Literature and cinema have long played with the idea of the end of the world. By imagining the forms of life or society that will emerge from the apocalypse, explains Jean-Paul Engélibert, these stories must be read above all as a critique of the present.
From the industrial revolution to XIXe century, Western literature began to imagine an end of the world caused by man and not (only) by gods or other supernatural beings. Inspired by the technological developments of their time, writings such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The New Adam and Eve” (1843) and the novel After London (1885) by Richard Jefferies evoke the idea that man could one day disappear under the effect of his own progress. XXe century, new threats appear on the horizon, such as nuclear war and climate change, which renew the apocalyptic imagination on a global scale. Hollywood blockbusters like The Day After Tomorrow And 2012 exploit and feed the feeling of catastrophic and immanent end, while the “Doomsday Clock” of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists shows humanity “100 seconds from midnight.” Is it true that there is no more time to lose?
It is on the imagination of the end that Jean-Paul Engélibert invites us to reflect in this study on apocalyptic fictions. The researcher in comparative literature looks at a diverse set of written productions (novels ranging from Last Man (1805) by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville to the trilogy MaddAddam (2003-13) by Margaret Atwood) and cultural productions (three films, a television series and an animated film). These fictions have in common that they do not reduce the destruction of the planet to a spectacle, but offer another way of thinking about the present and avoiding the vision of a hopeless future. For Engélibert, this is where their critical power lies.
Getting out of presentism
As the example of the “Doomsday Clock” shows, apocalyptic imagination often poses time as a linear and inevitable development from the present to the future. But apocalyptic fiction is situated in other temporalities, which go beyond this chronology. The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood states loudly and clearly: “I am not a prophet. Science fiction is really about now.” In Fabulate the worldEngélibert argues that apocalyptic fictions open a breach in the present by placing the action during or after the catastrophe. For example, the trilogy of MaddAddam Atwood’s novel tells of life before and after a pandemic that wipes out most of the human population. In this way, the novel creates a pure event, a kairosas opposed to the continuous time of reality, chronos. Moreover, Atwood’s point is not to predict a devastating pandemic; she uses this idea to show that we are already living through a kind of apocalypse. This is one of the most telling theses of Engélibert’s book: the apocalypse is not imminent, it is immanent. We live it day by day, but we act as if we do not see it. This is very literally illustrated in the novel. Blindness by José Saramago, which depicts a population that is gradually becoming blind. The catastrophic event here allows Saramago to think about the tragedies of XXe century without adhering to a fatalistic vision of the present (p. 84-6).
In his choice of apocalyptic films, Engélibert reinforces the idea of a new perspective on time to escape “from the regime of presentist historicity” (p. 12). By focusing on films such as Melancholia (2011) by Lars Von Trier, On the Beach (1952) by Stanley Kramer and 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011) by Abel Ferrera, Engélibert shows that it is the expectation of the apocalypse that creates meaning, that allows us to weave bonds of friendship and love while facing the inevitability of the end. The images of destruction and action are replaced by the experience of delay that permeates each moment, not to tire the viewer, but to interrupt the flow of time as progress. This look at the time of delay reveals the promise of something else, whether it be a place of refuge (Melancholia) or the possibility of love (4:44).
Releasing the energy of despair
The obsession with apocalyptic scenarios can lead to a form of nihilism, a paralyzing refusal that suppresses all political creativity. In the case of climate change, environmentalist discourse has often been criticized for the feeling of helplessness it arouses in the face of a problem that seems inevitable and necessarily catastrophic. Rather than opposing a naïve optimism to such fatalism, Engélibert takes up the notion of the “energy of despair” developed by the French poet and philosopher Michel Deguy. For the latter, ecological awareness can lead to a new engagement with the here below. Literature becomes a way not to “save” us from the ecological crisis, to move “beyond,” but to redefine the conditions of literature as representation.
To show how such an energy of despair operates, Engélibert looks at three novels in particular: The Minor Angels by Antoine Volodine, The road by Cormac McCarthy and The Last World by Céline Minard. In each novel, the end of the world serves as a starting point to bounce back to another (im)possible world. In Volodine’s story, human survivors wander in a hostile post-apocalyptic world, but the work does not feed on nihilism. On the contrary, it cultivates linguistic inventiveness and the literary power of ambiguity, of the political (im)passes of the apocalypse. As Engélibert explains, “fiction must not entertain any hope, this is how it will give the dreamer the energy to survive, or at least not take it away from him” (p. 72).
By referring to the “dreaming” reader, Engélibert evokes the reception of the work, which according to him is part of the process of activating the poetic energy of despair. Without instrumentalizing apocalyptic fiction, we may want details on the modes of circulation of such energy. How is it transferred to the reader? How is the latter affected, in the literal sense, that is to say emotionally and psychologically disturbed? The theoretical framework of literary pragmatism, which conceives of the literary text as an agent endowed with a real affective capacity, could have served as a starting point to answer such questions. Such a perspective would allow us to examine more closely the reactions in situ readers and spectators of apocalyptic fictions and would be in line with Engélibert’s project, which seeks to multiply the diversity of possible responses to such fictions.
Composing new human and non-human collectives
After the catastrophic event (whether or not it is represented in the apocalyptic narrative), the representation of alternative worlds often gives way to forms of unheard-of and extreme violence. What interests Engélibert is that moment in the narrative when a character turns violence against himself, performing an act of sacrifice that puts an end to the vicious circle of gratuitous violence and leads to a new promise of life. For example, after cutting off his ten fingers, Leonardo, the main character of The Vertical Man by Davide Longo, can save his pregnant daughter from the hyper-violent post-apocalyptic society where she has been tortured and raped. According to Engélibert, such forms of violence must be placed in the context of a necessary and (im)possible exit from post-modernity, in the context of a “civilizational catastrophe”, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s expression (p. 146). In The road McCarthy’s work is about expressing the inestimable loss of beauty and fragility of the natural world that such violence brings, while also evoking the possible legacy of the young son who joins a new family after his father’s death.
In apocalyptic fiction, violent acts can wipe out societies under the influence of progress and capital, which allows the (re)composition of human and non-human societies. (This is one example among others of the influence of the sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour on the work of Engélibert, who often cites him in his text.) The nuclear apocalypse in Malevil by Robert Merle creates the conditions for a state of nature in which a group of survivors tries to build, willingly or unwillingly, an egalitarian society. The television series The Leftovers rather shows an intolerant society composed of subgroups each seeking in its own way to make sense of the sudden disappearance of two percent of the human population. However, these two examples of social reconstruction remain anthropocentric, explains Engélibert, unlike Atwood’s trilogy and the animated strip Ghost in the Shell which illustrate the work of negotiation and translation at the heart of heterogeneous human-animal-biotechnology collectives. In these stories, the model of the autonomous human subject gives way to the idea that life is necessarily woven from links of interdependence and vulnerability. By ending his analysis with the question of the post-human, Engélibert shows both the continuity of apocalyptic stories (since Grainville’s critique of progress and the philosophy of enlightenment) and their multiple ruptures, which make them escape any simple or linear historicity. By their political diversity, apocalyptic stories reject “the discourses that make the Anthropocene the result of universal and spontaneous tendencies ofanthropos » (p. 225).
For a minor criticism
Engélibert handles his corpus with great originality and finesse. That said, one can regret the lack of transitions from one chapter to another, which would allow the reader to better understand the specificity of the genres in question. It is true that Engélibert proposes to substitute for generic identification a “minor critique” that is intended to be deterritorializing, collective and focused on “the political in the individual” (p. 19). Still, this minor critique would benefit from paying particular attention to the way in which a crisis such as climate change is integrated into the story differently than other crises (nuclear, pandemic, etc.). Without building impenetrable walls between literary genres, one can regret that Engélibert does not participate in the rich critical discussion on climate fiction. Finally, one might want minor criticism to pay more attention to the cultural and linguistic context of each story in the corpus that mixes American, French, Canadian, English, Portuguese, and other fictions. Wouldn’t diversifying cultural specificities be another way of “distinguishing within the human species one people, one group, one individual from another” (p. 225)? This would also help advance the discussion on the apocalypses already experienced by indigenous, native, and ethnic minorities throughout the history of Western civilization.