"Where men can’t live gods fare no better”: Apocalyptic Fiction and the Absence of God in Lessing’s The Making of Representative of Planet 8 and McCarthy’s The Road - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

"Where men can’t live gods fare no better”: Apocalyptic Fiction and the Absence of God in Lessing’s The Making of Representative of Planet 8 and McCarthy’s The Road

Résumé

The booming rise of ‘secular eschatology’ in science-fiction, whereby contemporary authors strive to rewrite stories of the end of the world in a post-Christian and postmodern framework, forces the readers to address what can be characterized both as a representational dead-end and what futurologists frame as more and more realistic prospects. In both American and British postapocalyptic science fiction, the idea at the etymological root of the “apocalypse’, i.e the ‘revelation’ offered to the true believers, is counteracted by the survivors of the ultimate catastrophe that are neither punished nor saved, but simply left behind on Earth. The stories of the end of the world as told by Cormac McCarthy or Doris Lessing shift the attention from the climactic moment of the apocalypse to the lingering, symptomatic aftermaths and echoes of the catastrophe, or else the cosmological deafening silence that had already been characterised by Pascal in the 17th century: “le silence de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” . Indeed, the representation of a planet coming to an end often triggers open questions about the ethical, political and ontological conditions of surviving for the left-behinds. Between efforts of recreating an alternative Genesis - as survivors, like stranded Robinsons Crusoe on a dying planet, strive to rekindle civilization - or else the gleeful scopic drive witnessing the extinction of a corrupted society, the renewal of the theological framework of speculative fiction opens the door to radical interrogations about the relationship between a tutelary entity and its Creation, but also God’s persistent silence, or even its moral necessity. The absence of a revelatory value in an end brought about by the destructive drive within men’s society or the violent upheaval of environmental resources and conditions envisions the latter not as a threshold, but as a slow process. The colourless world of The Road presents the reader with another anti-prophetic figure, that of the old Ely, who phrases the Sisyphean tasks of surviving in a godless world , or rather a world that has been abandoned by God. On their hollowly hopeful journey southward, the father and his son have to fashion new rules and ethics for themselves, literally and morally ‘carrying the fire’, but also reconstitute an admittedly fragmented teleological story pointing towards a rewarding ending similar to what the Bible expresses. In The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, Lessing stages the extinction of one of the pupillary planet of the Canopean empire by way of an accelerated ice age. The emissaries of the benevolent guardian and life-giver Canopus powerlessly monitor the survival of a group of individuals whose sole role is to turn into a collective entity bearing witness to the doom of their planet. In both cases, the need to register, process the end of the world as well as filling in the silence of the either absent or impotent Creator both tie up with the idea of a fundamental and traumatic unsayable that is at the core of post-WWII fiction in general.

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hal-03945413 , version 1 (18-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03945413 , version 1

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Quitterie de Beauregard. "Where men can’t live gods fare no better”: Apocalyptic Fiction and the Absence of God in Lessing’s The Making of Representative of Planet 8 and McCarthy’s The Road. Science-fiction, religions, théologies, ETHICS (Ethique, Technologie et Transhumanismes - EA 7446); Université Catholique de Lille, Jun 2022, Lille, France. ⟨hal-03945413⟩
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