Rewriting the Noah Myth: The Waterless Flood

Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy comprises three relatively long and complex novels, published over a span of more than a decade: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and Maddaddam (2014). The basic schema of a rewriting of the Noah myth which again takes in multiple contemporary crises, including climate change, is comparable to that of Rich’s novel, although there are significant differences. Atwood’s trilogy is broader in spatial and temporal scope than Odds Against Tomorrow: the action is set on both the east and west coasts of America, the emphasis on the longue durée identified in the previous chapter with regard to Rich’s novel is greater, and a higher number of characters is deployed. The flood in Atwood’s trilogy is universal rather than local, and in its wake things do not go back to how they were before, as is the case when the waters subside at the end of Rich’s novel, making it possible for Jane to set up a company along the lines of the one she worked in previously.

To give a brief synopsis for the purposes of this chapter—one which is necessarily selective and schematic given the considerable combined length of these three novels—Oryx and Crake opens on a post-catastrophe scene in which Jimmy believes himself to be the “last man” left on Earth. Anthropocene Anxiety no longer has any meaning, since wholesale destruction appears to have taken place. It emerges that a pandemic, which is dubbed in the second and third volumes The Waterless Flood, has occurred, and most human life has been wiped out. While in Odds Against Tomorrow, a pandemic is just one among the panoply of future dangers referenced by Mitchell (Odds, 25–26), in Atwood’s trilogy the pandemic is the central event, towards which the past builds, and away from which the future stretches.

The first volume introduces the reader to a dual temporality that will continue through all three volumes: the narrative alternates between present and past, between pre-and post-disaster.

Introduction

The first paragraph of Paul Kingsnorth’s historical novel The Wake immediately confronts the reader with its rather specific language. It is obviously written in a curious sort of English; it contains many forms commonly found in modern standards, but there are also several spellings and grammatical constructions that give it a rather unusual character. These occurrences can be linked to the setting of the novel: it takes place in England during the years 1066–8 and is intended to reflect some of the linguistic features that were used in late Old English. Roberto Calas, another writer of historical fiction, has commented on the risks involved with having the language conform to the medieval setting of a historical novel:

Seemingly less interested in ‘clarity’, Kingsnorth went to greater lengths to add ‘flavor’ to his historical novel and created a ‘pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language [Old English] by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today’. He termed the result ‘shadow tongue’ and even provided both an outline of its principal linguistic features in his ‘note on language’ and a ‘partial glossary’ to assist the reader. His ultimate aim was to ‘convey […] through the words of the characters, the sheer alienness of Old England […] a place at once alien and familiar’.

Introduction

The new religion of Islam emerged during the course of the First Plague Pandemic. Also referred to as the Justinianic Plague after the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (r. 527–65), in whose reign the plague pandemic is traditionally assumed to have begun (541), the origins of this significant disease episode are being studied anew. Historians, chief amongst them Lawrence Conrad, have examined the impact of this first pandemic on the burgeoning Islamic polity in Western Asia and North Africa, as well as on Islamic religious thought over the subsequent centuries. Although plague was discussed often in literary works throughout the Abbasid period (750–1258), scholars have generally concurred with Conrad’s judgement that the end of the First Pandemic coincided with the Abbasid dynasty’s rise in 750.

Historians also have generally believed that the Second Pandemic, whose first wave is known as the Black Death, began in the 1330s in Central Asia, arrived in Eastern Mediterranean societies in the late 1340s and lasted until the eighteenth century in Western Europe (and the nineteenth century in Islamic Mediterranean societies). However, as Monica Green has argued, recent genomic studies of the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis using archaeological DNA samples (primarily from Europe, but also Kyrgyzstan and Russia) have allowed historians to revisit historical literary sources and to expand both the geography and chronology of past plague pandemics.

This chapter builds upon Green’s invitation to revisit our historical sources in light of the new genomic evidence, much as Ann Carmichael and Robert Hymes have done for Italian and Chinese sources, respectively. I focus here on Arabic medical works from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, particularly the medical commentary corpus. Sustained, at times detailed, discussions of plague in the commentaries and other medical works suggest the distinct possibility that Islamic societies in Western Eurasia continued to witness plague outbreaks well into the tenth century. Yet their derivative writing suggests that physicians from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran did not have much direct experience with the disease. Medical commentaries composed after the 1240s, however, demonstrate significant changes in how plague was characterised, suggesting that by this era some Islamic physicians working in these regions were encountering or learning about plague outbreaks during their lifetimes.

This book began by putting forward one deceptively simple question: how is contemporary Ecuadorian literature reimagining the Ecuadorian nation? I stress that this is a deceptively simple thing to ask because, while it is widely acknowledged that Latin American writing has played a historical role in imagining and reimagining what Latin American nations are or are to be, the concept of the nation has been highly questioned in the last decades. I refer to the nation not only as a cultural construct but as an organising principle for literature as well. In this light, one could argue in favour of the straightforwardness of asking how contemporary Ecuadorian writers are reimagining the nation that their predecessors and other Latin American letrados had built through narration before. Nonetheless, that question is problematised by the context from which it emerges. That is, a global scenario where thinking of nations seems to be less relevant than before. Globalisation renders national frontiers seemingly irrelevant, especially when considering that not only can books easily travel physically throughout the globe, but they can also be instantly available through the Internet. Similarly, writers rarely limit themselves to one particular territory. International circulation and translation, for instance, have opened up room for focusing on globality and World Literature, rather than placing the locus of analysis on the old-fashioned nation.

Yet the nation is hardly gone. In the late 2010s, when the research for this book was being carried out, nationalist movements in the UK, the US, Europe and Latin America either coming to power or to the forefront of national politics put in serious doubts arguments for a globalised world where nations and national limits had little if any relevance at all. Some sociologists, who have made the case to term these movements ‘neo-nationalists’, argue that their popularity in Western Europe is fuelled by voters who seek – in the old-fashioned idea of the nation – economic, social, and cultural protection from the forces of globalisation. This book dialogues with such a context of disbelief in the dismissal of the nation. However, it does so by recognising that, while the nation continues to be critically important for understanding today’s world, it needs to be thought of by factoring in the nuances of the present.

This chapter discusses the establishment of the Association of Rhodesian and Nyasaland Industries (ARNI) in 1957 as an organisation that could speak for industrialists throughout the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It details the politics of the ARNI, especially the demands and aspirations of Southern Rhodesian industrialists as they interacted with territorial and federal governments as well as their Northern Rhodesian and Nyasaland counterparts vis-à-vis other economic interest groups. The formation of the ARNI happened in a fast-changing economic and political space in British Central Africa. The Federation suffered an economic recession from late 1956 following a fall in the price of copper, the linchpin of the federal economy, on the global market. From 1957, African nationalism in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland grew, resulting in frequent protests and states of emergency. In 1962, general elections in Southern Rhodesia brought in a new right-wing government under the Rhodesian Front. This political and economic situation resulted in the dissolution of the Federation in 1963, paving the way to the independence of Zambia and Malawi in 1964, while Southern Rhodesia continued under a White minority government that proclaimed a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain in 1965. The following pages give an overview of how the ARNI manoeuvred itself in this changing economic situation and during decolonisation. It further assesses how the dissolution of the Federation reconfigured trading relations among three territories and the implications of this on industrial development.

The discussion begins with the transition from the Federation of Rhodesian Industries (FRI), the predecessor to the ARNI. The second section analyses the existing economic and policy environment and the ARNI’s perspectives and responses on these. The next part discusses the road towards decolonisation and how the ARNI positioned itself under the circumstances. Lastly, the chapter examines the structure of secondary industry and its position in the economy. Broadly, the chapter maintains that industrialists managed with minimal state support. Other economic interest groups, in particular commerce, remained somewhat unsupportive of industrial development.

From the FRI to ARNI

The ARNI, established in 1957, succeeded the FRI, which until then had represented only the interests of industrialists in Southern Rhodesia. During the final congress of the FRI on 18 July 1957, Sir Malcolm Barrow, the Minister of Home Affairs (and former Minister of Commerce and Industry), urged industrialists to expand their membership to reflect the geopolitics of the Federation.

Scholarly discussion of the Middle Ages in historical fiction has frequently been framed in terms of the ways in which authors draw upon or make use of medieval texts to inform their writing, or else has tended to focus on the historical authenticity (or lack thereof) of given works. Indeed there is a widespread popular and critical fascination with what Jerome de Groot calls the ‘historicalness’ of historical fiction: that is to say, its relationship to history and the extent to which it depicts the past in a historically faithful manner. Novelists themselves have often encouraged these lines of investigation by stressing their commitments and feelings of responsibility in this respect, and regularly make claims regarding the historical accuracy of their work (consistency with events and chronology) and its authenticity (sensitivity towards the texture of life in their chosen period). When considering how the Middle Ages are depicted in historical fiction, however, it is important to keep in mind the wider narrative strategies, approaches and objectives into which the treatment of medieval texts and history is enfolded. Critical discussion of these strategies, approaches and objectives is urgently needed, as de Groot points out: ‘It is uncommon still for scholarship to look seriously at the ways in which historical fictions might work […] research into historical fiction has been bedevilled by an overriding concern about the historicalness of such work’ (italics in the original). As we shall see, the visions of the Middle Ages – in this case specifically eleventh-century England – that are constructed by historical novelists frequently approach and render the period in ways that owe little to contemporary source material, and indeed are not much concerned with history in the formal, academic sense of that word.

In this chapter, I bring a practice-based perspective to the study of historical fiction set in eleventh-century England, examining the various strategies by which novelists construct what I call ‘pastness’. Whereas de Groot’s term ‘historicalness’ refers to how a text embodies, represents or otherwise makes use of history, pastness can be defined as the feeling of the past generated by a work of fiction: a feeling that is characterised by the meaning(s) attributed to that past, and by the emotional and psychological effects that it exerts.

Sculpture is not a medium generally associated with early Franciscan art. Joanna Cannon has shown how the Dominicans used sculpted imagery on their founder’s tomb as part of a strategy to promote his cult in the second half of the thirteenth century. The Friars Minor, on the other hand, spread the visual image of their founder almost exclusively through frescoes and panel paintings; and some of the earliest sculpted representations of Saint Francis are not in Franciscan churches but on cathedral facades in France and Spain, among the elect in Last Judgement scenes. Any reader of Franciscan texts, though, must be struck by their vivid and frequent use of sculptural imagery to portray the founder of the Order and his most distinctive attributes, the stigmata. Saint Francis’s body was imagined as having been melted and imprinted like wax, moulded like clay, hammered like metal or chiselled like stone. Saint Francis is described by his most important thirteenth-century biographer, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, as coming down from the mountain of La Verna, after his transformative vision of the Christ-Seraph, ‘bearing with him the likeness of the Crucified, depicted not on tablets of stone or on panels of wood carved by hand, but engraved on parts of his flesh by the finger of the living God’. In his final years ‘he was squared like a stone to be fitted into the construction of the heavenly Jerusalem, and like a work of malleable metal he was brought to perfection by the hammer of many tribulations’. These are metaphors, to be sure, drawing on a longstanding tradition of comparing saints to ‘living statues’, and freighted with biblical allusions intended to reveal the eschatological significance of Saint Francis’s life. But it was central to the Order’s purpose that they should be understood not just as figures of speech but as describing a corporeal reality. Francis had been physically changed on La Verna: the side wound and the nails had quite literally been carved and modelled in his flesh to transform him into an image of the crucified Christ.

Medieval artistic images most commonly used today to depict the Black Death are not, in fact, illustrations of plague. Rather, they are contemporary images of other diseases or of biblical analogues. This misidentification raises several questions, including why so few contemporary images exist with recognisable clinical symptoms of plague and when clinically relevant images first appeared. Initial answers to those questions – that artists focused more on the social chaos of disease than its symptoms and only in the later fifteenth century – now needs adjustment. We may have been looking in the wrong place for medical images of plague.

Medical and art historians are giving renewed attention to and asking new questions about the presence and function of diagrams in medieval and early modern medical man-uscripts and printed books. In the 1960–70s, Loren C. MacKinney and Robert Herrlinger interpreted these diagrams as straightforward medical illustrations, but recent work has taken a more nuanced approach that considers them within a broader interdisciplinary context of the production and use of health and healing information. Surviving sketches of surgical tools and procedures, urine wheels and flasks, Zodiac, Bloodletting and Wound Men, medicinal plants and therapies and medical practitioners at work are now being considered in a wider context that not only cuts across socio-economic, professional and intellectual strata, but also dismantles cultural, linguistic, geographical and medieval–early modern divides. This broader perspective lets diagrams ‘speak’ about the practical side of medicine. Some surviving medieval medical manuscript images also show people suffering from disease. A treatise in London, British Library (hereafter BL), Sloane MS 2276, for example, provides short textual descriptions of several disorders – including leprosy, gout, podagra and alopecia – accompanied by marginal sketches of people afflicted by these conditions. An even more fully illustrated example is an early fifteenth-century copy of John of Ard-erne’s De Arte Phisicali et de Cirurgia preserved in Stockholm, National Library, X118; here one finds images of people afflicted with a wide range of illnesses, including leprosy, falling sickness, consumption and dysentery.

Images of plague signs and symptoms, plague therapies and plague patients, by contrast, are notably absent from medical manuscripts before the fifteenth century and remain rare in both manuscript and print thereafter.

A longside a deep understanding of iconography, Joanna Cannon’s work has always privileged the close examination of objects with repeated attention to their original design, intended function, and subsequent use. The painted panel depicting Christ, Mary, and Joseph, signed by the Sienese painter Simone Martini in 1342 and now held in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Plate XVI) has proven an enigma that repays such repeated examination. Owing to the inscription FILII QUI[D] FECISTI N[OBIS SIC] finely painted on the Virgin’s open book, the biblical scene that the panel represents is one of its few certainties. Simone has visualised the following exchange of speech recorded in Luke’s Gospel between the twelve-year-old Christ and his parents in the Temple after he has been missing for three days:

This fixes the narrative of the painting between the commonly depicted episode of Christ Disputing with the Doctors, and the lesser-represented Return of the Holy Family to Nazareth. What is remarkable about Simone’s painting is the manner in which he has dramatised the first recorded speech of Jesus Christ, not shying away from how he sternly rebuked his earthly parents. Simone’s depiction of a wholly unhappy Holy Family, arguably unique in the history of Christian art, suggests that it was an exceptional, bespoke commission for a particular client. This paper will synthesise the many theories that have been made about the textual sources and patronage of the Liverpool panel with an as-yet unremarked visual quirk in the painting. What will be interpreted as an intentional manipulation of the viewer’s gaze will be aligned with the playful approach to perception and cognition that characterised the more sophisticated examples of Trecento painting, confirming Simone’s enduring capacity for innovation in his artistic output.