Narrating the End of the World: The Pandemic, the Climate and The Death of Virgil

Sven Anders Johansson

doi:10.3390/h11010021

Abstract

There is a widespread narrative today that, due to climate change, we are living in the end of times. What does this apocalyptic narrative tell us about our relation to death? A peculiarity with the climate discourse is that “we”, i.e., mankind, are given a position that is both external and internal to the problems described. On the one hand, there is an all-encompassing apocalyptic mood, on the other hand, death appears as a scandal, something we had abolished. In order to capture this peculiarity, the article adopts the narratological concept of the “focalizer”. After comparing the way climate change is addressed by the philosophers Martin Hägglund and Roy Scranton, respectively, the article turns to Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil (1945). Here, another perspective on dying and the end of civilization may be found. In that way, Broch’s novel provides a much needed perspective on today’s apocalyptic narratives. With Broch, one may argue that the end of the world takes place all the time.

Highlights

The world?, today, the question is what this narrative of an end reveals about our understanding of life and death, and above all, about ourselves
Even though Hägglund is building quite a lot on Marx, there is, I would argue, in this sense a strong liberal, or neo-liberal, tendency behind the central arguments. This is not all there is to Hägglund’s book, but my point is that the view of life and death he conveys is quite typical of our time
If The Death of Virgil consciously is a literary reflection on the disaster to come in the 1930s, it may be read as an unconscious reflection on a wider motive or change, something that was not visible to Broch, but was already arriving, if it was not there already: the Anthropocene

Summary

Introduction

The aim of this article is to discuss what position, what subject, is implied in the current crisis consciousness, especially in relation to life and death. The world?—, today, the question is what this narrative of an end reveals about our understanding of life and death, and above all, about ourselves.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion