Read Maria's responses to popular apocalyptic literature. |
The Gone World is Tom Sweterlitsch mind-bending horror/thriller novel where the apocalypse meets time travel, and probably not the kind of time travel you’re used to. Sweterlitsch explores the concept of the multiverse. Shannon Moss, NCIS crime detective, travels to the future to investigate how past crimes were resolved and interview close contacts. The future world is merely a possibility of future that blinks out of existence as soon as the time traveler goes back to their original time or dies. There are innumerable possibilities of the future, and we see Moss discover different versions of the same future time periods. There is no traveling backward to a time before the present, known as terra firma. Sweterlitsch’s theory of time travel allows for a certain kind of resurrection. Individuals and objects can be “echoed”; different versions of the same person or thing can be created out of a time loop, and if the copy escapes the time loop, they will “echo” the original. When Shannon first encounters the time loop at the Vardogger, she is echoed, and the second version of herself is crucified by the QTNs that torture humans during the Terminus, the apocalyptic end of the human race brought on by a white hole that follows humans from an alien planet. The original Shannon dies, but is resurrected in the echo of herself, rescued off of her invisible upside down cross. Other characters seem to come back to life as well, such as Remarque, the commander of the USS Libra spaceship, once assassinated by her crew members, yet appearing in the Vardogger time knot. While many religions espouse faith in the afterlife, Christianity has beliefs and writings about the resurrection of the body. According to the Bible, Jesus resurrected from death 3 days after being crucified and buried in a tomb (Matthew 28:5-6; Mark 16:6). The Bible also teaches that Jesus ascended to heaven after coming back to life and he will one day return to earth again when everyone who believed in him will rise from the dead (1 Thessalonians 4:14-17). There are a plethora of other Christian themes, symbols, and allusions throughout the novel. Here are some examples. Nestor asks Shannon near the beginning of the story if she believes in the resurrection of the body—this foreshadows the figurative resurrection of echoing. At Nestor’s house, Shannon notices a painting of Jesus dead right after being taken off the cross. Karl Hyldekrugger, the character behind multiple murders and acts of torture, is referred to as “the Devil”. Nestor compares the Terminus to hell. It is an apocalypse in which a white hole (worse than a black hole) triggers a bitter winter storm and releases QTNS, small particles that infect humans, drive them mad, and ultimately kill them. These QTNs further allude to hell. They cause their victims to be lifted into the air, arms spread, feet pointing up and head down, as if being crucified on an upside down cross. Not quite the lake of fire as described in the New Testament, but the first symptoms of QTNs invading a person’s body is a sensation of burning from the inside out. I find it fascinating that Sweterlitsch chooses the upside down method of torture. In the Christian tradition, the apostle Peter, who knew Jesus personally and acted as the head of the early Christian church in the 1st century AD, was crucified upside down. Britannica.com gives a short summary of what is known of Peter’s death. Its says that Peter willingly chose the inverted execution because he felt unworthy to die in the same manner as Christ. This is the only notable inverted crucifixion to my knowledge. Why does Sweterlitsch weave so many Christian ideas into The Gone World? I spent quite a bit of time researching, looking for articles or interviews that would give me background information revealing why Christian themes are emphasized so much in the novel. And I found nothing… I have no idea what Sweterlitsch’s thoughts were behind these choices. In all of the resources I read and reviewed, the conversations focus on his inspiration for the novel and his theory of time travel. What I do know is that the Bible is the first major piece of apocalyptic literature with the book of Revelation. I can conjecture that Sweterlitsch wanted to nod to the Bible as a major literary work in the genre. I would also suppose that the spiritual aspects of The Gone World add an intentional spookiness to the narrative that creates a certain mood within the reader, playing off characteristics of the genre of horror. I love that the Sweterlitsch symbolizes death and resurrection in the echoes, but this ties into the story arc as a whole. The earth experiences something similar. When the Terminus appears in 1997, the earth is symbolically crucified. Then when Shannon blinks the future reality, we experience a return to the present 1985, the real terra firma. This is before anyone knows anything about the apocalypse, and hopefully they never will. The earth is reborn, resurrected. Just as Remarque. Just as Shannon. Just as Jesus.
0 Comments
The apocalypse inflicts a plethora of terrors across its literary genre. We have explored reverse evolution, lethal viruses, and bioterrorism, among others. Colson Whitehead’s apocalypse in Zone One has a classic trigger: zombies. While this story brings monsters to life, different apocalypses always include their fair share of figurative demons. The character, Kaitlyn, surmises on page 239 of the novel, “Maybe we can unsee the monsters again.” After reading this comment, I could not help but think of other real and fictional events that have felt like an apocalypse in one way or another. Do people get to a point after experiencing trauma, destruction, and death where they can unsee their monsters? Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel from a previous blogpost, is set two decades after a super-lethal virus wipes out 99.9% of the world’s population. As Jeevan and his friend discuss how their children’s education, the friend supposes that kids may be happier not knowing what was lost from the world before. Would this be possible? Or beneficial? Station Eleven shows that some monsters can be unseen—the monster of loss can disappear as the next generation, accustomed to the new normal, are not aware of the things that made life better or different in the past. Life simply moves on. The farther from real-life apocalyptic events we get in time, the less scary old monsters seem. WWII changed “life as we know it” for nearly every culture and country on earth, with millions upon millions of military and civilian casualties. As a young adult living eight decades later, I can see the aftermath of the war. Borders and treaties, world cultures and even bigotries exist today as a result of WWII. But the terrors of WWII do not currently cause me trauma—I was not alive to experience them. According to History.com, the Black Death killed nearly one third Europe’s population in the 14th century. While this zoonotic spillover still infects 1,000-3,000 people per year, the traumatic stress of this particular apocalypse can hardly be seen, if at all. Society is so removed from the loss of life and medical practices hundreds of years ago. Monsters can be unseen. Time makes them less and less visible. Covid-19 is an apocalypse of cancellations and anxiety, lost jobs and financial crises. The monsters of the virus and quarantines will be unknown to the next generation that will hopefully never experience what we have gone through over the past year. Monsters may be forgotten, but should they be? A good history education will tell you that we must remember the past so that we do not repeat it. And remembering the past brings its monsters with it. Andrea Eidinger writes a fascinating article about how historical trauma can emotional impact her students. It is possible that monsters can be unseen, but I do not think it is best to forget them. It is important to be aware of how they affect individuals over time. However, time seemed to be a rapidly diminishing resource at the end of Zone One, as Whitehead implies, up to the interpretation of each reader, that the zombies destroy humankind. In this case, unfortunately, the minds to remember the monsters cease to exist…so the zombies become unseen after all. Omar El Akkad presents a compelling and unique story in his novel American War. As the title reveals, this book is about war, unlike the disease and panic driven novels we have explored thus far. It seems near impossible to write about the apocalypse without a pandemic involved, and this book is no exception. However, rather than the dénouement, the world-shattering pathogen becomes a conclusion. A final act of revenge. The most intriguing of themes in El Akkad’s novel is the timelessness of American war characteristics. No matter the conflict in US history, certain qualities of wartime stand out, and the book includes obvious references to the true American Civil War in 1861-1865. There many similarities between the “first” and “second” American Civil Wars we can discover. The fictional Second American Civil War amplifies the political ideology divisions that tend to adhere themselves to regions of the nation. For example, conservatives in the South and liberals in the North. American war is fought over rights from the Revolutionary rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the Vietnam war rights to ownership and control of one’s life that were attacked by the spread of communism. The central conflict of the Second American Civil War was whether or not citizens should have the right to use fossil fuel. Southern states seceded after the use of fossil fuels were banned and they felt their rights were intolerably infringed upon. This directly parallels the “first” American Civil War concerning the issue of slavery. In each circumstance, the federal government tried to control something the South thought they should not be able to, and so the South chose to remove itself from the Union. Yousef, from the Bouazizi empire, highlights another timeless characteristic when he tells Sarat, “Everyone fights in an American war.” Foreign nations interfered with both wars. In the first war, foreign involvement took the form of other nations providing supplies as well as soldiers. About 1/3 of all troops in the Civil War were foreign born immigrants. I encourage you to read Andy Waskie’s article on foreign enlistment to learn more. The Bouazizi Empire takes the stage of foreign interference in the novel’s futuristic war. They also provide supplies, but claim much greater influence when Yousef orchestrates a devastating pandemic to prolong America’s state of weakness. I found a few more similarities of notabilia. The “first” and the “second” Civil Wars spill copious innocent blood. This wrenches our hearts when Dana is murdered by a random bomber drone. The fighting on American soil destroys the land and structures in both cases. In addition, I learned from Britannica that South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. This explains why the state was targeted and quarantined at the start of the Second American War to quell the hot spot of rebellion. Did you notice any of these similarities as you read American War? What other characteristics are shared across the different wars in American history? At the core of Station Eleven is art and music. The book is nothing without Miranda’s drawings, Arthur’s theatrical performances, or The Traveling Symphony’s devotion to sharing their music with the sad, silent remnant of the world. As a music major, I connected easily with Emily St. John Mandel’s narrative. For me, there couldn’t have been a better group of people to follow through the apocalypse than Mandel’s assortment of instrumentalists, actors, and artists. If I survived the Georgia flu, you can be absolutely certain the Symphony would have picked me up on one of their tours around Ohio. For those of you less inclined to the fine arts, you may ask why in the world—a plagued and empty world where you could get shot just for the bag on your back—would you travel around performing Shakespeare? The Symphony explains with a line borrowed from Star Trek, “Because survival is insufficient.” I whole-heartedly concur. But what happens when surviving means taking away the things that make life worth living? That is life for a lot of people during Covid-19. The pandemic has impacted every occupation, lifestyle, and industry, but the fine arts and performing arts is one of the areas hit the hardest. The Brookings study, published in August 2020, estimated losses of 2.7 million jobs and $150 billion in sales between just April and July 2020. The study emphasizes that “The creative economy is one of the sectors most at risk from the COVID-19 crisis…Any lasting damage to the creative sector will drastically undercut our culture, well-being, and quality of life.” Culture, well-being, and quality of life… Those three essentials were the driving force of the Symphony. These essentials define my own love of music, and as music-making was stripped from my life last March, my well-being, quality of life, and sense of culture distinctly diminished. It may be odd, but I can admit that I was jealous reading about the performances of The Traveling Symphony as a singer that has not sung with a choir in about a year. Yet again, apocalyptic narrative strikes a nerve for our coronavirus experience. Despite the devastation, the characters of Station Eleven find their way back to culture and art. I know that we will too. I choose to hope and I anticipate an abundance of music-making in the future. This too shall pass. Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God surprises readers with quite the creative twist on the apocalypse. In this book, you will not find a devastating super-virus nor will you encounter raging flesh-eating zombies. Erdrich chooses to attack the world at large with an evolutionary reversal—animals and human evolution jumps “backward…sideways, or in unforeseen directions” (pg. 54-55). Nature changes by storm: “ducks are not ducks and chickens are not chickens, insects are nutritious, and there are ladybugs the size of cats” (pg. 90). Society begins to collapse from the fear of nature’s reversal as a new religious government rises to authority and terrorizes pregnant women in order to ensure the continuation of the homo sapien species. Unlike the subject of last week’s post, The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, and next week’s post, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Erdrich’s apocalypse does not eliminate the population of earth. Her dystopia centers around change. Government, evolution, freedoms, and dangers all shift. Change is at the root of what made 2020 feel like an apocalypse for so many. The narrator, Cedar Songmaker, pregnant and avoiding “gravid female detention” spends her days quarantining in her home. Now that may sound a bit familiar. Cedar’s life, any activity of work or play, was suddenly removed, just as every event and trip of the 2020 calendar year was canceled. The presence of new dangers is another striking similarity. You tell me, have you ever feared walking outside of your home because of the saber-toothed tiger running around your backyard? (If evolution ever does reverse, be sure to watch out for that.) In Covid times, new fears have risen—it has become dangerous for at-risk individuals to do normal things like go to the grocery store. Mental health problems create an increasing danger for many struggling through quarantine. William Wan, writer for the Washington Post, reports on the rise in suicidal thoughts during the pandemic. Between 2018 and August 2020, the number of young adults with suicidal thoughts rose from 10.7% to 25.5%, and in all ages from 4.3% to 11.0%. As previously mentioned, the novel is written from the perspective of Cedar Songmaker, pregnant, half Ojibwe Native American, member of the Catholic faith. The novel takes the form of Cedar’s journal to her unborn baby. She writes to cope unknowns weighing on her and the future of her baby. These unknowns are what makes Erdrich’s writing so captivating to me. I turned every page wanting to know more. Erdrich threads the theme of mystery and the unknown through the narrative. Cedar was incapable of knowing what was going on around her or inside of her, as shown when she pondered “our baby, like every other baby on the earth, will be a throwback of some kind” (pg. 67-68) She had no idea if her baby would be a homo sapien, like you and me, or another version of humanity’s evolutionary history. Even worse, she did not know if she or her baby would survive the birth, with only a 15-20% chance of survival. The coronavirus pandemic has forced everyone into unknown territory. Uncertainty has become as much of a theme of the past year as change and danger. Unfortunately uncertainly left Erdrich’s readers with an ending that felt more like a cliff hanger than a conclusion. After turning the last page with several unanswered questions, I went online to search for answers to question I may have missed in my quick read. Rather than answers, I found critiques. Literary reviewers found flaws in a novel that left so many loose ends. Ruth Franklin from the New York Times commented in her review of the novel that “Because of the diary form, the novel’s perspective is limited to what Cedar experiences personally or hears about, which also results in tantalizing plot points that aren’t followed through.” It was comforting to know that someone else had the same issues as me, and I hadn’t unwittingly skipped over some major detail that would tie things together. While enjoyable and engaging, Future Home of the Living God was anything but satisfying. However, this may have been intentional for Erdrich. The apocalypse is not a satisfying subject, and Erdrich may be conveying the message that some questions may never be answered. This is a tough pill to swallow, but it may help us recover and soon move on from the small apocalypse we are all living through now. Our first novel in the Dystopian Discussion series is the second book in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. The narrative takes the perspective of two women, Toby and Ren, as they experience life in an environmentalist Christian cult and survive a global apocalypse. Atwood chooses to end the world with a…pandemic! Take a deep breath to recover from any Covid-19 PTSD (which, thankfully, has not wiped out the entire population of earth) and let’s get into the discussion. The Year of the Flood was not the easiest novel to read. I personally found its content overly vulgar and sexual. Atwood has a reason for being so explicit, however. Cannibalism, violence, and rape belong in stories that portray humanity at its worst. How much worse can it get when the environment is destroyed, nearly all animals are extinct, a government corporation poisons its citizens, and then the apocalypse results from an act of bioterrorism? The character, Crake, generates the pandemic as a means to erase all human life and repopulate the world with a new immortal species of intelligent creature. Yet some humans do survive. The God’s Gardeners cult expected the apocalypse imminently, so they prepared. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually. How did they do this and how does this connect to the pandemic we are all living through right now? Survival is a key theme throughout Atwood’s narrative. The novel is not only concerned with the apocalypse, but also what precedes it and the future following after. The God’s Gardeners look forward to a clean slate, when the dystopia will give way to a utopia. I don’t see any sort of utopia resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, but there are certain things we can learn from the approach Atwood’s characters take in weathering the viral storm. Survival was possible through sustaining one’s whole self. Many people associate doomsday prep with hoarding canned food, and now toilet paper. We are in the middle of our own kind of doomsday, but the emotional and mental toll is just as significant if not more so than the toll of rising coronavirus cases. Covid cases are in the millions, but pandemic fatigue may be in the billions along with growing anxiety and depression. In addition to physical needs, the God’s Gardeners survival tactics encompassed health for the soul. This is shown by Ren when she reminds herself of a God’s Gardeners proverb just as the pandemic begins: “Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance. Which meant that even bad things did some good because they were a challenge and you didn’t always know what good effects they might have” (Atwood 279). Ren was mentally prepared for a challenge. Challenges in life, like Covid-19, can illuminate the things we for which we can be grateful, the light. Ren’s perspective allows me to consider what opportunities I have to “dance” in this season. I can spend more time reading scripture and in prayer. I can make my living space beautiful. I have time in my schedule for cooking delicious meals, for exercise, for rest. There is a lot of dark in a season with a global pandemic, but without those trials and heart aches, I would have missed many good things that come alongside them. This mental and emotional technique is paramount in helping the Gardeners survive. Most of us have heard the message of the importance of self-care recently. I would encourage you to take it to heart. It is encouraging to me that Atwood reminds us of this message in her apocalyptic narrative that seems all too relevant now more than ever. Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance. |
|