Dossier: “The Future of Threat is Forever”: Canadian Apocalyptic Fiction
This article analyzes Thomas King’s The Back of Turtle. See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel.
Superstitions and Rituals in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle1See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel. and Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners
By Nadyne Kuhn
Believing in superstitions serves as a way to navigate chaotic events, such as an apocalypse. Elliott Oring writes in “Four Laws of Folklore” that “what counts as superstition… is not something that is merely known, or even something that is believed, but something that is, at least occasionally, acted upon. The action may be positive… or it may be negative” (60–61).
In this sense, action is a repeated performance that either benefits or hinders, regardless of the societal irrationality the superstition presents. Since superstition is a “subcategory of folk belief…” (Oring 60) and has a link to performance, rituals are also a type of performance that ties beliefs, landscapes, and occasionally objects (Moser and Knust 1). Claudia Moser and Jennifer Knust, in “Ritual Matters: An Introduction,” write that rituals are not necessarily easy to study because time erases their intentionality, but that objects associated with perceived ritualistic acts remain (1). In fact, they introduce “thing theory,” which “emphasize[s] the way that things ‘live’, circulate, and attain agency within human communities” (1). Associating meaning with objects gives superstition a physical manifestation and a means of establishing a ritualistic practice. “Belief and practice, concept and object, meaning and matter cannot be separated. In the end, however, even beliefs must be traced in material form since beliefs do not leave material traces; human activity does” (8).
Therefore, this paper will explore the characters’ tendency to associate superstitious beliefs with objects and performative actions in Thomas King’s Back of the Turtle and Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners and how their superstitions tie into apocalyptic literature.
Dorian and the Rituals of Consumerism
Thomas King, in his novel The Back of the Turtle, introduces the character Dorian, the CEO of the company Domidion, which releases a bacterium that devastates an entire community of people and the surrounding environment. Through consumerism, Dorian uses capitalist rituals to regain control amid uncertainty. His buyer’s compulsion is highlighted through a series of negative events:
Rosen’s hadn’t been enough. Even after he left the store, Dorian could still taste Toshi’s office in his mouth… he walked up and down Bloor Street, touring the other high-end shops and adding some twelve thousand dollars to his credit card… In the world of fine watches, the Rolex wasn’t an expensive piece. A Jaeger or a Patek would have made a larger dent in his expense account—and he had seen a very nice Jaeger—but he liked the casual look of the Milgauss. (King 191)
After purchasing the Rolex, Dorian imbues it with meaning and reflects on it whenever he has a positive or negative experience. “‘Material culture’ and ‘materiality’, Knappet has argued, offer both a ‘useful way of understanding the conjunction or intersection of the social and the material’ and helpful lenses for thinking about how an object… relates to people and their worlds” (Moser and Knust 2). Given Dorian’s penchant for living within a capitalist regime, following capitalist rituals is natural. Furthermore, Moser and Knust discuss the inertia of material objects, noting that “things ha[ve] effects on the way people think and behave…” (2). Dorian’s Rolex signals not only his materialism but also his behavioural tendencies. Given his employment at a major company, Dorian prioritizes wealth over confronting the reality of his health, despite his inner monologue.
Dorian wears his Rolex and vacillates between happiness and regret over the purchase. After multiple crises in Dorian’s life, he channels his anger into the Rolex: “And suddenly he was angry. Angry about the divorce. Angry about Florida. Angry that they had bought the condo on Queen’s Quay. Angry with Toshi. Angry that he had settled for the Rolex instead of getting the Jaeger as well” (King 411). His anger reflects his need for control in the face of uncertainty. Yet despite enumerating multiple crises, he ends with regret over not having purchased an additional watch.
In “Conscious and Nonconscious Components of Superstitious Beliefs in Judgment and Decision Making,” Thomas Kramer and Lauren Block illustrate that “research also suggests that people are motivated to rely on superstitious beliefs when their control over an event is undermined and threatened” (784). Considering the astute control Dorian has over his company and the media, the lack thereof over his own health leads him to assign meaning to an object to regain control, ultimately allowing his anger to surface. Dorian is facing an individual apocalypse: his own imminent death, which is directly affecting his present. The object to which Dorian clings for control, his watch, reminds him of his own demise: “He should have sat down with Toshi, should have listened as a stranger told him that his life was coming to an end. How did you tell someone that? How did you start? Six months, eight months, a year?” (King 468). His obsession with time demonstrates how the future directly affects his present.
In “Archaeology of Memory: About the Forms and the Time of Memory in a Necropolis of Pompeii,” Henri Duday and William Van Andringa write that “regular and continuous attendance at the necropolis is naturally accompanied by a rise of the level of circulation within the enclosures” (77). With Dorian’s regular, ritualistic participation in consumerism, he seems to be performing his own funeral ritual by shopping for new clothes, which could be his funeral clothes, and for his watch, which not only reminds him of his death but could also be used to determine his literal expiration date. By preparing for his impending demise, or his own personal apocalypse, Dorian gives himself structure and a sense of acceptance of his eventual end.
Sonny’s Salvaging
Thomas King also introduces the character Sonny, who lives near the community devastated by the bacterium released by Dorian’s company, Domidion. Like Dorian, Sonny uses capitalist consumerist rituals to regain control in his post-apocalyptic environment. In Sonny’s case, his consumerism is linked to salvaging:
Each day on the beach, the world begins anew. Fresh. Clean. Full of salvage. Sonny bends down and rakes the hammer through the sand. He likes the designs that the claw makes, and sometimes he finds things people have lost.
Eyeglasses.
Rings.
Baby soothers.
Car keys.
So far today, Sonny has found several metal spoons, a plate, and a cup. Right at the water’s edge, he’s found a trunk buried in the sand. (King 51)
When facing constant renewal, Sonny’s worldview remains positive. He ritualistically sets out each day to discover new objects. In a sense, he becomes an archaeologist, preserving the memory of objects left behind. Even Sonny’s proclamations have a sermon-like quality that echoes his daily ritual: “I have looked to the water, whence cometh my salvage. Verily, I say, my salvage is at hand. Sonny didn’t think these sayings up by himself. They all come from Dad, and Dad had him repeat them over and over. In the beginning was the salvage” (King 28). The emphasis on salvaging seems to be a malapropism, in that, rather than salvation, Sonny understood salvage. Regardless, Elliott Oring writes that “repetitive behaviours that seem to be directed towards producing a particular outcome can result from an accidental behaviour that is fortuitously reinforced” (62). The possibility that Sonny was originally tasked with cleaning the beach is highly probable, and that it eventually became a purification ritual.
Sonny’s fear is not obvious and could be unconsciously motivated. Whereas Dorian faces a possibly early death, Sonny has already lived through an apocalypse. His salvaging is linked to the ocean’s purifying nature: the objects he collects could be oceanic refuse or offerings for a new life to come. Keeping the beach clean is his unconscious, superstitious ritual to bring humans and animals back to the beach: “A beacon. A tower beacon. A lighthouse. More or less. A symbol of hope. A guiding light. A monument to perseverance. That’s what Sonny will build. Right here on the beach. A tower that will stand against the dark sky and bring the turtles home” (King 268). By deciding to create a beacon, Sonny demonstrates his unconscious fear that the beach will remain empty. The fear of being alone, of his missing father, of missing animals, and of a missing community drives Sonny’s superstition. Yet, instead of wallowing in this fear, Sonny proactively creates a beacon to restore a sense of community after the apocalypse. According to Moser and Knust, “such ritual continuity within a context of material change offers evidence for the tenacity of social and individual practice over time…” (5). Sonny’s tenacity in reusing what he finds on the beach to create a beacon to signal safety is reminiscent of birds’ nests made from discarded objects. All his hard work rewards him: “It’s a sea turtle, just like the turtles who used to arrive on Sonny’s beach during tourist season… Sonny tears some seagrass out of the sand and holds it out, in case Big Red is hungry” (King 429). Sonny symbolically creates life from death. Using his beacon of hope, he creates a superstitious omen to signal good fortune to come, such as the return of the turtles to the beach and the community in the reserve. With the apocalyptic collapse of his environment, Sonny regains control through a nurturing superstition.
Hope’s Inherited Belief
In the novel Apocalypse for Beginners, Nicolas Dickner introduces Hope Randall as one of two main characters whose family is obsessed with the Apocalypse as a genetic, prophetic sense emerges alongside their pubertal awakening. Like Dorian and Sonny in Thomas King’s novel, Hope and her mother, Ann, use capitalist rituals to regain control of their present as a looming future event looms over them. Ann ascribes superstitious significance to texts: “For example, [Ann] earmarked half of the library’s annual budget for the purchase of an extravagant collection of ancient texts: Bibles in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, a facsimile of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enûma Eliš and the Book of the Dead” (Dickner 13). These texts preserve possible Apocalyptic prophecies that could align with her prophesied end-of-the-world date. However, when the Apocalypse fails to occur, Ann ritually returns to the source material and abandons her daughter, Hope.
Hope learns capitalist rituals from her mother, originally using books as her gateway to the Apocalypse. Kramer and Block state that “many superstitions are culturally shared and socially transmitted from generation to generation…” (784). However, Hope shifts from books to television, which she treats as a ritual. Because televisions are both consumer products and vehicles for consumerist literature, Hope continues a ritualistic performance by watching television and paying close attention to the catastrophes: “The report on Pompeii was finishing, and Hope immediately insisted on watching the news. I switched channels just in time to catch veteran anchorman Bernard Derome announcing the top stories. Keywords: devastating, typhoon, Thailand” (Dickner 36). Yet her routine observations indicate that, despite the numerous natural disasters that devastate the world, Hope remains dissatisfied with society’s lack of awareness of a specific Apocalyptic date. Her belief in the Apocalypse must be made tangible. In “There Isn’t Belief, Just Believing: Rethinking Belief as a Keyword of Folklore Studies,” Benjamin Gatling writes that “if beliefs aren’t things, if they can’t be pointed to as the causes of action in the world, if they aren’t universally possessed or a feature of religious life writ large, then the term belief still seems the most relevant when conceptualizing non-artistic forms of believing, that is informal knowledge” (318). Hope needs to know the date of the Apocalypse. Therefore, by using a game of chance, she ironically takes control of her life by determining the date of the end of the world:
While I daydreamed, Hope tossed the dice. Between throws, she wrote certain numbers down and crossed out others. This method was not only elegant but quick, and two minutes were enough for her to determine that the apocalypse would land on July 17, 2001. Well, at least that was one thing out of the way! (Dickner 58)
Hope determines the date through a ritual of chance, and the date becomes a superstition. According to Kramer and Block, “superstitions are beliefs that are inconsistent with the known laws of nature or with what is generally considered rational in a society” (784). Hope rationalizes a game of chance as a logical course of action, even as she irrationally ascribes Apocalyptic meaning to a random date. Her superstition, ironically, seems positive, rewarding her perseverance in its discovery: “Hope had taped the treasured Captain Mofuku ramen wrapper inside her locker (beside the picture of David Suzuki) and scribbled the numbers 17 07 2001 everywhere: in the blank spaces of her notebooks, in her books, on her arms, her desk, her jeans, and even in the cafeteria’s infamous ravioli sauce” (Dickner 64–65). Marking the date “everywhere” across landscapes (locker, desk), objects (notebooks, books), and even on her person (arms) suggests a death-like, ritualistic preparation for the Apocalypse. Therefore, Hope crosses a threshold and is no longer a bystander but a prophet in her death ritual.
Midway through Dickner’s novel, Hope leaves Rivière-du-Loup in search of a second person who predicted the world would end on the same date. As Benjamin Gatling explains, “‘personal belief is whimsical; it fluctuates’” (310), and Hope’s original superstitious belief about her Apocalyptic date shifts as she decides to travel the world in search of a fellow prophet. Her superstitious need for confirmation recalls her mother’s obsessive tendency to scour texts to confirm her own (erroneous) Apocalyptic date. Kramer and Block write that “… superstitious beliefs can lead to behaviour contrary to financial common sense” (785). She uses her entire savings to travel the world:
I tossed the cushion aside, plunged my arm inside the couch and groped around in its entrails for a good while. There could be no mistake: instead of a thick envelope stuffed with money, my hand found nothing but springs, foam rubber and unidentified crumbs. Hope had closed her secret account. (Dickner 138)
Hope’s nonchalant spending reveals a character deeply embedded in a capitalist system. Yet Hope’s travels to Japan signal a change from her death ritual to one of purification: “Brushing the palm of her hand over her shirt pocket, Hope felt the reassuring bulge of the nail clipper” (Dickner 184). Hope assigns a superstition to her nail clipper, transforming it into a lucky talisman. The possibility that both Hope and the unknown prophet could have failed their Apocalyptic prophecy drives her to adopt a new superstition. Hope uses the nail clipper as part of a cleansing:
Since her nails were already short, she was working on a scale of a fraction of a millimetre, applying microscopic file strokes, refining a curve, meticulously shaping a cuticle.
Merriam watched her work for a moment.
“How many times a day do you cut your nails?”
“Dunno. I’m trying to quit.” (Dickner 198)
Hope’s new purifying ritual signifies a rite of passage, as “Van Gennep recognized that rituals [sic] attended the crossing of a geographical frontier…” (Oring 58–59). Hope crosses a “geographical frontier” into an entirely new environment and, with that, prepares herself for a new world after the Apocalypse (Oring 59).
Watching Infomercials: A Capitalist Ritual
Nicolas Dickner introduces the narrator, Mickey Bauermann, the son of a family that runs a cement company. Living in a capitalist system, Mickey is not exempt from its influence; however, Hope initiates a capitalist ritual with him:
She would quietly slip in through the back door, which I always left unlocked, and sometimes, when I woke up to take a leak at around 3 a.m., I would find her sitting cross-legged on the couch, blue and spectral in the glow of the cathode screen, totally engrossed by an infomercial.
I would sit down beside her without speaking and watch… (Dickner 108)
Television becomes Mickey and Hope’s place of worship, where they note all major catastrophes that end old worlds and create new ones. In “The Ties that Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification,” Harvey Whitehouse and Jonathan A. Lanman state that “the key to understanding the cognitive consequences of routinization lies in the effects on memory of regular participation in collective rituals and the ability of these rituals to produce and enhance identification of the group” (680). Mickey’s ritualistic performance allows him to form a kinship with Hope. Recalling that watching television is like Hope’s death ritual, Mickey’s routine participation solidifies his belief in apocalypses. Even after Hope’s departure, the death rituals are so deeply ingrained that Mickey continues to notice changes: “On the TV screen, Hans Blix was commenting on the UN inspections in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had agreed to abandon his weapons of mass destruction, to suspend his chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs…” (Dickner 225). Mickey is a supporter, an apostle, of Hope’s prophet. According to Whitehouse and Lanman, “under this folk category, however, are numerous cognitively and behaviourally universal patterns that are normally associated with the term “ritual,” including such phenomena as synchronic movement, casually opaque action, and both euphoric and dysphoric arousal” (675). Mickey’s participation in Hope’s rituals, whether or not he believes in her superstition, stems from a form of desire:
I was afraid to interfere with an infinitely delicate ceremony: Hope’s breath on my neck, her arm across my chest, the tips of her fingers under my belt. Our two bodies formed a tiny oasis of warmth in a universe that had been cooling down inexorably for fifteen billion years. (Dickner 137)
Mickey’s fear of allowing his arousal to ruin a moment shows he understands that neither he nor Hope is ready to cross the threshold from friends to lovers. Furthermore, Mickey’s lack of full belief in her superstition that the world is ending on July 17, 2001, indicates a disconnect between the believability of his prophet and her message. “Belief can express both doubt and confidence” (Gatling 312), a duality that Mickey inhabits fully. However, after Hope’s departure, his confidence is tested, and his life becomes directionless until she invites him to return. Therefore, by refusing to perform the superstition, Mickey incurs a negative consequence that ultimately affects his future.
Conclusion
The ritualistic use of objects associated with superstitions grounds humanity during catalytic events. In Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle and Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners, the authors demonstrate, through capitalist rituals, that the future affects the present, as seen in the characters Dorian, Sonny, Hope, and Mickey. They experience either positive or negative consequences, depending on their performative acceptance of the ritualistic aspects of superstition.
Furthermore, technology’s complexities show how it can at once aid and fail, from medical treatment failing Dorian to Mickey’s failed reliance on television. The fear the characters feel, whether conscious or unconscious, drives them to perform rituals when parts of their world collapse. The rituals and superstitions provide comfort and help with coping during transitions and transformations.
Works Cited
- Dickner, Nicolas. Apocalypse for Beginners. Éditions Alto, 2010.
- Duday, Henri, and William Van Andringa. “Archaeology of Memory: About the Forms and the Time of Memory in a Necropolis of Pompeii.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 13, 2017, pp. 73–85, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44898619
- Gatling, Benjamin. “There Isn’t Belief, Just Believing: Rethinking Belief as a Keyword of Folklore Studies.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 133, no. 529, 2020, pp. 307–328, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.133.529.0307
- King, Thomas. The Back of the Turtle. Harper Collins Publishers Ltd, 2014.
- Kramer, Thomas, and Lauren Block. “Conscious and Nonconscious Components of Superstitious Beliefs in Judgment and Decision Making.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 34, no. 6, 2008, pp. 783–793, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/523288
- Moser, Claudia, and Jennifer Knust. “Ritual Matters: An Introduction.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol 13, 2017, pp. 1–10, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44898615
- Oring, Elliott. “Four Laws of Folklore.” Western Folklore, vol. 81, no. 1, 2022, pp. 51–74, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27152254
- Whitehouse, Harvey, and Jonathan A. Lanman. “The Ties That Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification.” Current Anthropology, vol. 55, no. 6, 2014, pp. 674–694, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678698
Notes
- 1See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel. ↩︎
About the Contributor
Nadyne Kuhn
Nadyne Kuhn (she/her/elle/la) is a writer and actress who has appeared in many Hubcity Theatre productions, most recently as Adriana in Shakespeare in the Park’s The Comedy of Errors. She has now decided to change career paths and will begin a master’s degree in...
Nadyne Kuhn (she/her/elle/la) is a writer and actress who has appeared in many Hubcity Theatre productions, most recently as Adriana in Shakespeare in the Park’s The Comedy of Errors. She has now decided to change career paths and will begin a master’s degree in comparative Canadian literature at the Université de Moncton in the fall of 2026.
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