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Introduction : Modernity Beyond Salvage

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Introduction : Modernity Beyond Salvage Notes Introduction : Modernity beyond Salvage 1. For more on Crusoe as a “sole survivor,” see Stafford 56–82. For a discussion of Defoe’s pioneering role in the development of adventure fiction, see Cohen 59–98. 2. For a concise discussion of the post-apocalyptic aspects of postmodern thought, see Germanà and Mousoutzanis, “Introduction” 3–4. 3. For a discussion of postmodernity as “one moment within the long history of modernity,” see Felski 60. Beck also suggested this understanding of postmo- dernity in the 1980s when he wrote, “[T]he counter-modernistic scenario currently upsetting the world—new social movements and criticism of sci- ence, technology and progress—does not stand in contradiction of modernity, but is rather and expression of reflexive modernization beyond the outlines of industrial society” (11). 4. For an analysis of salvage in contemporary apocalyptic culture that is focused more exclusively on political economy, see Evan Calder Williams’s call for the development of a “salvagepunk” movement in Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (14–71). Interestingly, Williams and his collaborator, China Miéville, disavowed this “attempt to think lost social relations via relations to discarded objects” a year later at the launch for the book, claiming that as a social formation salvagepunk had already been co-opted by capitalism (Williams 62; Williams and Miéville). 5. Wagar defines “secular eschatology” as “a worldly study of world’s ends that ignores religious belief or puts the old visions to use as metaphors for modern anxiety” (4). Wagar’s chronology of this modern form of apocalyptic narrative begins somewhat later, with texts of the early nineteenth century, including Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man: Or, Omegarus and Syderia, a Romance in Futurity (1805) and Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). 6. This claim gains support from Germanà and Mousoutzani’s recent observation that “one of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary understandings and representations of the apocalypse is their relationship with modernity” (4). 7. According to Aldiss, “The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the tak- ing) while everyone else is dying off” (294). Mick Broderick has identified a similar, if broader, trend in science fiction cinema. Broderick traces an increas- ing movement toward “highly reactionary” plot lines in post-apocalyptic films, 174 Notes beginning in the 1950s and intensifying dramatically by the 1980s. According to Broderick, these films “articulate a desire for (if not celebrate) the fantasy of nuclear Armageddon as the anticipated war which will annihilate the oppressive burdens of post(modern) life and usher in the nostalgically yearned-for less complex existence of agrarian toil and social harmony through ascetic spiritual endeavors” (362). 8. Although all of these texts have enjoyed at least some critical attention, no study has yet been produced that examines this complete corpus and its collective engagement with postmodern poetics and politics. 9. A number of critics, including Leigh, Berger, and Heffernan, focus primarily on major writers, including Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Salman Rushdie, who include apocalyptic symbolism and allusions in their texts. Other critics, such as Rosen and Buell, consider both major literary figures and pop cultural depictions of apocalyptic events. Williams and Paik occupy the other extreme, looking exclusively at popular narratives and films. 10. Other important writers who have contributed to this literary trend include Will Self (The Book of Dave, 2006), Jim Crace (The Pesthouse, 2007), Marcel Theroux (Far North, 2009), Douglas Coupland (Player One, 2010), China Miéville (Railsea, 2012), Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles, 2012), Chang-Rae Lee (On Such a Full Sea, 2014), and Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, 2014). 11. For an instance of Hoberek’s recent work on the influence of genre fiction on twenty-first-century fiction, see his review of Zone One, “Living with PASD.” 12. Post-apocalypse is the term of choice for Berger and Heffernan; “neo- apocalypse,” “crypto-apocalypse,” and “counter-apocalypse” are three of many terms Catherine Keller coins, and which I discuss in chapter one; “ana- apocalypse” is Laurent Milesi’s term, which is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novels, in which Milesi claims, “No, Apocalypse has not (yet) taken place— Now—it will (not) have (yet) taken place . .; no apocalypse, but rather a (pre/post) ana-apocalypse, a necessarily constant rehearsal, repetition and working through of revelation between ‘to die’ and ‘to be reborn’” (224); Lee Quimby defines “ironic apocalypse” as “the dystopian view that history has exhausted itself,” and “[t]he irony is that we live on beyond morality or meaning” (xvi); Quimby explains that “one version of technological apoca- lypse regards technology as a threat leading to an inevitable end, but this mode is more often accompanied by the possibility of thwarting the trajec- tory of destruction” (xix); meanwhile, for Quimby “anti-apocalypse” is an “invocation to struggle against apocalypse, to know its logic, to say no to its insistence on an inevitable end necessary for a new order, its infatuation with doom, its willingness to witness cruelty in the name of righteous justice, and its belief in an elect with access to absolute truth” (xxii); according to Evan Calder Williams, “capitalist apocalypse is the possibility of grasping how the global economic order and its social relations depend upon the production and exploitation of the undifferentiated, of those things which cannot be included in the realm of the openly visible without rupturing the very Notes 175 oppositions that make the whole enterprise move forward” (8); eco-critic Frederick Buell explores “slow apocalypse,” which he explains “means that one has already entered (or perhaps is already well into) a time when [nature’s] limits have been breached and the risks from disequilibrium are rising” (105); and Richard Dellamora, after Jonathan Boyarin, characterizes “post- modern apocalypse” as “endtime-without-judgment” (5). 13. Jack London already anticipated this potential loss of global communication shortly after new technologies had made it possible. In his 1912 post- apocalyptic novella, The Scarlet Plague, his narrator recalls the effects of the sweeping contagion: “It was amazing, astounding, this loss of communication with the world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted out. For sixty years that world has no longer existed for me. I know there must be such places as New York, Europe, Asia, and Africa; but not one word has been heard of them—not in sixty years. With the coming of the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. Ten thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an eye, ‘lapsed like foam’” (20). 14. See, for instance, Randall’s discussion of We as an “anti-utopia” that captures “a sort of singular Bolshevik utopian rigor mortis” (xi–xii). 15. According to Zamora, “The resurgence of apocalyptic modes of thought and expression is a predictable reaction to social disruption and temporal uncer- tainty” (11). Similarly, Rosen observes, “Apocalyptic literature has tradition- ally been written to comfort people whose lives are, or who perceive their lives to be, overwhelmed by historical or social disruption” (xii). 16. For a fascinating overview of eschatological worldviews stretching from ancient India and China through prehistoric and classical Greece, see Wagar 33–41. 17. Atwood writes “I’d been clipping small items [about science] from the back pages of newspapers for years, and noting with alarm that trends derided ten years ago as paranoid fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities” (“Writing Oryx and Crake” 322). She continues that, after 9/11 took place midway through her writing process, she stopped working on the novel for a short period and considered writing gardening books instead, “But then I started writing again, because what use would gardening books be in a world without gardens, and without books? And that was the vision that was preoccupying me” (322). Mitchell, meanwhile, has observed that a major theme in Cloud Atlas is “predation,” stating, “Individuals preying on groups; groups preying on individuals; corporations preying on other branches within society; tribes preying on other tribes” (as quoted in Leith). He has also noted the novel’s interest in the fact that “[w]hat made us successful in Darwinian terms—our skill at manipulating our environment—now threat- ens to wipe us out as a species” (Mitchell, “The Art of Fiction”). In very different terms, McCarthy, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, described imagining having a bleak vision of the future for his young son with “every- thing being laid waste.” Whitehead cites the importance of genre fiction in inspiring his conception of Zone One, explaining, “Growing up devouring 176 Notes horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel” (Whitehead, “Colson Whitehead on Zombies”). 18. For a summary of how cyclical and linear eschatologies served as different vessels of social and political criticism, see Wagar 54. Rosen observes that, “The apocalyptic genre, at least in its religious incarnation, is usually written by and for the discontented, and often for a minority that is profoundly alienated by its powerless position” (xii). 19. For two compelling treatments of the intersections of postcolonial history and politics with current debates about how to avoid an environmental catas- trophe from anthropogenic climate change, see Chakrabarty and Nixon. 20. Benét, who first published “By the Waters of Babylon” in the Saturday Evening Post in 1937 under the title “The Place of the Gods,” may enjoy little name recognition today, but Wagar argues that his “influence on post- war American speculative fiction was considerable” (164).
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