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Earth Abides: a return to origins.

Article Excerpt
Published in 1949, George R. Stewart's Earth Abides tells the story of Ish, one of the few survivors of a nuclear holocaust that has destroyed America and possibly the rest of the world (although the narrative does not make this explicit). It is set in a crumbling San Francisco in the near future, and chronicles Ish's journey as he sets out to discover other survivors and rebuild a community from scratch.

In its reworking of tropes characteristic of the desert island or castaway narrative, the novel may be identified as a kind of science fiction robinsonade; that is, it draws much of its meaningfulness from an intertextual connection with Defoe's foundational novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). And as a concomitant of this literary revision, it builds upon the dominant premises of Defoe's novel in its references to imperial domination, bourgeois individualism and Christian dogmatism.

Earth Abides also draws a mythic etiology from Robinson Crusoe, in the sense that the novel, like Defoe's original, is in many ways a narrative about beginnings, or origins, in which a male protagonist brings the values of western civilization to a chaotic wilderness. In staging the male protagonist as central controlling subject, Earth Abides confirms the endurance of man's presence as the sine qua non of future global security. Such novels depict, in the words of critic Gary Wolfe, "the power of humanity to remain dominant in the universe" by relying upon ideologies grounded in a deeply patriarchal and conservative worldview to contain anarchic forces (19).

Furthermore the novel re-enacts a specifically Christian drama of world destruction and resurrection and in so doing encodes popular fears about the end of the world, and more importantly, what follows it. By staging the narrative at an unspecified post-apocalyptic moment, Stewart dispenses with the conventional constraints of time, allowing him to explore a notion of identity removed from extraneous "modern" concerns and which originates in a mythic "ecology" of paradise on earth. In returning his hero to a primal sphere, the natural world is figured as a "place of self-encounter," where fears about the continuation of human life after disaster may be explored (Gebauer 26, 27). Furthermore, I would suggest that Ish, like Robinson Crusoe, represents a reassuring corrective to this fear by embodying a touchstone of territorial and spiritual mastery cast in a familiar western idiom of adventure and conquest.

Notably Earth Abides also shares with Robinson Crusoe some identifiable features of the quest narrative, which it has embedded in various reassuring formulaic structures. Stewart's fictional exploration of the "end of the world" offsets the contingent and unquantifiable nature of "Armageddon" by deploying some of the following stages of action:

(1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final, decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world. (Wolfe 8)

It is perhaps noteworthy that this movement, mirroring a cyclical process of cataclysm-regeneration-civilization, does not only re-articulate the prodigal son paradigm offered by Robinson Crusoe, but recalls the "movement out to an unknown periphery or movement inward" of the archetypal "heroes in motion" which characterized the genre of the novel from its inception (Wolfe 8). As the mobility of adventure characterizes the early novel (at least the hybrid forms it first took before the mid-eighteenth century), so science fiction and fantasy novels signify a desire to return full circle to "beginnings" as a way of circumnavigating the unpredictable finality of "endings." Earth Abides recreates the Adamic hero that embodies the originary thinking inscribed in American pastoral: the main protagonists "Ish" and "Em" have names that derive from the Hebrew words for "man" and "mother."...

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