Frank Kermode says, "The age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics" (Sense of an Ending, p 28).
This makes me think about the proliferation of apocalyptic narrative in contemporary television and fiction, and whether we might not be enmeshed in an age of perpetual transition right now. Since my previous post, I've finished volumes 22 and 23 of The Walking Dead comic, watched season 5 of the TV show, watched seasons 1 and 2 of The 100 (a series that combines the best of BSG with elements of The Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies), and read Zombie Apocalypse! by Stephen Jones. And that's just popular culture. It's worth noting that David Mitchell's last two novels have had apocalyptic themes, along with Howard Jacobsen's J, a wonderful novel about what I'm tentatively calling a "silent apocalypse" (more on that in another post).
So what's the deal, pop culture? Why are you so obsessed with the apocalyptic? And what does it mean that your obsession is spilling over into "legit" fiction? Is our age one of perpetual transition? And if so, what does that mean?
There are certainly plenty of crises in the world that many of us would like to see come to an end. However, as John Berger notes in After the End, "The end is never the End. The apocalyptic text announces and describes the end of the world, but then the text does not end, nor the does the world represented in the text, and neither does the world itself" (5-6). The crisis of each and every literal and figurative apocalypse is more aptly described as a transition, not an ending. The characters in The Walking Dead transition from one way of life to another. Western civilization crumbles in the wake of the virus that causes the dead to walk; and by volume 22, the survivors have triumphed over the evil Neegan and started a kind of reconstruction. They aren't rebuilding the same civilization, at least not necessarily, and they are trying to avoid the problems and pitfalls that humans succumbed to the first time around. Likewise, in The 100, there are several important transitions: the transition from life on Earth to life on the space station, and then the transition back to Earth again. Both were "endings," in a sense. The way of life enjoyed by the people who left Earth could not continue in the enclosed environment of the space station (or The Ark, as it comes to be called). And once the children are sent back to the surface, the laws that made sense aboard the Ark are no longer useful. The adults in the group are painfully slow to come around to this reality, which could be just the nature of YA entertainment, but I suspect it has something to do with the nature of apocalyptic transformation.
Apocalypses are really just transitions, all of them. The question is ... transitions into what? This turns out to be a fundamental question that depends on our recognition of the postmodern idea of the Grand Narrative. It strikes me that all apocalyptic tales have this in common: the narrative that has guided a civilization's way of life for long proves no longer to useful, and the people must transition into a newer, more meaningful narrative.
As we see in The 100, however, people get really attached to their Grand Narratives, and they don't want to let them go down without putting up a fight. The Mountain People can't survive outside their bunker, but they refuse to accept the reality of their situation and greedily hoard the fruits of human culture while enslaving and murdering the Tree People to stay alive. Likewise, the adults from the Ark struggle to accept the implications of their transition to the surface, and most importantly, of their decision to send their young people ahead of them. Clarke and her "Sky People" have inadvertently become the new leaders, and in no small part, that's because they are less attached to the ways things were done on the Ark.
We might look at our situation today as an age of perpetual transition because technology changes things so quickly that we don't have time to adjust to a new idea or narrative before it evaporates or loses its usefulness. Or because the environment is the thing that's transitioning, and each change causes repeating devastations for human life.
Everything I'm saying here relies on the assumptions that there will still be humans around after the apocalypse to facilitate the transition into a new narrative or set of narratives. In another post, I'll explore ideas of the posthuman, including the implications of an environmental apocalypse that puts an end to human habitability on Earth.
