Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T20:28:17.378Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

PREFIGURING THE POSTHUMAN: DICKENS AND PROSTHESIS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Herbert Sussman
Affiliation:
New School University
Gerhard Joseph
Affiliation:
Lehman College and the Graduate School, City University of New York

Extract

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs…. by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance. Man has become a kind of prosthetic god.—Freud, Civilization and its Discontents DOROTHY VAN GHENT'S “View from Todgers's” classic essay of 1950 (about perspective in Martin Chuzzlewit) might be defined as the starting point for what we now accept as the veriest Dickens commonplace: the fact that an interchange between animate human subject and inanimate object characterizes his world view. The boundaries of person and material thing are permeable, are constantly criss-crossing, according to Van Ghent, in a “system that is presumed to be a nervous one…. its predications about persons or objects tend to be statements of metabolic conversion of one into the other” (221). But this persistent reading, expressed here in biological terms–“nervous” system, “metabolic conversion”–of Dickens's stylistic habit, itself depends upon attributing to Dickens the critic's sharp distinction between the “human” and the “inhuman” or “non-human.”

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN BOUNDARIES
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Babbage Charles. 1967 The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment. 2nd ed. 1838. London: Frank Cass
Babbage Charles. 1994 Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. 1864. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,
Ballard J. G. 1973 Crash. New York: Noonday P,
Clayton Jay. 2003 Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture. New York: Oxford UP,
De Man Paul. 1979 Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP,
Dickens Charles. 1970 Dombey and Son. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
Dickens Charles. 1994Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything.” Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers, 1833–39. Ed. Michael Slater. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens's Journalism. 1837. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 51330.
Dickens Charles. 1994Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything.” Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers, 1833–39. Ed. Michael Slater. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens's Journalism. 1838. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 53051.
Dickens Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Humphrey House, Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, K. J. Fielding. 10 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 19651998.
Hayles N. Katherine. 2000 How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
Heims Steve J. 1991 The Cybernetic Group. Cambridge: MIT P,
Hutter Albert O.Dismemberment and Articulation in Our Mutual Friend,” Dickens Studies Annual 11 (1983): 13575.
Hyman Anthony. 1983 Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer. Princeton: Princeton UP,
Matus Jill. “Proxy and Proximity: Metonymic Signing.” University of Toronto Quarterly 58 (1988/89): 30526.
Matus Jill. “Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster.” Victorian Studies 43 (2001): 41336.
Moynihan Julian. 1962Dealing with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Firmness versus Wetness.” Dickens and the Twentieth Century. Ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 12131.
Newsom Robert. “Embodying Dombey.” Dickens Studies Annual 18 (1989): 197219.
O'Connor Erin. 2000Fractions of Men: Engendering Amputations.” Raw Materials: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 10247.
Scarry Elaine. 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP,
Seltzer Mark. 1992 Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge,
Slater Michael, ed. 1994 Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers, 1833–39. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
Sutherland John. 1999Does Carker Have False Teeth.” Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? Oxford: Oxford UP, 7886.
Van Ghent Dorothy. 1961The Dickens World: A View from Todgers's.” Sewanee Review 58 (1950): 41938. Rpt. in The Dickens Critics. Ed. George Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 213–22.Google Scholar
Wills David. 1995 Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford UP,