Subjectivity in Apocalyptic Narratives

Hatice Yurttas

Apocalyptic narratives usually engage in an effort to create alternative

subjectivities on the base of a certain critique of the human. They offer a stance against

humanism but still the basic premises of humanism lurk behind even the most subversive

subject positions. Here, I will discuss how the subjectivity offered in secular apocalyptic

narratives reflects the religious and humanist conception of the subject. The endings,

apocalyptic visions, catastrophes reflect the logic of ending, progress, guilt, and control

we find in the Bible and in humanism. The apocalyptic philosophy of the Bible offers a

worldview which accommodates a certain subjectivity which is one of free will, a

complete entity defined in its difference from others – human, animal and divine. In

contrast, the self that we can infer from Joseph Campbell’s work on oriental mythologies

and Bakhtin’s study on carnivalesque is completely at odds with the subject of

humanism. The incomplete, shape-shifting, grotesque body in the folk culture of the

Middle Ages, as Bakhtin suggests and the divine subject that deconstructs the oppositions

between life and death, human and divine in Campbell’s study on the oriental

mythologies opposes the Western subject built on dualities. This comparison will show

that the deconstruction of the male subject requires a completely different configuration

of the human. To illustrate the recurrence of the same pattern of thought in apocalyptic

narratives, I will analyse two opposing modes of subject offered in Jeanette Winterson’s

The Stone Gods and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. In the first example, the

alternative subject is a robo sapiens, a subject rid of the biological body completely

whereas in the latter the subject is a perfect biological body eliminated from its faults by

biotechnological interference. Yet, both are are based on the same premises of humanism

and the Biblical model.

Key Words: Subjectivity, deconstruction, apocalypse, dystopian fiction, religion,

mythology, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, M. Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival, Joseph

Campbell.

*****

The idea of apocalypse is old, according to Greg Garrard, it has existed at least for

3,000 years but it seems that apocalyptic narratives have never enjoyed the popularity

they do now in contemporary culture.1

Not only in literature and film, where stories of

endings and of an evil future awaiting all humanity have a sustained popular appeal but

also in our daily lives ecological concerns and environmentalist consciousness have

gained an important place in public and political discourse. Benjamin Kunkel makes a

distinction between dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, with the first ‘a sinister perfection

of order’ and the latter concerned with the collapse of order.2

But, since the

establishment of a dystopian order requires the collapse of the existent order first,

dystopian fiction, too, can be regarded as apocalyptic. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New

World, for instance, the new order under the totalitarian World State that governs through

reproductive technologies and psychological manipulation is based on the disintegration

of the previous social political structure.3

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, is an

apocalyptic text as the order collapses when the mad scientist Crake kills off the whole

humanity but before this collapse, the corporate state is sinister enough.4

Jeanette

Winterson’s The Stone God narrates the order. But on the margins of this state is chaos

and environmental disaster, with mutated radioactive humans wandering the landscape.5

In both apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, the repetition of certain themes and patterns,

such as biotechnologies and hostile climate change is characteristic. Through these

themes, apocalyptic scenarios based on the destruction of order and nature as a result of

climate change and interference in nature by biotechnologies carry out a critique of the

human behaviour and offer alternative modes of being purged of the ills of the present

state of humanity. There is the idea that human beings are deficient, faulty in some ways

that makes a disastrous end unavoidable and a retribution for the wrongs. Scott Dimovitz

also notes the implication of retribution in apocalyptic forms ‘for flouting the laws of the

gods or for hubristically transcending some intuited notion of the limits of humankind.’6

On his reading of David Mitchell’s fiction, he identifies the root of this pattern of an

inevitable end in an inherent fracture in the individual that he interprets in Lacanian terms

of the transition to language, which creates a lack in us. He argues that Mitchell’s novels

point out to the entrance into the symbolic when desire comes to life by inscribing a lack

within the psyche. Thus the apocalypse is ‘the inevitable by-product of our being

human.’7

Whether the cause is placed on a psychological moment or an innate quality, the

stories about ends are governed by an impulse to underline the evils threatening humanity

today. This necessarily implies cures to improve the state of humanity. Sometimes the

correction is proposed more explicitly by creating subversive subjects as The Stone Gods

and Oryx and Crake does with the character of a robo sapiens in the first and a

biologically created tribe in the second.

The warnings for humanity are intertwined with a critique of patriarchal society

and the gender roles it imposes in contemporary women’s fiction. Yet, despite the

ostensible effort to create alternative subjectivities in these narratives, there is a certain

view of the human that lurks behind even the most subversive statements on human. The

post-humans as they are called now are actually created on the same understanding of the

human as the one that the Enlightenment ideology and the Biblical narratives presuppose.

The subjectivity offered in secular apocalyptic narratives resembles the religious and

humanist conception of the subject constructed on dual hierarchies such as between man

and woman, human and animal. The endings, apocalyptic visions, catastrophes that we

witness in apocalyptic fiction reflect the logic of ending, progress, guilt, control, and

perfection we also find in the Biblical narrative and in the basic tenets of humanism. A

brief analysis of the apocalyptic philosophy of the Bible will show that the intelligible

and rational worldview dominates both religious and secular writings. This worldview

accommodates a certain subjectivity, which is necessarily one of free will, a complete

entity defined in its difference from others – human, animal and divine. Both the Bible

and humanist ideology promote the view of the human as a complete, unique entity that

can be distinguished by the divine and animal and can control the world according to

rational rules. This appears in secular narratives such as dystopian fiction and

environmentalist discourse as well. This similarity will become clear when we contrast

the subjectivity implied in these apocalyptic narratives with the subjectivities that we can

infer from Joseph Campbell’s work on oriental mythologies and Bakhtin’s study on

carnivalesque in the middle ages.8

Bakhtin reads the images in the French novelist

Rabelais‘s work in relation to the folk culture of the middle ages. Bakhtin’s reading

shows that the body in Rabelais’s novels is conceived as incomplete, without definite

borders, as a shape-shifting entity. This incomplete grotesque body reveals a different

worldview that was suppressed by the Church. The particular emphasis on the body as

one that is not distinguished from the world is connected to a folk culture that has

survived under the tolerance of the Christian church in the Middle Ages. Joseph

Campbell’s study on Oriental mythologies and the comparison of the Western and

oriental mythologies also manifests a different configuration of the subject.9

This subject

deconstructs the oppositions between life and death, human and divine by embodying the

divine as well. In contradiction to this divine body that is also an organic part of nature as

well, the Western subject is individualized and differentiated from divine and nature, that

is, it is humanized. As Campbell, argues, this Western individual configured as such

dominates both secular and religious narratives today. In Campbell and Bakhtin, we see

an alternative mode of being that is not conjectured in relation to the world but as part of

the world. The comparison of these bodies with the subjectivity that we see in

apocalyptic narratives will show that the deconstruction of humanism, the male subject

requires a completely different configuration of the human and his/her relation to the

Earth, divine and animal.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

offer two opposing modes of subjectivity that illustrate the recurrence of the same pattern

of thought and the subjectivity in apocalyptic narratives. In the first novel, the alternative

subject is a robo sapiens, a subject rid of the biological body completely so as to refrain

from stating an identity based on the body whereas in the latter work, the proposed

subject is a perfect biological body in which all the evil tendencies are eliminated by

biotechnological technologies. The Stone Gods and Oryx and Crake suggest two diverse

solutions to what is claimed to be deficient in the present state of humanity. Both

narratives criticize humanity for being greedy, morally corrupt and destructive. Despite

the claim to subvert the human as it is, though, both novels hinge on the same premises of

humanism, which also informs the discourse on global warming.

The Stone Gods is a self- referential narration going back and forward from the

seventeenth century colonialist world to the post-apocalyptic world of Orbus. It tells the

story of humanity in three phases of history on different planets repeating the same

mistakes that result in the same destruction befalling humanity each time. From the

Easter Islands in the seventeenth century, when the inhabitants deplete the island’s forest

for the ancient god rituals, to the hi-tech post-apocalyptic world of the planet Orbus,

human beings repeat the same self-destructive acts that bring about the doom of the

planet. The novel opens with the hopeful and exciting discovery of a brand new planet,

Planet Blue, which eventually turns out to be the Earth, by the inhabitants of Orbus,

where robots do almost all jobs, meat is cloned in labs, and DNA-fixing promises eternal

youth. Behind this facade of technological advances and genetic engineering, however, is

a dying planet of life- threatening red dust storms that signal the end of the planet in fifty

years, and an oppressive corporate state. The robo sapiens named Spike is the hope of

humanity designed to make the perfect decisions and never fall victim to the emotional

weaknesses. Her human companion Billie Crusoe’s10

summary of the situation in the

interview she gives to a television channel on the discovery of Planet Blue illustrates the

novel’s visions of not only the apocalypse but also of the individual:

But we have taken a few wrong turnings. Made a few mistakes. We have limited

natural resources at our disposal, and a rising population that is by no means in agreement

as to how our world as a whole should share out these remaining resources. Conflict is

likely.11

In Billie’s account, human beings are guilty against the Earth but still they are

capable of correcting the present state of the world, taking control of their and the earth’s

destiny if only they learn from their mistakes. This deterministic view of the world is

governed by cause and effect relations and based on the idea of the responsible and all-

powerful god-like human who can bring about any change s/he likes. It is based on a

belief in the absolute control of the human over nature and world in a progressive view of

history.

Although causality underlies the narrative, randomness plays a role in the novel as

well. On one level, The Stone Gods dismantles the rational determinist world view when,

for example, the narration steps out of this determinism to make a foray into

unpredictable territories, as one of the novel’s mottos articulates: ‘A quantum universe,

neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is to

intervene.’12

One day, Billie spontaneously decides to extend their walk with Spike, the

robo sapiens she is training, in the gardens of the MORE-future company upon seeing the

gate open one day. Billie and Spike’s escaping from the privileged, protected Tech City

and their entrance into the Wreck city where the outlaws live triggers the events that

brings the corporate state’s plans about the robo sapiens and its use in the discovery of

the new planet, Planet Blue. Billie is shot by MORE-security when she is running away,

leaving Spike to a whole new future with her/its teenage lesbian lover in the alternative

community in the Wreck City. Spike decides to join the illegal groups and falls in love

against her/its programming. The evolution of the magnificent robo sapiens to learn to

love is certainly a shift from the deterministic view of life. However, Spike, without a

body, embodies the binary of rationality and emotions. On the one hand, Spike represents

a dissident, alternative path by deconstructing the binary of the robot and the human,

which recalls Donna Haraway’s cyborg subjectivity that can accommodate the

oppositions such as nature and culture, human and animal, human and robot in itself, and

become a contested, illegitimate, denaturalised epistemological position.13

In this cyborg

existence, identity is not defined by biology which is itself, as Haraway and also Judith

Butler14

among other poststructuralist thinkers argue, discursively and ideologically

produced. Yet, at the same time, the denial of bodily existence keeps the dichotomy of

the body and the mind intact. This duality reinforces the ideology of the rational

individual and confirms the humanism that creates subjectivities within violent

hierarchies such as the body/ min or man/woman, as Jacques Derrida argued.15

Winterson ventures to deconstruct the identity defined by the body, following the post-

structural line of thought that stands against any given biological determination. Yet,

there is also the fact that the humanist subject is constructed on the very rejection of the

body.

In the post-apocalyptic world of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, again, the

world is devastated by advancement of technology and bioengineering. The earth is

suffering from climate change and technoscientific developments: exposition to the sun

without protection is fatal, the rising sea levels have swallowed the cities, most of the

natural life forms as they exist today are extinct with the hybrid forms such as wolvogs

and pigoons produced in labs roaming the waste land of what is left of the world. These

scary hybrid forms, as Veronica Hollinger also notes, represent ‘technoscientific greed

and stupidity.’16

These hybrid forms, the unnatural, artificial life forms are the epitome

of the danger that scientific advancements pose. Political and economic situation reflects

a similar evil state with the rich living on the safe and protected compounds separated

from the poor dangerous pleeblands where crime and diseases prevail. Again, the idea in

this nightmarish picture is that human beings destroy the earth and ecological balance

because they take it upon themselves to intervene in the natural order of things as almost

all the other chapters in this volume discuss. As mentioned before, Scott Dimovitz

illustrates this implication in David Mitchell’s fiction, and Jeremy R. Strong does so in

relation to zombie narratives. This view rests on an idea of nature as something that exists

prior to human intervention and prior to its representation. This idea of nature is of course

constructed on the binary opposition between nature and culture. There is mourning for

the lost natural world in the portrayal of the hybrid forms as a danger. By keeping the

category of natural and artificial, Atwood returns to the fundamental dualities of

humanism that she ventures to displace.

In contrast to The Stone Gods, the correction and alternative subjectivity occurs

through an intervention in the body in Oryx and Crake. Not seeing any good in the future

for the Earth or humanity in such a corrupt state, the genius scientist Crake produces a

pathogen secretly ensconced in the magical birth control and sexual enhancement pill,

BlyssPluss while he is working on his secret bioengineering project of creating the

perfect human beings, Crakers. The plague almost suddenly breaks out and destroys the

whole generation except for Crake’s high school friend Jimmy, who Crake has already

planned to leave to look after Crakers when everybody is dead. These beautiful

vegetarian humans are designed so as to eliminate what Crake thinks as the source of evil

in humans: desire and god. Among these innocent and simple creations, the whole point

of sexual intercourse is to produce babies in a biologically determined pattern. When in

heat at certain times, their buttocks go bright blue and they mate in quintuplets, four men

and one female with no emotions involved in the proceedings. As love is not part of their

programming and sexual act is orchestrated in biological terms, there is no conflict and

war that can derive from unrequited love, hatred or desire. Because they are grass-eating

herbivores fit for the environment, there is no question of fighting for food resources,

either. Crake believes that by their perfect biological programming to live peacefully in

their environment and the lack of motive for God and desire, he will rescue the Earth and

humanity from devastation.

As Crake planned, Jimmy survives the plague because he was in the protected

room in the compound. Jimmy, the narrator, who calls himself Snowman as the human is

now reduced to a legendary existence just like Yeti, lives close to the group and teaches

them. Yet, Crake’s plan fails when Crakers spoil their purely natural state by inventing

religious rituals and discover desire. Jimmy has to leave the group sometimes to forage

for food and other needs in the compounds. Once, when he takes longer than expected, he

returns to observe that Crakers has discovered religion and ritual stimulated by lack and

lounging. They create a facsimile of Snowman, their strange companion, teacher, and

guide to call him back. This signals at the symbolic thinking that produces al the present

evils for Crake:

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in

trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in crake’s view. Next

they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the after-life, and sin, and

Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war (italics in the original).17

Facing Jimmy’s absence and longing his presence leads Crakers to lapse into

symbolic thinking. Here, Atwood suggests that however perfect science can be, it can

never be fault proof when human beings are involved. Crakers might not be programmed

to compete for sex, reproduction or territory, but still they are capable of love. Then,

science can never wipe out the consequences of love and desire.

Like Jeanette Winterson, Atwood, too, employs chance factor as a disruptive

force in the scientist’s deterministic design. Despite the mad scientist’s perfect plans, it

turns out that Jimmy is not the only survivor of the plague. The possibility of other

survivors escapes from Crake’s foresight. Snowman discovers three human survivors at

the end of the novel and wonders if the colonialist history will repeat itself when the

humans meet with the simple and innocent natives, Crakers. There is still the possibility

of a better future in this encounter, as implied by the disruption of the deterministic

worldview. While Atwood suggests that human beings cannot be in absolute control of

their destiny and that art and religion are part of the human psyche that will always make

a difference in nature, there is still the belief that human beings are wanting correction.

Scientific advancement and the present state of society can lead only to the collapse of

civilization and catastrophe18

as a result of climate change.

When we analyse the humanist ideology embedded in the narration, however, the

chance factor that escaped Crake’s determinism or any other determinism will disappear.

To begin with, these narratives are based on the premise that the earth is governed by a

cause and effect relation in human being’s control. This scenario of the end of the world

is familiar enough as it reverberates with the environmentalist global warming discourse,

which claims that the end of the world is coming because of our wrongdoings, and argues

that humanity has the power to change this course. There are two problematic

assumptions in this discourse. One assumption is that there is an ‘end’ to the world,

which is very much disputable as we first need to establish what constitutes the end.

Nothing vanishes in the universe: the matter, planets, stars, bodies do not vanish and

always transform into something else, we can only talk about the planet’s transformation

into another state whether hostile to human life or not, rather than an absolute end.

Planets in the universe are not eternal nor have they remained in the same state since their

formation. Stars are born and die every day, planets collapse and disperse or scatter in the

universe.19

This apocalyptic narrative presumes that the world has evolved into its final

and complete state today, which we can and have to maintain. The five billion year of

history of the earth, however, tells a different story that resists this linear model of

development. This progressive view of the planet rejects the ever-changing nature of the

universe and Earth by imposing a false perfection and completion on the planet. The

naive belief that if human beings do not interfere with the ecological balance of the earth,

this perfect blissful state will continue forever ignores the fact that the Earth and the

universe has always been changing. The present state and climate is neither the final nor

the ideal state of the earth. There have been five major ice ages so far and we are still in

the interglacial period of the fifth ice age that began 2.6 million years ago, the last glacial

advance ending about 10,000 years ago, making agriculture possible. Moreover, many

scientists believe that the pattern of the ice ages so far signals to the coming of another

glacial period.20

This tells us that there is no evidence to suggest that the current state of

the earth is the ideal state that the earth has been moving towards since its formation.

Another questionable idea is that human beings have the power to bring the doom of the

universe or to maintain it as it is today. Ice ages began and ended when humankind

populated very little of the earth. Although the exact reasons are unknown, scientific

speculations on the causes of the previous glacial retreats are changes in the earth’s orbit,

the motion of tectonic plates, large meteorites, atmospheric composition and

volcanisms.21

Moreover, whether the earth ends up as a desert or snowball planet in the

future, of which the latter is more likely considering the history of ice ages,22

we cannot

call this an apocalypse proper for all life forms since these periods produce species fit for

the particular climate. Another fact that invalidates this environmentalist view is that the

sun has got only a few million years left before it will burn out, expand and make the

earth uninhabitable.23

Then, the mistakes we have been repeating, as Winterson argues,

have neither been the cause for the retreat of the ice sheets or the changes in the climate,

nor for the end of the planet.

Our belief in our power over the planet despite our limited control over the

universe shows the extent to which we believe in our importance and centrality in the

universe. In this misconception of the relation of the human to the planet, the

nature/culture binary is kept intact and nature is objectified. The deconstruction of the

subject that Winterson and Atwood embarks on, then, fails when it re-enacts the myth of

the subject in total control of itself and the world, capable of correcting all the wrongs on

the planet. This, of course, does not mean that human intervention and pollution has no

effect on the planet nor do I recommend continuing to use plastic bags. It may well be

true that we are causing climate change but environmentalism will not stop planets

crushing or the sun exploding. What I argue for is that undoing the binaries, as Winterson

suggests in another of the novel’s mottos, ‘Forget the binaries,’24

requires a change in

the environmentalist consciousness to figure out a new logic to regulate human activity

on Earth as Greg Garrard suggests to do if the world is not ending or not ending because

of us.25

The configuration of the subject in relation to nature/the planet is itself informed

by a dual hierarchical thinking that can only create violent and oppressive relationships.

Donna Haraway argues that feminists’ estrangement from science as a reaction to

the employment of science and biology by patriarchal, oppressive ideologies has left the

domain of life sciences uncontested by feminists.26

When we turn our back on natural

sciences, we ignore alternative views of nature and biology that can allow us to intervene

in the production of this kind of knowledge. This withdrawal from natural sciences

reinforces the opposition between social sciences and natural sciences as well, which

again contributes to the objectification of nature. Moreover, this discourse needs to be

analysed in terms of the economic and political implications it promotes. In this volume,

Stephen Jackson, for instance, argues that climatic change discourse has been employed

to naturalize political conflict. Projecting the cause of social conflict on climatic change

covers over the responsibility of human agency in politics. He says

The fixation on trying to isolate and represent how climate change can produce

changes in the social world promotes a narrative in which existing social, economic, and

political practices (and injustices) are frozen, rendered as taken-for- granted conditions or

states that merely exist.27

Jackson argues that the climatic change discourse can also serve political ends and

rationalize oppressive politics. We need to read the scientific accounts of climate change

and the call for the preservation of the world as it is in the wider political and economic

structures.

On the surface, there seems to be disruptive, alternative modes of subjectivity in

both Winterson and Atwood’s fiction but since these novels as other dystopian fictions,

repeat the same nature/culture binary and the centrality of the human in universe, the

difference that creates robo sapiens or Crakers who escape the scientific determination,

the disruptive impulse disappear. Although Winterson is not hopeful about the potential

for endings to produce new beginnings, as the novel argues that the end is only the

beginning of the repetition of the previous destructive cycle, I do not think that she

deconstructs the myth of apocalypse as Hope Jennings suggests.28

Despite the lack of

consolation and revelation at the end, as the common interpretation of the myth of

apocalypse goes, the pattern in The Stone Gods reinstates the humanist ideal keeping the

culture/nature hierarchy intact. And this is what sustains the all-knowing male subject.29

Atwood, too – for while she critiques sciences’ naïve belief in itself to control human

nature and its future – the controlling impulse still remains in the cause and effect logic in

the climate catastrophe in Oryx and Crake. Even if Crake fails to determine the fate of

the Crakers, the suggestion is that human beings are deficient and destructive and they

can control the planet. Jeremy Strong, too, in his reading of zombie narratives, identifies

the critique of the human, though he identifies a different pattern than the one I discuss

here. Strong argues that zombie narratives reveal an eternal apocalypse ‘as they are

continually ending civilisation’, in contrast to the eternal cycle of beginnings and endings

in The Stone Gods and Oryx and Crake.30

This deterministic worldview built around a central all-powerful and responsible

subject also resonates with the common interpretation of the narrative of the Bible.

Teresa Heffernan, for instance, assumes that the apocalyptic narratives are rooted in the

Christian apocalypse, which has produced the secular fundamental narratives of the

Enlightenment, the Nation, History and humanity that offer a sense of continuity, purpose

and meaning to existence in a parallel way to the religious narrative of apocalypse.31

While it is true that secular apocalyptic narratives reflect the same pattern derived from

the Bible, the interpretation of the Bible as a progressive, linear narration is also one that

is imposed on the text. The reliance on the Bible to derive the idea of apocalypse is

contingent on a biased reading of the text. Despite the common interpretation, the Bible

does not actually present a coherent pattern with a clear beginning and a move towards an

ultimate end that will see the inception of a new order. This is despite Frank Kermode‘s

sweeping conclusion that:

The Bible is a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning (“In the

beginning ...”) and ends with a vision of the end (“Even so, come, Lord Jesus”); the first

book is Genesis, the last Apocalypse.32

In fact, the Biblical narrative is fragmentary, repetitive, with many rewritings of

previous stories and self-references. To begin with, the Bible is composed of many books

written by many different writers. The order of the books in the Bible and the canon

varies and is not undisputed among Christians and Jews. The idea that there is a

beginning and development towards an absolute end is not possible in such a structure.

Throughout these texts, the disasters or ends are closely connected to a principle of

justice and retribution. In the Old Testament‘s visions, destruction comes as a punishment

to those who do not obey god’s commands. The end of the world is not a predesigned

event but one that comes as a result of sacrileges. The first mention of the end of the

world, Noah’s story, for example, illustrates this logic very clearly. The flood that ends

the world and brings about a new one is retribution for humankinds’ wrongdoing and

disrespect for god. Repenting his creation, God punishes humanity except for Noah and

his family because they were good and obedient.33

After this first apocalypse, the tension

between God and his people continues because people revert to polytheistic religions and

worship other Gods. One instance where the conflict between religions is obvious is in

Ezekiel:

And you, son of man, set your face against the daughters of your people, who

prophesy out of their minds; against them and say, Thus says the Lord God: Woe to the

women who sew magic bands upon all wrists, and make veils for the heads of persons of

every stature, in the hunt for souls!34

God’s wrath against the pagans and against other gods and goddesses appear

throughout the Bible. The Bible narrates the vicissitudes of the conflict between the

pagans and the Israelites. The descriptions of the day when the non-believers will be

punished appear not only in Daniel but in many other places.35

Curses accompany

promises of eternal prosperity and abundance for the believers. The judgment day that

will initiate a new beginning gains a central place only in Matthew, with the narration of

Jesus Christ’s life; yet, it is still possible to interpret this ‘kingdom of heaven’36

as the

victory of the sons of Israel over pagans. I am aware that the reading I offer here is prone

to what Kermode criticizes as taking the language of the Bible ‘literally’37

but I would

call this kind of approach secular because it diverges from the dominant religious

discourse and recognizes the parallels between the Biblical stories, history and

mythology. This literal or secular reading reveals the Bible as a record of history or

mythology, which can be regarded as an alternative source of historical knowledge. I

suggest that the text yields itself to this interpretation more with its repeated references to

itself as ‘the book of life.’38

Similar to Genesis, Mathew begins with the account of the

genealogy with the introduction of the book as ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus

Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’39

The Bible, in addition to being a record

of the members of the Israelites and of history, rather depicts the scene of transition, the

establishment of the monotheist religions by suppressing the polytheist religions. In this

conflict, reward and punishment, threats and promises, naturally, have an important

place. Revelation, for example, is a record of those who is to be punished and who is to

be rewarded when the ultimate victory is won over pagans. From this perspective, the

coherent narrative of an inevitable apocalypse that will come no matter what will be seen

as the reflection of our own schemata; the result of our need for absolute ends to make

sense of our existence. This coherence is contained neither in the workings of the

universe nor in the Biblical narrative. David Leigh’s search of apocalyptic patterns in the

Eastern mythologies such as the myth of Rudra and Hindoo myths Bhagavad Gita is a

similar gesture. Even though Leigh realises that the latter does not have a proper

apocalyptic pattern, he still reads the cyclic pattern in Rudra as apocalyptic, which

ignores the idea of transformation from good to bad and vice versa, and the repetition of

beginnings prevail in the myth of Rudra and in many other Eastern mythologies.40

These

conclusions drive only from our need for comprehensible beginnings and ends, which is,

as Kermode argues, an essential human need, and which, I believe, should be located

within the specific historical philosophical era. A secular reading of the Bible makes one

wary of such simplistic conclusions of clear beginnings, a logical development and

comprehensible, rational endings.

In addition to promoting a problematic progressive linear course for the planet’s

chaotic and unpredictable existence, the two secular apocalyptic narratives – the

dystopian and environmentalist – and religious narratives confirm the subject of

humanism, as they offer a rational individual of free will in control of the world. This

subjectivity defines a certain era in human history whereas we can see alternative

configurations of subjectivity at different moments in history. Bakhtin’s study on the

sixteenth century French novelist Rabelais and Renaissance literature, for instance,

reveals a dissident subjectivity within the folk culture of medieval times. The folk culture

and the carnivalesque elements that characterize this culture consist of a different view of

life in which the body, time, and life have different borders than the classical or rational

view conjectures. Emphasising carnival’s broad reference to an outlook on life rather

than an organised, spatially and temporally limited event, Bakhtin argues that the

carnivalesque characterises the folk culture that is accentuated by the combination of

humour with philosophy, the comic with the tragic, where the material bodily principle

shows itself in a certain idiom of symbols and imagery to merge oppositions.

Constituting the grotesque realism of medieval times are the images of the body

conceived as an entity that comes to life, grows up, ages, defecates, copulates, and dies.

The emphasis on excessive eating and defecation, and sexual organs emphasize the

trespassing of the limits of the body, the body’s organic connection to the world. What

emerges in these images is a different body politic within a cyclical conception of time in

which death and life are phases of one continuous cycle. Death does not mark the end of

time nor does the birth is an absolute new beginning. They can laugh and celebrate death

and sexuality, as the pagans celebrated the sacrifice of kings because death and sexuality

is necessary for the continuation of life. In Enlightenment rationality, the peak of the

official and also the ecclesiastical ideology, the being is defined as a completed, finished

existence distinguished with clear boundaries from other beings – animal, vegetable and

human. This relation is based on oppositional and exclusive relations between death and

life, or humankind and God, for example, within a progressive linear perception of time.

On the other hand, the folk humour highlights an incomplete, becoming being with an

organic relation to other beings and divinity; a being, moreover, that can become divine

as well. Bakhtin says that the grotesque images of the body that appear in Rabelais‘s

work [...] discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order,

another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the

indisputable and stable.41

These images of the body overrule oppositions between the body and soul,

abstract and concrete, immanent and transcendent. In this way, the imagery of grotesque

realism revokes abstract ideas and salvation through the rejection of the body imposed by

the church during medieval times. With their ageing, dying, desiring, eating bodies, the

subjects deconstruct the abstract ideals and transcendence of the bodily existence,

bringing everything down to earth, literally.

Bakhtin suggests that this folk culture is rooted in the pre-classic Roman and

Greek culture. The banquets, rituals and comic spectacles in carnivals are reminiscent of

pagan rituals suppressed or transformed into more acceptable forms by Christianity and

monotheistic religions in general.42

This suggestion takes us to Joseph Campbell’s 1962

study on oriental mythologies, which also offers a new modality of being to discuss the

deconstruction of the subject. Campbell argues that a certain moment in history has

marked the divergence of the Western and Eastern religions and created the Western self

as such today. This is the moment when the spheres of God and human, the individual are

separated. Campbell argues that both Western and Eastern religions and philosophies

share the same roots where divine is a matter of identification, where man/king is

identified with God. This identification explains the king and human sacrifices in Indian

and Egyptian mythologies, which continued to as late as the nineteenth century. The

traces of this view still exist in oriental religions, in Buddhism, for instance. This

subjectivity built on identification is, of course, incongruous with the individual in the

monotheistic religions that draw on the autonomous individual of free will. Eastern

mythologies envisage the individual as part of the cosmic realm and divine, not as a

completed and differentiated being that we see in Western philosophy and in

monotheistic religions. The self is a position that can be taken up by many individuals as

the generic names for multiple kings in Egyptian mythology illustrates. The divine

character of the Pharaoh makes the distinction between God and the human inapplicable

to Eastern philosophy. That is why human sacrifice was a celebratory event securing the

continuation of life and return to the body of God. Campbell remarks that

For these sacrifices were not properly, in fact, individuals at all; that is to say,

they were not particular beings, distinguished from a class or group by virtue of any sense

or realization of a personal, individual destiny and responsibility, to be worked out in the

way of an individual life. They were parts, only, of a larger whole; and it was only by

virtue of their absolute submission to that in its unalterable categorical imperative that

they were anything at all.43

The self in Eastern mythologies differs from the Western self that is conceived in

its relation to divine and the world. The subject contained in oriental philosophy is not

one that can be positioned in opposition to the world nor can it be held responsible for the

cosmic order to which it is not only submitted but also organically attached. This

individual is one of transformation and becoming between life and death, which resonates

well with the idea of the individual articulated in Bakhtin’s argument on folk culture.

This is not only an embodied being but also one whose body is also the universal body of

God. Campbell argues that the separation of God and humanity marks an important

moment in history that fostered the narratives of fall, progress and conflict between

opposing powers.44

With the differentiation between God and man, man becomes

meaningful as an individual in relation to God: he is now a servant of God, his ‘Tenant

Farmer.’45

Positioning man in relation to God rests on the idea of fall from heaven, from

a perfect unity and harmony, and produces a yearning for return to God and to the

original harmony.46

This insight, I think, applies to every apocalyptic narrative:

apocalyptic vision, the sense of an ending is built on the idea of fall, a desire for a unity,

or the separation of God and man. The fall implies guilt, a mistake that brought about the

separation from God. A whole package of guilt and a sense of responsibility before God

and the world define the individual that is constructed on an original separation from the

divine. This Western individual has to behave well in order to be rewarded by his father,

God. The individual conjectured in relation to a separate God and empirical reality is

endowed with free will and autonomy. Since the secular sphere also envisions the

individual as such as I have discussed in the two apocalyptic fiction and scientific

narrative of global warming scenarios, the distinction between the secular and religious

spheres we take for granted appears questionable. This perspective on the religiosity of

apocalyptic narratives in scientific discourse, I think, adds to Seline Reinhardt’s

suggestion of the religiosity in Lovelock’s Final Warning in terms of the implicated

transcendence of Earth and tropes of sin and guilt in environmentalism.47

My use of

religion, though, differs from Reinhardt’s, as I limit the sense of religion here to the

Biblical narratives and to Campbell’s study on mythology.

This sense of guilt and responsibility is, of course, inconceivable in Eastern

mythologies since the good and the bad, life and death, are not perceived as oppositional,

dissonant categories; they are instead part of a cosmic order that relies on both. The

goddess of fertility is also the goddess of the underworld; as Campbell says, the ancient

people of ancient religions buried the death as they buried the seeds in the earth. The

belief in the divine order does not allow the thought of a wrong, a sorrowful state that

needs to be corrected or overcome. Everything occurs because this is what the

maintenance of the order requires. There is death so there is abundance and life. Yet, now

this guilty consciousness before God as much as before the planet is a constituting

element of the Western subject accompanying a sense of rebellion as well, for, while he

feels guilty for playing God, he cannot, nonetheless, give up the benefits of science and

bioengineering. This double consciousness appears in both of the dystopian novels I have

discussed here. Neither Winterson nor Atwood accuses science and biotechnologies per

se; on the contrary, both writers explore the potentials science can make possible to shift

the grounds of power structures and biological determinism. Yet, with the burden of guilt

that defines the subject, the alternative subject positions offered in Spike or Crakers do

not challenge humanism much.

The two models of being that we can infer from Bakhtin and Campbell’s work on

folk culture and Eastern mythologies, on the other hand, are outside the binaries on which

Western philosophy is built as Derrida argues,48

and suggest an alternative to the

abstract, disembodied, rational subject of humanism and monotheistic religion. I do not

propose that these models are the only alternatives to humanism, nor do I imply that

alternatives to humanistic ideal should be constructed according to these modes of being.

What I want to point out is that these models illustrate the compulsory elements of the

subject as humanism conjectures by revealing what is outside the boundaries of the

humanism. However much apocalyptic narratives seem to be repudiating religious and

humanist ideals, they repeat the same gestures of dualistic thinking. Deconstruction of the

subject, to step outside the oppressive humanist philosophy requires us to see how the

subject in Western philosophy reflects the premises of the dominant religious narrative,

which is the relatively recent invention of being as an individual entity defined in relation

and opposition to God, and the world. Ignoring the defining elements of this self results

in the repetition of the same patterns which are disruptive subjectivities on the surface

only as we see in The Stone Gods or in Oryx and Crake, for instance.

Notes

1 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), 85.

2 Benjamin Kunkel, ‘Dystopia and the End of Politics,’ Dissent: A Quarterly of

Politics and Culture 55.4 (2008): 90.

3 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998).

4 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004).

5 Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (London: Penguin, 2008).

6 Scott Dimovitz, ‘Humanity’s Oldest Pastime: David Mitchell’s Postmodern

(Non)Endings,’ in this volume.

7 Ibid.

8

M. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Héléne Iswolsky

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).9

Joseph Campbell, Oriental

Mythology (London: Souveneir Press, 1973).10

The Stone Gods makes many allusions

to Robinson Crusoe in addition to many other works. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

(London: Penguin, 1985). This intertextuality is employed to strengthen the argument

that human beings have been repeating the same mistakes in various forms in different

phases of history.11

Winterson, The Stone Gods, 5.12

Ibid., 75.

13 Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-

Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century,’ Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The

Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books), 149-181.14

See Judith

Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993) for a detailed discussion of

how sex and gender are the same, that sex, the body is discursively constructed to serve

to maintain hierarchies.

15 See Jacques Derrida’s seminal work on Western philosophy, initially in Of

Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998). Derrida analyses

Western philosophy’s reliance on binary oppositions within the linguistic system.

16 Veronica Hollinger, ‘Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to

Pattern Recognition,’ Science Fiction Studies 33.3 (2006): 452-472.17

Atwood, Oryx

and Crake, 419-420.18

Joseph Campbell says that the word ‘catastrophe’ means the

final event, denoement of a drama in Oriental Mythologies, 136-137.

19 Lars Von Trier’s 2011 film, Melancholia (Denmark: Zentropia, 2011), is an

interesting case here. It is, I think, the only apocalyptic narrative where the end,

cataclysm comes as an accident beyond human control. Yet, the approaching collision of

a rogue planet with the Earth is rather depicted as symbolic of the catastrophe in the

characters’ petty bourgeois lives.

20 Doug Macdougall, Why Geology Matters: Decoding the Past, Anticipating the

Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 147-167. See Donald for a

detailed explanation of why the future of the climate cannot be established for certain in

addition to his discussion of how political and economic interests are involved in global

warming scenarios. Donal Rapp, Ice Ages and Interglacials: Measurement,

Interpretations, and Models, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 327- 375. Donald Rapp

identifies four glacial periods. Donald Rapp, Assessing Climate Change: Temperatures,

Solar Radiation, and Heat Balance (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 12; 18-39.

21 Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Ice Age’ Wikipedia: The Free Encylopedia, Viewed

May 8, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_ages and Donald Rapp, Ice Ages and

Interglacials, 17- 21 and 215-245.22

This is a more likely scenario. Maggie Gee’s

1998 novel, The Ice People (London: Telegram, 1998) takes this clue and tells the story

of a future ice age, when the ice begins to advance again.

23 Wikipedia Contributors, ‘The Sun’ Wikipedia: The Free Encylopedia, Viewed

on May 8, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_sun and Martin Beech, Rejuvenating

the Sun and Avoiding Other Global Catastrophies (New York: Springer, 2008), 8, 23- 60.

24 Winterson, The Stone Gods, 153.

25

26 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 8-9.

27 Stephen Jackson, ‘Weather of Mass Destruction: Forecasting the Future as

Climate-Driven War,’ A Critical Approach to the Apocalypse, 77.

28 Hope Jennings, ‘A Repeating World’, 132-146.

29 The binary of culture/nature appears in many science fiction novels. Margaret

Atwood’s sequel to Oryx and Crake, The Year of The Flood (London: Virago,

2010); Doris Lessing’s The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter

(London:

Harper Perennial, 2006), and Maggie Gee’s The Flood (London: SAQI, 2005) are

some of the novels that are based on a false belief in humanity’s exaggerated

power over nature.

30

32 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 6.33

Gen 5:8 (Authorized (King James)

Version).34

Ezek. 13:17 (AV).

35 Some of the references to ends can be seen in Dan; Hosea; Jonah (AV).

36

Matt 3:2 (AV).37

Frank Kermode argues for an interpretation of the Bible based on the

figurative use of language. Frank Kermode. The Sense of an Ending, 8.38

See Rev 3:5;

13:8; 17:8 (AV).39

Matt 1 (AV).40

David J. Leigh, Apocalyptic Patterns in

Twentieth-Century Fiction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 7-

8.41

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 4842

Ibid., 74.

Garrard, Ecocriticism, 107. Although Hope Jennings quotes Garrard’s suggestion

that the world may not be ending, she does not dwell on the implications of this in regard

to the problematic environmentalist view in The Stone Gods. Hope Jennings, ‘A

Repeating World: Redeeming the Past and Future in the Utopian Dystopia of Jeanette

Winterson’s The Stone Gods,’ Interdisciplinary Humanities 27.2 (2010): 135.

Jeremy R. Strong, ‘Destruction from Within: The Signification of the Resurgence

of Zombies in Film and Fiction,’ A Critical Approach to the Apocalypse, 18.31

Teresa

Heffernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture Modernism, Postmodernism and the Twentieth

Century Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 4-5.

43 Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology, 65.

44 Ibid., 6-7.

45 Ibid., 6.

46

Scott Dimovitz’ reading of David Mitchell’s fictions as the fall from a unity into the

fractures of language at the beginning of time in Lacanian terms resonates with the idea

of Fall in Campbell. Dimovitz, in this volume.

47 Seline Reinhardt, ‘Lovelock,s ‘Final Warning’: Toward a Typology of

Religious Narration of Scientific Climate Change Accounts,’ paper presented at the 2nd

Global Conference on the Apocalypse, July 2013.48

Jacques Derrida Of

Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998)

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Hatice Yurttas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation and

Interpreting Studies (English), Murat Hüdavendigar University, Istanbul Turkey.