ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Post-Apocalyptic Themes and Postmodernism in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

The postmodern narrative strategies of The Stone Gods are fragmentary and non-linear, using such devices to present a nuanced commentary on cyclical human self-destruction on Orbus, a dying planet on its last days, and two other apocalyptic realms: the defunct Easter Island civilization and post-nuclear Tech City. The novel uses both narrative lines running simultaneously to show how different human civilizations share similar dynamics concerning/propped up by identical mechanisms of environmental degradation, resource exploitation, and societal breakdown. The postmodern narrative devices: temporal dislocation, metacommentary, and repeated characters serve to confront not merely specific narrative readers but civilization generally with aspects of what is termed The Fractured Reality Of The Anthropocene. The introduction of Spike, a synthetic cyborg with authentic human emotion and consciousness, serves to deconstruct humanist notions of consciousness and intersubjectivity, extending such notions to other beings. The novel transcends postmodern irony and nihilism to embrace what critics call Metamoderism, fluctuating seperately between apocalyptic urgency and knowledge about cyclical human failure. This dual characterization is literally embodied in both disjunct narrative confusion and passionate prosaic expression a combination rejecting simplistic solutions to these apocalypses while nevertheless upholding intersentence functions concerning love, connection, and meaning-acting both on a mere rational level and embodied on more intuitive substructural senses associated amaze particularly secured on latter. Using ecocriticism and queer theory, The Stone Gods places the fate of both environment and human civilization exemplarily within and simultaneously outside overarching narratives about Capitalist patriarchies and/or Heteronormativities. The final project is to offer to such a civilizationally threatened scenario one on which there is established this asymptotic constructively pessimistic vision ported toward necessarily coupling probability estimates concerning civilization’s cyclical constructive self-destruction with necessary engagement therewith on both love and knowledge fronts within our contemporary normalized called The Anthropocene Epoch.