Literature and the Apocalypse

One of Foucault’s most controversial claims was that our notion of man and all that it includes is merely a product of the modern epistemic epoch, which he says is on the decline. While humanism declared man the creator of discourse and science, Foucault maintains that ‘we do not produce science, it produces us’. ¹ It can be said, then, that the science that once constructed us is now dismantling us.

‘Foucault announces that the famous era of the death of God, ushered in by Nietzsche and the existentialists, is now being superceded by a new era whose signal achievement is the death of Man‘. ² Foucault says in The Order of Things that man is a recent invention, and is approaching his end.

Eco and Derrida both bemoan the end of the library:

Both…[grieve] retrospectively for the end of the human project, incomplete and with potential unrealised, mourning that at time’s end no-one will be present to read/construct the text… It is a nostalgia simultaneously critiqued and embraced in Eco’s popular metafiction. The flames that engulf the labyrinthine, medieval monastery of The Name of the Rose, simultaneously devouring and extinguishing the accumulated knowledge of millennia, are identical to those which devastated Alexandria’s ancient repository. However, in the former, the tongues of flame licking at forbidden manuscripts are fuelled by the predeterministic mania of prophetic eschatology. A crazed, blind monk torches the archive and self-immolates in a frenzy of denial, preferring to destroy one heretical tome rather than witness its influence (and pleasure) spread. ³

If mankind were wiped out but the earth remained intact, however, it has been said by scientists that some of our largest man-made structures – the Hoover Dam and the Great Wall of China, for example – would still be evidence for our existence 10,000 years on. ⁴

Man has, for centuries, been fascinated with his end. The subject of the apocalypse transcends man’s curiosity regarding his own personal demise, as it incorporates the demise of the entire species. Apocalyptic literature has been around in various forms for quite some time, with the Old Testament story of Noah and the Ark is a prime example of an apocalyptic event which occurs in the hopes of ushering in a better post-apocalyptic world.  However, the beginning of fictional apocalyptic discourse as we know it is usually attributed to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

Apocalyptic discourse communicates both a sense of a nihilistic destruction and of a sort of rebirth. It usually follows the Judeo-Christian tradition of a series of events predicted by a prophet-figure, that radically break up the linear movement of time, initiating a new era that is often beyond the limitations of time. The Book of Revelation implies that, following the ultimate battle between good and evil (which good will inevitably win), the elect will exist in bliss and God will live among his people in the ‘New Jerusalem’. In fact most literature and film dealing with the subject of the apocalypse ends on a somewhat hopeful note. Most Apocalyptic fiction nowadays takes on the form of a somewhat ‘cosy catastrophe’ in which the world comes to an end and all of humanity perishes, save for a handful of survivors, usually including a docile dog (e.g. Dr Neville’s pet German Shepherd in I Am Legend; Jasmine and Stephen’s pet dog in Independence Day), who then rebuild their version of civilization. In the film version of I Am Legend, the protagonist Dr Robert Neville takes on the Messianic, Christ-like role by sacrificing himself to allow Anna to escape with the cure, which eventually enables humanity to survive. In Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending is left ambiguous; the more optimistic reader will assume that Offred was rescued as she was able to make tapes describing her experience.

[W]hat sets apart [our time] from earlier artistic renderings of visions of the end, is that the means for accomplishing Armageddon is no longer in the realm of prophetic mythology. Technologically, our species has been capable of destroying itself by its own hand for decades – either through thermonuclear conflagration or chemical/bacteriological warfare – which could come instantaneously and unannounced at any time. ⁵

Furthermore, there has always been the fear that our own creations (namely robots and computers) will turn against us, and this will eventually lead to our end. One such example is the HAL computer in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. When astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole question HAL’s reliability and agree to disconnect it, HAL is reading their lips. HAL kills Frank and three ‘hibernating’ crew members before Dave succeeds in disconnecting it. It is not uncommon for humanity to fear technology and regard it as a threat: it is definitely not a coincidence that in the ‘ape’ sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, violence directly follows the invention of tools fashioned out of bones.

The Book of Revelation tells us that the day of reckoning will come like a ‘thief’ in the ‘fullness of time’.  If Foucault was right and the era of man is coming to an end, then surely we must be close to that end.  This kind of logic has been present for centuries: innately fearing the end, man will try and ‘predict’ when it will happen:

Looking back over the gospels, we can point to a certain number of signs which Jesus presents as harbingers of the end of time: there will be wars an earthquakes, signs in the heavens, the powers of the heavens shall be shaken, men shall be in anguish, evil will be widespread. Even Jesus asks: ‘Will there still be faith on earth?’ But he points out in another place that ‘this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world… And then shall the end come’ (Matthew 24:14). This was one of the reasons why Christopher Columbus was certain that he was living in the last age of the world when he discovered America, because the gospel was going to be proclaimed to peoples who, up till then, had been unknown. ⁶

…throughout history, the people of the West have not stopped interpreting the extraordinary or dramatic events of their own time as signs of the end of the world…[e]specially particularly tragic happenings – the outbreaks of plague, the great schism of the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, the wars of religion – all of which have been thought to be signs of the end of the world. Without doubt these dramatic events have been seen through the prism of apocalyptic literature. People found no difficulty in believing that these eschatological ‘days of reckoning’…were imminent. ⁷

The Christians believe, nonetheless, that the Book of Revelation ‘is a book of consolation as well as of hope.’ ⁸ Delumeau describes the apocalypse as a sort of transitioning from time into eternity, and remarks that this is a positive event, marking an ‘emerging from darkness and entering into the light of total revelation… What, in the Christian terms of any age, is heavenly bliss, if not seeing God ‘face to face’? … for the believer, the journey, whether tortuous or not, ends in absolute and perfect bliss.’ ⁹

This philosophy certainly does not lend itself to posthumanism.  Of course, as I mentioned earlier, much of our apocalyptic fiction is based on the Biblical Armageddon; yet if all people had a faith as deep as Delumeau’s appears to be, there would certainly be no place for a terror of the apocalyptic and what follows it.  Frye’s philosophy, although less literal and more literary, also does not lend itself to negativity:

For Frye, ‘spiritual’ always centrally means ‘metaphorical,’ and the metaphors employed in apocalyptic texts constitute ‘a form of imaginative comprehension.’ Beyond this, Frye would regard the condemnation of any text because it is filed with ‘rattling skeletons of satiric hypotheses’ as senseless [Frye's response to critic Robert Alter] because, from his point of view, literature is hypothesis, and his understanding of mimesis is of a more visionary and radical sort. For Frye, mimesis entails not an imitation of nature, but ‘an emancipation of externality into image, nature into art.’… the anagogic phase in which this emancipation… of nature is most obvious… is [the] phase that Frye specifically associates with apocalypse… ‘This is not reality, but it is the conceivable, or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate.’ ¹⁰

Then where does the fear come from?  We are certainly not luddites: we sit at our computers without any fear of it rising up to take over the world.  However, we might be as nervous as the next person that one day we might take our curiosity too far and accidentally create a sort of Frankenstein monster.  Somehow, literature and film seem to be our venting space: by creating a world of endless possibilities, it becomes okay for us to express our fears and slight technophobia. What we seem to be afraid of is the demise of the human spirit.  In this, Eco and Derrida were not off the mark.  Reality seems to take on a shade of science-fiction as time goes by: cloning, robots, even a computer on which one can allegedly upload his or her mind and live on in mechanical form.  Even Jonathan Swift was suspicious of technology.  In Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver travels from one island to another, meeting strange groups of people who are all dreaming up ways by which they can create utopias with the help of technology.  Needless to say, what they create are dystopias.  Dickens’s Hard Times with its ‘dark, satanic mills’ also paints a terrifying picture of technology.  The sense that technology may suppress the human spirit – which we may forget is what is most important – is found in several works of literature, such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the telescreens remove all privacy from people’s lives and become a variation on the Panopticon (isn’t only God meant to be omniscient?); Zamyatin’s We, where instead of by name, people are known by serial number in order to dehumanize them; Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are prescribed drugs by the state, babies are made in laboratories, and love is unheard of.

All these add to the view that humanism and technology are poles apart and irreconcilable.  We are, by nature, petrified of being reduced to code.  The paradox is that curiosity is human nature, and by delving deeper and putting ourselves in the position of ‘creator’, we are simply following what we are ‘programmed’ to do.

Endnotes

¹ Kearney, Richard, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) p. 285.

² ibid. p. 285.

³ Broderick, Mick, ‘The Rupture of Rapture: Recent Film Narratives of Apocalypse’, in Southern Review, Volume 27 No. 1, March 1994, <http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/~mickbrod/postmodm/m/text/rupture.html>.

⁴ Life After People 10,000 years after, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzZmkQT-lv8&feature=related>.

⁵ Broderick, Mick, ‘The Rupture of Rapture: Recent Film Narratives of Apocalypse’.

⁶ Delumeau, Jean, Conversations About the End of Time, ed. by Catherine David, Frederic Lenoir and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, trans. by Ian Maclean and Roger Pearson ([n.p]: Penguin Books, 2000), p.67.

⁷ ibid p.67.

⁸ ibid p.70.

⁹ ibid p.50.

¹⁰ Robson, David, ‘Frye, Derrida, Pynchon, and the Apocalyptic Space of Postmodern Fiction’, in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. by Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 70-71.

References

Bowman, Donna, ‘The Gnostic Illusion: Problematic Realized Eschatology in The Matrix Reloaded’, in Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Volume IV, 2003 <http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art4-matrixreloaded-print.html>

Broderick, Mick, ‘The Rupture of Rapture: Recent Film Narratives of Apocalypse’, in Southern Review, Volume 27 No. 1 (March 1994) <http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/~mickbrod/postmodm/m/text/rupture.html>

Delumeau, Jean, Conversations About the End of Time, ed. by Catherine David, Frederic Lenoir and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, trans. by Ian Maclean and Roger Pearson ([n.p]: Penguin Books, 2000)

Kearney, Richard, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994)

Robson, David, ‘Frye, Derrida, Pynchon, and the Apocalyptic Space of Postmodern Fiction’, in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. by Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)

Life After People 10,000 years after <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzZmkQT-lv8&feature=related>

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