ABSTRACT
Post-apocalyptic fiction, as I define it, is a narrative of a period of time from a pre-apocalyptic past through a cataclysmic event (or series of events) that culminates in an entirely new world order – the post-apocalypse. During this transition from pre-to post-apocalypse, the landscape and geography of the world change drastically: usually from a recognizable, urban “normality” to an uncanny wilderness. The majority of stories that belong to the post-apocalyptic canon are set in a post-catastrophic version of our own recognizable Earth, and thus comment on our own reality, and it is largely from this immediate connection that the genre derives its strength: through the imagined destruction of our world. From the earliest examples to the latest, through cataclysms of plague to nuclear war and zombie diseases, the genre describes the collapse of nations and cities and the ruins they leave, the recognizable places of our world. At the end of The Planet of the Apes (1968) we come across the Statue of Liberty, which in a flash turns the entire movie into a post-apocalyptic epic and a potent expression of Cold War fears: all through a recognizable, nameable place-marker. In this article I wish to discuss the role of place and space in a genre that, in recent years, has become increasingly prevalent. Place, I argue, is a necessary component for the creation of hope, meaning and a sense of the future, without which it becomes impossible or very difficult to reconstruct a lost world or construct an entirely new one. I will approach this by analyzing two recent, critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic novels, The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, and World War Z (2006) by Max Brooks, using various theories of space and place, notably Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of striated and smooth space. These two works exemplify two extremes of the representation of place in the post-apocalypse: the almost complete effacing of place, and the utter dependence on place.
