IN SEARCH OF A LOST FUTURE: THE POSTHUMAN CHILD

A considerable amount of recent English prose fiction includes child figures that can be interpreted as posthuman in that they embody contemporary society's fears and anxieties about the future. In a reading of John Banville's The Infinities, Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz and Emma Donoghue's Room, the essay claims that child characters in each of the narratives place our visions of the future in a distorted perspective. For all of the differences between these children and the cyborgs, beasts and ghostly figures that the technological branch of posthumanist discourse focuses on, they nonetheless function in similar ways: children and other posthumanist figures serve as powerful signs of global, and specifically European, anxieties. The future projected through these children - or the 'dark continent of childhood', to use the words of Jean Baudrillard - is not a postapocalyptic one. Rather, this future is fraught with fear and burdened with responsibility and guilt, embodying the worries that the ageing 'mother of continents' experiences when it sees its increasingly 'alien' children drifting towards an uncertain future.