Apocalypse as Release

Review of After the Apocalypse

“Outside she checked her hair. She wasn’t on fire or anything, but she had blister on her arms and they hurt. God, she was stupid. She hadn’t known that was going to happen. She looked back at the house. Had it gone out? Part of her kind of wanted it to have gone out, like the grill did sometimes. But not really. She wanted to see fire. She wanted to see it burn.” (The Effects of Centrifugal Forces, p. 166)

“After the Apocalypse” is a title that sounds in keeping with our times. One can imagine it referring to the most recent and sordid episode of discord, that of the wrangle over reaching an arrangement to avoid the much ballyhooed “Fiscal Cliff” that hung like a noose over our collective heads during Christmas of 2012. For the past several months, ever since President Obama’s reelection, we have heard of little else, and the conservative sectors in particular have hunkered down and engaged in their perpetual mode of bluster and outrage to sabotage any possible agreement.  Doom was spelled out in earnest terms by newscasters and economists who reflected on the possibility of a world-wide slowdown and a renewed recession. What had been started by W. would be completed by the Tea Party, a group that represented only the latest reincarnation of our biblical prophets of doom.

The title in this case, however, refers to a collection of short stories by Maureen McHugh. They detail a variety of possible scenarios that can be constituted as signaling the putative end of the world. They describe various visions of possible apocalypses, with the consequent slow unraveling of the world. Strangely, perhaps because of the frustration and futility that comes with the experience of a poisonous political culture during the last few presidential terms and the lingering effects of a recession that have cast a haze on our collective sensibility and traditional optimism, these scenarios don’t sound in any way extravagant.

We have, for example, visions in which plagues figure prominently. For example, a mutation of the Avian Flu that kills hundreds of millions of people, leading to a culture in which people earnestly hope to collect mementos of their past lives. Things substitute for people and for missed affection as we all become collectors, but I ask myself, are things any different now in our material culture? In other stories we have references to another disease (perhaps the same one describe in other scenarios?), one called Avian Prion Disease (APD), one that eats away at the brain and incapacitates and ultimately kills those who are infected in five years.  And there is another scenario that is described in the first story and that harkens to the contemporary popular craze over zombie apocalypses, one in which zombies have been isolated in forbidden zones and in which they come to constitute a natural order that is, ultimately, more suited to the protagonist, an uninfected prison convict.

These scenarios are explored artfully, and we are treated to stories that are noteworthy for their psychological complexity and for their poetic grace. They are not one-note scenarios, nor melodramatic and hysterical narratives that are heavy on action with little reflection. We see instead the description of difficult social scenarios, in which scientists and those agents who we would presume would be addressing these problems never appear and instead we see ordinary people struggling to cope. There is no Deus ex Machina, no miraculous antibody or world order to set things right.

The scenarios are familiar, and they don’t seem entirely unfamiliar. We have all been struggling during these past years, dealing with a culture of poisonous political paralysis, with a strong note of paranoia and suspicion that, as eluded to before, has given rise to a narrative of American decline. We fear what is happening to our economy, and we fear as well the loss of our place in the world. Was it all an illusion, this culture of greed and inflated real estate prices, this binge that inevitably gave rise to a bust, with soaring foreclosure rates, a stubbornly high unemployment rate, a scaling back of expectations, a never-ending crisis in Europe and the Middle East and the recognition that yes, we are as vulnerable as we ever were to natural forces, those forces that seem to have become more destructive than they have ever been, as seen in the recent episode with Hurricane Sandy and the longstanding drought in the Mid West? Are these signs in a climate of impending doom? It is almost as if we have been recapitulating what we have been seeing, but in accelerated form.

Our societies are, indeed, fragile and the economic and social processes at play can be, as always, predatory. But even in the face of the apocalypse, we are subject to the same universal urges and the same responses. Perhaps an apocalypse is a reset, an opportunity for escape, a certain wish fulfillment that can be interpreted as a corrective, as a purging or cathartic experience. Perhaps that is part of the reason why we find them so compelling, although one must admit that they do seem to usher in a heightened dramatic note.

I am taken by stories such as “Useless Things”, a narrative of loss and futile substitution, told from the point of view of a middle-aged woman who has moved to New Mexico to fabricate dolls that she sells online and that she speculates are meant as substitutes for loved ones lost during the recent plague. There are, indeed, many “useless” things, but these dolls are certainly among that class of items, and the title is in the end ironic.  When so much of material culture is disappearing, when water has become as scarce as work and when people have taken to living in RVs out in the desert, we need to find those things that are still useful, and in this case, perhaps those things that are “useless” or those that serve to remind of the veneer of a past culture that is disappearing.

There is an urgency in this story, for the protagonist is forced to confront the evidence of the continuing existence of domestic squabbles, among those fortunate classes that still cling to a past lifestyle, out in the civilized cities that are in reality reservations. There are migrants trekking through the desert from down south, then as now, and they trace out the pattern of economic systems that continue to survive, even under duress. We are nothing if not flexible, and we cling to useless things, to the dogs that the protagonist keeps as pets even though they are unable to provide protection against strangers, or the tools that recall a past life for the character, or to family bonds such as that evident between the old man and his deranged, violent nephew who seems to lack any capacity for affection for his family. We cling to emotions and attachments and affection, because ultimately they are not luxuries, and this is part of the grace and satisfaction of the stories that explore these human sentiments and urges.

There are also stories that seem more genuinely marvelous in their scenarios, such as the one that narrates the possible arrival of what we can term artificial intelligence. It seems as if in the near future programs are fashioned that are able to create subroutines that are tested and that evolve into organic entities, and one of these is a program called DMS that is fashioned to analyze disease indicators and data that is fed to it by a network of sensory inputs. It is a fascinating story that deals, once again, with a readjustment in social relationships, as we become privy in this instance to the social contract that is in place between two programmers. Having been a programmer myself in a past incarnation, the dynamic sounds familiar and convincing, and I found myself identifying with the position of the protagonist who, as I was, is an outsider. She is an overweight female programmer who struggles under the shadow of a fellow worker who seems to be much more brilliant, but in reality, is unable to recognize his own limitations.

DMS, the nascent intelligence, is living as it is in the “Country of the Blind”, and seems to be unable to take cognizance of the existence of other intelligences.  It would seem to be “blind”, but in this instance, who is to say that we are any different? After all, aren’t we also living in a similar environment, one in which we are forced to reflect on whether we can give credence to the date that we receive from our own sensory apparatus? How do we distinguish ourselves from our bodies? It recalls the thought experiment formulated by Rene Descartes, that of consciousness taking the form of a brain in a vat, subjected to external stimuli and unable to tell whether our material sensations are not illusory, fed to us by some exterior agency running an experiment. The protagonist is herself insecure and unable to perceive the illusions that characterize her own relationships, and it is perhaps inevitable that she would come to identify with the DMS and seek to save it from being erased.

Another story feeds into this conceit of life as a simulation. It is called “Going to France”, and it deals with a dream-like scenario in which the fantastic combines with the everyday. It recalls the idea that is being explored by certain cosmologists who speculate that the universe is, indeed, a computer simulation being run by some higher entity. In this story we have people who are suddenly overcome by an urge to go to France, an irresistible urge that is shared by the protagonist, once again an unattached, middle-aged woman. Some people are able to fly by their own means, by which I’m not actually referring to their being able to piloting their own craft, but instead their ability to flap their arms and take flight across the Atlantic.  Others are unable to share this ability, but nonetheless drop everything they are doing in order to purchase airline tickets and succumb to this mysterious compulsion that almost seems to symbolize the way in which we are also subject to strange whims and compulsions that we can’t resist. Is it the power of the simulation?

Memes, like biological agents and viruses, are units of meaning that circulate freely within a culture and that control the way we think and perceive our world. It is a concept that was first formalized by the biologist Richard Dawkins, and has taken a place in the analysis of popular culture. If our material bodies are mediums for the transmission of DNA, then memes transmit the DNA of culture, and they represent elements that condition our perception and control to a certain extent our actions. Who doesn’t feel that we are all subject to hidden compulsions that belie the illusion of independence and control?  We are left with a reflection of what is it to be provoked and stimulated to act in strange ways, strange at least for the reader until he or she reflects on similar crazes that have characterized their own actions.

The stories frequently have notes of melancholy and confusion but they are describe processes in which our worlds are reordered. There is, after all, an atmosphere of ideological coherence even in these doomsday scenarios, and we see the protagonists expressing a very rational need to adjust. Some even thrive, such as the Chinese teenager Jieling in “Special Economics”, who finds an opportunity to benefit from a situation in which predatory capitalism and repressive labor policies have given rise to an indentured labor force. We are adaptable, after all, and the slow unraveling of the world will be met with attempts to compensate, to adopt strategies that, in the end, are familiar. It is all curiously rational, and in this way, the scenarios in this collection contrast with the apocalypses that were envisioned in J.G. Ballard’s novels, works such as “The Drowned World” that unfold at a lethargic pace, and that show their protagonists strangely unable to adjust to these processes of decline and transformation. Humanity in those novels finds itself in an evolutionary dead-end.

In McHugh’s stories we find a common thread. We are invited to question the conditions in which we find ourselves, those conditions that constitute the seeds of these future apocalypses, and to admire protagonists, frequently middle-aged women but also younger females, who are unattached and who, one must repeat, find a certain emancipatory potential n these situations. Perhaps we revert to our truest essence, a need to adapt and move on, and in this way, there is no real gloom in these scenarios.

We are left to wonder and ultimately admire the energy of the woman in the final story (“After the Apocalypse”), she who along with the remnants of American society are left to trek to the north, to Canada, as they attempt to escape the collapse of a society that has been hit by further dirty bombs wielded by terrorist forces. This escape is hair-raising, and she is trudging across a dangerous landscape with a curiously innocent daughter, one who she comes to recognize as a rival as well as burden. She abandons this teenage daughter to the protection of a young man they meet and joins up with a group of soldiers.

Her governing urge is escape, and her mode is to give in to her automatic impulses. “She doesn’t know where she is going. She is in motion.” And this motion seduces us all, even in these apocalypses.




Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013