Recycling Apocalypse

Peter Paik (bio)
Yonsei University

A review of Hicks, Heather. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Post-apocalyptic fiction has become arguably the defining genre of the contemporary period. A search on WorldCat reveals that Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) — which depicts the near-total extinction of the human species in a pandemic and its replacement by bio-engineered humanoids — has been a topic in over sixty dissertations and the subject of over 400 articles. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) has figured in roughly eighty dissertations and over 1,300 articles. Novels such as these have exerted an outsized influence on popular culture, given the current fascination with the post-human in such series as Westworld or the reboot of The Planet of the Apes — as well as the great success enjoyed by the narrative of the zombie apocalypse, which parallels the basic plotline of The Road, where a father and son must guard against being captured and eaten by cannibals. But the significance of today’s post-apocalyptic fiction remains very much in dispute. Should we understand the intense interest as a symptom of collective fear, whether of religious extremism, economic collapse, or catastrophic climate change? Does the spectacle of the destruction of a technically advanced civilization constitute a form of metaphoric atonement for the colonization of the globe by the Western powers? Or is the apocalypse a kind of figure for a fundamental psychic deadlock, a response to the loss of an otherness that could serve as a source of sociopolitical renewal for a society that remains incapable of transforming itself to avoid catastrophe?

In The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage, Heather J. Hicks analyzes six works by authors who have become widely known as representative of the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction – David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2012), in addition to the aforementioned Oryx and Crake and The Road. Her thesis — that the key theme of the post-apocalyptic novel is the collapse of modernity — challenges the familiar version of literary history, according to which the modernist aesthetic that is defined by seriousness of purpose and aspires to depth of insight is succeeded by a postmodern aesthetic that revels in irony, strikes deliberately superficial poses, and insouciantly repudiates the cultural authority accorded to high culture. Post-apocalyptic literature by contrast forms a sort of middle ground between the modern and the postmodern – it is marked by a certain seriousness in posing urgent questions about the future of humankind and the fate of the planet, while being close in formal terms to such more accessible genres as adventure fiction or horror fiction. Post-apocalyptic fiction is preoccupied with survival, which leads it to place an intense focus on the material conditions of existence. The collapse of industrial society throws the characters in these works back on their own resources to save themselves and their loved ones or to preserve the remnants of civilized ways.

For Hicks, the patron saint of the apocalyptic novel turns out to be Robinson Crusoe, the solitary survivor of a shipwreck who draws on his knowledge, instinct, skills, and religious faith to recreate on his desert island as best as he can the civilized existence that he has lost. In the novels under consideration, there has been or takes place a calamity on a planetary scale, such as nuclear war, a global epidemic, a zombie apocalypse, economic collapse, or the depletion of natural resources. The preoccupation with disaster results not in a wholesale repudiation of modernity as the source of inescapably destructive enterprises, but instead in the efforts of the protagonists to “salvage” various elements of the ruined civilization in the furtherance of life (15). Robinson Crusoe serves as the emblematic figure for such an undertaking. His presence can be felt in the watchfulness of the father in McCarthy’s The Road, whose “competence and acuity” ensure that he will lead his son to safety in the less contaminated and more civilized zones of the South (103). The protagonist who goes by the name of “Snowman” in Oryx and Crake is likewise a survivor of a genocidal catastrophe who echoes the endeavors of Crusoe, in this case serving as a teacher to the Crakers, a new humanoid species that has been designed to replace human beings after a pandemic has driven the latter to extinction. In The Stone Gods, a novel that spans both galaxies and centuries, Jeanette Winterson names the three protagonists, two of whom are female, after Crusoe himself. One section of the novel involves the familiar plotline of shipwreck which leaves the male Crusoe stranded on Easter Island just as its people descend into a vicious civil war, while the primary threat to one of the female Crusoes comes not from nature but from corporate control..

But if civilizational collapse or the near-extinction of the human species serves to give new life to this paradigmatic figure of modernity — one who is distinguished by his independence, self-sufficiency, and the will to master his environment — Hicks also emphasizes the ways in which the novels in her study engage in critiques of racism, colonialism, and sexism. In Oryx and Crake for example, human trafficking plays a significant role in the storyline, condemning a world in which anything can be for sale. The character Oryx, who becomes the lover of both the scientific genius Crake and the pathetic protagonist Jimmy, is born in an impoverished village in an unnamed Southeast Asian country and sold to a con artist at an early age by her mother. She enters the lives of Crake and his friend Jimmy as one of the sex workers supplied by the student services division of the prestigious university Crake attends, and is later hired by the scientific prodigy to work in his laboratory. Eventually, Oryx is sent around the world by Crake to promote and distribute the pills he has invented, which she believes to be a combination aphrodisiac and contraceptive. But the pills unleash a deadly epidemic that wipes out most of humankind. A young woman with a Southeast Asian background who serves one man while sleeping with his friend and plays a major part in the destruction of civilization — such a representation runs the risk of reinforcing the image of the subaltern woman as hyper-sexualized, lacking inwardness and the capacity for unconditional loyalty, or reproducing the idea of feminine desire as inherently harmful to the institutions that run civilization. Hicks takes the side of critics who defend Atwood’s decision to ascribe to Oryx characteristics that fit the stereotype of the “exotic Asian woman,” on the grounds that she would not otherwise have been able to expose the economic and social forces at the root of the stereotype itself (41). For Hicks, the character of Oryx serves as the most significant link in the novel between the apocalypse and post-colonialism. She is a victim of the modernity that has colonized the entire globe as well as the agent of apocalypse, evoking the figure of the Whore of Babylon in a revisionary mode.

Hicks’s approach that brings together the critique of colonial modernity and the representation of apocalyptic catastrophe works well for Oryx and Crake, but runs into difficulties with The Road. McCarthy’s novel is similar to Robinson Crusoe in featuring both cannibals and a child who is in need of receiving an education to become properly civilized. But while the preoccupation of the father in finding ways to survive in a harsh and brutal environment recalls the struggles of Defoe’s castaway, Hicks’s reading of the novel does not address the disparity between the endeavor to maintain a hold on civilized ways after civilization has for all intents and purpose met its demise and that of seeking to establish and practice civilized ways while cut off from a civilization that nevertheless continues to exist. While it is the case that the father in The Road and Robinson Crusoe both fear being caught and eaten by cannibals, the barbarism evoked in Defoe’s adventure novel is of a completely different order from the apocalyptic narrative of McCarthy. Hicks notes that the cannibalism practiced by the natives is for Crusoe a marker of their inferiority. Crusoe’s feeling of superiority is a hallmark of the imperialism that brought most of the globe under the rule of the European powers. But the thought that the cannibals in The Road are “inferior” to the father and his son would strike the reader as a most incongruous sentiment. In the post-apocalyptic world of McCarthy’s novel, civilization is fast becoming a dim memory, so viciously have the survivors abandoned all restraint in order to survive. Hicks ascribes the terror of cannibals in The Road to the fear of “barbarism” that arose in the West as a response to the attacks of 9–11, yet a postcolonial approach does not do justice to the theme of the demise of civilization, which would call for insights and concepts drawn from the collapse of civilizations and the ruin of empires.

Would the act of salvaging modernity ultimately restart an historical process that leads inescapably to conquest and colonization? The fear that a salvaged modernity would turn into an imperial modernity arises in Hicks’s reading of Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, a young adult novel set in an impoverished United States, the coastal regions of which have been submerged by the rising seas. The hero, Nailer, is part of a crew that makes a living by scavenging abandoned oil tankers, but over the course of the novel he learns how to read maps and masters the art of sailing. These newfound skills enable him to rescue a girl from a wealthy merchant family who has been taken hostage by her unscrupulous uncle and to join the crew of a clipper owned by the girl’s family. Hicks observes, “Bacigalupi turns to the very origins of modernity as the source of development for Nailer – the craft of seafaring” (150). The clipper ship, the vehicle that takes Nailer to a better life, exemplifies for Hicks a “retromodernity,” in contradistinction to the “petromodernity” of the present era, where the global economy remains dependent on the burning of fossil fuels that increases carbon emissions in the atmosphere. The return of three-masted, wind-powered ships, especially as the setting for the hero’s coming of age, would appear to extol the famous sea voyages with which the modern age commenced – the sea voyages that led to genocide and slavery in the New World. But Hicks insists that “retromodernity” in the novel is at least as “forward-looking” as it is “nostalgic,” in that it corresponds to a “life without oil as an inevitable future that will call on technological innovation and new social formations” (159). She makes this point toward the end of her commentary on the novel, but she does not appear wholly convinced by it either. Indeed, the triumph of Nailer over his tyrannical father has explicitly Oedipal overtones that foreshadow the tragedy to come from the act of liberating one’s self from the world of one’s parents. Modernity, which Hicks admits is the most “unruly” of the terms employed in her study, keeps coming back, perhaps because it has become formidably difficult for us to conceive of freedom and fulfillment apart from its categories.

Yet there is fresh about Hicks’s idea of “retromodernity,” inasmuch as it presents an alternative to the oppressively linear movement that leads from modernity to the dead end of apocalypse, understood in its secular and destructive sense. A cyclical conception of time stands at odds with the linear model of history that, in the words of Elizabeth K. Rosen, reflects a “rigid tyranny of time” (xxiv). In the chapter on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Hicks focuses on the ethical and political possibilities offered by a cyclical understanding of time, one that breaks with the liberal belief in moral and political progress. Mitchell’s novel explores historical recurrence in six interconnected stories set at different points in time, from the 1850s to the distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each of these stories centers on a protagonist who finds himself or herself victimized by hostile forces that are more powerful than him or her. They fight these forces and produce documents of their respective conflicts that influence the characters who appear in the subsequent narratives. The protagonists include a primitive and superstitious farmer named Zachry, who lives on the big island of Hawaii after a nuclear war has destroyed most of civilization, a clone named Sonmi-451, who is likewise a figure from a dystopian future, in her case a totalitarian state formed by the reunification of North and South Korea, vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose story unfolds in the UK of the present, muckraking reporter Luisa Rey from the California of 1975, a musician named Robert Frobisher from the Belgium of 1931, and a notary named Adam Ewing, who travels from Sydney to San Francisco in 1850.

As Hicks points out, the stories that make up Cloud Atlas recount the exploitation and oppression of the weak, who are “poisoned, cuckolded, blackmailed, assaulted, imprisoned, enslaved, and, ultimately, eaten in a system of organized cannibalism” (64). But the connections that the novel draws between the protagonists, who never meet each other but who influence each other through the texts and documents they leave behind, evokes a “solidarity” between victims and rebels across time that would defy the “homogeneous and empty time” that Walter Benjamin famously attributed to historicism (71). The madcap escape of Cavendish from a tyrannical nursing home is made into a film that inspires Sonmi-451 centuries later, while the clone herself becomes worshipped as a goddess by Zachry’s tribe on Hawaii, long after the disintegration of industrial civilization across most of the globe. Luisa Rey listens to the music composed by Frobisher and comes across his letters to his former lover, the scientist who is murdered for trying to expose the dangers posed by a nuclear power plant. Adam Ewing writes a book about his voyage across the Pacific and his journey to becoming an abolitionist, which Frobisher reads while working as a secretary to a famous composer. As Hicks points out, none of these characters is transformed by coming into contact with the writings or artworks produced by their fellow protagonists; rather, these instances of contact are simply part of the culture in which they happen to be immersed. But the unexceptional and undramatic manner in which the novel’s protagonists come into contact with each other serves to reinforce the basic conviction of the novel that “individual acts can become collective historical transformations” (71). The mysterious affinities that inspire resistance to tyranny and struggles for liberation are thus as much a constant in the novel’s idea of history as the injustices they attack.

What some readers will find to be the most challenging part of this argument is Hicks’s reliance on the idea of cyclical history in the work of Mircea Eliade, the influential and controversial scholar of religion who during the 1930s in his native Romania had expressed support for the Iron Guard. For Eliade, the key difference between the mythical view of cyclical time and the modern idea of linear time is that in the former, human beings were capable of finding meaning in catastrophic events and so were better able to endure them. The modern category of history, by contrast, places humans at the mercy of the “blind play of economic, social, or political forces” and prevents them from seeing any “sign” or any “transhistorical meaning” behind “the horrors of history – from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings” (Eliade 151). The cyclical view of history appears to accord wider latitude for human action, in that an act is not the personal gesture of a lonely and isolated ego, but rather an impersonal deed that reaches across identities and across distant expanses of time, drawing on the energies of collective memory. In such an act, the individual renounces her or his significance as an individual in order to tap into the store of meaning that resides in the founding myths of a culture. For Eliade, such potency is proper to a traditional society, whereas modern society is based in part on the repudiation of a historical vision in which predetermined roles matter far more than the freedom exercised by the individual and particularity of his or her identity as an individual. But the paradox here is that Mitchell seeks to press this transhistorical symbolic in the service of an emancipatory politics that centers on an oppressed underdog figure struggling against an oppressive status quo, which is not the same as the traditional hero who purges the corruption in his society by calling for a return to its original principles and whose acts are understood to repeat the gestures of the culture’s founding father.

Mitchell’s emphasis is on resistance rather than on foundation. Central to the novel’s scheme of affinities across historical time is the concept of reincarnation: the main characters are revealed as having the same soul. Progress is no longer identified with civilization but comes to reside in the progressive movement of the soul towards enlightenment across its incarnations. Hicks notes that the antihistoricist approach of Cloud Atlas has the consequence of flattening its characters: “the more audaciously Mitchell plays with literary styles and genres, the less these characters seem like individuals and the more they appear to be the repetitions of archetypes derived from the history of Western literature” (75). Somewhat surprisingly, she does not regard this statement as a criticism of a shortcoming of the novel. Instead, she argues that Mitchell’s use of “literary” and “cultural archetypes” and his “invocation of literary icons” are aimed not at exploring “how individuals can become historical agents in order to derail our momentum toward apocalypse” (75). Rather, the novel seeks to “resist” or defuse the “terror of history” by calling on the reader to “invest” himself or herself in “older, larger stories” (75). But Hicks errs in identifying historicism with the overpowering and stifling presence of archetypes, whereas for Eliade the modern susceptibility to the “terror of history” arises from the modern insistence on liberating itself from archetypes. There is in other words a trade-off between freedom and autonomy on one side and the conviction that historical tragedies and disasters have a transhistorical meaning on the other that Hicks resolves too quickly in her reading of Cloud Atlas. Indeed, Hicks misses the bitter irony in Eliade’s comparison of an imagined “anhistorical” society of the future, which would prohibit in spiritually suffocating ways the “making of history” as such, with the “myth of the golden age” (Eliade 154, qtd. Hicks 60).

Hicks deserves credit for breaking into politically provocative and intellectually promising territory by taking up the work of Eliade, whose work, in spite of his reactionary political affiliations, merits greater attention today in light of the sociopolitical malaise that has overtaken the liberal West and the resurgence of militant religion as well as the more recent rise of populist nationalism. Eliade’s speculation regarding the possibility of a “desperate attempt” to “prohibit” historical events, which would include not only wars of conquest but also revolutions, presents a fruitful way of viewing the insistence of the capitalist Right that “there is no alternative to free market capitalism” as well as Francis Fukuyama’s version of the end of history (Eliade 153). Eliade’s prediction anticipates Jean Baudrillard’s point that Islamist terrorism and the futile state response against it constitute the “violence of a society in which conflict is virtually banned and death forbidden” (94). Hicks’s study of post-apocalyptic literature is an important contribution to the scholarly work on the genre. It compares well with recent studies, such as Elizabeth K. Rosen’s Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination and Andrew Tate’s Apocalyptic Fiction, though like the latter it suffers somewhat from its brevity. Hicks’s focus on modernity in the fictions of apocalypse provides a rigorous vantage point from which to study the genre, and it should serve as a fruitful springboard to studies of work that have not received the attention they deserve, such as George Stewart’s Earth Abides and James Howard Kunstler’s cycle of peak oil novels.

Works Cited

• Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Anchor, 2003.
• Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 2003.
• Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. Translated by Willard Trask, Princeton UP, 2005.
• McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
• Rosen, Elizabeth K. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lexington, 2008.
• Tate, Andrew. Apocalyptic Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2017.