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Apocalyptic thought is hardly unique to the end of the twentieth century; it’s been a fixture of American culture for decades. Currently, the media are rife with omens and signs, and we’re bombarded with warnings that “the end is near.” But as James Berger argues here, the end never comes. There is always something left.
In this study of the cultural pursuit of the end and what follows, Berger contends that every apocalyptic depiction leaves something behind, some mixture of paradise and wasteland. Combining literary, psychoanalytic, and historical methods, Berger mines these depictions for their weight and influence on current culture. He applies wide-ranging evidence—from science fiction to Holocaust literature, from Thomas Pynchon to talk shows, from American politics to the fiction of Toni Morrison—to reveal how representations of apocalyptic endings are indelibly marked by catastrophic histories.
These post-apocalyptic visions reveal as much about our perception of the past as they do about conceptions of the future. Berger examines the role of such historical crises as slavery, the Holocaust, and the Vietnam War and describes how these traumas continue to generate cultural symptoms. The shadow of impending apocalypse darkens today’s vision of the future, but it’s a familiar shadow: traumas we have already experienced as a culture are recycled into visions of new endings. Our “endings” are already after the end.
Berger demonstrates that post-apocalyptic representations are both symptoms and therapies. Contemporary culture continually draws on these traumatic histories, trying to forget, remember, deny, and recover. After the End puts these visions in context, revealing them in some cases as dangerous evasions, in others as crucial tools for cultural survival. “A unique thriller of ideas. Berger's lucid, cogent, and eruditely demonstrated arguments often startled me and mesmerized me—I couldn't put the book down until the end, and after the end I walked away with a sensation of having had my mind expanded and edified. I predict that After the End will become a classic text not only in literature but also in theology and cultural studies.” Josip Novakovich, author of Salvation and Other Disasters, associate professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Cincinnnati
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Berger uses the idea of apocalypse in order to explore representations of both the imagined end of the world (as found in St. John's Revelation, for example, or the Terminator movies) as well as events which traumatize on a comparable mass scale (the Holocaust, for example). Among the films and texts he analyzes are "Eve's Tattoo," by Emily Prager; _The White Hotel_, by D.M. Thomas, _Beloved_, by Toni Morrison, and the oddly futuristic film _Until the End of the World_. I suppose if one were to define "apocalypse" more narrowly, one might be disappointed by this theoretical approach. I found it illuminating, however. (He writes at some length in the book's first chapter about Americans' longstanding pop-cultural fascination with films like Mad Max and Independence Day, begging a re-examination of why we are drawn so intensely to moments of mass destruction.)
Finally, I didn't find the book especially "jargony," just complex. (Then again, I'm a Ph.D. student in rhetoric, so perhaps Berger's professional vocabulary as an English professor is closer to mine than the other reviewer's.) I've actually cited _After the End_ numerous times in my own work, both published and for class. If you're got a serious academic interest in media, trauma theory, or late twentieth-century American culture, this book definitely belongs on your "to read" list.
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