So we ended our two hour seminar today talking about apocalyptic literature, a genre which I am fairly wary of for a number of reasons. (As you can see from the post title, this is not the only time I will talk about the apocalypse. It is a big part of environmental literature and could not possibly be covered in one text post.)
Apocalyptic literature, whether books or films, is always theatrical, fantastical, and downright unbelievable. And this poses a very real problem for environmentalists when the causes of the apocalypse are environmental - e.g. from climate change - as rather than making climate change seem like a realistic possibility, it makes it a horror story which can only happen in a writers imagination.
When you try and define "apocalypse" and get past the religious definitions (I shall return to them in a later post), the OED defines it as "a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm". The problem I have with this definition is that it does not seem big enough. Although it is on a global scale, it is not total, i.e. there are always survivors. Even in Cormac Mccarthy's "The Road" where the entire plant population is wiped out - in itself impossible but for now I will let it slide - humans survive. Or in Stephen King's "The Stand", there is a percentage of the population, however small, which is miraculously immune to the deadly virus which wiped out the rest of the human populous. This is what I mean by making it seem fantastical. These things could happen, it's true, however what could not happen is that people survive. Humans are adaptable, we are survivors, I cannot deny that, but the chance of even 1% of the population being immune to some incurable disease they have never been exposed to is so monumentally tiny that it is negligible. By drawing their inspiration from the almost completely implausible, writers are guilty of making the very feasible fall into the category of dramatic speculation.
Look at the film 2012 as an example. If you haven't seen it - spoiler alert - the whole world floods. This does not lead people to believe that the whole world could actually flood. It does not do this because the idea of that happening to you, to your family and friends is just too terrible. Your mind will not let you think about something so horrific because it is personal, but also because it is too big. It is an idea that we cannot comprehend. It is this same reason that these things are set within our lifetimes and not 1000 years in the future, it's too much for our imagination. But that's another post entirely...
I will first look at your comments on apocalyptic literature, you say you are wary of this (which is interesting in itself), as I do agree with the idea that some of it is downright unbelievable, though there are texts that actually can have plausible elements.
ReplyDeleteA good example of this is an older text by Richard Jefferies 'After London', which predates War of the Worlds by over a decade, it describes the ecological repercussions of some unspecified disaster, and looks at a return to barbarism, "There are few books, and still fewer to read them; and these are all in manuscript, for though the way to print is not lost, it is not employed since no one wants books" (chap 4). Since it is before science fiction, there is of course a fantasy element but it is also grounded in a sense of the idea of humanity returning to barbarism. I know this is very dated compared to the modern age, but it is an example I wanted to highlight that even early apocalyptic fiction can have some elements that are plausible. The idea of humanity collapsing is a key theme in many different books, but it is also interesting to study and in my personal opinion, I like apocalyptic literature, there is always elements in there that could be a possibility in the future, no matter how far fetched. There are of course ludicrous amounts of fiction out there, one I remember -whose title of the book I have since forgotten- revolved around the lines that some alien disease had wiped out the population and only a handful of women remained, to try and rescue humanity alone. This is what is interesting to look at in this format, the plethora of different types, I wouldnt dismiss apocalyptic fiction, the ridiculous can still have elements that are worth studying.
Thank you for your comment Jack. I find it interesting that the examples you have chosen were written before environmental crises were so well known and written about. Take climate change as an example, we know more about that now than we ever have before, and thus it has spread itself throughout our culture, in our media, our politics, our social lives, and many other aspects of our lives, including our books. Although the texts you have mentioned do have elements of the plausible, there is so much that is in itself contradictory or just mislabeled that it skews a readers thought process. I bring you back to the definition of "apocalypse" - a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm. Much of the literature surrounding "the end of the world" never really keeps to the idea of it being the end of the world, they always have a hero, a saviour, some warrior who can bring the human race back from the edge of extinction. The truth is they can't. The damage is irreversible. I understand that no one wants to read stories with sad endings, it's why the film version of George Orwell's Animal Farm has a different ending to the book, film makers didn't believe that people would see it knowing that everyone dies. But by doing this they changed the entire message of the book. And this is what happens when authors only use part of a definition, or part of an idea, or part of the scientific research - it changes everything. By changing everything, yet still making it seem believable, or even just plausible, they make people believe in the wrong things, in the possibilities so minute that they don't matter, while the dead certainties, the 90% likelies, they go unnoticed, unspoken about and unchanged. I'm not saying we cannot learn anything from apocalyptic literature, I do believe it has its uses. But I also believe that it could be more useful to educating people about the environment if it wasn't so fantastical.
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