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The essay film after fact and fiction.

Nora M. Alter

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: January 2018

ISBN: 9780231178211

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For many years, Nora Alter has been our most brilliant advocate of the essay film as an open genre that floats between documentary, fiction, and the art film. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is the first comprehensive survey of this difficult and experimental genre in both its historical context and variable aesthetic manifestations. The depth and complexity of Alter’s account of the essay film’s critical force and aesthetic innovations will not soon be surpassed. D. N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago

This magisterial study marks a milestone in scholarship on the most intellectually expansive and unpredictable film genre of the last half-century. Global in scope, Alter’s book displays the essay film's astonishing richness of forms and functions from its beginnings in the 1920s to contemporary art installations. Both a reliable history and a sharp-eyed investigation, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is indispensable for anyone interested in the past and future of nonfiction cinema. Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is unfailingly lucid, balanced, and informed. Alter provides generous and illuminating analyses of specific films, filmmakers, and decisive shifts in the arts and media history. Her book is a definitive guide to the multiple modes of production and global contexts of a vital tradition that continues to enrich contemporary culture and nurture critical thought. Edward Dimendberg, University of California, Irvine

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction deepens the reader’s understanding of the history, aesthetics, and politics of its subject. Josh Guilford, Film Quarterly

This book is invaluable for its scope and depth; the sheer number of films and filmmakers considered makes it an indispensable resource. Choice

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The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction

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Nora M. Alter reveals the essay film to be a hybrid genre that fuses the categories of feature, art, and documentary film. Like its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches; in the process, it fundamentally alters the shape of cinema. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction locates the genre’s origins in early silent cinema and follows its transformation with the advent of sound, its legitimation in the postwar period, and its multifaceted development at the turn of the millennium. In addition to exploring the broader history of the essay film, Alter addresses the innovative ways contemporary artists such as Martha Rosler, Isaac Julien, Harun Farocki, John Akomfrah, and Hito Steyerl have taken up the essay film in their work.

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9780231178204

Film and Culture Series

Nora M. Alter

Columbia University Press

02 January 2018

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Nora M. Alter, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction . Rick Warner, Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks

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Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss, Nora M. Alter, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction . Rick Warner, Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks , Screen , Volume 60, Issue 4, Winter 2019, Pages 634–637, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjz045

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‘Essay film’ is a notoriously slippery term that denotes both subjectivity and non-fiction, both experimental filmmaking techniques and critique of form. Several outstanding twenty-first-century monographs have already carefully categorized the genre of ‘essay films’ while acknowledging the permeability and self-critique of any category that would pose to contain them. It is no wonder that both Nora M. Alter’s and Rick Warner’s new books largely set aside the question of category in order to focus on the far more permeable forms that essay films have taken most recently.

Alter has already contributed much to this established question of ‘essay film’ definition. In fact the introduction to her latest book, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction , feels like an addendum to her introduction to Essays on the Essay Film , a 2017 anthology in which she and Timothy Corrigan laid out a history of the literary essay as hybrid writing and compared it to the essay film’s hybridity of form and argumentative style. Her new book spends little time historicizing the connection of essay films to literary essays. Here the essay film has moved beyond its ‘essay’ tether and has taken on roots in its own medium. In place of extensive comparisons to literature and political philosophy, Alter emphasizes elements of the essay film that are unique to film: the collision of audio and visual information, collective art-making, and new digital options for production and distribution. Whereas some earlier analyses relied on Michel de Montaigne, György Lukacs and Theodor Adorno to legitimize the essay film, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction finds forebears in Dada, Impressionist and city-symphony filmmakers and theorists. Thus the book rests on a history of avant-garde filmmaking, creating film-specificity in the argument that essay film interrogates form and makes filmmakers out of all artists.

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

What is fact and fiction in Netflix’s Prince Andrew film Scoop?

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Netflix ’s latest original film Scoop stars Billie Piper and Gillian Anderson and covers the story of how the BBC secured that infamous Prince Andrew interview.

Set in the run-up to that November night in 2019, Piper stars as Sam McAlister, the Newsnight producer who spent a year behind the scenes, working tirelessly to get the Duke of York in front of Emily Maitlis.

The film is available on Netflix from April 5, 2024 , with its controversial subject matter expected to make it one of Netflix’s most popular April releases in the UK.

While it’s based on McAlister’s memoir, titled Scoops: Behind the Scenes, artistic license has obviously been taken, while some scenes seem almost too good, or too convenient, to be true.

So, what’s the truth behind some of Scoop’s biggest moments?

Did Prince Andrew’s PR expert quit on the spot?

A scene takes place in Scoop during which Prince Andrew’s public relations expert Jason Stein finds out that the Prince’s private secretary, Amanda Thrisk, is planning on organising an interview for the Prince with Newsnight.

Angered and shocked, Stein quits on the spot, shouting ‘I’m out!’, having planned to organise much softer, friendlier interviews in order to improve the Prince’s public image.

In real life, however, Stein’s resignation was apparently a little more tactful. He’d been hired just weeks before the interview and resigned in Prince Andrew’s office ‘by mutual consent’ after hearing it was to take place.

Does Emily Maitlis own a dog called Moody?

In Scoop, it’s shown that Emily Maitlis owns a whippet called Moody, who accompanies her while she’s jogging and even comes to the BBC Newsnight studios before the interview with Prince Andrew.

If you can believe it, Maitlis does in fact own a whippet whose name is Moody, and she has been known to bring him to work. A BBC insider has revealed that Maitlis loves the dog dearly and that Moody is known around BBC offices.

Maitlis gave her dog the nickname ‘Moods’ and is a regular star of her Instagram page.

Did Sam McAlister really call Prince Andrew ‘Randy Andy’?

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Yes, Sam McAlister really did call Prince Andrew ‘Randy Andy’ in front of his face. In a tell-all interview on Good Morning Britain, she said that the lines delivered by Billie Piper actually took place.

She revealed: ‘There’s a scene in the negotiations where we’re in front of Prince Andrew, Princess Beatrice, and his private secretary Amanda Thirsk. And I, to his face, called him “Randy Andy” and that did happen.’

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Does Prince Andrew have an obsession with teddy bears?

You read that correctly. In Scoop, it’s shown that Prince Andrew still had a sizeable collection teddy bears and stuffed toys. In one scene, he scolds an assistant after she puts one of them back in the wrong place on his bed.

In 2022, it was reported by The Sun that the Prince had a collection of 72 teddies and plushies, and that it took a whole day for staff to be trained on where they needed placing to keep Prince Andrew happy.

Charlotte Briggs, a maid who worked for the Royal Family in the 1990s, told the paper: ‘As soon as I got the job, I was told about the teddies and it was drilled into me how he wanted them. I even had a day’s training. Everything had to be just right. It was so peculiar.’

Was Prince Andrew actually friends with Jimmy Savile?

In the Netflix drama, Prince Andrew is speaking with Emily Maitlis off-camera when he says: ‘I don’t know why everyone’s so upset about my friendship with Jeffrey Epstein – I knew Jimmy Savile so much better.’

However, it’s not known whether the Prince and the late disgraced TV presenter knew each other. The Prince did help out on an episode of Savile’s series Jim’ll Fix It, when an eight-year-old girl visited the HMS Cottesmore.

That episode of Jim’ll Fix It was filmed all the way back in 1994, and was among the final episodes produced for the show which finished later that same year.

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MORE : Prince Andrew breaks cover with horse ride on day of Scoop release

MORE : Scoop’s unexpected take on Prince Andrew’s Newsnight disaster sees Rufus Sewell triumph

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Scoop fact vs fiction: Prince Andrew's teddies, Queen's hair comb and more

How much truth is in the film.

Netflix’ s new movie  Scoop has been a fascinating insight into what went into landing the now-infamous interview with Prince Andrew, which ultimately led to the suspension of the Duke's royal duties. But how much of the film, which includes a disclaimer that “certain elements have been fictionalised for dramatic purposes,” is true? Here’s the ultimate fact vs fiction guide for watching the show…

Jae Donnelly snapped the photos of Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew in Central Park

The movie opened with photojournalist Jae Donnelly, played by Connor Swindells, going to some lengths (and getting very out of breath) to take the now-infamous shots of Prince Andrew taking a walk in Central Park with Jeffrey Epstein. Jae, who is still a photojournalist, did indeed take the snap which confirmed once and for all that the pair knew one another, and that Andrew had seen the convicted sex offender after he had spent 13 months in prison on child sex charges. 

Jae was in contact with Sam McAlister

While in the movie, Jae is the one to help tip off Sam about the breaking news that Epstein had been arrested, leading her to be the first person at Andrew’s personal aide Amanda Thirsk’s door , there is no evidence to suggest that this actually happened in real life. 

Andrew’s people reached out to Newsnight first

Andrew’s team did initially reach out to Newsnight about a potential interview. However they were hoping that they would strictly discuss questions about Pitch@Palace, and the BBC show turned them down, telling them that they would need to be able to ask questions about Andrew’s relationship with Epstein. 

As Sam McAlister wrote in a piece for Radio Times: “It started, innocently enough, with an email in my inbox from a PR inviting us to do a ‘puff piece’ […]  We declined that offer. We don’t do those at Newsnight. And then, a few months later, came an invitation to the Palace to meet Amanda… But there was a red line – no questions about Jeffrey Epstein. And so, even though at that stage (May 2019) it wasn’t the huge story that it became, we declined again. No interview.” It wasn’t until Epstein was arrested that Andrew’s team finally relented in allowing the interview to go ahead. 

The palace budgets extra for teaspoons

Unverified 

In a comment to Sam in the movie, Amanda jokes that the Palace has an extra budget for teaspoons, as guests tend to steal them as a memento that they have been there. She says: “They just seem to go. It’s seen as a good thing. It means everybody wants a part of us… The day we don’t need to budget for extra teaspoons…” 

Although this sounds perfectly plausible, there isn’t any official word on the teaspoon budget situation at the Palace. Be warned though, if you ever step foot in the building, chances are the staff know what you’re planning to take home with you! 

Prince Andrew has a vast teddy bear collection

In the film, Andrew loses his patience with a member of the house staff (incidentally played by Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton ) over how she has arranged the teddy bears on his bed. If former testimonies are anything to go by, this is completely true.

Former royal protection officer Paul Page worked at Buckingham Palace from 1998 to 2004 and spoke about his love of teddy bears in the ITV documentary Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Paedophile back in 2022. He said: “There was a card in a drawer and it was a picture of these bears all in situ. The reason for the laminated picture was if those bears weren't put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream."

The Queen combed Prince Andrew’s hair before he left for boarding school 

In the movie, Andrew reflects on his mother, telling his aide: “The morning I went away to boarding school… Mummy combed my hair. It was one of those tortoiseshell combs. Remember those? I can feel it now, scraping across my head. It hurt, but I… But I didn’t want it to stop.” 

While it’s certainly possible that the late Queen did have a hands-on approach to caring for her second youngest son, it appears that this particular recollection of Prince Andrew’s was invented for the film. 

Andrew’s publicist quit over the planned interview

PR guru Jason Stein did walk away from his role on Prince Andrew’s team after advising him not to speak on Newsnight, but it wasn’t quite as dramatic as the movie depicts. According to The Times, the decision to leave was “by mutual consent”.

Princess Beatrice joined Andrew to meet the Newsnight team

In the movie, Andrew brings along his daughter, Princess Beatrice, who is seen making notes at their meeting with the Newsnight team. According to Sam, this is completely true, as she told Tatler: “A meeting at the Palace on Monday 11 November (with Andrew, Emily, the deputy editor and a surprise guest, Princess Beatrice). A ‘yes’ finally came on Tuesday. A date was set for Thursday. A panic of preparation ensued.”

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Emily also spoke about the awkward moment in the 2023 documentary, Andrew: The Problem Prince. She said: “[Princess Beatrice’s presence] was really quite a curve ball of curve balls. Can you imagine being in Buckingham Palace about to talk to a member of the royal family about sexual offences? That’s pretty tricky. And now I’ve got to do it in front of his daughter.” 

Andrew also knew Jimmy Savile

True (to an extent) 

Prince Andrew had had dealings with Jimmy Savile in the past, namely featuring on Jim’ll Fix It in 1994 after hosting one of the contestants on the HMS Cottesmore. However, despite that, it appears that they had very few dealings, and that the line “I don’t know why everyone’s so upset about my friendship with Epstein – I knew Jimmy Savile so much better,” was written more as a joke, and perhaps to convey Andrew’s lack of understanding at the severity of the situation. 

Andrew commented ‘Trousers !’ in regards to Emily Maitlis’ outfit

Sam McAlister told the press that she didn’t hear him make such a comment before the interview. However, Emily’s outfit was given plenty of consideration before the chat. Sam explained: “Like many women in journalism, every element of Emily’s appearance is pored over on social media.

“It was definitely important we felt, sadly, that she wore something very conservative so we didn’t have an onslaught of criticism about her attire being inappropriate given the seriousness of the interview and the content. [That line] is the spirit of the situation.”

Jeffrey Epstein went to Beatrice’s 18th birthday party

Yes, as mentioned in the show, Jeffrey Epstein did go to Beatrice’s Victorian-themed 18th birthday party and was photographed alongside Ghislaine Maxwell and Harvey Weinstein. Yikes. 

The late Queen trusted Andrew’s judgement on the Newsnight interview

It is thought that the late Queen ultimately allowed the interview to go ahead, but the reason behind this isn’t known - while in the movie Andrew claims it is because she trusts his judgement. In reality, Emily previously revealed that Her Majesty realised that the interview would be a problem before Andrew did. 

Speaking in the Andrew: The Problem Prince, Emily explained: “It was only on the Saturday when the Queen had reportedly read the whole transcript that he received a tap on the shoulder by his security detail. And they said, I think, ‘Sir, you might have to come with us’. It was after the Queen had seen what the interview contained that I think it dawned on her before it dawned on him.” 

Andrew thought that the interview went well 

Prince Andrew was reportedly delighted by the interview, as was his team at the time. In her book, Sam wrote: “I could barely believe his people hadn’t stopped the interview. I would have, despite the consequences. ‘How did you think it went?’ I asked the equerry. She beamed. ‘Wasn’t he wonderful!’ she said. 

“I’d expected Amanda Thirsk to be distraught, the Prince to look shaken or concerned, but she was smiling, and he seemed ebullient. And then it hit me: he thought it had gone well. He was in such a good mood that he offered us all a tour of the palace.” 

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Imprinted by Belief

Does It Seem Like the End Times Are Here? These Novels Know Better.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward.

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By Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s most recent novel, “The Unsettled,” was published in September.

• April 11, 2024

On the day my mother died, I sat by her bedside and read the Psalms. The room was quiet — the need for machines had passed — save for the sound of my voice and my mother’s labored breathing. Outside her room, the hospital went about its business: Lunch trays were delivered, nurses conferred, a television played too loudly down the corridor. Out there, time passed in its usual, unremarkable way. In her room, my mother and I had stepped off time’s familiar track.

Everything inessential vanished in her final hours. I read the Psalms because they comforted her. I told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand, which, in that afternoon when she was no longer able to speak, was as profound an expression of love as any words had ever been. When she died hours later, I knew that on the other side of her hospital room door there awaited, at least for me, an altered world.

The subject of this essay is apocalypse, and so I have begun with an ending. If you have lost a deeply beloved, then you have experienced the obliterating finality of death, that catastrophe in the small universe of an individual life. The loss also brings a realization: The “worst thing” that could happen is no longer a future projection; it has exploded into the present.

Apocalypse is generally understood as a future event: widespread suffering, extinctions, various iterations of end-time destruction gunning for us from some tomorrow. Out there, in the vast, unknowable not-yet, apocalypse roars. It paralyzes us with fear, deadens us into numbness or provokes us to hysteria. We are powerless in its face.

But what if we could change our relationship with the end by shifting our perspective on it? The first step might be dwelling more profoundly in the here and now where our crises amass, rather than focusing on the boogeyman future. We already know something about how to do this: We are creatures of loss; we have confronted, or will confront, the “worst things” in the real time of our lives. There is a precedent, then, for how, in this moment, we might collectively approach the apocalyptic worst things. While our beloved still lives, there is possibility: We can give her our attention; we can hold her hand.

I won’t downplay the current horrors — tens of thousands dead in Gaza, conflict in Ukraine, the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon — or imply that all will turn out right. The novels in this essay don’t do that either. Instead, they suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire. The theologian Catherine Keller calls this “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “A cloud of roiling possibility seems to reveal itself,” she writes in “Facing Apocalypse” (2021). “It guarantees no happy ending. It may, however, enhance the uncertain chance of better outcomes.”

Many of our end-time notions are inflected by the biblical Book of Revelation. Its phantasmagoric visions and lurid scenes of destruction have thoroughly infiltrated Western talk of the end: the Four Horsemen, the beast we call the Antichrist (though Revelation doesn’t use the term), fires, plagues and raging pestilence. It may come as a surprise, then, that apokalypsis, the Greek word for “revelation,” means not “ending” but “unveiling.” As Keller writes, “It means not closure but dis-closure — that is, opening. A chance to open our eyes?” But, to what?

In Ling Ma’s novel “ Severance ” (2018), newly pregnant Candace Chen wanders a near-deserted New York City in the midst of a pandemic caused by a disease called Shen Fever. The majority of the city’s residents have fled or become “fevered,” a zombielike state that leaves victims stuck on repeat: a family endlessly setting the table and saying grace; a saleswoman, her jaw half eaten by decay, folding and refolding polo shirts at an abandoned Juicy Couture store on Fifth Avenue. The fevered are the least threatening zombies imaginable: so busy with their mindless performance of mundane tasks that they don’t notice the living. Ma has a knack for nuanced satire.

Candace sticks around because she’s got nowhere else to go; she’s the orphaned child of Chinese immigrants who died years before. Inexplicably, and perhaps somewhat to her dismay, she remains virus-free. As the pandemic shuts down the city, she doggedly persists with her job in the Bibles department at Spectra, a book production company: “I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless,” she says. When public transportation stops entirely, she moves into her office on the 32nd floor, overlooking an empty Times Square.

It doesn’t take long to understand that a vast grief underlies Candace’s workaholic paralysis. So intense is her mourning for her parents that for a while the pandemic hardly registers. She needs to hold on to something, even pointless work at Spectra. The office setting is no coincidence: In some sense, Candace, too, is fevered, and her job’s rote repetition is a kind of anesthetic.

The dull but familiar grind of late-capitalist working life acts as a numbing agent, or perhaps a blindfold. When work dries up because the rest of the world is no longer at its desk, Candace rambles around the city utterly alone, taking pictures of derelict buildings that she posts on a blog she calls “NY Ghost.” One afternoon she enters a flooded subway station. “You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage,” Ma writes. “The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.” Grieving Candace is adrift, her internal landscape aligned with the desolation of the external world.

Published two years before the Covid pandemic, “Severance” offers an eerily prescient description of a nation shocked and exhausted. For so many, 2020 was a kind of apocalyptic unveiling. The pandemic revealed the fault lines in our health care and our schools, as well as the fact that so many of us were living in perpetual economic precarity. Then there were the deaths, which as a country we have hardly begun to mourn. Painfully and all at once, we understood the fragility of the systems we relied on, and the instability of our own lives.

Yet alongside the devastation there was transient beauty: In many places, air and water quality improved during lockdown and wildlife resurged. Health-care and essential workers were acknowledged and more respected; we realized the extent of our dependence on one another. If only for a little while, we were thrown into Keller’s “apocalyptic mindfulness.” But the eye snapped shut. We “recovered,” and, like Candace, we find ourselves once again in a collective disquiet, punctuated by bouts of terror as we contemplate the future.

On the final afternoon of her wandering, Candace ventures into the same Juicy Couture store she’d photographed weeks before. Ominously, the fevered saleswoman has been bludgeoned to death. Candace’s unborn child seems frightened too: “The baby moved inside of me, fluttering frantically.” Candace leaves Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel in a yellow taxi she’s commandeered from a fevered driver. She joins a band of survivors led by a creepy zealot named Bob, a former I.T. guy who wears a brace for carpal tunnel syndrome, that most banal of white-collar work maladies. They journey to the Chicago suburbs to homestead in a deserted mall. (I told you Ma has a knack for satire.)

In this semi-cult, Candace’s grief intensifies. She begins to have visions of her mother, who warns her that she and her unborn baby aren’t safe with Bob. Candace’s mother is right. Bob has a penchant for shooting the fevered in the head if he encounters them when he and the others go “stalking” for food and supplies. We squirm at these killings, even if the victims are not quite alive, at least not in the usual sense. Bob’s violent demagoguery opens Candace’s eyes to her metaphorically fevered state, and as we look into the mirror the novel holds up to us, we begin to wonder about our relationship to our own beleaguered world.

At last, Candace’s fever breaks and, fully alive, she escapes Bob and the others in a Nissan stolen from the group’s mini-fleet. She drives into once grand Chicago, swerving to avoid abandoned cars clogging Milwaukee Avenue. Finally, she runs out of gas. “Up ahead there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge,” she recounts. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city. I get out and start walking.”

The “end” for Candace and her baby is not, in fact, an ending, but rather, an awakening that follows revelation.

If “Severance” chronicles its protagonist’s end-time stirrings from the stupor of grief, Jenny Offill’s novel “ Weather ” (2020) is its manic cousin, a diaristic account of climate anxiety. Narrated in the first person, aggressively present tense and composed of short chapters that leap from association to observation, the book is like a panicked brain in overdrive.

“Weather”’s protagonist, Lizzie, works as a university librarian in New York City. Her former professor, Sylvia, a climate change expert, finagled the gig for her though Lizzie isn’t really qualified. “Years ago, I was her grad student,” Lizzie explains, “but then I gave up on it. She used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise. The answer was always yes.”

Lizzie is all wry self-deprecation. As the book progresses, we understand that she is less an underachiever than an empath, so often overwhelmed that her focus scrambles. Or perhaps it’s that she is deeply attentive to things we try to ignore. Her experience of the world is the opposite of Candace’s near-impenetrable grief. Lizzie is porous. Too much gets in: grave news about the environment, the plights of relative strangers — like kindly Mr. Jimmy, a car-service owner being run out of business by Uber. Lizzie “helps” by taking Mr. Jimmy’s car to various appointments, though she can’t afford it and the traffic makes her late.

The novel doesn’t so much unfold as tumble out over the course of a turbulent year that encompasses Donald Trump’s election in 2016. After Trump’s win, tensions rise in Lizzie’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Even Mr. Jimmy is spewing casual vitriol about Middle Eastern people and car bombs. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, retreats to the couch, to read a “giant history of war.” And I haven’t even mentioned Henry, Lizzie’s depressive, recovering-addict brother, who meets a woman, marries and has a baby, all at whiplash speed. When the marriage implodes, Henry winds up on Lizzie and Ben’s couch, using again and barely able to parent his daughter.

For Lizzie, as for most of us, personal and collective catastrophes run parallel. Her vision of the future grows ever darker. She talks to Sylvia about buying land somewhere cooler, where Eli, her young son, and Iris, her newborn niece, might fare better in 30 years or so. “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks.

“I look at her,” Lizzie thinks. “Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.” The realization of her helplessness is unbearable, but Lizzie knows she must bear it: This bleak state of affairs is her son’s inheritance.

Lizzie is gripped by grief and despair — she spends far too much time on doomsday prepper websites — both complicated responses to a planet in the midst of radical, damaging change. “In a world of mortal beings,” Keller writes in “Facing Apocalypse,” “it would seem that without some work of mourning, responsibility for that world cannot develop.” Lizzie’s sense of loss and futility is wrenching, but her response attaches her that much more deeply to this world. Her anxiety is acute because the time in which to act is limited and shot through with urgency.

Lizzie experiences her moment as unprecedented; her end-time sensibility suggests an analogy, albeit to a starkly different context. The Apostle Paul also understood himself to be living through an extraordinary rupture in time. Paul's zeal to spread the Gospel through the ancient world was fueled by his conviction that ordinary time, and life, had been profoundly derailed by Christ’s crucifixion, and was soon to end with his imminent Second Coming. Paul believed he was living in an in-between time that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has aptly called “ the time that remains ,” a phrase borrowed from Paul’s letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. “The time is short,” Paul wrote. “From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not.”

The old world and its rules had not yet passed away but the prospect of Christ’s return cast an altering light on the present, highlighting the impermanence of all things. Everything was revealed to be in flux and therefore subject to reversals and change.

In “Weather,” Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones. Near the end of the novel, Henry reclaims his sobriety, and Lizzie finds renewed, if melancholic, love for this imperiled world. She wants to find a new way to engage, even as she is uncertain what that might be. “There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,” Lizzie says. “What if we were to tear through it?” The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory “ dis-closure .”

Jesmyn Ward’s “ Salvage the Bones ” (2011) takes a very different approach to apocalypse. The novel is set over 12 days, before and just after Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast. The 15-year-old narrator, Esch, her father and three brothers live in the Mississippi Delta, outside a coastal town Ward calls Bois Sauvage. Unlike other characters we have encountered, Ward’s need no awakening; and time is far too short for existential anxiety or long-term planning.

The novel opens as China, a pit bull belonging to Esch’s brother Skeetah, is giving birth. Moody, commanding China is the love of Skeetah’s young life and as vivid as any human character in the book. “What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do,” Ward writes. “Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet.” Skeetah hopes to sell China’s puppies for big money. Enough to send his older brother, Randall, to basketball camp, where, the family hopes, he’ll be noticed by college scouts. Enough, perhaps, to help Esch take care of her baby. Esch is pregnant, though not far enough along to show, and she is in love with the baby’s father, her brother Randall’s friend Manny, who keeps her a secret and won’t kiss her on the mouth.

The novel is full of mothers: mothers to be, absent mothers (Esch’s mother died in childbirth years before), animal mothers, even mythical mothers (Esch is fixated on the avenging Medea, whom she’s read about in school). And, of course, Mother Nature is flying across the gulf, heading straight for Bois Sauvage. Mothers in this novel are makers and destroyers. In some cases, they are also unprepared to occupy the role; they are in jeopardy or else the circumstances of their motherhood run afoul of certain proprieties.

Esch’s pregnancy isn’t easy. It may also be hard for readers to accept: Esch is in dire financial straits and young enough to scandalize some of us. Does the prospect of her motherhood elicit the same empathy as Lizzie’s or Candace’s? Whose children do we think of as the hope for the future when the end is nigh? Which mothers are most valued in the collective perception? Not, generally speaking, an impoverished Black girl barely into her teens.

Ward’s concerns are with those who will bear the brunt of the coming storms, both natural and metaphoric, on the page and in the world. Esch and her family face Katrina with nothing besides a few canned goods they’ve scared up, and some plywood nailed over the doors and windows. Esch herself is the sort of vulnerable person Scripture might refer to as “the least of these.” Each time I read the novel, my mind leaps to the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, a poor, brown, teenage girl who gave birth in a barn because no safer provision was made for her. In that story, the life least protected turns out to be the most essential.

So it is in “Salvage the Bones”: Esch and her unborn child, along with fighting China and her puppies, are the beating heart of this universe. Here, Esch considers which animals flee before a coming storm: “Maybe the bigger animals do,” she reflects. “Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us.”

With “the small,” or those treated as such, as focal points, Ward’s novel is also an indictment. It’s true that Katrina was a natural disaster, but its effects were preventable, or might have been mitigated. Most of us remember the levees breaking. The disaster’s aftermath — thousands, mostly poor, stranded without food or water; critically ill patients dying in storm-ravaged hospitals ; desperate, unarmed civilians shot by police officers — was entirely the fault of humans.

We might extend Ward’s insight to end-time crises in general, in which other Esches are similarly left with the greater share of suffering. We may not be able to reverse the crises themselves, but we can intervene in the devastation they cause, and to whom.

We have been down a harrowing road; there isn’t much comfort here. But perhaps at this critical juncture in our human story, it is not comfort that will aid us most. Perhaps what will aid us most is to enter more fully into dis comfort. To awaken to our grief, like Candace. To try to tear through the veil, like Lizzie. In this way we might begin to believe that the future is not foreclosed upon, whatever it might look like.

I leave us with Esch’s declaration of hope at the end of Ward’s novel. Esch’s family has survived, but Skeetah is searching for China, who disappeared in the storm: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore … dull but alive, alive, alive.”

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