Counter-apocalyptic, counter-sex: 9/11 as event and The Year of the Flood

This chapter makes the claim that September 11, 2001, is a date that marks an event, and that there is something eternal about events: events take place within time but disclose a potentiality that transforms all of time.1 Events are sexual insofar as they necessarily transform the structures that have bound the human individual into its oedipal mode. Margaret Atwood’s fiction is a good starting point for thinking about the possibility of women’s writing, and the novel, after 9/11: Atwood’s fiction has always been concerned with the formation of man as a political animal whose relation to other men proceeds via the traffic in women, and, yet, after 9/11, her direct engagement with post-apocalyptic writing thematizes the sexual delirium surrounding the very figure of apocalypse. Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2010) is a counter-post-apocalyptic novel.2 It is symptomatic that, just as man senses his demise, at the end of a history in which he has treated the earth and woman as so much material for his own end, that he continues to insist that he is not yet already postapocalyptic, and that the end has not already arrived and passed without too much changing at all.