Category: working papers (page 2 of 2)

The first answer to the question of whether post-apocalyptic fiction is comedy or tragedy seems all too obvious. The sheer number of horrific events, losses, causalities, and trials faced by the characters after the apocalyptic event insists that we are dealing with a tragic form here. The last dying gasps of our world are meted out by the survivors, each one a sign that things in the present, our present, went terribly, terribly wrong. Perhaps a more suitable way to grasp the question is to return to the birth of the modern form of the comedy, (i.e. the romantic comedy), which happens to arrive on the scene at a crucial moment in the pre-history of post-apocalyptic fiction as well.

The comparison I am asking us to consider is, for all intents and purposes, actually between Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). This is where the question of comedy clarifies its place in my inquiry. But first a word on Shelley’s science fiction novel:  Frankenstein enacts one version of tragedy, when, in the face of a possible resolution to the conflict of the narrative the monster asks Frankenstein to fashion him a wife, Frankenstein refuses, shattering any hope that a resolution can be met. The novel is obviously much more complex than this, but it illustrates the dynamic of the tragic closure, which is made unbearable by the possibility of a complete resolution, if only for an instant, seeming to be so close at hand and then being dashed away.

Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, incorporates many minor tragedies time and again into its narrative form, bringing Elizabeth and Darcy close together and then pulling them apart. But in Austin’s case the bittersweet sting of a nearly fulfilled love is finally overwhelmed by understanding, union, and marriage. Phillip Wegner has commented that the insidious nature of Austin’s text is that, beneath the veneer of love and the hustle and bustle of posturing and relationships, is the work of the bourgeois Cultural Revolution, which at this point in history, was engaged in an occluded struggle to make marriage a natural conclusion and the only direction in which one ought to move.

My argument, then, about post-apocalyptic fiction hinges on its own mode of closure. What is often the case at the end of these novels, rather than marriage or the failed reconciliation of opposing forces, is the overwhelming prescience of the family or an insistence on its importance. To name a few examples Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009), Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), and so on. To quote the ending of DeNiro’s novel: “I understand love a little bit more—and what it can cost. But it’s a cost I’m more willing to pay. Mother taught me that. Ciaran taught me that. My living breathing family is still teaching me that. I don’t pretend to be wise anymore, and I don’t try to stop being afraid when I’m afraid, or angry when I’m angry. It sounds so easy but it’s the hardest things in the world” (306). So, in terms of closure, it is safe to say post-apocalyptic fiction is comedic. 

What’s at stake in all of this, besides some musings on literary history and generic form? The stakes for me are simply this, the work of Austin marks a moment when the operations of the novel, in hindsight, did the work of solidifying a class and outlining that class’s role in history. The marriage at the end of Austin’s novels isn’t the deepest moment of cultural warfare, however, I would argue that moment comes after the novel’s close and that its name is the reproduction of daily life under capital. Isn’t then the form of closure we find in much contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction engaged in the same type of warfare? Though we can argue about the role of literature and the death of the novel (about which see more here), I think it’s clear that post-apocalyptic fiction is doing a similar kind of work to Austin’s novels in that it tries to maintain the status quo and is deeply disinterested in the movement of history as such, which isn’t the same as saying it cannot tell us anything about history.

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.[1]

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) describes a journey from one place to another, a passage through an inhospitable landscape in elegant sparseness, stripped down dialogue, and with luminous descriptions of the devastated countryside. The Road is a story about a man and a boy who travel down the presumably post-nuclear, U.S. East coast in search of warmer climes. McCarthy consistently draws attention to the precarious nature of their survival. In the novel, the man and the boy have been left behind by the boy’s mother who opted to take her own life rather than face the ravages of cannibal gangs or the devastation of life in this unrecognizable United States. 

The novel presents us with an impasse—the totality within the narrative provides empirical examples of only a few logical ways to live collectively: struggling as the man and the boy do, surviving in a cannibalistic gang (a mode the novel cautions that should be strictly avoided), or living in the seemingly benevolent family group that emerges at the end of the novel. The Road seems to have already moved beyond the problem of the family, but still returns to it as a fundamental question. What remains at stake is the way The Road simultaneously and on a different register engages historical structures and processes that have marked it both visibly and invisibly.

From the very start, The Roadinsists on the characters’ inability to locate themselves–socially, geographically, politically or even in a more physical sense. On the opening page, vision is figured as a rapidly dwindling facility: “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (3). The destination of the travels remains unclear and clouded not only for the reader, but for the man and the boy themselves. 

The novel comes closest to making its inner logic visible when the boy describes a toy he had in a dream: “this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary” (36). After his father reassures him, the boy concedes one final detail—the key on the penguin was not turning. No one was responsible for winding the penguin, yet it moved of its own accord. Here, the boy expects windup toys to operate in accordance with a particular logic—the key should move along with the toy and require someone, a boy for instance, to wind it before the mechanism could release this stored up kinetic energy. What the boy finds “really scary” is as much the ostensibly magical dance of the penguin as the logical breakdown of his own relation to the external world, a world that the novel registers as entirely unplottable. The dream not only records the demise of the expected order, but also registers an unintentional truth: these unpredictable objects mark the novel’s inability to posit a future where the boy could be in control at all. This is a fact only reinforced by the novel’s close where, at the very moment the boy is alone, he is discovered by a friendly group and any chance he has of developing a new mode of survival or belonging in the world is severed.[2]

The dream is frightening for the boy not because it is reminiscent of the end, but because the toy continues to move without his input: the penguin’s mobility is a signature of the invisible dynamic guiding the frighteningly autonomous-seeming object, the motivating force behind the apparently free figure, what Louis Althusser called the absent cause, which has been understood both as the logic of History, along the lines of Althusser and Fredric Jameson, or as that of capital itself, following Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, and outlines the invisible core of the novel.[3] 

The novel imagines this absence in terms of social responsibility or collective support. What keeps the two nameless protagonists from interacting with others is the fear of death, rather than the preference of solitude or something like racial or social prejudice. The novel posits the problematic on a political register as the loss of the social contract. The boy’s fear of the dancing penguin, however, underscores the breakdown of a far larger set of relations, namely capitalist social relations as such. His horror gestures to a contradiction behind the sign of the magically dancing object, behind the veil of the political, namely an economic contradiction of production and scarcity. The novel attempts to resolve an economic problem on the level of political social organization – the relation of strangers within a national context and the relation of individuals within a familial one.[4]

What generates the nation and the family, however, is the economic necessity of production in terms of national competition and state organization, and also the regulation and social reproduction of the working class family and the reserve army of the proletariat, things that, in reality, have long been irrelevant as residual forms of the ideology of an earlier organization of production, ones which have since been sublated and exported beyond U.S. borders in the global or better yet transnational configuration of capital. At its conclusion the novel puts these contradictions on the table, but does not attempt to sort through them: put another way, The Road ends with an insistence on the family as the dominant social form, an aporia it fails to read as a contradiction, or at the least a ‘dead end’ that cannot be resolved within the novel form which raised it in the first place. My argument about post-apocalyptic fiction cannot stop here, however; and, perhaps, tying a number of these failures together under the category of genre may serve to paint a better picture of the particular failure of the novel apparatus in The Road to offer resolutions to the problems it emplots.

Notes
Althusser, Louis and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: Verso, 2009.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. 
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage P, 2006.

Heller’s The Dog Stars repeatedly demonstrates its awareness of and takeness with post-apocalyptic fiction and the U.S. post-apocalyptic novel by massaging and tweaking previous post-apocalyptic accounts through its loose epistolary style. Subtle reference is made to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), for instance when the protagonist, Hig, finds not just a can of coke but a whole truck of the stuff, or to David de Vries’s Life After People (2008 – 2010). The fragments and notes that form the narrative of the novel are much like the scraps, the bits and the pieces that Hig must use to survive, which brings us to the greatest vehicle for survival in the novel – indeed an actual vehicle: the airplane.

One might typically balk at the suggestion that any sort of vehicle could still operate after the end of the production of oil, after auto garages – or in this case airplane hangers – for repair, after infrastructure maintenance crews, etcetera. But, Heller’s novel provides the kind of thoughtful and logical account one can be pleased with. Ever the resourceful protagonist, Hig is a knowledgeable pilot: he understands the short life span of unleaded gasoline, where to find the freshest airplane fuel, and how to best extend its shelf life. Following this consistency, the novel is deeply satisfying on other registers as well. For instance, there is no pretense about Hig being one of the good guys, he even quips at one point that he’s not sure he is “carrying the fire” (in another McCarthy reference). Hig, it turns out, is just as much the subject of circumstance as he is resourceful – he’s immune to the disease that kills almost everybody, he’s an aspiring poet (thus the epistolary style), and an airplane pilot – this is how the novel accounts for its conceit.

The novel does more than satisfy the skeptics among us, however, as it also traces the limits of Hig’s own knowledge and expertise. One recent review by Caroline Leavitt suggests that “The pages of The Dog Stars are damp with grief for what is lost and can never be recovered,” but that “there are moments of unexpected happiness, of real human interaction, infused with love and hope, like the twinkling of a star we might wish upon, which makes this end-of-the-world novel more like a rapturous beginning.” I prefer to read the novel along the lines of Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (2009), as the novel remains dedicated to thinking through the local in a moment of the global scarcity of oil, though appearances in the novel suggest otherwise. Just because Hig has figured out, in post-apocalyptic Erie, Colorado, how to maintain his plane and find the fuel necessary to patrol the perimeter of his shared territory doesn’t mean he can fly any short of extensive scouting missions, or travel beyond a certain distance. It should be noted, that this flying of the perimeter is part of a deal he has with his interminable compadre Bangley, with whom the deepest moment of connection is a shared “Fuckin A.”[i]That is, each trip to scout their small territory is limited by the amount of fuel required to get home again safely, by a point of no return, by a limit beyond which Hig cannot go. 

The publisher Knopf Doubleday ran a sweepstakes to win the above pictured “The Dogs Stars Survival Kit.”

Wesley, Rawles, James. Survival Blog (12 Dec. 2012). Web. Accessed 12 Dec. 2012.

Brian Evenson’s Immobility (2012) meditates on stasis as it follows an amnesiac, paraplegic carried by two “mules” (special clones designed to carry a burden for several days before deteriorating beyond use) across a torn and hostile post-nuclear landscape. The novel thinks  three or four, depending on how you count them, ways out of stasis. Though,  it may seem, at times, like taking on one of these ways out would simply be trading one mode of stasis for another. The starting point of the novel’s meditation on immobility is that of the paraplegic protagonist, who cannot use his legs and is told he needs to receive a drug-cocktail shot to his spine every 24 hours or so in order to slow its deterioration. Oddly, though the novel’s focus seems to be on stasis, it posits a world where one can never be sure what or who will survive and return; indeed, characters often offer one bit of advice when dealing with bandits or the unknown: “Always remove the head” (232).

The beauty of the novel, in almost classic science fiction fashion, is that we have to learn with the focalizing character just where he is, what he is, and what has happened. In one sense, then, the entire novel offers a political lesson in estrangement. Though the novel appears deceptively simple in retrospect, it is complex and detailed. Each descriptive element cannot be outlined with brevity but must be allowed to fit into the network of the book and then be explained using the novel’s own logic. Put another way, the novel needs to be read immanently.

What I Know

1. I was stored for thirty years.

2. I have been woken up to perform a task.

3. Something is wrong with my memory.

On his way back to the community Horkai is sidetracked by a strange building he remembers from a moment of delirium. What he discovers marks both the most opaque moment in the novel, a moment the novel itself cannot seems to resolve, and the closest Horkai comes to deviating from his path and breaking, what we’ll see in a minute is, the cycle of stasis: “He moved carefully forward, rifle ready. The body was relatively recent, not the desiccated corpses he’d seen while travelling with the mules.  It was naked. A stake had been hammered into its chest. It was extremely pale and hairless, just like him. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman; the facial features were ambiguous and the hips could have belonged to a boyish girl or an effeminate man. It had what looked like the beginnings of breasts, but the body itself was chubby and the nipples looked more like those of a man than a woman. Between the legs was no sex, neither male nor female, but instead what looked like series of a half dozen strings of pearls in a strange gelatinous casing that seemed to have been extruded from the flesh itself. He bent to have a closer look, but couldn’t figure their purpose. He was just reaching out to touch them when the creature opened one eye” (231). This moment of the strangest occurrence, in a somewhat unparaphraseable book, is followed immediately by the moment when Horkai’s decision to return to the community is the sharpest. Horkai thinks, “Back to the original purpose. . . focus Horkai.” (232). This encounter is not only the shortest in the whole book, it’s also the most difficult to fit into the cycle of the plot. As such, it is also the moment when we realize that there is still much of this strange, post-apocalyptic world that we do not understand. I’m not trying to say the solution to Horkai’s situation (or our own) necessarily lies in an encounter with the unknowable, but that doesn’t mean he should rule it out either. What is most telling about this encounter then is the fact that he so quickly returns to the well worn path of service to a community, a group that by now we realize have out and out lied to him.