‘As the Last Morning Breaks in Red’: Frye's Apocalypse and the Visionary Tradition in Canadian Writing

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 DONNA BENNETT >As the Last Morning Breaks in Red=: Frye=s Apocalypse and the Visionary Tradition in Canadian Writing The Greek word for revelation, apocalypsis, has the metaphorical sense of uncovering or taking a lid off, and similarly the word for truth, aletheia, begins with a negative particle which suggests that truth was originally thought of as also a kind of unveiling, a removal of the curtains of forgetfulness in the mind. Northrop Frye, The Great Code >And doom is luminous today.= Margaret Avison, >Apocalyptics?= I The idea of apocalypse, shaped by the Judaism from which Christianity emerged, has had an uneven reception ever since John of Patmos composed the Book of Revelation. For much of its history the Christian church deemphasized John=s vision, but apocalyptic beliefs began to gain attention in the nineteenth century, and apocalypse, both as a religious idea and a popular myth, became one of the twentieth-century=s obsessions. Nineteenth-century interest in apocalyptic prophecy can be attributed to a variety of factors, mostly having to do with the dislocations and social change caused by the industrial revolution; the proliferation of twentiethcentury apocalyptic imagery and narrative, especially after mid-century, was impelled by further advances in technology B particularly weapons technology B and by the depredations of the environment that population growth and modern technology brought. The essential narrative of apocalypse as derived from the Book of Revelation has three essential moments: 1) a time of waiting for the return of Christ and the apocalyptic end of the world B which may include the dead awaiting resurrection but focuses chiefly on the living faithful who wait for >rapture= (an ascent to a celestial realm) and on the signs or events in the present that give clues to the faithful about the timing of that event; 2) Armageddon, the climactic battle between good and evil, which will be the culmination of a whole series of disruptive events occurring at the time of the return of Christ; and 3) the transformation of the old order into a new heaven and earth, which brings with it a millennial kingdom and the revelation of ultimate reality and meaning. 814 donna bennett The first of these narrative moments is what structures the thought of apocalyptic religious sects, because they see it as their present, and therefore spend much of their time inspecting the present for signs of its imminence, often rejoicing at any indication that the world is getting worse. Some secularized version of the second dominates popular media (resulting in, among other things, a substantial number of films about the end of the world) B if often in the form of apocalypse avoided or apocalypse postponed. But it is the third of these three moments, in which revelation rather than destruction is important, that has engaged some of Canada=s best-known writers. In the latter half of the twentieth century, poets and novelists such as James Reaney, Jay Macpherson, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Avison, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Dennis Lee have all created works that invoke the idea of apocalypse, but one that looks rather different from those ubiquitous in evangelical Christianity or popular culture. What has been important for these Canadian writers is that third, often neglected, stage of the apocalyptic narrative, the possibility of perfected vision. Rather than creating scenarios of utter disaster, these writers look to a visionary experience, and become >apocalyptic= in that original sense of unveiling of secrets. A secular version of that unveiling can be seen in >Unhiding the Hidden,= the title of Robert Kroetsch=s 1975 essay arguing that this dis-covering is the goal of contemporary Canadian fiction. Alluding to Atwood=s controversial critical analysis of Canadian themes, Kroetsch playfully opens his essay with the observation that >Survival itself is the Canadian apocalypse= (58), and then argues that, because contemporary Canadian writers are seeking >something essentially new, something essential not only to Canadians but to the world they would uncreate,= they are engaged in a necessary and revelatory >decomposition of the world= (63). II In creating a visionary apocalyptics, several Canadian writers have drawn directly upon biblical...