology in ‘Teleportation, Cyborgs and the Posthuman Ideology’, Social Semiotics, 12/1 (2002), 45, where he argues posthumanism is an ‘[i]nternet-based social movement driven by an extreme scientific utopianism’. 6 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 28. 7 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 30. 8 Alexandra Warwick, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9/1 (2007), 14. 1

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Undead Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 28. R. Miles, ‘Eighteenth-Century Gothic’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 16. 11 See J. E. Hogle and A. Smith, ‘Revisiting the Gothic and Theory: An Introduction’, Gothic Studies, 11/1 (2009), 1–8. 12 Warwick, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, 6. 13 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), defines the Gothic through ‘excess and transgression’. Rather than sources of terror, I argue that in the posthuman Gothic utopia, excess and transgression are normal and acceptable. 14 Jamieson Ridenhour, In Darkest London:The Gothic Cityscape in Victorian Literature (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), p. 4. 15 True Blood, ‘Whatever I am,You Made Me’, dir. David Petrarca (HBO, 24 June 2012). 16 B. A. McClelland, ‘Un-True Blood: The Politics of Artificiality’, in George A. Dunn and Rebecca Housel (eds), True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things with You (Hoboken: Wiley, 2010), p. 88. 17 A. Blayde and G. A. Dunn,‘Pets, Cattle, and Higher Life Forms on True Blood’, in Dunn and Housel (eds), True Blood and Philosophy, p. 41. 18 Blayde and Dunn, ‘Pets, Cattle, and Higher Life Forms’, p. 42. 19 True Blood,‘I Don’t Wanna Know’, dir. Scott Winant (HBO, 9 November 2008). 20 True Blood, ‘Everything is Broken’, dir. Scott Winant (HBO, 15 August 2010). 21 Blayde and Dunn, ‘Pets, Cattle, and Higher Life Forms’, p. 46. 22 True Blood, ‘Scratches’, dir. Scott Winant (HBO, 28 June 2009). 23 True Blood, ‘Authority Always Wins’, dir. Michael Lehmann (HBO, 17 June 2012). 24 True Blood, ‘Never Let Me Go’, dir. John Dahl (HBO, 19 July 2009). 25 P. K. Nayar, ‘A New Biological Citizenship: Posthumanism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling’, Modern Fiction Studies, 58/4 (2012), 796. 26 McClelland, ‘Un-True Blood’, p. 81. 27 True Blood, ‘Strange Love’, dir. Alan Ball (HBO, 7 September 2008). 28 J. Culver, ‘Dressing Up and Playing Human: Vampire Assimilation in the Human Playground’, in Dunn and Housel (eds), True Blood and Philosophy, p. 25. 9 10

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Posthuman Gothic Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 8. 30 T. Morton, ‘Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals’, SubStance, 117 (2008), 77. 31 Culver, ‘Dressing Up and Playing Human’, p. 21. 32 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 96. 33 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 291. 34 True Blood, ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, dir. Daniel Attias (HBO, 5 August 2012). 35 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 171. 36 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 50. 37 True Blood, ‘Lost Cause’, dir. Howard Deutch (HBO, 20 July 2014). 38 True Blood, ‘Thank You’, dir. Scott Winant (HBO, 24 August 2014). 39 The politics of matrimony and equal rights reflect contemporary fights for marriage equality in the United States. 40 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 170–1. 41 True Blood, ‘Radioactive’, dir. Scott Winant (HBO, 18 August 2013). 42 True Blood, ‘Thank You’. 43 True Blood, ‘You Smell Like Dinner’, dir. Scott Winant (HBO, 3 July 2011). 44 True Blood, ‘Let’s Boot and Rally’, dir. Michael Lehmann (HBO, 8 July 2012). 45 True Blood, ‘Thank You’. 46 True Blood, ‘The First Taste’, dir. Scott Winant (HBO, 14 September 2008). 47 True Blood, ‘Karma’, dir. Angela Robinson (HBO, 27 July 2014). 48 True Blood, ‘Spellbound’, dir. Daniel Minahan (HBO, 14 August 2011). 49 True Blood, ‘Radioactive’. 50 True Blood, ‘Let’s Boot and Rally’. 51 P. Marrati, ‘True Blood, Bon Temps, Louisiana 2008–2012’, MLN, 127/5 (2012), 987. 52 McClelland, ‘Un-True Blood’, p. 85. 53 J. Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki, 5/3 (2000), 4. 29

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6 Forging Posthuman Identities in Dominic Mitchell’s In the Flesh Maria Alberto

 Identity, Normality and Monstrosity in the Posthuman Gothic The contemporary entertainment landscape exhibits an increasing prevalence of artefacts such as the dystopian young-adult novel, the forensic detective show, the paranormal romance and the post-­ apocalypse survival story. Despite considerable differences of medium, genre and narrative, though, these artefacts are all character­ized by common concerns over identity and its assignation: what determines who you are, and how can you change that? Even as these media types and narratives posit threats to or loss of identity through the misidentification, forcible redefinition and/ or even death of central characters, their ongoing popularity also seems to show that both producers and consumers are concerned with similar questions. Such narratives are often informed by ‘a complex vista of contemporary identity’ characterized by feared yet fascinating ontological mutability,1 and more specifically, Gothicderived definitions of monstrosity have regained popularity in a global society still struggling to overcome, or even explain, cultural differences and shared tragedies.2 Although it is tempting to invoke clichés about millennial anxiety or desensitization to violence, it

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would be more accurate to say that both the Gothic tradition and its contemporary subgenres have become pervasive in recent decades ‘precisely because [the Gothic] is so apposite to the representation of contemporary concerns’.3 Inherent elements of the genre keep the Gothic relevant and relatable to contemporary audiences by recasting familiar issues in ways that offer entertainment, provoke consideration and even facilitate catharsis. Many critics also assert that, in response to new audiences and their changing needs, contemporary manifestations of the Gothic have moved beyond the tradition’s generic origins. Pramod K. Nayar, for instance, observes the recent development of a post­ humanist ‘species Gothic’ that functions by subverting or refusing ‘acceptance, recognition, and the forging of a relationship’.4 Through this refusal, he suggests, the horror of a posthuman Gothic lies less in its depiction of the Other than in human characters’ own ‘intolerance for this Other and [their] refusal to recognize the Other-which-is-us’.5 Michael Sean Bolton further expands the definition by outlining the difference between a postmodern and a posthuman Gothic. He contends that where the postmodern Gothic typically generates horror from external sources, or the ‘fear of the eradication of humanity at the hands of monstrous techno­ logies’,6 the horror of the posthuman Gothic is generated internally, or from the fear that the Other ‘already inhabits the human subject, that the subject is betrayed from within’.7 In the posthuman Gothic, then, certain humanist values and beliefs are not so much lost as forcibly changed or even discarded to enable humans’ survival in a posthuman world.8 The posthuman Gothic thus marries the horror inherent in the Gothic mode to the posthuman occupation with becoming, and most narratives of this subgenre emphasize horror specifically for and of human subjects, especially in terms of Bolton’s rejecting previous humanism(s). Some common themes of posthuman Gothic narratives include an emphasis on the environment or environmental factors that force human characters to this extreme; a focus on the literal alterations to the human subject’s body, psyche or spirit that mirror the fear or presence of an internal Other; and/ or the human subject’s own agency in and accession to rejecting a previous state of humanity. In each of these three themes, horror 110

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becomes a part of the posthuman text or artefact and accesses the posthuman Gothic ‘when seemingly immutable spaces are crossed between boundaries [such as] animal, human, inanimate or technological’:9 notably, ‘[t]he monstrosity of these interfaces has as much to do with the human component’.10 Significantly, the posthuman Gothic is often tied to technology as or within the Other, even as Donna Haraway has contended that technology and the technological Other are not limited to the purely mechanical construct.11 Judith Halberstam, for instance, also argues that the Gothic and its texts are themselves technologies ‘that produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body’, and that much of this power stems from ‘a generic spin that transforms the lovely and beautiful into the abhorrent and then frames this transformation within a humanist moral fable’.12 The posthuman Gothic maximizes the sympathetic horror of this process through what Kyle Bishop calls the ‘flipped’ allegory of monstrosity: depictions in which ‘otherwise sympathetic’ human characters coded as protagonists perform monstrous actions in order to protect themselves and/or others, often justifying their own monstrosities by claiming that humanity and its values have little place in a posthuman world where necessity must trump morality in the interests of survival.13 The posthuman Gothic thus invites audiences to consider what signifying, making and becoming might mean when value systems are shaken or overturned – and what this shift means for human identity, if such value systems form its foundation. Complicating the Zombie: More than a Monster While more recent Gothic subgenres such as the horror film have added new ‘monsters’ to those already present in the original trad­ ition, certain monster figures from this combined heritage are particularly easy to co-opt into the posthuman Gothic. As a monster figure, for instance, the zombie already construes what Rosi Braidotti calls the ‘porous threshold’ of death that subjectively, and even artificially, separates and subsumes its subjects.14 Much like the Gothic and its subgenres remain relevant for the way they offer 111

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audiences a fantastic frame for ‘contemporary concerns’,15 the zombie also offers a convenient frame upon which to (dis)place social issues and anxieties. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry note that the zombie’s articulation of ‘anxiety about the division of body and mind/soul [often] takes on various trappings of political and social crises’,16 but of all the posthuman Gothic’s monster figures, new and old, the zombie also offers particular opportunities for portraying and problematizing identity. Lauro and Embry assert that the zombie engenders fear and aversion because both its nature and its very existence repudiate Western values of individuality, agency and cognizance, but unlike Haraway’s collaged cyborg, Lauro and Embry’s patchwork zombie is shaped ‘by the (negative) dialectic of power relations rather than gender’.17 Here, then, audiences’ fear of the zombie may stem from its gruesome appearance and its predatory potential, but their horror stems from the questions at play behind these fears: what are or were these monsters? While Lauro and Embry do offer a useful explanation of the zombie’s fear factor, they do not quite account for the range of zombie portrayals in contemporary media.The classic zombie, for instance, is a slow, stiff, shambling creature, in some cases complete with a muttered chant of ‘brains’, but recent offerings more often feature a fast, non-verbal zombie that hunts in intelligent packs. Although both are examples of the same monster figure, their effects are remarkably different. The classic zombie is subhuman, with visual and auditory markers to its past humanity, and its slow mindlessness plays to fears of inevitable monstrosity. The more recent zombie, on the other hand, is inhuman, with visual and auditory markers of an animalistic nature, and its attendant texts and films often read more like survival narratives of natural disasters. In both cases, though, considering the zombie must necessarily lead audiences to consider questions of identity: who this person had been before death, whether anything is left of that original person in the new monstrous figure, and ultimately how, why, or even whether the human individual was transmuted into the subhuman or inhuman predator. Dominic Mitchell’s 2013–14 horror/drama In the Flesh builds from the posthuman Gothic’s combined inheritance of concerns regarding agency, mutation, individualism, rationality and 112

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monstrosity, but also adds to this inheritance specifically by complicating both the classic and the contemporary zombie and the two types’ already attendant questions of identity. In the Flesh repositions the typical zombie narrative to examine the complications and ramifications of survival for both living and once-dead posthuman subjects, exploiting Nayar’s ‘Other-which-is-us’ in order to explore the evolution and assignation of posthuman identities. For the living characters of In the Flesh, identity encompasses the interrogation of both traditional and wartime social, cultural and religious/ moral values; for the once-dead characters, identity becomes a struggle with former lives, previous familial and social bonds, and the question of whether such lives and bonds are better restructured or even rejected. The narrative of In the Flesh follows two recent events: the 2009 Rising, in which many recently deceased ‘rose’ from their graves, and the 2009–13 Pale Wars, in which the living fought to protect themselves by exterminating Rising victims, often through the formation of militia groups such as northern England’s Human Volunteer Force (HVF). During the final years of the Pale Wars, two scientists develop a moderating but non-curative drug that foregrounds previously immersed consciousness; Rising victims treated with daily doses of this drug, Neurotriptyline, regain the cognitive functions, personalities and memories they possessed before death and Rising. In the Flesh follows central character Kieren Walker, a young man from the fictional north England village of Roarton, as he returns to his family and community after his Rising and subsequent containment and treatment. Identity becomes an issue of question and concern throughout In the Flesh as the Rising, the Pale Wars and the advent and application of Neurotriptyline each create, change, and/or supersede some fundamental sociocultural discourse. As Catherine Spooner asserts, the contemporary Gothic ‘is not preoccupied with the end of the world, but rather the end of innocence’,18 and In the Flesh opens to a world in which humanity is threatened not by extinction but by definition – who or what is human? The Rising, for instance, forcibly challenges religious discourses, and specifically Judeo-Christian traditions about eternity and resurrection. Similarly, the Pale Wars inevitably generate a militant discourse, a 113

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‘kill or be killed’ mentality that dehumanizes those who surfaced during the Rising as ‘rotters’, or mindless decomposing predators, and hallows those who died fighting these ‘rotters’. Finally, the advent, application and aftermath of Neurotriptyline completely disrupt the discourses developed during both the Rising and the Pale Wars by restoring ‘rotters’ to cognizant, functional versions of their original subject positions. One of the most recognizable attributes of the Gothic in any of its subgenres is the discovery of difference, especially as a visible and often-constructed marker of monstrous identity: Spooner, for instance, asserts that ‘[t]he fascination with freakiness is partly based on performative notions of identity  – remaking the self as monstrous’.19 Throughout In the Flesh, a posthuman Gothic take on this idea can be found in the ways in which language and appearance are rendered ‘performative notions’ to be monitored and policed as proof of identity. Indeed, much of the show’s horror stems from the ways in which characters are forced to prove their fitness to remain undestroyed – and from the way that this pressure comes from both sides, revealing both living and once-dead are that ‘Other-which-is-us’.20 As will become clearer, In the Flesh provides no impermeable, universal binaries between the show’s living and once-dead characters: due to the reversing effects of Neurotriptyline, which restores invisible cognitive capacities but not visible physiological appearances to the once-dead, even the traditional distinction of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ provides little traction. Furthermore, as the Rising and Pale Wars have effectively caused Spooner’s ‘end of innocence’,21 both living and once-dead characters are equally posthuman subjects: through experience, they all realize that traditional definitions of humanity (i.e., life/living) are not all-encompassing. Both the living and the once-dead have their own stakes in the definition of identity, and in the race to this definition, sociocultural practices and artefacts such as language and appearance become means through which to communicate and validate these new identities.

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Language as the Performance of Expectations From the opening scenes of In the Flesh, language becomes one of the ‘performative notions’ that separates the dangerous threat of freakishness from the stabilizing haven of normality.22 During the show’s narrative present, each of the three major events that preceded it – the Rising, the Pale Wars and the advent of Neurotriptyline – must be addressed in language that will acknowledge its horror while also trying to move beyond that horror. For the once-dead in particular, discursive transitions in general language mirror more physiological transformations: with the Rising, they became ‘rotters’, a term reflective of their appearance, and with the Pale Wars, they became ‘rabids’, a term rationalizing their extermination in terms of the indiscriminate, mindless danger they posed to the living. Finally, with the invention and administration of Neurotriptyline, the once-dead are physiologically shifted from decomposition and instinct back to living-like baselines of consciousness; discursively, they are shifted from inhuman ‘rotters’ and ‘rabids’ into subhuman ‘PDS (Partially Deceased Syndrome) sufferers’. Terms such as ‘zombies’ become largely pop-culture remnants of a time before anyone could even imagine the catastrophic impact of the Rising as a real-world event. By the narrative present of In the Flesh, then, a language of past horror has been normalized and made into a performative artefact used by this posthuman society to try and recreate normality. In particular, both living and once-dead struggle to understand the ramifications of the once-dead recovering their memories and personalities through Neurotriptyline: are they the same people they had been before their deaths and Rising, and if so, how does this return to normality/humanity fit with the mindless ‘rotter’ or ‘rabid’, or for the living they killed, or for the living who hunted them during the Pale Wars? Another way to conceptualize this question might be, who is most in the wrong and why? In the beginning at least, the living majority see themselves as the wronged and the victorious, and so dictate the definition of safety and normality. As living and once-dead endeavour to rebuild, though, specific performances of language must be made to certain standards before a safe or favorable identity will be confirmed. 115

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When audiences are first introduced to In the Flesh protagonist Kieren Walker, for instance, he is having a graphic flashback and then recovering from it in a medical facility, and part of his recovery is to repeat ‘affirmations’.23 After his flashback, Kieren tries to fall back on the familiar language of popular culture to communicate the horror of the memories he is recovering from both his life and his death: ‘I’m a zombie, and I killed people.’ The living doctor, though, refuses this language and prompts him, ‘[n]o. Kieren, what are you? You – are – a –?’ and with an irritated huff, Kieren restarts: ‘I am a Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferer’: he is then prompted through the declaration of ‘[w]hat I did in my untreated state was not my fault’, to which the doctor responds,‘[g]ood. Okay’ and allows him to leave the room.24 With this exchange, language is being used not only to define Kieren, but also to do so in a way that will make him ‘safe’ for reintegration among the living. He is walked through a redefinition of himself and his agency, and only allowed movement when his own language matches what the living demand to hear. This performance of language to the living’s expectations continues throughout In the Flesh, with previous terms continually resurfacing as slurs or excuses. The Pale Wars term ‘rabids’, for instance, is often used to accuse the once-dead of mindlessness, while the Rising term ‘rotters’ often suggests that the once-dead subject may be conscious but still remains devious and untrustworthy. In Kieren’s hometown of Roarton, the sympathetic living are denounced for their stupidity to ‘think these things are people’, and Kieren himself is described as ‘not a person . . . He’s an animal.Worse than an animal.They might walk and talk, but rotters are evil.’25 Yet this use of language to define Kieren as a once-dead subject is not limited to just his enemies. His own father, side character Steve Walker, explains away his use of the word ‘rabids’ and his evaluation of ‘[b]loody scary’ by adding ‘[n]ot like him [Kieren]. I’m talking about the other ones.The killers.The rabids that were eating people’s brains during the Rising.’26 Even Roarton villagers’ later assertions that ‘that rabid was someone’s son . . . Rabids are people too’ are met with rejoinders such as ‘well, last time I checked, people don’t go around trying to eat one another’.27 In such cases, ‘people’ is easily translated to mean ‘human’ with ‘rabids’ or ‘rotters’ meaning the exact opposite, and whether 116

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well- or ill-intentioned, the living speaker is creating boundaries for and around the once-dead subject. In the case of Kieren’s father, Steve is obviously desperate to believe his son is the exception to a thoroughly monstrous rule of creatures that ‘were eating people’s brains during the Rising’.28 Even this well-meaning definition of the once-dead subject, however, can be almost as damaging as definitions from the living who use Rising and Pale Wars language for more obviously hurtful effects. Because he wants to see and define Kieren in a certain way, for instance, Steve is oblivious to his son’s continuing flashbacks and panic attacks, and later even threatens to have him sent back to the medical facility when Kieren makes him uncomfortable. However, the language of identity is also used among the living themselves as they struggle to reorient a previously war-torn society. For instance, when Roarton citizens and militia members remind a visiting politician of their sufferings during the Rising and Pale Wars, he resorts to official language that promises the rehabilitated once-dead are not a matter for concern because ‘the PDS Domiciled Care Initiative’ is backed by a ‘Protection Act’.29 When further challenged about the returning ‘rotters’, though, the politician first tries to reframe the debate through different language, insisting that ‘PDS sufferers didn’t decide to attack anyone’ and ‘all assimilated PDS sufferers must legally take their medication’.30 Ultimately, his arguments rest on language alone: he cannot actually explain the mechanics of how the once-dead will be policed or why Roarton in particular should accept them, and his unconvinced audience runs him out of the village. The once-dead themselves, though, offer the ultimate example of language-as-identity through their eventual adaptation of the living’s language. Since each of the terms referring to them has its roots in the culture of the living  – ‘zombie’ from popular culture, ‘rotter’ from the Rising, ‘rabid’ from the Pale Wars and ‘PDS sufferer’ from the Neurotriptyline rehabilitations  – the once-dead eventually make their own meaning for these terms, and create their own in turn. An exchange between Kieren and a once-dead friend, Amy Dyer, demonstrates this process in motion. Teasingly, Kieren calls both himself and Dyer ‘zombies’ and is surprised when Dyer, 117

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usually sunny and easy-going, actually takes offense: more surprisingly, she won’t accept his correction to the socially mandated term ‘Partially Deceased’. This, she tells him, is ‘even worse. That’s the name the living gave us. We are the Undead. We are the redeemed. Got it?’31 and Kieren quickly learns that these new ‘names’ are the work of revolutionists looking to unite the oncedead as a community separate from the living. One of the first steps to building this community, though, has obviously been the creation and assignation of new names. As Dyer unknowingly reveals, a shared language indicates shared experience, and the once-dead revolutionists need their compatriots to accept separ­ ation. Rejecting the standard language of the living and creating their own replacements thus becomes the first step for the oncedead to accept their separation as subjects. While language remains a ‘performative notion’32 as In the Flesh progresses, the underlying poles of freakishness and normality shift away from the foundation laid by the living. Where the once-dead were initially labelled freakish, wrong and dangerous by default – and the language of this posthuman society reflected these beliefs – the once-dead eventually begin to claim and perform language differently as their own sense of identity changes. Appearance as the Performance of Expectations In addition to language, appearance(s) in In the Flesh also become something that must be performed in order to confirm a positive or favourable identity. Where the performance of language often reveals whether a character understands and will conform to the living’s expectations of repentance, shame and humility after the horrific experiences of the Rising and the Pale Wars, appearance(s) become comparably contentious since they function as an explicit visual shorthand for the same implicit messages conveyed by language. Characters’ correct or incorrect use of language warns others of social dangers, such as the belief that Neurotriptyline can’t control ‘rotters’, or that ‘rabids’ will always be mindless animals, but at the same time, the definition of correct or incorrect language changes as this posthuman society develops and matures. With 118

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appearances, however, characters have concrete signs to read for danger or grudging acceptance. Prior to the show’s narrative present, the once-dead are visibly Other than human, with blanched skin, conspicuous veins, dark lips and starburst pupils as visible markers that accentuate their stumbling movements, animalistic noises and gory smears from feeding. As Neurotriptyline restores their memories and personality during the show’s narrative present, the latter issues are also addressed: the oncedead regain their former ease of movement and will no longer feed like carnivorous animals.The Neurotriptyline rehabilitations, though, cannot change the visual markers of otherness in skin and eyes, so the posthuman society of In the Flesh must find other ways to address these uncomfortable appearances. To admit and then hide such markedly Other appearance, the once-dead are expected to wear certain items of cosmetics and clothing.These apparel and cosmetics continue to mark the once-dead as Other while simultaneously altering their outward appearance to the specifications of the living, signifying their willingness to reintegrate into a posthuman society with a majority of living citizens. As a result, the once-dead who still exhibit the original, ‘untreated’ visual markers of otherness are presumed uncooperative and dangerous. The importance of performing a specified appearance is highlighted when audiences first learn Kieren Walker’s full name from a medical ruling rather than a personal introduction: as he leaves his doctor in the medical facility and is made to stand in another line, Kieren is simply a subject that once had either blue or brown eyes.33 With a determination of eye colour made, he is allocated contact lenses and ‘cover-up’ mousse, given back his ‘normal’ or pre-death clothes, and deemed fit to see his parents and return to Roarton. For most of the show’s current two-season run, Kieren is shown applying his lenses and mousse quickly, heavily and blindly out of shame over his appearance: he hangs a towel over any nearby mirrors and admits that he keeps his lenses in at all times, even while asleep, despite warnings against continuous use.34 Thus, while neither set of cosmetics has actual physiological benefits, they do offer the advantage of deterrence – once-dead subjects can be allowed to ignore their unwanted appearances, and living subjects are not forced to see once-dead subjects without this semblance of ‘normal’ life. 119

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In turn, the deterrence provided by wearing these cosmetics offers its own physiological benefits, as those who go without risk attack by fearful or angry living.35 Even clothing itself briefly becomes an issue of performative expectations with the introduction of the PDS Give-Back Scheme, a social reform through which the once-dead are expected to wear uniforms and perform community service in exchange for renewed UK citizenship, supposedly to help rebuild the society they had torn apart during the Pale Wars.36 Once-dead subjects are required to wear bright orange safety vests with explicit demarcations: the reform’s name, ‘Give Back Scheme’, across the front, and an identification of the wearer, ‘I’m PDS and I’m giving back!’, across the back. Although the living initially lay the rules of appearance, ostensibly to prevent fear and smooth social reintegration, both living and once-dead quickly realize that appearance has more to do with security of identity for the living. By mandating appearances, the living can pretend their once-dead neighbours are back in their ‘normal’ places – or better still, not worry about whose identity is dictated by the words ‘rotter’, ‘rabid’ and/or ‘PDS sufferer’. As the once-dead realize this, though, appearance quickly becomes a site of tension through which beliefs and allegiances are easily revealed. Once-dead subjects who take to attacking the living announce their presence by wiping off their mousse and ripping off ‘normal’ clothes to reveal burial clothes underneath;37 Kieren warns his friend Dyer about the dangers of not wearing her mousse, and she is later attacked in her own home by a militia member who forcibly smears mousse and lipstick across her face.38 Though Dyer is initially intimidated into leaving Roarton, she eventually returns and confronts her former attacker, who responds with a furious ‘[c]over up or get the hell out, you fucking rotters!’39 At the same time, though, the standard of modesty and decency is doubleedged: when Kieren, a young gay man, steps in to support Dyer, her attacker warns that ‘I don’t take orders from a lad who wears make-up.’40 Though Kieren is following the living’s rules of appearance, Roarton citizens’ awareness of his sexual orientation comes into conflict with their demands that he hide his once-dead physiognomy. For Dyer, performing the appearance of a penitent 120

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once-dead female is not in conflict with the expectation that a living woman wears make-up; for Kieren, performing the appearance of a penitent once-dead male cuts too close to Roarton’s fears that gay men adopt feminine performances. Inevitably, the performative expectations of language and appearance collide as the living struggle to maintain power in a posthuman society that slowly comes to include both living and once-dead. When Kieren tries to renew his stock of mousse and lenses, for instance, he is first required to perform his ‘affirmations’ again: before medical personnel, he must face himself in a mirror and recite: ‘I am a Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferer and that is not my fault’41 before receiving the cosmetics. Later, though, Dyer points out that the once-dead are not technically obliged to wear their cover-up mousse or coloured lenses.42 Similarly, many once-dead subjects see the Give Back Scheme as indentured servitude or even slavery rather than community service, as they had no agency during the Rising anyway: interestingly, one of the loudest vocalizations argues that the Scheme is ‘against our basic human rights’.43 Though explicitly coded as Other through both language (PDS sufferers, Give-Back participants) and appearance (cover-up mousse and Give-Back vest), many of the once-dead subjects of In the Flesh begin insisting on pre-Rising terms such as ‘human’, rather than accepting the posthuman realities of living and once-dead. Performative Identity: A Question of Posthuman Normal(ity) These performed semblances of normality, then, show how posthuman identity in In the Flesh becomes defined by past loss and present unsurety, as performative expectations are explained or justified under the guise of social propriety and/or respect for the living’s losses during the Rising.Through language and appearance, the identity of the once-dead especially can be either rationalized or explained away. Language becomes at once a means of justifying an entire side’s existence as well as a discursive marker to warn the once-dead when they speak or act out of bounds, while appearance becomes a tangible reflection of the demanding reintegration that 121

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the once-dead face in order to rejoin a society that the living have supposedly maintained. However, it is also easy to observe that neither of these performative expectations makes much account of the once-dead’s own Rising and Pale Wars experiences, at least initially. Although both the living and the once-dead characters of In the Flesh have experienced the ‘end of innocence’,44 their actual experiences are completely different.The once-dead experienced this ‘end of innocence’ mindlessly, by Rising and hunting the living, and then retroactively, as they regain their awareness and memories through the administration of Neurotriptyline. The living, though, experienced the ‘end of innocence’ fully in the moment, as they witnessed the Rising and then had to defend themselves, often against former friends and family members. In this sense, the once-dead have ‘lost’ the moral fight, and so must play by the rules of the victors, the living. As the living ‘won’, then, they define their version of society as the right or ‘normal’ one, and the once-dead must deal with Neurotriptyline dosages and any other rehabilitation deemed necessary in order to rejoin society in whatever diminished roles the living decide to grant them. Both the workings and the results of this compromise invite audiences to consider identity as an issue of the posthuman Gothic. Since the semblance of normality is dictated by appearance and language throughout In the Flesh, both the show’s characters and its viewers will note that these two ‘performative notions’45 also dictate whether someone is treated as an inhuman or subhuman monstrosity, or as a reluctant member of a newly posthuman society, thus returning to a common refusal ‘to recognize the Other-which-is-us’.46 Notes  . Campbell and M. Saren, ‘The primitive, technology and horror: a N posthuman biology’, Ephemera, 10/2 (2010), 156. 2 Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 7, 241. 3 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 8. 1

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Undead  ramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 116–17. P Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 118. 6 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 2. 7 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 5. 8 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 4. 9 Campbell and Saren, ‘Primitive, technology and horror’, 157. 10 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 5. 11 D. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’, in David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (eds), The Cybercultures Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 291. 12 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 21–2. 13 K. W. Bishop, ‘Battling monsters and becoming monstrous: Human devolution in The Walking Dead’, in Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui (eds), Monster Culture in the 21st Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 73–5. 14 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 64, 131. 15 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, pp. 8–9. 16 S. J. Lauro and K. Embry, ‘A Zombie Manifesto’, boundary 2, 35/1 (2008), 101. 17 Lauro and Embry, ‘Zombie Manifesto’, 91. 18 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 23. 19 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 29. 20 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 118. 21 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 23. 22 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 29. 23 In the Flesh, dir. Johnny Campbell and writer Dominic Mitchell (BBC Three, 2013–14). 24 In the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 1’, dir. Johnny Campbell (BBC Three, 17 March 2013). 25 In the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 2’, dir. Johnny Campbell (BBC Three, 24 March 2013). 26 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’, dir. Jim O’Hanlon (BBC Three, 4 May 2014). 27 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 28 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 4

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Posthuman Gothic I n the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 1’. In the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 1’. 31 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 32 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 29. 33 In the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 1’. 34 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 35 In the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 3’, dir. Johnny Campbell (BBC Three, 31 March 2013). 36 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 2’, dir. Jim O’Hanlon (BBC Three, 11 May 2014). 37 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 38 In the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 3’. 39 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 40 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 41 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 1’. 42 In the Flesh, season 1, ‘Episode 3’. 43 In the Flesh, season 2, ‘Episode 2’. 44 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 23. 45 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 29. 46 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 118. 29 30

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7 More than Human: Reading the Doppelgänger and Female Monstrosity in Television Vampires Maria Marino-Faza

 In recent decades, the concept of identity and what constitutes human nature has been challenged by many scholars, who have perceived there to be a crisis to the previous humanist ideas based on man’s central position, and a belief in his exceptionalism. Humanism regards categories as stable, promoting an anthropocentric view of the world based on hierarchies and binary oppositions that, in the past, confronted the category ‘human’ with that of a ‘non-human’ or ‘inhuman’; a world view where ‘man’, traditionally understood as a white male, is placed at the highest hierarchical position, above the rest of humanity, the animal species and technology. But, as Rosi Braidotti suggests, ‘the concept of the human has exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns’. 1 Posthumanism has appeared not only as a philosophical but also as a cultural theory, rejecting this traditional articulation of the human, and stating that his supposed uniqueness is a myth. Nevertheless, far from a unified theory, posthumanism can be addressed from a variety of perspectives. As Pramod K. Nayar explains, the term can be used to refer to two basic ideas. First, it is regarded as ‘an ontological condition’,2 where the human body is

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subjected to modifications. This idea of transhumanism has been proposed by many authors, including Cary Wolfe, who has commented on ‘the decentering of the human by its imbrications in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks’,3 or N. Katherine Hayles, who focuses on the relation between human and machine where the former is understood as a construct whose ‘characteristics might be enhanced through technological intervention’.4 Secondly, from a more philosophical perspective, the term posthumanism is also used to refer to ‘a new conceptualization of the human’.5 Referred to as critical posthumanism, it questions previous humanist ideas based on dualism and human exceptionalism and replaces them with ‘a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction’.6 This second strand of posthumanism ‘sees the uniquely human abilities, qualities, consciousness and features as evolving in conjunction with other life forms, technology and ecosystems’.7 Although both branches of posthumanism differ in many aspects, they share the common idea that ‘humanity is now a liminal zone where individuals are forced to confront the meaning and future of the human’.8 In this regard, Micheal Sean Bolton explores how Gothic narratives and the posthuman intersect at the point of ‘the postmodern fear of disintegration of the human subject’,9 a fear that is reflected in the representation of our monsters. In the twenty-first century, when a ‘profound acceleration in changing symbolic, economic and technological systems’10 has been taking place, the study of monstrosity and how it is constructed is crucial in understanding the problems facing contemporary Western societies. Monsters represent ‘a category crisis’; they stand for ‘the dialectical other’,11 and for this reason they become the perfect site for interpreting the way discourses are articulated in every period. David Punter and Glennis Byron have also highlighted how monsters are used to construct ‘the politics of the “normal” [and] police the boundaries of the human, pointing to those lines that must not be crossed’.12 In this sense, both posthumanism and monster theory analyse the Other in terms of its liminality, not only as a representative of transgression but, as Milburn explains, drawing on Derridean theory, it is also a way of ‘reaching for other posthuman futures’,13 since they help in breaking ‘boundaries and binary oppositions’.14 126

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These non-human bodies do not only serve to contain; their intrinsic liminality threatens ‘the liberal humanist principle of uniqueness’15 and raises the question of what it means to be human, allowing hybridization as a new politics of representation that challenges previously established boundaries. Understood in terms of liminality, there has not been a monster that better embodies this ‘projected difference [and] poses a danger for any form of categorization’16 than the vampire.This supernatural creature evolved from folklore tales in the eighteenth century to become a successful theme in nineteenth-century Victorian narratives, including, amongst others, John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s well-known Dracula. But it is the adaptation of vampires for cinema and television in the following centuries that completely changed the way they were represented. In fact, as Nina Auerbach states, adaptability becomes one of the vampire’s most relevant features, emphasizing their ability to ‘blend into the changing cultures they inhabit’.17 These supernatural creatures were originally portrayed as the dangerous Other and given animal-like characteristics that fit into the humanist discourse of the superiority of man over all other species. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, one of the most significant changes to the vampire concept was undertaken in novels such as Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, when the creatures started to be presented, not as the villains in the story, but ‘as a source of empathy and identification’.18 In addition, the emergence of the supernatural romance in the 1990s, a new genre that mixed the main features of horror and romance fictions, also marked a transition from the vampire being ‘associated with instinctual, primitive and animalistic energies’ to a connection with love and ‘a passion beyond life and death’.19 In this sense, the transformation from animalistic creatures to Byronic heroes has now led to a portrayal of the vampire as the-boy-next-door, a trope that appears in supernatural romance fiction aimed at a youngadult audience.Vampires have always stood for the Other but this taming of the vampire, their ‘domestication’20 and transformation into a romantic hero has also turned them into a marketable product that generates huge revenues. The relationship between this type of cultural production and the system in which they have 127

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been created is a complex one. In fact, as Fred Botting explains, romance has always had a double reading. On the one hand, it contributes to reinforce mainstream ideas by means of binary oppositions and its depiction of adequate and inadequate behaviours through its representation of otherness and its involvement in the post-industrial society. Rosi Braidotti complements this idea by stressing the process of objectification that is taking place in many cultural products, and how this has become part of a power strategy where ‘the commodification process itself reduces humans to the status of manufactured and hence profit-driven technologically mediated objects’.21 However, Botting also claims that, despite being part of this society of consumption, ‘popular romance seems both critical and supportive of the established institutions’.22 It neither totally complies with the establishment nor is it intrinsically subversive, presenting an ideology ‘at times complementing and at times contradicting prevailing currents’.23 Based on this theoretical background, I will analyse Elena Gilbert and Katherine Piers, two characters of the American TV series The Vampire Diaries, as representatives of this category crisis between human, inhuman and posthuman, and discuss the way the traditional Gothic figure of the uncanny double is presented in this supernatural romance in order to explore the dialectics of otherness. In addition, I will examine how the image of the female monster is used to echo contemporary concerns about identity and the construction of subjectivity, in line with posthuman theories about the articulation of the subject in Western societies marked by capitalism and a fierce promotion of consumerism, through the study of the vampire as a popular culture product. Monsters and, in particular, vampires have been transformed into a product that has not only evolved but adapted to each period. From Malcolm Rymer’s periodical story of Varney the Vampire to the Hammer Horror Dracula films, or the more recent and lucrative Twilight phenomenon, vampires have proven a particularly successful product. This mercantilist aspect is also present in The Vampire Diaries, an American TV series produced for The CW that echoes the success of supernatural romance fictions while also reflecting the changes in the portrayal of vampires that have taken place in recent decades. Although it is based on a series of novels written 128

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by L. J. Smith in the 1990s, some changes were made to accommodate the taste of contemporary audiences, and incorporate the formula that has proven to be particularly profitable since the turn of the twenty-first century. Similarities between the characters of The Vampire Diaries and many of the characters in popular TV series and films, including Bella and Edward in Twilight, and Angel and Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, can be observed.24 In this sense, Michael Ryan talks about the process of the standardization of products in Western societies marked by a fierce advanced capitalism, and how ‘any departure from the standard that is financially successful will . . . quickly generate copies and the new quickly becomes the standard’.25 This idea helps us understand how the economic forces at work within the entertainment industries influence cultural activities in the Western world, and clearly reveals the ‘connections between the vampire and capitalism’.26 The producers of this new TV series sought to capitalize on the box-­ office success of Twilight, premiering The Vampire Diaries in September 2009, two months before the second instalment of the saga, New Moon, was released. As expected, it became an instant hit and attracted a large audience for the network. Like Twilight before it, The Vampire Diaries made substantial profits, not only from the sale of the novels and the television adaptation, but also from merchandise and marketing campaigns, reflecting how ‘economic neoliberalism, free market ideology and late capitalist individualism can no longer be separated from the various technological and cultural post-humanization processes’.27 Indeed, as Braidotti points out, ‘under the cover of individualism, fuelled by a quantitative range of consumer choices, that system effectively promotes uniformity and conformism to the dominant ideology’.28 Vampires have not only become ‘a highly marketable commodity’,29 but they have turned into consumers themselves. As if it were a catalogue of products that the audience could see and then purchase, the latest state-of-the-art technologies, luxury items, clothes, jewellery, etc., are presented to a young-adult audience eager to imitate their heroes, continuing in this sense with a culture based on fierce consumerism; a process that, according to Herbrechter, has become ‘an integral part of contemporary technoculture’.30 In addition to this mercantilist element – which is difficult to avoid in television 129

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series in general – a much more worrying aspect of this culture is becoming increasingly clear: an underlying ideology that not only promotes a society of consumption but also helps construct ‘assumptions about beauty, desire, glamour, and social value.31 Vampires represent the embodiment of perfection in a culture with ‘a socially enforced ideology of fitness, health and eternal youth’ and ‘the obsession with being “young forever” ’.32 No one represents better the American dream, promoted by the unattainable ideal consumer society, than a perfect being of eternal youth, beauty and unmatched power. Moreover, because of the changes they have undergone and the new genre they have inscribed, these vampires are now also linked to the idea of eternal love. All the characters appearing in The Vampire Diaries represent this ideal that their young-adult audience should aspire to, and, thus, contribute to the promotion of a conservative ideology through ‘the presence of highly stereotyped characters and plots’.33 The Vampire Diaries must, therefore, be understood within the context of a culture industry that is now hegemonic, and presents ‘both an economic and moral system’34 in which ‘film and television are media though which we see reinforced ideological constructions such as the value of romantic love, the norm of heterosexuality, nationalism, or traditional concepts of good and evil’.35 Apart from this promotion of a society of consumption through the use of the vampire as a sympathetic hero and a role-model for their audience, The Vampire Diaries also presents a particular set of values through its use of the vampire as a monster; a portrayal that has typically appeared in Gothic narratives emphasizing their otherness and contributing to maintaining ‘the inner engine of humanist Man’s power, who assigns difference on a hierarchical scale as a tool of governance’.36 One traditional trope used to highlight the opposition between positive and negative attitudes is the doppelgänger. Following both Jung and Freud’s theories, many scholars have discussed the idea of the double in terms of a division within the self, and explain how it ‘exposes an uncontrollable . . . side of the individual’37 since it typically marks the uncanny double of the protagonist, an aspect of his/her ‘often conflicted, unstable identity’.38 This is the pattern that appears at the beginning of the TV series when we meet Elena Gilbert, a typical high school 130

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teenager who is at a turning point in her life after losing her parents in a car accident. It is after this that she meets the mysterious Stefan Salvatore, falling in love with him before learning that he has a secret: he is a vampire. The plot develops with the appearance of Stefan’s brother, Damon Salvatore, resulting in a love triangle between the three of them. It is at this moment of transition, when Elena has to face her parents’ death and the realization that the world is ruled by supernatural creatures, that she is faced with a darker version of herself. Katherine Piers, the vampire that transformed both Salvatore brothers, reappears in the form of her doppelgänger to haunt her. Katherine is depicted as Elena’s ‘dark side’, and, because of the vampire’s status as the Other, is used to demonstrate those lines that must not be crossed by Elena herself, the boundaries within which the human can move. In order to do so, she is inevitably constructed in negative terms, in clear opposition to Elena. She must be turned into a monster, ‘an embodiment of cultural difference and a reflection of power relationships through which difference may be rendered monstrous in order to expel it from a social group that seeks homogeneity’.39 And this is precisely what happens in the first seasons as Katherine continuously plots against the heroine. She is the external menace that threatens the established order of the community of Mystic Falls. In Gothic narratives, monstrosity is typically reflected through the ‘disturbing capacity’40 of the monsters’ bodies. However, in The Vampire Diaries, horror comes not from the unknown or deformed body, but from the monster that hides in plain sight, pretending to be like everyone else. Katherine is hideous, not because of a physical deformity, but because of her horrifically close resemblance to Elena. It is ‘a fear of not being able to distinguish with any certainty who exactly is “the enemy within” ’.41 As Linnie Blake explains, vampires, together with other monsters, now fulfil the cultural function of offering ‘a set of readymade exempla of the dark forces against which the nation must struggle’,42 articulating ‘models of gendered, ethic and class-bound identities available to Americans in a post-9/11 world’.43 This discourse of monstrosity can also be analysed in terms of the construction of gender. Katherine is constructed to be what Barbara Creed calls the monstrous feminine;44 highlighting negative aspects 131

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and fashioning her as a monster, not only because she is a vampire but because she is a female vampire whose attitude does not fit traditional perceptions of how women should behave. In the first seasons we learn of Katherine’s story from the Salvatore brothers’ perspective: how she manipulated them, as well as other vampires, to achieve her goals. She is always regarded as the evil vampire who tries to destroy everybody’s lives, a stark contrast to the sympathetic Elena, a human who, despite all the trauma she has experienced in her life, is still the heroine, helping others regardless of the circumstances. Katherine’s decisiveness and strength are not regarded as positive feminine qualities. On the contrary, she is characterized as irrational and impulsive, reflecting the ‘ancestral patriarchal suspicion towards powerful women and women in positions of power’.45 She is portrayed as the very opposite of the feminine ideal promoted by Victorian narratives, in which women’s acceptable behaviour is conveyed as the idea of the angel in the house.46 Similarly, Elena also does not fit into the patriarchal definition of woman that appeared in nineteenth-century Gothic narratives; a depiction that reinforced ‘the essentialist view that woman, by nature, is a victim’.47 In fact, she rebels against this passive role and actively seeks an identity of her own. However, her perception of herself as a young American teenager, and her search for a place in the world, clash with the romantic theme of the television series, since she is mainly described and defined through her constant search for love and a romantic relationship. As Gaïane Hanser explains, characters in supernatural romance reflect ‘the tensions between the expectations of twenty-first-century society and those conveyed by fairy tales or previous (mainly Victorian) literature or between social constructs and what women experience as individuals’.48 The role of the female monster is a pivotal element in this construction of femininity because of her opposition to the protagonist. Katherine’s function is that of presenting censurable attitudes, a model Elena should not follow, and this includes sexuality as a control mechanism. Katherine is described as promiscuous and vicious and her seductiveness is ‘inscribed in this inhuman script as a threat but also as an irresistible attraction’.49 Her overt sexual appetites are condemned and characterized as a trend of her monstrous behaviour. She is a vampire and, as such, she is ‘transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker’,50 132

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whereas Elena’s sexual choices are always framed within traditional schemes, within a love story. Sex has moved ‘beyond Victorian notions of repression and sexual secrecy [and] becomes an imperative, a right and an everyday social activity’.51 However, supernatural romance always frames sexuality within the limits of a romantic relationship, not as a means to achieve goals. The monster is used to enforce ‘the cultural codes that regulate sexual desire’52 and promotes the patriarchal myth of romantic union by clearly contrasting acceptable attitudes – Elena’s search for romantic love – to unacceptable ones – Katherine’s lust. This use of monstrosity to establish the boundaries of acceptable behaviour can also be analysed in Elena’s sacrifice and becoming a vampire. Vampirism is understood as ‘a dreadful yet compelling state of freedom from every restraint’.53 Therefore, as if she were freed from her human limitations, all feelings Elena had been repressing burst out violently at the moment of turning, and a clear change in her attitude can be perceived. As a newly born vampire, she defies the established rules and her behaviour is presented as negative, particularly regarding her desire and lust for blood. All her friends question her new direction in life, and constantly lecture her on the dangers of the change, warning her against the risk of becoming like Katherine. In Season Four, she continues this ‘regression’ by turning her humanity off and, as happens with Katherine before, containment mechanisms are set into action. Elena as an uncontrollable vampire must be repressed, and it is only when she returns to demonstrating ‘adequate’ female attitudes that she is accepted again by the community, reinforcing the idea that gender plays a crucial role ‘in the construction of monstrosity’.54 Elena’s transformation into a vampire can have a double reading. On the one hand, the figure of the double is constantly used to establish a comparison between acceptable and unacceptable behaviours, and Katherine is presented as the role model she should not follow since she is the monster. This interpretation can be challenged, on the other hand, as her transformation into a vampire also questions the adequacy of the categories of human and monster or, rather, the categories of female human and female monster. In line with posthuman theories, it can be argued that as well as contributing to the reinforcing of the established system through binary 133

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oppositions, Elena  – who has now become a monster/vampire herself – also challenges the ‘mystical notion of human “nature” with its insistence on uniqueness and exceptionalism – a “device” which sanctions and perpetuates processes of inclusion and exclusion’.55 Botting describes the ability of monsters to ‘throw off older associations and anxieties, and emerge as harbingers of new forms and relationships, their previous threats now tendering a promise’.56 In this sense, The Vampire Diaries discusses the disintegration of the human subject through Elena, who tries to find a balance between the concepts of human and vampire, showing how these categories are mere constructs. Posthumanism delves into questions of identity, the concept of the human, and the adequacy of binary oppositions, advocating a non-dualistic perspective. In The Vampire Diaries, vampires are initially portrayed as the ‘embodiment of projected difference’57 in the sense of Freud’s the uncanny or Kristeva’s the abject. Elena and Katherine, as doppelgängers, repeatedly show aspects of each other’s mindset that they try to hide even from themselves. For Elena, Katherine represents those dark aspects she tries to deny, ‘those aspects of the psyche with which the adult cannot be reconciled’.58 She is the monster that haunts her dreams and reminds her of her own darkness.Whereas for Katherine, Elena stands for what she has lost in her fight to stay alive. She is a painful reminder of what she no longer is. It must be noted, however, how, in recent postmodern fictions, the double has moved away ‘from a consideration of the Cartesian self  – an indivisible, unified, continuous, and fixed identity – and universal absolutes’ to now explore precisely its divisions and discontinuities in an attempt ‘to decenter the concept of the self, to view human reality as a construct’.59 Traditionally, it is the double that appears to haunt the original human. Within The Vampire Diaries, however, Elena is not ‘the original’ but ‘the copy’ of Katherine Piers, breaking with this tradition. Identity is, therefore, questioned when the audience realizes that the copy is not wholly negative but has, in fact, more positive characteristics than the original; she is the one the audience empathizes with. The representations of Katherine and Elena establishes this difference between the human and the monstrous. This dividing line, however, is ‘rarely secure’60 and, from the beginning of the narrative, we perceive this boundary as merely a 134

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construct. It is not their nature as human or inhuman that defines their characters.Vampires are not evil per se, and the same is true for other supernatural creatures, including witches, werewolves, hybrids, as well as natural creatures – human and Other.Within The Vampire Diaries, the narrative portrays these different categories as coexisting in a world where the human/monster dichotomy no longer stands. Rather, it is their behaviour and attitudes that define them. In traditional Gothic narratives, vampires are presented as beasts that follow their instincts, but supernatural romance posits the monster as ‘having a distinctly “human” quality’.61 Characters such as Stefan Salvatore, his friend Lexi Branson, Caroline Forbes, and, later, Elena (once she becomes a vampire) are portrayed as more human than humans themselves, and this is made possible by ‘denying the illegitimate animal within itself, by seeking an expulsion of the animal inside’.62 As Victoria Nelson explains, although these humanized supernatural characters ‘retain their generic identity (demon, vampire, werewolf) along with the innate dark desires connected with that identity (killing humans) [they] are able to rise above their instincts by an act of will that must be tested again and again’.63 In fact, this struggle is perceived as ‘a redeeming feature’.64 When the monster is no longer regarded as a monster but a victim,‘the ambivalent and often alienated existential status of the “human” ’65 is highlighted. In such circumstances, the dichotomy of the human and the monster no longer functions as monsters are presented as ‘self-reflective, often compassionate and willing to assume responsibility for even [their] worst actions’,66 whereas humans display evil behaviours traditionally characteristic of the monstrous.The actions of Elena’s birth mother who abandons her baby daughter, and mass murderer Pastor Young who kills the members of the Council, are such examples, and are ‘frequently figured as irrational, animalistic, irresponsible, self-alienated, “monstrous” ’.67 The dividing line between human, inhuman and posthuman blurs, and humanity turns into ‘a liminal zone where individuals are forced to confront the meaning and future of the human’68 in a world where binaries are no longer valid. This questioning of categories is not only applicable to the aforementioned vampires, but also to characters that are branded as evil in the narrative, specifically Rebecca, the rest of the original vampires, 135

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and Katherine. Vampires understood as monstrous Others are also sites for the renegotiation of the human and the monstrous. The previous stability dissolves and the Other ceases to be such when we hear the story from their perspective.When we are confronted with the circumstances surrounding Katherine’s life, we are positioned to sympathize with her as we are presented with ‘the traumatic consequences for women of their inability to defend themselves against forms of abuse that are, if not directly authorized, at least permitted by patriarchal systems of power’.69 We learn that, when she was still a human, Katherine was chased by an original vampire intent on killing her. Instead of resigning herself to her destiny, Katherine fought back using all means at her disposal to stay alive. She became a vampire to escape a terrible fate at the hands of Klaus – one of the original vampires – but in her act of rebellion, in her refusal to become yet another victim of male power, she is branded a monster. The labelling of Katherine as ‘the monstrous feminine’ because of her strength and wish to control her own destiny shows how ‘power relations between the genders are maintained through particular models of femininity’.70 Evil characters are traditionally used to oppose the protagonist and reinforce hierarchical structures but this assertion is problematized when she is given a voice in the narrative since, to a certain extent, the audience can identify with her.With this, she ceases to be solely the dangerous outsider, as she now also gives ‘voice to the effects of exclusion . . . [and] reflects upon the monstrosity of social or familiar institutions’71 that constructed her as a monster. Mystic Falls’ patriarchal society is similar for both human and supernatural communities, reflecting that it is not necessarily the category of human or vampire/ monster that is intrinsically good or evil, but rather the persistence of a system that promotes a particular set of values. In terms of gender, the transformation from human to vampire and the acquisition not only of immortality but also of a great deal of supernatural powers would in theory open up new possibilities since they transcend the limits of human potential and put an end to physical differences in terms of gender. The potentiality of the vampire as a posthuman, however, clashes in this instance with the discourse of supernatural romance that focuses on women’s romantic relations. Once again, there is a simultaneous but oppositional discourse. On 136

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the one hand, characters such as Elena and Caroline are initially constructed as ‘damsels in distress’, hoping to be rescued by a ‘knight in shining armour’, reinforcing the humanist perception that centres ‘the white male as the universal human, [while] all other genders, differently formed bodies and ethnic types [should be] treated as variants of this “standard” model, and [as] forms/models that lack something’.72 But as the narrative evolves, despite the romantic plots still dominating the TV series, female characters start to question these values. Characters such as Elena and Caroline are now vampires in a twenty-first-­century world and the audience is faced with the changes that have taken place in American society in the last decades, including, among other things,‘the evolution of gender roles towards a more egalitarian participation by both sexes in the business of killing’.73 Despite being a romance, supernatural female characters question the adequacy of this hierarchical system, revealing ‘the monstrosity of the systems of power and normalization to which all are subjected’ and contributing to ‘a wider denaturalization of ideological constructions of identity, gender, race and class divisions and distributions of power’.74 The construction of supernatural romance shifts between contesting and reinforcing mainstream ideology.Thus, Katherine’s status is conflictive since she is both the hunter and the prey, the monster and the victim. In this sense, her death reflects this ambiguity inherent to the vampire. Her monstrous behaviour and attitudes are a constant, and even in those final moments, she tries to trick Elena. But Katherine’s sacrifice to ensure that she is with her daughter in her final moments contributes to her humanization. Therefore, it can be argued that there is both a discourse of containment in the construction of the character of Katherine and also a questioning of the categories regulating the normative and the Other, the human and the monster. This idea of the human and the monster being ‘a locus of contradictions in a reality of conflicting discourses and discursive practices’75 is present in The Vampire Diaries, which uses the figure of the double to emphasize the fact that these categories are mere constructs.The dichotomy human/original vs. double fails in this instance as it is not the evil doppelgänger that arrives to haunt the protagonist but it is the original, Katherine, who haunts the double, Elena. Later, the contrast between human and vampire is questioned further when 137

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Elena is transformed into a vampire; and other categories are debunked in the subplot of Silas and Amara that completely breaks with the preconceived idea of human identity. Both Katherine and Elena realize that they are not unique but, in fact, are two of many copies of a ‘true’ original, a woman called Amara. As if it were a question of mere cloning, the narrative develops around the idea of a curse that has caused history to repeat itself over many centuries. As such, both Katherine and Elena must deal with the fact that they are only ‘alternative versions of the self ’.76 The concept of exceptionalism is debunked and there is a questioning of the validity of previous discourses since, rather than unity, multiplicity is enabled, allowing new modes of understanding the self, and breaking pre-­ established boundaries. As Donna Haraway explains in reference to cyborgs and robots, posthumanism offers a unique opportunity ‘to weaken other humanist boundaries, namely the ones between genders and species’.77 The Vampire Diaries raises objections to the adequacy of this system, not only by questioning the concepts of human and vampire, but also by introducing new elements that disempower the discourse of superiority. Firstly, the supremacy of the white, male human is replaced by that of the white, male vampire. Later in the series, the supremacy of the white, male vampire is equally called into questions when the ‘original vampires’, the most powerful of all vampires, make their presence known. As the series progresses, the appearances of the once-human Silas, an immortal being who cannot be killed by humans or vampires, and the powerful witch Qetsiyah, who gave Silas immortality, further question this hierarchical structure which places the white man at the pinnacle of society, contributing to the debunking of the socially constructed categories of gender or species, blurring the differences between human and inhuman.This coexistence of different beings – humans, vampires, immortals, werewolves and witches, among others – marks ‘the collapse of species borders’ and promotes a posthumanist view of the world that proposes ‘a multispecies citizenship that involves all forms of life’.78 Although romance fiction is traditionally criticized as an ‘escapist fantasy, brief relief from social pressures, a release of subversive desires or a reaffirmation of patriarchal forms like marriage’, it can be understood ‘both as reinforcement of and a challenge to dominant social and sexual roles’.79 Vampires, as any type of monster, not only 138

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offer ‘a space where society can safely represent and address anxieties of its time’80 but also help to dismantle boundaries. Posthumanization ‘seems to have become an intrinsic part of the cultural imaginary of our time’;81 it reflects the fear of the different, of the Other, and questions the concept of identity. In The Vampire Diaries this is presented not only via the oppositional pair of Katherine and Elena, but also through the use of the doppelgänger trope to examine the principle of exceptionalism to challenge humanist ideas in a manner similar to Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. As Nayar explains, human nature is ‘interrogated by drawing attention to the constructed nature of the human “person” ’, emphasizing ‘the blurring of bodily borders, identities (gender, species, race) and even consciousness’82 since it is impossible to isolate the category human/inhuman. The Vampire Diaries contributes to questioning the adequacy of previous divisions by highlighting how the idea of human nature is a fallacy, and portraying a world in which the ideological construction of good and evil is examined, and human supremacy and uniqueness is denied. In this sense, ‘the marginalisation of “other” bodies as infrahuman or non-human has been deconstructed’.83 At the same time, however, it must not be forgotten that the discourse that appears in this TV series is constructed by an entertainment industry that is part of a capitalist system, with the aim to attract large audiences and make huge revenues by transforming the vampire into an attractive product.Vampires, once the embodiment of the dangerous Other, are now glittering stars that support the values of capitalism. Their intrinsic liminality not only promotes the establishment, but also contributes to the questioning of socially constructed categories, and the discourse of the exclusion of the Other is substituted by multiplicity as a new politics of representation. Notes Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 1. Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 3. 3 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xv. 4 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 8. 1 2

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Posthuman Gothic  ayar, Posthumanism, p. 3. N Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 3. 7 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 5. 8 Steven Best and Douglas Keller, The Postmodern Adventure (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 195. 9 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 2. 10 Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui (eds), Monster Culture in the 21st Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 1. 11 Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 88. 12 David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), p. 263. 13 C. Milburn,‘Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida’, MLN, 118 (2003), 603. 14 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 86. 15 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 81. 16 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, pp. 87–8. 17 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 6. 18 Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 29. 19 Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 2. 20 Williamson, Lure of the Vampire, p. 31. 21 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 106. 22 Botting, Gothic Romanced, p. 16. 23 Botting, Gothic Romanced, p. 17. 24 These similarities have been analysed in further detail in the chapter: M. Mariño Faza, ‘Constructing Ideology in Twenty-First-Century Supernatural Romance’, in E. Álvares López, E. M. Durán Almarza and A. Menéndez Tarrazo (eds), Building Interdisciplinary Knowledge (Oviedo: KRK Ediciones, 2014), pp. 173–80. 25 Michael Ryan, Cultural Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) p. 1. 26 Punter and Byron, Gothic, p. 269. 27 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 55. 28 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 61. 29 Punter and Byron, Gothic, p. 269. 30 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 78. 5 6

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Undead  arita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking (Oxford: Oxford M University Press, 2003), p. 21. 32 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 114. 33 Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 3. 34 Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 7. 35 Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, p. 21. 36 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 68. 37 Gordon E. Slethaug, The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), p. 13. 38 Sue Chaplin, Gothic Literature (London:York Press, 2011), p. 234. 39 Susan Bordo,‘The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity’, in Susan Bordo (ed.), Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 250. 40 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 233. 41 W. Hughes, ‘Fictional Vampires in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), p. 151. 42 L. Blake, ‘Vampires, Mad Scientists and the Unquiet Dead. Gothic Ubiquity in Post-9/11 US Television’, in Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (eds), The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 39. 43 Blake, ‘Vampires, Mad Scientists and the Unquiet Dead’, p. 39. 44 See Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993). 45 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 105. 46 This concept draws on the eponymous narrative poem by Coventry Patmore (1851). 47 Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, p. 7. 48 G. Hanser,‘Isabella Swan: A Twenty-First-Century Victorian Heroine?’, in Claudia Bucciferro (ed.), The Twilight Saga (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2014), p. 124. 49 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 107 50 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 17. 51 Botting, Gothic Romanced, p. 26. 52 Cohen, Monster Theory, p. 14. 53 Bordo, ‘Body and the Reproduction of Femininity’, p. 256. 31

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Posthuman Gothic Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, p. 3. Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 29. 56 Botting, Gothic Romanced, p. 3. 57 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 87. 58 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 238. 59 Slethaug, Play of the Double, p. 2. 60 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 27. 61 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 28. 62 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 85. 63 Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 134. 64 Nelson, Gothicka, p. 86. 65 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 27. 66 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 28. 67 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 28. 68 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 51. 69 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 212. 70 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 15. 71 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 172. 72 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 12. 73 Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 114. 74 Botting, Gothic Romanced, p. 15. 75 Slethaug, Play of the Double, p. 3. 76 Chaplin, Gothic Literature, p. 238. 77 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 99. 78 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 153. 79 Botting, Gothic Romanced, p. 16. 80 Levina and Bui (eds), Monster Culture, p. 1. 81 Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 48. 82 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 2. 83 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 4. 54

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8 There’s Something in There: The Posthuman Gothic Mind/Body Divide in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake Amalya Ashman and Amy Taylor

 Set in her native New Zealand, Jane Campion’s Top of The Lake is a seven-part television series exploring the abusive misogyny affecting a rural town. The series is a Gothic rendering of the classic tale of a hard-boiled detective (Robin) returning to her hometown to attend to her dying mother. But upon her return, Robin is drawn into the search for a missing, pregnant twelveyear-old, named Tui. Robin’s attempt to distract herself from her family troubles is thwarted as it is slowly revealed that both she and Tui are linked by similar fates of teen rape and pregnancy and even parentage. Top of the Lake’s Gothic markers are assured by the dark, threatening image of the Lake that is central to the geography and theme of the series, replete with its own Maori myth that the Lake swells to the beat of a demon’s heart.The Lake itself is an almost supernatural presence. In their most vulnerable moments, the protagonists find themselves drawn (or drowned) in the icy waters of the Lake, and into the bush  – the dense forests  – that surrounds it. However, the interpretation of the Gothic we suggest approaches a subtle form of the posthuman, connected to the protagonists’ ‘return to nature’.This chapter will explore the vein of posthumanism concerned with animality that

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questions human trepidation towards degeneration into primitive, non-human species. Unlike the majority of posthuman Gothic analyses of the fear of futuristic human interface with technology, this chapter will examine the posthuman Gothic in terms of cultural anxieties over a human reversion to the animal, and a sense that the civilized is deteriorating into the primitive. Here, primitive regression is depicted in instances of physical transformation – such as pregnancy, birth and death – and is embodied in the figure of Tui: the pregnant, post-racial child of mixed Thai/Scottish heritage. Following on, we will argue that the human subject is divided in this text between the fragmented mental and the bodily experiences of sexual trauma, and that it is only through ‘trusting the body’ that these mental and physical experiences – and sense of subjectivity – can be regained. Separate to, but ultimately entwined with this crime narrative and posthuman Gothic condition, G.J. and her ‘groupies’ descend upon the Lake to set up a commune for abused women. A reluctant ‘healer’, G.J. nonetheless delivers the strongest advice to Tui and all the broken women who seek her out, which is ‘to trust the body’. This chapter argues that this formula inspires these abused characters to channel, and eventually unite, a fragmented, posthuman experience of the classic Gothic monstrous. Catherine Spooner defines the Gothic monstrous as ‘the radically provisional or divided nature of the self; the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or “other”; the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased’.1 For the traumatized teen, Tui, her swollen pregnant belly represents a distinctly female, physical horror, which invites Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ into the analysis.2 The chapter concludes, as G.J. does, that the greatest antidote for these women, who are attempting to make sense of their bodily traces of abuse – and for the destabilizing encounter with the posthuman Gothic – is faith in the body and its ‘tremendous intelligence’. Ultimately Top of the Lake suggests that ‘the source of dread in the posthuman Gothic lies not in the fear of our demise but in the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change’.3

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Top of the Lake in Context Top of the Lake reads as a culmination of Jane Campion’s previous works, and illustrates most aptly her interest in women, and their bodily and existential experiences  – an interest which is often depicted through a Gothic prism in her work, such as Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke! (2001) and In the Cut (2003). Her female characters traverse the fear and desire common to the Gothic by becoming monstrous themselves (like Sweetie’s Dawn), or by being subjected to the monstrous (as in the case of Frankie in In the Cut). Alison Milbank suggests that the Gothic heroine possesses some feminist qualities due, in part, to her efforts to resist patriarchal control, which is certainly true for Campion’s heroines in Top of the Lake.4 Robin Griffin, a police detective who specializes in working with children and teens, returns to her hometown of Lake Top in New Zealand to care for her dying mother. Robin is quickly caught up in a local case involving a twelve-year-old girl,Tui, found pregnant, waist deep in the freezing lake. Robin’s stay becomes indefinite after Tui goes missing during the police investigation.Tui is the daughter of local crime lord Matt Mitcham, who operates almost feudal control over the small community through his drug racketeering, police collusion and sporadic acts of charity. With his brutish sons Luke and Mark as deputies, Matt’s ‘empire’ is run from his compound: a dilapidated Swiss-style chalet surrounded by caged dogs, barbed wire and CCTV. His basement houses a drug lab, where impoverished, local women cook amphetamines. Matt’s corrupting presence in the town seeps through the generations: the children of his ‘cooks’ are plied with the very drugs their mothers make. All of which is maintained by a terrified silence in the face of Matt’s unpredictable rage and inhumanity. In complete contrast to the male-dominated town of Lake Top is ‘Paradise’: a gentle, grassy plane beside the lake blessed with perennial summer weather, where a group of women misfits have formed a small commune. The women hail from all places and walks of life – some wealthy, others battered – to follow G.J., who 147

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they believe to be a guru of sorts.Their makeshift village of shipping containers hooked up to generators is a place of refuge for the women who feel otherwise alienated and abused, and is temporarily a safe haven for Tui and Robin as well.Their routine, if any, consists of daily sessions in G.J.’s container to confront their troubles. G.J. is equally annoyed by the silence of meditation and the nonsense of psycho-babble, so both are discouraged. Instead, the endless ‘bullshit’ (as G.J. calls it) that these victims of abuse feel compelled by popular psychology to verbalize is paused, and the women are encouraged to tune into their bodies’ needs: the tired rest, the horny have sex, the sad cry. Like many tales of trauma, the series traces patterns of incest and sexual abuse back through the generations of Lake Top. Tui’s plight forces Robin to come to terms with her own sexual assault as a teenager growing up in Lakeside. It is revealed that Robin was gang-raped by a group of local men, who were never brought to justice for their crime. Instead, Robin gave birth to a daughter at the age of 16 and was forced to put the child up for adoption. The death of Robin’s mother during the search for Tui’s rapist brings to light family secrets, including the fact that Robin’s mother had an affair with Matt as a young woman, meaning that Robin and Tui are half-sisters.This revelation has horrific consequences for Robin’s rekindled romance with Johnno, her high-school crush, and supposedly Matt’s son. While the series clarifies in the final scenes that Robin and Johnno do not share parentage, the constant anxiety that their physical, sexual instincts may have led them into a taboo state of incest lingers throughout as a warning of an amoral, uncontrollable animalism within that pervades Lake Top. Antipodean Gothic The Australian Gothic film, and indeed that of New Zealand, represent their island nations as impenetrable, mysterious and exotic terrains, rich in symbolism for the Gothic. Romana Ashton has observed that ‘the construction of both Australia and New Zealand, even in contemporary times, through Europeanism (and North Americanism) as antipodean and as “other-worldly” has resulted in 148

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a Gothicization of Australia and New Zealand (antipodean) cultures and national identities’.5 Ashton cites William Schafer’s observations that ‘from the pakeha [non-Maori] perspective, the sudden appearance of the shining, silvery-white mountains and clouds of New Zealand were like the apparitions on medieval romance, like the unpredictable and incomprehensible magic of sorcerers and genies in fanciful oriental tales’.6 There is a long history in both Australian and New Zealand national cinemas of presenting the landscape as both otherworldly and inhospitable. The fantastical representations include The Lord of the Rings (2001) and Mad Max (1979) trilogies, that continue to spawn sequels. However, there is also a large collection of texts which offer a Gothic vision of these settings, particularly where the Australian landscape is concerned. Ken Gelder suggests of Australian film that ‘mysterious experiences in the bush remain a stock theme of Australian Gothic, especially those involving in­ experienced metropolitan travellers who find themselves stranded in some remote and often deranged outback location’.7 In addition to the wild, and Othered, landscape of the Australian and New Zealand Gothic cinema, there are the characters that inhabit such spaces. Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka,8 together with Jonathan Rayner,9 agree that the characters of Australian Gothic film are flawed or disturbed in some way. Dermody and Jacka suggest that although they may start out as stable, ‘few “sane” protagonists escape normality with their lives or sanity completely intact’.10 Rayner notes that the mental state of the characters is mirrored by the environment: ‘disturbance on the personal, emotional and psychological level is echoed by disruption in society, natural order and the physical world’.11 The Posthuman Gothic Micheal Sean Bolton argues that the posthuman Gothic evolved from the intersection of the Gothic with postmodernist thought, which according to Gothic scholars, Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner, shares a ‘fear of the disintegration of the human subject’.12 Both entail ‘the loss of human identity and alienation of the self ’ in 149

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‘increasingly dehumanised environments . . . and violent, psychotic fragmentation’13 with a ‘preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased’.14 The anxieties of the postmodern segue into that of the posthuman Gothic when the menace to subjectivity is no longer external, but internal.15 In general, the posthuman Gothic is defined as the terrifying prospect of the human reconstituted as posthuman via the integration of technology and the human, whereas the subgenre of ‘species Gothic’ critiques the posthuman integration between the human and non-human species.16 Nora Campbell and Mike Saren support this atavistic view of posthumanism that ‘is not concerned simply with the “future human”, but with deconstructing the human as an ancient concept’.17 Top of the Lake, we argue, harks back to the primitive: to the colonial and pre-colonial histories of New Zealand, on the one hand, with its subtle (Tui’s Eurasian appearance) and not-so-subtle (Peter Mullan’s Scottish grit) markers of ethnicity; and to the feral intelligence of the body that overpowers the anxious mother/host to birth and protect its young, on the other hand.The scope of the horrifying primitive in the series is due to the historical precedent in Western civilization to objectify the primitive as its Other, whose broad-­ ranging application invokes the binaries of colonialism (civilized vs. primitive) and speciesism (human vs. animal) in the backwater wilderness of Top of the Lake.18 In a return to the Gothic, Campbell and Saren conclude that ‘horror accompanies the posthuman when seemingly immutable spaces are crossed between boundaries (animal, human, inanimate or technological)’.19 And so, this chapter turns the focus of the posthuman Gothic to the horrifying revelation that the animal instincts of rage, murder, rape and incest lie just below the surface in Top of the Lake like the Lake’s beating demon heart. The Foetus as Abject Other ‘She doesn’t know how to get it out’, Tui’s friend Jamie announces in G.J.’s makeshift living room in Paradise in episode six.20 The six-month pregnant Tui next to him quietly adds that she doesn’t want to be naked when ‘it’ happens. Just like the baby within her, Tui’s imminent childbirth is an unnamed ‘it’, which reveals in equal 150

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parts her dissociation from the physical changes that are taking place to her person, and her genuine ignorance of the biological facts of pregnancy. The swollen belly of a pregnant woman has become emblematic in Western academia of the ‘monstrous feminine’ – a term coined by Barbara Creed to contextualize Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject in the ‘repulsive’ imagery of the maternal found in the horror genre. Creed writes that ‘horror films that depict monstrous births . . . point to the inherently monstrous nature of the womb as well as the impossibility of ever completely banishing the abject from the human domain’.21 Birth is not merely ‘horrifying’, Kristeva considers it a defining instance of the abject:‘the scene of scenes is here not the so-called primal scene but the one of giving birth, incest turned inside out, flayed identity’.22 In Creed’s view, the womb is particularly abject and horrifying because it alters the body and contains ‘an alien life form’.23 Creed quotes Kristeva to explain that ‘the body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper’ but that a ‘woman’s reproductive functions place her on the side of nature rather than [Kristeva’s] symbolic order’.24 The ability to bear children, alone, writes Creed, links women ‘directly to the animal world’ and often casts them as human / animal figures.25 In this sense, Tui’s pregnancy is doubly horrific in Top of the Lake, communicating first an underlying cultural disgust at the grotesque nature of reproduction, and second the personal revulsion of a child experiencing pregnancy, before maturing mentally and physically herself. Tui’s pregnancy, in this instance, is physical evidence exposing a horrific subculture of misogynistic violence, and breaks the silence over the incest, rape and paedophilia rings operating in Lakeside. At first, her father and the local constabulary shrug off her pregnancy; Tui is constantly referred to as ‘a troubled teen’ – surely the precocious girl got knocked up messing around with some boy? However, in Robin’s first interview with Tui at the police station, it is clear that it is not only the audience that is left in the dark about her pregnancy. Tui can only reply to Robin’s questions that ‘something’s in there’. Her reluctance to respond is not a sign of insolence; she appears scared and confused by the changes in her body and she lacks the words to name them. Even the teacher who discovers her pregnancy recoils at the thought that Tui’s belly may 151

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contain a foetus, and Robin also treads carefully in revealing the truth obtained via ultrasound; this child bearing a child is more than disturbing, it is horrifying for the adults around her. Tui’s ignorance stands for innocence: she was not ‘complicit’ in the sexual act that led to this unwanted foetus growing inside, and as we find out later, she was not even conscious. Her silence hints at another interpretation: that she cannot come to terms with (or find terms for) her pregnancy. The ‘unspeakable’ and ‘inarticulable’ nature of a victim’s testimony is central to Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman’s discussion of traumatic witnessing.26 Trauma theory in the Humanities rests on the notion that ‘massive trauma precludes all representations because the ordinary mechanisms of consciousness and memory are temporally destroyed’, which leads to the experience of trauma as ‘the unthinkable, lack of witnessing, numbing, the unrepresentable, the absence of narrative, and failures in language’.27 Tui’s nomenclature remains vague: ‘there’ for womb, ‘something’ for foetus, and ‘it’ for childbirth. She is not alone in remaining silent, the ‘troubled teens’ of Lakeside are criticized for mumbling during community service, and her best friend Jamie withdraws entirely from adult conversation with a simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’ penned on to his palms. This muteness is accompanied by memory loss for girls and boys alike in Lakeside. However, their amnesia is not merely a metaphorical expression of trauma; the final episode reveals that a paedophile ring organized by the lead detective, Al, has routinely drugged and raped groups of children in the community. Nonetheless, the symptomatic loss of speech and memory speaks to the experience of dissociation, which we argue is common to trauma and the posthuman Gothic. According to Botting, psychic disturbances permeate Gothic literature as ‘subjective disintegration’28 and subvert an objective sense of reality, while fragmentation and multiplicity characterizes the posthuman condition.29 As such,Tui’s bewilderment and fear of the foetus within exhibits the internalization of Gothic anxieties inherent to posthumanism that fragments psychological and physical experiences of reality.

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Primitive Instincts As her father becomes increasingly erratic in the midst of the police frenzy to identify her abuser, Tui takes a rifle and a sensible white, fur-lined coat, and steals a horse. She rides out to the impenetrable, uncharted forests surrounding the Lake – to wait out the investigation, and whatever is happening inside her. Robin confronts unexpected resistance from her male colleagues in her determination to mount a comprehensive helicopter search for the teenager as winter fast approaches. Robin’s warning that Tui is vulnerable as her abuser(s) may want to eliminate her to protect themselves, is met with latent racism. She cites two grizzly examples in the former Commonwealth – Australia and Canada – where young girls were murdered and their wombs were removed to destroy any evidence of paternal DNA, which fail to inspire any sympathy among the officers.30 The rescue seems a waste to the (male) sergeants of Lake Top who voice their opinion that Tui’s actions are the same as ‘primitive societies, where they get married early and just wander off alone in the bush to give birth’. The sense that she has sought the seclusion of the bush in her pregnant state renders her behaviour primitive and animal, which, against the backdrop of postcolonial New Zealand, also evokes an engrained white-settler racism towards their colonized aboriginal communities. Of course, Tui – of ‘Eurasian appearance’ according to the police report – is native to New Zealand by birth, but to no degree Maori, given her Scottish father and Thai mother. And yet, here and elsewhere in Top of the Lake there are clues that Tui embodies more than ‘multicultural New Zealand’, and begins to represent a persistently disenfranchised, postcolonial Other: the first peoples of the former Commonwealth (and a young female one, at that). While both boys and girls are abused in Lake Top, the raped and discarded teenage girls (Robin, Tui and another victim of the town’s sex ring) are emblematic of the patriarchal violence that characterizes the town. What is most striking about the officers’ disregard for Tui’s welfare is the implicit assumption that she is fully capable of surviving in the bush in winter (unlike the [white] men at the meeting), and able to give birth without drugs or medical support. While crude, 153

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it indicates a belief that Tui has some primal maternal instinct not gifted to the male gender.Tui’s father, Matt, repeats with conviction that Tui is resilient, commenting that ‘I like to think of my little one shooting deer, doing whatever it is she needs to do to survive’ and that ‘she’ll come back when she’s ready’.31 This is at odds with the reality: Tui is at higher risk of perishing as she escaped to the bush unprepared (no food supplies or professional camping gear), and may suffer greater complications giving birth with her immature body frame. Their attitudes echo those of a previous generation – that of colonial New Zealand – which lauded an indigenous female primal instinct’s superior knowledge of birth and the ‘mysterious’ female body. Across the New World, Europeans imported early Romantic stereotypes of the ‘noble savage’ in the guise of modern scientific concerns that civilization was debilitating European health, which has particular links to childbirth. As late as 1950, Lawrence Z. Freedman and Vera M. Ferguson of Yale Medical School wrote that ‘many obstetricians have now come to consider the pain of labor to be an artificial, superimposed phenomenon resulting from abnormalities in our “civilization” ’.32 In the colonies, exposure to ‘primitive’ peoples provided (severely limited) access to the practices of childbirth, but substantial comment from the travelling European men, in which ‘the comparison of New World women with animals was, in fact, a multi-faceted theme of [their] travel narrative[s]’.33 ‘What is significant’, according to Patricia Jasen, ‘is the insistence upon the aboriginal woman’s bodily strength and self-sufficiency, and the suggestion that she, like other mammals, simply relied upon natural forces and her own normal instincts to carry her and her infant through birth’.34 The birthing aboriginal woman – a spectacle for European explorers unlike their own pregnant wives, mothers or sisters – brought torn flesh, mucus and a bloody infant, and is a reminder in Creed’s eyes of the monstrous-feminine by which the ‘woman is like an animal’.35 The similarity between these historical perspectives and the assumptions projected onto Tui’s pregnancy and survival is further enforced by the photographic evidence that comes to light of her location in the forest. The police helicopter sweeps of the dense forest proved unsuccessful, but a group of hunters that Matt hires 154

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to find his daughter take a short video on their phone of Tui, alive, in the bush.The video is grainy and washed-out, only lasting a few seconds, but it shows Tui emerge in a long, white puffy winter jacket from the forest into a clearing between the trees, and then turn back in slow motion to disappear again. Robin and Johnno are captivated and tears come to their eyes as they replay the video. The short montage smacks of vintage footage of supposed Sasquatch/Yeti sightings: the stark white figure against a dark green forest, and the wonderment of glimpsing the mythic and the ‘hunted’. In symbolic terms,Tui embodies indigenous legends of the reclusive ‘humanoid’, which captivated the nineteenth-century European scientific imagination. Part of this (perhaps universal) fascination is the anticipation that the Sasquatch represents an abominable fusion of human and animal – as either evolutionary link or taboo sexual union. Likewise, the child that Tui carries is the result of forbidden sexual union: certainly the product of rape of a minor, but possibly also a child of incest.The final episode of Top of the Lake reveals that Tui was victim to drugging and rape by the detective Al’s ring of paedophiles; however, her father is still suspect. Throughout the series, those closest to him (his obedient sons) cast doubt upon his actions, remarking that Matt often fell asleep drunk into Tui’s bed at night. The final scenes of the series play on this ambiguity with Matt’s attempt to kill Tui’s newborn. Matt’s motivations are initially unclear, but Robin’s fears that he is attempting to erase evidence of his impregnation of Tui are confirmed by DNA testing later on. Tui does in fact give birth to her baby, unsupported, in a hole in the bush. Tui groans and screams leaning over a fallen tree as her contractions progress. As G.J. has reiterated, ‘the body will know what to do’.36 Yet, Tui alone must face the posthuman Gothic fear, not of her own demise, but of ‘the uncertainty of what will be left after the change’.37 The camera maintains a respectful distance and cuts away until after the baby has been born, and Tui and the newborn rest under a makeshift tarp shelter. Apart from some groans from Tui in labour, the birth is suspiciously clean and tidy, considering the lack of facilities or support for Tui alone at her encampment. The decision to gloss over the gore of childbirth instead moves the focus towards the real monsters of this text, which are not the bodies of the raped children and women of Lake Top, but the men: Matt 155

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and Al, particularly. In a fit of rage over the ineptitude of his sons and hired guns, Matt sets out to the bush where Tui was last sighted to deal with the issue himself. Tension builds as Matt creeps up on the sleeping Tui and newborn and steals the baby away, cursing at it to stop crying. Just as Matt is about to shoot the baby, Tui appears from the bushes, hissing and baring her teeth, and guns Matt down.Tui responds in a primal fashion, as if in a fugue state. Tui’s animalistic, aggressive behaviour ties back again to Creed’s monstrous feminine, which includes a reference to medical ‘hysteria’.38 Historically, hysteria was believed to be caused by the womb wandering around the woman’s body provoking various symptoms such as a pale complexion, loss of voice and gritting teeth.39 Tui’s possible fugue state, or hysteria, represents another instance of the physical overwhelming the mental. In the exhaustion following childbirth and survival in the bush, her instinctual protection of her young seems a reversion to the animalistic. In one sense, the ‘monster’ Tui becomes after childbirth is a realization of the posthuman anxiety of mental and physical regression into the animal. Just as Matt casually shoots his dogs (or his unwanted offspring),Tui kills him instinctively as a threat to her young, without pause for mental or moral reflection that he is her father. In the bush surrounding the Lake, which Botting might describe as a ‘dehumanised environment’, their beastly acts of patricide, and attempted infanticide, appear inhumane, or at least, devoid of ethical and cerebral problematization. Despite the negative connotations of animality and primitivism in her instinctual response, trusting the body saves Tui (and her son) when hesitation would have been fatal. It also delivers quick, and definitive, justice: removing Matt as the corrupt overlord of Lake Top topples his drug racquet, diffuses the tensions between the town and the women of Paradise, and releases Tui from a bond of incest. Conclusion Returned to the retreat at Paradise,Tui’s primitive, maternal instinct is instantly shrugged off and she reverts to a young teen, giggling and gossiping with friends. Her transformation, from a traumatized, impregnated, posthuman being surviving at the fringes of the Gothic 156

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Lake to a well-adjusted, carefree teenager, was won apparently by her surrender to the wisdom of the body. Her newborn son finds natural parents in Robin and Johnno, who name him Noah. According to the rabbinic scholar, Rashi, the biblical origin of the name ‘Noah’ may be translated as ‘the consoler’ who ‘will give us rest from our work and the toil of our hands from the ground, which the Lord has cursed’.40 As such, new hope comes to the accursed community of the Lake no longer manipulated by Matt or the corrupt detective Al. On a conceptual level, the birth of Noah marks the end of Tui’s grotesque pregnancy that had shocked the inhabitants of Lake Top and the newcomers of Lakeside to come together to expose and drive out Matt and Al’s sadistic control of the area. Another interpretation comes from Mary Russo, who suggests that the female grotesque is ‘the body of becoming, process, and change’ that represents not only personal transformation, but societal transformation – ‘the grotesque body is the figure of the socialist state to come, a state unfinished’.41 Tui’s pregnancy, in some ways, represents a period of gestation and transformation of the drifting, abused personalities of Lake Top and Paradise into a community, supporting and accepting of diverse experiences and characters. Likewise, the collective promise of the grotesque is not a homogenous, normalized society, it is a heterogeneous space where ‘noise, dissonance, or monstrosity’ may flourish, and ‘a sense of solidarity and community emerges from the participants’ collective differences’.42 The funeral for Tui’s best friend, Jamie, in the final episode best celebrates this new sense of community at the banks of the Lake in Paradise. Full of emotion, candlelight and eclecticism, the wake borders on a religious gathering or music festival where grief is public, as are public apologies, and all the protagonists, nasty and nice, are equal. In spite of these heartwarming scenes, G.J. has grown tired of repeating her message to the broken women of the commune and the town to stop listening to ‘your own crazy thoughts, like a river of shit on and on’ and understand that ‘there is no match for the tremendous intelligence of the body’.43 It is unclear whether she feels they are a lost cause or if there is no cause to lose:‘we are living out here at the end of the road, the end of the earth, in a place called Paradise. How’s it going? Perfect? NO! You’re madder than ever!’44 But despite her cynicism, G.J.’s message to trust the body invited 157

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Robin’s mother to release her guilt and accept her imminent death; it gave Tui the strength to give birth alone in the woods, and helped Robin to come to terms with her own gang rape. By encouraging these women to disconnect from their mental plague of anxieties, the fragmented sense of posthuman subjectivity is tentatively linked as they reach for the bodily experience to understand their trauma. As terrifying as it is to acknowledge the body’s instincts (which may be murderous or sexual), its intelligence proves capable of circumventing the repetitive, futile mental patterns of the fragmented, posthuman Gothic subject. Notes Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 8. 2 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993). 3 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 3. 4 A. Milbank, ‘The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830–1880’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 155. 5 R. Ashton, ‘Antipodean Gothic cinema: a study of the (postmodern) Gothic in Australian and New Zealand film since the 1970s’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Central Queensland University, North Rockhampton, 2005), p. 82. 6 William J. Schafer, Mapping the Godzone: A Primer on New Zealand Literature and Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998). 7 K. Gelder, ‘Australian Gothic’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 121. 8 Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia – Volume Two (Paddington: Currency Press, 1998). 9 Jonathan Rayner, Contemporary Australian Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 10 Dermody and Jacka, Screening of Australia, p. 51. 11 Rayner, Contemporary Australian Cinema, p. 44. 12 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 2. 1

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Evolving Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 157. Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, p. 8. 15 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 2. 16 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 2. 17 N. Campbell and M. Saren, ‘The primitive, technology and horror: a posthuman biology’, Ephemera, 10/2 (2010), 159. 18 Campbell and Saren, ‘Primitive, technology and horror’, 154. 19 Campbell and Saren, ‘Primitive, technology and horror’, 157. 20 Top of the Lake, dir. Jane Campion (BBC and Sundance Channel, 2013). 21 Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, p. 49. 22 Julia Kristeva quoted in Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (London: Routledge, 1994) p. 64. 23 Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, p. 49. 24 Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, pp. 47–8. 25 Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, p. 47. 26 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992). 27 E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang (eds), Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), p. 4. 28 Botting, Gothic, p. 7. 29 E. Gomel, ‘Science (Fiction) and Posthuman Ethics: Redefining the Human’, The European Legacy, 16/3 (2011), 341. 30 While Tui is not Maori, Robin aligns her plight with that of disenfranchised, indigenous women suffering unprecedented sexual and physical violence across the Commonwealth. See Amnesty International Canada, ‘No More Stolen Sisters’, http://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/ campaigns/no-more-stolen-sisters (accessed 25 June 2016); C. Hoeata et al., ‘Māori women and intimate partner violence: Some sociocultural influences’, MAI Review, 3 (2011), 1–12; J. Philips and M. Park, ‘Measuring domestic violence and sexual assault against women’ (Australia), 2006, http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/ Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/ archive/ViolenceAgainstWomen (accessed 25 June 2016); Amnesty International USA, ‘Maze of Injustice’, http://www.amnestyusa.org/ our-work/issues/women-s-rights/violence-against-women/maze-of-injustice (accessed 25 June 2016). 31 Campion, Top of the Lake. 13

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Posthuman Gothic  . Z. Freedman, and V. M. Ferguson, ‘The Question of “Painless L Childbirth” in Primitive Cultures’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 20/2 (1950), 363. 33 P. Jasen,‘Race, Culture and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada’, Society for the Social History of Medicine, 10/3 (1997), 387. 34 Jasen, ‘Race, Culture and the Colonization of Childbirth’, 388 35 Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, p. 47. 36 Campion, Top of the Lake. 37 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 3. 38 Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, p. 56. 39 Creed, Monstrous Feminine, pp. 56–7. 40 A. J. Rosenberg (trans.), ‘Breishit’ 5: 29, The Tanakh (Jewish Bible) with Rashi’s commentary (The Judaica Press, 2016), http://www.chabad.org (accessed 25 June 2016). 41 Russo, Female Grotesque, pp. 62–3. 42 Russo, Female Grotesque, pp. 11, 90. 43 Campion,Top of the Lake. 44 Campion, Top of the Lake. 32

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9 Still Alive: Understanding Femininity in Valve’s Portal Games Dawn Stobbart

 Gothic and the Video Game Recent years have seen an increasing recognition of the subgenres of the Gothic literary tradition, as this volume attests. These subgenres, whilst always being present in the Gothic, are more prominently occupying a range of media, as creators of Gothic narratives explore new ways in which to relate their tales. From the first novels, like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto,1 the Gothic has always been interested in exploring and critiquing the representations of femininity, and critics such as Emma Clery2 and Donna Heiland3 have utilized Gothic narratives to consider how women are treated in society, both in the past and contemporarily. This is achieved through an interrogation of such themes as the loss of human identity, fracturing of the self and the construction of women as monstrous or Other; all themes found within Gothic narratives.These themes appear across multiple media platforms, in the words of Laurie Taylor to ‘question, define, and redefine the [boundaries]’4 of femininity, and video games constitute a recent addition to the canon of media that utilizes the Gothic to interrogate cultural doubts, concerns and fears in this way. Video games, whilst not specifically a Gothic medium, are well suited to representing Gothic themes, which Taylor designates

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‘ludic-gothic’.5 The inclusion of narrative and rhetoric as standard video-game tropes makes them useful conduits not only for considering Gothic, but also for the Gothic subgenres that are beginning to become part of the canon, such as Gothic posthumanism. Robert Geraci writes that video games are ‘an illustration of our human potential’ because ‘in games, we always come back to life, and thanks to what we learn in the process, we come back better than before’.6 Despite (or even because of) this resurrective power, video games are equally an illustration of posthuman potential, and as such allow the player to consider gender, posthumanism and the continuing and changing role of patriarchy in the twenty-first century. When defining the posthuman condition in her seminal work, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies In Cybernetics, Literature, And Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles considers that the ‘posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation’, that it ‘considers consciousness . . . as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow’, that ‘the body is the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate’ and finally, and she believes, most importantly, that ‘the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines’.7 The posthuman condition, as defined by Hayles, can be seen in the technology that is used to create prosthetics that can feel8 or glasses that can offer augmented reality.9 In video games these real-life prosthetics are frequently bestowed on players, protagonists and other characters, as a matter of course, and therefore offer crucial ways to investigate the phenomenon in society. The learning of new skills through ‘levelling up’ and acquiring new powers and abilities in video games makes them a space that enables posthuman ‘experiences—the player gains transcendent powers and a potential for continued growth’10 past that of the human, and even past death.Video games, then, are particularly suitable outlets through which to consider posthumanism: as increasingly intelligent computers and software come into being, the very technology that creates this posthuman condition is an appropriate medium for critiquing its possibilities and dangers. In considering the hopes and fears of posthumanism, the boundaries between it and postmodernism are blurred when Fred Botting 162

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offers insight into what he calls ‘Postmodern Gothic’, which includes ‘the confrontation with scientifically-inspired machines, mutants and inhuman, automated worlds’, which brings about ‘the loss of human identity and the alienation of self from both itself and the social bearings in which a sense of reality is secured’.11 Micheal Sean Bolton broadly agrees with this, considering that ‘Gothic works confront mainstream fears of external threats from the alien Other, faceless terrorism, and technological annihilation’, going on to suggest that ‘some recent works indicate a shift in concern from external to internal threats to subjectivity and human agency’.12 These themes converge in posthuman Gothic.13 It is this concept that the video games Portal and Portal 2 address through the figure of GLaDOS, a posthuman computer constructed around a human consciousness, and whose original identity becomes lost in the technological system she inhabits. Play, Setting and Character: Introducing Portal Portal and its sequel Portal 2 are not the first video games that come to mind when investigating the Gothic. As Ewan Kirkland states, the games ‘high-tech world of white, featureless test chambers, artificially intelligent super computers, laser targeting security robots and the portal gun itself, an elegant device allowing the player to pass through one flat surface to another, has none of the imagery commonly associated with Gothic culture’.14 However, beneath the technological veneer of a robotic antagonist (which itself foreshadows the posthuman condition) there is a narrative of female imprisonment, trauma and emancipation, of which Gothic fiction has been concerned since its inception. This is achieved through an underlying – or embedded – narrative that exists alongside the games structure as a puzzle solving game, which the player can, if she chooses, explore. In video games, an embedded narrative differs from that in other media, and is one that is constructed within the landscape or setting itself, to create ‘affective potential or communicate significant narrative information’.15 As the player enters a space in a game world, for example a deserted room, and looks around, she may experience an emotional reaction 163

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to that space, especially ‘where the space has been transformed by narrative events’.16 It is this embedded narrative that defines the Portal games as Gothic, articulating a tale of imprisonment, madness, loss and acceptance centred around a posthuman antagonist, who embodies the role of the traditional Gothic female, the monstrous feminine and the postfeminist Gothic woman, endowing the characters with these Gothic themes attempts to interrogate the role of the woman in the Portal universe and, more widely, in contemporary culture. In order to understand the Portal universe and how the games function as an example of posthuman Gothic, it is important to firstly explore the structure of the game, to show how it enters into the Gothic tradition, and how the setting and ludic elements of the game make up a significant part of this structure. Initially, the setting of the Portal games seems to bear little resemblance to that of traditional Gothic fiction; the enrichment centre the player travels through appears very different from the Gothic mansion in the Castle of Otranto, for example. Just like the traditional Gothic castle, however, the enrichment centre is filled with hidden and forgotten rooms, locked doors and labyrinthine passages, which gives the player her first notion that this game is not simply a puzzle-solving exercise, but that there is something hidden beneath its surface.The ludic aspects of the game are straightforward: there are a series of spatial puzzles, in which the player has to guide the protagonist from point A to point B. In order to complete each level, the player creates pairs of ‘portals’ – holes that allow instantaneous movement between one place and another, and these aid movement through space – which the player uses to assist in solving puzzles, and to guide the female protagonist through the game. To do this, the player has to assess trajectories, speed, and use lateral thinking in the completion of what are specifically mathematical and scientific problems.Whilst solving these problems, and using the same methods, the player is able to explore the enrichment centre, discover the hidden rooms, and uncover parts of the embedded narrative that are built into the setting itself. Whilst the setting of Portal provides the player with the initial clues to its Gothic narrative, it is in the construction of the small cast of characters that this becomes explicit.There are two females 164

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in the game: Chell the protagonist and GLaDOS the antagonistic super computer, and the second game adds a third character, Wheatley. Two further characters make appearances through recordings that are triggered automatically as the player guides Chell through the enrichment centre exploring the abandoned rooms and corridors: Cave Johnson the CEO of Apeture Science, and his personal assistant Caroline. Performing the role of Chell, the player is given a first-person perspective, which allows the player to more easily identify as the protagonist. As well as the usual video-game tropes of not showing the character, marked by a lack of visual, aural or oral reminders of her presence, Portal employs several other devices that encourage player identification as Chell. She is rarely seen, and is referred to as ‘you’ throughout the entire game by both GLaDOS and Wheatley, an immersive technique in video games that leads to the allusion that it is the player being addressed, rather than the protagonist. Similarly, the gender of the character is rarely referred to, allowing both male and female players to take the role, without any significant difficulty, especially if the game is played as a puzzle-solving exercise, rather than interacting with the narrative. Also, the name Chell is reminiscent of the word ‘shell’ literally a shell for the player to inhabit.This then, submerges the player in the diegesis of the game as part of it, rather than creating a secondary level of identification with the protagonist, in which the player is conscious that she is controlling a third party.The benefit of the first-person perspective is twofold; firstly, this perspective allows the ludic aspects of the game to be more accurate.When trying to complete spatial puzzles in a 3D environment, it is both easier and more precise to be able to work out the positioning of the portals, and by extension the path Chell will take through each level, if the player can see from her perspective. Secondly, the first-person perspective allows the player to enter into the narrative to a greater extent than if she were controlling an explicitly separate avatar, and being able to see that character, with its own physical presence on the screen. The positioning of the ‘camera’ in video games that use the first-person perspective means that there is very little distance between that of the player and that of the protagonist, a concept discussed by narratologists as narrative distance, 17 whereby the 165

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proximity of the protagonist and the player to each other denotes how closely the player may identify with, or as, the protagonist. Whilst the player takes the role of the protagonist, she does not take the role of the chief character. Instead, this belongs to GLaDOS, the antagonist of the Portal games.The name of this character is an acronym, standing for Genetic Lifeform and Digital Operating System. GLaDOS is a hybrid of human consciousness and computer technology and it is in this character that the Gothic and the posthuman elements of both the narrative and the game revolve. Donna Haraway, in her groundbreaking ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, defines a cyborg as ‘a hybrid of machine and organism . . . simultaneously animal and machine’18 and initially GLaDOS appears to fulfil this criterion; she is a genetic life form – an organism – yet the narrative beginning of this character establishes that whilst she began as a human being, the GLaDOS character retains none of the organic material that a cyborg would. Piecing together the narrative in a typically Gothic fashion, through pictures, audio clips and memories, the player learns that the genetic life form portion of GLaDOS was originally Caroline, the personal assistant of the Apeture Science’s CEO Cave Johnson. Like many other Gothic heroines before her, Caroline is ‘an innocent and blameless heroine threatened by a powerful male figure and confined by a labyrinthine interior space’.19 When the research into creating a computer to house the consciousness of Cave Johnson is complete he has died, and instead, Caroline’s consciousness is forcibly removed from her body and placed inside a computer mainframe instead, as per Johnson’s instructions: ‘If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place. She’ll argue. She’ll say she can’t. She’s modest like that. But you make her. Hell, put her in my computer. I don’t care.’20 Incarceration into the computer system, it is revealed, instantly drives Caroline insane and leads her to attempt to kill the Apeture Science employees in revenge, as she suffers a complete mental collapse, which establishes Caroline as a posthuman Gothic figure.This causes her to be, literally, turned off, until the Apeture Science team can devise a method by which they can control her power. It is at this time that Caroline becomes the supercomputer GLaDOS, and is trapped within the Apeture Science Enrichment Centre (the setting of the game), in order to be able 166

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to supervise and control the research taking place in the centre, and to take over all the routine tasks that the scientists do not want to do, such as monitoring the testing of the experimental portal device that is used throughout the game. As part of her programming, and as a control mechanism, the scientists at Apeture implement a digital feedback loop; when a test is successfully completed, GLaDOS is given a digital equivalent of enjoyment, and leads her to create another test, in order to achieve that feeling again. The result of this feedback loop is an ‘addiction’ to testing, or more precisely, ‘a built-in euphoric response to testing’,21 and even after the facility is shut down, GLaDOS continues to force subjects to conduct tests, which is where the first game begins, with the reviving of Chell so she can become a test subject. Whilst the imprisonment of Caroline’s consciousness within the computer system and the removal of her body, along with the addiction that she is given by the scientists, is enough to expose Caroline’s role as a specifically posthuman Gothic heroine, her incarceration at the hands of the employees of Apeture Science is compounded by the implantation of several personality cores, which include dampening spheres, designed to stifle her intelligence and decision making abilities, thus making her more pliable and allow the scientists to more easily control her. Tellingly, all of these spheres, or cores, are male. The player is introduced to one of these personality cores, Wheatley, the third character in the Portal series – designed to be the ‘dumbest moron who ever lived’ – at the beginning of Portal 2, when he revives Chell from cryogenic hibernation. It is Wheatley who assists Chell when GLaDOS is revived (after Chell has beaten and deactivated her at the end of the first game) accidently, and Chell is again forced to perform more tests, feeding GLaDOS’s addiction, until her consciousness is removed from the computer, and replaced by Wheatley’s, who also becomes insane and tries to kill both GLaDOS and Chell. Implantation into the GLaDOS system then reads cyborgization as a descent into the Gothic horrors of madness, rather than the intended utopian realization of posthumanism.

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The Three Gothic Females For GLaDOS, the environment she is trapped in is a constructed world ‘in which the damsel in distress cannot escape her painful fate. Masculinity defines and contains her . . . a process almost invariably violent’,22 both figuratively and literally. A drawing in the game world shows Caroline being forced into the computer system by several men in white coats, and this is compounded by having her personality supplanted by male qualities. This, then shows a world in which the female body, or the removal of it, is the ‘battleground of female oppression . . . act[ing] out one of the most ancient and perhaps most fundamental of misogynistic fantasies: that women are nothing but body’23. The removal of Caroline from her own body, and subsequent implantation into a machine, represents the central Gothic core of the game, refuting both her gender and her humanity, and this creates a Gothic nightmare, rather than a posthuman utopia such as that posited by Norbert Wiener. Caroline is the victim of patriarchal power then, literally reduced to being ‘a set of mechanical functions’24 by being placed inside a computer system, over which her control is limited by the dampening spheres that are then attached to it. Caroline’s inclusion in the digital operating system as the genetic life form, or human, part of the program means that she is included in a periodic backing up of the system. This then, means that GLaDOS can be reanimated at any time through the restoration of the program she is encased in, ensuring that her immortality is maintained as long as there is sufficient power to run her hardware. Usually, a computer system is restored after a malfunction in the programming, or the inability to perform correctly, reverting back to a fully functional version of the program; however, GLaDOS relates that the operating system that she is included in was corrupted during the genesis of the project, at the point Caroline was inserted into it, therefore making the subsequent backup corrupt. In creating a backup of the corrupted and insane GLaDOS program, the human within the program is also backed up, and as such is denied death, becoming a veritable ghost in the machine; her personality and memories are stored in the hardware and the 168

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software, to allow her to live forever, even when that self is suppressed and denied. This calls to mind the notion of the horror trope of the body without a soul, as described by Barbara Creed in The Monstrous-Feminine. However, whilst Creed writes that ‘several of the most popular horrific figures are “bodies without souls” ’,25 for GLaDOS, this concept is subverted and made more horrific, becoming the posthuman ‘soul without a body’. Even if there is a malfunction (such as occurs at the end of Portal, when she is defeated by Chell and appears to die), GLaDOS (and therefore Caroline) does not die, but rather is placed in a form of suspended animation, as there is the possibility of the program being restarted by a third party as happens in the second game, when GLaDOS is accidently reawakened by Wheatley. Here, then, GLaDOS’s very existence is controlled by the scientists who oppress her, controlling even her ability to die. Whilst a major theme of the game is an exploration of the use of posthuman technology – considering the ramifications of a corrupt artificial intelligence on the humans around it – there is also a darker theme in this game, the consequences of being subjected to trauma. Like her Gothic predecessors, GLaDOS is ‘physically and psychologically constrained by societal limitations, scarred by madness, and locked into monstrosity’,26 and it is this that changes her from being a traditional Gothic heroine to the monstrous-feminine character that she is for a large part of the games and the narrative. Donna Heiland notes in Gothic and Gender that to ‘inhabit a woman’s body is to be a Gothic heroine’,27 which can be seen in the first incarnation of Caroline as she becomes GLaDOS. However, this changes when GLaDOS takes charge of the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre, and this forms the basis of the second part of GLaDOS’s Gothic incarnation. Being taken from her body and imprisoned in the computer changes her from a Gothic heroine, a victim of patriarchal oppression, to the monstrous female, explicitly marked by the change from being Caroline to being GLaDOS. At the point she becomes posthuman, femininity in the game takes on a darker, distinctly monstrous aspect after GLaDOS floods the enrichment centre with a deadly neurotoxin during ‘Bring Your Cat to Work Day’ in revenge for her imprisonment, refuting both her status as a Gothic heroine, her femininity, and the nurturing role 169

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her gender usually intimates. As the monstrous female, GLaDOS inverts the notion of woman as the source of all life; she is instead a source of death, repeatedly subjecting individuals to ‘testing’ progressively harder puzzles, that invariably kill them. At this point, even though GLaDOS has been in existence for some time, the modest, innocent character of Caroline, along with the predetermined and monolithic understanding of femininity as nurturing, maternal and protective (this is something Stéphanie Genz explores in Postfemininities in Popular Culture),28 is exchanged for the contradictory understanding of the female as antagonist, with GLaDOS’s insanity and need for revenge transforming the positive feminine virtues for their transgressive opposites. Once her transformation into the Gothic monster is complete, GLaDOS cannot remember her original incarnation as Caroline; her ‘human identity has been stolen, wiped out and replaced with a grim purpose that denies [her] previous identity’29 as a woman. She has also been implanted with specifically male characteristics, in the form of the dampening spheres, further refuting her status as female, as feminine and as femme. It is this version of the character that exists throughout the first Portal game, and the first part of the second game. As the antagonist and the Gothic monster, GLaDOS takes on a distinctly anti-feminist role, through the scrutiny of the female, especially in relation to the female body and attributes of the protagonist Chell. Throughout Portal and Portal 2, GLaDOS’s anti-feminist comments are designed to undermine Chell’s self-worth, and further support the notion of the character as a monstrous female. These include comments such as ‘this plate must not be calibrated to someone of your . . . generous . . . ness. I’ll add a few zeroes to the maximum weight’, and ‘Here come the test results.You are a horrible person. I’m serious, that’s what it says: a horrible person’ and even ‘the birth parents you are trying to reach do not love you’.30 These are a representative sample of the multitude of barbed comments that are designed to scrutinize and belittle Chell as a human being, and especially as a woman, by the monstrous female whose very thoughts are controlled by the male dampening spheres that are designed to refute her femininity. This changes at the point GLaDOS becomes PotatOS, the third incarnation of Gothic femininity in the game. 170

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The personality spheres and dampening cores, the masculine com­ ponents of the computer program are removed from her, and it is GLaDOS herself that articulates the futility of such insults, defending Chell when Wheatley makes similar comments. Here again, we see the influence of patriarchy, both in the game universe, and more widely throughout contemporary culture, as the game forces the player to take on the role of Chell, and to be subjected to these insults, by both GLaDOS and Wheatley. The unique character construction of GLaDOS as a formally female, cyborgized, entity, who becomes monstrous through patriarchal control (in the form of the male dampening spheres attached to her personality) and who is abusive of Chell, a female protagonist, offers insight into the continuing role of patriarchy in twenty-first-century society, conveying the Gothic ability to interrogate this prejudice further into the posthuman Gothic realm. Rosalind Gill considers that women are as much to blame as men for ‘the monitoring and surveying’ of the female body and it is through this that we judge ‘the performance of successful femininity’.31 This self-surveillance is found throughout media, especially in television and magazines, in which ‘bodily shape, size, muscle tone . . . home, finances etc. are rendered into problems that necessitate ongoing and constant monitoring and labour’. ‘Women’, Gill writes, ‘simply cannot win’, 32 suggesting a gendered competition that involves the use of women to vilify the female body and to reinforce the patriarchal notion of what a successful woman is, although GLaDOS refutes this role in her third incarnation, and instead embraces her own femininity, and recognizes Chell as an ally. The third incarnation of Gothic femininity occurs when GLaDOS is once again removed from her body, this time the computer system that she was originally imprisoned in. Usually, release from imprisonment would signal the emancipation of the Gothic female and a return to normality. In Portal 2, this is complicated by the fact that GLaDOS is returned to the Gothic female state, through reimprisonment – inside a potato battery.Whilst this appears far-fetched, the premise of the imprisonment is factually correct. A potato can be used to create enough energy to power a clock for example, and since the game’s release, a working 171

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GLaDOS model has been created that uses a potato as the battery. However, the energy produced by the potato renders GLaDOS incapable of more than thought and speech. This incarceration as PotatOS, then, signals a loss of power for the monstrous GLaDOS; she is rendered completely passive and helpless in this incarnation, and it is through this helplessness, her reliance on Chell, and the loss of the (male) dampening spheres that GLaDOS is able to rediscover the memories of her original incarnation as Caroline, which in turn re-endows her with femininity and humanity. Here, the player sees the game not only as a critique of female oppression by a patriarchal society through her incarceration by male scientists and the masculine superimposition on her personality, but offers a redemption of the female character as she refutes the masculine traits imposed on her, and ‘resignifies her feminine position [and] regains control over her life’.33 GLaDOS, as PotatOS, is stripped of her omniscience and power, and whilst in this state rediscovers her original personality, and it is this that allows her to come to terms both with her treatment at the hands of the oppressive males of Aperture Science and with her own behaviour as GLaDOS, the Gothic Monster. This is most clearly symbolized in the epilogue of the second game, in which GLaDOS, who has been returned to her monstrous body, releases Chell, telling her ‘thank God you are all right’ and that ‘all along, you were my best friend’, her femininity and her ability for empathy restored. During this third part of the game, the relationship with GLaDOS becomes what Fred Botting calls ‘a “posthumane” identification with the other’, meaning that ‘from female abjection and otherness, from corporeal destruction and rebirth, a new subject appears to be resurrected, with an ethical, compassionate spirit’.34 Whilst GLaDOS continues to consciously refute this as part of her character, her actions in rescuing Chell from death, and releasing her from the enrichment centre show her as having compassion for another woman, granting her the freedom that GLaDOS still cannot have, despite her mental emancipation.

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Still Alive: Freedom from the Oppressors In the Portal games, the representation of the female figure is explored through the paradoxical posthuman role of a single character taking the role of the Gothic heroine, the Gothic monster and the liberated postfeminist Gothic woman. Claire Knowles writes that: the potential for feminine empowerment has always existed within the heroines of Gothic fiction . . . but, whereas earlier heroines . . . are constrained in their actions by the limitations placed upon them by the patriarchal society in which they live, twenty-first-century women are constrained only by their perception of their own limitations.35

This is the stance the games takes; GLaDOS is able, through her return to the role of Gothic heroine, the loss of patriarchal control in the form of the dampening spheres, and her collaboration with a strong female, to come to an understanding of her own feminine power and this frees her from the subjection that she has been held in thrall to, and allows her to come to terms with the loss of her body, and her subsequent immortality. The Gothic has always been a forerunner in considering the negative presence of patriarchy as a dominant cultural factor in contemporary society and exploring female empowerment through the rejection of this patriarchy. This video game joins such discussions, using a technology that is itself part of a discourse around posthumanism. Video games require a player to control a fictional character that has been created, and wholly exists, in a machine through direct, physical interactivity, a practical realization of posthumanism.This allows the player – and the critic – to consider what it means to play a game, and to assume an identity that is a truly posthuman construct. In doing so, games such as Portal emphasize and revise the practices of life and death – death is no longer the end of a life in these circumstances; Chell can be resurrected hundreds of times with no ill effects, or Caroline (as GLaDOS) is kept alive through insertion into the very same system being used to engage with the posthuman condition, both complicating and 173

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critiquing its use – essentially allowing the player to question what it means to be human, and asking whether she endows the character she is controlling with humanity, through control of the actions and reactions the character makes. As well as offering such an explicit consideration of post­ humanism, this game can be coded as a Gothic exploration of the female in many guises, both within a fictional capacity, and within the wider cultural remit of feminist studies and posthuman studies. Using the antagonist as the principal character in the narrative, the player is forced to consider the (post)human trapped inside the computer as the Gothic heroine, as well as the Gothic monster, and the empowered female who has shaken off her male oppressors and established herself as a symbolically free entity, despite forever remaining trapped as a genetic life form and digital operating system. Notes Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 E. J. Clery,‘Anne Radcliffe and D. A. F. de Sade:Thoughts on Heroinism’, Women’s Writing, 1/2 (1994), 203–14. 3 Donna Heiland, Gothic and Gender: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 4 L. N.Taylor,‘Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming’, in B. Perron (ed.), Horror Video Games (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), p. 49. 5 Taylor, ‘Gothic Bloodlines’, p. 47. 6 Robert M. Geraci, ‘Video Games and the Transhuman Inclination’, Academia.edu (2012), http://www.academia.edu/2283059/Video_Games_ and_the_Transhuman_Inclination (accessed 7 October 2013), 735–56. 7 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 2–3. 8 S. Connor, ‘A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel’, The Independent, 17 February 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/ life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/a-sensational-breakthrough-the-first-bionichand-that-can-feel-8498622.html (accessed 1 October 2013). 1

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Evolving  . DeSouzza, ‘4 Ways Google Glass is Making Us Transhuman’, h+, 6 C June 2013, http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/06/06/4-ways-google-glassmakes-us-transhuman/ (accessed 3 October 2013). 10 Geraci, ‘Video Games and the Transhuman Inclination’, 739. 11 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 157. 12 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 2. 13 Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery’, 3. 14 E. Kirkland, ‘Gothic and Survival Horror Videogames’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 454. 15 H. Jenkins,‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, in Noah WardripFruin and Pat Harrigan (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), p. 127. 16 Jenkins, ‘Game Design’, p. 127. 17 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 162. 18 D. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’, in David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (eds), The Cybercultures Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 291. 19 Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz, ‘Introduction’, in Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz (eds), Postfeminist Gothic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 5. 20 Portal 2 (Bellvue:Valve, 2011). 21 Portal 2. 22 A. Williams, ‘The Stepford Wives: What’s a Living Doll to do in a Postfeminist World?’, in Brabon and Genz (eds), Postfeminist Gothic, p. 88. 23 Williams, ‘Stepford Wives’, p. 89. 24 Williams, ‘Stepford Wives’, p. 90. 25 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 10. 26 K. F. Stein, ‘Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic’, in J. E. Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden, 1983), p. 123. 27 Heiland, Gothic and Gender, p. 158. 28 Stéphanie Genz, Postfemininities in Popular Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 9

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Posthuman Gothic  inda Dryden,‘She: Gothic Reverberations in Star Trek: First Contact’, L in Brabon and Genz (eds), Postfeminist Gothic, p. 161. 30 Portal 2. 31 R. Gill,‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10/2 (2007), 155. 32 Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’, 157. 33 S. Genz,‘(Re)Making the body Beautiful: Postfeminist Cinderellas and Gothic Tales of Transformation’, in Brabon and Genz (eds), Postfeminist Gothic, p. 75. 34 F. Botting, ‘Aftergothic: Consumption, Machines, and Black Holes’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 290–1. 35 C. Knowles, ‘Sensibility Gone Mad: Or, Drsuilla, Buffy and the (D) evolution of the Heroine of Sensibility’, in Brabon and Genz (eds), Postfeminist Gothic, p. 149. 29

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10 Patchwork Girls: Reflections of Lost Female Identity in Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours Donna Mitchell

 The dystopian world of Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours (2014) is one of natural men and unnatural women, one where the nature of female identity has been irrevocably compromised by the replacement of natural women with man-made figures known simply as eves. Although the exact details of the eves’ construction process are not detailed in the text, there is enough evidence to suggest that they are designed and assembled according to the masculine vision of female beauty. My reading of these figures as posthuman Gothic entities is therefore linked to the fact that they do not possess natural DNA; they are formulated instead from a scientific concoction that ensures their possession of exceptional levels of beauty and physical perfection. In other words, their physical make up confirms their status as posthuman Gothic figures because it proves they are not real human beings. They are man-made imitations of the natural women who no longer exist. The ambiguity surrounding their classification as women raises the notion of the Baudrillardian simulacrum in relation to the interchangeable relationship between the sign and the real. Specifically the third stage of Baudrillard’s theory, which ‘marks the absence of basic reality’,1 is applicable to the eves as it relates

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to the sign’s ability to ‘play at being an appearance’2 of the real when in fact it has become an imitation copy with no original. The sign now represents a hyperreality that is the binary opposite to any meaningful version of reality. Therefore, the existence of the eves is particularly ominous because it signifies the extinction of their natural predecessors.They are also significant because they exemplify the subject matters of oppressed femininity and unnatural creations that are principal concerns of the Gothic genre; they are central to how O’Neill’s text works as a social critique or commentary on the difficult relationship between patriarchal structures and the female figure.The new version of female identity in this text is indicated by a rewritten scripture on the very first page, which quotes the ‘Original Father’s’ claim that ‘in the beginning, Man created the new women, the eves’.3 The gender forms of these nouns and the terminology in this statement suggests a revised portrayal of patriarchal convention that promotes man to a transcendental state and demotes woman to an effigy of male desire who is defined and categorized by her beauty. This paper will use relevant Gothic criticism and feminist theories to analyse O’Neill’s female figure in relation to her posthuman Gothic status and to explore the subsequent issues that arise from this version of female identity. Control of the female figure in this text is maintained by extensive training which the eves receive until the age of sixteen. During this time they are conditioned to believe that the revision of female identity was necessary in order to guarantee the perpetu­ ation of the human species as explained in a class showing of ‘The Noah Project’, which is the official propaganda for man’s elimination of natural women that is taught in the training school. The class is told that this project was an unavoidable social response to natural women’s rejection of the female foetus, although there is a strong underlying suggestion in the project’s narrative that their extermination was, in fact, a deliberate and planned event. The eves are conditioned to believe that their creation occurred in reaction to the loss of beauty that came with nurturing a natural female baby and because beauty is considered to be the most important of all female attributes in this text, female foetuses became a threat to their mother’s social worth. 178

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They are taught to believe that natural women rejected their unborn daughters out of fear that they would steal their beauty, which led to the establishment of mass girl graves. These graves contained the bodies of thousands of unwanted daughters and continued to expand until the manufacture of gender-specific fertility drugs that could prevent the creation of any more female foetuses. In this account of history men are portrayed as saviours who had no choice but to build an alternative and posthuman female figure in place of the natural woman: [T]he body . . . learned that a female baby was an invader, come to steal her mother’s beauty . . . Soon there was only a handful of the original women left, all past child-bearing age . . . [so] Genetic Engineers were forced to create women to ensure the survival of the human race. And since they had the opportunity, it would have been foolish not to make necessary improvements in the new women.4

This version of history perpetuates the notion of essentialism by situating the eves at an inferior position to their natural male counterparts. It also justifies the power imbalance between the two sexes in relation to both their origins and function in society as it promotes the eves’ gratitude towards men for their very existence. This in turn ensures their compliance in fulfilling the role of their assigned category once their training is complete and they are divided between the three restricted categories of female identity: companions, who are wives and mothers; concubines, who are used only for sex; and chastities, whose sole purpose is to train the next generation of eves. The organization of female identity in this manner emphasizes the importance of beauty as only the most attractive and obedient eves become companions, which is regarded as the best and most desired category, while the least attractive eves are destined to spend their lives as chastities. The strict regulations that govern the eves’ division at graduation demonstrate how they are rewarded for their efforts in maintaining an almost impossible standard of physical perfection and submissiveness. The categorization of women in this derogatory manner also illustrates how the Gothic narrative can be read as ‘a study of male/female power relations’5 offering texts that expose how women can be used ‘as 179

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pawns in a male property game, seeing their use or uselessness as economic commodities central to their worth’.6 The manipulation of the female figure in this way dehumanizes her by erasing her true history and reduces her to the position of a doll or an automaton. In doing so, it demonstrates Hélène Cixous’s claim in ‘Sorties’ that man’s old dream is to be ‘god the mother’7 to a masculine creation of woman who is ‘[b]eautiful, but passive; hence desirable . . . [as] it is men who like to play dolls’.8 The doll imagery used to describe women in this theory correlates to the notion of de Beauvoir’s interpretation of Freud’s penis envy. Her analysis states that ‘to compensate . . . and serve [the young girl] as alter ego, she is given a foreign object: a doll . . . which will . . . serve the girl as substitute for [a] double . . . : the penis’.9 The confusion with this act is that ‘the doll represents the whole body’10 while simultaneously being a passive object that she will dress up and dote upon in a manner which reflects her personal desire for attention and affection. According to de Beauvoir, the little girl’s identification with the doll during this practice will eventually cause her to inversely think of herself ‘as a marvellous doll’11 and to become similar to ‘a live doll’12 that is admired solely for her beauty and fancy clothes. The doll’s status as an inert being becomes especially problematic during this process because of its unavoidable link to passivity, which is another element likely to be mirrored by the young girl who then associates beauty and passivity as being inseparable and integral components of the ideal female figure. In other words, it is through the doll that the young girl gains her idyllic representation of womanhood, which she then wishes to epitomize so that she too can be admired just like her doll. This doll analogy can be connected to the eves’ posthuman Gothic status in terms of their design basis and the education which they receive in the training school. The fact that their man-made design is based on a scientific formula and is literally made up of physically perfect body parts confirms their status as doll-like entities. The basis of their learning centres on beauty and fashion advice, dieting tips and training sessions, and information on the behavioural requirements for their desired category. Passivity is the central performative requirement of all categories as the eves are constantly 180

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reminded to always be willing to submit themselves to the desires of their male counterparts. Collectively, this knowledge will both help them make themselves as beautiful and as physically perfect as possible and allow them to epitomize the repressive components of either a companion or a concubine by graduation. In other words, the training school conditions them to base their self-worth on their physical beauty as well as their ability to gain attention and affection, which in turn relates back to de Beauvoir’s discussion of how young girls are taught to think of themselves as marvellous dolls to be admired. This level of physical perfection proves to be almost unattainable for even the most beautiful eves, but despite this, daily maintenance and improvement of beauty is the main focus of their training. Their efforts to obey impossible diet and exercise habits illustrate how they are groomed to become a perfect and socially constructed version of femininity. This practice is further encouraged during class when they are reminded of the many restrictions on their physicality through the repetition of daily mantras that ‘[f]at women are ugly. Old women are ugly’13 and how ‘[n]o man likes a fat girl. We’ve been told this since design’.14 But at the same time they learn that ‘men don’t find skinny women attractive [either]. [Our] target weights have been specifically set for that reason’.15 Target weights are strictly governed on a weekly basis and are their main focus as the eve who manages to meet her target is usually voted the most attractive. In an effort to prompt further gratitude for their perfect designs they are shown old videos of human women and are conditioned to view them in a negative light by noting the lack of symmetry in the face, the bulbous noses, the dilated pores over the forehead and chin of ‘[u]ndesigned, natural women’.16 This exercise portrays natural female features as ugly and subsequently encourages the eves to appreciate the perfection of their scientifically created physicality. This gives further evidence of their posthuman Gothic status as the text’s protagonist, freida, knows the exact breakdown of her design which she describes as a scientific formula of ‘S41 Delicate Iced Chocco Hair. #66 ChindiaYellow eyes. That’s me.That’s what people see when they look at me.’17 This approach to beauty formulation becomes more problematic when considered in terms of Western standards of female beauty as freida reveals that man’s ability to choose specific 181

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design combinations means that ‘only blonde, blue-eyed girls are [now] designed in the Afrika and Chindia Zones, their past literally white-washed’.18 Age is another enemy of beauty according to this mentality and is a concept that horrifies the young eves who, ironically, find comfort in the fact that both companions and concubines have a Termination date of forty years old.The chastity category is exempt from this deadline but their longer lifespan is not envied by the other eves who are horrified at facing life ‘without the luxury of a Termination date appointed to preserve [their] beauty . . . I imagine [them] at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and I shiver’.19 The idealized version of female beauty that the eves are encouraged to personify can be explained through Germaine Greer’s concept of ‘the Eternal Feminine’, which discusses how the ideal feminine stereotype is perpetuated through various social channels that promote and perpetuate the objectification of women: [T]he ‘Eternal Feminine’ . . . is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all women . . . Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others . . . nothing must interfere with her function as sex object . . . [S]he is not a woman . . . she is a doll: weeping, pouting or smiling, running or reclining, she is a doll.20

Once again the image of woman as doll emerges as this notion emphasizes the correlating passivity and desirability in the ideal version of female identity which the eves must embody. The performative requirements of the female figure as a sexual object are also highlighted and demonstrate how, in order to fulfil this role, she must be dehumanized and demoted to the status of an idol or the inanimate object of the doll that is admired only for her beauty and silence.The reduction of posthuman Gothic female identity to a doll-like status is evident in O’Neill’s text when freida recognizes that their daily intake of enforced medication ensures they ‘are wound up and wound down like mechanical dolls’.21 Furthermore, she feels that the chastities speak about isabel as if she is ‘a doll that needs her face repainted’22 when discussing her need for surgery to ‘fix her up’23 and return her to her perfect state. The catalogue of body parts involved in this production confirms the eves’ position within the Gothic spectrum as, despite their 182

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physical beauty, they are unnatural and uncanny creations whose existence signifies the obliteration of natural women and therefore represents a monstrous state of womanhood.The physical perfection that they embody can be read within Masahiro Mori’s concept of ‘the uncanny valley’, which relates to the psychology behind how non-human entities, such as robots, can be admired for their lifelike qualities up until they become excessively anthropomorphic. At this point the human spectator regards the being’s uncanniness in terms of their ‘appearance [which] is quite human like, but the familiarity is [now regarded as] negative’24 and eerie or repulsive. While the most obvious Gothic text to discuss issues pertaining to these monstrous creations would certainly be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), this chapter will focus instead on Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl: A Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley & Herself (1995), which resurrects Victor’s female monster. Specifically, the destruction and reassemblage of the female figure in O’Neill’s novel connects the eves to Jackson’s monster who, as a (wo)man-made creation, represents ‘the Everywoman’. She also shares their posthuman Gothic status in terms of both her human creator and unnatural physicality which consists of a fused medley of (mostly dead and mostly female) body parts. Bonded together by a shared experience of womanhood, these appendages reveal her to be a non-human entity similar to a swarm or a multiple organism that is linked by a collective behaviour.The literal binding of her parts is reflected in the hypertext’s structure which is made up of five main sections that contain a variety of over four hundred links and lexias. Her self-professed claim that ‘I am a mixed metaphor’25 is illustrated through this complex network which traces the design pattern of her stitching and allows the reader to dissect and reconstruct her according to their chosen sequence.The guide for doing so is a map in the shape of a graveyard with coffin-shaped hyperlinks which act as narrative constituents for the reader’s version of the story, and additional information in the form of key words and sentences can be found in the various links to her internal organs. This fragmented format is important for two reasons: firstly, because it raises the notion of patriarchal structures of female identity which often reduce women to the sum of their body parts, and secondly, because it offers an alternative model of construction 183

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which thereby supersedes these structures. The most significant feature of this unfixed configuration, however, is its embodiment of blurred identity in the posthuman Gothic creation. The Everywoman herself recognizes the gaps in her anatomy and uses them to reconnect with her human ancestors by tracing the origins and personal histories of her various body parts and internal organs because she believes that ‘we are who we were; we are made up of memories’.26 The shared history of the text’s many women highlights Jackson’s deliberate blurring of identity and gender, thereby leading the reader on an introspective journey that subverts traditional and social constructions of these features. It also reiterates the presence of a female authority in this text in relation to Mary/ Shelley and (the Patchwork Girl) herself and their shared ownership of the various body parts and sub-narratives. The Everywoman’s rebirth occurs when her creator, who is a fictional version of Mary Shelley, grafts a piece of flesh from her own calf onto her creation. In doing so she mimics the biblical imagery of Adam and Eve and creates a biological connection between them. This action reminds the reader that this creature exists solely because of the amalgamation of other women’s body parts and organs. But despite her female lineage of natural women, she remains an unnatural female figure who, according to Marie Mulvey-Roberts, can only really exist within the gaps of the text at ‘the intersection of being and non-being, life and death’.27 The uncertainty of her identity is eventually personified by the unravelling of her entrails and body parts which begin to separate and spill from her. The ambiguous and unfixed sequence of the hypernarrative encourages the reader to reconnect these limbs according to their chosen design, which subsequently likens them to the transcendental, eve-constructing men in O’Neill’s text. Although the eves are not physically connected like the various female figures in Patchwork Girl, they are united by a shared existence of constant self-surveillance and comparison which is encouraged by the omnipresent mirrors in the training school. These observational practices are an essential part of their training and are promoted on a daily basis as the class is repeatedly reminded that ‘[a]ll eves are created perfect but, over time, they seem to 184

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develop flaws. Comparing yourself to your sisters is a useful way of identifying these flaws, but you must then take the necessary steps to improve yourself ’.28 This proves to be an exhausting activity which freida defines simply as an act of ‘[w]atching, watchers, watchers.We’re all watching each other.’29 The continuous surveillance of themselves and of each other raises the notion of ‘the male gaze’ and the correlating role that mirrors play in influencing the construction of female identity. This is a definitive trait of many Gothic narratives which often elevate the heroine’s ‘sense of herself as the object of the obsessive male gaze [and] masculine scrutiny and praise’30 to the point where she engages in what critic Diane Long Hoeveler defines as ‘a professionalization or masquerade of [her] femininity’31 in order to satisfy the gaze. The male gaze is a theory developed by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey, and stems from the ‘sexual imbalance’ of a ‘split between [an] active/male and passive/female’.32 The function of this gaze is to project the male observer’s ‘fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly’ and ‘coded for strong visual and erotic impact’, so that she can ‘play to and signify male desire’ by being ‘on display [and] sexualised’.33 The delicate power balance between the male subject and his female object in this theory emphasizes the strict patriarchal regulations governing social definitions of female identity and female beauty. Furthermore, Mulvey’s hypothesis suggests that the core function of a woman’s physicality is to appeal to a masculine onlooker, which raises the question of transgressive behaviour in women who choose not to mould their image in terms of the specific design and performativity inherent in this model. This suggests that the gaze can regard female beauty as either positive or negative, which is an issue that is central to Gothic critic Monica Germanà’s claim that ‘[f]emale beauty is acceptable as long as [the female figure] is the object of the controlling male gaze; when she strays from the literal and metaphorical enclosures designed for her body by patriarchal authority, she becomes a threat to the very foundations of masculine power’.34 The principal ideas in these theories correspond with the aforementioned notion of ‘the Eternal Feminine’ and illustrate how gendered performativity in sexual relations contributes to the perpetuation of essentialist ideas. To connect Mulvey’s theory to the text, however, it must first be noted 185

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that the eves live in a completely female world and do not have any interaction with men until it is time to meet the Inheritants who are the teenage boys that select their future wives or companions from the graduating class. Before this time their only experience of a male figure occurs in the form of recorded Public Address messages from the Father of the Euro-Zone, which are shown throughout the final school year. These recordings can be read as evidence of internalized state doctrine in O’Neill’s dystopian world and contain various auditory and visual cues that echo the ‘two minutes hate’ screenings of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The function of these broadcasts in both dystopian texts is to instruct and condition their viewers according to the wishes of the governing powers. [F]reida’s reaction to the Father’s televised presence illustrates the power and influence that the male gaze has on the young eves, and further reinstates the symbolic union of the male gaze and the mirror within the text. She describes her actions in preparation for the Father’s Public Address: I grab my lip gloss and apply it generously, inspecting myself in my desk.This is ridiculous as the Father can’t even see us . . . But I’m not alone. The rest of the class are preening manically too, almost falling into their mirrors.35

Their collective reaction to his image portrays two things: an immediate concern with their appearance under the male gaze as well as a dependency on mirrors for assurance of their beauty and desirability. This behaviour is indicative of power relations and body politics in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, specifically in relation to his discussion of how careful observation can be more effective than excessive force as a form of punishment because it allows disciplinary institutions to construct ‘subjected and practised bodies, [or] “docile” bodies’.36 According to his study, these docile bodies can be moulded and continue to remain in a particular state simply because careful observation will eventually cause them to create an internalized controlling gaze, which ensures that the person will behave correctly even when they are no longer under surveillance.Therefore, the eves’ shared attempt to look as attractive as possible even when they are not actually 186

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under observation confirms their status as docile bodies in possession of an internalized male gaze to which they must perform.The fused medley of images that appear in the opening sequence of the address relates O’Neill’s female figure to Jackson’s Everywoman once again as a selection of women from each category appears as the screen burns to life: [T]he symbol of the thirds appears . . . The ivory of the companions, the scarlet of the concubines, the ebony of the chastity robes. Separate entities but inextricably linked.The screen flashes with images. A girl. A girl. A girl. A girl . . . One girl is replaced with another, and another, always a newer, better version to follow . . . A voice roars from the ceiling, ‘ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT’.37

The fusion of female identity and the presentation of beauty in this broadcast reminds the eves of the physical evaluation to which they are continuously subjected. Even more importantly, the contrast between the objectified eves in this video and the godlike appearance of the Father reminds the reader once again of the text’s promotion of man to a transcendental state and reduction of woman to an exaggerated effigy of male desire. The Father’s divinity is confirmed by the video’s presentation of him as well as the capitalized pronouns that are used in freida’s account of his address. He is portrayed as an omniscient force in her reverent description of ‘His face. His sharp blue eyes peering into my soul, His mouth opening, about to speak, about to fill my empty brain with His wisdom.’38 His address to the eves is short and succinct as he reminds them that ‘it is time for [them] to make a contribution to the society that has created . . . [them] . . . [They] must all play [their] equal part . . . [and] Remember [that they] may be perfectly designed but there is always room for improvement.’39 His closing statement echoes the school’s persistent reminder to strive for perfection, which once again raises issues of self-image and comparison that are inherent in the eves’ construction of identity and their subsequent promotion of self-­ hatred. [F]reida notes that although all eves ‘were designed equally . . . some eves were lucky enough to be designed better than their ugly sisters’40 and harbours a special jealousy towards isabel who has been considered the prettiest of the class for many years. 187

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Her scientific dissection of isabel’s beauty reminds the reader of the eves’ posthuman Gothic status as a man-made creation: I breathe in deeply, as if I could suck in her mesmerizing beauty and steal it from her. I looked up her chart online once, hoping to find an easy formula to copy. PO1 Metallic Silver hair . . . #76 Folly Green eyes. Muted gold-coloured skin, frosted-pink lips, a few small freckles over a neat nose. I wish I looked like you. Everything would be easier if I looked like you. I’ve been thinking that since I was four years old.41

This mentality illustrates freida’s belief that beauty equates to happiness, and so she submits herself to vigorous training and dieting in order to improve her appearance and to feel as pretty as isabel and the other girls in her class. She relies heavily on mirrors to monitor any differences in her physicality; they act as a substitute for the absent male gaze by inciting her formation of the aforementioned internalized male gaze. When considered from this perspective they also highlight the constant surveillance in the school as its interior is dominated by ‘mirrors, [with] every surface papered in glass. . . . [T]here I am. And there. And there. I am imprisoned in these walls . . . reflected in all of the mirrors, splintering into parallel images, echoed from the ceiling to the walls and back, multiplied over and over again.’42 The fragmentation of freida’s self-image in this passage connects her to both the medley of eves in the Father’s Public Address and the various appendages of the Everywoman’s anatomy. Furthermore, the simultaneous act of viewing herself in this way and recognizing her disjointed state of self supports the link between the male gaze and the mirror when examined through John Berger’s theory on the presumed male spectator of the female figure in Renaissance art who is presented looking at her reflection in the mirror. The gender arrangement of this positioning illustrates how women construct themselves as a reflection of the masculine view. He contends that the female figure’s main concern is to appear erotically desirable to her male observer by the end of this process: A woman’s self being [is] split in two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own 188

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Evolving image of herself . . . Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at . . . Thus she turns herself into an object.43

When considered in relation to Mulvey’s earlier theory it is interesting to note how Berger illustrates the female figure’s ability to partake in an active/male role of observer as well as her ultimate acceptance of being the passive and surveyed object of desire. In doing so, she fulfils the performative demands of her gender that are usually learned during the maturation of sexual identity during adolescence. This is a natural stage of development that is inextricably linked to her narcissistic tendencies as she relies on the mirror to review her progress. These gender dynamics can therefore be related to the notion of essentialism and the polarizing characteristics of masculine and feminine sexuality that are described in Naomi Wolf ’s notion of ‘the beauty myth [which] keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. It is most important to note that this gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it . . . its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.’44 [F]reida’s compliance with the socially constructed image of beauty as well as her desire to be the receiver of the objectifying male gaze positions her as an inanimate doll, which illustrates the naturalization of this dual hypothesis on gender and sexuality.To elaborate on its connection to the subject matter of the aforementioned theories, the beauty myth claims that ‘what little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired’.45 This practice reverts their attention back onto their own bodies, and causes them to obsessively monitor any personal physical changes and to compare themselves to both their female peers and profuse medial representations of perfect female bodies. Furthermore, it ensures that they engage in the objectification of their own physicality, which can create an unhealthy body-image as well as a competitiveness and jealousy of their counterparts’ beauty. At the same time it encourages the young girl to both celebrate her newly developed sexuality and maintain the power of the male gaze. Its most notable aspect, however, is its ability to secure the objectified nature of femininity in a way that the young girl can understand and even celebrate, as the daily ‘torrent of media images show the female face and body 189

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split into pieces, which is how the beauty myth asks a woman to think of her own body parts’.46 [F]reida literally exemplifies this concept when she confesses her fantasy of ‘having a terrible accident, one so awful . . . that a complete re-design was unavoidable. I could flip through a catalogue of body parts, hand-picking the new, improved me’.47 The shopping-list imagery of female appendages in her thought process mimics the media’s typical representation of women in reductive terms that focus only on their physicality and beauty, and by exercising this kind of mentality, she illustrates the psychological damage of this common practice.The matter of self-harm also arises in this reverie as it suggests that she is willing to submit herself to severe bodily harm in order to improve her physical appearance. These factors thereby emphasize both the perverted essence of the school’s environment and the destructive effects of the media’s influence on it its female audience. Ultimately, freida’s self-obsession proves to be the main catalyst for her descent into madness. Her inner monologue traces her self-perceived transformation into a grotesque rearrangement of herself that progresses further during each encounter with the mirror. This internal revision of her identity demonstrates the damaging psychological consequence of the school’s environment and is further illustrated by her recurrent sighting of multiple reflections and trapped figures in her walls that reflect the helplessness of her situation. During one particular period of insomnia, she studies her reflection and readjusts her facial features to reimagine herself as a gruesome anomaly. Her self-perception in the following passage is especially reminiscent of the anonymous narrator’s sighting of ‘strangled heads and bulbous eyes’48 in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s discussion of women and madness in The Yellow Wallpaper, as both texts concern themselves with the psychological plight of docile female bodies that are subject to the tyranny of domineering patriarchs. [F]reida’s self-inflicted dissection also links her to Jackson’s Everywoman as she describes her reflection in corpse-like and monstrous terms: Turning on my side, I press my fingertips into the glass wall, watching that girl in the mirror. Her features float off her face, swimming in the air before rearranging themselves in the strangest way. Her eyes 190

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Evolving are too big, black in her pallid skin. Her lips are bloodless, gloopy bits of dried spit forming in the cracks, her jaw jutting out.49

This vision of freida confirms not only her posthuman (‘bloodless’) Gothic (‘eyes . . . too big, black . . . pallid skin’) status but also a newly developed disassociation with her mirror image which remains for the duration of the story. This estrangement is demonstrated again by her reaction to chastity-magdalena’s observation of her reflection which she dismisses as a watched figure that is merely ‘another image of myself, one more image out of thousands and thousands that I’ve been presented with during my life, told this image is real, now this is real, no, this one and this one and this one. I’m constantly trying to match all the thoughts in my head with these images in front of me, trying to put all the pieces of myself back together until I’m complete, until I can feel whole.’50 The Russian-doll-like structure of the images in this description links her to the fragmented figure of the Everywoman for a final time as well as to the reader of Patchwork Girl who must assemble and construct the pieces of the Everywoman in order to progress with the story, and it is only at this point that freida surrenders to her fate as being just ‘an imprint of a real person. I am nothing.’51 Her choice of wording in these sentences raises the concept of the Baudrillardian simulacrum once again as she questions the nature of her existence and self-worth. By the end of the novel she has submitted completely to the horror that she is not a real person and in doing so she rejects any remaining claim to herself as she watches ‘in the mirrored walls . . . this face that is so familiar yet which never feels as if it belongs to me. It is the property of the School, of the Zone, of my future Husband.This face is my worth, my value. This face is all that I have to offer and it isn’t even mine. I watch myself for hours. I watch myself until this face becomes meaningless.’52 Despite her extensive training, freida commits the ultimate crime of trying to manipulate an Inheritant into choosing her to be his Companion and as punishment she must become a chastity. This sentence demands severe changes to her physical beauty and identity. She details her punishment as follows: ‘they shaved my head . . . they ripped my useless womb out and I am empty, so empty . . . I am chastity-felicity now.They have even taken my name 191

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from me.’53 Her newly absent womb can be read in terms of Diane Long Hoeveler’s definition of Gothic feminism and how it is ‘embodied in the sense of . . . the female body as a void, an empty signifier’.54 [F]reida’s one comfort is that within her new living quarters ‘[t]here are no mirrors . . . and I am glad of that’.55 Her punishment is taken one step further at the very end of the story when she is sent Underground with all the other girls who break the rules. Here it is implied that she will be destroyed and studied in order to identify the cause of her rebellious tendencies and prevent further outbreaks in future eves. The dissection involved in this study mimics Victor’s destruction of his female monster in Frankenstein and indicates that she will now be transformed into a subverted version of the Everywoman who is no longer whole and will never be reassembled. [F]reida’s fate is a morbid reminder of the helplessness of the female figure in this text as, in her position as a man-made and posthuman Gothic creation, she is at the mercy of her patriarchal maker. Her inability to fulfil her performative duty as an obedient and feminine vision of doll-like perfection ensures that she must be punished and/or removed from the text in order to maintain the strict regulations of its social order. While Only Ever Yours can be read as an exaggerated version of patriarchy, which amplifies the ridiculous performative and beauty standards that modern society demands of women, it is extremely accurate in its representation of the perpetual voyeurism that is an intrinsic part of the female experience as well as its corresponding psychological plight. Furthermore, freida’s descent into madness shows how the impossible demands of femininity can dehumanize the female figure by causing her to view herself in fragmented terms as a series of body parts rather than as a whole being. The distorted nature of this self-image raises the notion of the Baudrillardian simulacrum in relation to how women often imagine themselves to be merely a poor imitation of the perfect woman. Their perspective is altered to such an extent that they forget their status as real human beings and think of themselves in reductive terms as a disjointed or patchwork physicality that could potentially be flawless if they would only subject their bodies to surgical procedures that would disassemble and reassemble their form in a new design. The desire to 192

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replace a natural body with a man-made creation would then potentially categorize the natural woman as posthuman in terms of her possession of a scientifically determined design basis and physicality, and as Gothic in relation to how her existence would eventually eradicate and replace real women, thus creating a version of society similar to that of O’Neill’s text. Notes Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 6. 2 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 6. 3 Louise O’Neill, Only Ever Yours (London: Quercus Publishing, 2013), p. 1. 4 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 49. 5 Clare Broome Saunders, ‘Incarcerating the Sane: The Asylum and Female Powerlessness in Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction’, in Maria Purves (ed.), Women and Gothic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 153. 6 Saunders, ‘Incarcerating the Sane’, p. 153. 7 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 66. 8 Cixous, Newly Born Woman, p. 66. 9 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London:Vintage, 1997), p. 306. 10 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, p. 306. 11 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, p. 306. 12 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, p. 306. 13 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 7. 14 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 40. 15 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 147. 16 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 59. 17 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 13. 18 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 58. 19 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 51. 20 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Harper Collins, 2012), pp. 67–9. 21 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 46. 1

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Posthuman Gothic O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 46. O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 46. 24 M. Mori, ‘The Uncanny Valley’, Energy, 7/4 (1970), 33–5. 25 Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (London: Eastgate, 1997). 26 Jackson, Patchwork Girl. 27 M. Mulvey-Roberts, ‘The After-Lives of the Bride of Frankenstein’, in Maria Purves (ed.), Women and Gothic (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 92. 28 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 53. 29 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 144. 30 Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism:The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998), p. 132. 31 Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism, p. 5. 32 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 19. 33 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, pp. 19–21. 34 Monica Germanà, Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 62. 35 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 36. 36 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York:Vintage, 1995), p. 138. 37 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, pp. 35–7. 38 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 37. 39 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 38. 40 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 8. 41 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 8. 42 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, pp. 5–6. 43 Aidan Day, Angela Carter:The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 110–11. 44 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 144. 45 Wolf, Beauty Myth, p. 157. 46 Wolf, Beauty Myth, p. 230. 47 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 94. 48 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (New York: Dover, 1997), p. 14. 49 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 45. 22 23

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Evolving O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 144. O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 141. 52 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 303. 53 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 380. 54 Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism, p. 183. 55 O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, p. 380. 50

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Part IV Reimagined

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11 Being Virtual: The True (Posthu)man Show Dennis Yeo

 Prologue The Truman Show (Weir, 1998) is an unlikely movie to be mentioned with regards to Gothic film. The bright mise en scène and casting of Jim Carrey is atypical of the dark gloom commonly associated with the horror and dread of the Gothic tradition. It is precisely this veneer of jollity which accentuates the sinister deception that Truman is victim to and belies the underlying disruption of accepted notions of the human. More than just a liminal or abject being, the posthuman explores not the post life of our humanity, but the possible half-lifes which we may be compelled to inhabit because of technoscientific progress. These potential monstrous Others which we are in the process of becoming manifest themselves in forms which are inhuman, subhuman or abhuman, yet which remain fundamentally human. Drawing from antecedents like Moreau’s hybrids, Frankenstein’s biotech creations and Jekyll’s experiments, the posthuman in the Gothic questions how ‘this anxiety about technology-based dehuman­ ization also forces us to reconceptualize what it means to be human’.1 The Truman Show is Gothic because it questions the authenticity of our reality and the unity of our being. Both satire and allegory, and comedy and tragedy, the movie defies generic definition and

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self-reflexively interrogates the process of its own fabrication. If the posthuman Gothic arises ‘from the interfaces and integrations of humans and technologies’,2 Truman is a potential future product of the capabilities of media corporations and humanity’s fascination with watching themselves represented onscreen.This led critics to find the movie ‘profoundly disturbing’, ‘perhaps the scariest movie in years’.3 Instead of the dystopian zombies or the clones, androids and cyborgs of a utopian artificial intelligence, the next step in the ongoing evolution of humankind is the technologically mediated human, caught in a liminal state between a dehumanized reality and a virtual existence. This virtual embodiment is the result of screen and imaging technologies that range from seeing people in a box or on Skype, the creation of an avatar in a role-playing game (RPG) to the simple act of taking a selfie and multiplying it as it goes viral. The age of the posthuman is not in the future, it is already upon us. Virtual Reality The world of the Gothic posthuman interrogates the concept of reality as an artificial construct. As it distorts and defamiliarizes our concept of reality, ‘the Gothic is revealed not as an escape from the real but a deconstruction and dismemberment of it’.4 Truman is the simulacrum of a human life incarcerated, under perpetual surveillance and alienated by his abjection. He lives in a fictional world where all the people in his life are actors, all the places sets and all the objects props on the largest soundstage ever created so fans around the world can watch every minute of his life in real time. Like the ‘reality’ of a movie set, Truman’s environment is manufactured just for him. ‘The Truman Show’ is a laboratory experiment with a living subject. Random variables are controlled in order to answer the question Descartes posed: how do we know that what we are experiencing is ‘real’? Although ‘nothing about Truman is fake’, everything else around him is. The surreal theme park utopian setting of Seahaven is reminiscent of Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley because it is too perfect to be natural.5 The streets are spotlessly clean, the weather is perfect and the friendly neighbours greet one another on cue. His childhood phobias, particularly 200

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Reimagined

his aquaphobia, are artificially embedded in his psyche for the purpose of containing him on the island of Seahaven.6 Unaware of the hypernatural artificiality of this perfect set, Truman believes this simulacrum to be his reality. The virtuality of the posthuman is thus produced by rendering reality virtual. By depicting a heterotopia of realities – Truman’s world in the Dome, that of the diegetic audience, and us, the cinema audience and our reality – the movie, like the Gothic, questions the notion that there can only be one reality. This stratification of realities implies a gradation of authenticity. Like the play within the play, the set façade of Seahaven is, like Baudrillard’s Disneyland, a sub-real world located within the diegetic world of the diegetic audience. As they look into the people within the Dome, the diegetic audience outside the Dome believes that they exist in a reality which is more authentic than the television show they are watching but likewise, so do we, the cinema audience, who are more ‘real’ than the reality of the diegetic audience. ‘Neither element can be separated from its “other” and thus its otherness-in-itself . . . so that we can seem whole in contrast.’7 When one reality supersedes another, the latter becomes fake, relative to the first.The artificial acts as the Other by which the real can be defined. The mastermind-director of ‘The Truman Show’, Christof, explains the phenomenon of Truman’s acceptance of his reality by saying that ‘we accept the reality of the world with which we are presented’. In the same way, instead of questioning if our reality is indeed real, we too have accepted the simulation of our reality as real. Since the criterion of what is real to us is actually based on our present paradigm of reality, we are trapped in an existential entropy within which we cannot ascertain how real our reality is. Ironically, like the diegetic audience, to escape from our reality, we opt to participate in fictional and artificial realities depicted in film, television and computer games. In The Truman Show, these planes of reality are divided by a screen. In the scenes when the diegetic audience are shown watching television, the cinema audience is aware that we are actually watching them as well. In this way, the diegetic audience themselves is being watched although they are unaware of it. By implication, this voyeurism and surveillance extends to the cinema audience. Peter Weir comments that: 201

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Posthuman Gothic I even had a crazy idea at one time, which was impossible technically. I would have loved to have had a video camera installed in every theater the film was to be seen. At one point, the projectionist would cut power and could cut to the viewers in the cinema and then back to the movie. But I thought it was best to leave that idea untested.8

By staring directly at the camera, the diegetic audience breaks the fourth wall and presents the possibility that they are watching us. In this way, the cinema audience is themselves virtualized. By extension, then, the question is whether there is an alternate reality which is, in turn, watching us. This cultural fear of virtuality is ambivalent as ‘the prospect of becoming posthuman both evokes terror and excites pleasure’.9 The Truman Show reflects a zeitgeist which questions the reality of our reality. Its displacement and replacement of reality realize Baudrillard’s simulacrum by presenting the image of reality as reality itself, and perhaps, reality as its own image. Virtual Origins The posthuman raises epistemological and ontological notions of being, becoming and non-being. The identity of the Gothic posthuman is born from the narrative reconstruction of a forgotten history and a fractured memory. Like the monster, the identity of the posthuman is indeterminate, displaced and alienated because it has no origins. With no trace of parentage, Truman’s character is a construct of Christof ’s creation. Despite Christof ’s claim that ‘there’s nothing fake about Truman himself ’, Truman’s identity is as much simulated as his reality. Even his name is fabricated from ‘true man’ and Burbank, the ‘Media Capital of the World’ in Los Angeles, California.10 Although Truman grew up with an inherent quest for adventure and exploration, his desire to be like Magellan is quelled by his teacher’s remarks that there is nothing left to discover and by Truman’s belief in the drowning of his father Kirk.This memory is authentic as this is a lived event in Truman’s life albeit one which is enacted. Likewise, Marlon’s recollection of their childhood is true because the incidents they shared did occur and this seals Truman’s 202

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trust in his companion. Marlon asserts the authenticity of the reality programme when he states that ‘it’s all true, it’s all real; nothing here is fake . . . it’s merely controlled’. The photographs of Truman’s childhood and marriage also serve as reminders of his history, but, unbeknownst to him, his entire life has been archived, compiled and replicated in ‘the greatest hits tape’. Like his childhood toys, Truman’s secrets are kept in a locked trunk in his subterranean basement. Dressed in shorts like a little boy as he opens it,Truman finds, amongst his other mementoes, the sweater of Lauren, his high-school crush. By recreating what he remembers of Lauren’s face,Truman’s identikit collage also represents the fragmented nature of his memory. In this way, the reality of his memory anchors Truman to his concept of reality. His memory is intrinsically flawed since the events of his life have been engineered and the people who share his collective memory are the cast of the television show and its audience. When Truman stands at the exit of his world, Christof tries to capitalize on this history in a last-ditch effort to lure him back.Truman’s rejection of this plea is a dismissal of the fake memory of his false life hitherto and a decision to forge a new identity of authentic experiences. Truman’s posthuman virtuality is also inextricably linked with the medium of television, and the idea of actors taking on a virtual identity and the virtual onscreen presence of these actors. The mise en abyme of multiple realities is paralleled as the real-life actress, Laura Linney, plays the character Hannah Gill, who acts as Meryl Burbank. Although Christof attributes the success of the show to the idea that ‘we’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions’, Marlon, who grew up with Truman as a child, ‘has to be perpetually false to a person who is authentically probably his best friend in the world’.11 The viewer is not immune from this virtualization. The intercutting of the prologue between the opening credits, Truman, and the interviews with Christof and the cast members, makes the cinema audience aware that they are concomitantly watching both the television programme and the movie.The conventional opening movie credits are replaced by the opening credits of ‘The Truman Show’, which feature ‘Truman Burbank as himself ’ and a programme ‘created by Christof ’, instead of headlining Jim Carrey or Peter Weir. It is notable that if the television 203

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programme is being broadcast non-stop for twenty-four hours, the opening credits function only to meet the expectations of the cinema audience and to cue them to participate in this role-play. The timely flashbacks which recapitulate the memory of past episodes are also for the benefit of the cinematic audience to provide a backstory to present events. This immediately causes the cinema audience to identify with the diegetic audience, virtually making the cinema audience part of the movie. Virtual Personality This virtualization of personality is most evident the first time we cross into the Ecosphere and see the mechanizations which go behind the programme. As Truman’s childhood friend, Marlon is the natural choice for Truman to confide in. While he reminisces with Truman and comforts him, we, like Truman, are touched by his genuine friendship until the movie cuts into the Ecosphere and we realize that Christof has been feeding Marlon his lines and that we have been duped.This time, as Marlon continues talking, we see through his artificiality and Christof ’s manipulative artistry. In the reunion scene between Truman and his father, we watch Christof control the camera angles and musical score to maximize the emotional response of the diegetic audience and we become cognizant of how they too have been hoodwinked.The diegetic audience, unlike the cinema audience, is not privy to the goings-on in the hypodiegetic Ecosphere. Although they are aware that Marlon is an actor in Truman’s world, they are unaware that the words Marlon is saying are actually scripted by Christof and not improvised. Like Truman, who believes Marlon when he says those words, the diegetic audience plays along with the illusion buying into the reality which Truman believes to be real although they know it is false. Enraptured by the programme and living vicariously through him, they are as much prisoners of the illusion as Truman is. The cinema audience, however, is aware that when Marlon tells Truman that ‘the last thing I’d ever do is lie to you’, he is merely a puppet repeating the words of the puppet-master. Being privy to the artifice of the scene and the fact that Christof is cueing Marlon increases the sense of deceit 204

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and betrayal that the cinema audience feels, causing them to sympathize with Truman. Instead of marginalizing him, the status of the posthuman as outsider ironically, like other Gothic monsters before him, makes Truman the centre of attention. Truman’s life is under constant gaze but, unlike a prisoner within a panopticon, he is unaware that he is being watched. The paranoia he feels only sets in when he begins to suspect that he is somehow important enough to warrant any attention.Truman’s suspicion arises because of the transgression of realities which upsets his perceived reality of the world. The catalyst is Kirk’s infiltration of the show, a ghostly unheimlich return, especially since Truman has been repressing the guilt he feels for causing his father’s death. When Truman’s car radio crosses frequency, he unwittingly eavesdrops on the parallel behind-thescenes world which directs the action in his world.12 As he pauses in his routine to scrutinize the behaviour of the ‘regular people’ around him, the apparent normalcy of his everyday life intensifies the increasing suspicion of the abnormality of Seahaven. Everyone acts as if all this is normal when it is evident to Truman that something is amiss. It is precisely the assumed familiarity of this ordinariness which renders any potential threat undetectable and thus more alarming. The irony, of course, is that Truman is the only true man in a world where personality is virtualized. Although we sympathize with Truman, our spectatorship indirectly endorses Christof ’s exploitation of his plight. Truman’s comment that ‘everybody seems to be on it’ cuts across the layers of realities and includes the cinema audience. The virtual posthuman is also manifested when actors merely play roles and follow a scripted life.This fakery is exposed when the pretence unravels and the supporting cast is found to be untrained to operate the prop bus or to perform a surgery. In this instance, the Gothic monster ‘arises out of the notion of simulation, particular in relation to “virtual” living and performative identities’.13 The script, perfected and embellished, is thus a simulation, which is incongruent with the reality of the unrehearsed spontaneity of authentic dialogue. This approximate proximity to human likeness turns our empathy for the characters to revulsion and evokes the eeriness Mori refers to as the Uncanny Valley. Truman’s morning greeting is a repeated 205

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catchphrase which comes across as clichéd and exaggerated. Meryl’s overly enthusiastic smile and forced cheer is feigned and turns her into an automaton, which merely regurgitates meaningless words. The discourse of advertising seeps into the dialogue as Meryl breaks the fourth wall to describe the wonders of a product to the diegetic audience.When she is confronted by Truman later, she falls back on this scripted advertisement as it makes her feel that she has at least regained control over an impromptu situation. The sponsorship of ‘The Truman Show’ emphasizes its economic motive and its parasitic dependency on its viewership. As the show is one endless episode ‘broadcast live and unedited twenty-four hours a day seven days a week’, commercials are embedded as subtexts within the narrative of Truman’s life.This overt product placement gives the illusion that the Burbanks are actually using this product. Truman unwittingly does a celebrity endorsement when a tickertape scrolls across the screen as he drinks his morning coffee.14 Such advertising is intrinsically linked to identity as it convinces viewers that they can be someone if they use a particular product or that their lives are incomplete without the product. The paraphernalia surrounding the programme include compilation videos, talk shows and global merchandising. In fact, ‘everything on the show is on sale’ and viewers can pick from the Truman catalogue and call a hotline.This promotion and marketing of Truman further contribute to his posthuman status as an entity which is manufactured, multiplied and distributed.The diegetic audience is complicit in this conspiracy as the programme’s ratings contributes to the continued airing of the show and the prolongation of Truman’s incarceration, commodification and consumption. Entrapment for the posthuman is thus not just physical or psychological, but existential. Truman is physically trapped in the set of Seahaven and psychologically enslaved to the memories of his childhood, but his real prison is his life. The photograph of him as a toddler dressed in a clown-suit behind the bars of his cot accurately depicts him as both performer and prisoner.The image of Truman going in circles at a roundabout and being ‘blocked at every turn’ is symbolic of his attempts to break free from this gridlock.The trap, Truman realizes, is not a product of Christof ’s ability to control ‘beautifully synchronized’ traffic, but the predictability of his routine. 206

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By noticing the repetitious nature of his world, he breaks the code and realizes ‘they’re on a loop . . . they just go round and round’, alluding to the cyclical existence which we ourselves live. His frantic spontaneity subverts the order established by Christof, in which ‘any unpredictable behaviour has to be reported’. The predictable cycle of Truman’s life is equally comforting to the diegetic audience who leaves ‘him on all night for comfort’ and the television on even when the programme is temporarily suspended.The perfection of Seahaven is a form of wish-fulfilment. Meryl describes ‘The Truman Show’ as a ‘lifestyle’. By placing their concern for a fictitious character before that of their fellow human being, the diegetic audience neglects their customers, their work and other aspects of their lives. Money is spent buying merchandise and viewers call up talk shows to discuss the lives of non-existent characters as if they were real. The diegetic audience living vicariously through Truman’s life are thus denying their ‘reality’ and living in a simulacrum. Screenwriter Andrew Niccol said in an interview, ‘I’m interested in this idea of who’s the real captive – is it Truman, or is it the viewers watching Truman?’ Before the domination of Reality Television in network programming, the movie had already exposed the voyeuristic inclination of a contemporary audience. Joseph Crawford suggests that the Gothic ‘tends to mutate further with every generation, taking advantage of the possibilities offered by each new form of media technology for the articulation of monstrosity, instability and disruption’.15 While today’s televisual cyberworld breeds a culture of spectacle, narcissism and voyeurism, it also results in a global synopticism of representation, control and paranoia. Virtual Creation Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, the narrative of creation, death and rebirth in The Truman Show undergirds this exposé of our sense of being and identity, and the unknowingness of life. As a result, there is usually a religious subtext in the Gothic of the nature of our creation. Seahaven is a simulated cosmos in which Christof is its omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent god. He tells Truman that he was present at every point of Truman’s development and that he has been 207

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‘watching you your whole life’. With his Omnicam, Christof presumes he sees, knows and controls all that happens in the universe of Seahaven which he has created. Marlon tells Truman, ‘Look at the sunset Truman. It’s perfect.That’s the big guy. Quite a paintbrush he’s got.’ In Truman’s world, the ‘big guy’ is Christof, who cues the sun, hastens the sunrise and controls storms. His actors are auto­ matons he manipulates and gives voice to. He even appears to stop time when his actor-props are told to return to their starting positions.The repetitive and absolute manipulation of Truman’s cosmos negates any dilemma or any genuine need to make choices. Like Deleuze’s society of control,Truman’s world is totalitarian and raises questions on the themes of free will, fate and predestination. For instance, Truman’s infatuation with Lauren is deflected by his pre-­ arranged marriage with Meryl.This battle for Truman between the maternal Lauren and the paternal Christof is depicted in parallel shots when they caress his screen-within-the-screen image. When he exercises his free choice,Truman’s rebellion is akin to that of the archetypal overreacher’s revolt against his god. In a stereotypical parody of what we have come to perceive to be godlike, Christof speaks to Truman through the clouds and tells him, ‘You can speak, I can hear you.’This knowing position is analogous to the Creator’s relation to His creation, the author’s relationship with his text and the director’s control of his film. Again, this virtualization is transferred onto the cinema audience as the movie interrogates the process of its own fabrication and the game of illusion which it plays with the audience. The simulation is so complete that ‘all possible authenticity has become subsumed within the many masks of replica’.16 The fragmentation of the Gothic text is expressed in the self-reflexive metacinema which blurs the line between the movie and the television show and their directors, Weir and Christof. As the director of the movie directing the director of the television programme,Weir is the actual one who controls the action and not Christof. Just as Christof remains invisible to the diegetic audience, Weir uses Christof as a mask for his own mechanizations. The director of The Truman Show, Peter Weir, is himself controlling real-life actors in our reality acting as real people in the diegetic audience, watching the real-life actors of the diegetic world, who are being directed by Christof, the director of the television 208

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programme, to act as characters in ‘The Truman Show’. Although Jim Carrey is not being directed by Christof, he is being directed by Weir in his role as Truman. The cinematic audience is so taken in by Christof ’s manipulation of his audience in the reunion scene that they are distracted from Weir’s artistic manipulation of the scene as he has scripted and cued Ed Harris, the actor playing Christof, in the same way as Christof has done to his actors. When Christof resumes transmission after Truman is found, the audience readily assumes that the music accompaniment is being played in the Omnicam studio as it was earlier. The music, however, comes to an abrupt halt when the yacht crashes into the cyclorama of the Dome. There is silence as Truman realizes that he has literally reached the end of his world before the music plays again building to an emotional crescendo. At this point, although we are made to believe that we are seeing the same television images as the diegetic audience and that Christof is still directing the scene, the camera angles and soundtrack are being decided by Weir to evoke in the cinematic audience the same response as it does the diegetic audience.Without us knowing, the audience is now watching the movie directed by Weir as it is implausible for Christof to have positioned cameras to capture any activity at the edge of the Dome. The virtual artifice of Truman’s reality is compounded by the simulacra of Weir’s direction, which is camouflaged by Christof. Weir gives the semblance of the movie being shot from hidden cameras utilizing awkward framing caused by unusual camera positions and angles to simulate the use of hidden cameras. As the camera placements in the Dome are fixed and stationary, he uses only zoom shots and there are no tracking shots in the movie except for hand-held perspectives from moving objects.To distinguish a TV shot from a movie shot,Weir uses a gobo which creates a vignette edge around the corners of the frame.17 The footage of the cinematic audience and the Omnicam crew are thus invariably shot without an iris.18 Theoretically the cinema audience should see every shot of the television programme which the diegetic audience sees but this is not so. For example, the falling of the studio light would not have been captured by the cameras as it was not planned or predicted by Christof. As Truman sits by the beach, there is a flashback of the drowning sequence but it would 209

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be impossible for Christof to have known that Truman was replay­ ing the incident in his mind. Since ‘you never had a camera in my head’, Christof should not have any access to Truman’s thought processes. Likewise, in his flirting with Lauren, Truman is framed by a hidden camera but the full screen shot of Lauren is from his perspective and is unmotivated. The use of extreme close-ups, albeit sparing, is also unconvincing as a hidden camera would not be able to frame the image so accurately. In the final scenes, Christof sets up his ‘hero shot’ from a camera on the yacht but the other shots from the water or underwater which are supposedly direct from hidden cameras for the television broadcast are un­ believable. The gobo shot of Truman at the wall is similarly questionable. The god behind the intensification of the storm is not Christof, but Weir.The curious observation is that the cinema audience hardly notices this directorial sleight of hand except with repeated viewings, demonstrating how readily we have accepted the simulacrum of Christof ’s omnipresence and the credibility of the movie’s premise. Epilogue Truman’s life is played out like a soap opera ‘full of laughter and love, pain and sadness, but ultimately redemption’. When Truman realizes his entire world has been a lie, and that the reality he was in was not ‘reality’ as we know it, he asks ‘Then who am I?’ The Gothic exposes the simulacrum which is life. Like ‘The Truman Show’, life is lived ‘live’; everything is experienced in the present and we have no idea ‘how is it going to end’. In Truman’s words, ‘This isn’t about insurance. This is about the great variable: when will death occur? Could be a week, a month, a year, could be today.’ In suggesting that there is ‘no way to guard against this kind of thing’,Truman subscribes to the theory that life is chaotic. Christof tells Lauren, ‘The world, the place you live in, is the sick place. Seahaven is the way the world should be.’ Having made his metaphorical epic voyage and been baptized by the tempest,Truman can no longer remain in a ‘reality’ no matter how perfect when he knows it is a lie. Like Pinocchio, the boy becomes a man. ‘The silent 210

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omnipresent horror of the situation is that if Truman doesn’t wake up to the lie of his life, he’ll die within that lie, never having truly experienced anything.’19 In rejecting the proposed alternative ending which was considered of showing Lauren and Truman happy together while watching Christof ’s new reality programme, the conclusion of the movie refuses to assure the audience of a typical romantic ending in which Truman and Lauren are reunited, which will, in turn, signify that Truman will eventually find happiness in the world outside the Dome. The Truman Show expresses a scepticism about existential authenticity, about the possibility of a true self in a true place, and in doing so shares the Gothic concern of defining our humanness. The anxiety at the heart of the genre is, indeed, the nature of human being . . . the state of being human . . . shading over into nonhuman categories . . . this confrontation with uncertainty, with the ‘unnatural’, with a violation of the ontological categories in which being and culture reside.20

In his final overture to Truman, Christof tells him that ‘there’s no more truth out there than in the world I created for you – the same lies, the same deceit. But in my world you have nothing to fear.’ These words refer to the diegetic world of the movie but also by extension implicate our reality. Likewise, the actors in the Dome parallel the actors performing as the diegetic audience which also extends to the role-playing in our lives.‘The spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance.’21 In the same manner, Christof ’s powers as director are subsumed under Weir’s direction. While the panopticon depends on visibility, and the power to penetrate darkness and make things visible, its operations remained unseen. Power sees but is not seen. Its subject knows it sees . . . the desire for concealment signals criminal intent. But it also signifies an identification with power which sees and is not seen.22

This godlike power to control the fates and events of life is rendered suspicious and potentially malicious.The movie raises epistemological 211

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and ontological issues as the reality of our lives is subject to the presumption that there is no outside reality beyond ours. In this way, virtuality constructs a domain of reality ‘mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject’.23 When Truman bows and takes his leave, he breaks the fourth wall and his final greeting cuts through the heterotopias of the Dome, the diegetic audience and our reality. In Jacques Derrida’s words, we are ‘spectralised by the shot’.24 The final object of scorn however is not reserved for Christof but for the diegetic audience. Channel surfing to a new spectacle, they persist in i­gnoring reality, choosing instead to continue existing in a virtual simulacrum. Notes J ustin D. Edwards (ed.), Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 2. 2 M. S. Bolton, ‘Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic’, Aeternum, 1/1 (2014), 2. 3 S. Vaknin, ‘The Truman Show’, http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/12-20-2001-8286.asp (accessed 2005); J. Cozzi,‘The Truman Show’ (1998), http://www.mixedreviews.net/maindishes/1998/trumanshow/ trumanshow.shtml (accessed 15 June 2015). 4 David Punter, The Literature of Terror – Volume One (London: Longman, 1996), p. 85. 5 Although the task of special effects is to make the movie photorealistic, the team was tasked to create a heightened stylized hyperreality for The Truman Show, including the creation of man-made ‘natural’ effects like sunsets.This ‘art-directed world’, which had to look like someone had designed it, had too much fill light and a brighter pastel colour palette. Due to constraints, the town centre was also created digitally adding artifice upon artifice. DVD Extras, ‘Faux Finishing: The Visual Effects of The Truman Show’, The Truman Show, dir. Peter Weir (Paramount Pictures, 2007). 6 Although it appears like a set, the film was filmed on an actual location in a ‘ghastly candy floss town’, which Weir said some described as 1

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Reimagined ‘hideous’ and an example of the ‘futuristic horror of urban planning’: see ‘How’s it going to end? The Making of The Truman Show, Part II’, The Truman Show. 7 Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 157. 8 Dan Lybarger, ‘More to Digest than Popcorn: An Interview with Peter Weir’ (1998), http://www.tipjar.com/dan/peterweir.htm (accessed 15 June 2015). 9 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 283. 10 The screen names, and thus identities, of the other characters are no less original being derivations from famous thespians like Meryl Streep, Lauren Bacall, Marlon Brando and Kirk Douglas. 11 Noah Emmerich, who plays Marlon, in ‘How’s it going to end? The Making of The Truman Show, Part I’, The Truman Show.The DVD Extra also describes how Peter Weir created backstories for the other characters to help the actors understand their personalities and motivation. 12 In the deleted scenes, Truman recognizes an extra in different roles – first, as a paraplegic he was generous to and then, as a jogger – by the shoes he wears (‘Deleted Scenes’, The Truman Show). 13 M. Germanà, ‘Being Human? Twenty-First-Century Monsters’, in Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (eds), The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 69. 14 The product placement is overt as generally product placement is done without disclosure as a natural part of the diegetic world. 15 J. Crawford, ‘Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology’, in Edwards (ed.), Technologies of the Gothic, p. 40. 16 David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 274. 17 A gobo is a physical stencil or template slotted inside, or placed in front of, a lighting source, used to control the shape of the emitted light. 18 However, this is not the case as Weir’s concern was that overusing the technique would distract the audience and so these were mixed with full-screen shots. 19 [Anon.], ‘A Wisdom of Film: A Life of Lies – The Truman Show’, The Gurdjieff Journal, http://www.gurdjieff-legacy.org/40articles/truman.htm (accessed 15 June 2015). 213

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Posthuman Gothic  tephen Prince (ed.), The Horror Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers S University Press, 2004), p. 2. 21 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 14. 22 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 257. 23 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. xiii. 24 Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question:The Poetic of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 177. 20

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12 The Posthuman Monstrous can only be Gothic, or Screening Alien Sex Fiends Evan Hayles Gledhill

 This chapter examines the presentation of Gothic monsters in science fictions that screen the posthuman:1 the Alien films focused on the character Ellen Ripley (1979–2012),2 and instances of the multiple Star Trek series and films that have depicted the cybernetic Borg Collective3. Addressing the concept of the monster and the human as cross-referential categories of subjectivity, through the construction of monstrosity proposed by Canguilhem and Foucault, this chapter explores the ways in which the Gothic, the monstrous, and the posthuman are inextricably interconnected by the idea of transgression. Gothic is dark, discomforting, unstable. The Gothic exists in the margins, it can exist in fragments; as a house divided against itself, it still stands. It does not seek wholeness or perfection, it revels in transgression.4 This is also the space of the monstrous as defined by Canguilhem: that which is not whole, that does not meet expectations and fails in cohesion, that which transgresses. The monstrous subject, as Margrit Shildrick has argued, challenges the boundaries of the humanist subject constructed in Western enlightenment philosophies, by demanding its own perspective and agency be recognized and validated.5 The monster and the posthuman are both figures that extend, challenge and disrupt the boundaries of the ‘human’.The terminology of trans-, post- or pan-human still references humanity, and while a human referent remains, so too will

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their counterpart the monster.There can, this chapter argues, be no such thing as a postmonstrous era. The posthuman can be Gothic, it can be monstrous, but it is not necessarily either.The singular posthuman may be monstrous when judged against the boundaries and limits of a human society, and this posthuman would then also be Gothic, existing in liminal space, causing unease and tension. Although it is possible to be a non-Gothic posthuman, there appears to be no such thing as a non-Gothic monster; the monster remains on the boundaries.The monster, in turn, can invoke the posthuman when it demonstrates a subjective selfhood that humanists thought previously to be reserved for the human species. Thus, posthuman monstrosity, specifically, can only be Gothic, because the Gothic is the liminal space in which culture addresses endings, and hauntings of that which does not end. The monstrous posthuman contemplates the demise of the human referent as recognizable subject: what is more Gothic than the associated state changes that the corpus undergoes in death? Ripley’s alien (m)Other and the Borg collective both begin as unquestionable monsters but, over the course of the narratives, parts of the other become incorporated into the (dying) human self, transforming it into the Gothic posthuman. I, Monster: Embodied Subjectivity The human, I argue, is an unstable subject, constructed through the establishment and maintenance of constantly reconfigured boundaries and limits, such as sex, gender and species. As outlined by Canguilhem, it is the construction of boundaries that produces monstrosity: measured as deviant against two axes of normalcy – the physical and the moral.6 The first category depends upon a genus, or archetype, and thus Canguilhem states that the monster must be an ‘organic being’.7 A constructed machine or a geological specimen cannot be a monster by this definition, no matter how aesthetically unappealing; ‘that which has no rule of internal cohesion . . . a spectrum that can be called a measure, mold, or model – that cannot be called monstrous’.8 A machine that does not fulfil the purpose for which it was constructed is declared 216

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faulty, but as an invention it conforms to no innate genus. Canguilhem’s second category of judgement, morality, depends upon autonomous will; judging an action to be correct or incorrect has no meaning if the actant has no control – or no belief in their control. If this same judgement could apply to a machine, Canguilhem’s categorization of monstrosity is thus extended by the possibility of a mechanistic subjectivity. Foucault refined Canguilhem’s categorizations, stating that ‘there is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs, civil, canon, or religious law’.9 Foucault thus defines four potential boundaries for the monster to transgress – the natural, the legal, the social and the scriptural – all of which depend upon cultural interpretation. Shildrick goes further in explicating a culturally bounded identity formation, arguing that ‘the Western notion of subjectivity in general is both guaranteed and contested by those who do not, indeed cannot, unproblematically occupy the subject position’.10 Recognizing a boundary is to also recognize that which exists beyond or outside. The monster, therefore, might serve as a limit test for the human, but at the same time it contests those limits when ‘it’ simultaneously demands to be part of ‘us’. The phrase ‘posthuman’, adds a temporal prefix to the human and situates itself in the aftermath of the social and cultural movements known as humanism – beyond the ‘us’.11 According to N. Katherine Hayles,‘the posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’.12 In a posthuman culture, in which such an entity under constant reconstruction is normative, what would be termed transgression? It is almost impossible to imagine what could constitute a monster, and it would then seem that posthuman would also be postmonstrous. However, though Hayles is a theorist who approaches posthuman discourse with enthusiasm, Hans Moravec’s concept of human consciousness ‘downloaded’ into a computer still strikes her as a ‘nightmare’.13 Hayles suggests that disembodied consciousness would be monstrous; her insistence on the embodied subject, as always already the subject, thus both creates and denies the monster simultaneously.This calls for an examination of the ‘interdiscursivity’ of the monster and the posthuman. 217

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The posthuman declares itself at one and the same time ‘not’ human and yet ‘still’ human: it already resembles the monster.This is Patricia MacCormack’s view; that ‘the posthuman emphasizes that we are all, and must be, monsters because none are template humans’.14 The identity of monster or cyborg is therefore positioned as one that can be adopted, regardless of the material condition of the body, to liberate us from this binary paranoia that polices the boundaries. The monstrous is, for MacCormack, a site of resistance, as posthumanism is for Donna Haraway.15 However, the history of the terminology is inescapable, with pejorative connotations to the terms ‘monster’ and ‘inhuman’.These authors invoke the popular phrase the ‘promise of monsters’ but do not note, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen does, that the promise of the monster is often revenge upon its creator.16 We remain paranoid in our identification with, and fear of, the inhuman monster in the body of the Other. The humanist ideal of humanity is similar to Kant’s categorical imperative – the ‘universal moral law’ – in declaring that nothing should be considered essential to the individual human that one could not declare to be a universal ideal. This universality is ultimately problematic because at the heart of the humanist ideal is the individual subject as a discrete and self-sufficient entity. As explored within science fictions, from Poul Anderson’s ‘Un-Man’ (1953) to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (dir. George Lucas, 2002), a race of clones, all alike, is somehow less than human. In horror narratives, such as John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), a race of humanoids who reject individuality by sharing a ‘hive mind’ is depicted as likewise monstrously inhuman. Also explored in both genres is the fear of being mistaken for the Other, of one’s true humanity being misrecognized as simulacrum – which is echoed in the posthuman machine’s desire to be recognized as human, as with Star Trek android Data (Brent Spiner), and the gynoid Call (Winona Ryder) in Alien: Resurrection (dir. Jean Pierre Jeunet, 1997).

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‘In space no one can hear you scream’: The Gothic and Science Fiction Science fiction and the Gothic can be regarded as interconnected genres, but this would be a limited perspective. Gothic is, first and foremost, an aesthetic. In Anne Williams’s terms, it is ‘broader than genre, deeper than plot, and wider than a single tradition’.17 Gothic is used to create a tense or unstable atmosphere, to disrupt dominant narrative techniques, methods and messages in mainstream cultural offerings. It has the same liberatory potential as the posthuman. It also, as observed by Jarlath Killeen, disrupts time; as every era locates the Gothic in the past, whilst bringing it into the present, drawing parallels and forging new anachronisms.18 The idea of a futuristic Gothic, projecting this aesthetic forward in time, rather than backwards, can be seen in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), where the moral failures of the contemporary capitalist era are projected into the eventual downfall of the human race.Yet,Wells goes further still; attempting to envision a future for the Earth on the point of destruction, in the sun’s last years before supernova. Wells imagines posthumanism, avant la lettre, in such works and in The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). Like Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Wells’s scientists often see destruction at the hands of their posthuman creations and, like Shelley, the author does not kill off his posthuman creations, but leaves them to wander into the future. The Gothic science fictions of the late twentieth century are often similarly ambivalent in their presentation of the Gothic posthuman.Through the development of the monster into the familiar, or by the suggestion that the familiar is more dangerous than the monster, these narratives return to Wells’s theme that the current humanist society will create its monstrous posthuman Other. Or that it already has. This chapter focuses on Gothic posthumans in two of the most popular science fiction franchises of the late twentieth century, Alien and Star Trek. The Alien film franchise started with Ridley Scott’s titular film in 1979, and three direct sequels continued the story of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the ‘final girl’ of the original film.19 The off-shoot films AVP: Alien vs. Predator (dir. Paul W. S. Anderson, 219

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2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (dir. Greg and Colin Strause, 2007), and the prequel Prometheus (dir. Ridley Scott, 2012), occasionally utilize elements of the Gothic, but are not the main focus of this chapter which charts the development of the Gothic relationship between Ripley and the alien species as she becomes posthuman. Described, almost ad nauseam, as a horror film that transfers the haunted house to space, the original Alien utilizes the Gothic aesthetic. The crew of a workaday spacecraft full of used coffee cups and oil stains investigate a Gothic crashed ship  – fog-drenched and cavernous – on an apparently uninhabited planet. Unwittingly, it first seems, they bring back a deadly parasite that grows into a vicious monster. There are few blameless victims in this franchise, however, where most characters work for the corrupt Weylan-Yutani Corporation, or other military-industrial capitalist entities of an industrialist future. Though the alien species is certainly a dangerous Other, it is not in fact the origin of the heroes’ suffering. The true villains are other humans, who manipulate, deceive and exploit their fellows in the pursuit of the alien. All life forms are merely sentient commodities.20 Star Trek, the original series, was broadcast between 1966 and 1969, and has long been recognized for its humanist ideals.21 It is the later instalments of the franchise that address the posthuman, directly challenging some assumptions of the earlier series.The Star Trek reboots began in the 1980s, with series The Next Generation (hereafter TNG, 1987–94) and its spin-off film First Contact (dir. Jonathan Frakes, 1996). Then followed Deep Space Nine (1993–99), Voyager (1995–2001) and Enterprise (2001–5), all deploying many posthuman characters.The android Data and partial cyborg Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) of TNG live within a majority human society, as friends who navigate notions of what it means to be ‘human’ in their culture. Data is recognized as a subject with agency, but seeks an emotional capacity as a path to greater humanity, yet he finds that emotional response without physical stimulation lacks something his colleagues are unable to describe to his satisfaction (First Contact). A machine that wants to be incorporated into the human world is inevitably a posthuman subject. The posthuman that refuses to be incorporated into the humanist world view is conceived here as a Gothic monster.The futuristic society that forms 220

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part of the interplanetary Federation in Star Trek, with its visual aesthetic of bright, white spacecraft, full of overlit corridors and crew clothed in primary colours, has nothing of the Gothic. Gothic, here, is not an inevitable aspect of life but the dark side of humanism, the rejected space of monsters. This Gothic side of the posthuman is represented in Star Trek narratives by the Borg collective. ‘Resistance is futile’: The Inevitability of a Gothic Aesthetic The Borg Collective is represented as lacking any awareness of individuation, gender or sex; it has no art and recognizes no purpose beyond self-perfecting improvement, yet it has a unique and unified aesthetic, and this aesthetic is Gothic. Its drones are clothed in black and grey, its ships are industrial conglomerates with perfect geometric regularity, the interiors partially illuminated in red and green. There is little distinction made between drone and ship, as the same energy sources maintain both,22 and drones and ship alike are capable of ‘self-repair’.23 The Borg consists of a hive mind connecting cyborg ‘drones’ through a subspace frequency.24 Constantly expanding, yet never reproducing, the asexual Borg assimilates others, implanting a host organism with nanotechnology that transforms it, from within, into a drone and then maintains it. The converted drone takes on the appearance of an animated corpse – with inhumanly pale skin, dark eye sockets, and a ‘life support’ system of tubing and machinery embedded within its flesh. As identified within the series, for crew and viewer alike,‘[n]ot a he, not a she, not like anything you’ve ever seen before. An enhanced humanoid’.25 The physical capability of the body is certainly enhanced; with weapon-repelling shielding, and the apparent ability to restore life in conditions in which the unenhanced human would die. In the episode ‘Regeneration’ of Enterprise (2003), three Borg drones reanimate after over a century buried in Earth’s Arctic Circle after the events in First Contact. Reanimated, these long-frozen bodies immediately set about their mission of assimilation, and re-establish contact with the Collective to alert them to Earth’s location and suitability for colonization. The undifferentiated Borg resemble another 1980s science-­ fiction horror, the android Terminators: ‘it can’t be bargained with. 221

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It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.’26 Thus, the Borg transcends binaries. The Borg does not mourn the loss of a drone, it stops only to recover the usable parts of the corpse. It is relentless in its pursuit of its objectives, even travelling through time to achieve in the past what it cannot do in the present – for instance in the episode ‘Regeneration’.The Borg do not experience conventional emotional responses, which is presented as a by-product of the hive mind; there can be no desire, no longing, when there is no Other to desire and no experience of hunger.The Borg’s only objective is the ‘perfection’ of its self (this term used advisedly) as an entity; it seeks to add the ‘biological and technological distinctiveness’ of encountered species and cultures to its own.27 Though individual drones are all depicted as humanoid they are drawn from many biological species, and reference is made to the collective colonizing planets of non-­humanoids.28 No two drones depicted in the series are exactly alike in their cyborgization; the uniqueness of embodied existence is still recognized. Each assimilated body is adapted to become its most perfect version, with improvements seemingly fitted to its original capabilities and limitations. The Borg idea of perfection is never explained directly, but it is certainly hyper-rational and based on efficiency for survival. The Borg transcends binaries between art and science, collective and individual, agency and determinacy, supporting Halberstam and Livingstone’s claim that the posthuman emerges ‘out of a disenchantment that is both anti-aesthetic and anti-scientific’.29 The Gothic also revels in that which was declared ugly and proclaims beauty, suggesting that these oppositions are culturally constructed and artificial, and yet it retains an investment in cultural ideals; the abject is recognized to be repellent and yet fascinating. Mark Poster, exploring the Borg as a product of cultural paranoia, claims that the Collective are ‘physically ugly and morally repugnant . . . evil incarnate.The viewer must hate them and fear them.’30 Yet, this imperative ‘must’ does not hold true; the Borg are not universally despised by fans or even within the show itself.31 Though Poster claims that the audience are ‘put unequivocally in the position of detesting The Borg’,32 Star Trek’s creators go to a lot of trouble to debate the moral dangers of binaristic thinking. 222

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Dr Beverley Crusher (Gates McFadden) utterly rejects a plan to annihilate the entire Collective via a computer virus, and convinces Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) of the moral argument against this ‘genocide’.33 The Borg stimulates, rather than ends, debate; our fear of them does not insulate humanist ideals from critique, but opens up the space for acknowledgment of its flaws. The Gothic, like posthumanism, is a space of dialectic; not only as a critical idiom, but as a subculture and mode of artistic expression, engaging with the past and revelling in the inexplicable, whilst exploring the future and invested in the rational. Introduced as the ultimate villain of the future that humanity are not yet ready to face, the Borg are initially incomprehensible within the current epistemes regarding the human and the body.34 They are disembodied subjectivity with a body; the hive mind using body parts as tools, tools as body parts, with no differentiation between flesh and machine. Human bodies with no concept of what it means to be an individual. However, as these monstrous posthumans engage in negotiated ally-ship,35 so the horror of the Borg diminishes; as individuation becomes possible, so does full characterization. The first Borg to attain separation from the Collective is the drone designate Three of Five (Jonathan Del Arco), though Geordi renames him Hugh, as a symbolic play on ‘you’, in the episode ‘I, Borg’. Hugh’s concept of self is shown to cause a rift within the collective; a group of newly individuated drones form a separate society allied with Data’s ‘brother’ (an android from the same creator), Lore (Brent Spiner).36 Lore is untrammelled desire personified; unlike Data who longs to experience emotion to help him become more human, Lore revels in his mastery over human ‘weaknesses’ like emotion that would prevent him from realizing his desires. Styled as a modernist dictator, echoing the Gothic elements of twentieth-­ century fascism, Lore is an immoral machine; a monstrous paradox, as he contravenes Canguilhem’s own boundaries, his name reinforcing this role. Symbolically, it is Data who defeats Lore by rejecting the discourse of android superiority and supporting the humanist collective of Starfleet humanoids (including cyborgs like Geordi, and aliens such as the Klingon Worf, played by Michael Dorn). However, individualism and free will – the necessary basis of agency and desire – are always the values upheld. 223

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The reintroduction of individuality, and the difference and differentiation this brings, are however rejected by many Borg who attain separation from the collective and wish to return to the hive.37 The ex-Borg colonists of Unity are presented as a new horror; using Borg means to achieve seemingly humanist ends, they use their neural communicators to control others’ free will in the pursuit of peace. The Unity colonists hide their cyborg nature from the Federation representatives, until they are sure that they can achieve their goals. This is, once again, fear of simulacrum. Hugh and his colleagues, by contrast, retain the visible cyborgization, genderless appearance and Gothic aesthetic of the collective. They establish a median point between Borg, android and human – still able to connect with each other but choosing not to, offered the chance to ally with Starfleet society, yet choosing not to.They do not wish to follow the structured hierarchy of value offered by humanism in the model of Starfleet, but recognize the dangers of excess and desire represented by Lore – and later depicted in ‘Unity’. Like Frankenstein’s monster, they choose to remain in the wasteland, a haunting Gothic possibility of alienated, highly moral, monstrosity. ‘I don’t know which species is worse’: Human, Posthuman and Alien In Star Trek the monsters and posthumans slowly become more human, and those that deny the superiority of humanity are destroyed or banished. In the Alien franchise the horror develops in quite the reverse manner; though the outright aim is to domesticate the monster, in the end it is the human who must adapt or face extinction.The dangerous extraterrestrial species in the Alien film franchise again has a distinctly Gothic aesthetic, in contrast to the human heroes, with different designers employed to ensure that the visual styles of the two worlds were distinctively different.38 The alien does not change or develop in the first three films; the alien remains a monster, presented as an extraterrestrial animal and cunning predator. However, though this Gothic monster may transgress every boundary Foucault identified, it only encounters human limits because the human goes out to seek it.The humanist desire to impose rules 224

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and order, and to dominate ‘lesser’ beings, turns an extraterrestrial life form into a monster, a threat. Simon Bacon has gone so far as to label the alien queen the ‘final girl’ of the franchise;39 I argue that the hero Lt. Ellen Ripley still retains this title: the queen is humanism’s monster, but Ripley is her posthuman, matricidal, successor. Though the alien predator is certainly a dangerous Other, it is not in fact the origin of the heroes’ suffering. In three out of the four films explored here the true source of danger is the WeylanYutani Corporation, who first instigate a mission to capture the dangerous creature, then build a colony on a planet inhabited by the hostile species, and finally seek to create an alien/human hybrid as a supersoldier. This company, deeply embedded in the military-­ industrial complex of an unseen governance system, are willing to sacrifice any and all human employees if necessary to achieve their goal of attaining a dangerous weapon, which is how they view the monster; leading Ripley to question which species is, in fact, worst. The alien remains a constant presence across the films, as a dangerous and disturbing Other, seemingly fixing the position of the monster in opposition to the human and posthuman represented by androids. However, the callous behaviour of a range of humans from representatives of the company such as Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), to the rapist inmates and incompetent governors on the prison colony Fiorina 161, and the scientists on the spaceship Auriga, show that humans are not to be trusted either. It is the posthuman characters that develop across the series to finally stand as heroic. The posthuman constructed in this franchise incorporates the Gothic and the monstrous, rather than banishing those elements, challenging humanist ideals. In the first film, Alien, the Corporation’s representative is revealed to be an android. Ash (Ian Holm) is the only ‘person’ immune to the creature’s reproductive parasite; the others are an expendable organic food source. The Gothic horror of the simulacrum is made overt as Ash ‘dies’; mechanical lubrication fluid spurting like blood, in simulated gore. However, in the sequel Aliens (dir. James Cameron, 1986) Ripley must conquer her distrust of androids based on her previous experience with Ash, as the android Bishop (Lance Henriksen) proves himself reliable. Ash’s behaviour in the original film is described as a ‘malfunction’, and Bishop attempts to reassure Ripley of her safety in his company 225

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with references to his improved programming. However, Bishop’s loyalty to individual people above and beyond his loyalty to the company is interpreted by Ripley as personality, as an individualist trait, rather than programme. The boundaries between human and android further blur with Bishop’s stated preference for the term ‘artificial person’. The series becomes increasingly sympathetic to the posthuman perspective; in the fourth film Resurrection the gynoid Call is the most ideologically motivated character, and that she hides her ‘artificial’ status is presented sympathetically, as she hates to be reminded of her non-biological origins which confer a lessthan-human status upon her. The agency of these characters is repeatedly called into question within the narrative, as is the fear of the simulacrum, and it is the motivations of their human creators that is increasingly coded as monstrous. The posthuman is a foot soldier for humanism, from the perspective of powerful humans. The Corporation’s use of Ripley purely as tissue to be cloned, the crew of the Nostromo as a food source for the alien, and reliance upon programmable drones, suggests the industrial ideal that distinctions between living flesh and other material is unimportant. Unlike the Borg Collective, however, this is a hierarchical humanist society and some bodies matter more than others; Carter Burke and the scientists of Auriga never had any intention of laying down their lives for the greater cause. Only in Aliens do we see the paid foot soldiers of humanism, literally the US marines, and they are shown to be less prepared to fight Gothic monstrosity than those their society has declared expendable Gothic monstrosities already  – an insubordinate woman, a psychologically damaged child and an android. The expendable bodies in this franchise include the poor in the form of colonists, people of colour and women, echoing the trad­ itional hierarchy of Eurocentric humanism since the Enlightenment. In Resurrection it is the expendables of the humanist project who prove to be the last line of defence against the Gothic monster; the wheelchair-using, and thus cyborg, John Vriess (Dominique Pinon), a black pirate called Cristie (Gary Dourdan) and two inhuman women – Call and Ellen Ripley’s artificially created descendant, imbued with alien DNA, clone 8.Though critics such as James H. Kavanagh claim that Ripley can be read as a direct 226

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replacement for the rationalist, humanist subject of the male action hero, as Ximena Gallardo C. and C. Jason Smith state ‘even if Ripley were standing in for the heroic male, the fact remains that by the end of Scott’s film all the men are dead and a woman is the last one’.40 Yet, this simple rebuttal is not enough for Ripley’s posthuman, monstrous clone/alien hybrid descendant. The hero has not only become posthuman, but now incorporates part of the monster. Her appearance reflects a Gothic aesthetic to display this change visually; her fingernails are black claws, and she dresses in close-fitting, dark red leather. The posthuman includes, here, those who are never comfortably accepted into the Western humanist tradition because of their gender or race, those who are cyborgs because their bodies are augmented by prostheses, alongside androids and genetic hybrids. The ultimate goal for the survivors is not to save the whole of humanity, but only themselves; demonstrating their will and ability to validate living ‘otherwise’ to humanist values. Simply for surviving, Ripley 8 is a heroic posthuman monster. Conclusion The acceptable posthuman in Star Trek must find a balance between desire and collective good, sensuality and sterility, between self and collective, past and future.They must carefully negotiate the boundaries of not only what it means to embody the human, but what it means to perform moral ‘humanity’. The Borg are, ultimately, brought within the realm of humanist ideology or are destroyed, as are all android and cyborg characters in Star Trek. The posthuman in the Alien franchise is never acceptable in the dominant humanist paradigm, but eventually they refuse to dampen their desire for life to enable the humanist dream of domination; they will survive to fight another day, as will the monster. The Borg and the Alien are at once frighteningly asexual and frighteningly sexual; they penetrate and impregnate, their appearance echoing the imagery of highly sexualized fetish subcultural fashion with piercing tubular appendages and shiny black surfaces, yet neither have apparent sensuality nor individuated desire. These monsters represent a living death not only in physical terms, but also in 227

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psychological terms; having no desire, only purpose – replication at the expense of the human, they are the antitheses of the desiring subject. A drone or a clone, weaponized and utilized only as living flesh, is part of just such a ‘material-informational entity’ Hayles describes: coming from a postmonstrous future, projected back into our present, it is a monstrous haunting in reverse. Which is why the Borg’s aesthetic could only be Gothic; the future is inescapably Gothic, when the human contemplates its own demise. But, as Weaver’s performance of clone 8 proves, the Gothic can also be powerful and uncompromisingly sexy. A desiring subject, a monster, a posthuman, a survivor: Ripley 8 is both the threat and the promise of monsters embodied, the end of the human paradigm and its continuation. Notes  his chapter works from a very broad definition of the ‘posthuman’, T inspired by N. Katherine Hayles, as a term with the potential to encompass a range of perspectives, practices and experiences, much as ‘queer’ has done for sexuality and gender identity. For an excellent overview of the competing perspectives that underlie the many theoretical approaches to the posthuman, see Eugene Thacker, ‘Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman’, Cultural Critique, 53/1 (2003), 72–97. 2 Alien, dir. Ridley Scott (Twentieth Century Fox, 1979); Aliens, dir. James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox, 1986); Alien: Resurrection, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Twentieth Century Fox, 1997). 3 Star Trek: First Contact, dir. Jonathan Frakes (Paramount, 1996); Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount, 1987–1994), Star Trek: Voyager (Paramount, 1995–2001), Star Trek: Enterprise (Paramount, 2001–5). 4 Fred Botting’s seminal work Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996) explores all these aspects most effectively: transgression (p. 4), instability (pp. 15, 45), and fragmentation, with particular reference to Dracula (pp. 91–7). 5 Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002). 6 G. Canguilhem ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’, Diogenes, 10/40 (1962), 27–42. 7 Canguilhem, ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’, 29. 1

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Reimagined  anguilhem, ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’, 28. C Michel Foucault, Abnormal (London:Verso, 2003), p. 63. 10 Shildrick, Embodying the Monster, p. 54. 11 This chapter uses the term humanist to describe the ‘assumed  . . .  primacy of man[kind] and his [sic] values’, recognized in science fiction by Harry Geduld as an ‘expressed confidence and conviction concerning man[kind]’s ability and need to survive any confrontation with the forces of a hostile universe [and] threats posed by technological and scientific advancement’, quoted in J. P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 38. 12 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 3. 13 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 47. 14 P. MacCormack, ‘Posthuman Teratology’ in Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (London: Ashgate, 2012), p. 294. 15 D. Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A.Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 295–337. 16 J. J. Cohen, ‘The Promise of Monsters’, in Mittman with Dendle (eds), Monsters and the Monstrous, p. 463. 17 Anne Williams, Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 241. 18 Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). 19 ‘Final Girl’ is a term for the surviving heroine in horror films, coined by Carol Clover. Ripley’s status as final girl is debated by critics, but I am here following Elizabeth Ezra’s analysis of Ripley and the gynoid Call, in the chapter ‘Uncanny Resemblances: Alien Resurrection’, in Elizabeth Ezra, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Contemporary Film Directors) (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 20 For a Marxist reading of Alien, see J. H. Kavanagh,‘Feminism, Humanism and Science in Alien’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 73–81. 21 Star Trek’s humanist influence has been explored in publications such as Judith Barad with Ed Robertson, The Ethics of Star Trek (NewYork: Harper 8 9

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Posthuman Gothic Collins, 2000), and D. Bernardi,‘Star Trek in the 1960s: Liberal-Humanism and the Production of Race’, Science Fiction Studies, 24/2 (1997), 209–25. 22 TNG, ‘I, Borg’ (1992). 23 TNG, ‘Q Who?’ (1989). 24 The Borg standard threats, that ‘resistance is futile’ and ‘you will be assimilated’, have entered common parlance. The first appearance of the ‘Borg’ is season 2, episode 16, ‘Q Who?’ of Star Trek: The Next Generation, dir. Rob Bowman (1989). 25 TNG, ‘Q Who?’ 26 The Terminator, dir. James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox, 1984). 27 TNG, ‘The Best of Both Wolds: Part I’ (1990). 28 Voyager, ‘Scorpion: Part II’(1997). 29 Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 1. 30 M. Poster, ‘The Borg “R Us”’, Parallax, 3/2 (1997), 194. 31 The attraction posed by the Borg, with reference to fan response and queer subculture, is explored in Mark Dery, ‘Slashing the Borg: Resistance is Fertile’, in I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 151–8. 32 Poster, ‘The Borg “R Us”’, 195 33 TNG, ‘I, Borg’. 34 I use episteme in Foucault’s sense, as the historical specificity ‘that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 183. 35 TNG, ‘Descent: Part II’ (1993); Voyager, ‘Scorpion’ (1992). 36 TNG, ‘Descent; Parts I and II’ (1993). 37 Voyager, ‘Unity’ (1997). 38 Ron Cobb and Chris Foss were the designers of the human spacecraft, and H. R. Giger the artist for the alien world, craft and creature. See Paul Scanlon and Michael Gross, The Book of Alien (London: Titan, 1993). 39 S. Bacon, ‘Alien Queens and Monstrous Machines:The Conflagration of the Out-of-Control Female and Robotic Body’, in A. Anson (ed.), Evil,Women, and the Feminine (Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2011), pp. 111–22. 40 Ximena Gallardo C. and C. Jason Smith, Alien Woman: The Making of Lt Ellen Ripley (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 22. 230

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13 Gothic Inhumanism: Prometheanism, Nanotechnology, Accelerationism Aspasia Stephanou

 As the archaeology of our thought 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 would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.1

Foucault’s 1966 declaration of the death of man in The Order of Things is particularly important in its rejection of the humanist tradition and for the ensuing implications of such an inhumanism in the examination of what constitutes humanity. Humanism privileges human beings ruled by reason over non-human and non-organic life and promotes a progressive view of history governed by the actions of human beings as autonomous and powerful agents. In the opening quotation Foucault denies the primacy of man as the foundation of all knowledge and as something natural. Instead, such an idea of man is historically created and thus, open to change. History is inhuman in the sense that it is governed by forces beyond human control and notions of individual autonomy and free will

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are mere illusions. After Nietzsche’s death of God and Foucault’s disappearance of man, there is, for the latter, the possibility for an opening and a thought:‘to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking’.2 In this respect, man is only an impermanent possibility, whose end opens up new possibilities that might take the form of inhuman figures. It follows that such possibilities are examined by what I would call here ‘Gothic Inhumanism’.This term describes those narratives that participate in the construction of the future imagined in its most nihilistic manifestation as a monstrous, alien and alienating machine that looks over its shoulder to assault the present: ‘The future wants to steal your soul and vaporize it in nanotechnics.’3 Such narratives fictionalize the meeting space of the machinic, inorganic and non-human with the organic and the human, speculating on a posthuman future that might be radically different from the human present due to technological interventions or warning of humanity’s extinction by merciless, self-organized and indestruc­ t­ible machines.The Gothic mode and its avatars give form to these monstrous accelerationist forces of capitalism and its technologies as they butcher the last vestiges of human civilization. In ‘CyberGothic’ Nick Land argues that Gothic avatars, with their familiar monstrosity, mask the alien face of something inhuman and machinic: A moment of relief. You had thought the goreflick effectively over, the monster finished amongst anatomically precise ketchup-calamity scenes, when – suddenly – it reanimates; still locked on to your death. If you are going to scream, now is the time.4

Accelerationist philosophers believe that the only realistic and progressive way to respond today to capitalism’s inhuman speed is to go even further by accelerating its alienating tendencies. The earlier accelerationism of the 1990s, as it has been elaborated in the work of Land, identifies with the alienating and destructive forces of capitalism. Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Hamilton Grant and other thinkers associated with the collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, espoused the integration of the human with cyberspace and sought to accelerate the emancipation from the prison of the human. Such a dark vision 232

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is expressed by Land’s virulent inhumanism and has been criticized as Deleuzian Thatcherism. But accelerationism’s ‘desperate joy’ as the only way to move forward in a permanent state of revolution and ‘creative festivity’ is also the prevalent mood of neoliberal capitalism’s consumer culture.5 Recently there have been attempts for conceptualizing a left accelerationism that embraces rationalism and Prometheanism. According to left accelerationists, Williams and Srnicek, it is not possible to know what a technoscientific body would look like or what technology, liberated from its capitalist bonds, could do.6 Gothic Inhumanism takes its cue from Robinson Jeffers’s concept of the inhuman as a move away from human solipsism, but also from Paul de Man’s understanding of the inhuman as something impersonal, machine-like and completely other than man.7 Avoiding the idea of the posthuman as some peaceful integration of machine/ human (N. Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark) or immortality as an enhanced version of the human (transhumanists), this essay will commit to the idea of an inhuman future that will, as Reza Negarestani argues, complete the Enlightenment’s project of self-mastery by revising the human altogether. Nevertheless, as argued by David Roden, any account of posthuman ethics or politics that is not fooling itself should be aware that it is not possible to know what it would be like to encounter, or be, the posthuman.8 Through recourse to a series of accelerationist writings as well as recent scholarship on the posthuman, I will argue that in order to move forward there is a need to abandon any phobic resistance to traditional discourses that oppose technology to the human in order to embrace a progressive politics that opens up the human to its future synthetic possibilities. The essay concludes with another understanding of inhumanism that does not naively celebrate a trendy antihumanism, nor seek to relinquish the human at the hands of an abstract, indifferent monstrous capitalist machine. Against the neoliberal dictum of no alternative to capitalism, Negarestani proposes an inhumanism that is only possible through the space of human reason, of an ongoing rational revision and construction of the human which will eventually result in the end of the human. For him, committing to what it means to be human is a process of becoming inhuman. 233

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Gothic inhumanism enables us to think about the implications of NBIC (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science) technologies and their future effects on biological humanity.While Gothic’s engagement with such questions is often tainted by exaggeration and negativity, the ideas expressed rather than the actual events, particularly the confrontation with the inhuman and the limit of the human, make it uniquely apt for philosophical discussion.9 Whether humans choose to experiment in these narratives with new technological modes so that they bring about the posthuman, or are radically altered by an inhuman technology, these are possibilities that the Gothic explores and questions. Novels such as Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) and Michael Crichton’s Prey (2002), as well as the Japanese horror films Meatball Machine (2006) and Tokyo Gore Police (2008), are examples of Gothic inhumanism and present us with narratives of engineered viruses that penetrate human bodies only to change them into something inhuman. These texts explore the fluid and permeable boundaries between organic nature and inorganic technology, considering ideas about nature’s artificiality and technology’s organicity. At the same time dystopian and apocalyptic, these scenarios are nonetheless about transcendence, enlightenment and change. They express anxieties about the use of nanotechnology as well as the fusion of technology and the human and help us navigate through the current issues surrounding the posthuman. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) can be considered here the Gothic father of the aforementioned posthuman narratives. The monster is a composite of fleshy remains brought to life by the new technology of electricity. A living pile of decomposed matter, Frankenstein’s monster is living death and a perverse synthesis of the organic and the inorganic.This inhuman life is perhaps the first literary example of Gothic inhumanism.The novel clearly expresses fears and anxieties of the human’s supersession by a race of devils nurtured by the monster and his future bride and ‘propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror’.10 Frankenstein considers his promise of creating a female companion to the monster and how its fulfilment will be a curse on the ‘existence of the whole human race’.11 It can be argued that 234

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Frankenstein’s desire to experiment and create something inhuman, pushing technology beyond its accepted uses, anticipates several issues relating to the posthuman and much accelerationist thought. It’s Prometheanism – going beyond ‘appropriate’ human limits, desire for change and technological experimentation – is also the kind of Prometheanism that Ray Brassier advocates. His, however, has shed any theological belief in some ready-made world that we should accept the way it is. The body horrors of such Japanese cyberpunk films as Yūdai Yamaguchi’s Meatball Machine and Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police originate from, and are influenced by, Shinya Tsukamoto’s cult cyberpunk horror film Tetsuo:The Iron Man (1989). The film welds a posthumanist future of metal architectonics where meat melds into metal in unrecognizable formations. It focuses on a metal fetishist’s attempts to integrate metal with his flesh by inserting a metal rod in a wound in his body. After being hit by a car, driven by a businessman, he takes revenge by forcing the driver’s body to mutate into a living pile of metal. Metal-infected bodies and humans mutating into inhuman living-metal forms become the reality, and the metal fetishist and the businessman merge together in order to change the world into metal, now transformed into the so-called Iron Man. Followed by Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), where body limbs turn into weapons, and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009), the series speculates on the consequences of merging the human with inhuman metal, as the human transcends the messy materializations of meat and the machinic. Meatball Machine’s biomechanical NecroBorgs controlled by an alien homunculus inhabiting their bodies, and Tokyo Gore Police’s monstrous parasites called Engineers, whose wounds birth weapons, are machinic assemblages, which, like the Tetsuo biomechanical creatures, subordinate the human and biological processes to the machinic and inhuman. It can be said that technology is fetishized, as seen by Tokyo Gore Police’s depiction of a perverse underworld, where pleasure is found in the surgically altered female body. The female body’s plasticity and malleability, its remoulding into unrecognizable human-animal forms, reminding one of medieval chimeras, is not merely the product of masculine desire, but of, perhaps, a new form of posthuman pleasure, uncoupled from normative sexuality 235

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and recognizable female corporeality. Instead, what is eroticized is the site of monstrosity itself, of a desire to move beyond the human. Dethroned from its previously privileged position, the human is revised or totally destroyed, as machinic-fecund things disseminate. The films enable us to understand the posthuman in terms of materiality, as an assemblage of machines in the manner of Levi R. Bryant’s conception of being as a collective of machines in his OntoCartography.12 In this sense, avoiding the elevation of the mind or consciousness over the base materiality of flesh or the machine, Gothic inhumanism mutates the two into monstrous syntheses that cannot recuperate past idealist values. Nanotechnology in Michael Crichton’s Prey and Greg Bear’s Blood Music While the previously discussed texts playfully fetishize body modification through the fusion of flesh and metal, the following two texts are concerned with the convergence of NBIC technologies and biological life, moving away from the familiarity of the human body altogether. Michael Crichton’s Prey and Greg Bear’s Blood Music are both novels that describe a future threatened by the posthuman as they elaborate on the Grey Goo scenario involving nanotechnology and self-replicating nanomachines or microorganisms that transform the human and the world around them.13 In many ways, the nanoswarms in Prey and the biomolecular consciousness of the noocytes in Blood Music shift attention away from the centrality of human DNA by opening up the concept of biological life to include other living forms traditionally associated with base materiality. Beyond this expansion of the concept of life in terms of a Deleuzian a-personal force, a multiplicity, Blood Music’s use of an intelligent plague challenges conceptions of disease and infection as simply negative, problematizes embodied subjectivity and proposes the idea of a radical living consciousness. The novel is especially unique in showing the human transforming into a miniaturized part of an intelligent assemblage of cellular matter functioning in cooperation with the collective consciousness of previous and potential humans. 236

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In Crichton’s Prey, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer programming converge in the making of the nanoswarm, PREDPREY. A distributed system based on biological models, the mechanical swarm is developed as a military technology to replace drones in future warfare. However, released in the desert by accident, and acting autonomously, the micro-robotic machines can no longer be controlled by humans. Due to their goal-seeking programming based on a model of predator–prey relationships, the microbots behave like predators with a common goal: hunting. Independent of humans and engineered to eat anything, the swarm adapts to the environment and is able to survive and reproduce. The swarm consists of nanoparticles which form a cloud and are endowed with intelligence, interacting with each other to wheel in the air as a flock. The swarm, which can divide into three independent swarms with perfectly coordinated behaviour, is ‘a swirling cloud of dark particles’.14 The image of the swirling black swarms, ominously clouding the sky and speedily moving in coordination attacking their human prey, resonates with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), which was based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 story The Birds.The aerial assault on humans by birds, echoing the threat of communist attack in du Maurier’s story, and the nanoswarm’s predatory behaviour resembling contemporary drone attacks, is equally frightening. Hitchcock’s black birds and the ‘black stream’15 of the nanoswarm curving high in the air are horrifying because they are unpredictable and unnatural.The swarms of birds and machinic intelligence preying on humans attest to the liquidation of symmetry and a breach in the natural order of things through the revolt of nature or the uncontrollable forces of programmable matter. Fear is associated with the domination of the human by the inhuman and the desire to return things to the way they were before rings true with a certain kind of moral and theological thinking that prohibits transgression of those limits divinely allocated. The swarm’s collective intelligence and ability to reproduce, sustain itself, learn through experience and innovate to respond to problems mean simply that,‘It’s alive’.16 Consisting of bacteria, which provide the components for the reproduction of particles, and particles themselves, the swarm, is a monstrous synergy of organic 237

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and inorganic parts existing in symbiosis. Here, the swarms evolve through their interaction with other forms, and this evolutionary change does not merely upset the equilibrium of life as we know it, but also intelligence as a human privilege: ‘It was difficult to believe that extremely stupid creatures with brains smaller than pinheads were capable of construction projects more complicated than any human project. But in fact, they were.’17 The swarms not only demonstrate life as multiplicity but they resist any human attempt to calculate their number or to understand their ‘psychology’. Their ‘abstract, nonhuman number’,18 as well as the ability of the swarm to appear singular but also to divide into unpredictably more than one self-organizing swarms, liquidate any notion of number characterized by calculation and consistency. Similarly, despite the attempts at human psychology and maternal nurturing by child psychologist and vice president of Xymos corporation, Julia Forman, it becomes evident that the fabricated micro-robots are unaffected, autonomous and evolving on their own.Without any ‘central control’ and acting as ‘a defined purposeful organism’,19 the swarm appears demonic and inhuman. The human is further humiliated when the swarms appear to imitate human behaviour and appearance: ‘It was creepy to see this human replica, suddenly floating over the desert.’20 Later, when Julia’s body is eaten by the swarm, the nanoparticles give her an image of herself as beautiful and healthy: ‘The skin of her swollen face and body blew away from her in streams of particles, like sand blown off a sand dune . . . And when it was finished, what was left behind . . . was a pale and cadaverous form.’21 The semblance of human life and the transformation of the human into a robot-like puppet possessed by non-human life is evocative of the Gothic’s spectral forms or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Olimpia in his story The Sandman (1816). In particular, the story becomes the focus of Freud’s analysis of the uncanny effect resulting from the lifelike appearance of the doll and the human confusion and uncertainty caused by what appears to be both familiar and unfamiliar, animate and inanimate. It is this uncanny feeling that is experienced when in Prey human bodies appear to be merely an ethereal mass of nanoparticles after they have been consumed or infected. Julia’s disintegrating human form here, visually 238

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captured by the blowing sand, resounds with Foucault’s erasure of man like a face drawn in the sand. While in Prey the human is completely abandoned and mortified by the swarm’s evolution, in Blood Music the human is integrated with the machinic as human consciousness is absorbed in the sphere of the noocytes. The novel disrupts the binary of the feminized, soft, liquid body and the masculine hardness of the machine by merging the two through the viscous fluidity of the organic and inorganic.Vergil Ulam, a researcher at Genetron genetic engineering firm, is dismissed after his secret project is deemed unethical due to its use of mammalian cells. Vergil, who was working on a side branch of biochips called biologics –‘autonomous organic computers’22 – decides to save his ‘white blood cell cultures – his special lymphocytes’ by injecting them into his body in order to recover them later and resume his experiments. The lymphocytes, however, technologically augmented, and able to think, rebuild him from the inside ‘finding things, changing them’.23 Vergil names his intelligent cells noocytes from the Greek word for mind, ‘noos’. Like Frankenstein, he ‘gives birth’ to the lymphocytes, which are ‘his children, drawn from his own blood, carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic material into at least a thousand of them. And now they were busily transforming all their companions.’24 But the noocytes’ ability to infect others through ‘every vector known to epidemiologists’,25 and the spread of an ‘intelligent plague’, redesign not only the human, but also the environment itself. The infection of the whole of North America within eight weeks sees large cities vanish and change into ‘a wonderful landscape of an entirely new form of life’26 and the transformation of their citizens within forty-eight hours.27 In the end, while the noocytes suddenly disappear because they realize that they are unable to survive and function in the macro-scale world, they still save humans for something else later and the abrupt change transforms the earth as climatic conditions become extreme. The novel imagines a future where the human is consumed by a new form of intelligent biological life that is characterized by cooperation, adaptation and the ability to alter the environment. The body is transcended as the human is liquidated and turned into a part of the collective of blood cells. On the other hand, the 239

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few survivors in North America become, like Matheson’s last human in I am Legend,‘the uncomprehending, the limited, the transient and fragile’.28 Individuals are ‘duplicated hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of times . . . like being Xeroxed . . . So like, if I die here, now, there’s hundreds of others tuned in to me, ready to become me, and I don’t die at all. I just lose this particular me.’29 As the human passes the Rubicon, individual identity is reproduced efficiently so that perpetual functionality is guaranteed in the noocyte factory. The autonomous cells are ‘efficient’30 and can learn with ‘incredible speed’.31 Reproduction is not understood organically but mechanically since ‘after all, [it was] but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability’.32 The work ethic of the cells and the theme of reproduction, growth and self-replication inject the noocytes with the ideology of neoliberalism. Life imitates the machinic rhythms of capital. But the question arises about whether they were ‘all truly equal, duplicated a million times, or did the noocytes exercise a little judgement?’33 And further, ‘[d]id they really respect and love humans as masters and creators, or did they simply suck them in, chew them up, digest the information needed and send the rest into entropy, forgotten, disorganized, dead?’34 As Dr Bernard considers this, the horror of difference and radical change is manifested in the simple question about the future of the human, the loss of control, human consciousness and reason. The transform­ ation of the human, the landscape changing into a ‘nightmare land’, and the appearance of airborne life forms and gigantic animals unknown to biologists are all described in terms of awe and terror as everything is revitalized, injected with life, flowing as a viscous green fluid. As the human is digested, assimilated or spat out, no more special than any other organism in the noosphere, then one considers the repercussions of being superseded by our intelligent organic/machines. If indeed Vergil’s acceleration of technology and his Prometheanism are to be encouraged, then such experimentation needs to be calculated to benefit the common, not driven by selfish pursuits. Hayles’s reading of Blood Music focuses on the novel’s positive conception of the posthuman because it preserves human agency and stands for ‘an improbably idealized combination of identity, 240

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individuality, perfect community, flawless communication and immortality’.35 This, however, is not the case as Vergil attempts to control the noocytes because he does not want them to find his brain and take over,36 and Bernard questions how autonomous the human really is in the noocyte sphere. In addition, Hayles contends that the novel conveys the notion of leaving the body behind and the cells becoming ‘weightless information’.37 On the one hand, certainly, the novel expresses the thrill and threat of separating consciousness from its material support which lies at the heart of neoliberalism.38 This is the transhumanist belief in the liberation from the meat and immersion into immanent flux as human and machine are technologically synthesized.39 The migration from one material embodiment to another, and the immortality of the noocytes, suggests a desire for undeadness and the eternal return of the same.40 On the other hand, the notion of bodiless information reiterates the traditional dualism of material body and immaterial information; the latter acting as the privileged term. Information, though, needs to be purged from idealism and understood as material. Blood Music demonstrates that information is not an abstract but a material process and the result of cell clusters performing different tasks.41 The posthuman might even not have a recognizable human body, leaving open the possibility of different material entities and weird becomings.42 Prey and Blood Music also help us understand biological processes under a different light, as machine-like operations, working like computers. One can think of here the notion of blood flow as information,43 or the analogy between the brain and the computer (developed by Paul and Patricia Churchland).44 As Bear explains, ‘Blood Music followed hard on the dawning of my realization that DNA is a self-organizing cybernetic system – a kind of neural network . . . It’s a parable . . . of what happens when biological systems acquire supreme control over their environment.’45 The swarm in Prey, for example, is not merely the opposite of the human. Instead, the novel seeks to invert such assumptions by demonstrating that ‘a human being is actually a giant swarm. Or more precisely, it’s a swarm of swarms, because each organ – blood, liver, kidneys – is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a “body” is really the combination of all these organ swarms.’46 In this sense, the human body 241

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is understood as a multiplicity of swarms, and, like the nanoswarm, human beings are ruled by ‘swarm intelligence’, since ‘a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs’.47 In Prey the human concept of consciousness and our sense of ‘self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion. We don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all’.48 Like the nanoswarms, humans are understood as organic machines.This is echoed by novelist and cultural critic Scott Bakker in his Blind Brain Theory in which he conceives the brain as ‘just another natural processing system, one able to arrest and amend its routines via some recursively integrative subsystem’.49 For Bakker, the brain is almost blind to itself, while the notion of personal identity is possibly an illusion. According to him, humans need to admit the horrifying truth of how small and inconsequential they are. As he writes: I sometimes fear that what we call ‘consciousness’ does not exist at all, that we ‘just are’ an integrative informatic process of a certain kind, possessing none of the characteristics we intuitively attribute to ourselves. Imagine all of your life amounting to nothing more than a series of distortions and illusions attending a recursive twist in some organism’s brain.50

Prey’s machinic swarms, self-less and displaying a kind of ‘communist subjectivity’, seem to be closer to a more realistic understanding of the posthuman than the utopian and positive vitalism à la Deleuze and Guattari evident in Rosi Braidotti’s elaborations of her posthuman nomadic subjectivity. And like Blood Music, the world might as well end in a grey goo scenario where everything is reduced to an undifferentiated slimy green viscosity. For Roden, our ‘wide’ technological descendants might possibly be so alien that the trans­ humanist and bioconservatives’ ethical frameworks will be inefficient to evaluate them. In ‘Hacking Humans’, he postulates that a posthuman is ‘the result of a technically mediated process’, a ‘WHD [Wide Human Descendant] that goes feral; becomes capable of life outside the planetary substance comprised of narrow biological humans, their cultures and technologies’.51

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Accelerationism, Reza Negarestani and the Inhuman Unlike the optimism and utopianism of 1990s cybercultural acceleration, current accelerationist strands are more abstemious, due to the financial crisis and the need to account for a left politics of the common.52 Accelerationist thinking, from Fisher and Negarestani to Brassier and Williams and Srnicek, celebrates the emancipatory possibilities promised by modernity through the reconfiguration of the relation between freedom and reason so that collective intelligence and freedom are no longer anchored to monstrous Capital, as espoused by Land.53 Unlike earlier accelerationism’s identification with machinic, inhuman intelligence, left accelerationism purports ‘the active design of new systems of collective intelligence’.54 Moving away from Land’s machinic intelligence, current left accelerationists propose the realization of ‘the construction of a genuine collective political agency’.55 Although it is impossible to know ‘what a modern technosocial body can do’,56 left accelerationists affirm Prometheanism as a project of re-engineering the human and the world, and a technological acceleration that capitalism and neoliberalism are unable to generate. The possibility of retaining collective self-mastery as we accelerate towards the future is possible, as Negarestani tells us, by returning to the project of the Enlightenment and reason, despite its apparent regressive connotations. It is only by understanding the human and our world that we may be able to control our lives. Defining the human, understood as a ‘constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention’,57 is an inhuman labour. It is this capacity for reason – our ability ‘to engage in discursive practices’58 and shape processes of ‘genuine collectivity’ and freedom59 – that makes us human and not mere biological things. Being committed to humanity, then, involves the active construction and revision of the human through the autonomous power of reason. But reason’s objective to maintain and enhance itself is radically revisionary in regards to the human.60 Eventually, by committing to reason’s autonomy and its revisionary program, the human is erased: As soon as you commit to the human, you effectively start erasing its canonical portrait back from the future. It is as Foucault suggests, the 243

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Posthuman Gothic unyielding wager on the fact that the self-portrait of man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.61

Inhumanism is this labour of rational agency on the human, of being ‘impersonally piloted’62 by reason’s revisionary program. In this respect, as Brassier puts it, the ways in which we understand and change the world based on our reasoning are continually re-­ established in a dynamic process in which our impulse to predict and control is not incompatible to the catastrophic consequences of our technological inventiveness.63 Inconclusion If capitalism exhibits a retrograde approach to technology, then the above horror texts imagine a posthuman future where humanity is threatened, mutated or re-engineered beyond recognition, as ‘[o]ur human camouflage is coming away, skin ripping off easily, revealing the glistening electronics’.64 However, in order to avoid becoming slaves to monstrous capital, machinic intelligence or any other future tyrannical order, a progressive politics needs to be aligned with an understanding of ourselves as humans, and by committing to being human, which is characterized, as Negarestani affirms, by constructing and revising humanity.65 The Gothic’s scenarios of human extinction and control by bioengineered machines are not only horrifying but also pessimistic.They vaporize the human by imagining the future as monstrous and antihuman. Eventually, they reaffirm the degradation of the human by some powerful Thing. However, the true inhuman task, as Negarestani and left accelerationists instruct us, is to understand the human and its ability of sapience/reason in order to re-engineer ourselves and the world through a left Promethean politics that stresses the transformative potential of technology.66 By avoiding the impasse of underestimating or celebrating ‘subjectivity’67 it is significant to commit to the (in)human task of autonomous reason’s revising and constructing the human as we move towards a synthetic future. In this respect, any discussion of posthumanism or the inhuman steeped in giddy celebrations of trendy newness and liberation from 244

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the drag of the human should be supplanted by the continuous labour of what we think of ourselves and what we are becoming.68 Perhaps Negarestani’s vision comes closer to the assimilation of human life by the noocytes in Blood Music or the collective hive mentality of Star Trek’s cybernetically enhanced Borgs, who were once like humans but developed into a more perfect synthetic life and against whom any resistance is futile. But the lack of retaining some form of control or choice over technology or the possibility of liberating it from its capitalist bonds or expansionist politics in these texts remains problematic. The nihilistic outlook of many Gothic narratives and their radical inhumanism are, nonetheless, like posthumanist or inhuman philosophies, speculative in nature.What might be, or what we would like it to be, are equally events beyond our control and can be altered and irrevocably changed, like figures drawn in the sand. Notes Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 422. 2 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 373. 3 Nick Land, ‘CyberGothic’, in Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (eds), Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Truro: Urbanomic, 2011), p. 346. 4 Land, ‘CyberGothic’, p. 349. 5 Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian,‘Introduction’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate:The Accelerationist Reader (Truro: Urbanomic, 2014), p. 18. 6 See A. Williams and N. Srnicek, ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’, in Mackay and Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate, pp. 347–62. 7 See Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearance of the Future (London: Routledge, 2012). 8 See David Roden, Posthuman Life (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 124. 9 See Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015), p. 11. 10 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; New York: Norton, 2012), p. 119. 11 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 119. 1

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Posthuman Gothic  evi R. Bryant, Onto-Cartography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University L Press, 2014), p. 38. 13 See Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation (New York: Anchor, 1986); R. A. Freitas,‘Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations’ (2001), www.foresight.org/nano/ Ecophagy.html (accessed 25 June 2016). 14 Michael Crichton, Prey (2002; London: Harper, 2006), p. 202. 15 Crichton, Prey, p. 324. 16 Crichton, Prey, p. 252. 17 Crichton, Prey, p. 395. 18 E. Thacker, ‘Pulse Demons’, Culture Machine, 9 (2007). 19 Crichton, Prey, p. 373. 20 Crichton, Prey, p. 407. 21 Crichton, Prey, p. 487. 22 Greg Bear, Blood Music (1985; London: Gollancz, 2007), p. 8. 23 Bear, Blood Music, p. 59. 24 Bear, Blood Music, pp. 16–17. 25 Bear, Blood Music, p. 118. 26 Bear, Blood Music, p. 163. 27 Bear, Blood Music, p. 120. 28 Bear, Blood Music, p. 124. 29 Bear, Blood Music, p. 193. 30 Bear, Blood Music, p. 68. 31 Bear, Blood Music, p. 16. 32 Bear, Blood Music, p. 14. 33 Bear, Blood Music, p. 213. 34 Bear, Blood Music, p. 214. 35 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 256. 36 Bear, Blood Music, 60. 37 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 255. 38 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), pp. 51–2. 39 See Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), p. 152; Noys, Malign Velocities, p. 58. 40 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 193–4. 12

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Reimagined Bear, Blood Music, p. 160. See Roden, Posthuman Life. 43 See Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_ OncoMouseTM (New York: Routledge, 1997); Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Sarah Kember, Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (London: Routledge, 2003). 44 For eliminative materialists Paul and Patricia Churchland, the mind and consciousness (as well as mental states like thoughts, beliefs and desires) are not real entities, but folk psychology phrases that need to be eliminated and substituted by more accurate accounts of neuronal processes. 45 Greg Bear,‘Tech Flesh:An Interview with Greg Bear’, CTheory, 13 (2001). 46 Crichton, Prey, p. 374. 47 Crichton, Prey, p. 374. 48 Crichton, Prey, p. 375. 49 S. Bakker, ‘The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness’, www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_ Magic_Show_A_Blind_ Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness (accessed 16 June 2015), 1–35. 50 Bakker, ‘Last Magic Show’, 31. 51 See Roden, Posthuman Life; David Roden, ‘Hacking Humans’ (2012), http://enemyindustry.net/blog/?p=2870 (accessed 13 June 2015). 52 Mackay and Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, p. 43. 53 Mackay and Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, p. 45. 54 Mackay and Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, p. 45. 55 Mackay and Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, p. 45. 56 Williams and Srnicek, ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’, pp. 355–6. 57 R. Negarestani,‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, in Mackay and Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate, p. 427. 58 Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, p. 434. 59 Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, p. 434. 60 Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, p. 437. 61 Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, p. 446. 62 Mackay and Avanessian, ‘Introduction’, p. 31. 63 R. Brassier,‘Prometheanism and its Critics’, in Mackay and Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate, p. 486. 41 42

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Posthuman Gothic N. Land, ‘Circuitries’, Pli, Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 4/1–2 (1992), 219. 65 Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, p. 438. 66 Brassier, ‘Prometheanism and its Critics’, p. 487. 67 Negarestani’s second note on Michael Ferrer in ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, p. 427. Also see Ray Brassier’s notion of ‘autonomy without voluntarism’ in ‘Prometheanism and its Critics’, p. 471. 68 See Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, pp. 448, 464. 64

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Index

 abject 6, 23, 25, 45, 89, 134, 150–1, 172, 199–200, 222 abnormal 26, 89, 154, 205 accelerationism 13, 231–3, 235, 241, 243–4 Agamben, Giorgio 40–2 agency 11, 38, 78, 81–2, 110, 112, 116, 121, 163, 215, 220, 222–3, 226, 240, 243–4 alien 25, 27, 37, 59, 79, 151, 163, 216, 220, 223, 225–7, 230, 232, 235, 242 Alien (franchise) 13, 215, 218–20, 225, 227 alienate 5, 37, 135, 148–9, 163, 200, 202, 224, 232 android 200, 218, 220–1, 223–7; see also gynoid animal and machine 166 bodies 9, 69 characteristics 25–6, 31, 39, 116, 118–19, 127, 153–5

human 6, 135 human/animal relationship 40, 42–3, 78, 111, 125, 150–1, 155, 235 non-human 38, 224, 240 rights 62 studies 31 animalistic 12, 58–9, 101, 112, 119, 127, 135, 148, 156 animality xi, 31, 145, 156 animalize 56 anthropocene x, 8 anthropocentric 2, 20, 31, 72, 125 antihuman 233, 244 apocalypse 19, 21–2, 24, 30–1, 109 Aquinas, Thomas 40 archive 6, 203 artificial 12, 26, 68, 111, 154, 163, 169, 200–1, 204, 226, 234 artificial intelligence 163, 169, 200 Atwood, Margaret x, 7, 10, 36, 39, 41–2, 44–6, 48–50 Auerbach, Nina 98

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Index automaton 180, 206, 208 autonomous 20, 217, 231, 237–41, 243–4 avatar 13, 165, 200, 232 Badmington, Neil 3 Bakker, Scott 242 Baudrillard, Jean 177, 191–2, 201–2 Bear, Greg 234 beauty 129–30, 177–83, 186–90 becoming-animal 72 becoming-with 54–6, 58, 61–2 becoming Other see Other Berger, John 188 biohorror 13 biopolitics 8, 62, 67 biotech 6, 49, 55, 68, 71, 200, 234 Birds,The (film/short story) 237 birth 135, 146, 148, 150–8, 170, 172, 182, 207, 235, 239 Blade II (film) 11, 56, 58, 62–4, 67, 70 Blind Brain Theory 242 blood see human blood Blood Music (novel) 234, 236–42 bodily desire 82, 85 experiences 12, 146–7, 158 body female 11, 48, 154, 168–71, 179, 183, 189–90, 192, 235 grotesque 157 horror 9, 146, 235 human 9, 110, 125, 223, 236, 241 monstrous 172 parts 9, 182–4, 190, 192, 223 perfectibility of 54 technoscientific 233 wisdom of the 146, 150, 156–8

bodysnatcher 21, 26 Bolton, Micheal Sean 6, 9, 37, 55, 110, 149, 163 Botting, Fred 1, 5, 21, 24, 26, 36–7, 128, 134, 149, 152, 156, 162, 172, 228 Braidotti, Rosi 2, 4, 8–9, 48, 54–5, 68, 72, 111, 125, 128–9, 242 brain 25, 40, 44, 60, 112, 116–17, 187, 238, 241–2 Brassier, Ray 235 Bryant, Levy R. 236 Campion, Jane 12, 145, 147 Canguilhem, Georges 13, 215–17, 223 capitalism 54, 56, 66–71, 93, 128–9, 139, 219–20, 232–3, 243–5 categorization 67, 96, 127, 178–9, 193, 217 category crisis 2, 126, 128 Churchland, Paul and Patricia 241, 247 Cixous, Hélène 180 cloning 138, 200, 218, 226–8 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 13, 218 commodity 9, 67, 69–70, 128–9 computer virus see virus consciousness 25, 113, 115, 126, 139, 152, 162–3, 166–7, 217, 236, 239–42, 247 consumerism 49, 67, 69–71, 109, 128–30, 133 contagion 25, 56–7 creation see monster creature alien 225, 230 animal-like 69, 127 bioengineered 46

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Index creature cont. biomechanical 235, 238 Frankenstein’s 1–2, 46 human-like 39 hybrid 42, 47, 71, 184 infected 26 inhuman 79, 225 liminal 8, 50 machine 37, 79 posthuman 1, 54, 57–62 prostheting 50 supernatural 95–9, 103, 127, 131, 135 tentacled see tentacle undead 57–62, 112, 117 worm-like 20, 29 Creed, Barbara 131, 146, 151, 154, 156, 169 Crichton, Michael 234 critical posthumanism 4, 7, 11, 20–1, 31, 126 culture 6, 10, 13, 24, 38, 42, 45, 49, 54, 98, 117, 126–7, 129–30, 149, 163–4, 171, 207, 211, 216–17, 220, 222, 233, 242 CyberGothic x, 13, 232 cybernetic 33, 37, 162, 215, 232, 241, 245 Cybernetic Culture Research Unit 232 cyberpunk 235 cyborg 8, 27, 34, 43, 63, 112, 138–9, 166–7, 171, 200, 218, 220–2, 223–4, 226–7 Cyborg Manifesto, A see Manifesto for Cyborgs

Daybreakers (film) 11, 56, 58, 63, 67, 70–1 de Beauvior, Simone 180 death 8, 10, 12–13, 24, 25, 33, 47, 60, 67–8, 77, 81, 83–4, 89, 100, 109, 111–19, 127, 131, 137, 146, 148, 158, 162, 168, 170, 172–3, 184, 205, 207, 210, 216, 227, 231–2, 234 decentering 3, 37, 126, 134 definition 3, 5, 7, 10, 20, 28, 37, 40, 57, 97, 109–10, 113–18, 132, 185, 192, 199, 216, 228 dehumanization 37, 58, 114, 150, 156, 180, 182, 192, 199–200 Deleuze, Gilles 208 and Félix Guattari 13, 242 Derrida, Jacques 7, 62, 95, 100, 105, 126, 212 Descartes, René 84–5, 134, 200 difference 1, 5, 10, 20–1, 40, 62, 97, 109–10, 114, 127, 130–8, 157, 188, 224, 240 disability ix, 7, 26, 38 discursive 2, 6, 10–1, 13, 38, 115, 121, 137, 243 docile bodies 186–7, 190 domestication 11, 127 doppelgänger 125, 130–1, 134, 137, 139 double 37, 46, 60, 83, 128, 130, 133–4, 137, 180 drone 221–3, 226, 228, 237 dystopian x–xi, 11, 39, 48–9, 56, 62, 67, 70, 109, 177, 186, 200, 234 embodiment 6, 13, 37, 67, 103, 130–1, 134, 139, 184, 200, 241

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Index Enlightenment 3–4, 215, 226, 233–4, 243 environment 110 epistemological 2, 5, 57, 202, 211 eternal youth 130 ethics see moral eugenics 39, 47, 56, 64–6, 70 evolution 6, 7, 12, 50, 59, 64, 113, 137, 155, 162, 200, 238–9 excess 5, 94, 107, 224 extinction 38–9, 64, 70, 82, 113, 178, 224, 232, 244 fake 200–3, 205; see also virtual fat 181 father 28, 66, 116–17, 151, 153–6, 178, 186–8, 202, 204–5, 234 female body see body grotesque 157, 190 identity 12, 177–9, 182–3, 185, 187 monster 11, 125, 128, 132–3, 183, 192, 234 femininity xi, 12, 31, 178, 181, 185, 189, 192 Foucault, Michel 13, 186, 215, 217, 224, 230–2, 239, 243 fragmentation 12, 31, 37, 78, 82, 146, 150, 152, 158, 183, 188, 191–2, 203, 208, 215, 228 Frankenstein (novel) x, 1, 9, 12–13, 42, 44–7, 183, 192, 199, 207, 219, 224, 234–5, 239 freak 44, 47, 114–15, 118 free will 208, 223–4, 231 freedom 24, 133, 172–3, 189, 124 Freud, Sigmund 130, 134, 180

gaze male 185–9 techno-patriarchal 12 gender 12, 48, 80, 112, 131, 133, 136–9, 154, 162, 165, 168–71, 178–9, 184–5, 188–9, 216, 221, 224, 227–8 genetic engineering 49, 55–6, 62, 64, 71, 179, 237, 239 genocide 25, 64, 223 God/Goddess 40, 43, 64, 101, 180, 187, 207–8, 210-11, 232 Gothic aesthetic 10, 220–1, 224, 227 condition 102, 146 heroine 147, 166–7, 169, 173–4 inhumanism 13, 231–4, 236 monster see monster Greer, Germaine 182 grotesque see body gynoid 218, 226, 229 Hammer Horror 65, 128 Haraway, Donna 34, 43, 54, 77, 81, 111–12, 138–9, 166, 218 Hayles, N. Katherine 126, 162, 217, 228, 233, 240–1 Herbrechter, Stefan 2–5, 7–9, 19–20, 44–5, 129 and Ivan Callus 2–3, 7, 9, 20, 44–5 heroine see Gothic heroine heteronormative 7 heterotopia 201, 212 hive 31, 58–9, 218, 221–5; see also swarm horror 5–7, 9, 13, 24–5, 36–9, 49–50, 89, 110–16, 131, 150,

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Index 167, 169, 191, 199, 211, 213, 223–6, 234, 240; see also body horror horror genre xi, 56, 127, 151 horror text 111–12, 151, 218, 220–1, 229, 244 hospitality 11, 93, 95, 99–103, 105 hostility 44, 95, 105 human blood 63, 65, 67–8, 95, 98, 104–5 body see body consciousness 126, 163, 166, 217, 239–40 identity 6, 11, 13, 22, 37, 111, 138, 149, 161, 163, 170 monster see monster nature 19, 45, 49, 54–5, 125, 139 subject 6, 9–10, 12–13, 37, 39, 46, 55, 71, 79, 110, 126, 134, 146, 149, 212 values 19, 24 human-technology interaction 4 interface 1, 6–7, 9, 39, 55, 111, 146, 200 humanism 1–4, 6, 13, 20, 37–8, 50, 84, 86, 110, 125–7, 130, 137–9, 215–20, 223–7, 231 humanities 4, 152 humanoid 155, 218, 221–3 hybrid 21, 31, 34, 42, 44, 47–8, 50, 55–7, 62, 67, 71, 99, 127, 135, 166, 199, 225, 227 hyperreality 178, 212 hypertext 10, 12, 14, 183 I am Legend (film) 11, 55–7, 62–4, I am Legend (novel) 11, 55, 77–89, 240

identity embodied ix, 72, 216–17, 222, 236 female see female identity human see human identity monstrous 114, 218 posthuman 11, 81, 121, 202 questioning of 6–7, 26, 29, 78, 99, 102–3, 109, 112–18, 120–1, 125, 128, 132, 134–5, 137, 139, 173, 184, 187, 190–1, 203, 206–7, 212, 217, 240, 242 racial 81 sexual 84, 189 unstable 21, 23, 32, 109, 130, 151, 163 virtual see virtual imitation 79, 177–8, 192 immersive technique 165 immortality 13, 136, 138, 168, 173, 233, 241 implant 27, 167–8, 170, 221 imprisonment 12, 25, 89, 163–4, 166–7, 169–72, 188, 200, 206 In the Flesh (television series) 11, 109, 112–22 incest 9, 148, 150–1, 155–6 individual 1, 20, 26, 32–3, 64, 68, 71, 79, 99–100, 103–5, 112, 126, 130, 132, 135, 146, 170, 218, 222–4, 226, 231, 240–1 individualism 11, 112, 129, 223 industrial 26, 66–8, 106, 220–1, 226 infection 19–20, 22, 25–8, 30–2, 38, 54, 77, 105, 235–6, 238–9 informatic 3, 126, 242 inhuman 20, 22, 128, 132, 135, 138–9, 147, 163, 199, 218, 221,

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Index 226, 231–8, 241, 243–5; see also Gothic inhumanism inorganic 78, 232, 234, 238–9 instinct 46, 85, 105, 115, 127, 135, 148, 150, 153–4, 156, 158 intelligence 112, 146, 150, 157–8, 162–3, 167, 169, 200, 236–40, 242–4 Jackson, Shelley 9, 12, 183–4, 187, 190 John Dies at the End (novel) 20, 22, 26, 29–30, 32 Kant, Immanuel 218 kinship 42–3 labour 69, 155, 171, 243–5 Land, Nick 13, 232–3, 243 landscape 12, 60, 109, 149, 163, 239–40 language 6, 25, 47, 58, 81, 89, 114–18, 121–2, 152 Levinas, Emmanuel 95, 99–104 liberal humanism 20 liminality 8, 10–1, 25, 43, 94, 103, 126–7, 135, 139, 199–200, 216; see also monster ludic-Gothic 162, 164–5 Lyotard, Jean–François 86 MacCormack, Patricia 218 machine 1, 23, 37, 43, 68, 72, 126, 162–3, 166, 168, 173, 216–18, 220–1, 223, 232–4, 236–7, 239–42, 244 MaddAddam (trilogy/novel) 10, 36, 39–40, 48, 50

madness 102, 164, 167, 169, 190, 192 mainstreaming 95–101, 105 male gaze see gaze ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs, A’ 43, 166 marginal 13, 86, 90, 94, 139, 205, 215 Matheson, Richard 11, 55, 57, 77–90, 240 Mbembe, Achille 9–10, 15 Meatball Machine (film) 234–5 mechanical 5–6, 26, 111, 168, 182, 225, 235, 237, 240 medical 3, 11, 65, 116–17, 119, 121, 126, 153, 156 military-industrial complex 67, 220, 225, 237, 247 mind 6, 24, 27, 84–5, 112–16, 118, 122, 145, 163, 218, 221–3, 236, 239 misogyny 145, 151, 168 modernity 26, 36, 243 monster as harbinger 7, 134 concept of 13, 48, 94, 111–12, 126, 128, 215–19 creation of 3, 14, 24, 131, 136, 170, 234 female see female monster Frankenstein’s 1–3, 9, 44–7, 224, 234; see also creature, Frankenstein Gothic 170–4, 205, 215–16, 220, 224–6 human 22, 24, 28, 47, 90, 155, 218, 227 human/monster indeterminacy 25–32, 45, 126, 131, 135–7, 202, 217, 224

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Index monster cont. liminal 11, 21, 44–5, 126–7, 221 non-human 22, 25–7, 43, 57, 81, 97, 130, 170, 216–18, 220, 225–7 promises of see promises of monsters always returns 13, 23, 232 technological 8, 111; see also technological Other tentacled see tentacle monstrous body see body feminine 131, 136, 146, 151, 154, 156, 164, 169; see also female monster Other see Other moral 22–4, 36, 68, 96–7, 104, 111, 113, 122, 130, 148, 156, 216–19, 222–4, 227, 237 Moravec, Hans 217 Mori, Masahiro 183, 200, 205 mother 85, 135, 145, 147–8, 150, 153–4, 158, 178–80, 216 multiplicity 79, 138–9, 152, 236–8, 242 Mulvey, Laura 185, 189 nanotechnology 221, 231–2, 234, 236–8, 242 narcissism 13, 189, 207 narrative 1, 4, 6–7, 10–13, 23–4, 36–7, 39, 47, 71, 77–9, 86–8, 90, 109–10, 126, 130–1, 136, 152, 161–6, 183–4, 202, 206, 219 nature see human nature Nayar, Pramod K. 4, 20, 24–6, 31, 55, 87, 97, 110, 113, 125, 139

NBIC technologies 234, 236 necro-politics 9–11, 15, 56, 67–8, 71 necro-romantic 81–2, 85–6 Negarestani, Reza 233, 243–5 negative aesthetic 5 neoliberalism 67, 69, 192, 233, 240–3 network 3, 31, 126, 183, 241 Nietzsche, Friedrich 232 Night of the Living Dead (film) 83 nightmare 13, 168, 217, 240 nihilistic 232, 245 noble savage 47, 154 nomadic subjectivity 242 non-human 8, 20, 22, 25, 31–2, 38, 43–4, 46–7, 114, 125, 127, 139, 146, 150, 183, 211, 222, 231–2, 238; see also monster, Other normal 69–70, 94, 102–3, 107, 109, 115, 118–22, 126, 137, 149, 154, 158, 172, 205, 216 normative 7, 38, 84, 94, 137, 217, 235 O’Neill, Louise 12, 177–8, 182–4, 186–7, 193 objectification 71, 128, 150, 182, 187, 189 Only Ever Yours (novel) 12, 177–93 ontological 2–3, 5, 8, 24, 42, 78–9, 81, 83–6, 99, 109, 125, 202, 211–12 oppression 168–9, 172–4, 178 organic 10, 17, 46, 78, 166, 216, 225, 231–2, 234, 237, 239–40, 242 organism 43, 166, 183, 221, 238, 240

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Index organs 9, 63, 183–4, 241–2 Oryx and Crake (novel) 36–50 Other becoming 9, 111, 222 human and its Others 2, 4, 7, 10–13, 20, 26, 46, 60, 79, 93–4, 96, 99–100, 105–6, 110, 119, 126–7, 131, 135–7, 139, 150, 163, 201 monstrous 1, 6, 8, 10–11, 23, 25, 27–30, 32, 80, 121, 136, 146, 161, 199, 216, 218, 220, 225 non-human 20, 31, 37, 49, 56, 86 posthuman 4, 7, 9–10, 50, 219 technological 6, 37, 111 Other-which-is-us 110, 113–14, 122 Othered landscape 149 otherness 1–2, 60–1, 93, 119, 127–8, 130, 172, 201 pandemic 39, 44, 48, 57, 78 panopticon 13, 205, 211; see also surveillance paranoia 13, 78, 81, 205, 207, 218, 222 paranormal romance x, 77, 79, 81, 91, 109, 127–8, 132, 135–8 parasite 20–1, 25–33, 38, 63, 66, 80, 206, 220, 225, 235 Patchwork Girl (hypertext) 9, 12, 183–4, 191 patriarchal 12, 48, 80, 132–3, 136, 138, 147, 153, 162, 168–9, 171–3, 178, 183, 185, 190, 192 perfection 39, 94, 130, 177, 179, 181, 183, 187, 192, 207, 215, 222

perform 86–8, 111, 165, 167–8, 171, 187, 205, 211, 227–8, 241 performative 114–16, 118–22, 180, 182, 185, 189, 192, 205 pleasure 8, 43, 202, 235 Portal (video game) 12, 161–74 post-apocalypse x, 39, 47–8, 109 post-industrial society 128 postcolonial 153 posthuman balance 94–5, 99 construct 12, 173, 225 dialectics 87–9 ethics 233 identity see identity Other see Other potential 162 rhetoric 77–8, 89 society 83, 86, 96–7, 115, 118–19, 121–2 utopia 11, 94–5, 99, 106, 168 vampire 11, 54–62, 71, 84, 86, 87, 90 posthumanism x, 2–12, 20–2, 25, 31, 37–9, 43–4, 50, 61–2, 66, 88, 97, 106, 110, 125–6, 134, 138, 145, 150, 152, 162, 167, 173–4, 218–19, 223, 235, 244–5; see also critical posthumanism posthumanist reading 2, 20, 39, 44, 62, 66 theory 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 20, 22, 25, 44, 50, 110, 245 postmodern 6, 36–8, 42–3, 55, 71, 82, 110, 126, 134, 149–50, 162–3 postmonstrous 216–17, 228

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Index power relations 97, 112, 131, 136, 179, 186 predator 27–8, 58, 60, 86–7, 90, 112, 114, 224–5, 237 prey 27, 70, 87, 89–90, 137, 237 Prey (novel) 234, 236–42 primitive 47, 95, 127, 146, 150, 153–4, 156 progress 7, 43, 49, 54, 56, 71, 78, 95, 98, 199, 231–3, 244 prometheanism 13, 231, 233–5, 240, 243–4 promises of monsters 13, 218, 228 prosthesis 6–7, 23, 27, 50, 162, 227 puppet 85, 204, 238 psyche 61, 110, 134, 201 quarantine 27, 30 queer 94, 228, 230 racial equality 48 identity 38, 81 politics 71, 96 purity 64, 66 racism 40, 153 rape 22, 41, 44–5, 48, 145, 148, 150–5, 158 rational 1, 3, 36, 61, 65, 112, 115, 222–3, 227, 233, 244 reality as artificial construct 12, 200–1, 204, 222; see also fake, virtual reanimated 8–9, 13, 25, 168, 221, 232 reason 3, 14, 36, 62, 231, 233, 240, 243–4 reciprocity 95, 99, 103, 105

regression 12, 133, 146, 156; see also reversion to the animal replica 29–30, 38, 203, 208, 228, 236, 238, 240 representation x, 2–3, 10–13, 27, 55–6, 71, 110, 126–8, 139, 152, 161, 173, 180, 189–90, 192, 207 repressed 3, 7, 37–8, 133, 205 reproduction 43 organic/biological 48, 68, 85, 151, 221, 225, 240 inorganic/mechanical 237, 240 resistance 24, 43, 78, 81–3, 86, 105, 153, 218, 221, 230, 233, 245 responsibility 22, 43, 56, 95, 99–100, 104, 135 return to nature 12, 145 reversion to the animal 146, 156; see also regression revulsion 25, 36, 56, 151 Roden, David 3, 233, 242 role-play 200, 204, 211 romance see paranormal romance Romero, George 83 Russo, Mary 157 Sandman,The (novella) 238 science fiction x–xi, 1, 4, 56, 71, 78, 215, 218–19, 221, 229 scientific 3, 49, 56–7, 61–71, 87, 106, 125, 154–5, 163–4, 177, 180–1, 188, 193, 229 self 31, 37, 43, 46, 64, 72, 114, 130, 134, 138, 146, 149, 161, 163, 169, 188, 211, 216, 222–3, 227 self-replication 236, 240; see also replica

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Index sexual trauma 12, 146 Shelley, Mary 1, 9, 13, 42, 46, 49, 183–4, 207, 219, 234 Shildrick, Margrit 215, 217 Ship of Theseus problem 10, 21–3 simulacrum 79, 177, 191–2, 200–2, 207, 209–10, 212, 218, 224–6 simulation 12, 201, 205, 208 society see posthuman someness 8 species 4, 7, 19–20, 39, 42, 55–8, 62, 64, 67, 79, 81, 83, 85–6, 96–8, 101, 125, 127, 138–9, 146, 150, 178, 216, 220, 222, 224–5, 234 species Gothic 4, 87, 110, 150 speciesism 2, 20, 150 spectacle 13, 154, 207, 211–12 speculative fiction 49 posthumanism 3 Spooner, Catherine 113–14, 146, 149 Star Trek (franchise) 13, 215, 218–24, 227, 245 subaltern 7 subculture 6, 151, 223, 230 subhuman 25, 112, 115, 122, 199 subject see human subject subjectivity 13, 37–8, 42, 55, 62, 71–2, 86, 128, 146, 150, 158, 163, 215–17, 223, 236, 242, 244 sublime 37, 94 subversive 10, 128, 138 superhuman 46–7 supernatural romance see paranormal romance

surveillance 185–6, 188, 200–1; see also panopticon survival 19, 24, 48, 56, 64, 94, 100, 103–4, 109–13, 154, 156, 179, 222 suspended animation 67, 169 swarm 20, 32, 183, 236–42; see also hive symbiosis 72, 238 sympathetic vampire 79–80, 91 taboo 148, 155 technoculture 129 technological Other see Other technoscience 54–8, 62, 66, 68, 71–2, 199, 233 tentacle vii, 27–8, 58 terror 1, 9, 25, 27, 36–9, 49, 55–6, 60, 89, 94–5, 107, 202, 234, 240 Tetsuo:The Iron Man (film) 235 thing 26, 28, 30, 86, 101, 116, 236, 239, 243, 244 This Book Is Full of Spiders (novel) 20–5, 30–1 thought 2–3, 149, 216, 231, 235 tissue 25, 226 Tokyo Gore Police (film) 234–5 tool 6, 8, 62, 64, 88, 130, 223 Top of the Lake (television series) 12, 145–58 torture 44, 48, 60, 65 transcendence 234 transgression 5, 8, 36, 46, 54–5, 71, 94, 107, 126, 205, 215, 217, 237 transhumanist 54, 72, 126, 233, 242

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Index trauma see sexual trauma True Blood (television series) 11, 93–106 uncanny double 128, 130; see also double, doppelgänger the 6–7, 39, 94, 134, 238 valley 183, 200, 205 undead 8, 11, 19, 23–5, 57, 81, 118, 241 unheimlich 105; see also uncanny uninfected 19–20, 30 universal 2, 54, 114, 134, 137, 218 unnameable 40 unnatural 31, 177 unrepresentable 31, 37, 57, 177–8, 183–4, 211, 237 unsustainability 3 utopia 11, 39, 45, 47–9, 62, 93–106, 167–8, 200 utopianism 242–3 vampire 8, 10–11, 24, 54–71, 77–90, 96–106, 125–39 Vampire Diaries, The (television series) 11, 128–39 video-game tropes 162, 165 violence 29–30, 44, 49, 70, 109, 151, 153 viral going 200 infection 20; see also contagion thinking 38 virtual creation 207 identity 203

personality 204 reality 8 simulacrum 212; see also simulacrum virtuality xi, 8, 199–212 virus computer 62, 223 engineered 56–7, 62–4, 234 fatal 96; see also viral, contagion visual narrative 12 vital politics 8 voyeurism 13, 192, 201, 207 Walking Dead,The (television series) 19, 22 wasteland 224 welcome 98, 100–2 welcoming of the face 100 white male 125, 137–8 Wiener, Norbert 33, 168 Williams, Alex and Nick Srnicek 233, 243 Wolf, Naomi 189 Wolfe, Cary 3–4, 6, 8, 37, 43, 126 women natural 177–84 powerful 132 unnatural 177 Wong, David 10, 19–32 Year of the Flood, The (novel) 39 youth see eternal youth zoe 62 zombie x, 8, 10–11, 19–25, 28–32, 57, 79–80, 82–3, 111–17, 200 zombie apocalypse 19, 22, 24, 30–1

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