ABSTRACT
In The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell inventories the ghastly after-effects of a likely thermonuclear exchange. Allegorical and whimsical, Malamud kicks off with a thermonuclear war “between the Djanks and Druzhkies, in consequence of which they had destroyed themselves, and, madly, all other inhabitants of the earth”. Like other protagonists of post-apocalyptic novels, from Earth Abides to A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cohn takes it upon himself to rekindle civilization from nuclear ashes. Rounding up this refresher course on the cultural history of people civilization, Bernard Malamud’s protagonist reincarnates at various points suffering redeemer Jesus, blind storyteller Homer, stranger-in-a-strange-land Gulliver, morality-play Everyman, and socio-engineering Utopus. In one fell swoop, America sacrificed decades of non-proliferation policy on the altar of a geopolitical counterweight to China. Biology runs so deep that only technology can engineer it out of our systems. Humans are programmed for language, with precise surface-level manifestations left open.
