(Neo)liberalism and the Banal Apocalypse

Abstract

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) parenthetically enclose a number of conversations regarding the history of the apocalyptic novel. Shelley’s text, widely read as her second-best literary effort (next to her 1818 novel, Frankenstein), launches the genre and establishes many of its recognizable tropes. McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel restages these tropes in the most recognizable contemporary inquiry into the crisis of lastness. Upon comparing these texts, readers will note stark contrasts. Most visibly, Shelley’s prose tends to be verbose while McCarthy remains notably laconic. McCarthy writes in a time and place where technology plays a crucial role, a role that would have been impossible to predict in 1826. The parameters of neoliberalism—with its clear departure from classical liberalism—would have been foreign to the author of The Last Man. Nonetheless, Shelley’s text shows tremendous prescience (perhaps explaining a recent revival of interest in this novel). By comparing these two works, we can draw a picture that depicts the Janus face of a liberal tradition: the individual without bounds (encyclopedic) and the individual that omits everything but his own self-interest (minimalist). Both sides terminate at the same place: “Our mind embraces infinity … Thus, losing our identity, that of which we are chiefly conscious, we glory in the continuity of our species, and learn to regard death without terror” (Shelley, 184). This chapter focuses upon how the two novels, in similar ways, contemplate the central paradox of (neo)liberalism.