In Search of the Self: Alienation and Anxiety in a Posthumanist world in Charles Burns’ Black Hole and Jeff Lemiere’s Sweet Tooth

Abstract

 We inhabit in the world of technology and everyday it is challenging the corpus of our ideas. Technology has infiltrated our lives to such deep extremes that it has become difficult for humans to assert a meaningful existence. We struggle to find ourselves dissected at such moments where there is a struggle between these alterations. The historian Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book Homo Deus, that there has emerged a possibility where this technological search will lead the vulnerable humans to a better world where they will be invincible like the gods. That will be the next step of our civilization. However literature has already foraged into this unthinkable. Posthumanism as a theory tries to seek a passage into this hitherto unknown world borrowing the wings of its imagination.

 In this paper I want to talk about the concept of alienation and anxiety suffered by humans in such a futuristic world by locating my observations on two phenomenal graphic novels published in two different eras. The first one is titled Black Hole by Charles Burns published between 1995 and 2005 by Kitchen Sink Press and then by Fantasgraphics. The second one is Sweet Tooth written by Jeff Lemiere published by DC Comics, Vertigo Imprint, between 2010-13. What binds these two novels is the sheer intensity of alienation faced by the characters in a posthumanist world. While Charles Burns depicts the transformations of teenagers in Seattle area, after they have contracted a mysterious strange disease transmitted sexually that transformed their bodies and ultimately leading them to societal ostracism, Lemiere’s Sweet Tooth is a search of the self in a post-apocalyptic world. Gus a 9year old boy with antlers is a new breed of human/animal hybrid that appeared after an apocalyptic pandemic of an unknown virus. Underlying these two novels is the crisis of the human. The paper will be an attempt to address the issues of identity, anxiety and alienation deeply embedded in these two novels which are set in a posthumanist, post-apocalyptic period. It will try to engage these issues that have become critical in the concept of understanding posthumanist literature in itself.