TRANSHUMANISM AND THE BIOLOGICAL BODY IN DON DELILLO’S ZERO K

Extract

1. The Loss of Materiality in the Transhuman Era

The dehumanizing effects of technology1 and the invasion of consumer culture into personal lives have been constantly blended in Don DeLillo’s work.2 Indeed, living in this postmodernist era, in which technology and consumer culture have become broader social and cultural forces, influences our perceptions toward subject and object, mind and body, life and death. Very often, we experience a difficulty to distinguish these perceptions as if it was not us but objects, consumption, and death that represent the markers of ourselves. DeLillo often shows this reversal of relations through the consumption of the mediated images of death in his works, whereby the mediated images blur the distinction between reality and illusion, creating an unconventional perception of reality as “death folded in life, happiness in death, black in white, fiction in reality” (Chang 218).

DeLillo’s latest novel, Zero K (2016), further makes visible this reversed relation between life (immortality) and death (mortality) through introducing cryopreservation, biotechnology used for freezing biological materials at shallow temperatures. Narrated by Jeffrey Lockhart, the son of Ross and Madeline Lockhart, Zero K tells the story of Jeffrey’s exploration of the Convergence, a self-sufficient, underground cryogenic facility where frozen (human) bodies and mannequins blur the boundaries between life and death. Inspired by the disabling illness of his current wife, Artis Martineau, to pursue immortality through cryopreservation, Ross believes in the promise of a utopian after-life offered by the Convergence’s founders, the Stenmark twins. However, Jeffrey remains skeptical toward this faith-based transhumanist utopianism and admits to a sense of repulsion toward the mediated death images, the broken mannequins, and hundreds of human chambers in the Convergence. In this respect, Jeffrey’s skeptical narrative represents a neohumanist counter-narrative against the transhumanist narratives presented by Ross and the Stenmark twins.

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To cite this article: 

Lay Sion Ng, Transhumanism and the Biological Body in Don DeLillo’s Zero K: A Material Feminist Perspective, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 28, Issue 2, Summer 2021, Pages 686–708, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa114

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