Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

9: Ordinary Catastrophes: Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions

9 Ordinary Catastrophes Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions christoPher Palmer Send me, sir, a few trifles to read, but nothing about the prophets: everything they predicted I assume to have happened already. Madame du Deffand to Voltaire In a recent essay, Perry Anderson offers a parable that reflects on the novel as a form. He tells how Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Moretti paused before a Vermeer painting with a lucid depiction of everyday life and proclaimed, “That is the beginning of the novel”: In other words, a narrative of ordinary people in a familiar setting—neither epic nor tragedy. Ginzburg then spun around to a portrait by Rembrandt on the opposite wall, of the disfigured painter Gerard de Lairesse, his nose disfigured by syphilis, and retorted: “No, that is the beginning of the novel.” In other words, the anomaly, not the rule.1 The implication is that the novel exists in a constant tension and dialogue between the everyday and the anomalous; the present chapter examines a medley of inventive recent post-apocalyptic fiction in the light of this tension. Postapocalyptic fiction throws both the everyday and the anomalous into uncertainty , but in this uncertainty new ways of controlling or even defeating the fear of apocalypse become available. Apocalypse is by definition exceptional and fearful, yet imagining apocalypse is a pervasive cultural habit; often through its valuing ordinary decency, contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction interrogates 159 O rdi nary C atas tr O p he s| pal m e r the nature of “the ordinary” in a situation in which the ordinary is itself in question and ordinary decency often turns out to be itself anomalous. What is everyday, what is ordinary or normal, is thrown into doubt after the apocalypse, when social forms all have to be reestablished or reimagined. Language struggles to bridge, or paper over, the gap, seeking to normalize the new but often simply banalizing it. And if what is normal is in question, so too is what is anomalous. After a glance at Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, published in 1971, this chapter traces these considerations through three more recent novels, Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and China Miéville’s Kraken (2010). In what follows, discussion concentrates on a series of figures who present themselves as ordinary—often in contrast to exceptional figures of power and violence—yet whose ordinariness turns out to be distinctly and even spectacularly extraordinary. It is a tendency that no doubt follows from the democratic desire to find heroism in ordinary people, narratively released when the fiction embraces the comic—but this tension takes a paradoxical and problematic form in the texts under discussion. Narratives of apocalypse form a tradition that frequently degrades into routine. Nuclear disaster and ecological collapse are too important to be ignored—in fact they cannot be ignored because they haunt us in their demand not merely for emotional and imaginative response, but for action. But nuclear disaster and ecological collapse (and their many siblings regarding possible catastrophe) are easily drawn upon through reliable images and appeals. Brian Stableford has argued that the nuclear gloom of the 1950s gave us the sense that the future is “a kind of continuing catastrophe”2 ; if so, recent waves of unease about ecology and about Earth’s future will have surely reinforced this. Yet, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. notes with regard to SF during the 1950s and 1960s, “the enthusiasm with which sf writers wiped the slate of civilization clean to construct postapocalyptic scenarios struck many as unseemly.”3 Apocalypse threatens to become cliché because we have lived with it too long; its imagery and its impressive effects are too readily available. Textually speaking, we face not “the end,” but “the endings,” as Miéville explores in Kraken, where people have become “endsick.”4 The catastrophe as an event so devastating that it ought to be unique in fact has dozens and dozens of precedents and variants. It is both anticipated and déjà. There is, then, some cultural need for skepticism, if not about the real threat of disaster then about our habit of imagining it. Yet the habit of apocalypse also opens opportunities: if apocalypse is dreamed, 160 Brav e Ne w wo rl ds & l aNds o f...