Madeline Cash is doing something really smart in Earth Angel.[1] Her’s are stories of a certain kind of moral situation. It's a situation with a history and has a reason for working on the page. Sam Lipsyte calls it “the nightmare of the now” for which Cash is a “vicious new bard.” But what is it that makes Cash’s drama nightmarish and why must she be vicious to write it? Consider the premises of the following stories.
A woman invites everyone she knows to an adult slumber party. None of them come—some are murdered, others don’t care to—and so they are outsourced. Slumberparty LLC takes over the itinerary and subcontracts the guest list.
A suburban woman has casual sex with a millionaire CEO whom she resents. His company manufactures toxic scent pods.
A child in the Miss Florida Beauty Pageant asks her sister to club her leg with a sledgehammer. This is to curry sympathy with the contest judges.
A teenage girl meets a photographer at an all ages club and agrees to take pornographic commercial shots. As she lies on the floor kissing her friend, the photographer asks, “isn’t this wonderful? Aren’t you happy to be here?”
What makes these stories interesting is the kind of tension they produce. To be sure, Cash’s characters have real problems. But it is not the practical consequences of these which create the tension we feel. Rather it's the qualia of the problems, what it is to endure the dreadful subtleties of modernity.
These subtleties are both existential and neoliberal. The commodification of personal relationships, violent parodies of feminine beauty, the proceduralization of trauma, and the banality with which it is daily presented in high resolution—all this and more creates a dissonant and terrifying drone in Cash’s prose. That it's usually written humorously makes it worse. Earth Angel provides comic narratives of moral dread, circuses of bored unrest.
It is also deeply satisfying and addicting to read. I thought of Joseph Conrad’s stories, and Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lies, but funny—think a mutant with Don Delillo and David Sedaris DNA. But it's exactly because Cash is funny that she sets herself apart from the boomer apocalypse fiction for which Didion and DeLillo are famous. It captures the surreal in what Alisdair McIntyre has called the modern simulacra of morality.[2]
McIntyre, an ethicist and philosopher of history at Notre Dame, argues that modern life is marked by unfixable moral suspension. The reasons for this are historical. He tells a parable to illustrate the point. Imagine the natural sciences were to suffer a catastrophe, some kind of know-nothing political crusade. Rioters burn laboratories and computer servers are demolished. Such would produce a break in scientific knowledge. Future generations would only possess fragments of a once intelligible synthesis. When people finally pick up the pieces and attempt to practice science their knowledge of it would only be partial; how partial, they would never know. In this post apocalypse nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science at all. For everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.
That this notion of science would be one only in name would create a suspended discipline, one which does not have resources to resolve its own contradictions.
This state of affairs, argues McIntyre, is an analogy for modern life. The Enlightenment, fueled by the chaos of the Protestant Reformation, rejected an ethical tradition which Marxist, Pragmatic, and Aristotelian philosophers have only recently begun to recover. In its place, the Enlightenment introduced forms of voluntarist and individualist ethics. The communal was exchanged for the one, the pragmatic was exchanged for the ideal. McIntyre argues that this amounted to an intellectual apocalypse, and guaranteed a modernism that can’t resolve its own differences.
Hence, for us, moral assessment is an imprecise, long distance affair. This explains the irony of Cash’s funny tragedies. Having inherited no framework with which to reason ethically, her millennial characters are left to observe moral problems without engaging them. Such is their surreal, disconnected interiority. Cash’s characters are anesthetized moral agents, dying in ways which should be painful yet, somehow aren’t. As the lights dim they are lucid.
Earth Angel’s first story, “Plagues,” sets McIntyre’s post-moral stage perfectly. Exodus style atrocities—frogs, locusts, aerial drone strikes—are met by the narrator with a sense of calm. “We were happy because at least we knew that God existed.” (19) However, as the plagues continue, “the rumor that God had forsaken us spread through our neighbors, friends, and Preists… Marry fuck kill: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” (20) Its in the wake of God’s death that society begins to shift and Cash’s characters’ relationship to catastrophe ironizes. Lice is spread like AIDs, people take shots of blood, group sex is enjoyed in the basement as frogs pelt the roof.
By drawing our attention, not toward the plagues themselves, but toward her characters’ response to them over time, Cash frames a moral-historical process, the entropy of which is produced by her character’s emotional dissociation. In a situation which has for previous generations, produced theodicy, or Nietzian rage, or Marxist rebellion, or even tragic despair, Cash’s character’s apply a face cleanser and slip on a pair of 3D glasses. What else are they supposed to do? They don’t have moral certainty. They are, as Walker Percy put it, children trying to play among the ruins.
And a ruined landscape it is. Here there is no center which holds the lives of her characters together, something which makes sense of the picture at the end of her book. “This is a photo of a black hole,” Cash tells us. “It looks like the camera misfired, only capturing the end of a cigarette. Blink and you’ll miss [it].” (143) But she warns us not to be deceived. This absence, a blank of time and light, is really “the begotten soul of the universe, simultaneously letting us view our past and our future, and no one, artist nor scientist, knows where it leads.” (ibid) Here Cash makes herself explicit, coincidentally evoking McIntyre: it is in the black hole of moral history that a modern drama can unfold.
[1] Earth Angel. By Madeline Cash. Troy, New York: CLASH Books, 2023. 143 pp. $16.95
[2] “After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition.” University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
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