A Comparative Study: Jean Baudrillard’s Notion of The End of History and Meaning in Two

Apocalyptic Novels:John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids

and Saramago’s Blindness

Apocalyptic Novels 

Apocalyptic novels are concerned with the end of the world and civilization. The idea of ending goes back to thousands of years ago but it is still popular. Concerning the nature of the catastrophe the post apocalyptic novels are categorized under 14 titles. (There are about 14 ways by which the novels represent the demise of the world). I have chosen John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and Saramago’s Blindness to compare since both are post-apocalyptic novels and considering the subject in both of them the people go blind due to a catastrophe. The catastrophe in Blindness is pandemic and also has unknown reason and the catastrophe in The Day of the Triffids is resulted from an astronomic impact.Writers like James Berger, Lois Zamora, Richard Dellamora, Valerie Zimbaro have books on the Apocalyptic Literature to which I will refer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction#Novels_6

John Wyndham (1903 –1969) is a pen name used for John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris who is an English post-apocalyptic novelist. His style is to write about the catastrophes like in the The Day of the Triffids. His works have a theme of taking the rational society in which we are living now and to introduce extraordinary factors and to analyze our reaction to these situations. In his novels he wants to say that catastrophes do not just happen to "other people" and he shows that it is difficult for our civilization to deal with the catastrophes.

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids

He has about 10 novels published during his life and many other novels and collections that were published after his death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/thedayofthetiffidshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/john_wyndham

http://triffids.wuthering-heights.co.uk

Plot Summary of The Day of the Triffids:

The Day of the Triffids tells the story of an earth where some giant plants that eat meat and are called Triffids are raised to use as a fuel source be. They are kept in farms and are under the control. Then one day there is a strange shower of lights from the sky that causes all who see it blind.

Only one person can see and that person is a Triffid expert who is attacked by a Triffid and sent to hospital for an eye operation so he doesn’t see the strange lights from the sky. When nobody can see the Triffids escape from the farms and began to eat people. In the end some people try to form a colony and to try to survive humanity.

http://jameseagle.wordpress.com/http://jameseagle.wordpress.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind

Jose Saramago (1922 –2010) is a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Saramago's novels usually deal with fantastic scenarios.

He uses imaginative themes to talk about important matters related to the human condition in the contemporary life. He represents characters who try to connect with one another and want to bond a community and also talks about their needs for individuality. His works are considered under the category of magic realism as well. He has about 29 works and he wrote his last novel in 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jose_saramago

http://myfoxla.com

Jose Saramago’s Blindness

http://gerhardstein.blogspot.com

Plot Summary of the Blindness:

It is a post-apocalyptic novel in which a city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness”. So the people begin to go blind without any reason. The government gathers the blind people in an asylum. Among the blind people only one woman who has the ability to see. They are there until the whole city becomes blind. A group of blind people with the help of that woman manage to go out of the asylum. She witnesses the how human beings behave harsh and brutal. At the end of the novel suddenly their visions come back as secretly as it has gone previously.

http://www.shvoong.com/books/novel-novella/1810158-essay-blindness/

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Approach

The purpose of my Thesis is to use Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “the end of history and meaning” and compare The Day of the Triffids to Blindness.

Jean Baudrillard (1929 –2007) is a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His works are usually related to postmodernism and post-structuralism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jean_Baudrillardhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#1

According to Jame Jam Online, Dr. Moradkhani who had a lecture on” The End of History” has stated that the roots of the idea of the end of the world go back to Hegel in 19th century but nowadays especially before and after the beginning of the new millennium this notion has become controversial.

Dr. Moradkhani quoting Baudrillard says that because of the recent huge progress in media and technology we have taken distance from history and everything has change into a hyper real and in other scene the history has come to an end. Baudrillard, very much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, believes that that history had ended or "vanished" but this end is because of the historical progress.

http://www.jamejamonline.ir/newstext.aspx?newsnum=100890043113http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jean_Baudrillard

Baudrillard has many books and lectures on this idea:

The Illusion of the End is a meditation on the theme of history and the human fate which is bound up with it.

The Vital Illusion that argues real is not only dead, it has vanished completely.

The Fatal Strategies discusses that the apocalypse has happened and so he talks about “Fatal Strategies” by which we may be able to protect what he calls “our fatal selves”.

hhtp://www.sup.org/books.cgi?id=2026http://www.amazon.com/Vital-Illusion-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/0231121008http://rickroderick.org/308-baudrillard-fatal-strategies-1993/

Hanieh Mehr Motlagh

Karaj Islamic Azad University

April 2011