American Germ Culture: Richard Matheson, Octavia Butler, and the (Political) Science of Individuality

The last few decades have witnessed a significant creative and critical shift in the relations between fiction, science, and "the human." As bioscientific practices have penetrated deeper into material reality, they have yielded startling new discoveries that, rather than clarifying or delimiting life (humanness), actually obfuscate the boundaries thought fundamental to the life sciences. The discovery of species for whom purity and impurity, individuality and communality, no longer stand in opposition challenges orthodox evolutionisms that fixate on genetic individuality or see humanity relentlessly at war in a world swarming with alien competitors. Environmental, evolutionary, and immunological sciences are increasingly posthuman-centered as living organisms are revealed to be emergent and distributed entities, hybrid in essence, infective by nature. For example, microbiologist Lynn Margulis reveals the pervasive role infection and symbiosis play in the evolution of biological diversity, and immunologist Ludwik Fleck contends that if biological organisms may no longer be construed as self-contained, self-congruent units set apart from the world, then "it is very doubtful whether an invasion in the old sense is possible" (61).

By including such bioscience within the fabric of their imaginative cultures, science-fiction writers Richard Matheson and Octavia Butler create speculative life-forms and novel kinships, new ways of experiencing our own and others' bodies. Set against a long, cruel American history of race invasion and immunological politics, Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) and Butler's Clay's Ark (1984) use the viral contact narrative to challenge Self/Other recognition paradigms as highly fraught means of becoming human, contaminating categories that have been used to deny humanness to others. Both authors incorporate infection into their postapocalyptic cultures, subverting racist and sexist discourses of contamination that premise an expansive (white) individuality on the assimilation or annihilation of the Other. In contrast to the hygienic or immune bodies valorized in orthodox evolutionary and political discourses, their bodies are infective and affective, the infiltration of foreign genes triggering mutations that subvert any notion of human nature or the biologically sound. Rather than having "killer" immune systems that overpower "difference," Matheson's and Butler's science-fiction bodies are crossbreeds open to an alterity that insinuates itself into the body as a disease. Yet their subversions of biological and political notions of individuality make little sense decontextualized outside of the peculiarly American histories of bacteriological racism and virological politics. So it is to these I briefly turn.

Sinister Science, Infectious Fictions

By the 1920s, American managers of whiteness had cultivated a powerful web of signifiers connecting race—specifically, nonwhiteness—with invasion, parasitism, and contagion. In fact, "infection" had by this time become a distinct genre, a second-order text that threaded through multiple social and disciplinary practices to enlist readers in their own self-cultivation as healthy and productive Western citizens. Science-fiction writers, anti-immigration activists, eugenicists, and microbe hunters (and later, anticommunists) mined infection for new tropes and narratives, ideological antagonisms, and modes of address that together informed a national culture that sought to police the border between "us over here" and "them over there." As the concept of a microbial parasite was extended to a race parasite, the language of bacteriology—bad blood, infection, invasion—converged with the language of national defense—border patrols, resistance, immunity—to militarize the fight against foreign agents that penetrated the body, took up permanent residence, and transformed the host into a killer by subverting the body's/nation's security defenses.¹ But how exactly did race, immigration, and nation become epidemiological issues? How did the protection of white America merge during the Red Scare into a science of an individuality, the loss of which signaled a body less than human?

In nineteenth-century transatlantic literatures of invasion, biological warfare rages between bodies, nations, and races; evolutionary spectacles play out on the international stage, where ethnic differences collapse into species differences—most notably, the Jew/vampire versus the Anglo-Christian/human in Bram Stoker's Dracula. A sampling of popular imaginary warfare novels from 1874 to 1936 illustrates the irrational extrapolation of the Darwinian principle...