← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
694 Apocalyptic Literature (with Dorian Lynskey) | My Last Book with Charles Baxter
01:07:02
Loading summary
Transcript83 lines
- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Wow, this house is cute, but can I really get in the game in this economy? I do have savings and I am responsible. Ish. Ugh, I should bury it. I'm being wild. But what if I'm not being wild though? Could I actually Score a kick off.
- [00:27]
Dorian Linsky
Your home buying journey with Zillow's new buyability tool. It makes it easy to find out what you can afford so you can get off the bench and onto the playing field with confidence. Check your buyability only on Zillow. Membership means more with American Express Business Gold earn four times Membership Rewards points in your top two eligible spending categories every month, including eligible U.S. advertising purchases in select media and U.S. purchases at restaurants, including takeout and delivery. What are you waiting for? Get the card that flexes with your spending every month. Terms and points cap apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Gold MX Business Gold Card built for business by American Express.
- [01:10]
Jack Wilson
Hello. Today on the podcast we talk to Dorian Linsky, author of Everything Must Go. And by everything he means everything. Our world, our universe, us. He's been looking at literature of the apocalypse and he'll tell us what he's found. Plus, we we look at the life of Richard Blair, the 80 year old man who's been living with the legacy of his famous father, the author George Orwell. And finally, because even apocalypses and dystopias have to have their moments of uplift, we'll talk to friend, mentor and guest Charlie Baxter, who will stop by to discuss his choice for the last book he will ever read. That's all coming up today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. So nice of you to join me today. You have choices, I get it. Maybe this is on your list. You have to scroll down several pages to get here past other compelling episodes. Well, my thanks to you and to your scrolling thumb. I hope you both find something here to enjoy. What kind of books do thumbs like? Does anyone know Tom Thumb? Maybe. Or maybe they hate Tom Thumb, resenting his fame. Who knows? I guess I'll talk to you and we'll let your thumb listen in its little thumb, brow furrowed, as it sees if I'm going to mention its hated rival, the frenemy, we shall only call Tom T. Moving on. George Orwell was a pseudonym, of course. His real name was Eric Blair, and he left an imprint on literature that's kind of hard to measure. He was Wealthy or not exactly wealthy, lower upper middle class, as he put it. It was a tony class, but he fought for the working man and literally fought in the Spanish Civil War taking a bullet to the throat. He crawled down coal mines and wrote about that. He washed dishes and generally did a vagabond stint in Paris and London and wrote about that. He analyzed politics and language and Stalinism and its rise, totalitarianism like few others have before or since. He also had his blind spots and his weaknesses and what we would today find suspicious and sometimes cringeworthy. A fascinating man and life. And if you love George Orwell as I do in spite of everything, or maybe I should say I admire him in spite of everything and love his writing, then you'll be both heartened and a bit saddened by a picture of him which I used to post on my blog back in the day, of George Orwell with a little boy on his lap. And Orwell is looking down, proud papa, delighted by this happy looking little one, big grin on his face and it's. The picture is heartening because it's nice to know that George Orwell experienced that and felt that joy. And it's saddening because Orwell died young, aged 46, from tuberculosis. And we know that he must have left this little one too early. Well, the little baby in that photo is all grown up now. He's 80 years old and the Guardian newspaper caught up with him and wrote a long article about it. I'll refer you to that, read the whole thing, but I wanted to give you some highlights to wet your whistle, so to speak. Here are five highlights, counting down from number five to number one. Number five. Richard Blair learned about his father's death by hearing it announced on the radio. Orwell had been living in a sanatorium as disease took its toll at the end of his life. Young Richard visited him there and a week later heard an announcement. The death has occurred today of George Orwell, author of 1984. Just prior to his death, Orwell had worried about his disease. Let's back up a moment, explain this family dynamic here. Orwell wanted a family deeply for most of his adult life, but he couldn't have children and he was married to a woman who probably couldn't have children either because she'd had uterine cancer. So they adopted a three week old baby. That was Richard, the subject of this article that we're talking about today. Nine months later, Richard's adopted mother died, leaving him and his father, George Orwell, as the only two family members. Orwell was devoted to, but he also knew that he was sick with tuberculosis and he was worried that he might pass it on to his beloved baby boy. So he had to keep his distance from him. And then he worried that this might affect the boy for not receiving hugs and a lot of physical attention. What a dilemma. And then George Orwell died. Very sad. Luckily, the boy managed to survive and live what sounds like, overall, a pretty happy life. Item number four. Richard Blair started his life as a farmer. Then he trained people to sell tractors and finally ended up as a landlord for some holiday cottages in Craignish, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, on the west coast of Scotland. For years, Orwell's second wife, Sonia, had fought for the rights to Orwell's royalties to get those back from the publisher. And through all this time, Rich, who was the heir to the literary fortune. But it was inaccessible to him. He was just a working man barely scraping by. Orwell's family had become wealthy thanks to the slave trade long ago, but the money had dwindled so that Orwell himself could not have lived up to the family standard of living. That's what he meant by lower upper middle class. He couldn't have afforded the education that such a boy from such a family felt entitled to. But he couldn't. They couldn't have afforded to pay. But luckily George was smart enough to earn some scholarships. Then the money that did come in from animal farm in 1984, which were successes, was wasted away by the accountants and tied up in legal battles. Finally, the royalties were won back by Orwell's wife, Sonia, who Richard says was every bit of George's equal intellectually. And the family again had some funds enabling Richard to purchase a house. The year that that happened, you might guess, was 1984, which he says was just a coincidence. Item number three. Richard Blair remembers going out fishing with his father while his father was still alive. This was when they lived on the Isle of Jurassic, where Orwell was writing 1984 during the mornings, as his life and strength ebbed away. Once he on one of these fishing trips, he misread the tide and he and his young baby boy wound up in a whirlpool. Their dinghy overturned and they almost drowned. I think it gave him a hell of a shock, Richard Blair says today. Another memory he had was that his father wanted him to wear tall boots when walking around because of the snakes, which Orwell himself used to stomp on whenever he saw them. Boots come in handy for the stomping One assumes item number two. Orwell's womanizing was notorious. And one of the ways he strikes us as being kind of of his time, to put it charitably. Some other ways are the casual anti Semitism and his squealing on some of his friends for being potentially dangerous communists. We have to judge him by the standard of the time for that. In particular during this rise of Stalinism that he felt like he was perhaps alone in seeing. When Richard Blair's parents, this now is George Orwell and his wife Eileen were living in Marrakesh, Orwell asked his wife if he could sleep with a young local woman as a birthday present and her response was, yeah, for Christ's sake, get on with it. Richard did not inherit this kind of approach toward women from his father, being happily married for 60 years. He also thinks that his father would have evolved his views over time, becoming less prejudicial in all sorts of ways. And it's hard not to agree. The man with such a clear vision and such anti totalitarian views and such a respect for honesty and accuracy would, I think have wound up understanding his own flaws and weaknesses and blind spots if he'd lived long enough to be called out on them and if he'd lived in a world that understood them differently, as he surely would have in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Okay, number one. Richard Blair has not felt bad about living in his father's shadow. Did he ever consider writing? I'm too bloody lazy, he says in response. And then he says, everyone would say, look at your father and look at the rubbish you're churning out. He himself didn't follow his father's path. Quote, he was a highly intelligent academic. I'm quite the reverse. I was very good at the work I did, but a lot of it was manual. I was a senior demonstrator and ended up in sales training for the tractor people. Massey Ferguson. That's hardly an intellectual occupation, end quote. It's very likable. This guy Richard, perhaps he's right about that not being an intellectual occupation, but I suspect that his father, George would have approved. The interviewer concludes by asking Richard what's more important to him, his legacy or his father's. My father's legacy, he says instantly. I'm just the keeper. The ordinary son of an extraordinary father, end quote. Well, that may be, but I came to this article because of my gratitude toward an extraordinary person, George Orwell, and I ended up feeling grateful for all of the ordinary people too. So there's a little bit about the boy on the lap in that famous photo, grinning in a kind of mischievous way with a proud father, George Orwell, beaming down at him. Orwell, of course, took us into a kind of apocalypse. Maybe not quite suiting the definition of an apocalypse, but apocalypse adjacent, let's say dystopia. Other writers went into the apocalypse more fully, including Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, H.G. wells, Jack London, W.B. yeats, J.G. ballard. And in movies, too, we have Dr. Strangelove and Mad Max and the Terminator. What can we learn from all of this? What drives authors toward this scenario? Why do readers seek it out? And are there trends or patterns that we can see from looking at a whole bunch of them? Well, Dorian Linsky has done this work and he'll tell us all about it after this.
- [13:21]
Dorian Linsky
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts will take the world by storm.
- [13:27]
Jack Wilson
There's a big right out there and you're gonna help me Stop. Stop it Us.
- [13:31]
Dorian Linsky
Why? You got some place to be on May 2nd?
- [13:33]
Jack Wilson
Avengers are gone no one's coming to save the day their time I think we could be the people that are.
- [13:39]
Dorian Linsky
Coming has come being the hero There is no higher calling.
- [13:43]
Jack Wilson
Let's do this.
- [13:46]
Dorian Linsky
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts only theaters May 2 get tickets now. This film is not yet rated.
- [13:51]
Jack Wilson
PayPal lets you pay all your pals like your graduation gifters. Who's paying for the mattress topper? You mean the bean bag chair? Aren't we getting a mini fridge? Can we create a pool on PayPal? It lets us collect the money before we buy. Oh, yes, that's smart. Glad we can agree on something easily. Pool split and Send money with PayPal. Get started. In the PayPal app, a PayPal account is required to send and receive money. A balance account is required to create a pool. McDonald's meets the Minecraft universe with one.
- [14:23]
Dorian Linsky
Of six collectibles and your choice of a Big Mac or 10 piece McNuggets with spicy nether Flame sauce.
- [14:29]
Jack Wilson
Now available with a Minecraft movie meal.
- [14:32]
Dorian Linsky
I participate in McDonald's for a limited.
- [14:34]
Jack Wilson
Time, a Minecraft movie only in theaters. Okay. Joining me now is Dorian Linsky, whose previous works include 33 RPM, a history of protest songs, and the Ministry of Truth, a biography of George Orwell's 1984. He's here today to discuss his new book, Everything Must the Stories We Tell about the end of the World. Dorian Linsky, welcome to the History of Literature.
- [15:12]
Dorian Linsky
Hi. Thanks for having me.
- [15:14]
Jack Wilson
Your book opens with what I found to be kind of a breathtaking or heart palpitating compendium of references in literature and popular culture and science and politics and religion, all talking about the end of the world. Apocalypse follows apocalypse. What do you think is driving this constant feeling we have of doom?
- [15:42]
Dorian Linsky
I mean, I think there's a lot of things, but the main one. And we see this in religions that don't have that apocalyptic narrative where history is circular rather than linear, so there's never really an end of the world, like Hinduism, for example. And they will have kind of like the four quarters of the wheel, the four ages. And in these religions, we are always in the fourth and worst phase, which then sort of culminates in, you know, fire and disaster, and then leads back to the first phase of perfection. And this just seems to be a pattern that people tend to think that they are living in the worst times and. And that sort of. It must reach a conclusion soon. And that seems to be quite consistent thinking. It's certainly in Christian eschatology, you know, going back even before the book of Revelation to the Gospels. It's always about, it's coming soon, you know, it will happen in your lifetime. And I think that even though many of us are not religious anymore, that is a natural, that's a human thing. I don't even know if it's a legacy of religion or just that the reason it's in religion is that it's a human instinct to believe that, you know, the end is coming. And what I found really disturbing was just how many times I would just come across journalism or novels or stand up comedy specials, and people would just sort of just almost as a throwaway, just go, you know, with apocalypse looming or, you know, on the edge of armageddon. And I was like, well, this doesn't seem like something that you should just sort of throw out there as, like rolling your eyes like we all know what's happening. And so I got interested in looking back and finding all these periods of time. And you can just go back decades, you can go back centuries. And sometimes there's a very good reason for it, like, you know, the Black Death. And other times you're looking back, you think, what really did you think that the end was nigh? And then when you dig deeper into these individual writers, they have lots of different impulses and motives and feelings about the world as it is, and whether they would like to see it end or not. But I think the thing that unites everyone in that feeling is sort of that the time that they live in is untenable and that somehow it must all come crashing down.
- [18:20]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, it's interesting what you say about looking back and thinking, well, how could you have believed it? Because I'm sitting here thinking, well, we've got like, I've grown, grown up with the idea the threat of nuclear war, which could end the world, and climate change, which seems to be potentially ending the world as we know it. And I think, well, you simple minded little people, you had no idea how close things could actually get. You lived in such halcyon days where you didn't have to worry about these things. But of course, 100 or 200 years from now, people would probably look back at me and think the same thing.
- [18:57]
Dorian Linsky
You know, when they're thinking along these lines, they don't really notice the sort of advantages they have, but they really notice the negative. So the problem is, again, is human nature is, you know, if you've got like a back pain or something, and then you just think, oh, my God, I'd be so happy if this cleared up and it clears up and within a week you've kind of forgotten you ever had it and something else is bothering you.
- [19:20]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [19:21]
Dorian Linsky
And so of course we can, you know, there's a long list of things that you can say, oh, we should be really worried about. And then again, against that, you put certain things like, you know, medical advances, for example, and, you know, that Covid, you know, disastrous there. It was really was not like pandemics of the past, the worst ones, and was certainly not like the pandemics you find in fiction. You know, we got off despite, you know, huge numbers of deaths and lockdowns and all that. We got off sort of relatively lightly. And one of those reasons was because a vaccine isn't that wonderful, but people are not comparing it to the worst thing that didn't happen, you know, and so it's, it's really just how our brains work. We tend to emphasize the negative. And I get that, and I get why people are worried, myself included, about lots of things. You follow the news, there are reasons to be worried. Where I felt alienated was from this sort of almost glib apocalypticism that I quote from, you know.
- [20:22]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [20:23]
Dorian Linsky
At the beginning, from the characters from the White Lotus. And it's just like as if everything is awful, you know, as awful as you can imagine. It's only going to get worse. And I really started thinking about, well, why is that in some ways an attractive thing to think?
- [20:41]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. You wrote that you wondered whether sort of immersing yourself totally in these visions of the end might make you feel better in a funny way. What was your thinking there?
- [20:57]
Dorian Linsky
Well, there are a couple of things. One is this thing that I'm obsessed with. There's a couple of different words for it. The one I like is chronocentrism, which is the feeling that the time that you're living in, everything is unprecedented. And things have never been as bad or as important or as exciting or whatever it is. It's just like you lack that sort of historical context. So I thought historical context would be interesting. And, you know, there are certain things that you can look back at, like the cooling theory of the 1970s, which was not the scientific consensus, but it was, you know, fairly popular, and there was quite a lot of coverage of it. And that was the idea that actually what we were facing was not global warming, but a new ice age. And a lot of people were very worried about this. And that's something that just didn't happen. And a lot of times these things didn't happen, and sometimes they were never going to, it turns out. And other times, perhaps we were lucky, such as nuclear war. But going back to times where people felt as sort of scared and as bad as they could, you know, and I found loads of articles and letters and diary entries, and, you know, Roald Dahl, his first novel is out of print, was about nuclear war, was absolutely convinced that an annihilating war was coming within a couple of years in the late 1940s. And, you know, there was real terror. And, of course, that didn't happen. And so that was one thing, like context, and then the other thing was perhaps to confront certain things I'd been avoiding, because sometimes the fear, you know, the fear when you're avoiding something is greater than the sadness you may feel when you know more about it. So, you know, I really managed to sort of wrestle with, I suppose, my feelings about the climate crisis and that I found useful. And then I think the third bit was just a little bit of perhaps numbing. I don't know, that people would still say, at least with the fiction stuff, not so much the science, which can still be very worrying. With the fiction, people would go, well, you know, this must be very depressing. And it's. If that's all you're reading almost for a couple of years, it's not so bad. I remember reading Cormac McCarthy's the Road when it came out and thinking, this is the bleakest thing I've ever read. And this time I read it and I was like, oh, I can handle this. It didn't sort of break me in the same way, because I'd read so many other Bleak novels.
- [23:27]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. So we've touched on three different things that I feel like I need to ask you the question, whether you see this as us projecting the human condition onto something larger, onto the world, that basically we're all aware that we're headed for death ourselves. And one way of projecting that onto the world is to imagine that so is planet Earth, that the time is finite as well for human civilization or for the planet. Another is that we tend to think that our youth was better than our middle age and our elderly years, that we think things are getting worse. And we have this tendency to look back and think, well, things were much better. And a lot of it is because they were much better for us as humans, because we were young and our bodies were strong and we didn't have disease and that kind of thing. And then the third thing you mentioned is one you just mentioned, which is that we tend to think our time is special, and I think that's kind of human as well, because it's hard to imagine a time when we weren't alive. And so we think that there must be something unique and. And special about the time that we're alive. So do you think that there's a feeling that we're all kind of projecting apocalypse onto the world, when actually what we're not dealing with is our own mortality?
- [24:57]
Dorian Linsky
I think that's a large part of it. I mean, it's not the only explanation, but certainly it's a way of thinking about death. It's the way of thinking about the end of things. And I was really struck by. There were a couple of examples. There was a great architect called John Soane in the 19th century in London, and he commissioned an artist who had been sort of drawing ruins in Rome to draw the bank of England, which he'd literally just designed, literally just had bills. And imagine it in ruins in the future. Yeah. And there's an American novel from the early 20th century called the Doomsman, which is about New York in ruins. And one of the kind of landmarks, the broken landmarks, is the Flatiron Building, which I looked up, and it turns out that the Platinum Building had been completed, like, a year before the novel came out. So there was a sense of that you almost immediately want. People sometimes. Almost immediately want to imagine the most. The newest, most alive things dead or finished or broken, and that. That somehow, I mean, sometimes there's something quite ghoulish and that people just want to knock things down. And sometimes it's quite cathartic. And I think, you know, there's a relationship between apocalyptic fiction and the horror genre in that you're watching something happen to people that you fear and that watching that is helpful. Just as you're not the one being stalked by the serial killer, you're not the one watching your city consumed by a tidal wave. So there's definitely a way of thinking about death, but then there's lots of other motives in play which tend to reveal how people feel about their society.
- [26:50]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [26:51]
Dorian Linsky
And I think that the, you know, what I try and say to people is that there is a distinction between the apocalyptic, the ending, and valid concerns that there are lots of things that you could be worried about, but a particular fixation on sort of the end, that absolute finality, which has obviously never happened before. And it's a pretty extreme scenario. So if you look at, for example, climate crisis, there's, you know, lots of ways in which it would make the world considerably worse and cause a great deal of suffering, but there is really no kind of like, realistic scenario in which it would mean the end of the world.
- [27:31]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [27:31]
Dorian Linsky
And yet that's the sort of language and storytelling that people use, and that's why I gave it this subtitle. The stories you tell about the end of the world, because it's not just about fiction. Those stories appear in activism, in politics, you know, in science. Sometimes there's a real apocalyptic streak, you know, in Silicon Valley, where it's about kind of almost escaping the world. This fantasy of life on other planets, which Ray Bradbury once said that essentially it was because, you know, that the Earth is going to die one day. I mean, like a very long time away, but still, you know, that the Earth is finite and therefore dreaming of settlements on other planets is a way of outrunning death. And it's interesting that a lot of these tech billionaires who are building bunkers in New Zealand and so on are also obsessed with, you know, quite radical health treatments and never getting old and never dying.
- [28:30]
Jack Wilson
Right. And Mars, so.
- [28:31]
Dorian Linsky
And staying young on Mars, you know, so it's definitely a lot of. Kind of. A lot of it is to do with how we feel about our own deaths, which is basically where I chose to sort of conclude the book on that more kind of personal, emotional level, as opposed to a lot of these politics and science that I explore.
- [28:54]
Jack Wilson
Right, so you broke this down, I thought, in a very helpful way, of the different possible ends. And I was wondering, if you look at apocalyptic literature, in particular fiction, which of these do you see occurring the most? I'll just take them off. Here you have total demolition of the planet, the extinction of the human race, the collapse of civilization and the Christian apocalypse. And which of these do you think recurs the most in apocalyptic literature?
- [29:32]
Dorian Linsky
I think it is the collapse of civilization to what we would now generally call the post apocalyptic, which is a relatively new word that really surprised me. It really, you know, come into being until the early 80s with the release of Mad Max 2. Yeah, and there's a great Stephen King line where he goes, no survivors, no story. Which is why you have this genre of the last man story where the entire human race is dead except for one person. Because then you have to follow that one person. And that fiction sometimes has problems in like, well, what does that one person do? And therefore quite often they have to discover other people. Then they realize, oh, they're not the last person at all because there's only so much you can do with that.
- [30:19]
Jack Wilson
Person'S going to die and that'll be the end. I guess when I think about it, the first two that we mentioned, total demolition of the planet and the extinction of the human race would maybe not make for a very interesting story.
- [30:32]
Dorian Linsky
I mean, there's ways to do it with perhaps if it's something imminent, which is why people still really drawn to the relatively archaic idea because we now know that this is a very, very, very, very tiny risk of the Earth being hit by a comet or an asteroid, you know, an extinction level event. And I think because it's imminent and people know it and they can almost, you know, tell you the time that it is going to hit, the world will end. There's a lot of interesting movies that, like Last Night and Melancholia that deal with that. But so there are more, I've noticed there are more films, more than novels, I would say, in which the world literally ends at the end of the movie. You know, it's almost like there was a bit of a taboo around that and now they're just like, no, let's, let's do it novels. Less so novels are much more interested in the kind of like the process of collapse and the aftermath. There's a really strong literary tradition which goes back, well, it goes back to the 19th century, but really gets sort of established by people like John Wyndham and JG Ballard and John Christopher and all these different sort of collapse slash post apocalyptic scenarios because I think they create so much space for storytelling. It's like, well, what happens next? What happens when people are robbed of or unshackled from all the social norms. And that's when you get into the sort of strange like, you know, tribes and warlords and odysseys across the country seeking safety. It's just a very narratively rich space.
- [32:25]
Jack Wilson
Are there similarities between the collapse of civilization and those narratives and the stories about the Christian apocalypse? It seems like they could be different, but they could also kind of follow some of the same trend lines.
- [32:40]
Dorian Linsky
Yeah, because the distinction of the Christian apocalypse, which is really just the prologue to my book because, you know, I'm mainly focusing on secular fiction. But the difference is, is that the world as we know it ends, but then the survivors live on forever in some form. It's not actually clear in Revelation quite what's going on and where they're going. Is the Earth being remade? Are they going to heaven? Is there some sort of third space? But certainly it's like a, it's a happy ending. And this feeds into some of that post apocalyptic fiction and unfortunately into the thinking of like real life survivalists, a kind of community, I suppose, that sort of began in the 70s and really became very obvious during the 80s and 90s that, you know, the right wing militias with bunkers full of canned food and guns. And they actually seem to kind of be anticipating the collapse, like drooling over it, because they were like, well, the pure people will be able to, you know, live free and be in control of their own destinies and not have to pay taxes and deal with rules and social norms that they don't like anymore. And so that in a way is their sort of post apocalyptic paradise. And there is a quite sinister. The more that. More you read a sinister tendency of almost cleansing, which is you might think of as coming from the Noah's Ark myth, which is not strictly apocalyptic in the scriptural sense, but has that same idea. It's like the world is a disaster, so let's wipe out all the bad people or like even just most of the people, and then the sort of the virtuous elite will live on. And I think that's, that's very big in the Bible and unfortunately it translates in a very dark way into sort of into real life behavior that the problem with the world is just sort of everybody else and you just need to get them out of the way and then things will be great again.
- [34:48]
Jack Wilson
Do you think that's bled over into the secular fiction as well? I'm thinking of stories where it's kind of like almost cautionary tales or kind of saying if we're not vigilant about wealth inequality or what we're doing to the planet or eating meat or whatever. The kind of. If an author has kind of an idea of if we do too much of this, it's going to lead to that. Does it feel like people are out there trying to warn people or trying to punish a certain kind of behavior?
- [35:25]
Dorian Linsky
It so depends on the individual that some people are clearly trying to warn. So that Roald Dahl novel I mentioned sometime Never, it is a nightmare depiction of nuclear war. And his idea was, like many novels about nuclear war, is to say this is madness to have these weapons. We must do everything we can to try and get rid of them. Because they could spend. Certainly I don't think that's contentious to say it would be at the end of the world as we know it. But then there are people that are sort of interested in this sort of post apocalyptic space, like JG Ballard, where the happy ending for him is a completely transformed world, sort of broken to pieces and turned upside down. It's like that's what he wants. He doesn't want to get back.
- [36:13]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [36:13]
Dorian Linsky
So there's an interesting contrast between him and say, John Wyndham, where John Wyndham in Day of the Triffids. It's like, how can we rebuild? How can we get back? And you've seen this in zombie movies, for example. There's always this desire to find the safe space, find the fortress, rebuild society. So you've got those people and then you've got the people that actually think they want that great shattering transformation. And you've got people who are candidly didactic about it. And I think in those cases, people, it's the cause really matters. Because if you're writing about comets or asteroids, you're generally not trying to say we must take action, with Arthur C. Clarke being the exception, I think. But generally what they are is giant metaphors, you know, and that what you're really interested in is thinking about human behavior and society and life on Earth. Whereas if you're writing about nuclear weapons or climate disasters, then you probably do have a political message and a warning. And then there's another category which I really love, which is summed up by Emily St. John Mandel's Station 11, which is really about mourning and appreciation. And they have this sort of elegiac quality that actually, it's quite a bold thing to say, actually in this field. She's basically saying, actually the world that we live in right now is not that bad and we would really miss it if it was gone, which actually that idea doesn't come up as often as you'd expect in apocalyptic fiction. That really kind of focusing on what gets lost.
- [37:53]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Dorian Linsky at the Home Depot. Spring Black Friday is here, and we've.
- [38:13]
Dorian Linsky
Got 14 days of deals to transform your space.
- [38:16]
Jack Wilson
So what are you working on? How about a quick and stylish patio furniture update?
- [38:21]
Dorian Linsky
And what's outdoor dining without a shiny new grill?
- [38:24]
Jack Wilson
Find a wide selection of grills under $300 like the next grill four burner for only $229 at the home Depot. Then add a little ambiance with string lights. Shop 14 days of deals during Spring Black Friday now through April 16th at the home Depot. Hey there, travelers. Kaley Cuoco here. Sorry to interrupt your music great artist, BT Dubs, but wouldn't you rather be there to hear it live? With Priceline, you can get out of your dreams and into your dream concert. They've got millions of travel deals to get you to that festival, gig, rave, sound, bath, or sonic experience you've been dreaming of. Download the Priceline app today, and you can save up to 60% off hotels and up to 50% off flights. So don't just dream about that trip. Book it with Priceline. Go to your happy price. Price. Okay, we're back. So, Dorian, you start out the book with an epigraph that cites a passage from David Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas that says, quote, anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest pastime. End quote. How far back do you go? We talked about the Bible. Where does your inquiry begin? Where were you finding the first references that you wanted to focus on anyway to Apocalypse?
- [40:04]
Dorian Linsky
It seems to come from Zoroastrians. But I mean, by that point, you're going back so far. I mean, this startled me. I actually had no idea for the research that people didn't even know what can't even agree on what century the prophet Zoroaster lived in. So we're getting back. It's huge uncertainty. And Norman Cohen, the great historian of this kind of thing and apocalyptic narratives, you can't really tell how this idea of linear history, which did not seem to exist before the Zoroastrians, there was that cyclical view that I talked about at the beginning.
- [40:38]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [40:38]
Dorian Linsky
And Zoroastrian seems to be the first to say that time would be like an arrow rather than a wheel. So it would have a beginning and a middle and an end and when it ended, it would not begin again. That would be it. And certainly that's adopted by the Jews in the Old Testament and then Christianity, and that follows through into it's in Islam, Norse mythology, and all these things that came after. So I start back then just to sort of. Just to explain, I suppose, the essential logic and why there's not such important thing in, for example, Japanese or Chinese or Indian culture, even though they will produce kind of apocalyptic movies sometimes, is not as ingrained in their thinking about history as it is in the sort of Judeo Christian cultures.
- [41:27]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay. And then I could imagine one could fashion a book by proceeding chronologically through the various accounts. But you've organized your book according to some topics, so let's go through some of the individual sections so we can kind of preview what it is that you cover in those chapters or sections. You start with God. Why was it important to start there?
- [41:54]
Dorian Linsky
Well, that's my prologue. And I really wanted to start in 1816, which is the birth of the secular end of the world story with Lord Byron and his poem Darkness. That's generally agreed to be the first story about the end of the world with no God. And that's really the focus of the book. And yet so much in terms of both the thinking and also just explicit references doesn't make sense unless you explain that religious context. So I have to kind of, like I said, I'm talking about the Zoroastrians and this view of history and so on. But then I have to go quite deep into Revelation, try to do it as concisely as possible. But, you know, I did. Do you do have to explain, like, what actually happens in Revelation? What do all these, these words and numbers and strange images mean? Because they get picked up over and over again later on in fiction, even if the plot does not depend on God. A lot of these writers would have perhaps grown up with the book of Revelation. It's just. It's in your bones and. And therefore it's in the bones of the culture. You know that a massive Michael Bay movie about an asteroid is called Armageddon. Now, of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual battle of Armageddon. Armageddon is not synonymous with the end of the world. It's a battle which takes place sometime a thousand years or so before the end of the world. It's a resonant name. So I really wanted to explain to people, like, look, just this is what the word apocalypse actually means. This is what Armageddon actually is. This is what the millennium, actually is just to give people a little bit of a toolkit.
- [43:36]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, it does seem like God would be present no matter what, because you'd have, on the one hand, you'd have all the people who have kind of grown up with the model of, as we talked about Noah, or, you know, God wants this to happen. He's ready for the cleansing, he's about to punish the sinners and that kind of thing. On the other hand, I would guess that people who are writing apocalyptic fiction, you know, because of things that man is doing to himself, like if you're writing about the threat of nuclear war, for example, you would be saying, don't count on God. Don't think that God's going to save us. We're doing this to ourselves. If you're putting your trust in prayers, you might be missing that. We have actions that have consequences.
- [44:23]
Dorian Linsky
I mean, and that is a really a 20th century shift. You know, you get these secular end of the world stories coming out in the 19th century, from like Byron and Mary Shelley through to H.G. wells at the end of the century, but it's really in 20th century with kind of even before the nuclear bomb, world wars was this sense that, like, we understood the world better and almost our own. I think guilt is such a huge theme of this genre because early on you've got, like I said, the comet or the asteroid is always a metaphor for, like, fate, for an act of God. It's like, well, there's nothing that we could. We could, you know, maybe we could try and stop it. But it's certainly not our fault that it's headed this way. Right? It's just fate or chance or whatever. But the atom bomb particularly just introduces this sense that if the world was to end, it would be our fault. And then that extends to all these other things. And so if you look at, like early pandemic fiction, again, it's almost like fate. They don't really understand how, you know, viruses and bacteria worked. And they're just like, wow, we are the victims. Like, this isn't our fault. This isn't just an appalling thing that has happened to us, like as people felt about Black Death. Whereas now, if you read a lot of pandemic fiction, it started in a lab, it started as a weapon. And so even the pandemic, and you get this in some conspiracy, more out there conspiracy theories about COVID If they don't pandemic, it's got to be our fault. It can't just be something that nature did you know, it's our fault or it's our fault for meddling with nature or whatever. And that's not to say this is not true in many cases. Like, a lot of things are our faults, but that's become the kind of dominant theme of end of the world fiction, that it's always us, it's what we're doing to the climate, it's our greed or it's our lust for war or whatever.
- [46:25]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, it's Promethean, I think. Right. Humans should not be trying to play God, or humans are. You thought it was great to develop all these machines, but look how that turned on you or AI or whatever the latest development is.
- [46:44]
Dorian Linsky
Yeah, well, I mean, the wonderful for me as a writer, just in terms of history helping me with my narrative, you know, the fact that as Byron is writing Darkness and starting this entire secular apocalyptic genre, Mary Shelley is writing Frankenstein. Now, that's not a novel about the end of the world, but that archetype appears in so many novels about the end of the world and just the way that we think about technology. So, you know, a lot of people who think about AI, and some people are very positive about it, and some people are very critical, but about different things. Things like disinformation and surveillance and causing mass unemployment, things like that, rather than the end of the world. They still complain about the Frankenstein archetype and they go, this is just so ingrained in us that we just think the things we create will destroy us. And that's what you see in the Terminator and the Matrix and any of the many early novels about killer computers, which were, again, based on Frankenstein. That's just how we have come to think. That's not always how we thought that we would be the architects of our own destruction. But I think that when God is, if not completely removed from the picture, certainly receding, that seems like the natural place to point the finger. So a lot of these novels really wriggling with self hatred and shame on behalf of humanity.
- [48:10]
Jack Wilson
Is there a range of tone or approach? I'm thinking of all of these as being kind of sober, bleak, maybe a little bit finger wagging. Are there any comedies or is there a way to approach this that you found might surprise people in how they all chose to portray this?
- [48:31]
Dorian Linsky
Well, there's a wonderful, I mean, pretty obscure, but like a wonderful Austrian play from the 30s by Tura Soyfer called the End of the World, which is about all the. The sun and all the planets getting together and deciding that humanity has just, you know, blown it and dispatches this comet to destroy Earth. And then it's all about how the people of the Earth respond to this impending crisis. And it's so absolute sort of obscure that I don't know if it inspired the movie. Don't look up. But there's quite a lot of similarities in the way that some people are trying to kind of grift, you know, sell insurance against the end of the world. And he's got satire on politicians, including Hitler, who basically says, if anyone, if anyone's going to destroy the world is going to be me.
- [49:16]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [49:16]
Dorian Linsky
It's full of gags, it's really sharp and funny. And there is a bit of a tradition. You know, I think Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began with his idea for a six part radio show about different ways in which the world could end. And then his, his editor just said, why don't you focus on the funniest one? And that's sort of the springboard for the Hitchhiker's Guide. So there is definitely room for satire and there's definitely room for humor even in novels that seem quite heavy. And I mean, that's very, very welcome, you know, because you can't just be reading stuff like the Road or Children of Men. I think that would have battered me down. But I think there is an opportunity for kind of humor, particularly because it's about how humans react in a crisis. And that can be funny.
- [50:13]
Jack Wilson
Right. So that does bring us kind of a bit of full circle to the place where we started. Did you feel like this cheered you up the way that you thought it might?
- [50:25]
Dorian Linsky
It kind of did, in the sense that sort of clarified my own feelings. Because like I said, if you're thinking about the end of the world, then you realize that you're also thinking about, you know, life and death and the society you inhabit and what you think about the future. And you're an optimist or a pessimist or some mingling of the two. So it took me back to this really personal place, having gone to all these different spaces where I had to try and work out the, you know, had to understand the exact difference between comets and asteroids or a basic understanding of nuclear fission, or wading through like incredibly bleak apocalyptic novels from the 20s and 30s. And. And then I just came back to this very sort of personal, emotional place. And I found that the people that I had related to who I'd been writing about were, I suppose, the most humane and hopeful as opposed to the kind of more like, you know, the misanthropes and the nihilists and the ultra pessimists. So I suppose maybe it just clarified how I felt. And I certainly felt like anti doomer. You know, I think there is such a dangerous tendency, and particularly I think dangerous when it's among younger people to talk in terms of doom and despair and foreclosed hope. And that doesn't help at all. It doesn't help them feel better. But it also doesn't help anything change for the better. You know, that if you do want to try and kind of avert certain disasters, we actually have to do something or at least, you know, belief that that is possible. So I suppose, yeah, it really just clarified my own feelings and steered me away from that sometimes glib despair that can be very tempting and that can be read, I think falsely as sort of, you know, unflinching honesty and, and profundity. That if you say that we're all doomed, that makes you a very serious, clear eyed person. Whereas I think it might make you complicit in the worst happening. So yeah, I did actually feel better. And also I found a lot that was funny. I think one of the hardest things talking about this book is telling people that it's not depressing to read. Like it's full of, you know, I just found, I found so many, you know, fascinating stories and personalities and, you know, opportunities for comedy and it's a really rich thing. It's not something that. It's not something that brought me to my knees weeping.
- [53:12]
Jack Wilson
Right. What you're saying about the way that you can respond to this idea, even if you believe that the world is ending, that again reminds me of how we all have to respond to the idea that none of us are going to be here forever. And you can either take that as the opportunity to wear all black and crawl under the covers and not come out, or you can try to live with some optimism and some hope and try to do good things while you have your time on Earth.
- [53:44]
Dorian Linsky
Yeah, that's where I ended up with this quote from Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics. He thought quite a lot about existential risk, what technology does to us. He sort of says it is extraordinary that we have ever existed. That there was a way of thinking that if humanity ends one day, that almost sort of invalidates the whole thing. You get this in long termists like Elon Musk, before he became obsessed with other things, you know, used to be one of those people. It's like, well, humanity must live Forever. Otherwise, what's the point? It doesn't invalidate anything. No more than dying means that you should never have bothered living. And so that's where I ended up with an appreciation. And I can't say that I, since finishing the book, walk around every day just sort of marveling at the miracle of life and never complaining. But it certainly kind of like pushed that idea of appreciation a little further to the front of my brain.
- [54:49]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. Well, let's leave things there. I like that note of hope. Dorian Linsky, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [54:57]
Dorian Linsky
Thank you, man.
- [55:08]
Jack Wilson
Foreign we had a little moment of hope there, but I didn't want to leave you just with that. So let's bring out a man whose gloominess is laced with humor, just as his humor is undergirded by gloom, which is of course the perfect, or let's say my preferred approach to life. Clouds in the coffee, Lennon and McCartney, thunderstorms and rainbows. We need the balloons, we need the ballast. Death needs life and vice versa. So let's hear what this writer, Charlie Baxter, has to say about all of this. After he joined me for the second time on the podcast and we discussed his latest novel, I asked him a special question. Okay. Joining me now is Charles Baxter, author of numerous award winning novels, short story collections, and collections of ess, most recently the book Blood a Comedy. Charlie, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [56:23]
Charlie Baxter
You know, I've thought about this question and the phrase that came to mind, I hope this doesn't seem too strange, is the phrase, I will die laughing. And I thought, you know, there's a character in Moby Dick named Stubb who says, I know not what I may be headed for, but whatever it is, I'll go to it laughing. So I would like to die laughing. And I would like to have a comedy of some kind on my bedside. Something like Flannel Bryan's the Third Policeman or one of Shakespeare's comedies, or really any comedy that lightens my spirits and allows my spirit to levitate.
- [57:30]
Jack Wilson
How hard is it for comedy? Because this moment could I think it will be decades from now. And how hard is comedy to endure? I'm thinking comedy, it seems like it has kind of a shelf life sometimes to me. And do you find yourself laughing at things that you would have found humorous when you were in your Teens and twenties, the way we sort of appreciate pop music that's from that part of our lives. And maybe the comedy gene sort of gets formed at that point as well. Or do you find that new books can make you laugh because everything is more current and fresh? How do you feel about comedy, I guess, and age and history?
- [58:20]
Charlie Baxter
Yeah. Freud thought quite a bit about comedy. And Freud, being Freud, thought that there was always something slightly mean or cruel in comedy, that it's the phenomenon of laughing at somebody. And I think that kind of comedy dates because the object of the scorn passes from the scene. But I think there's another kind of comedy, that there's another kind of laughter. It's joyous laughter, the laughter of delight, kind of the laughter of recognition. And the phrase the human comedy simply means that we can see the ambitions, the failures, the vanities, the habits of other people and laugh in a way that is not mean, but is happy. It's a kind of happy laughter that's a sort of comedy I. I really love.
- [59:38]
Jack Wilson
So a person, maybe a person who really wants something and is hell bent on getting it, but is encountering one obstacle after another that thwarts the person in a humorous way is a kind of timelessness to that.
- [59:58]
Charlie Baxter
I think so. I think so. And, you know, I would almost equally be inclined to have some poetry be my last book that I read, or some wise book, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. But I sort of like the idea of leaving the world with a laugh more than anything else.
- [60:30]
Jack Wilson
And then you arrive at the other side and you are in the right frame of mind. I'm imagining that everybody there is laughing and having a good time, and probably the newcomers are always showing up with dour faces or scared faces, and so you'll be able to fit right in as soon as you get there.
- [60:53]
Charlie Baxter
Yeah. The idea of arriving on the other side and finding that people are laughing, that seems like paradise to me.
- [61:02]
Jack Wilson
That's right. Yeah. Okay. And it's all the, you know, they probably stop hanging out at the depot because they're so depressed by the people showing up who don't know anything and who are, you know.
- [61:18]
Charlie Baxter
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just think of the contrast. Henry James is supposedly his last words. Here it is at last, the distinguished thing, you know. Yes, yes. Death is a distinguished thing. And maybe it's correct to be solemn about it, but, you know, maybe you don't have to be solemn.
- [61:44]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [61:45]
Charlie Baxter
Maybe something else is called for.
- [61:47]
Jack Wilson
Right. And I'm imagining when he passed over to the other side. And everybody there was probably saying like, oh, get a load of smarty pants here. Okay, well, that was an excellent choice. We'll go with something that makes us laugh or we'll head to it with laughter in our hearts and with levitation. Charles Baxter, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [62:17]
Charlie Baxter
Oh, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure for me.
- [62:26]
Jack Wilson
So there we go. That's going to do it for this particular ep. My thanks to Charles Baxter and to Dorian Linsky for joining me. We have some great topics and guests and everything else coming up. What's on our calendar? Let's see. How about Mark Twain and Folk Tales from Iceland. Christopher Isherwood will make an appearance. And the Emily's, Dickinson and Bronte, Amazing Worlds. That's a fun one. And Atrocities. That was surprising. Well, not fun, but compelling, gripping. We've got Jane Austen in the spring, early summer. D.H. lawrence, John Keats, and some other goodies, too. I'm Jack Wilson, doling out the goodies left, right and center. I'm the chief goody doler. Getting older. The getting older goody doler. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. That finale of the Bachelor was ridiculous. Lest we forget, this past season of Love is Blind. I know. At least there's always sex in the city to keep us warm and fuzzy at night. Always watching it back 25 years later has been the best. Why are we so obsessed with watching people fall in love on tv? Every week on our podcast, Two Black Girls, One Rose, we break down your favorite TV shows centering modern dating, love and relationships. Come ready to unpack the mess and have a laugh with us. I'm Justine. And I'm Natasha. See you every week on all podcast platforms. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the news cycle, you are not alone. I'm Emma Varvalukas and along with Progress Network founder Zachary Carabell, I host what Could Go Right, a podcast that looks beyond the headlines to uncover progress happening in the world, even in difficult times. Each week we sit down with experts to discuss today's biggest challenges without ignoring the hard stuff. We bring nuanced insight and a forward looking perspective to help make sense of the current moment. Fight the urge to do your scroll. Tune in to what could Go right instead. Wherever you get your podcasts.