The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel

Critical Temporalities and the End Times

Diletta De Cristofaro

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350085794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

Traditional apocalyptic texts concern the advent of a better world at the end of history that will make sense of everything that happened before. But what is at stake in the contemporary shift to apocalyptic narratives in which the utopian end of time is removed? The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel offers an innovative critical model for our cultural obsession with 'the end' by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel and challenging traditional apocalyptic logic. Once confined to the genre of science fiction, the increasing popularity of end-of-the-world narratives has caused apocalyptic writing to feature in the work of some of contemporary literature's most well-known fiction writers. Considering novels by Will Self, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Jeanette Winterson and others, Diletta De Cristofaro frames the contemporary apocalyptic imagination as a critique of modernity's apocalyptic conception of time and history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book historicises apocalyptic beliefs by exploring how relentlessly they have shaped the modern world.

1

Biblical Parodies

In the first chapter of Douglas Coupland’s Player One (2010), one of the novel’s protagonists finds herself thinking about a TV miniseries – The Langoliers (1995), based on a novella by Stephen King – in which the passengers of a flight abruptly vanish, leaving their clothes behind. Karen, herself on a plane, starts musing about what it means for someone to vanish: what constitutes that someone? What does not? What would be left behind? After a vertiginous catalogue of everything that is inessential to our identity and would therefore be left behind if we were to vanish – not only clothes, but pacemakers, dental veneers, hair extensions, the various bacteria and viruses that inhabit us, even the water that constitutes so much of our bodies – Karen comes to the realization that ‘only her DNA is actually her’ (Coupland [2010] 2011: 4; emphasis in original).¹ Coupland elaborates on this realization further in the ‘Rapture Goo’ entry of the glossary that closes Player One: ‘The stuff that gets left behind …. Jesus gets your DNA. That’s all he gets, roughly 7.6 milligrams of you’ (PO 240). As Karen concludes, ‘somebody had better tell those fundamentalist Christians waiting for the Rapture to leave out some buckets and mops’ to clean up the Rapture goo (PO 4). Karen’s quip frames the background of her considerations: the rise of Christian fundamentalism and its apocalyptic beliefs in the United States, as well as the prominence in American popular culture of images of the Rapture. Karen’s irony, however, also indicates, as this chapter argues contrasting the orthodox apocalypticism of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series (1995–2007) with the parodic tone of texts like Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) and Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World (2009), that the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel deploys biblical tropes parodically, to subvert traditional apocalyptic discourse and its temporality from within.

Parody ‘is most readily invited by doctrinal utterances that seek to present themselves as absolute’ (Bernstein 1994: 80) and is, therefore, a particularly appropriate strategy for the deconstruction of the apocalyptic metanarrative and its totalizing conception of history. In this chapter, I draw on Hutcheon’s canonical definition of parody as what ‘paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies’, with irony establishing a ‘critical distance’ between the parodied and the parodic texts that signals ‘difference at the very heart of similarity’ (1988: 11, 26). For as Hutcheon underlines drawing on the etymology of ‘parody’, from the Greek ‘para’ (against and beside) and ‘odos’ (ode), the term does not necessarily entail the ridiculing and mocking imitation with which it is commonly associated. Rather, coherently with postmodernism, which often uses parodic strategies, parody ‘does not pretend to operate outside the system, for it knows it cannot; it therefore overtly acknowledges its complicity, only to work covertly to subvert the system’s values from within’ (Hutcheon 1988: 223), as the narratives analysed in this chapter do by drawing on apocalyptic tropes to critique them from within. After considering the phenomenon of Left Behind and its adherence to the traditional apocalyptic construction of history in the context of the continuing appeal of religious apocalypticism, I turn to the critical temporalities articulated by the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel through the appropriation of biblical and religious apocalyptic tropes. A text like Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers (2011) features a Rapture event but undermines central elements of dispensationalist history; prophets appear in fictions like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) and Coupland’s Player One but only to expose the violence of apocalyptic discourse; finally, Self’s The Book of Dave and Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World, the focus of this chapter, parody the biblical apocalyptic narratives of Revelation and Genesis to foreground the constructedness of apocalyptic history and its complicity with oppressive power structures.

With close to 70 million copies sold and a successful franchise of movies, video games, children’s books, graphic novels and podcasts, LaHaye and Jenkins’s sixteen Left Behind novels are the most popular example of contemporary narratives of the Rapture.² Adhering to premillennialist dispensationalism, the novels recount seven years of chaotic events – the Tribulation – replete with plagues, earthquakes, droughts and even an invasion by killer horsemen coming from the sky, following god’s removal of the true believers from Earth – the Rapture – which is also represented through passengers disappearing from a transatlantic flight, leaving behind, unrealistically Karen would say, nothing more than their clothes. While a politician, who is in fact the Antichrist, rises to power, a group of people who have been left behind realize the error of their ways, convert to evangelical dispensationalism, and form a Tribulation Force devoted to resist the Antichrist and interpret the Bible to understand what the future holds, for ‘Bible prophecy is history written in advance’ (LaHaye and Jenkins 1995: 214). As Jennie Chapman explains in her study of the series, Left Behind has an ‘overtly pedagogical objective: to instruct its readers in the way of dispensational hermeneutics so that they too can discern the prophetic “truth” contained in the Bible and hence avoid the terrible fate of being “left behind”’ (2013: 5).³ With this pedagogical objective, the series foregrounds the revelatory aspect and historical sense-making function central to dispensationalism and apocalyptic logic more broadly.

Dispensationalism is an apocalyptic theory of history that understands time as a series of eras, known as dispensations, which culminate in the present Church Age. This is the age that ends with the events of the Left Behind: the Rapture, the Tribulation, the Antichrist, the second coming of Christ and the millennium.⁴ Dispensationalism has its origins in the preaching of John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century. It is to Darby that we owe the belief in the Rapture, which he based on 1 Thessalonians 4:16-4:17 (Frykholm 2004: 15–17). As Amy Johnson Frykholm maintains, in its origins in the ‘turmoil over the rapid changes in cultural life that were the result of capitalist expansion, new technologies, scientific discoveries, and large-scale immigration’, the narrative of the Rapture, through the distinction between the saved and the unsaved, provided the means to react to a perceived ‘loss of cultural control’ and ‘reject a disorienting new social terrain’ (2004: 19).⁵ For dispensationalism, the world grows more and more evil as the Church Age comes to an end, so that any event can be read through the prophetic framework of the Bible as a manifestation of sin signifying that the end times are nigh. As ever, apocalyptic logic is a way of imposing an order on a time of disorder and crisis, as well as a way of providing a vengeful escapism from a world that is deemed to be corrupt. To those confronted with the chaos of historical contingency and social change, apocalypticism affords a revelation of the true nature of the temporal flow, a strong sense of purpose through a triumphant vision of the future for the elect and the punishment of the sinners, and a clear worldview that explains one’s place in history, allowing the firm differentiation between good and evil.

It is this apocalyptic ‘tone of certainty … against the growth toward pluralism, ambiguity, indeterminacy’ (Keller 2005: 12; emphasis in original) that makes religious apocalypticism still so appealing in the twenty-first century. According to the 2014 Bible in American Life report, ‘of the 50 percent of all Americans who have read any of the Bible in the previous year, over one-third claimed that they did so “to learn about the future”’, an element that ‘reveals how widespread Christian apocalyptic ideas are and how thoroughly evangelical premillennialism has saturated American culture’ (Sutton 2014: 372). Indeed, in texts like the Left Behind series, the plotting of history in accordance to dispensationalism affords, especially in a post-9/11 context that is read by fundamentalists as proof of the imminence of the end, a ‘certainty about the future, and a promise that the good guys win in the end’ (McAlister 2003: 792).⁶ To put it with the words of one of the followers of the ‘One Way Brotherhood’, the fundamentalist apocalyptic sect in Gee’s The Flood whose name encapsulates the deterministic linearity of apocalyptic history, ‘He’d never been able to imagine his future, which was why the Last Days provided the answer’ ([2004] 2005: 126).⁷ It is important to underline that fiction like the Left Behind ‘never strays far from politics tout court’, for ‘many tenets of evangelical Christianity, such as the absolutist view of the scriptures, the belief in divine agency, or the desegregation of state and religion are mirrored in its political platform [the Christian Right] – such as an apocalyptic view of history, the displacement of democracy by charismatic leadership, and the advocacy of behavioral control’ (Swirski 2014: 12). As we shall see in Chapter 2, after 9/11, apocalyptic views of history came to the forefront of politics, informing America’s response to the attacks. Through their North American settings, texts like The Leftovers, Station Eleven, Player One, the MaddAddam trilogy and The Island at the End of the World engage, more or less explicitly, with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States, while fictions set outside of North America, like The Book of Dave, speak to a wider persistence of spiritual and religious constructions of reality in what John A. McClure identifies as the ‘post-secular’ aspects of postmodernity (1995).⁸ It is against the apocalyptic revelation of totalizing historical plots that close off possibility and alternative explanations, and their import on politics and power, that the critical temporalities of the novels discussed in this chapter are positioned.

A case in point is The Leftovers. The novel revolves around a Rapture event, the ‘Sudden Departure’, but immediately signals its critical distance from Rapture narratives, and Left Behind specifically, by opening with a sceptical character, Laurie, who defines premillennial dispensationalism as ‘mumbo jumbo’, ‘religious kitsch’, and ‘feel[s] a twinge of pity, and even a little bit of tenderness, for the poor sucker who had nothing better to read’ than LaHaye and Jenkins’s series (Perrotta [2011] 2012: 2).⁹ Although Laurie, following the Sudden Departure, goes on to join the apocalyptic sect of the Guilty Remnant (GR), and thus the ranks of the believers in the Rapture, The Leftovers continues to affirm its parodic distance from traditional Rapture narratives. The cause of the Sudden Departure remains unclear. Christians actually oppose the identification of the Sudden Departure with the Rapture, since ‘The whole point was to separate the wheat from the chaff, to reward the true believers and put the rest of the world on notice. An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all’ (TL 3). Perrotta’s certainly is an indiscriminate Rapture, in that it sees the Pope disappearing alongside Vladimir Putin and an unspecified ‘Latin American tyrant’ (TL 51), as well as, to the dismay of fundamentalist Christians, ‘Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons and Zoroastrians, whatever the heck they were’ (TL 3). The Sudden Departure does not fulfil the apocalyptic requirements of a clear separation between good and evil and thus fails to impose an order on the temporal sequence.

Furthermore, The Leftovers presents the readers with two apocalyptic sects, convinced that the Sudden Departure indicates that the end times are nigh, which both serve to undermine apocalyptic discourse through parodic distance. The GR’s theology is fuzzy even to its believers but includes smoking incessantly – cancer is not a worry, given the approaching end – as a form of sacrament that reminds anybody being stalked by GR members that god is keeping track of every action. The GR is later revealed to be a brainwashing death cult that demands the ultimate sacrifice of its members. Similarly, the followers of Holy Wayne, a man believed to have the power of absorbing the immense grief of people whose family and friends have suddenly disappeared, are later exposed to much more unpalatable revelations about this apocalyptic prophet: he is a rapist and a paedophile. As Tate observes, The Leftovers is an ‘acknowledgement of American fascination with “end-times” prophecies [and] an exploration of the seductive rhetoric of fanaticism as a response to loss and a sense of powerlessness’ (2017: 60) – it is, in other words, a parodic take, in Hutcheon’s terms of ‘difference at the very heart of similarity’ (1988), on Rapture narratives like Left Behind and the sense-making function of the apocalyptic paradigm more broadly.

Perrotta’s Holy Wayne is paralleled by other parodic prophetic figures in the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel. In its essence, the apocalyptic narrative is prophetic, in that it offers the revelation of a utopian teleology to history. Thus, John opens the Book of Revelation by presenting it as ‘The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place’ and as prophecy: ‘Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near’ (Rev. 1:1, 1:3) – sentences in which the temporal nature of apocalyptic discourse clearly emerges in its deterministic nature. As Elizabeth K. Rosen underlines, the difference between apocalyptic prophecy and prophecy more broadly ‘lies primarily in their visions of history and mankind’s role in it’:

The future which a prophet predicts is a possible future, one which may occur if mankind does not act according to God’s wishes. But that predicted future is also one which can be avoided by returning to God’s word……. An apocalypticist, on the other hand, sees God’s behavior as fixed. God will intervene and bring human history to an end. Apocalypticists warn of an unalterable end. Their aim is to comfort and prepare those who are already ‘saved’. (2008: 66; emphasis in original)

Indeed, in addition to the determinism of apocalyptic history, the core of the ‘apocalypse pattern’, to put it with Keller, is the inclination of the apocalyptic prophet and believers to think in terms of clear-cut polarities of good versus evil, and their identification with the good that purges the evil from the old world and is worthy of the imminent utopian renewal of the new world ([1996] 2005: 11). These are all elements that the prophets of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel exhibit, with the texts’ critical temporalities underlining through parodic distance how the deterministic teleological plotting of the apocalypse pattern serves to push violent ideological agendas.

Station Eleven’s prophet, Tyler, is only a child when the pandemic that is at the heart of this post-apocalyptic narrative hits the world, but grows up to be the charismatic leader of a violent doomsday cult. Echoing Holy Wayne’s deterministic pronouncement after his arrest that ‘Whatsoever happens to me … do not despair. It happens for a reason’ (TL 47), Tyler believes that ‘everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason’ (SE 59), including the novel’s apocalypse. Faced with the chaos of historical contingency – chaos which is even more evident and dreadful at times of crisis, such as that of the novel’s devastating Georgia Flu, with its 99 per cent mortality rate – Tyler resorts to the order afforded by apocalyptic determinism and the Book of Revelation, which he heavily annotates.¹⁰ In an echo of Revelation 15-16, he sees the pandemic as an ‘avenging angel’ (SE 60, 286) and as punishment for the ways of the corrupt old world, which he compares to Revelation’s Babylon (SE 259), a symbol of the sinful Roman Empire that John gleefully describes as a ‘great whore … corrupt[ing] the earth with her fornication’ and receiving her comeuppance in the end times through plagues (Rev. 19:2; 18:8). This violent misogyny is something I return to throughout this chapter, and that is reflected in the ‘hegemonic masculinity that is central to the conservative evangelical worldview’ embodied by Left Behind, with its ‘acts of violent retribution meted out against transgressive females’ (Chapman 2013: 137, 138). Similarly to Holy Wayne in The Leftovers, indeed, Mandel presents her readers with a prophet that embodies the patriarchal logic of apocalyptic discourse: Tyler has several wives, including very young girls, and it is the refusal of the Travelling Symphony – a Shakespearean troupe around which the post-apocalyptic chapters revolve – to sell him another wife that provokes the confrontation between the prophet’s cult and the Symphony. As opposed to those who died in the Georgia Flu, to Tyler, the survivors are t...