Flowers of Time

On Postapocalyptic Fiction

Mark Payne

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691206400
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la ciencia ficción

An exploration of postapocalyptic fiction, from antiquity to today, and its connections to political theory and other literary genres The literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction—stories set after civilization's destruction—is a long one, spanning the biblical tale of Noah and Hesiod's Works and Days to the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Traveling from antiquity to the present, Flowers of Time reveals how postapocalyptic fiction differs from other genres—pastoral poetry, science fiction, and the maroon narrative—that also explore human capabilities beyond the constraints of civilization. Mark Payne places postapocalyptic fiction into conversation with such theorists as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Carl Schmitt, illustrating how the genre functions as political theory in fictional form.Payne shows that rather than argue for a particular way of life, postapocalyptic literature reveals what it would be like to inhabit that life. He considers the genre's appeal in our own historical moment, contending that this fiction is the pastoral of our time. Whereas the pastoralist and the maroon could escape to real-world hills and fashion their own versions of freedom, on a fully owned and occupied Earth, only an apocalyptic event can create a space where such freedoms are feasible once again. Flowers of Time looks at how fictional narratives set after the world's devastation represent new conditions and possibilities for life and humanity.

1

The Apocalyptic Cosmos

MARY SHELLEY’S The Last Man is a curious case for genre studies. Part plague chronicle, part roman-à-clef, part future history, it is also the first work in a mode of speculative fiction it played no part in founding. Appearing at a moment when Romantic enthusiasm for apocalyptic fantasies was largely played out, it was derided at the time of its publication in 1826 and remained little known until its 1965 U.S. reprint, by which time last man narratives and postapocalyptic tales of various kinds were a staple of speculative fiction. The Last Man thus precedes the circumscription of postapocalyptic fiction as genre writing. It does not offer itself as storytelling in a minor key or in the marginal voice of an unheeded prophet. The models it presents for its project are major: Greek epic and Hesiod, in particular. Its story of humankind destroyed by a plague that leaves the rest of life unharmed looks to Greek antecedents for its vision of human victimization at the hands of a whimsical cosmos. In Hesiod, Shelley found not only thematic precedents but a model for the scale of her endeavor: a vision of what it would be like for all of humanity to perish, more or less in one go.¹

It is this sense of scale—a global scale appropriate to our present ecological predicament—that Amitav Ghosh has argued is lacking in contemporary realist fiction. The mode of fiction that peaked in the great nineteenth-century realist novels, and whose workings were taken apart, refracted, and remade by the modernists, excels at fine-grained staging of character and action, and the fine-grained appraisal of singular fictional beings these afford to the reader. What it is less good at is showing humankind in general responding to global situations and events, with climate change for Ghosh being the development that most urgently calls for a different kind of fictional response. Contemporary fiction, he argues, is hobbled by experimental structures it adopted in the nineteenth century: the small-scale crucibles of testing, proving, and verifying that it shared with contemporary technological innovation. Not only is their scale similar, but the kinds of verification that can be achieved when working at this scale cultivate unwarranted optimism about our powers of understanding and prognostication. The ways human beings act in the world look knowable if the frameworks within which they are studied are the predictable behaviors of the bourgeois family in its everyday settings and scenarios, but these frameworks are now a way of insulating ourselves from basic unknowns in the planetary situation.

The irony for Ghosh is that the forms of realist fiction we now consider normal, and the accumulation of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere that renders these forms obsolete, are coeval, Industrial Age, developments. Before this time, human beings everywhere were “catastrophists at heart,” with an “instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability.”² Poetry, in particular, had long had “an intimate relationship with climatic events,” but at the very moment when human beings could have used this traditional resource for thinking about their own vulnerability with regard to planetary systems, poetry was superseded as a way of knowing by new technologies of probability in the realist novel. Realist fiction, wittingly or not, served as a booster for human self-confidence, giving its readers an unjustified faith in their ability to forecast their fate and how they would be likely to respond to it.

The outliers in Ghosh’s literary history are the various forms of speculative fiction that have maintained the intellectual and cosmic scope which used to be the province of poetry, and epic poetry, in particular. They preserve this scope by treating humankind in the aggregate and rejecting the kinds of singular psychological insights that give the realist novel its precision and prestige.³ Shelley has a place of honor in this history because her work forcefully rejects the reduction of Nature to setting and ontic frame, which is the process of literary anthropocentrism that the nineteenth-century novel accomplishes.⁴ Whereas to be modern is to participate in the partitioning of Nature and Culture, and so delimit what the novel can and cannot legitimately treat, Shelley’s work is deliberately archaic in its refusal to erect and police this boundary.

Ghosh focuses on Frankenstein, but an interventionist Nature is the major agential force in The Last Man. It is Nature that, for reasons unknown to human beings, decides to bring humankind to an end, and all the human action in the book is undertaken with respect to this unknowable and unforeseeable apocalyptic event. The effective causes of human annihilation in The Last Man are “an unusually warm climate” and a global pestilence, which may or may not be related, and it is when imagining the precariousness of human life with respect to these forces that Shelley has Hesiod especially to hand. She cites (in Elton’s translation) Works and Days 238–47 on the plagues that Zeus sends to destroy human beings en masse, Works and Days 101–105 on the countless harms that wander the earth as silent autonomous agents of Zeus’s ill-will toward human beings, and a passage from the fragmentary Shield of Heracles 151–53 that describes human bones when the skin has rotted off them and they lie bleaching and crumbling in the sun.⁵ These are not passing references but long, inset block quotes, whose frame-breaking function is to direct our attention back to premodern awareness of human precariousness and the literary forms that enshrined this understanding. The series of citations from Hesiod punctuates The Last Man with reminders that human beings were not always so confident about their relationship with Nature and that realist fiction did not always look the way it looks now.

Formally, these citations contribute to the staging of The Last Man as a weak text. The bulk of the novel’s three volumes is a first-person history of the plague written by its last survivor. But this first-person history is only encountered in the form of Sibylline leaves that the protagonist of the frame narrative discovers by accident in a cave in the course of a tourist visit gone awry. The narrator of the frame narrative transcribes these Sibylline leaves into the first-person history that we read. She tells us she is moved by the story to transcribe it and is also moved in the act of transcribing it, so the text is (fictionally) both contingent and unreliable, for reasons of character, language, and sheer chance, since she might never have found it in the first place. The interruption of the narrative by large, unexplained citations, which may derive from the fictional author, the frame narrator, or Shelley herself, pushes the found manuscript device toward further levels of contingency as a textual assemblage. Its voice from the future is very much a speculative staging, a kind of ghost work.⁶

Tim Morton has noted Shelley’s fascination with stories of first contact, anthropology’s tales of indigenous others who experience the world in ways quite unlike our own. Frankenstein’s Creature experiences a kind of Adamic awakening, a version of the impossible encounter between mature consciousness and the world that is so vividly imagined in book 6 of Paradise Lost, but Shelley also sometimes places such moments in her fiction “as a sort of message in the bottle from the future,” as in the finder’s story of her discovery of the Sibylline leaves in The Last Man.⁷ Extreme mediation by a weak text is what enables the encounter; fragmentation and distant touching are convergent experiences.

The wonder we encounter in the weak text of The Last Man is a single life that has twice experienced the full compass of human cultural possibilities, once as ascent, and a second time as decline. Lionel Verney, the author of the future history recorded in the Sibylline leaves, begins his life in bourgeois prosperity as the son of a royal adviser, but with this adviser’s fall from grace he is consigned to the life of a rural shepherd, only to be restored to an advisory role by the son of the ruler his father served. Lionel’s life recapitulates the stages of human culture, and his occupation in each of these stages is directly productive of his mentation. After his rescue, just in the nick of time, from pastoral employment, he reflects that “my life was like that of an animal, and my mind was in danger of degenerating into that which informs brute nature”—still a mind, just not a human one. This regression becomes in retrospect a mode of cathexis to the deep past, since in this life he was “as uncouth a savage as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome,” a claim that he repeats when he finds himself in Rome, composing his history as the last survivor of the plague.⁸

There are good models for this kind of narrative in Greek literature. In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the protagonist is removed from human sociality when he is marooned on Lemnos by the Greek army that is on its way to Troy, and on this island, which Sophocles imagines as uninhabited by human beings, he is integrated into new forms of shared life with other living beings, only to be offered the chance to rejoin history and human culture when Odysseus and his men come back to collect him. The play enacts the crossing of the threshold between early humanity’s larger horizon of shared life and the present’s more limited forms of human sociality as an event that might occur within a single human life. It stages the farewell look that Nature gives to human beings as subjects of shared life as a glance directed at a singular human being who is leaving this life behind. Callimachus’s Hymn to Demeter develops this possibility through more severe textual mediation. The tale of the legendary figure Erysichthon, who cuts down a primeval sacred grove and is punished by the goddess Demeter, is told to a contemporary audience by a narrator who seems not to grasp the full import of the story she is telling. Engaging with the form of life in the story involves a similar kind of touching at a distance as the one that is staged in The Last Man.⁹

Shelley naturalizes this story type somewhat by stretching it out over an entire developmental autobiography, but it is still legible as such. And Lionel himself signals the convergence of personal and cultural history with a reflection on Robinson Crusoe: “The wild and cruel Caribbee, the merciless Cannibal … would have been to me a beloved companion … his nature would be kin to mine.”¹⁰ Robinson Crusoe will remain a staple of postapocalyptic fiction, particularly in its survivalist mode, although Crusoe’s longing for human companionship will be largely displaced by Walden’s separatist ontology.¹¹ Here, however, Crusoe marks the downhill side of the track that Lionel has previously traced on the way up, from his “degeneration” in the countryside to his rehabilitation as a legitimate human being under the care of Adrian, the son of the king his father advised.

In The Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau reflects that what drives such thought experiments in Deep History is the desire to identify the moment in human cultural development at which there was an optimal match between communal resources and individual capability, so as to note the point at which such development ought to have been arrested:

There is, I sense, an age at which the individual human being would want to stop; you will look for the age at which you would wish your species had stopped. Discontented with your present state, for reasons that herald even greater discontents for your unhappy posterity, you might perhaps wish to be able to go backwards.¹²

Postapocalyptic fiction is able to translate such unhappy fantasies into fictional realities. Since the author is the one who sets the parameters of cultural regression, she can arrest it at whatever point she wishes and dwell, if only for a short time, on what she believes is the most optimal form of life for human beings, and why. For Shelley, this moment is primitive agriculture, by which she means a form of agricultural production in which all members of the community who consume its goods participate in their production. In this form of life, 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 be...