REVIEW-ESSAY
Peter Y. Paik
The Fiction of Belief
Andrew Tate. Apocalyptic Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 185 pp. $29.95 pbk.
The return of nature, the return of barbarism, the return of superstition, the return of history, the return of chaos—today’s apocalyptic fiction typically stages the revival of some forgotten or repressed element of human existence that manifests itself in the wake of the collapse of industrial civilization. The victims of this return of the repressed are by now quite familiar: representative government, the rule of law, economic abundance, and the other institutions and socioeconomic structures responsible for making available a stable middle-class lifestyle to the broad majority of the inhabitants of the First World. Post-apocalyptic literature and media depict possible futures, the key features of which recall the pre-modern past. The collapse of political structures means a descent into anarchy and tribalism or a reversion to older, harsher, and crueler forms of rule, if some form of government still manages to carry on. Economic life is also no longer what it once was, as the survivors of the apocalyptic cataclysm are depicted as being reduced to a subsistence-level existence scavenging the refuse of a once-glittering consumer economy. Finally, beliefs that were once considered to be thoroughly oppressive or even alarmingly sinister make a comeback in the form of cults composed of survivors who have been shaken to the roots by the destruction of their former ways of life.
The post-apocalyptic imagination thus appears to be fascinated by questions of a fundamentally anthropological nature. The fiction of apocalypse seeks to envision what modern human beings might become if the complex and fragile structures on which modern society depends were to come crashing down around them. An insistent curiosity about this question leads the creators of apocalyptic literature to cultivate a sense of historical consciousness, both for the sake of creating a future that strikes the reader as believable and for the purpose of identifying the human attributes and traits that would emerge and flourish in the aftermath of a catastrophic upheaval. For Andrew Tate, a concern for historical consciousness shapes his reading of a series of novels that have become well-known works of post-apocalyptic speculation. In Apocalyptic Fiction he takes on such prominent contemporary novels as Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (2011), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), The Pesthouse by Jim Crace (2007), and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series (2008, 2009, 2010). In these works the imaginative leap into the future appears to involve the return of beliefs and practices from the distant past. Implicit in the motif of the destruction of the existing order is of course the endeavor to create a new way of life whereby the survivors find ways to adapt to a radically transformed world and environment. Adaptation to the post-apocalyptic world runs the gamut from joining a violent gang of survivors that hunts and eats other human beings to protecting the young and vulnerable from these terrors to recovering the cultural treasures of a vanished civilization. But the effort to imagine a post-apocalyptic existence and its horrors also reveals a search for hope, something that we can trust to help us find a way out of our own predicament precisely because it will have arisen under extreme conditions.
The question of belief looms large in Tate’s readings of these works. The opening chapter of the study is dedicated to a pair of novels that deal with the biblical flood. Both bear the identical title of The Flood, and both were published in 2004. While one reimagines the story of Noah and his family, the other is set in a contemporary London that is sinking into the sea; both novels, in Tate’s view, mount critiques of the violent forms of religiosity that cause believers to delight in the sufferings and deaths of unbelievers. In The Flood by David Maine (published in the US as The Preservationist), the daughter-in-law of Noe (as Noah is called in the novel) is anguished by the drowning of humankind, but finds more horrifying the “jubilation” of the patriarch at the spectacle. Maggie Gee’s novel likewise features a zealot who leads an apocalyptic sect that eagerly looks forward to the punishment God will mete out to the unbelieving. Father Bruno, leader of the cult known as One Way, promises to unify Judaism, Christianity, and Islam under his umbrella, but he acts in a brutal fashion, condemning those who reject his message and persecuting those within his own ranks who come to doubt his teachings. Apocalypse, or the yearning for divine intervention, is associated in both novels with extremist and exclusionary forms of belief that are widely blamed for spreading strife and violence across the globe. Indeed, Tate’s concluding passage in this chapter conflates the unflinching engagement of these novels with the violence and cruelty contained in the biblical story with the effort to “critique the injustices of the present” (41). Such a claim, however, sidesteps the likelihood that it is authoritarian and illiberal belief systems—systems that confront people with the stark choice between being one of the saved and being one of the damned—that have been on the side of human survival across the centuries. Indeed, the persistence of the Bible, as a record of the catastrophes and tribulations suffered by the Jewish people and as a text that has endured across periods of civilizational collapse, would indicate that the intense and binding forms of religiosity denounced today as fundamentalist might actually be the most resilient elements of religion, more durable than its liberal and tolerant manifestations.
Cults also play a major role in Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, which is set in a world where two percent of the population has vanished into thin air in a manner akin to the Christian fundamentalist idea of the Rapture. But there appears to be no rhyme or reason behind the disappearances—atheists as well as believers have vanished, as well as the old and the young, the peaceful and the violent, and the dissolute and the disciplined. The main characters are the members of a suburban New Jersey family who try in different ways to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of what becomes known as the “sudden departure.” The father, Kevin, becomes the hardworking and benevolent mayor of the town, ever mindful of the grief that has overtaken the community, while the mother, Laurie, joins a cult called the Guilty Remnant, which is bent on reminding people of the divine power at work in causing the mass disappearances by silently following and observing various residents around town. The members of the Guilty Remnant renounce the comforts of middle-class life and break their ties to family and friends. They dress in white, smoke cigarettes, and travel in pairs, no longer communicating by speech but by writing messages on little notepads. Although they appear at first to be a harmless nuisance constantly at risk of being assaulted by the people they follow, this cult is revealed at the end to be practicing a form of human sacrifice: if a pair becomes too attached, one partner is asked to kill the other.
Tate’s reading of the novel unfortunately does not engage as fully as it might with the significance of the cult in the post-Rapture world. His conviction that authoritarianism is irredeemably bad causes him to overlook the ways in which violent practices such as human sacrifice can satisfy deep human needs, especially in times of upheaval. The Leftovers may emphasize the quotidian aspects of middle-class life even as it evokes a spiritual predicament of a fantastic nature, but Tate does not address the uncanny proximity of the world of the novel to the real world, the world of our present, in which increasing numbers of people feel as though something vital has gone missing inside them. This sense of emptiness might be related to the populist backlash behind the election of Donald Trump, or the opioid epidemic, or the generalized feeling of helplessness about the catastrophes one senses at the doorstep. Tate’s efforts to root the novel in events in America’s recent history, such as the siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco and the attacks of 9/11, come across as ephemeral gestures that fail to grapple with how deeply and fundamentally the United States has changed during the past decade and a half. Perrotta’s novel registers these drastic changes in its depiction of responsible, progressive, and competent people making a radical break from their formerly orderly and disciplined middle-class lives. What sparks the desire for authoritarian beliefs is a process of spiritual hollowing out that is the common feature of both the fictional post-Rapture world and our own world. Tate notes that the novel ends with a “different kind of … apocalypse, one in which new life is celebrated” (60). But what makes Perrotta’s novel an outstanding and exceptional work of contemporary fiction is its convincing depiction of how the members of the Garvey family recover their desire to go on living in the aftermath of calamity.
Tate is on much firmer ground in his chapter on Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy. In this section of the study, he works out a cluster of ideas that would have helped him immensely in the readings contained in the two previous chapters. In the first novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), the human species is nearly wiped out by a pandemic concealed in a pill marketed as a combination aphrodisiac and contraceptive. The scientist who invented the pill has also engineered a new type of humanoid that he believes will live in harmony with the natural world, rather than exploiting and destroying it the way human beings have. The Crakers have been designed to be free from “sexual jealousy, greed, clothing, and the need for insect repellent and animal protein,” but they nevertheless develop an insatiable curiosity to learn about their origins (xiii). As Tate points out, a major theme of the trilogy is the relationship between story-telling and religious belief. The persistence, or return, of symbolic thinking among entities who have been specifically designed not to create art or venerate gods reveals a hope and faith in the power of story-telling to enable human beings to find meaning and insight even after the collapse of their civilization. This chapter makes the intriguing point that literature is what can bring the agnostic into contact with the experience of religious belief. If it is the “fundamentalist” forms of religion that have endured across history, it would appear that they owe their evolutionary success in no small measure to the aesthetic dimension.
The subsequent chapter deserves to be singled out for the originality of Tate’s approach to two novels set in nightmarish, post-apocalyptic worlds, McCarthy’s The Road and Crace’s The Pesthouse. Here he takes up the case for walking as an emancipatory and moral activity made by Frédéric Gros, Henry David Thoreau, and Rebecca Solnit. Walking, for Gros, is a form of “micro-liberation” from an all-pervasive consumer society, while Solnit praises walking as a medium of political dissent and as a repudiation of the wasteful culture of the automobile (83, 87). Before them, Thoreau made the case for walking as a means of cultivating freedom and independence, in stark contrast to the inactivity imposed on shopkeepers and tradesmen by commerce. But can these conceptions of walking as a politically and psychically liberating practice that enables one to break free of the status quo be meaningful with respect to novels of the apocalypse in which the main characters, having been reduced to scavenging for survival, are forced to walk because they have no other form of transportation? In The Road, some unnamed catastrophe, perhaps a nuclear war or asteroid strike, has left behind a scorched and barren earth in which no vegetation can grow. In this bleak and accursed landscape, human beings have been reduced to eating each other for lack of nourishment. But Tate probes beyond the gruesome imagery and unrelievedly grim tone of the novel to note the frequency with which the verb “walk” appears in it. The ordinary activity of walking, he argues, takes on the resonances of an “embodied prayer, a discreet rebellion against the temptations of despair” (90). The references to walking give the novel a constant and steady rhythm that summons the very future which the bleakness of its descriptions appears to rule out. Indeed, the hopeful ending of the novel is made credible by virtue of a movement that takes on a life of its own, continuing onwards even after the devoted father has died and taken leave of his young son.
The question of mobility in an America that has lost faith in a constantly improving future shapes Tate’s analysis of The Pesthouse, in which the characters traverse a likewise ruined United States from coast to coast. His attention shifts in the final chapter of the book toward a group of young-adult novels that also explore the loss of the belief in progress: The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner (2009), and Divergent (2011). But unlike The Pesthouse or The Road, in which the characters traverse great geographic expanses, the protagonists of these works are often confined to sharply defined milieus in which their freedom is curtailed or suppressed by an authoritarian power. These novels are notable not only for the ways in which they mix the genres of the bildungsroman and the dystopia, but also for their popular success, raising the question of whether they are “quietly conformist fables disguised as rebellious social critiques” (106). Indeed, the success of the protagonists in these novels in brutal competitions where the losers often suffer death would appear to affirm an ethics of individualism, although these works conflate the process of becoming a “self-governing subject” with freeing oneself from the control of an authoritarian or totalitarian government. Tate’s reading of The Hunger Games in particular takes a broadly affirmative view of its politics, which is then followed by an overview of the arguments of the critics who maintain that the trilogy is in fact more conservative than critical. The chapter then finds a synthesis of sorts in Katha Pollitt’s summation that the series can support both left-wing and right-wing interpretations. Tate, however, does not build on this point in a satisfying manner, as it could be the very availability of the text to multiple interpretations that marks it as a mainstream cultural product.
Apocalyptic Fiction is a worthy contribution to the body of literary criticism devoted to the genre, but it is unfortunately marred by its brevity. Tate covers a wide range of secondary literature, yet his readings of the novels are too brief, often failing to build on the intriguing connections he draws and the compelling insights he achieves. The chief flaw of the work, and perhaps the main explanation for its lack of detailed interpretations, is the absence of an overarching theoretical approach. To return to the question of belief that opened this review, Tate stresses its importance in the works he analyzes, but he fails to tap into its potential as a unifying concept. All the novels in his study contend with the problem of the constitution of social order in the wake of catastrophe, in which belief serves as a key term both as a source of social order and as an artifact of it. A sustained reflection on how social order disintegrates and how it is restored or reconstituted in these novels would have given his readings more detail and depth.
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