The End of the World as We Know It

Abstract

Depending on your disposition, it's either a very good or a very bad time to read about apocalypse. Good if you're looking for a literary path through the flaming hellscape of coronavirus, climate change, border wars, white supremacy, and incipient fascism; bad if you'd prefer some escapist fare. Curiously, Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction satisfies both impulses. Although it is indeed an examination of postapocalyptic fiction, from the eighth-century Greek poet Hesiod's work to Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and all the way up to Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011), the book is resolutely optimistic. Payne is interested in “large-scale works of literary fiction that stage how new forms of life emerge from catastrophe, how survivors adapt to the altered conditions of existence” (2). By “new” Payne means better, as he states explicitly early on: “postapocalyptic fiction is by definition catastrophic,” he writes, but the catastrophe “rescales human aspiration for a better life from illusory macrosocial goals to the level of individual capabilities grounded in the human body” (3).Although Payne is interested in new forms of human sociality that writers imagine, the implicit suspicion of “macrosocial goals” suggests a tension between the good of the collective and the individual who flourishes through work in a newly razed world. The classic liberal humanist of Payne's book bends toward a romantic vision of Homo faber, the person who controls their fate through their labor. The “rescaling” that Payne explores is sometimes relational: survival compacts between small groups and communes in which labor and resources are shared. But just as often, postapocalyptic fiction depicts the struggle to survive as brutal and competitive, everyone out for themselves. Celebrating postapocalyptic life as pastoral and harmonious has the danger of veering into individualist nostalgia and away from collective politics performed at scale. To put this in practical terms, there is real good that can arise if we reverse our alienation from land and labor, but Heideggerian principles leave little room for state-mediated policy (e.g., the Green New Deal) that requires social engineering.In the postapocalyptic conditions of the novels Payne analyzes, survivors must learn “premodern capabilities”: how to hunt, fish, skin and clean animals, build shelter, tend to plants, and so on (6). Payne's argument is that in depicting this new turn to old labor, postapocalyptic fiction reimagines the “relationship between occupation and mentation” in healthier, more harmonious ways. When people adopt new forms of labor in the postapocalyptic world, their orientation to that world changes. Payne's wager is that “beauty, seriousness, and commitment emerge from engagement with the things of the world, rather than by separating oneself from them in deliberate acts of contemplation” (9). Setting aside for a moment whether or not we believe that such agrarian and arduous labor indeed generates beauty, at least one identifiable strain of postapocalyptic fiction certainly does concern itself with the daily practices required to survive and the forms of sociality that spring up around such survival.Payne is able to read postapocalyptic fiction as an optimistic genre because he focuses on books that present catastrophe as an opportunity for new forms of work and new relations: a chapter about Shelley's The Last Man is followed by one about survivors who return to “the forms of life of the peoples who preceded them on their terrain” in Richard Jeffries's After London (1885), Cicely Hamilton's Theodore Savage (1922), Leslie Mitchell's Three Go Back (1932), George Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), and Jean Hegland's Into the Forest (1996). Chapter 3 examines the “survivalist anthropology” of Octavia Butler's Parable novels (1993–98) and Whitehead's Zone One (2011). This selection of texts is the result of Payne's decision to “omit fictions that do not commit themselves to imagining a postapocalyptic figure in which human beings live better than they do now” (19). Such a selection principle is strange when discussing literature of the apocalypse, since many of the most popular examples in the genre insist on the grim, unrelenting violence of postapocalyptic life. The desolation and cannibalism of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), the imprisonment and sexual vulnerability of Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014), the pervasive loss and tiresome nomadism of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), the betrayal and deceit of survivor groups in Ling Ma's Severance, and, I'd argue, the tragic decrepitude and comic impotence of the American government in Whitehead's Zone One all pose serious challenges to Payne's hopeful reading of the genre. These novels do some of what Payne would want them to do, revealing characters' desires, strengths, and shortcomings more clearly to themselves. But it takes pointed and strategic omissions to look past the conditions of bare life that are so often the norm in postapocalyptic fiction.Much of the existing work on apocalyptic fiction, especially by scholars who work on contemporary fiction, considers the competing impulses of the genre: the desire to see existing structures destroyed and the terror at witnessing this destruction, the fear of what will be left in its wake. Payne names James Berger's After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse (1999) and Heather Hicks's The Post-apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity beyond Salvage (2016) as influences but does not discuss them in detail. Both Berger and Hicks treat apocalyptic fiction with a historical and literary granularity, reading the genre not as the transhistorical expression of human imagination but as a cultural form intimately related to specific moments and histories. Hicks, in particular, reads many of the influential texts Payne considers, including recent novels by Margaret Atwood and Colson Whitehead. Her claim, although situated more squarely in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has much in common with Payne's. She argues that the collapse of industrial society forces characters to rely on their own resources to survive and to ensure the survival of civilization. It makes sense, then, that Hicks, like Payne, sees in Robinson Crusoe an ur-figure for the apocalyptic novel: a survivor who, as Payne puts it, “focuses on the work of survival” and as a result is rewarded with “new forms of mental life that he could not have experienced or anticipated in society” (4). Payne's long view of the genre may not be granular enough for readers focused on contemporary fiction, but it gestures toward the lineages of our current dystopias that predate modernity. The book's turn to antiquity can help readers thresh the particularities of our own plight from the long run of human catastrophe and recovery.Reading Shelley's Last Man, Payne argues that the author gets to set “the parameters of cultural regression” and “arrest it at whatever point . . . on what she believes is the most optimal form of life for human beings” (44). According to Payne, for Shelley this moment is “primitive agriculture,” because everyone consuming goods in a given community would have a hand in their production. “In this form of life,” writes Payne, “the relationship between occupation and mentation is the most satisfying to human beings, because it affords them the idea that personal, small-scale, local divinities care about human beings in the same way that human beings care for them” (44). Another scholar of apocalyptic fiction (whom Payne doesn't cite) might agree that better work makes for better humans, not because of anything divinity related but because it is less alienated. Dan Sinykin explores this possibility in his 2020 book American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse. Sinykin argues that contemporary apocalyptic fiction is a response to the neoliberal economics of the past five decades, a form that writers adopted to confront the hollowing out of political agency.A key writer for Sinykin is Leslie Marmon Silko, whose Almanac of the Dead (1991) chronicles characters struggling to survive in the wreckage of neoliberalism in the US-Mexico borderlands. Sinykin carefully unpacks how the novel's eponymous almanac serves as “an enigmatic indigenous object that incites the apocalypse and prepares a life after neoliberalism” (21). Given Payne's interest in indigenous lifeworlds, it is surprising that he does not mention Silko. Instead, he turns to Jean Hegland's Into the Forest (1996), a novel about two sisters surviving in the backwoods of northern California after an unspecified apocalyptic event. Like Silko, who stresses the importance of indigenous books as weapons against colonial destruction, Hegland's characters learn to survive the wilderness by reading about the people who inhabited the forest before them. For Payne, the accounts of indigenous ancestors in Hegland's text are tools of “speculative anthropology,” which, unlike Rousseau's “depressive anthropology,” allows us to learn useful lessons “from a gleaning of Deep History” (77). This also names Payne's own method, as he looks back to antiquity and draws on a century-spanning range of texts and thinkers to elucidate the generative possibilities of apocalyptic fiction. Given the breadth of Payne's knowledge, it is perhaps all the more jarring to encounter, in his discussion of Into the Forest, a more contemporary reference—to Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Though Payne points out that what Kaczynski has said about solitary existence and survival “is deliberately unoriginal,” he cites him at length without further disclaimer, noting that “Kaczynski's reflections on his life in Montana are of a piece with Rousseau's rediscovery of pleasure in the sentiment of existence” (114). It may be troubling for some readers to follow Payne as he slides somewhat quickly from Kaczynski to Rousseau and then back to the sisters in Hegland's novel. At the very least, such moves—in their frictionless, thematic glide—seem at odds with the feminine (if not overtly feminist) and indigenous imperatives of Into the Forest.Payne does want to read Kaczynski against Hegland to stress that her novel valorizes “surrender” and “dependency” over rogue individualism. Here again, readers interested in the long view will find new perspectives in Flowers of Time, but students and scholars of the modern and contemporary novel will also want to consult Jessica Hurley's excellent Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (2020). Hurley's book ends with a discussion of feminist science and technology studies, citing the theories of entanglement that insist on relationality, permeability, connection, and assemblage. To survive in the postapocalyptic world, which Hurley reminds us is our own, we must recognize our entanglements but also resist the seductions of a future thinking that turns us away from the devastated present. And so Hurley shares with Payne a sense of the potential optimism of the postapocalypse genre, seeing in its futurelessness a commitment to radically transfiguring the present. But because, like Sinykin, Hurley is attentive to a tighter and more recent historical context that prompts writers to turn to the ancient trope of the apocalypse, her optimism does not hinge on the promise of an emergent or transcendent humanity. For both Hurley and Sinykin, apocalyptic fictions are hopeful less because they imagine better ways of being in some transcultural scale of value than because the end is a means for shared critique of a specific American status quo.Of course ideology critique need not be the only thing literary criticism does. Payne's broad knowledge and erudition show readers that texts and tropes we find thoroughly contemporary have deep roots. To use the language of Payne's title, the genre flowers forth from age-old concerns with what humans might do in the wake of epic destruction or societal collapse and is, in this sense, political theory in the guise of fiction. The book's title, as signaled in an epigraph, comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne's English Notebooks. Hawthorne describes a visit to the Gallery of British Painters, where he laments that the great quantity of pictures overwhelms him: “It seemed like throwing away time to look twice even at whatever was most precious; and it was dreary to think of not fully enjoying this collection, the very flower of Time, which never bloomed before, and never, by any possibility, can bloom again.” How poetic, how sad! But just after this line, from which Payne culls his epigraph, Hawthorne adds that “it is somewhat sad to think that mankind, after centuries of cultivation of the beautiful arts, can produce no more splendid spectacle than this. It is not so very grand, although, poor as it is, I lack capacity to take in even the whole of it.” Here, Hawthorne is the critic of an impoverished spectacle and his own impoverished mind. Taken in its fuller context, the epigraph is not a statement of humanist confidence but rather an admission of the limits of the human to rebound and rebuild. In Hawthorne's sardonic view, the flowers quickly wilt.Payne's book sets out to educate readers about all the things that might bloom in the wake of disaster. And Payne shows the long and viable literary tradition that conforms to his scholarly and historical vision. Yet the world of our present reading and research may also demand attention to some more grim and grisly aspects of the social contract on the far side of catastrophic change. Certainly there are important new writers who view the postapocalyptic world with a decidedly mixed view, whose hope is cut and corroded by deeper and sharper visions of loss. For example, Ling Ma's eerily prescient 2018 novel Severance, about survivors cobbling together an existence in the wake of a massively destructive pandemic, seems to open with a conceit that would place it in Payne's lineage: “After the End came the Beginning.” But when Ma's fictional Shen Fever obliterates global civilization, the new beginnings are not necessarily a reinvigoration of human values or concrete labor, nor an efflorescence of a civilization held closer to uncorrupted nature. Instead of presenting humans that learn greater balance or intimacy, Ma, like many writers and readers of the genre, uses it to cut more sharply into the idea that such harmony is likely to happen after ecological or epidemiological catastrophe. This apocalyptic vision, like so many others, requires us to make sense of not just time's flowers but its noxious weeds.