Post-Apocalyptic, Post-Postmodern, Post-Traumatic! And Oryx and Crake

It was honestly a little difficult for me to read Katherine Snyder’s 2011 article (full reference below) on Oryx and Crake. 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:

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:

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.                                                                                                                                                     

(Snyder 2011: 473)

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.

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 The Last Man 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.’

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 Oryx and Crake. It was also at this point when I realized exactly how powerful the idea of post-postmodern theory may be. Consider:

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.

(Snyder 2011: 479)

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” (Ibid). 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:

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.                                                                                                                                                                            (Snyder 2011: 479)

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.

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.

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!):

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.                                                                                                                                                                             (Snyder 2011: 486)

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.

Elmer, Jonathan. 2009. “'Vaulted Over by the Present': Melancholy and Sovereignty in Mary Shelley's The Last Man.” In Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Summer2009, Vol. 42 Issue 2: 355-359.

Snyder, Katherine V. 2011. ” “Time to go: The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake”. In Studies in the Novel; Winter2011, Vol. 43 Issue 4: 470-489.

Realism in Post-apocalyptic fiction – a general introduction

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.

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, the willing suspense of disbelief 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 avant-garde 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 believe 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.

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 The Rise of the Novel (1987 [1957]). Watt (1987: 291) defines formal realism as follows:

[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.

This is firmly rooted in the empirical, rational, Enlightenment tradition of the early 19^th 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 On The Beach, 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.

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 story time and narrative time. Story time refers to the whole chain of events from start to finish. As an example, let us take On The Beach: 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.

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 author 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 On the Beach, like many other PA novels, the first and most pressing questions are without fail: what happened and why. 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 Survivors). In some, like On the Beach, 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 must stop, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction must be abandoned, and a more peaceful form of dialogue must be adopted in order to prevent On The Beach from happening.

Morris, Pam. 2003. Realism. London: Routledge.

Watt, Ian. 1987 [1957]. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: The Hogarth Press.

Towards a Post-Apocalyptic Chronotope – An introduction

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):

"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."

(Bakhtin 1981: 84)

Bakhtin goes on to say that the chronotope in essence “defines genre and generic distinctions” (Ibid: 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 adventure-time. 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 biographical 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.

"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."

(Bakhtin 1981: 91)

This, however, is only the chronos. The topos 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” (Ibid). 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 alien world” (Ibid: 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!

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) (Ibid: 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 genre, 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:

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.

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 28 Days Later, 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.

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'.

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.

Bakhtin, M.M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.

The Apocalyptic Sublime - Reading Shelley's The Last Man

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:

"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)

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).

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, The Last Man (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.

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.

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:

"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" (The Last Man: 319)

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.

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:

"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)

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!

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.

I would like, in a much more academic essay, to fruitfully compare this novel to McCarthy's The Road - 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 The Death of Grass, or why not trailers for the new Denzel Washington-starring movie "The Book of Eli"). Ah, ah, such wonderfulness.

Ahem. Absolutely wonderful book anyway!

Here's where I took the picture on top, titled The Last Man, by John Martin:

[link]

And also, the whole book in electronic format (can also be found on Project Guthenberg):

[link]

Ta-ta for now!

Sources:

Burke, Edmund. 1880. Burke's Works Vol.1. London: George Bell & Sons.

Kant, Immanuel. 1952 [1790]. The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shelley, Mary. 2004 [1826]. The Last Man. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited.