1In the first pages of his 2020 essay, The Prosthetic Imagination, Peter Boxall offers an examination of the evolution of prosthetics as medical devices meant to replace missing body parts and thus facilitate the life of their owners. This evolution, he explains, has led to the progressive transformation of the hand-crafted prosthesis, carefully modelled by its creator to resemble the original form, into a digital set of data exploited by 3D printers, making it possible to indefinitely reproduce the human body. This marks a transition towards an era of dematerialisation, the transformation of matter into information, which Katherine Hayles identifies as our ‘becoming posthuman’ (1999). As she explains, a certain conception of the cyborg relies on the emancipation of information from embodiment:

Central to the construction of the cyborg are informational pathways connecting the organic body to its prosthetic extensions. This presumes a conception of information as a (disembodied) entity that can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components to make protein and silicon operate as a single system. When information loses its body, equating humans and computers is especially easy, for the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature. (2)

2Since our bodies have become transformable into information, all our interactions with machines make us part of an information system of which we are only, for the time being, the embodied part. Therefore, the prosthesis finds itself redefined along new lines. It is no longer the ‘artificial’ as opposed to the ‘natural’—a distinction made by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) where human beings build tools and artifacts to extend their ‘inch of nature’ (38), as ‘[w]ith every tool man [sic] is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning’ (37). However, what we now see is an opposition between the ‘material’ and the ‘virtual’. Thus, as Hayles explains, the posthuman view considers the body as ‘the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born’ (3).

3The difference between these understandings of the prosthesis results from and highlights the complexity of its definition. In its most restrictive sense, it is an artificial device meant to complement a disabled body: as such, it ‘fills the gap’ left by missing body parts after an injury or an amputation. It replicates the body not only in terms of appearance to make it look ‘complete’ again but also, and most importantly, in terms of its functionalities as it attempts to restore the patients’ physical abilities to their former state. However, the term prosthesis can also refer to other types of medical devices and has come to designate any kind of artificial addition to the body meant to support it. By extension, all the tools that enhance our abilities can be seen as prostheses, taking us back to Freud’s tools through which we artificially extend ourselves, so much so that ‘[m]an has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times’ (39). As a result, the distinction between glasses that correct eye conditions and tools like the telescope that enhance vision beyond the body’s biological capacities, becomes blurry. This establishes a continuum between the various abilities to which prostheses can give access, whether they exceed or not the body’s traditional limitations, so that all embodiment becomes prosthetic. As Boxall explains, the prosthetic logic is therefore generalised to the point that ‘It can seem no longer to be the case that there is a prior, non-prosthetic body out there in the world . . . which only requires prosthetic addition when it is injured or curtailed’ (5).

4Through all these definitions, however, the prosthesis appears as a figure of the in-between. It is a bridge that enables the—never fully achieved—transition between different states: from the injured body back to its former state or towards an enhanced version of it, from the human to something-other-than-human or not-fully-human, or from immaterial information to its embodied form. In this article, I will attempt to define the different types of transition that the prosthesis produces in two texts, Harry Parker’s essay Hybrid Humans (2022) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun (2021), focusing first on temporal transitions between before and after the body’s mutilation. Then, I will analyse the ontological transitions between the human and the non-human or the more-than-human, as the prosthesis ‘hybridizes’ human characters and reconfigures their agency and relation to others. Finally, using Peter Boxall’s essay, The Prosthetic Imagination, I will conclude by showing how the text itself becomes a space of transition towards hybridity, transforming itself along with the readers’ perceptions.

Prostheses and Temporal Transitions: Bridging the Gap

5In Hybrid Humans, Harry Parker, who served in Afghanistan and was amputated of both legs after stepping on an IED, reflects on the specificities of his status in society but also questions the relation to his own body that has emerged from his ‘acquired disability’ (14). In his retelling of his accident and the events that followed, Parker highlights the belated realisation of the way in which this traumatic event would alter him. He writes: ‘Physical injury could be endured; it was harder to come to terms with what this loss had done to my sense of self. And I lay in a room of unexpected survivors, wondering what my future would be like. What kind of human would I become?’ (13). The distinction between ‘injury’ and ‘loss’ is essential here, as the former refers to a temporary state while the latter stresses the definitive dimension of the physical (and psychological) alterations the narrator sustained. At any rate, the alterations to the narrator’s physical shape will entail an ontological change, as he anticipates his transformation into another ‘kind of human’.

6Parker’s difficulty in coming to terms with the multiple implications of his injury stems from its traumatic dimension, and Cathy Caruth reminds us not only that trauma is experienced ‘too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known’ (4), but also that the occurrence of a traumatic event opens up an unbridgeable gap in the subject’s sense of self and perception of time, so that ‘the future is no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through a profound discontinuity’ (14). Thus, the effect on Parker’s sense of self is turned towards the irrecoverable dimension of what he has lost but also forecloses any projection into a possible future. He is caught between an irretrievable past and an impossible future, as he recalls his first weeks in hospital: ‘when I allowed myself to think of the future, I found it hard to imagine walking again; the body I looked down on just seemed too pathetic and incomplete’ (15). Here, the narrator draws an inextricable link between physical abilities and sense of self but also essentialises the relation between the shape of one’s organic body and their potential agency which, as David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder remind us, is the result of certain cultural representations of disability: ‘Culturally, we imagine agency to be precluded by the fact of a disability—one is transformed into the principle of passivity where agency is only a longed-for ideal available to the normative inhabitant of an intact body’ (127). Yet, the breach opened up in his perception of himself also places the narrator in a state of in-betweenness, of ‘becoming’—as he asked himself in the previous quote ‘What kind of human would I become?’. Although the question seems rhetorical and might express despair—can he even still be a human after such a loss?—it can also be perceived as hopeful insofar as it marks his state as transitory, that is, open to a multiplicity of futures and in particular an ontological reconfiguration through a new hybrid self.

7The power of the prosthesis lies precisely in its ability to bridge the perceptual gap between the intact body and the amputated one. In Parker’s case, the prosthetic legs appear as the element on which the transition between the wounded soldier’s former and future states, or selves, hinges. The specific status of the prosthetic as the object around which revolves the transition between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of the injury is described by Peter Boxall when he explains that ‘[t]here is a tension . . . at the heart of the prosthetic as an object, between stasis and movement, between its reproduction of a particular moment of being and its role as a conduit that brings its user or wearer into relation with moving time, with time still to come’ (2). That feeling is expressed by Parker when he recalls:

For all the newness of the prosthetics, there was familiarity. They inhabited the space in which my brain expected my body to be, making me upright again, letting gravity act on me in a way that felt normal. What was so odd was how natural it looked. . . . A future with a different body now seemed hopeful, a life of new experiences that I might not otherwise have had, and I knew I could be independent again. (18–19)

9The same tension can be observed in Klara and the Sun, though from a fictional perspective. Klara, a humanoid ‘Artificial Friend’ (or AF), has been bought to care for Josie, a teenager who we learn is ‘sick’ after she has been ‘lifted’, a procedure that seems to consist in the genetic alteration of children in order to enhance their intellectual abilities. Indeed, as Vanessa Guignery explains, the dystopic world in which the characters live is organised around the (almost) impossible choice between one’s child’s social success and their physical wellbeing, as ‘[t]he adults who decide to have their children genetically enhanced (‘lifted’) so that they can benefit from a better education make these children vulnerable by exposing them to the risk of illness and death if the procedure is not successful, while the parents lay themselves bare to emotional distress should this happen’ (256). In Josie’s case, the aspiration towards a posthuman, augmented existence thus paradoxically leaves her crippled, unable to embrace the carefree life of a teenager in the name of a potentially greater future. Klara’s role is to look after Josie but also to fill the emotional gap she has to live through as her existence is confined to the house, attending school online with almost no social interactions with other teenagers.

10However, readers discover later that Klara has also been bought to ‘continue Josie’ for her mother, that is, to lend her artificial mind to the embodiment of a synthetic avatar of the girl if she were not to survive her illness. Klara thus appears as an emotional prosthetic, a ‘disposable affective thing’ (DeFalco 36) meant to provide support to Josie as well as to the mother through the anticipated loss of her daughter. She is also a physical prosthesis, first as a caring object, a carer ‘programmed’ to care for the teenager, and second as a future replacement for the girl’s diseased mind and body. As Parker observes, ‘[r]obots inspired by human biology can function in a world designed for us, but they also become the prosthetics and assistive tech that can repair and replace our damaged bodies’ (149) and, in a way, Ishiguro’s novel only pushes the logic a bit further.

11Yet, as Josie eventually recovers, she ‘outgrows’ Klara—literally, as she observes ‘[s]he’d become taller than me’ (300)—, and the Artificial Friend then becomes obsolete. The child’s growth makes the AF superfluous as she remains ‘stuck’ in time and as the teenager’s needs evolve. When in her store, waiting to be bought, the narrator was already capable of identifying ‘the age [of children] for which [she was] most suitable’ (8). Nevertheless, her awareness of obsolescence has more to do with technological time and evolutions than with human biological time, as shown through her reflections on the fear she reads in the behaviour of AFs she can see on the street: ‘They were afraid because we were new models, and they feared that before long their children would decide it was time to have them thrown away, to be replaced by AFs like us’ (15). This fear of technological obsolescence stresses the prosthetic status of the AFs and is echoed by Parker’s description, in Hybrid Humans, of the ‘REHAB European trade fair’ (92), where he observes ‘parents pushing their children with multiple severe disabilities, flowing between stands, all searching for the latest gadget that will make their lives a little easier’ (101). Thus, both texts not only highlight the apparently unstoppable and infinite progress of technological innovation, but they also point out its subjection to the capitalistic logic of supply and demand, showing the hypocrisy behind what has become an ‘economy of care’. As Parker says, ‘[b]eing a hybrid human means expensive kit—you have to pay for the privilege of leading a normal life’ (104) and, in the same way, Klara’s shop owner explains to her that she is ‘beyond [the] reach’ (Ishiguro 9) of certain children. While the presence of an Artificial Friend might seem less essential than owning a wheelchair or a prosthetic leg, the logic is the same: first, the transition towards a new—hybrid—ontology is not available (and affordable) to all and, second, although the prosthesis is essential to hybridization, it can itself be replaced, lost, or discarded.

12Klara herself is never replaced by another technological device and, paradoxically, it is the very fulfilment of her role (caring for Josie and maybe even saving her) that leads to her being discarded: if Josie had died, she would have been made to ‘continue’ the girl and therefore been allowed to go through some kind of evolution. As Josie grows older, Klara’s awareness of her irrelevance is expressed through the shift in the vocabulary she uses: Josie and her friends are no longer ‘children’ but ‘young adults’. She herself seems to feel redundant and cumbersome so that she decides to put herself out of Josie’s way: ‘It was because of the young adult visitors that I discovered the Utility Room. Naturally there was not enough space during such visits for me to remain in the bedroom myself, and in any case, I understood that my presence wasn’t appropriate as it once had been’ (293–294). Ironically, the ‘Utility Room’ is the place where Klara’s uselessness manifests itself the most, but it also refers to her utilitarian nature, reasserting her status as a mere object meant to be discarded once it has fulfilled its role. As Om Prakash Sahu and Manali Karmakar write, ‘empathetic humanoids like Klara are designed for a stipulated time frame after the expiry of which they are converted into trash’ (1351).

Prostheses and Ontological Transitions: Becoming Hybrid

14The temporal transitions constructed by the prosthesis serve, most importantly, ontological ones as prosthetic devices blur the definition of the human. In Hybrid Humans, Parker acknowledges his own hybridity but also reflects on the ways in which the interdependences that unite us with things and machines make us all hybrid. Following Haraway’s statement that ‘machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves’ (61), he highlights our ability to ‘merge’ our bodies with the things that extend them:

We can extend ourselves to incorporate a tool instinctively, almost as soon as we’ve picked it up. . . . We can “feel” how big a car is and thread it through the narrowest of gaps. Our brain deals with the problem for us by creating a representation of the large box-like space on wheels that we are inside. (That’s also why we sometimes duck when driving under a low barrier going into a car park, even though only the car is in any danger of being hit; we have become the vehicle—we embody it.) (39)

15The relation between the body and the objects is essentially metonymic as they are not only contiguous but also part of one another and, to quote Kövescses, ‘metonymy is a relationship based on contiguity’ (175) which ‘may emerge in two ways: either (1) a whole stands for a part or a part stands for a whole or (2) a part stands for another part’ (178). Whether the prosthetic leg becomes ‘part’ of a body to make it ‘whole’, or the driver in a car becomes ‘part’ of it, these interactions highlight a continuum of materiality and even suggest, to quote Jane Bennett (2010), its ‘vibrancy’ as agency is distributed through both human and non-human objects (ix). The logic is pushed even further when Parker describes himself as a ‘coupled system’ (150), echoing Bennett’s theory of ‘the agency of assemblages’, where she calls for a ‘congregational understanding of agency’ (20):

While the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus, conatus or clinamen, an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms [sic] but as vital materialities. (21; original emphasis)

16Parker’s understanding of his own hybridity is, in the same way, not merely tied to the fact that his body is partly non-organic but, on the contrary, he reflects on the ‘system’ created between one’s body and of all the things with which he associates and whose agency has become essential to him: ‘If you . . . make my smartphone and prosthetics some of the cognitive resources I bring to bear on the everyday world, then I am very much a coupled system’ (Parker 150). This idea of distributive agency is further literalised when Parker reflects on the microprocessor in his artificial knee:

This little chip receives information from all those sensors and feeds it into a control algorithm, which, depending on the countless variables and permutations, decides what to do next. If it’s quiet—say, at the end of the day, when I slump down on my bed to take my legs off—I can just about hear the microprocessor thinking, crackling away. I bring it close to my ear to listen. . . . I’ve delegated some of the cognitive load of walking to a second brain, and it’s an important part of me and the way I experience the world. (31–32; original emphasis)

17In this passage, Parker’s hybridity is presented as an intertwining that has complex ontological repercussions as it is not only the human speaker who finds himself ‘part-thing’ through his ‘coupling’ with inorganic matter, but it is also the artificial knee that has become ‘organicized’ through its description as a brain and ability to ‘decide’ and ‘think’. The prosthesis’s agency appears not only through Parker’s reference to its cognitive abilities but also through its material manifestations: as he puts his ear to the object, he points to the embodied nature of this ‘thinking’, which makes it more than mere computational language.

18This conception of the prosthetic self is, therefore, fundamentally embodied and grounded in materiality. On the opposite, the possibility of abstracting the self from its physical form seems impossible to the narrator, a point he discusses with a scientist known as ‘the first cyborg’ for implanting a microchip in his arm:

‘So, would you upload yourself if you could?’ I ask Kevin. (One possibility the singularity might bring is uploading our minds to some kind of artificial super-intelligence substrate, in a sense swapping the fleshy wetware of our current bodies for something less prone to glitches and crashing—it would be the culmination of the cyborg project. Even as a hypothetical, I find the idea monstrous.). (173)

19Here, we find once more the idea, mentioned by Hayles earlier, present in a certain conception of the posthuman that the body itself can be a prosthesis, while embodied experience becomes accessory. In other words, ‘[t]he prosthetic . . . becomes the mark of weightless information freed from its material instantiation, as Donna Haraway’s cyborgs or William Gibson’s neuromancers live in a technological realm, a cyberspace, that is not limited, bordered or bounded by the non-prosthetic real’ (Boxall 12). This leads to a sort of ‘reverse’ hybridization, where the machine takes precedence over the body instead of supplementing it, and eventually transforms it into computational data.

20Parker explains his uneasiness as resulting from his own experience of prosthetics, which is essentially sensory and marked by pain, and he expresses scepticism in the face of the desire to dematerialise one’s self:

I know I look at the cyborg and transhumanist dreams from a certain point of view—as someone who has had no choice but to become dependent on technology—and I can only apply my less-than-perfect relationship to it, and the anxieties that come from relying on a machine. Transhumanists talk of freeing themselves from the body, of transforming, and I raise an eyebrow. All I see is rubbing and sores, oozing body fluids and infection; the frustrations of not being as mobile as I would like, the anxiety of dependence on a machine. I can’t imagine the pain, anxiety and frustrations of being a sentient being uploaded to a hard drive—what it would be like never again to feel rain on my face, or the visceral feeling of my family when we all bundle together on the sofa for a hug. (175–176)

21This fundamentally embodied conception of the posthuman self is echoed by Hayles, who writes:

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (5)

22Both Parker and Hayles, then, see the ideal of disembodiedness as a theoretical trap and even, for Parker, as a physical one, the machine becoming an uncontrollable envelope bringing pain and frustration—rather than an emancipation from ‘glitches and crashing’—that ultimately hinders a cognition ‘embedded in [the] material world’.

23Interestingly, in Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro uses the fictional medium to push the prosthetic logic even further as the mind itself turns into a prosthesis, thus shattering the very notion of identity and establishing an ontological continuity between the human and the machine. In the novel, this continuity means they are interchangeable rather than complementary, leading to the replaceability—and therefore disposability—of the human. This posture is especially embodied in the novel by Mr Capaldi, the ‘visionary’ scientist preparing Klara’s transitioning into the duplicate of Josie he has made. As he tells the Mother, ‘The new Josie won’t be an imitation. She really will be Josie. A continuation of Josie’ (208; original emphasis)—though one can point out the inner contradiction contained in these sentences through the incompatibility between the idea of a ‘new Josie’ and that of a ‘continuation of Josie’. His stance is further developed when he explains:

A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. You know that. For people our age it’s a hard one to let go. We have to let it go, Chrissie. There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now. (212; original emphasis)

Prostheses and Literary Transitions: Hybridizing the Text

25However, the relation of identity that Mr Capaldi establishes between Klara and Josie relies exclusively on its external and behavioural dimensions. As such, Klara is indeed a prosthetic meant exclusively for the mother, who tells her ‘there’s going to be no other way for me to survive’ (212), thus explaining how she intends to construct and maintain her denial of her daughter’s death. The mother’s difficulty to convince herself of the fiction she wishes to create for herself can be perceived along the lines of what Boxall terms the ‘prosthetic imagination’ as she wishes for Klara not only to ‘represent’ Josie but to ‘produce’ and ‘enact’ her.

26Yet, for the reader, the difficulty of believing in this fiction stems not from the attachment to the idea of the uniqueness of the human described earlier by Mr Capaldi, but from the way in which the text has managed to produce the specificity of Klara herself, to endow her with an identity. As such, the narrative goes through a process of hybridization. As Boxall claims, ‘narrative, information, does not refer to the world but produces it, gives rise to it in the form of a prosthetic trace, an original difference from self, from ipse, which is the genesis of meaning, language and being’ (11). Klara herself has been—though only temporarily—asked to ‘produce’ a world for Josie’s mother, one where her daughter would still be alive. Yet, at the end of the novel, Klara notes that this attempt to ‘continue Josie’ would have resulted in failure, that ‘something’ akin to Boxall’s ‘prosthetic trace’ would have kept escaping her:

Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded. So I’m glad I decided as I did. (306)

27The AF thus places human specificity neither on the level of embodiment nor on that of the mind but on the level of relationality. In that respect, the subject, whether fully organic or not, appears as one of Bennett’s agentive assemblages, being constituted not only of its own materiality but also by the affects that circulate through and around it. As stated by Sara Ahmed, ‘emotions operate to “make” and “shape” bodies as forms of action, which also involve orientations towards others’ (4). She explains indeed that ‘it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others’ (10). In that sense, the ‘something very special . . . inside those who loved’ Josie, though never named by Klara, seems to be the attachment of the girl’s loved—and loving—ones, an attachment from which the AF herself seems, in the end, totally excluded. Yet, from the readers’ perspective, the logic of attachment is reversed as we are made to feel for—and with—Klara rather than Josie.

28Thus, the novel manages to turn the readers themselves into hybrids, or cyborgs, as we are made not only to adopt the android’s point of view and technological perspective, but also, and most importantly, as we empathise with her. As noted by Guignery, ‘[i]t is significant that Ishiguro did not choose to portray an all-powerful autonomous robot with greatly enhanced qualities compared to humans but one whose vulnerabilities mirror the frailties of her human counterparts, thereby blurring the boundaries between the human and the other-than-human’ (257). That blurring is essential to the increasing empathy of the readers for Klara, resulting in a first form of confusion, or hybridization of our perspective as we realise—just as in Never Let Me Go (2005)—that we empathise with the posthuman. This hybridization goes further through Ishiguro’s choice to mark the robot’s perspective as obviously non-human—an obvious difference with Never Let Me Go—, thus decentring and defamiliarising the readers’ perceptions, as shown through Klara’s vision ‘in boxes’: ‘The Mother leaned closer over the tabletop and her eyes narrowed till her face filled eight boxes, leaving only the peripheral boxes for the waterfall, and for a moment it felt to me her expression varied between one box and the next. In one, for instance, her eyes were laughing cruelly, but in the next they were filled with sadness’ (104). The perspective expressed here is not only specifically technological—the narrator’s sight being as if pixelised—but it also unsettles the readers’ rationality as we find we cannot reconstruct a clear image for ourselves: the coexistence of the mother’s eyes ‘laughing cruelly’ and ‘filled with sadness’ seems impossible, so that we have to read this as Klara’s hermeneutic effort to interpret what she sees. However, by combining our own hermeneutic work with the narrator’s, we hybridize our own perceptions and in so doing are faced with our own becoming posthuman. Thus, although Klara is eventually discarded by the family, highlighting their own fundamental inability to bridge the gap between the human and the non-human, we readers are made, on the contrary, to ‘feel with her’, to share some of her vulnerability, and to perceive the inhumanity of the human characters, having become a little hybrid ourselves.

29Harry Parker adopted a similar strategy of hybridization of the readers’ perceptions in his novel, Anatomy of a Soldier (2016), whose narrative is constructed through the perspectives and voices of objects, whose point of view we are made to adopt and with which we even empathise at times. To quote Ahmed once more, ‘emotions can move through the movement or circulation of objects’ so that ‘[s]uch objects become sticky, or saturated with affect’ (11): Parker’s objects are saturated with affect—the readers’ and the characters’—so that the blending of their voices creates a composite—hybrid—text requiring the readers’ participation and ethical engagement with the narrative. As Catherine Bernard writes, ‘[p]rosopopeia does not merely allow these seemingly dead and deathly things to speak up. It reaffects and acknowledges them as “vibrant matter”, fully part of Barnes’s experience, and by extension of the reader’s experience’ (online).

30Although in Hybrid Humans, Parker adopts a straightforward first-person narration, he further hybridizes himself by writing himself into the text, and produces his own composite identity when he claims the name ‘hybrid’ for himself:

 . . . I have started to think of myself as a hybrid human. It is a label just for me, not one I would impose on others. Hybrid bikes and hybrid cars, hybrid working—it is on-trend; it isn’t perfect, but ‘a combination of two different elements’ seems to fit. And I like that human is part of it—human, more than anything, is how I want to feel, and it disappears from cyborg, bionic and disabled. This hybrid is a fusion, an amalgam, a confluence of things—of pig’s-heart hybridity, of robotics and AI (artificial intelligence), of genetic engineering and new kinds of interfacing. It feels like a better way of describing my experiences and is somehow less loaded. (21)

31The essay, which blends autobiographical, scientific and historical considerations, but also contains strong intertextual echoes with Parker’s novel, hybridizes itself as it turns into a manifesto. It thus becomes a means for the author to reclaim his identity, to re-signify himself and his disability by crafting himself through the book. By presenting himself in such a way, Parker induces a change of perspective in his readers, a subjective and historical decentring that reminds us that ‘hybrids’ have always existed and solicits our empathetic engagement.

Conclusion

32Klara and the Sun and Hybrid Humans both offer a reflection on the posthuman that, by focusing on the figure of the prosthesis—though in different ways—, interestingly relocates the question of the transition towards a hybridized humanity in the fields of illness, disability and care. As such, the prosthesis becomes a means to build bridges, to allow transformations to take place, in the shape of temporal transitions between two states or selves (from injured, incomplete to ‘remade’, healed or empowered), between two ontologies (from organic to inorganic, from human to ‘hybrid human’), and finally between fiction and reality since, as Boxall explains, ‘[t]he fictional image does not merely stand in for an absent reality, is not simply a replica of a missing thing, but, like the prosthetic, it is that thing itself’ (9; original emphasis). Thus, the text acquires a prosthetic dimension through its ability to both represent and create at the same time. As such, it appears as essentially material, far from the ideal of dematerialisation mentioned earlier, because it enacts the transition between the world of the text and that of the reader. By producing the hybrid bodies it presents, the text becomes a space of transition and makes the act of reading itself an act of both relationality and hybridization, allowing the vitality of matter to circulate between the narrative and the readers.