Cyborg or goddess: Postmodernism and its others in John Fowles's Mantissa

College Literature, Summer 2003 by O'Sullivan, Jane

Reading Mantissa is a bit like peeking into someone else's virtual reality, and in this instance, that reality is conjured up by the relatively low-tech imagination of a fictional male author, Miles Green. Rather than experience such extraterrestrial entanglements as those selected by the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in Total Recall, Miles prefers to tango with the many personae adopted by Erato, his creative muse. However, when Erato trades her role as nubile nymph or heavenly goddess for that of a man-hating cyberpunk bent on revenge, Miles ceases to find her amusing. In general, the novel's representation and conflation of feminism and postmodernist mutability is highly suspect, and this is particularly apparent in its distorted portrayal of an ostensibly postmodernist "de-gendering," or masculine appropriation of the specifically maternal body. Nevertheless, the empowering ease with which its phantasmagoric female protagonist dons and doffs her various personae does point to some of the potential of this uneasy partnership. It might suggest, for instance, that by adopting such a postmodern provisionality of identity, some of the attributes of a cyborg and a goddess need be neither antithetical, nor mutually exclusive.

A cyborg is described by Donna Haraway as "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (1990, 191), and "a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self" (205). This is in many respects a description that is strikingly applicable to the muse-figure in Mantissa, and yet, contrary to the traditional image of muse as nurturing of and responsive to the creative demands of the male artist, the cyborg is envisaged by Haraway as "the self feminists must code" (205). The cyborg's value to feminists resides in its blurring of the boundaries between the "natural" and technological or cultural. In doing so, it has great potential as a vehicle for challenging existing "dualisms," described by Haraway as "persistent in Western traditions," and as having been "systemic to the logics and practices of domination of . . . all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self" (219). This disruptive power of the cyborg, like that of the polyvalent muse in Mantissa, is very much the product of the provisionality and indeterminacy of its embodiment.

Feminism is only one of a number of discursive modes that is defined in relation to postmodernism within the largely gender-specific binary structure of Mantissa. Another is that of the Cartesian concept of subjectivity which, in Mantissa, is aligned with realism, liberal humanism, and the masculinist mind of Miles Green, and set in opposition to postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the feminine body of Erato. Interestingly, just as Erato refuses to be contained by strictly Cartesian division of mind and body, or indeed by the traditional author/muse dichotomy, Haraway's cyborg does not make it clear "who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine . . . [or] what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices" (1990, 219). The introductory epigraph to Mantissa comprises a quotation from Descartes: "I knew that I was a being whose whole essence or nature is confined to thinking, and which has no need of a place, nor depends on any material thing, in order to exist" (Fowles 1982, 5). The mind within which the action of Mantissa takes place is that of its male protagonist and ostensible author Miles Green, who imagines himself lying in a hospital bed awaiting treatment for his sudden bout of amnesia. Within the confines of this implicitly Cartesian intellectual oeuvre, Miles Green and Erato engage in a highly energized sexual and textual power struggle. Despite the thus explicitly "embodied" nature of the discourses with which they wrestle, each is seen to eschew his or her own body, preferring the freedoms of "pure thought" and the possibilities of provisionality and endless self-recreation. It would seem then that the novel's sustained representation of Cartesianism as postmodernism's adversarial other is highly questionable. Indeed, the difference between Cartesian dualism and postmodern indeterminacy may be largely one of perspective, with the former laying claim to the impartiality of what Susan Bordo characterizes as "a view from nowhere," and the latter as pursuing "detachment" and "disembodiment": in short, as "a dream of being everywhere" (1990, 143). This latter ideal suggests a kind of omniscience which, in relation to feminism, is seen by Susan Bordo as a highly problematic aspect of postmodernism.

The relationship between feminism and postmodernism has been characterized by Linda Hutcheon as a difficult one, because there exists between the two "a major difference of orientation" in that, "postmodernism is politically ambivalent for it is . . . both complicitous with and contesting of the cultural dominant within which it operates," whereas "feminisms have distinct, unambiguous political agendas of resistance" (1989, 142). In addition, postmodernism displays an intolerance of totalising or "grand narratives of legitimation," seen by Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson as including some feminist theories which share "essentialist and ahistorical features of metanarratives" in that they display an inadequate appreciation of "historical and cultural diversity" and "falsely universalize" the theorists' own social context (1990, 27). In an attempt to bring together postmodernism's critique of foundationalist narratives, and the force of feminism's social criticism, a "postmodern-feminist form of critical inquiry" is proposed by Fraser and Nicholson, who suggest that this would constitute: "the theoretical counterpart of a broader, richer, more complex and multilayered feminist solidarity, the sort of solidarity which is essential for overcoming the oppression of women in its 'endless variety and monotonous similarity'" (35).1 Such an approach recommends feminism's incorporation of features of postmodernism which can also be seen, in an exaggerated form, both in the cyborg and in the representation of Erato in Mantissa. They are also the features with which Susan Bordo takes issue.