The Light We Carry With Us: Part I

Narrative Visions of Apocalyptic Futures, Eschatological Humanism, and Kicking Post-Thinking to the Curb, for the Present

The world is always ending for someone, somewhere. While there is a tendency in literary and cultural studies today to link narrative explorations of the end of the world to a postmodern climate of thought, the idea of apocalypse—in the sense of the end of an era, or a moment of cataclysmic upheaval—has been playing out in literature since long before old St. John went to Patmos. In fact, the tendency to peer constantly towards the end, to contemplate cataclysm, may be one of the defining characteristics not of any particularly post- ideology, but of being human, and of a humanism that perhaps transcends the relativist humanist principles that postmodern thought labels as problematic and even “dead.” That cataclysmic moment can be defined, I believe, as one in which the human is separated from that which is distinctly non-. While my exploration of this moment is grounded by the idea that narratives of the end are nothing new, I do acknowledge that they have changed over time, particularly in response to the creeping specter of globalization. But the entanglements of a global society should call for new and exciting iterations of humanism, not its rejection. Because globalization has revealed to us the geographical limits of humanity, what it has to offer, and stands to lose, we now approach contemplation of a possible end to it—this big human project—with a growing sense of what is at stake, and hence, with an enormous sense of trepidation. While future studies consider the dangers of technology, and the potential threat of human extinction, or evolution into something post-human, it not only becomes a trend in literature and culture to explore these same ideas, it places the onus on us to examine the value of our global society and of humanity itself, and furthermore, to explore the ethical implications of the postmodernist trend towards decrying humanism as a dead concept at a time when exploring a global humanist philosophy may be far more useful than attempting to define what it is to be post-human.

Through a series of mini-essays, I will now explore each of the ideas touched on in the above paragraph. My intention is to use literature and critical theory as tools to delve into topics of globalization, humanism, and future studies, in order to unearth the patterns and ideologies that drive our fascinated obsession with the end of the world.

Medea, and a Theory of Private Apocalypse

With the exception of religious texts and their cultural products, the mainstreaming of eschatological speculation is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, the private apocalypse—the end of a world—a city, a family, a life—if not the world proper—is a perceivable subgenre that can be found throughout history and world literatures. It is definable as an extreme of the tragic form, distinct in the thorough and systematic way in which an entire world or life is stripped down, doors to potential futures shut, leaving nothing remaining in the world of the tragic figure but a species of existence barely recognizable to the audience—darkness, and a wasteland to wander, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, or a species of dystopian half-life, outside of the realm of human experience, as in Euripides’ Medea.

Indeed, it is with absolute precision that Euripides peels away every facet of Medea’s world. As the play opens, she is already an exile from a home that she left behind in ruins. Now, rejected by Jason, friendless, and humiliated, she faces a second exile. Her fate to this point is tragic, but the utter destruction of her world takes place only after she is driven to lay waste to it rather than continue in a life wherein, as she laments, “How short of my hopes I am fallen!” Determinedly, Medea herself becomes the bringer of “utter destruction,” crushing the house around her by poisoning Glauce and Creon. Finally, in a controversial touch added by Euripides, Medea murders her children. Her motives Euripides portrays as the products of conflicting passions: she does it to wound Jason, she does it to protect her children from scorn, she does it because she can’t bear to allow them to live apart from her, she does it because of a long-held and complex rage at the role of motherhood. Ultimately, however, the murderous impulse seems to come from the author himself, who in an effort to create a performance of perfect tragedy, in fact succeeds in performing an eschatological act. Life, the world, as Medea has known it—and as we, as human beings, frame it with family, society, and a sort of agreement to all be a part of this big human project—has disintegrated absolutely. Medea exits in a fiery chariot pulled by dragons, reminding the audience at the last moment that she is a child of the gods, and therefore not quite a creature governed by human law, or perhaps, human emotion. She is headed for Athens where a new life ostensibly awaits her, but the audience is left wondering what kind of life that can possibly be.

Euripides’ play was not so well-received as it might have been at the Dionysian festival where it was first staged. Much scholarship has pointed to the addition of her filicide as the reason for the audience’s unfavorable reaction to the “deeply confrontational tragedy” (Ewans 60), and I would argue that this is the point that turns the play from a satisfyingly cathartic tragedy into a performance of private apocalypse. Unlike the traditional tragic form, the private apocalypse travels to an area of human nature beyond which most audiences are willing to follow. Medea, from the first portrayed by Euripides as a character who moves dangerously outside of contemporaneous gender boundaries, does, in fact, choose a path that goes beyond what the average audience member (of ancient Greece or of today) would like to encompass in the realm of that which is not only ‘properly’ feminine, but ultimately, that which is ‘properly’ human. While it’s true that infanticide is not as rare, either historically or culturally, as we’d like to imagine, it may also be argued that it is never an act performed lightly or moved beyond easily, particularly when it’s performed as an act of murder rather than of abandonment or neglect. With this final act of destruction, Euripides takes Medea into that other world where human laws do not apply, that place beyond the end, and in doing so he turns her into a goddess-like figure. This transformation serves a function, encompassing actions that must, we tell ourselves, be something other than human, something non-human, and in this final act of stripping away, the world, as we know it, comes to an end. As Emma Griffiths frames it, “Either Medea is divine, and the gods can come among us and exact revenge for our crimes with savage force; or Medea is mortal, and sometimes mortal crimes go unpunished” (77). Whichever scenario we choose, the result is the same—something apocalyptic, something that whispers about an end of the human project, has taken place.

The concepts I explore above—the private apocalypse, the narrative act of stripping away, and the idea of going beyond the human, into something other—as being definitive characteristics of eschatological narrative, will be expanded on in the coming sections. The act of thinking the end of the world, the private apocalypse, and what comes after, can be traced from Greek tragedies up through biblical texts, Arthurian legends, Shakespearian tragedies, and (a personal favorite) Dickensian serials. But I’ll leave this subject for now, to leap ahead and over continents to the America of the 20^th century, where the privacy of the apocalyptic moment has become publicized, and where, as I hope to suggest, the phenomenon of globalization has brought new challenges to the table, both for a theory of humanity, and for those of us peering into the possibility of its end.

(Go to Part II)