ABSTRACT
Having established the fundamental importance of the body to Wallace, we look in Chapter 2 to the ghosts that populate his fiction. Here we see that Wallace was not the posthumanist that his critics take him to be. From his very early stories, Wallace always wrote about human beings as having interiority, a ghost-like, soul-like self inside their body. René Descartes’s major influence on Wallace is much neglected in Wallace studies, but in this chapter I argue that all of Wallace’s characters are governed by the Cartesian metaphor of the ghost in the machine. Setting Wallace’s work against a backdrop of postmodern and posthumanist theory, we see that Wallace’s treatment of the soul marks him apart from an earlier generation who viewed the body as posthuman, malleable, and hollowed out. I suggest in this chapter that Wallace’s work is perhaps better understood if we situate it in the context of science fiction, which often has a more conservative approach to posthumanism insofar as it sees posthumanism as a bad thing.
