The story of Revelation is a defining feature of the present. In parallel, narrative itself is in decline, or even obsolete, according to many thinkers. Mittelweg 36 It explores the paradox of why end-of-the-world stories have become so popular when the story itself appears to be coming to an end.
The perceived narrative crisis is tied to a broader diagnosis of late modernity, write the issue’s editors. Shared historical perspectives and collaborative projects have dissolved into fragmented information flows, and contemporary culture has shown a conservative preference for “reproducing familiar patterns.” The result is that there is no grand narrative that can generate consensus, and “small, meaningless stories are omnipresent.”
At the same time, apocalyptic thinking is permeating society. Climate collapse, the erosion of democracy, the acceleration of technology, and war are increasingly interpreted in terms of irreversible collapse. Apocalypse functions not as a religious motif but as a cultural construct for organizing uncertainty. “Apocalypse narratives avoid certain problematic aspects of storytelling, such as teleological orientation, false claims to realism, and assumptions of causality.”
Today’s series of crises are woven into a narrative that seeks to make sense of disruption by imagining an endpoint. Even the claim that society has entered a “post-narrative” era relies on narratives of decline and exhaustion. The end of the story itself becomes another story about the end, a recursive structure in which the story survives by narrating its own extinction.
blank space in the story
A German think tank recently claimed that narratives can help “reduce complexity, guide current and forward-looking strategy, foster cooperation, and increase predictability.” But when politicians in Congress bring up a story, whether it’s a “pro-Russian or anti-Semitic story” or a “green change story,” they rarely provide any information about its content.
This inflationary use of the term is problematic, argues literary scholar Niels Werber. If in the traditional concept of narrative, meaning emerges from the order of events, modern “stories” are like placeholders for meaning intended to evoke an emotional response.
Werber contrasts enduring narratives, which provide “purpose, stability, and direction,” with the temporary logic of platform capitalism, where “storytelling is selling stories.” The demands of the attention economy create narrative voids filled with ephemeral snippets designed to stimulate consumption.
The result of this hollowing out of the narrative is the rise of an “unpredictable, discontinuous, unforeseeable” form of politics characterized by chaos and instability. Social movements flare up like ignorant swarms in response to “short-term, powerful stimuli” and fizzle out before they can make a lasting impact. In our atomized, algorithmic society, current events are reduced to a kind of Brownian motion. It can be modeled statistically, but it cannot be explained sociologically.
zombie novel
If fictional monsters are “metaphors that express the underlying fears and anxieties of a culture,” what kind of fear do zombies, popular monsters of the 21st century, express?
Literary scholar Elana Gomel suggests that these undead hordes, with no agency or voice, represent a fear of “the way language becomes divorced from meaning in the age of mass media and the internet.” Unlike vampires or aliens, zombies are fundamentally repetitive and “anti-narrative.” Zombie novels depict relentless waves of attack, “a potentially endless chain of conflicts, with each new episode repeating the basic pattern rather than serving as a step toward closure.”
This structure transforms the traditional apocalyptic narrative inherited from the Book of Revelation, moving from catastrophe to rebirth through the revelation of hidden knowledge. Zombie novels suspend this process indefinitely, replacing revelation and salvation with an endless continuation. “Rather than another apocalyptic story, the zombie invasion is the end of the story.”
For Gomer, the zombie virus is a metaphor for language itself, endlessly replicating, disconnected from intent, and spreading like digital information. “Because zombies exist in a vacuum, they can function as a stand-in for the loss of referentiality in discourse.” After all, zombie fiction reflects a culture dominated by digital media, where stories no longer reveal stable truths or provide meaningful endings, but instead endlessly circulate, reproduce, and consume themselves.
Teleology and porosity
Observed by Robert Musil man without qualifications “It would be an eerie world if events simply disappeared without final confirmation that they actually happened.” Historian Achim Landwehr argues that this all-too-human desire for a clean ending shapes dominant historical narratives structured by teleological assumptions. “The end is the beginning of a historical story” because the beginning can only be recognized retrospectively.
From Hegel and Marx to Spengler and Fukuyama, modern historiography conversely imagines history as a progression toward some final solution. Anthropocene discourse reproduces this logic, presenting the climate crisis as an apocalyptic endpoint and the culmination of modern faith in progress. However, it is precisely these ‘collective singular, unilinear, causal, teleological’ forms of historical telling that have contributed to the creation of the Anthropocene itself.
At the same time, the Anthropocene destabilizes such narratives. Because ecological crises unfold over vast and overlapping time scales that resist linear storytelling. To revisit this issue, Landwehr turns to the idea of ”porosity” developed by a German intellectual living in Naples during the hyperinflationary crisis of the 1920s. In their writings, Naples appeared porous, as the boundaries between public and private, old and new were constantly fused.
For Landwehr, porosity is a model for “a mode of thinking that is antisystematic and open to interpretative connections.” Rather than treating eras as sealed, linear entities, historians should recognize that temporalities overlap and persist within each other. He therefore advocates a more descriptive “fuzzy historiography” that focuses on surface-level complexity and open-endedness rather than coherence and closure.
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
