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Prologue: Miracle and Mass Destruction (Underworld I)
- Fordham University Press
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Prologue Miracle and Mass Destruction (Underworld I) ‘‘You believe in God?’’ he said. ‘‘Yes, I think so.’’ ‘‘We’ll go to a ball game sometime.’’ —Don DeLillo, Underworld Because there is—as I believe—no proper place to begin reading Derrida on religion or anything else, because all one can do is prepare, calculate, strategize, and then give it a shot, I would like to begin with a religious tale that is rather far away from Derrida’s interests, idiom, and culture, an American prophesy followed up by an American tale of faith and knowledge , testimony and technology, the miracle and the machine. The prophecy I am alluding to is not to be found, however, in what would generally be recognized to be a religious text. Worse, it is not exactly a prophecy about the future, about some future event that has not yet taken place but is promised one day to come to pass, on December 21, 2012, for example, to cite just the latest in a long line of Doomsday predictions. No, the prophecy I am alluding to has in some sense already happened, even if, as we shall see, it has never been taken fully into account and so has never fully arrived, like a trauma that has been registered in our collective conscience but has yet to be revealed and understood. And while it has left traces and will continue to leave traces in our history, the prophecy I am alluding to was first and most clearly pronounced in literature, in a couple of works of American fiction, which does little, in my view, to 13 annul its prophetic power. For inasmuch as prophecy—and particularly prophecies of apocalypse and a final judgment—can be uttered and heard only in a time before the end of time, fiction has perhaps always been their proper place. The first attempt to voice this prophecy in American fiction is to be found in Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, where an African-American street preacher proclaims the Day of Judgment to be near and even takes the risk of giving it a precise date. Speaking in 1939, the time in which the novel is set, the preacher in McCullers’s novel stands on a soapbox with Bible in hand and preaches to the crowd that has gathered around him that the apocalypse will not be long in coming. ‘‘He talked of the second coming of Christ. He said that the Day of Judgment would be October 2, 1951.’’1 Now while it is tempting to read this passage today with a smile as yet another example of a mistaken or false prophecy, as one that simply never came to pass as predicted, I would like to suggest that we not be so quick to dismiss it in this way. If prophecy must always be thought in relation to fiction, and fiction can never simply be measured against history, then it might be said that the prophecy has either not yet happened, that it remains imminent, or that it has already happened, that the end has already come, and that our historical knowledge is simply trying to catch up to what has always been known or registered by our fiction. Entertaining this last hypothesis, one might speculate that McCullers’s street preacher was perhaps not as mistaken as all that but was simply off by a single day, that the Day of Judgment actually came not on October 2 but on October 3, 1951. This would have been the day of a true apocalypse , one that, again, will have left traces in history but will have been registered most profoundly in literature, in fiction, where a certain revelation and a certain end of the world are foretold and where what comes to pass is an event, a miracle, that so shocked those who witnessed it that they could express little more than their disbelief, a sign of their belief after reason, their faith in the wake of knowledge. As the announcer of the event would say in words that live on today as a testament to the miracle, words recorded but first pronounced ‘‘live’’ over the radio, as if radio waves were the proper element for this miracle: ‘‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I do not believe it. Bobby Thompson hit a line drive into the lower deck of the left-field stands and the place is going crazy’’ (U...