ABSTRACT
American environmental discourse lives by jeremiad, exhortation, and other modes of doom-saying, so it may not occur to us that trickery can also protect the world. This is where anti-heroes like Constantine-and comics as a genre-can assist us. In his analysis of environmental injustice, Rob Nixon defines “slow violence” as violence that occurs “gradually and out of sight,” so environmental justice movements want to make violence visible (Nixon 2). But stealth should not be forgotten. In sites of environmental injustice-New Orleans, Alberta, the Amazon, Chernobyl, Ogoniland-we must remember Dolus, the god of guile, as the apprentice of Prometheus the fire-thief. Through this memory we enter the territory of myth. Bruce Lincoln, a historian of religion, offers three basic meanings of myth in the contemporary world: “a primordial truth” to be respected; a “lie” or “outmoded worldview” to be scorned; and a “pleasant diversion” or “story for children” (Lincoln ix). Constantine holds all three meanings together: the sacred story is also a scruffy fiction mediated by a comic book. This is myth as a coincidence of opposites, a lie that tells a truth, bundled in an illegitimate genre; this coincidence is a device for sneaking past the archons of academe. It is possible to reconstruct the narratives of apocalypse using powerful materials drawn from antiquity and transmitted by popular culture. In its biblical form, apocalypse is a visionary genre that radicalized prophecy, a
protest against injustice in Judah, Israel, and their Near Eastern neighbors. When independent Jewish states were conquered by Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, the prophets concluded that something was wrong with Creation itself: certain angelic lords, known to Gnostic traditions as archons, had become demonic spirits of empire.2 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza understands empire as the central rhetorical category of Revelation: Christians are “locked into a struggle with Babylon/Rome, whose imperial powers are the agents of the demonic and destructive power of Satan,” which “corrupts and devastates the land” (Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation 119). Apocalyptic writers despaired of a solution within history: God would have to re-create the world to overcome the archons. In Revelation, apocalypse unfolds as political disasters that herald cosmological destruction before the descent of the New Jerusalem. But Revelation is a comedy: its pattern consists of crisis, destruction, and salvation, not just Armageddon. Moreover, the plot is driven by divine rather than human agency. Once it begins, there is nothing humans can do to alter its course. The destruction of empire and the renewal of Creation are guaranteed by divine power. When apocalypse is secularized in the rhetoric of environmental disaster, the divine agent becomes human, removing the guarantor of the ending. Apocalyptic rhetoric preserves the sense of doom without the bulwark of God’s power. Secular apocalypse never reaches the New Jerusalem, losing its way in an unending middle of destruction. Apocalypse itself nears collapse as a discourse. Stealing apocalypse today means taking back the hope for a just end without
sacrificing human agency. This kind of theft has been staged before by writers, activists, and scholars facing another world-historical force. For several centuries, feminists of the Atlantic world have confronted an intractable power of divinelymandated domination-kyriarchy, “the rule of the lords.” Schüssler Fiorenza coined
the term “to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination” (Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways 211). By combining the Greek words for “lord” (kyrios) and “ruler” (arkhē), kyriarchy promotes an intersectional reading of unjust political power, emphasizing the ways in which gender combines with race, class, and other social hierarchies to produce different patterns of domination under varying historical conditions. Though Schüssler Fiorenza does not include species in her analysis, it is simple enough to extend kyriarchy in an ecofeminist direction to point to the modern project of the mastery of nature.3 Because it encourages us to investigate the complex social patterns that literature, film, and other media represent, kyriarchy is especially helpful as a category of semiotic, tropological, and narrative analysis. As anti-kyriarchal activity, stealing apocalypse constitutes a theft of canonical narratives and the elements of language itself, a venerable strategy of women writers (Ostriker). Theft is not the opposite of poiesis, but a strategy to transform patrimony without having to create ex nihilo. Such an immanent critique is particularly suited to the problem of teaching climate change, because we already inhabit stories of world-destruction. If Val Plumwood is right that the “ecological crisis requires a new kind of culture,” we should invade the spaces where our meanings of profit and industry are stored to steal the apocalypse from petroculture (Plumwood 4). This requires what Catherine Keller calls a “counter-apocalypse,” which “recognizes itself as a kind of apocalypse; but then it will try to interrupt the habit. It suggests an apo/calypse [“un/veiling”]: a broken, distorted text, turned to abusive purposes, only revelatory as it enters a mode of repentance for Constantinian Christendom and its colonial aftermath” (Keller 19). The formation of a counter-apocalypse to guide environmental culture is the treasure, and there is evidence that American popular culture struggles now to reveal it. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, first a book and then a blockbuster film series, provides a popular example of a carbon counterapocalypse. If we understand The Hunger Games as a revision of Sophocles’ Antigone, the
rituals of grief appear as a blow to the archons of coal. The Hunger Games is the story of Katniss Everdeen, a resident of District 12 in Panem, a fascist state that arises in North America after a climate disaster that has been erased from historical memory. District 12 lies somewhere in the Appalachians, and Katniss’s people are the coal miners whose suffering has been depicted in a distinguished literary lineage.4 The people of the districts, who provide fuel, food, and raw materials for the Capitol, are kept in line by the Hunger Games, gladiatorial matches founded as a punishment for the last rebellion against the state. Katniss volunteers as a “tribute” in the games as a proxy for her younger sister, and she embodies the coal of District 12 in the spectacle that precedes the games. Before the games, her primary identity is that of sister, and her role as a new Antigone arises from sisterhood. In Antigone, Interrupted, Bonnie Honig argues that Antigone stands, in recent political theory, for a “mortalist humanism” that would ground the universal human subject in vulnerability and the capacity for suffering rather than reason (Honig 17). Honig objects to this on the grounds that grief is political “all the way down,” so Antigone’s grief for her unburied brother cannot be reduced to the essence of
humanity. Antigone does not symbolize “grief for ungrievable life” but a “sororal solidarity”: a praxis, not an essence (19). As an aristocrat trying to honor her brother with proper burial, Antigone must defy the will of the polis, represented by the tyrant Creon. She is not a figure of feminist democracy in the contemporary sense. She is an excellent model for Katniss, who defies President Snow by honoring a fallen tribute, Rue of District 11, during the games. The bodies of dead tributes belong to the state, but Katniss, who thinks of Rue as a younger sister, surrounds her corpse with flowers “to show the Capitol that whatever they do or force us to do there is a part of every tribute they can’t own” (Collins 237). Her ritual takes place on national television, so all of Panem witnesses Katniss’s defiance. This is the beginning of the revolution that topples the government of Panem, and it is rooted in the sororal solidarity of an Antigone who refuses to leave the body of Ismene to the state. In this myth of grieving against the state, there is a model of feminist solidarity rooted in burial that is also a revolt against slave labor. Thor, God of Thunder: The Last Days of Midgard presents the opposite problem.
