Narrative Conflict and Implied Value Conflict: An Analysis of Aspects of the Implied Worldview of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002) and Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002)

I. The Meaning-Constitutive Function of Narrative Conflict

In the early 1960 s, the East German scholar Günter Stolpmann published an essay whose purpose was to help authors pick the right kind of conflict for their literary work (Stolpmann 1964). The article was prompted by Stolpmann’s observation that fiction in the newly founded GDR was often characterised by a flawed presentation of reality. This presentation was linked to the way conflict featured in many texts (Stolpmann 1964: 1413): conflict was either lacking entirely or depicted as a purely private matter.

Some fifty years later, conflict was again declared to be the pivotal point of appropriate storytelling. In her approach to eco-narratives, Donly (2017) criticises that most plots are structured by conflict in one way or another. Since dominant narrative patterns reflect and reinforce existing power structures, a new narrative blueprint which does not hinge upon conflict is needed. Such a blueprint could help break the dominant narrative frame, which perpetuates existing conflicts and, for instance, pits humans against nature (Donly 2017: 20).

Stolpmann’s and Donly’s essays could hardly be further apart regarding their historical contexts and worldviews. Yet, they share the same analytic interest, namely narrative conflict. Thus, they indicate that in storytelling, conflict is a powerful vehicle of meaning which exceeds a purely mechanical function such as triggering the action or creating suspense. Meaning and conflict are intricately linked. As Roland Barthes (2005: 7) specifies, meaning “rests on conflict”, since the production of meaning entails “the choice of one term against another”.

Applied to a literary text, this structuralist notion might mean that every story told is always told at the expense of a story which is not. Given that choice always reflects values, the object of conflict in a piece of fiction, its circumstances, its resolution, its specific framing and its implicit or explicit evaluation are likely to be indicative of the text’s implied value system – simply by virtue of being actualised in the text in question. However, there is another, perhaps more general reason why narrative conflict might reveal something about the values negotiated in a given text: we fight over what we value. An analysis of narrative conflict is consequently likely to generate insights into the text’s implied ethical norms and thus into a central aspect of its implied worldview.

Yet, despite the eminent function of conflict and despite its appreciation as a crucial literary device in theoretical writings (see, for example, Gottschall 2012) and creative writing manuals alike (see, for example, Glover 2018: 24), there seem to be very few literary analyses which put the spotlight on narrative conflict. The reason for this is perhaps that ‘conflict’ is often perceived as too trivial a notion to be turned into a productive hermeneutic category. As Barthes (2005: 125) points out, conflict has always something of the everyday about it. Consequently, readings hinging upon narrative conflict might run the risk of producing results which do not transcend everyday reasoning.

This essay is willing to take this risk. In line with Stolpmann’s and Donley’s essays, it rests on the assumption that narrative conflict is indeed a powerful lens through which aspects of a text’s implied worldview can be made visible. More specifically, it sets out to analyse the narrative conflicts in Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon (2002) and Hanif Kureishi’s neo-gothic novella The Body (2002). Both texts are fundamentally different. Yet, they both dramatise the motif of body swapping. Consequently, they actualise textual worlds removed from what is commonly experienced as extra-fictional reality. This is the reason why they have been selected. By analysing conflict in two texts which depart from realist aesthetics, I hope to evade the risk of producing everyday reasoning. More specifically, I hope to resist the temptation to prematurely equate a certain narrative conflict with an obvious social or psychological condition.

The fear of producing such a predetermined, in the worst case circular reading is also the reason why common categories of narrative conflict such as ‘internal vs. external conflict’ (for example, Friedmann 2018: 66) or “man vs. nature” (Brooks and Warren 1971: 652) will not be resorted to. Instead, an approach derived from Lotman’s border crossing which – perhaps counter-intuitively – construes narrative conflict primarily as a spatial category will be used. Before we turn to Altered Carbon and The Body, however, it seems necessary to briefly outline the article’s basic assumption: the connection between narrative conflict and a text’s implied worldview, specifically its implied values or conflict of values, respectively. In doing so, the approach applied in the analyses will also be more thoroughly justified.

II. Implied Value Conflict and Implied Worldview: Narrative Conflict as Border Crossing

The connection between a story’s central conflict and aspects of its implied worldview can already be traced in Hegel’s seminal discussion of conflict in drama – “Kollision” as Hegel terms this phenomenon (Hegel 2007: XII, 234 et passim). Hegel’s concept of conflict is complex and can only be fully appreciated if viewed against the role he assigns to conflict as a feature of historical change in Die Phänomenologie des Geistes. In a nutshell, conflict is viewed as “a crucial transitional experience in a world-historical process, which generates ever higher levels of social and spiritual perfection” (Zerba 1988: 28). Similarly, Hegel views conflict in drama as the play’s engine, which serves two main functions: firstly, conflict propels the individual actions and moves the play from one level to the next; secondly, it provides the “frame in which those actions become meaningful” (Puckett 2016: 51). The ideal dramatic conflict manifests itself, in Hegel’s view, between “two equally weighted rights” rather than between right or wrong (Zerba 1988: 71). Such a conflict is, for instance, realised in Sophocles’ Antigone, in which the eponymous heroine is torn between her obligations to her family and her obligations to the state. To Hegel, the substance of the conflict is of such importance that he turns it into the ultimate gauge by which a work’s artistic rank can be determined (Gerigk 2005: 297).

The insistence that a story depict a conflict between “two equally weighted rights” ​​– in other words, between two values – is crucial (Zerba 1988: 71). It suggests that narrative conflict, among many other things, always serves an abstract purpose, namely the negotiation of worldview positions, specifically of value-based assumptions. As Abbott (2002: 51) argues, “riding on top of the conflict of narrative entities [...] are conflicts regarding values, ideas, feelings, and ways of seeing the world”. Hence, narrative conflict is a way of thinking about various non-narrative concepts, which a story translates into narrative entities such as events, characters and settings.

A hermeneutical problem arises here. When analysing a story, narrative elements such as characters, settings and events may be accessed directly and identified with reasonable clarity. In contrast, the identification of worldview assumptions which “[ride] on top” of these narrative entities is possible only indirectly (Abbott 2002: 51). This is due to the fact that the implied worldview of a literary text is a “second order inference” (Wally 2019: 151). Story elements such as events or characters are inferred from a text’s discourse, whereas a text’s implied worldview is inferred from discourse and story as well as various paratextual items. In short, a text’s worldview is not openly accessible; it is implied, and everything present in as well as absent from a given text might be indicative of it (Wolf 2008: 174). Consequently, anyone who wishes to read a text’s narrative conflict as an index of the text’s implied worldview is always confronted with the problem of attributing meanings to the text that seem somewhat removed from the actual textual data.

This is not just a problem of textual interpretation. Rather, it reflects a core property of the concept ‘worldview’. Kant, who is usually credited with coining this term, stresses the intuitive or preconscious dimension of a worldview when he defines it as “a power [within itself, i. e. the human mind] that is supersensible” (1987: 111).^[1] A person’s worldview is only partially consciously developed. To a far greater extent, it consists of cultural imprints and subjective insights (Schnädelbach 2011: 19) which are unconsciously acquired, believed and, if necessary, defended emotionally (Raupbach-Strey 2011: 33).^[2] One might think of a worldview as a set of assumptions about epistemological, ontological and ethical matters, which probably seem self-evident to the person holding them and of which the person in question is thus likely to be unaware. In analogy, one might think of a text’s implied worldview as a set of similar assumptions which are not explicitly discussed in the text, but which determine the text’s specific take on the world, for instance, by governing the choice of what is narrated (and thus deemed worthy of narration) and what is not (and thus deemed perhaps unimportant or even undesirable). What characterises a worldview in the contexts of psychology as well as literary theory is its elusiveness.

Given this elusiveness, one might develop an approach to narrative conflict which makes precisely this elusiveness its pivotal point and seeks access to the ethical dimension of a text’s implied worldview indirectly. Such an approach can be derived from Jurij Lotman’s theorem of border crossing. According to Lotman (1977: 231–232), space rather than character or plot is the fundamental organisational principle of a literary text. Lotman derives this notion from the observation that we tend to endow our sense-making concepts “with spatial characteristics” (1977: 218), even if these concepts bear no spatial meaning themselves. Applied to a literary text, this means that the topological structure of a text becomes a “language for expressing other, non-spatial relations in the text” (Lotman 1977: 218). In a sense, elusive worldview meanings such as ethical evaluations are displaced into a story’s setting and can be identified only indirectly, hence via a thorough spatial analysis.

Commensurate with the importance he assigns to space, Lotman develops a plot theory which conceptualises plot – i. e. “a chain of events” (1977: 234) – as the protagonist’s journey in the literal sense. Every event in this plot theory is defined as “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field” (Lotman 1977: 233). As soon as the protagonist transgresses the border of their semantic field and enters into conflict with the narrative world and, more importantly, with the text’s “world picture” (Lotman 1977: 238), an event occurs. According to Lotman (1977: 238), the “crossing of the basic topological border in a plot’s spatial structure” is of such fundamental quality that it contains, as a kernel, the entire plot. All other topological transgressions are subfunctions of this first event.

If we now exchange Lotman’s notion of ‘event’ with the notion of ‘conflict’, we have arrived at a model of narrative conflict which conceptualises Hegel’s abstract value conflict as something textually concrete: the protagonist’s crossing of the basic topological border (Dietrich and Schmidt-Bleeker 2013: 33).^[3]The protagonist’s move from one semantic field to another resulting from this border crossing signifies the move from one value system to another. This new value system, however, stands in opposition to the value system of the protagonist’s original semantic field. The reason for this is that a text’s spatial structure and thus its semantic structure is, according to Lotman, subdivided into “basic oppositions” (1977: 209). Once the protagonist crosses the border, they enter an “anti-field” (Lotman 1977: 241). The border crossing thus marks the instance where two opposing value systems are brought together and thus into conflict with each other. The ensuing narrative constitutes an attempt to resolve the conflict between these opposing value systems.

The indirectness of such a Lotmanian approach comes with two advantages. Not only is it specifically suited to the elusive nature of a text’s implied worldview. It is also counterintuitive and thus, I believe, superior to common categories of narrative conflict. Narrative conflict is usually considered a character-based function (see, for example, Brooks and Warren 1971 or Friedman 2018). Hence, the analysis of a story’s defining conflict is likely to be shaped by the reader’s take on human nature – an emotionally charged concept which might well be shaped by a number of preconscious assumptions. As indicated above, this might give rise to circular analyses. Once one believes that a certain type of psychological or social conflict determines human existence, one is likely to read every text with a view to this conflict.^[4] In contrast, space – at least at first sight – is a more neutral category. Carrying out the analysis of the narrative conflict on the basis of a spatial analysis thus seems a good strategy to prevent one from drawing preconceived conclusions. The protagonists of Altered Carbon and The Body find themselves in conflict with numerous other characters. Moreover, as text’s foregrounding the motif of body swapping, they obviously depict a conflict between various notions of human nature. The analysis of these conflicts can certainly help gain a better understanding of the implied value conflict in these texts. However, as I hope to demonstrate now, it is the analysis of the central border crossing – hence a spatial category – that can generate the most profound and perhaps perplexing insights.

III. Narrative Conflict and Implied Value Conflict in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and Hanif Kureishi’s The Body

The cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon and the neo-gothic novella The Body share a common literary heritage. As texts reworking the notion of ‘body-swapping’, they both rework “classic gothic-horror motifs of bodily invasion and disruption” (McHale 1992: 161). In an essay on creative writing, Kureishi (2015: 21) lists the foundational works of this heritage: “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Wilde’s Dorian Gray”. Of these, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) might well have had the most powerful impact on Western (pop-) cultural imagination. As an intertext, it certainly looms large in the two texts under discussion. Altered Carbon alludes to the genre’s literary ancestor by having its main character narrate the story of “The Patchwork Man” (Carbon: 298)^[5]: a monster sewed together from body parts of murdered children. Similarly, The Body includes more than just a nod to Shelley’s Frankenstein by showing its protagonist choose his future body in a place “worse than a mortuary”: full of dead bodies that “would be reanimated” (Body: 25; see also Bühler-Dietrich 2006: 168–169).

Since it is such an important intertext for Altered Carbon and The Body, it seems appropriate to precede the analysis of narrative conflict in both texts by a closer look at Shelley’s seminal story. As we will see, Altered Carbon and The Body continue many of the motifs already found there. Frankenstein is perhaps the first novel centring on bioengineering. It anticipates many of the social, philosophical and theological concerns which characterise science fiction in general and cyberpunk in particular (Schwetmann 2006: 129). In the popular imagination, Frankenstein is usually stored as a conservative expression of technophobia (Butler 1996: 302), which frames the manipulation of human biology as an “unacceptable act of hubris” (Lebow 2012: 236). However, the novel appears to be more complex than a simple rejection of science and technology. For example, Frankenstein is a profoundly ambivalent character. As a scientist – hence, as a representative of the Bourgeois enlightenment (Schäfer 1977: 63) –, he is both hero and villain. Equally, Frankenstein’s monster – the product of science – is not simply evil. Rather, his destructive potential fully unfolds as a result of his rejection by his creator and, later, by society.

One reason for this ambivalence can be identified by analysing the border transgression that marks the narrative conflict in Frankenstein’s autodiegetic story: Frankenstein’s move from Geneva to Ingolstadt. At first sight, each town seems to represent a specific system of technology or knowledge, respectively. Geneva is the place where Frankenstein, living with his “unscientifical [sic] family” (Frankenstein: 22), becomes infatuated with alchemy. Ingolstadt is the place where his interest in natural science is sparked. It is thus tempting to read Frankenstein’s move from Geneva to Ingolstadt as signifying the progress from old to new technology, perhaps as symbolising the transition from a pre-industrialised England to one where the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. However, such an interpretation is too neat. After all, Frankenstein persists in pursuing the alchemists’ dream of overcoming death and “raising [...] ghosts or devils” (Frankenstein: 22) even after his exposure to modern science. Hence, there is a spill-over between these two epistemological systems across the topological border. The border that Frankenstein actually crosses might thus be not one between technologies but one between attitudes towards technologies.

This change in attitudes towards technology is connected to a change in the valuation of social relations. Geneva constitutes not only a space of alchemist power fantasies but, more importantly, a space of social, especially familial embeddedness. Frankenstein stresses his parents’ benevolence time and again, who “were indulgent, and my companions amiable” (Frankenstein: 20). In view of this parental love, it is indeed striking that Frankenstein does not manage to show his creation a similar kind of affection. On the contrary, like a megalomaniac artist, he rejects his creature on what appear to be mostly aesthetic grounds. Ingolstadt is not only the space of modern scientific enquiry but also the space of self-imposed isolation if not narcissistic severing of social bonds. In his thought-provoking analysis, Vargish (2009: 335) relates Frankenstein’s rejection of his creation to the abandoning of “socially contextual conceptions of freedom” in the Romantic period. One certainly finds literary representations of individuals who wilfully place themselves outside social norms long before the Romantic period. However, these characters such as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus are aware of their transgression. In contrast, Frankenstein, at least at first, “feel[s] socially justified in his unlimited pursuit of knowledge” (Vargish 2009: 335). Hence, the value conflict marked by the crossing of the basic topological border is one between social responsibility (in the form of familial duties) vs. self-actualisation (in the form of scientific progress) – two, arguably, “equally weighted rights” in the Hegelian sense (Zerba 1988: 71). Frankenstein’s ambivalent take on technology can be read as the result of the conflict between these two values.

It is probably true that a conflict between societal demands and individual desires lies, in one way or another, at the core of the novel as a generic expression of individualism (Watt 1957: 60–92). However, with its focus on (bio)technology as a means of tilting the balance towards the individualistic component of this conflict, Frankenstein, as indicated above, sets the blueprint for cyberpunk literature. In cyberpunk, the notion of the technologically enhanced self is taken to its extremes. Typically, cyberpunk texts feature “prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alternation [...] brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry” (Sterling 1986: xiii).

All these technological items can also be found in Altered Carbon. Published in 2002, it is the debut novel of the British science-fiction writer Richard K. Morgan. The novel was well received and won the prestigious Philip K. Dick Award in 2003. In 2018, the book served as the basis of the Netflix Series of the same name. It is the first of three novels which feature the protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, an inter-galactic ex-elite soldier who is employed as a private eye and mercenary. As the opening sentence of Altered Carbon’s first chapter indicates – “[c]oming back from the dead can be rough” (Carbon: 9) –, the universe actualised by these texts is very different from the everyday experiences of contemporary readers. In these novels, a person’s body – in the books’ parlance: a ‘sleeve’– is little more than a means of storing or transporting a person’s self, which is defined as the sum of a person’s experiences and memories. In line with the phenomenon that we frame our inner lives in terms of the latest technology available (Nelson and Bower 1990: 403), this self is stored on a cortical stack, a piece of technology not unlike a computer disk. Every person has such a stack implanted at the base of their skull once they are one year of age. The self can be downloaded into any body, including cloned, synthetic and virtual sleeves – an operation called ‘re-sleeving’. Re-sleeving usually happens after a person’s ‘sleeve death’, but simultaneous re-sleeving – i. e. ‘multi-sleeving’, which means downloading one’s self into several bodies simultaneously – is possible too, although considered a severe crime punishable by RD – ‘real death’. Real death occurs if a person’s stack is physically destroyed and the data stored on the stack has not been updated and saved onto a remote storage device.

As can be gathered from this description, Morgan’s debut novel combines the hyper-technologized world of cyberpunk with a profoundly traditional conception of what it means to be a person. In an essay on evolutionary literary criticism, Ian McEwan bitingly comments that “[l]ike Christian theologians, the cultural relativists freed us from all biological constraints” (McEwan 2005: 14–15). McEwan could have said the same about many post-humanists. Hayles (1999: 13) relates datafied versions of the self, as for instance found in Altered Carbon, to a Platonic worldview. This worldview has found its way into contemporary science fiction via various Christian traditions and perceives of the self as something other than its physical manifestation, the body (Muri 2003: 78). The indebtedness of much posthumanist thought to this philosophical heritage results in a paradox. It views the essence of a person as both: profoundly altered by “technological changes to the body” and yet “distinct – even detachable – from the body” (Muri 2003: 80). The paradoxical match of futuristic technology and a traditional understanding of human nature might thus not be a specific characteristic of Altered Carbon. Rather, it can be attributed to a type of posthumanist discourse in which Altered Carbon partakes and which seems to indicate that, ultimately, human imagination cannot transcend materiality.^[6] After all, the posthumanist self’s freedom from the body is only the flipside of the posthumanist self’s dependence on technology.

An indebtedness to a traditional understanding of the self need not necessarily result in a conventional novel. However, in the case of Altered Carbon it does, partly because the novel reworks thriller elements typically found in hardboiled detective fiction or its filmic adaptation, the film noir. An intertextual vicinity to the hardboiled genre has been identified as an important, though not indispensable element of cyberpunk (Nazare 2003: 383). One often encounters stock characters such as “the femme fatale, the wealthy temporary employer, the Mr Big [i. e. the crime boss] and the suspicious authorities” (Butler 2000: 14). All these characters also roam the universe of Altered Carbon. Sometimes, they are characterised by intertextual references. The novel’s narrator-protagonist, for example, is a character modelled on Philip Marlowe, the alienated and elitist detective of the Raymond Chandler’s novels. Similarly, the premise of the thriller – i. e. the fact that Kovacs is employed by the obscenely rich, multiply re-sleeved business tycoon Laurens Bancroft in order to solve Bancroft’s own murder – is an allusion to the 1950 film noir D.O.A., in whose opening scene Frank Bigelow reports his own murder. Also, readers re-encounter the stock character of the femme fatale in Bancroft’s wife; and Kovacs’ complicated relationship with the policewoman Kristin Ortega echoes the troubled relationship the hardboiled detective usually has with authorities.

Still, the adaption of hardboiled fiction goes deeper than a simple homage to stock characters. In a nutshell, the novel’s intricate plot centres on two elements. The first is Laurens Bancroft’s interest in sadism. The second revolves around religion. Bancroft enjoys the occasional torturing of a prostitute, which, as long as he re-equips her with an appropriate sleeve, does not get him into conflict with the law. In one of his visits to a brothel, Bancroft kills a prostitute who is a Catholic. Catholics, in Altered Carbon’s world, object to being re-sleeved since they believe that this would destroy their soul. Their belief makes Catholics likely murder victims since their objection to being reanimated prevents them from bearing witness in their own murder investigation. These two elements – sex and religion – converge in a political agenda, Resolution 653. Resolution 653 is a law which would allow the reanimation of Catholics for investigative purposes. As it finally turns out, Bancroft, who originally refused to vote against Resolution 653, was drugged by his jealous wife, who acted on behalf of a mighty crime lady (a gendered version of Mr Big), and killed a Catholic prostitute. Through this murder, he became vulnerable to blackmail. In order to escape shame and guilt, Bancroft shot himself, just before his consciousness was uploaded on a remote storage device (which is the reason why he suffers from amnesia and hired Takeshi Kovacs in the first place). Thus, broken down to its basic pattern, Altered Carbon regurgitates the well-known formula of a (rich) married couple’s domestic fight about extra-marital, often perverse sex with a bit of a socio-political agenda – here, a religiously framed conflict connected to the novel’s gothic motif of body swapping – thrown into the mix. This narrative blueprint seems to be hugely pleasing to a mainstream audience and variations of it can, for instance, be found in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the 1999 mystery thriller 8 mm and the 2006 neo-noir film The Black Dahlia.

What implied values could possibly clash in such a formulaic story? Recent research, mostly based on the Netflix adaptation of Morgan’s novel, has focused on the obvious conflict between religious worldviews and biopower (Pisarev 2020), hence Foucault’s idea that political authority seeks control over its citizens’ bodies as a means of exerting political power (Foucault 1998: 140). Pisarev’s article provides a fine discussion of this clash, analysing it in terms of collision between Abrahamic conceptions of human nature and what Pisarev calls the “ideology of the cerebral subject” (2020: 31): the notion that the self is nothing but a function of the brain. In the same vein, Bugajska (2019) uses Resolution 653 as her point of departure and undertakes a lengthy critique of the representation of Catholics in Altered Carbon.

Both articles demonstrate that religion plays a crucial role in the value conflict enacted by Altered Carbon. I will acknowledge this in my reading of the novel’s narrative conflict. Yet, one may doubt that the posthumanist question of who has the right to resurrection – God or manmade technology? – summarises the novel’s most central worldview concern. Rather, this question is only a by-product of a larger cultural conflict, which a reading that views Morgan’s debut as a narrative elaboration of neuroessentialism might overlook. Fascinated by the complete otherness of re-sleeving, critics producing such a reading might fail to see that body swapping is not at all a revolutionary element with regard to Altered Carbon’s world picture. As Trębicki (2011: 122) astutely points out, “the digitalization of the mind is no longer a personal epiphany – but rather a routine procedure, a social convention, with all the consequences resulting from this fact”. In such a world, death no longer equals the ultimate border crossing and neither does being put into a new body. It is thus unlikely that the novel’s ethical subtext exhausts itself in a value conflict related to body swapping.

But what is the central topological border the protagonist crosses and what does it tell us about the novel’s implied value conflict? This question is anything but easy to answer given Altered Carbon’s confusing topography, which consists of a myriad of spaces – global, virtual, and extra-terrestrial. However, at the beginning of the novel, there is a basic topological border in the strict Lotmanian sense. Its transgression initiates as well as anticipates the novel’s complex plot: the border between Bay City – the slummy twenty-fifth century version of San Francisco – and Suntouch House, the residence of Laurens Bancroft, the protagonist’s employer. It is telling that Kovacs is offered “a lift up to the Bancroft residence” (Carbon: 20; my emphasis). This topographical specification is fully exploited in the novel’s Netflix adaptation. In this adaptation, Suntouch House is situated in ‘The Aerium’, a residence area located literally above the clouds, a hight-tech version of Mount Olympus, where the superrich live godlike lives. The Aerium is not part of the novel, but the hierarchical implications of the vertical opposition ‘high vs. low’ are nevertheless present. In Altered Carbon, the superrich, called Meths, who can avail themselves of “remote storage and clones on ice” (Carbon: 405), have achieved a type of immortality via advanced IT-technology and biotechnology. Given their potentially endless lifespans they can continuously accumulate wealth and power. To Meths, ordinary human beings are little more than resources to be used and discarded as one pleases. As the supervillain and Meth Reileen Kawahara puts it: “[Human life] has no intrinsic value to itself. [...] Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine” (Carbon: 502–503). Hence, Kovacs’ move from Bay City to Suntouch House marks the transgression of a socioeconomic border separating those that have everything from those that have nothing.^[7] In the light of this socioeconomic border, the Catholics’ refusal to be reanimated gains an entirely new dimension. It is an act of defiance; the defence of the helpless against a world that offers them so little. The value conflict the novel enacts according to this reading is thus between self-worth gained through the rejection of a certain type of life and this type of life itself, which might per se be desirable but from which those who reject it are excluded.

Given that much genre fiction uses a David-vs.-Goliath-type of conflict, in which the supressed can ultimately throw off their yoke, one might expect that the novel offers a sympathetic view of the religious and deprived. But this is not the case. Takeshi Kovacs, the character readers are meant to identify with, has nothing but disdain for the Catholics and hatred for the women-torturing “Right Hand of God martyrs” from planet “Sharya” (Carbon: 435), one of whom he annihilates in the course of his investigation. Kovacs’ sole motivation is to solve Bancroft’s murder in order to rid himself of his contractual – hence, social – obligations. This motivation leads to the “up-to-date knight errant” typical of Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled fiction, which Altered Carbon so heavily draws on (Knight 1980: 137). The holy grail of this quest is, however, not truth, as one might expect, but radical individualisation. As Kovacs muses shortly before he leaves earth for good: “Whatever world it is, whatever you’ve done there for better or worse, you always leave the same way. Alone” (Carbon: 531). Freed even from a particular body, Kovacs thus represents the most radical realisation of Romantic individualism, which we already encountered in Frankenstein and which has shaped many stock characters of Western literature from the mad scientist to the lonesome cowboy and alienated hardboiled detective. Kovacs moves smoothly on both sides of the novel’s socio-economic divide without belonging to either. Once he has freed himself from all social bonds, he leaves.

Hanif Kureishi’s novella The Body (2002) is shaped by a thought experiment similar to the one shaping Altered Carbon. As a story about an aging playwright who has his brain transplanted into a young man’s body it also shows similar philosophical concerns. Specifically, The Body explores (i) the body-mind dualism, especially in the form of what Pisarev calls the “ideology of the cerebral subject” (2020: 31), and (ii) the socioeconomic consequences of medical and technological progress. Yet, despite these similarities, the value conflict structuring the novella’s implied worldview is profoundly different. The reasons for this lie with the textual world actualised by The Body. It is a world immediately recognisable as contemporary. The only, though significant difference is that in The Body’s world, medicine has advanced to a point where body swapping is no longer a far-fetched vision but a feasible option. This option, however, is still a novelty and available only to the odd individual that is “either well-connected or lucky” (Body: 98). Hence, in contrast to Altered Carbon, where re-sleeving is depicted as nothing out of the ordinary, body swapping indeed constitutes the startling occurrence – Goethe’s unerhörte Begebenheit – from which the entire novella evolves.

This neo-gothic element makes The Body stick out from Hanif Kureishi’s otherwise mostly realist oeuvre (Thomas 2005: 157). Kureishi is best known as a postcolonial writer whose extensive work chronicles the British Asian experience in a rapidly decolonising Great Britain. Especially Kureishi’s early texts such as the play My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and the picaresque novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) explore the ramifications of race, class and (pop) culture in late twentieth century London. After the Salman Rushdie affair, Kureishi became increasingly interested in religious radicalisation, which is displayed by the short story “My Son the Fanatic” (1994) and the novel The Black Album (1995). In the late 1990 s, however, Kureishi turned away from more openly political concerns and began to focus on “the trials and tribulations of private life” (Buchanan 2007: 69). The controversial novel Intimacy (1999), which offers the perspective of a middle-aged man leaving his wife and two young children, is a case in point.

Preoccupied foremost with aging, and bodily decay, The Body continues this interest in private rather than political affairs. There is the occasional reference to skin colour such as when the autodiegetic narrator is advised to “choose a black body” (Body: 24) or when he categorises himself as belonging to the “dark skinners” (Body: 53). Still, neither skin colour nor ethnic origin have been considered concerns central to the novella (Bühler-Dietrich 2006: 174). Instead, critics have mostly focused on the neo-gothic element of body swapping and have read The Body as an instance of “neurofiction”, hence a type of fiction which uses the insights of “neuroscience about the human brain” in order to contemplate questions of human nature (Front 2020: 487).

As indicated above, body swapping certainly is the novella’s most striking feature. However, the prominence of body swapping should not cause us to overlook that there is a strong connection between a concern with body swapping and a concern with race or racism, respectively. Both concerns indicate that “the type of body one has, and the reactions of others to this, moulds our very being in the world and how we experience and engage with the world and others” (Burwood 2009: 122). Our body is fundamental to the construction of our identity, and as the largest organ of the human body, so is the skin. Hence, the shift from a concern with skin colour to a concern with discarding an aging body might not be all that fundamental. Kureishi’s early work often depicts protagonists who feel rejected because their skin colour deviates from what society projects as desirable. The Body depicts an aging writer who wishes to exchange “[his] half-dead old carcass” (Body: 3) with a young and beautiful body, at least partly because beauty causes one “to be more desired, and therefore, more loved” (Body: 29). Issues of race and issues of aging thus converge in the protagonists’ shared sense of alienation, which stems from “seeing what others see in me” (Leder 1990: 92). Hence, despite its introspective thrust, The Body poses questions of identity whose social, political and ethical implications partly overlap with those of questions of racial identity. The question of who I am is intimately tied to the question of who I want to be. Body swapping is thus another tool for tackling a fascination which has shaped Kureishi’s work from the beginning and which Thomas (2005: 151) summarises as “a preoccupation with the values that we live by”. What is indeed new, however, is the way this preoccupation plays out in Kureishi’s novella. In The Body, the question of “What are the values that we live by?” translates into the curious question: “Why would anybody want to be young?”

Wanting to be “more desired” or “more loved” (Body: 29) is only superficially the answer to this question. A more profound answer and thus an indication of what values might collide in The Body can be derived from an analysis of the novella’s narrative conflict as manifested by the protagonist’s crossing of the central topological border. We have already established that body swapping is a revolutionary element regarding the novella’s world picture. Hence, the central border crossing is indeed the brain transplant, in the course of which Adam has his brain transplanted into a body “as classically handsome as any sculpture in the British Museum” (Body: 25). This border crossing is of such fundamental quality that it is not simply a topological but a biological one. Adam’s old body and the young man’s body into which his brain is transplanted constitute the two “semantic field[s]” between which the protagonist – Adam’s self – moves (Lotman 1977: 233). This shift from Adam to what will be Adam-turned-Leo (Leo being the name that Adam calls the young version of his), signifies a shift from old to young, from impotent to potent, from history to future. Most significantly, however, it marks – at least this is what Adam is hoping – a shift from experienced to unexperienced. Before he undergoes the brain transplant, Adam claims to crave a “pure, unadulterated ‘shot’ of life” (Body: 30). The move from an old to a new body is consequently rooted in nostalgia, a mindset that Žižek (1989: 39) has described as a fascination with the “gaze of the mythic ‘naïve’ spectator”. Nostalgia is a what-if-scenario that requires the adoption of the perception of someone untouched by a certain experience – a perception which Adam tries to obtain by having his brain transplanted into a young body.

Adam’s nostalgia can, of course, be read as a psychologically plausible reaction to an aging man’s diminishing capabilities. However, there is also a larger cultural dimension to his craving. Jameson (1992: 178) identifies nostalgia as a cultural condition of consumer society, which manifests itself particularly obviously in postmodern aesthetics. Contemporary high culture as well as mass culture are characterised by pastiche, i. e. an imitation of old aesthetic methods and techniques. This imitation is rooted in a pervasive feeling that nothing new or original can be created anymore. Hence, nostalgia as a cultural characteristic is, on the one hand, indebted to an ideology which views former artistic achievements as braver and more original than contemporary ones and, on the other hand, to the logic of consumerism, which prefers something which is already known to something which is not; after all, a well-known product is likely to sell better than something whose otherness might unsettle consumers. Both aspects are embodied by the two versions of Adam – the aging artist lacking creativity and the young playboy seeking easy entertainment. Moreover, both aspects converge in a shared deficit, which, by implication, indicates a shared value: intensity.

It is intensity which Adam nostalgically longs for before he crosses the novella’s basic topological border. However, as a what-if-scenario, nostalgia can never convincingly evoke the authentic experience which the adoption of the naïve gaze promises. The nostalgic person always oscillates between irony and identification. This state of mind also characterises Adam-turned-Leo. The very hybrid he becomes after the brain transplant defies the fulfilment of this wish. Adam-turned-Leo can never enjoy the intensity of a first-time experience. His knowing mind necessarily compares whichever experience he has as a “Newbody” (Body: 41) to those he had before the operation.

His futile attempt to recapture inexperience sets Adam-turned-Leo on a quest, which turns out to be a dark parody of the Grand Tour – this educational journey through Europe which was common among the aristocratic or bourgeoise families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an allusion to his literary ancestor Frankenstein, Adam-turned-Leo not only goes to Greece and Italy, but also spends some time in Switzerland, where he joins a group of young people making a movie (Body: 56–57). However, this artistic activity is an exception. What Adam-turned-Leo usually does is receiving an education in extreme market economy. Everything is a commodity, including his own new body, and those who have means can avail themselves not of a “pure, unadulterated shot of life” (Body: 30) but of its next best substitute. As the drug-echoing formulation of Kureishi’s autodiegetic narrator suggests, this next best substitute is consumption. Adam-turned-Leo makes good use of his desirable body. Among other things, he partakes in drug-ridden orgies and plays the “tart” (Body: 53) for a queer biographer in Rome and the gigolo for an “American heiress with a partially collapsed villa outside Perugia” (Body: 55). After some time, however, Adam-turned-Leo feels a sense of alienation and begins missing his old life, especially his wife. More importantly, he learns that consumerist logic is a double-edged sword. It can turn the subject of consumption into the object of consumption. The novella ends with Adam-turned-Leo on the run, hunted by another Newbody who wants to kill him in order to steal the young body for his brother. Unable to go back to his old body, Adam, who originally only wanted a “body holiday” for half a year (Body: 99), is condemned to Nietzsche’s eternal return: “a body alone, condemned to begin again, in the nightmare of eternal life” (Body: 126).

This ending turns The Body from a meditation on the values we live by to “a story of hedonistic disappointment” (Thomas 2005: 158). This, however, does not mean that The Body’s value conflict is structured by a dichotomy between an ethics of intensity and an ethics of moderation. As indicated above, both semantic fields as embodied by Adam and Adam-turned-Leo are connected by a craving for intensity. The difference between them is how intensity is to be achieved. Is intensity to be gained through intellectual struggle, as is the case with Adam, the aging writer, or is it to be gained through acting out one’s bodily desires as is the case with Adam-turned-Leo, the beautiful playboy? The Body does not settle this question, but the fact that it is framed in terms of an opposition between intellectual and bodily pleasures points to the novella’s indebtedness to the initially mentioned body-mind dualism. Moreover, intensity as the crucial value emphasises The Body’s status as a cultural product of late modernity, which is not only characterised by nostalgia but also by a dwindling belief in transcendence and the possibility of life after death.

In a sense, intensity is a way of rethinking eternity in purely materialist terms. Instead of an afterlife one seeks to obtain the most intense variety of the one and only life there is: life inherently tied to matter, hence the body. Garcia (2017: 97) observes that intensity as a moral ideal abolishes any frame of reference but that of a subject’s experience. The nostalgic person craving intensity views herself as the measure of all things. Seen from this angle, we can think of the nostalgic person as a perverted, perhaps dead-end variation of the Romantic subject, which we have already encountered in Frankenstein and Altered Carbon. Rather than a moralistic admonition to temperance, The Body’s ending can thus be seen as exploring the tendency to isolation inherent in this configuration of the self. If Altered Carbon, however, glorifies this figure of thought by evoking the indestructible and completely independent superhero, The Body, reminiscent of Frankenstein, offers a much more ambivalent take on this ideal, pointing to its pleasures but also to its costs.

IV. Summary and a Final Consideration Regarding the Relationship between Implied Value Conflict and Implied Worldview

This essay has examined narrative conflict in the cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon and the neo-gothic novella The Body. The theoretical assumption of the analysis has been that the narrative conflict in a text can serve as an indicator of a very specific layer of meaning, namely the ethical norms implied in the text. Narrative conflict, it has been assumed, is indicative of a value conflict implied in a given text. This value conflict is part of a larger, elusive unit, namely the implied worldview of a text, which consists not only of ethical but also of ontological and epistemological presuppositions.

In order to avoid the risk of an interpretation that is predetermined by preconscious assumptions, the analysis has avoided common categories of narrative conflict. Instead, a spatial conflict model based on Jurij Lotman’s concept of border crossing has been used. This model has the decisive advantage that it links Hegel’s abstract value conflict with a sensually tangible entity – the central topological border – in a text. As a result, a text’s implied value conflict does not need to be grasped intuitively, but can be derived from the analysis of concrete, textual data.

A central objection to this way of thinking about narrative conflict can be raised, namely that it is too schematic and thus too reductive. After all, hardly any text seems to do justice to Lotman’s structuralist oppositions. Indeed, this argument is difficult to refute on theoretical grounds, only. The practice of interpretation, however, can serve as a counter-argument. The analyses undertaken in this article have shown that the connection between implied value conflict and narrative conflict construed in this way can be extremely revealing. It can produce a fresh look at a crucial narratological unit, whose meaning-creating function is rarely appreciated.

Altered Carbon is a typical cyberpunk novel whose central conflict of values seems – at least at a first glance – to be of a metaphysical nature. After all, a religious understanding of human essence collides with a transhumanist one. However, our analysis has shown that beneath this metaphysical conflict there lurks a tangible socio-economic conflict, which can easily be overlooked due to the dominance of religious themes. Seen in this way, Altered Carbon is less about the question of “Should man play God?”, but about the construction of self-worth in view of an economically and socially overpowering opponent.

In contrast, The Body negotiates a conflict of values that is perhaps more readily associated with the literary motif of body swapping. While the text clearly shows the mechanisms of exploitation of global capitalism, its narrative conflict is, in fact, metaphysical. By weighing different forms of intensity (e. g. intellectually vs. physically obtained) against each other, The Body emerges as a search for a value which can fill the void created by the dwindling relevance of religious notions of eternity in a secular world.

As has been demonstrated, the value conflicts implied in the two texts under discussion are markedly different. However, does this also mean that their implied worldviews are markedly different? In order to answer this question, further analyses are needed, since the implied value conflict belongs to a central component of the implied worldview of a text – its ethical dimension – but is unlikely to be indicative of the implied worldview in its entirety. Still, some observations will be offered as concluding remarks.

It has been argued that Romantic individualism with its claim to limitless freedom from social bonds constitutes a central point of reference for Altered Carbon as well as The Body. Both main characters – Takeshi Kovacs as well as Adam before and after the brain transplant – can be read as embodiments of this concept. What is of interest is that both characters are not just solitary characters but also one-man-companies: one protagonist is a mercenary, the other protagonist a freelance artist. Hence, both texts depict the struggle not only of a Romantic but also of an entrepreneurial individual against a global elite.

If we agree that character make-up is indicative of the ontological presuppositions of the texts in question, we might have a further piece of evidence on which to base a preliminary conclusion. This economic twist of the Romantic self points to a bourgeois worldview which is, however, no longer characterised by a belief in social advancement through professional advancement, but, as the end of both texts suggests, by existential fears. None of the protagonists find a place in their respective worlds. Hence, both bear witness to the postmodern unease eating away founding assumptions of a typical middleclass worldview (see, for instance, Bude 2014: 19). The difference, which the analyses of the implied value conflict of Altered Carbon and The Body have brought to light, lies in the way this pessimism is dealt with. While in Altered Carbon this existential fear is camouflaged with an infantile fantasy – i. e. the fantasy of the superhero who cannot be affected by economic or social conflicts – it is revealed in The Body. After all, intensity as a central value may promise many things but not existential security.