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CONTENTS Postmodernism: Surviving the Apocalypse DAVID T. LOHREY

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The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England SINAN AKILLI

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(Post-)Apocalyptic Imagination: Uncanny Undead between Sublime and Cynical CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU

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Persuading an Audience: Margaret Thatcher’s Speech to the Foreign Policy Association (“The West in the World Today”) IRINA DREXLER

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The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ÉVA ANTAL

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Images of the Apocalypse in Latin American Hardboiled: Preterist, Futurist, and Postmodern Interpretations OSVALDO DI PAOLO

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POSTMODERNISM: SURVIVING THE APOCALYPSE DAVID T. LOHREY*

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses how key American writers take the tragic narrative beyond personal disappointment into an arena of political catastrophe, with the following aims: 1. to throw more light on the discourse content and structure of post-war novels by writers such as Don DeLillo and John Edgar Wideman; 2. to identify the place of apocalyptic thought in their work. Postcolonial theory and discourse analysis provide the theoretical framework for this study of the wider implications of American imperialism to the society at large as shown in key works by these writers. In the case of Wideman, that instability is mirrored by his narrative techniques, which undermine traditional modes of narrativity as the societal monolith is undermined. Don DeLillo’s text also presents a society in flux, by presenting events which undermine stability and uniformity. Neither of these writers searches for the means of imposing singularity on the extremes they depict, but seek to embrace the heterogeneity they face. These writers show an America home-front undermined and threatened by dissolution, imperial hegemony gradually evolving into an imposed and permanent state of exception. In their writings can be seen a larger project, which takes as its subject the prospect of an American imperialism at war with its own people, a process whereby imperialism develops into domestic totalitarianism. The end of civilization is considered as the prospect of an American imperialism unable to differentiate between internal and external enemies. KEY WORDS: Apocalypse, postcolonial, totalitarianism, state of exception, hegemony

The echoes of 20th century war can be heard in narratives of late century American fiction by John Edgar Wideman and Don DeLillo. This paper will show how accounts of urban collapse employ imagery from the First and Second World Wars to express the authors’ contention that the types of political disorder seen earlier in the century can be found today in America. These two writers depict varying degrees of civic collapse, overshadowed by the spectre of apocalypse. Depictions of urban collapse are juxtaposed with scenes of the absence of authority or the abuse of power in the hands of those whose authority lacks legitimacy. The society is shown to be under assault. Problems of social class are addressed, but the authors are more concerned with the emergence of the American mass, ill-defined, undifferentiated, but equally helpless in the face of abuse and neglect.

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DAVID T. LOHREY (PhD) is Assistant Professor of English at Kean University in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, P. R. of China. E-mail: [email protected].

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These writers come to the same conclusion: authoritarian government cannot protect its citizens and, more provocatively, has no intention of doing so. Wideman and DeLillo describe failed systems in which citizens in the face of civil disorder are left on their own. The authoritarian government that proves able to wage foreign wars resorts to abuse of power domestically in desperation to maintain order but finally collapses; in moments of crises government fails to govern. These narratives show scenes of modern society in extremis. These writers can be said to participate in a rigorous interrogation of the American myth of imperial innocence. Each author offers through his analysis of contemporary and historical events an interpretive revision of American power and how that power has been used domestically and internationally. Visions of the apocalypse frame our age. Cold War preoccupations with nuclear war and its prophesied aftermath maintain a secure position in the popular imagination (Shaw, 2001: 59-76). One’s ability to clearly conceive of victors in a global war has been undermined, replaced by the even more difficult problem of imagining what it might be like to survive a nuclear holocaust. Harlan Ellison’s classic A Boy and His Dog (1951) juxtaposes the devastated world with a utopian remnant, in this case surviving below ground (Ellison, 1985: 332-373). What these utopian visionaries seek is not the world immediately prior to the imagined Third World War, but one before the twentieth century, that is, before 1914: “The best time in the world had been just before the First War, and they figured if they could keep it like that, they could live quiet lives and survive” (Ellison, 1985: 356). Nostalgia for an idyllic past can be found in inform apocalyptic imaginings to understand McCarthy’s terrifying landscape. The historic roots of pulp fictional representations of the genre have been succinctly described by Mike Davis as “doom” literature, “rooted in racial anxiety” (Davis, 1999: 281). This anxiety, although partially expressive of an existential insecurity, can be found as a bridge linking the imperial and the apocalyptic imaginations. Confinement and disillusion can be found in contemporary literature, but there can also be seen a sustained if frustrated impulse toward emancipation. For the most part, however, especially among prominent American novelists, the search for liberation often devolves into an escape for a chosen few. Key works envision modes of survival in the context of worldly destruction. The literary response to our age has in turn lacked coherence, reinforcing the turmoil rather than giving it form. As George Steiner nicely summarized this cultural impasse, A common formlessness or search for new forms has all but undermined classic age-lines, sexual divisions, class structures, and hierarchic gradients of mind and power. We are caught in a Brownian movement of every vital, molecular level of CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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individuation and society. And I may carry the analogy one step further, the membranes through which social energies are current are now permeable and nonselective (Steiner, 1971: 83).

Wideman and DeLillo make an effort to understand the motivations of their protagonists’ vision. They have in common the recognition that a healthy, sane, human life can no longer be guaranteed to the race, that pockets of civilization contain defensive, beleaguered remnants which maintain themselves precariously, if at all, and that it is vital for the survival of human kind that alternative visions of human life be realized so as to preserve the best within us as destruction and corruption feed on themselves. If we compare DeLillo’s college campus to the spiritually focused compound of Wideman, what emerges is a vision of a small world seeking to act out dreams of survival in a hostile environment. This too can be said of the Jewish ghetto which drew on centuries of tradition to find its organizing principle. As long as the ghetto existed or was allowed to exist, the possibility of a future survived with it, as its members nurtured continuity though their celebration of the past and their stubborn faith in its power to inform present action. Wideman takes pains to defend the decency and the ultimate humility of his saviour, an African-American named King, whose vision is informed by a realization that salvation would never come from the promises made to consumers. Wideman attributes to King an insight into the workings of contemporary society that Sheldon Wolin (2004) has articulated, namely, that consumerism and the spread of capitalism have replaced the territorial ambitions of the Nazi regime as depicted by Hannah Arendt (1964) (Wolin, 1969). The American regime of oppression may resemble superficially the highhandedness of the Nazis, especially those like King and his followers, residents of an inner-city ghetto, but the organizing principles of the societies are different. King’s insight informs his radical rejection of the trappings of material comfort and his call for an intense struggle to remain true to and disciplined for an alternative way of life. Wideman’s characters are very alert to entertainment and consumerism as part of the regime’s hold on power. As in DeLillo’s White Noise the process of turning citizens into shoppers instead of corpses is seen finally as what differentiates the American government from the Nazis (DeLillo, 1985). Part of the radicalization of the society, part of the corruption, and a large part of the increasing coarsening of the society are due to the militarized ethos on the domestic front. The writer’s contention is that the moment of the firebombing of a Philadelphia city block by the city police can be seen as a declaration of war made by the local government against its own people. More generally, it is in fact Wideman’s understanding that CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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American imperialism abroad is making life more unbearable at home. Much of the anger has arisen from a sense among the people that their sacrifices have been ignored. It is, according to Wideman, an increasingly embattled environment, with the veterans of foreign wars bearing the brunt of injustice and neglect: They say this Republic’s built to last, blood of twenty million slaves mixed into the cement of its foundations, make it strong brother, plenty, plenty strong. They say there are veterans’ benefits available. J. B.’s not a vet, his name not scratched on some goddamn cold-ass black-marble slab in DC, but half his crew who went to war killed over there in the jungle and half the survivors came home juiced, junkied, armless, legless, crazy as bedbugs… Casualities just as heavy here in the streets as cross the pond in Nam (my emphasis) (DeLillo, 1985; also McCarthy, 2006: 181 on his identification of shopping and the apocalypse).

Wideman’s insight is not limited to the notion that those who participated in foreign wars were brutalised by their experiences (Wideman, 2005: 178). The traumatizing experiences left them maimed and wounded emotionally and physically, to be sure, but his argument is that the children of the veterans have been brutalized, that they have taken on the identities of their fathers. In the words of Jerry Varsava, “The untamed violence of A Clockwork Orange has taken over the city” (Varsava, 2000: 425). An urban army has emerged that is at war with its surroundings and spares no one: My army stuffs them chumps. Right up the gut. Down to the bone. Jam city. They squeal and scatter like they the rack, we the cue... The hard black fist. Hit them hard, real hard. Knock some on the ground. Take everything they got. Wave your piece in the faces of the ones on the ground. Stand shoulder to shoulder. Hard black brothers. Swoop in like Apaches, like Vietcong, hit for the middle. Grab a few. Knock a few down (Wideman, 2005:165).

The attempt to build an alternative community within and surrounded by an indifferent or hostile society required on the part of King and his followers a commitment beyond the trappings and promises of a materialist society. It was not enough just to reject society’s definition of progress and the means of acquiring the rewards of subordinating the self to the “good life”. King required a total and absolute break from one’s own past, as if to suggest that the reward for casting off success was the promise of a new life, a second chance: … when you went to live with King… he said, give it up, give up that other life and come unto me naked as the day you were born. He meant it too… Oh, so happy. Happy it finally came down to this. Nothing to hide no more. Come unto me and leave the world behind. Like a new-born child (Wideman, 2005: 18). CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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The condemnation of society is total as is King’s demand that his followers break with their past. The irony is that one of the central grievances of the community is its sense of having been forgotten. His rage at the conflagration set by the security police literally to smoke out the commune expresses only a part of his sustained anger, chiefly directed at those he feels have forgotten their pasts. Amnesia, as Harold Pinter has pointed out (Harold Pinter, 2006: 815), is part of the American hold on power from the massacre of native-Americans to the Philadelphia’s grand jury’s willed forgetfulness shown by their refusal to bring charges against those who bombed the city block where members of MOVE resided: This Black Camelot and its cracked Liberty Bell burn, lit by the same match ignited two blocks of Osage Avenue. Street named for an Indian tribe. Haunted by Indian ghosts—Schuylkill, Manayunk, Wissahickon, Susquehanna, Moyamensing, Wingohocking, Tioga—the rivers bronzed in memory of their copper, flame-colored bodies, the tinsel of their names gilding the ruined city (Wideman, 2005: 159).

The massacre of Native Americans, slavery, police brutality: memories of past genocides play on the mind and animate contemporary urban unrest; the sense of continuity is vital to urban unrest. Names of places and incidents of unrest and injustice preoccupy. History and current events merge into a single incident; past and present are barely distinguished. The purification urge derives from the leader-theoretician’s belief that his community exists as a kind of divine remnant whose very existence is in peril. The life urge is activated by a vision of total annihilation awaiting those who stray. Wideman presents the link between the massacres of the American West and the genocidal ambitions of the Third Reich. From his point of view the moment has arisen when the imperial ambitions of the American empire have turned against its own people, while employing the mechanism of destruction employed in the recent past by the Germans. Wideman’s protagonist Cudjoe, the writer who returns to his old neighbourhood to make sense of what had happened, has paranoid delusions about the forces aligned against his community. His fantasies, however, draw from historical precedent: Cops herd them with cattle prods into the holds of unmarked vans. Black Marias with fake shower heads in their airtight rear compartments, a secret button under the dash. Zyklon B drifts down quietly, casually as the net. Don’t know what hit you till you’re coughing and gagging and puking and everybody in a funky black stew rolling round on the floor (Wideman, 2005: 177).

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storm troopers, despite the fact that a different form of tyranny has taken control of his old neighbourhood on the west side of Philadelphia. But the imagery of Nazis is interspersed with images of a more distant past, of a genocide beyond the memory of any of Wideman’s city dwellers. Still, they identify with historical victims of genocide. The identification with past victims of American expansionism formed part of the inner-city ethos, the sensibility of the ghetto, but another part, and an even greater part, was the increasing awareness among many that their existence consisted mainly of watching others. They were victims but they were also spectators of their own demise. They were not being attacked, just forgotten. This new form of power, a tyranny of indifference, although every bit as threatening and perhaps as destructive as the more familiar forms, was to a large degree what King and his followers in the Move organization were fighting against (Neal, 2007; Wolin, 2004). Wideman’s theory of imperial power rejects the claim that the American empire is to be distinguished from its predecessors, chiefly the British. He seeks to explode the myth of American exceptionalism, whereby American power expanded without conquest and dispossession. Instead, he argues that those dispossessed by its power are the American people themselves. Neglect has the power to brutalize. The author’s descriptions of local and federal power structures and their indifference confirm Hannah Arendt’s chilling descriptions of the Nazi state which, she argues, was not to be characterized as one of traditional despotism but of bureaucratic inhumanity: “And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is” (Arendt, 2005: 117). The remnant King sought to invite into his dream made itself vulnerable to the society it sought to escape. Wideman sees them historically as part of a long line of victims of conformity and powerlessness. His claim is that social misfits incite an urge to punish through exclusion. Deportation, imprisonment and punishment await those whose ‘disease’ of nonconformity can be externalized or marginalized or just identified, but when that threat becomes too close to be so easily eliminated, then, he suggests, it must be destroyed completely—erased (Mbembe, 2003: 11-40). According to Wideman, the unusual degree of antipathy is saved for those whose memory itself poses a threat. DeLillo is less committed to the explication of the visionary’s impulse than he is to the anti-utopian nightmare which surrounds and engulfs an increasingly isolated community. He shows that the consequence of such destruction has wider implications for our culture than those attributed to mere brutality: Devastation does not just mean a slow sinking into the sands. Devastation is the high velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne… [D]evastation is the expulsion of memoCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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ry, the historically weighted spiritual and useful objects which made up the traditions and material culture of western man (DeLillo, 1985: 177).

This is why remembrance, revision, and regeneration become crucial to preventing the annihilation of culture. The acknowledgement and recording of past events function as a crucial part of a restorative process. The restoration of what has been forgotten is itself a political act. DeLillo envisions a spiritual desolation set in motion by the destruction of memory itself. White Noise, while not functioning as an act of historical recovery, as Philadelphia Fire aspires to do, nonetheless is concerned with the annihilating forces of contemporary culture. The white noise of which DeLillo speaks consists of the lulling distractions, enhancements, and obsessions that erase memory. DeLillo fashions a disaster narrative that sets into motion the kind of societal dislocation that mirrors the fragmentation of community that left the Jews of Eastern Europe so vulnerable. The image of fleeing crowds, parents desperately seeking lost children, terrified, once prominent individuals suddenly thrown in with the anonymous mass: this dislocation of the commonplace occasioned by the chemical spill of Nyodene D. left people without any sense of being part an organised society. Suddenly, as was seen in the slums of Philadelphia where King’s followers were fire-bombed, Jack Gladney and his family find themselves on the run. Their plight is described by DeLillo in the following evacuation scene: It was still dark. A heavy rain fell. Before us lay a scene of panoramic disorder. Cars trapped in mud, cars stalled, cars crawling along the one-lane escape route, cars taking shortcuts through the woods, cars hemmed in by trees, boulders, other cars. Sirens called and faded, horns blared in desperation and protest. There were running men, tents wind-blown into trees, whole families abandoning their vehicles to head on foot for the parkway. From deep in the woods we heard motorcycles revving, voices raising incoherent cries. It was like the fall of a colonial capital to dedicated rebels (DeLillo, 1985: 157).

Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies at College-On-The-Hill, finds himself a nobody and, as such, experiences the vulnerability made so terrifyingly part of modern life. He believed that he was invulnerable, protected from the chaos by his social status. Gladney intuits the connection between the loss of privilege and the threat of annihilation. The erasure of social distinction and the emergence of the mass lead to the potential for abuse, perhaps trivial at first, but gradually small inconveniences and indignities can develop into humiliations and violence. There is little standing between the mass and the power of the state. Gladney’s family and all the others left stranded and uninformed also experience one of the vital characteristics of being part of the mass: they are CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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utterly helpless. Rather than fearing the brutality of a disciplined, occupying army, DeLillo’s characters face chaos. Nobody answers when they call 911. But what DeLillo imagines comes quickly to resemble Wideman’s prophecy. None of us will escape the total collapse that is coming. The chaos that engulfs the isolated, impotent people resembles totalitarianism as understood by both Wolin and Arendt by its being a crucial part of what gives power to the regime. The tyranny is not familiar; it is a new form of control: “Its danger”, according to Hannah Arendt, “is that it threatened to ravage the world as we know it—a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end—before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to assert itself” (Arendt, 1964: 476). And, indeed, the ineffective, nonresponsive nature of the modern bureaucratic state, as described here and in the work of DeLillo and Wideman, is by no means unique to the United States. Wideman is especially alert to the consequences of such neglect. In this connection, Philadelphia Fire and White Noise, the two novels set in the United States, share a common vision of our collective political passivity and isolation. Both authors see the community under threat, both articulate a general spiritual malaise, and both find literal and metaphorical embodiments for one’s sense of physical intrusion, dispossession and isolation. They do not see physical annihilation through political action as the threat; instead they imagine a spiritual death. What King’s group and the panicky evacuees have in common is the fear of obliteration, of their lives coming to nothing. The link between these novels is their concern for the possibility of human survival in an increasingly dangerous world. In White Noise the dualworld theme is drawn less concretely in that there is no utopian remnant experimenting with an alternative life style as in Philadelphia Fire, but the choice of a college campus shows how one world survives when set apart from what surrounds it. There is a palpable sense of menace surrounding and encroaching on the parenthetical lives of the students and faculty. Theirs is a world organised for self-sufficiency and designed for selfsatisfaction: “The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theatre, sports, conversation, sex” (DeLillo, 1985: 59). DeLillo fashions a world, however, that takes the shape of a centre encircled by concentric rings of turmoil and menace, all the way to the outer boundary beyond which death awaits. In such conditions, as Wolin has pointed out, the political inactivity of the consumer society is more easily manipulated. The regime is able to adopt extra-legal measures about what becomes a state permanently in a state of emergency (Andrew Neal, 2007). Whether it is dealing with an urban police action, or to the ensuing chaos set in motion by a threatening toxic plume, the government convinces itself CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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that it must be on a permanent footing. In other words, government responds to the world described by Wideman and DeLillo by reshaping itself. It is a view of life that the author of Politics and Vision argues is manufactured by a form of government that believes itself in the post-911 era strengthened by a fearful populace: A government controlled, color-coded climate of fear existing side by side with officially sanctioned consumer hedonism appears paradoxical, but the reality is that a nervous subject has displaced the citizen (Wolin, 2004: 593).

Wolin and Agamben find in the contemporary political state what some argue can be found in key modernists at the beginning of the century (Tony Simoes da Silva, 2005: 1-11). Edward Said argues, for example, that there is in the postmodern political order a powerlessness and paralysis that can be traced back to the early twentieth century (Said, 2000: 313). This is in substance Wideman’s conclusion, too, from his contact with the survivors of MOVE and those who remember King’s vision. DeLillo gives this prophetic power of seeing to Murray Suskind, professor of popular culture, whose occasionally authoritative voice often speaks for the author. Boehmer shows how Mbembe’s conception of a “necropolis” comes close to describing the world Wideman’s and DeLillo’s characters inhabit (Boehmer, 2009: 141-159, and 2005: 254). The American people have become colonized by their own government: Terror according to this logic can be defined, in terms taken from Achille Mbembe’s exposition of the necropolitical, as a politics exercised through the imposition of death and near-death. For Mbembe, whose work in this respect is interestingly informed by Franz Fanon’s concept of colonial violence, imperial and post-imperial sovereignty depends on the right to kill or, more precisely, to hold the subject in a state of continual confrontation with death: “the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law… and where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end’” (Boehmer, 2005: 145).

In such a world, we become Comanches or Jews. Extinction discourse is turned upon itself. DeLillo wants to draw a kind of parallel between the television watching public in the United States and the Nuremburg crowds of the Third Reich by locating within the centre of his quiet campus town a Hitler studies program and by linking it with the broader fascination of Hitler to our society at large. By positing the notion that advanced societies possess weakened family units, Murray implicitly characterizes our modern society as one of atomized individuals whose knowledge of the world is undermined by loneliness. Alone, we attend to the rituals of community by viewing television, “where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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desires...” These rituals can be reduced, metaphysically, to a depiction of the death-world, which was the raison d’etre of the Nazi assemblies: Many of those crowds were assembled in the name of death. They were there to attend tributes to the dead… Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone (DeLillo, 1985: 73).

In this connection, it is understandable that DeLillo would see the modern American shopping mall as a mausoleum. People find it as difficult to resist commodification as they do consumerism. The mall is the one place people feel safe, virtually guaranteed to enjoy their loneliness among strangers. It is, according to him, the closest thing to attending one’s own funeral. The symbolic connection, ironically made, between television and Hitler parallels the earlier link between shopping and death. Consumption is made to serve as a confirmation of life in a one-dimensional society, depoliticized and apathetic, except when it comes to shopping. DeLillo through Murray subverts this ideology through parody and irony, but the critique emerges, namely, that our denial of death imperils our lives. DeLillo’s vision springs precisely from that sense of life as a construct of perception, hence the double meaning of the world “seeing” itself, whereby a life depicted by television impedes vital contact. Conclusions In this paper, I have proposed that patterns of oppression identified earlier as belonging to imperialist powers can be found in contemporary America. The three writers analyzed here place their narratives in the broader context of the dissolution of civic order in contemporary American society. These authors consider issues of gender, class, and race, which are of central concern to Wideman, but in fact the broader issue of the powerlessness and the citizen’s loss of control are taken up with vigour. I have tried to bolster and particularize that political interpretation by embedding it in a context of the modern state as it has transformed itself. I also hope to have clarified the odd dynamic of political overreach, oppression and neglect. As this synopsis indicates, the chapter also participates in my effort to consider issues of responsibility and accountability in the context of the emerging social mass. Theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Elleke Boehmer, Achille Mbembe, and Sheldon Wolin have been used to make my case for understanding American imperialism and its domestic ramifications in the context of 20th century totalitarianism. The rise of state lawlessness is of central concern to Agamben. The two key novels under analysis participate in and contribute to an unmasking of American claims of innocence. The issue of accountabilCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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ity relates to American myths of equality and denials of imperial intent. An unmasking of purported innocence plays a part in the narrative intent of these works by Wideman and DeLillo. These authors themselves make connections between the past and present in an attempt to understand better America’s emerging and until recently unchallenged hegemony. What I do hope to have formulated freshly, however, is the unique relationship each writer develops between the politics of race and class and that of imperialism. The two key writers studied here—Wideman and DeLillo— represent a spectrum of ideological strategies rather than a unified outlook. Stark as these writers’ differences on imperialism may have been, their efforts to revise understanding of domestic conflicts in the context of American expansion of power deserve attention. Both writers address the ways personal and cultural dissolution can be traced to America’s political liabilities, its expansionism, and its corruption. Their writings contribute to our understanding of the relationship between cultural hegemony and cultural debasement. Wideman and DeLillo can in the end be said to address America’s self-definition and by doing so participate in a redefinition of its identity. Through recovery and revision these writers can be read as participants in a project aimed at undermining hegemonic structures.

References Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann and the Holocaust. London: Penguin, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York, NY: Meridian Books, 1964. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Boehmer, Elleke. “Postcolonial Writing and Terror.” In Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, eds., Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, 141-159. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear. New York, NY: Vintage, 1999. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York, NY: Viking, 1985. Ellison, Harlan. “A Boy and His Dog.” In Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Martin H. Greenberg, eds., Beyond Armageddon, 332-373. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolis.” Translated by Libby Maintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York, NY: Vintage International, 2006.

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Neal, Andrew. “Georgio Agamben and the politics of the exception.” Paper presented at the Sixth Pan-European International Relations Conference of the SGIR, Turin, September, 2007. Pinter, Harold. “Nobel Lecture 2005: Art, Truth & Politics.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 811-818. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Shaw, Tony. “The Politics of Cold War Culture.” Journal of Cold War Studies 3:3 (Fall, 2001): 59-76. Simoes da Silva, Tony. “Strip It Bare—Agamben’s Message for a More Hopeful World.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 2.2 (2005): 111. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971. Varsava, Jerry. ‘“Woven of Many Strands’: Multiple Subjectivity in John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire. CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41.4 (June 22, 2000): 425. Wideman, John Edgar. Philadelphia Fire: A Novel. New York, NY: Mariner, 2005. Wolin, Sheldon S. Politics and Vision. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

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THE ANTICHRIST(IAN) TURK IN SEVENTEENTHCENTURY ENGLAND SINAN AKILLI*

ABSTRACT. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, a distinct tradition of astrological prognostications emerged in England and this tradition became established in the seventeenth century, especially during the Civil War, through the wide circulation of astrological and prophetic texts. A significant number of these texts were either influenced by or the translations of astrological and prophetic texts originating in continental Europe, especially Germany. Therefore, images and depictions—constructed mostly in diabolical terms and in association with the events of the end of the world—of “the Turks”, who were among the main concerns of the continental astrologers and prophets in the centuries in question, found their way into the English tradition. Moreover, in England of the same period there was a visible interest in the Ottoman Turks and their empire and the diabolic imagery associated with the Turks became tools of propaganda at the hands of various parties that used and exploited texts of astrology and prophecy for their political interests. The wider impact of such exploitation of the images of the Turks by individual parties was the discursive construction of a negative image of the Turks in the seventeenth-century English public imagination. This article offers a contextualized study of three such texts and contributes to the larger scholarly attempts to better understand the literary and cultural encounters and interactions taking place between England and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period.1 KEY WORDS: Turks, Civil War, England, prophecy, astrology

The relevance of a contextualized study of text debating the apocalyptic image of Turks, which seems to have received inadequate attention in mainstream scholarship, is twofold. Firstly, by the study of selected texts of prophetic and astrological literature, exemplifying what Chapman aptly calls “textual barometers for early modern assumptions and reading practices” (Chapman, 2007: 1259), this article reveals and explicates one of the ways by which popular beliefs and assumptions held by the English people of the Turks in the seventeenth century were formed. Secondly, by showing *

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SINAN AKILLI (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature within the Faculty of Letters, Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. E-mail: [email protected]. This paper is an abridged version of the author’s previously published article “Apocalyptic Eschatology, Astrology, Prophecy, and the Image of the Turks in SeventeenthCentury England”, Hacettepe University Journal of Faculty of Letters 29.1 (June, 2012): 2552.

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how the concept of the Antichrist or implications of Antichristian qualities were deliberately associated with the Turks for political propaganda in seventeenth century England, the article aims to contribute to the findings resulting from recent scholarly interest in the nature and context of the direct and indirect cultural exchanges and encounters taking place in the Renaissance and the early modern period between the English and the Turks, in particular, and between the Christian West and the Muslim East, in general. Emanating from the simple principle that everything that has a beginning must also have an end, the notion of finality as it relates to the existence of the world and of the cosmos, has intrigued human minds since antiquity. In the Judeo-Christian culture, such eschatological beliefs have been based on the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament (McGinn, 1998: 1). In this context, apocalypticism, deriving mainly from the Book of Revelation and interpreting the revelations about the imminence of and events preceding the End, has emerged as a type of early Christian eschatology. Apocalyptic eschatology as such has three characteristic convictions: the first one involves a teleological and deterministic view of history and of all existence and accepts that the world will end at a time predetermined by God; the second belief is that the predetermined End is, in fact, the goal for the fulfillment of the divine plan in a process of “crisis-judgment-vindication”; and thirdly, the belief that the End is imminent and the process is already under way (McGinn, 1994: 1011). Such a view of the End inherently contains a sense of duality as it implies both a pessimistic and an optimistic vision, which is essentially related to the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. In other words, to herald the coming of Good, Evil has to dominate first. In Christian apocalyptic eschatology, which had strong ties with prophecy and astrology,2 the above-mentioned duality of Good / Evil has been conceived in relatively more tangible terms by the duality of Christ and Antichrist, the latter being the main target of interpretation for it has remained but a concept and a metaphor that could be used from different points of view to mean different things in different contexts. The essentially antagonistic nature of the term Antichrist, which is immediately visible in the prefix “anti-”, has in many cases allowed for the use of the name to refer to the “other” or the “enemy”. In Elizabethan England, for instance, terminology of apocalyptic eschatology was a common and legitimate part of political

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For instance, thirteenth-century English mathematician Roger Bacon was influenced by the Islamic doctrine of conjunctionism, and he presented a Christian interpretation of the doctrine as well as using mathematics to forecast the coming of the Antichrist based on the conjunctions of the planets, thereby combining astrology with the apocalyptic tradition (Geneva, 1995: 130).

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discourse. As is also noted by Hill (1971: 14), when Richard Hakluyt wrote Discourse on Western Planting in 1584 to persuade Queen Elizabeth to support and sponsor the expedition plans of Sir Walter Raleigh for the colonization of the West Indies, he argued that English presence and naval activity in the region would be a blow to Spanish monopoly and “abate the pride of Spaine and of the supporter of the greate Antechriste of Rome” (Hakluyt, 1584: 155). Such commonness of the eschatological language was a consequence of the Reformation which had made the Scriptures accessible for the larger public and had led to an increased popular interest in the prophetic parts of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, which were, in turn, quite literally interpreted by the intellectuals of Elizabethan England as suggesting that the End was near (Thomas, 1978: 167). Having achieved such prevalence and popularity in the sixteenth century, apocalyptic terminology had become an ideal tool for propaganda by the time Civil War began and was used frequently during and long after the war. Accordingly, in seventeenth-century England the term Antichrist came to be associated with the Pope, the Catholic bishops, the Protestants, the Spanish, the Jews, the Royalists, the Parliament, the Irish, and last but not least, the Turks (Hill, 1971: 178-182) depending on who was using the term, when and against whom. Perhaps one of the long lasting impacts of the astrological and prophetic traditions in England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was related to the construction of a very negative image of the Turks among the wider English public. It is true that the English had had face-to-face encounters with the Seljuk Turks, the people who were rapidly gaining control of Asia Minor during what Norman Housley calls the period of “‘classical’ crusading (1095-1291)” (2007: 190). However, in this period the term used in Europe to refer to the Muslim “enemy” was not the “Turks”, but the “Saracens”, obviously a misleading term confusing religious belief with ethnic stock (Housley, 2007: 196). From the late thirteenth century onwards and as the Ottoman state steadily expanded in Europe, the Turks gradually replaced the Saracens as the ultimate Muslim “enemy” and, with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the term “Turk” was firmly established, though carrying over from the term “Saracen” the same confusion between religion and ethnic origin. Therefore, in order to fully comprehend the various aspects of the construction of the image of “the Turks” in apocalyptic eschatological terms in the seventeenth-century English public imagination through astrological and prophetic texts circulating in England at the time, one must start off with an account of the appearance of the Turks in general European astrology and prophecy as a significant figure, which dates back not surprisingly to the mid- to late fifteenth century, that is, to the conquest of Constantinople and the decades that followed. CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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After 1453, the shock waves caused by the fall of the most important Christian stronghold in Eastern Europe spread deeper into Western Europe as, shortly afterwards, eastern European countries like Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania also became Ottoman territories. It seemed that next in line were Austria, Hungary, Germany, and even Italy. All this was happening at a time when Europe was already polarized within itself because of sectarian wars. It was in this time of crisis, when the need for knowing things before they happened became crucial, that Johannes Lichtenberger wrote his prognostications in Pronosticatio in latino (1488) where he discussed the Pope and the Church, and the Turks and the Jews. [The work aroused so much interest in Europe that] [“f]rom 1488 to 1499 fourteen Latin, German and Italian editions were published” (Kurze, 1958: 63). More significantly, Lichtenberger combined astrology and apocalyptic prognostication when, interpreting the meaning of the Turkish advance in Europe, he predicted that the end of days was near (McGinn, 1998: 270-271). In other words, from the beginnings of the interpretation of the apocalyptic prophecies in the Holy Scriptures together with astrological predictions in Europe, the Turks were one of the main concerns. Especially the Germans were growingly restless about the possibility of an Ottoman invasion of their kingdom, and when “[a]round noon on 7 November 1492 the thunderous crash of a meteorite terrified the inhabitants of southern Germany, Alsace and Switzerland” (Soergel, 2007: 303), the first response was to try and come up with an interpretation of this extraordinary phenomenon. As Soergel states: After examining the circumstances surrounding the event, as well as the historical record of similar incidents, the king’s dignitaries concluded that the stone pointed, not to coming military catastrophes, floods or earthquakes—all events frequently associated with comets and other celestial phenomena—but that it revealed impending imperial victories against […] the Turks (Sorgel, 2007: 306).

As is clear from the examples given above, the presence of the Turks in sixteenth-century European astrological and prophetic works was observed, for the most part, in the ones produced in Germany, due primarily to the proximity of the perceived threat to this country. As Jennifer Forster notes, for centuries, prophecies with political content had a dual function of both articulating and molding public opinion especially in times of brewing crisis (Forster, 2001: 611); and in the sixteenth century it was primarily the Germans who needed an effective propaganda in the face of Turkish advance in Europe. Another reason which can explain the German astrological and prophetic preoccupation with the Turks was the role the concept of “he Turks” played in Reformation discourse. Even though Martin Luther had suggested the diabolic alliance and similarity between the Catholic pope and CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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bishops and the Turks in his earlier writings, 3 it was his 1529 book, On War against the Turk—written in the same year as Süleyman the Magnificent began his march to Vienna—which authoritatively established for all of Protestant Europe, but especially for the Germans, the conceptual link between the Turks and the eschatological language. Luther wrote that “just as the pope is the Antichrist, so the Turk is the very devil incarnate. The prayer of Christendom against both is that they shall go down to hell, even though it may take the Last Day to send them there; and I hope that day will not be far off” (Luther, 1529: 29). Established so strongly, German prophetic preoccupation with the Turks continued in the latter part of the sixteenth century, especially during the long period of war (1593-1606) between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire when prognostications containing eschatological scenarios like the conquest of the Holy Roman Empire by the Turks4 or the conversion of the Turks to Christianity to initiate the Second Coming were widespread (Mout, 1994: 96). More importantly, the German prophecies and predictions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also seem to be the main sources through the influence of which similar texts began to be printed in the rest of continental Europe and in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A Most Strange and Wonderfull Prophesie upon this Troublesome World, published in London in December 1595, for example, was based on the 1569 predictions of two German astrologers, Dr. John Cypriano and Tarquatus Vandersmers, but the title page also stated that their work was translated from Italian into English by Anthony Hallowey (Forster, 2001: 601). The depiction of the Turks in this text typically uses the language of apocalyptic eschatology. In the section where Cypriano’s predictions about the future events in the four corners of the world were reported, there was an account of how in the East, a black dog would enter Germany, but after losing one

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For example, in “Treatise on Good Works”, Luther wrote “these are the real Turks whom the kings, princes, and nobles ought to attack first” (1520, 172) when he referred to Catholic bishops, whom he had also associated with the Pope who was the greatest enemy of Christ’s, in other words, the Antichrist according to him. These prophecies were mostly based on the fifteenth-century prediction by the German Franciscan Johannes Hilten, who had given the year 1600 or 1606 for this conquest (Mout, 1994: 96). However, Hilten’s predictions apparently were interpretations of the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic eschatology. As Darin Hayton deals with another late fifteenth century German interpretation of the Book of Daniel, he reports that in the original biblical source, Daniel dreamt of four animals, a winged lion, representing the transfer of rule from Babylon to Persia; a bear, symbolizing the taking over of imperial power from Persia by Alexander the Great’s Greek Empire; a four-headed leopard, giving the authority to the Roman Empire; and a ten-horned beast, interpreted as the transfer of imperium from the Holy Roman Empire, with possible implication to the Ottoman Empire (2007: 64-66).

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of his legs he would forsake his old master and become loyal to a new one, which was also explained to the reader as the conversion of the Turks to Christianity, which, in turn, was a sign of the End (Forster, 2001: 605). Similarly, in the part where Vandermers’s prophecies were given, the Turks were conceived of as partaking in the apocalyptic scenario as an Antichristian entity, as under the title of “misbelieving nations” they were grouped together with the “papal Antichrist”, and the King of Spain (quoted in Forster, 2001: 605). Obviously, such views as expressed in texts like A Most Strange and Wonderfull Prophesie upon this Troublesome World were being written into an English context in which the dominant discourse on the subject was not very different. To illustrate this point, one may mention John Aylmer—who was the third Lord Bishop of London from 1577 to his death in 1594 in the reign of Elizabeth I, and whose diocese included the Court, the Westminster Hall and the City of London—as he conceived of the Turk as an ally of the Devil or Lucifer, namely the King of France who was oppressing the Protestants in his realm: King or a Devil, a Christian or a Lucifer, that by his cursed confederacy so encourageth the Turk, that he now dares be bold to venture upon Polonia, a Christian realm, which hath received the Gospel, and that way to come into Germany. Oh! Wicked caitiff, and firebrand of hell [...] which, for the increasing of the pomp and vain-glory which he shall not long enjoy [...] will betray Christ and his cross to his mortal enemy (quoted in Strype, 1821: 183-184).

One may argue that such a comment coming from an authority like the Lord Bishop of London must have had a major influence in constructing the diabolic image of the Turks in Elizabethan England. The sense of immediacy of the perceived threat for Germany, rather than for England, is also noticeable in Aylmer’s statement, which is yet another example for the German- and Germany-originated nature of the English preoccupation with the Turks. Another figure who contributed to the depiction of the Turks in terms of apocalyptic eschatology, more specifically, as the Antichrist, in England was John Foxe, a late sixteenth-century historian. In Book VI of his Acts and Monuments of Christian Martyrs, after giving a lengthy history of the Ottoman monarchs, and the Turkish advance in Europe, he wrote a section about the Biblical prophecies and his self-stated purpose was “to cōsider and examine in the Scriptures, with what prophesyes the holy spirit of the Lord hath premonished and forewarned vs before, of these heauy persecutions to come vpon his people by thys horrible Antichrist” (Foxe, 1583: 786). After a prolonged account of the several interpretations of the apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, which was followed CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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by a prayer for protection from the Turk, Foxe concluded his argument by addressing his readers: In this long digression, wherin sufficiently hath bene described the grieuous and tedious persecution of the Saracens, & Turkes against the Christians, thou hast to vnderstand (good reader) and beholde the image of a terrible Antichrist euidently appearing both by his own doings, & also by the scriptures, prophecied & declared to vs before. A question whether is the greater Antichrist the turke or the Pope. Now in comparing the Turke with the pope, if a question be asked whether of them is the truer or greater Antichrist, it were easy to see and iudge, that the Turke is the more open and manfiest enemye agaynst Christe and hys Church (Foxe, 1583: 797).

John Burrow explains Foxe’s intellectual impact in England by referring to his work as “the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking of the late Tudor and early Stuart period” after the Bible (2008, 296) and in view of such influence, it would not be wrong to argue that there prevailed a strong identification of the Turk with the Antichrist in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, which would definitely find voice in literary productions of various sorts. One such example from the early seventeenth century was from travel literature. In the 1609 manuscript “Mr Stamp’s Observations in his Voyage to Constantinople,” the capital city of the Turks was described as follows: “Constantinople [is] in the forme of a Triangle in circule 15 myles, seated upon seaven hils, and therefore some would have it the seate of the Anti-christe” (in MacLean, 2007: 1). Presumably, the author of this early text of travel literature wished to fascinate his possible readers with sensational descriptions, and he knew, most probably from prior exposure to the texts like that of Foxe, that employing the image of the Turk as Antichrist would match with the contemporary constructions of the Turks in English public imagination. As I have explained elsewhere (Akıllı, 2012: 32-33), from the midseventeenth century onward, the production and dissemination of astrological and prophetic works in England reached historic high levels and with the influence of Puritan millennialism, the terminology of apocalyptic eschatology became dominant in these works. The representation of the Turk as the Antichrist was no exception in this flooding of apocalyptic literature and preoccupation with the End. In his The Resurrection Revealed (1654), Nathanael Homes, a Puritan theologian and a millenarian, presented an interpretation of the fourth beast mentioned in the Book of Daniel, and claimed that the Pope and the Turk together embodied the Antichrist: The ten horns are explained by St. John to be the character of the Roman empire, and to signify the ten kingdoms into which at last it was divided; and the breaking off three of these ten by the one horn that grew up among them doth furCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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ther notably describe the body of Antichrist arising out of the Roman empire, with its two sides: the Turk having one eye, leg, and arm, and the Pope the other: one both making up one antichristian body, to keep the world from embracing Christ and his pure Gospel. […] I would propose this expedient to the learned: viz. to consider the Turk and the Pope to be the main integrals of Antichrist (Homes, 1654: 148).

Homes, like John Foxe before him, made sure to depict the non-Christian other as the worse evil by arguing that if one must tell which is “the Antichrist” it would definitely be the Turk, as the Pope opposed the Christ “more covertly, pretending in some things to be for Christ” and went on to provide further evidence for his argument: Their names, Antichrist, is doubtless applicable to both; […] But the Turk most decidedly merits the name anti-Christ (i.e. against-Christ) since he opposes him openly […] His NUMBER is applicable to both Turk and Pope, viz. 666. For as the numeral letters of [the Greek and Hebrew] names of the Pope who is a Latin and Roman make up that number, so do the numeral letters of Mahomet, written in Greek [….] (Homes, 1654: 150).

Occasionally giving sermons before the House of Commons, Homes too was an influential figure, and in a 1641 sermon he had talked about the urgency of throwing down the Antichrist “in fifty years hence”, because according to his calculations it was “the promised time” (Hill, 1971: 82). As such, he was also a key figure in the establishment of the mental association of the Turks with the Antichrist or Antichristian concepts prior to the Restoration. Especially in the few years leading up to 1666, the so-called annus mirabilis, the issue of the Antichrist was brought even more to the center of discussion, as some believed that “the number of the beast” would initiate the events of the prophesied Apocalypse. Hence, astrologer Thomas Nunnes predicted the downfall of the Antichrist, namely the Turk and the Pope, in that year, while John Tanner added the return of the ten lost tribes of Israel to the former scenario,5 and in the face of the apparent falsity of these prophecies, after 1666 figures like John Napier and Johannes Alsted pointed to the 1680s and 1890s for the fulfillment of these prophecies (Capp, 1979: 1745

Especially in early seventeenth-century England, the lost tribes of Israel was the subject of an ongoing debate and the Turks, though under the name of Tartars—a term which referred to the Turks too in the Tudor and Stuart England—were central to this debate as by some they were believed to be the lost tribes whose return to Jerusalem would inaugurate the millennium in Jerusalem (Cogley, 2005: 782-783). The reemergence of the debate in the post-Restoration period was due mainly to the 1677 publication of Giles Fletcher the Elder’s 1610 manuscript entitled The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes, by a Puritan minister (Cogley, 2005: 782).

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175). After the Restoration, there was a rapid decline in the use of the symbolism of the Antichrist, a name “less and less frequently mentioned, in print at all events” (Hill, 1971: 147-148), for political propaganda and criticism related to the matters of England. However, as the descriptions in the texts that are commented on here will show, the construction of the Turks as Antichristian continued well into the final decades of the seventeenth and would decrease in number significantly only after the defeat of the Ottoman army in Vienna in 1683,6 and the gradual dismissal of prophecy and astrology from the mainstream cultural and literary scene into the realm of “nonsense”. In the light of the brief historical background and contextual information provided so far, in the remaining part of this article, the construction of the image of the Turks in terms of apocalyptic eschatology and by the use of Antichristian imagery in seventeenth-century England will be further illustrated with reference to some manuscripts available to the seventeenth-century English reader. The three texts selected as examples contain reports, prophecies and predictions about the Turks and the Ottoman Empire. As such, these texts represent different groups of manuscripts which can be roughly categorized as “natural phenomena”, “miraculous happenings”, and “astrological prognostications and prophecies” that were available to the seventeenth-century English reader. The first text to be commented on here belongs to the group of texts which relate narratives of “natural” phenomena such as comets and earthquakes. It must be pointed out at the outset that most of these texts typically treat these “natural” phenomena as “unnatural” or “supernatural”, or infuse a “supernatural” element into the narrative. This can be explained by referring to Bernard Capp’s contention that even though the Reformation had erased the magical and the supernatural from the center of faith, the masses still demanded to read and know about supernatural phenomena, and astrological and prophetic texts functioned as the suppliers of this popular demand (Capp, 1979: 279). The manuscript selected from this category is entitled Extraordinary Nevves from Conſtantinople, dated November 27, 1641, which is a translation from French by one W. C. Claiming to report the contents of a letter, sent from a person whose name is undisclosed, to Lord Dominico, Mugliano, Florantoni on September 6, 1641, the text relates a story which is interpreted as confirming the prophecies about the 6

Capp notes that the advance of the Turks further into Europe and their eventual siege of Vienna were among the major reasons behind a new period of anticipation from the late 1670s onwards, though less pervasive than the one in the 1640s; and that an equal combination of astrological and prophetic interpretations were more characteristic of this period, as opposed to the dominance of biblical prophecy in the prognostications of the earlier period (1979: 175-176).

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“Ruine of the Turkiſh Empire” (Extraordinary Nevves, 1). After giving the reader an interpretive frame at the very beginning, the author starts his account of the story in the following, which is dominated by an eerie and sensational tone: From the tenth of Auguſtaſ, to the 13. of the ſame Moneth there was ſo ſurious a winde in the plaines neere unto Conſtantinople, that it did diſroote and blow up many Trees, and ruinated a great number of ſtately Edifices, and amongſt thoſe perſons who received great loſſe, it is perticularly obſerved, that four of the Turkes grand Couriers, and a Captaine of his Troopes, were by the violence of this Tempeſt, throwne into deep precipices, and were never ſince ſeene... (Extraordinary Nevves, 2).

The sensationalism in this opening seems to be the strategy of the author to impress the reader from the very beginning. Indeed, it may be argued that sensationalism was a staple of this kind of text as its target audience was not the educated elite but the masses. Capp, too, places importance on the role of the sensational by stating that the contents of the almanacs were also an escapist literature and that “[m]onstrous births, the fall of kings and seas red with blood were an important element in the public’s appetite for entertainment and excitement” (Capp, 1979: 285). In other words, the more sensational an almanac was, the better it sold. However, the representational aspect of this opening seems to be the more interesting one. Even in this very first paragraph the majestic image of “the Turk” is constructed mostly in militaristic terms such as “Captaine” and “Troopes” and would easily appeal to the readers’ mental association of the Turks with the Antichrist and his army at the apocalyptic battlefield of Armageddon. Another point is that, by such imagery, the reader is to understand that the might of the Turks comes from their military strength only. Nonetheless, even from the beginning it is established that the Ottoman troops are vulnerable to Nature’s fury. Since God meant the same thing as Nature, after the reconciliation of astrology and religion,7 the mid-seventeenth century English reader of this text would immediately remember the Biblical prophecies about the eventual downfall of Antichristian forces. After the introduction, the author includes more sensational descriptions to increase the tension and to build up suspense: all this was made the more fearefull and deſtroyable by the Aſpect of two Commetts or blaſing ſtarres with double tailes, or forked poſteriums. The one of which appeared from two of the clocke in the morning until midnight, juſt over 7

The reconciliation of astrology and religion in Germany and England, respectively has already been explained by other critics (Brosseder, 2005: 575; Chapman, 2007: 1261).

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againſt the great Turkes Seraglio, and the other over the Church or Moſque of Santa Sophia, from three of the clocke in the afternoone till five a clocke the next morning… (Extraordinary Nevves, 2).

One of the two points which must be considered here is the deliberate emphasis on specificity and exactness. The comets stay hovering over the city “from three of the clocke in the afternoone till five a clocke the next morning” (Extraordinary Nevves, 2). Such deliberate expressions of attempted realism that are repeated throughout, of course, only have the purpose of making the story look more credible. The second point is the binary opposition created by the comets’ being positioned above the Muslim Sultan’s palace on the one side and above a structure which had been the symbol of Christendom for centuries on the other. It is noteworthy that the phrase “Church or Moſque of Santa Sophia” (Extraordinary Nevves, 2) signifies not only the dualistic character of Santa Sophia, but also an unsettled dispute. The implication here is that Constantinople has not been lost forever and might as well be reclaimed soon, an idea which will prove to be in accord with the resolution of this narrative. On a second interpretive level, the unsettled dispute here implies the final battle between Christian and Antichristian forces before the End, in which the Antichrist will be utterly defeated, and accordingly in this interpretation the Turks are immediately constructed as the Antichristian forces. The text also tells of how on the twelfth day of the same month at about three o’clock in morning “the great Turke”, whose name is not given but who must be Sultan İbrahim I as he reigned in 1641, dreamt that he was being attacked by “many Lyons, the greatest of which having bitten him upon the breast” (Extraordinary Nevves, 2-3) and woke up in terror. Shortly after going back to sleep, the Sultan “had a second vision of many Centaures” (Extraordinary Nevves, 3) who fiercely battled against each other until a great army of “Griffens” (Extraordinary Nevves, 3) came from the East and began slaughtering the Centaurs. The Sultan “with a flaming ſword in his hand” (Extraordinary Nevves, 3) tries to help the Centaurs, “but as he lift up his ſword againſt the Griffens, the Eagle conducting them, diſarmed him, upon which the great Turke being ſurprised, awakens with ſo great confuſion and trouble” (Extraordinary Nevves, 3). After waking up, the Sultan immediately summons the diviners and the astrologers in his realm to interpret the appearance of the comets and his dreams within three days and give a report without hiding any truth. The most senior member of the group, named “Moſſa Egypſiano” (Extraordinary Nevves, 4), presenting the interpretation tells the Sultan that “all our Anceſtours have believed, as we alſo believe our ſelves, that thy raigne ſhall be the laſt of the Turkes” (Extraordinary Nevves, 5). Upon this, the Sultan gives a severe physical punishment to all of the diviners and astrologers, who were, miraculously, not hurt in the least, which CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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made some of the inhabitants of Constantinople to go and be baptized into the Christian religion (Extraordinary Nevves, 8-9). Apart from displaying, to the relief of the reader, the vulnerability of the most powerful man of the time, the Ottoman Sultan, the Grand Signor of Europe, the use of the selfconfessed testimony of the enemy diviner is meant to convince the English reader of the eventual defeat of the threat against Christendom. The immediate message here is that, the Turks’ story in Europe will end in such a way that it will bring joy to Christendom. But more importantly, the conversion of some Turks into Christianity is very meaningful, as according to apocalyptic eschatology it was one of the signs of the imminent end, before which Christianity would prevail all over the world. So, this text without doubt depicted the Turks in Antichristian terms by alluding to some common knowledge originating from apocalyptic eschatology, and contributed to conception of the Turks in these terms by the mid-seventeenth century English reader. The second text is representative of the accounts of “miraculous happenings.” The anonymous author of the text entitled Strange and Miraculous Newes from Tvrkie (June 13, 1642), claims to relate the account of a miraculous vision which appeared in Medina, which was reported to the English Ambassador in Constantinople. Just like in the exposition of the previous text, the author of this manuscript uses the same strategy of giving specific time and place and, to further enhance credibility, employs the authority of an ambassador. The typical sensational exposition is seen in this text too: On the 20th of September of 1641 there was a severe thunderstorm in Medina. After the storm “the vapours being diſperſt, and the Elements cleert, the People might read in Arabian Characters, theſe words in the Firmament, O why will you believe in Lies (Strange and Miraculous Newes, 2).

At first, the author creates only enough anticipation to prepare the reader to the main incident, the climax of the narrative: a woman in white […] having a cheerfull countenance, holding in her hand a Book, coming from the Northeaſt, opposite againſt her were Armies of Turkes, Perſians, Arabians, and other Mahometans, ranged in order of Battaile, and ready to charge her, but ſhee kept her ſtanding, and onely opened the Booke, at the ſight whereof the Armies fled, and preſently all the Lamps about Mahomets Tombe went out, for as ſoone as ever the Viſion vaniſhed […] a murmuring Wind was heard... (Strange and Miraculous Newes, 2).

Once again, the central event reported by the text is imbued in allusions to the battle of Armageddon and the identification of the Turks as the army of the Antichrist, the eventual defeat of which is central to apocalyptic eschatological scenario is obvious. The witnesses of this episode cannot conceive the CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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meaning of the vision, but “only one of the Dervices, which is a ſtrict religious Order among the Turkes […] and live in contemplation, ſtepped up very boldly and made a Speech…” (Strange and Miraculous Newes, 2) interpreting the vision. The “Dervice” first gives a summary of the beginnings of the Jewish and Christian religions respectively and tells people how God, being weary of the vanities of these people, in time “diſpoſſeſ[ed] them of their chiefeſst Cities, Jeruſalem and Conſtantinople” (Strange and Miraculous Newes, 3). Towards the end of the narrative, the dervish goes on to tell how God sent Prophet Muhammet as a new hope for his people, who shall be happy forever if they serve his religion right. At this point, the dervish states that he believes they have not been very successful in this, and declares: I tremble to ſpeake it, we have erred in every point, and willfully broken our firſt Inſtitutions, ſo as God hath manifeſted his wrath by evident ſignes and tokens […] this ſtrange and fearefull viſion is a prediction of ſome great troubles and alterations […] I feare our Religion will be corrupt, an our Prophet an impoſter, and then thiſ Christ, whom they talke of ſhall ſhine like the Sunne, and ſet up his name everlaſtingly (Strange and Miraculous Newes, 4).

Upon these statements, his audience condemns the Dervice and after suffering through unspeakable torture he dies, with this as his last gaspe: “O thou VVoman with the Booke ſave me” (Strange and Miraculous Newes, 5). Once again, the message to the reader is that Islam will be corrupt and eventually dissolve and Christianity will “shine like the Sunne”. There reference is obviously to the conversion of the Turks and the universal domination of Christianity before the end of days, so this text too can be regarded as drawing a picture of the Turks by employing the language of apocalyptic eschatology. The last text which will be dealt with here was published into the immediate aftermath of the second siege of Vienna by the Ottoman army, and thus the image of the Turks is central to narrative. As such the text clearly illustrates how common the image of the Turks was in astrological prognostications employing apocalyptic vocabulary, written by English astrologers and printed in England as late as the final decades of the seventeenth century. John Merrifield’s Catastasis Mundi: Or the True State, Vigor, and Growing Greatneſs of Christendom (1684) begins as a criticism of John Holwell’s Catastrophe Mundi, or, Europe’s many mutations until the year 1701, which was published in 1682, and of his 1683 Appendix to the book, in which he had predicted a speedy establishment of Turkish domination in Christendom. As the Ottoman army was approaching the gates of Vienna, Holwell had predicted that the catastrophe of the world was at hand. Merrifield’s account, on the other hand, takes the reader to the stage of catastasis, which is the stage preceding the catastrophe in classical tragedy. So the reader is to understand that the catastrophe did not occur yet, and there is still time and CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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hope to reverse the course of things. Merrifield defines Holwell’s work as a “bold and fallacious dealing, under the pretence of explaining the meaning of the triple Conjunction of Saturn, and Jupiter in Leo [which had occurred in 1682], wherewith he hath encouraged Mahomet, and crucified our Saviour afreſh” (Merrifield, 1684: A2), and states the aim of his own work as “the promotion of Chriſtian Courage, and imbaſing of Turkiſh Power, in expounding the ſame Conjunction” (Merrifield, 1684: A2). He then expresses that he “thought whether this Holwel might be a Prophet of Mahomet, to encourage the Turks, and to diſhearten the Chriſtians” (Merrifield, 1684: A3). Of course, one needs to keep in mind that Merrifield was writing after the successful defense of Vienna by the Christian armies in 1683, which had proved Holwell wrong. After his accusations directed toward Holwell, Merrifield begins to make his own point by first giving an astrological interpretation of the history of the Turks, and then by presenting “the true Nativities [of The Sultan and Prophet Muhammet], with an Aſtrological Diſcourſe thereon ſhewing you how that the Turks ſhall not over-run Chriſtendom” (Merrifield, 1684: A4). Merrifield’s astrological findings about the Ottoman monarchy are as follows: If we take the Original, or Beginning of the Turks Empire, to be from the Ottoman Family, as I ſuppoſe we juſtly may (although they had many Riſings and Fallings, after [the Turks] left their Native Countrey, Anno Dom. 844. and were then called Scythians) for Ottoman taking upon him the Government of the Turks, he firſt founded this great Empire, in the year of Chriſt, 1289. at which time, Saturn was in Piſces; and Authors tell us, that Turky, or the greateſt part of it, lies under Capricorn, and therefore governed by Saturn. And according to the rules of Aſtrology, Saturns great years are 465. which added to 1289. will make 1754. therefore this Monarchy ſeemeth to ſtand firm and ſtable no longer then unto the year of Chriſt, 1754 (Merrifield, 1684: 1).

In other words, the reader is invited to anticipate the fall of the Ottoman monarchy within seventy years from the date of publication. Following his calculation of the time of the downfall of the Turks, Merrifield presents his own version of the nativity charts of Sultan Mehmet IV and of Prophet Muhammet, which can again be considered as parts adding to the sensationalism of the text. Merrifield argues that the nativity chart of Sultan Mehmet IV shows that “The Sun, Jupiter and the Moon, in the Aſcendent, are ſure Teſtimonies of Honour […] it makes him extreamly proud, ſo that he will eſteem none ſo good as himself, but will be apt to quarrel with thoſe of his neighbouring Nations…” (Merrifield, 1684: 3). Moreover, The Lord of the Eleventh, is in ſquare to the Lord of the Aſcendent, which will cause the Friends of the Native to prove deceitful to him. Saturn, Lord of the AſCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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cendent, poſited in the Second, ſhews the Native to uſe induſtry to increaſe his Subſtance, and to inlarge his Territories; but Saturn is an Infortunate by Nature, and by being poſited in the Aſcendent, will rather deſtroy the Natives Subſtance, and diminish his Empire (Merrifield, 1684: 4).

One can assume that Merrifield must have had enough knowledge of Ottoman history8 to predict that after the unsuccessful campaign in Vienna, the Sultan would encounter growing opposition in his court, which indeed happened. He could have predicted this much by commonsense. Yet, one must admit that Merrifield makes a lucky hit about the year of the Sultan’s death when he writes: “About the year, 1687, he hath the Sun, Moon and Aſcendent, directed to the Body of Saturn; I cannot poſitively ſay that he will loſe his Life then about; but I am certain he will undergo Afflictions of body, and all his Affairs go unſucceſsful for some conſiderable time…” (Merrifield, 1684: 6). Sultan Mehmet IV died in 1687. The nativity of Prophet Muhammet in Merrifield’s text is given as the “Scheme of the Nativity of Mahomet, the Author of the Turks Faith or Religion” (Merrifield, 1684: 7). The choice of the word “author” instead of “prophet”, of course, is in line with the Christian belief that the prophet of Islam was an impostor. Accordingly, Merrifield first gives a brief biography of Prophet Muhammet, explaining how being a merchant and a “curious reſearcher into both the Jews and Chriſtian Religion” (Merrifield, 1684: 7), he saw many countries and accumulated wealth, and how at the age of thirty eight “Pride enflamed his heart, and wrought in him a deſire to be taken for a Prophet; and to make men believe that he was a real Prophet” (Merrifield, 1684: 7). He then explains the Turks’ conversion to Islam as follows: no wonder that the Turks, which were the Seed of Ham, that wicked son of Noah, whom his Father curſed, ſhould eſteem ſuch a lying Impoſtor as Mahomet was, for a God or Saviour; for Hiſtory plainly ſaith, that after the Death of Noah, Ham went into Africa, and there ſetled his Abode, and from his Poſterity ſprang the Turks, a ſort of People, much of his own nature... (Merrifield, 1684: 8).

After establishing the wickedness of the Turks and their faith, Merrifield refers to the Bible to make his point more authoritative and to realize his explicitly-stated aim of promoting Christian courage: “God hath ſaid in the Holy Scriptures, that all Nations ſhall be converted to the Chriſtian Faith, before the Day of Judgement, therefore […] about the year, Anno Chriſti 8

Richard Knolles’s General Historie of the Turkes (1603) and Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1665), several editions of both of which appeared after their first publications, were probably the main sources of reference for anyone writing about the Turks in seventeenth-century England.

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1759. we may expect the the Diſſolution of the Turks Faith…” (Merrifield, 1684: 9). The conclusion part of Merriefield’s work is clearly one more example of how, even as late as 1684, the image of the Turks was constructed in the minds of English readers based on the language of the prophecies about the End, which was integrated into the astrological discourse. As has been illustrated by the prophetic and astrological texts studied here, which were available to seventeenth-century English reading audience, the image of the Turks was constructed with references, though at varying degrees, to apocalyptic eschatology and led to the conception and representation of the Turks as the agents of the Antichristian, if not the Antichrist himself. Even though the authors or translators of the texts are different individuals, it is observed that the narrative and discursive strategies of the texts, such as sensational openings, elements of suspense, attemptedrealism displayed by exactness and detail in description to create an effect of credibility, are very similar to each other in many ways, which provokes suspicion of deliberation and systematization. Although this deliberate association was done for purposes of political propaganda most of the time, there is enough evidence to argue that such an identification must have influenced and shaped the popular beliefs and assumptions held by the English people of the Turks in the seventeenth century. In relation to this last remark, one final question needs to be answered: how does one know that these texts were really influential in the construction of an image of the Turks, a diabolic one at that, in early modern English public imagination? For an informed answer, one needs to refer again to the views of Capp who, in explaining the popularity of these texts, has pointed out that: [i]n assessing the role of the almanac [and its content of astrological and prophetic prognostications] in Tudor and Stuart England, we must recall that astrology in this earlier period was far more than a subculture. It formed a part of the dominant pattern of beliefs, though one which slowly declined and which coexisted very uneasily with other hostile elements. With sales that passed a third of a million copies a year, almanacs clearly did belong to the popular culture of the age (Capp, 1979: 283).

Elsewhere in his book, Capp argues that the sales figures of the almanacs in early modern period are proof that they constituted a strong element in both shaping and reflecting the beliefs and practices of the period (1979, 292). Therefore, one may conclude that one of the ways in which the image of the Turks was constructed in seventeenth-century English public imagination was typically characterized by the use of Antichrist(ian) imagery, and thus, the issues discussed in this article may contribute to the efforts stemming from the recent scholarly interest in the various aspects of the early modern cultural and literary encounters between Christian Europe and the CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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Muslim world in general, and between the English and the Turks, in particular. Of course, similar research must be done in the reverse direction, that is, through a study of the beliefs and assumptions about the Europeans in general and the English in particular as they may have been discursively expressed in similar Ottoman and other Islamic astrological and prophetic manuscripts, so that the other half of this general scholarly inquiry can be completed.

References Akıllı, Sinan. “Apocalyptic Eschatology, Astrology, Prophecy, and the Image of the Turks in Seventeenth-Century England.” Hacettepe University Journal of Faculty of Letters 29.1 (June, 2012): 25-52. Brosseder, Claudia. “Writing in the Wittenberg Sky: Astrology in SixteenthCentury Germany.” Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005): 557-576. Accessed January 12, 2012, JSTOR. Burrow, John. A History of Histories. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Capp, Bernard. Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800. 1979. Reprint. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Chapman, Allison A. “Marking Time: Astrology, Almanacs, and English Protestantism.” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 1257-90. Accessed December 4, 2007, Project Muse. Cogley, Richard W. “‘The Most Vile and Barbarous Nation of all the World’: Giles Fletcher the Elder’s The Tartars or, Ten Tribes (ca. 1610).” Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005): 781–814. Accessed March 07, 2009, Project Muse. Extraordinary Nevves from Conſtantinople, November the 27, 1641. Being a Letter ſent from thence to the Lord Dominicco, Mugliano, Florantino, dated the ſecond of September. 1641. Contayning a most certaine and true Relation of the late and ſtrange viſions, with the aſpects of two Commetts or blazing Starres with forked Tayles. Appearing to the Great Turke, and perpendicularly hanging over his Seraglio in Conſtantinople, as also his incredible dreames, together with their Interpretation by the wiſeſt of his Divines, Aſtrologers, and Magicians. Written in French and faithfully Tranſlated by W. C. (1641). London: Printed for Francis Constable, and John Thomas, 1641. Accessed May 17, 2007. Early English Books Online. Forster, Jennifer. “Anticipating the Apocalyse: An Elizabethan Prophecy.” Historian 63.3 (2001): 601-617. Accessed February 03, 2012. Wiley Online Library. Foxe, John. Actes and Monumentes of Christian Martyrs, and matters Ecclesiasticall, passed in the Church of Christ from the Primitiue beginning, to these our dayes, as well in other Countreys, as namely, in this Realme of England, and also of Scotland, discoursed at large, 1583. Accessed February 08, 2012. John CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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Foxes’s The Acts and Monuments Online: http://www.johnfoxe.org/index.php?realm=text&edition=1583&gototype=modern. Geneva, Ann. Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Hakluyt, Richard. A Discourse on Western Planting, 1584. Accessed February 08, 2012. Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/stream/cihm_07386#page/n7/mode/2up. Hayton, Darin. “Astrology as Political Propaganda: Humanist Responses to the Turkish Threat in Early-Sixteenth-Century Vienna.” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 61-91. Accessed April 29, 2011. Cambridge Journals Online. Hill, Christopher. Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Homes, Nathaniel. The Resurrection Revealed, or the Dawning of the Day-Star, 1654. Reprint. London: Simpkin and Marshali, 1833. Accessed February 08, 2012. Google Books: http://books.google.com.tr/ebooks?id=ggMPAAAAIAAJ&hl=tr. Housley, Norman. “The Crusades and Islam.” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 189-208. Accessed April 25, 2012. Brill: http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/ncaputo/euh4930-08/articles/hously.-pdf. Kurze, Dietrich. “Prophecy and History: Lichtenberger’s Forecasts of Events to Come (From the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century); Their Reception and Diffusion.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21.1-2 (1958): 63-85. Accessed January 26, 2009, JSTOR. Luther, Martin. “On War against the Turk.” (1529). In T. G. Tappert, ed., Selected Writings of Martin Luther: 1529-1546, 9-53. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. _____. “Treatise on Good Works.” (1520). In T. G. Tappert, ed., Selected Writings of Martin Luther: 1517-1520, 103-196. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. MacLean, Gerald. Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. McGinn, Bernard. Apocalypticism in the Western Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994. _____. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998. Merrifield, John. Catastasis Mundi: Or the True State, Vigor, and Growing Greatneſs of Christendom, Under the Influences of the Laſt triple Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Leo, the late Comet, &c. Together with the true Genitures of, Mahomet the Impostor, The Grand Seignior, The German Emperour. The French Monarch. Proving thence, That the Turks will be defeated in all their Attempts againſt Christendom, &c. notwithſtanding Mr. Holwel’s Menaces to the contrary in his Cataſtrophe Mundi, and his Appendix thereunto. Alſo the ſaid CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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Holwel’s monſtrous Falſhoods and Errours diſcovered, retorted and confuted, and himſelf remitted to the Turks, to comfort them now after their Loſſes before Vienna. By John Merrifield, Student in Aſtrology, Phyſick, and the Heavenly and Sublime Sciences. London, Printed for Rowland Reynolds near Salisbury-Exchange in the Strand, 1684. Accessed May 17, 2007, Early English Books Online. Mout, Nicolette. “Chiliastic Prophecy and Revolt in the Habsburg Monarchy.” In M. Wilks, ed., Prophecy and Eschatology, 93-109. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Soergel, Philip M. (2007). “Portents, Disaster, and Adaptation in Sixteenth Century Germany.” The Medieval History Journal 10.1&2 (2007): 303-326. Accessed January 26, 2009, SAGE. Strange and Miraculous Newes from Tvrkie. Sent to our Engliſh Ambaſſadour reſident at Conſtantinople. Of a Woman which was ſeene in the Firmament with a Book in her hand at Medina Talnabi where Mahomets Tombe is. Alſo ſeverall Viſions of Armed men appearing in the Ayre for one and twenty dayes together. With a Propheticall interpretation made by a Mahumotan Prieſt, who loſt his life in the maintenance thereof. London, Printed for Hugh Perrey neere Ivy-Bridge in the Strand, 1642. Accessed May 17, 2007, Early English Books Online. Strype, John. Historical Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmer, Lord Bp. of London in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth Wherein are Explained Many Transactions of the Church of England; and What Methods Were Then Taken to Preserve It, With Respect Both to the Papist and Puritan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821. Accessed February 08, 2012. Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/historicalcolle00strygoog. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Penguin, 1978.

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(POST-)APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION: UNCANNY UNDEAD BETWEEN SUBLIME AND CYNICAL CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU*

ABSTRACT. Over the last two millennia, the dominant representations of the End Times in the popular conception of the Western World have been chiefly based on the biblical account of St. John's revelations on the Greek island of Patmos. In it, multiple scenes advocate the repenting of mankind before an impending Day of Reckoning, resorting to imagery that has largely kept its power to terrify and inspire throughout the centuries due to its being drawn from profoundly human experiences. One such motif is the relationship between the living and the dead. Treated in the keys of the miraculous and the holy in the Bible, that relationship is reused in the last two centuries in such literature and cinema genres as science-fiction and horror to express cynical truths about modern human incongruence and alienation. Returned, as it were, with a vengeance, the topic of how we deal with our dead forces us to (re)consider how we deal with one another, as the uncanny underlying our own social contracts shines through our projections of the Self into the Undead Other. KEY WORDS: Apocalypse, pop-culture, uncanny, undead, alterity

Owing to the spread and socio-cultural hold of Christianity over the last two millennia, the dominant representations of the End Times in the popular conception of the Western World have chiefly been based on the biblical account of St. John’s revelations on the Greek isle of Patmos, confined to writing as The Apocalypse or The Book of Revelations. There has been much controversy regarding the concept, with various religious and secular factions disputing the literal-prophetic or allegorical character of this final chapter of the New Testament. However, its potential to inspire as well as frighten, together with its relatability to the human experience at large, appears hardly diminished throughout the ages. The Christian belief in an End of Days was a Weltanschauung-altering philosophy noticeably distinct from those espoused by other cultures, whether contemporaneous or not—a philosophy which perfectly fit in with the other Christian tenets of renouncing (and denouncing) the world and its materialism (If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the *

CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU (PhD) is Assistant Lecturer in German at Emanuel University of Oradea, Romania. He specializes in German language and culture, and also in English literature with a strong interest in creative writing. E-mail: [email protected].

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poor […] and come and follow Me, Matthew 19:21 KJV). That denouncing of the world, whether actively (ascetically) embraced or merely implied via lifestyle choices, was one of the many spiritual nuances that vigorously opposed the new Christian religion to the politics-spliced cults of the Roman Empire, wherein freedom of religion was largely observed, provided the (private) worshippers of the cults imported or adapted by the Romans were centralised by their (public) act of bringing homage to the deified Emperor. Likely as an extension of his proclaimed divinity, the Emperor’s city, the mighty Rome, was believed to be eternal, sacred, and the beacon of civilisation. Even at its most conflicted, Rome was still thought indestructible, lest its fall should bring about the fall of civilisation as the ancients knew it. This is precisely why its infamous fall in the fifth century AD created an unparalleled moment of sheer terror by disturbingly connecting the scriptural with the historical, as the citizens of the Empire, many of whom had become Christians by that point, cowered in fear at the possibility of witnessing the prophesied End Times. We may argue that, at that point at the end of the fifth century, as well as nowadays, the cognitive and spiritual reception of the Apocalypse concept would vary along two distinct lines: joy and fear. For the faithful, having internalised the socio-ethical precepts of the Christian doctrine based on neighbourly love and communion with the divine, the End of Days did not stir despair and panic, but it was eagerly awaited and celebrated as the would-be fulfillment of a divine covenant, the return to their Paradise home, their homecoming and blissful reunion with the Heavenly Father. Included in the New Testament as the ultimate memento mori (in its Christian sense of watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is, Mark 13:33 KJV), the Apocalypse vision is thus a profoundly sublime experience connecting the natural, if repressed, sense of utter fright at the crumbling of the material world, and the bliss of eternal salvation. The Second Coming would thus mark the end of all personal and earthly tribulations, the end of evil and the rewarding of the faithful, and most notably the resuming of a pre-Fall eternal existence of unbroken communion with God, as presumably intended for all sentient life. On the other hand, for the less spiritually immersed, i.e. the more materially-minded, as typical of the Roman citizens in the above comparison, such Christian eschatology may have appeared naive; they struggled with the concept of the destruction of their world, central to their very personal and public identity, being for the best. The concept of an “end of days” certainly exists in other cultures as well, from the Egyptians to the Norse to the Mayans, most often in conjunction with, and as a mythological explanation for, the natural and agricultural ebb and flow. However, the cyclical nature (the eternal recurrence) of such cosmologies presumes, or is accompanied by, fundamentally, a sense of an CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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eternal status quo, where time is either meaningless in a cosmic sense, or has little to do with human history (as per Eliade’s concept of sacred time, see Eliade, 1967: 174). Multiple mythologies describe primordial struggles between various avatars of the forces of chaos and order, settled by the universe-shaping victory of the latter, which establishes the known order of the natural world, including timekeeping or even the flow of time (or of our time) itself. Yet in the same mythologies, various “dead” or “eternally imprisoned” deities are recurrent in what is perceived as an age contemporary to, or immediately preceding, that of man, associating with other members of the pantheon, including their symbolic and narrative enemies, or being featured before and after they are born or otherwise conceived, existing on multiple planes or in multiple temporal lines, etc. Naturally, such narrative inconsistencies are easily explained by the historical circumstances of their myths’ compiling, viz. ethno-political shifts, religious reforms and reinterpretations. In turn, the ancient worshippers were also arguably hardly concerned with such inconsistencies, as the default omnipotence of such deities was reason enough for them to get away with conflicting or illogical details (not unlike their modern counterparts, comic-book characters), even in the face of notable personal flaws making them all too human, as in the famous case of the Greco-Roman pantheon. On the other hand, the Christian cosmology is rife with a sense of purpose. The world is said to have been created for mankind, and even in its fallen, highly material form it remains the ultimate testing site of the soul and the battleground between good and evil, never left to its own devices but part of a divine plan including its redemption along with that of man. This sense of divine teleology is in fact the key ingredient behind the sublime presumably experienced by the devout Christians at the time of the fall of Rome, the reason for the Apocalypse being a terrifying, but equally hopeful moment. Yet it is interesting to note that, while frightful indeed, the events in St. John’s vision are not singular in their quality of worldchanging catastrophes described in the Bible, though they are perhaps the most massive. A similar global purging event is featured in the Old Testament, pertaining to the worldwide-mentioned Flood, with its extinction of most life on earth and of most humans, save for righteous Noah, his kin and the living samples they were able to cram aboard the Ark. Furthermore, Sodom and Gomorrah are later obliterated, with only one surviving family, warned by the angels for the sake of pious Lot, just as Egypt is devastated in the days of Moses, with only the Jewish minority leaving the country of the Nile largely unharmed. There is a pattern perpetuated across such moments, throughout the Judaic-Christian biblical tradition, a red line of faith intertwined with hope and love. Each catastrophe, from Adam to Christ through Noah, Lot, MoCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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ses, Job and others, whether personal or cosmic, brings about the faith that the disaster was meaningful, not haphazard, and that its meaning is that of fatherly all-knowing and all-managing love, whereby God and the world are to be reconciled in hope of a fresh new start, with better prospects. Ever since Adam’s Fall, disaster is coupled with the promise of salvation, therefore the Apocalypse—as part of theodicy—is sublime by its inspirational virtue of teleology. The fall of the Roman Empire was, as previously argued, a secular, historically verifiable Apocalypse, perhaps one of the very first proper ones in recorded history, profoundly affecting most of the known world—from a European perspective—and truly forging a new earth, if not a new heaven, by means of the ensuing cultural and sociopolitical struggles. After the initial shock and awe, the former empire’s populace saw this had not been the dreaded or welcomed Apocalypse and that life went on, with its share of changes and respective adaptations, the horror show postponed until further notice, to render it in modern lingo. Many former Roman settlers would have witnessed a steady drop in living standards, technology and literacy, aggravated by the lack of civil order and the steep increase in lawlessness over the following decades, but Rome’s former slaves, together with the former provinces of the west, were now free to rule themselves, while the surviving eastern half of the Empire enjoyed relative prosperity, free from political strife and directly benefiting from the Asian trade routes. This mixed appreciation of the Roman postapocalypse, and its underlying meaning of averted and thus avertable doom, undermined the dread of a realised Apocalypse, laying the cognitive foundations of a subsequent tradition (see below) of increasingly secular Apocalypses, with the original relegated to the world of philosophical and religious symbolism (and cf. Jonah’s initial annoyance at the canceled destruction of Niniveh). Over time, as the desolate toil of living in the so-called Dark Ages gave way once more to sophistication and comfort (and marked social stratification), and ultimately to the mass-consumed impression of self-sustainability and technological nigh-omnipotence, humanity gradually came to approach the concept of the Apocalypse somewhat differently. Idealist and materialist skeptics began doubting that the world would end at all—or anytime soon— suggesting instead that St. John’s revelations were rather an ethical allegory, or a short-term vision whose atrocities had already been fulfilled by the Romans or other repressive reigns in history. Pessimists of various conviction but united in their mistrust of man handling power, with our without any divine supervision, feared that the horrors hinted at in the original text, though perhaps symbolic, may well yet come to pass in increasingly terrifying forms attuned to each generation’s collective fears and imaginative abilities—themselves based on the ideas and technologies available in the age. In CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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either case, the original teleology that the Apocalypse was approached with by the early Christians was undergoing erosion, while the individually and globally transforming faith established by the sacrificial example of the Nazarene followed in the footsteps of the official Roman cults, generators and warrants of sociopolitical identity. Proportionate to mankind’s development accelerating over the last few centuries, a proliferation of would-be apocalyptic moments could be noted, featuring such staples as war, famine, plagues and death, cataclysms and increasingly destructive technology, even certain historical figures likened to the Antichrist. The fall of Rome, the Black Death, the fall of Constantinople, the New World Conquistador massacres, the Thirty Years’ War, the post-1789 Terror in France, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War could all variably well fit the apocalyptic scenario (in most aspects except the raising of the dead) in the eyes of their contemporaries, only to become historical false positives: averted Apocalypses. While alarming in a homo homini lupus meditational direction, the sheer number of such moments is liable to induce a certain desensitisation effect; averted Apocalypses, though ideally cautionary, are much less frightening and even confidence-building. In a fascinating twist on the tale of the little boy who cried wolf, such scares may build up to become a generational acquired taste, replacing the sublime initially achieved by the promise of divine salvation with the flattering thrill of having seemingly fended off disaster ourselves. Ironically enough, the sheer number of potential and averted apocalypses thus weakens the very concept of the Apocalypse, simultaneously reifying it and mass-marketing it for audiences growing addicted to the Russian-roulette-like thrill of its “misfires”. In brief, this research paper argues that the original God-inextricable sense of teleology underpinning the concept of the End of Days has, throughout history, been eroded in the collective imagination of the Western world by the repetition of false-positive apocalyptic moments in conjunction with the increasingly secular nature of culture and civilisation. By removing God from the equation of pop-culture aesthetics, the psychosocial and cognitive “safety net” with which to theorise and depict the Cosmos is also lost. The orderly chains of being held together by Providence have been replaced with the brutal law of the jungle, appended, particularly in recent fiction, with a Murphy-esque principle along the lines of “whatever can go horribly wrong, it monstrously will.” Thus, the original sense of the Apocalyptic sublime, initially hinging on fear and faith, has been transformed into cynicism by the steady loss of teleology (and the faith therein) and the conditioning to enjoy and crave fear (in a somewhat sublime key induced by the fourth wall of cinematic media). Within this research paper, itself part of a larger effort of pursuing the uncanny in pop-culture as a CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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mirror and vehicle of global imagination and consciousness, we shall investigate how the Apocalypse-derived imagery, drawing on some of the most basic and primeval fears of mankind, has been reconceptualised in modern and contemporary times and what insight such persistent fears provide us with regarding our culture and civilisation. For instance, some of the most recognisable imagery of the Apocalypse relates to the Four Horsemen. It is quite understandable that war, plague, famine and death would register as continuous bogeys of collective imagination, developed from and further enhancing some of the greatest real-life terrors of mankind, on both public and personal levels. This is equally true about the cataclysms also mentioned in the Apocalypse, such as earthquakes and the impacting “great star” (Apocalypse 8:10, KJV). There is nothing particularly insidious about the quality of the fear they conjure within us, just the “classical” fear of personal harm and its associated socio-emotional traumas. We know what they are, we know what they may do to us and we know we’d better avoid them, and their shock value is largely the same whether taken literally or used as symbols. Yet there is another kind of fear-spectrum emotions evoked by the Apocalypse vision or its subsequent adaptations, pertaining to the aesthetic category of the uncanny. Namely, the last chapter of the New Testament depicts certain fantastical creatures as likely metaphors of historical events or societal aspects, most of which are composite and of unnatural size and / or abilities, some emerging from the sea in scenes reminiscent of classical Kaiju cinema. The uncanny also includes the character of the Antichrist, through the latter’s hidden and manipulative human nature, an unsettling reminder of the “banality of evil” (cf. Arendt) as witnessed too many times in human history. Lastly, while the Universal Judgment is deeply unnerving on its own because of its stern finality correlated with all-applicable human fallibility (If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us, John 1:8 KJV), it is believed to also consist of the universal resurrection of the dead. That is to say, in view of the upcoming universal judgment, the living would be sharing close quarters with (all) the dead. The above scene may be one of the earliest and most impactful depictions of the uncanny in one of its fundamental and universal forms. According to Sigmund Freud (2003: 17), the uncanny is both the heimisch and the unheimlich, namely featuring aspects which on some level are deeply familiar to us and yet they appear in a context or position entirely distinct to what we have come to know or expect of them. That is indeed the case with the en-masse resurrection prior to the Final Judgment. It is a scene which, though not more openly frightful than those of the devastations brought about by the Four Horsemen or the beasts, bears the mark of subtler psychological terror, instilled by some of the most basic Self-Other dichotomies CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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of all individuals, as we shall explore further. The biblical thriller is enhanced by the cognitive dissonance produced at the joining of our affectionate recognition of many of the revenants as ancestors or close family and friends with the instinctive repulsion towards dead matter. Lastly, the third component of the uncanny as manifested in the Apocalypse scene is our cognitive inability to properly imagine the specific circumstances and details of how the dead would come back, as well as confidently anticipate and manage our respective emotional responses. In short, the uncanny of the Apocalypse has much to do with the unsettling of uncertainty. One of the greatest and timeless unsettling mysteries mankind has had to face is that of the relationship between life and death, in particular that between the living and the dead, such that the pervading uncanny exuding from the universal resurrection scene is entirely justified. The ancient-tomedieval world, on one hand, as well as the modern-to-contemporary one, on the other, features world paradigms and thought structures for handling such cosmic uncertainties as death in ways that, while distinct or even contrary, both seek to reduce (cognitive) chaos by explaining it away, by providing systemic certitudes their respective societies can rely upon. The ancients chiefly employed complex systems of rituals and superstition to ensure, based primarily on faith, hope and sacred / taboo authority, the proper communication and balance between the forces and corresponding realms of life and death, and, most importantly in an immediate sense, to reassure and placate the living via knowledge of the apparent fulfillment of that ideologically-underlying promise of cosmic equilibrium. By partaking in such rituals, they sought to partake in the balancing and perhaps the development of their own world—initially by the mimesis of the myths, and later by their own efforts, for “masking is becoming” (cf. Mack, 1994: 4)—a subtle power only a few sparks of genius away from the emancipated selfreliance of modernity. The same cosmic concerns are met with significantly less clarity in modern and contemporary times, where the opposing tugs of material-cum-scientific secularism and, respectively, that of a burgeoning new spirituality cobbled together from traditions of the East and the West threaten to cause the permanent rupture of any coherent philosophy dealing with life and death. It appears the man of the twenty-first century is no longer able to relate to death in the life-integrated natural way his ancestors purportedly used to, nor retain the strength of their faith in any of the more recent types of (urban) rituals, while the growing inter-individual estrangement over the last two centuries leads to a proliferation of cynicism and paranoia. In the Bible, itself part of the wider more structured philosophy regarding life and death of the early ages as per above, any instance of the dead coming back to life, from miracles to the Final Judgment, is a rare epiphany CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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of the divine, and is most often assumed true by the faithful, and admissible by other social groups. Nowadays, when publications are usually clearly cleft into fictional and factual, miraculous recoveries, let alone revivals, are met with the greatest of skepticism in most factual media, with the exception of some tabloids and niche magazines. However, fictional literature displays an abundance of characters (depending on the literary genre) whose feigned or diegetically genuine resurrection(s) constitute(s) major plot devices, though the trope is generally frowned upon as being a “cop-out” too similar to the ancient Greek technique of deus ex machina, no longer satisfying for modern audiences. The reanimation of the various characters in contemporary popular fiction is, most often than not, no longer a miracle but a scientific achievement. Typically, it is not the restoration of man as a complete cosmic entity made up of soul, mind and body, but rather—ever since Frankenstein’s creature (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, quoted on http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84)—the return of something else entirely: a barely sentient (or “re-programmed”, including literally), oftentimes aggressive, wretched lump of decayed or technology-hybridised flesh. Nevertheless, the threshold of life and death remains confounding and, to some extent, taboo, hence the circumstances of characters making comebacks after their diegetic death need to be exceptional, particularly in the contemporary secular and scientific context. Yet producing effective suspension of disbelief, as a narrative mechanism, has changed very little, merely by the substitution of agents of holy and sacred power by currently-acceptable sufficiently mysterious or speculation-liable “higher powers”. Among such, recent pop-culture is awash with superior alien technology (Stargate, The X-Files), genetic mutations granting particular abilities (The XMen, The Fantastic Four, Highlander), or Earth technology so advanced and so resource-intensive that only the political, military and / or technological elite have access to it (Robocop, Fringe). Interestingly enough, in some of the above tropes there is the distinct tendency of reinterpreting sacred imagery by resorting to dazzling technology (cf. Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim of “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”). In Robocop, the eponymous part-man part-machine saviour, resurrected by the political-corporate technological elite, is nearly invulnerable and cleanses the streets of Delta City, appears to walk on water and is even tortured in a cruciform position complete with hand shot wounds as stigmata, from which his cybernetic parts restore him; the Stargate franchise draws on the ancientastronaut hypotheses of Erich von Dänniken and his followers to interpret the gods of multiple ancient mythologies as warring alien species, some of which parasitic and requiring human hosts and slaves, hence their worship on the planets they had visited and ruled, including Earth, and perceived as CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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immortal due to their regenerative sarcophagus-like devices. On occasion, such advanced technology, the brainchild of “mad”-perceived exotic science, is depicted as able to avert certain apocalypses by means of time travel and / or shifting into alternate dimensions, e.g. in the Terminator franchise and the more recent science-fiction television series Fringe, respectively. The scenario of a narrowly-avoided death resulting instead in unusual abilities is characteristic of comics and their adaptations in the other media of the superhero genre, currently enjoying a fanbase boom: the original “children of the atom”, The X-Men, feature the iconically grouchy die-hard regenerative mutant Wolverine, whose entire body was dismantled and allowed to regrow in the successful attempt of lacing the fictitious indestructible adamantium alloy to his bones in order to obtain a living weapon; the Hulk, deliberately created by Stan Lee in homage of Frankenstein's creature and the duo of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (see http://soundonsight.org/greatest-comic-book-adaptations-part-4), should have died as a mere man from exposure to gamma radiation, but mysteriously lived to develop a rage-fueled monstrous alter ego; he is paralleled by Dr. Manhattan from The Watchmen franchise, whose similar accidental exposure to radiation during his atomic research for the army transform him into an unabashed dispassionate godlike being that eventually flees Earth; The Fantastic Four are of course another illustrious such example, yet their origin story refers more to the dangers of outer space radiation for astronauts, being also very reminiscent of the unpredictability of mystic energies, as the protagonists are exposed to the same radiation wave, which nevertheless triggers markedly distinct transformations within each one of them; lastly, sarcastic antihero Deadpool, of the same Marvel comics universe, is the living result of an experiment to create the ultimate warrior from the gene pool (the corpses) of multiple human mutants with exceptional abilities. Lastly, although they may be somewhat less statistically represented, antiheroes dead and reborn monstrous are noted even in the very noir settings of urban sprawls, where they reinterpret the Faustian theme of humans tricked into demonic pacts, splicing it with the folk motif of the cunning humans attempting to trick the devil back into regaining their freedom and the theme of struggling with their lost or dwindling humanity while attempting to put their newly-gained infernal abilities to good use (Ghost Rider, Spawn). Beyond the exercise in creativity and science-fiction speculation, such fiction involving individuals who have transcended death primarily by means of experimental technology reads in many ways as contemporary fairy tales. While the origins of comics can be found in a war-torn age in need of models of bravery, virtue and patriotism (cf. Reynolds, 1992: 20), with their Golden Age reaching into the Cold War period of scientific and technological rivalry between the USA and the USSR, there are often cauCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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tionary undertones to the adventures depicted therein, expressing certain underlying fears of the postwar generation, indeed a post-apocalyptic generation secretly bracing itself for the dreaded nuclear apocalypse. The diegetic struggles of superheroes appearing in comics were paralleled by the social struggles of the symbols they embodied. The isolation and public hostility encountered by the human mutates closely followed the racial and sexual tensions of the second half of the twentieth century; similarly, the monsters (whether as antiheroes or heroes proper) created by radiation exposure stood for merely a glamorous take on the real-world horrors of radiation poisoning and the permanently looming atomic threat. Finally, the various versions of humans struggling with retaining their (full) humanity when amalgamated or otherwise associated with machines were merely voicing, for a new generation, the same identity complex and the dread of seeing the creator-creature relationship overturned experienced by mankind since the earliest automaton horror stories. Despite the overall message of hope through continuous effort towards world progress and self-improvement conveyed by the superhero comics, the above undertones reflect the levels of cynicism and paranoia found in global pop-culture: governments are secretive and manipulative cliques, corporations have enslaved mankind for the profit of wicked corrupt oligarchs, war and violence is ever-present, there are untold numbers of dangers mankind never even suspects, etc. In such a context, technology is truly an awe-inspiring force, and its misuse appears to be only a matter of time (a “Chekov’s gun”), as is the case with spiritual phenomena and beings, part of a truly alien world as far as contemporary laity is concerned, inaccessible for most but the eeriest of humans, with wondrous but intimidating details, a world of abstract beauty and cold rigour or (especially since Lovecraft) of misshapen life forms in whose image mankind is clearly not made. However, the truest resemblance to the mass-scale uncanny of the resurrected dead scene from the original Apocalypse is to be found not in the individual stories of mutated transcendence as the source of science-fiction heroes and antiheroes, but in the populations (and even civilisations) of the undead as popularised by the horror and science-fiction genres, particularly in their various combined niches. The undead genre draws on the virtually universal fear of the “restless dead”, a concept with a huge visceral impact on and within the imaginary of various civilisations past or present, from the abject to the artsy and from sublime to ironic. The uncanny evoked by the undead relates to our primeval fears of not only death itself, but of dead bodies as the ultimate (surviving) taboo (cf. Freud, 1950: 12). The dead were not to be disturbed or summoned in trifle, but appeased and propitiated as they were seen as human essences freed of material limitations, ascended to near-godhood, CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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guardians but often also terrible avengers. Their former bodies thus had a dual significance, being the material anchors and vehicles of such aweinspiring forces, symbolic as well as cultic, entities on another plane of existence and beyond the human values of “good” and “evil”, as they were understood as simultaneously hallowed and foul. Symbolically, they were the one persistent link to the afterlife, a two-way portal for the articulation of cosmic willpower, which rendered the corresponding ancestors departed but even more powerful, virtually indestructible potential assailants of the living. Contemporary cinema and the derived new-media entertainment have capitalised on such culturally persistent imagery, popularising and partly reconceptualising the vampire and the zombie. Regardless of their particularities as affiliated to various cultures of the world, the two ghouls, as appearing in modern lore, seem to have always signified something beyond the “cheap thrills” they conveyed. Firstly, they resonate with our species consciousness in the key of biological horror: as opposed to the angstfraught uniqueness of Frankenstein’s creature, denied a mate exactly so that his kind would not propagate (if even possible), modern vampires and zombies are able to multiply on their own, producing a genuine demographic plague. Though exponentially infectious in much the same way as a virus (itself on the cusp of living and dead matter), vampires and zombies do not, in fact, reproduce to generate actual new individuals or clones of an original, but instead mortally wound individuals of the opposing population to turn them into new members of their marching army. The process by which that occurs is arguably indicative of the origins of such ghouls in the worldwide fear of contamination, ages before the natural phenomenon was properly understood, but clearly also afterwards, in contemporary times, where the concept is compounded with the paranoia of deliberate infection, as related to the modern dread of biochemical warfare. Apart from the ancient fear of being “soiled” by contact with certain bio-waste matter, especially by their ingestion, surviving in several world religions to this day, the audience is gripped by the symbols of vampires and zombies because the latter feature perhaps the apex of human “uncleanness”, cannibalism. However, this is where their similarities stop. On one hand, vampires, regardless of the culture originating them, are always seen as robbers of life essence, as per the truism adopted by modern vampire enthusiasts that “the blood is the life”, being thus in many ways a parasitic race. In fact, modern western lore often depicts them as going to great lengths in containing their own demographic figures by the refusal to kill humans, whereby they would (according to certain lore variants) transform them into vampires instead of mere “farmed cattle”, thus empowering them. Since the resurgence of the Gothic genre, they have been increasingly described as keeping a complex CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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social order and having constituted a variably secret sophisticated civilisation. On the other hand, zombies are visibly less sophisticated, little more than mysteriously reanimated flesh lurching about driven by the basic mechanism of finding sustenance, most notoriously human brains. Although social organisation commensurate with canine packs is occasionally noted in modern zombie lore, the vast and traditional majority of them are simply dumb, if resilient, beasts. The issue of their bodily resilience is one particular aspect of their multifold uncanny, since both categories, as embodiment of the restless dead concept, are essentially immortal from a logical standpoint, since they have already died. They are not, however, indestructible, yet their ability to withstand most conventional attacks makes them formidable foes on their own, and especially, as is the case with zombies, overwhelming when part of a demographic outbreak or a “horde” (even though multiple instances of recent popular vampire fiction TV series, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to True Blood, feature groups of vampires used as expendable minion-armies by more powerful demonic creatures). The aspect of their unnerving resilience in death and in sheer numbers has made the transition from horror to science-fiction, with such notable nemeses as the Borg Collective—ruthless highly adaptive cyborgs bent on assimilating (technically counting as killing them first by annihilating their individual consciousness) all sentient species in the Star Trek universe—and the Cybermen—similarly ambitious robots ‘upgraded’ from humans in the Doctor Who franchise. The other major level of symbolism rendering the undead so uncanny is the socio-cultural one. As in the original Apocalypse, revenants strike the living with a concrete sense of alterity, while always contained in one's own self: the undead is the fundamental multilayered Other inspiring fear of the same potential within the Self. Building on that concept, vampires and zombies are indicative of the great paranoia permeating human society, of having been infiltrated: the mistrust of the Other possibly embedded within the very ranks of the Self, from plague-carrying individuals to the more recent sleeper-cell terrorists. As such, they are often used in modern and contemporary fiction to reveal certain truths about the unrests of the social milieu they originate in and occasionally to thus convey certain propaganda messages (as notorious in the first half of the twentieth century, when Nazis would use the symbol of the vampire as a racial slur against Jews and Slavs, while some of the latter retorted by comparing the ferocity of Nazis with that of werewolves). As alluded to earlier, the distinctions between the respective social order of vampires and zombies mirror the social strata of class- or caste-based societies, with vampires traditionally perceived as the wicked aristocratic or

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bourgeois elite and zombies associated more with the lower or working classes and, recently, with consumerist frenzies. The most iconic vampire, essentially establishing the lore canon on the undead bloodsuckers, remains the infamous Count Dracula, as introduced by Bram Stoker (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/345) in a time of postVictorian unrest where Britain saw itself confronted with international and domestic challenges as its global supremacy was being questioned. Within Stoker’s novel, Dracula emerges as both a public threat (determined to constitute his new domain and vampire court on English soil) and—chiefly—a private threat, as he seduces and manipulates, ultimately turning Lucy and partly Mina into his minions. His description identifies him, by the predatory animal suggestions (the aquiline nose, the pointed teeth), as a cultural assailant against the English social norms, presumed to be those of the “civilised world” of the time, with his Victorian-disturbing “hard, and cruel, and sensual” aspect helping to cement the link between vampirism and sexual predation. Further pursuing his symbolic nature, we may discover Dracula to be an epitome of the Immigrant and, surprisingly, of the lower classes, for he is parasitic and endeavouring to spread his influence, uses exotic practices to bend the laws (of nature) and escape capture and, respectively, associates with vermin, dark spaces and the mentally unwell. The protagonists’ struggle against him is not merely a private one, to save Mina, but a public one as well, a self-appointed West-to-East crusade meant to secure the socio-economical and class status quo (from its being overturned by the vampire upstart), a crusade complete with hints of ethno-cultural amusement and disdain, opposed to Dracula’s same voyage from East to West, labeled an invasion. From wretched creatures of the night vulnerable to a number of holy and vegetal paraphernalia and to drowning, decapitation, heart stabbing and especially sunlight (according to the established Hollywood tradition, rather than Stoker’s depictions), connotative of the shadier elements of society, vampires are immensely glamourised over the past decades in works by Anne Rice and her followers. They thus garner a Gothic bohemian mystique emphasising their irresistible seduction and superhuman attributes such as agility, regeneration and immortality, turning them into a kind of belated Romantic Übermenschen, not far—certainly not in the most recent portrayals in the Twilight series—from the Victorian idealisation of the undead pharaohs. Lastly, vampires become stock figures (among the most recognisable “universal monsters”) in the contemporary genre of urban fantasy, often displayed in gritty, would-be realist tones, which allows them to become—much in the way of other contemporary superhumans, e.g. superheroes—conveyors of certain social messages. In the True Blood series, they are often used as thinly-veiled metaphors of sexual and racial minoriCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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ties, opposed by certain radical church groups as the series is set in the American South, but of other shady elements of society as well, including drug runners reaping the benefits of selling vampire blood-derived compounds. But if the vampire protagonist in True Blood appears as a country gentleman battling his own (blood)lust, the eponymous antihero in the Blade franchise, the so-called “Daywalker”, is a doubly resurrected hero of sorts, as he is born with his liminal attributes of both vampire and man from a mother initially said to have been killed by a vampire before giving birth to him. Blade exists in a punk dystopia rife with vampires, presumed a monstrous variant of mankind due to mutation, not occult forces, organised along gangland or Mafia structures and depicted as being the true elite controlling human society by means of “familiars” (human slaves) in every major institution. In the above examples we have seen how vampires may express the public’s insecurity towards the apparent disdain of the major institutions regarding their socio-politically enslaved average citizen, itself the revaluation of the age-old resent of the unempowered masses towards those who seemed to have it all. However, even the vampire rulers in Blade’s universe are terrorised by other types of undead invader- converters appearing in their midst, particularly as described in the second and third films of the cinematic trilogy, where science (both vampire- and human-driven, respectively) has produced bioengineered monstrosities. In the first case, vampires are being hunted down by an “enhanced vampire”, a Reaper, of alien monstrosity even by vampire standards, whose mere scratch is able to turn both vampires and humans into Reapers, and resistant to most attacks (e.g. due to its bone-encased heart) except ultraviolet rays. Secondly, in order to do away with all vampires, humans produce the so-called “Day Star” virus, which Blade must take a lethal risk of using in order to put an end to the rule of a returned nearly omnipotent Dracula. Science, in particular mad, exotic science, warped for economic or military-political profit, is a staple of contemporary pop-culture fiction, and the trope does not fail to be associated with the undead. Alongside the above examples involving vampires, zombies are routinely depicted as created by and for nefarious corporations, some as a result of research in biological warfare, including cases of providing both human and animal corpses with ghastly genetic upgrades, in e.g. 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, George Romero’s genre-establishing Living Dead films (http://www.timeout.com/film/news/631.html) and the Resident Evil franchise. In general, the horror genre is replete with various dead characters returning with horrendously murderous grudges, such as the Candyman (with its own legend resurrection and duties conferral act), Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Samara of The Ring notoriety. On occasion, inanimate objects gaining deleterious volition, CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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if not sentience per se, and thus seemingly coming alive, provide excellent opportunities to ponder our dependence on objects in an uncanny key (reminiscent of Eastern mythologies dealing with abandoned household wares coming to vengeful or mischievous life after years of neglect)—and give rise to such unforgettable classics as Chucky, the abusive doll, or Christine, the revengeful haunted car. On occasion, the proliferation of the various undead (of both types described herein), treated ironically and even parodically (Shaun of the Dead, Fido) leads to memorable instances of dark comedy, such as in The Addams Family, Beetlejuice or The Corpse Bride. Just as vampires hinted at class-based society inequality and the paranoia of invasion, zombies are reminiscent—through their very roots in Voodoo slave work, itself a culture steeped in slavery—of current diverse forms of socioeconomic slavery, most typically illegal immigrant work, being thus often quoted as a metaphor of the evils of consumerist culture. Lastly, the sciencefiction undead carry their own political messages, as both the Borg Collective and the Cybermen, particularly the latter in their sarcastic depiction of a would-be glorious Cyberman future, strongly connote with the still relevant fears of real-world totalitarian evil empires banning freedom of thought or individuality and perpetuated through forceful indoctrination. Fear of the undead, by means of the uncanny conceptualisations of their encounter, has stirred mankind for ages and is, unsurprisingly, also found in sacred texts such as the Apocalypse, a particularly rich trove of meaningful terrorising imagery including other representations of the uncanny itself. In this research paper we have argued that the initial sense of divine teleology permeating the Cosmos and making the Apocalypse a sublimeconveying memento mori may have largely been lost to the secular progress. Instead, the uncanny of the Apocalypse’s undead is now arrayed with the addictive virtuality of the vicarious on-screen fear, otherwise a contemporary form of the sublime itself. In doing so, in reconceptualising some of the most primeval fears of mankind in the keys of cynicism, paranoia or irony, we are able to gain new insight into the contemporary human experience, as well as the eternal duality of Self and Other and perhaps even predict the future development of pop culture.

References Eliade, Mircea. “Cosmogonic Myth and ‘Sacred History’.” Religious Studies 2 (1967): 171-183. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1950. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Mack, John, ed. Masks: The Art of Expression. London: British Museum Press, 1994. CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson, FL: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Sound on Sight. “The Incredible Hulk.” Greatest Comic Book Adaptations (Part 4). http://soundonsight.org/greatest-comic-book-adapta-tions-part4. Acessed November 16, 2013. Stoker, Bram. “Dracula.” http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/345. Accessed November 13, 2013. Walters, Bob. “Simon Pegg Interviews George Romero.” Time-out.com, http://www.timeout.com/film/news/631.html. Accessed November 17, 2013. Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary. “Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus.” http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84. Accessed November 12, 2013.

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PERSUADING AN AUDIENCE: MARGARET THATCHER’S SPEECH TO THE FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION (“THE WEST IN THE WORLD TODAY”) IRINA DREXLER*

The language of truth is simple. (Euripides)

ABSTRACT. The firm attitude is what brought Margaret Thatcher the appellation of “Iron Lady”, for she found herself in the position to act with toughness against the rights of the employees and unionists (in what internal politics was concerned) and to be actively involved in the war against Argentina for the Falkland Islands (in external affairs). The political figure of Margaret Thatcher is noted down in the history of the British people as the only woman to hold the position of both leader of the Conservative Party, as well as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for over a decade. Her unshaken rhetoric gained her the nickname the “Iron Lady”, which explains much of the firmness of her speeches addressed to the public. The speech proposed for analysis in this present paper, addressed to the Foreign Policy Association on December 18th, 1978, having the subtitle “The West in the World Today”, is given to the British in the form of a public statement of major importance. In its moderate length content it manages to tackle a number of political and economic themes, among which general discussions on foreign policy in the USA, Middle East, Africa, USSR and successor states and Commonwealth, economy, defence, society, terrorism, as well as European Union budget, religion, morality, socialism and so on.** KEY WORDS: speech, structure, Thatcher, politics, audience

Any observable claim about the importance of rhetorical studies requires as a first step a clarification of the various definitions that the researches that have been conducted so far have provided. This attempt would, however, *

**

IRINA DREXLER (PhD) is affiliated to Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and the University of Vienna, Austria. Her main research interests cover debates on modern American and British diplomacy, and are related to the rhetoric of postmodern political treaties. E-mail: [email protected]. [Note. This work was possible with the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU / 107 / 1.5 / S / 76841 with the title “Modern Doctoral Studies: Internationalization and Interdisciplinarity”.]

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make it clearer once again for the researcher, the writer and the reader alike that no one single definition can be as concise and as elaborate at the same time to comprise the full meaning of rhetoric. Some might even go as far as to firmly state that not a single definition could ever pin rhetoric down. From the times of Aristotle’s first major work on the topic, “The Art of Rhetoric”, this field has been thought to have no specific territory or subject matter of its own, as rhetoric is so diverse and can be applied to everything that surrounds us. The contrasting definitions of rhetoric, ranging from it being seen as an art of discourse to it being perceived as a study of its resources and consequences, have spread throughout time in the specialised literature from the Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and other classicist thinkers to the Middle Age rhetoric, Renaissance and Modern rhetoric of our days. In Ancient Greece, a rhetor was a speaker who possessed the skills of addressing the law courts and large gatherings of people with the purpose of persuading them in one direction or another. Rhetoric was thus the theory of how to best achieve this aim by employing carefully selected linguistic devices in both written and spoken speeches. In the beginning, the skill of using rhetoric was ascribed to the oratory of males and it was usually connected to the range of resources used for winning in politics, a dominant male activity. In our times, however, the emphasis is no longer on male orators, and the spectrum of rhetoric has extended as well, covering more than verbal communication—as we have seen two paragraphs before, such gestures as frowning, smiling or raising an eyebrow can be equally eloquent in sending a message across. From the pre-Socratics until now rhetoric has been seen as at least one of the indispensable human arts (Booth, 2004: 4) and the relevance of studying it in a systematic manner was not denied, irrespective of its powers of destruction when in the hands of those whose minds are set on harming. Even Plato, considered perhaps the most negative critic of rhetoric before the seventeenth century (Booth, 2004: 4), believed the study of rhetoric was essential. Without considering an impediment of the status of rhetoric at the time being an “art of degrading men’s souls while pretending to make them better” (Booth, 2004: 4), Plato did not deny the essential role of the study of rhetoric to any attempt to study the mechanism of thinking and expressing thoughts. The Greek philosopher from the fourth century BC, Aristotle, the Roman philosopher, orator and political theorist from the second century BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, the theologian and rhetorician from the fourth century AD, St. Augustine and the first century AD Roman rhetorician from Hispania, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, usually referred to as Quintilian could not exclude persuasion from their definitions of rhetoric, although

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their works are separated by centuries in time. It is one of the great continuing mysteries of rhetoric and related disciplines as well. There is an undeniable truth that discourse has often had as a result and a potential force to move hearts and influence minds, to transform people and courses of action in remarkably powerful ways. The studies of rhetoric, that began many centuries ago, BC, have been trying to identify underlying principles of persuasion as a central point, one of the defining ends of rhetoric. The modern studies charted a road map to social-scientific work concerning persuasive communication, trying to answer such enduring questions as how people direct and shape belief, how consensus is achieved through dialogue, how words transform into actions and which actions. It has not always been an easy road. Despite the fact that the answers to such questions and other alike have sometimes confirmed intuitions and sometimes yielded remarkably counterintuitive findings (Sloane, 2001: 575), persuasion research is not pinned down under any single disciplinary or conceptual framework. As the many social sciences of the twentieth century have tried to shape a better image of what persuasion is, after research having been conducted in the respective academic fields there have not been enough efforts made to connect these findings, to find the common traits and paint a comprehensive, multi-angled image of persuasion. Nearly all the social sciences, including psychology, communication, sociology, political science, anthropology and so on, and other related applied endeavours with social-scientific questions and methods, as is the case of advertising and marketing for instance, have relevant research being conducted by specialists. This is to offer a smidgen of persuasion studies, an overview of which would be a difficult, yet useful endeavour. In one way or another, persuasion presupposes influencing the audience perception of reality or thoughts, which later transform into action. As the saying goes, “watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they will become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, it becomes destiny. What you think, you become.” In this simple way, this saying, sometimes attributed to Lao Tzu, other times to Christians or Muslims, summarizes the power that persuasion has; for, if something or somebody can influence the thoughts of the audience, they influence their actions as well. The audience has long been central to rhetoric studies. An overview of available definitions on audience would show that this term usually refers to “a real person or collection of people who see, hear, or read an event or work” (Sloane, 2001: 59). A key consensus in rhetorical studies is that discourse is shaped having in view the people who will read or read it. The strategy of the rhetors is thus to meet or address the needs of their audiencCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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es when they deliver a written or oral speech, which, depending on the intentions of the addresser, can prove to be the finest and most harmful way of manipulation. This concern for the audience dates back to the fourth century BC Plato’s “Socrates”, who noted that one must understand the nature of the audience if one hopes to be a competent speaker (Brickhouse and Smith, 1994). In time, the notion of the audience has expanded, from a merely face-to-face audience who “requested” competence in oral rhetoric, to a more distant audience, changing the medium of rhetoric to written speeches, nonverbal communication, visual messages, mass mediated strategic communiqués, virtual monologues or dialogues. In classical times, the audience was a physical gathering in a given space at a given time, with listeners witnessing an oratorical event. In earlier times these groups were more compact and the themes were mainly focused on social matters and cultural events, depending on class and status they could range from social problems being debated, to fights, races, games, comedies and circuses being on display or literary and musical works being performed in front of the educated high class groups. Contemporary theorists however extend the definition of audience to consider the many audiences that experience a text, i.e. individuals who witness a speech in real time as well as those who read, hear, or see a recorded version of that speech, in whatever form it may come. We are no longer experiencing communication, social, cultural, political or diplomatic, solely in its classic form, but new forms of communication have emerged as well as a natural consequence of the Internet almost monopolizing the way new generations interact and collect their information. Because of the advancement in communication technologies, the groups that were once compact and public are nowadays dispersed, fragmented and privatized. According to Sloane and Smith (Brickhouse and Smith, 1994), the term “audience” first appeared in the English language in the fourteenth century and it was originally used to refer to a hearing. Etymologically, the term derives from face-to-face communication contexts, where a group of people would listen to someone delivering a speech. Over time, the word audience has grown to represent a group of listeners, not in the classical manner, but including readers or viewers of particular authors, speakers or publications as well. With the technological advent of the twentieth century and the public character of groups soon becoming a rather privatized one, the word audience expanded its meaning to include individuals behind a radio station, a TV set, a laptop or a smartphone, an individual in a cinema hall, a theatre or any other context that implies a distance between the broadcaster and the receiver. In early twentieth century the rhetorical studies began to emphasize the training of students on how to communicate in an effective manner. As a CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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result of organized courses on the matter, corroborated with the works of philosophers and literary critics of the day, modern rhetorics began to shift its focus from the speaker or writer to the auditor at the other end of the communication situation. “New Rhetoric” of the fifties and sixties revived principles from the classical rhetorical theory inherited from Aristotle and moulded it with new insights from modern philosophy, linguistics and psychology, Sloane further argues. Theorists of the new rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969) that all argumentation should be adapted to an audience and based on beliefs accepted by them if the argumentation should be approved and considered for support. The two authors describe three broad types of audiences in their text: self as audience (arguing or questioning oneself); a universal audience (an ideal audience); and a particular audience (a real audience). The first type of audience, on the one hand, is an easy concept to grasp and it requires no further explanation; the last two types of audience, on the other hand, have been of greater interest to rhetorical theorists. To distinguish the two, Parelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca rely on Immanuel Kant’s notions of conviction (which resides in objectivity, being a judgement valid for most) and persuasion (a judgement grounded in the character of the subject). To continue in the same line of argument, the two authors suggest that the particular audience, which can be associated to character, persuasion and action, is subject to persuasion, whereas the universal audience, depicted by objectivity, conviction and competence, holds to its convictions. They both admit that the universal audience is, at the same time, ideal and unreal: ideal, for it encapsulates traditional reasoning, yet unreal, for it can never really exist. Rhetors can focus on constructing an ideal message and a universal audience to persuade a particular one (which will have some of the characteristics of the universal audience, but not all of them), having as guidelines the presumptions that are associated with it. Such a construct of a universal audience, the same authors believe, can be useful for rhetors in their quest for distinguishing good, reasonable arguments that this ideal, objective, universal yet unreal audience would reason to, from the bad arguments, with which the same group would disagree. In the second half of the twentieth century attention shifted from the readers to the authors and the texts themselves. Expressivist scholars, interested in writing as self-discovery and the development of “authorial voice” and aesthetic scholars, concerned with stylistic devices, believed true and pure artists create for themselves, not others (Sloane, 2001: 61), and therefore it became acceptable in these circles to focus on intriguing authors or texts, or both, at the expense of audience. Later on, however, at the close of the twentieth century, audience was again the focus of scholar research, the same author continues, specifically from the perspective of reader-response CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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critics, who view the audience as playing an active role in constructing the meaning of a text; social constructionists, who look at the reality of truth as being created by the author, text and reader; mass communication and cultural studies scholars, who question and measure the effects of media on the audience; telecommunication scholars, who search into the size and scope of virtual audiences; and postmodern scholars, who encourage new conceptualizations of the audience as a community or forum. These angles for tackling the role played by the audience are different, yet such an interest manifested by these scholars shows that the audience is perceived as a powerful component of rhetorical studies and the effect of rhetoric itself, not merely a receptacle of rhetoric. However disputed the idea of a powerful audience might have been, this belief generated consistent research in this direction. The studies on audience are further developed by theorists, yet at the same time students follow the steps of those who have been interested in the subject and assimilate what has been established as true so far, for audience analysis is of interest to both scholars and students of oral and written rhetoric. The exploration of this component of rhetoric studies, i.e. audience analysis, is systematically approached in student textbooks, the same editor notes. In them, the relationship between speaker and audience is often underlined, he further argues, as this relation determines the success of the speech. Whether the audience is hostile or receptive makes the difference between a successful and a failed speech. In making an audience receptive, the speaker’s credibility must not be damaged in any way. It is not only a matter of substance, but also of perception and image, self-promotion and sometimes deliberate deception. Demographic aspects such as social status, age, sex, sexual orientation, family status, race, ethnic background, political beliefs, religious orientation, together with such issues as values, attitudes, ideologies, lifestyles and others as well can determine whether an audience is hostile to or welcoming the speech that is being delivered, in a direct relation with the degree of identification between the speaker and the audience, based on the afore mention criteria. Having these in view, one cannot refrain from asking the question of how ethical it is to take advantage of all this knowledge beforehand while crafting a message to obtain a certain effect on, as well as a reaction from the audience. About identification, taking Aristotle’s “common ground” concept further, Kenneth Burke writes (Burke, 1950) an account of why, in his view, persuasion occurs when rhetors connect with their audiences and address them in a language that speaks to them. He argues that the identification process actually changes the speaker. While the traditional approach to the relation between the speaker and the audience is unidirectional, from the speaker to the audience, with the signally aim of persuading the audience in a desired direction, Burke argues that the process of identification allows, at CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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the same time, the speakers to learn from the audiences, the relation between the two being thus, in fact, bidirectional. For him, the audience imprints on the speaker its moral values, in a process during which the rhetors, in an attempt to resemble the audience, internalises their words, beliefs and actions. Going deeper in his assumption, Kenneth Burke argues that persuasion is not a linear process, but a cooperative activity in which the speaker and the listeners become “one in being” or “consubstantial” (Burke, 1950). As far as the ease with which identification takes place is concerned, it is easier done with audiences of oral speeches, for while audiences of oral rhetoric are regarded as “stable entities that speakers can analyse, observe and accommodate” (Sloane, 2001: 62), audiences of written texts are perceived as much less predictable. In the former case, on the one hand, the speaker is faced with a given audience, in a given place, at a given time. Needless to say that identification with every single member of the audience is impossible; however compact the group might be, as compared to the audience of a written speaker-audience interaction at least, the depths of every single person’s belief cannot be grasped. In the later case, on the other hand, the audience diversifies and expands in time. One cannot predict whom their words will reach to when they produce a written text. As the old Latin saying goes, verba volant, scripta manent, which is the ticket to future paths explorers of a given written text might take. It is for this reason, like Douglas Park notes down (Park, 1986: 487-488) that composition instructors should, as part of the challenges they are facing as teachers, encourage their students to avoid writing for their immediate readers (peers or teachers) and to push themselves to anticipate other potential readers and some of their sceptic question marks. Furthermore, students should not assume familiarity with the readers of their texts, nor should they make the mistake of not writing for a broader educated audience. However important the audience is, and without doubt its role cannot be belittled, for a speech that has no audience is a wasted speech or, as Lloyd Bitzer (Blitzer, 1969: 1-15) put it, “because rhetoric is never about discourse in the abstract” and therefore the notion of audience plays a central role in rhetorical situations, theorists have not universally advocated writing for the audience or with the audience in mind. As we have shown before, expressivist scholars were interested in writing as self-discovery and in writers developing their own voice rather than creating texts by filling in the blanks with the desired ideas that would please some audiences. Other critics (Elbow, 1987: 50-69) believe that focusing on getting the insights of a group and anticipating the likes and dislikes of an audience can perturb the writing process itself by paralyzing and compromising the integrity of the writer. Constantly thinking about how to please an audience increases the author’s CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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stress level, for striving for perfection or universal acceptance is similar to chasing a chimera, an attempt that when it eventually ends, it ends in disappointment or resignation—neither perfection, nor universal acceptance can be achieved. At the same time, chasing such utopian goals interferes with the writing flow and, at times, can encourage writers to rely stereotypes of specific demographic groups, compromising thus the quality of the written text, the same author believes. He goes on offering a possible alternative to relying on these type of stereotypes, namely to conceptualize the audience as capable of playing many different roles during the reading of the text (or while they hear a speech being delivered). If the writer doesn’t think of the audience as a fixed category, then he cannot write with a particular audience in mind, therefore his text will have the chance to be authentic. A different angle from which the audience is included in rhetorical studies is that offered by Edwin Black (Black, 1970: 109-119) who, instead of analyzing a speech for how well it moulds upon its anticipated audience, he does it in terms of who the intended audience might have been at the moment the speech was written, what audience is implied in the discourse. The language used, the references, the metaphors, the images created by the author, the depth of the arguments, the topic itself are some instances that can give an author away on who his intended audience has been. Philip Wander takes the analysis further, as the title of his article suggests as well (Wander, 1984: 197-216), by searching for those groups that are deliberately not a part of the intended audience or those who are purposely excluded, negated, alienated through linguistic devices, discriminated or reduced to silence. He believes that rhetors have a moral responsibility towards these groups as well. Advancements in communication technologies and proliferation of media outlets and mediatic sources have challenged the classic scholars’ belief that the mass media play a uniform presence in people’s lives. It might have been the case in early twentieth century, when mass media meant less sources of information for the masses (Williams in Sloane, 2001: 68). Individuals have now the opportunity to rely on alternative sources of information and to create them themselves the news they wish they saw broadcasted on television or written in online and offline newspapers. Via online social networks news travels even faster today than it did before, real time events news reaching an increasingly number of households every minute. The role of filter for this news is played by the user themselves, who can choose what he wants to read about, from whom, when and where, in accordance with what they find as most relevant. Whereas the audience of traditional media outlets is broader and, therefore, the content of the news

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is shaped accordingly, the audience of modern media outlets is narrower, oftentimes a niche category. Another lead for mass communication researchers, following the study of the influence mass media has on individuals, is the effects mass audiences wield on institutions. This relation stirred the interest of James Webster and Patricia Phalen (Webster and Phalen, 1997), who advanced the concept of the presumed audience, one that put pressure on public figures. It is no secret that public institutions are aware that they are being watched and, when the case be, held liable for their (lack of) (re)action—as they should be in any democratic society—which is why these institutions attempt to predict the positions this presumed audience holds. This is not to say that public institutions react in the manner the presumed audience wishes. A statement belonging to the President of the Romanian Senate, according to which “a nation cannot be governed by following the streets’ wishes, but nor can it be governed by ignoring them” (Hotnews, Sept. 9, 2013), points to the main role of democratic public institutions, that of serving the population and to the role of political leaders, that of representing the will of those who elected them in their positions. A corollary of this statement would imply that the pressure put on the public figures and institutions by this presumed audience that Webster and Phalen write about is a powerful democratic governance tool that, if handled by the right hands, can shape the relation between the audience and institutions and, subsequently, their public endeavours. Post-modern research includes new terms for the audience, seen as subcultures, interpretive communities and taste publics (Sloane, 2001: 66). From this perspective, rhetors’ speeches are believed to be a set of borrowed ideas from the texts present in the various communities in which he or she resides. The discourse patterns in those communities, in turn, construct the rhetor, the editor Sharon E. Jarvis argues further. This interactive model offers a local truth and knowledge, created through social and contextual rhetoric, she believes. To perceive and address the audience as a community is a compromise between the views that separate the audience as individual beings and the audience as a homogenous group. This model can and it does, at the same time, offer an account of audiences from a general point of view, while being also aware of the differences between the individuals that make up these communities. This model, the editor continues, is praised for acknowledging differences between different types of groups but, at the same time, is criticised for being constraining, “because some communities have been known to be hegemonic and intolerant of minorities or dissenters.” One such group is that of religious practitioners. “Some classicist saw rhetorical probing as the proper route to the right kinds of religious CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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thought,” Booth considers (Booth, 2004). Others, he continues, like St. Augustine, sensed there was a conflict between their religious beliefs and the training they had in rhetoric. No matter how much one might want to fight this idea, religion makes use of rhetoric perhaps just as much as any other field, for rhetoric is what one uses to spread religious methods and truths to the world. Many believe that religion, being mere irrational faith, makes use of a language that is nothing but rhetoric, oftentimes mere rhetrickery, the same author continues. Two ways of tying rhetoric to religion—as the dutiful altar boy or as forlorn doomed twin—have been used to tempt researchers to study further the deep relations between the two domains. However, Booth believes that neither one of these methods is effective. The pursuit of a deeper understanding of what is to be worshipped, how and, more importantly, why could, however, explain the existence of many discussions of rhetoric and religion as two inseparable topics, the author continues. Since Kenneth Burke’s “Rhetoric of Religion” the academic world has been flooded with such studies that aim at diving deeper into how rhetoric, under somebody’s definition, either serves or leads to somebody’s definition of religion. Audiences are important also for theorists of democracy, as there can be no democracy without the demos or the public. Persuasive speeches have been determining public policies, have been tools for the implementation of laws and have played an incommensurable role in lending support or removing leaders (Booth, 2004). As etymologically democracy resides on the will of the people, public opinion has to be at the heart of all democratic endeavours. It is difficult an attempt, however, to gain insight into the thoughts and passions, both positive and negative, of the public, although sociologists have been working on developing surveys as accurate as possible. Polling, a practice that gained institutional legitimacy in the 1930s, has become the means of measuring opinion, but has not escaped critical voices that argue that the instruments meant to keep track of public opinion are not neutral. Cases of manipulative questions asked in surveys, strategic moments chosen for public referenda or even buying the answers or the survey interpreters to serve this or that momentary interest of a third party are not isolated and, unfortunately, are decreasing the credibility of these practices altogether. It has been argued that public opinion polls “give power to the already powerful” (Herbst in Sloane, 2001). Audience analysis is of interest to businesses and public relations departments as well, which are aware that adaptation to audience is crucial to successful writing. Marketing scholars are studying the niches that are making their presence felt on the Internet and as such audience demographics is observed in order to offer informed consulting services. For their part, audiences have the opportunity to get involved in computer-mediated CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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communities and engage themselves in online chats, forums, polls and debates via e-mail and interactive web sites. The possibility of remaining anonymous online and having much knowledge at just a few clicks’ distance while comfortably sitting behind the screen of a computer has made many to believe that the audience in cyberspace is more active than that of a Greek polis or agora. In modern days, there has been a huge growth in audiences that are not unified in space, although unified in time, by simultaneously being connected to radio or television stations or to online news platforms. One and the same speech can reach recipients in both oral and written form, thanks to modern technology, therefore those specialists who write these speeches have to take into account this aspect as well, so as to be efficient. An interesting fact worth noting is that in computer-mediated communication there is no immediate sign of a messenger’s status or expertise. This implies more things, the most important being that no person is judged before their text is read, when labels may, indeed, be attached according to the language they use, the arguments they bring to the attention of the new audience (the new speaker’s audience), the knowledge and proficiency of language usage, attitude and so on. From a reader’s perspective, any person posting might be as influential or as important as anyone else—and their messages, as well. No judgements are made on extra-textual circumstances. As long as they share a common language, the members of a virtual audience are brought together by common interests, despite geography and this adherence to the same interests, possibly same principles and beliefs, unites them. They start an online series of replies from the premises that everybody is following the same goal in what the topic that brought them together online is concerned. This kind of interactivity between members of the same audience, though miles away and, oftentimes, separated by long periods of time as well—for, as we have already shown, verba volant, scripta manent, making virtual responses more persistent in time—is perhaps one of the main differences between virtual audience and traditional audience. The growing nature of the audience concept opens up dialogue across subfields, pointing to future theoretical development and revealing how the audience has long been an area of interest to both theorists of rhetorics and rhetoricians who practice rehearsed speeches. Because audience, i.e. that of a written text, expands over time, the idea of addressing worldwide audiences, ancient or modern, with differences in language, culture, social background and so on, has become somewhat utopian. Attempts to reach all the members of an audience are likely to end up by reaching only some of them, “the effort to conjure a mass (universal) audience at best yields a mix of segmented (particular) audiences”, editor John Durham Peters asserts (Sloane, 2001: 68). We find that the mass audience is not the same as an CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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audience of masses, he continues. Another type of audience that expands and is not limited by acoustic intelligibility (as is the case of listening audiences of dramas or oratories) is the case of participants to an open-air event, such as an organized cultural or political event or a street demonstration. What is interesting to note in the case of the latter is that, although thousands of protestors might fill a public square, they might be understood as rather being mass rhetors than mass audiences, for their aim is sending rather than receiving communication, the same editor remarks. To understand the persuasion process, theories of attitude and voluntary action indirectly point to factors connected with influencing behaviour. As Fishbein and Ajzen conclude (Fishbein and Ajzen in Sloane, 2001: 577), a person’s behavioural intentions are influenced by the person’s attitude towards the action in question and by the person’s “subjective norm”, that is, the person’s assessment of whether significant others desire performance of the behaviour, two factors that may weight differently in different situations, thus stimulating different behaviours. The firm attitude is what brought Margaret Thatcher the appellation of “Iron Lady”, for she found herself in the position to act with toughness against the rights of the employees and unionists (in what internal politics was concerned) and to be actively involved in the war against Argentina for the Falkland Islands (in external affairs). The political figure of Margaret Thatcher is noted down in the history of the British people as the only woman to hold the position of both leader of the Conservative Party, as well as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for over a decade. Her unshaken rhetoric gained her the nickname the “Iron Lady”, which explains much of the firmness of her speeches addressed to the public. The speech proposed for analysis in this present paper, addressed to the Foreign Policy Association on December 18th, 1978, having the subtitle “The West in the World Today”, is given to the British in the form of a public statement of major importance. In its moderate length content it manages to tackle a number of political and economic themes, among which general discussions on foreign policy in the USA, Middle East, Africa, USSR and successor states and Commonwealth, economy, defense, society, terrorism, as well as European Union budget, religion, morality, socialism and so on. The structure of the speech is given in the form of nine clear-cut subparts, each provided with a keyword-like title to summarise their content, namely: Introduction, Interdependence, Iran, Ideology, East / West Relations, Economic Problems, Rhodesia and South Africa, the Strengths of the West and, finally, Conclusion. Thatcher begins her dissertation on the role of the West in the world by setting the social context of that time. Being held in 18 December 1979, a few months after her winning the Cabinet’s confidence in the General Elections on May 4th, the speech begins with a remark stating CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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that the previous 10 years had not been “a happy period for the Western democracies domestically or internationally”. It is for the same reason that the following sentences impel the need for action to change that reality of “unhappiness”, sentences that can be found throughout Thatcher’s whole speech. It is the role of a good leader to induce people to act, providing at the same time the proper direction to be followed. Linguistic structures such as “[t]he time has come when…”, “[but] now is a time for…”, “we all have a direct practical interest in…”, “[i]t is a time for action” are meant to sensitize the people and set their mood on getting involved in solving major issues affecting them all. Margaret Thatcher’s newly elected Cabinet is at a bridge point in time between the 1970s and 1980s, giving her reason enough to consider that her role as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is even more important in the opening of a new decade, which she calls to be a “dangerous one.” She refers to the challenges to be faced in the 80s later in her speech, upholding however a positive, encouraging attitude towards the chances to overcome the difficulties the new decade threatens to bring along: “[t]he problems are daunting but there is in my view ample reason for optimism”, she ends her Introduction. At every point in her speech, Margaret Thatcher uses the first person pronoun “we” with reference to the British Government and the British people, a sign that she identifies herself with the British, considering herself as being one of them: it is we who “face a new decade”, it is our security that is challenged, it is we in Britain who have “supported with calmness President Carter’s resolutions”, it is still our “democratic systems that have made possible” healthy political relationships and so on. As long as she is one of the British, Thatcher’s position gives her the authority to speak in the name of the people whose interests she represents, a fact which is linguistically highlighted by the use of the inclusive, and not exclusive first person pronoun, plural. It is not a novelty that language has an impact on social relations and that popularity is greatly influenced by the words chosen to express realities. That is why politicians pay special attention to word choice and tend to adopt a note of formality when holding a speech, inserting at the same time structures that speak in the language of the audience. It is thus a fine line that has to be kept intact so as not to speak too formal (and thus running the risk of not being understood or credible in the eyes of the simple citizen), or too informal (and thus diminishing authority). In this respect, when Margaret Thatcher uses in her speech to the Foreign Policy Association words that she considers to be jargon, she immediately apologises to the public for doing so (“I apologise for the jargon”), showing what Norman Fairclough calls in his study on “Language and Power” (Fairclough, CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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2001:98) “the concern from participants for each other’s face”, a desire to be liked by the ones we talk to. Another linguistic device that Thatcher uses to appeal to the public is irony. When speaking about the 200 years ago fights in India and along the Great Lakes in America, she makes a comment that the purpose for those fights was “as Macaulay put it, [for] the King of Prussia [to] […] rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend.” Then, to explain in more detail what the concept of “interdependence” is, Thatcher makes a parallel between a “then” and a “now”. Years before, when, as she says, “she was in her teens”, countries could still be referred to as being “far-away” lands, whose problems would not affect the others, the British included. She offers the example of the then Czechoslovakia and its quarrels, and the difficulties the American President Franklin Roosevelt still experienced when trying to convince his people “of the need to concern themselves with a European war.” Such a difficulty would, in Thatcher’s opinion, not emerge nowadays, when, as she states, “no country is an island.” Issues such as the price of oil in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, the size of grain harvest in Kansas and the Ukraine are “of immediate concern to people all over the world” and, sooner or later, “the bell tolls for us all”, Thatcher concludes her point on Interdependence. When speaking about Iran and the events that had taken place in Tehran the previous weeks, the tone is a negative one, supported by words such as “anger”, “dismay”, “hostages” and the negative pronoun “nothing” that, even though associated with an affirmative verb, could still induce the disapproval of the treatment applied to Iranians. The disapproval comes from a large community, for it was “[t]he world [that] has watched with anger and dismay the events in Tehran”, alluding to a sense of unity when it comes to expressing condemn towards an unjust situation. The following paragraph however, making reference to “we in Britain” has, not surprisingly, positive connotations: “[we in Britain] have respected and supported the calmness and resolution with which President Carter has handled an appalling situation.” Other words that give confidence in the rightness of the Britain’s and its allies’ officials are those such as “our partners in Europe”, “full public and private support”, “his efforts to secure”, “[we] will continue to support and help”, “we have admired the forbearance.” Through such sentences Margaret Thatcher applauds the initiatives and ways of dealing with difficult situations President Carter has adopted. Regarding Ideology, Thatcher appears to be the defender of religious traditions that define the identity of a nationality or community: “There is a tide of self-confidence and self-awareness in the Muslim world […]. The West should recognise this with respect, not hostility. […] It is in our own interests, as well as in the interests of the people of that region, that they build on their own deep religious traditions.” Manifesting her support of CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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the differences between the Muslims and the West, she makes no concession however when speaking about the frauds of imported Marxism. She points out that Marxism “failed to take root in the advanced democracies”, “failed to provide sustained economic or social development” in those countries where it did take root, such as backward countries or authoritarian ones. It is no secret that Margaret Thatcher constantly expressed herself in public speeches to be against the Soviet Union and even though she is aware of the faults Marxism had in practice, she publicly admits in the speech under analysis in this present paper that there is still a “technique of subversion” left which, together with “a collection of catch-phrases”, “is still dangerous”. Using this very same word, she points to one of the challenges to come in the new decade, as announced in the beginning of her speech. She then goes on to clarify her point of view by using a simple comparison structure (element A is like element B): she draws an analogy between the technique of subversion and terrorism, which is, in Thatcher’s view, “a menace that needs to be fought whenever it occurs.” The fifth part of the speech held by Britain’s then-newly elected Prime Minister deals with the East vs. West relations. It is, among the nine parts of the speech, the one that is devoted the most attention, succeeded in terms of length by that focusing on the “Strengths of the West”. The concern Margaret Thatcher manifests regarding USSR is mainly directed at its military rather than ideological power. She considers this to be another immediate threat of the new “dangerous” decade. In her view, the threat might have consequences not only on the security in the West, by proxy or directly, but also on the Third World. The section checked against BBC Radio News report 2200, 18 December 1979 contains Thatcher’s concern with the military challenge the West was facing at the time. Her concern being given expression on more than one occasion, it had been subject to speculations coming from those opposing Thatcher’s political views. She had often been, as she puts it, “deliberately misunderstood”, especially by “her enemies, who had labelled her «the Iron Lady»”. In order to confirm her aggressiveness and combatant attitude, she admits that she really is the Iron Lady and then laughs ironically, obviously addressing this way to her enemies. The following paragraphs draw a line between “them” and “us”, which stand for the East and the West, by repeatedly using the third person plural “they” and the first person plural “we” when describing positions opposed to one another. “They” are the ones to be blamed, for while they “expand their armed forces on land, sea and air”, “continually improve the quality of their armaments”, “outnumber us in Europe”, “appear more regularly in parts of the world where they had not been seen before”, we, the West are facing the obligation to respond. Britain, the USA and the European members of NATO must reach a consensus in this problem and Margaret Thatcher adCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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vises for both sides to “seek agreements on arms control which preserve the essential security of each”: no-one benefits from totally destructive and highly expensive modern weapons being piled up unceasingly. It is again the “we in Britain” who appear to have a more peaceful and positive view on the power of the politics. In short, whenever she is referring to “them”, words allude to negative situations, whereas “we” is associated with positive feelings and actions. To give a more personal note to her speech, besides apologising for the jargon when the case, talking about the times when she was in her teens and countries were still seen as “islands”, Thatcher introduces information regarding her own experience with the Soviet government: “I have been attacked by the Soviet government”, “I am not talking about…”, “[w]hat I am seeking is…” Her view seems fairly argumentative, seeking no more than equilibrium in status and power between the East and the West, eliminating from the start the idea of superiority or inferiority of the one over the other, appealing therefore to the common sense of the common citizen. She makes negotiation from a position of balance between East and West a personal issue; when the balance will be maintained at lower levels, “I shall be well content”, she further declares. Due to the interdependence of states’ affairs, economic problems make no exception from being a key element in a Domino-like set of issues that appear on the horizon. If ten years before those days when Thatcher addresses the public this speech only 5 percent of oil was imported in Britain, in the late 70s the number has multiplied by ten. “But it is not just oil”, Margaret Thatcher says, “this has obvious consequences for your foreign policy.” To be noted here, from a linguistic point of view, is the use of the second person pronoun “you”, in an attempt to strike a sensitive chord and raise awareness in the people in the audience. However, looking beyond the linguistic level, the message delivered by Thatcher is unsettling: if the management of the relations between not only the East and the West, but also between individual countries is poor, along with emergences of price rises, refusals to continue offering a product or a service, ineffective negotiations between states—they will all lead to a precarious balance of the world economy. One might find similarities between such a situation and the results of Russia’s Gas Market Reforms in 2009. In these circumstances, as a leader, Thatcher once again uses language to induce the British the appetite for getting involved by supporting their elected ones in “the orderly settlement of political disputes”. The partnership Britain had previously established with the USA is once and again sustained by Thatcher, who openly thanks President Carter once more for his “timely support”, especially in the final stages of the negotiations for a ceasefire, free and fair elections and a new constitution for ZimCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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babwe-Rhodesia. Clarity, awareness and the sense of reality (“We have no illusion about…”) never seem to leave Mrs. Thatcher, as she manifests her concerns regarding implementing this agreement on the ground. Despite the obstacles she foresees, she impels people to seek reconciliation, to take the initiative and to persevere, the ultimate goal to be achieved in this issue being a progress towards an ending of the isolation of South Africa in world affairs. Focussing so far on the variety of problems the new decade seems to bring along, Thatcher leaves for the finale of her speech what she believes could give people a reason to be confident and action-oriented. It is thus the moment to present the Strengths of the West, a section of the speech that is reserved, as stated above, the second longest paper coverage. Pursuing the reinforcement of the idea of a strong West, the choice of categorical modalities such as “must” and “must not” is most appropriate. The West has “immense material and moral assets”, to which clarity, will and confidence must be added to use them with precision, she says. Thatcher further uses a negative pronoun used with an imperative sentence and praises the power of the West in the world in “Let us never forget that despite the difficulties to which I have referred, the Western democracies remain overwhelmingly strong in economic terms.” These nations leave the impression of a team, agreeing on steps to be taken, starting from the basic requirements—the need to defeat inflation, to avoid protectionism and to make best use of the limited resources available. Thatcher’s first economic reforms aimed at lowering inflation. She managed to reduce inflation and to strengthen economic growth by taking a stubborn and risky initiative of increasing indirect taxes. The downside of her success however was the increasingly unemployment figure and the dropping of manufacturing output. Mrs. Prime Minister shows confidence in political institutions, that “meet the aspirations of ordinary people”, “attract the envy of all those who do not have them” and “have shown themselves remarkably resistant to subversive influences.” Then again she uses words with positive connotations linked to the “us” side: “democratic”, “healthy”, “free people”, “frankly debated”, “debates are a sign of strength.” Moreover, the members of the Community have “stronger interests that unite [them] than those which divide them.” She keeps her positive attitude and goes as far as to imply that the world depends on the West! (“A strong Europe is the best partner for the United States. It is on the strengths of that partnership that the strength of the free world depends.”) It is not only the free world that depends on the West, but also the Third World, which needs the experience, technology, markets, goods and contacts the Western partners have. It is in this part of her speech that Margaret Thatcher lets the public understand what the role of the “West in the World [Today]” is. CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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Resuming her opening remark of a “dangerous new decade”, the speech takes the form of a well-structured, round discourse and, as a wellstructured speech could not end without Conclusions, Thatcher concisely presents hers. She states again her confidence in the strengths to overcome the difficulties and lists the main priorities she has set on her Prime Minister agenda. Choosing again strong modals, the list is a series of must’s: restore the dynamics to our economies, modernise our defence, continue to seek agreement with the East, help the developing countries to help themselves, work together to improve world’s economy through our international trading and financial institutions, conserve resources, reach an agreement with the oil producers, never fail to assert faith in freedom. She is aware that none of these solutions is new, but to all the cynics she only says sustained effort is what the challenge consists of. Between all these grand goals there are two slips of the tongue, intentionally or not. The first, the lack of differentiation between “to affect” and “to effect” in “our economic welfare is increasingly effected by the operation on the market” and “increasingly effected by the growing demand of…” The second one is the use of a different preposition when referring to “our belief on the institution.” However, such slips of the tongue do not distort the targeted message and are rarely even noticed. The fact that Thatcher uses mainly declaratives when presenting the issues of the world and the strengths of the West, imperatives when calling for action (“[let us never forget…”, “[let us go down in history as…”) and no interrogatives is another linguistic strategy she adopts to leave the British the image of a decided mind and, why not, of an “Iron Lady”. This speech is a particularly special one. It is held by a new Prime Minister, a position held, for the first time in Britain’s history, by a woman. Her position was delicate and so was the time, therefore one could imagine how carefully her words had been chosen to reach the intended audience. Moreover, the speech was given at the crossroads between two years and two decades, which makes it a bridge-talk, a sort of “New Decade’s Eve Resolution”, with the wish to “go down in history as the generation which not only understood what needed to be done but a generation which had the strength, the self discipline and the resolve to see it through,” the wish to be the memorable people of the 80s. With this speech we, the audience, gain a little insight into the linguistic persuasion strategies that made up Margaret Thatcher’s unshaken rhetoric and undeniable toughness that were not abandoned during her time in office, accompanying her throughout her entire political career. With a critical eye and attention to common elements or, on the contrary, to distinctive rhetorical features, with our knowledge of her sometimes controversial approaches and being given the opportunity to enunciate an informed and objective opinion on (part of) her entire career CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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(after her recent death in April 2013), the speech proposed for analysis offers valuable insight into the choices of one prominent political figure of our times. An overview on more such speeches can only prove of even more substance for historians and linguists reuniting their forces to shaping knowledge for the future.

References Alburnus Maior. “15 Septembrie—Protestul continuă în întreaga lume.” September 12, 2013. http://www.rosiamontana.org/ro/stiri/-15-septembrie-protestul-continua-in-intreaga-lume. Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1969): 115. Black, Edwin. “The Second Persona.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 109-119. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Rhetorics. The Quest for Effective Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Brickhouse, Thomas C., and Nicholas D. Smith. Plato’s Socrates. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York, NY: Prentice-Hall, 1950. Elbow, Parker. “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” College English 49 (1987): 50-69. Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. Second Edition. Harlow: Longman, 2001. Fishbein, Martin, and Icek Ajzen. Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behaviour: An Introduction to Theory and Research, 1975. In Thomas O. Sloane, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 577. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001. Herbst, Susan. Numbered Voices, 1993. In Thomas O. Sloane, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 577. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hotnews.ro. “Declaraţie-surpriză a lui Crin Antonescu: Proiectul Roşia Montană trebuie respins. Nu se poate guverna după stradă, dar nu se poate guverna ignorând strada.” (September 9, 2013). September 10, 2013. My translation. http://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-politic-15542061-conferinta-presa-sustinuta-presedintele-pnl-crin-antonescu-ora-12-30.htm. Margaret Thatcher Foundation—Complete list of 8,000 + Thatcher Statements & Texts of Many of Them.” January 21, 2009. http://-www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=104199. Park, Douglas. “Analyzing Audiences.” College Composition and Communication (1986): 478-488. Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Indianapolis, IN: Notre Dame, 1969.

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Sloane, Thomas O., ed. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wander, Philip. “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn I Rhetorical Theory.” Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 197-216. Webster, James G., and Patricia F. Phalen. The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model. New York, NY: Routledge, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Keywords, 1985. In Thomas O. Sloane, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 68. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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THE APOCALYPTIC TONE OF IRONY IN WILLIAM BLAKE’S THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL ÉVA ANTAL*

“… the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than [the Devil del.] he who dwells in flaming fire.” (William Blake)

ABSTRACT. “(T)he (Devil) who dwells in flaming fire”—being the only and quite spectacular correction in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it reveals (cf. apokalypsis) the truth of the tone of the work, Blake’s way of thinking and also of his working process. This correction can be regarded as a visible—or, being engraved, a tactile—expression of Blake’s irony, an ironic undercut expressis verbis. The present paper is concerned with the possible interpretations of the ironical-satirical context of the apocalyptic work and, while paying attention to the figures of the text, it will basically focus on two facets of the tone—the apocalyptic and the ironic. I can promise that by the end of my paper we can learn more about him “dwelling in flaming fire”— toning with the Blakean irony. Although the Blakean vision operates with a disturbing multiplicity of voices—namely, Rintrah, the Devil, the I persona, Ezekiel, Isaiah, the Angel, and the illustrator—the first striking impression is the assured clear-sightedness which characterises all of them. On the one hand, while an apocalyptic writing always keeps some mystery in the core, the clear tone desired for revelation deconstructs the speculative and visionary discourse itself. On the other hand, this polytonality and the sudden change of tone seems to reveal, as Derrida argues, “the disorder or the delirium of destination”. However, in an apocalyptic discourse the destination, the end is (its) truth itself, and the text becomes—and actually every text is always already—apocalyptic. KEY WORDS: apocalyptic, ironic, tone, polytonality, truth

In his Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry, in the chapter titled “Irony and False Consciousness”, Andrew Cooper emphasises the overwhelming ironic tonality of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the repetition of self-creation and self-destruction, due to the persona’s masks used in his works, the ironist is able to free himself from the limitations of self*

ÉVA ANTAL (PhD, Dr. Habil.) is Professor of English literature and Philosophy at Eszterházy Károly College, Department of English Studies in Eger, Hungary. She specializes in Neoclassical and Romantic British literature and culture, and literary theory. E-mail: [email protected].

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consciousness. Besides referring to the famous “doors of perception” as revolving doors, Cooper also claims that Blake’s irony is aimed at “[the] antinomian striving to transcend ‘the Body’ and identify the indeterminacy of rhetorical self-consciousness with the unshackled energies of a genuinely world-consuming apocalypse” (Cooper, 1988: 46). The motto of my paper comes from Blake’s early prophecy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), and it refers to a “corrected” mistake in the text. On plate 6, Blake truncated the expression, “the Devil”, leaving only the personal pronoun, “he”, in the sentence (Blake, 1976: 150, hereafter as MHH). As Geoffrey Keynes remarks, Blake changed the expression as in its own context he had “found it redundant to name him again, the description, ‘he who dwells in flaming fire’, being all that was needed” (Keynes in MHH, xxii). What’s more—as Keynes goes on—(t)his error could easily be corrected on the copperplate by deleting the letter “t” of the article, “the”, and the word “Devil”. Later the gap is “filled with a flame touched with gold” (MHH, xxii). Closely regarding the expression, with this deletion Blake eliminated half of this striking alliteration-complex, destroying the sounds of “the devil who dwells” while leaving (him) “in flaming fire”. Otherwise, due to this alteration, His/his living-space is emphatically damned to be fire and now the expression can be compared with the Biblical phrase when the Lord, our God, is named “consuming fire” (cf. Deuteronomy 4:24 and Hebrews 12:29). I suppose that being the only and quite spectacular correction in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it does not only reveal (cf. apokalypsis) the “true” tone of the work but also the artist’s way of thinking together with his working process. This correction can be regarded as a visible—or, being engraved, a tactile—expression of Blake’s irony, an ironic undercut expressis verbis. The present paper is concerned with the possible interpretations of the ironical-satirical context of the apocalyptic work and, while paying attention to the figures of the text, it will basically focus on two facets of the tone—the apocalyptic and the ironic. I can promise that by the end of my paper we can learn more about him “dwelling in flaming fire”—toning with the Blakean irony. Jacques Derrida thematises the problem of the textual complexity of the apocalyptic tone relying on the original meaning of the Greek word apokalypsis as “disclosure, uncovering, unveiling” (Derrida, 1999: 119). Consequently, he basically tries to reveal the meaning, the truth of the tone, accepting the definition of the Greek tonos (viz. “pitch”, “tension”) as “first signified the tight ligament, cord, rope when it is woven or braided, cable, strap—briefly, the privileged figure of everything to stricture” (Derrida, 1999: 127). Moving away from the obvious musical associations of strict tonality, Derrida claims that the analysis of the tone in a writing should be CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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done “in terms of contents, manners of speaking, connotations, rhetorical staging, and pose taken in semantic, pragmatic, scenographic terms” (Derrida, 1999: 127). In the complex truth-revealing tone, the writer makes the voice of the other (in us) audible—and in Blake’s case also visible—which inevitably results in delirium, that is derangement, or rather out-of-tune-ness (désaccordement). Although the Blakean vision operates with a disturbing multiplicity of voices—namely, Rintrah, the Devil, the I persona, Ezekiel, Isaiah, the Angel, and the illustrator—the first striking impression is the assured clearsightedness which characterises all of them. On the one hand, while an apocalyptic writing always keeps some mystery in the core, the clear tone desired for revelation deconstructs the speculative and visionary discourse itself (Derrida, 1999: 148). Edward J. Ahearn in his Visionary Fictions also calls the attention to the rhetorical confidence of such writings displayed “to make us experience what we think to be impossible” (Ahearn, 1996: 11). On the other hand, this polytonality and the sudden change of tone seems to reveal “the disorder or the delirium of destination” (Derrida, 1999: 150). But in an apocalyptic discourse the destination, the end is (its) truth itself, and the text becomes—and actually every text is always already— apocalyptic: “[…] if the apocalypse reveals, it is first of all the revelation of the apocalypse, the self-presentation of the apocalyptic structure of language, of writing, of the experience of presence, in other words, of the text or the mark in general: that is, of the divisible envoi for which there is no selfpresentation nor assured destination” (Derrida, 1999: 157, italics in the original). In his essay Derrida mainly discusses the characteristics of the “apocalyptic discourse”, not dealing with the problems of the genre, and he refers to such a work as a conservative and apocryphally coded mixed form of writing. He also claims that “among the numerous traits characterising an apocalyptic type of writing, let us provisionally isolate prediction and eschatological preaching, the fact of telling, foretelling, or preaching the end, the extreme limit, the imminence of the last” (Derrida, 1999: 144). Tracing the sources of apocalyptic literature, attention is paid to its links with eschatology, millennium and with a possible holy utopia (Paley, 1999: 3), or the utopian myths of the lost Golden Age, Atlantis; moreover, with some gnostic, hermetic or esoteric ideas (Ahearn, 1996: 2-7). Certainly, the prototype— and also the namegiver—of the genre is John’s Book of Revelation, but in the New Testament other descriptions of the so-called little apocalypse of Matthew, Peter, Daniel and Isaiah should also be mentioned (Paley, 1999: 8). In his book, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry, Paley collects and analyses the possible apocalyptic writings in English literature CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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elaborating on their political, scientific and social connections. At the end of the 18th century the radical thinkers of the age were greatly influenced by the ideas of the Swedish visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, and joined the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church. The Church was “a gatheringground for a miscellany of seekers after mystic experiences” from Behmenists and Rosicrucians, through masons to enthusiasts for mesmerism and magnetism (Thompson, 1994: 135). Blake and his wife were sympathisers of the New Church in 1790, when he started to compose The Marriage and Swedenborg’s figure, or rather “Swedenborgianism”, is presented in the work (on Plates 3 and 21-22). Blake did not only read but also annotated the English translations of Swedenborg’s apocalyptic and millennial prophecies titled “Wisdom of Angels concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom”, “The Wisdom of Angels concerning Divine Providence” and “Heaven and Hell” (Blake, 1976: 89-96, 131-133, and 929), in which the mystic published his conversations with angels. In his remarks Blake welcomed the visionary’s expressive language and his way of differentiating between man’s natural, or rational understanding and spiritual understanding, or wisdom, which were originally joined by Love, or the Will (Blake, 1976: 9395). As it is recorded, in 1790 the master first taught the doctrine of concubinage, namely that the Swedenborgian married man can engage in adulterous relationships in case of the wife’s disease, insanity, or difference of faith (Thompson, 1994: 129-145). It cannot exactly be said that Blake rejected the idea of free love and sexual liberation but in his eyes such disputable doctrines made Swedenborg the figure “barring the way to the millennium by blocking the improvement of sensual enjoyment” (Paley, 1999: 37). As Foster Damon summarises, Blake was inspired by his “divine teacher” but he found that “Swedenborg’s greatest error lay in his not understanding the real nature of ‛evil’, and therefore accepting conventional morality” (Damon, 1988: 392-394). Thus, opposed to Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell prophesying the start of the New Heaven in 1757, Blake in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, due to his birth in the same year and now with his reaching the age of thirty-three, claims that new Hell has arrived pronouncing Swedenborg’s heaven to be his own hell. After this shockingly and negatively positive—let us say, ironic— introduction it becomes obvious that Blake represents the true (Christian) wisdom contrasted with Swedenborg’s New Church and its “old falshoods” (MHH, 157). Here referring to the apocalyptic prophecy of Isaiah about the fall of Babylon, Blake - like John in “his” Book of Revelation—reverses the pattern of the prophecy as The Marriage starts with the announcement of Swedenborg’s false new heaven and ends with the portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar displaying the logical consequence of false reasoning (Wittreich, CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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1975: 192-193). The chosen ironic title of the work criticises not only Swedenborg’s inability of vision but also attacks his ideas on marriage as Blake’s Marriage displays a sexually active spiritual union. Moreover, he does it engraving and illustrating his work on his own, that is, protesting against the “mass produced”, printed doctrines of Swedenborgianism by refusing to have his work printed. In the work the apocalyptic tone is introduced by Rintrah’s voice who “roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air” (MHH, 148). The very first voice introduces his apocalyptic vision of the topsy-turvy world where the true prophet, “the just man rages in the wilds” while the false prophet as “the sneaking serpent walks in mild humility” (Wittreich, 1975: 194). “The Argument” can be taken as “a miniature emblem of human history” (Ahearn, 1996: 27) showing up the continuous fight between the villain and the just; that is, right in the introduction the primary rhetorical force of the work is displayed in the dialectic of opposites. Here the villain as a mild Angel usurps the just man’s place, so, Rintrah, “the wrathful spirit of prophecy” is forced to become the Devil (Bloom, 1963: 75). Thus, the narrator uncovers the truth (of apocalypse) in an ironic mock-argument referring to the danger of reasoning, which also becomes a characteristic feature of The Marriage. Consequently, the first voice after introducing the irony of mockreasoning logically goes on heralding the ironic Eternal Hell instead of the promised new heaven on plate 3, where Swedenborg is the “mild villainous” Angel and the speaker—together with Isaiah—takes the role of the “devilish” just man. In his Angel of Apocalypse, Wittreich, who reads the work as a true prophecy and the formation of the prophetic character, claims that the real dialectic of The Marriage can be found “in the antagonism Blake establishes between it and its prospective audience” (Wittreich, 1975: 195). It is true that the text wants to inspire its readers and wants their active response—whether its writer is a prophet or not. Reading the text, its dialectic is “figured by Rintrah and the I persona, who identifies so closely with the voice of the Devil” (Wittreich, 1975: 196); that is, in “The Argument” besides the roaring true prophet, the devilish I persona is introduced—“he who dwells” in irony. The introduction of the prophetic voice opens up its whirlwind and its “overlordly tone detones” (Derrida, 1999: 133). As Wittreich remarks: “The voice of indignation (Rintrah’s voice) is a complement, a prologue, to the voice of the Devil, critical of Milton, and to the I persona, derisive of Swedenborg” (Wittreich, 1975: 198, italics are mine). However, the first person singular speaker is really close to the Devil in his ideas, the two voices have different butts: the Devil’s voice ironises Milton while the I persona satirises Swedenborg—and later the Devil’s voice. Opposed to this, according to CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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Bloom, the overwhelming tone of The Marriage is “devilishly” ironic as right from the very beginning, the Devil’s voice can be heard (Bloom, 1963: 7879). Although the Devil’s voice is put in the centre not much is known about his figure. In the work the names of the Devil and Satan are used together and regarded as synonymous on plate 5 (cf. “call’d the Devil or Satan”), but they are not identified. The word devil comes from the Greek diabolos meaning “accuser” or “slanderer”, while the word satan is of Hebrew origin meaning “adversary” (Frye, 1972: 65). In Blake’s later prophetic works instead of the word, devil (or devils) Satan is used to name the selfish “Evil One” (Milton) and he is also called the God of Men, Jehovah, who arrives with flaming fire. But in this early prophecy it is emphasised that the two words, Devil and Satan, with their quite close meaning both signify that they differ, criticise or rebel against something. As having negative power, they cannot exist in themselves: their contrary force is needed. For Blake the devils—often in plural—present a more universal force, a principle of creative energy, which is related not only to the soul/spirit but also to the body: “Energy is […] from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (MHH, 149). It is usually understood that the Devil stands for bodily and sexual energy, or the id, while the Angel represents the reasonable soul, or the superego. But it provocatively also means that the devil stands for the union of the body and the soul; more exactly, questioning and criticising the usual catagories, the Devil wants the reader to redefine these contraries. That is, the Devil, re-valuating the conventionally accepted assumptions, deconstructs the apparent contradictions and reveals the primordial unity of the mind. Consequently, opposed to the usual meaning of the body, for the visionary “it is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age” (MHH, 149). Thus, it is not by chance that the Devil is introduced as a great rhetorician using here the argumentative tone of his voice and relying on the reader’s common sense. As on Plate 3 it is stated: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. / From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. / Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell” (MHH, 149). Although here the opposition of good and evil is given religious denotation, their sign(ification) is not obvious. In his Annotations to Lavater’s “Aphorisms on Man” Blake remarks on aphorism 409 that “Active Evil is better than Passive Good” (Blake, 1976: 77). On the basis of the Blakean conception, hypothetically, the angelic restraining minus can be corrected by the devilish revolutionary minus—so, the double negation results in affirmation.

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Actually, such a “reasonable” reading of the Devil’s logic shows the Angel’s viewpoint as well. Whereas the Devil’s voice is fully developed through his own statements, his antinomian proverbs and the I persona having been converted to his party, the Angel who stands for the reader’s ideas is less described. Blake putting on the Devil’s mask, aims at the devaluation of reason, where the reader is offered to “apprehend truth discursively, reasonably, like the Angel”, or “intuitively, energetically, like the Devil” (Wittreich, 1975: 206, italics in the original). Nevertheless, heaven vs. hell and angels vs. devils only exist separately from the angelic point of view. Let me mention a great example of the “black or white” typed angelic thinking. In the fourth “apocalyptic” “Memorable Fancy” the angel wants to show Blake his “eternal lot” saying that it is “between the black & white spiders” (MHH, 156). It can refer to Blake’s and the Devil’s obsession with contraries and to the fact that the “normal” way of thinking in black or white terms can obstruct the understanding of the work. This fancy ends in quite a postmodern fashion stating that all of us (readers, critics, angels or devils) impose upon each other our own “phantasy” “owing to our metaphysics” (MHH, 156-7). But the devils at least can reflect on it: they represent an intellectually higher level as they are able to see things in greater contexts and in more universal connections—due to their ironic ability of shifting points of view. As Derrida says about the apocalyptic tone, it “leaps and rises when the voice of the oracle, uncovering your ear, jumbling, covering, or parasitizing the voice of reason equally speaking in each and using the same language with everyone, takes you aside, speaks to you in a private code, and whispers secrets to you” (Derrida, 1999: 132). However, I would like to emphasise that in The Marriage the devilish needs the angelic so as to function, and the truth is being formed in their (ironic) “mental fight”. In the work, as Wittreich points out, the devilish-angelic contraries are historically represented by Milton, the true, and Swedenborg, the false prophet. Accordingly, in the argumentation the work operates with a double strategy in order “to expose the false prophets, eliminating the negation they represent; and to accomplish through prophecy the struggle of contraries by which the organs of perception are cleansed and the apocalypse finally achieved” (Wittreich, 1975: 199). We should admit that Blake’s work was greatly influenced and liberated by Milton’s radical ideas. On the whole, the direction of Milton’s and Swedenborg’s thinking and ouvre can be contrasted since in his writings Milton moved away from orthodoxy whereas Swedenborg starting from a radical view, reached orthodoxy. More exactly, referring to Bloom’s remark, in The Marriage Swedenborg is shown as the ex-prophet, a priest, but he originally was a reasoner (a scientist) who could become a visionary and sect-founder (Bloom, 1963: 70); that is, in his career Swedenborg displays the rise and the fall of the visionary. CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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While the I persona mainly mocks Swedenborg’s ideas, the Devil ironises Milton as Blake puts his Milton-criticism into the Devil’s mouth. On the one hand, the Devil’s voice criticises Paradise Lost aesthetically, on the other hand, it ironically attacks his theology. In The Marriage the Miltonic Satan, the unironic hero of rebellion, is put in the centre and ironised by/in Blake’s Devil. But, as Wittreich calls the attention, the Devil “never exhibits the same largeness of mind as the figure with whom he is identified” (Wittreich, 1975: 215). Likewise, the Devil’s idea that in Milton “the Father is Destiny, the Son a Ration [cf. Reason] of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost Vacuum” (MHH, 150) is true only in the ironic context of the work. We cannot forget that besides criticising Milton, the Devil’s main task is to ironise reasoning by expressing distorted views and by the sudden changing of perspectives. The ironic shifting of viewpoints culminates in the complicated sentence, where the Devil’s name is deleted as in the work his name equals the evasive tone itself. Opening up the vortex of contraries, he would rather let the reader find out that the devilish Jehovah of imagination, or the Biblical creator “dwells in flaming fire”. Finally, the Devil, or the “converted” I persona in his ironic awareness notes on Plate 5 that “The reason Milton wrote fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (MHH, 150, italics are mine). In this statement we should pay attention to the opening word of “reason” associated with the angelic principle which is opposed to the energy of the devilish irony expressed here; due to the ironic tone, reason is put in antinomy with freedom and truth in the rhetoric. On Plate 16 another “portion of being” and its (ironic) opposite is revealed: the Prolific and the Devouring. According to Bloom, “if ever Blake speaks straight, forgoing all irony, in The Marriage, it is here” (Bloom, 1963: 90). I think that without using the ironic tone, the statement—“to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in chains; but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole” (MHH, 155, italics are mine)—cannot be uttered. More exactly, only from an evasive (betwixt and between) viewpoint and in an atonal/atoned voice can such a statement be uttered. These two classes—the imaginative, creative artists and the Reasoners, the ones of limited knowledge—should be enemies because following the main principle, their opposition and fight means the essence of human existence. As David Erdman sees: “Blake rejects [Swedenborg’s] “spiritual equilibrium” between good and evil for a theory of spiralling “Contraries” that will account for progress” (Erdman, 1991: 178). Though the interaction of contraries regarded eternal their unique “union”, their marriage—promised and illustrated in the work—can be achieved.

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The interaction is figured by the dynamic vortex as in Blake’s visions it symbolises the essence of imaginative activity and “serves as an image of the gateway into a new level of perception”—quoting Professor Mitchell (Mitchell, 1978: 73). Here this whirlwind is created by the devil and his attribute, his ironic attitude—his “flaming fire”. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell fire is the main, the first principle: it is clearly associated with (devilish) desire, consummation and sexuality as “the word ‘consummation’ […] refers both to the burning world and the sacred marriage” (Frye, 1972: 196). It is not only the means of the “devouring” purification (apocalypse) and prohibition (the cherub’s flaming sword), but also of the “prolific” creation and artistic imagination (see Plate 14). Moreover, fire symbolises inspiration as Northrop Frye says “imagination cannot be consumed by fire, for it is fire” (Frye, 1972: 196). In the first “Memorable Fancy” a mighty devil writes the infernal “Proverbs of Hell” using “corroding fires” and later the “devilish artist” calls his own working method infernal: “[…] I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (MHH, 154). Practically, with his “corrosive method” Blake invented a new technique of engraving. After drawing the outlines in varnish on the copper plate he put it into the acid bath. As a result, quoting Anthony Blunt, “the unprotected parts were bitten away, leaving the parts painted out in a varnish in relief. This is roughly an inverted form of the ordinary process of etching, or a transference of the process of wood engraving to a copper plate” (Blunt, 1966: 128). That is, this process does not only imply the use of the corrosive and purifying acid bath but also the working out of the design backwards while the text has to be written in black surrounded by a thin white line in the overall darkness of the space. It can be said that in this way Blake made darkness visible as the process of engraving produces such a visual paradox. It is another ironic game with the contrary-complementary points of view in our perception, meaning another challenge for our senses. As the apocalyptic and Platonic conclusion states on Plate 14: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. / For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” (MHH, 154). Blake thinks that the divine (or diabolical) imagination is locked in the Platonic cave of the human skull or body which is lit by the sensory organs: nostrils, ears, eyes, tongue and skin, or genitals. The purifying and energetic flames of imagination used by Blake, metaphorically and literally, can free our perception and open the way towards infinity. In The Marriage, the other prophetic figures, Isaiah and Ezekiel, also want to raise men into “a perception of the infinite” with their strange “corroding” behaviour (MHH, CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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154). Similarly, Blake tries to show the power of the “Poetic Genius” in his “fire of intellect and art, which must begin ‘by an improvement of sensual enjoyment’” (Bloom, 1963: 88). According to Wittreich, “the true prophets” should rely on satire and irony (Wittreich, 1975: 207)—that is, following the devilish ironic logic, they can pretend to be false prophets. Rather thinking in the infernal, or poetical-artistic meaning of the work, I agree with Harold Bloom that the creative Devil is the artist Blake’s ironic mask and “the corroding fires refer metaphorically both to his engraving technique and the satiric function of the Marriage” (Bloom, 1963: 83). While the Devil’s irony seems to be controlled—as he is still a reasoner though a false one—the I persona is likely to be taken away by his irony. In the last “Memorable Fancy”, in the description of the parallel visions of the orthodox Angel and the heretic, with the abundance of figures the same story is told from two opposite viewpoints—with understanding shamefully “imposed upon” each other (MHH, 157). First, the Angel shows his fantasy about eternity with the symbols of Christ’s life (the stable, the church, the vault), of the institutionalised Church (mill, cave), and finally with the apocalyptic pictures of the black tempest, the fiery cataract of blood and Leviathan in the black sea (Summerfield, 1998: 382-3). Afterwards the I persona displays “his” visionary story of Christianity flying with the Angel towards the Sun reversing Satan’s journey through chaos described in Paradise Lost. Then descending into the abyss of the Bible, they reach the seven houses of the Church where monkeys live quarrelling, copulating and devouring each other “by plucking off first one limb and then the another, till the body was left a helpless trunk; […] one savourily picking the flesh off his own tail” (MHH, 157). In his Marriage the rational “either-or” typed point of view is attacked: if devils and angels separately exist in our world the persona deliberately acts for the devil’s party. In this (ironic) sense he can be said to be the devil’s advocate who puts not only the “case of reason” but also the reasonable (Swiftian) satire to the acid test. As Relihan remarks, “the anatomy of folly can only be ironically performed” (Relihan, 1993: 30); that is, irony is used upon irony, or the technique of betrayal with a false persona. The ending is not satiric but ironic and can be taken as an imaginative poetic ending, not a reasonable one where the “fiery polemic uttered for its fire and not its light” (Bloom, 1963: 94). But after the promise of “The Bible of Hell” another shock awaits the reader: the warning of the “devilish” illustrator who shows us the repressive and degenerate state of Nebuchadnezzar. That is, the final “word” is uttered by the illustrator putting up the Devil’s/his complex ironic mask. As a starting point, Paley also emphasises that “the apocalyptic mode, both in the Bible and in secular literature, involves a seer who communiCAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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cates his visions, and these apocalyptic truths are conveyed not as pure spiritual transmission, but through images and words” (Paley, 1999: 2-3, italics are mine). Actually, regarding the different and intertwined voices of the work, the very first and very last voice—before and after Rintrah, the I persona, the Devil and the Angel—is the voice of the illustrator. From the starting plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, from the title and its first “illumination” of the title-page, the reader is contrasted with a Blakean twofold or more exactly “threefold vision”: the union of two contrary forces. If we want to understand, or rather imagine its meaning, we should go beyond and accept the challenge that the whirlwind of these apparent “contraries” indicates. Having analysed the work, I should realise that even from the very beginning in the satirical-ironical context Blake acts as the devil’s advocate, the advocatus diaboli representing a higher state of imaginative vision. If the reader can accept the illogical though imaginative marriage of good and evil, then (s)he can see the contraries already united—in its double negative, assertive way. We have an artist who works with “flaming fire”, what’s more, uses its power in the creation of the “great synaesthesia” of his art. As Professor Mitchell sees, “Blake’s pictorial style, like his poetic form and the total form of his composite art, is organised as a dramatic, dialectical interaction between contrary elements” (Mitchell, 1978: 74). In his “illuminated” works, in his artistic threefold vision, words and pictures—and the sculpture-like letters, motifs of the relief etchings - are composed to show the synaesthetic presentation of sensory elements, so as to open the dynamic vortex of imagination. In this sense his illustrated/illuminated prints do also function as windows, as sensory openings, and through his pictures the spectator’s sensual enjoyment can be improved by “designing visual illusions which continually demand and imply [all] the other senses in their structures” (Mitchell, 1978: 74). I cannot agree with Erdman that the usage of the word ‘marriage’ in the title of the work—on the basis of Blake’s aversion of this institution—can only be taken as a “half-jest”. In Blake’s poetic and prophetic works marriage has different meanings, from the burdensome bondage of loveless and forced marriages, through the happy sexual union, to the spiritual wedding between God and Man. According to Wittreich, “[i]f Milton thought that the marriage of truth would not occur until the Apocalypse, Blake thought the Apocalypse would not occur until such a marriage had been accomplished” (Wittreich, 1975: 203). However, the argumentation of the work fails to show up the promised “marriage” as the Devil’s voice is fully developed through his utterances, proverbs and the I persona having been converted to his party, but the Angel’s figure is less described. That is, the text of the Blakean Marriage presents the weak and unbalanced union between the fully described figure of the Devil and the flat reasoning character of the CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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Angel—consequently, the true expression of marriage should be looked for in the illustrations. The title of the prophecy—written to the experienced living in division—clearly refers to the world of “threefold vision” and sexual unity. In the work it is visualised in the title-page, in its illustration and typography, and verbalised in the last “Memorable Fancy”. The title-page can be taken as an illustration to the section where all the voices are present: the I persona records the conversation between an Angel and a Devil which is finally/originally depicted by the illustrator on the title-page. In the textual vision, the devil in flaming fire addresses an angel sitting on a cloud and questions the ancient traditions of orthodox Christianity, while putting emphasis on Christ’s humanity instead of his divinity. As the angel fails to defend his own ideas he “stretched out his arms, embracing the flame of fire, & he was consumed and arose as Elijah [viz. the prophet, or John the Baptist]” (MHH, 158). Although in the text the two figures are masculine (referred as “he”) or can be taken as androgynous, in the title-page below the level of the ground or consciousness we can see an embracing love-couple: the devil is characterised with flames of fire and a nice feminine bottom, and the angel’s masculine nude is shown reclining on a bluish cloud. The harmonious moment of their kissing is made dynamic by the moving fiery flames and the other embracing couples flying above the central one. The whole picture shows the whirlwind of ecstasy rooted in and raised by the union of the two main principles. That is, the main schematic form dominating the entire space of the design is the vortex, which can be “the configuration of [the Blakean] ‘progression’” and “the focus of the encounter between conflicting forces” (Mitchell, 1978: 70). Besides the vision of the whirlpool there is another little vortex coiling around the uniting conjunction, “and”, which looks like going into the space of the drawing. Above the ground in accordance, or toning, with the visionary scene we can notice that the branches of the trees move towards each other in the wind (of passion) and as if the word, “marriage”, had united “the abstraction of typography [of HEAVEN and HELL] with the flowing, organic forms of Blake’s pictorial style” (Mitchell, 1978: 75). Finally, we should pay attention to the illustrator’s attitude and the Blakean irony. Being taken not as “anti-ironic” but a complementary counter-vision, this anironic vision accompanies irony and the absolute ironist is capable of the intertwining of the ironic and the anironic. I think, opposed to the hovering of modern irony, in Blake’s irony the anironic apocalyptic vision about the realm of fantasy ironises the Devil’s ironic tone. It means that the Devil’s irony is “Blake’s vehicle for carrying reason to excess, making it undermine itself and become energy” (Cooper, 1988: 48), which is CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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displayed in the illustrator’s (an)irony. In this sense, marriage can refer to the intertwined unity of the different tones which are tensed then braided. Thus, The Marriage does not only mean the Devil’s and the Angel’s spiritual union but also the marriage of satire and irony in a prophetic/apocalyptic ending-beginning. According to Wittreich, the work’s final irony [l]ies in the fact that what is true from the human perspective is not true from a demonic one, just as what the Devil says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell may be true from the perspective of history, but it is not true from the perspective of eternity that the prophet enjoys. The irony […] [of] Blake’s Devil lies in the fact that Blake [is] in possession of a larger consciousness and thus aware of subtleties that his devil does not perceive… (Wittreich, 1975: 215).

I agree with Wittreich’s calling Blake a “supreme ironist” but “the irony lies in the fact” that while in the final irony he sees “the formation of the prophetic character”. I would rather see the illustrator and the engraver’s perspective here. I think, supreme irony is expressed in the annihilation of the tones in the fiery ending and also in the illustrations where the artist represents his (an)ironic vision of prophecy. The illustrator’s “spiritual eye” is truly meant to be “the eye through which the rest of the world might see” (Wittreich, 1975: 218) and in this sense ironically the cover-page is rather an uncovering, apocalyptic page. In his essay on the apocalyptic tone, Derrida refers to a flower of rhetoric, the eucalyptus, which, as the ironic flower of revelation, after flowering remains closed, “well hidden [cf. the Greek word, eu-kaluptos] under the avowed desire for revelation” (Derrida, 1999: 149). In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, besides the puzzling multitonality, the author’s “true” voice remains concealed—like the Derridean apocalyptic flower of rhetoric, the eucalyptus. Moreover, the eucalyptus is also remarkable for its cleansing and healing oil, which can be associated with the corroding acid of Blake’s irony. In his writing Blake “argues” against all restraints, limitations and bondage, and he is capable of loosening the strict tension of the tonos, due to the elasticity of his ironic tonality. In spite of my first satirical remark on Professor Keynes’s explanation, I should accept that instead of “the devil” this “he” is “all that was needed”. The apocalyptic work ironically marks not the ending but the beginning of Blake’s prophetic and artistic career where heaven and hell, angels and devils do not exist—there is no reason for their existence. Regarding the conception, context and tonality of The Marriage, the “pronoun” and, what’s more, its hiatus/gap, is definitely enough. As He in his mask/incognito says in the “Proverbs of Hell”: it is “more than enough”, or “too much” (MHH, 152).

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References Ahearn, Edward Jonathan. Visionary Fictions—Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Altizer, Thomas Jonathan Jackson. The Apocalytic Trinity. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Blake, William. Complete Writings. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London: Oxford University Press, 1976. Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse—A Study in Poetic Argument. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1963. Blunt, Anthony. “The First Illuminated Books.” In Northrop Frye, ed., Blake—A Collection of Critical Essays, 127-141. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Cooper, Andrew M. Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. Damon, Samuel Foster. A Blake Dictionary. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy.” Translated by John Leavey, Jr. In Peter Fenves, ed., Raising the Tone of Philosophy, 117-171. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Erdman, David V. Blake—Prophet against Empire. New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1991. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Keynes, Geoffrey. Introduction and Commentary to William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Paris: Oxford UP & The Trianon Press, 1975. Mitchell, William John Thomas. Blake’s Composite Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Paley, Morton D. Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Relihan, Joel C. Ancient Menippean Satire. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Summerfield, Henry. A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998. Thompson, Edward Palmer. Witness against the Beast—William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr. Angel of Apocalypse—Blake’s Idea of Milton. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.

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IMAGES OF THE APOCALYPSE IN LATIN AMERICAN HARDBOILED: PRETERIST, FUTURIST, AND POSTMODERN INTERPRETATIONS OSVALDO DI PAOLO*

ABSTRACT. The end of the world is a millennial archetype, which has become quite popular in recent times. The current obsession with the destruction of the planet is also present in hardboiled literature. A great number of the XXI Century hardboiled genre presents an apocalyptic view that fluctuates between a vague moan and a deadly explosion. In this particular case, the urban landscapes of Medellin, Havana, and Buenos Aires are seen as chaotic and disheartening, immersed in irrational and catastrophic violence, heralding the destruction of these Latin American cities. In order to prove my thesis, I analyze Rosario Tijeras (2000) by Jorge Franco, Yesterday’s Mist (2005) by Leonardo Padura, Holly City (2010) by Guillermo Orsi and 77 (2009) by Guillermo Saccomanno. From each text, I present a summary of the story in order to reveal the apocalyptic tendencies in the novels, along with the social implications they convey. KEY WORDS: hardboiled, apocalypse, Latin American fiction

The destruction of the World is a contemporary enigma and concern, either unuttered or manifested in cultural productions—cinema, television, literature, plastic arts—of the new millennium. For example, the apocalypse is the main theme of the sixth season of the television program Dexter (2011). Dexter, a policeman and vigilante killer, chases a murderer who recreates the atrocious deaths mentioned in the Apocalypse of John. On the big screen, the blockbuster 2012 (2009), directed by Roland Emmerich, explores the Mayan prediction that the world will come to an end. Similarly, in the field of plastic arts, the work of Russian artist Vladimir Manyuhin centers on this subject as well. A popular genre par excellence, the novela negra hispanoamericana— contemporary Hispanic hardboiled fiction—also manifests the unrest associated with being curious and fearful of nearing end. 1 The novels Rosario * 1

OSVALDO DI PAOLO (PhD) is Professor of Latin American Literature at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. E-mail: [email protected]. Starting in the late 1950s, the hardboiled genre in Spanish American countries has become undoubtedly popular. At that time, the traditional detective novel, in which a detective offered a rational explanation to an enigma, was transformed gradually into

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Tijeras (2000), by Jorge Franco, La neblina de ayer (“Yesterday’s Mist”, 2005), by Leonardo Padura, 77, by Guillermo Saccomanno, and Ciudad santa (“Holy City”, 2010), by Guillermo Orsi, are examples of this. In all of these stories, the urban landscape is seen as chaotic and disheartening, immersed in irrational and catastrophic violence, heralding the destruction of Medellín, Havana and Buenos Aires. These novels share an apocalyptic outlook, the form of which fluctuates between a vague moan and a deadly explosion. The idea of the future annihilation of the world was first entertained by Zoroaster, an Iranian prophet who lived between the years 1400 and 1000 BC. According to Zoroastrianism, there are two opposing forces in the universe: Ahura Mazda, representative of Evil and predecessor of the JudeoChristian figure of Satan, and Ahriman, representative of Good. Zoroaster believed that the world was a great battle field and that, one day, the war would come to an end in a great fight, the Zoroastrian Armageddon, between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman (Lewis, 2001: 4).2 This ancient archetype of the end of times can also be found in Judaism and Islam, which predict the arrival of a judgment day. Christianity discusses the notion in the Apocalypse of John, one of the most mysterious parts of the New Testament, and in St Augustine’s City of God. In his book, Augustine proposes a symbolic reading of this book of the Bible, attempting to depart from the traditional view of apocalyptic millennialism 3, an eschatological early Christian belief that the Kingdom of Christ would last one thousand years and would end with the coming of the Antichrist and his defeat in a final battle. The Final Judgment, the destruction of the world and everlasting life in Paradise would then follow (Montero, 2001: 155).

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Hispanic hardboiled fiction through the inclusion of sharp social criticism in an attempt to denounce certain aspects of society and through a pessimistic view of the future (nothing can be solved or changed). In the Spanish American world, Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh and his counterparts, the Mexican Rafael Bernal and the Spanish Eduardo Mendoza, were pioneers in this new approach and are probably its best known representatives, their respective novels being iconic of the genre: Operación masacre (“Operation Massacre”, 1957), El complot mongol (“The Mongol Conspiracy”, 1969) and La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (“The Truth about the Savolta Case”, 1975). In Satanism Today, James Lewis notes: “Zoroastrianism differs from the other monotheisms in its conceptualization of the genesis of Satan. Mainstream Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all view Satan as a fallen angel who was cast out of heaven… By way of contrast, Ahriman is believed to be very much on par with Ahura Mazda. They even created the world together, which explains why the world is such a mixture of good and bad” (Lewis, 2001: 4). Bishop St. Augustine (354-430) is known as “Doctor and Father of the Church” for having written a variety of theological texts aimed at refuting the idea that Christ would return in a thousand years. In his book City of God, he proposes an allegorical interpretation of the millennium, without establishing a date for the second coming of Christ (Saragozá, 1997: 68).

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Throughout the centuries, many catastrophic historical events have been interpreted as apocalyptic, such as the Black Death (1348), the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (Carbajal, 2000: 90). Even Christopher Columbus wrote, in the sixteenth century, that “only 150 years remain[ed] until the… end of the world.” Martin Luther, on his part, is quoted as having said that “we have reached the time of the white horse of the Apocalypse. This world will not last any longer… than another hundred years” (Delumeau, 2000: 118). As of the last decade of the 20th century, this apocalyptic concern has been expressed by the Heaven’s Gate cult4, the Order of the Solar Temple 5, Uganda’s Religious Movement, Harold Camping, an Evangelist minister and Oakland radio broadcaster who predicted the end would come on 21 May 2011, and of course, the notorious Mayan prophecy that set 2012 as the year of the fatal cataclysm. 6 As previously stated, the idea that the apocalypse may be near is also explored in contemporary hardboiled fiction; and rightly so, since—as hardboiled fiction literary critics, writers and readers will agree—this genre best reflects the problems that society faces today. For instance, they present violence, corruption, and socioeconomic or political crises. In the words of writer Juan Sasturain, Hispanic hardboiled fiction is “a form of literature stemming from the crisis in contemporary society… because in each and every one of these [novels] there is a comprehensive structure that describes the world by means of its most destructive contradictions” (quoted in Laforgue, 1996: 223). Juan Martini, on his part, deems it impossible not to recognize the conflicts “stalking and preying upon contemporary man: he who lives and suffers under a social ordering governed by the despotism of 4

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The members of Heaven’s Gate lived together at Rancho Santa Fe, an affluent CDP in San Diego County, California. In “Heaven’s Gate: The End?”, Wendy Gale Robinson explains that “on March 26, 1997, the bodies of 21 women and 18 men, ranging in age from 26-72, were discovered in various stages of decomposition. Several days before, they had ingested applesauce or pudding laced with barbiturates and a shot of vodka, and they had submitted to suffocation from plastic bags placed over their heads. They were identically dressed in unisex black shirts, pants, and Nikes, and had purple shrouds placed across their faces. Many of the men had been castrated. Nevertheless still frustrated with their bodies, they chose to leave their ‘earthly containers’ behind in San Diego to join aliens who would take them to the Next Level with a newly embodied life” (Robinson, 1997: 1). The Order of the Solar Temple is a cult founded by Dr. Luc Jouret, responsible for mass suicides. The first one took place “on 4 October 1994 in Cheiry and Salvan, two idyllic Swiss villages. Forty-eight people were burned to death. On 23 December 1995, sixteen additional bodies, including those of three children, were also found charred at a wood in the French Alps, in the Grenoble region” (Miranda Matos, 2004: 1). For a better understanding of the concept of apocalypse, refer to Apocalipsis: la angustia del fin del mundo (“The Apocalypse: Anguish over the End of the World”), by Emilio Carbajal.

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economic interests and by violence, the most obvious—and most dramatic expression—of the struggles for power in any of its forms” (Laforgue, 1996: 222). But before moving on to other apocalyptic outlooks and signs, it is essential to establish the meaning of the word apocalypse, as it is used in this essay. When speaking of the apocalypse, I refer to the revelation and the acknowledgement of the destruction of the world as we know it, incorporating both the secular and the Christian positions. For theologian John McArthur, apokalypsis (revelation) means “‘to be become visible’… it is a front-page story of the future of the world written by someone who has seen it all” (McArthur, 2010: 25). By Christian apocalypse, I mean St. Augustine’s opposition to millennialism, which regarded the birth of Christ as the beginning of His one-thousand-year Kingdom, followed by the Final Judgment and the reaching of the Holy City. St. Augustine advocates for a symbolic reading of the biblical text (Carbajal, 2000: 88). Secular apocalypse, in turn, dates back to the 18th century’s Enlightenment and French Revolution. At that time, people started to diverge from a literal interpretation of biblical prophecies and their fulfillment, questioning the authority of both Church and Monarchy. The secular idea of apocalypse evolved alongside the growing advancement of modern civilization, a crisis in morality and the terror instilled by the World Wars, until it became impregnated with the postmodern view, which, by refusing to give any final answers, causes “melancholic moods” and disillusionment, with no hope in the future (Carbajal, 2000: 96). Thus, the novels presented in the following pages do not exclusively explore a singular religious or secular view of the apocalypse. Instead, they feed on both positions to question and reflect on the end of the world and human life. Rosario Tijeras: Violence, Power and Control in a (Post)apocalyptic World Rosario Tijeras was the first contemporary Hispanic hardboiled novel of the new millennium to win the Hammett Prize7. Without revealing the actual date of events, the narrator takes us back to the Medellín of the 1990s, when drug trafficking became a serious issue for Colombia. The story is told by an intradiegetic narrator, Antonio, who Rosario familiarly calls parcero, meaning friend in Colombian slang. According to Antonio, Rosario received the nickname Tijeras (“Scissors”) because, as a child, she would attack her 7

The Hammett Prize is awarded to the best contemporary Hispanic hardboiled novel. The idea for the award arose during the Noir Week of Gijón, a festival aimed at promoting hardboiled fiction. The first ceremony took place in 1988, the recipient being Paco Ignacio Taibo II for his book La vida misma (“Real Life”).

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teachers with her mother’s scissors and because, later on, she used the same tool to castrate the man who raped her. Antonio is a friend of Emilio’s; they both belong to the Medellín upper classes, while the girl comes from a poor family living in one of the shanty towns surrounding the city. The two men meet Rosario at a nightclub and fall in love with her at first sight. While Antonio keeps his feelings to himself, never telling Rosario he loves her, Emilio becomes the teenager’s official boyfriend. They all become close friends and eventually learn that Rosario is a hitwoman.8 She works for a drug cartel and takes part in the bloody struggle for power of the drug-trafficking world. Danger and death are undeniable realities: the lives of these young men are at risk. Rosario herself loses her brother Johnefe and her ex-boyfriend Ferney to the violence triggered by the drug business. Rosario’s life is a living hell, which she cannot escape, since she murders people for money. Her suffering becomes obvious when, after killing someone, she isolates herself for some time and turns to binging food. Although introverted about her job, Emilio and Antonio know that, every time she puts on weight, she is dealing with the guilt from having committed a crime. Drug trafficking being a volatile business, her bosses eventually decide to get rid of her. So the condo Antonio and Rosario are staying in gets raided. Los duros (“the tough guys”), as parcero calls them, end up murdering Rosario. In Colombia, the exponential growth of drug trafficking costs the lives of innocent young people and of those who break the law by getting involved with the cartels. Armed groups of outlaws in the communes are key to safeguard the business—making, distributing and selling the drug, as well as protecting the dealers—to settle scores and to wage vendettas (Yarce, 2007: 1). Rosario illustrates this when she tells Antonio: “it’s war, parcero, war. It was time to fight back.” The girl adds that that is why the cartel had hired Ferney, her ex-boyfriend, and Johnefe, her brother: it needed more muscle on the street. She also explains that, when the capos (“lords”) of the cartel realized that the two men were turning into professional killers, they got promoted, “started doing very well for themselves, changing motorbikes” and building a second floor to their house (Franco, 2000: 59). However, the city became violent, unsafe and apocalyptic, as part of the self-destructive process of the Medellín society. In Rosario’s words: “the city had heated up.

8

In Medellín: 20 años de llanto en las calles (“Medellín: 20 Years of Tears on the Streets”), Elizabeth Yarce points out that the word sicario (“hitman”) comes from sicarius, which was used “in ancient Rome to designate young hired killers, whose weapon of choice was a dagger or a knife (sica meaning point). The Medellín Cartel adopted the figure” (Yarce, 2007: 1).

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The sorrow was suffocating. We were up to our necks in bodies. Every day, a several hundred pound bomb would wake us up, leaving the same number of people charred and the buildings like skeletons” (Franco, 2000: 65). Antonio also realizes that newspaper articles at the time were all about “the hundreds of boys found dead in Medellín every morning” (Franco, 2000: 147). In an article published in the newspaper El Colombiano, with the headline Medellín: 20 años de llanto en las calles (“Medellín: 20 Years of Tears on the Streets”), Elizabeth Yarce reports that, in two decades, more than 40,000 youths ages fourteen to sixteen were killed in the city due to armed conflict. She adds that, in the early 90s, a war over territory broke out in the poorest communes and that “this situation, coupled with the spread of drug trafficking, led to a record murder rate in the city in 1991 and 1992: 444 for every 100,000 inhabitants, according to the statistics of the now-dismantled Asesoría de Paz y Convivencia de Medellín (‘Medellín Agency for Peace and Coexistence’).” DECYPOL statistics (Colombian Department of Criminological Studies and Identification) indicate that there have been an exorbitant number of homicides in the new millennium as well. While, in December 2000, the murder rate was 150 for every 100,000 inhabitants, the figure rose to 200 in 2001 (Yarce, 2007: 1).9 This violence and destruction hint at a profound desperation, typical of the secular and postmodern apocalypse. Medellín appears unstable and dangerous. Antonio relates the story of Rosario with sadness and acknowledges: “it was Rosario who hurled us [Emilio and me] into the world, who forked our road, who showed us that life was different from the picture that we had been painted” (Franco, 2000: 88). Antonio and Emilio are from the upper-classes and have bourgeois values; Rosario Tijeras lifts the veil off their eyes by introducing them to the chaos, death and social disintegration of her surroundings. In “Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utopia Today”, Krishan Kumar states that the current idea of apocalypse is a melancholic feeling rising from the impossibility of visualizing a promising future. He views the apocalypse as a “moan” rather than an “explosion”: “it is a version of the Apocalypse that focuses obsessively on the end, with no expectations of a new beginning” (Kumar, 1998: 243). The characters in Franco’s novel embody such a feeling.

9

Yarce compares Medellín to other Latin American cities and reaches the conclusion that “in Santiago de Chile, there are three deaths for every 100,000 inhabitants; in Mexico City, 14; in Buenos Aires, 34, and in Bogotá, 36; in Medellín, in 2001, there were 220 (an average of 12 deaths a day)” (Yarce, 2007: 1).

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Rosario Tijeras experiences anguish and chaos, to which her own religion offers no solution, therefore turning to Satanism. 10 The narrator explains that she “would put on white foundation and paint her lips and eyes black.... She wore black… and from her neck hung an inverted cross” (Franco, 2000: 68).11 The hitwoman admits that she thinks the devil is a bacán (great, a bon vivant) and tells parcero that Johnefe believed Lucifer was generous. Apocalypse scholars, such as John McArthur, argue that one cannot be neutral in the “cosmic battle” between good and evil. Evidently, these hitmen feel themselves to be Satan’s associates, which links the secular apocalypse explored in the novel to the religious one. The site of the battle seems to be Medellín. It is as though the sixth trumpet of the Apocalypse of John was being blown by this society. John explains that even after three plagues had wiped out one third of humanity, the survivors did not repent: they did not regret having committed homicides and thefts, and continued to worship demons (Apocalypse 9:13-21). Similarly and in spite of the countless deaths of innocent people and of youths related to the drug business, Rosario does not alter her life style. It is only when she herself is being chased by hitmen that she starts thinking about deviating from her self-destructive path and vows: “I won’t be bad anymore, parcero” (Franco, 2007: 107). A promise she never fulfills. In the end, the hitwoman admits: “many times I’ve promised you that I would change, but I always go back to the same, it’s true… it’s strong, stronger than me and it makes me do things I don’t wanna” (Franco, 2007: 150). Her inability to change and her identification with Satanism suggest Rosario is affected by demonic forces, which take the form of attacks by her drug-dealing enemies and ultimately destroy her. The story ends in pessimism and nostalgia: there can be no happy ending. In contrast, in the Apocalypse, the satanic killing announced by the sixth trumpet is followed by the coming of Christ and the ensuing hope of a better future, which the seventh trumpet heralds. Franco’s secular apocalypse, however, sees the future as hopelessly depressing.12 10

11

12

The theme of satanic worshipping and alternative spiritual practices is present in many hardboiled novels. See Juan Hernández de Luna’s Cadáver de ciudad (“City Corpse”, 2006). Rosario’s boyfriend tells Antonio that Medellín satanic groups sacrifice children: “they kidnap them and put them in an altar and cut their necks and drink their blood” (Franco, 2000: 69). Likewise, in Cadáver de ciudad (“City Corpse”), by Hernández de Luna, children are sacrificed to the devil. In the words of Umberto Eco: “for a religious mind, the end of times is an episode, a rite of passage leading to the radiant city, the Heavenly Jerusalem. For a secular mind, it is the end of everything and, therefore, it tends to reject it, which is regrettable, since reflecting on death should be the core of all philosophy” (quoted in Carbajal, 2000: 97).

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La neblina del ayer (“Yesterday’s Mist”): (Post)apocalyptic Virulence While Franco’s novel centers on the violent crimes of hitmen during the drug war in Colombia, Padura’s novel revolves around two homicides committed by the same killer: one after the second coup d’état by Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973), between 1952 and 1959, and another one in the 21st century.13 The person in charge of solving the crime is Mario Conde, a retired policeman who becomes a dealer of antique books. Conde discovers a valuable private library, owned by the influential Montes de Oca family. Alcides Montes de Oca’s bourgeois dreams had crumbled with Batista’s coup and he had been forced to immigrate to the United States. From that time onwards, his secretary and mistress had lived in the Montes de Oca mansion. Alcides had had two illegitimate sons with her, Dionisio and Amalia Ferrer, who are looking to sell the books to avoid being affected by the government’s food rationing policy. Among the rare collection, Conde finds a photograph of a 1950s bolero singer and falls in love with her beauty. He becomes obsessed with discovering her identity and eventually finds out that her name was Violeta del Río and that she had been another one of Alcides’ mistresses, who had supposedly committed suicide. Conde combs Cuba’s lower-class neighborhoods and comes across a prostitute who used to be friends with the charming singer. The woman tells him that Alcides and two friends of his, Louis Mally and Lansky, had had a prostitution ring and that she suspects Violeta was in fact murdered. At the same time, Dionisio is found dead in the Montes de Oca library. Since Conde and his partner are the main suspects, the retired policeman decides to continue with his investigation in order to prove their innocence. His decision is also prompted, of course, by his infatuation with the singer, whose voice he has been able to hear, having come across one of her records. Conde investigates Violeta’s murder and reflects on the luxury and the amount of cash flowing in the island under capitalism. He eventually links her death to Dionisio’s, which took place in a wore-down, deteriorated and apocalyptic Cuba brought about by the change of regime. Conde has a hunch that Acides’s daughter and her mother, Nemesia, can help solve both murders. He demands to speak to Alcides’s former sec13

Fulgencio Batista was a Cuban dictator, who, in 1933, “organized a military coup (the “Sergeants’ Revolt”), consolidated his power, and became President (1940-1944). In 1952 he overthrew President Prio Socorras, and ruled as a dictator until his overthrow by Fidel Castro (January 1959), when he found refuge in the Dominican Republic” (Lenman, 2000: 80). The narrator of La neblina de ayer (“Yesterday’s Mist”) does not specify whether the events in the 21st century take place during Fidel Castro’s administration (1959-2008) or his brother Raúl’s (2008-present).

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retary and Amalia takes him to her mother’s room. They find her almost dead, tied up by Amalia, who had kept her there without any water or food. Finally, the girl confesses to killing Violeta, her father’s last mistress, to prevent him from leaving Cuba with her. She moreover confesses to her brother’s murder, prompted by his discovery of some letters written by Nemesia, in which she related her suspicions about her daughter and, ultimately, her discovery that Amalia had poisoned the singer. Apart from his obsession with Violeta, the antique books dealer is a somber, gray man. He is in anguish over the irreparably lost, pre-revolutionary Cuba and disillusioned with the country, which has not reached its goals of equality and prosperity.14 He expresses his feelings to one of his friends: “Havana used to be insane: I think it was the liveliest city in the world. The hell with Paris or New York!” (Padura, 2005: 88). Likewise, in a conversation with another friend, he complains that, after the Revolution, they “were made to believe that [they] were all equal and that the world would be better.” His friend’s reply is: “they’ve been ripped off, I swear. There are people everywhere who are less equal than others and the world is going from bad to worse. Right here… there are people right now who are getting rich, the right way and the wrong way” (Padura, 2005: 45). The virus of corruption and violence has infected the core of Havana society. A former colleague of Conde’s, Manolo exemplifies this with a comment. He tells Conde he cannot begin to explain the state of things: “muggings on every corner, drugs up in your face, robberies are a plague, corruption is like weed, you won’t get rid of it no matter how much you pull up, and don’t even get me started on pimping and pornography” (Padura, 2005: 105). Although the Cuban Revolution attempted to eradicate prostitution, corruption and gambling, to implement agricultural reforms and to make citizens respect the Constitution, many 21st century Cubans feel their situation is merely a perpetuation of past misfortunes (José Gómez Navarro, 1998: 318). In The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1989), Jean Baudrillard maintains that modernity has led mankind to total confusion, which contaminates every facet of the human being, including the political, economic and artistic ones. In “Prophylaxis and Virulence”, one of the essays from this book, Baudrillard declares man to be an irrational virus that ruins the transparency of the universe. He also believes genetic and 14

Andrés Amorós was perhaps the first scholar to characterize the figure of the contemporary Hispanic hardboiled fiction detective. In “Novela policíaca” (“Crime Fiction”), an essay from the book Introducción a la novela contemporánea (“An Introduction to Contemporary Novel”), Amorós explains that the hardboiled investigator is a “dark figure, a gray man, not too different from those against whom he fights, made human by his little quirks” (Amorós, 1974: 127).

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social disorders are comparable: “the very same thing happens to the social body… a situation comparable to the genetic disorder that occurs at the cellular level, again occasioned by overprotection, overcoding, overmanagement. The social system, just like the biological body, loses its natural defences in precise proportion to the growing sophistication of its prostheses” (Baudrillard, 2000: 35). Conde quits his job as a policeman because he wants to get away from “the invincible weaknesses of the human soul—even of the souls which claimed to have the power and the responsibility of justice on their side” (Padura, 2005: 103). The former detective wants to escape the social virus propagated by mankind. That is why he becomes an honest dealer of antique books, who even asks Dionisio, with “a dose of dignity his very blood demanded at the time”, not to sell the most valuable items (Padura, 2005: 28). In spite of his honesty and, in a wider context, of Fidel Castro’s government program— aimed at obliterating corruption, immorality, gambling, robbery, illiteracy, illness, hunger, exploitation and injustice—the virus is still active in contemporary Cuban society (quoted in Quirk, 1995: 22). These are anomalous symptoms to be found at the basis of the system; they “represent a reactive virulence designed to counter… a political overmanagement of the social body” (Baudrillard, 2000: 36). When Conde and his friends visit Havana’s Chinese Quarter looking for Silvano Quintero, an antique records dealer, they recognize the social virus in that part of the city. The narrator points out that its inhabitants’ “main occupation is breaking into homes, pushing whores onto tourists and, of course, selling drugs” (Padura, 2005: 141). He adds that they live in such a state of poverty that they “become aggressive and cynical, like creatures devoid of any type of hope” (Padura, 2005: 138). The hopelessness pervading Havana is the result of the frustration felt by its citizens before and after the Revolution. Many citizens find that the drastic sociopolitical change brought about by Fidel Castro amounts to the destruction of a familiar world. It is a radical change that can be interpreted as apocalyptic. Nemesia, Amelia’s mother, describes it so. In a letter to Alcides, she acknowledges: “I’m experiencing an all too turbulent history: everything crumbles and new myths rise; some heads roll and everything is rebaptized… for the first time I’m afraid the situation will turn really tragic and, above all, irreversible. Is this the true end of the world?” (Padura, 2005: 93). The apocalyptic feelings expressed by Alcides’s former secretary at the time of the coup d’état resurface in the characters living in the 21st century. In Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, Richard Dellamora speculates the apocalypse is an endless horizon: “it can imply CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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mere repetition, a ceaseless doing again of deeds that issue in frustration and failure. This last possibility helps explain a pervasive sense of unease in contemporary existence… the genre of apocalypse includes a concept of repetition that permits the writing of new stories about the end” (Dellamora, 1995: xii). In turn, Jean Baudrillard argues, in “The Anorexic Ruins”, that contemporary society has become something nuclear, vaporized, remote and lost. He maintains that “the explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now” (Baudrillard, 1989: 34). Just as Nemesia foresees the end of the world back in 1959, Conde, in the 21st century, asks his friend Manolo: “What’s going on, Manolo? D’ you think the end of the world is really coming? Why are people getting more and more fucked up?” (Padura, 2005: 105). His friend sighs and responds that he keeps asking himself the same questions. In his words: It must be there are too many people that don’t wanna work anymore in life and look for an easy way out. There’s many, too many who grew up watching half the country steal, forge, embezzle, and by now it’s the most natural thing in the world to them and they do it like it’s nothing bad at all. But the most terrible thing is the violence: they don’t respect anything and when they want something they get it whatever way they can (Padura, 2005: 105).

It would seem that, as stated by Baudrillard, it is human beings themselves who taint every chance of progress, violently and without realizing the extent of the damage, being wrapped up in a vicious circle, foreseeing their end and regarding themselves as witnesses of the last stages of human life on Earth. Conde repeatedly wonders whether the end of the world might not be near and suspects that man is a “specimen in rapid danger of extinction... a testimony to genetic failure”, somewhere between the vanished world of the glamorous Cuba of the 1930s and the disintegrating present— riddled with violence, marked by scarcity and food rationing (Padura, 2005: 205). While in Franco’s Rosario Tijeras, Medellín is a city crammed with the skeletons of blown-up buildings and hundreds of corpses, the Cuba of the new millennium described in La neblina de ayer (“Yesterday’s Mist”) has a post-apocalyptic landscape. The narrator characterizes it as “postwar, filled with deep cavities and debris, with buildings on precarious balancing acts, wounded by irreparable cracks… with overflowed waste containers like infectious peaks”... Conde is overcome by the chaos; the spectacle of the city tells him he is “in the presence of a world at the verge of a hardly avoidable Apocalypse” (Padura, 2005: 208). The demoralizing and daunting atmosphere of a neighborhood he is exploring also prompts him to remark on the violence, historical frustration and everyday erosion of moral values experienced by the population. He is CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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sorry to hear “the sounds of the ferocious trumpets of the Apocalypse, willing to forever stifle amongst them a person’s capacity for ethical discernment, making them into a primal being, only fit to fight and even kill to survive” (Padura, 2005: 310). It is the picture of a secular apocalypse, since Conde has no faith in Catholicism and often states his belief that mankind is alone in the world, and that there is no God. At the same time, he criticizes those who turn to religion and to other rituals in search of “false” hope. In Rosario Tijeras, the protagonist becomes a Satanist; in this novel, the crisis in the island drives people to “the confessional booths at the churches and sittings with santeros, spiritualists, cartomancers, seers and babalawos” (Padura, 2005: 210).15 The search for comfort in spirituality, the loss of morality, hunger, corruption and the rise in violence are all signs which the characters see as apocalyptic. Conde and his friends draw a line between the past and the present, failing to acknowledge that these signs are recurrent. Because the apocalypse is in fact a circular notion. Both the years prior to the Revolution and those following it have eroded people to such an extent that they believe the end is near. Ciudad santa (“Holy City”): An Ideal City within a “Real” and Corrupted One Guillermo Orsi’s Ciudad santa (“Holy City”) is set in Buenos Aires and shows a range of characters from different social milieus. The novel may be read as a whole—the reader connecting individual experiences by the various characters—or as separate stories, unique and personal, about lost souls in a decrepit world. It is a collage, made up of the lives of the main characters and of other voices, joining in to terrify the reader with a macabre prose and a succession of demoralizing images. One of the protagonists, Verónica Beruti, is a lawyer whose husband died during the Argentine transition towards democracy, after the deposition of the military government that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. Her husband was a policeman, murdered for handing over compromising information to the judicial system, concerning some of his colleagues who had been involved in the genocide ordered by the military. Verónica represents Ana Torrente, a Bolivian beauty queen who came to Buenos Aires with the dream of leaving behind the third-world decadence of her own country, but who ends up infatuating policemen and climbing up the power ladder of the drug industry.

15

Babalawo is a Yoruba word meaning Priest of Ifá. Babalawos are said to predict the future (Saldívar-Arellano, 2010: 116).

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Ana is joined by her brother, Jaguar, who senselessly decapitates Ana’s victims and takes refuge in Tierra Santa (“Holy Land”), a religious theme park in the “holy” city of Buenos Aires. Another character is Pacagoya, a Paraguayan national, occasional lover of Verónica’s and tour guide on a cruise liner that had to make a stop in Buenos Aires for repairs. He is a man without scruples that satisfies his passengers’ every need, selling them drugs and even prostituting himself to both men and women. Within the group of federal and Buenos Aires provincial policemen described in the story, there are two particularly worth mentioning: Oso Berlusconi and deputy inspector Walter Carroza. Berlusconi is another one of Miss Bolivia’s lovers. He brags about having participated in the torture and murder of Argentine citizens during the last military dictatorship. He is also responsible for the kidnap and death of four foreign couples of millionaires, who were on board the broken down cruise liner Queen of Storms. Three of them were CEOs at multinational companies; the remaining one, Osmar Arredri, was the boss of a powerful Medellín cartel. Carroza also has sexual relations with the beauty queen. Although he had no part in the genocide of the late 1970s—in the course of his investigation on the kidnapping of the foreign nationals—he does “make an arrangement” with Sirena Mondragón, the Colombian drug-dealer’s girlfriend. In fear of being murdered like Arredri, she promises to give Carrosa, Verónica and El Tío, an Argentine cartel lord, millions of dollars. Orsi’s novel offers a prophetic and a non-prophetic apocalyptic view of Buenos Aires. In Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth, Scott Hahn explains that, if taken literally, the Bible’s Apocalypse relates to the fall of the city of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD (Hahn, 1999: 93). This would be a preterist interpretation of the text, the word Preterism deriving from the Latin praeter or “bygone”, and could reflect either current events or those that took place in the near past from a nonprophetic outlook (Edinger, 1992: 8). The text, attributed to the apostle John, describes the corruption of ancient Jerusalem and compares it to a prostitute “drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus” (Apocalypse 17:6). 16 Moreover, it is worth remembering that it was Jerusalem authorities who decided the fate of Christ and that the city was a place in which early Christians were persecuted (Acts 6:8-14, 7:57-60, 8:1-3). Allegorically, the apostle John calls Jerusalem Sodom and Egypt, these being places of opposition to the divine plan. In “Apocalypse Then!”, Scott Hahn explains: “Sodom stood in the way of God’s covenant plan with Abraham; Egypt stood in the way of His 16

Other Old Testament texts also make this comparison. For further reference, see Ezekiel 16:2-6-3, 23:2-49; Jeremiah 2:20, 3:3; and Isaiah 1:21.

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covenant plan for Moses and Israel. Now, it’s Jerusalem’s turn to oppose God, as its leaders persecute the Apostles and the Church” (Hahn, 1999: 95). This preterist view of the Apocalypse is idealistically or symbolically represented in Ciudad santa (“Holy City”). Buenos Aires has become the Jerusalem of old, a corrupted city that deserves being destroyed. In the text, the narrator relates how Pacagoya, the tour guide, wakes up to the sight of a Buenos Aires that seems to be the Holy City of Jerusalem (Orsi, 2009: 73) and deputy inspector Carroza, in a conversation with another policeman on the decapitated bodies they have been finding, says “Buenos Aires is, more than ever, a holy city” (Orsi, 2009: 152). They are both ironically referring to the Jerusalem that deserves destruction. Orsi’s story offers a succession of maddening and abhorrent images and events. To Carroza, the city equals corpses and the information on the police radio makes this clear: “male with deep slash wound on Cuzco St, dismembered female by Sarmiento railroad tracks… fight among St. Cajetan worshippers”; “badly wounded young male, street fight with one dead, raped female with no vital signs in ditch” (Orsi, 2009: 144). The policeman also dwells on the city’s nightclubs that “become crowded with dancers and the emergency rooms at the hospitals with stoners in shock and people with gunshot wounds and blunt force traumas.” Similarly, the narrator describes the city’s market as “a Persian market for outdoor smuggling and thieving… Buenos Aires is a jungle without Tarzans; an artificial garden where roses and jasmines are plastic, where the rich live in neighborhoods built on ruins or corpses” (Orsi, 2009: 27, 32). Each one of the characters offers a terrifying view of the city; even Miss Bolivia gets disappointed when she realizes Buenos Aires is not the Paris of the South, a place where even taxi drivers spoke French, as she believed it to be, and she tells herself: “you’ve been lied to… Buenos Aires is as filled with colored assholes as any crumbled down city in Bolivia or Peru” (Orsi, 2009: 38). Violence, drugs, poverty, unscrupulousness, corruption and unchecked ambition prevail and obliterate any attempt at fraternity. The maddening city of Buenos Aires is contrasted with a holy city inside of it: the theme park Tierra Santa (“Holy Land”), located near the airport. To the narrator, this is indeed a holy city, however unreal and unreachable—a “cardboard pulp Jerusalem” (Orsi, 2009: 7). It is in this artificial city that Jaguar the decapitator lives. Jaguar uses the skulls of his sister’s victims to build himself an altar in search of resurrection and eternal life. He wants to craft his very own Mount Golgotha, the word Golgotha meaning “mount of skulls” (Orsi, 2009: 300). It seems as though Jaguar equates Buenos Aires with Sodom, Egypt or the accursed Jerusalem, riddled with misfortune. He does not want to live in it because there is no salvation there. He shall have CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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to search for eternal life in a new Jerusalem, the Jerusalem that will rise after the Apocalypse. This speaks of a futuristic interpretation of the Bible. In “The Grand Final Catastrophe”, George Edinger states that a valid interpretation of the Apocalypse is “the futurist interpretation… the text of Revelation refers to events around the Return of Christ, coming sometime in the future” (Edinger, 1992: 9). Buenos Aires is lost, doomed; utter destruction is upon it. Jaguar knows it and so takes refuge in Tierra Santa (“Holy Land”). Deputy inspector Carroza knows it too. In a conversation with a colleague, who believes Jaguar is dead, Carroza reflects: “nobody dies forever, Escocés. Take Jesus, think of the scare he gave the Galilean Jews” (Orsi, 2009: 152). This remark relates to the apocalypse: the destruction of the world as we know it. It clearly states the possibility of a second coming of Christ, a scare for many, as Carroza puts it. But it also brings about hope, the chance that Buenos Aires will rise from the ashes and become a celestial city, the Jerusalem described in the last part of the Apocalypse. 17 77: Genocide, Collective Dehumanization and the Catastrophe of the “Great Damage” Guillermo Saccomanno’s novel 77 explores the subject of Argentina’s 19761983 military dictatorship, also taken up by Orsi’s Ciudad santa (“Holy City”). This book describes the life of Professor Gómez during 1977, the most dangerous year of state terrorism. Looking to understand the chaos that surrounds him, he visits an astrologer / seer / mentalist by the name of Doktor Joseph Lutz, an occultist who studies the prophecies of Krumm Heller (1876-1949).18 Gómez continues with his spiritual research, turning to I Ching and hermetic astrology. Meanwhile, one of the Professor’s neighbors begins to cast spells on him, burning hair and leaving a dead toad on his door handle. Gómez is homosexual and, while picking up male prostitutes, he witnesses kidnappings and other forms of violence infesting the streets of Buenos Aires. His students are not safe from it either. One of them, Esteban, is arrested by the military during the Professor’s Argentine Literature course. He himself is detained by the police for quarreling with a casual boyfriend. He then meets Walter, a policeman involved in the military dictatorship, who becomes his lover. Through him, the professor tries to find out what 17

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In the fourth part of the Apocalypse, the narrator sees a new city rising as a symbol of a brand-new Church: “I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Apocalypse 21:4). In The Unknown God: W. T. Smith and the Thelemites, Martin Starr points out that Krumm Heller goes by the mystic name of Huiracocha. Heller was a representative of the German Sovereign Sanctuary of the Ancient and Primitive Rite and is best known for his 1930 book Logos Mantram Magia (Starr, 2003: 76).

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has happened to Esteban. On her part, Esteban’s mother, Azucena, angrily casts spells on General Videla, de facto President of Argentina. Around that same time, Gómez encounters Martín, the son of a friend, Delia, who had been killed during the 1955 dictatorship. Martín asks him to take a letter to the guerrilla leader in Rosario, a city in the Province of Santa Fe, to which he agrees. On Gomez’s return, Martín’s pregnant girlfriend, La Colo, a political activist like her boyfriend, moves in with him while Martín continues his fight against the government. One day, the Professor reads in the paper that the boy has been killed by the military. Some days later, he reads of Walter’s “heroic” death fighting the guerrilla. Having described the horrific events that took place in 1977, Gómez ends his story with an account of the trials held after the return of democracy, when many people who had committed murders and acts of torture during the dictatorship were brought to justice. For those persecuted by the military government, that period of fear, uncertainty, kidnappings, torture and murder was very much apocalyptic. The professor gives testimony to this. He explains that in 1977 “terror and poverty were everywhere... it was impossible not to see it, feel it.” He also remarks that “God, if he had ever existed, had died. It was more useful asking help of charlatans passing as miracle workers. Deolinda Correa or Pancho Sierra gave one more hope” (Saccomanno, 2008: 15). 19 It is clear that the professor has lost his faith in God, just as the inhabitants of Ephesus had. According to the Apocalypse, its people had stopped believing in the Lord: “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love” (2:4). On the same subject, John McArthur, in his analysis of John’s Apocalypse, notes that those who do not believe in God cannot understand the spiritual dimension that surrounds them, or interpret future realities (McArthur, 2010: 29). In search of answers, the Professor turns to other forms of belief. He decides to visit a seer, Doktor Joseph Lutz, who tells him that the energy of the cosmos has led him to his door, since he is “hungry for knowledge” of “matters relating to the cosmic mystery” (Saccomanno, 2008: 22). The pro19

Pancho Sierra (1831-1891) was known as the holy gaucho of the city of Pergamino. In his book Cultos y canonizaciones populares de Argentina (“Popular Cults and Canonizations of Argentina”), Félix Coluccio says he is believed to have had “exceptional powers” and that people still worship at his grave, since his gifts did not end with his death (98-100). Regarding Deodolina Correa, aka La Difunta Correa, Roque Pichetto explains that “her miracles, now well known, are described all throughout the Province of San Juan: local poets and singers speak of her in their verses and songs, country people ask for her protection during harvest time, drivers, to whom she is indebted, think of her as their patroness, make dangerous journeys through the mountain ranges and ravines under her guard, mothers who are too weak to feed their babies fervently pray to her to make their empty breasts fill with milk” (Pichetto, 1994: 95).

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tagonist is trying to make sense of the dreadful reality in which he is immersed, having witnessed so many human rights violations. The seer tells him that what is going on in Argentina is “the Great Damage and is nothing new. It’s part of the thunder announcing catastrophic changes on the planet… the Great Damage has already arrived in the country” (Saccomanno, 2008: 42). It is, in fact, the beginning of the end, as though one of the seals of the Apocalypse had been broken and destruction and violence had ensued. John the Apostle describes how, after the breaking of the fourth seal, a voice announced “power was given to them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth” (Apocalypse 6:8). These are the evils the Professor recognizes. Lutz also thinks the genocide is proof that the end is at hand and that, to “the worshipers of power, the youths carry out the designs of the Antichrist. The military are the Holy Inquisition. To them, torture is exorcism” (Saccomanno, 2008: 42). With his irony, the seer is supporting the guerrilla and criticizing the military, who falsely believe that God is on their side. Many biblical passages warn of the coming of false prophets. For example, in Jeremiah 14:14 the Lord says: “The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.” The military justify the murders by saying they are for the sake of peace and safety, in pursuit of national security. In La doctrina militar de seguridad nacional (“The Military Doctrine of National Security”), Roberto Calvo argues that for “the Chilean military, national security means structuring the potential of a country, so that it can be developed while fully exercising sovereignty and independence from both inside and outside forces” (Calvo, 1979: 66). In turn, General O. G. Villegas believes “there can be no safety without progress, nor progress without safety” (Villegas, 1968: 8). 20 In other words, those in power justify genocide under the pretext of a need for progress, peace, and stability to build the future of a nation. The same happened with Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, he vowed to be a peaceful man, which France and England initially believed (McArthur, 2010: 183). The Apocalypse itself warns of the false peace brought about by the breaking of the first seal.21 What is more, some believe the first horse-

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Refer to Villegas, “Seguridad, política y estrategia” (“Safety, Politics and Strategy”), in Temas Militares (“Military Matters”) 4 (1968). John the Apostle wrote: “And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer” (Apocalypse 6:1-2).

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man to be the Antichrist, who, in order to deceive people, creates the appearance of peace, which is soon followed by hunger, war and death (McArthur, 2010: 184). Faced with uncertainty and with the false pretenses of the military government, several characters in the novel try alternative spiritual practices. The mother of the Professor’s missing student also consults a seer, in an attempt to locate her son. The narrator reacts to this with a comment: “witchcraft, tarot, the stars: any trick will do to give parents back their lost hope” (Saccomanno, 2008: 202). While Lutz tells Gómez the military view guerrilla members as the Antichrist, the woman’s seer says that, in spite of the young rebels’ idealism, 1977 is a bad year for spiritual people because “there are dark wizards in power. Powerful ones” (Saccomanno, 2008: 202). While walking out of the fortune teller’s office, her secretary tells the boy’s mother and father: “many others come here looking for answers but the magic of the dark wizards is so strong that the seer can’t make anything out” (Saccomanno, 2008: 206). It is clear that the narrator’s and the seers’ intention is to portray the military as a negative, apocalyptic force responsible for the genocide. Not only the parents of the missing student take refuge in other types of spirituality: Gómez, on his part, talks to his friend Bodhi Dharma about The Hermetic Circle, the collection of letters between Hermann Hesse and C. G. Jung. His friend quotes Hesse: “Nothing ever happens by chance… This is the Hermetic Circle” (Saccomanno, 2007: 25). Bodhi insinuates that the genocide and the horror caused by the dictatorship are part of a plan. Following John the Apostle, one could think that state violence and its consequences are merely another manifestation of evil within the world’s apocalyptic reality. From the perspective of the aforementioned philosophers, expressed in their letters to each other, which Miguel Serrano has included in his book C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, Gómez could be exploring the two human tendencies described in Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, and in his Siddhartha. As already seen, the Professor indirectly helps those acquaintances and students of his who take action against the dictatorship, and he acknowledges it, explaining that he admires them because he realizes he himself only contemplates the horror while taking a walk across the city at night. Serrano notes that Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund represent “two essential tendencies in man—contemplation and action” (Serrano, 1966: 7). In a similar manner, “Siddhartha and Govinda represent the opposed characteristics of devotion and rebellion” (Serrano, 1966: 7). At first sight, the professor seems to be but a witness of the genocide, due to his failure to join Esteban and other acquaintances in their rebellion. In John’s Apocalypse, there is no room for hesitation, no gray areas. There CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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are only two sides: Good and Evil. Gómez, however, joins the side of Good indirectly, attempting to thwart the plans of the “dark wizards”. Moreover, giving testimony of events purges him of the guilt of having failed to take affirmative action to stand up for his beliefs. In the end, the act of writing helps him understand why he stayed in the country during this period: to aid and protect the victims of persecution. Conclusions Across Latin America, Contemporary Hispanic hardboiled fiction manifests the preoccupation with the destruction of the world. The cities of Medellin, Buenos Aires, and Havana are chaotic enclaves immersed in irrational and catastrophic violence. In Colombia, the drug trafficking unleashes death and destruction, and Medellin suffocates its inhabitants with sorrow, a typical symptom of the secular postmodern apocalypse. On a religious note, it seems as if the sixth trumpet had been blown, but the survivors do not repent. They continue to kill each other and turn to Satanism. In regards to Havana, the virus of corruption and violence infects the Cuban society before and after the Castro Revolution. This results in hopelessness and frustration. Both political and economic systems are presented as apocalyptic. The fear of a near apocalypse seems to repeat itself. It is a vicious circle that keeps Cubans demoralized and in danger of extinction. Moreover, they turn to alternative forms of spirituality in order to suffice their lack of faith. The Havana of today is no different from the corrupted Cuba of the 1930’s. Poverty, violence and dilapidation invade the city. Consequently, Cubans feel that they are on the verge of an avoidable apocalypse. The Cuban Revolution has not solved its problems. Buenos Aires is no different from Medellin and Havana. On the one hand, the genocide of the 1970’s was perceived as the destruction of a country where blood and violence prevailed. On the other hand, the 21st century has brought more poverty and crime. The Argentine capital is compared with the ancient Jerusalem that must be destroyed. At the same time, Buenos Aires and its inhabitants exude a postmodern anguish that heralds that the end is near. Ironically, a religious themed park is contrasted to the real city, accentuating the need for destruction and renewal of this Latin American capital. Through the study of hardboiled fiction, emanates an endless horizon of destruction, fear and hopelessness. If drug trafficking, revolutions and dictatorships were the apocalyptic themes of the past, different explosions continue to occur. New stories about the end emerge—crime, insecurity, poverty, globalization, drug trade, corruption—and perpetuate images of discontent, nostalgia and anxiety, those of which reinforce the collective imaginary of the apocalypse. CAESURA 1.1 (2014)

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