Cyborg visions : Mitchell, Ishiguro, Winterson and the negotiation of modernity

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to examine a selection of contemporary utopian texts by David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro in an effort to understand how their alternative realities might address man’s amalgamation of postmodern identities. In the texts, the human protagonists attempted to cast the pastoral landscapes of their youth as sites of safety and sanctity in order to sustain their modern reality, yet their attempts to return to or embrace the pastoral were a failure in part because of the intrusion of modernity into the spaces and in part because they themselves had become modern entities. The posthumans in these texts, including cyborgs, clones and robo sapiens, were emblematic creatures that served a dual role. They were both the subservient foundation of the utopias in these stories, as well as reflections of the postmodern human condition, which was artificially reliant on religion and consumerism for its modes of identity. Each of these texts yielded one particular voice that embodied and celebrated the postmodern experience and the hybridity that is an innate part of it. These characters functioned as important models of negotiation, providing a constructive bridge to the postmodern future for humanity, whether they worked within the societal systems of their eras in order to seek change or rebelled from society, fighting the classifications that defined their identities.