On the Pleasures of Reading the Apocalypse

by James Cairns

How many times have novels and movies shown me the end of the world? I watch humanity wiped out by nuclear war, or an asteroid, or a plague, or a flood. Survivors hunt for and hide from one another in wrecked buildings and toxic swamps.

We go to end-of-the-world fiction for two obvious reasons. First, we want distraction. Explosions on screen can block out explosions in our lives. I’d rather worry about the storms in The Day After Tomorrow than the tasks I said I’d finish before actual tomorrow.

Second, perhaps paradoxically, we want to feel hopeful. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, civilization is collapsing, yet Lauren Olimina never wavers from her commitment to survival and rebirth. At the end of Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, the Anishinaabe community leaves its apocalypse-ravaged reservation for a new beginning in the woods. In Armageddon, Bruce Willis blows up Michael Bay’s asteroid moments before Armageddon commences. Even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, widely regarded as “emotionally shattering” (Alan Warner in the Guardian), ends with the adoption of the newly-orphaned boy in the wake of his dead father’s command to go on. The moral of the stories: We, humanity, shall overcome. In the Globe and Mail, David Moscrop recently wrote that while reading apocalyptic novels might not be “comforting,” it can encourage “valuable reflection about how we live our lives today – and how we might choose to live them tomorrow.”

Leave the World Behind. Rumaan Alam. Ecco Books. $21.99, 272 pp., ISBN 9780062667649

Ruuman Alam’s apocalyptic novel Leave the World Behind (a 2020 finalist for the National Book Award) enchants for a different reason. By painting a picture of total human annihilation – no plucky survivors, no one spared by design or by chance – the book offers the relief of surrender.      

Alam’s novel begins with a white, middle-class family arriving at a bucolic vacation home east of New York City. The family splashes in the pool and fantasizes about owning marble countertops, solid oak floors, ample space. The mom, Amanda, can’t resist checking work email. Clay, the dad, sneaks cigarettes in the driveway while cooking up half-baked media studies theories to test out on his fall crop of college students. The kids – Rose, 10, and Archie 13 – look at their phones.

The centrality of technology is true to life and crucial to the plot. Cell signals, the internet, and cable television stop working shortly after the family lands in the countryside. Probably, they think, their remote vacation spot is beyond reach of satellite networks. That night, though, when the owners of the house show up and ask to stay, Clay and Amanda learn that the loss of service is widespread. The power is out across New York City.

The homeowners, the Washingtons, are a kind, elderly Black couple. GH made his fortune in finance. Ruth was a private school administrator. They offer Clay and Amanda one thousand dollars to stay in the guest suite until determining what’s going on.

 Drama unfolds on two tracks. There is tension between the families. Clay and Amanda are suspicious of the Washingtons, which has as much to do with the white couple’s latent racism as with the unexpected appearance of the homeowners. For the Washingtons, managing the racial entitlement of their guests is especially fraught because, against type, the Black couple is wealthier and more successful than Clay and Amanda. Who has the right to call the shots: the white renters or the Black deed-holders? At what point does valid speculation about the crisis slide into harmful paranoia? The claustrophobia of strangers stranded together in the absence of information is powerful plot fuel.

On a second narrative track, the world is ending. The reader understands this early in the book more clearly than the characters ever do. There’s plenty of evidence on Long Island that something is wrong. The blackout, communication breakdown, a deafening noise overhead, terrified neighbours, flamingos in the pool. A few days after the vacation begins, Archie’s teeth fall out. The families know there is trouble, they are in trouble, but they never understand the extent of it. Not-knowing is part of their terror.

By contrast, readers know that we’re witnessing the end of the world because Alam periodically interrupts action in the vacation home with a Voice of God narrator (VOG) describing cataclysmic events far off. While Clay and Amanda fuss over the lost TV signal, the VOG tells us: “A storm had metastasized into something for which no noun yet existed […] a pipeline was spilling crude onto the ground in an unpopulated part of Wyoming […] the electrical grid broke apart like something built of Lego […] machines meant for supporting life ceased doing that hard work after the failure of backup generators in Miami, in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Annapolis.”

Around the novel’s midpoint, a horrifying noise erupts from the sky. The noise divides the families’ lives in two: “the period before they’d heard the noise and the period after.” Inside the novel, no one discovers the source of the sound. However, readers learn from the VOG that top-secret fighter jets are scrambling toward a new era of battle over the eastern seaboard.

Far from New York, the VOG explains, “Some people were committing suicide. Some people were packing things up in cars and hoping they’d be able to get a mile or two or ten or whatever it would take to reach wherever safety endured. […] Some people didn’t know anything was amiss. […] Some people started to realize they’d had a naïve faith in the system. Some people tried to maintain that system. Some people were vindicated that they’d stockpiled guns and those filter straws that made any water safe to drink. However much had happened, so much more would happen.”

If there were no VOG interruptions, no recurring omniscient assurances anchoring the contingencies of the interpersonal plot to the certainty of global apocalypse, Leave the World Behind would be an anxiety novel. Is Armageddon nigh or not? Some of my favourite books are anxiety novels. I identify with the catastrophism and fear expressed in books like Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Jenny Offill’s Weather. In fact, I find it comforting that the anxiety of Weather’s narrator (Lizzie) far surpasses my own. Watching Lizzie worry as she does affirms the validity of my worries, and tells me that my anxiety isn’t nearly as bad as some people’s.

Arguably, the end-of-the-world anxiety novel is scarier than speculative end-of-the-world fiction. The anxiety novel is about the world as it is: the painful truth of real existence, not the threat of some imagined existence-to-come. Anxiety is torturous, paralyzing. It’s a truism of the horror genre that anticipating the arrival of the monster can be more terrifying than the beast’s actual appearance.  

But the uncertainty driving the anxiety novel, the book’s ultimate source of terror, can’t help but leave open the possibility that things might not be as bad as they seem. Notwithstanding the disastrous portents of the present, the future could turn out better than we’d predicted (especially given that anxiety, even well-founded anxiety, always contains traces of paranoia). No matter how implausible the idea of post-novel happiness is in Weather, it is conceivable that movements for eco-sustainability could usher in a world less destructive than Lizzie imagines. The narrator in Lerner’s 10:04 pictures today’s super-storms as tomorrow’s ice-age… but, then, maybe they won’t be.    

In Leave the World Behind, there is no uncertainty. When Amanda wonders if war has erupted suddenly, the VOG interrupts: “She didn’t know that it was worse, that war could not describe it,” and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Apocalypse is underway, whether you can see that, worry about it, resist it, or not. Maybe you’re healthy and optimistic; maybe your teeth have fallen out and you’re losing consciousness (hello, Archie). In the grand scheme of things, it matters not. Your fate is sealed.

Because if the bombs are already in the air, the electrical grid is already down for the final time, the life-destroying echoes of the noise are already in your body, there is no future that isn’t mass slaughter. As if to put a fine point on the guarantee of imminent death, the futility of resistance, Alam bores an unnoticed tick into Archie’s ankle long before the boy is dying from noise-sickness.

In spring 2022, when I read Leave the World Behind with an undergraduate seminar called “The Crisis Today,” several students saw signs of hope in the book’s final chapter. Rose, the young girl, goes into the woods alone to find a house she’d seen on an earlier hike. No one answers when she knocks on the door. The VOG tells us that its occupants, stranded in California, “would never see this house again in their lives, though Nadine, the matriarch, would sometimes dream of it before she succumbed to cancer in one of the tent camps the army managed to erect outside the airport. They’d burn her body, before they stopped bothering with that, as the bodies outnumbered the people left to do the burning.”

Brave Rose breaks in to discover what first might seem like a lifeline. Food, supplies, living space. A place to wait out the storm? A new beginning? In a different novel, yes. Butler’s Lauren Olimina could’ve turned the place into a plush Earthseed settlement. But the apocalyptic prognosis Alam has developed by this point in the book forecloses the possibility of a future here.

The vision of safety in the house is a mirage; worse, the illusion of hope mocks Rose’s hopeless situation. Knowing what we know about the collapse-in-progress, the things in the house that symbolize safety to Rose – a bit of food, soft carpeting, camping gear – are no more promising than her dead phone. A giant TV that doesn’t work (none do), a jar of pickles, a bottle of Advil, a few batteries: this stuff can’t save them. Nothing can.

Why does Alam’s crushing story captivate me? Why am I thrilled by the promise that we’re on the edge of extinction?

I think the book delights by allowing us to revel in the pleasures of giving up. Quit your job, break dinner plans, stop exercising, leave the relationship. What joy there is in not having to do the thing we thought we had to do. The world is ending and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

In his LRB essay “On Giving Up,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes: “We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and fearful. That is to say we tend to value, and even idealise, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them.” However, Phillips argues, there is such a thing as “a tyranny of completion, of finishing things, which can narrow our minds unduly.” The refusal to give up can be harmful, murderous. Phillips interprets Macbeth, Lear, and Othello as tragic dramatizations of the tyranny of completion.

He could’ve mentioned capitalist ideology’s emphasis on resilience, grit, and bootstrap-pulling. In the eyes of employers and the state, working people must never give up striving. No matter your low wages, your skyrocketing rent, you must persevere, try harder. To give up can be to walk-out, strike, object. There’s radical political potential in Phillips’ suggestion that “we should not underestimate the pleasures of giving up, however forbidden or shameful they may seem to be.”  

My earliest memory of the desire to give up ends with my mother rejecting it. (If Phillips were my therapist, no doubt I’d be encouraged to reflect on this memory to better understand my attachment to Alam’s novel.) I was nine or ten years old and wanted to quit the school choir. Mom and I stood in the kitchen before breakfast. I don’t remember why it felt so important to quit, but I was crying, shaking, desperate for the relief of not having to sing that afternoon.

Mom’s response was sympathetic but stern: No. We don’t quit things partway through. It’s fine to not want to do choir. You don’t have to be in the choir next year. But you made a commitment, and you will see it through. No negotiation. I felt like puking. How could Mom so strictly enforce the principle that we don’t quit things when she’d just left her marriage of eighteen years? (And now that I’ve asked the question, perhaps I’ve also answered it.)

I have quit things, though. And I’ve loved it. In the second year of my undergraduate studies, I dropped a statistics class late in the term. Because I’d missed the course drop date, I was required to get the professor’s signature granting me special permission. The prof’s office was hot, and I was wearing a parka. Sun streamed in the window behind his head. I thought of how in class once he’d teared up while talking about the pain of losing his wife to cancer. I started justifying my decision to drop the course in the direction of his silhouette. He took the paper from me and signed it while I rambled. “People do things for different reasons,” he said. “It’s fine.” The relief I felt far exceeded the joy produced by any A+ I ever got.

Oh, the joy of leaving that troubled ten-year relationship! I imagine it’s what Scrooge felt waking on Christmas morning, learning that he has another chance. I instantly recall the butterflies, the excitement of quitting what seemed like a life destined for permanent frustration. The breakup was terrible. I hated hurting her. The logistics of moving were complicated, and she trashed the house when she left the final time. But I don’t feel the pain of those hurtful memories as intensely as I feel the pleasure of the memory of giving up.

Several students in my crisis seminar dismissed Alam’s novel for being little more than crisis-porn for rich white people who’ve never experienced an actual crisis. In the foreword to Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, Doug Henwood dismisses the notion that social movements will grow only after more people grasp how truly catastrophic our times are. “Catastrophe can be paralyzing, not mobilizing. Revolutionaries should be talking about possibilities of transformation, not spinning tales of great chaos and suffering.” It’s possible that acclaim for Alam’s novel stems from the nihilism of those who’ve had it easy.

However, considering the pressures on individuals to strive, take your licks, work harder, be thankful for what you have, it wouldn’t surprise me if rich white people weren’t the only ones who fantasize about giving up. Saddled by debt? That’s your fault. Can’t find work in your field? You should’ve studied something employers actually want. Trouble with immigration authorities? You’re the one who chose to come here.

The incredible thing is that most of the time, people don’t give up. They struggle, they overcome, they get by, they make do. Why don’t people kill themselves, asks Camus at the start of “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Life is absurd; what’s the point of living it? He might’ve added that for many people, life is extremely unfair: full of back-breaking labour doing unfulfilling, poorly compensated tasks. Notwithstanding its obviousness, Camus’ conclusion is profound: the nature of the human condition is to keep going, to not give up. It is human to rebel against the absurd and material obstacles to survival. That doesn’t mean we don’t fantasize about quitting, maybe even about leaving the world behind.

It’s the pleasure in the dream of quitting, the fantasy of the feeling of the void, not the politics of mass death, that I desire. In imagining the end of the world, I experience the release of countless other pressures. My own anxieties get transferred to the novel, where they disappear, if only for a fraction of a moment, in the blackout, the sound, the carnage of the plot. This tendency of mine, which first struck me as troubling (am I really so sadistic?) might even be grounding, reinvigorating, healthy. Easing chronic stress and fear is a good thing. It’s why some people meditate or jog. Research shows that watching horror movies can relieve psychological tension.

There are better apocalyptic novels than Leave the World Behind. For portraying social collapse as gradual and incomplete, Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven are doubtless more realistic depictions of how modern society falls apart. Impoverished and homeless, surrounded by violence, drought, and disease, Butler’s Lauren Olimina has allies helping to establish a community rooted in the revolutionary vision of God-as-change. Mandel’s roving theatre troupe carries the nourishing power of art over the pandemic-ravaged dead lands of northern Michigan.

The spirit of those books reminds me of Andreas Malm’s admonition to fight climate change no matter the chances of victory. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Malm argues that even if we know for certain that the climate crisis cannot be stopped there remains a moral imperative – a species-defining need – to fight until our last breath. “If it is too late for resistance to be waged within a calculus of immediate utility, the time has come for it to vindicate the fundamental values of life, even if it only means crying out to the heavens.” Malm reveres the Jews in ghettos and camps who rebelled against the Nazis, knowing always they would die. “Better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively,” writes Malm. The words could’ve come from Lauren Olimina’s mouth.

In Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, once it’s clear that widespread disaster has struck in “the south” (the heartland of Canada, and, presumably, the world), Aileen, a community elder, says to her neighbor, Evan:

You know, when young people come over, sometimes some of them talk about the end of the world. […] They say that this is the end of the world. The power’s out, and we’ve run out of gas and no one’s come up from down south. They say the food is running out and that we’re in danger. There’s a word they say too – ah... pock… ah…

[Evan intervenes: “Apocalypse?”]

Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. I can tell you there’s no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders, anyway. […]

The world isn’t ending. Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash [white man] came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here. […]

But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this… what’s the word again?

[Evan: “Apocalypse.”]

Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.

Aileen (and Butler and Mandel, and every book and movie portraying post-apocalyptic human struggle) is very likely right in assuming that the world will not end all at once. In Station Eleven, twenty-five years after the pandemic killed “99.99 percent” of the human species, characters refer to themselves as living in the world after the end of the world. Viewed in one light, the world will not end even if it does.

Of course, in a different light, one capable of simultaneously illuminating past, present, and future, the world will end, is ending. It’s just a matter of time. In an essay about art’s ability to alter experiences of time, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes: “We see the changes in the clouds, but not the changes in the mountains,” because the “now” of human perception excludes geologic time. In reality, mountains are moving, just more slowly than rivers and rabbits. Humans may hold on for another few million years (although the smart money isn’t betting on it); but ultimately, the existence of our species, our planet, is finite. It’s anyone’s guess how life on Earth is eventually snuffed out for good. Fire? Ice? Alien invasion? In any case, the party won’t last forever.

Butler and Mandel’s realistic depictions of the gradual, uneven nature of collapse can make Alam’s Big Bang version of the final crisis look foolish by comparison. But Alam is not wrong that one day it will all end in the passage of one second to the next. The light will be on, as it has been for millennia, and then, the light will go out. Alam’s innovation is drawing that uniquely decisive moment from the (hopefully far-off) future and placing it in the now. Lights out tomorrow, or next week. Or after lunch.   

Whereas Butler, Mandel, and Rice’s main characters brim with insights about societal change and social justice, Alam’s self-absorbed middle-class cast lusts over money and searches for Coca-Cola. Yet while I identified more closely with the politics of Station Eleven, Moon and Parable, and enjoyed those books immensely (few would dispute that Butler’s book is a major contribution to late twentieth-century literature), none enthrall me as does Leave the World Behind. Stories of reproducing lives and communities in the aftermath of civilizational collapse are inspiring, admirable, and satisfying. They’re also exhausting, and not only because there are fires to build, continents to trudge across, and gangs of murderous thieves to avoid. There’s also the intense, inescapable fear on every page that survival won’t work out. Nothing is guaranteed in the post-apocalyptic novel of endurance. By contrast, Alam’s book guarantees the sudden and utter end of it all. There’s catharsis in the swiftness and totality of such destruction.

The OED defines catharsis as “the purification of the emotions by vicarious experience.” Philosophers since Aristotle have praised the cathartic potential of art. Amid today’s overlapping political, economic, and ecological crises, art’s cathartic power is needed more urgently than ever. Show us the world vanishing on the page, and we may more clearly see sustainable paths ahead. Release in us the pleasure of giving up, and we may find new strength to struggle on.    

James Cairns (he/him) is an HRB staff writer, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of three books on social theory and political culture, most recently, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (UTP, 2017). His work has appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, Studies in Political Economy, Canadian Notes & Queries, Briarpatch, Spring Magazine, and the Hamilton Spectator. He lives in Paris, Ontario, where he is writing a collection of essays around the theme of crisis.

Follow James on Twitter @jicairns and Instagram @jamesicairns