Representing (Post) Human Enhancement Technologies in Twenty-First Century US Fiction by Carmen Laguarta-Bueno

Carmen Laguarta-Bueno’s remarkable volume Representing (Post)Human Enhancement Technologies in Twenty-First Century US Fiction is part of the Routledge series Perspectives on the Non-human in Literature and Culture. I mention the series because although this volume might have also been published within the Studies in Speculative Fiction series, the author distances herself both from this mode and from science fiction. Laguarta-Bueno emphasizes instead the literary aspects of three representative American novels analyzed in three lengthy chapters: “Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009): A Metafictional Reflection on the Biotechnological Pursuit of Happiness,” “When Utopia Meets Dystopia: Social Media Tools and Surveillance Devices in Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013),” and “Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016): Transhumanism, Trauma, and the Ethics of Premature Cryopreservation.”In her introduction, Laguarta-Bueno mentions Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mónica Calvo-Pascual’s edited volume Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative (2021), to which she herself contributed, as her most immediate predecessor. She insists, however, that her approach consists of analyzing “the narrative strategies and modes used by some renowned contemporary US writers to fictionalize current transhumanist debates and explore the potential and limitations of different human enhancement technologies” (14, my italics). Laguarta-Bueno thus highlights a key difference between the nongenre, creative fiction by Powers, Eggers, and DeLillo and the cyberpunk and postcyberpunk fiction with which it overlaps in its attention to posthumanism and transhumanism. The authors she mentions as key practitioners of these genres (Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, Ken MacLeod, Peter Hamilton, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson) are not considered together with the trio selected because they publish, it is implied, nonliterary genre fiction, whereas Laguarta-Bueno is interested in the presence of posthumanism and transhumanism in twenty-first-century American literary fiction.My objection is that when Laguarta-Bueno writes that although Powers, Eggers, and DeLillo “address topics which had previously belonged almost exclusively to the SF realm . . . they do not give up on the sophisticated storytelling techniques that characterized their earlier works” (21), she unfairly dismisses all of SF as a domain in which only “more straight-forward realist modes of narration” (21) are used. Certainly, the novels in the SF circuit (the candidates for the Hugo and Nebula awards, rather than the Pulitzer) are usually less sophisticated, but there have been plenty of narrative experiments since the 1960s, from Samuel Delany to Kim Stanley Robinson. The lines separating creative literature from the nonexperimental type are, in any case, always difficult to establish. Laguarta-Bueno quotes a review by Margaret Atwood calling Eggers’s The Circle “a novel of ideas,” which, because of its limited characterization, appears to be “an entertainment” though “a challenging one” (80, my italics). The thesis that “fiction may be indeed a suitable tool to invite readers to reflect on some of the ethical and philosophical questions that surround the transhumanist ideal of using technology to enhance the human condition” (21) is, therefore, only valid if the focus falls narrowly on literary fiction, for SF has been for a long time a genre where these ideas are discussed. In fact, Laguarta-Bueno’s volume is proof of worrying divisions among individuals interested in the same topics: on one hand, she aims at convincing reluctant readers interested in posthumanism and transhumanism that fiction is as relevant a vehicle as the essay to deal with these topics, but, on the other hand, she places literary fiction above the very abundant SF sharing the same topics and discourse. Laguarta-Bueno explains beautifully how Powers, Eggers, and DeLillo use literary resources to undermine the transhumanist discourse, but most SF is also critical of posthumanism and transhumanism, following Mary Shelley’s technophobic discourse in Frankenstein (1818).Beyond these objections, Laguarta-Bueno’s analysis is intelligent, generous, and fulfilling. Her chapters offer a very complete panorama of the issues dealt with in the novels and the narrative strategies employed in them. In this era of overwhelming academic prose, with each sentence carrying several quotations and references, it is refreshing to read a volume with room enough to comment at length on the secondary sources and to provide readers with substantial plot summaries. The structure of the chapters, with sections that review very proficiently both the scientific literature and the academic work on and media criticism of the novels, stresses the common purpose of the three novelists, who have turned their revulsion at the transhumanist project into protest articulated with fine narrative, literary tools.Chapter 1, on Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement, deals with a writer of high reputation (he won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker in 2006) very much interested in science and technology. Powers considers whether a predisposition to feel happiness might be ingrained in our genes with the unfortunate story of Algerian civil war refugee Thassadit Amzwar, or Thassa, a woman apparently endowed with a gene for happiness which biotechnology seeks to exploit. Laguarta-Bueno argues that with his self-reflexive narrative and his distrust of transhumanism, Powers “conveys instead an alternative view of happiness as a state of mind that can be reached by means of being resilient in the face of our problems, establishing solid relationships with the people around us, and enjoying the present moment” (37). Powers splits his novel between a pseudo-nonfiction strand dominated by transhumanist scientist Thomas Kurton and a metafictional narrative by an anonymous author much closer to Thassa, another white male. Laguarta-Bueno argues that the metafictional questioning of realist narrative undermines the monolithic construction of the transhumanist discourse, though her analysis does not comment on why Powers does not use Thassa’s own voice. His decision to focus on a foreign, traumatized woman who, nonetheless, remains cheerful and resilient should perhaps be questioned, particularly considering that American patriarchal science is the main threat for her (and for humankind).Chapter 2, on Dave Eggers’s The Circle, extends the debate on transhumanism beyond biotechnology to social media tools and surveillance devices. By focalizing his dystopian tale of the near future through protagonist Mae Holland while intensifying his authorial distance from her increasingly dangerous views, Eggers manages to awaken his readers’ awareness of the intrusive nature of current social media and the constant surveillance of public and private life. Although it can be certainly read as social satire in the vein of Huxley’s Brave New World, Eggers’s novel and its sequel, The Every (2021), are also horror stories, at least for those readers jealous of their privacy. Eggers, who does not use social media, has been criticized, as Laguarta-Bueno notes, for his faulty research and for his superficial characterization, though a point he makes throughout his novel is that the loss of privacy turns individuals into robotic empty shells. Eggers, Laguarta-Bueno maintains, uses deftly free indirect discourse and his heterodiegetic, omniscient narrator focalized on the protagonist to show how Mae ends up supporting a totalitarian view of human life that endangers privacy, but also civil rights. The irony arising from the distance between protagonist and author is a satirical tool to warn readers, American or otherwise, about the possible end of democracy if technological corporations are allowed to run it.Chapter 3, focused on DeLillo’s Zero K, deals with life extension technologies, in particular cryonics, from the point of view of the trauma its use may cause to the relatives of the persons who use them. The story of how billionaire Ross Lockhart cannot stand life without his wife Artis Martineau, who chooses to undergo cryopreservation hoping that her crippling illness might be cured in the future, is told through the traumatized perspective of Jeffrey, Ross’s son. Laguarta-Bueno’s thesis is that the presence of trauma has been overlooked by most critics of DeLillo’s novel, even though it constitutes the narrative core of this “psychic trauma novel” (168). As she further adds, “mirroring the workings of [Jeffrey’s] traumatized mind, the story is highly fragmented and full of flashbacks, repetitions and intrusive images, which enhances, in turn, readers’ sense of emotional and psychological breakdown” (168) and their firm rejection of cryonics.Laguarta-Bueno’s excellent volume calls attention to how American literary fiction has finally incorporated the debates on posthumanism and transhumanism into its plots, though possibly her main contribution is highlighting that academic critical posthumanism has unfairly ignored the work by authors such as Powers, Eggers, or DeLillo (and, surely, by other nonmale, nonwhite U.S. literary authors interested in similar topics). Few academic publications on transhumanism and posthumanism discuss speculative fiction, science fiction, or literary fiction about technological and scientific themes, and this is a situation which needs to end. Fiction is not a superfluous addition to the debates on transhumanism and posthumanism, but, as Laguarta-Bueno proves, a major tool to extend those debates to readers who would otherwise remain uninformed about the personal experiences to which we might all soon be subjected

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dystopia · Epistemology · Human enhancement · Literature · Narrative · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Transhumanism · Utopia · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative

  Sonia Baelo-Allué, Mónica Calvo-Pascual•Transhumanism and Posthumanism in…•2021

  Add to list