Mist Manifesto & The Burlesque Genre: Ephemorality in a World Full of Pinochet Plushies

Abstract

Set in a post-apocalyptic marsh where a strange, bright mist consumes the town of Ahpisaw and stops time, Mogyype, a grieving widower, struggles to keep a hold on reality when he sees his dead wife in the blinding mist. The narration is split between Mogyype and anonymous manifesto chapters, which detail desperation and malicious intent in destroying the world of the Now Times. As we learn more about the world, the Fall, the gods, and the mist’s origin, we worry about the fate of Mogyype and what really is lurking in the marshes. This story is characterized by a subgenre of postmodernism coined as burlesque, a descendent of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque works. As such, the burlesque genre depends upon a performer or a trickster that functions as an agent of chaos and an agent of change. The characters are stuck in cycles of grief; they would rather create chaos than accept that they must move on. Instead, their actions are fueled by desperation and anger at a world that they feel has failed them and gods that have abandoned them.