“WHERE YOU ARE: MIGRATION, NARRATION, AND THE SHAPE OF APOCALYPSE”
MATTHEW HART, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
“Where You Are” asks and answers a literary-historical question: Why are so many recent post-apocalyptic novels set in archipelagic landscapes? The long version of this argument, which forms a chapter of my forthcoming book, Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction, considers more than ten examples. This paper relies instead on a single case-study: an analysis of setting, narrative voice, and point-of-view in Asian American author Chang-rae Lee’s novel, On Such a Full Sea (2014). Contemporary novelists such as Lee have responded to the increasingly extraterritorial nature of twenty-first-century political geography by accenting and magnifying a quality inherent in many forms of romance narrative: a tendency to divide the story-world into the city and the wilderness, with characters journeying between one kind of redoubt and another. In Lee’s hands, this basic narrative geography shapes a collective narrative voice that’s at once diffuse and certain, comprehensive and unsystematic. Lee’s unusual post-apocalyptic style shows how the extraterritorial spatial logic of the outside within functions as a terrific engine for mediating speculative fiction’s basic oscillation between fantastic and everyday events.
