Continuing with a theme that I began in the last post, I want to juxtapose the images of excessive death from Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man and Max Brooks' World War Z with the mid-century American post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides.
Beyond the constitutive scene that I recounted from World War Z, where bodies are stacked around a battalion, literally forming a fortress, there are several places in the novel where even after the situation has become manageable, zombie body parts liter the landscape. Here is a description of a Canadian Wildnerness Park:
In contrast to this, Earth Abides is unsettling bereft of death. A plague has swept over America, and presumably the entire planet, leaving an uncertain amount of survivors, the most important being the main character of Isherwood, or Ish, whose reason for survival, like the cause and nature of the deathly virus, remains a mystery.
Ish, who had been in the wilderness as a graduate student "working on a thesis" about the ecology of the Black Creek Area, slowly comes to realize that something drastic as happens as he moves from the wilderness back to the city. Almost every town he goes to has been deserted, populated more with stray dogs and chickens than any signs of human beings. After reading in a newspaper about the "Great Disaster," Ish takes off across the United States to survey the land before returning to his childhood home and beginning a community.
Despite his extensive travels, the novel almost never finds Ish facing the remnants of the disaster in the form of dead bodies or even skeletons. In fact, there are very few places where death is even discussed. Here is the earliest instance:
Just a quick bit of simple arithmetic to drive home how striking this quarantined vision is: the population of the United States in 1950 was roughly 150 million. If a virus killed off 99.9% of the population, a rough guess considering the absence of survivors that Ish runs into despite driving across the country twice, that would mean 149,985,000 bodies found their deathly bed in a hospital, which would be an impressive feat of bureaucratic engineering.
By envisioning a post-apocalyptic landscape empty of deathly remains, the novel is capable of accomplishing the title's promise: the Earth begins to take back over the World of Man, meaning hedges grow wildly, roads succumb to natural erosion, and various species that were parasitic to man begin to die off.
This last point regarding species populations becomes somewhat of a not uninteresting obsession of the novel. There are successive waves of species over population that threaten Ish and his burgeoning Tribe: ants, rats, cows. At the peak of rat infestation, Ish guesses that the number of rats is "somewhere in the nieghborhood of fifty million," calling this guess "conservative." However, shortly after the rats seem to disappear, but no bodies remain:
The absence of dead bodies, both animal and human, is a stark contrast to World War Z. On the one hand, this could be read as symptomatic of Earth Abides' historical myopia, which finds the human race devolving into a "primitive" state only fifty years after the Great Disaster. In this case, the remnants of history remain inside designated unexplorable areas, beyond the purview of the post-apocalyptic subject. A piece of evidence from the book to support this perspective is the way in Ish guards the library as a personal, sacred temple to be entered by no one else.
On the other hand, the absent bodies could be indicative of death's peculiar place along the natural/artificial continuum. In this case, the novel would be incapable of seeing the decay of deathly bodies as equivalent to the natural processes of wind and water erosion or species selection.
Not to say that death doesn't have a place in this novel, simply that mass death is something that never finds visual representation; its presence is safely located on the margins of a world that is returning to naturalness. Even before he gets to these mass graves, Ish knows not to go and see; he is beyond the pull of the desire that sends Leontius rushing to look at the dead corpses.
Empty of living bodies and dead, Earth Abides isolates deathly human remains from the natural landscape rather than incorporating them. The animals hunted by the sharpened nickel and penny arrowheads of Ish's great grandchildren will never be found gnawing at the rotting flesh of another animal or human, but always remain idyllically back in their natural environment: eating the green grass that grows out of a cracked and empty road.
Beyond the constitutive scene that I recounted from World War Z, where bodies are stacked around a battalion, literally forming a fortress, there are several places in the novel where even after the situation has become manageable, zombie body parts liter the landscape. Here is a description of a Canadian Wildnerness Park:
"The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris, and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice."As in the previous accounts, the remnants of death become literally woven into the fabric of post-apocalyptic life. Bones, limbs, and bodies become features of the natural landscape along the same lines as DVD sets, Sponge Bob sleeping bags, trees and rocks.
In contrast to this, Earth Abides is unsettling bereft of death. A plague has swept over America, and presumably the entire planet, leaving an uncertain amount of survivors, the most important being the main character of Isherwood, or Ish, whose reason for survival, like the cause and nature of the deathly virus, remains a mystery.
Ish, who had been in the wilderness as a graduate student "working on a thesis" about the ecology of the Black Creek Area, slowly comes to realize that something drastic as happens as he moves from the wilderness back to the city. Almost every town he goes to has been deserted, populated more with stray dogs and chickens than any signs of human beings. After reading in a newspaper about the "Great Disaster," Ish takes off across the United States to survey the land before returning to his childhood home and beginning a community.
Despite his extensive travels, the novel almost never finds Ish facing the remnants of the disaster in the form of dead bodies or even skeletons. In fact, there are very few places where death is even discussed. Here is the earliest instance:
"Here and there he saw bodies, but in general he found only emptiness. Apparently the onset of the disease had been slow enough so that people were not usually struck down in the streets. Once he passed through a town where the smell of corpses was thick in the air. He remember what he had read in the newspaper; apparently there had been concentrations at the last upon certain areas, and in these the corpses were now to be found most thickly."Olfactory alerts will dominate the remainder of Ish's relationships to the death caused by the Great Disaster, as happens when he arrives in New York where "his nostrils" tell him that he is near a "Medical Center." By envisioning such a perfectly functioning State, which capable of ushering almost every infected person into a hospital or specific area, the novel is free to bypass the very deathly matter so ubiquitous in World War Z.
Just a quick bit of simple arithmetic to drive home how striking this quarantined vision is: the population of the United States in 1950 was roughly 150 million. If a virus killed off 99.9% of the population, a rough guess considering the absence of survivors that Ish runs into despite driving across the country twice, that would mean 149,985,000 bodies found their deathly bed in a hospital, which would be an impressive feat of bureaucratic engineering.
By envisioning a post-apocalyptic landscape empty of deathly remains, the novel is capable of accomplishing the title's promise: the Earth begins to take back over the World of Man, meaning hedges grow wildly, roads succumb to natural erosion, and various species that were parasitic to man begin to die off.
This last point regarding species populations becomes somewhat of a not uninteresting obsession of the novel. There are successive waves of species over population that threaten Ish and his burgeoning Tribe: ants, rats, cows. At the peak of rat infestation, Ish guesses that the number of rats is "somewhere in the nieghborhood of fifty million," calling this guess "conservative." However, shortly after the rats seem to disappear, but no bodies remain:
"Day by day, the numbers of rats became fewer, and then one morning they seemed to be gone entirely."Similar to the Great Disaster, the novel references a death that would have to be into the millions, and yet no bodies populate the landscape to serve as a reminder of the infestation.
The absence of dead bodies, both animal and human, is a stark contrast to World War Z. On the one hand, this could be read as symptomatic of Earth Abides' historical myopia, which finds the human race devolving into a "primitive" state only fifty years after the Great Disaster. In this case, the remnants of history remain inside designated unexplorable areas, beyond the purview of the post-apocalyptic subject. A piece of evidence from the book to support this perspective is the way in Ish guards the library as a personal, sacred temple to be entered by no one else.
On the other hand, the absent bodies could be indicative of death's peculiar place along the natural/artificial continuum. In this case, the novel would be incapable of seeing the decay of deathly bodies as equivalent to the natural processes of wind and water erosion or species selection.
Not to say that death doesn't have a place in this novel, simply that mass death is something that never finds visual representation; its presence is safely located on the margins of a world that is returning to naturalness. Even before he gets to these mass graves, Ish knows not to go and see; he is beyond the pull of the desire that sends Leontius rushing to look at the dead corpses.
Empty of living bodies and dead, Earth Abides isolates deathly human remains from the natural landscape rather than incorporating them. The animals hunted by the sharpened nickel and penny arrowheads of Ish's great grandchildren will never be found gnawing at the rotting flesh of another animal or human, but always remain idyllically back in their natural environment: eating the green grass that grows out of a cracked and empty road.
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