Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Preface

xi P R E F A C E This study arose from questions that students and colleagues were asking me in the last decade of the twentieth century: Why are there so many novels about the end of the world? Why are major critics like Kermode , Frye, Derrida, Bloom, and Ricoeur speculating about the “sense of an ending” and writing about the book of Revelation? The most obvious answer is that the past century was a time of great violence, change, and crisis, all symptoms of an apocalyptic era. A century of major world and regional wars, of multiple economic depressions, of a growing sense of cultural con- flict, of continual threats of environmental or nuclear catastrophe, of the rise of various fundamentalist religious movements, of the extended cold war between capitalist and Communist nations and ideologies—such a century has brought about what some have called the “end of history” but what others call a conflict between traditional and modern societies. Given this historical and cultural crisis for over a hundred years, it should not be surprising to find a number of major literary texts that are truly “apocalyptic.” What I propose to examine in this study are two fundamental questions : First, in what innovative ways have modern fiction texts used the apocalyptic tradition as found in the book of Revelation and other classic works dealing with the end of the world? Second, how do these literary apocalypses raise issues that call for philosophical and theological reflection ? I will explore the apocalyptic patterns in twenty major novels, and two autobiographies, written in English during the twentieth century by a range of authors (from Walker Percy, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams to Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, and Salman Rushdie) and in a range of fictional genres (fable, science fiction, realistic narrative, postmodern tale, postcolonial novel, and others). I will group novels according to their thematic emphasis, contrasting those with a sacred or a secular use of apocalyptic Leigh.indb xi Leigh.indb xi 7/25/2008 9:31:29 AM 7/25/2008 9:31:29 AM patterns. In each novel I will trace the apocalyptic patterns derived from Revelation and other sources in order to tease out their ultimate significance for philosophical reflection. Critical Influences on This Study How does this study differ from those of other modern critics? It differs from studies by early exegetes of apocalyptic novels like John R. May in Toward a New Earth, who focused primarily on the sociopolitical dimensions of novels using apocalyptic imagery of a cosmic struggle or ending to refer to any catastrophic change in society that brought about some sort of judgment according to an ethical norm. Thus he divided apocalyptic literature into five categories—primitive, Judeo-Christian, anti-Christian (or pessimistic), secular utopian/dystopian, and humorous—in his study of traditional novels of crisis from Moby Dick to Day of the Locust to Invisible Man. My study also distinguishes itself from the study of “speculative literature” in William Wagar’s encyclopedic Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things, which examines a wider range of popular novels, often in science fiction, that deal with literal cosmic endings, from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Although I will include three texts from Wager’s study, I will draw out more thoroughly their ultimate implications. I will also use what I have learned from Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending about the intrinsic literary value of ultimate endings as “useful fictions” from the time of Aristotle , with his emphasis on the coherence between the beginning, middle, and ending of plots in tragedy and epic. However, I will not limit myself to Kermode’s focus on the personal and contemporary crisis as the main significance of such fictional endings, as he applies them to modernists like Yeats, Eliot, Beckett, or Sartre. Another author whom I have found helpful is Douglas Robinson, whose long essay in the Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism distinguishes five methods of categorizing and interpreting apocalypses within modern fiction. Like May, he shows the difference between biblical, hopeful apocalyptic patterns of an imminent end involving a transformation by a transcendent God, and secular pessimistic annihilative patterns of xii Preface Leigh.indb xii Leigh.indb xii 7/25/2008 9:31:29 AM 7/25/2008 9:31:29 AM [18.219.112.111] Project MUSE (2024-04...