Abstract
One of the main functions of post-apocalyptic narratives is, arguably, to offer writers a compelling and convenient setting in which to discuss and enact alternative forms of society, often based on various existing ideologies, religions, or other systems of belief.Historically, these kinds of narratives have often been considered a typically British genre, and one of the most important writers in this tradition after the Second World War is John Wyndham (pen name for John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, 1903–1969), whose breakthrough novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) is one of the most widely read post-apocalyptic novels in the English language. It has been kept in print continually since the 1950s, and has been adapted numerous times (into radio dramas, television series, graphic novels, and a film).This chapter examines both the ways in which The Day of the Triffids demonstrates how post-apocalyptic narratives can be used to discuss alternative ways of organising a society and how the novel can be seen as addressing the contemporary predicament of post-war Britain, undergoing both decolonisation and rapid social change. Following the depiction of its infamous double disaster, most of the novel is in fact spent exploring various ideologies and their eventual shortcomings in a world which has experienced major changes. Moreover, John Wyndham is not often thought of as a particularly radical writer, and most of his writing after the Second World War was aimed mainly at the British middle class. A comparison, however, of the novel as published in the UK in 1951 with its oldest extant manuscript reveals some remarkable differences, ultimately highlighting the ideological content of The Day of the Triffids.
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Notes
- 1.
A new film adaptation has, as of 2017, been reputed to be under way for a number of years, despite the fact that a new TV adaptation aired on the BBC as late as in 2009. On the 1963 adaptation, directed by Steve Sekely, see Sawyer 1999.
- 2.
One of the few exceptions from recent years is Claire P. Curtis’s Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (2010), which discusses a handful of post-apocalyptic novels in relation to the thinking of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls.
- 3.
The wording “uncertain stone” is probably a reference to the fact that the original magnesian limestone was badly quarried, soon showed signs of deterioration, and was later replaced by Clipsham stone (from the late 1930s onwards). In the oldest extant, mainly holograph manuscript to the novel the passage reads: “That pretentious confection in uncertain stone, of which one part or another had seemed always to be in remedial scaffolding, could now decay in peace.” (Wyndham 1/3/1: 172)
- 4.
The phrase was slightly more subversive in the holograph manuscript, with the wording “good intentions, bad intentions and sad expediences”. (Wyndham 1/3/1: 172)
- 5.
These scenes can be compared with the disbelief in public institutions expressed in Wyndham’s short story ”Confidence Trick” (published in the July–August issue of Fantastic in 1953, and reprinted in Jizzle [1954]), where Hell itself is shown to be a phoney institution, which crumbles upon the strong disbelief of one of the characters – but it is also implied that the Bank of England would topple faced with the same kind of scepticism (no doubt a comment on the frail British economy in the years following WWII). It is also interesting that the traditionalist Mr Forkett, who puts blind faith in authorities, mentions that “The Roman Empire was real enough once – as long as people believed in it” (Wyndham 1954: 133; cf. Sawyer 2010).
- 6.
Cf. Webster 1975: 57: “Civilised man, Wyndham is saying, is so smugly confident in his scientific humanism that he is failing [to] examine the precarious foundations on which his civilisation stands.”
- 7.
Cf. Manlove 1991: 47f, where Manlove tries, rather unsuccessfully, to make sense of the fact that the opening scenes of the novel are set in a hospital.
- 8.
- 9.
The neo-feudalism of the Brighton militia is reminiscent of the repressive slave society on Venus in Wyndham’s “No Place Like Earth” (1951b), published in the same year as Triffids. The ruling caste has even built a seraglio behind palisades, and plan a pre-emptive strike on a Slav colony (Wyndham 1951b: 82ff).
- 10.
It is also intriguing that both TV adaptations are from times of political change, the first (from 1981) when Margaret Thatcher had recently become Prime Minister, and the second (from 2009) as Tony Blair had stepped down.
- 11.
Much of the little writing there is on Wyndham seems almost to obsess about the alleged middle-class perspectives of his novels. As Rowland Wymer was early in pointing out, however, “the conventional British middle-class values and attitudes of Wyndham’s characters do not, in themselves, constitute his worldview. It is the challenge to these attitudes with which he is concerned.” (Wymer 1992: 26) Furthermore, the claim that the survivors in his stories are, as Jo Walton puts it, almost always “nice middle-class white men” (Walton 2005: 36; cf. Manlove 1991: 41), doesn’t really hold. As Phil Gochenour has observed, two of the main characters in Triffids, Coker and Josella, are actually minor anomalies within the British class system, both having left their class behind (Gochenour 2011: 15ff).
- 12.
At the risk of stretching it too far, even the name Ivan Simpson could be interpreted as an ideological compromise between Russian socialism and Anglophone democracy.
- 13.
One of the novels was Plan for Chaos, published by Liverpool University Press in 2009, and by Penguin in 2010.
- 14.
The whole deletion, including careful notation of deletions and additions, is going to be published as an appendix in David Ketterer’s forthcoming biography.
- 15.
A related critique is also to be found in one of the few stories Wyndham wrote during WWII, “The Living Lies” (1946), which deals with apartheid on Venus and has an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-racist agenda – in the future depicted, Earth has even experienced what seems suspiciously close to a socialist revolution (Beynon 1946: 5, 11). In fact, “The Living Lies” is probably one of Wyndham’s most subversive stories, which might explain why it has never been reprinted in any collection.
- 16.
This reading does, however, give the last, Churchillian paragraph of the novel an ominous aspect.
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Acknowledgment
The research in this essay stems from a brief postdoc at the School of English, University of Liverpool, in 2010/2011, sponsored by a generous scholarship from The Wenner-Gren Foundations. I am very grateful to Professor David Seed, Mr Andy Sawyer, and Professor David Ketterer for their warm hospitality during our stay.
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Määttä, J. (2017). The Politics of Post-Apocalypse: Ideologies on Trial in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids . In: Baron, C., Halvorsen, P., Cornea, C. (eds) Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56577-4_13
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