Apocalypse Then and Now

Abstract

In this chapter I want to examine the beginnings of an oceanic imaginary that I see overlapping and intersecting with the development of the Information Age. I propose to consider how the transfer of information and knowledge formerly via the ocean is increasingly achieved via technological means in the Digital Age. Thinking of the oceanic imaginary in digital terms suggests fresh possibilities as well as new limits for transatlantic encounters and their resulting subjectivities. Through William Golding’s 1954 Lord of the Flies and Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 The Road, this chapter revisits the pivotal role that the ocean, and now the oceanic, played and continues to play in conceiving the shape and design of cultural and literary interactions across virtual or real distances. Joseph Roach offers the notion of a circum-Atlantic that retains “the memory of a movement … redolent of violence and fatality, but also of agency and decision” (33). For Roach, this is where the consequences of genocidal histories endure and evolve by virtue of a memory-based diaspora of lived impressions. In this chapter I want to take further Roach’s idea. My claim is that oceanic encounters in literature from the 1950s and the early twenty-first century show how, even though all history tells the history of its area, the Digital Age has changed the nature of area itself. Peoples who once encountered each other via the ocean are, since the Information Age, discovering a coastless area of interaction, because the ocean is no longer constituted by boundaries that can be crossed, transgressed, or violated one way or another. Today, my argument goes, there is no transatlantic or even circum-Atlantic. In what I call throughout this book a “post-Atlantic” world, all narratives of encounter, exploitation, or oppression can be cited by anyone, owned by anyone, and, importantly, can touch and move anyone.