Becoming Posthuman
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, The New Human In Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900
Bloomsbury, 256pp, £24.99, ISBN 9781474228190
reviewed by Imogen Woodberry
By the early years of the 20th century the nature and boundaries of human identity had become increasingly destabilised. One of the many conceptual revolutions provoked by Darwinism was the recognition that the present state of humanity was temporary; this led to a volume of speculation on what could next lie in store for the human species. Despite Darwin’s charting of human development as an upward trajectory, a move from simpler sub-species to more complex entities, change, it was feared, might not necessarily be for the better. Qualifying the hope that humanity was evolving to increasing stages of perfection, degeneration theory threatened that human beings could just as easily regress. In the classic literary statement of these anxieties, HG Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), the Victorian time traveller finds himself propelled 30 million years from hence into a world populated by nothing but a giant, slimy crab-like creatures.
Aside from the long-term changes considered by science, writers at the start of the 20th century were faced with the radical societal alterations brought by the processes of modernity. It is with the changed sense of consciousness they rendered that Thomsen starts his literary overview, examining responses within the work of the key modernist writers Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
As labour became mechanised, the new techniques of mass production seemed to increasingly pre-figure the human worker as a mechanical entity (Henry Ford’s My Philosophy of Industry included a section entitled ‘Repairing Men Like Boilers’), while equally within the home mechanical labour was frequently replaced the work of human hands. Thomsen cites Céline’s commentary on the dehumanising effects of American industry in his novel Journey into the End of the Night (1932):
Industrialisation also brought with it a new sense of emotional identification and fulfilment within secularised arenas. Thomsen discusses Williams’ poem ‘At the Ballgame’ (1923) for its rendition of human enchantment within the modern secular world and for the loss of the individual within the collective – the crowd ‘is moved uniformly.’
At times, however, the connections between the writers and the changes with which they are purported to be engaged can seem somewhat tenuous – the description in Williams’s poem XXVII in Spring and All (1923) of ‘Black eyed susan’ as ‘Arab / Indian / dark woman’ is, for example, rather nebulously connected to the contemporary scientist’s Spencer Wells’ point that within recent century ‘genetic diversity has accelerated.’ Thomsen has a tendency to retrospectively impose ideas upon texts in ways that are not necessarily that elucidating: Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is discussed primarily for its relation to current issues of transgenderism when it would seem rather more pertinent to analyse it in terms of the radical shifts in gender relations within the 1920s.
The focus of next section feels rather sharper, dealing with writers’ responses to grand political projects; ‘the twentieth century’s attempts to actively change people, by changing societies and cultures.’ Efforts to implement new social orders did not simply stop with the political but were frequently combined with ambitions of creating news types of humanity. Thomsen cites the example of a pamphlet which announces that the Soviet Union has become the homeland for a new and higher order of Homo Sapiens – the ‘Homo Sovieticus.’ Trotsky in particular had a tendency to combine Soviet politics with transhumanist ideas, in for instance his essay ‘Revolutionary and Socialist Art’ (1924) he asserts:
Yet rather than enhancing humanity, the net effect of these grand projects is typically one of dehumanisation. Thomsen examines the recurrent use of the motifs of cyborgisation and metamorphosis in the work of Mo Yan: ‘Iron Child’ details how a boy whose parents are working on a large railroad construction develops the ability to eat iron, the narrative of ‘Life and Death are Wearing Me Out’ is structured around a series of reincarnations of the protagonist, while in ‘Soaring’ a young woman named Yanyan seeks refuge in a tree and refuses to come town: ‘In your arms, she’s your wife, but perched atop a tree, she’s some kind of strange bird;’ when she’s shot down the bystanders want to know whether she has feathers.
In a similar vein, Thomsen examines the sense emotional lose rendered by Chinua Achebe in his portrayal of the effects of the European colonialism upon African tribal culture in Things Fall Apart (1958), where a traditional African village is gradually transformed into a Christianised society, and by Orhan Pamuk in his examination of attempts to westernise Turkish culture and nationality.
The life sciences of the late 20th century have perhaps, more then any other arena, foregrounded the malleability of the human form. The techniques of cloning, ectogenesis, gland therapy, in vitro fertilisation, and tissue culture all seem to position human life as something that can be manipulated and determined within the laboratory. Although this has provoked a rich body of science fiction, the early examples of which are now retrospectively labeled as such, Thomsen generally shies away from that genre. In the introduction he asserts his intent of using the discourse of ‘the new human’ as a lens to provide observations on more canonical literature. After a brief account of some notable science fiction works, the book ends with an examination of ideas of biotechnological transformation in the novels of Don DeLillo and Michel Houellebecq, concluding a contemplative account of the infusion of the technological imagination in literature and its role in constructing notions of human identity.
Aside from the long-term changes considered by science, writers at the start of the 20th century were faced with the radical societal alterations brought by the processes of modernity. It is with the changed sense of consciousness they rendered that Thomsen starts his literary overview, examining responses within the work of the key modernist writers Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
As labour became mechanised, the new techniques of mass production seemed to increasingly pre-figure the human worker as a mechanical entity (Henry Ford’s My Philosophy of Industry included a section entitled ‘Repairing Men Like Boilers’), while equally within the home mechanical labour was frequently replaced the work of human hands. Thomsen cites Céline’s commentary on the dehumanising effects of American industry in his novel Journey into the End of the Night (1932):
We ourselves became machines, our flesh trembled in the furious din, it gripped us around our heads and in our bowels and rose up to the eyes in quick continuous jolts.
Industrialisation also brought with it a new sense of emotional identification and fulfilment within secularised arenas. Thomsen discusses Williams’ poem ‘At the Ballgame’ (1923) for its rendition of human enchantment within the modern secular world and for the loss of the individual within the collective – the crowd ‘is moved uniformly.’
At times, however, the connections between the writers and the changes with which they are purported to be engaged can seem somewhat tenuous – the description in Williams’s poem XXVII in Spring and All (1923) of ‘Black eyed susan’ as ‘Arab / Indian / dark woman’ is, for example, rather nebulously connected to the contemporary scientist’s Spencer Wells’ point that within recent century ‘genetic diversity has accelerated.’ Thomsen has a tendency to retrospectively impose ideas upon texts in ways that are not necessarily that elucidating: Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is discussed primarily for its relation to current issues of transgenderism when it would seem rather more pertinent to analyse it in terms of the radical shifts in gender relations within the 1920s.
The focus of next section feels rather sharper, dealing with writers’ responses to grand political projects; ‘the twentieth century’s attempts to actively change people, by changing societies and cultures.’ Efforts to implement new social orders did not simply stop with the political but were frequently combined with ambitions of creating news types of humanity. Thomsen cites the example of a pamphlet which announces that the Soviet Union has become the homeland for a new and higher order of Homo Sapiens – the ‘Homo Sovieticus.’ Trotsky in particular had a tendency to combine Soviet politics with transhumanist ideas, in for instance his essay ‘Revolutionary and Socialist Art’ (1924) he asserts:
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into the hidden recesses, and thereby raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
Yet rather than enhancing humanity, the net effect of these grand projects is typically one of dehumanisation. Thomsen examines the recurrent use of the motifs of cyborgisation and metamorphosis in the work of Mo Yan: ‘Iron Child’ details how a boy whose parents are working on a large railroad construction develops the ability to eat iron, the narrative of ‘Life and Death are Wearing Me Out’ is structured around a series of reincarnations of the protagonist, while in ‘Soaring’ a young woman named Yanyan seeks refuge in a tree and refuses to come town: ‘In your arms, she’s your wife, but perched atop a tree, she’s some kind of strange bird;’ when she’s shot down the bystanders want to know whether she has feathers.
In a similar vein, Thomsen examines the sense emotional lose rendered by Chinua Achebe in his portrayal of the effects of the European colonialism upon African tribal culture in Things Fall Apart (1958), where a traditional African village is gradually transformed into a Christianised society, and by Orhan Pamuk in his examination of attempts to westernise Turkish culture and nationality.
The life sciences of the late 20th century have perhaps, more then any other arena, foregrounded the malleability of the human form. The techniques of cloning, ectogenesis, gland therapy, in vitro fertilisation, and tissue culture all seem to position human life as something that can be manipulated and determined within the laboratory. Although this has provoked a rich body of science fiction, the early examples of which are now retrospectively labeled as such, Thomsen generally shies away from that genre. In the introduction he asserts his intent of using the discourse of ‘the new human’ as a lens to provide observations on more canonical literature. After a brief account of some notable science fiction works, the book ends with an examination of ideas of biotechnological transformation in the novels of Don DeLillo and Michel Houellebecq, concluding a contemplative account of the infusion of the technological imagination in literature and its role in constructing notions of human identity.