«The Future of Humans in a Post-Human World»: Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, is a mirror transposition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel adumbrates a posthuman or transhuman life to be lived «forever as brain emulation» thanks to artificial Intelligence. Scientist Victor Stein argues that we can develop our brain software through learning, including outsourcing to machines, until we learn to share the planet with «non-biological forms created by us». This delineates a world in which the cyborgification (the fusion of nature and culture/technology) is seen as inevitable and there is no need to ‘defend’ nature. With further lines of thought, my paper explores the metaphorical fields (parallel worlds, simulacra) and narrative devices (metalepsis, alternating montage, internal parallelism) that underpin this story. My point is that the attempted fusion of nature and technology, as theorised by technoscientists in Winterson’s story, only produces a modification in the attitude of some unaugmented humans towards other unaugmented humans, both living and dead. Finally, humans are not cyborgs, nor inforgs, nor full-blown transhumans but boundary creatures straddling alternative ontologies and often acting as less than humans, infrahumans or, like transsexual Ry Shelley, «inappropriate/d others».