An End in Itself: Genre, Apocalypse and the Archive in Deon Meyer’s Fever

Abstract

What are the affordances of reading apocalyptic fiction under apocalyptic conditions, when a realism without apocalypse hardly seems realistic at all? What does it mean that our attempts to imagine a future beyond capitalism seem tethered to such an apocalyptic event, and what might these attempts tell us about the present – and the past – from which they emerge? While apocalyptic fiction contends to imagine a world beyond capitalism, I argue that it is more effective at exposing the apocalyptic nature of our present. I tether my analysis to a novel as prototypical of the genre as it is exceptional: Fever by the South African crime novelist Deon Meyer. I explore this protean text through a variety of generic frames – as fictional memoir, as Bildungsroman, and as multi-genre hybrid – to consider what the post-apocalyptic genre is and can be. Ultimately, I propose that, by rerouting our readings of post-apocalyptic and other speculative fictions towards what they reveal of our present cultural logics, this literature and our readings of it hold the capacity to escape the confines of anticipatory mourning towards the politically urgent task of recognizing and reckoning with the world of late capitalism and the affective trap of capitalist realism.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• apocalypse
• archive
• Bildungsroman
• capitalism
• climate change
• disease
• genre
• memoir
• realism

Notes

1 While Fever is, for its bulk, quite meticulous in making clear the material status of its additional narrative perspectives, as the text goes on the ‘Amanzi History Project’ tags sometimes do not appear before these passages, though they are still italicized. I am unable to fully explain the ontological status of these passages within the novel’s universe, a puzzling conundrum that Fever forces us to consider (yet which we of course encounter, without anxiety, in the ‘immaterial’ narrations of free indirect discourse in countless other novels). The inconsistency of Meyer’s practice perhaps unwittingly betrays the unwieldiness of the attempt to stave off the archival anxiety of post-apocalyptic fiction under the supposedly stable and contained genre of ‘memoir’.