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I Am, I Was, I Will: The Posthuman Subject in Non-Linear Narratives
Orin Posner
Science Fiction Symposium 2016
My paper deals with the representation of posthuman characters in narrative.
I'm asking: is it possible to represent in a narrative text a subject who is not wholly
human, but rather, posthuman? I suggest that in order to represent a posthuman
character, the narrative structure must be unconventional and employ innovative
techniques. Specifically, I'll discuss two short science fiction stories, in which there's
a manipulation of traditional temporality, and whose protagonists I consider to be
posthuman.
I'll start by defining posthumanism, so that we have a working definition of
the concept and a shared understanding of what I mean when I talk about a posthuman
subject. That said, posthumanism is a huge and expanding field so it's likely the
definitions I work with here are not be the only ones or the most conclusive ones. I
also think that this whole paper throughout it tries to define what it means to be
posthuman, and specifically what it means for a character to be posthuman, and where
the boundaries of humanity stand.
Posthumanism means a rejection of humanity, going beyond human concepts
and humanist ideas. According to R.L. Rutsky, posthumanism involves "a
fundamental change or mutation in the concept of the human" (107). Significantly,
posthumanism is not about physical change from human to posthuman, but a more
fundamental shift away from human perspectives and experiences. As Cary Wolfe
says, posthumanism is a field dealing with "the decentering of the human in relation
to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates". It also deals with the
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question of "what thought has to become in the face of those challenges" (xvi). And
so, my questions are: When does someone step outside of their human perception of
the world and become posthuman? and what kind of narrative structure is necessary to
capture this? Is it even possible to capture posthumanity in narrative? And overall:
What is thought when it is no longer completely human?
This question is, of course, explored in science fiction. Representing the
strange and the Other - things that are beyond humanity - is arguably at the core of the
genre. But this can be challenging and doesn't always succeed: there is a paradox in
attempting to represent something which is not human within the framework of stories
written by and for humans, and by using human tools, like language and narrative –
because our language is human, and because both communicating and telling stories
can be considered specific human traits. A possible solution for this seeming
impossibility is using a new, different narrative voice in order to achieve
representation of a new, different subjectivity. With this in mind, new questions
follow: what kind of narrative voice constitutes a posthuman voice? how is it
formulated? and is it at all possible?
I will try answering these questions by discussing two different short stories in
which the protagonist's perception of time is different than the normal human
perception. Our perception of time as sequential – one event following the other in a
linear manner - is basic and integral to our human identity. Therefore, the two
characters I will discuss, who each has a non-sequential perception of time, can be
considered posthuman, and so their representation in narrative can provide a
challenge. I will look at the temporalities employed in their narratives, and discuss
their effectiveness in representing posthumanity. In both stories, the posthuman
character is the narrator and/or the focalizer.
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First, "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan. This picture here is to remind you
of the film version, Memento, by Christopher Nolan, which you may be familiar with,
but I will discuss the short story, which was actually written by Christopher Nolan's
brother, and is similar in premise.
In "Memento Mori", the protagonist is Earl, a hospital patient who suffers
from the fictional rare disease called CRS – "backward amnesia". His condition
makes him unable to retain new memories, and so every ten minutes or so he forgets
everything he experienced in those minutes. As a result, Earl has to be constantly
reminded of everything, and told what he has to do next, with various notes, signs,
lists and pictures around his hospital room. Most importantly, every ten minutes Earl
needs to relearn the fact that he has this disease, and that his wife is dead. Earl learns
that his wife was raped and murdered, and eventually decides to escape the hospital
he is in, find his wife's murderer and avenge her death. How he goes about doing it is
unclear, not to Earl, who cannot remember his own past, and exists only in the now,
and not to the readers, because the story's unique narrative structure imitates Earl's
unique perception of the world.
"Memento Mori" alternates between segments told by a first-person narrator –
a letter Earl has written to himself – and segments told by a third-person omniscient
narrator which focalizes through Earl. In the segments told in first-person, the narrator
is Earl who addresses himself – but a later-version of himself, who he knows would
not remember having written the letter, or anything else. In these segments, Earl tries
to make sense of his situation, construct his identity and the narrative of his life. To
give an example: “And as for the passage of time, well, that doesn't really apply to
you anymore, does it? Just the same ten minutes, over and over again. So how can
you forgive if you can't remember to forget?”
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But it is in the other half of the story that Earl's condition is more clearly
conveyed to the reader, not only by example, showing Earl's actions and reactions, but
also with the use of a certain narrative structure, which employs unconventional
temporality. Each chapter in which Earl is the focalizer begins with Earl as a clean
slate, remembering nothing that happened up to that point. The reader, too, knows
nothing, as nothing is conveyed in the narrative but the short moments before Earl
forgets again. Before and after each of these chapters there are ellipses, which are, to
use Gérard Genette's defintion, amounts of time that are "covered in a zero amount of
narrative" (137). The implied reader still knows more than Earl, because they can
piece together these chapters to guess at a certain sequential narrative, an ordered
progression of events. But the most important events in "Memento Mori" are left
untold, as ellipses, and the result is that the narrative's temporality is manipulated in
such a way as to be nonexistent: there is no time in Earl's world, no before and after,
and the narrative structure reflects that.
Earl's view of the world does not have a past or a future, he does not know
what happened to him and so does not care what will happen, because for him, there
is only the present. He tells himself in his letter that "it doesn't matter what you do.
No expectations. If you can't find [your wife's murderer], then it doesn't matter,
because nothing matters. And if you do find him, then you can kill him without
worrying about the consequences. Because there are no consequences." (12). And so,
Earl's life becomes the eternal search for the murderer of his wife: the search can
never be completed, it is always in progress and always now: there is no end. With
this cyclical and eternal narrative formed, Earl's identity becomes fully formed, as
well: he embraces his posthuman self, no longer just a mentally disabled hospital
patient, but a hero on a travelling adventure of revenge. He tells himself: "What kind
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of idiot, after all, is in any kind of rush to get to the end of his own story?" (14). In
this, Earl both uses the construction of a narrative to construct his identity, and rejects
the very concept of narrative – because what is narrative without time, without
progression of one moment to the next, and without a beginning, middle, and end?
Earl's life story becomes a new, posthuman narrative that does not conform to the
traditional idea of narrative, to reflect his becoming a new, posthuman self, which
does not fit the traditional idea of humanity.
The second story I want to discuss is "A Story of Your Life", a short story by
Ted Chiang. Chiang has written only a few short SF stories, but they've been very
successful and this one is his most well-known work, and it's also being adapted into a
movie. This picture of him, by the way, is from his recent visit to Israel, during Icon
festival last year.
The protagonist of "A Story of Your Life" is Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist who
is recruited by the government after aliens inexplicably arrive at various locations
around Earth. Louise joins a team of scientists that includes physicists and linguists,
and her job is to study the language of the aliens – who they call "heptapods" – in an
attempt to communicate with them. Gradually, she is able to learn the heptapods'
languages. They have a spoken language, which she names Heptapod A, and a written
language, Heptapod B. In Heptapod A, words can appear in any order, while
Heptapod B is made out of "semagrams" – complex symbols each representing a full
sentence, with strokes of different shapes, sizes, curves and rotations indicating
different words in various inflections. Louise understands that, "the heptapod had to
know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first
stroke", and eventually she realizes that the reason for this is that they have a different
mode of awareness than humans do: The Heptapods have "a simultaneous mode of
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awareness", and so perceive events as teleological, not sequential: they are aware of
everything that's going to happen because for them, it’s all happening at the same
time.
As Louise studies the Heptapods' written language, she develops "a faculty
like that of the heptapods" and feels that the language is "changing the way [she]
thought“ – she begins thinking in semagrams. Soon, her mind accepts different rules
not only of grammar but also of time. She begins processing ideas differently: her
mind begins to work teleologically, like the aliens', who are aware of everything that
is to happen. When Louise knows the alien language well enough to think in it, her
perception of the world transforms, and she becomes posthuman. She now
experiences the world like the aliens, for whom there is no sequential time. This
posthuman world-view allows Louise to "remember" events that will occur in her
future. The temporality of the narrative is therefore unique because for Louise, its
first-person narrator, the sequence of events doesn't matter.
Louise goes back and forth from recounting the events of the past – her
studying the alien language, meeting and falling in love with Gary, the physicist she
works with; and the events of the future – brief scenes from moments throughout her
own life and her future daughter's life. While the past events are recounted in
traditional narrative form, in past-tense and chronologically, the narrative structure of
the future events constitute what Genette calls "achronisms": "episodes entirely cut
loose from any chronological situation whatsoever" (135). These future-tense
achronisms are inserted throughout the narrative, not breaking the chronological pasttense narration, but continuing it in a natural flow. The narrative begins and ends in
present tense, in one moment – right before Louise's husband asks her to have a child
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– this is the moment in which Louise tells her entire narrative, in her head, to her
unborn daughter.
To illustrate this, I want to quote a short passage from early in the story,
exemplifying an achronism. All the bolding is mine:
“The only reason you had me was so you could get a maid you wouldn't have
to pay,” you'll say bitterly, dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the closet.
“That's right,” I'll say. “Thirteen years ago I knew the carpets would need
vacuuming around now, and having a baby seemed to be the cheapest and
easiest way to get the job done. Now kindly get on with it.”
“If you weren't my mother, this would be illegal,” you'll say, seething as you
unwind the power cord and plug it into the wall outlet.
That will be in the house on Belmont Street. I'll live to see strangers occupy
both houses: the one you're conceived in and the one you grow up in. Your
dad and I will sell the first a couple years after your arrival. I'll sell the second
shortly after your departure. By then Nelson and I will have moved into our
farmhouse, and your dad will be living with what's-her-name.
I know how this story ends; I think about it a lot. I also think a lot about how
it began, just a few years ago, when ships appeared in orbit and artifacts
appeared in meadows. The government said next to nothing about them, while
the tabloids said every possible thing.
And then I got a phone call, a request for a meeting.
In this mixing of present, past, and future events, the narrative equates them, putting
all the events on the same level, as they all constitute Louise's memory and therefore
her experience of the world. By using different tenses to describe the events, Louise is
translating into English what for her exists outside or regardless of time. This
necessary translation is done because the implied author and reader are human, but
also because Louise has a clear narratee, her daughter. In doing do, Louise is
translating the way her posthuman mind works, how she perceives the world, into a
human language and narrative.
But this translation of alien perception into human language necessarily must
fail. As Elana Gomel argues, Louise "epitomizes the failure of translation. The sharp
divide in the story between the chronological and achronic sections is the divide
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between human and alien which cuts Louise into two. She becomes a living
oxymoron, stuck between two mutually untranslatable visions of the world" (173).
Both Earl and Louise decide to tell a story, which might be their way to
reclaim control over what happens to them. Their non-human perception of time
makes them feel helpless: Earl doesn't experience cause and effect because he
remembers nothing, and Louise doesn't experience cause and effect because she
remembers everything, but knows she can't change it. They both turn to storytelling in
order to construct their new posthuman identity in which they exist outside of time.
Ultimately, Louise's choice of telling the story re-stabilizes her humanity.
Though she herself exists outside of time, telling the story necessitates choosing an
order to the events she recounts. In that, she imposes chronology over her timeless
perception of events. The narrative still follows a clear sequence: Louise is aware of
the order of events, and uses the appropriate grammatical tenses to describe these
events. In other words, she imposes human perception of time over her own nonhuman perception of it, employing a sequential order of events even though she no
longer sees the world with the concept of sequential time. As she was once human and
is still surrounded and deeply, emotionally affected by other humans, Louise holds on
to her humanity. Her choice to tell a story to her daughter is a very human choice of a
very human act: storytelling.
Unlike Louise, Earl tries to reject his humanity through storytelling, not hold
on to it. And yet, he still uses sequential narrative in order to achieve that – a long
letter with clear sequential order of events, explaining everything to himself, and to
the readers.
The role of storyteller that each of those posthuman characters takes on is
what connects them to humanity, even while they are representing their own unique
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posthuman perspective. It might seem as though giving the posthuman subject a
voice, having the story narrated through them, is the best way to accurately represent
their posthuman view of the world. However, it is the act of narration that actually
brings the posthumans back to humanity.
First, because narrative in general can be considered a human concept, one
which is defined by a human conception of time, according to which there is always a
beginning, middle, and end – as opposed to timelessness. Furthermore, by narrating a
story, the posthuman subjects engage in an act of communication with humanity,
because the narratives that the posthumans tell are told to humans. These humans can
be explicit within the text, in the shape of other characters or narratees, but ultimately,
they are also always on the extradiegetic level, outside the text, as the implied human
reader. This necessitates the use of a human language, that necessarily follows human
conventions and expectations. As long as the posthuman narrative only represents the
posthuman as an Other who must be explained in order to be understood by humans,
there is still no narrative space fitting for true posthuman subjectivities.
So, can narrative represent something that's outside of humanity, and if so,
how? In what narrative space can posthuman subjectivities exist? It seems that every
attempt to represent posthumanity fails, because it can't help but tell it in the context
of humanity. But still, I want to leave you with some conclusion. One answer I'll
propose is that the only way to represent something non-human in a human narrative
is… by not representing it, employing zero narrative space. This is what is done, in a
way, in "Memento Mori": the only way to represent a character who exists outside of
time, is to remove the concept of time from the narrative. Using ellipses may be the
only way to represent the seemingly un-representable, posthuman perception.
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But even beyond ellipses, I believe that this challenge of representation
remains open, and might push us towards stepping outside of narrative itself: going
beyond narrative in order to represent that which is beyond humanity.
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Works Cited
Chiang, Ted. "A Story of Your Life." Year's Best SF 4. Ed. David G. Hartwell. New
York, NY: HarperPrism, 1999. 119-82. Print.
Genette, Gérard. "Order, Duration, Frequency." Narrative/theory. White Plains, N.Y:
Longman, 1996. 132-39. Print.
Gomel, Elana. Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism:
Beyond the Golden Rule. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
Nolan, Jonathan. "Memento Mori." Esquire March 2001. Print.
Rutsky, R. L., “Mutation, History, and Fantasy in the Posthuman,” in “Posthuman
Conditions,” ed. Neil Badmington, special issue, Subject Matters: A Journal of
Communication and the Self vol. 3, no. 2–vol. 4, no. 1. 2007.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2010. Print.