The Posthuman Comedy

Abstract

According to Wai Chee Dimock, scholars of American literature should study it in a bigger historical context than the one beginning in 1776 or even 1620, freeing themselves in this way from the narrow-minded nationalism that has so often drawn a border around their research. To view American literature in light of the longer durée of ancient civilizations is to see Henry David Thoreau reading the Bhagavad Gita, Ralph Waldo Emerson the Persian poet Hāfez, and rediscover in these and other extensive sympathies the kinship of American literature with world literature. Dramatically expanding the tracts of space-time across which literary scholars might draw valid links between author and author, text and text, and among author, text, and the wide world beyond, the perspective of deep time holds the additional promise, for Dimock, of reinvigorating "our very sense of the connectedness among human beings" and of dissuading us, thereby, from the wisdom of war. 1 At the very least we might hope that American soldiers wouldn't look idly on, as they did on 14 April 2003, as the cultural treasures of the Iraqi National Library-which are the treasures of all humankindwere looted and burned. Dimock's Through Other Continents is among the most prominent but also most unusual works of the transnational turn in literary studies, and one way of beginning to discern its originality is to run through a checklist of readily offered objections to the way its argument is framed. For starters there is the historical materialist objection, which casts an ironic light on events like those of 14 April 2003, when some ancient "documents of civilization," as Walter Benjamin called them, finally became victims of the same "barbarism" of which they were originally made. 2 Refusing to contemplate that original horror, Dimock would seem from this perspective to want to acquit culture of its complicity in historical violence, dissolving Special thanks are due to the editors of this journal, in particular Lauren Berlant, for inspiring large-scale acts of revision. Thanks also to the many individuals and institutions whose benign influence was felt at various points in the unusually long duration of its composition.

Literary Proto‐Humans

“…In an article on the difficulty of reconciling the evolution of life on Earth with narrative representation, Porter Abbott writes that ‘there is no unencumbered way of packaging [Darwin's theory of natural selection] in narrative form without serious distortion’ (Abbott , 144). Abbott's conclusion points to the radical challenges to narrative and literary practices raised – as noted by McGurl (, ) – by phenomena that go beyond the ‘human scale’ of everyday experience: phenomena that take place over millions or even billions of years and feature no distinct anthropomorphic agency or teleology. But fiction, and particularly fiction of the literary variety, has other strategies for coming to terms with the ‘deep’ history of humankind than direct representation.…”

“…In two seminal articles, Mark McGurl (, ) calls attention to the uneasy tension between literature and the ‘big scale’ of evolutionary, geological or cosmic phenomena. Literature, a human practice with barely 3,000 years of recorded history, looks quite small in front of the millions of years over which life on Earth evolved.…”

Pynchon’s Posthuman Temporalities

“…45 Nor is the tragic tonality of Dimock's proposal quite adequate for literary works that factor in "scientific knowledge of the spatiotemporal vastness and numerousness of the nonhuman world." 46 Works in which nonhuman vastness "becomes visible as a formal, representational, and finally existential problem," McGurl argues, are better characterized as instances of "posthuman comedy." 47 As Krzysztof Piekarski and colleagues have noted, Pynchon has undermined tragic form throughout his career, and Against the Day is written in "a form that is both anarchic and nontragic."…”

‘In the eyeblink of a planet you were born, died, and your bones disintegrated’: scales of mourning and velocities of memory in Philipp Meyer’s American Rust

“…Whilst giving Dimock 'considerable credit for broaching the issue of scale in literary studies', 21 Mark McGurl questions whether her apparent desire to 'acquit culture of its complicity in historical violence' by 'dissolving it in a 'deep time' now recognisable as aestheticised time' risks reducing the expanded scales and complicated causalities of the Anthropocene to 'a remarkably frictionless conduit of transnational sympathy and identification'. 22 In his critique of Butler's work, moreover, Cohen contends that, in the face of a 'suddenly reset referential horizon', 23 Precarious Life engenders a 'negotiated back-loop to a more humane order', 'a residual humanism [that] cannot stop re-inscribing itself in familial oikos or boundedness'.…”