Before we went into the text, I tried to get attention back to that frontier issue: around the turn of the century, you already had to go far to find any real frontier that offered frontier hardships. Klondike was one of these - or rather the Klondike River, near the town of Dawson City. London's most famous novel, The Call of the Wild, is set in front of that background of late 19th century Yukon gold rushes.
You certainly can have that feeling at times when you're reading one of his stories - his characters are always in a position where they - what the heck! - could just get up, reign in the dogs to the sled and move out into the wild...to do things. Hunt maybe, fish, or just find a meditative backdrop.
If there is spirituality, it is carved into the sense of adventure he creates, that very physical activism that makes characters go out and do things - I think you can find that in The Scarlet Plague, a post-apocalyptic story: the world has been devastated and effectively cleared by a massive sweep of an ultra-lethal plague (correspondent to level 2 on Jamais Cascio's apocalypse scale), only a handful of survivors remain. And, naturally, they are organized in tribal structures.
Granser makes the case for us:
"Yes, Yes, Edwin; I had forgotten. Sometimes the memory of the past is very strong upon me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man, clad in goatskin, wandering with my savage grandsons who are goatherds in the primeval wilderness. 'The fleeting systems lapse like foam,' and so lapsed our glorious, colossal civilization. I am Granser, a tired old man. I belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans. I married into that tribe. My sons and daughters married into the Chauffeurs, the Sacramentos, and the Palo-Altos. You, Hare-Lip, are of the Chauffeurs. You, Edwin, are of the Sacramentos. And you, Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe takes its name from a town that was near the seat of another great institution of learning. It was called Stanford University. Yes, I remember now. It is perfectly clear. I was telling you of the Scarlet Death. Where was I in my story?"
Note that he, the old man, is not the narrator - there is an omniscient narrator pulling his strings, and obviously this narrator is not part of the apocalyptic experience: no need to keep him alive for the sake of the narration, he has it all organized in his hands.
We analyzed the state of pre-apocalypse society in this story and saw that American democracy has been turned into a capitalist oligarchy, where presidents are no longer elected, but called into office by a "Board of Magnates". The state is being run like a business venture from top to bottom. The working population is being held in slavery ("ironically called freemen"), enserviced to the intellegentsia and the economic elite. The coming apocalypse then causes a major transformation, indeed: power has gone to the proletariat, and they are characterized none to friendly - variously termed as animals, brutes, and so on. And obviously, the exercise of power is not one that comes easily to them: once they have it, they abuse it. Thus, the Chauffeur, rather than playing out his power over Vesta van Warden,
"I went on with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one woman. It was glorious and . . . pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden, the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion work-she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple to greatest baronage of wealth the world has ever known."
...kills her in one of his fits of rage -
"It was while he was drunk, once, that he killed Vesta. I firmly believe that he killed Vesta in a fit of drunken cruelty though he always maintained that she fell into the lake and was drowned."Or does he? Who are we supposed to align with here? Not the hairy Chauffeur brute, probably, but also not Granser, the former literature professor - note how absolutely inefficient his attempts to perpetuate culture are. When it comes to the worst and Vesta's life is at stake, all he comes up with - foolishly - is a ham-handed attempt to barter with the Chauffeur, thereby commodifying the woman. This might seem inevitable in his position, almost pragmatic - all out of a sudden, human existence is being magnified in scope, "embiggened", as the Springfield folk have it. There are only a few dozen individuals left, after all, and each life must needs be secured and linked into the reproductive cycle: women like Vesta are by default called to biological efficiency (= as many births as possible).
And still, even decades after the event, Granser can drool on and claim that it was all a matter of private jealousy he cultivated toward the Chauffeur -
"-Bill-that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur. That was his name. He was a wretched, primitive man, wholly devoid of the finer instincts and chivalrous promptings of a cultured soul. No, there is no absolute justice, for to him fell that wonder of womanhood, Vesta Van Warden. The grievousness of this you will never understand, my grandsons; for you are yourselves Primitive little savages, unaware of aught else but savagery. Why should Vesta not have been mine? I was a man of culture and refinement, a professor in a great university. Even so, in the time before the plague, such was her exalted position, she would not have deigned to know that I existed. Mark, then, the abysmal degradation to which she fell at the hands of the Chauffeur. Nothing less than the destruction of all mankind had made it possible that I should know her, look in her eyes, converse with her, touch her hand-ay, and love her and know that her feelings toward me were very kindly. I have reason to believe that she, even she, would have loved me, there being no other man in the world except the Chauffeur. Why, when it destroyed eight billions of souls, did not the plague destroy just one more man, and that man the Chauffeur?
He doesn't seem to acknowledge just what had occured to the planet - or maybe he decides to ignore the post-apocalyptic reality to take refuge in a pre-apocalypse world of concepts where jealousy was an option.
Laying a finger on the outlines of the apocalypse presented, we saw that salvation was not one of its constituents: Granser survives due to his immunity - by coincidence, not by a virtue of a righteous, god-fearing, witch-hunting life. History, and humankind, is longer moving toward a definite goal (that is, it is not teleological), but rather keeps rambling and rambling on, beginning all over again once a cycle has been completed.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen