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CC BY 4.0

A contribution to: Science and Literature

Edited by Alex Stuart and Jessica Goodman

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 7

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  Amin Maalouf’s novel, Le Premier Siècle après Béatrice, tells the tale of the global rise in popularity of ‘fertility beans’, sold inside containers shaped like scarab beetles. These ensure the birth of male heirs to those who take them, and the result is that women begin to face global extinction. This causes the spread of global unrest, and the threat of apocalypse hangs in the air. The story is narrated by a Parisian entomologist, who first comes across the beans at a humanities conference on the mythological importance of the scarab beetle, where he is asked to offer a token scientific account of the scarab. The novel is narrated in a linear fashion, with twenty-six chapters headed A-Z. Thus a strong sense of narrative control is juxtaposed with the chaos of the events recounted. At an aesthetic remove, Chris Marker’s film, La Jetée, tells the story of a prisoner of war living in an underground world in post-apocalyptic Paris. Whilst the subject of a time-travel experiment, he is projected into the Parisian past, and pieces together disjointed memories, before being shot dead by those running the experiment.

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