A recent issue of Africa Geographic highlighted what it called
an “Elephant Apocalypse” – meaning that elephants are (yet again) coming under
intense pressure from ivory hunters. The
word “apocalypse” has become so loose that it more or less equates with
“disaster”, or “severe damage”, rather than the complete cleaning-of-the-slate
envisaged in the original Apocalypse relayed by John in the Book of Revelation.
Not that it’s easy
to discern just how much destruction there is in that phantasmagoric prophecy,
as it unfolds through its various bizarre and terrifying stages. Just what is unveiled – apocalypse derives
from the Greek for an unveiling or uncovering – is weirdly obscure. My own question, though, is this: while the
fate of sinful and repentant humans is obviously the central concern in
Revelation – what is said of the fate of other species?
The short answer is:
not much. In one of the early stages of
God’s ravaging of earth, one third of the earth, its forests and animals, are
slated for termination. Well, we humans
are close to achieving that rate of extinction all by ourselves. Thereafter, a number of nightmarish symbolic
animal hybrids appear on both good and evil sides of the equation: four great “creatures”
with animal features worship the Lord; four vari-hued horses bear the
forbidding horsemen; locusts bear scorpion-like stings; a woman sprouts eagle’s
wings; Jesus is the raging Lamb and Satan a “beast” with ten horns and seven
heads or a vomiting serpent. But these
are obviously all metamorphic symbols of a distraught imagination; and until
the last chapter, when John dismisses dogs, along with various human
miscreants, “outside”, there is no sign of real animals at all, and certainly
no concern for their moral or ecological well-being.
This sort of
existential neglect still affects the views of many Christians today, though
thankfully it’s being countered by movements within various churches advocating
– instead of a Genesis-based “we command the earth” attitude – forms of
ecological stewardship, sometimes including animal rights. One can find arguments, drawing on a very
different selection of Biblical quotations, placing animals firmly within God’s
glorious creative ambit.
Meanwhile, humankind,
with no apparent intervention from the divine, is visiting its own apocalypse
upon the animal kingdom: nearly half of all non-human species destroyed just
within the last 40 years. Another form
of literature – science-fiction or speculative literature – has for a long time
been projecting this man-made catastrophe into our imagined future. In these fictional apocalypses, there are almost
always survivors left on earth to muddle through the aftermath, often in the
company of animals.
Back when nuclear
holocaust seemed imminent, Edwin Muir wrote his famous poem “The Horses”, in
which horses re-emerge to save humans from their post-technology plight. In the more misanthropic treatments, animals
outlive the humans. This is the case
with American poet Anne Sexton’s 1962 poem “Venus and the Ark”. In this slightly tongue-in-cheek updating of
the Biblical Noah’s Ark story, a rocket mission is launched, bearing various
odd animal species and two human PhDs, to colonise Venus – at which point Earth
itself is obliterated in a nuclear war. Stranded on Venus, the captive animals
get restless, and the two scientists release them:
Trees sprang
from lichen, the rock became a park
...
it grew quick and noisy with
a kind of wonder in the lonely
air...
and the waters grew, green came
taller and the happy rats sped
through the integrated forest...
Rather unwisely, the
mission had neglected to include a breeding pair of humans! A non-human ecosystem begins it all again: on
their dying day they perceive “two fish creatures stop/ on spangled legs and crawl/
from the belly of the sea.”
As for fiction, many of us will have read Margaret Atwood’s
futurist trilogy, especially the first, Oryx
and Crake. The sequels – The Year of
the Flood and MaddAdam (2014)–
don’t quite match up, in my view, and there is always something just a bit
obvious about Atwood. She has insisted –
not to everyone’s satisfaction – on a distinction between science-fiction, involving the technology-obsessed realms of time
travel or other-planetary improbabilities, and speculative fiction, which takes current real-world trends and
extrapolates them into a plausible future.
Most of the animals in the MaddAdam trilogy are clones and hybrids of
various sorts – pigoons and the like – created by biotechnology which already
exists. Nevertheless, it still feels a
little overblown and improbable, delivered with a certain teenage-y jocularity
that doesn’t convince me of Atwood’s seriousness.
Much closer to a conventional and almost over-serious realism
is another speculative trilogy: Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital”
series, set in a near-future Washington DC.
Government agencies, politicians and scientists grapple with abrupt and
massive climate change. In the first
volume, Forty Signs of Rain (2004)
the city is flooded by deluges of near-biblical scale. Animals don’t appear much, but Robinson is
thoroughly informed on current climate science.
Animals feature more strongly in the second volume, Fifty Degrees Below (2005), in which the
polar ice-cap melts, causing a catastrophic shift in the offshore Gulf Stream
(this is already happening). The central
character of the novel kind of goes feral: temporarily homeless, he builds a
treehouse in a well-wooded park, which he shares with various animals. Many of these have escaped from zoos and are having to adapt
to changing climate – though many of them are having trouble with the rapid
onset of unprecedentedly savage winter (again, this has already been
happening). Robinson conceives of a kind
of multinational microcosm of the world’s animals: tapirs and okapi, jaguars
and zebras. The protagonist is
especially fond of a group of gibbons, with whom he communicates after a
fashion:
Other days
he woke and could only struggle to escape the knot his stomach had been tied
into during the night. Then it took the gibbons to free him. If they were
within earshot, and he heard them lift their voices, then all was immediately
well within him ... It was another gift. Sometimes he just listened, but
usually he sang with them, if singing was the right word. He hooted, whooped, called...
If Robinson here hints that animals presences are, if not
actually vital to our lives, at least of therapeutic value, he is later in the
novel both more scientific and less optimistic.
He notes that because of acidification of the oceans and temperature
changes, the tiniest, almost invisible animalcules of the ocean – phytoplankton
– the base of the pyramid upon which all other life rests, not excluding
helping govern the oxygen-CO2 balance – are also threatened with
extinction. And at this point of the
novel – set only marginally in the future – Robinson’s characters, scientists
and policy-makers alike, are forced to realise that certain climate-change
effects are now “unmitigable”: there is simply nothing that humans can do to
halt the catastrophic processes that they themselves have induced.
Animals feature in at least two other perhaps less
well-known post-apocalyptic novels. One
is John Updike’s Toward the End of Time (1997),
which is as much a complaint about the ravages of old age as about a vaguely “post-war”
future America – an unusual foray for the usually thoroughly realistic Updike. The feisty essayist David Foster Wallace,
despite being an Updike fan, gave this work a thorough mauling, claiming there
was far too much introspection about the protagonist’s waning sexuality. At any rate, it opens with a chapter entitled
“The Deer”: some environmental awareness and animal issues are encapsulated in
the main couple’s conflict over a deer.
It eats the wife’s roses, so she badgers her octogenarian husband to go
out and shoot it with a shotgun – but by the time he totters out there it has
always vanished...
Far more wacky is a final novel by the now
unfairly-neglected Bernard Malamud, God’s
Grace (1982). Here the protagonist
just happens to be alone at the bottom of the Marianas Trench in a submersible
when nuclear holocaust overtakes the world.
He surfaces to find himself alone on the ocean with only one companion –
a chimpanzee who has survived on board the mother ship, once subject to
horrible experiments. The chimp has
learned to speak in human language, in fact (another in a long literary
tradition of speaking apes, from Franz Kafka to Jeannette Winterson). As the title indicates, there is quite a bit
of discussion about what role God has played in this weird apocalypse (God converses,
too). When the pair eventually wash up
on a remote island, they find other chimps, who also begin to learn human
speech independently...
Few writers – Cormac McCarthy in The Road excepted, perhaps – seem willing to envisage a future
without animals. But with Donald Trump
and Co apparently quite happy to make (nuclear-) warlike noises as well as to ignore environmental degradation, the fate of animals, including human animals,
is looking as bleak as it has ever done. And one wonders, in our Trumpish ‘post-truth’
world, what is the role of fiction in affecting human consciousness. Updike’s narrator in Toward the End of the Time ironically comments: “I never read
fiction; after all its little hurly-burly what does it amount to but more proof
that we are of all animals the most miserable?”
Yet this very outpouring of future scenario-building evidences our
unquenchable – dare one say animal? – capacity for hope.
*****
"Dum spiro spero" and "Spes arduis". (Pardon my Latin)
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing this blog, Dan, I enjoyed it very much!
Take care,
Alan