Man-Clone Proxemics: Changing Perspectives from Mary Shelley (Frankenstein*) to Kate Wilhelm (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang**)

Abstract

The present paper addresses a question that was born simultaneously with the emergence of a non-organic factor in the generation and utopian projection of human beings. The organicist view of romanticism perceived the animating effect of Luigi Galvani’s experiment, according to Mary Shelley’s ground-breaking scientific romance Frankenstein (1818), as disquieting as humanist Horatio’s response to Old Hamlet’s ghost in Shakespeare’s 1600 tragedy. Horatio’s qualification of the ghost as “a mole in the eye†renders exactly the sense of an impurity that does not fit among the familiar phenomena of the known world. Mary Shelley too envisioned the role of technology in the future projects of biologically and intellectually enhanced human beings, leaving behind humanistic notions of natura naturans, or projects of improvement of the biological given through education or acculturation creating a second nature. Looking at several rival versions of utopianism, the present paper has opted for the Maturana and Varela model of evolution (“autopoiesisâ€) which biologists the order of artifacts, redefined as a living system growing out of itself and only revealing capacity of evolution through creative and revisionist incorporation of tradition. In light of their theory, an influential book on post human proxemics, such as Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1974), is a hallmark of postmodern post humanism to the extent that it manages to transform in a significant way its early nineteenth-century precedent – Frankenstein.