Critical Apocalypses

Abstract

280 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) back home to her mother. When Holly sends away her granddaughter on the ship at the end of The Bone Clocks, the granddaughter is on her way back to her father. Hotel World, in its charting of grief, records a search for home in the unhomely surroundings of a hotel. For Edwards, as for Bloch, utopia is home. This may seem a banal conclusion for a study of this complexity, but in fact there is something quite profound about the idea of a search for home within a society and a culture that leave us endlessly disoriented about what home might be. And when we take Edwards’s gloss on Bloch’s notion of non-contemporaneity, there is something profoundly sad about the idea that this utopia is always out of reach, always not yet.—Paul Kincaid, Independent Scholar Critical Apocalypses. Jean-Paul Engélibert. Fabuler la fin du monde. La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse. Paris: La Découverte, 2019. 239 pp. $20.20 pbk. Jean-Paul Engélibert positioned himself as a touchstone critic for apocalypse studies in French-speaking academia with his 2013 study Apocalypses sans royaume. Politique des fictions de la fin du monde [Apocalypses without a Kingdom: The Politics of End-of-the-World Fictions], followed quickly by a co-edited volume on the same topic. His latest book, Fabuler la fin du monde. La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse [Fabulating the End of the World: The Critical Power of Apocalyptic Fictions], solidifies his position as an incontournable, a must-read, for those working in this field and able to read French. Building on the work begun in Apocalypses sans royaume, Fabuler la fin du monde develops the idea of the “critical apocalypse,” largely analogous to the “critical utopia,” i.e., a tale of the end of the world with a utopian rather than nihilistic goal. Engélibert contrasts conservative narratives expressing fears that the world will change (he cites Roland Emmerich’s film 2012 [2009] as an example) with those whose aim is “to fight to bring about a world worth living in” (16; my translations throughout the review). He defines narratives of “l’apocalyptisme critique” as: fables of the end of the world … which, through their apocalyptic scenarios, stage the necessity of cultivating our rootedness and the promise of another world. Paradoxically, these fictions thus constitute the instruments of fighting against the apocalypse. (16) Whereas his 2013 volume set out a typology for apocalyptic narratives, this volume focuses specifically on works with a utopian horizon and examines a (mostly) different corpus (Margaret Atwood’s MADDADDAM trilogy [20032013 ] and works by Antoine Volodine figure in both of Engélibert’s studies). Divided into five parts of two chapters each, Engélibert’s study addresses an international corpus of both literary and visual narratives, drawing on a broad body of theoretical texts including those of Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, and others. Part I, “Faire table rase” [Cleaning the Slate], explores the link between apocalyptic texts and that twenty-first-century buzzword, the Anthropocene. Chapter 1 posits that although the term may be relatively new, 281 BOOKS IN REVIEW texts critical of the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the environment were already appearing in the early nineteenth century. Engélibert then examines the very first secular narrative of the apocalypse, Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme [The Last Man, 1805], as a refutation of the Enlightenment’s narrative of evolutionary progress as outlined in Buffon’s Les époques de la nature (1778). In chapter 2, he describes literature’s powerful role in constructing “L’affirmation du négatif” [the affirmation of the negative, 51] necessary for the critical apocalypse, illustrated by readings of Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels (1999), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), and Céline Minard’s Le dernier monde [The Last World, 2007]. Engélibert also argues that his textual analyses differ from earlier approaches, as they “do not see works as symptoms but as works. Not looking for documents or signs of an apocalyptic culture, but an active resistance to apocalypse” (55). Engélibert argues that the critique of...