a working bibliography: u.s. post-apocalyptic fiction and cultural production

u.s. post-apocalyptic fiction and cultural production

The most striking thing about looking at the bibliography of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be also the most banal. What catches my eye is that the number of volumes released during what I’m calling the contemporary (2002 to 2013) phase of post-apocalyptic fiction is greater than those released from 1946-2001. This detail doesn’t tell us as much about the changing nature of our fears or our dreams as one might expect from a spike in the production of stories about surviving the end of the world; instead, I think this intensification reveals something about cultural production and the logic of growth/expansion and what Chris Anderson has dubbed the long tail. 

That U.S. post-apocalyptic titles more than doubled in the last decade is surely a sign that niche publishing has continued the growth of markets for the book industry, even if those measures of growth (1% in revenues) don’t match standards in other industries. The long tail, a term discussed heavily in conversations about Amazon.com around marketing smaller items to specialist audiences, proposes that it is better to have many smaller scale products that interest a variety of different consumers than have one or two mega commodities that everyone would buy. Publishers like Permuted Press, whose slogan is “Enjoy the Apocalypse,” haven’t even been accounted for in these observations, but  I would still argue that they operate within and exemplify the logic of the long tail. 

As per my quick assessment here, it seems the broader cultural explanation, or one such explanation, for the proliferation of post-apocalyptic fiction hinges on the generation of content for a demand from niche markets, on the one hand, and their correspondence with the direction of marketing and publishing, on the other, which is not to say that there aren’t ideological explanations for this spike of production of end of the world scenarios as well.  Indeed, what I am trying to point to here is that conditions seem perfect for precisely this type of writing. Put another way, cultural production, rather than something like a collective apocalyptic imagination, it seems, is a powerful place to start addressing the questions: “why post-apocalyptic fiction” and “why now”?

u.s. post-apocalyptic fiction 1946-2013: 
a working bibliography

the long fifties 1946-1964*

Brackett, Leigh. The Long Tomorrow. 1955. New York: Ballantine, 1986. Print.
Burroughs, William. Nova Express. NY: Grove P, 1964. Print.

Dick, Phillip K. The Penultimate Truth. 1964. New York: Bluejay Books, 1984. Print.

---. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. New York: Ace Books, 1965. Print.

Gayoule, Daniel F. Lords of the Psychon. New York: Bantam Books, 1963. Print.

Heinlein, Robert A. Farnham's Freehold. New York: Signet, 1964.

Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1954.

Miller Jr., Walter. A Canticle for Leibowitz. New York: Bantam Books, 1997.

Sheckley, Robert. Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962). London: Gollancz, 1985. Print.
Stewart, George R. Earth Abides. New York: Random House, 1949.

Tucker, Wilson A. The Long Loud Silence. New York: Rinehart, 1952. Print.

the rise of feminist and new wave sf 1965-1978

Charnas, Suzy McKee. Walk to the End of the World. 1974. New York: Berkeley, 1978.

Chilson, Rob. The Star-Crowned Kings. New York: DAW-Books, 1975. Print.

Disch, Thomas M. The Genocides. New York: Books, 1965. Print.

Harrison, Harry. Make Room! Make Room! 1966. New York: Ace, 1979.

Kane, Gil. Blackmark. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

King, Stephen. The Stand. 1978. New York: Signet, 1991.

Spinrad, Norman. The Iron Dream. New York: Avon, 1972. Print.

Wilhelm, Kate. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. NY: Harper & Row, 1976. Print.

the late cold war 1979-1989
Auster, Paul. In the Country of Last Things. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Print.

Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: Arbor Press, 1985. Print.

Berman, Mitch. Time Capsule. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988. Print.

Boyett, Steven R.. Ariel. New York: Ace Books, 1983. Print.

Brin, David. The Postman. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. Print.

Brinkley, William. The Last Ship. New York: Viking, 1988. Print.

Butler, Octavia. Clay's Arc. New York: St. Martin's P, 1984. Print.

Crowley, John. Engine Summer. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Print.

Elgin, Suzette Haden. Native Tongue. NY: Daw Books, 1984. Print.
Forman, James D. Doomsday Plus Twelve. New York: Scribner, 1984. Print.

Herbert, Frank. The White Plague. New York: Putnam, 1982. Print.
Hoban, Russell. Riddley Walker. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Print.                              

Kunetka, James and Whitley Strieber. Warday. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984. Print.

Lanier, Sterling, E. Hiero's Journey. Radnor: Chilton Book Co., 1983. Print.

La Tourette, Aileen. Cry Wolf.  New York: Random House, 1986. Print.

Lawrence, Louise. Children of the Dust. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Print.
Malamud, Bernard. God’s Grace. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Print.

Martin, Graham Dunstan. Time-Slip. New York: Harper Collins, 1986. Print.

McCammon, Robert R. Swan Song. New York: Pocket Books, 1987. Print.

Morrow, James. This is the Way the World Ends. New York: Henry Holt, 1985. Print.

Niven, Larry and Jerry Pournelle. Lucifer’s Hammer. New York; Del Rey, 1985.

Palmer, David R. Emergence. Toronto: Bantam, 1984. Print.

Paulson, Gary. The Transall Saga. New York: Delacorte P, 1988. Print.

Prochnau, William. Trinity's Child. New York: Putnam, 1983. Print.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Wild Shore. 1984. New York: Orb, 1995. Print.

Silverberg, Robert. At Winter's End. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988. Print.

Tepper, Sheri S. The Gate to Women's Country. New York: Foundation Books, 1988. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula. Always Coming Home (1985). Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Print.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. NY: Delacorte P, 1985. Print.

Williams, Paul O. The Fall of the Shell. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982. Print.
Wolf, Gene. The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. (1980). New York: Orb Books, 1997. Print.

the long nineties 1989-2001**

Anderson, Kevin J. and Doug Beason. Ill Wind. New York: Forge, 1995. Print.

Baker, Will. Shadow Hunter. New York: Pocket Books, 1993. Print.

---. Star Beast. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996. Print.

Burton, LeVar. Aftermath. New York: Aspect, 1997. Print.

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. New York: Aspect, 1995. Print.

---. Parable of the Talents. New York : Aspect, 2001. Print.

Dickson, Gordon R. Wolf and Iron. New York: T. Doherty Associates, 1990. Print.

Harry, Eric L. Arc Light. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996. Print.
Kadohata, Cynthia. In the Heart of the Valley of Love. NY: Viking, 1992. Print.

Kaye, Marilyn. The Return. New York: Avon Books, 1999. Print.

---. The Convergence. New York: Avon Books, 1998. Print.

---. The Vanishing. New York: Avon Books, 1998. Print.

LaHaye, Tim & Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days. Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 1995. Print.

Lethem, Jonathan. Amnesia Moon. San Diego: Harcourt and Brace, 1995. Print.

McDevitt, Jack. Eternity Road. Norwalk: Easton Press, 1997. Print.

Miller Jr., Walter. Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. New York: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 1997. Print.
Piercy, Marge. He, She, and It. NY: Fawcett Crest, 1991. Print.

Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York: Bantam, 1993. Print.

Williams, Walter John. The Rift. New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Print.

Wren, M. K. A Gift Upon the Shore. New York, Ballantine Books, 1990. Print.

the contemporary 2002-2013

Adrian, Chris. The Children's Hospital. San Fransisco: McSweeney's, 2006. Print.

Alexander, Marcus. The Oblivion Society. Permuted P, 2007. Print.

Amsterdam, Steven. Things We Didn’t See Coming. New York: Pantheon, 2010.

Bacigalupi, Paolo. Ship Breaker. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2010. Print.

---. The Windup Girl. San Francisco: Nightshade Books, 2009. Print.

Barnes, John. Directive 51. New York: Ace Books, 2010. Print.

Birmingham, John. After America. 2010.

Boyett, Steven R. Mortality Bridge. New York; Subterranean Press, 2011. Print.

---. Elegy Beach: A Book of the Change. New York: Ace Books, 2009. Print.

Bradley, Darin. Noise. New York: Spectra Ballantine Books, 2010. Print.

Braziel, James. Snakeskin Road. New York: Bantam Books, 2009. Print.

---. Birmingham, 35 Miles. New York: Bantam Books, 2008. Print.

Brooks, Max. World War Z. New York: Crown, 2006. Print.

Brown, Eric. Guardians of the Phoenix. Oxford: Solaris, 2010. Print.

Budz, Mark. Clade. New York: Bantam Books, 2003. Print.

Carlson, Jeff. Plague Year. New York: Ace Books, 2007. Print.

---. Plague War. New York: Ace Books, 2008. Print.

---. Plague Zone. New York: Ace Books, 2009. Print.

Collins, Paul. The Skyborn. New York: Starscape, 2005. Print.

Cronin, Justin. The Passage. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. Print.

---. The Twelve. New York: Ballantine Books, 2012. Print.

DeNiro, Alan. Total Oblivion, More or Less. Spectra: 2009. Print.

Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column. LaVergne: BiblioBazaar, 2010.

DuPrau, Jeanne. The City of Ember. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

---. The People of Sparks. New York: Random House, 2004. Print.

---. The Diamond of Darkhold. New York: Random House, 2008. Print.

Endo, Hiroki. Eden. Vol. 1, It’s an Endless World. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005. Print.

Evenson, Brian. Immobility. New York: Tor Books, 2012.

Forstchen, William R. One Second After. New York: Forge, 2009. Print.
Gischler, Victor. Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse. NY: Touchstone Books, 2008. Print.
Harrison, Mark. The Afterblight Chronicles: America. Oxford: Abaddon, 2011. Print.

Hart, Marcus Alexander. The Oblivion Society Edition 2.0. Permuted Press, 2007.

Hauge, Lesley. Nomansland. New York: Henry Holt, 2012. Print.

Heller, Peter. The Dog Stars. New York: Knopf, 2012. Print.

Howey, Hugh. Wool. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013. Print.

Judson, Theodore. Fitzpatrick's War. New York: DAW Books, 2004. Print.

Kane, Paul. Arrowhead. Oxford: Abaddon, 2008. Print.

Knight, Christopher and Johnathan Rand. Pandemia. Topinabee Island: AudioCraft, 2006. Print.

Kollin Dani & Eytan Kollin. The Unincorporated Man.Tom Doherty, 2009. Print.

Kunstler, James. The Witch of Hebron. New York: Grove Press, 2011. Print.

---. World Made by Hand. New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 2008. Print.

Mayhar, Ardath. The World Ends in Hickory Hollow. Garden City: Doubleday, 2007. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print.

McIntosh, Will. Soft Apocalypse. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2011. Print.

Ochse, Weston. Blood Ocean. Oxford: Abaddon Books, 2012. Print.

Pfeffer, Susan Beth. Life as We Knew It. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006. Print.

---. The Dead and the Gone. New York: Random House, 2008. Print.

Ringo, John. The Last Centurion. Baen Books, 2008. Print.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Sixty Days and Counting. London: Harper Collins, 2007. Print.

---. Fifty Degrees Below. London: Harper Collins, 2006. Print.

---. Forty Signs of Rain. London: Harper Collins, 2004. Print.

---. Years of Rice and Salt. New York: Bantman Books, 2002. Print.

Sagan, Nick. Idlewild. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003.

---. Edenborn. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004.

---. Everfree. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006.

Sharpe, Matthew. Jamestown. Orlando: A Harvest Book, 2007. Print.

Slatery, Brian Francis. Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America. New York: Tor, 2008. Print.

Stirling, S.M.  The Tears of the Sun. New York: New American Library, 2011. Print.

---. The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change. New York: New American Library, 2010. Print.

---. The Sword of the Lady: A Novel of the Change. New York: New American Library, 2009. Print.

---. The Scourge of God.  New York: Roc, 2008. Print.

---. The Sunrise Lands. New York: New American Library, 2007. Print.

---. A Meeting at Corvallis. New York: New American Library, 2006. Print.

---. The Protector’s War. New York: New American Library, 2005. Print.

---. Dies the Fire. New York: New American Library, 2004. Print.

Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Picador, 2007.

Wesley, Rawles, James. Founders: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. Berkeley: Ulysses P., 2012. Print.

---. Survivors: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. Berkeley: Ulysses P., 2011. Print.

---. Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. Berkeley: Ulysses P., 2009. Print.

Wilson, Robert Charles. Julian Comstock: A Story of 22^nd-Century America. New York: Tor, 2009.

Winters, Ben. The Last Policeman. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2013. Print.

Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Print.

* - the long fifties is a term for a period taken from Keith M Booker's excellent book: Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction in Novel and Film, 1946-1964.
** - the long nineties is a term for a period taken from Phillip Wegner's excellent book: Life between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties.

post-apocalyptic fiction: comedy or tragedy

The first answer to the question of whether post-apocalyptic fiction is comedy or tragedy seems all too obvious. The sheer number of horrific events, losses, causalities, and trials faced by the characters after the apocalyptic event insists that we are dealing with a tragic form here. The last dying gasps of our world are meted out by the survivors, each one a sign that things in the present, our present, went terribly, terribly wrong. Perhaps a more suitable way to grasp the question is to return to the birth of the modern form of the comedy, (i.e. the romantic comedy), which happens to arrive on the scene at a crucial moment in the pre-history of post-apocalyptic fiction as well.

The comparison I am asking us to consider is, for all intents and purposes, actually between Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). This is where the question of comedy clarifies its place in my inquiry. But first a word on Shelley’s science fiction novel:  Frankenstein enacts one version of tragedy, when, in the face of a possible resolution to the conflict of the narrative the monster asks Frankenstein to fashion him a wife, Frankenstein refuses, shattering any hope that a resolution can be met. The novel is obviously much more complex than this, but it illustrates the dynamic of the tragic closure, which is made unbearable by the possibility of a complete resolution, if only for an instant, seeming to be so close at hand and then being dashed away.

Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, incorporates many minor tragedies time and again into its narrative form, bringing Elizabeth and Darcy close together and then pulling them apart. But in Austin’s case the bittersweet sting of a nearly fulfilled love is finally overwhelmed by understanding, union, and marriage. Phillip Wegner has commented that the insidious nature of Austin’s text is that, beneath the veneer of love and the hustle and bustle of posturing and relationships, is the work of the bourgeois Cultural Revolution, which at this point in history, was engaged in an occluded struggle to make marriage a natural conclusion and the only direction in which one ought to move.

My argument, then, about post-apocalyptic fiction hinges on its own mode of closure. What is often the case at the end of these novels, rather than marriage or the failed reconciliation of opposing forces, is the overwhelming prescience of the family or an insistence on its importance. To name a few examples Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009), Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), and so on. To quote the ending of DeNiro’s novel: “I understand love a little bit more—and what it can cost. But it’s a cost I’m more willing to pay. Mother taught me that. Ciaran taught me that. My living breathing family is still teaching me that. I don’t pretend to be wise anymore, and I don’t try to stop being afraid when I’m afraid, or angry when I’m andry. It sounds so easy but it’s the hardest things in the world” (306). So, in terms of closure, it is safe to say post-apocalyptic fiction is comedic.

What’s at stake in all of this, besides some musings on literary history and generic form? The stakes for me are simply this, the work of Austin marks a moment when the operations of the novel, in hindsight, did the work of solidifying a class and outlining that class’s role in history. The marriage at the end of Austin’s novels isn’t the deepest moment of cultural warfare, however, I would argue that moment comes after the novel’s close and that its name is the reproduction of daily life under capital. Isn’t then the form of closure we find in much contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction engaged in the same type of warfare? Though we can argue about the role of literature and the death of the novel (about which see more here), I think it’s clear that post-apocalyptic fiction is doing a similar kind of work to Austin’s novels in that it tries to maintain the status quo and is deeply disinterested in the movement of history as such, which isn’t the same as saying it cannot tell us anything about history.

petrofiction

James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand (2008) contains a particular conservative logic common to post-apocalyptic fiction and environmentalist writing that can either be taken up as a maintenance of the status quo (i.e. “humanity can survive, if only things could stay a particular way”) or as political signs of warning (i.e. “if we continue along this path, this destruction is what will come”).

This conservative logic can be detected in James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand (2008), which imagines a post-petrol world in which human beings live peaceably in harmony with nature by regressing to a pre-oil dependant life, effectivley Kunstler forecasts the apocalypse as a solution to the ills he attributes to oil dependency and its attendant technologies. In a recent issue of the PMLA, the question of the relationship between oil and literature is further probed by Michel Ziser and Imre Szeman, respectively. Ziser gestures to a number of recent fictions that take on the same problematic addressed by Kunstler: “Later novels, as well as recent documentaries and feature films, have taken up this pessimistic vision of oil-induced apocalypse under the specter of climate change and high-tech imperial warfare… these ask us to acknowledge the connection between the oil age and its problematic surpluses—economic, political, environmental, sexual, aesthetic, and even religious—and to consider the human effects of its eventual passing.”[i] Ziser connects one type of surplus, oil, with a whole variety of others through “oil-induced apocalypse” fiction, thinking of the fiction as a way to measure the effects of such a breakdown. Kunstler’s novel makes the suggestion that in order to save the world oil production and consumption must stop (something most of us would be hard pressed to disagree with). Szeman picks up where Ziser leaves off by strengthening the connection between oil production and cultural production such that he argues for a periodization not based on national or historical periods, but on the dominant mode of resource extraction.[ii] Ziser and Szeman’s way of reading reveals a problem with Kunstler’s reasoning: World Made by Hand posits societal and technological retrogression as a solution to the degradation of the planet, rather than tracing our “petroculture” to its roots in capital’s dependence on and need for limitless expansion.[iii]

From the perspective of either the maintenance of the present or the apocalyptic politics of catastrophism,[iv] the conservative logic of post-apocalyptic fiction functions as a containment strategy. Each such approach to the disaster situation or the catastrophic scenario has a tendency to fall doubly short of a complete solution—both within the world of the text and as a solution to a real world problem. On the level of the plot, though post-apocalyptic fiction sets out to resolve a historical contradiction, it stops short by selecting the wrong problem (e.g. focusing on technological advances rather than the economic force driving them). Rather than imagining a relatively new historical situation, these fictions seem doomed to play out older, residual narratives, like the return to pre-industrial society in Kunstler, which may not be well-suited to engage with the present. Put another way, post-apocalyptic fiction tends to grasp at symptoms.

Ideology in post-apocalyptic fiction manifests itself somewhere between false immediacy and false consciousness, showing up in the return to simpler relations in Kunstler. World Made by Hand politically attempts to change how people behave. The logic of post-apocalyptic fiction resonates with Kunstler’s political bid—that describing and elaborating a different mode of life will give reasons for people to reflect objectively on the current situation and, crucially, change because of it. The problem that arises here is that post-apocalyptic fiction, like so many other cultural forms today, still assumes the link between knowing something and doing something about it. What’s more, presuming this type of connection means that post-apocalyptic fiction actually works to contain unmanageable contradictions rather than resolving them. Kunstler’s attempt may be off track, masking social relations and obscuring, for example, the imperative of growth under capitalism, but that is not to say it cannot teach us something about its point of intervention—post-apocalyptic fiction may hide social relations, for instance, but it also still depicts them. The takeaway is that even as they cover over and contain contradictions World Made by Hand present signs and symptoms of this containment. The question of how to move from knowing that to doing something about it is left wide open.

---

[i] Michel Ziser, “Oil Spills,” in PMLA 126.2 (March 2011): 323.

[ii] “This special Editor’s Column asks what might happen if we frame cultural and intellectual periods and the literatures they encompass not in terms of movements (e.g., modernism), nations (British modernism), or centuries (eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth . . .) but in relation to dominant forms of energy. A crude, perhaps too literal form of materialism, but a suggestive one nevertheless, and not just in the aha! manner of all thought experiments. A periodization organized around energy draws much needed attention to one of the key conditions of possibility of human social activity: a raw input—energy—whose significance and value are almost always passed over, even by those who insist on the importance of modes and forms of production for thinking about culture and literature.” Imre Szeman, “Literature and Energy Futures,” in PMLA 126.2 (March 2011): 323.

[iii] Petroculture is a periodizing term used most prominently in the research cluster of the same name at the University of Alberta which studies “the socio-cultural aspects of oil and energy in Canada and the world today.” See Petrocultures.com (2012) www.petrocultures.com (accessed on 29 Sept 2012).

[iv] Catastophism is a politics that bases itself around the shock or fear of catastrophe. It can be taken up either by the left or the right, through in Catastophism Liley and others argue that appeals to the threat of disaster always serve a conservative agenda. See especially Eddie Yuen, “The Politics of Failure have Failed,” 15-43.

aesthetics of exhaustion, mccarthy years later

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.[1]

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) describes a journey from one place to another, a passage through an inhospitable landscape in elegant sparseness, stripped down dialogue, and with luminous descriptions of the devastated countryside. The Road is a story about a man and a boy who travel down the presumably post-nuclear, U.S. East coast in search of warmer climes. McCarthy consistently draws attention to the precarious nature of their survival. In the novel, the man and the boy have been left behind by the boy’s mother who opted to take her own life rather than face the ravages of cannibal gangs or the devastation of life in this unrecognizable United States. 

The novel presents us with an impasse—the totality within the narrative provides empirical examples of only a few logical ways to live collectively: struggling as the man and the boy do, surviving in a cannibalistic gang (a mode the novel cautions that should be strictly avoided), or living in the seemingly benevolent family group that emerges at the end of the novel. The Road seems to have already moved beyond the problem of the family, but still returns to it as a fundamental question. What remains at stake is the way The Road simultaneously and on a different register engages historical structures and processes that have marked it both visibly and invisibly.

From the very start, The Road insists on the characters’ inability to locate themselves–socially, geographically, politically or even in a more physical sense. On the opening page, vision is figured as a rapidly dwindling facility: “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (3). The destination of the travels remains unclear and clouded not only for the reader, but for the man and the boy themselves. 

The novel comes closest to making its inner logic visible when the boy describes a toy he had in a dream: “this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary” (36). After his father reassures him, the boy concedes one final detail—the key on the penguin was not turning. No one was responsible for winding the penguin, yet it moved of its own accord. Here, the boy expects windup toys to operate in accordance with a particular logic—the key should move along with the toy and require someone, a boy for instance, to wind it before the mechanism could release this stored up kinetic energy. What the boy finds “really scary” is as much the ostensibly magical dance of the penguin as the logical breakdown of his own relation to the external world, a world that the novel registers as entirely unplottable. The dream not only records the demise of the expected order, but also registers an unintentional truth: these unpredictable objects mark the novel’s inability to posit a future where the boy could be in control at all. This is a fact only reinforced by the novel’s close where, at the very moment the boy is alone, he is discovered by a friendly group and any chance he has of developing a new mode of survival or belonging in the world is severed.[2]

The dream is frightening for the boy not because it is reminiscent of the end, but because the toy continues to move without his input: the penguin’s mobility is a signature of the invisible dynamic guiding the frighteningly autonomous-seeming object, the motivating force behind the apparently free figure, what Louis Althusser called the absent cause, which has been understood both as the logic of History, along the lines of Althusser and Fredric Jameson, or as that of capital itself, following Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, and outlines the invisible core of the novel.[3] 

The novel imagines this absence in terms of social responsibility or collective support. What keeps the two nameless protagonists from interacting with others is the fear of death, rather than the preference of solitude or something like racial or social prejudice. The novel posits the problematic on a political register as the loss of the social contract. The boy’s fear of the dancing penguin, however, underscores the breakdown of a far larger set of relations, namely capitalist social relations as such. His horror gestures to a contradiction behind the sign of the magically dancing object, behind the veil of the political, namely an economic contradiction of production and scarcity. The novel attempts to resolve an economic problem on the level of political social organization – the relation of strangers within a national context and the relation of individuals within a familial one.[4]

  

What generates the nation and the family, however, is the economic necessity of production in terms of national competition and state organization, and also the regulation and social reproduction of the working class family and the reserve army of the proletariat, things that, in reality, have long been irrelevant as residual forms of the ideology of an earlier organization of production, ones which have since been sublated and exported beyond U.S. borders in the global or better yet transnational configuration of capital. At its conclusion the novel puts these contradictions on the table, but does not attempt to sort through them: put another way, The Road ends with an insistence on the family as the dominant social form, an aporia it fails to read as a contradiction, or at the least a ‘dead end’ that cannot be resolved within the novel form which raised it in the first place. My argument about post-apocalyptic fiction cannot stop here, however; and, perhaps, tying a number of these failures together under the category of genre may serve to paint a better picture of the particular failure of the novel apparatus in The Road to offer resolutions to the problems it emplots.

Bibliography
Althusser, Louis and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: Verso, 2009.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. 
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage P, 2006.

Szeman, Imre and Eric Cazdyn. After Globalization. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

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[1] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage P, 2006), 3.

[2] The boy is discovered by a nuclear family in John Hillcoat’s film The Road (2009).

[3] See Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 2009), 208-9; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981); and, Imre Szeman and Eric Cazdyn, After Globalization (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

[4] For relation of strangers within a national contexts see Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 6.