Post-Apocalyptic Representations as Symptoms of Trauma

Robert S. Oventile

James Berger. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. xx + 278 pages. Notes, bibliography, and index. $47.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

James Berger’s After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse examines representations that explicitly or obliquely refer to historical traumas. The book’s first section elaborates Berger’s theory of post-apocalyptic representation. The middle section, “Aftermaths of the Holocaust,” examines novelistic representations as symptoms of the traumatic violence that was the Shoah. This section includes a chapter, “The Absent Referent: Derrida and the Holocaust,” that struggles with Jacques Derrida’s meditations that refer to that event. The last section, “American Post-Apocalypses,” consists of two chapters. “‘Achieved Utopias’: The Reaganist Post-Apocalypse” anatomizes Reaganism as combining “optimism with paranoia, nostalgia with millennialist fantasy, and fundamentalist religion with consumerism in ways that consistently refer to past traumatic/apocalyptic events” (xvii). “Not the Last Word: Trauma’s Post-Apocalyptic Returns” reads two novels, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to substantiate one of Berger’s major claims: narrative art can help us to work through trauma so as to remember it rather than to repeat it. In helping us come to terms with historical traumas, such narratives can release us from ideological enclosures that block us from recognizing and acting on the possibility of progressive social change in America.

In this possibility’s name, Berger interrogates texts in which “the destructive and revelatory” acts to which the word “apocalypse” refers contaminate each other in ways that variously perpetuate or contest pernicious ideologies (161). An apocalypse is a disclosure, a revelation, or an unveiling. The English word “apocalypse,” which derives from the Greek word apokalypsis, also names a genre of ancient Jewish and Christian writings. In contemporary usage, the word’s intimation of the world’s terrible end and final judgement tends to eclipse the word’s epistemological claim: an apocalypse unveils what is. The text perhaps most responsible for that eclipse is The Revelation to John, the last book of The New Testament.

The English title Revelation translates Apokalypsis. John’s Apocalypse narrates Christ’s “final and complete” disclosure and separation of “good from evil, true from false,” and saved from damned (8). The narrative unveils an evil place, “Babylon,” as absolutely distinct from a good place, “the new Jerusalem” (Revelation 14.8, 21.2). The apocalypse itself, John’s all-disclosing vision, or, more precisely, the text narrating that vision, divides history into a corrupt past and a timeless, pure post-apocalyptic aftermath. An apocalypse reveals what was, is, and will be present, but that revealing happens textually by way of representations of those presences. As final words sounding the last call, apocalyptic rhetoric suggests the end of representation. With Christ’s apocalyptic parousia, Christ’s “Second Coming,” absence will never again interfere with or trouble believers’ being by or near Christ. In Christ’s parousia or eternal and full presence, Christ’s or any other representation would be superfluous and even unthinkable.

Unwilling to wait for a Messiah’s arrival or Christ’s return, American culture heralds its own idolatrous parousia as the outcome of an apocalypse that has already happened. Berger examines narratives of post-apocalypse that posit presences cleansed of representation to manage, disavow, and deny traumas irreducible to representation. Post-apocalyptic representations’ confusion of representation, presence, and the unrepresentable, Berger argues, is an ideological gesture symptomatic of unresolved historical trauma. Contemporary or “postmodern” America is particularly addicted to such gestures. Before the Second World War, but increasingly so afterwards, claims After the End, American culture has cast itself as post-apocalyptic and has found in apocalypse a scenario that compulsively formats its political, novelistic, filmic, and pop-cultural narrations.

Though After the End examines TV talk shows, self-help manuals extolling angels’ healing power, and Wim Wender’s film Until the End of the World as examples of post-apocalyptic culture, the book avoids a weakness of some “cultural studies.” Works published as “cultural studies” whose titles include the phrase “Representations of” often assume “representation” to be an unproblematic term and practice. After the End admirably bucks this trend. To understand the American post-apocalyptic text, Berger asserts, we need to learn from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which “uncovers the underlying catastrophe of American culture”: the “dissolution” of social reform’s possibility into “greed, egotism, vested journalistic interests, celebrity culture—and the confusions of representation” (xi).

Berger details how the parousia or hypostatized presence exemplary cultural artifacts posit marks them as post-apocalyptic texts. The wishful notion that globalization signals history’s end, a parousia of USA-centric political and socioeconomic neoliberalism, is only the most hubristic of the various claims American representations of post-apocalypse tend to make. These representations, in referring to catastrophic historical pasts (American slavery, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and so on), depict an apocalypse that has ended history and delivered a present that knows no future. Deploying Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic terminology, Berger describes apocalyptic binaries as forming post-apocalyptic imaginaries that suture the symbolic order that houses the USA-centric parousia.

President Ronald Reagan’s opposition between “the free world” and an “evil empire” is an example of such a binary. In Reaganist ideology, this binary effectively forgot German fascism and the genocide it perpetrated to secure the “American-West German alliance” against the Soviet Union (147). Berger tracks the startling elisions of the Holocaust in Reagan’s “confused, virtually incoherent press conferences before” Reagan’s 1985 visits to Bergen-Belsen and to the cemetery in Bitburg containing graves of SS soldiers, who, in Reagan’s rhetoric, become victims of Nazism (146-7).

Traces of futurity vanish from the totality the post-apocalyptic imaginary sews shut. This foreclosure of futurity, especially as the possibility of “social reform” (xi), is a symptom of unresolved historical traumas. Those traumas, America’s racist history of slavery, for example, involved violence against singular others and partook of the irreducible, unrepresentable otherness of history, what Berger, using Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian term, calls “the Real” (25). All sorts of historical realities are unproblematically representable: we have no trouble representing the number of Columbus’s ships, the material they were made of, the hierarchy between crew and commander their architecture embodied, and so on. But if the history of the “New World’s” “discovery” were reducible to various representables, that history would be free of trauma. Or rather: what is traumatic about history is finally nothing representable, “the Real” of history, that which makes history a painful memory rather than merely a set of facts. In attempting to reduce the traumatic “Real” of history to a representable reality, post-apocalyptic representations deny or disavow the very traumatic events to which they refer. Historical realities are easily and amply documented. “The Real,” history’s traumatic otherness, exceeds and disarticulates “representational systems,” marking them with “a gap, wound, or incoherence” the post-apocalyptic imaginary would “stitch” closed and smooth over (25).

Alterity, irreducible to a presence available for representation, can be traumatic: it affects one without one being able to grasp, to control, or to domesticate it, except by futile violence that only results in more trauma. Berger teases out post-apocalyptic representations’ symptomatic ideological recuperations of otherness: the alterity of history’s victims and of the otherness of history. Such recuperation by way of apocalyptic binaries comports with historical acts of violence and is itself a mode of violence: “the representation of apocalyptic cataclysm” acts as “a means of banishing, symbolically obliterating, whatever the apocalyptic writer deems unacceptable, evil, or alien” (xv). Berger’s strongest, most convincingly reasoned thesis about history is this: a post-apocalyptic representation is another event in the history to which that representation refers.

Post-apocalyptic representations’ motivated confusion of the “Real” with a presence representation makes present again is at once a symptom of and an attempt to recover from trauma. But representations of post-apocalypse do not finally work through trauma because their apocalyptic epistemological claim to unveil presence, what is evil versus what is good, inevitably and sometimes violently defends against the unrepresentable “otherness” linked to the trauma. Berger hopes that post-apocalyptic representations, in helping us to remember our parousia’s others, history’s victims long dead, still haunting us, or even yet to come, may help us to act responsibly in the future’s name. But, Berger also demonstrates, to the extent that post-apocalyptic representations erase the alterity of others in rendering them known presences, these representations can reenact history’s traumatic violences.

Some readers, perhaps especially historians, will find Berger’s ideas about history perplexing. Berger writes, “My father is premodern. His favorite authors are Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy, for he finds in them ways to understand society as complex but whole, human nature as deep but fathomable” (4). Historians who consider medieval Europe to be “premodern” will balk at Berger’s use of the term. These readers might be even less happy when they realize that Berger defines the “premodern” as that which precedes the literary and philosophical “modernity” or modernism of such authors as Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Theodore Adorno, who find “enlightenment” to be “indistinguishable from barbarism” (8). Readers with an allegiance to historical study are likely to question this conflation of literary and philosophical periods with historical ones. But such qualms should not prevent readers from confronting Berger’s actual contribution to historical study: the demonstration of how texts, simultaneously positing presence and disrupting their own representational systems, are historical events that at once transmit, dissemble, and refer to “the Real” of other historical events.

Readers familiar with Jacques Derrida’s work will find Berger’s use of the words “history” and “historical” to be apotropaic precisely when Berger uses them in their familiar representationalist sense to retreat from After the End’s own historical argument. This use of “history” compromises the interest of Berger’s provocative but somewhat abusive chapter on Derrida. Berger suggests that Derrida changes his arguments with opportunistic “calculation and cynicism” to “rescue deconstruction from accusations of immorality” (125). We read that “Derrida is incapable of historical distinctions since, for him, history (always in quotes) remains the effect of some larger process within which particular distinctions blur” (129). Berger is most upset by what he takes to be Derrida’s blurring of the distinction between fascism and liberalism. But, ironically and tellingly, Berger also finds Derrida troubling because Derrida questions history as a matter of the representation of presence (112). The need for such questioning is perhaps After the End’s most forceful lesson. Berger appeals to “history” against a thinker who is supposedly blind to it, but Berger’s apotropaic gesture wards off Berger’s own most rigorously historical insights.

After the End will find enthusiastic readers in several quarters. Students of “trauma studies” certainly should read the book. Those interested in Slavoj Zizek’s appropriation of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory for the purposes of historical analysis will learn much from After the End. (Readers not familiar with Lacan would benefit from reading After the End in conjunction with Fredric Jameson’s “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” and Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.) Finally, “Historicists,” “Old” and “New,” will find Berger to challenge common assumptions about history in very innovative and productive ways.

Robert S. Oventile is assistant professor of English composition and literature at Pasadena City College.

Works Cited

Jameson, Fredric. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 75-115.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Ronald E. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.