(PDF) The Extinction Romance

The Extinction Romance Keith Leslie Johnson The Earth, we say, is our proper dwelling, but we know pre­ cious little of it. Phenomenologically, we tend to experience it only as surface, penetrating just so deep as is necessary to MODERNISM / modemitij plant marigolds. In exceptionally subversive moods, we’ve been VOLUME TWENTY THREE. NUMBER THREE, known to tear up the paving stones to contemplate the beach. But what is under the beach? A truly chthonic rapport with tlie pp 539-553. ©2016 JOHNS HOPKINS Earth is infinitely more hkely to be had among newts than among UNIVERSITY PRESS humans. Even our cave-dwelling forebears occupied only the shallowest pores in the Earth’s skin. The spelunker, for all his Orphic intrepidity, reinforces the superficiality of our relation to the Earth, his frisson a testament to the conceptual limits of the surface. The deepest mines and oil wells hardly descend beyond a few miles and even dien beggar the imagination. Weird fiction leverages tins ignorance against what H. P. Lovecraft called “the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us.”* Zarathustra “goes under” not just to liberate the inmates of Plato’s Cave__to bring them news of the Sun—but to confront the truth of the abyss. “Die Welt ist tief,” he sings, Keith Leslie “Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.”^ To descend into the Earth is Johnson has published to abandon the whole optic schema of knowing, to rely instead on Beckett, Benjamin, Kafka, Huxley and other on echolocation, say, in all its acousmatic eeriness. To descend modernist figures, as into the Earth is also to retreat into a past whose scales again well as on manga and thwart our comprehension. More than the empty tracts of space anime. Formerly Associ­ between Earth and Sun, it is the ground beneath our feet, its ate Professor of English “caverns measureless to man,” that invokes an alien subhmity: at Augusta University, wider than the Empyrean are the uncanny depths and stranger he Is currently Lecturer its wisdom. For Weird fiction, the fault lies not in our stars, nor of English and Film and Media Studies at the even in ourselves, but in the physical crust of the planet, which College ofWIIIiam and is cracked and stressed by strange energies roiling beneath. Mary. MODERNISM imodemitij 540 Part of what this subhmity registers is the precariW of hu m cin lilc'. itself now' ulien to the planet from which it sprang. The secret life of the planet, we arc lorec'cl to concede, is first and foremost mineral, then vegetable, and onlv belatedK* animal. W’e exist at the intersection of two energetic economies, one solar, the other ferromagnetic. The zone between is a clamoring ground for what Reza Negarestani calls “petropolitics.” In his mythos, oil itself is a dark Tellurian god, “an omnipresent entitx' narrating the dynamics of Earth.The Earth, for its part, cannot realK* be thought apart from such dynamics—is nothing fout dynamics, nothing but a succession of strata in reflation to one another. The ground, then, is ungrounded; as Iain Hamilton Ch ant puts it, “there is no ‘primal layer of the world,’ no ‘ultimate substrate’ or substance on which eventhing ultimately rests. The lines of serial dependency, stratum upon stratum, that geolog\' uncovers do not rest on anything at all.”^ There can be in Weird fiction—and this for me commends the truth of its outlook—no kitschy Fourfold, no elemental guarantors that condition our capacity for dwelling. Heidegger claims that “[m]ortals dw e^ll in that they receive the sky as sky . . . leav[ing] to the sun and the moon their jonrnew to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency'; thev do not tiim night into day nor day into a harassed unrest.”^ But what if the Earth is ungrounded? What if the sky is darkened? What if the stars skate out of their course and abandon us? To what does Heidegger, the original Black Forest ham, raise his face then? The modernists, no less than Heidegger, strov^e within this voided metaphvsics, as if the Hermetic aphorism—“as above, so below”—had been inverted; their realiza­ tion that “the world itself does not privilege the human” implicated at once the brutal exactions of Nature anc/the nugatory consolations of Heaven.^^ Since MoI?y Dick. Peter Nicholls writes, “[m]etaphysics means the death of the world”; as a result, modernists, particularly high modernists, tended to fall into one of two camps: those w'ho embraced anti-humanism of one sort or another and those who attempted to secure a new^ footing for humanism, in full acknowledgment of its “self-grounding character” (Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modemism,”14).~ Weird fiction would seem to occupy' the excluded middle of the modernist either-or, picking up at the very moment when humanist enunciation collapses and, strangely, in the act both preserving and disqualifying it. Part of what makes Weird fiction weird is precisely this doubled address. The diminu­ tion of human life it proposes against the backdrop of cosmic horror in fact assumes a baseline humanism—its eldritch fantasies implicitly require a ground of fairly con­ servative values in order to shock. It is only natural that Weird fiction has been read in this regard as reactionary and anti-modemist. Lovecraft, for example, bemoaned his fellow modems who “[blunder] along with a dislocated sense of value amidst a bustle of heavy trivialities and false emotions which find reflection in the vague, hectic, hur­ ried, and impressionistic language of decadence.”^ However, just as modernism has been productively coordinated with, for example, hard-boiled detective fiction, there may be illuminating comparisons to be had with other pulpy genres, like the Weird, Lovecraft s lament notwithstanding.^ If, as Nicholls contends, metaphvsics cannot be thought apart from oblivion, then it stands to reason that literary^ trends, even seem- ingly antithetical ones, share the same horizon, dim and ashen. JOHNSON / the extinction romance The Dying Earth 541 Such ruins and wastes, which for modernists tend to be allegorical, are quite literal for Weird writers like Wilhain Hope Hodgson, whose 1912 novel. The Night Land, is considered one of die eai*liest examples of what is now called a “Dying Eartli” nairative.^” Dying Eardi narratives are essentially extinction romances—less about survival than the “adventure" of trauma itself, the characters’ fates secondary to the readers brute contemplation of our non-futui*e. They have their origin in collapse, both personal and ecological: Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Graimilles Le dernier homnie (1805), pubhshed in the wake of his suicide (and in die midst of the Napoleonic wars), is the earliest “modem” narrative of this kind. A secular apocalypse, it tells of Omegams, last prince of a sterile planet, and his quest for Syderia, the Last Eve; rather than repopulating the Earth, however, they ultimately choose to let it die, in accordance with Gods wishes, putting an end to a botched Creation: ‘'the sun and stars were extinguished. The dark night of chaos covered the world; plangent sounds came from die mountains, rocks and caverns, as all nature moaned and wailed.”^^ The novel, which begins in a Syiian cavern from which “groaning sounds . . . and often tumultuous cries” issue, ends in a similar cacophony. Everything ends where it begins. The Brazihan beauty, Syderia (Syderie in the French original), from whose womb a new race might have descended, is herself but an echo of that desert cave (de Syrie) (3). De Grainville s novel generated several echoes of its own, including Auguste Greuze de Lessers Le dernier honinie, poeme, imite de Grainville (1831), Paulin Gagnes LUniteide ou la femme messie (1858)—an epic poem of 25,000 verses—and his wife Elises Omegar on le dernier homme (1859)—at 430 pages, a comparatively modest dramatic poem in twelve acts__as well as, by some lights, Mary Shelley s The Last Man (1826). Extinction and the death of Nature were Romantic preoccupations, tiiough ones to which even sentimentalists of the period like Thomas Gampbell were not immune.^" Though his own “last man” poem (published two years before Shelleys novel) extols the victory of the immortal Spirit, it is the image of Earth as a “sepulchral clod,” upon which the “Suns eye” casts its “sickly glare,” that carries the most poetic power.Marx and Engels’s famous condemnation of tlie bourgeois worldview, “All that is solid melts into air,” sounds almost shrill against Gampbell’s poem, in which “All worldly shapes .. . melt in gloom” as the Sun dies (199)- Imminent extinction throws a wet blanket on political rhetoric. And yet, Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816), written during the Year Without a Summer__and rightly considered the strongest poem of this sort—is in its own way angrily political.^** It is a dream (“but not all a dream”) of the Sun winking out of existence and of the world’s brief and violent afterlife. The poem draws its force from dissipation, its energy from depletion. Just as the human survdvors it depicts bur*n everything—their possessions, their cities, the forests—to beat back the darkness, ges­ tures which of course only hasten the darkness, so too does Byron seem to recilize that his poem must consume the very ground that makes poetry possible. The resources for enunciation are themselves consigned to the flames as the poem proceeds to the point at which there is nothing, quite literally, left to express, nothing wdth which to MODERNISM imodemitif 542 express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, nor even {contra Beckett) any obhgation to express. All that remains is darkness. The pohtical anxiety of Byrons poem, its images of mob \iolence, of social life as a zero sum game, indexes deeper, ecological fears as well, underscoring the radical contingency of the planet. Writers at the end of the nineteenth centnr\' like Camille Flammarion, Gabriel Tarde, and H. G. Wells used the Dying Earth genre to register utopian fantasies, yes, but profoundly undergirded by misanthropy, moral disgust, and concern over our cosmic fragihty, the prospect of our annihilation by the merest flick of a comets tail: nothing short of extinction appears capable of motivating humanity toward the good hfe. 0\a.(St3p\edons iMSt and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) both suggest that human hberation can only be imagined on immense temporal sctiles, billions of years, and guided not by human will but by forces of evolution (with all the biological valleys and vicissitudes therein). There is a kind of per\^ersit\’ to Stapledon s optimism; his “Last Men,*’ hyper-advanced cannibals living on Neptune, are incinerated as the sun goes nova and persist only as a genetic virus sent out into empty' space like dandehon spores. The last men of Star Maker, a telepathic collective, discover that theirs is but a “toy cosmos** created by an infant superbeing, as flawed and incomplete as the world of Syderia and Omegarus.^^ Weird fictions, like Hodgson’s The Night Land and its spiritual prequel The House on the Borderland (1908), in effect occur in the space of abjection revealed by the Star Maker; for all their breathtaking imaginative scope, their human meaning can only ever be insignificance, obsolescence, and abomination. Their epiphanies, unlike Joyce’s, can only ever madden and break us down; theirs is not a knowledge that can be borne by anyone, even, it would seem, by the reader, who is agciin and again dix erted by romantic quests, elaborate pantheons of monstrous gods, even the thrilling sense of acceleration through time and space—anything, in fact, but the brute truth before us. These compensatory elements in Weird fiction, and Dying Earth narratives in particular, partially insulate us from their crueler metaphysical implications. Ultimately, however, the ironies of world-building in such a genre must be confronted. In this sense, the harsh lesson of Dying Earth narratives, its radical satuminity, not only resonates wdth but radicalizes the modernist project—the frame of urban anomie, for example, seems comparatively tame and provincial against the Night Land. Like T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, it is a shattered place, but its fire sermons are only volcanic belches, the “small shining of little fire-holes” by which the hero navigates across the gloomy plain; its inhabitants, like Ehzabeth’s subjects, are “humble people who expect / Nothing” and get less than that.^® For Oliver Tearle, Hodgson’s novel, hke Eliots poem, “gesture[s] toward a void that is somehow full, a vast world of nothingness which is yet everything there is,” the blank space between the respective titles of poem and novel “creat[ing] a potenticil for vast emptiness, a gulf that cannot be breached, not even with the bridge of a h)q)hen.”^~ Eliot hoped to forge a new mode of poetic subjectivity on the far side of the Waste Land, one not entirely human (or at least humanist), sustained through “a continual extinction of personality,” that would become a kind of medium or channel of enuncia­ tion for both present and past.^^ Hodgson s narrator is such a medium, but can channel JOHNSON / the extinction romance only blankness, darkness, silence, or (worse) an awful repetition. A curious stylistic fact: 543 nearly every paragraph in The Night Land begins with “and” or “now”; the narrative is a great seriahzation of moments or die same moment—another creature attacking from the dark, another opportunity for the heroine to swoon, another tender kiss exchanged, and on and on in a weird simultaneity. Without the Sun, time becomes disorganized, becomes a seamless "and now”; without the Sun, subjectivity itself begins uncannily to decohere in a way that cannot quite be retrieved through Eliotic “impersonality.” Dylan Trigg links subjective decoherence to the phenomenological trauma of confronting the absolute anteriority of the past; in other words, as part of the project of building a self, the subject discovers a world that preceded it and sets about integrating it into its hfe-narrative. Photographs, letters, and other documents suffice for the recent and local past, and then more scientific means are needed. And yet, at a certain point “the subject discovers something in the past that betrays this sense of belonging... an inscription from another time, one that ruptures tlie unity of the self in the present, without ever being fully present... an unknowable mass of materiafity that becomes the site of a parallel history”; what else can Hodgsons narrator be but a literalization of this moment of temporal disjunction, suspended between a past and a future tliat cannot fathom each other?^® A medium who—or tliat—is itself a ghost, existing unanchored in an eternal “and now”? As Trigg argues, this “transformation of the human to a spectre [does not] entail a negation of tlie subject,” but rather the formation of an intensive unhuman subjectivity grounded in the materiafity of “the body... as a foreign presence” {The Thing, 59). The phenomenological lesson of Weird fiction, then, is that we are all, like Hodgson's narrator, possessed by our own spirits. Faced with the task of impossibly narrating across an erasure millions of years wide—a past and future irrevocably cut off from each other—it is no wonder that the narrator has, really, nothing to say, or only a few things that are said over and over. As in Samuel Becketts Ohio Impromptu (1981), nothing is left to tell. For Tearle, Hodg­ son s novel adumbrates less a world of things than no-things, and, consequently, calls for a "Nothing theory’’ to parallel Bill Brown s “thing theory,” which would take as its object all representations of nothings, including, as Trigg indicates, the human(ist) self (“Dustopian Futures ” 130). In this way, oddly. The Night Land comes closest to the great night book of modernism, Finnegans Wake (1939). John Bishop, in language that echoes our discussion so far, notes that "[a]ny reconstruction of the night would of necessity have to open up bottomless inquiries into the complementary relations of memory and amnesia, and into our relations with the past.”^” These inquiries, more­ over, cannot be mediated through the eyes, “sightless in all the dark places and darker parts of life,” but through the ears-—^where vision is dimmed, hearing is privileged (Joyces Book, 289). The irony of Bishops “observation” vis-a-vis Hodgsons novel is that, certainly compared to Joyce's phonetic tour-de-force, it is profoundly tin-eared. The Night Land begins, apparently, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century— though this past is not fully or expertly rendered, and it is unclear first of all if the flimsiness of its reality is owing to Hodgson's limitations as a writer or if he is inten­ tionally denaturing tlie past. Lovecraft found the novel "seriously marred by painful MODERNISM imodemity 544 verboseness” (which, coming from him, was saying something) and an "artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality.”** It is as if the novel were a diorama con­ structed by an ahen with an incomplete and garbled understanding of human histoiy', who was working from fragments culled from disparate ages aw'kwardly sutured into a whole. The language of the novel is replete with pseudo-Miltonian Hourishes and Bibhcal archaisms (Hodgson was the son of a curate, steeped in the rhythms of the KJV), but unevenly realized. The dialogue is shot through with strange lapses and the whole scenario embarrassingly maladroit. Byron s criticism of Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)—that it evinced more command of “gramarye ” than grammar—is doubly apropos of The Night Land, with its repeated ejaculations ol “And lo! Love- craft found its “attempt at archaic language . . . grotesque and absurd, while in the same breath extoUing it as “one of the most potent pieces of the macabre imagination ever written” (Supernatural Horror, 84).^ In what must have been an unprecedented confluence of tastes, C. S. Lewis likewise praised the novel’s “unforgettable solemn splendour” while at the same time finding it “disfigured by a sentimental and irrelevant erotic interest and by a foohsh, and flat archaism of style. The Night Land’s unnamed narrator has fallen in love with the beautiful and virtu­ ous Lady Mirdath, who (as the Germans say, naturgemass) dies. The narrative then leaps forward several milfion years (it will never exactly return to its Baroque frame, though it is narrated “from” there), to a time when the last few remnants of the human species occupy a vast arcology called “The Great Redoubt, an artifact of the scientific mastery of an earUer age, but now a sort of manmade mountain of madness. The in­ habitants of this arcology, a metalhc pyramid rising some eight miles above the planet’s surface and drawing its energy from immense subterranean conduits and dynamos, have regressed intellectually and in fact have almost no scientific understanding of their situation (many beheve they are living on the floor of an immense cav'e). Their conceptual categories seem uncannily proximate to the schizoid lexicons of James Tilly Matthews and Daniel Paul Schreber, as if the planet itself were a vast influencing machine.^ Instead of Schreber’s “divine rays,” Hodgson’s world is animated by “Earth- currents”—^psycho-magnetic energies that have replaced the Sun as the primaiy power source; as in Schreber’s world, the last humans of Hodgson’s novel exist as nodes within a telepathic network, what they call, again in a Schreberian (if not Joycean) key, “Night Hearing.” By virtue of his especially powerful “brain-element,” our narrator has made contact with an inhabitant of a second arcology, the Lesser Redoubt, which is in danger of utter collapse. Its reserve of earth-currents near depletion, it will no longer have the energy needed to support fife, in particular its “air-clog —a force-field protect­ ing it from a whole host of bizarre life forms that aggress it from the outside. Taken together, these persecutors are referred to as “Ab-humans,” eerie life forms that hav'e evolved not under conditions of what we might call solar excess (pace Bataille), but chthonic scarcity, adhering thereby not to recognizable social and ethical motiv'ations, but unfathomable impulses, bizarre nocturnal logics.*’ These Ab-humans represent a congeries of sub-species, some tnjglodytic, some bestial, with varying levels of sentience, but otherwise entirely inscrutable. During JOHNSON / the extinction romance the “Days of Darkening” (an event compared in temporal distance to the myth of 545 Creation), these monstrous creatures “materialised, and in other cases developed,” as if their origins were variously biological and/or “pyschoplasmic”: flesh, as it were, extruded from the psyche and subsisting, at least partially, on the weird energies of the ether (Hodgson, Night Land, 1:32).-® We can say of them what Eugene Thacker says of Lovecraft s Shoggoths, that they are “the alterity of alterity, the species-of-no- species, the biological empty set.”-’ Ironically, this weird polity of Ab-humans most resembles the alterity adumbrated in Emmanual Levinas s metaphorics of the night, as if Hodgson s weird scenario were actually describing tlie ethical life of the here and now, which for Levinas is a kind of waking nightmare in which we are surrounded by an inflnite intractable otherness. Tom Sparrows recent heterodox study, Levinas Unhinged, has drawn renewed attention to the “nocturnal ontology” in which Lexdnas couches liis ethics. Far from an ethics of transcendence basking in the light and wamitli of a Platonic sun. Sparrow contends, Levinas s ethics emerges from the shadowy ex­ perience of anonymous being (the il ij a). The il y a for Levinas, as the Ab-humans for Hodgson, is associated with the “dark background of existence” in which one is exposed to an ‘‘indeterminate menace.”-® It is against such a background (what Sparrow calls “sentience reduced to its affectivity or sensibility”—a descent into pure materiality) that we ought to read the hero s desperately chaste quest to rescue his beloved.-^ What he risks in the process is, in Levinas s sense, exposure to a pure otherness. But since for Levinas every other is “wholly other,” would diat not mean that in a sense eveiy' human is Ab-human (all too ab-human), an abyss of otherness? What then is really at stake for the narrator who, with imbecilic determination, ventures into the blackened wastes to retrieve the beloved? For the particular inhabitant of the Lesser Redoubt with whom the narrator has made contact, it turns out is in fact the reincarnation of the lost Lady Mirdath, now called Naani—her very name an encrypted absence, a non-I; she functions as little more than the placeholder of desire. Predictably, it is in the discovery of this placeholder that the narrators desire is activated. He realizes all of a sudden that he is in fact the reincarnation of the forlorn seventeenth-century gentleman; the narrative itself, as it happens, is a kind of mediurnistic channeling, a bond between reincarnations that allows the narrator to simultaneously witness and enact the adventure. His quest is in this regard a sad fantasy of adequation, that impossible carvdng out from the expanse of alien otherness ones fragile kingdom of conciliation called love. But for every labor of love there is a Love-craft a Weird poet of ungrounding who reveals not only the non-existence of the non-I, but the abhorrent void over which the non-I functions as a decal. The poignancy of human life is less attributable to this vain reaching for an infinitely other other—what else can we do?—than to our investment in the doomed structure of desire itself, as if there wer*e no alternative but consignment to this engine of pain and disappointment. MODERNISM imodernity 546 Black Sun Elegies, or Cruel Optimism The perspective described here reveals the otherwise ata\istic elemtMits of tlie novel ^its clumsy chivalric plot, its pre-Victorian grainmaticcil embroideries, etc.—i\s a mode of “cruel optimism.” These elements are not unique to Hodgson’s no\ el, but are present in nearly all Dying Earth texts. The whole genre might be recast within a larger exanthropic tradition whose goal is nothing less than the reprogramming of the human organism in preparation for its eventual extinction. For Lauren Berlant, cruel optimism denotes not merely an unfortunate or compromised attachment, but an attachment whose cruelty inheres in the fact that the subject comes to believe that the loss of the object, precisely the object that wounds, will “defeat the capacit}' to have any hope about anything”; the subject rather “finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.’”'" This coincidence of threat and confirmation defines the chi\ alric structure of the novels plot. The narrators eternal sense that, ev^en as he plods across a blighted landscape, recounting with dulling repetition the number of hours traveled between meals, the dim, invariant vistas of “fire-hills,” the ceaseless cacophony of monstrous hissings and rumbhngs, of “strange and horrid screaming,” the frequent attacks of Night-Hounds, Humped Men, Gray Men, Yellow Things, a whole menagerie of \no- lent creatures—amidst all these, the narrators sense that “I w^as truly come something nigh unto that hid place in the night where I should find mine Olden Love again,” this “sweet hope” home back to him by the faint echo of his “Master-Word” sounded upon the “brain-elements,” an echo which causes an oxymoronic “affright of joy”: in all these is found threat and confirmation, each suspended in the other in an affective structure Berlant calls “impasse” (Hodgson, Nighf 1:235, 1:243, 1:244; Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4-5). Cruel optimism occurs within two senses of “impasse.” It is, first of all, “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and... hypervigilance”; impasse in this sense billows the subject to “coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4). Impasse offers a productive way of rereading the tonal vacillations of Hodgson’s narrative, wdiich at times resemble the “wandering absorptive awareness” of a naturalist’s journal (noting geological features, encounters with “wildlife,” patterns of sleeping and eating) and at others the “hypervigilance” of a Breton lai (an ambient sense of danger punctuated by sudden episodes of supernatural combat). But impasse also denotes “impassivity,” implying styles of composure and self­ management, the chivalric idiom itself “coordinat[ing] the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event,” paradoxically- promoting ataraxy in the name of an all-consuming, life-organizing passion (5,4). There are passionate attachments and passionate detachments.'^^ The impasse, Berlant writes, is often itself a goal, because it “suggests temporary housing amidst the chaos, an im­ age not only suggestive of our hero’s interminable bivouac on the smoking plains—^will JOHNSON / the extinction romance he never simply arrive at his destination?—but also the affective stakes of the novels 547 weird temporal loop, its prolepsis in reverse, its anticipation of things already come to pass {Cruel Optimism, 5). The anxiety for the narrator may actually reside more in the breaking open of the loop of events that, however traumatic, are a known quantity, and fixed. So long as he has not yet found Naani, Mirdath is not whoUy lost. The “at­ tachment to compromised conditions of possibility,” Berlant argues, can on the one hand be impossible, sheer fantasy,” or on the other hand “too possible, and toxic,” necessitating any number of stalling tactics, diversions, takings of the long way round, even if ironically this should expose one to literal toxicity, to a landscape choked with ash, miasma, monstrous black” rivers rent by “monstrous bubblings and puffings-up of strange smoke” (24; Hodgson, Night Land, 1:218). Given this toxicity, it seems evident that in Dying Earth narratives it is our attachment to the Earth itself, our attachment to a human future, that dooms us. At first blush, the genre would seem to be a land of mourning—a working through of loss by returning, at the level of both plot and rhetoric, to the site of loss, which may be why the genre is organized around an ostensible rejection of modernity, even when its events occur in the distant future. Certainly in Hodgson s case, the science fictional narrative is only the completion and correction of the chivalric one truncated by the premature death of the beloved. The desire for the beloved then, apart from involving an extraordinary number of risks and obstructions (whose number and variety should begin to register as allegorical to the hero, but never do), is itself a form of doom, not a supervention, but a return of the repressed. It is as if the narrator cannot be himself outside of the coordinates of an originaiy loss; what he fears most is losing his loss. As in Berlant s model, it is the doomed attachment which itself generates and then vouchsafes the subject s identity. The narrator was, in a sense, himself a non-I, a sub­ jective cipher: his identity crystallized only in that moment of re-connection with a defining trauma. Schreber, at least, had recourse to psychosis—a site of compromise with his obstructed desire, an end-around—^but the hero of Hodgson s novel proceeds hke a Quixote without his Sancho Panza. For the narrator, who seeks only recuperation, tlrere can really be no hope, for there is no hope in recuperation. His quest can only ever occur between two deaths, the death of the beloved and the deatli of the species. The novel, far from a heroic record of the resihence of human fife against all odds, is pure and literal death drive. It ends with the hero being led by the beloved into the Hall of Honor, where stands a statue already commemorating his valiant quest. The triumph of this strange denouement can’t but ring hollow—^because there ultimately is no hope, the imminent death of tlie planet does not intensify but rather empties the narrator’s quest of any chivalric grandeur. The human society of the Night Land has no lines of flight—^they already occupy the Last Redoubt. Their optimism can’t be but cruel, their deaths no less bitter for being put off a short season. “Slow death” for Berlant signifies not just the “physical wearing out of a popula­ tion,” but wearing out “in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence,” a wearing out in which “life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable” (Cruel Optimism, 95, 96).^^ The in- MODERNISM imodernitij 548 distinguishability of life building and attrition returns us to the structure of impasse, to a “space of time lived without a narrative genre”—a holding pattern, a temporal loop, an endless, digressive journey (199). One of the targets of Berlants book is the discourse of trauma itself, which she associates with “modernist models of cognitive overload in the urban everyday,” but 5/iocfc is not the only story modernism tells of its relation to precarity, imbalance, temporal dislocation, and the withering promise of “the good life,” and it may be that supplementing our canonical picture with Weird texts like Hodgsons, however clumsy or half-baked, can sharpen our sense of how the period aesthetically processed its new mode of perpetual crisis (9). The House of Silence, or Kind Pessimism If Dying Earth narratives, by their very nature, are already mooted from the outset, how ought we to read the affective coordinates of the genre? If, as lin suggesting, their plots are epiphenomena, distractions even, what is left over? Does the genre not only embody cruel optimism but perhaps also present an alternative, a “kind pessimism” se­ creted within? There is, yes, an unavoidably traumatizing attachment to a compromised object—in this case the Earth itself—that hinders our flourishing, but only insofar as we understand flourishing under the original conditions of the attachment. Surely part of the allure of the Dying Earth genre, other than the contrastive assurance it affords the reader who is in nothing like the straits of the characters (nothing is so comforting as the discomfort of others), is a subtle attenuation of the ties that bind us to Earth, a gentle pre-traumatic stress disorder. These narratives, from Byron s poem to Danny Boyle s recent film Sunshine (2007), don’t seem completely invested in the articulation of the plot, a fact attested by the very outlandishness of plot, the forced and insistent drive to resolution; their lighting, no pun intended, on just about any conclusion other than the obvious one: everyone dies and nothing means anything. In their extremity. Dying Earth narratives stage not a confrontation with loss, but the loss of loss. The plots dazzle only against a background of absolute darkness, a negati\aty that nonetheless has generative or therapeutic potential. The question I think w^e increas­ ingly contemplate in Dying Earth narratives, even as their hero/ines expressly do not, is can we forge attachments otherwise or create nourishing modes of detachment or austerity? Can we think our non-human non-future in the human present? How^ might such a rewiring of our affective circuitry be advantageous or salutaiy? Is there poten­ tial liberation in jettisoning the values that make optimism cruel? Or, is the cruelest optimism the one that sends us perennially seeking out potential liberations in the jettisoning of values, a Wellsian, conciliatory vision of utopian reboot? The narrator of The Night Land in effect doubles down on (cruel) optimism, es­ caping one impasse only to opt for another (which is, of course, at some fundamental level the affective equivalent of the former), but there is that slight gap between, a w^ay station that hints at the possibility of a strange otherwise. This way station, marking roughly the midpoint on the narrator s journey to and from the Lesser Redoubt, is an JOHNSON / the extinction romance uncanny structure called the House of Silence, a place that “did put more fear upon 549 [the narrator] than all else that was horrid in the Land” (Hodgson, Night Land, 1:106). The scene of a bygone atrocity—some 250 youths, inexplicably lured to the House, are presumably captured by its monstrous inhabitants and never heard from again—it radiates a compelling malevolence. It is, nonetlieless, a useful landmark, a scene of (mal)adjustment, recalibration, and reorientation; amid tlie unending vistas of fire-pits, it is a kind of pit-stop, a place of absolute respite—that is, oblivion, “the quiet of some drear and unnatural Eternity”—^propelling the hero forward. The “Power” emanating from the house is “an utter Silence and a bleakness of Desolation,” the disavowed al­ lure (all the more acute in an time when reincarnation is commonplace) of anniliilation (2:208). Weird fiction and modernism, in short, botli countenance tlie consolations of a “horrid unease” of an otherwise impermissible (because counter-humanist) longing for death (1:170). In precisely such longing is kind pessimism. If cruel optimism signifies a structure of harmful desire, tlien kind pessimism signifies a structure of desirable harm, a negativity that unburdens, the paradoxical winter tliat warms in Eliot s poem. By contrast, all the conventional consolations of chivalric romance seem not a little disappointing. Compared to tlie ardor of the first courtship, tlie kisses, when tliey occur, of die hero s reunion widi Mirdath/Naani are very sober, accompanied not by birdsong but “anxiousness in the heart” (2:205). As if to acknowledge die potency of the House of Silence, its promise of erasure, the hero of the Night Land feels compelled to physi­ cally shield Naani from its psychic pulse on the return journey, and—^with seemingly the whole niahce of the Night Land at his heels rushes through the mighty gates of the Pyramid. Two curiosities, however, disturb the otherwise perfunctory conclusion and speak to the dialectic of cruel optimism and kind pessimism I see defining the Dying Earth genre. There is something oddly dilatory in this final flight to the refuge of die Pyramid, a dream-like stretching of the distance to be traversed, yet anodier pack of Night Hounds, yet another shadowy giant to be felled, repeated “last resort” emissions of “Earth-Current” from the Pyramid to destroy the hero’s pursuers. There is in the conclusion a palpable impasse, a lingering at the gate, a moribundity as he repeatedly “dies” inside, while the beloved lays inert, apparendy beyond the veil, only to miracu­ lously return to fife on the “Last Road, a conveyor belt upon which the dead are laid and transported into the vapors of the Earth-Current. This equivocation reaches its peak at the moment of Naani s revival, when our hero with existential and grammatical awkwardness resolves that he will not in fact die, but fight unto living,” at which point he immediately “[goes] into an utter blackness (2:237). His convalescence passes in contentment, but everywhere shot through with die language of irreality, of dreams, fainting spells, and haze; in a kind of post-traumatic stupefaction he wonders “without trouble whether [he] did be dead (2:239). These eerie “Love Days” see the hero’s recuperation, marriage to Naani, and induction into the Hall of Honour.” Even for a work of speculative fiction, it strains credulity. Naani lecounts the Doctors’ explanation of her seeming-death—she was “stunned and froze of the Spirit... all her Being and Life suspend”—and five hundred puges of grim combat in the dark are swept aside in MODERNISM I modernity 550 the name of Love... Honour and Faithfulness,” which together comprise the “House of J^y (2:241,2:243).^ It is as if the novel, never mind the hero, cannot fully commit to its own finale, knows at some level that the House of Joy is wholly inadeejuate to the House of Silence. If anything, the denouement reveals the utter Himsiness of the codes that motivate the hero, which sound like bon-bons at a firing s(piad. And what have these codes protected the hero against? The “Monster-Force” projected bv the House of Silence is strangely likened to a “silent Hill of Life”—indeed as the hero races to the Great Pyramid (which of course for the Egyptians were tombs), he notes that “all the Land did be a-crawl with foul and monstrous life,” as though life itself were loathsome and he an Ancient Landlubber contemplating “a thousand thousand slimy things” (2:216, 2:219). Insofar as he has opted for humanity which is doomed, he has opted in fact for death, or to put it as Coleridge did, LIFE-IN-DEATH. The future belongs to the Ab-humans who, it would seem, are the Earth s true children. Though Hodgsons novel is in every appreciable stylistic sense ^nfi-modernist, the House of Silence is not; facing up to its meaning, its kind pessimism brings The Night Land back into proximity with the main strands of high modernism, and even casts them in a new light (or dark, as it were). Far from being ghettoized, Dying Earth narratives can in fact be productively read as part of a more expansive field of texts contemplating extinction, suggesting in turn a way of folding Berlant s affective model back onto the modernist ground from which she wants to distance herself. . . or anyway, it militates against Berlant s consolidation of modernism under the sign of “trauma.” Kind pessimism or generative negativity also invites comparative scrutiny of works which, while not Dying Earth novels in the strict sense, nonetheless proceed by a similar logic of “minimal criteria,” recalibrating categories—social, ethiccil, even biological—according to their lowest thresholds of coherence, works like Franz Kafka s “The Hunger Artist,” (1922), Becketts Watt (1953), and Gertrude Steins Ida (1941). The human lesson, if we must articulate one, of the extinction romance is perhaps best presented in J. M. Coetzees Life and Times of Michael K (1983), practically legible as a Dying Earth novel. At the end of that book, after enduring all sorts of privations, Michael K surveys his ruined childhood home. If there is a coda to these remarks, it is the image of Michael K, examining the collapsed well on the property. He finds a teaspoon, which he bends at a right angle, and a length of string; tying the string to the spoon, he carefully lowers it into the water, lifting out a teaspoonful of liquid at a time. “And in that way,” he concludes, “one can live.”^^ Michael K in this moment reveals a nonhuman dignity within the very coordinates of abjection, one that in fact shatters abjection. On the far side of such nullification lies a creative zone where the human can become, in the words of Negarestani, “a constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention,” in short, a zone where, even in the face of planetaiy death, one can live.^ JOHNSON / the extinction romance Notes 551 1. H. P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird 'Fiction’'Arnateur Correspondent 2, no. 1 (1937): 7-10, 7. Originally composed in 1933, the essay appeared for the first time in this 1937 issue, dedicated to Lovecraft on the occasion of his recent death. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, AZso Sprach Zarathustra (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 283. R. J. Hollingdale s translation: “The world is deep, / And deeper than day can comprehend” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hol­ lingdale [New York: Penguin, 1961], 244). 3. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopediai Complicity with Anonymous ^^aterials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 242. 4. Iain Hamilton Grant, “Mining Conditions: A Response to Hannan,” in The Specidative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Smicek, and Graham Harman, (Mel­ bourne: re.press, 2011), 41^6, 44. 5. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 141—59, 148. 6. Michael Bell, *The Metaphysics of Modermsm, in The Canibridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9-32, 13. 7. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 22. For a discussion of modernist anti-humanism, see, for example, Elizabeth Kuhn, “Toward an Anti- Humanism of Life: The Modernism of Nietzsche, Hulme, and Yeats,” Journal of Modem Literature 34, no. 4 (2011): 1-20. For discussion of modernist retrievals of humanism, see Stephen Sicari, Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914: Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011). 8. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Case for Classicism, in Miscellaneous Writings, ed. S. T. Joshi (Sauk City: Arkliam House, 1995), 210-13, 212. 9. See, for example, Leif Sorensen, “A Weird Modernist Archive: Pulp Fiction, Pseudobiblia, H. P. Lovecraft,” ModemismJmodemity 17, no. 3 (2010): 501-22. 10. The subgenre takes its name from a story collection written by Jack Vance in 1950, very much under the influence of Hodgson and fellow traveler Clark Ashton Smith. 11. Jean-Baptiste Frangois Xavier Cousin de Grainville, The Last Man, trans. I. F. Clarke and M. Clarke (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 132. 12. Morton D. Paley s Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) is on this score definitive. The chapter on Byron discusses “Darkness” at lengtli, as well as Campbells poem and the “Last Man” vogue in general (196-209). 13. Thomas Campbell, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell; with an Original Bi­ ography and Notes, ed. Epes Sargent (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee, 1860), 201, 199. 14. Largely caused by the supercolossal eruption(s) of Mount Tambora (in modem day Indone­ sia) the previous spring, this event led to crop failures and famine across Europe, Asia, and North America. The massive amounts of atmospheric dust generated by tlie emption(s) resulted in strange climatic phenomena, from so-called “dry fog” to summer frosts and snows, sometimes red or brown from volcanic ash. 15. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men and Star Maker: Two Science-Fiction Novels (New York: Dover, 1968), 414. See Charles Tungs article in this issue. 16. William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land, 2 vols. (New York: Ballantyne, 1972), 2:42. The Night Land, while not featureless is denuded and blunts all but the most repetitive description. Even its major features, including “The Great Red Fire-Pit,” “The Shine (an expanse of phosphorescent, poisonous gas), and so on, merit only tlie most meager of descriptors, as if naming itself were an ob­ solete, optical phenomenon. Put differently, tliough not surprisingly, the Night Land reveals just how much of human reality revolves around light and its metaphorics. When Naani s eyes shine with ardor, they “shine as the olden stars tliat did sliine in the olden summers —an image incomprehensible to the hero, who has never seen stars, an “artifact” of the heros psychic connection to the seventeenth- centuiy narrator: or in other words, a long dead simile (2:113). MODERNISM imodemity 552 17. Oliver Tearle, “Dustopian Fictions: William Hope Hodgson and the Thing to Do,” Interdisci­ plinary Humanities 27, no. 2 (2010): 121-31, 122, 129. 18. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Kssays (Loiidoin Faber and Faber, 1932), 13-22,17. 19. Dy\anTngg,TheThing:APhenomenologijofHorror(W\nchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 27. 20. John Bishop,/oi/ces Book of the Dark (Madison: Universitv' of Wisconsin Press. 19(S6), 7. 21. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), 84. 22. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2005). 41. 23. G. S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories {New York: Harvest, 1994), 59-73, 71. 24. John Haslams case study of Matthews, Illustrations of Madness (1810), has the distinction of being the first description of paranoid schizophrenia in the medical literature. Matthews (1770-1815), a London tea merchant, came to believe he was persecuted by a gang of spies b) means of an influencing machine called the “Air-Loom”—a complicated device controlling individuals through a combination of magnetic, pneumatic, and chemical means. Of note for our purposes are the many fanciful terms Matthews coined to describe the effects of the Air-Loom on his person: “lobster-cracking,” “apople.xy- working with the nutmeg grater,” “Idteing,” and so on. See also Mike Jay, The Air Loom Gan^i: The Strange and True Story ofJames Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness (New York: Four W^alls Eight Windows, 2003). Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), being the subject of Freuds Psycho-Analytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account ofa Case ofParanoia (1911), requires less introduction. A highly successful jurist, Schreber came to befieve himself the object of universal persecutions: by means of “nerve- language” transmitted by “divine rays,” various figures (initicilly his psychiatrist. Dr. Paul Flechsig, and later God himself) attempted to control Schrebers thoughts, particularly sexual ideation, and transform him into a woman. Like Matthews, he generated an extraordinary^ lexicon of symptoms, effects, and agents, from “fleeting-improvised-men” and “tested souls” to “play-with-hnman-beings” and “soul murder.” His Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) was written in an attempt to secure release from Sonnenstein asylum, itself a Great Redoubt in an all-too-real Night Land which Schreber suspected had (with the rest of Leipzig) been “‘dug out’ and removed to some other celestiid body” whose “starry sky [was] largely, if not wholly, extinguished” {Memoirs of My Nervous Illness [New York: New York Review of Books, 2000], 77). Sonnenstein (lit., “sunstone”) would later be converted into a kilhng center by the Nazis for disabled individuals deemed Ballastexistenzen (“useless lives”). 25. Perhaps unique for a novel of its land. The Night Land is notable in its lack of neologism. Its working vocabulary is, in fact, extraordinarily limited, as if language itself had atrophied. “Ab-human” is one of two or three exceptions, the others being “Diskos” (the hero’s weapon) and “Monstruwacan” (one who studies the “ecology” of the Night Land and attempts to manage its horrors). 26. “Psychoplasmics” is a fictional therapeutic method in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) whereby the analysand attempts to materialize his or her neurosis upon the flesh. Just as these mate­ rializations are, in tlie film, invariably mafignant (ranging from spontaneous hives to cancerous tumors to monstrous children), so too is the fauna of The Night Land. There are, strangely, no herbivorous creatures described in Hodgson’s novel (though “moss bushes” seem to abound), only large, more or less humanoid, predators. 27. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 1:103. 28. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1988), 60, 59. 29. Tom Sparrow, Levinas Unhinged (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2013), 16. 30. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 24, 2. Throughout her career, Berlant has articulated the (fraught) historical relation of affects to norms, the private to the pubhc. Cruel Optimism, as she notes in her introduction, “is a book about the attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, tlie good hfe” (11). More specifically. Cruel Optimism targets a complex of toxic neoliberalisms that have steadily intensified since the Clinton era, propping up the JOHNSON / the extinction romance fantasy of the good life while eroding the possibility^ of its retilization. Literature and intiss media 553 from 1990 to the present tlierefore comprise a public repository—^what Berlant calls a “historical sensorium”—of symptoms and coping mechanisms that reflect a historically conditioned sense of “systemic crisis” (3, 9). Without exactly invalidating the historical impact of Berlant s argument, I do want to think about its explanatory' power for earlier epochs, particularly' those, like modernism, toward which Berlant herself seems somewhat allergic. Agiiinst paradigmatically psychoanalytic theories of trauma emphasizing liistorical rupture, Berlant s model attempts to “[explain] crisis-shaped subjectivity amid the on-goingness of adjudication, adaptation, and impro\isation” (54). My contention is simply' that modernism offers other “theories” of trauma than those keyed to Nachtrdglichkeit, shock, and alienation; in turning from Freud and Benjamin to Weird fiction, we not only find pre-instances of Berlant s categories, but uncanny inversions of them. 31. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 1997): “no subject emerges without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent (even if that p<ission is ‘negative’ in the psychoanalytic sense)” (7). 32. The referent of Berlant’s subsequent discussion is not, as in Hodgson’s novel, scarcity* but excess: the “obesity epidemic” and its rhetoric. 33. I have here preserved the “archaism” of the narrative, in which “did be” is a frequent, jarring construction. 34. To my knowledge this is an unprecedented usage of suspend in tlie participial sense of “suspended.” 35. J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 184. 36. Reza Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human, e-flux 52 (2014): e-flux.com/ joumal/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/.