A Thesis by RICHARD MILES BRITTON , RSVP Richard!
Submitted to the Graduate School at Appalachian State University in painful fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2015
Appalachia in Science Fiction: Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games
ASU Author/Contributor (non-ASU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Richard Miles Britton (Creator)
Institution
Appalachian State University (ASU )
Web Site: http://www.library.appstate.edu/
Advisor
Sandra Ballard
Abstract: In literature, science fiction and Appalachia seem to exist in two separate—even opposing—worlds. Science fiction is a genre typically devoted to technology and an imaginary future. The Appalachian region, on the other hand, is often celebrated for its roots in tradition and history. Yet there are a number of literary works where science fiction and Appalachia not only cross paths, but converge. Using an ecocritical approach, this study focuses on two recent science fiction texts set in southern Appalachia—Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games—their treatment of place, otherness, and the impact of human modernization and technology on the post-apocalyptic futures envisioned in the works. The emotional power of these novels, similar to other science fiction works set in Appalachia, lies in the startling and often uneasy convergence of tradition and innovation, of past and future—of what was, is, and may be—and all that can be lost along the way.
Appalachia in Science Fiction: Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games
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Publication
Thesis
Britton, R.M. (2015) Appalachia in Science Fiction: Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Unpublished master's thesis. Appalachian State University, Boone, NC
Language: English
Date: 2015
Keywords
Science fiction, Appalachia, Ecocriticism, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games,
Department of English APPALACHIA IN SCIENCE FICTION: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD AND SUZANNE COLLINS’S THE HUNGER GAMES A Thesis by RICHARD MILES BRITTON May 2015 APPROVED BY: Sandra L. Ballard Chairperson, Thesis Committee William Brewer Member, Thesis Committee Jennifer Westerman Member, Thesis Committee Carl Eby Chairperson, Department of English Max C. Poole, Ph.D. Dean, Cratis D. Williams School of Graduate Studies Copyright by Richard Miles Britton 2015 All Rights Reserved iv Abstract APPALACHIA IN SCIENCE FICTION: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD AND SUZANNE COLLINS’S THE HUNGER GAMES Richard Miles Britton B.A., Tulane University M.J., Temple University M.A., Appalachian State University Chairperson: Sandra L. Ballard In literature, science fiction and Appalachia seem to exist in two separate—even opposing—worlds. Science fiction is a genre typically devoted to technology and an imaginary future. The Appalachian region, on the other hand, is often celebrated for its roots in tradition and history. Yet there are a number of literary works where science fiction and Appalachia not only cross paths, but converge. Using an ecocritical approach, this study focuses on two recent science fiction texts set in southern Appalachia—Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games—their treatment of place, otherness, and the impact of human modernization and technology on the postapocalyptic futures envisioned in the works. The emotional power of these novels, similar to other science fiction works set in Appalachia, lies in the startling and often uneasy convergence of tradition and innovation, of past and future—of what was, is, and may be— and all that can be lost along the way. v Acknowledgments I would like to thank my thesis director Dr. Sandy Ballard for her invaluable guidance and feedback throughout the process. Her passion for and knowledge of the Appalachian region, as well as her constant encouragement and always open door, pushed this study beyond just the pages. I would also like to thank my thesis committee members Dr. Bill Brewer and Dr. Jennifer Westerman for their wonderful advice, suggestions, and insights. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Lizzie. Without her love and support, none of this would have been possible. vi Table of Contents Abstract......................
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...... v Chapter 1: Science Fiction Works Set in Appalachia ..............................
.......................... 1 Chapter 2: “Senseless. Senseless”: Post-Apocalyptic Appalachia in The Road .............. 18 Chapter 3: “Out of the Ashes”: Appalachian Ecodystopia in The Hunger Games........... 40 Chapter 4: “A New Earth”: Envisioning Ecological Catastrophe in Appalachia ............. 60 Works Cited ..............................
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................ 80 1 Chapter 1: Science Fiction Works Set in Appalachia In literature, science fiction and Appalachia seem to exist in two separate—even opposing—worlds. Science fiction, as a genre, is typically devoted to technology and an imaginary future. The Appalachia region, on the other hand, is often celebrated for its roots in tradition and history. Yet science fiction and Appalachia are not as opposed as one might imagine. In fact, there are literary works where science fiction and Appalachia not only cross paths, but converge. This connection between science fiction and Appalachia, though, is a subject matter that has been little explored by scholars. My research has uncovered only one scholarly work that directly addresses the topic: Alessandro Portelli’s 1988 essay “Appalachia as Science Fiction.” Focusing on the crossroads between Appalachian literature and science fiction, Portelli’s article examines the thematic similarities between these two seemingly disparate literary genres and argues that the treatment of “space,” “otherness,” and the impact of modernization and technology share common and often overlapping features in each genre. Yet, while Portelli makes a strong case for the literary similarities between Appalachian local color fiction and science fiction, nearly all of the texts he refers to as science fiction should properly be labeled as horror or fantasy, not science fiction. According to the definition of the term “science fiction” that will be used in this study, a definition based on science fiction scholarship, Portelli's textual examples—while under the umbrella of speculative fiction—would not technically fall within the science fiction genre. Moreover, Portelli does not mention any examples of science fiction set in Appalachia. His essay is only 2 concerned with the concept of Appalachia as science fiction, and not the setting of the Appalachian region in science fiction. This is the gap in scholarship that my study aims to fill. This study will examine two recent works of science fiction set in the Appalachian region, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games. Both use established science fiction tropes and familiar themes in Appalachian literature and culture to explore imagined—and unsettling—futures for the region. Both works also share a similar focus on the impact of human technology on the environment, detailing post-apocalyptic Appalachian landscapes that emphasize humanity’s integral role in the ecological balance of nature—though in intriguingly different ways. Because there is no single, concise, and agreed upon definition of the term “science fiction,” it is important to begin by establishing a working definition of “science fiction” to use in my study. While some authors and critics, most notably Margaret Atwood, prefer the term “speculative fiction” in place of “science fiction,” much recent scholarship marks a distinction between the two terms, with speculative fiction viewed as an umbrella category that includes the genre of science fiction. For example, M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas’s The Science Fiction Handbook, in its glossary, defines speculative fiction as a “[b]lanket term for imaginative fiction that involves the construction of worlds different from our own in fundamental ways. This category thus encompasses science fiction, fantasy, horror, and some forms of romance” (331). There is much overlap between science fiction, fantasy, and horror—not to mention their multitude of sub-genres, such as alternate history, post-apocalyptic fiction, and steampunk, to name a few—but the “speculative” approaches in the genres are distinct. According to Booker and Thomas, “science fiction might be defined 3 as fiction set in an imagined world that is different from our own in ways that are rationally explicable (often because of scientific advances) and that tend to produce cognitive estrangement in the reader” (4). Similarly, while John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction concedes that no definition of science fiction has yet emerged that will satisfy everybody, the entry on the term “science fiction” stipulates that to be considered science fiction, a work must place emphasis on science and follow natural laws, or at least be something that the author represents as scientifically plausible (as opposed to fantasy). Clute and Nicholls also note that the work does not have to be intended as science fiction to be considered science fiction. Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction establishes a similar definition, concluding that science fiction is a “symbolist genre” that takes place in a “rationalized and materialistic discourse” (181) which explores encounters with what critic Darko Suvin has termed the “novum” (i.e. new scientific things or “point of difference”) to shed a fresh perspective on our contemporary world (6). In his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Suvin argues that not only is the novum “validated by cognitive logic” in science fiction, it “is hegemonic, that is, so central and significant that it determines the whole narrative logic—or at least the overriding narrative logic—regardless of any impurities that might be present” (63, 70). In other words, the mere presence of a scientific novelty or innovation in a work—case in point, the technological gadgets in the James Bond series—does not automatically qualify it as science fiction. To be considered science fiction, the novum must be the central, dominating logic upon which the imagined world of the narrative is based upon. The working definition of science fiction that I will use in my study firmly places my primary texts in the category of science fiction. While McCarthy’s The Road has generally 4 not been considered science fiction by scholars—unlike Collins’s The Hunger Games, which was marketed as science fiction upon publication—the text is set in imaginary future that has not yet occurred but is scientifically possible and framed in rationalized discourse. So while this study will fundamentally differ from Portelli’s essay on the definition of science fiction and the types of texts that will be analyzed, it will explore the three, overlapping connections between science fiction and Appalachia that Portelli identifies— space, otherness, and the impact of technology and modernization—because these themes are relevant and helpful to understanding science fiction texts set in the Appalachian Mountains. A literal, emotional, and metaphorical connection to place or space, as Portelli notes, is a major theme in much Appalachian literature, often centering on the concept of the “homeplace.” In Appalachian literature, the term “homeplace” is a common way for characters of the Appalachian region to refer to the family home, typically the cabin or small house where the character grew up. In the fictional world of the texts, it is a literal place, a literal space, one for which the characters feel a deep emotional attachment. In the past 25 years, Appalachian scholars have expanded the concept of the homeplace beyond the literal to the metaphorical. In the collection of essays The Poetics of Appalachian Space, scholars such as Nancy Carol Joyner and Don Johnson, in their analyses of Appalachian works, look to the ideas that French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explored in his celebrated 1958 book The Poetics of Space. The book is a philosophical and poetic meditation on the concept of “felicitous spaces,” the special places—like a house—where a person feels secure and safe and allowed the chance to daydream. Yet felicitous spaces are more than just physical spaces; they are mental ones as well. A notable “felicitous space,” according to Bachelard, is the childhood home, the literal space where a person grew up, 5 which only exists in memory and imagination once the person has moved away. This “oneiric house” from childhood, or “house of dream-memory,” exists in a mental space beyond just the reality of the past. Bachelard refers to it as “poetry of the past,” a blend of memory and dream image that holds a power that forever attracts the person (15-16). In “The Poetics of the House in Appalachian Fiction,” Joyner uses Bachelard's aesthetic theories on “space” to examine the imagery of the house, or the homeplace, in Appalachian literature. She argues that while the image of the Appalachian mountain cabin has been stereotyped in popular culture, place and the image of the house are important parts of fiction set in the region. In his essay “The Appalachian Homeplace as Oneiric House,” Johnson applies Bachelard’s concepts of “felicitous space” and the oneiric house to analyze Appalachian author Jim Wayne Miller’s The Mountains Have Come Closer. Johnson examines how Miller’s poems explore the loss and abandonment of the traditional Appalachian homeplace, leading to a deep sense of loss and dislocation, as well as the “Appalachians’ obligation to re-claim their heritage through the recreation of the oneiric cabin” (41). Unlike Joyner, Johnson is concerned not just with the image of the house or homeplace in Appalachian literature, but also with the loss of that felicitous space and the impact that loss has on what Bachelard describes as a person’s “dream-memory.” The loss of homeplace and the disruption of the actual felicitous space is one of the focal points of my analyses of science fiction works set in the Appalachian region. As my study will establish, the primary texts that I will examine can be considered post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. Booker and Thomas’s The Science Fiction Handbook defines apocalyptic fiction as: 6 A type of science fiction narrative dealing with the approach and arrival of a cataclysmic event that causes widespread destruction, leading to a dramatic change in the nature of human civilization on Earth. As opposed to the Biblical narrative of apocalypse, the science fiction apocalypse generally results from natural and scientifically explainable causes, such as environmental degradation, a cataclysmic cosmic event...a catastrophic plague, a devastating nuclear or biological war, or an alien invasion. Postapocalyptic science fiction deals with the aftermath of such apocalyptic events. (321-2) In a dramatic sense, then, post-apocalyptic fiction can be considered the ultimate loss of place. Apocalyptic rhetoric and the trope of an imminent environmental catastrophe in fiction is also a major focus in the theory of ecocriticism. Lawrence Buell, in his study The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, famously argues that “[a]pocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (285). Its power lies in the fact that “the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis,” with the imagination “being used to anticipate and, if possible, forestall actual apocalypse” (Buell 285). In Greg Garrard’s study Ecocriticism, he explores the role that apocalypticism plays in literature that deals with the environment. He notes that “apocalypticism is inevitably bound up with the imagination, because it has yet to come into being” (94). This common trope appears in some of the most influential books in the environmental movement, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. Garrard views apocalypticism as a literary device that is 7 always, in a narratological sense, “proleptic.” By this, he seems to mean that it is a type of prophetic flashforwarding. It is a device that produces a crisis to galvanize activists and responds to that crisis by holding out the possibility of another “road” (104). He argues that apocalyptic rhetoric in literature can be problematic because it often sets up an “emotionally charged” framework that reduces complex problems into monocausal crises, as with the “common inflection” of using medical terms to depict Earth in the throes of a terminal illness. He concedes, though, that apocalyptic rhetoric “seems a necessary component of environmental discourse” (113). Garrard’s definition of the apocalyptic trope in literature naturally falls into the genre of science fiction, since it centers on an imagined future world. In his study New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature, David Ketterer examines apocalyptic literature within the context of a variety of American science fiction works. Ketterer details the history of the term “apocalyptic” and its many facets in literature, eventually arriving at a definition for apocalyptic literature and its role in science fiction. He writes, “Apocalyptic literature is concerned with the creation of other worlds which exist, on the literal level, in a credible relationship (whether on the basis of rational exploration and analogy or of religious belief) with the ‘real’ world, thereby causing a metaphorical destruction of that ‘real’ world in the reader’s head” (13). He further notes that the “apocalyptic imagination...finds its purest outlet in science fiction” (15). The connections between science fiction and environmental discourse have become an emerging theme in recent ecocriticism. Gerry Canavan, in the preface to Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, posits that “Nowhere is the science fictionalization of the present clearer than in contemporary consideration of humanity’s interaction with its 8 environment, which frequently deploys the language and logic of SF to narrativize the dire implications of ecological science for the future” (x). Canavan points out that even early landmark texts in the environmental canon, such as Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, share the language of science fiction. In fact, Carson “famously chose to begin her book not with some detached presentation of the facts at hand but with a science fiction parable” (Canavan, Preface x). Eric C. Otto, in his study Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism, argues that the connections between science fiction and the environmental movement are prevalent enough to warrant a separate subgenre of science fiction, one that he terms “environmental science fiction.” He describes this subgenre as one that “share[s] with transformative movements an interest in environmental degradation and its origins. Among these works are future histories, postapocalyptic fiction, utopias, and more” (4). At the same time, Otto is careful to note that viewing certain science fiction works as environmental texts does not devalue the science of environmentalism. “None of this is to suggest that the concerns of environmentalism are feebly grounded in fictional speculation, but instead that science fiction offers valuable representations of and critical commentary on environmental issues. If environmentalism shares rhetorical strategies with science fiction, it is because those strategies facilitated necessary critical perspective, not because the two are equally fabulated” (Otto 17). In this sense, science fiction—especially post-apocalyptic science fiction—can be seen as a powerful, dramatic tool that furthers, not hinders, environmental discourse. The theme of “otherness” raised in Portelli’s article is also prominent in science fiction works set in Appalachia. J W. Williamson’s Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the 9 Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies examines the quality of “otherness” in the stereotype of the “hillbilly,” exploring why images of mountains and mountain people are so popular and pervasive in our culture and the function this stereotype may serve. While the primary focus of Williamson’s study is on the representation of Appalachia in film, his study raises some interesting points about the treatment of Appalachian characters as “others,” as well as the role of ambiguity and the sublime in Appalachian settings. “Otherness” and ambiguity—and, in particular, the sublime—are qualities of the Appalachian Mountains that create an ideal setting for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction works. The concept of the sublime was a major theme for Romantic writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, both in Europe and America. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the 1757 essay that was a foundational text for the concept of the sublime for Romantic writers, generally defines the sublime as “[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (39). The aspect of “obscurity” or ambiguity, along with terror, plays a major role in creating a sublime effect, for “[w]hen we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes” (Burke 58-9). In the Romantic tradition, mountain ranges—most notably the Alps—became an ideal source for images of the sublime in nature. Marjorie H. Nicolson’s study Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite makes a strong link between mountains and the concept of the sublime. Nicolson’s study focuses on one central question: Why did 10 descriptions and feelings for mountains change so dramatically in English poetry from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century? In other words, what caused the shift in attitude in English literature from viewing mountains in a negative, gloomy light to viewing mountains in a positive, sublime light? To answer this, Nicolson explores the various historical attitudes toward mountains in Greek philosophy, Christian religion, and the burgeoning science movement of seventeenth-century Europe, examining the origins of the attitudinal shift. For my analysis, the aspects of the book centered on the origins of the mountain sublime, as well as the connection between the seventeenth-century scientific sublime (e.g., astrology) as a direct prelude to the mountain sublime, help to explain the appeal of the Appalachian setting in science fiction. The concept of the sublime is also a major focus of ecocriticism. Garrard’s aforementioned study Ecocriticism juxtaposes the Romantic movement’s interest in images of the pastoral—highlighting the stability of nature—with sublime images of “otherness” in wilderness—highlighting nature in its pure, raw, and often terror-inducing state. He argues that an attempt to “return” to either extreme should not be the goal of ecocriticism, but these images raise awareness of the responsibility of humans for their actions concerning the environment. The third theme that Portelli’s article examines, the impact of science or technology, is also an important aspect of science fiction works set in the Appalachian region. According to my working definition of the term “science fiction,” science or technology must play a central role in the text to be considered science fiction. My study will establish this central role of science and/or technology in each of my primary texts. 11 Overall, in light of the thematic connections between Appalachia and science fiction that Portelli makes in his essay, my study will use an ecocritical lens to examine these same themes in McCarthy’s The Road and Collins’s The Hunger Games, both of which I will establish as science fiction novels set in Appalachia. I will explore how each text uses science fiction tropes inside an apocalyptic Appalachian setting, as well how the themes of science and technology, the mountain sublime, and the concept of Appalachian “space” interact in the plausible-yet-imaginary worlds the authors have created. While these themes are developed fully in the primary texts my study examines, a number of other examples of science fiction set in Appalachia have been published since the nineteenth century which contain traces of these themes. Of those, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” is one of the earliest. “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” is one of the few works by Poe that involves a clearly marked setting, in this case the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville, leading Appalachian author and scholar Robert Morgan to note that Poe’s short story “may be the first work of classic short fiction set in the Southern Appalachian Mountains” (75). Scholars like Martin Willis also consider it an early work of science fiction, because the tale centers on the then-popular scientific field of mesmerism. Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, was a theory first proposed by Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late eighteenth century, based on the belief in an invisible force or fluid that exists between bodies, which could be manipulated to improve mental and physical health (Mills 323). The theory of mesmerism is disregarded as quack science today, along with similar fields like phrenology and alchemy, but in the midnineteenth century in the US, mesmerism was viewed by many as a fringe but credible field of science. While never accepted into the scientific orthodoxy of the day, mesmerism was 12 practiced in hospitals across the country, and was widely discussed in journals and in public discourse as a burgeoning scientific field (Willis 95-6). In fact, many of Poe’s mesmeric tales were mistaken as fact when they were published, despite Poe’s insistence that they were works of fiction (Faivre 35-6). By the time Poe was writing his mesmeric tales, the theory of mesmerism had shifted to an interest in the notion of mesmeric, trance-like states, during which mesmerists were believed to be able to interact with patients solely through a “pure communication between minds,” a shift which coincided with the scientific invention of the telegraph (Enns 62). With its interest in the unconscious mind, mesmerism is often considered a forerunner to the modern field of psychology, and “the rapport between mesmerists and patients may be more familiar to modern readers as a precursor to hypnotism” (Enns 62). This mesmeric rapport is the central theme in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” Poe’s short story details the close—and ultimately deadly—mesmeric bond between a Dr. Templeton and a patient named Bedloe, whom the doctor has been successfully treating for “neuralgic attacks” through the use of mesmeric trances (679). One day, after taking a walk “among the chain of wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville” (680)—the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains—Bedloe relates a strange story to Dr. Templeton. He claims that as he was hiking through the mountains, an odd mist suddenly appeared. Once the mist cleared away, he found himself not in the Appalachian Mountains anymore, but in a city in India, dressed as a British officer. As his vision—which he describes as having the “vividness of the real”— continued, Bedloe fights in a losing battle against a native uprising, eventually dying after being wounded by a poisoned spear (685). After Bedloe finishes his story, a horrified Dr. Templeton reveals that, during the exact 13 time of his patient’s strange visions, the doctor had in fact been at his home writing an eyewitness account about a close friend and British soldier who had been killed in the Indian city of Benares years prior, in the same circumstance that Bedloe had just described. The text implies that it was the strong mesmeric rapport between the doctor and his patient that caused Dr. Templeton’s memory to be telepathically transferred to Bedloe. The tale ends with the note of Bedloe’s death not long after his strange vision, caused by the accidental use of a poisoned leech during a blood letting session administered by Dr. Templeton, leaving the reader to wonder, though, if the true cause of death was the poisoned spear that pierced Bedloe in his mesmeric trance. Like many of Poe’s other works, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” is steeped in Gothic and sublime imagery, though here those elements are intimately connected with the “Ragged Mountains.” As Robert Morgan remarks, “It is appropriate that [Poe] set this story of mystery, hypnosis, and transmigration of souls in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a world of dark coves and ancient, majestic forests” (75). The science fiction quality of mesmerism works equally as well in this setting, exploring scientifically plausible ideas surrounding the power of electricity, hypnosis, and long-distance communication, where the Appalachian Mountains become the catalyst for the novum. French science fiction author Jules Verne was also attracted to the mysterious and sublime quality of the Southern Appalachians. One of his last novels, The Master of the World (Maître du monde), published in 1904, is set in part in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the novel, John Strock, “head inspector in the federal police department at Washington [DC],” is assigned to travel to Morganton, North Carolina, to investigate a series of mysterious events involving a nearby mountain crest called Great Eyrie (4). The townsfolk 14 living near Great Eyrie had been reporting sightings of mysterious lights and flying creatures emanating from the mountain, causing fear of an impending volcanic eruption, or worse. In the text, the “rocky and grim and inaccessible” crest embodies the sublime (5). Upon seeing it for the first time, Strock relates his awe: “Assuredly the Great Eyrie now took on to my eyes an aspect absolutely fantastic. Its heights seemed peopled by dragons and huge monsters. If chimeras, griffins, and all the creations of mythology had appeared to guard it, I should have been scarcely surprised” (38). By the end of the novel, Strock is able to solve this seemingly fantastical and sublime mystery. The strange events taking place inside Great Eyrie turn out not to be geographical or supernatural by nature, but entirely scientific. A “crazy inventor” (210) had been using the mountain as headquarters to build a machine so technologically advanced that it could transform into an airplane, automobile, boat, or submarine with the flick of a switch. The scientific wonders of the machine, described in plausible detail in the novel, empower the inventor to cause havoc across the US, until his maniacal romp is eventually stopped by the natural, and deadly, power of a hurricane. While these early examples of science fiction set in Appalachia focus on the sublime quality of the mountains, later writers begin to place more emphasis on the Appalachian setting itself. North Carolina author Manly Wade Wellman is probably best known for his fantasy fiction short stories featuring the character Silver John, a wandering balladeer who fights supernatural evil with the aid of his silver-stringed guitar and traditional folk songs. But Wellman also dabbled in straight science fiction. In his 1977 novel The Beyonders, aliens from a parallel universe/dimension—a hypothetical possibility in science—attempt to invade the small Appalachian town of Sky Notch, part of a grander, more sinister plot to enslave the 15 entire human population. After discovering the plot, Sky Notch-native Gander Eye Gentry— a banjo picker, avid hunter, and resident trickster—takes it upon himself to rally the townsfolk to grab their guns to fend off the alien invaders. In many ways, the novel can be considered a “first contact story” paralleling Native Americans’ first encounters with European invaders, who possessed superior technology, weaponry and armor. Yet, in The Beyonders, the native Appalachians successfully defend the town and ultimately save the human species from an apocalyptic future as alien slaves. While the novel is far from Wellman’s best, it is similar to his other work in that it charmingly captures the Appalachian dialect and customs of his characters. The theme of homeplace and the celebration of Appalachian culture is central to the novel, and the majority of the pages are devoted to describing small-town Appalachian life, where traditional music, religion, and strong familial ties become the very weapons used to fight back against the superior scientific technology. A number of other Appalachian authors in the past half-century, most notably Fred Chappell, have also intertwined the mountain sublime with Appalachian culture, though their speculative work falls under the genres of fantasy or horror and not science fiction. Famous North Carolina science fiction author Orson Scott Card, on the other hand, writes clearly in the genre of science fiction, but none of his works to date are set in Appalachia. Of these more recent regional writers of speculative fiction, only Pinckney Benedict truly crosses over into science fiction. “Zog-19: A Scientific Romance,” a short story from Benedict’s 2010 collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories, is a science fiction tale that takes place (mostly) in Appalachia. The story follows the life of Zog-19, an alien from a faraway planet that has 16 taken over the body of an Appalachian farmer. The narration jumps between the present time, following Zog-19’s coming to terms with life on Earth, and the far-away future, where his native planet is facing complete destruction at the hands of greedy humans who want to deplete the planet’s natural resources to use as fuel for their technologically superior spacecraft. It is an Appalachian, apocalyptic, and environmental tale with a twist—the apocalypse is not being done to humans, but by humans. If there is a trend in the historical progression of science fiction set in Appalachia, it seems to point to this thematic intersection between science fiction and Appalachian literature in the treatment of “space,” “otherness” or the mountain sublime, and the impact of technology and modernization on the environment. In fact, Appalachian author Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent novel, Flight Behavior, examines similar themes. While her 2012 work has not been considered science fiction by scholars and critics, the text—set in present day Appalachia—uses science and apocalyptic fears of global warming to enact an imaginary, future event that has not yet occurred but is scientifically possible. The impact of science, therefore, lies at the heart of the novel, and the Appalachian setting could be considered a pre-apocalyptic landscape where the ecological balance is threatened by climate change, yet one which still holds optimism that the apocalyptic event can be reversed through the appropriate human response. Kingsolver’s novel opens the door for further exploration of the intersection between science fiction and Appalachia, which I will examine more closely in the conclusion of my study. Overall, similar to the primary texts I examine in this study—McCarthy’s The Road and Collins’s The Hunger Games—the works mentioned above highlight science fiction texts set in Appalachia, all of which feature the major themes that Portelli raises in his 17 aforementioned article “Appalachia as Science Fiction.” Yet the most recent of these works explore these themes in intriguingly ways, which I will demonstrate in my analysis of The Road and The Hunger Games. 18 Chapter 2: “Senseless. Senseless”: Post-Apocalyptic Appalachia in The Road Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road follows the harrowing, post-apocalyptic journey of an unnamed father and son—referred to in the text as simply “the man” and “the boy”—through an unnamed region after an unspecified cataclysmic event. Considering all the unknowns, the novel might seem like an unlikely candidate for consideration in this study. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, the Appalachian Mountains play a significant role in the novel’s setting. At the same time, while scholars and critics are divided over whether to consider The Road as science fiction, the scientifically plausible, future world of the novel along with the central role of modern technology clearly position The Road within the definition of science fiction as established previously in this study. Overall, through the realm of a post-apocalyptic world on the brink of complete ecological collapse, McCarthy’s novel examines the themes of place, the mountain sublime, “otherness,” and the ecological impact of human technology, all which lie at the heart of science fiction works set in Appalachia. While the vague setting of The Road led some early reviews of and scholarship on the novel to erroneously pinpoint the novel’s setting at places as varied as Georgia, the Southwest, and California (W. Morgan 39), critics and scholars now generally agree that the majority of the story is set in southern Appalachia, as the characters travel south through the Appalachian Mountains on their way to the coast, possibly the Gulf Coast. Wesley G. Morgan’s article “The Route and Roots of The Road,” an intriguing and thorough analysis of 19 the possible highway routes taken by the man and the boy in the novel, argues that The Road begins near Middlesboro, Kentucky, and continues through the Cumberland Gap into Knoxville, Tennessee, across the Newfound Gap on the Tennessee/North Carolina border into Franklin and Highlands, North Carolina, and finally ends along the coast of South Carolina (not the Gulf Coast as others have surmised). Regardless of where the man and the boy end their journey, the text makes it clear that at the start of the novel they “were moving south” toward the “foothills of the eastern mountains” (McCarthy 27), most likely near McCarthy’s former home city of Knoxville (Walsh, “Knoxville” 28). In fact, early on, the man and the boy pass by a log cabin with a large, faded advertisement painted across the roof that reads: “See Rock City” (McCarthy 21). Rock City is a famous tourist attraction in Chattanooga, Tennessee, known for its unusual advertising campaign that became a familiar sight in the Southern Appalachian region (Hardwig 46). The man’s objective is to cross over the snow and ash-choked mountains (the Smoky Mountains, located between Tennessee and North Carolina) for the warmer and safer climate of the southern coast. It is a perilous and possibly deadly journey into the unknown, but it is a risk the man reasons he has no choice but to take. “He thought they had enough food to get through the mountains but there was no way to tell...everything depended on reaching the coast, yet…[t]here was a good chance they would die in the mountain and that would be that” (McCarthy 29). The man’s uncertainty regarding the mountains establishes the ambiguous and obscure quality of the Appalachians in the text. In …of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke designates an entire section to the idea of obscurity and its integral role in the sublime, reasoning that not being able to “know the full extent of any danger” creates 20 feelings of dread and terror where “all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree” (58-9). The man and boy’s journey into the obscure and unknown—into the mountain sublime—establishes the underlying tension and apprehension that propels much of the plot. Yet, while the man’s stated goal is to reach the coast, the text points to another, much more personal reason for the particular route he chooses through Appalachia. Near the beginning of the novel, while the man and the boy are scavenging for supplies inside an abandoned gas station, the man “picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago” (7). At first, it seems like an odd textual detail—considering that in the post-apocalyptic wasteland where the man and the boy are among the few remaining survivors, the man surely cannot be expecting anyone to answer. But it becomes clearer days later when the man stops in front of a house a “few miles south of the city” (as mentioned above, most likely Knoxville). When his son asks him what it is, the man replies, “It’s the house where I grew up” (25). Here, the man reveals his true motivation for a route that Wesley G. Morgan claims would “hardly be the most direct way to the southern coast” (46): the return to his boyhood home, a space many Appalachian writers refer to simply as the “homeplace.” As Chris Walsh notes, this strong pull the man feels to return to his Appalachian roots is “another motivating factor for the father to take his son in a southward direction,” even if the journey kills them (“Post-Southern” 12). The man leads his son inside his childhood home and is pleasantly surprised to find it “[a]ll much as he’d remembered it.” The years of abandonment have taken their toll on the “old frame house,” and trash has piled up on the porch, but inside the man finds the same “empty” rooms and scarce furniture he remembers from growing up: 21 He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago. This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. On cold winter nights we...would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming him he could not see. (McCarthy 26) Lost in his reverie, the man’s emotional response highlights what Bachelard calls the “oneiric house.” Often the house we were born in, the oneiric house is “a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past” (Bachelard 15). For the man, struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, Bachelard’s definition is almost too fitting. The man’s childhood home is not just a bitter-sweet reminder of the “real past.” It is “beyond” the past, part of a world irrevocably lost forever, and one that will never be regained. Yet at one time, the house was the man’s “felicitous space,” a safe place that had allowed him a sanctuary in which to dream. Standing in the doorway of his old bedroom, the man recalls: “This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against this wall. In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be” (27). The imagined worlds that he dreamed as a child may have been “rich or fearful,” but sheltered within the walls of his homeplace, he is safe to dream such sublime dreams. In his boyhood, he could never imagine the true horror of the world “to be,” the post-apocalyptic nightmare of the only world the man knows now. The man’s son, though, has a much different reaction in the presence of the man’s memorialized homeplace. The boy—born after the cataclysmic event that left the planet in ruins—knows only a world destroyed. Unlike the man, the boy has no memories of a pre- 22 apocalyptic world. The boy’s childhood years have been filled with deserted roads, charred forests, and the constant fear of being raped or eaten by rag-tag armies of “bloodcults” or the gangs of marauding “roadagents.” The boy has never known the safety and comfort of a homeplace, and has “no concept of a bedroom or a living room...because all the sleeping and living that he has ever known has been outdoors” (Noetzel 122). This creates a fascinating cognitive dichotomy between the man and his son, highlighted at the start of the scene quoted above. Just before they enter the man’s abandoned homeplace, the boy reluctantly asks: Are we going in? Why not? I’m scared. Dont you want to see where I used to live? No. It’ll be okay. There could be somebody here. (25) For the boy, interior spaces are equated with danger. Because he has never known an oneiric house, he has no frame of reference in which to relate interiority with felicitous space. In his post-apocalyptic upbringing, houses are not places of shelter that provide “dream-memory” and safety, but abandoned, walled-in traps full of possibly horrific surprises. While the “father retains his spatial identity and remembers his life before the apocalypse, the past when interiority was associated with comfort and security” and “clings with all his might to the memories of his childhood home and other relics of history...the son possesses a profoundly different life experience and sees his father’s house as just another building that might hide evil men” (Noetzel 123-4). In the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road, the 23 traditional idea of “homeplace” becomes not an idealized “oneiric house,” but an obscure and understandably terrifying source of danger. The ways the man and the boy respond to the Appalachian landscape reveal a similarly striking contrast. Days or weeks after the visit to the man’s homeplace (time is difficult to measure in The Road), the man and the boy come upon a waterfall in the woods not far from the highway. The text describes the waterfall—which Wesley G. Morgan concludes is likely Dry Falls between Franklin and Highlands, North Carolina—as “dropping off a high shelf of rock and falling eighty feet through a gray shroud of mist into the pool below” (37). The boy is in awe at the sight. “Wow, the boy said. He couldnt take his eyes off it” (37). For Walsh, this scene is the most “sublime moment in the whole novel” (“PostSouthern” 53), and one of the few—if not only—instances where the boy experiences a delightful combination of pleasure and terror: They walked out along the rocks to where the river seemed to end in space and he held the boy while he ventured out to the last ledge of the rock. The river went sucking over the rim and fell straight down into the pool below. The entire river. He clung to the man’s arm. It’s really far, he said. It’s pretty far. Would you die if you fell? You’d get hurt. It’s a long way. It’s really scary. (39) Curious and excited by the power and novelty of the waterfall, the boy “venture[s] out to the last ledge” to stare down into the pool far below, clinging to the arm of his father for comfort. 24 While the boy is frightened of the drop, there is a palpable thrill in his fear as he flirts with disaster while at the same time knowing that in the safety of his father’s arm he is not in any true danger. In …of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke states that “[w]hen danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful” (40). This feeling of safety in the face of danger, which the man once felt while dreaming “fearful” images in the comforts of his homeplace, is a new and all-too-rare emotion for the boy. As Dianne C. Luce notes, “The boy’s thrill of the Sublime is far different from the pure terror he experiences so often in the novel in the actual or anticipated presence of cannibals and rapists from whom his father may not be able to protect him” (80). In this sense, the waterfall scene is one of the few moments in the young boy’s life where he can distance himself from the terror he feels over the nearly constant—and very real—threat of pain and death. Again, though, similar to the contrary emotions that the man and the boy experience in the presence of the man’s homeplace, the waterfall scene reveals another cognitive disparity in how the characters respond to their environment. While the boy is thrilled by the sight of this natural phenomenon, for the man, the waterfall is not a sight of awe and wonder, but simply another painful reminder of what the world once was. According to Luce, “the father does not perceive the same sublimity. Here in this good place, he recalls the better place it was, a wild locus amoenus [pleasant place] that exists only in the past...a scene of profound aftermath” (80). Moments after they leave the waterfall, the man and the boy walk through the charred remains of woods. The man imagines that this landscape was—preapocalypse—a “rich southern wood that once held mayapple and pipsissewa. Ginseng.” Now, all that remains are “huge dead trees” and “raw dead limbs of the rhododendron twisted 25 and knotted and black” (McCarthy 39-40). As Laura Gruber Godfrey notes, the fauna mentioned here are all native to the southern Appalachians, with ginseng and rhododendron holding iconic and “enormous cultural and historical significance” as some of “this landscape’s most cherished and revered symbols” (170). Yet, like everything else in The Road’s imagined future, “the landscape here is almost entirely removed of its former beauty or cultural significance: these things exist only in the father’s mind” (Godfrey 170). These native Appalachian plants are now mere memories, and for the man, “the naming of plants serves as role [sic] call for the dead” (Honeycutt 7). The former beauty of this ecologically ruined landscape is a bitter dream-memory of the past, making it impossible for the man to derive any sublime pleasure from nature. The man’s and the boy’s conflicting interpretations of the wasteland around them reveal a fascinating difference between the mindsets of those born pre-apocalypse and those born post-apocalypse. Because the man remembers a time before the cataclysmic event, the man can look out at the blackened landscape and conjure in his mind images of the former beauty and tranquility of the pre-apocalyptic environment. Because he can remember his homeplace, his oneiric “house of dream-memory,” he is able to connect now-abandoned structures with pleasant memories and experiences. But the boy has no such pre-apocalyptic well of knowledge to draw from and therefore has an entirely separate understanding of the world. This cognitive disparity creates a disturbing picture of “otherness” in the text. Halfway through the novel, the man stares at his sleeping son and comes to a realization: “Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he himself was an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect” (154). Here, the man 26 intimately understands that not only are his and his son’s interpretations of the world irrevocably different, but also in this new, post-apocalyptic landscape, it is the man, not the boy, who is out-of-place. Connected to a past that no longer exists, the man is an “alien,” a stranger in a strange world. He has become, in fact, the “other.” While this thought of being the “other” is disconcerting for the man, it is equally disconcerting for the reader. According to Suvin, science fiction is a “literature of cognitive estrangement,” and “the essential tension of SF is one between the readers...and the encompassing and at least equipollent Unknown or Other introduced by the novum” (3, 64). As readers living in a non-apocalypse world, we readily identify with the man’s interpretation of the world. Like him, we can picture the images he conjures during his frequent ecological roll calls “of the dead,” and we can relate to the “dream-memories” of his homeplace because we are familiar with oneiric places of our own. The text implies, then, that we too are “others” in the novel’s novum, post-apocalyptic world. Like the man, we are aliens looking in, trying to make sense of a world that is not our own. Canavan notes that “[t]he alienated view-from-outside offered by cognitive estrangement allows us to examine ourselves and our institutions in new (and rarely flattering) light; SF distances us from the contemporary world-system only to return us to it, as aliens, so that we can see it with fresh eyes” (xi). The Road, then, seems to imply that it is not the future world of the novel that is out-of-place, strange, or “other”; it is we who are out of place in our future. The boy, though, is a native of the post-apocalyptic world. It is the only world he has known, and therefore the only world he can see. Walsh, applying Martyn Bone’s terminology, refers to the setting of The Road as having a “post-Southern” sense of place, “where it is virtually impossible to return to or imagine a sense of the foundational South” 27 (“Post-Southern” 50). This idea can be fittingly applied to the man’s and boy’s interpretations of their post-apocalyptic world. While the man intimately and intensely experiences this “post-Southern” loss of place, the boy—who has no concept of homeplace nor any memory of the iconic Appalachian ecology—has no sense of place to lose. He, in fact, is the epitome of “post-Southern,” without any images, memories, or concept of a Southern landscape to which to return. Ironically, in the chilling world of The Road, the boy’s complete lack of sense of place is not a tragedy—it is an asset. As the text suggests throughout the novel, memories and colorful daydreams of the pre-apocalypse are, in fact, dangerous. Early in the novel, the man laments the fact that he still dreams in the colors of the pre-apocalypse. “And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day” (21). Dreaming offers few benefits in a post-apocalyptic world, since all the memories and colors are cruel reminders of a world that has ceased to exist. Instead, dreams offer only the coldly alluring temptation of death. As the man tells the boy after the boy wakes up from a bad dream, “when your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up” (189). Dreams of the past, or dreams of another life or a better future, are to be regarded with wariness. In The Road, dreams are not products of Bachelard's “felicitous spaces,” but are the siren calls of death. At the end of the novel, as the man lies dying, he wakes up in the darkness and listens to the sounds around him as he looks at the boy in the fading daylight. But now, even with his eyes open, “[o]ld dreams encroached upon the waking world” (280). A paragraph later, he is dead. The boy, though, remains alive at the end of the novel. Without any pre- 28 apocalyptic memories of a homeplace or a colorful world, death cannot call him through dreams. The text suggests, then, that the boy—born post-Southern, post-homeplace, and postcolor—may be the ultimate survivor in this post-apocalyptic world. This relationship between memory, ecology, and death also plays a central role in the science fiction and technological aspect of The Road, and is key to an ecological and “proleptic”—to use Garrard’s term—understanding of the novel’s place in environmental fiction. Garrard defines prolepsis as the narratological “anticipation of future events” (208), a predictive literary device clearly seen in the future worlds created in science fiction, especially science fiction texts set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. As Buell’s aforementioned quotation states, “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (285). Post-apocalypse texts like The Road, therefore, are often a fascinating crossroads of environmental and science fiction imaginations and a proleptic warning about human’s ecological responsibilities. Ever since The Road was published in 2006, consideration of the novel as science fiction has been in constant debate. Some scholars and critics, maybe most famously author Michael Chabon, dismiss the idea that a literary work such as The Road can or even should be labeled as science fiction, preferring more literary genre tags such as “Gothic horror” and “epic adventure” (Chabon). Others, like Carl James Grindley, argue that the novel needs to be viewed through a Biblical lens, in which the apocalyptic setting of the novel is a dramatic representation of the Apocalypse as prophesied in the New Testament. There are a number of scholars and critics, such as Bill Hardwig and Christopher Pizzino, that find the science fiction elements of The Road not only clearly displayed, but inherent to an understanding of the text. Popular culture tends to agree. Reviews of the novel 29 in media outlets such as The Guardian and NPR—not to mention the numerous science fiction publications like Amazing Stories and SF Site—have no qualms about referring to The Road as science fiction. In fact, The Road was included in the recent volume Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010. This genre debate is understandable, considering the ambiguity of McCarthy’s novel. Yet the textual evidence, in light of the definition of science fiction established in the first chapter of this study, firmly places The Road in the realm of science fiction. In fact, there is little disagreement between scholars that the novel is set in an imaginary future—postapocalypse America—that has not yet occurred but is scientifically possible and framed in a rationalized discourse. The central consideration, then, is the role that science—more specifically technology—plays in the novel. This might seem like a moot point, since in the post-apocalyptic setting of the road, any last semblance of technology has been all but wiped out (e.g., many of the novel’s characters are reduced to fighting and/or defending themselves with such antiquated weapons as spears and bows and arrows). Yet, as Suvin argues, “antiscientific SF is just as much within the scientific horizon” as science fiction that champions technology (67). So it is reasonable to consider The Road as science fiction, despite its being set in a blasted and barren landscape devoid of any modern technology in which all humans, animals and vegetation are on the verge of extinction. A determining factor of whether or not the novel can be considered science fiction hinges on the origin of the cataclysmic event that caused the initial destruction. Again, the text’s lack of specific details regarding the cataclysmic event makes this determination difficult. In fact, there is only one passage in the novel that directly touches on the cause of the disaster: 30 The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didn’t answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. (McCarthy 45) Critics and scholars have gleaned from this passage a variety of hypotheses. The prevailing conclusion is that the cataclysmic event is a nuclear bomb attack, and that the “unnamed disaster—in all probability a nuclear holocaust—has created a nuclear winter on earth” (Greenwood 77). As Gabriella Blasi notes, this hypothesis is also the one that ecocritical readings of the novel tend to favor (91). So even though the “novel details neither nuclear weapons nor radiation, [...] the physical landscape, with its thick blanket of ash; the father’s mystery illness; and the changes in the weather patterns of the southern United States all suggest that the world is gripped by something similar to a nuclear winter” (Grindley 11). A nuclear winter, as hypothesized by several studies and scientific conferences since the 1970s—such as the famous TTAPS study that coined the term—would result in massive, uncontrolled fires, dust storms of ash and soot, and widespread radiation sickness. This would wipe out much of earth’s plant and wildlife, though a small fraction of the human population would likely survive (“nuclear winter”). These are the exact conditions that take place in The Road. Other scholars and critics, though, argue that a number of other causes could have induced a similar scenario, including a meteor strike, a volcanic explosion, human-caused climate change, or the Biblical Apocalypse, to name a few. McCarthy himself, in interviews, has been notoriously ambiguous about the exact cause of the event, sometimes hinting toward the meteor theory (Kushner), other times suggesting nuclear war, volcanic activity, or 31 “anything” (Jurgensen). Josiane Smith suggests that it is this very lack of specificity regarding the cataclysmic event that emphasizes the novel’s central, ecological issue: It is the genius of McCarthy to have written a futuristic tale devoid of futuristic tropes by constructing a hypothetical image of our present that allows for a broad scope of interpretations about his take on the way humans inhabit Earth, and about the future consequences of this inhabitancy. (101) Hardwig, even while speculating that the event was most likely caused by “either a nuclear war or a meteor impact,” agrees with Smith, arguing that McCarthy “keeps the exact cause of the event ambiguous, as he is more interested in the science fiction theme of a new world in the future than he is about the scientific and historical explanation of the causes that initiate the change” (42). While there is no doubt that the novel’s narrative focuses more on postapocalyptic aftermath than initial causes, the text does seem to point to—if not an exact cause of the cataclysmic event—a likely suspect on which to rest the blame: humans. Near the end of the novel, the man and the boy have reached the coast. The man stands on the shore line of the dead sea, staring at the ecological disaster before him: They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless. (222) The key word lies at the end of this passage: “Senseless.” In fact, it is so importan