The Machine in the Desert: Posthuman Immortality in Don DeLillo’s Zero K
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This essay investigates the ways in which DeLillo utilizes the well-trodden trope of the desert or barren wilderness in Zero K for structuring and thematizing the precarious conditions of posthuman immortality and nonidentity. In Zero K, DeLillo revisits the desert wilderness he has explored in his previous novels from Americana to Point Omega. Whether it is the American wilderness or some unhomely spaces of foreign barrenness, the desert, for DeLillo, functions as an enchanted spatiality for querying conditions of American self-examination. What most emphatically complicates the posthuman fantasy of immortality in Zero K is the curious decision DeLillo makes to locate the site of the most advanced Western science and technology in an other-worldly geography of prehistory, a kind of dialectical synthesis in his career-long artistic engagement with the desert wilderness. The desert in Zero K is, I will argue, a site of human history, on which the dream of transhuman resurrection and the perennial fear of the machine converge, an unhomely terrain of the technological imaginary to which DeLillo projects the posthuman dread of immortality, while attempting to imagine uncertain prospects of the American novel and self-identity in the age of Anthropocene. Zero K’s wilderness vision of posthuman immortality belongs to the territory of the Hawthornean romance where the speculative and the real reflect each other. As a Hawthornean dream vision, DeLillo queries the implausibility of posthuman immortality and its impact on human consciousness.
Abstract
This essay investigates the ways in which DeLillo utilizes the well-trodden trope of the desert or barren wilderness in Zero K for structuring and thematizing the precarious conditions of posthuman immortality and nonidentity. In Zero K, DeLillo revisits the desert wilderness he has explored in his previous novels from Americana to Point Omega. Whether it is the American wilderness or some unhomely spaces of foreign barrenness, the desert, for DeLillo, functions as an enchanted spatiality for querying conditions of American self-examination. What most emphatically complicates the posthuman fantasy of immortality in Zero K is the curious decision DeLillo makes to locate the site of the most advanced Western science and technology in an other-worldly geography of prehistory, a kind of dialectical synthesis in his career-long artistic engagement with the desert wilderness. The desert in Zero K is, I will argue, a site of human history, on which the dream of transhuman resurrection and the perennial fear of the machine converge, an unhomely terrain of the technological imaginary to which DeLillo projects the posthuman dread of immortality, while attempting to imagine uncertain prospects of the American novel and self-identity in the age of Anthropocene. Zero K’s wilderness vision of posthuman immortality belongs to the territory of the Hawthornean romance where the speculative and the real reflect each other. As a Hawthornean dream vision, DeLillo queries the implausibility of posthuman immortality and its impact on human consciousness.