So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Adams, 1984) is the title of the fourth volume of Douglas Adams’s series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams, 1979). It is also the message left by the dolphins when they depart Earth just before it is demolished to make way for a hyper-spatial by-pass. Whether treated in comedic or tragic terms, in fiction or poetry, film or art, (and the refusal to treat it seriously might be what in the future would make the possibility more likely to become a reality), the end of the world as a theme, if a pun may be permitted, is here to stay. The promise of eternity has always been elusive, but also, in equal measure, both desirable and abhorrent. We fear death, but also eternal (or even unusually long) life, even when the latter is pleasant or at least overall satisfactory, as in John Wyndham’s The Trouble with Lichen (Wyndham, [1960] 1982), Julian Barnes’s History of the World in 10½ Chapters (Barnes, 1990) or Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993). In these and many other examples, the fear of eternal repetition (on-going life, even on-going perfection) is at least as potent as the fear of an ending (death, whether individual or global). And this ultimately may be what, in our culture’s narratives, lies at the heart of the atavistic ontological hope but also dread that, after the world ends, everything will begin again much as it was before. It may all end in tears (floods of tears), but it soon dries up again. Much as it was before. Or not?

Figure 23. John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath

Figure 24. Michaelangelo Buonarroti, The Flood (right panel view)

At the end of Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (Findley, 1987), a re-telling of the story of the Flood in Genesis, God/Yaweh is dead. And not just dead but defiled, his body devoured by flies. In his place remains Yaweh’s best friend, Noah (Dr. Noyes), a cruel patriarch guilty of infanticide, eugenicide, humanitarian abuse, animal cruelty and incest, who rules tyrannically over his wife, their three sons and their sons’ wives, one of whom, Hannah, he has impregnated, and upon whom he has begotten a throwback, an ape-child who is immediately put to death. Not a good beginning to a New Beginning. In ‘The Second Coming’ Yeats warns of just that:

In Genesis, a querulous God predicts that, in view of humanity’s fundamental flaws, after the Flood the new world will almost certainly be just as bad as the one that was wiped out before, ‘for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’ (Genesis 8:21). If humanity as a whole suffers from a factory defect, it is perhaps unsurprising that in Findley, even if not in the original text, the manufacturer should go out of business:

In Findley, as the rains stop, the narrative concludes with a new race that is already schismatic: on one side Noah and his eldest and youngest sons (Shem ‘the Ox,’ with all the characteristics and limitations that the nickname suggests; and Japeth, corrupted by violence and himself now a killer). On the other side Mrs. Noyes, Japeth’s child-bride Emma, Ham, the middle son, whose scientific curiosity about the world alienates him from his father, and Ham’s enigmatic wife Lucy, who is in fact Lucifer, the Fallen Angel of Morning in woman’s form: a ‘rogue angel […] smiling, soft spoken and beautiful’ (Findley, 1987: 59) and as troublingly appealing as Milton’s Satan.

Somewhere between the two family factions, but testimony by her very existence to Noah’s crimes, is Hannah, whose child, the first one born in the Ark and begotten by Noah upon his own son’s wife, is an ape, and therefore a throwback to an evolutionary descent unrecognized by a future Mosaic law which its incestuous father/grandfather seeks to anticipate (in doing so arguably usurping God’s law-making monopoly, and therefore self-destructively weakening the very authority upon which he anchors his own).

The ape-child drowned in a symbolic purge (which however is also a pre-Christian baptism that returns it to a primeval soup/womb thus signposted as humanity’s real point of origin), is in fact the second such freak born to Noah. It therefore stands as the tell-tale evidence of the latter’s biological (simian) descent, which is necessarily traceable to himself, since the two children were born to different mothers. Both children are murdered at birth, bereft motherhood thus bonding Hannah to Mrs. Noyes, the mothers of Noah’s ape-children. In the early stages of the Flood Mrs. Noyes had rescued another ape-child (Lotte, Emma’s sibling) and brought her to the Ark, only to see her throat cut by Japeth at Noah’s orders, because she was not on Yaweh’s list of those to be saved.

In The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman’s outraged Block doubts the existence of both God and Satan in a world where a child finds no protection, and is sacrificed as a burnt offering against the plague (Bergman, 1957). In Findley’s novel, too, Hannah and Mrs. Noyes reject the rule of both Yaweh and Noah: ‘There is no God worthy of this child. And so I will give her back to the world where she belongs.’ (Findley, 1987: 170)

Back in his days in Heaven, Lucifer, now Lucy, like Julian Barnes’s forlorn recipient of eternal bliss, had dreamed of the possibility of something different:

Now, as the rains stop and the flood waters begin to subside, Mrs. Noyes goes one step further than Lucy/Lucifer. Looking down to where there used to be ‘the world that had been destroyed by Dr. Noyes (with some help from his illustrious Friend)’ (Findley, 1987: 352), she lays down what is in effect a profane, manifesto of nihilistic non-repetition, noncontinuity, ongoing cataclysm promising an absolute ending:

God is dead and for Mrs. Noyes, finally privy to forbidden gnosis, and dreaming of no worlds at all, it is none too soon.

Under the auspices of Lucifer, Mrs. Noyes, mother of a new beginning/ending, squares the circle and chooses an infinity which precludes all that is not nothing.