Deconstructing the Body Politic in Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo

Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952) remains an unjustifiably neglected novel despite some signs of growing interest in recent years. It draws on contemporary cultural criticism to burlesque the development of technology in a number of important aspects: the use of supercomputers to wage an atomic war particularly and also to depict a mass movement dedicated to the removal of human aggression by amputating limbs. The latter movement explains the black joke of the novel’s title and emerges as an exercise in self-mystification since the new prosthetic limbs turn out to be vastly more powerful than their originals. Like Vonnegut in Player Piano, Wolfe shows cybernetics to involve a dangerous series of substitutions for the human, dangerous because they obscure the divided and ambivalent nature of humanity. In order to bring out such ambivalence Wolfe implicates his surgeon-protagonist Dr. Martine in the novel’s power structures and also uses a series of puns and other word play to alert the reader to a duplicity not just in Cold War political statements but in expressions of human purpose more generally. Limbo anticipates later fiction by Pynchon and the cyberpunk group in its ironic examination of humanity’s technological constructs. (DS)