Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Problem of Cultural Anxiety

Apocalypse can be understood as a social process masquerading as an event. The process in question for many contemporary narratives, according to Brent Ryan Bellamy's engaging new study, is the decline of US power on the global stage. Indicated by a turn away from the industrial economy that drove mid-twentieth-century prosperity and a consequent rise in militarization, US decline, as Bellamy understands it, triggers widespread cultural anxiety together with a literary "form of wish fulfillment that, in many cases, stages the imaginary collapse of the United States to narrate its return to the days of promise" (2). In postapocalyptic fiction, in other words, the systemic instability of the US-dominated capitalist economy is reduced to a singular event, such as nuclear explosion or an epidemic, that leaves in its wake a devastated social landscape in which small bands of human subjects attempt to survive.Bellamy refers to the primary means of restaging a slow social process as an apocalyptic event as "subtractive reduction"; "it is that reduction that defines the post-apocalyptic storyworld," he asserts (62). By stripping the post-apocalyptic world of one or more institutions or infrastructural elements that uphold social life as it is experienced in the present, subtractive fictions produce a simplified narrative world that functions as a thought experiment. Populations disappear, cities collapse, states fall, industries become inoperative. With this emphasis on reduction as a definitive element of postapocalyptic writing, Bellamy usefully distinguishes between the world-destroying aspects of postapocalyptic fiction and the world-building of science fiction. Where a science fictional universe might extrapolate from tendencies in the empirical world, for instance, by adding new technologies or scientific discoveries to the institutions with which contemporary readers are familiar, the postapocalyptic world removes elements, asking how or whether a collective rebuilding of a functional social life proceeds in their absence. Subtractive reduction is thus essential to the fictional treatment of the apocalypse itself and the world that imagined event leaves in its wake.Although Bellamy does not develop this theme, subtraction also suggests avenues for rethinking literary approaches to negation and opposition in other genres. In particular, the creative potential released by subtraction might help us to recognize some effects that exceed the paranoid forms of reading against the grain with which many humanists are so familiar. Rather than hunting for that which has been sidelined in order to achieve a gleeful gotcha moment of complaint about the ideological aporias in a text, Bellamy's model of reading illustrates a method for tracking the generative effects of reduction. Focusing on destruction as an essential motif in the creation of a world, his approach offers a serious insight into the tools of narrative invention.In his wide-ranging survey, Bellamy also supplements his account of subtraction with the equally valuable concept of the remainder. After the world-destroying event of the apocalypse, remainders occupy the scene. Bellamy distinguishes among postapocalyptic fictions according to the ways that they imagine what might remain and how those remainders might be used. In his instructive chapter on fictions that envision a collapse of petroleum-based energy systems, for instance, Bellamy opposes James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand (2008) to Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014). The former envisions a world from which oil-based industries and all of their infrastructure have been removed, necessitating a return to something closely resembling a nineteenth-century agricultural economy, while the latter imagines a virus that incapacitates petro-economies, leaving behind wandering performers who operate makeshift vehicles pieced together from automobiles as well as stable communities that occupy and reuse airport facilities. For Bellamy's purposes, Mandel's emphasis on the remainders of old energy systems proves more promising than Kunstler's because it explicitly imagines rebuilding a new social life from the detritus of an oil economy. Narratives like this, which feature tinkering with remainders, sit higher in Bellamy's estimation than those that simply whisk away the traces of old systems. The latter, dominant tendency "veers toward political reaction," Bellamy asserts, since such work rather self-pityingly figures white US characters embroiled in situations that resemble those of domestic racial minorities or denizens of developing or neocolonial economies (1). In other words, for Bellamy, a reactionary postapocalyptic narrative involves US authors expressing horror at the discovery that they may be situated inside the global norm rather than above it. That norm turns out to involve living on remainders, waste, and secondhand goods—including the waste products of the book market. Writers who can recognize and even embrace those remainders come in for higher praise as exemplars of a less exceptionalist sensibility.After outlining key concepts and general assessments of postapocalyptic writing as a mode (which differs from a genre in absenting itself from the historical circumstances of the emergence of the form), Bellamy turns in the second half of his study to thematic clusters. Chapters are devoted to clusters of works focused on the frontier, race, reproduction, and oil. Each of these themes involves its own twist on the subtraction and remainder dynamics. The frontier mythology illustrates the process by which ideological remainders are recycled in a postapocalyptic context. The subtraction of racial heterogeneity represents a regressive tendency in novels by Robert Heinlein but is reconfigured by other works—notably Colson Whitehead's Zone One, N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and Levar Burton's Aftermath—that focus on Black life as it survives the assaults of white supremacy. In the third thematic chapter, Bellamy's reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road provides an especially astute insight into the remaindering of the maternal body. The role of remainders in the chapter devoted to energy closes the sequence. In these thematically oriented chapters, Bellamy offers succinct and cogent accounts of twelve works that define postapocalyptic writing in the United States. Some, like The Road and Station Eleven, are well known, while others, like Aftermath, appeal to a smaller group of fans devoted to the genre. The balance of familiar voices and new discoveries works well.In general, Remainders of the American Century is well conceived and executed. It presents a clear argument on a significant topic. Bellamy makes good use of existing positions in the field, building productively on the work of foundational figures such as Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin. His volume will make a valuable contribution to studies of futurism, science fiction, dystopian studies, and contemporary fiction.At the same time, Bellamy's project exhibits one or two persistent methodological tics that bedevil so many studies of the novel—in particular, a difficulty establishing the connection between text and context. As the title indicates, Bellamy's central assertion is that postapocalyptic fiction manages widespread cultural anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. This is a thesis that relies on a generalized social psychology that is difficult to document, no matter how sincerely one might intuit it. This prompts the question of whether it is necessarily the case that a nation occupying a hegemonic position experiences a sense of comfort and ease while it exercises hegemony and then shifts to anxiety when that situation changes. Can a large and nonhomogeneous nation even have a shared psychology in the first place? Collective affects that respond to changes in material conditions seem likely to be much more variable and complex than this familiar assertion about cultural anxiety assumes. And even if collective affects do exist at the level of the nation, why wouldn't we assume that leaving behind the responsibilities of the hegemon involves a certain relief? The famous decline in US influence might just as well provoke gratitude at the relinquishment of the burden of self-appointed responsibilities and a happy sidestepping of intractable problems as it would status anxiety. And, even if anxiety about the loss of hegemonic power is a demonstrable phenomenon in some corners of US society, why should we put reactionary anxiety at the heart of the social psychology of the nation? One wonders whether postapocalyptic fictions assume this anxiety (and so help to call it into being) or respond to an actually existing mood.One wonders, as well, how many novelists invoke that anxious hegemon-in-decline as their ideal reader. After all, a number of the authors that Bellamy surveys do not seem to have such a reader in mind at all—for example, Octavia Butler, Burton, Whitehead, Jemisin, and Mandel. The more progressive wing of the caucus of postapocalyptic writers that Bellamy has assembled is not insubstantial, and these writers seem to begin from a quite different assessment of the apparent decline of US hegemony than Heinlein and his ilk. Why should we grant the reactionary wing priority? Can the distribution of collective affects not be described in a more dialectical and dynamic manner?Similarly, one wonders about the decline thesis. If US hegemony is in fact disintegrating, what does that process look like in a global context, and what narratives capture that process internationally? In his final chapter, Bellamy suggests that future research should investigate the relationship between the collapse of an integrated global system and novel or as-yet under-exploited versions of apocalypse, and he describes "the lived experience of such a transformed social and political space" as "profoundly unique and challenging" (195). The idea here seems to be that new visions of apocalypse will be required in a world that emerges after the final decay of US hegemony. That prospect does suggest promising directions for new scholarship. Indeed, some of this thinking may already be underway.Jodi Dean's hypotheses about neofeudalism, for instance, outlines one form that a post-American model of power might take. Arguing that "capitalism is turning itself into neofeudalism," she describes the emergence of an international techno-corporate elite that undermines state power and extracts massive and monopolized pools of data from consumers in order to redistribute wealth from the global populace to private owners (Dean). She also describes the spatial division between technologically enhanced cities and deprived hinterlands, as well as the cultural impact of widespread labor precarity. Whether or not Dean's analysis entirely accounts for the uneven and combined structures of global power at present, it certainly offers a strong vision of a post-American (indeed, postnational) social condition—one that contains its own apocalyptic possibilities should the digital platforms at the center of a neofeudal system collapse or otherwise reach their limits.Fiction responding to this sort of neofeudal scenario is already appearing, particularly in the work of writers located beyond the North American sphere. The Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica, for example, develops a brilliant and crisply written send-up of the meat industry in Tender Is the Flesh (2017; translated into English 2020). This compelling and readable novel imagines a world in which a virus has probably killed off nearly all nonhuman animals, resulting in the emergence of a state-sanctioned cannibalism that preys on refugees, racial minorities, and the underclass. Bazterrica's version of the postapocalypse has little interest in US state power, yet it shares a number of features with a novel such as McCarthy's The Road—from the fascination with edible human flesh to the motif of the forced sacrifice of the mother. A comparative approach that could explain modal similarities between such visions might be helpful in refining the claims made about the relationship between narrative elements and their empirical contexts. The specifically North American elements of postapocalyptic fiction would likely emerge with greater clarity in a comparative study.One final question that a reader who is interested in scenes beyond North America might be forgiven for entertaining has to do with the commonly held view that the apocalypse has already happened for indigenous peoples in the Americas or formerly enslaved peoples. (Bellamy explores this idea in his reading of the racial imaginary of postapocalyptic fiction in the United States.) A reader familiar with the literary imaginations informed by colonialism in Africa and Asia or the collapse of the Soviet bloc might recognize many similarities between the narratives of shattered societies and devastated natural environments of these locations and the North American situation. From this vantage point, the notion that apocalypse is something imminent rather than historical soon comes to seem a highly provincial, local, or specialized sensibility rather than a norm. Apocalyptic scenarios may not reflect an American national perspective so much as a niche technocratic view favored by a numerically small portion of the world population. This kind of global reconsideration of influential postapocalyptic narratives opens up the questions that Bellamy's instructive and crystalline study cleanly elaborates, giving them an even broader scope. And, as Bellamy proposes, one of the crucial terms for considering life in the aftermath of colonization may well be the concept of remainder. Locating, repairing, and repurposing the remainders of colonial rule is a task for which a socially committed postapocalyptic imagination is particularly well suited.