Green Planets (31 page)

►
►
►

The ecological messages of the speculative texts included for discussion in this chapter are intertwined with an acute awareness of pressing sociopolitical issues in South Africa and the rapidly shifting notion of what it means to be human. South African speculative narratives approach the question of identity formation in South Africa as a complex process, influenced not only by violent legacies of oppression and institutionalized racism, but also by the effects of global technological advances on nature and on the human body. Many contemporary, post-apartheid South African speculative narratives draw on the technological aspect of the
SF
genre, introducing nonhuman or post-human characters such as clones, genetically engineered donors, extraterrestrial aliens, technologically altered humans, and high-tech equipment such as spaceships and heat-regulating suits.

The South African speculative narratives discussed in this chapter thus have in common not only the representation of a futuristic or alternative South African landscape, but also the expression of an entanglement between self, other, and environment. This is evinced as the need for a sense of responsibility toward and connection with both human and nonhuman others in the face of global ecological disaster and an uncertain technological future. The speculative mode is a useful means of staging such an encounter between self, environment, and human and nonhuman other precisely because the established
SF
tropes of the apocalyptic wasteland and the altered body allow for the creation of a literary space in which all established boundaries between selves and others can be erased and reestablished in different ways. These tropes highlight the issue of
survival and suggest that continued existence of any individual is interdependent with that of the other, be it human, animal, or environment.

Notes

1
. Deidre C. Byrne, “Science Fiction in South Africa,”
PMLA
119, no. 3 (May 2004): 522–25 (522).

2
. See David Barnett, “Putting South African Fiction on the Map,” Guardian.co.uk (May 26, 2011),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/26/south-africanscience-fiction
.

3
. Felicity Wood, “Subversive, Undisciplined, and Ideologically Unsound or Why Don't South Africans Like Fantasy?”
Language Projects Review
6, nos. 3–4 (1991): 32–36.

4
. Introduced in Woolf's essay “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown” (1923).

5
. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Science Fiction and Mrs Brown,” in
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
(London: Women's Press, 1989), 86–102 (90).

6
. Ibid., 87–88.

7
. Ibid., 102.

8
. An apocryphal, dimwitted “Mr. van der Merwe” is the subject of many South African jokes.

9
. Lawrence Buell,
The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 56.

10
. Jane Rosenthal,
Souvenir
(Johannesburg: Bromponie Press, 2004), 4. Additional references to this text are given in parenthetical citation.

11
. Andy Caffrey, “Antarctica's Deep Impact Threat,”
Earth Island Journal
13, no. 2 (Summer 1998).

12
. Wendy Woodward, “Whales, Clones and Two Ecological Novels:
The Whale Caller
and Jane Rosenthal's
Souvenir
,”
Ways of Writing: Critical Essays on Zakes Mda
, ed. David Bell and J. U. Jacobs (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), 142.

13
. Stewart Crehan, “Disowning Ownership: ‘White Writing' and the Land,”
Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries
, ed. Isabelle Maria Zoppi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), 41–71 (58–59).

14
. Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place and the Pathetic Fallacy,” in
The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology
, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 101.

15
. Joan Slonczewski and Michael Levy, “Science Fiction and the Life Sciences,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 174–85 (174).

16
. Adam Roberts,
Science Fiction
(London: Routledge, 2003), 100.

17
. Donna Harraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Free Association, 1991), 149–81 (150).

18
. “Stap Fanta in die hand uit op die stofstoep van die kafee en onthou maar: Oor daardie ruggens van die Swartberge begin die Groot-Karoo, asvaal en gedaan van oudgeid.
Daar bly mense so lank as 'n mens kan onthou en dit is ook joune, dit maak nie saak wat daar gesê word nie. En daar mag jy gaan áánlewe.” Eben Venter,
Brouhaha: Verstommings, Naakstudies en Wenresepte
(Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, 2010), 57. My translation.

19
.
District 9
, dir. Neill Blomkamp (2009; Culver City, CA: Tristar Pictures, 2009), DVD.

20
. This aspect of
District 9
evokes Andrew Buckland's play
The Ugly Noo Noo
, first performed in 1988, which depicts the fantastic battle between a man and a Parktown prawn. This conflict between man and insect is representative of Buckland's own struggle against the restrictive apartheid government of the time, but can also be seen as a critique of irrational fear and intolerance of difference.

21
. Andries Du Toit, “Becoming the Alien: Apartheid, Racism and
District 9
” (October 1, 2009),
http://asubtleknife.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/science-fiction-in-the-ghetto-loving
the alien.

22
. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris,
The Taste for the Secret
, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Malden, MA: Polity Press / Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 26.

23
. This use also echoes the term “nonwhite,” which was commonly used in apartheid legislation.

24
. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988).

9

Ordinary Catastrophes

Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions

CHRISTOPHER PALMER

Send me, sir, a few trifles to read, but nothing about the prophets: everything they predicted I assume to have happened already.
Madame du Deffand to Voltaire

In a recent essay, Perry Anderson offers a parable that reflects on the novel as a form. He tells how Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Moretti paused before a Vermeer painting with a lucid depiction of everyday life and proclaimed, “That is the beginning of the novel”:

In other words, a narrative of ordinary people in a familiar setting—neither epic nor tragedy. Ginzburg then spun around to a portrait by Rembrandt on the opposite wall, of the disfigured painter Gerard de Lairesse, his nose disfigured by syphilis, and retorted: “No, that is the beginning of the novel.” In other words, the anomaly, not the rule.
¹

The implication is that the novel exists in a constant tension and dialogue between the everyday and the anomalous; the present chapter examines a medley of inventive recent post-apocalyptic fiction in the light of this tension. Post-apocalyptic fiction throws both the everyday and the anomalous into uncertainty, but in this uncertainty new ways of controlling or even defeating the fear of apocalypse become available. Apocalypse is by definition exceptional and fearful, yet imagining apocalypse is a pervasive cultural habit; often through its valuing ordinary decency, contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction interrogates
the nature of “the ordinary” in a situation in which the ordinary is itself in question and ordinary decency often turns out to be itself anomalous. What is everyday, what is ordinary or normal, is thrown into doubt after the apocalypse, when social forms all have to be reestablished or reimagined. Language struggles to bridge, or paper over, the gap, seeking to normalize the new but often simply banalizing it. And if what is normal is in question, so too is what is anomalous. After a glance at Ursula K. Le Guin's
The Lathe of Heaven
, published in 1971, this chapter traces these considerations through three more recent novels, Douglas Coupland's
Girlfriend in a Coma
(1998), Margaret Atwood's
Oryx and Crake
(2003), and China Miéville's
Kraken
(2010).

In what follows, discussion concentrates on a series of figures who present themselves as ordinary—often in contrast to exceptional figures of power and violence—yet whose ordinariness turns out to be distinctly and even spectacularly extraordinary. It is a tendency that no doubt follows from the democratic desire to find heroism in ordinary people, narratively released when the fiction embraces the comic—but this tension takes a paradoxical and problematic form in the texts under discussion. Narratives of apocalypse form a tradition that frequently degrades into routine. Nuclear disaster and ecological collapse are too important to be ignored—in fact they cannot be ignored because they haunt us in their demand not merely for emotional and imaginative response, but for action. But nuclear disaster and ecological collapse (and their many siblings regarding possible catastrophe) are easily drawn upon through reliable images and appeals. Brian Stableford has argued that the nuclear gloom of the 1950s gave us the sense that the future is “a kind of continuing catastrophe”
²
; if so, recent waves of unease about ecology and about Earth's future will have surely reinforced this. Yet, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. notes with regard to
SF
during the 1950s and 1960s, “the enthusiasm with which sf writers wiped the slate of civilization clean to construct postapocalyptic scenarios struck many as unseemly.”
³
Apocalypse threatens to become cliché because we have lived with it too long; its imagery and its impressive effects are too readily available. Textually speaking, we face not “the end,” but “the endings,” as Miéville explores in
Kraken
, where people have become “endsick.”
⁴
The catastrophe as an event so devastating that it ought to be unique in fact has dozens and dozens of precedents and variants. It is both anticipated and
déjà
. There is, then, some cultural need for skepticism, if not about the real threat of disaster then about our habit of imagining it.

Yet the habit of apocalypse also opens opportunities: if apocalypse is dreamed,
then this can give the dreamer power; if apocalypse is repeated, then the repetitions open space for comic excess. The combination of need and opportunity prompts a series of complex and often comic moves in the texts under discussion. The setting of these novels is often local, but when the putatively ordinary is brought into closer focus, its nature and potential tend to be questioned and complicated. What part might ordinary people and ordinary decencies play in narratives of catastrophe and apocalypse? What is the ordinary anyway, in a new world in which social reality has changed, in which, arguably, anomaly has now become normal? A recurrent pattern is one in which ordinary decency is both found to be anomalous and to be locked in a conflict with power and violence that can be resolved only by the action of some third, even more anomalous force, which is not ordinary and sometimes not human. This can be first explored in Le Guin's
The Lathe of Heaven
; in the later novels to be discussed the pattern recurs in a more complicated form, and the questioning of the ordinary and everyday takes in the whole of contemporary society as well as individuals.

In
The Lathe of Heaven
the ordinariness of George Orr is seen as a depth of dignity and integrity, but the series of radical and inadequate rearrangements of reality that his “effective dreaming” brings about cannot simply be blamed on his antagonist/partner, the monstrously egotistic Dr. Haber. Each of the new realities that Haber induces Orr to dream into existence is flawed in a fundamental way. The result is not without comedy; for instance, racial difference is abolished along with racial discrimination in one reality when everyone ends up gray in color. Orr dreams new realities with the literalness characteristic of dreams, and the effect is a series of comic anticlimaxes as well as a series of new demands from Haber, and new unsatisfactory dreams.

Orr stands for being, and its depth, while Haber stands for doing, and its blindness; the moral structure of the novel is clear, as is not so clearly the case in the later novels to be discussed. Haber becomes megalomaniac and all-powerful in the latest world he has had Orr dream into existence, while Orr reacts to the extremity of interference with the grounds of being—an interference in which he feels he is himself participating—by dreaming away the human race. Their relationship has reached deadlock. The deadlock is broken by the accidental introduction of amiable aliens who become Orr's helpers, to the homely tune of “With a Little Help from My Friends.” They make a third term that unlocks the impasse between Orr and Haber and brings a halt to the succession of radically rearranged but ironically flawed situations the pair had brought about. Haber is driven mad and reduced to silence, Orr is freed of his ability to have effective
dreams, and reality settles into commonplace mess, to which the aliens calmly adapt.
⁵

I now turn to three recent novels that are somewhat less easy to schematize than
The Lathe of Heaven
. In Coupland's
Girlfriend in a Coma
, Atwood's
Oryx and Crake
, and Miéville's
Kraken
we can see evidence of the response to the cultural habit of apocalypse in three broad features: catastrophe is repeated; catastrophe is subjective; catastrophe is taken for granted. To expand: