If art in general is a formalizing process that grants the raw violence
of life some moralizing structure, then certain modes of narrative would
seem to intensify what Fredric Jameson (writing after Adorno) has sum-
marized as the ideological transformation of existential horror into social
symbolization. Science fiction, for example, codes otherness as such into
the delimited and opposed figure of the alien or invader ( Jameson 2005,
141). (...) . In so doing narrative parses into a
temporal project—an overcoming of adversity—what could not be confronted as such: our subjection to life.
The novelistic imagination tends to personalize, or even render familial, the symbolizing order that had once—in epic or tragic modes—required a confrontation with forces that required more than ‘life management.’
If one examines cultural production today the manifest content that seems at first to confront radically threatening forces is ultimately returned to the genres of family drama and romance, as though even the end of human existence could be Oedipalized. That is, there is an efflorescence of disaster and post- apocalyptic narrative, but always with a narrative resolution that restores a basic human binary (such as the romance ending that allows humanity to triumph in The Adjustment Bureau [2011] or the victory of New Age humanoids over corporate and military greed in Avatar [2009].)
Even a story as bleak as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (especially in its cinematic adaptation of 2009), devolves around a father-son relation: the man and boy wander a landscape while struggling for survival against remaining humans; the journey concludes with a sense of the possible renewal of the family-maternal bond as the son is taken in by a potential new family (192).
The novelistic imagination tends to personalize, or even render familial, the symbolizing order that had once—in epic or tragic modes—required a confrontation with forces that required more than ‘life management.’
If one examines cultural production today the manifest content that seems at first to confront radically threatening forces is ultimately returned to the genres of family drama and romance, as though even the end of human existence could be Oedipalized. That is, there is an efflorescence of disaster and post- apocalyptic narrative, but always with a narrative resolution that restores a basic human binary (such as the romance ending that allows humanity to triumph in The Adjustment Bureau [2011] or the victory of New Age humanoids over corporate and military greed in Avatar [2009].)
Even a story as bleak as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (especially in its cinematic adaptation of 2009), devolves around a father-son relation: the man and boy wander a landscape while struggling for survival against remaining humans; the journey concludes with a sense of the possible renewal of the family-maternal bond as the son is taken in by a potential new family (192).
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