Apocalyptic Allegories and Post-Apocalyptic Utopias: Saramago’s A Caverna and Sánchez and Pita’s Lunar Braceros

The twenty-first century has witnessed a planet in crisis. Seemingly every day, new life-ending disasters threaten existence in local and global contexts. As startling reflection, as incisive critique, apocalyptic art has resurged in what jessica hurley and dan sinykin call a “privileged form for engaging the central aesthetic-political problems of our time: crises that feel like they exceed human scale, human agency, human understanding.”¹ The two novels that I discuss in this essay—josé saramago’s A Caverna (2000; The Cave [2002]) and rosaura sánchez and beatrice pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2009)—are works of apocalyptic science fiction (sf) that depict crisis and catastrophe on regional and planetary scales.² Although both novels imagine futures on the brink of ruin, their images of environmental and social collapse function as allegories for utopian renewal and transformation. As charles m. tung, andrew tate, and sharae deckard (among other scholars) have observed, apocalyptic art can turn solipsistically inward, generating nothing more than “visions of the end of the world.”³ But in other works, and in particular those created from within or about culturally marginalized communities forced daily to resist cataclysmic realities, apocalypse often figures as a “disruption which enables the re-emergence of utopia as desire and future.”⁴ A Caverna and Lunar Braceros are apocalyptic in this latter sense. saramago’s apocalyptic visions dialogue continually with his experiences during and after the salazar dictatorship in Portugal, and sánchez and pita’s work returns to Latin American and Latinx histories of (resisted) oppression to reimagine the present and the future.⁵ Both novels are allegories of constantly imperiled but never extinguished utopian hope.

That is, the imagery of disaster in A Caverna and Lunar Braceros functions allegorically not as an emblem of hopelessness but as a symbol for the dire need to re-create society as it currently exists. The novels are less about ruined futures or alternative presents (although those are foregrounded in their narratives) than they are ultimately concerned with the “imaginary reconstitution of society,” the key function of utopia according to Ruth Levitas.⁶ It is a utopian longing for a better world that compels the protagonists of Saramago’s novel, the Algor family, to flee the “Centro” [Center]: a microcosm of global capital that has ravaged the unnamed town and surrounding countryside where Cipriano Algor lives with his daughter and her husband. No less than Saramago, Sánchez and Pita have scripted a novel that transforms an apocalyptic future into a locus of “utopian energy,” into a “space that makes other sorts of world imagination possible.”⁷ Set in the twenty-second century, Lunar Braceros contrasts the ecological and political havoc that the reckless “accumulation of capital” has wreaked on the Americas, the planet, and the moon with the potentially world-changing resistance of the novel’s principal characters: Lydia, one of the eponymous “lunar braceros,” and her teenage son Pedro.⁸ Sánchez, Pita, and Saramago revitalize—in ways that accord with and build on Hurley’s and Sinykin’s call for a “revaluation of apocalypse”—the world-transforming and revelatory aesthetics of apocalypse in allegorical form.⁹ Foregrounding the allegorical dimensions of apocalyptic art allows for apocalypse as an aesthetic (and, in this essay, specifically as a literary genre) to be reconsidered in ways that emphasize its long history and contemporary development into a sociopolitical art form and hermeneutic of the present. A Caverna and Lunar Braceros engage that history at the same time as they exemplify the interpretive and literary significance of apocalyptic allegories in the twenty-first century.

This essay develops its argument for the revitalization of allegorical critique as a means to uncover and decipher forms of utopian hope within apocalyptic sf through a contrapuntal reading of A Caverna and Lunar Braceros, a comparison that juxtaposes Latinx and Portuguese texts (emerging from literary traditions that historically have been underrepresented in studies of apocalypse) to emphasize the cross-cultural and multilingual dimensions of apocalyptic literature.¹⁰ Apocalypse, a...