Sixth lecture for my students in English 165EW, "Life After the End of the World," winter 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/w13/

1. Lecture 6: “My vegetable love should grow/
Vaster than empires”*
English 165EW
Winter 2013
28 January 2013
“[A]round 1910 a certain space was shattered, […] [the]
space of common sense, of knowledge [savoir], of social
practice, of political power […] enshrined in everyday
discourse, just as in abstract thought.”
—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
*Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” (1678), ll. 10-11

2. “The atomic bomb thrust the United States into a
totally new age, one full of promise and peril. Atomic
energy dramatically altered the way the government
operated, the military fought, the economy
functioned, and ordinary people felt. Reacting to this
new reality, people responded with new ways of
living. They searched for ways to understand and
live in the Atomic Age and in so doing created a new
culture.” (Hunner 33)
“The Cold War conception of nuclear reality
represented an attempt to think about the
unthinkable, to conceptualize an unintelligible event
and rationalize a world that seemed to be irrational,
by reducing the apparently unimaginable
experience of nuclear war to a set of routines.” (45)

3. “Faced for the first time with an atomic
explosion, some witnesses had to culturally
code switch to understand the event. When Dr.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian director of
the laboratory at Los Alamos, experienced the
first atomic detonation at Trinity in July 1945, he
thought Hindu scripture from the Baghavad-
Gita: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds.’” (34)
“As early as August 12. 1945, journalist Edward
R. Murrow said on his radio program, ‘Seldom if
ever has a war ended leaving the victors with
such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such
a realization that the future is obscure and that
survival is not assured.’” (38)

4. Practicality and “realism”
“One might collect a small party and keep it alive
somehow for an uncertain length of time—but who was to
be taken and who left? No objectively right course
presented itself however I tried to look at it.” (Wyndham
49; ch. 4)
Bill: “Our likes and dislikes as decisive factors have pretty
well disappeared.” (85; ch. 6)
Bill: “And an obstinate refusal to face facts isn’t going to
bring anything back, or help us at all. I think we’ll have to
try to see ourselves not as the robbers of all this but more
as—well, the unwilling heirs to it.” (66; ch. 5)
Dr. Vorless: “The laws we knew have been abolished by
circumstances. It now falls to us to make laws suitable to
the conditions.” (101; ch. 7)

5. Social (re-)organization
Michael Beadley: “Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are
going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out
at once, for it is builders that we must become.” (95; ch. 7)
The Tynsham clergyman: “Let us all beseech Him that we
may survive the trials and tribulations that lie ahead in order
that in His time and with His aid we may succeed in playing
our part in the rebuilding of a better world to His greater
glory.” (140; ch. 10)
Coker: “I’ve watched one lot fall to bits, and I can see this
one’s going to do the same—more slowly and, maybe, more
nastily. It’s queer, isn’t it? Decent intentions seem to be the
most dangerous things around just now.” (149; ch. 11)
Ivan: “We aren’t out to reconstruct—we want to build
something new and better.” (215; ch. 16)

6. The re-production of knowledge
Coker: “in spite of all that’s happened this thing hasn’t got
home to these people yet. They don’t want to turn to—
that’d be making it too final.” (150; ch. 11)
Coker: “Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to
learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to
learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we
are on now is a road that will take us back and back until
we can—if we can—make good all that we wear out.” (165;
ch. 12)
“[F]arming […] is not the kind of thing that is easily learned
from books. For one thing, it has never occurred to any
writer on the subject that any potential farmer could be
starting from absolute zero.” (191; ch. 15)

7. The (social) production of space
“in an environment reverting to savagery it
seemed that one must be prepared to behave
more or less as a savage, or possibly cease to
behave at all, before long.” (127; ch. 9)
“Before I went into the Russell Square garden I
looked it over carefully. I had already begun to
become suspicious of open spaces.” (129; ch. 9)
Miss Durant: “This is a clean, decent community
with standards—Christian standards—and we
intend to uphold them. We have no place here
for people of loose views.” (141; ch. 10)

8. “There were signposts which pointed to ‘Exeter & The
West,’ and other places, as if they still pursued their
habitual lives.” (159; ch. 12)
“As a rule they showed little wish to join up with other
parties and were inclined rather to lay hands on what
they could, building themselves into refuges as
comfortably as possible while they waited for the arrival
or the Americans.” (163; ch. 12)
Josella: “the world’s gone, and we’re left.” (188; ch. 14)
Ivan: “They [triffids] make a dark border round any
inhabited place.” (212; ch. 16)
Torrance: “But the state of society which gave sanction
to his [Dennis’s] ownership no longer exists. Titles to
property have therefore ceased to be valid.” (220; ch.
17)

9. Balance and precarity
“It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most
persistent and comforting hallucinations that ‘it can’t
happen here’ – that one’s own little time and place is
beyond cataclysms.” (70; ch. 5)
Alf: “Cor, blimy, oo’d ever’ve thought it could ’appen
like this!” (109; ch. 8)
Elspeth Cary: “I’ve been in places where they
[triffids] are out of hand. Quite nasty. But in England
—well, it’s hard to imagine that here.” (92; ch. 6)
Michael Beadley: “From August 6, 1945, the margin
of survival has narrowed appallingly.” (95; ch. 7)

10. “Growing things seemed, indeed, to press out
everywhere, rooting in the crevices between the paving
stones, springing from cracks in concrete, finding
lodgments even in the seats of the abandoned cars. On
all sides they were encroaching to repossess themselves
of the arid spaces that man had created.” (192; ch. 15)
Bill: “I don’t think we can blame anyone too much for
the triffids. The extracts they give were very valuable in
the circumstances, Nobody can ever see what a major
discovery is going to lead to—whether it is a new kind of
engine or a triffid—and we coped with them all right in
normal conditions. We benefited quite a lot from them, as
long as the conditions were to their disadvantage.”
Josella: “Well, it wasn’t our fault the conditions
changed. It was—just one of those things. Like
earthquakes or hurricanes—what an insurance company
would call an act of God.” (204; ch. 15)

11. The Triffids
“I saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused
in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had
somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our
careless greed, had cultured all over the world. One could
not even blame nature for them. Somehow they had been
bred—just as we had bred for ourselves beautiful flowers
or grotesque parodies of dogs. … I began to loathe them
them now on account of more than their carrion-eating
habits—for they, more than anything else, seemed able to
profit and flourish on our disaster. …” (160; ch. 12)
Dennis: “I tell you, there’s more to them than we think.
How did they know? They started to break loose the
moment there was no one to stop them.” (196; ch. 15)

12. What’s a life worth?
Bill: “I got around to feeling that if the treatment [for the
triffid sting] had not been successful I’d rather end the
whole thing than go on that way.” (8; ch. 1)
“‘It’s going to be a very queer sort of world—
what’s left of it. I don’t think we’re going to like it a
lot,’ she [Josella] said reflectively.
“It seemed to me an odd view to take—rather as if
one should protest that one did not like the idea of
dying or being born.” (93; ch. 6)
Coker: “God almighty, aren’t you people human?” (83;
ch. 6)

13. “She did not reply for some seconds. Then she
said unsteadily:
“‘Life is very precious—even like this.’ Her
control almost cracked.” (124; ch. 9)
“Let it [Parliament] shower its crumbling pinnacles
onto the terrace as it would—there would be no
more indignant members complaining of the risk to
their valuable lives.” (128; ch. 9)
Josella: “If I were a child now, […] I think I should
want a reason for what happened. Unless I was
given it—that is, if I were allowed to think that I had
been born into a world which had been quite
pointlessly destroyed—I should find living quite
pointless too.” (203; ch. 15)