Introduction

Aaron Kaye sensed that his sister and the alien were in some way ‘in league’ with each other. ‘This is her crazy plot’ (A148): a mother/daughter subplot in science fiction guise, as I have explained in the previous chapter. ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’'s posthuman setting accommodated a choric fantasy, an ambivalent fantasy of a union with the mother that is both desirable and terrifying. The intention of the present chapter is to provide a complementary perspective on the collapse of the patriarchal–phallic order and the emergence of the maternally connoted alien in ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’. We shall see, then, that another dimension of the mother/daughter plot comes to light, in addition to the choric fantasy. I want to show that it is possible to observe a dimension of religious desire in the ‘league’ between Lory and the alien. From that viewpoint, the alien does not point only to the maternal but also to the divine.

For this reading of Tiptree's text, I shall move on to a quite different ‘fantasmatic space’: the Wirkungsgeschichte of biblical mythology. Even the uninitiated can recognize in the story a set of basic narrative themes from the Hebrew Bible. At a closer scrutiny, however, far from being smoothly matching analogies, these images appear to be distortions carved on the palimpsest. What is the meaning of these biblical distortions, and how do they refer to the maternal? I will find my answer as a set of readings between three interacting partners. To begin with, the biblical text and ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ mutually highlight each other but as a third party Julia Kristeva plays an important role again.

In Kristeva's studies, the Hebrew and Christian Bible, as well as other Christian writings, are a regular focus of attention, which she motivates as follows:

While Kristeva rereads the Bible to trace the roots of certain obsessions and fantasies that persist in Western secular culture, I turn to the Bible as well as to Kristeva's reflections to gain insight in particular fantasies that appear in ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’.