‘Humans are not victors but survivors’: surviving the disaster of subjectivity in The War of the Worlds
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Erdogan Sima
University of Lapland Finland
simaerdogan@yahoo.com
Author(s):
How do we survive the disaster? The proposed paper suggests that the question is particularly pertinent in the Anthropocene. The stratigraphic determination entails not only the articulate environmental disaster but also an inarticulable disaster of subjectivity, the latter emanating from the sheer inability to act upon the former. As in ‘apocalyptic revelation’, the two disasters interact to disclose the human subject as open to narrative alteration. The empirical data that define the environmental disaster could speak to us but in the light of the anthropocenic novum — i.e. our estrangement to ‘our’ conventions, which is a science-fiction fixture. Conversely, we could survive the disaster but in our radically altered relationship to the world — i.e. as an other ‘we’. Thus, it will be argued, the anthropocenic ‘revelation’ enables a sustainable claim to articulate the inarticulable disaster, precisely as an open-ended survival strategy. What is only implicit to the Anthropocene is fictionalised in The War of the Worlds (Wells, 1898): the diegetic post-apocalypse enables human subjectivity to survive its inarticulable apocalypse. In effect, despite its manifestly local setting, the war speaks to a universal ‘us’. For, rather than the ‘Martian invasion’, Wells’ disaster scenario is grounded in the ineffable anxiety of alien intrusion. The scenario could possibly claim to articulate this mute anxiety by breaching the familiar conventions of international war, specifically through the then unfamiliar idea of universal enemy. The impossibility of assimilating the alien other proves a compelling case for setting aside the disastrous precariousness of the self. The ‘war of the two worlds’ is indeed a textual Procrustean bed by which the inability to secure a victory gives way to the uncertainty of an open-ended survival. Human subject will survive, but as a yet-to-come subjectivity: ‘humans are not victors but survivors’, as it emerges in Aldiss’ introduction to the text. In such terms, Wells’ post-apocalyptic text deploys its Victorian novum; it is a ‘revelation’ that is too familiar to be effective in the Anthropocene. The ‘war’, however, may still provide a standpoint for examining the effectivity of a disaster scenario that, among others, the intrusive Gaia (Stengers, 2009) and the Posthuman to come (Braidotti, 2013) imply.
Post-apocalyptic dystopias and disaster studies: Crossdisciplinary perspectives on environmental challenges today