Flowers of Time by Payne Mark;

Author:Payne, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Is it better to arrest the glissade or let it run its course? Alas, Babylon comes down firmly on one side of this question and Earth Abides just as firmly on the other. David Brin’s The Postman (1985) revisits the issue via a minor interaction in Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon. Faced with the collapse of the national banking system, the manager of the Fort Repose bank is pleased to note the arrival of the local mail carrier and quotes to him the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service: “Neither rain nor snow nor dark of night …”71 To which the mail carrier responds: “This is my last delivery.”72 Not all that much is at stake in this interaction for Frank. The mail carrier is eager to get back to his family, the bank manager is a coward whose identity depends on minor forms of amour-propre, and the mail system, like the banking system, is down and out. Their encounter is a minor incident in the return of the past, but from this minor incident Brin develops an insightful counternarrative of the performative basis of civilization’s social bond.

In The Postman, a postapocalyptic traveler makes his living as a wandering player, journeying from settlement to settlement, where he performs what he can remember of Shakespeare and other highlights of the vanished civilization. While on his travels, he is set upon by highwaymen and flees into the woods, where he finds an abandoned Post Office jeep, with its mail carrier dead inside it. The mail carrier died in the performance of his duties against all odds. He, and those whose letters he bore, “tried this hard to keep the light alive.”73 The actor takes his clothes and boots because his own have been stolen, but he soon comes to enact the figure of the postman for the communities he visits, instantiating for them the possibility that through collective belief they might bring the lost America back into being.

What stands in the way of the success of this collective performance is the return of previous forms of historical life that block out the belief that imaginative possibilities can have direct social outcomes. Scarcity has led to crop-indebtedness and sharecropping. Further stages of glissade are in evidence too as barbarian survivalists beyond the stockades of the remaining micropolities raid the settlements for women, food, and slaves. The return to subsistence lends an aura of inevitability, not just to what people do all day, but to the relationship between occupation and mentation. When mere existence is so precarious, speculation seems not merely a pointless distraction but counterindicated as a survival strategy. As in After London, the glissade is not merely technological but entails general societal resignation to what passes for fate. The form of life that prevails is the form of life that must be.

And yet the predicament in which people find themselves is in fact a direct consequence of partisan deployment of the historical record. At the heart of the calamitous social

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