A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer, and that I would become. A hope of amelioration always attends on change of place, which would even lighten the burthen of my life . . . Tiber, the road which is spread by nature’s own hand, threading her continent, was at my feet, and many a boat was tethered to the banks. I would with a few books, provisions and my dog embark in one of these and float down the current of the stream into the sea; and then, keeping near land, I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean . . . Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney – the LAST MAN.
There were a great many ‘last man’ poems and stories at the start of the nineteenth century; far from initiating it, Shelley’s novel chased the coat-tails of this trend. Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Grainville’s Dernier Homme (1805) was the prototype for this particular mode, and since then there have been hundreds of examples. You might think stories of everybody dying of the plague would be examples of tragedy, either gloomily or stoically encountered, but in fact these stories usually inhabit the more complicated heady elegiacism of freedom, albeit one purchased at a heavy price. Part of the appeal of this kind of story is its peculiar blend of melancholy exhilaration. The deal here is the thrill of a guilt-struck but liberated loneliness: tragic finality combined with all sorts of possibilities, the whole world our oyster, unrestricted by other people.
Freud talked of civilisation and its discontents* – arguing that the cost of living in a civilised society is the necessity of repressing our urges to kill and rape, which leaves us psychologically discontented. One route out of those discontents is to remove civilisation altogether. In Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence, lovers Birkin and Ursula discuss the apocalypse while out for a stroll:
‘I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better’ . . .
‘So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?’ said Ursula.
‘I should indeed.’
‘And the world empty of people?’
‘Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?’
The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own proposition. And really it was attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the really desirable. Her heart hesitated, and exulted.*
This vision of the death of everybody may be beautiful to Birkin, but it’s only beautiful if, in some phantasmic way, we are there to observe it, if our consciousness escapes the collective extinction event to wander through the new pristineness.
There’s something interesting going on with this. When we fantasise about the end of the world – as we have been doing since St John’s Revelation – we feel simultaneously guilty (we’re projecting the deaths of billions of people, after all) and liberated: freed from everybody else, from the myriad forces and obstacles that prevent us from being free. This, I suspect, is what makes the zombie apocalypses we looked at in the last chapter so grisly. In such tales the world has ended, but instead of the one-dimensional harmony of last-man solitude, the landscape is filled with people who have lost the positive potential of interpersonal interaction but retain the abilities to obstruct, threaten and overwhelm.
In comparison, Mary Shelley’s Last Man is striding out into a world picked clean, inheriting an arena of tainted freedom – tainted because it is absolute and purchased with death – but freedom nonetheless, the ultimate perfection of privacy. This is about apocalypse as escape from the other.
Shelley’s contemporary, Byron, was particularly concerned with this notion and sought to preserve a sanctum of private individuality from the crush of everything else. ‘I only go out,’ he wrote in his journal in 1813, ‘to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.’ It was after he left England in 1816 that he began to realise that the very idea of privacy was under threat, or even that it might be, to use his preferred word, cant. What one critic calls his ‘pathological desire for privacy’ was his growing acknowledgement that there may be no such thing.
This, perhaps, is the paradoxical force of the ‘last man’ trope: the strange notion that the only way to safeguard our privacy absolutely would be to eliminate everyone else. After all, hell is other people, as the phrase goes, and the appeal of this particular apocalyptic dream is not only its lonely harmony, but its tacit validation of the notion that such a harmony is worth the price of everybody else in the universe dying.
Of course, this leaves the dangerous supplement of you, still lingering on after the disease has caused a collective extinction. And that brings us back to reality. To the way coronavirus has confronted Shelley’s last-man fantasy of perfect mobility with a reality of lockdown and house arrest. It seems facile to note that the fantasy of plague-apocalypse is different to the reality, but the situation is more extreme than that – in fact, the fantasy and the reality are diametrically opposed to one another.
However, this is all wrong. Ultimately, humans are social creatures; the majority of us rely on the connections and interactions we have with each other – don’t we? Society is built on them. Disease does not just threaten death, whether individually or on a mass scale, but devastation to the way we live our lives through, and with, one another.
Helen Marshall’s fantasy novel The Migration (2019) is a beautiful meditation on the horrors and strange potentials of disease in such terms. One character notes:
Disease shaped our development, and on a biological rather than a superficial level. Our genome is riddled with the debris of ancient viruses, invaders, colonizers who inserted their genes into our own. They changed us, and we changed them in return . . . Think about this: it was only when people began to gather in large communities, during the Neolithic period, that the opportunities for disease to spread increased dramatically.*
The core truth of disease is that it correlates with physical intimacy. If we are physically intimate with somebody who is ill, we are liable to get ill ourselves. If we separate from us those who are ill – from large-scale projects like leper colonies down to simple precautions, such as keeping a sick child at home rather than sending them into school – we contain the spread of contagion. The coronavirus lockdown in 2020 emphasised this banal but powerful truth, but it also brought home its overwhelming correlative: just as disease involves intimacy, so intimacy actualises disease. We might be scared of being intimate with other people but more often we desire such intimacy – it’s reassuring, pleasurable and exciting.
There is an intuitive linking of plague and sex.* Think of John Donne’s erotic poem ‘The Flea’, in which the bloodsucking insect (a vector in the spread of bubonic and septicemic plague) becomes associated with sexual intimacy:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Before the 2020 pandemic, the greatest plague panic of recent times was AIDS, a debilitating and potentially fatal autoimmune disease passed from person to person by – among other mechanisms – unprotected sexual intercourse. We are at our most intimate during sex, which both provides our most intense pleasure and is how we bring new life into the world. For sex to become the potential vector not merely of non-fatal sexually transmitted disease but also of a new deadly contaminant that turns sex into death is a peculiarly culturally potent eventuality. Sex makes
us, and if we believe that it can literally unmake us, it’s not surprising that we will become fascinated and repelled by it.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS provided the focus for anxious and hysterical pseudo-moralistic commentary about sex. In March 1983, reviewing a TV documentary about the new phenomenon of what was then called ‘full-blown AIDS’ for the Observer, Martin Amis wrote:
It seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ‘tricks’ or sexual contacts, the body just doesn’t want to know any more, and nature proceeds to peel you wide open. The truth, when we find it, may turn out to be less ‘moral’, less totalitarian. Meanwhile, however, that is what it looks like.
The truth turned out to be nothing whatsoever like this panicky overreaction – you are, of course, just as likely to get HIV from unprotected sex on your first as your thousandth encounter. Health professionals were proportionate in their response to this dangerous and distressing but, ultimately, not world-ending disease; popular culture was not so measured. AIDS captured exactly the sweet spot where desire and disgust fold into one another, where sex and death become the same thing.
AIDS, like any disease, is an individual experience, but AIDS as a cultural phenomenon was seen by many as a global judgement. It marked what I regard as the integral logic of apocalypse: the local and particular projected upon the total; our individual mortality iterated as the death of everybody and everything. In the words of Susan Sontag, ‘the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide’.*
HIV/AIDS is still a threat, although it is a less present global danger than used to be the case. Although there is still no cure, nowadays antiviral drugs and other therapies render it a chronic rather than a fatal infection. In 2004, the disease’s peak year, the fatality rate for sufferers was 50 per cent higher, globally, than in 2020, and that number continues to fall.
Nevertheless, AIDS continues to affect our collective imagination in a way that other plagues do not, including those that were by any objective metric much more destructive. The Spanish flu outbreak of 1918–20 killed five times as many people as AIDS has over fifty years, but after it happened it was basically forgotten – at least, until the coronavirus outbreak of 2020, which reminded us all of it once again. The Spanish flu killed off several per cent of the entire global population, more than died in the century’s two world wars, and the authorities flailed in response. Some did what they could: San Francisco, for instance, brought in draconian public health laws, restricting shaking hands and mandating face masks for citizens in public places. John Ryle notes that because of such measures ‘there were only a few thousand deaths in San Francisco during the first year of the pandemic’, but adds that ‘elsewhere, including Europe, the toll was much higher. In Alaska and Central Africa and Oceania entire communities were wiped out.’ He goes on:
In statistical terms it was the greatest natural disaster since the Black Death, yet the Great Influenza Epidemic (or Pandemic) of 1918–19 has vanished from public consciousness. Unlike the war that immediately preceded it, the flu has left scarcely a trace in modern literature; historical accounts of it are sparse. One of its few chroniclers claimed that ‘the Spanish Lady inspired no songs, no legends, no work of art’.*
Why didn’t the Spanish flu leave a greater cultural footprint? Where are all the great novels and films about that appalling global catastrophe? The answer may have to do with timing. The Great War had facilitated the spread of the disease, since it involved millions of people being moved around the globe, as troops or refugees. But the Great War also dominated the post-war imagination in a way that the Great Flu did not. War gave us heroes and antagonists, enemies with faces against which we could pit ourselves; flu gave us none of those things.
This collective amnesia ended in 2020 with the arrival of a new virus, Covid-19. In the global lockdown that followed, the long history of flu and flu-like viruses came crashing back into our lives, and the entire planet revised their knowledge of epidemiology. Our lives were entirely changed by the trauma of loved ones getting sick and dying, but also by the disruption of lockdown, which overnight completely transformed our societies.
It’s too early to say how coronavirus will factor into our ongoing general fascination with the end of the world. But it illustrates a core truth about human beings: we are our interactions with others – our friendships and sex lives, our workplace interactions and social media, our family and friends and the kindnesses we show strangers. Those who live as hermits, sealed away from human interaction, are the exceptions to the norm. Our existence is woven from a great many human intimacies – we require them to acquire empathy and social skills, to love and even to speak. That network of various intimacies defines us, but it is also what disease is: not merely the potential infections of particular germs or viruses, but the actualisation of contagion in the world.
And this is the crucial thing. Our understanding of disease, and our improved medical science, make the gloomier prognostications of science fiction doom-sayers less and less likely. No plague will kill 4,999 out of every 5,000 humans – as we’ve seen, even if the numbers are high, in terms of percentage of population it’s likely to be very low. It feels like being a hostage to fortune, writing as I am in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown, but it is true nonetheless: disease by itself won’t bring about the end of the world. But the world that emerges, post lockdown, will surely look different, and perhaps very different, to the one we knew before. We will learn new modes of remote social interaction, distanced and masked, separated into more atomised little units. Plague may not prove the end of the world – but it might be the end of the world as we know it.
* He did so in a book called, appropriately enough, Civilization and its Discontents (1930).
* D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Thomas Seltzer, 1920).
* Helen Marshall, The Migration (Random House, 2019), pp. 44–45.
* The English word ‘plague’ comes from the Latin plāga, which means wound or cut, and which in Roman times had a rude slang meaning relating to female sexual organs. The English cut, via its older variant cunt, has the same double meaning.
* Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 180.
* John Ryle, ‘Zero Grazing’, London Review of Books, 5 November 1992, p. 13.
THE AGE OF THE MACHINE: TECHNOLOGY UNLEASHED
In 1958 American author Peter George wrote a bestselling novel called Red Alert, concerning a mentally unbalanced and paranoid US general called Quinten who launches a nuclear attack on the USSR. Both American and Soviet governments struggle to call off the attack, but then Quinten, the only man who knows the recall codes, kills himself. Eventually all but one of the bombers are recalled, but the destruction of a Soviet city is set to provoke global war. In a desperate attempt to avert such disaster, the US president offers the Soviet premier the opportunity to destroy Atlantic City, as compensation.
It is hardly surprising following the dropping of atomic bombs, and the development of the Cold War with its arms race between the USA and USSR, that the fear of nuclear apocalypse was weighing on people’s minds. It illustrates the clear possibility that humans may well be the cause of our own demise; that we can’t be trusted not to use technology, however destructive it might be.
The success of Red Alert led to various imitators, including one by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler called Fail-Safe (1962), in which a nuclear attack is launched on the Soviet Union when a civilian airliner is misidentified as an enemy plane. The US bombers cannot be recalled and although most are shot down one gets through and is set to destroy Moscow. The US president phones the Russians and promises to destroy New York City with US weapons to balance out the destruction and avert total war.
Both books also inspired film deals: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb, based on Red Alert, and Fail Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet. Strangelove is now an acknowledged classic, while Fail Safe is forgotten. This may have something to do with the fact that, due to various reasons, Strangelove came out in January 1964 to widespread acclaim, while Fail Safe came out eight months later to a lukewarm reception, having missed the hype. But it might also be because it is po-faced and period-specific, while in Strangelove the use of comedy in portraying the world’s end keeps the material fresh, even though the film’s details are just as period-specific as Fail Safe.
In Kubrick’s rewrite of the Red Alert storyline, the insane Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper rants about how communists are polluting his ‘precious bodily fluids’ as justification for his nuclear attack. Peter Sellers plays three roles: the US president Merkin Muffley, an upper-class British air force officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who remains agonisingly polite despite being kidnapped at gunpoint by Ripper, and Dr Strangelove himself. The latter is a creepy ex-Nazi scientist, modelled in part on the real-life rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. The action is divided between the British airbase from which the attack has been launched and which the US are attempting to recapture, and the US war room, from where the president and his advisors are attempting to stave off disaster. Strangelove, confined to a wheelchair, has what appears to be an artificial hand that is prone to making inappropriate Nazi salutes* and even attempts to throttle its owner. He believes that nuclear war might be winnable, with senior US figures hiding in bunkers until the radioactivity diminishes. In order to repopulate the human race, says Strangelove, these survivors will ‘regrettably’ have to abandon ‘the so-called monogamous sexual relationship’. It will be ten women for every man, he insists: ‘a sacrifice required for the future of the human race’.
It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) Page 7
