tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8151936000987298192024-03-05T12:12:41.297+02:00Encountering the (Post-)ApocalypseL Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-6283848347589065862013-01-10T12:21:00.000+02:002013-01-10T13:34:50.178+02:00A Short Review of Le Temps du Loup (2003)<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgol0yZZeyQ63Q_VcLkqtanH3MCFJbAbv3axVZPqLsvdvTPLV8OamAUhZyA4ZYuSNt6KSUj63ptDcZeKG6PvdbN73ycD9P_rH9ojTQNmEQgyxYSQtGyd6MWQSJ-K5wbkr3dbOS7hVnnKmhV/s1600/tempsduloup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgol0yZZeyQ63Q_VcLkqtanH3MCFJbAbv3axVZPqLsvdvTPLV8OamAUhZyA4ZYuSNt6KSUj63ptDcZeKG6PvdbN73ycD9P_rH9ojTQNmEQgyxYSQtGyd6MWQSJ-K5wbkr3dbOS7hVnnKmhV/s1600/tempsduloup.jpg" /></a></div>
<span lang="EN-US">I recently got my hands on this little
French-language gem, directed (and written) by Austrian director Michael
Hanneke who, it appears, is a bit of a household name. The English title
translates the French one: <i>Time of the
Wolf</i>. The story is quite standard post-apocalyptic fare: some unknown
cataclysm (IMDB comments point out oblique references to nuclear war here and
there, but it’s never spelled out) has upheaved the social order, and we follow
a family trying to survive and make sense of their new rather hostile
environment. The movie is entirely set in the French countryside, beautifully
realized in all its bleakness and chill. The central location, where most of
the film takes place, is a train station, where a diverse group are waiting,
hoping against hope that a train will come and take them away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The movie begins innocently: the Laurent
family arrives at their summer cottage somewhere outside of Paris, their car
stocked up with supplies. When they enter they are immediately faced by a man
with a gun. A very nervous man, who asks them about what food they have and how
much gas they have in the car (“very little”). The fact no-one says anything
about the police at this point, and the fact that the housebreaker is
accompanied by his wife and child – who immediately loot the Laurent’s bags for
something to drink – is perhaps the first suggestion something is very wrong
indeed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The husband tries to bargain – he manages
to send the children to safety outside, and then continues, sounding very
reasonable indeed: sharing food, putting down the gun, talking about it. And
then bam, he’s shot and killed, blood splattering over Isabelle Huppert’s
character Anne. Just like that. There is no gore, no shots of brain matter, in
fact we do not see the father and husband again, nor do we see the aftermath of
that whole scene. The next thing we know Anne has taken her two children and
their bike and is trekking down the road with little but the clothes on their
backs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This beginning scene sets the mood: talking
isn’t going to help. Being reasonable isn’t going to help. But it’s not a question
either of some kind of Mad Max-esque gang versus still-civilized families with
children either: just normal people in abnormal circumstances. When Anne goes
to her neighbors to explain what happened, they basically shrug: “You know how
things are now.” Indeed we do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Whereas American apocalypses often very
quickly create an us-versus-them mentality, where there are good guys and bad
guys, and where the bad guys are very obviously bad (e.g. Mad Max) and violence
is taken for granted, <i>Le temps du loup</i>
is much more subtle than that. At the train station where Anne and her children
eventually end up, most of the people seem perfectly normal. Scared and
stressed, they blow up at one another, squabble over who has authority over
whom, and protect their own to the exclusion of everyone else. The leader is a
man named Koslowski, who seems to lead only because he has a gun in his pocket
– a gun, interestingly, that is never even shown. Yet the mere mention of it is
enough to make him, an otherwise very unassuming and uncharismatic figure, the
‘leader’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Koslowski’s leadership is undermined when
another group arrives, a group so big that when Anne asks them “who are you?”
they all reply with “aren’t you with us?” The original group is entirely
subsumed into this new group, which carries with it animals, guns and some kind
of organization. At this point they stumble into the man (and his family) we
met in the beginning, who shot the father. They try to exact some kind of
justice, but the murderer vehemently denies everything, making it a case of his
word against hers. An incredibly frustrating impasse, made even more so because
it always feels like civilization, the old world, the rule of law and all the
other things we take for granted are just <i>so
close</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The cover image of the film is a dramatic
one – a naked child outlined against a blazing fire over railroad tracks. This
is also the penultimate scene in the movie. The child is the younger of Anne’s
two children, Ben. He intends to throw himself into the fire, offering himself
up as a sacrifice in order to make things better. The basis of this belief
comes from a storyteller and trickster they call the ‘razor eater’ that came
with the new group. Among his stories is one of self-immolators who do just
that in order to make things better, woven into an odd pseudo-religious
narrative of the thirty six “Just”, people without whom the world would
immediately cease to exist (this is apparently based on a semitic tradition of
exactly this – 36 men who through overt or covert acts of good and justice keep
the world from spiraling into the apocalypse). He is saved from this fate at
the last moment by one of the guards, who despite Ben being entirely mute still
recognizes the attempt for what it is. He tells him that his intentions were
enough, that he was very brave, that maybe tomorrow a car or a train will
arrive and someone will step out and tell them everything will go back to normal.
The fact that this guard, this saving angel, is also a racist asshole who tried
to kill an apparently innocent Polish man several times for alleged crimes
makes the whole end scene doubly ambiguous. Where are the good guys? Where are
the bad guys? What’s going on!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This is perhaps not as much a review as a
notation of <i>mood</i>. The final scene of
the movie is several minutes long, and consists of just the self-same French
countryside passing by, watched from the window of a train. Is the train
arriving, at long last? Has it already passed them by, leaving them behind? Are
they already on it? My feeling was one of calm; if nothing else, it suggests
trains are still running. Most of the movie consists of these long stretches of
silence, with people staring into fires or into the dark of the night and, most
importantly, not <i>saying</i> anything.
Just being quiet. No-one communicates, and the actual main protagonist of the
movie, Eva (Anne’s daughter) says as much in a letter she writes to her dead
father (the only person, apparently, she can try to communicate with). She
tries to befriend a thieving runaway who is probably much her same age, but he
proves to be unreliable, selfish and, above all, a lone wolf. Although, like
all characters in <i>Le temps du loup</i>,
far from entirely unrelatable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The mood of silence, of despair, of coldness
and darkness is, I feel, supplanted by the one I felt the most strongly: the
feeling of injustice. The feeling that something very unjust is happening. In
whatever conversations the characters have amongst one another, this same
feeling is topmost. It is unjust Koslowski leads merely because he has a gun.
It is unjust the poor Polish family’s child dies. It is unjust a probably
mentally ill woman is raped and then later commits suicide. The water merchants
are unjust. Even the purported leader of the larger group is unjust – as he
says himself, he’s not ‘really’ the leader, he just “organizes things”. No-one
takes responsibility, no-one carries the blame. Or then everyone does. What is
suggested throughout is, in short, that perhaps the 36 just men are no longer
around; all it takes after all is that one disappears for the whole world to be
consumed by its sin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-US">The
Road</span></i><span lang="EN-US">, both the movie and the book, are of course
also unjust in many ways. Most post-apocalyptic narratives are. But most of
them have also introduced, and solidified, a new status quo. In <i>The Road</i>, it is absolutely clear that
no-one but the father and the son are allowed into that duo. They may share
their food sometimes and they may show compassion and empathy with others they
meet, but in the end, there is no-one but the two of them. The behavior of
others, however ghastly and monstrous, must also be understood as a symptom of
the new status quo: if you are caught by the bad guys in <i>The Road</i>, they won’t mince words: they will kill you and eat your
body. In <i>Le temps du loup</i>, there is
(not yet) any such status quo. Most people still want to adhere to old rules of
morality and decency – such as the man who, despite his glasses being stolen,
does not want the thief thrown out into the woods. Others, such as the water
merchant who steals this self-same man’s watch for no other reason than that he
can, seem to want to impose a new order on things, but it is all still too
fragile, too new, too uncertain. Most importantly, we can <i>see</i> the slide towards what we see as the new post-apocalyptic
status quo, and it’s terrifying. The bottom line seems to be: this could be us,
tomorrow. Us tomorrow with all of our old problems and unresolved issues and
petty disputes and useless skills, not to mention the piles upon piles of
evidently traumatized children amongst the families, staring hollow-eyed at the
new world. And as such, the topmost feeling must always be one of a great
injustice being done: “What have we done to deserve all of this?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And thus, the great post-apocalyptic
challenge: “What have you done to prevent it?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Le temps du loup</i> (IMDB): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324197/</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The 36 Just (Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzadikim_Nistarim</div>
L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-4972070888030666472012-05-11T13:30:00.001+03:002012-05-11T13:31:12.551+03:00Revisiting J. B. Bouson – The Year of the Flood<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Here is yet another article by J. Brooks
Bouson (who I think I have now determined to be a she), this time on the <i>The Year of the Flood</i>. I need to re-read
her earlier article on <i>Oryx and Crake</i>,
I believe, but even without re-reading it I can tell she is more or less still
talking about the same things – utopia and hope and a call to action amidst a
narrative laden with the most awful predictions imaginable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Bouson speaks at length about how Atwood
equates the various carnivorous things happening in <i>Year</i> (her short form, which I might as well use) to the state of
women in the novel. She invokes de Sade’s musings on predator-prey
relationships and how only the predator can enjoy sex because “pleasure belongs
to the eater, not to the eaten” (Bouson 2011: 12). This is seen particularly in
the character of Blanco, who not only operates a SecretBurger chain (which
literally minces human meat into burger patty) but also treats all of his
female employers as meat to be sexually exploited. This of course also ties
into the other kinds of meat-eating going on, like the Rarity chain that
regularly serves the meat of endangered species as a specialty – in fact this
whole meat-eating theme is quite strong indeed when looked at it from that
point of view. The Gardeners, naturally, are vegetarian.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Another thing she discusses is
postfeminism, in particular the characters of Ren and Amanda who have chosen or
accepted “[their] own sexual commodification and humiliation” (Bouson 2011: 14)
and who use their female bodies as tools and trading goods. This contrasted
with Toby who, Bouson contends, is a more traditional feminist (mainly because
she protests against this sexual objectification). Atwood, Bouson says, is
afraid that “the recent gains women have made as a result of the feminist
movement may be short-lived and that there is a thin line, indeed, between the
postfeminist’s embrace of her sexuality and the sexist world of the prefeminist
past.” (Bouson 2011: 15).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Furthermore, she discusses what she
strangely calls ‘Americanism’, “that is, the American culture of violence and
corporatization and commodification and unbridled consumption” (Bouson 2011:
15). This seems to me to be rather unfairly directed at a specific nation,
although there is no doubt some merit to this term (although others have seen
this not as an expression of Americanism, but rather a universal human
tendency). Global capitalism? Postmodernism? Globalization in general?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Bouson evokes the idea of ‘degeneration’
when Atwood “gives voice” to the “fear” that “scientific advances will lead not
to a progressive utopian future but instead will result in humanity’s reversion
to a savage dystopian (even pre-human) past” (Bouson 2011: 16). That is to say,
the post-Darwinian idea that despite the rhetoric of progress civilization
itself generates degeneration inevitably – perhaps an evolution of the idea
that capitalism (which drives progress) must by necessity create haves and have-nots,
and that the (degenerate) have-nots must again by necessity outnumber the
haves. Thus, the dark pleebland cityscapes that <i>Year</i> is set in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This, Bouson thinks, is the background
Crake comes from and which inspires him to create the Crakers, “noble savages
that are environmentally friendly, peace-loving and socially and economically
egalitarian” (Bouson 2011: 17) – the replacements of the degenerate 21<sup>st</sup>
century humans. However, as we have seen time and time again, <i>Year</i> also offers an alternative to this:
namely the God’s Gardeners.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">They too “see the need for a cleansing
renewal of humanity and the creation of a new social and moral order”, however
their vision is a “counter-vision and counter-narrative of sweetness and light”
to the “dark vision of a corporation-controlled, consumer-driven and morally
corrupt elite class” (Bouson 2011: 17). The idea seems to be (much like
Bergthaller argued) that “environmentalism will not work if it does not become
a religion” (Bouson 2011: 18). There is the tension here between nature as good
and nature as ‘bad’, nature as prey and predator, and the combination of the
two (for instance in Toby’s vision animal being a liobam, a genetically spliced
lion-lamb creature). This same duality is reflected in human nature, between
the Painballers who torture and kill, and Toby and Ren who selflessly set out
to rescue Amanda from their hands. The feminist statement inherent in having
only men on one side and only women on the other is perhaps a little too on the
nose, but I personally don’t mind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Bouson finishes with a call to the
phronetical (or in common parlance, art not for art’s sake, but for some other,
practical sake) in Atwood’s work:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Atwood, who has long talked
of the moral imperative that drives her work, also believes in the
transformative – and ethical – potential of imaginative literature, and indeed,
<i>Year</i>, like <i>Oryx</i>, is a feminist, anti-corporate and radically ecological work
in which Atwood, in sharing her fears of and outrage against current trends in
contemporary society, also wishes to prod her readers to meaningful political
thought and action.</span><span lang="EN-US"> (Bouson 2011: 23)</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Perhaps a fair enough assessment of
Atwood’s oeuvre; it is after all difficult to read this kind of literature in
any other way, I would contend! Bouson reaffirms her belief in the ultimately
utopian vision of Atwood in the very final scene of <i>Year</i>, where they hear singing voices arriving through the trees –
whether they’re the Crakers or the Gardeners however Atwood leaves unsaid.
Either, I suppose, offers its own version of utopia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Reference:</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Bouson, J.B. 2011. “’We’re
Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone’: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future
in Margaret Atwood’s <i>The Year of the
Flood</i>”. In <i>The Journal of
Commonwealth Literature</i><span itemprop="datePublished" style="border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-style: initial; outline-style: none;"> March 2011 vol. 46 no.
1: 9-26</span></span></span></div>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-84727565783947696352012-05-09T11:42:00.001+03:002012-05-11T13:31:57.320+03:00Housebreaking Humans – Critiquing Ecocriticism<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-US">If
anyone is actually reading these, please know that they are mainly written for
my own benefit – it’s a psychological thing, a way of forcing me to process the
information in the article. Actually posting my musings online in turn forces
my notes to be coherent, and I’ve found coherent notes to be much, much more
useful than scribbles. That said, if they’re of some interest to anyone, that’s
an added benefit!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I recently read another interesting article
on Atwood’s two novels, <i>Oryx and Crake</i>
and <i>The Year of the Flood</i>, written by
Hannes Bergthaller (full reference below as always). Bergthaller’s analysis is
quite crisp, and dives straight into the post(-post)modern issue of the
usefulness or uselessness of art, a topic close to Atwood’s heart in these
novels. Framing the whole piece is the idea of ecocriticism and how it fits
into the general humanist discourse. His own summary:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">The first half of this essay
argues that the idea of sustainability, and the question of species survival
lying at its heart, poses a direct challenge not only to ecocritical orthodoxy,
but to traditional conceptions of the humanities, as well. It challenges
ecocriticism insofar as it exposes the untenability of the normative
conceptions of nature which, under the name of ecology, have informed much
ecocritical work. It challenges the humanities insofar as it forces them to
revise the very understanding of <i>humanitas</i>
that has traditionally underpinned them, and to recognize the arts as
‘‘anthropotechnologies’’, in Peter Sloterdijk’s terms: they are technologies of
self-domestication that deal with human beings as evolved, biological creatures
so as to make them governable.</span><span lang="EN-US"> (Bergthaller 2010: 729)</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The reference to Sloterdijk here is not a
one off occurrence; Bergthaller keeps referencing this particular philosopher.
Unfortunately I am not very familiar with him, but I might need to familiarize
myself after this – point is anyway I might have missed some of the author’s
original points just because I am unfamiliar with Sloterdijk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">According to Bergthaller, the modern idea
of ‘sustainable development’ was a response to the more Malthusian, nihilistic
views on ecology prevalent during the 1970s, (Bergthaller 2010: 730), but has
since been criticized as being an ideology of having the cake and eating it:
the idea being that we cannot simultaneously sustain the constant capitalist
need for growth while also sustaining our natural world. This criticism is what
Bergthaller terms ‘ecocriticism’ (with ties to Deep Ecology), which claims that
the problem with the world today is a failure of imagination: we must
understand that humankind is a part of nature and can exist as a part of the
natural order. Bergthaller however astutely points out that this criticism is
just “a continuation of Romantic critiques of modernity” (Bergthaller 2010:
731) and claims that “Atwood’s novels expose the woeful inadequacy of this formula
as an ethical foundation for humanity’s relationship to its natural
environment” (<i>Ibid</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The ecocritical/Romantic fallacy is the
fact that although humanity is indeed a part of nature, “there is little
comfort in this realization” (Bergthaller 2010: 732). Humanity is after all
following its own destructive, but wholly natural, urges when it wipes out
other species and destroys their habitats (and humanity is hardly alone in this
kind of behavior either – all of natural history is an endless succession of
such cataclysms). The solution to this, Bergthaller (via Sloterdijk) contends,
is that humankind must in fact de-naturalize itself, we must ‘housebreak’
ourselves and “tame the human animal.” (<i>Ibid</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">How this can all be applied to <i>Oryx and Crake</i> and <i>The Year of the Flood</i> has already been intimated in other critical
essays I’ve previously mentioned, especially the two conflicting views the
novels present (posthumanism/Crakers versus spiritualism/God’s Gardeners). <i>Oryx and Crake</i> is a world on the brink
of apocalypse (even without Crake’s interference) exactly because culture has
“failed to produce workable strategies for taming the human animal”
(Bergthaller 2010: 732). Via Sloterdijk, he makes a (in my view) rather odd
aside into eugenics, claiming that humanists are simultaneously the shepherds
and the breeders of the herd of humanity (a role that Jimmy-Snowman literally
embodies with regards to the Crakers) – in essence then the argument is that
any culture work (attempting to ‘housebreak’ the human animal) is also an
eugenics project attempting the breeding of better humans. The Crakers
represent the final and finally successful attempt at creating a thoroughly
housebroken human being through genetics, one that no longer needs or even is
able to perpetuate the kind of destructive, natural behavior us regular <i>homo sapiens</i> are prone to. A useless
piece of hyperbole, probably inherited from Sloterdijk, but the idea itself is
solid: ‘humanists’ do see themselves as shepherds of good ideas versus bad
ideas (thus the eugenics would be memetic, rather than genetic). This is where
Jimmy-the Snowman comes in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">However, disagreeing with other critics
(such as Bouson 2004) Jimmy alone is not a solution, as he (in Bergthaller’s
words) only embodies a kind of “half-understanding”: “He is fully alive to the
thrill of artistic beauty, yet does not understand that it is meaningful not in
itself, but because it provides a way of coping with the conflicting tendencies
rooted in our biological being” (Bergthaller 2010: 738). The real solution,
that brings together the two half-understandings of Jimmy and of Crake in <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, is, Bergthaller
contends, the God’s Gardeners in <i>In the
Year of the Flood</i>. Bergthaller quite simply states that the reason the
God’s Gardeners turn out to be successful in the end is that they have created
“a symbolic order within which the fact of survival can appear as meaningful
and ‘good’” (Bergthaller 2010: 738) – in other words, they have reintroduced
God (this in turn ties into e.g. Dunning 2005). This, Bergthaller says, is a
necessary element of the fiction of the whole symbolic order (the rituals, the
sermons, the arbitrary rules etc) – “as fictions, they are, in a sense,
self-supporting structures for which our biological nature can provide no
warrant” – we have no imperative to do any of it, there are no actual norms in
place, thus “nature acquires normativity only by virtue of its createdness at
the hand of God” (Bergthaller 2010: 740). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">What we have here then, in conclusion, is a
rather wonderful piece of post-postmodern criticism (more of that old
validation, I’d say!): we need ‘imagination’ (art, culture, literature, etc) <i>not</i> in order to see some Romantic ideal
of man and nature living together in harmony, but rather we need it to see what
is <i>not</i> there (since there <i>is</i> no such natural harmony in the
world!): we need it to <i>imagine</i> that
we can live in harmony with nature (which is only possible thanks to a
meaning-creating entity such as God), yet without forgetting the scientific
evidence that suggests we cannot. A return to Romanticism perhaps, but a
slightly jaded, cynical return. A return to believing-without-believing, to
leaps of faith, to blind trust in things that we rationally know cannot be
trusted. Very strange, very curious. I do wonder however if the reintroduction
of God is the true solution to this dilemma, and Atwood is I think equally wary
of it – but there is no denying that the God’s Gardeners have a lot of good
points.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
Reference:</div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bergthaller, Hannes. 2010.</span></span> “Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood's <i>Oryx and Crake</i> and <i>The Year of the Flood</i>.<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">” </span><i style="font-size: 12pt;">In English Studies</i><span style="font-size: small;">; Nov 2010, Vol. 91
Issue 7: 728-743</span></span>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-68405235020375475262012-05-04T14:31:00.000+03:002012-05-07T11:12:17.793+03:00Post-Apocalyptic, Post-Postmodern, Post-Traumatic! And Oryx and Crake<br />
<div style="border-bottom: solid #4F81BD 1.0pt; border: none; mso-border-bottom-themecolor: accent1; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 0cm 0cm 4.0pt 0cm;">
<div class="MsoTitle">
It was honestly a little difficult for me
to read Katherine Snyder’s 2011 article (full reference below) on <i>Oryx and Crake</i>. Since academia is now my
business, any hint of someone else doing exactly the same thing as oneself
makes you quite nervous, and leaves you feeling like someone beat you to the
punch – especially as I haven’t officially published anything yet in a journal
or whatnot. Still, it was a useful exercise, so here follows my immediate
thoughts:</div>
<div class="MsoTitle">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Snyder discusses pre- and post-apocalypses,
analepsis and prolepsis, Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory as applied on
post-apocalyptic fiction, Freud’s uncanny, and even the uncertainty inherent in
fantastic fiction as opposed to realistic fiction. In other words, the only
thing she is missing is Bakhtin’s chronotope and she would already have
pre-empted most of my thesis. Her definition of what I’ve termed ‘realistic
science fiction’ but which I’ve come to realize most people (Atwood included)
seem to term ‘speculative fiction’ is quite apt:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">The novel teeters, and we
teeter with it, on the unstable brink that separates real from imagined, now from
later, an exercise that blurs the line between what is inside and outside the
self, between what is already present in our world and what may be yet to come.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(Snyder 2011: 473)</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But perhaps I shouldn’t feel threatened,
but rather validated, by Snyder’s article. After all, everything that has been
said and done has already been said and done (Adam One's comment on a limited moral keyboard springs to mind), and this just
means I am not alone in my musings. What Snyder does do is talk about Caruth’s
trauma theory in much more detail than I have, which was quite useful to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">First of all, she wants to make a connection
between the major traumatic event in the novel (the apocalypse) and Jimmy’s own
personal apocalypses (the loss of his mother and pet Killer): “Losing one’s
mother at a tender age is not the end of the world. It just feels that way.”
(Snyder 2011: 473), in much the same way as readers of Shelley’s <i>The Last Man</i> have postulated that
Shelley’s own trauma (the loss of her family) was made “commensurate with
global history itself” (Elmer 2009: 356). Although I don’t fully agree with
this idea (the only personal trauma that explicitly causes the apocalypse was
Crake’s, and that discussion is not one Snyder takes up), Snyder does back her
thoughts up through liberal examples taken from the text. She discusses the way
the story itself is set up, from post-apocalyptic ‘present’ to analeptic ‘past’
scenes starting from Jimmy’s childhood and finally coalescing at the very end.
Snyder also talks about the present of the post-apocalypse, of how the “present-tense
narration of this new but compromised dawn hints at a traumatic past event yet
withholds the context that would allow the reader to understand what has
happened, or is still happening, or what it all means” (Snyder 2011: 477). So,
in essence, the ‘ungrasped’ idea of trauma theory, that one is not consciously
aware of the trauma despite it affecting your life constantly.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The third part, where she talks about ‘traumatic
witness’, was probably the part that intrigued me the most, since it actually
had a discussion on how one can apply the idea of the traumatic witness (the
all-important third part to my post-apocalyptic chronotope) to <i>Oryx and Crake</i>. It was also at this
point when I realized exactly how powerful the idea of post-postmodern theory
may be. Consider:</span></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The pandemic—a singular traumatic event of global proportions, yet one that replays past private traumas for the protagonist—marks the moment at which these two registers of the narrative collide, or the moment at which they are revealed to have been one all along.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(Snyder 2011: 479)</blockquote>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In other words, read symbolically
(deconstructively?) the whole narrative is more or less about Jimmy’s own
childhood traumas becoming manifest in the most obvious way imaginable. “The
trouble at home at once predetermines and is retrodetermined by the cataclysmic
world events around which the narrative is structured” (<i>Ibid</i>). But yet, but still! There are the other plots, the other
ideas, the bioengineering and the dystopia and all the rest. And then, from
this, she goes on to wonderfully define post-apocalyptic fiction based on this
idea of trauma theory:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">It is this uncanny aspect
of the protagonist’s experience, I contend, that is fundamental to the imaginative
investments of the reader of post-apocalyptic fiction. Post-apocalyptic fiction
serves as rehearsal or preview for its readers, an opportunity to witness in
fantasy origins and endings that are fundamentally unwitnessable. We are
horrified and yet thrilled to see ourselves and our world in the unthinkable
plight portrayed here, and even more horrified and thrilled to see the origins
of this plight in ourselves.</span><span lang="EN-US"> (Snyder 2011: 479)</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Thus, she returns to the actual powerful
message of the science fiction narrative: that it must in a way be read as ‘real’
(witnessable), that there must be that element of suspension of disbelief and
so on for it not to simply collapse into the (still very valid and powerful)
interpretation that the whole cataclysm is just an extension of Jimmy’s own
trauma.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">At this point, Snyder goes into more
Freudian depths, something I think is a mistake. For one thing she brings up
the Oedipus complex when trying to explain the (to me still quite intriguingly
puzzling) deaths of Oryx and Crake. Although an acceptable enough explanation,
she makes the (in my view wrong) assumption that Oryx is “fatally infected”
(Snyder 2011: 481) and the actually patently false assertion that Crake would
likewise be thus infected: we know perfectly well that Crake is immune to the ‘super
bug’, having taken the same immunizing ‘cocktail’ as Jimmy did.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">One interesting point she makes about
trauma, a point I had not thought of myself, is the idea that although trauma
by definition is the unconscious repetition of an event, Snyder claims the
possibility of “repetition with a difference, repetition as reworking”, in
other words that characters could actually deal with trauma in order to “remake
their present relation to loss” (Snyder 2011: 485) – perhaps for the better.
Again we return then to the dual meaning of apocalypse – the end of the world,
or a revelation of a new, better one – perhaps even through reworked trauma! Her
conclusion is, again, painfully close to my own (validation!):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Such fictions allow us
imaginatively to rehearse the end, a rehearsal that itself stands as both
traumatic symptom and potential cure, as acting out and working through, as repetition
and repetition-with-a-difference. Our awareness that such apocalyptic visions
of human futurity mirror our own inner fears and desires does not mean that all
trauma, whether individual or collective, will be consigned to the past, but it
does help us to confront our status as subjects of history by looking to the
future.</span><span lang="EN-US"> (Snyder 2011: 486)</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A perfectly viable theory, this one: that
post-apocalyptic science fiction in essence is our own attempt at, through
endless repetition, perhaps eventually rework some of our unrealized traumas.
And this, dear friends, might very well fit nicely with some things Zizek (add
upside-down ^’s on the Z’s please) had to say about catastrophes, dystopian
zero points, and other such nice things. But – for a later post.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Elmer, Jonathan. 2009. “'Vaulted Over by
the Present': Melancholy and Sovereignty in Mary Shelley's <i>The Last Man</i>.”
In <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=815193600098729819" name="linkSource2"></a><i>Novel: A Forum on Fiction</i>; Summer2009, Vol.
42 Issue 2: 355-359.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Snyder, Katherine V. 2011. ” “Time to go: The
Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s <i>Oryx and Crake</i>”. In <i>Studies</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; padding-bottom: 0cm; padding-left: 0cm; padding-right: 0cm; padding-top: 0cm;"> </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">in the Novel; Winter2011, Vol.</span><span rwthpgen="1" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-style: initial; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px;"> 43 Issue 4</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">: 470-489</span>.L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-686752775993368002012-03-01T09:38:00.011+02:002012-03-01T20:44:35.679+02:00Metro 2033: Science Fantasy or Fiction?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWDm4QNmOAmOjKKZh1cnnpBD8twCNPo6JFwARxz9KGIunvq7E_X_MgK9nM8B11hl2KR-EXY41CenDjTnvnpNgBwQkG1YVdfbKXWFBWH_xu980a1Uac-STQ1iVN1vx_PNjXXsMKp8IOmVB9/s1600/Metro-2033_1837506a.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWDm4QNmOAmOjKKZh1cnnpBD8twCNPo6JFwARxz9KGIunvq7E_X_MgK9nM8B11hl2KR-EXY41CenDjTnvnpNgBwQkG1YVdfbKXWFBWH_xu980a1Uac-STQ1iVN1vx_PNjXXsMKp8IOmVB9/s320/Metro-2033_1837506a.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5714996728266432722" border="0" /></a><br />Hello, um, Blogger.<br /><br />It seems it has been since 2010 that I last wrote anything here? Well - I am, as it were, back in the saddle. My thesis proper is finished long since, and accepted with good grades and so on, and now I am in fact doing research in this very same field of literature! Isn't that exciting? This means I've a reason to write something in these here blog again, so I hope to be doing that a bit more frequently now. We'll see if the ratio of entertainment-academia becomes slightly more skewed towards the former or not - chances are they might?<br /><br />Anyway, the purpose of this post is to approach/discuss the Dmitry Glukhovsky novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Metro 2033</span>. Unfortunately this particular piece of Russian writing won't be a part of my eventual doctoral thesis since it's a translation, so my thoughts on it will largely be rambling rather than proper reviewing. Also, it's rife with spoilers, so if you want to avoid that, don't read I guess? It's a good book and I can recommend it, although the translation is spotty to say the least.<br /><br />So: the premise is that somewhere around 2013 or so, a global nuclear war (the reasons for which are never discussed) devastates the Earth. Luckily for the Muscovites, the Moscow metro system is also the world's largest nuclear fallout shelter, and it is to it and its myriad tunnels and stations that the survivors flee. A decade or two later, people are still living underground, in societies formed along station or line boundaries or according to ideologies. The survivors' diet consists mainly of mushrooms and pigs that eat mushrooms.<br /><br />The secondary premise is that the metro dwellers must remain such. The surface has become uninhabitably lethal. Aside from the radiation and the blinding sunlight, the surface is now home to mutated creatures, many of which it seems do not even have an equivalent animal it mutated from (such as the Librarians, unless they're mutated humans I suppose). What more, and this is even touched upon at some point, the rate of mutation makes little sense - it's difficult to imagine the kinds of monsters found on the surface could appear in scarcely a decade, not to mention the monstrosity in the Kremlin. Or, indeed, the Dark Ones themselves, the instigators of the whole plot of the novel.<br /><br />The Dark Ones are not a part of the premise, exactly, seeing as they ultimately only appear a few times. They start our protagonist's journey through a task given to him by a member of a mysterious group, Hunter, dedicated to the preservation of the Metro. Artyom must travel to the centre of the Metro, Polis, in order to warn Hunter's superior about the threat of the Dark Ones, and so that they may find some way for his station to combat the encroaching monsters. Artyom, as befitting of a blank slate protagonist, obviously knows little of the Metro outside of his station, and is thus the perfect set of ears and eyes for the reader to experience it all through.<br /><br />And that's what this book is essentially about: discovering the underground world of the Metro, with all its varied types of survivors, ideas, ideologies and mysteries. And they abound, oh yes: Glukhovsky, were I to use him in my thesis, fits very neatly into the definition I have made of post-postmodern writing. The novel's more than aware of the fact that fiction is fictitious, but it does not flaunt it like postmodern texts did (except in one particularly memorable dialogue towards the end, but that was a bit of authorial indulgence I had no trouble swallowing): rather it neatly incorporates the inexplicable and the supernatural into the general mood of the story. From the very first pages, we realize that <span style="font-style: italic;">Metro 2033</span> is a two-layered thing, where what is 'real' and what is just stories is constantly in question.<br /><br />We gain access to most of the Metro via stories told to Artyom, starting from the very first pages, stories about other stations and lines, some grounded in reality while others are more fantastic. We (the readers) in turn experience the Metro through Artyom as he travels it, alternately finding that reality is not as fantastic as we were told, and alternately finding it is even more fantastic. This technique is not in itself something unique, but the layers of 'reality' versus 'superstition' effectively become so blurred it is entirely up to the readers sense of willing suspension of disbelief (please see my previous entry on Coleridge et al.!) whether or not they end up 'buying' the world of <span style="font-style: italic;">Metro 2033</span>. Of course, 'buying' the world itself is what largely determines how effective the novel will be.<br /><br />This brings us to the point of all this: where does <span style="font-style: italic;">Metro 2033</span> fit in on the arbitrary scale of science fiction rationality versus the kind of fantasy typically found in magical realism? I admit that I myself had actually played the game before I read the book, and I was therefore surprisingly enough prepared for the supernatural elements when they arrived (surprisingly because game narratives rarely follow their sources very closely), but I'm not sure how I would have reacted without prior knowledge of them. Probably with inquisitiveness: how do hypnotic voices emanating from pipes or stretches of tunnel with deadly effects on the human mind fit into the overall picture of ragged survival and very human conflict? Luckily, this same inquisitiveness is what Artyom feels, so our journeys happily coincide - what more, his companions are more than willing to provide their own interpretations of events, which either muddles or clarifies the issue, depending on how you wish to view it.<br /><br />This duality is perhaps best presented through an event in the novel itself. Towards the last third of the book, when Artyom finally reaches <span style="font-style: italic;">Polis</span>, Artyom has just experienced the memorable piece of dialogue I mentioned earlier. This happens on the station just before Polis, where he meets two hookah-smoking gentlemen who engage him in conversation. Allow me to reproduce a short extract from it:<br /><br /><blockquote>"But do you believe in fate?" asked Sergei Andreyevich, inclining his head to the side and examining Artyom studiously, while Yevgeniy Dmitrievich turned away from the hookah with interest.<br />"No," said Artyom decisively. "There is no fate, just random events that happen to us, and then we make things up on our own later."<br />"Too bad, too bad..." sighed Sergei Andreyevich disappointedly, austerely looking at Artyom over his eyeglasses. "Now, I'm going to present a little theory of mine to you, and you see for yourself if it matches your life or not. It seems to me that life, of course, is an empty joke, and that there's no purpose to it at all, and that there's no fate, which is to say anything explicit and definite, along the lines of you're born and you already know that you're going to be a cosmonaut or a ballerina or that you'll die in your infancy...No, not like that. While you're living your allotted time...how do I explain this...It may happen that something happens to you that forces you to perform specific actions and make specific decisions, keeping in mind you have free will, and can do this or that. But if you make the right decision, then the things that happen to you subsequently are no longer just random, to use your word, events. They are caused by the choices you made. [...] And your life will gradually stop being just a collection of random events; it will turn into....a plot, I suppose, where everything is connected by some logical, though not necessarily straight, links. And that will be your fate.<br /> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Metro 2033</span>: 254-255) </blockquote><br />Strengthened by the realization that the incredible events leading up to this point in his journey (that is to say, the plot of the novel) indeed constitute the plot of his life (hello, postmodernism), Artyom hurries on. However, in Polis, the description of the two gentlemen he spoke with earlier causes a different reaction. There are two factions in the station, one scholarly and one military. Both contend that the station through which Artyom passed and where he met Sergei Andreyevich and Yevgeniy Dmitrievich is in fact empty and uninhabitable. The military claim that people often experience hallucinations while there due to a gas leak, whereas the scholars come to believe people who see and speak with someone while there are special and chosen. This very neatly puts the ball in the reader's court: do we believe the military (it was just a gas leak, causing Artyom to hallucinate the whole conversation) or the scholars (it was exactly what it seemed to be; a bit of otherwordly providence, showing Artyom how special and unique he is to the plot of the Metro). Artyom himself is troubled, but Glukhovsky does not provide a definite answer either way, although he <span style="font-style: italic;">allows </span>for both.<br /><br />The one piece of suspension of disbelief we <span style="font-style: italic;">do </span>have to accept, even if we go in for the harder science fiction route, is that mind control or telepathy or psionics what-have-you is now officially possible, potentially through the effects of a powerful experimental bioweapon released on Moscow during the war (which, in turn, might also be the reason behind the improbable monsters on the surface). This ability is particularly apparent towards the end, when they meet the worshippers of the Great Worm, who turn out to have a few capable telepaths among their numbers. Another example is the Kremlin and its inhabitants: demons or merely monstrous mutations? Once it is established that the human mind can now be affected in this way, by whatever means it is accomplished, one can easily explain most of the bizarre occurrences in the Metro by ways of this. Perhaps there are simply other creatures like the monster in the basement of the Kremlin who are capable of controlling minds, and these live here and there, preying on lone wanderers in dark tunnels.<br /><br />Or, then we allow for the preternatural, in which case <span style="font-style: italic;">Metro 2033</span> is an interesting amalgam of the post-apocalyptic science fictional genre and horror writing, possibly set in the kind of world <a href="http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/">these guys</a> are creating, where the bizarre and memetic exists just underneath and hidden away from the surface normality - except, of course, that in the Metro, it has all come bursting out of the woodworks following the nuclear apocalypse.<br /><br />Being a post-postmodern reader myself, I accept both interpretations as equally valid. The rational, science fictional interpretation is canon, the one I would use if I were to be transported bodily into the world of the text and had to 'explain' what was going on. The other interpretation is the super- or metatextual one, the one that self-consciously uses the text to talk about issues outside the text or then about the text itself in relation to other texts. A metaphor, a comment, another layer. And read so, <span style="font-style: italic;">Metro 2033</span> is, to say the least, very enjoyable.<br /><br />The translation is still incredibly spotty though, or at least it feels like it is. Yikes.<br /><br /><br /><br /><p class="western">Glukhovsky, Dmitry. 2007. <i>Metro 2033.</i> London: Gollancz.</p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-42586591062893920852010-10-17T19:03:00.003+03:002010-10-17T19:08:42.875+03:00Realism in Post-apocalyptic fiction – a general introduction<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">I wonder if it is too much to say that realism is a key concept in post-apocalyptic (PA) fiction: are we not after all dealing with a subject that is inherently fantastic, describing events that have not, and cannot, take place? Well, that is only if you adhere to an idea of 'realism' as being something only associated with things (whether physical or psychological) that exist presently, or existed within living memory (historical novels, no matter how assiduously researched, can never be considered realistic within this definition, since they by necessity concern themselves with a time or place no longer in existence). Obviously this definition however is far too limited: a novel's sense of realism cannot be contingent on the subject matter. Rather it must be a factor of the text itself, the way the reader is approached through it.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">To get the groundwork out of the way: obviously realism in a novel demands that the reader and author enter into a contract, a consensual, shared belief in the existence of certain things, such as contiguous time and recognizable space. The famous (almost cliché) remark of Coleridge's, <i>the willing suspense of disbelief</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> comes to mind: the author asks the reader to believe for the duration of the novel everything that is told in it. The reader does so willingly, albeit with a little help from a skilled author. I can imagine a postmodern, post-apocalyptic novel, where this contract is wilfully broken: fair enough, that is after all the role of the </span><i>avant-garde</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in any situation, to make us aware of our own conceptual shortcomings. But a comment on language, or on the death of the author, or on any such thing would no longer be a comment on the apocalypse and its aftermath: for that, we have to </span><i>believe</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> it really happened. I contend that the moment the apocalypse merely becomes an obvious, over-extended metaphor that can at any time be reversed, it loses its sublime power and thus its true artistic viability. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This is of course only my opinion on it, but it does seem to be the general consensus among the post-apocalyptic canon (see my previous posts on the various books I've read and that I consider a part of this canon). Not one of them offer a post-modern or even modernist reading, they all stay firmly rooted within the realist tradition most famously described by Ian Watt's </span><i>The Rise of the Novel</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1987 [1957]). Watt (1987: 291) defines </span><i>formal realism</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as follows:</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> <blockquote>[T]he particularisation of time, place and person; to the natural and lifelike sequence of action; and to the creation of a literary style which gives the most exact verbal and rhythmical equivalent possible of the object described.</blockquote></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This is firmly rooted in the empirical, rational, Enlightenment tradition of the early 19</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;"> century. The Arts often follow science, so too in the case of the early novels: science purported to describe a natural world without the vagaries of religion, superstition or subjectivity, to provide an accurate and objective view of the world. Much like that, the early realist novelists wanted to give their reader an unromanticized view of the world (often to the outrage of their contemporaries, who were scandalized by the themes of sex, lust and violence that had hitherto been considered too vulgar for the Arts). None, once again, of the novels I have read have had any scruples about hiding the realities of the post-apocalyptic world (with the slight exception of Shute's </span><i>On The Beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, whose future vision ended with a whimper rather than a bang). Even without gore and violence aplenty, however, the post-apocalyptic novel remains a clearly realistic one.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Morris (2003) points out two central tenets of realism: contiguity, and the search for truth. Contiguity is basically what Watt (1987) spoke of above: namely a contiguous chain of events that eventually lead to a conclusion. There is a distinction, of course, between </span><i>story time</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and </span><i>narrative time</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Story time refers to the whole chain of events from start to finish. As an example, let us take </span><i>On The Beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: an escalating world tension leads to a launch of nuclear warheads by a small third world country, which is misconstrued as an attack by one superpower upon another. In the nuclear exchange that follows, a 'powder-keg' akin to pre-World War I Europe is ignited, as everyone takes the opportunity to solve their own disputes. The result is that the entire northern hemisphere is destroyed. Unfortunately, the cloud of radiation that killed everyone that wasn't killed in the original exchange is now slowly moving down south with the seasonal air currents, killing everything in its path. Australia and New Zealand, where the action takes place, will be the very last to go. In the end of the story, everyone dies. This is the story time. The narrative time does not even encompass all of this: it begins in the post-apocalypse and ends there. Whenever the narrative jumps to a past moment or a future moment (analepsis and prolepsis), it does so within story time. Thus contiguity is created, and maintained. There is of course also the matter of psychological contiguity for the characters and many other situations in which an ordered chain of events is desirable.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The search for truth, on the other hand, is another feature of realism and the realist novel. In the beginning I mentioned Coleridge's suspension of disbelief and the contract between author-writer. What this contract is based on is that the reader suspends their disbelief for a good reason, a moment of grace to allow the writer to rely whatever insights (truth) he or she wants to. If at the end of a narrative these insights, or truths, prove inconclusive or irrelevant, then the </span><i>author</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> has broken the pact with the reader (this is, in general, what happens in postmodern novels, who have a tendency of avoiding any even semi-conclusive endings). In </span><i>On the Beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, like many other PA novels, the first and most pressing questions are without fail: </span><i>what</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> happened and </span><i>why</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. This is the basic quest for truth that generally colours a post-apocalyptic narrative. In many, but far from all, stories, the author also offers a solution, a way to prevent the disaster. In many others, the author provides us with an alternative future instead of dwelling on the past (e.g. the aptly named </span><i>Survivors</i><span style="font-style: normal;">). In some, like </span><i>On the Beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, neither the past nor the future seem to hold any promise. But it is here we are reminded of the basic fact of post-apocalyptic literature: it is science fiction. Until the moment it becomes fact, everything described in a novel such as Shute's is preventable. This, of course, was the great truth of the Cold War-era novels of nuclear Armageddon: the Arms race </span><i>must</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> stop, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction </span><i>must</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> be abandoned, and a more peaceful form of dialogue </span><i>must</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> be adopted in order to prevent </span><i>On The Beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> from happening.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Morris, Pam. 2003. </span><i>Realism</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. London: Routledge. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Watt, Ian. 1987 [1957]. </span><i>The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. London: The Hogarth Press.</span></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-89872431812897860992010-09-19T15:03:00.002+03:002010-09-19T15:09:14.534+03:00Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">A few scribbled comments (amounting to more than 1000 words – oops!) to round Atwood off for now, this time an article written by Stephen Dunning in 2005.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">I quite liked this article. He starts off by reminding the reader there are essentially two kinds of dystopias: the Orwellian and the Huxleyian. The boot stamping on your face forever, or the more subtle vision of Huxley's <i>Brave New World</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which emphasises the carrot rather than the stick, but is no less totalitarian. Dunning places </span><i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> into the Huxleyian tradition, and with good reason:</span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 0.18cm;"><br /></p><blockquote>It finds our current vulnerability to unprecedented disaster arises not from dystopian societies with hostile political structures, underwritten by oppressive metanarratives, and established through threat of imprisonment, torture and death, but rather within the qualitative vacuum of a culture that has lost its "great" narratives.<p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 0.18cm;"> (Dunning 2005: 86)</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 0.18cm;"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 0.18cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">This loss of 'great narratives' is of course a post-modern concept, borrowed directly from Lyotard, although Dunning refuses the post-modern label and prefers “late modernity” (although this does force him to translate 'postmodern' into 'late modern' whenever he discusses it in the text, and then I have to translate it back in my head...anyway). This culture, Dunning goes on to argue, has lately, with the fall of the Soviet Union, lost even the political alternative to the old religious narratives, leaving only unfettered scientific progress behind. A pattern can be discerned, I would say. Dunning claims that the “sacred narrative” (Dunning 2005: 87) is being excised from the world and replaced with ideas stemming from “the laboratory and ledger” (science and capitalism).</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">Much like DiMarco's text on <i>homo faber</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Dunning also goes back to antiquity and then to the beginning of 'modernity', when science ousted the old traditions, without however truly offering an alternative. He speaks of 'orders of desire' (which I believe corresponds to the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs): </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Modernity can offer no convincing rationale for pursuing second-order desires, which require the suppression or deferment of first-order desires to achieve higher ethical (often communal) goals, precisely because, as both Huxley and Atwood recognize, modernity rejects the traditional cultural narratives that give such goals their authority.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> (Dunning 2005: 87)</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">I should read more Lyotard, but I would assume such a traditional cultural narrative might be something like 'God', who, through the advance of science, has now become a mere “God of the gaps” (Dunning 2005: 88), only powerful wherever there has been no scientific explanation yet. <i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is then </span>a “darkly comic critique of our triumphant scientific modernity that is only now beginning to reveal its true shape, having finally exhausted the resources of the world it has systematically destroyed” (Dunning 2005: 88-89). Sounds a bit post-postmodern to me, I must say!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">Dunning's article, as the title suggests, focuses on psychological, or therapeutic elements in the text (another postmodern concept, incidentally). Thus we see the relationship between Jimmy and Crake, and the relationship between the compounds and the outside world, as elements of a mentally ill world (or culture). One of the major elements is the lack of communication between people: when Jimmy entertains himself by having love affairs with bored compound wives, they are entertained by his way with words: “it is telling that they find his considerable linguistic skills appealing, suggesting that on some level, they recognize the nature of their deprivation, the cause of their extraordinary loneliness. Community, even a community of two, requires communication.“ (Dunning 2005: 91). Likewise, the image of Jimmy and Crake as adolescents sitting back to back with their computers seems to suggest that “they are not present to each other at all, or perhaps virtually not present” (Dunning 2005: 92). This, of course, is hogwash, brought on by Atwood's amazing inability to grasp what a video game is actually about (which is quite staggering, considering how central a role her 'Extinctathon' game plays), but Dunning nonetheless probably captured her authorial intent with the scene. In essence, the separation between mind and body is becoming more and more acute, which leads to a sort of split personality for those afflicted (where the body, for instance, is merely entertained by pornography, executions and violence). This is a typical Freudian concept, Freud also belonging to the modernist tradition (Dunning 2005: 94); the separation between the id, the ego and the superego.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">Crake's solution to Freud's problem (that we all have base, often destructive needs, that have to be sublimated or expressed in some less destructive way for society to survive) is to entirely replace <i>homo sapiens</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with his own species – the Crakers – through genetic manipulation (Dunning 2005: 95). As I already mentioned in some of my other article reviews, this kind of backfires, with Jimmy-Snowman teaching the Crakers in the post-apocalypse of Gods and Goddesses and giving them the beginnings of a mythical framework just like the one Crake attempted to eliminate. Atwood could probably not have made it more obvious through the Crakers' 'exodus' from 'Paradice (Dome)', after all. Dunning has an interesting insight into Crake's character here: why would he kill Oryx (who is important to the Crakers) in front of Jimmy, knowing full well this would make Jimmy kill him, while leaving the Crakers in Jimmy's (a “words” person) hands? Why not leave Oryx alive, or why not take care of the Crakers himself? Dunning suggests that Crake is, ultimately, only human, and that in killing Oryx he follows his own inner qualitative and unscientific first-order desire to own her in death, which would not be possible if either both Jimmy and Oryx survived, or Jimmy and Crake did (Dunning 2005: 96). Curious stuff.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The end result, however, is what we see in the post-apocalypse: new “sacred narratives” being constructed by the prophet Snowman and embraced by the Crakers who, despite Crake's intentions, remain at least “marginally human” (Dunning 2005: 98). “</span>Thus, whatever solutions we may hope for must come at least partially by way of recovery, recovery of some form of great narrative that reestablishes culture firmly in the cultus from which science has torn it” (Dunning 2005: 98). In other words, “numbers people” 0, “words people” 1. Hooray!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Dunning, Stephen. 2005. “Margaret Atwood's <i>Oryx and Crake</i>: The Terror of the Therapeutic” In <i>Canadian Literature; Fall2005, Issue 186</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: 86-101.</span></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-9714512195873882072010-09-18T15:37:00.001+03:002010-09-18T15:39:01.888+03:00Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: homo faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake.<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003)critiques modernity’s commitment to <i>homo faber</i>—he who labors to use every instrument as a means to achieve a particular end in building a world, even when the fabrication of that world necessarily demands a repeated violation of its materiality, including its people.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> (DiMarco 2005: 170)</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">This is basically the point DiMarco is trying to make in her article, which much like previous criticism I have read focuses mainly on the two characters of Jimmy and Crake and what exactly they represent. Crake, then, is “the quintessential <i>homo faber</i><span style="font-style: normal;">” (DiMarco 2005: 170), the working man, the creator-man, the tool-using man. One of the theorists working with this concept is Hannah Arendt, who (quoted in DiMarco 2005: 174), says that</span> “<i>homo faber</i> is contrary to <i>animal</i></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><i>laborens</i> because he has always destroyed nature, not worked with it.” As good a description as any of Crake, I should say. The problem, DiMarco (2005: 174) notes, is that in modern days <i>homo faber</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> has turned from altruistic, ethical and community-oriented goals for his powers of creation towards more selfish and inwards-looking goals – in the case of the scientists running Atwood's dystopia it is the pursuit of money and power and immediate physical gratification. The blame obviously lies with capitalism and commodification – a cornerstone of post-modernism – which Atwood is here attempting to overturn.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">DiMarco, like Bouson, makes much of the division of labour between people: first there are the compounds and the pleeblands, then within the compound the 'words' and 'numbers' people, and finally Crake's own invention, the Paradice Dome which is a compound within a compound (DiMarco 2004: 177-179). DiMarco (2004: 178) calls this “[p]ower through enclosure”, the idea that there are 'wild' areas and 'civilized' areas and that it is within the civilized, metropolitan centres that the 'work' of the </span><i>homo faber</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> takes place. The problem, of course, is that the work of the compounds, although marketable, is hardly ethical or desirable or even necessary, and as we get to the post-apocalyptic part, we come to realize they are dangerous (such as the human-eating Pigoons). Interestingly, DiMarco seems to think Crake engineered the bio-plague for profit (DiMarco 2004: 183), and that seeing it as anything else (such as 'culture' work) would be a misunderstanding. This probably explains why DiMarco glosses over what Bouson called the 'assisted suicide' of Crake by Jimmy in the end, giving only this very odd interpretation of events:</span> “[Jimmy] cannot allow her—or Crake—to re-enter Paradice in their known human existence, for both have “sinned” against the potential goodness of humanity. So he shuts the doors on them both and stands alone in Paradice.” (DiMarco 2004: 187). Although this fits with the general neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist reading of DiMarco, I personally think it stereotypes Crake's character too much: <i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> may be an exercise in the evident, but it would be a mistake to think the characters are mere archetypes.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">DiMarco ends with an analysis of Jimmy's character, who according to her </span>“has the ability to be compassionate and ethical, to see himself as embedded within the world as opposed to separate or above it” (DiMarco 2004: 187-188), and who has a closer relationship with nature and the living other (e.g. animals, plants): this is curiously reminiscent of God's Gardeners that we are introduced to in <i>The Year of the Flood</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, although DiMarco obviously could not have read that book at the time of her writing this article. Some good points are made regarding Jimmy's character: despite all of his vices, what comes through ultimately is a likeable and ethical person who, unfortunately, did not have the same backbone has his mother had in rejecting the compound, </span><i>homo faber</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> world. When that world collapses, and we are left with the post-catastrophe world, Jimmy suddenly comes closer to the </span><i>animal laborens</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, working only to live. “</span>As he journeys toward Paradice it is as though he moves backward through history, tending to the reality that consumption for physical and emotional sustenance and survival is potentially separate from production for economic gain.” (DiMarco 2004: 190). The final part of DiMarco's article deals with the choice Jimmy is left with at the very end: should he hide from, attack, or interact with the other three human survivors he comes across? And if he chooses to interact, what kind of society will they rebuild? Will they follow in the footsteps of <i>homo faber</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and instrumental philosophy, thus restarting the whole escapade, will they entirely abandon </span><i>homo faber</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and find</span> “some new way of community building and caring for one another” (DiMarco 2004: 194) or will there be something in between? </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">Way to go asking the question post-apocalyptic literature has been asking since the beginning! </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">DiMarco, Danette. 2004. “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: <i>homo faber</i> and the Makings of a New Beginning in <i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;">”. In </span><i>Papers on Language & Literature; Spring2005, Vol. 41 Issue 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: 170-195.</span></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-66014049914696731192010-09-17T15:52:00.004+03:002010-09-18T15:39:53.234+03:00““It’s Game Over Forever”: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake” by JB Bouson.<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">I recently read an interesting article by one Bouson, JB (whose gender I've yet to determine, but I'm leaning towards a she), and thought I'd jot down its contents before I forget.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"> The article is in regards to <i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, in particular its vision of our very own bioengineered future. Bouson calls it a 'dystopian' novel, Atwood herself prefers 'speculative fiction', but I am not budging my label of 'post-apocalyptic'. The first point Bouson makes is </span>“the division between the humanities and the sciences through the stories of her two male characters, Jimmy and Crake” (Bouson 2004: 140): aside from marketing jingles, Atwood's future seems to have no use for “word” people at all, focusing solely on “numbers” people like Crake. This, it seems, is at the centre of Atwood's dystopian vision: a world where scientists hold all the power and the liberal arts have become “little more than worthless pastimes” (Bouson 2004: 144) is also a world without ethics. The most ethical, altruistic scientist we find in this whole novel is probably Crake, and his solution is very much in character, but simultaneously very much not a solution at all: “in a strange twist on the idea of scientific imperialism, uses science not to conquer the natural world but to control human nature by creating his bioengineered and environmentally friendly hominids, the Crakers, as a replacement for humanity” (Bouson 2004: 141). Crake, then, represents the “the 'postmodern' scientific mindset that openly flouts the 'laws' of nature posited by modern science and works to collapse boundaries among species” (Bouson 2004: 145). However, it is exactly in the 'Crakers' that Crake fails: he is unable to genetically remove the desire to sing and dance, for curiosity, and ultimately for symbolic thinking of the kind that leads them to regard Crake as a God, Oryx as a Goddess, and Snowman/Jimmy as their prophet. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">In other words, despite their set of strange characteristics, the 'Crakers' are human in all the important aspects. Likewise, the last apparent human survivor is a “words” person, someone who, in what Bouson terms the “post-catastrophe” world, is constantly plagued by words and wordplay, by clichéd bits and pieces of self-help books and whatnot. “If Atwood uses the clichéd language and borrowed speech that runs through Snowman’s mind to discredit her character, she also works to redeem him, in part, by revealing his reverence for art and language.” (Bouson 2004: 152). After civilization ends, as Jimmy notes, all that remain are the words, the stories, the legends: and these he is, during the whole course of the novel, passing on to the Crakers. The saving grace, then, of humanity, and the ultimate discrediting of the Crakean view of life.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Bouson, J. Brooks. 2004. ““It’s Game Over Forever”: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake”. In<i> The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2004 39: 139</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: 139-156. Available: DOI: </span><span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">10.1177/0021989404047051.</span></span></span></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-10332088411065782552010-09-14T21:12:00.003+03:002010-09-18T14:11:29.887+03:00On The Beach<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYSCIzg8qtvRu6wUR8F-gAAuKHpTdypaWiCvGrqXiw8a2eRxpLHhlNUatdGgouf32xSYQvM4SepKXQT77QLFGSG_n25ns7tD8H5kyHuKYE2jrS24kmAWjxzdyJ87r7fA0tM8O3QsiKagOT/s1600/onthebeach.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 103px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYSCIzg8qtvRu6wUR8F-gAAuKHpTdypaWiCvGrqXiw8a2eRxpLHhlNUatdGgouf32xSYQvM4SepKXQT77QLFGSG_n25ns7tD8H5kyHuKYE2jrS24kmAWjxzdyJ87r7fA0tM8O3QsiKagOT/s320/onthebeach.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516841887896608802" border="0" /></a><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Nevil Shute's <i>On the beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1957) is different. Very different. Perhaps the world it portrayed – one where Australia (and indeed the whole southern hemisphere) ha</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s narrowly escaped nuclear annihilation, only to succumb months later to the radioactive winds blowing in from the northern hemisphere – is what makes it so different. </span><i>On the beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is post-apocalyptic in every sense of the word, except for the fact that the society described (mainly Australia) is in no way descending into barbarism and chaos: rather they are accepting of their fate, to various degrees, and life goes on to the very end. T.S Eliot's famous quote, which also adorns the title page is apt: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper”. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It made me think of the ad-hoc difference made between “plot” and “setting”, as if these two things were somehow divisible: the plot was good but the setting boring, or the setting was compelling and interesting but the plot was bland. It seems to me that what makes post-apocalyptic novels stand out is that the setting very often IS the plot. As I wrote in my post on the chronotope, the post-apocalyptic world is one that is re-discovered, as in a travelogue, and no-one would demand a travelogue to have a plot beyond the descriptive: “I came from here and went there and saw this”. In </span><i>On the beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the setting is one of a still-living and breathing Australia waiting for the inevitable, together with the submerged scouting trips by the last operational US submarine </span><i>Scorpion</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> all along the United States coastline which allows for a glance into what will soon be true in all the world. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The plot then, naturally, is 'merely' the lives, thoughts and feelings of those still alive to witness this – in particular the burgeoning but never consummated love affair between Commander Dwight Towers and Moira Davidsson, Peter Holmes and his slightly delusional wife and their newborn baby daughter Jennifer, and the egghead John Osbourne with his Ferrari and newfound passion for racing. Each tells a slightly different and quite compelling version of how to cope with the whimpering end of the world. Perhaps the only thing marring this setting and plot is the hunch I have that radiation would not work in the way Shute describes it, notwithstanding any potential 'cobalt' bombs used – the lethal fallout would have rained down and disappeared long before reaching Australia, and even if not it would have been rendered mostly harmless in 15 months time. The real problems, it seems to me, would be the unimaginable social turmoil brought on by such a war, the collapse of industry and most probable the inevitable famine and unstoppable mass of refugees from the areas of conflict. Although Shute addresses the issue of petroleum no longer being available, in the book it is truly a minor problem: trains and electric-powered trams, together with bikes and horse-drawn carriages can apparently completely replace fuel driven transport with nary a hitch. Likewise, until the very, very end (as in a few days until the radiation arrives), there is no sign of normal day-to-day business changing at all: people still show up at work, buy and sell things, plan their gardens and otherwise go about their lives, despite (or perhaps because of) the inevitability of their demise. It's a testament to Shute's skill as a novelist that he manages to pull it off.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Because he does, he really does. </span><i>On the beach</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a quiet, contemplative, incredibly solemn view of the post-nuclear holocaust. We are left with the image of empty houses in the morning air, completely untouched, bathed in the deadly, invisible and incomprehensible new threat to all life on earth that had been unleashed just slightly more than a decade before Shute's book was published. A new kind of sublime for our age, the nuclear sublime.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Of course, the nuclear sublime is now receding, and what comes next...well...that'll be for my thesis to find out, maybe?</span></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-60874701680531613272010-09-06T19:59:00.005+03:002010-09-18T14:12:12.421+03:00Formulating a research question<blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">“Usually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them. (Futurology has never been a very respectable field of inquiry). But since we cannot afford under any circumstances to let a holocaust occur, we are forced in this one case to become the historians of the future – to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced and must never experience.” </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> (Schell 1982: 21)</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">When I explained to the professor in charge of the pro gradu seminar the topic of my thesis, he asked incredulously: “POST-apocalyptic fiction? Has the apocalypse already occurred?” Upon which I informed him it was, happily, science fiction I was going to write about.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">This does however pose a problem, as Jonathan Schell also observed in his seminal <i>The Fate of the Earth</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1982), a book concerning the ever-looming threat of nuclear war of his time. I am supposed to produce an academic, perhaps even scientific text concerning events which have not, and hopefully never will occur. Where to start? How to approach the topic, the books, the narrative? For this, the good people at our department have provided us with the tools to formulate a or several research questions, questions that our texts should attempt to answer. I am now going to try to spell out at least a few such questions, around which I can work.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The questions need to be very carefully formulated, obviously. First of all, they need to be </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>open ended</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">: if they can be answered “yes” or “no”, they are no good. Wh-questions is key. Secondly, they need to be </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>non-trivial</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">: of interest to a larger community (whether the academic one, or the world in general) as well as avoid presupposing the answer in itself. Third, it needs to be </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>empirically answerable from the available data</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. Obviously the key to all scientific discourse; in this case, obviously, the 'empirical data' must be the novels, rather than actual physical events (therefore, the question too must pertain to the novels, rather than an non-existent objective 'apocalypse' or 'post-apocalypse'). Finally, it must be </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>motivated by a hypothesis</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">: however open-ended the question is, and however much it avoids presuppositions, there is no point in formulating a question if one has no idea of what one is looking for.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A tall order, I'd say. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nonetheless, these questions (I do not think I can manage with just one) will form the basis of my thesis, and will therefore need to be carefully thought out – even if they are amended later. I am currently considering writing about Cormac McCarthy's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Road</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> (2006), Paul Auster's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">In the Country of Last Things</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> (1987) and potentially Margaret Atwood's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Oryx and Crake </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(2003). As support I have quite a number of other post-apocalyptic novels, including Nation's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Survivors</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, Matheson's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">I am Legend</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, Shute's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">On the beach</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, Mary Shelley's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Last Man</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and Christopher's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Death of Grass</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. I have also recently acquired Mike Ashley's (ed.) very recent </span></span><i>Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (2010), which contains a slew of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic short stories and novellas which, no doubt, can be of some use to me as well. But the initial trio, with a particular emphasis on McCarthy, are my main focus. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In the questions below I have used just McCarthy since, frankly, it's too much to write something like “Auster, Atwood and McCarthy in their respective works” all the time.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>How does Cormac McCarthy's </i><span style="font-style: normal;">The Road</span><i> fit into the context and historical progression, if any, of post-apocalyptic science fiction of the last four decades (1970-2010)?</i></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>What are the narrative/rhetorical/symbolic etc strategies that McCarthy utilizes in </i><span style="font-style: normal;">The Road </span><i>in order to create the fiction of a believable post-apocalyptic world? </i> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>How does post-apocalyptic fiction mesh with the idea of Lyotard's meta- or master narrative, in particular considering McCarthy's </i><span style="font-style: normal;">The Road, </span><i>Auster's </i><span style="font-style: normal;">In the Country of Last Things</span><i> and Atwood's </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Oryx and Crake</span><i>? </i> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">The third question would enter into the wonderful world of post-modern theory, although that might just be fun, really. Combined, all three questions would create a tripartite thesis, in which I place the novel(s) in a historical context (after defining what 'post-apocalyptic' means), perform a deep reading of its/their actual content, and then finally apply a piece of postmodern theory on them to see if they sink or swim (i.e., I enter, briefly, into the possibility of post-postmodernism, and whether or not these novels might apply).</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">This could work.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">Edit: Since writing this, I have put some more thought into it, and changed my last (and most important) question to be something like:</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;"> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>In what way(s), if any, are McCarthy's, Atwood's and Auster's post-apocalyptic tales pushing the boundaries of (post-apocalyptic) (science) fiction: have they entered into the realm of the post-postmodern?</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>I'm digging my own grave here, of course, with trying to define 'post-postmodern', but I'd still like to try!<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span></p><span style="font-style: italic;"></span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Lyotard, Jean-François. 1986. </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">. University of Manchester: Manchester. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Schell, Jonathan. 1982. <i>The Fate of the Earth</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Jonathan Cape: London.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-75667964720433298142010-08-16T13:19:00.007+03:002010-09-18T15:40:09.778+03:00The Art of the EvidentMargaret <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrhvEWRDaQ9naYCjrnaxQMa6lPYolS4dD3KD22LVxP6iNm79ahBb-R60nB0UMU1eCUgKXMgxMzFwuYouXxjiMDGY_jnSMJFtwkyXuEip4jO-FT4DYWTUfTmPzNlms6z6kq5hM8iPJZ8yTQ/s1600/atwood_oryx_uk.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 128px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrhvEWRDaQ9naYCjrnaxQMa6lPYolS4dD3KD22LVxP6iNm79ahBb-R60nB0UMU1eCUgKXMgxMzFwuYouXxjiMDGY_jnSMJFtwkyXuEip4jO-FT4DYWTUfTmPzNlms6z6kq5hM8iPJZ8yTQ/s200/atwood_oryx_uk.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5505951849316384930" border="0" /></a>Atwood's two recent forays into the world of post-apocalyptic/dystopian literature is, I think, a successful one. Although I would say that something in the environs of 80% of both novels concern the dystopian, near-future world destined to destroy itself, the apocalypse itself (and the post-apocalypse) is such an important event that everything else in the novels is informed by it (meaning I can discuss them as specifically 'post-apocalyptic' novels). <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The below is fantastically spoilerific, and the novels themselves quite good, so I really, really recommend not reading this unless you enjoy spoiling the story. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (2007) is the first novel in the series. It begins quite powerfully, describing all the necessary elements of Atwood's fantastical world in a single chapter: a man calling himself Snowman lives in a tree on the scraps of yesterday, his only companions odd, created humans ('Crakers') to whom he functions as a sort of prophet or demi-god. We are given an idea of the pre-apocalyptic world first through the brand/company names: BlyssPluss, ChickieNobs, AnooYoo, HelthWyzer, HappiCuppa, and so on. A hyper-consumerist-capitalist society, in other words. We also learn, very soon, that almost all natural species of our world have long gone extinct, replaced by lab-grown gene splices, including a particularly nasty species of giant pig, called a Pigoon – by virtue of being like a balloon in size. Visible from the beach, the towers of some city that was caught in the rising waters of global warming is now only home to sea birds. The environment is harsh, there are daily storms and the sun's rays are more harmful than not, suggesting a hole in the ozone layer. A hyper-consumerist-capitalist, morally bankrupt, god-complexed society. If it weren't for the abject misery of the Snowman, the reader is probably already happy that the old was swept away.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The story then turns to the Snowman's childhood – or, more precisely, Jimmy's childhood. It</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> is told in a precognitive manner, with constant references to the future, which gives it an almost breathless feeling. Now we are truly immersed into the dystopian, pre-apocalyptic world of Atwood's. Jimmy is a 'compound brat', a child living within the safety and comfort of corporate-run compounds, surrounded by walls and safeguarded by the sinister CorpSeCorps (yes, “Corpse Corps” - the art of the evident in action). Jimmy's father is involved in the creation of the Pigoons, as well as many other gene-spliced animals, including Jimmy's own rakunk (raccoon-skunk) he names Killer. His mother, on the other hand, seems to have once been a top scientist, but now spends most of her time at home smoking too much and generally not living up to the American Dream. She is a subversive, a person who has realized the utter corruptness of the system, and has decided to escape it (which she eventually does, an act that haunts Jimmy for almost the rest of his life). </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Contrasted with the compounds are the “pleeblands” - where regular people live, except that it is assumed the pleebs are filled with diseases, poverty and crime (and nothing in either book seems to suggest otherwise). The pleebs – once again, she couldn't be more obvious in her naming – are us, the rabid consumers who fund the whole corporate horror culture, swallow their slogans whole, and generally act exactly like 'they' want us to act. To drive the point h</span><span style="font-style: normal;">ome as cleanly as possible, Atwood has replaced the government, the army, the police; everything, with the CorpSeCorps (Corporate Security Corporation; alternatively Corps as in the Marine Corps). Ostensibly, they are there to protect the corporations as a private security contractor, but in reality they control everything in the same way Big Brother controlled everything in </span><i>1984</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: through violence and surveillance.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Using classic storytelling techniques, Atwood tells two tales at the same time (the post- and the pre-apocalyptic ones), with the same protagonist. As time goes on, the two timelines close in, and soon we are reading about how Jimmy survived the man-made apocalypse, rescued the 'Crakers', and ended up naked and alone in a tree by the beach. The two characters in the title, </span><i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, are there for a reason: Jimmy is, after all, just the eyes, ears and mouth of the reader-author, since he is mostly incapable of actually doing anything, instead merely observing and following the flow. Crake is his one and only friend, a boy-genius who grows up with an intense dislike for the human race as a whole and a desire to, in short, replace it with a wholly new one. These are the Crakers that he creates, with a long range of characteristics, habits and so on that would, in his eyes, eliminate the destructive tendencies in human nature (the most oft-cited example of these changes being seasonal mating, coupled with a 'group sex' kind of tradition in which there can be no obvious father, and therefore no obvious family units). Sex is also the way he goes about ending the human race, by creating a pill called “BlyssPluss”, a sort of super-viagra that is apparently irresistible to any who try it. He spreads it across the </span><span style="font-style: normal;">whole world, and they begin the pandemic which in a few short weeks wipes out almost everything and everyone. Oryx, on the other hand, is the one person who can make Jimmy act (through his love for her), which he does, at the very end when he kills Crake for killing her. It may be noted that it was never really explained why things went down the way they did in the end, but perhaps Crake had it planned all along: kill her, have Jimmy kill him, then have Jimmy lead the Crakers to safety, and then let Jimmy die (since the Snowman, although Abominable, is also quite a hopeless survivalist).</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgxkbUHuoGsugIeqP_hLScDfgSmEY8uZcd_vvv11KTZXyCY97WL9Ixz8EUOLGXuYNIIapmEsCMTk4aYIzOUrE4tOdXo_NVIb3WeF6OzWFeagvNDJK2AfWkhtfRxTxr6LTg0eyRgC6jYdGC/s1600/yearoftheflood.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 130px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgxkbUHuoGsugIeqP_hLScDfgSmEY8uZcd_vvv11KTZXyCY97WL9Ixz8EUOLGXuYNIIapmEsCMTk4aYIzOUrE4tOdXo_NVIb3WeF6OzWFeagvNDJK2AfWkhtfRxTxr6LTg0eyRgC6jYdGC/s200/yearoftheflood.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5505951926374214130" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The second novel, </span><i>The Year of the Flood</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, concern a different, but interconnected set of pe</span><span style="font-style: normal;">o</span><span style="font-style: normal;">ple in the same world – in the same city even – as Jimmy, Crake and Oryx. The two main characters, Toby and Ren, are both </span><span style="font-style: normal;">members of a sect called God's Gardeners, who were also mentioned in </span><i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The Gardeners believe in the imminent coming of the Waterless Flood, which will wipe away all but the faithful. Their belief is a fascinating mix of new age eco-green thinking and modern-day scientific Christianity, and their thoughts take almost complete control over the characters in the novel: each chapter, more or less, begins with “The Gardeners used to say...” or “Adam One used to say...” (Adam One being the leader of the sect). Although there are plenty of rather frightening aspects to the cult, as there must be, it does seem like Adam One, the founder and leader, really is as sincere as he appears to be. Once again, the novel mostly concerns itself with the childhood and adulthood of the characters involved, including B(Ren)da, the childhood sweetheart of Jimmy, but this time the past and the present (pre- and post-apocalypse) seem to come together much more strongly. The children they grew up with return as adults, the survival skills they learnt are put to use, their creeds, holy days and traditions are used as a basis of a new culture, and their old enemies still stalk the new wilderness. It may be noted that </span><i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> ended in a cliffhanger, a cliffhanger that is finally resolved in </span><i>The Year of the Flood</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, in quite a masterful manner. Atwood also goes deeper into the world she created, seeing as all her characters are now pleebrats instead of compound children. The pleebs, it seems, really are as dangerous and inhospitable as the people in the compounds believe, unless you find yourself inside a corporate stronghold of some kind, which both Toby and Ren do. I do not believe this novel can be read without first reading </span><i>Oryx and Crake</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (or reading it afterwards – either way, both are needed for the full picture) – there are plenty of events, characters and groupings that only really make sense after reading both novels. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I called this essay (post?) 'The Art of the Evident', because that is the strongest impression I got from reading Atwood's work. From the fanciful product names to the endless lists of never-explained-but-clearly-immoral jargon, Atwood's dystopia is a frightfully obvious vision of all that can and will go wrong in the world if we allow it to continue in its current downward spiral. Everything she does or writes just piles it on higher. Instead of real leather, they have 'fleather'. Instead of real hair, they have 'Mo'Hair', the result of a gene-spliced lamb of some kind. Instead of animal meat, they have soy-everything. Except, of course, the ones who do want 'animal protein', who will eat endangered species to get it – or why not the ones who are so desperate for an animal protein burger they'll buy a SecretBurger (the 'secret' meat being so ridiculously thinly veiled that it's not even a veil, really). The HappiCuppa franchise is really just Starbucks, except even nastier on the rainforests (supposedly). HelthWyzer first makes you sick with their pills, and then make tons of money off the treatment. ChickieNobs are chicken muscles grown on sticks – 'no brain, no pain', although that too might just be marketing rather than truth. There are religious groups like the “Known Fruits” or the “PetroBaptists” which consists of, well... Hell. A name like “Petrobaptist” is pretty much about as in-your-face as you can get! It is all very, very </span><i>1984</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, except of course it has been updated to </span><i>2012</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-standards instead. The final obvious thing is of course that it was all coming to an end -anyway-, even without Crake's specifically engineered plague: generally when we read a contemporary post-apocalypse, the end seems neither inevitable nor desirable (since we live in it), whereas in Atwood's novel, it is both.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I would not claim post-apocalyptic fiction is subtle most of the time. You take an inconceivably terrible event of some kind, which brings an end to the-world-as-we-know-it, and then you putter about the aftermath, bringing to fore this or that aspect of the world we left behind (often discussing in length the causes of the apocalypse and ways to prevent it). </span><i>Survivors</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as I explained in an earlier post, is particularly flagrant about this, but all post-apocalyptic works enjoy their own special brand of pathos. This is probably why we like reading them, after all! Atwood, however, takes this lack of subtlety to a new level. She creates a whole world, run by short-sighted idiots, and then she kills it through the self-same methods that allowed said idiots to run it. She does it through amazingly skilled prose, believable characters, fantasy-author level and beyond world building (this is meant as a compliment), and a great storyline. Make no mistake, they're eminently readable and enjoyable books.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But they are also pastiches. There is a certain point up to which you may write about evil corporations taking over the world before it becomes vaguely ludicrous (that point is crossed when they're called “Corpse Corps”). The horror/wonder of genetic modification can be discussed up to a certain extent, and then it just crosses over into “what the hell” land (Lamb-Lion splices for religious purposes is pretty much up there). The disparity between the rich and the poor, the well-educated and the “plebs” can be discussed at some length, but there has to be some leeway for regular, normal people as well (this point is crossed when every single feature of the 'pleeblands' is described as if from the eyes of someone who's watched 24/7 news coverage of gang warfare in the inner city and has extrapolated this to encompass everything that is not within a compound). Atwood's Earth is a living, breathing world, teetering on the edge of oblivion, and the fact she managed to pull that off is a testament to her skill as a writer. That notwithstanding, it ends up reading like a Kilgore Trout story delivered straight (or, as if Kilgore Trout was suddenly given the ability to write good prose, instead of just coming up with good ideas). Kilgore Trout, of course, being Kurt Vonnegut's famous science fiction writer, who in turn is modelled after Theodore Sturgeon.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I'm not so sure, though, that it is a pastiche of a post-apocalyptic novel. In fact, the post-apocalypse is every bit as serious and gritty as any other described. This pastiche/parody/over-the-topness is more a feature of the pre-apocalyptic world, her dystopian vision. Atwood's book asks us to consider the environment, consumerism, endangered species and genetic modification, and gives us a hypothetical and somewhat exaggerated extrapolation of what might happen if we continue following the trends she's perceived in the world. I wonder if this may be that can be termed a post-post modern book as well, and if it is in that case one of the first post-post modern works of post-apocalyptic fiction (I'd love to say post-post apocalyptic, but that might be reserved for book three ;). A fascinating, if very different, breed of books, nonetheless.</span></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-79295925251621229492010-08-10T11:42:00.010+03:002010-09-18T14:12:52.452+03:00A Slew of Post-Apocalyptic ClassicsRecently, I have caught up on my post-apocalyptic novel reading, and have finished a number of old classics as well as more recent works in the genre, and thought I might as well write down my most immediate impressions of them, and how they 'handle' the whole concept of the post-apocalyptic. What makes many of these different from the traditional 'nuclear apocalypse' is of course that only one of them (<i>A Canticle for Leibowitz</i><span style="font-style: normal;">)</span> in fact concerns itself with that particular Armageddon scenario. <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Without further ado, here are the novels (oh, and: huge spoiler alert, so don't read unless you want to):</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijULxcSODbpXIixksxYb96xWev_QdhaaOI5sqgOVmnJ65HAe_CI29X8baY9Z2jxP9JRKuvYKv_t_-Vh5jSSewvNXgemgSgI0WOpHE82QcaOcjUISrjfFob-dXEHT5js-TMufZT32PbtoTV/s1600/survivors-novel.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 122px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijULxcSODbpXIixksxYb96xWev_QdhaaOI5sqgOVmnJ65HAe_CI29X8baY9Z2jxP9JRKuvYKv_t_-Vh5jSSewvNXgemgSgI0WOpHE82QcaOcjUISrjfFob-dXEHT5js-TMufZT32PbtoTV/s200/survivors-novel.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5503701510793393202" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>Survivors</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by Terry Nation (1976)</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">This is the book that inspired the eponymous TV-series (according to the inside flap – Wikipedia says the novel was written based on the series; chicken and the egg anyone?), which I haven't seen but which is without a doubt very good. The novel itself, I must say, is not perhaps my idea of high literature, even when compared to some of the other science fiction novels in the genre (notably <i>The Death of Grass</i><span style="font-style: normal;">). In </span><i>Survivors</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, almost everyone is wiped out suddenly by wh</span><span style="font-style: normal;">at is essentially the Black Death, except the survivors simply label it “the 'Death'” - a flu-like disease which, after an initial six day incubation period very swiftly leads to the demise of 99.99% (or some such ridiculous number quoted by one of the doctors) of the infected. The few thousands remaining must survive on scavenging and, eventually, rediscover agriculture and toolmaking. A group mentality is born, where some simply band together to farm, whereas others band together to loot, or to rule over the farmers – essentially returning to a feudal type society where a strong-armed baron rules over h</span><span style="font-style: normal;">amlets or individual farmhouses. Finally, in a move reminiscent of </span><i>The Last Man</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Abby and her group decide that the British w</span><span style="font-style: normal;">inters simply cannot sustain life, and they decide to move south towards the 'cradle of civilization' where winters are milder and life less harsh.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What can be said of the book? It is, I believe, a case of classic science fiction extrapolation almost getting out of hand. Through a series of increasingly unlikely encounters, we the readers are introduced a varying bunch of factions formed directly after the apocalypse. Early on, for instance, Abby meets the founding members of the National Unity Force, which eventually turns into a classic robber baron-type organization, levying taxes, laying claim to loot, and even imposing conscription on those it arbitrarily considers to be within its jurisdiction. In another encounter, we are given a brief look at a man named Garland, the fourth son of an earl, and a textbook example of a 19</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;"> century adventurer, up until then a relic. Capable, tough, forever gallant and above all relishing every moment of the post-apocalypse, he's either a sociopath or just someone who realizes he's found his niche at last. Garland wishes to reclaim his family's mansion and rule those around like a benevolent dictator, and is participating in a sort of guerilla/Robin Hood campaign against the 'squatters' who have taken up residence there to do so. Although the only real action hero in the novel, Garland is killed off-stage from something as unheroic as a gangrenous wound. Various other encounters also give us a glimpse into Nation's perceived version of post-apocalyptic Britain, including a travelling band of scavenger-traders, operating out of Birmingham, which attempted to reinstate the gold standard, and a group of boatsmen near Dover that ferry the willing across the channel to France in return for food and petrol (although these might very well have been swindlers).</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">The philosophical side of the apocalypse is also explored, almost immediately and with about as much subtlety as the political/social landscape mapped above. The main philosophy, which is, Abby's view that the survivors cannot rely on scavenging and using up the materials of the old world, but must rather endeavour to rediscover old techniques, both for farming and for making tools and such, is contrasted with the short-term goals of looters and tough guys like the NUF, who are content with living off the remnants all around. The decision for the exodus to France, for instance, is prompted by Abby's realization that they simply haven't the time or manpower to do anything except plant the bare minimum for survival every year – which will eventually lead to their tools and equipment breaking down, without them ever having had the time to relearn how to make them. The unsubtle criticism of modern day man's ineptness is all around, including an early encounter with an older professor sporting a hearing aid with only two more batteries, who asked Abby if she knew how to make something as relatively simple as a candle or a glass decanter. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In short, </span><i>Survivors</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a survivalist fantasy first and foremost, concerned with the rediscovery of 'old' skills and a gradual return to a simpler, agrarian society, which is nonetheless frustrated by the ambitions of men with guns wishing to wage war (a word often thrown around, both regarding the NUF and Garland's skirmishes). Although it is bleak, it is never hopeless, especially as the core group around Abby shows itself to be uniformly made out of 'good guys' (with the possible exception of Tom Price). Nation only scratches the surface of the psychological and emotional side of things, preferring to stick solely to practical topics – perhaps a good way of going about it for a TV series, where the actors and the director can provide an emotional outlet, rather than the text itself. Unfortunately though, although there is plenty of drama and excitement, the novel reads more like a textbook on practical post-apocalyptic survival than as a story about humanity struggling to cope (socially, psychologically) with its new surroundings.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmcIdh5KSPHulZXZU57cVu1POsUkxpwHasvPsgL35jTHdO5A8AkSU5SqHI6aubHUdZNgcHZWSOyf23BNkOc09D-oWoblFOR6YlbB1RvAkkXx4zLPKiVA77nqOxpOFwvk2uulgcD0pi6ojn/s1600/the-death-of-grass.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 120px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmcIdh5KSPHulZXZU57cVu1POsUkxpwHasvPsgL35jTHdO5A8AkSU5SqHI6aubHUdZNgcHZWSOyf23BNkOc09D-oWoblFOR6YlbB1RvAkkXx4zLPKiVA77nqOxpOFwvk2uulgcD0pi6ojn/s200/the-death-of-grass.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5503701835744681282" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>The Death of Grass</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by John Christopher (1956)</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This is essentially a long short story, or a novella, or some other such appellation, seeing as it's not a very big work. I wanted to jot down my thoughts on it right after </span><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">Survivors</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">, since much like Nation's novel, this one too is set in Britain. Christopher's apocalypse comes in the form of a virus that specifically targets cereals – wheat, grain, rice. Much like in </span></span><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">Survivors</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">, the pre-apocalypse is a time of propa</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">ganda and attempts to avoid widespread panic, but the main characters (John Custance, Roger Buckley and gunshop-owner Pirrie with families) soon realize where things are going: very soon, food stores will run dry, and life will become a desperate struggle to find food. Unlike </span></span><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">Survivors</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">, however, there is no 'Death' on a massive scale: everyone is at least initially still alive. Since we can't have a post-apocalyptic survival tale featuring millions of people walking the roads, Christopher solves the 'problem of too many people' by having the government threaten to launch nuclear bombs on all major cities to curtail the population (which, I believe, does not ultimately happen). In a curious twist, it is in fact these hordes of soon-to-be ravenous people who are the main 'threat' in the novel, and essentially what Custance and his band are pre-emptively escaping. Of course, they're not the only who got that the idea, a</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">nd they soon meet all the other roving gangs in anarchy-stricken Britain. Their goal is an isolated and easily defensible plot of farmland, set between a rapidly coursing river and unassailable mountains, which is tended by John's brother. On the way they pick up some survivors, leave others behind, kill to defend themselves and kill to eat and above all begin to lose most layers of basic human decency in a cavalcade of “it was us or them” justifications.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">The story itself is a lot more contained than </span></span><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">Survivors</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">, in that it only details a single journey across the land, rather than years of agriculture, childbirth etc., which might be one reason for it being more compelli</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">ng as well. But the main reason, perhaps, why </span></span><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">The Death of Grass</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"> is so captivating lies in the fact that our heroes aren't the good guys. They are, in fact, looters. They are, in fact, a band of armed men who will do whatever it takes to survive – and not only that, they will also justify it. In the end, it is revealed that John's brother has (predictably) already found a likeminded group, who have already moved in and fortified the farm. The brother is willing to let John and his family enter, on the condition the rest of John's band is left outside. Rather than keeping with filial loyalty, John doublecrosses and kills his brother and the gang he lives with, and moves in in his stead. 'It was us or them'. Much of this 'evil' influence comes from Pirrie, who is in many ways a sociopath of the Garland type – a person who relishes in the newfound freedom of the post-apocalypse, except he does not hold on to any old chivalric ideals. Instead, he kills his hateful wife the first chance he gets, and then 'claims' a younger girl for his own at a later point. Yet his usefulness and skill with the rifle makes him indispensable. Despite allowing all of this to happen (or in some cases making it happen), the reader cannot help but root for Custance and his band. Perhaps this is due to the nature of the apocalypse: where else is the mentality of eat or be eaten clearer than when it comes to the bare necessity of procuring food? Any other type of apocalypse would, first of all, have killed off most of the populace, and second of all, left traditional food crops unscathed – in this version, all that remains are potatoes and too many mouths to feed.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">Philosophically, the apocalypse (much like </span></span><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">Survivors</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">) brings out old, nasty traditions. The women are relegated to second-tier citizens almostinstantly, and in some cases (as detailed above) literally become goods that can be claimed. The men, on the other hand, very quickly place themselves into a pecking order, with John Custance and Pirrie on top. In one memorable scene, they meet another group of armed men, and John suggests they team up for security. The leader of the other pack, however, wishes to stay top dog – and Pirrie shoots him down with no remorse. Afterwards, all the men of the other group pile in to shake hands with John, and almost immediately begin calling him “Mr. Custance” - only a step below 'Lord' or 'Sir'. This theme of leadership is one the two novels share, and the implication seems to be that as long as the chosen leader is strong, the group will thrive. Although John initially thinks of his role as leader as only temporary, by the time they gain their stronghold, he is sure that his children will become rulers after him, in an unprecedented return to old system of inheritance.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">The Death of Grass</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"> is not a survivalist book in the same way as Nations' novel, as it does not concern itself with the truly long term, or with any organizations or the like that might form. Rather it is an exploration of exactly how swiftly and ruthlessly 'civilized behaviour' evaporates in the face of the apocalypse, and of the elements that replace it: tribalism, nepotism, survival of the fittest. Refreshingly, our heroes aren't the 'good guys' who watch as others devolve, but rather just a group of survivors among others, looking out for their own. The text is minimalistic, and much is left to the reader's imagination, but in my view it works very well. It is terse and sometimes terrifying, and highly recommended.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3tjPc-jV0TxFBKI7xfSdQDfN4kKmwzYoODHgDzNlqYcsugH1hF60eKoYIBuB3x6alo0ixEEFHRoiD_OR2aSDkKVBiP5eVJ4WenCfSNqi0qERgt2XUNb27XRsRZy7Okd2bW9dsnRS8Mv5y/s1600/i-am-legend.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 124px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3tjPc-jV0TxFBKI7xfSdQDfN4kKmwzYoODHgDzNlqYcsugH1hF60eKoYIBuB3x6alo0ixEEFHRoiD_OR2aSDkKVBiP5eVJ4WenCfSNqi0qERgt2XUNb27XRsRZy7Okd2bW9dsnRS8Mv5y/s200/i-am-legend.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5503702063741198562" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>I Am Legend</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by Richard Matheson (1954)</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">For once a novel wherein I've watched a movie adaptation (I say 'a' since there are many) before reading the book (or short story). The movie in question was the recent Will Smith flick, and I can honestly say that although the movie was a beautiful rendition of post-apocalyptic, post-human New York, it didn't really have anything to do with Matheson's story.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In </span><i>I Am Legend</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the world has inexplicably been taken over by what appears to be vampires, the living dead. Blood-drinking, repelled by garlic, religious symbols and their own mirror image, and slain by stabbing a stake through their heart or by exposing them to sunlight, they at first truly appear to be the supernatural. Robert Neville believes himself to be the last survivor, and makes do as well as he can in his fortified house, which every night comes under siege by his old neighbours and friends. His life is carefully timetabled, and he fills the daylight hours with equal measures of vampire-killing and scavenging, or doing other tasks around the house, such as securing every opening with garlic. He is particularly tormented, for some reason, by the women, and is apparently of a rather horny disposition, and sleeps poorly at night with the aid of too much alcohol and ear plugs. At first, Neville appears rather self-destructive, breaking things in frustration, sometimes coming close to exposing himself or his home to the vampires. Over time, we are given glimpses into his past, the progress of the disease and the events leading up to his isolation. And Neville also gives himself a reason for existence: finding out what exactly the disease is all about.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">This is a very effective technique for a novel of this type, where we only have a single protagonist to worry about, and none other he can interact with (until the end stages of the book). His frustrations and his discoveries slowly make the picture clearer. He finds the bacillus that causes the change, and figures out how it functions. He realizes that some things (such as garlic and sunlight) are (sometimes lethal) allergic reactions, whereas others (such as mirrors and crosses) are merely strong psychosomatic ones. He alsofigures out where the bacillus came from: a result of radioactive mutation, spread through ubiquitous 'dust storms', which in turn are the result of some other, more mysterious calamity suffered earlier (perhaps a nuclear war – referred to as the “bombings” (p.45) that are causing said dust storms). In a way, then, the apocalypse of the vampire plague was caused by human hand as well, if nothing else due to the (apparently global) dust storms. He places a great emphasis on the fact that the whole 'vampire' myth is ultimately only a result of deranged minds, religious fervour and the yellow press.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">The one thing Neville does not figure, despite his research, is that some might not be as badly affected as others. The great end twist, which also explains thename of the novel, is that the 'living', non-crazed vampires have found a way to live with the disease, and eventually even thrive (and send a spy, Ruth, to find out more about him). Neville, as the sole surviving 'human', has become a sort of terrifying legend to these people – a day-time hunter who can kill any of them at any time, a terrible scourge upon them possessing mystical powers (i.e., he has become a 'vampire' to the vampires). He is, finally, executed for his 'crimes', albeit these crimes were committed without him being aware of it (although he does become a surprisingly dispassionate person by the end of the novel). </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;">In this novel, like in the two previous ones, the agent causing the apocalypse is not exactly a result of human action, although the connection between the 'bombings' and the mutated bacillus is a fascinating one. The only other thing connecting this to the other novels I've read is that Neville, too, survives on scavenging – except he never has a thought to agriculture, since he is only one man, and has more than enough food to get by. Instead of fear of looters or gangs, he simply fears the monsters gathering outside his door every night. He does worry about his belongings – his generator, for instance – but not that they are stolen, only broken. Although there are several aspects of survivalism in his day-to-day life, Neville is ultimately never in any real danger of the elements. Rather, it is the day-night cycle that controls his life, and which also forces him to stay at one place (although he, unlike his Will Smith movie-self, never seemed to make any particular effort to contact any other potential survivors).</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What then is the philosophy of this one? It is a character study, for sure – how does a single man survive in a world surrounded by sub-human monsters? There are the various aspirations and desires of the main protagonist, above all the will to explain the end of the world. That will appeased, Neville seems to be at some kind of peace; until Ruth shatters that. It seems though that even after Ruth's appearance, he still didn't have any desire to truly understand the new vampiric society that had appeared unbeknownst to him. As the title of the book proclaims, he has become a legend, relic of old times, left behind and, finally, exterminated. That, in addition to the bombing-induced dust storms, with a healthy dose of survivalism, seems to be what </span><i>I Am Legend</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> brings to the table of post-apocalyptic discourse.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdQH3A7dKEG6JwbzfDxQFQqEYEOjnvapcR5U0G_3z3opQ35OkGnC9T60A7T5TerZdF-m2yrWn6VZgQ9ecqCbyR74a-1mgNGP7K1yiQPSGeKodfFubUQChWcNPLUBBCok068j-hFKaNxAbZ/s1600/canticleforleibowitz.jpeg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 128px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdQH3A7dKEG6JwbzfDxQFQqEYEOjnvapcR5U0G_3z3opQ35OkGnC9T60A7T5TerZdF-m2yrWn6VZgQ9ecqCbyR74a-1mgNGP7K1yiQPSGeKodfFubUQChWcNPLUBBCok068j-hFKaNxAbZ/s200/canticleforleibowitz.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5503702406754408082" border="0" /></a></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>A Canticle for Leibowitz</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by Walter M. Miller Jr. (1959)</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> This one is perhaps the most difficult of the bunch to categorize and to discuss, since it does not only concern itself about the end of the world and the immediate aftermath, but rather details the post-'Flame Deluge' world's slow and steady rise from the primitive 'darkness' directly following the apocalypse all the way to a rediscovery of atomic energy and the eventual re-destruction of the world. This is all seen through a succession of abbots for the (catholic) monastery dedicated to St. Leibowitz – a saint whose purpose in life was to safeguard the secrets of the old world until the new would be capable of learning from them again.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> Although the subject matter here is serious enough, and the events throughout are likewise dire, Miller never lets go of his humorous side. From the description of Brother Francis and his fear of the great demons of Fallout, to the much later domne fighting with his electronic dictation machine and failing miserably, it's hard to read through the whole book without laughing. Considering post-apocalyptic novels tend to lean towards the sad and depressing, it was a bit of a change. That, and survivalism is never a question in this story. The monks of St. Leibowitz go through good times and bad, but as monks, they are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves in a manner all the white-collar British middle class men and women of previous books have been entirely unable to do. That, and the story only actually picks up centuries after the Flame Deluge, when most of the old world has been reduced to rubble and legend.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> My edition (Orbit, printed 2009) has a cover picture which encapsulates the central tenet of the Order of St. Leibowitz – both its positive and negative sides. The picture is of a shopping list – “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels – bring home for Emma” - except that the P has been beautifully illustrated in the manner of old religious manuscripts, and the rest of the text is written in fancy Gothic lettering. In other words, what the monks do is preserve <i>everything</i> from the old days, often by making endless and meticulous copies of it, without actually understanding the importance or relative unimportance of the texts. In one instance, a brother makes a gilded, illustrated, beautiful copy of a blueprint, retaining the lines and 'squiggles' of the original but adding all the trappings of a medieval manuscript to its margins and wherever he felt it was permissible. The brother, of course, had no idea what the blueprint was actually <i>of</i>, or even what it had been used for, or the fact that the original print as it was was a lot more readable and usable than his illustrated copy. The fact that, when later on a mission to bring both the copy and the original to New Rome, he is robbed, the robbers only take the copy rather than the original points out how skewed the concept of what is valuable and what is not has become.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> However, eventually the value of the monk's hoard of knowledge does become apparent, and their musty old libraries are finally visited by the learned men of the new renaissance. Despite some tensions, the purpose of the monks of St. Leibowitz is actually realized, and the narrative shifts to a present-day or perhaps near-future scenario (or far future, perhaps, for Miller). Suddenly, there is the threat of nuclear war again, and soon enough it does come to pass – the total annihilation of the human race once again. This time, however, the church has sent out a space ship to a colony in the stars, containing the whole Memorabilia of the Leibowitzian monks – and thus ensuring the continuation of their mission.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> The book goes through too many characters and events and epochs for me to succinctly state what the philosophy of the novel is, aside from what I've discussed above. Miller briefly describes the formation of new kingdoms and realms, of new wars and warlords and bids for power, of religious crises and a technological renaissance. One might ask if it's really a good idea to preserve past knowledge, especially if it's just going to lead to a repeat of the original mistakes. Then again, the monks also preserved the knowledge of the Flame Deluge and warned against that, yet no-one took heed. In other words, a fairly pessimistic outlook. The most powerful image the book leaves is that of a brotherhood of monks keeping the old knowledge alive forever and ever, whether or not they know what it once was for. It is, ultimately, impossible not to sympathize with their task, and hope that some day the circle can be broken.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> The circle, incidentally, is something that can no longer exist in modern post-apocalyptic literature, at least not if the writer is astute enough – something I will comment on in Margaret Atwood's <i>Oryx and Crake</i>. The reason is simple: fossil fuels. But that is not something one can assume Miller would have thought of back in 1959. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> I will continue with <i>Oryx and Crake</i> by Margaret Atwood in a separate post, and possibly also discuss <i>In The Country of Last Things</i> by Paul Auster and finally Cormac McCarthy's <i>The Road</i>, since I have a feeling these might be the central novels around which I will concentrate my thesis.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;"> </p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-60729212010616471792010-04-27T16:55:00.006+03:002010-09-18T14:13:22.527+03:00Towards a Post-Apocalyptic Chronotope – An introduction<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLt6KGIPx09rYdFfEC7SScATW9CAVpafGDhWJQwOFe6aKGPJq-53qmldd6CFqxQQv8owL4L8-5pMSbOvDbm5hCsfZRnzVyG4qwPYuT7IVkRKWtkJpA_mZwpPed2-YHuinoALMck1kIDVjd/s1600/bakhtin.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 284px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLt6KGIPx09rYdFfEC7SScATW9CAVpafGDhWJQwOFe6aKGPJq-53qmldd6CFqxQQv8owL4L8-5pMSbOvDbm5hCsfZRnzVyG4qwPYuT7IVkRKWtkJpA_mZwpPed2-YHuinoALMck1kIDVjd/s320/bakhtin.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5464816091974232722" border="0" /></a><br />Mikhail Bakhtin, the famous Russian formalist, was the one who introduced the concept of the chronotope, or “time-space”, in an essay titled “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel – Notes towards a historical poetics” (1975):<p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">"In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> (Bakhtin 1981: 84)</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">Bakhtin goes on to say that the chronotope in essence “defines genre and generic distinctions” (<i>Ibid</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: 85); he takes as an example three quintessential types of ancient Greek romance novels. The basic structure of star-struck lovers, shipwrecks, adventures in far-away places, kidnappings, war, attacks by pirates etc. still saturate our big screens and trashy adventure novels today, in a tradition set down over a thousand years ago. To describe the chronotope of the Greek romances, Bakhtin introduces the concept of </span><i>adventure-time</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Adventure-time is the duration of all the adventures between the start and the (happy) end of the novel, which nonetheless does not take any </span><i>biographical</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> time. That is to say, there is no change in the personality or affections or anything else of the characters involved, the adventure (no matter how prolonged) has taken no actual time, such time as one might add in a biography. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">"In this kind of time, nothing changes; the world remains as it was, the biographical life of the heroes does not change, their feelings do not change, people do not even age. This empty time leaves no traces anywhere, no indications of its passing. This, we repeat, is an extratemporal hiatus that appears between two moments of a real time sequence, in this case one that is biographical."</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Bakhtin 1981: 91)</span></p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This, however, is only the </span><i>chronos</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The </span><i>topos</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is not unaffected by this strange dilution of time-space. Bakhtin notes that there are no identifiable traces of the era “no matter where one goes in the world of the Greek romance, with all its countries and cities, its buildings and works of art” (</span><i>Ibid</i><span style="font-style: normal;">). The space in the Greek romances is purely abstract – and vast. “In order for the adventure to develop it needs space, and plenty of it” (Bakhtin 1981: 99). If there is an attack by pirates on the sea, resulting in a shipwreck and a kidnapping, there are various spatial considerations that need to be taken into account (the sea, the boats, where the kidnappers take their victims, where the shipwrecked end up), but in a real, geographical sense, none of these need exist – although the novel might mention countries or seas, they are entirely interchangeable. Thus follows, that the Greek romances take place in “an </span><i>alien world</i><span style="font-style: normal;">” (</span><i>Ibid</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: 101), to which the heroes have no ties or relationship and which is filled solely with random chance, that governs every event in their adventures. This is not, however, an alien world in the sense of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars adventures (which were strongly laced with exoticism, like much of the sci-fi of that era) – there is no opposition here between known and unknown, native and non-native. For that reason alone it has been hard, Bakhtin points out, for scholars to date the romances any more closely than five or so centuries!</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> So what does all of this signify for the post-apocalypse? The example above was of a larger whole, a super-chronotope if you wish. Bakthin also writes of 'smaller' chronotopes, and chronotopes attached to certain motifs. Within the super-chronotope there can occur smaller chronotopes, and chronotopic thought can also be used to consider for instance how individuals are portrayed. The character of the Greek romance chronotope is, for instance, someone who is forced (by chance, fate) to move spatially, yet also one who endures it all and emerges unscathed (as if no time had passed whatsoever) (</span><i>Ibid</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: 105). I believe that trying to find a post-apocalyptic (super-)chronotope, and identifying the various chronotopic motifs within that chronotope, might be a considerably more fruitful path than merely trying to define a post-apocalyptic </span><i>genre</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, since that to me seems as pointless as trying to define science-fiction as one heterogeneous 'genre'. Let us consider, in brief and quite abstractly, what the spatial and temporal features of the post-apocalypse are:</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> First, there are two 'times' in the post-apocalypse: now and then. 'Then' is the pre-apocalypse, 'now' is the post-apocalypse. The point of the apocalypse is sometimes instantaneous (the bombs fall, almost everyone dies) and sometimes drawn out (the plague slowly destroys society), but there is always a defining moment when things are no longer as they were before, and there is no return to that previous time, no matter how subtle this change may be (in Shelley, for instance, this moment is the siege of Constantinople). However, whereas the post-apocalyptic timeline might very well be biographical (to borrow Bakhtin's term), the pre-apocalyptic time tends to be an amorphous whole, a 'then' of indistinct memory and nostalgia: this 'then' usually corresponds to the reader's, and author's, 'now', or some other period of historical time.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Second, the apocalypse is unlimited spatially, it expands in all directions – the whole world is affected and changed by it. Generally, Armageddon tends to be global. However, in some cases it needn't be – consider for instance </span><i>28 Days Later</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, in which only the United Kingdom is affected. Nonetheless it fulfils the requirements of the post-apocalyptic chronotope, since it is the whole world of the characters and that of the viewers that has been affected. Had half the movie been dedicated to relief efforts outside the UK, the evacuation of refugees and so on, it would have been a disaster movie with zombies, not a post-apocalyptic vision of an empty England. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> In any which case, the defining aspect of the post-apocalyptic chronotope is the rupture in the generally accepted timeline, which has left (spatially and temporally) both the reader and the author in the 'then', whereas the characters and the novel have been transported into the 'now'. The post-apocalyptic novel, in short, is a sort of travelogue of the post-apocalyptic novel's 'here and now'. In the post-apocalyptic novel, there are constant references and comparisons between the post- and the pre-apocalyptic world, but unlike the chronotope of the travelogue (which also makes such comparisons, between the native land of the author and the foreign lands of travel), the post-apocalyptic narrator cannot return, either temporally or spatially, to his or her 'native land'.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> This very superficial definition, of course, is merely a beginning, and needs to be much narrowed down. Nonetheless, the basic premise of a spatial and temporal point of no return, of the division into pre- and post-, can form the basis of a more thorough post-apocalyptic chronotope. The addition, and identification, of typical post-apocalyptic motifs and their chronotopic constitution will certainly be of further help.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Bakhtin, M.M. 1981. </span><i>The Dialogic Imagination</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Austin: University of Texas Press.</span></p> <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></p>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-72769816665633122922010-04-20T19:44:00.005+03:002010-09-18T14:13:38.007+03:00The Ecological Post-Apocalypse - The World Without Us<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3SPKajVfRrS4cJiMUG9FbnCHJ7CMAekcyml0HsL_y0z8AkKIaJg04VCpfLCcQAYFZ8XhCOvjP_4nXCiCqsp80La8TGuxV3eaXoni1aS35Pim2_apENkmhdsU0m_37aNgbu-H-q5eW8hMG/s1600/varosia.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3SPKajVfRrS4cJiMUG9FbnCHJ7CMAekcyml0HsL_y0z8AkKIaJg04VCpfLCcQAYFZ8XhCOvjP_4nXCiCqsp80La8TGuxV3eaXoni1aS35Pim2_apENkmhdsU0m_37aNgbu-H-q5eW8hMG/s320/varosia.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5462264208330352050" border="0" /></a><br /><br />A little while ago I read Alan Weisman's wonderful non-fiction book<span style="font-style: italic;"> The World Without Us</span>, and thought it'd be interesting to consider it in comparison to its genre. Make no mistake - despite it being a work of popular science rather than prose fiction, it's still essentially post-apocalyptic fiction, even if it skirts around the subject a little. What it gives us is a compelling and well fleshed-out vision of an alternative future that is, nonetheless, based on an entirely fictional and highly unlikely premise. Weisman, in his book, asks the simple question: "What if we all disappeared tomorrow?". Thus, rather than creating a complicated fictional world around typical tropes such as nuclear annihilation, a long-dragged out eco-catastrophe or an asteroid colliding with earth, he can simply observe the world without us. In post-apocalyptic fiction in general, I think this has been a surprisingly uncommon question to ask. Instead of a storyline following a ragged band of human survivors, his storyline follows the ragged remnants of the biodiversity we've left behind, and its struggle to reassert its right to the planet. Like most post-apocalyptic fiction, it's not really about the survivors either, but about the reasons for the apocalypse itself - the challenges the world has to overcome with us gone are all things happening right now. What's fun about Weisman is that the real ecological apocalypse is what will happen UNLESS the premise of his book is fulfilled, which is a nice twist.<br /><br />It has to be admitted that the book is written like a screenplay for TV; filled with flowering prose it is not. The way he introduces the various characters and events reads like directions to the cameraman (or like Tom Clancy), and much of the text itself could be converted directly to a documentary voiceover. This is perhaps not unsurprising considering Weisman's background as a journalist, and in the context of this book it functions marvellously: the purpose of screenplay prose is, after all, to put images as clearly and succinctly into our heads as possible, and I think <span style="font-style: italic;">The World Without Us</span> manages that just perfectly.<br /><br />As a resource for anyone wishing to write post-apocalyptic fiction, this book is invaluable. Ever wonder what would happen to skyscrapers, left alone for long enough? At what point all of our largest constructions, from bridges to dams, would begin to crumble? How soon the forests would repopulate the abandoned fields, how the animals would retake their old territories, what would happen to our useless domesticated pets (some of which, happily, aren't quite as useless. Yay, cats!), and how plants imported by humans might affect the end result. Did you, when you wrote your post-apocalyptic world, ever think of what would happen to New York once the pumps stopped working? Or what would happen to the over 400 nuclear power plants when their coolant water finally dried away and the fuel rods were exposed to the air?<br /><br />Although he theorizes much (with solid, scientific backing, mind), he also visits many locations which are in essence miniature versions of his vision, such as Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ and an absolutely fascinating place in Cyprus called Varosha, which was a beach resort that was abandoned when the country was split in twain in the 1970s, and since then jealously guarded by the Turkish military.<br /><br />His thoughts on how quickly everything we leave behind would disappear is, to say the least, sobering, as is the descriptions of civilizations that have already disappeared, such as the Mayans. Throughout, his message is clear: ecologically, the human post-apocalypse would indubitably be Eden, and the only things we would leave behind would be our bronze statues and a couple of things we carved into solid bedrock (oh, and a lot of nuclear waste and plastic).<br /><br />The post-apocalypse is usually a dreary thing, and that is for a reason I believe. We tend to anthropomorphise the world, and if things are going bad for us (people) then things ought to be going bad for everything else as well. I believe this is sometimes referred to as 'pathetic fallacy'. This book essentially proves the opposite. The visions of post-nuclear deserts or ash-ridden skies or eternal winter or whatever scenario the post-apocalyptic imagination can conjure up are all, in the long run, brief seconds in the ever-crunching wheel of life which will, soon enough, retake the earth, with or without us. I don't know about you, but I at least feel a little of the existential blight of the coming end-of-the-world lessen when I think of just how much better off the world will be without us.<br /><br />On a purely philosophical level, however, I still think it's pretty neat to be able to think, feel, observe and share stuff that happens in this world, so I'm not saying we humans are -completely- defunct in the universal order of things. Just that we really should stop breeding and consuming. Now excuse me while I go back to chewing on chocolate grown on another continent while surfing the Internet on a computer containing bucketloads of petroleum in my nicely centrally heated apartment.<br /><br />(Picture of Varosia/Varosha taken from here, with licence :<br /><div cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bass_nroll/3895941267/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bass_nroll/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/bass_nroll/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</a> )<br /></div>L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-12126812913216572252010-04-20T19:30:00.007+03:002010-09-18T14:13:57.718+03:00The Apocalyptic Sublime - Reading Shelley's The Last Man<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY9nul78Cb4v5dg6hVzja_kOco5CxQQkTdIRfqhyeLEB7sIy75L1wQWjLtRuzERTqwy8q0qOq5o5JouuF4Z29HZ2hp4mxmy1EmdJ9JIwjS3LdvuTaqZZcwK8TGHTYGy6ffuJI9ks0Wnbsv/s1600/midmart.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 203px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY9nul78Cb4v5dg6hVzja_kOco5CxQQkTdIRfqhyeLEB7sIy75L1wQWjLtRuzERTqwy8q0qOq5o5JouuF4Z29HZ2hp4mxmy1EmdJ9JIwjS3LdvuTaqZZcwK8TGHTYGy6ffuJI9ks0Wnbsv/s320/midmart.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5462264890873059074" border="0" /></a><br />I have variously bumped into the concept of the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic sublime in the stories I have experienced (e.g. viewed or heard) or read. I have to admit I was not entirely clear on what exactly 'the sublime' meant until I had a chance to read about it properly, but once I did I started seeing it in everything. The first mention of the sublime comes from Longinus, but a more recent and pertinent definition comes from Burke:<br /><br /><blockquote>"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." (Burke 1880: 74)</blockquote><br /><br />He goes on to describe various images that are sublime, such as towering heights, craggy cliffs, the vast ocean, endless chasms. You get the idea. Kant has a slightly different definition, one which adds the concept of subjectivity to the sublime (i.e. it's not the properties inherent in the external objects that makes something sublime, but the subjective experience of the viewer). In either case, the sublime is "a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful." (Kant 1790: 91).<br /><br />The sublime has a very special, and powerful, place in apocalyptic literature (and film, and video games etc etc). I have recently read a book by Mary Shelley, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Last Man</span> (1826), which details how humanity comes to an end due to a relentless plague epidemic. Beware, spoilers below, although the title of the book itself should be a clue.<br /><br />In short, this was an awesome read. It's a little fragmented, and in principle consists of three books: the first book details the happy life of the main protagonist, Lionel Verney, and his circle of friends and his family. The second book details a war in Greece, in which one of the main characters, Raymond (a byronic hero) is killed, and whispers of The Plague begin. And finally, in the third part, we enter into the real meat of the story: the detailed description of the fall of man.<br /><br />This part is quite remarkable, I think, for its ultimately realistic portrayal of the foibles and mad hopes of humankind. The English resolve to head south, away from the cruel winters of their northern climate, and gather what survivors they can. But as they make their way through France, there is in-fighting, and factions form, including a fanatic, power-hungry would-be prophet who attempts to create his own cult in which he may one day be venerated as a deity. On the way they find other survivors; an estranged nobleman riding like a Black Spectre on the road, a little girl found alone in a grand palace, all dressed up with finery playing by herself. Or how about the Swiss girl who plays the organ for her blind parent who is not aware that the end of the world has already occured. Shelley does not mince words:<br /><br /><blockquote>"Weed-grown fields, desolate towns, the wild approach of riderless horses had now become habitual to my eyes; nay, sights far worse, of the unburied, and human forms which were strewed on the road side, and on the steps of once frequented habitations" (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Last Man</span>: 319)</blockquote><br /><br />The most amazing part of the book is the contrast. Shelley unabashedly abuses the typical romantic tropes (well, she can't really be blamed for that, can she?) such as torrential rains and thunderstorms breaking out just as it is the most appropriate, or the fact that Lionel constantly takes refuge in long, melancholy walks through the woods whenever he feels a little under the weather, and that everyone appreciates the beauty of nature and there is nary a single mention of anything that would suggest the industrial revolution.<br /><br />The first part of the story revolves around royalty; kings and queens and princesses and Lord Protectors. But as the plague sets in, the contrast becomes absolutely palatable. When everyone around him dies little by little, when nature retakes what was once the domain of humans, when all things from art to literature to architecture and history becomes worth less than a single human being. When vain things such as title, rank and heraldry become as nothing, and all men are equal. He sits alone in Rome, the 'capital of the world', and imagines the peoples who have lived there, when he realizes:<br /><br /><blockquote>"The generations I had conjured up to my fancy, contrasted more strongly with the end of all - the single point in which, as a pyramid, the mighty fabric of society had ended, while I, on the giddy height, saw vacant space around me" (TLM: 369)</blockquote><br /><br />In the end, Lionel (with his trusty dog - take that, Mad Max/A Boy And His Dog) ends up a "lone wanderer" (and that's for you, Fallout!), forever to search the earth for another survivor, another soul to alleviate his loneliness. Pathos, but GOOD pathos!<br /><br />This, I contend, is the right of every post-apocalyptic novel: the pathos of extreme loneliness, the SUBLIME description of the end. Yes, this novel most probably emerged as a result of Shelley's loneliness upon the death of her three children AND her husband, and the estrangement caused by her husband's nasty father and so on, and yes it was probably inspired by contemporary accounts of the plague in various parts of the world, including the Americas (although it was something else there, yellow fever maybe?) - but that just makes it all the more powerful.<br /><br />I would like, in a much more academic essay, to fruitfully compare this novel to McCarthy's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Road </span>- in particular the idea of 'no redemption' which suffuses McCarthy's novel and which, I think, is echoed in Shelley, as well as the powerful imagery of 'the road' and the discoveries made during travels (this is of course a typical trait of post-apocalyptic novels and films, see for instance John Christopher's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Death of Grass</span>, or why not trailers for the new Denzel Washington-starring movie "The Book of Eli"). Ah, ah, such wonderfulness.<br /><br />Ahem. Absolutely wonderful book anyway!<br /><br />Here's where I took the picture on top, titled <span style="font-style: italic;">The Last Man</span>, by John Martin:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/jmartin.htm">[link]</a><br /><br />And also, the whole book in electronic format (can also be found on Project Guthenberg):<br /><br /><a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/contents.htm">[link]</a><a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/contents.htm"><br /></a><br />Ta-ta for now!<br /><br />Sources:<br /><br />Burke, Edmund. 1880. <span style="font-style: italic;">Burke's Works Vol.1</span>. London: George Bell & Sons.<br /><br />Kant, Immanuel. 1952 [1790]. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Critique of Judgement</span>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br /><br />Shelley, Mary. 2004 [1826]. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Last Man</span>. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited.L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-815193600098729819.post-5656012252303615232010-04-20T19:00:00.001+03:002010-04-20T19:00:50.891+03:00TestTest the test <span style="font-weight: bold;">test</span>.L Verneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16566252690933692797noreply@blogger.com0