Apocalypse Later
How the world used to end
Peter Coviello
“Nobody came to such a painful and distorted state of mind unless clarity was the more terrifying alternative. Even the most collaborative and well-informed neurotic patients had some resistance, but in those cases the price of abandoning an archaic defense was a wave of anxiety or the renunciation of a cherished self-image; for the schizophrenic patient, it felt as if the price of abandoning psychosis would be annihilation.
—Edward St. Aubyn, Double Blind
Imagine a defeated populace. Here inside the era of terminal polycrisis—a time of secular stagnation, deliriously ascendant neofascisms, climate collapse lurching nearer in increments less and less negligible every day—this should not be too taxing.
Picture them, then: a great mass of persons, loosely cohered, living out their quotidian rituals and accumulated habits of being, but poised on the cusp of ruin. A futurelessness yawns open before them but remains, in scope and scale, not quite imaginable, not especially amenable to thinking. Imagine, in turn, the various forms of life—of ardor and attachment, of sorrow and refusal, of neurosis and fantasy and knowing and unknowing—that might flourish there, among a people subject to a suite of authorities so abstracted, so insulated from anything resembling worldly consequence, that to call them “secular powers” seems a misbegotten way of speaking.
How might the contours of such a world best be figured or represented? What concepts would best serve the purpose? And how, given this extremity of circumstance, might they be torqued and revised? Where might a person go looking for resources, if resources were wanted, for the labor of reconception in respect to the textures of this particularly stricken, particularly calamitous psychic economy?
One answer, odd but true: 1957.
Say what you will about the staid and Eisenhowerish ’50s—they were also extremely weird. On the very week Viking Books released its fantasia of joyously disreputable vagabonding life by a nobody named Jack Kerouac—this was On the Road—the book that sat atop The New York Times Best Seller list was the sudsy Peyton Place. You may remember it from the Lana Turner film, or from the long-syndicated TV series.
But the things of 1957 were curiouser still. At number three on the bestseller list that early September was an impressively grim novel by an established British author and émigré to Australia. Despite the bleakness, the book would end up among the highest sellers of all of 1957, outpacing even Ayn Rand’s doorstop blockbuster, Atlas Shrugged. This novel was On the Beach, by a writer named Nevil Shute. Its subject was mass death and human extinction.
As with On the Road, there’s a period-specificity—less charitably, a datedness—to On the Beach that you’re unlikely to miss. Its entire context is the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, and this lends to the proceedings a certain ripped-from-theheadlines Atomic Age topicality. (None other than Robert Oppenheimer, deep in his Delphic phase, had delivered the heralded William James Lectures at Harvard only a few months before the novel appeared.) For all that, though, On the Beach remains a jolting and, I think, supremely uncanny book, and not just in its thoroughgoing dystopianism.
Even across the chasm of years, it’s not hard to see why the book hit, and stuck. At the heart of its lasting power is a single deft stroke. On the Beach is, paradigmatically, an end-of-the-world novel, a bit of genre-updating cued to the era of the Bomb. But it is one that forthrightly declines to dwell upon scenes of detonation, incinerated cityscapes, the stock footage of nuclear horror. Rather, Shute sets his story in placid, peaceable Melbourne, Australia. We open shortly after Christmas, with citizens ambling back to jobs, gardening, boating, drinking highballs— and, also, adjusting as best they might to the civic rationing of things like petrol. For, concealed inside the hush of these weeks, we discover, is the fact that a brief but evidently decisive nuclear conflict has wiped out the whole of the northern hemisphere. Herewith, the kicker: an encompassing cloud of radiation from that recent war is meanwhile drifting, with unhurrying inexorability, southward across the face of the earth. All-devouring death is due to arrive in about September, or possibly late August. Apocalypse is coming, then; just not yet.
“On the Beach remains a jolting and, I think, supremely uncanny book, and not just in its thoroughgoing dystopianism.”
Every last figure we encounter in the novel knows this—though “knowing” is perhaps not the right term for the state of blocked, partial apprehension that prevails. And so: a displaced American submarine captain, Commander Towers, is asked to take a crew north to explore the North American coast for traces of life, which he does (there are none); parents to a newborn wonder how to provision their home with milk; an unmarried woman, Moira, pursues a chaste affair with Commander Towers, who chooses to remain faithful to his wife and children in Connecticut, of whom he speaks unfalteringly in the present tense. These are the novel’s basic through-lines as the impossible news comes trickling in, every day nearer.
But it’s that small narrative pivot, from scenes of fiery ruin to an atmosphere of simmering expectation, that invests all these homely details with a creeping nightmarishness. Not that the temperature of the prose ever once rises; conspicuously, it does not. The characters each and all comport themselves with mildness and a distinctly Anglophilic style of polite restraint, like guests soldiering through a stilted garden party. All is strangely unemphatic. There is no high drama, no keening in the face of coming annihilation.
Instead, On the Beach immerses us in the secular mundanity of ordinary lives, and the cumulative effect of this is potent and eerie. This world, the character world of the novel, turns out to be brimming with figures who are, in an odd and insinuating way, near to us indeed. For these are people for whom what had been a menacing prospect, a likelihood even, has with an almost imperceptible shift been transformed into an irrevocable certainty. And that’s On the Beach: a sustained fiction in which those two cataclysmically different states—anxious expectation, blighted certitude—converge toward an awful vanishing point.
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You might read the striking emotional continence of the characters, and of the novel itself, as another kind of period affect, the residue of a distinctly post-war existentialism very much cycling through a mass-cultural vogue by 1957. (That February, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal appeared in Sweden, arriving in the United States to great renown in early 1958.) The problem of impending annihilation, of futures truncated into nothingness, roiled across cultures high and low—which is perhaps not surprising in a world threatened so undeniably by the prospect of nuclear war. Accordingly, and whatever else it might have been, the era marks a sort of apotheosis for a now-familiar style of secular heroism: typically laconic, paradigmatically masculinist, expressed largely in a stoic and setjawed refusal of what are imagined to be the weak consolations of “religion,” routed as these have been by the pitiless facts of an inescapably mortal world. You’ll know the type.
There is some of that in On the Beach, to be sure. Faced with annihilation—with what years later Jacques Derrida, really leaning into the headiness of apocalyptic imagining, would call the “remainderless and a-symbolic destruction” of nuclear cataclysm—characters one after another are seen to choose, if not their fates, then how they will live toward and into them. New parents plant trees and imagine their newborn enjoying the accommodating shade of their future creation; several men splurge on the remaining petrol to stage high-speed amateur car races, which, in a grim bit of comedy, results in the death of a sizable number of the participants. (“The next two heats produced nine crashes, four ambulance cases, but only one death.”) Commander Towers, growing closer to Moira, ultimately chooses fidelity to his wife, and Moira, resigned to this platonic intimacy, resolves to enroll in a typing course.
In an especially jarring passage, when Commander Towers ventures up the desolate shore of the Pacific Northwest, a member of the crew, a young yeoman, jumps ship in his home port, where he discovers a scene of stilled emptiness. The sub spots him, bobbing along in a skiff, and he and Towers discuss his fate, the Commander via microphone and the yeoman answering back from out in the poisoned air.
“‘Everybody’s dead here, Cap— but I guess you know that. I went home. Dad and Mom were dead in bed—I’d say they took something. I went round to see the girl, and she was dead. It was a mistake, going there. No dogs or cats or birds, or anything alive—I guess they’re all dead, too. Apart from that, everything is pretty much the way it always was. I’m sorry about jumping ship, Cap, but I’m glad to be home.’ He paused. ‘I got my own car and gas for it, and I got my own boat and my own outboard motor and my own fishing gear. And it’s a fine, sunny day. I’d rather have it this way, in my own home town, than have it in September in Australia.’
’Sure, fella. I know how you feel. Is there anything you want right now, that we can put out on the deck for you? We’re on our way, and we shan’t be coming back.’
’You got any of those knockout pills on board, that you take when it gets bad? The cyanide?’
’I haven’t got those, Ralphie. I’ll put an automatic out on deck if you want it.’
The fisherman shook his head. ‘I got my own gun. I’ll take a look around the pharmacy when I get on shore—maybe there’s something there. But I guess the gun would be best.’
The cordiality, the unfanciful reserve, and the genial frankness even around the matter of suicide—the yeoman’s last words in the book are, “Thanks, Cap. It’s been pretty good under you, and I’m sorry I jumped ship”—strike, you could say, the presiding notes of the novel. Press your ear close enough and you’ll hear the crossed strains of Hemingway, of Camus, of a Sartrean resolve tuned to the cadences of an American mid-century demotic. Sure, fella.
Even here, though, Shute’s imperturbable temperateness does a kind of work, however it may have rankled some early reviewers. (“The stiffupper- lip attitude is carried to the point where his characters behave like statues wired for sound,” America magazine complained, in August of 1957—a not totally shocking opinion coming from a venue billed as “the Jesuit Review of Faith and Culture.”) For one real persisting grace of On the Beach is that none of these small decisive acts, these decisions to live while dying, is rendered with posturing ostentation, as though it were a grandiose bit of philosophical valor achieved in the teeth of absurdity. There is bravery and absurdity enough in the book, certainly. But the things of the novel never cease to be subdued, small-scale, as resolutely matter-offact as the yeoman’s account (“It was a mistake, going there”) of his journey into the land of the dead.
“How do we live with what we cannot endure to know, yet do know, but also do not?”
For in On the Beach, with its pervading quietness and household scale, these doomed inhabitants of a collapsing world are less heroic than they are, in effect, ruined. What matters most about them to Shute is not their steeliness, nor for that matter their existential resolve. Here is another real grace of the book, and of Shute’s authorship: what matters about them is the texture and the breadth of their suffering.
At the center of that suffering is a stark and recurring drama. Person by person, hour by disappearing hour, the disparately arrayed characters of On the Beach struggle to encounter the vast, devouring fact of their onrushing futurelessness. Moira, in a moment of bleak clarity, recognizes that Commander Towers could have loved her, if only he’d had time to grieve his family, even just five years. But then: “Five years were not granted to her; it would be five days, more likely. A tear trickled down beside her nose and she wiped it away irritably; self-pity was a stupid thing, or was it the brandy?”
It is a telling passage, marked by the novel’s signature counterposing of stoicism and muted tenderness. The matter is in its way straightforward. Like everyone else in the novel, Commander Towers is unraveled by grief: the subtraction from the world of elements upon which his conception of self, life—of everything—had been founded. Like the bereaved everywhere, he labors to come to grips with something at once ordinary but also, by its nature, near to inconceivable: to produce for himself, as actual knowledge, something he nonetheless knows to have happened, and to be happening still.
How do we live with what we cannot endure to know, yet do know, but also do not? What words are there to describe this state of arrested apprehension—the style of unceasing awareness that also keeps sidestepping recognition, slipping the noose of knowing? These are the humanhearted questions that pulse at the center of Shute’s Atomic Age parable.
*
Period flourishes abound in On the Beach—the country-club manners and starchy divisions of gender, the milk bottles and the highballs—and as I’ve said, you’re unlikely to miss any of them. Here at least, in this depiction of a fraught psychic economy of knowledge and its undoing, 1957 has never seemed so claustrophobically near.
To be alive in 2025 is to walk under the cloud—the smoke, I almost said— of our own dire possibilities, likelihoods only barely not inevitabilities. Pick your devastating factoid. July of 2023, as by now everyone knows, was the hottest month on record, and likely the hottest in 125,000 years, give or take—until it was succeeded, in predictable turn, by July 2024. Likewise, the facts of warming, melt, desalination, sea level rise, the corresponding possibilities for resource war, border-fetishizing authoritarianisms, a billion displaced persons by 2050 (by modest UN estimate), are not revelations, late-breaking discoveries. None of this is “news,” not really.
And yet the economy into which these blank facts enter, and through which they circulate, keeps churning them into something else. Across platforms and media, scenes of stunted, forestalled, or just hysterically scrambled perception proliferate. To take a recent and irresistible example: Back in early July 2023, the redoubtable Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, splenetic champion of male grievance and fortunecookie pseudo-evolutionism, came out with a tweet so befuddled, so blinding in its expressive perfection, you have to call it poetry. “DIE you NetZero tyrants,” he began, with the gladiatorial bathos one expects from certain malecentric precincts of the internet. “Leave us alone / Leave our cars alone / Leave our flights alone / Leave our heating and fires alone / Leave our air conditioners on.” And then, rousingly, “Back the hell off / Or reap the whirlwind.” Punchline: “Go panic about the apocalypse by yourself / In the dark.”
On the one hand, this is the Invictus-ish grandstanding and purely generic bluster of the Extremely Online Man, taking his place among a larger population of “blowhards and temporarily embarrassed grand inquisitors and armchair genocidaires,” in David Roth’s pungent phrase. On the other, though: leave our fires alone? Reap the whirlwind? In July of 2023? Across the internet a million voices cried out (1.3 million views, as of this writing), My dude, you are so, so close. It’s not every day you see insight and its revocation coiled in so tight a helix.
And yet it’s hardly fair to single him out. Whatever his sour belligerence, Peterson is himself a relatively moderate example; many are considerably more extreme. In fact, the Global North’s preferred mythology tends to favor the more extreme, more vividly deranged versions. It makes sense. Lunatic counterfactuals, squalid and transparent falsehoods, spectacles of hysterical projection: how better for a range of elite institutions to incubate the reassuring fiction that what’s happening in these lurid fantasy scenes (pizza sex rings, micro-chip’d vaccines, the ever-expanding catechisms of QAnon) is outlandish, obviously unhinged, and thus shares no meaningful contact with the more everyday circuits of living in and knowing the world?
But we should perhaps be cautious about dismissing it all so quickly. Nowadays, when I catch wind of some new strain of delirious conspiracy-mongering (see, most recently, the sad and awful fate of Max Azzarello), I try to recall how easy it is—how human, you almost want to say—to swap in garish horrors for nearer, less imaginary ones.
No unbroken “we” corresponds in the present tense to the character world of On the Beach—and not just because it is a fictive scene whose fate is locked in and so, in that precise sense, unhistorical. The static comes from this end as well. You misconstrue the conditions of the world if you imagine that threats of planet-wide catastrophe will translate smoothly into a kind of political universalism. The specter of nuclear annihilation was particularly well-suited to the fantasy that more putatively “local” divisions— of caste, color, religion, relations to capital, the racialization of global geography itself—were in the last instance ephemeral, distractions from a singular fate. But, of course, as with even the most vastly ruinous disasters of capital, those of planetary immolation will live out in the familiar, staggered asymmetries, wherein the expanding decimation of populations marked out as expendable will travel along the welltrodden routes of accumulation and dispossession, inflected now by opportunistic geopolitical alliance, now by resource hoarding, and now by local expedience. An encompassing human wreckage may be in the cards, but its path is neither arbitrary nor straight.
I think in this same vein of Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, from 2017, which, among its other clarities, offers a vision of the future of liberal empire in the warming, post-crash world. For Puar, Palestine stands less as an exception to contemporary orders of power, a territory of stark anomaly, than as a laboratory for security experiment, wherein a nominally liberal state tests out, through varying styles of life-fracturing, -diminishing, and finally, -eliminating violence, the modes of regulation proper to populations it has deemed unassimilable, nonviable, surplus. This, she argues, is the trajectory of imperial biopolitics in the new millennium, and precisely nothing about the genocidal horrors of the last year in Gaza has suggested to me that her analysis is wrong, nor that a future of resource diminishment, climate refugees, displaced persons numbering in the hundreds of millions, promises a violence any less unsparing and asymmetrical.
So there is no near-to-hand sodality that the figures of On the Beach neatly analogize, and it would be exegetically falsifying to pretend otherwise. And yet. If On the Beach retains an unnerving power—and I think it does—it is at least in part because of the seasick way the space of difference between 1957 and now keeps expanding and, at almost the same instant, contracting. It is entirely possible to say, for instance, that the devastations of contemporary life are not solely to do with the psychic unassimilability of an onrushing and planet-wide cataclysm, such as bewilders Shute’s defeated cast of characters. There is nothing especially heartening about the facts on our side, but we may be said to be living through a different sort of dispossession, if similarly dire. This one comprehends not only an array of collapsing conditions (though, again, of these there is no shortage) but conjoined with all this, the want of any even remotely adequate mode of response to them: of, let’s say, any habitable venue for the convening of needed solidarities at needed scale.
The “scale” here is not merely geospatial, a graph of planet-wide carbon production plotted against countable months and years. Think, too, of all the proliferating technologies of domination that distinguish our age— so many of them instruments of financialization, yes, but not all—whose endpoint is distantiation, thoroughgoing abstraction, and what amounts to an evermore absolutized impunity. To put it with perhaps simplifying abruptness: it is in the nature of contemporary capital, amply demonstrated by now, to create zones of concentrated accumulation and profit so extreme, so exponentially outsized, as to achieve an almost pure removal from sublunary contestation. Or, at least, from the possibility of substantive diminishment or alteration inside the prescribed mechanisms whose most familiar name is “politics.” When we speak of the vertiginous rise of “fascism” in the contemporary frame, this, I think, is no small part of what is meant: in this elaborately formalized indemnity, woven into the textures of capital accumulation and the corresponding practices of statecraft, we encounter something of the brutalizing structure of “whiteness” as such, exportable now to a polyglot overclass, but available still to class-fragments in decline, where it appears as advertisement or pledge, the promise of glorious restitution on offer in any number of new-sprung authoritarianisms. Your world is crowded with unjust diminishment and constraint, the would-be strongman declaims. Come, then, and partake in fervid ecstasy of my unblemished impunity. The projection, the grim jouissance: this, too, you will have seen.
It’s here, in a queasy and uncanny way, that difference and similitude converge. For in a scene in which the properly political content of what is called “politics” has become so vitiated, even as the scope of impending consequence has expanded to such dizzyingly existential heights, what could be less mystifying than blunted apprehension? Where the scale of ruin so outpaces available modes of redress, where the enormous machinery of dispersal and containment is so well-greased and so murderously high-functioning—where there is nothing remotely commensurate to do with whatever the unmystified facts of the matter may be—what could make plainer sense, a more human sense, than the translation of what you “know” into something that is not quite “knowledge,” that sits beside knowing but eludes its terrible grasp? “Repression” is one perfectly serviceable term, I know. (So too, of course, is “ideology.”) But I’m not sure it names as precisely as it might the particular density of this exchange, or that it gets us as far as we might wish into the frantic, functionally psychotic simultaneity of recognition and straining derealization that characterizes so much of the offhand Real of this season of polycrisis, our Age of Ongoing Disasters.
“It is in the nature of contemporary capital, amply demonstrated by now, to create zones of concentrated accumulation and profit so extreme, so exponentially outsized, as to achieve an almost pure removal from sublunary contestation”
It was Octave Mannoni, in an essay called “I Know Well, but All the Same . . .,” who proposed that the familiar idioms of disavowal and repression are of use to the analyst, certainly, but do not in themselves cover the matter, do not quite grasp what he calls the “several ways of believing and not believing” that inhere in psychic life. “We psychoanalysts have taken up the notion of magical thinking in far too simplistic a fashion,” he observes, and this seems to me inarguably correct. We might, with Jameson, think of the quasi-magical unknowing that is conspiracy-mindedness as “the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital,” a laboring toward the mapping out of an inapprehensibly vast systematicity. On the Beach, though, helps us think something different, something nearer to Mannoni’s cautionary point. Whatever else it may do, Shute’s novel gives us at least the beginnings of a vocabulary with which to grapple with the rush, the present-tense overwhelmingness, of things at once apprehensible but insusceptible to redress, unavailable to us not as knowledge but as politics actionable at the scale of crisis. It is this, I think, that makes for the distinctive co-presence of knowing and unknowing, and for what I have described as a kind of cognitively hypercharged nonknowledge, proper to an era of climate collapse and the Long Downturn. It is something of what you find here in the lengthening shadow of “an already anticipated genocide,” as Mike Davis put it in the weeks before his own death.
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It goes without saying—but I will say anyway—that incommensurabilities of scale are no argument against mobilization, commitment, every imaginable militancy. We are not coterminous (as it were) with the defeated characters of On the Beach, who in 1957 came into vivid life as emblems of a globetraversing nuclear dread, their anxious probabilities transformed, in the speculative space of fiction, into dire inevitability. Whatever the resonance of their sorrows, their struggles with the inconceivable enormity of what they know to be happening to them, their lives transpire definitively after the possibility of politics: of transformation, massed implacability, solidarity at the hard-to-conceive scale of planetary life. Our conditions, however ruinous, are not theirs; we inhabit a different temporal frame, one susceptible to all the unforeseen irruptions of “history” as such.
A slender difference, perhaps—but then, at other angles, maybe not so slender. Futurelessness can after all kick an unruly number of ways. It was Michel Foucault’s long-ago point that regimes of securitization—another name for that huge and murderous apparatus of containment we mentioned earlier—propagate nothing so much as a fantasy of homeostasis: of an everlasting, tranquilized, veritably amniotic disturbancelessness in the social field. With Shute as a sort of field guide, I’ve tried to suggest that the psycho-political economy of the catastrophic present tense is psychotic, a glitching circuitry of knowing and its dissimulation. But if it is so, this is in no small measure because precisely that fantasy of untroubled homeostasis has run so spectacularly aground, has broken against the lived proximity to so much stochastic disaster. This, too, is not really news. If the multitude of fascists currently surrounding us know anything, it is that, in the ruin of such fantasies, there is fertile ground for the most extravagant political fantasies. Should you need instruction in the garishness of such fantasizing, or its delirious extent, look no further than the Heritage Foundation’s altogether boggling “Project 2025,” a vast fever dream of seizure and reaction tricked out over 900- some-odd pages of white-paper prose.
For our part, we might take a kind of heart from this florid outpouring, so unlike the shattered stoicism of On the Beach. We might observe that at least some of what trundles along with the blighting of the futural promises of “politics” as such is a correspondingly brazen openness to the unthought, the unimaginable, possibly even the incendiary—an openness to ruptures that might yet be, properly speaking, revolutionary. There is no silver lining to be found in the fiery skies of this, our era of contraction and collapse, and we do well not to pretend otherwise. But if I had to pick one, it would be this.