Chapter 5 - Apocalypse

Summary

This chapter considers the totalising scale of historical representation that post-apocalyptic narratives make possible. Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004) and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) blend speculative, science-fictional elements with a self-consciously literary experimentation of narrative voice and temporal structure. In their post-apocalyptic settings these novels move between religious and secular representations of historical time, and their different apocalypses all rehearse what I call a possible eschatology of nature, reconfiguring the relationship between humans and their natural environment. Mediating between a formal shift in the temporal scales of narration, a reformulated aesthetic of non-mimetic literary realism constructed through generic borrowing, and the enactment of an ecstatic relationship with apocalyptic nature, such texts demonstrate the ways in which utopian temporalities contribute towards a rejuvenation of narrative form as well as of the hermeneutic acts required to read them.