caesura 1.1
TRANSCRIPT
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
CONTENTS
Postmodernism: Surviving the Apocalypse 3
DAVID T. LOHREY
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 15
SINAN AKILLI
(Post-)Apocalyptic Imagination: Uncanny Undead 35
between Sublime and Cynical
CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU
Persuading an Audience: Margaret Thatcher’s Speech to the Foreign 51
Policy Association (“The West in the World Today”)
IRINA DREXLER
The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William 71
Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
ÉVA ANTAL
Images of the Apocalypse in Latin American Hardboiled: 85
Preterist, Futurist, and Postmodern Interpretations
OSVALDO DI PAOLO
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 un-
dermined. Don DeLillo’s text also presents a society in flux, by presenting events which un-
dermine 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 imperial-
ism 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 po-
litical 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, undiffer-
entiated, but equally helpless in the face of abuse and neglect.
*
DAVID T. LOHREY (PhD) is Assistant Professor of English at Kean University in
Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, P. R. of China. E-mail: [email protected].
4 DAVID T. LOHREY
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These writers come to the same conclusion: authoritarian government
cannot protect its citizens and, more provocatively, has no intention of do-
ing 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 interroga-
tion 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 imagina-
tions.
Confinement and disillusion can be found in contemporary literature,
but there can also be seen a sustained if frustrated impulse toward emanci-
pation. 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 destruc-
tion. The literary response to our age has in turn lacked coherence, rein-
forcing 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
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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 them-
selves 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 com-
pound 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 possibil-
ity 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 con-
temporary society that Sheldon Wolin (2004) has articulated, namely, that
consumerism and the spread of capitalism have replaced the territorial am-
bitions of the Nazi regime as depicted by Hannah Arendt (1964) (Wolin,
1969).
The American regime of oppression may resemble superficially the high-
handedness of the Nazis, especially those like King and his followers, resi-
dents 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 shop-
pers 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 milita-
rized ethos on the domestic front. The writer’s contention is that the mo-
ment 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
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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 sac-
rifices have been ignored. It is, according to Wideman, an increasingly em-
battled 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 vet-
erans have been brutalized, that they have taken on the identities of their
fathers. In the words of Jerry Varsava, “The untamed violence of A Clock-
work 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 follow-
ers a commitment beyond the trappings and promises of a materialist socie-
ty. 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 sug-
gest 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).
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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 conflagra-
tion 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 massa-
cre of native-Americans to the Philadelphia’s grand jury’s willed forgetful-
ness 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 ig-
nited two blocks of Osage Avenue. Street named for an Indian tribe. Haunted by
Indian ghosts—Schuylkill, Manayunk, Wissahickon, Susquehanna, Moyamen-
sing, 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 inci-
dents 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 neigh-
bourhood 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 un-
der 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).
The reference to Zyklon B, the gas used in the German extermination
camps, maintains a hold on Cudjoe’s imagination, as does the image of Nazi
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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 vic-
tims of American expansionism formed part of the inner-city ethos, the sen-
sibility 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 Ar-
endt’s chilling descriptions of the Nazi state which, she argues, was not to be
characterized as one of traditional despotism but of bureaucratic inhumani-
ty: “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, imprison-
ment and punishment await those whose ‘disease’ of nonconformity can be
externalized or marginalized or just identified, but when that threat be-
comes too close to be so easily eliminated, then, he suggests, it must be de-
stroyed completely—erased (Mbembe, 2003: 11-40). According to Wide-
man, the unusual degree of antipathy is saved for those whose memory it-
self 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 memo-
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ry, the historically weighted spiritual and useful objects which made up the tradi-
tions 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 record-
ing of past events function as a crucial part of a restorative process. The res-
toration 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 obses-
sions 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 Nyo-
dene 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 abandon-
ing 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 distinc-
tion and the emergence of the mass lead to the potential for abuse, perhaps
trivial at first, but gradually small inconveniences and indignities can devel-
op 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
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utterly helpless. Rather than fearing the brutality of a disciplined, occupy-
ing 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 cha-
os 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, nonre-
sponsive 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 embodi-
ments 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 dual-
world 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 self-
satisfaction: “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” (De-
Lillo, 1985: 59).
DeLillo fashions a world, however, that takes the shape of a centre encir-
cled 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
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that it must be on a permanent footing. In other words, government re-
sponds 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 manufac-
tured 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 ar-
gue 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 cul-
ture, 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 colo-
nized 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 rep-
resents 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 tel-
evision 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 Hit-
ler 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 un-
dermined by loneliness. Alone, we attend to the rituals of community by
viewing television, “where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret
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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 dy-
ing. 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, de-
politicized 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. De-
Lillo’s vision springs precisely from that sense of life as a construct of per-
ception, 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 con-
text of the dissolution of civic order in contemporary American society.
These authors consider issues of gender, class, and race, which are of cen-
tral 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 bol-
ster and particularize that political interpretation by embedding it in a con-
text of the modern state as it has transformed itself. I also hope to have clar-
ified the odd dynamic of political overreach, oppression and neglect. As this
synopsis indicates, the chapter also participates in my effort to consider is-
sues of responsibility and accountability in the context of the emerging so-
cial 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 accountabil-
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 con-
nections 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 rela-
tionship 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 ef-
forts to revise understanding of domestic conflicts in the context of Ameri-
can expansion of power deserve attention. Both writers address the ways
personal and cultural dissolution can be traced to America’s political liabili-
ties, 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 Amer-
ica’s self-definition and by doing so participate in a redefinition of its identi-
ty. Through recovery and revision these writers can be read as participants
in a project aimed at undermining hegemonic structures.
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
THE ANTICHRIST(IAN) TURK IN SEVENTEENTH-
CENTURY 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 pro-
phetic 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. There-
fore, 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 contextual-
ized study of three such texts and contributes to the larger scholarly attempts to better under-
stand 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 prac-
tices” (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
* 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].
1 This paper is an abridged version of the author’s previously published article “Apoca-
lyptic 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.
16 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
how the concept of the Antichrist or implications of Antichristian qualities
were deliberately associated with the Turks for political propaganda in sev-
enteenth century England, the article aims to contribute to the findings re-
sulting from recent scholarly interest in the nature and context of the direct
and indirect cultural exchanges and encounters taking place in the Renais-
sance 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 begin-
ning must also have an end, the notion of finality as it relates to the exist-
ence of the world and of the cosmos, has intrigued human minds since an-
tiquity. In the Judeo-Christian culture, such eschatological beliefs have been
based on the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revela-
tion in the New Testament (McGinn, 1998: 1). In this context, apocalyp-
ticism, deriving mainly from the Book of Revelation and interpreting the rev-
elations 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: 10-
11). Such a view of the End inherently contains a sense of duality as it im-
plies 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 prophe-
cy and astrology,2
the above-mentioned duality of Good / Evil has been con-
ceived in relatively more tangible terms by the duality of Christ and Anti-
christ, 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 antago-
nistic nature of the term Antichrist, which is immediately visible in the pre-
fix “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
2 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 apoca-
lyptic tradition (Geneva, 1995: 130).
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 17
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
discourse. As is also noted by Hill (1971: 14), when Richard Hakluyt wrote
Discourse on Western Planting in 1584 to persuade Queen Elizabeth to sup-
port and sponsor the expedition plans of Sir Walter Raleigh for the coloni-
zation of the West Indies, he argued that English presence and naval activi-
ty 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 conse-
quence 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 termi-
nology had become an ideal tool for propaganda by the time Civil War be-
gan 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’ crusad-
ing (1095-1291)” (2007: 190). However, in this period the term used in Eu-
rope to refer to the Muslim “enemy” was not the “Turks”, but the “Sara-
cens”, 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 re-
placed 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 Eng-
lish 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 centu-
ry, that is, to the conquest of Constantinople and the decades that followed.
18 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
After 1453, the shock waves caused by the fall of the most important
Christian stronghold in Eastern Europe spread deeper into Western Eu-
rope 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 hap-
pening 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 sig-
nificantly, Lichtenberger combined astrology and apocalyptic prognostica-
tion 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 prophe-
cies 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 No-
vember 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 extraor-
dinary phenomenon. As Soergel states:
After examining the circumstances surrounding the event, as well as the histori-
cal 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 re-
vealed impending imperial victories against […] the Turks (Sorgel, 2007: 306).
As is clear from the examples given above, the presence of the Turks in six-
teenth-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 Ger-
mans 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
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 19
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 be-
gan his march to Vienna—which authoritatively established for all of
Protestant Europe, but especially for the Germans, the conceptual link be-
tween 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 pray-
er 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 pro-
phetic preoccupation with the Turks continued in the latter part of the six-
teenth century, especially during the long period of war (1593-1606) be-
tween the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire when prognosti-
cations 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 im-
portantly, the German prophecies and predictions of the fifteenth and six-
teenth 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, pub-
lished 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
3 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 re-
ferred 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.
4 These prophecies were mostly based on the fifteenth-century prediction by the Ger-
man Franciscan Johannes Hilten, who had given the year 1600 or 1606 for this con-
quest (Mout, 1994: 96). However, Hilten’s predictions apparently were interpretations
of the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic escha-
tology. As Darin Hayton deals with another late fifteenth century German interpreta-
tion 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 Per-
sia; 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 Em-
pire; 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).
20 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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). Sim-
ilarly, in the part where Vandermers’s prophecies were given, the Turks
were conceived of as partaking in the apocalyptic scenario as an Antichris-
tian entity, as under the title of “misbelieving nations” they were grouped
together with the “papal Antichrist”, and the King of Spain (quoted in For-
ster, 2001: 605).
Obviously, such views as expressed in texts like A Most Strange and Won-
derfull Prophesie upon this Troublesome World were being written into an Eng-
lish 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 Westmin-
ster 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 en-
courageth the Turk, that he now dares be bold to venture upon Polonia, a Chris-
tian 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 im-
mediacy 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 prophe-
cies in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, which was followed
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 21
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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, prophe-
cied & 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 sev-
enteenth 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). Presuma-
bly, 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 mid-
seventeenth century onward, the production and dissemination of astrolog-
ical and prophetic works in England reached historic high levels and with
the influence of Puritan millennialism, the terminology of apocalyptic es-
chatology 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 em-
pire, 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 fur-
22 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 oth-
er: one both making up one antichristian body, to keep the world from embrac-
ing 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 Anti-
christ (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 Anti-
christ” 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, writ-
ten 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. Espe-
cially 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: 174-
5 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 de-
bate 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 re-
emergence 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).
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 23
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
175). After the Restoration, there was a rapid decline in the use of the sym-
bolism of the Antichrist, a name “less and less frequently mentioned, in
print at all events” (Hill, 1971: 147-148), for political propaganda and criti-
cism 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 astrol-
ogy from the mainstream cultural and literary scene into the realm of “non-
sense”.
In the light of the brief historical background and contextual infor-
mation provided so far, in the remaining part of this article, the construc-
tion 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 sev-
enteenth-century English reader. The three texts selected as examples con-
tain 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 earth-
quakes. It must be pointed out at the outset that most of these texts typically
treat these “natural” phenomena as “unnatural” or “supernatural”, or in-
fuse 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 pop-
ular 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 re-
lates 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).
24 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
“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 Tur-
kes grand Couriers, and a Captaine of his Troopes, were by the violence of this
Tempeſt, throwne into deep precipices, and were never ſince ſeene... (Extraordi-
nary 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 enter-
tainment and excitement” (Capp, 1979: 285). In other words, the more sen-
sational 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 ap-
peal 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 Na-
ture’s fury. Since God meant the same thing as Nature, after the reconcilia-
tion 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 Com-
metts 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).
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 25
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 em-
phasis 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 morn-
ing” (Extraordinary Nevves, 2). Such deliberate expressions of attempted real-
ism that are repeated throughout, of course, only have the purpose of mak-
ing 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 Chris-
tendom 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 un-
settled dispute here implies the final battle between Christian and Antichris-
tian forces before the End, in which the Antichrist will be utterly defeated,
and accordingly in this interpretation the Turks are immediately construct-
ed 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 ap-
pearance 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 divin-
ers and astrologers, who were, miraculously, not hurt in the least, which
26 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 self-
confessed testimony of the enemy diviner is meant to convince the English
reader of the eventual defeat of the threat against Christendom. The im-
mediate 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 con-
version 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 com-
mon 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 happen-
ings.” The anonymous author of the text entitled Strange and Miraculous
Newes from Tvrkie (June 13, 1642), claims to relate the account of a miracu-
lous 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 eschato-
logical scenario is obvious. The witnesses of this episode cannot conceive the
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 27
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
meaning of the vision, but “only one of the Dervices, which is a ſtrict reli-
gious Order among the Turkes […] and live in contemplation, ſtepped up
very boldly and made a Speech…” (Strange and Miraculous Newes, 2) inter-
preting 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 al-
terations […] 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 suffer-
ing 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 dis-
solve and Christianity will “shine like the Sunne”. There reference is obvi-
ously to the conversion of the Turks and the universal domination of Chris-
tianity 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 imme-
diate 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 prognos-
tications employing apocalyptic vocabulary, written by English astrologers
and printed in England as late as the final decades of the seventeenth cen-
tury. John Merrifield’s Catastasis Mundi: Or the True State, Vigor, and Growing
Greatneſs of Christendom (1684) begins as a criticism of John Holwell’s Catas-
trophe Mundi, or, Europe’s many mutations until the year 1701, which was pub-
lished in 1682, and of his 1683 Appendix to the book, in which he had pre-
dicted a speedy establishment of Turkish domination in Christendom. As
the Ottoman army was approaching the gates of Vienna, Holwell had pre-
dicted 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 un-
derstand that the catastrophe did not occur yet, and there is still time and
28 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 expound-
ing 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 de-
fense 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 Otto-
man 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 Mu-
hammet, which can again be considered as parts adding to the sensational-
ism 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 Aſ-
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 29
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 Ot-
toman 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 Reli-
gion” (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 thir-
ty 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” (Merri-
field, 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.
30 SINAN AKILLI
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 ex-
ample 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 audi-
ence, 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 An-
tichrist himself. Even though the authors or translators of the texts are dif-
ferent individuals, it is observed that the narrative and discursive strategies
of the texts, such as sensational openings, elements of suspense, attempted-
realism 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 asso-
ciation was done for purposes of political propaganda most of the time,
there is enough evidence to argue that such an identification must have in-
fluenced and shaped the popular beliefs and assumptions held by the Eng-
lish 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 prophet-
ic 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 coex-
isted 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 imagi-
nation was typically characterized by the use of Antichrist(ian) imagery, and
thus, the issues discussed in this article may contribute to the efforts stem-
ming from the recent scholarly interest in the various aspects of the early
modern cultural and literary encounters between Christian Europe and the
The Antichrist(ian) Turk in Seventeenth-Century England 31
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
Muslim world in general, and between the English and the Turks, in par-
ticular. 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.
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
(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 re-
penting 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 fac-
tions 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, ap-
pears 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].
36 CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 op-
posed 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 civilisa-
tion. 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 unparal-
leled 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 con-
cept would vary along two distinct lines: joy and fear. For the faithful, hav-
ing 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 intend-
ed 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
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 uni-
verse-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 im-
prisoned” 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 reinter-
pretations. In turn, the ancient worshippers were also arguably hardly con-
cerned 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 pur-
pose. 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 sub-
lime presumably experienced by the devout Christians at the time of the fall
of Rome, the reason for the Apocalypse being a terrifying, but equally hope-
ful 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 world-
changing catastrophes described in the Bible, though they are perhaps the
most massive. A similar global purging event is featured in the Old Testa-
ment, 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, Mo-
38 CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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, there-
fore the Apocalypse—as part of theodicy—is sublime by its inspirational vir-
tue of teleology.
The fall of the Roman Empire was, as previously argued, a secular, his-
torically 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 ini-
tial 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 fur-
ther 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 law-
lessness 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 mean-
ing of averted and thus avertable doom, undermined the dread of a real-
ised 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 stratifica-
tion), 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 allego-
ry, or a short-term vision whose atrocities had already been fulfilled by the
Romans or other repressive reigns in history. Pessimists of various convic-
tion 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 terrify-
ing forms attuned to each generation’s collective fears and imaginative abili-
ties—themselves based on the ideas and technologies available in the age. In
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 Naz-
arene 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 Constanti-
nople, 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 apoca-
lyptic 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 desensitisa-
tion 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 gen-
erational 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 po-
tential and averted apocalypses thus weakens the very concept of the Apoca-
lypse, simultaneously reifying it and mass-marketing it for audiences grow-
ing 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 West-
ern world by the repetition of false-positive apocalyptic moments in con-
junction 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 trans-
formed 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
40 CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
mirror and vehicle of global imagination and consciousness, we shall inves-
tigate 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 imagina-
tion, 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 depic-
tions of the uncanny in one of its fundamental and universal forms. Accord-
ing 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 psy-
chological terror, instilled by some of the most basic Self-Other dichotomies
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
of all individuals, as we shall explore further. The biblical thriller is en-
hanced by the cognitive dissonance produced at the joining of our affec-
tionate 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-to-
medieval 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 con-
trary, 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 de-
velopment 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 self-
reliance 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 deal-
ing 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 es-
trangement over the last two centuries leads to a proliferation of cynicism
and paranoia.
In the Bible, itself part of the wider more structured philosophy regard-
ing 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
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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 fic-
tion is, most often than not, no longer a miracle but a scientific achieve-
ment. 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 thresh-
old 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 narra-
tive 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 X-
Men, 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 Ro-
bocop, 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 cru-
ciform position complete with hand shot wounds as stigmata, from which
his cybernetic parts restore him; the Stargate franchise draws on the ancient-
astronaut 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
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
immortal due to their regenerative sarcophagus-like devices. On occasion,
such advanced technology, the brainchild of “mad”-perceived exotic sci-
ence, 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 al-
lowed to regrow in the successful attempt of lacing the fictitious indestructi-
ble adamantium alloy to his bones in order to obtain a living weapon; the
Hulk, deliberately created by Stan Lee in homage of Frankenstein's crea-
ture 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 dur-
ing his atomic research for the army transform him into an unabashed dis-
passionate 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 mark-
edly distinct transformations within each one of them; lastly, sarcastic anti-
hero 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, alt-
hough 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 at-
tempting 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 cau-
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tionary undertones to the adventures depicted therein, expressing certain
underlying fears of the postwar generation, indeed a post-apocalyptic gen-
eration secretly bracing itself for the dreaded nuclear apocalypse. The die-
getic struggles of superheroes appearing in comics were paralleled by the
social struggles of the symbols they embodied. The isolation and public hos-
tility 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 ex-
posure stood for merely a glamorous take on the real-world horrors of ra-
diation 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 man-
kind 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 oli-
garchs, war and violence is ever-present, there are untold numbers of dan-
gers mankind never even suspects, etc. In such a context, technology is tru-
ly 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 resur-
rected 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 prime-
val fears of not only death itself, but of dead bodies as the ultimate (surviv-
ing) 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 hu-
man essences freed of material limitations, ascended to near-godhood,
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CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
guardians but often also terrible avengers. Their former bodies thus had a
dual significance, being the material anchors and vehicles of such awe-
inspiring forces, symbolic as well as cultic, entities on another plane of exist-
ence and beyond the human values of “good” and “evil”, as they were un-
derstood 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 particu-
larities as affiliated to various cultures of the world, the two ghouls, as ap-
pearing 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 angst-
fraught 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 demo-
graphic 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 an-
cient fear of being “soiled” by contact with certain bio-waste matter, espe-
cially 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, re-
gardless 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
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social order and having constituted a variably secret sophisticated civilisa-
tion. 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. Alt-
hough 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 multi-
fold 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 with-
stand 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 re-
cent 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 sci-
ence-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 re-
cent sleeper-cell terrorists. As such, they are often used in modern and con-
temporary fiction to reveal certain truths about the unrests of the social mi-
lieu 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 so-
cieties, with vampires traditionally perceived as the wicked aristocratic or
(Post-)Apocalyptic Imagination 47
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
bourgeois elite and zombies associated more with the lower or working clas-
ses 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 post-
Victorian 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 con-
stitute 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 predato-
ry animal suggestions (the aquiline nose, the pointed teeth), as a cultural
assailant against the English social norms, presumed to be those of the “civi-
lised 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 protago-
nists’ 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 amuse-
ment 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 so-
ciety, vampires are immensely glamourised over the past decades in works
by Anne Rice and her followers. They thus garner a Gothic bohemian mys-
tique 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 un-
dead pharaohs. Lastly, vampires become stock figures (among the most rec-
ognisable “universal monsters”) in the contemporary genre of urban fanta-
sy, often displayed in gritty, would-be realist tones, which allows them to
become—much in the way of other contemporary superhumans, e.g. su-
perheroes—conveyors of certain social messages. In the True Blood series,
they are often used as thinly-veiled metaphors of sexual and racial minori-
48 CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 com-
pounds. 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 con-
trolling human society by means of “familiars” (human slaves) in every ma-
jor institution.
In the above examples we have seen how vampires may express the pub-
lic’s insecurity towards the apparent disdain of the major institutions re-
garding 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, respec-
tively) has produced bioengineered monstrosities. In the first case, vampires
are being hunted down by an “enhanced vampire”, a Reaper, of alien mon-
strosity 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 mili-
tary-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 murder-
ous 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,
(Post-)Apocalyptic Imagination 49
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 Chris-
tine, the revengeful haunted car. On occasion, the proliferation of the vari-
ous 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 inva-
sion, zombies are reminiscent—through their very roots in Voodoo slave
work, itself a culture steeped in slavery—of current diverse forms of socio-
economic slavery, most typically illegal immigrant work, being thus often
quoted as a metaphor of the evils of consumerist culture. Lastly, the science-
fiction undead carry their own political messages, as both the Borg Collec-
tive and the Cybermen, particularly the latter in their sarcastic depiction of
a would-be glorious Cyberman future, strongly connote with the still rele-
vant 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 meaning-
ful terrorising imagery including other representations of the uncanny it-
self. In this research paper we have argued that the initial sense of divine
teleology permeating the Cosmos and making the Apocalypse a sublime-
conveying 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 contempo-
rary 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.
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Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson, FL: Universi-
ty Press of Mississippi, 1992.
Sound on Sight. “The Incredible Hulk.” Greatest Comic Book Adaptations
(Part 4). http://soundonsight.org/greatest-comic-book-adapta-tions-part-
4. 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.
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 em-
ployees 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 Common-
wealth, economy, defence, society, terrorism, as well as European Union budget, religion, mo-
rality, 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, Ro-
mania, and the University of Vienna, Austria. Her main research interests cover de-
bates 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”.]
52 IRINA DREXLER
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 sub-
ject matter of its own, as rhetoric is so diverse and can be applied to every-
thing 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 conse-
quences, 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 address-
ing the law courts and large gatherings of people with the purpose of per-
suading them in one direction or another. Rhetoric was thus the theory of
how to best achieve this aim by employing carefully selected linguistic de-
vices in both written and spoken speeches. In the beginning, the skill of us-
ing rhetoric was ascribed to the oratory of males and it was usually connect-
ed 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 ver-
bal communication—as we have seen two paragraphs before, such gestures
as frowning, smiling or raising an eyebrow can be equally eloquent in send-
ing 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 study-
ing 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
Persuading an Audience 53
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
their works are separated by centuries in time. It is one of the great con-
tinuing 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 rhet-
oric. The modern studies charted a road map to social-scientific work con-
cerning persuasive communication, trying to answer such enduring ques-
tions 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 some-
times yielded remarkably counterintuitive findings (Sloane, 2001: 575), per-
suasion research is not pinned down under any single disciplinary or con-
ceptual framework. As the many social sciences of the twentieth century
have tried to shape a better image of what persuasion is, after research hav-
ing 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, politi-
cal 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 special-
ists. 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 hab-
its. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, it be-
comes destiny. What you think, you become.” In this simple way, this say-
ing, 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 dis-
course 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 audienc-
54 IRINA DREXLER
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
es when they deliver a written or oral speech, which, depending on the in-
tentions 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 stra-
tegic communiqués, virtual monologues or dialogues. In classical times, the
audience was a physical gathering in a given space at a given time, with lis-
teners 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 be-
ing 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 communi-
cation have emerged as well as a natural consequence of the Internet almost
monopolizing the way new generations interact and collect their infor-
mation. Because of the advancement in communication technologies, the
groups that were once compact and public are nowadays dispersed, frag-
mented 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 pub-
lic 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
Persuading an Audience 55
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 psy-
chology, 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 au-
dience (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 uni-
versal 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 ar-
guments, 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, inter-
ested 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 there-
fore 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
56 IRINA DREXLER
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 cul-
tural 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 conceptu-
alizations of the audience as a community or forum. These angles for tack-
ling the role played by the audience are different, yet such an interest mani-
fested 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 rhet-
oric. 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 un-
derlined, 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 rela-
tion with the degree of identification between the speaker and the audience,
based on the afore mention criteria. Having these in view, one cannot re-
frain 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 ef-
fect on, as well as a reaction from the audience.
About identification, taking Aristotle’s “common ground” concept fur-
ther, 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
Persuading an Audience 57
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
the same time, the speakers to learn from the audiences, the relation be-
tween the two being thus, in fact, bidirectional. For him, the audience im-
prints on the speaker its moral values, in a process during which the rhe-
tors, 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 per-
ceived 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 oth-
er 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 instruc-
tors should, as part of the challenges they are facing as teachers, encourage
their students to avoid writing for their immediate readers (peers or teach-
ers) 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, expressiv-
ist scholars were interested in writing as self-discovery and in writers devel-
oping 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
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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 dis-
appointment 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 writ-
ten text, the same author believes. He goes on offering a possible alternative
to relying on these type of stereotypes, namely to conceptualize the audi-
ence 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 par-
ticular audience in mind, therefore his text will have the chance to be au-
thentic.
A different angle from which the audience is included in rhetorical stud-
ies 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 mo-
ment 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 deliberate-
ly 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 me-
dia 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). Indi-
viduals have now the opportunity to rely on alternative sources of infor-
mation and to create them themselves the news they wish they saw broad-
casted 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 ac-
cordance 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 insti-
tutions 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 elect-
ed 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 en-
deavours.
Post-modern research includes new terms for the audience, seen as sub-
cultures, interpretive communities and taste publics (Sloane, 2001: 66).
From this perspective, rhetors’ speeches are believed to be a set of bor-
rowed ideas from the texts present in the various communities in which he
or she resides. The discourse patterns in those communities, in turn, con-
struct the rhetor, the editor Sharon E. Jarvis argues further. This interac-
tive 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 gen-
eral point of view, while being also aware of the differences between the
individuals that make up these communities. This model, the editor contin-
ues, 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 mi-
norities 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
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thought,” Booth considers (Booth, 2004). Others, he continues, like St. Au-
gustine, 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 duti-
ful altar boy or as forlorn doomed twin—have been used to tempt research-
ers 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 im-
portantly, 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 flood-
ed 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 re-
moving 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 possi-
ble. 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 de-
partments as well, which are aware that adaptation to audience is crucial to
successful writing. Marketing scholars are studying the niches that are mak-
ing 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
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communities and engage themselves in online chats, forums, polls and de-
bates 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 connect-
ed 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 interest-
ing 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 adher-
ence 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 audi-
ence, 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 dif-
ferences 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 audi-
ences, 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
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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 audi-
ences 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 thou-
sands of protestors might fill a public square, they might be understood as
rather being mass rhetors than mass audiences, for their aim is sending ra-
ther than receiving communication, the same editor remarks.
To understand the persuasion process, theories of attitude and volun-
tary 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 situa-
tions, 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 pub-
lic statement of major importance. In its moderate length content it manag-
es 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, Eco-
nomic 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 De-
cember 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
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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 im-
portant 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 Presi-
dent 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 pro-
noun, 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 reali-
ties. 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 citi-
zen), 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,
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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 is-
land.” 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 peo-
ple 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 Teh-
ran 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 dis-
approval 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 Marga-
ret Thatcher applauds the initiatives and ways of dealing with difficult situa-
tions 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
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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 mili-
tary rather than ideological power. She considers this to be another imme-
diate 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 direct-
ly, 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 aggressive-
ness 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 ad-
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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, elimi-
nating 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 ad-
dresses 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 man-
agement 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 econ-
omy. 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 negotia-
tions for a ceasefire, free and fair elections and a new constitution for Zim-
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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. Pursu-
ing 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 low-
ering inflation. She managed to reduce inflation and to strengthen econom-
ic growth by taking a stubborn and risky initiative of increasing indirect tax-
es. The downside of her success however was the increasingly unemploy-
ment 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.
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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 well-
structured 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 trad-
ing 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, inten-
tionally 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 be-
lief 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 strate-
gy 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 Minis-
ter, 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 Res-
olution”, 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
Persuading an Audience 69
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
(after her recent death in April 2013), the speech proposed for analysis of-
fers 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-septem-
brie-protestul-continua-in-intreaga-lume.
Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1969): 1-
15.
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: Long-
man, 2001.
Fishbein, Martin, and Icek Ajzen. Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behaviour: An
Introduction to Theory and Research, 1975. In Thomas O. Sloane, ed., Ency-
clopedia of Rhetoric, 577. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Herbst, Susan. Numbered Voices, 1993. In Thomas O. Sloane, ed., Encyclope-
dia 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-con-
ferinta-presa-sustinuta-presedintele-pnl-crin-antonescu-ora-12-30.htm.
Margaret Thatcher Foundation—Complete list of 8,000 + Thatcher State-
ments & Texts of Many of Them.” January 21, 2009. http://-www.mar-
garetthatcher.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.
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 re-
garded as a visible—or, being engraved, a tactile—expression of Blake’s irony, an ironic un-
dercut 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 multi-
plicity 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 spe-
cializes in Neoclassical and Romantic British literature and culture, and literary theory.
E-mail: [email protected].
72 ÉVA ANTAL
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
consciousness. Besides referring to the famous “doors of perception” as re-
volving doors, Cooper also claims that Blake’s irony is aimed at “[the] anti-
nomian 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 descrip-
tion, ‘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”. Oth-
erwise, 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 work-
ing process. This correction can be regarded as a visible—or, being en-
graved, 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 at-
tention 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 apoka-
lypsis as “disclosure, uncovering, unveiling” (Derrida, 1999: 119). Conse-
quently, he basically tries to reveal the meaning, the truth of the tone, ac-
cepting 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 to-
nality, Derrida claims that the analysis of the tone in a writing should be
The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 73
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
done “in terms of contents, manners of speaking, connotations, rhetorical
staging, and pose taken in semantic, pragmatic, scenographic terms” (Der-
rida, 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 An-
gel, 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 (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 lan-
guage, 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 self-
presentation nor assured destination” (Derrida, 1999: 157, italics in the origi-
nal).
In his essay Derrida mainly discusses the characteristics of the “apocalyp-
tic 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 writ-
ing. He also claims that “among the numerous traits characterising an
apocalyptic type of writing, let us provisionally isolate prediction and escha-
tological 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 eschatolo-
gy, millennium and with a possible holy utopia (Paley, 1999: 3), or the uto-
pian 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
74 ÉVA ANTAL
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 gathering-
ground for a miscellany of seekers after mystic experiences” from Behmen-
ists 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 proph-
ecies titled “Wisdom of Angels concerning Divine Love and Divine Wis-
dom”, “The Wisdom of Angels concerning Divine Providence” and “Heav-
en 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: 93-
95).
As it is recorded, in 1790 the master first taught the doctrine of concubi-
nage, namely that the Swedenborgian married man can engage in adulter-
ous 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” (Da-
mon, 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 Swe-
denborg’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 Nebuchad-
nezzar displaying the logical consequence of false reasoning (Wittreich,
The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 75
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
1975: 192-193). The chosen ironic title of the work criticises not only Swe-
denborg’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 en-
graving 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 An-
gel usurps the just man’s place, so, Rintrah, “the wrathful spirit of prophe-
cy” is forced to become the Devil (Bloom, 1963: 75). Thus, the narrator un-
covers 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 mock-
reasoning logically goes on heralding the ironic Eternal Hell instead of the
promised new heaven on plate 3, where Swedenborg is the “mild villain-
ous” 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 re-
sponse—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” be-
sides 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 Sweden-
borg” (Wittreich, 1975: 198, italics are mine). However, the first person sin-
gular 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
76 ÉVA ANTAL
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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: 78-
79). 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 in-
stead 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 bod-
ily 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 criti-
cising the usual catagories, the Devil wants the reader to redefine these con-
traries. That is, the Devil, re-valuating the conventionally accepted assump-
tions, 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 rhetori-
cian 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 Pas-
sive Good” (Blake, 1976: 77). On the basis of the Blakean conception, hypo-
thetically, the angelic restraining minus can be corrected by the devilish
revolutionary minus—so, the double negation results in affirmation.
The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 77
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
Actually, such a “reasonable” reading of the Devil’s logic shows the An-
gel’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 rea-
son, where the reader is offered to “apprehend truth discursively, reasona-
bly, 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 men-
tion 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 ob-
struct the understanding of the work. This fancy ends in quite a postmod-
ern 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 intellectu-
ally 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 parasi-
tizing the voice of reason equally speaking in each and using the same lan-
guage 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 em-
phasise 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 dou-
ble strategy in order “to expose the false prophets, eliminating the negation
they represent; and to accomplish through prophecy the struggle of contra-
ries by which the organs of perception are cleansed and the apocalypse fi-
nally 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.
78 ÉVA ANTAL
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 imagina-
tion, 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 ex-
pressed here; due to the ironic tone, reason is put in antinomy with free-
dom and truth in the rhetoric.
On Plate 16 another “portion of being” and its (ironic) opposite is re-
vealed: 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 de-
vourer 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 Rea-
soners, the ones of limited knowledge—should be enemies because follow-
ing the main principle, their opposition and fight means the essence of hu-
man existence. As David Erdman sees: “Blake rejects [Swedenborg’s] “spir-
itual equilibrium” between good and evil for a theory of spiralling “Contra-
ries” that will account for progress” (Erdman, 1991: 178). Though the in-
teraction of contraries regarded eternal their unique “union”, their mar-
riage—promised and illustrated in the work—can be achieved.
The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 79
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 (Mitch-
ell, 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) de-
sire, 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 prohi-
bition (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 medici-
nal, 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 unpro-
tected 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, infi-
nite. / 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 energet-
ic flames of imagination used by Blake, metaphorically and literally, can free
our perception and open the way towards infinity. In The Marriage, the oth-
er prophetic figures, Isaiah and Ezekiel, also want to raise men into “a per-
ception of the infinite” with their strange “corroding” behaviour (MHH,
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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 cor-
roding 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 apoc-
alyptic pictures of the black tempest, the fiery cataract of blood and Levia-
than 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” an-
other 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 com-
plex 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 communi-
The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 81
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
cates his visions, and these apocalyptic truths are conveyed not as pure spir-
itual 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 per-
sona, the Devil and the Angel—is the voice of the illustrator. From the start-
ing plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, from the title and its first “illu-
mination” 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 advo-
cate, 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 Pro-
fessor 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 imag-
ination. In this sense his illustrated/illuminated prints do also function as
windows, as sensory openings, and through his pictures the spectator’s sen-
sual enjoyment can be improved by “designing visual illusions which con-
tinually demand and imply [all] the other senses in their structures” (Mitch-
ell, 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 mar-
riage 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
82 ÉVA ANTAL
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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 divi-
sion—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 perso-
na records the conversation between an Angel and a Devil which is final-
ly/originally depicted by the illustrator on the title-page. In the textual vi-
sion, the devil in flaming fire addresses an angel sitting on a cloud and
questions the ancient traditions of orthodox Christianity, while putting em-
phasis on Christ’s humanity instead of his divinity. As the angel fails to de-
fend 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 Bap-
tist]” (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 charac-
terised with flames of fire and a nice feminine bottom, and the angel’s mas-
culine 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, “mar-
riage”, 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 coun-
ter-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, mak-
ing it undermine itself and become energy” (Cooper, 1988: 48), which is
The Apocalyptic Tone of Irony in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 83
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 pro-
phetic character”. I would rather see the illustrator and the engraver’s per-
spective 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 repre-
sents 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 rheto-
ric, 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 Heav-
en and Hell, besides the puzzling multitonality, the author’s “true” voice re-
mains concealed—like the Derridean apocalyptic flower of rhetoric, the eu-
calyptus. 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 elas-
ticity 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 “pro-
noun” 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).
84 ÉVA ANTAL
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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: Ox-
ford 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 Univer-
sity 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: Prince-
ton University Press, 1978.
Paley, Morton D. Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry. Ox-
ford: 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.
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 apoc-
alyptic 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, ei-
ther 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, ex-
plores 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 asso-
ciated with being curious and fearful of nearing end. 1
The novels Rosario
* OSVALDO DI PAOLO (PhD) is Professor of Latin American Literature at Austin Peay
State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. E-mail: [email protected].
1 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
86 OSVALDO DI PAOLO
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
Tijeras (2000), by Jorge Franco, La neblina de ayer (“Yesterday’s Mist”, 2005),
by Leonardo Padura, 77, by Guillermo Saccomanno, and Ciudad santa (“Ho-
ly City”, 2010), by Guillermo Orsi, are examples of this. In all of these sto-
ries, 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 uni-
verse: Ahura Mazda, representative of Evil and predecessor of the Judeo-
Christian 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 dis-
cusses 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 millennialism3
, an escha-
tological 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).
Hispanic hardboiled fiction through the inclusion of sharp social criticism in an at-
tempt to denounce certain aspects of society and through a pessimistic view of the fu-
ture (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 ma-
sacre (“Operation Massacre”, 1957), El complot mongol (“The Mongol Conspiracy”, 1969)
and La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (“The Truth about the Savolta Case”, 1975).
2 In Satanism Today, James Lewis notes: “Zoroastrianism differs from the other monothe-
isms 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 con-
trast, Ahriman is believed to be very much on par with Ahura Mazda. They even creat-
ed the world together, which explains why the world is such a mixture of good and
bad” (Lewis, 2001: 4).
3 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 in-
terpretation of the millennium, without establishing a date for the second coming of
Christ (Saragozá, 1997: 68).
Images of the Apocalypse in Latin American Hardboiled 87
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 Temple5
, 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 no-
torious 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 ex-
plored in contemporary hardboiled fiction; and rightly so, since—as hard-
boiled fiction literary critics, writers and readers will agree—this genre best
reflects the problems that society faces today. For instance, they present vio-
lence, 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 La-
forgue, 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 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 embod-
ied life” (Robinson, 1997: 1).
5 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).
6 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.
88 OSVALDO DI PAOLO
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 essen-
tial 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 acknowl-
edgement 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 sto-
ry of the future of the world written by someone who has seen it all” (McAr-
thur, 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 Enlighten-
ment 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 im-
pregnated 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 pro-
moting hardboiled fiction. The first ceremony took place in 1988, the recipient being
Paco Ignacio Taibo II for his book La vida misma (“Real Life”).
Images of the Apocalypse in Latin American Hardboiled 89
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 him-
self, never telling Rosario he loves her, Emilio becomes the teenager’s offi-
cial boyfriend. They all become close friends and eventually learn that Ro-
sario 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 vio-
lence 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 some-
one, 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 de-
cide 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 murder-
ing 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 safe-
guard 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 num-
ber 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 Co-
existence’).” 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 acknowl-
edges: “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 feel-
ing.
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 reli-
gion offers no solution, therefore turning to Satanism.10
The narrator ex-
plains 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 ba-
cán (great, a bon vivant) and tells parcero that Johnefe believed Lucifer was
generous. Apocalypse scholars, such as John McArthur, argue that one can-
not 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 homi-
cides 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 Ro-
sario is affected by demonic forces, which take the form of attacks by her
drug-dealing enemies and ultimately destroy her. The story ends in pessi-
mism 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 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).
11 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.
12 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 re-
tired 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 discover-
ing 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 suppos-
edly 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 re-
tired 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 sec-
13 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 admin-
istration (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 pre-
vent him from leaving Cuba with her. She moreover confesses to her broth-
er’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 som-
ber, 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 conversa-
tion 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 so-
ciety. A former colleague of Conde’s, Manolo exemplifies this with a com-
ment. He tells Conde he cannot begin to explain the state of things: “mug-
gings on every corner, drugs up in your face, robberies are a plague, cor-
ruption 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 situa-
tion 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 confu-
sion, which contaminates every facet of the human being, including the po-
litical, 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 contem-
porary Hispanic hardboiled fiction detective. In “Novela policíaca” (“Crime Fiction”),
an essay from the book Introducción a la novela contemporánea (“An Introduction to Con-
temporary 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 cel-
lular level, again occasioned by overprotection, overcoding, overmanage-
ment. The social system, just like the biological body, loses its natural de-
fences 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 an-
tique 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 govern-
ment 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 overman-
agement 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 break-
ing 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 Alci-
des, she acknowledges: “I’m experiencing an all too turbulent history: eve-
rything 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
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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” (Del-
lamora, 1995: xii). In turn, Jean Baudrillard argues, in “The Anorexic Ru-
ins”, 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 ex-
tent 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 extinc-
tion... 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 in-
fectious 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
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sorry to hear “the sounds of the ferocious trumpets of the Apocalypse, will-
ing to forever stifle amongst them a person’s capacity for ethical discern-
ment, 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 sit-
tings with santeros, spiritualists, cartomancers, seers and babalawos” (Padura,
2005: 210).15
The search for comfort in spirituality, the loss of morality, hunger, cor-
ruption 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 Revolu-
tion 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 deposi-
tion of the military government that ruled the country between 1976 and
1983. Her husband was a policeman, murdered for handing over compro-
mising 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 fu-
ture (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 de-
scribed in the story, there are two particularly worth mentioning: Oso Ber-
lusconi 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 investiga-
tion on the kidnapping of the foreign nationals—he does “make an ar-
rangement” with Sirena Mondragón, the Colombian drug-dealer’s girl-
friend. In fear of being murdered like Arredri, she promises to give Car-
rosa, 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 Pre-
terism deriving from the Latin praeter or “bygone”, and could reflect either
current events or those that took place in the near past from a non-
prophetic outlook (Edinger, 1992: 8).
The text, attributed to the apostle John, describes the corruption of an-
cient 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 Eze-
kiel 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 rep-
resented in Ciudad santa (“Holy City”). Buenos Aires has become the Jerusa-
lem 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 po-
lice radio makes this clear: “male with deep slash wound on Cuzco St, dis-
membered 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 Bo-
livia 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 unreacha-
ble—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
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to search for eternal life in a new Jerusalem, the Jerusalem that will rise af-
ter 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 de-
struction 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 1976-
1983 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 Hel-
ler (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 wit-
nesses kidnappings and other forms of violence infesting the streets of Bue-
nos 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 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).
18 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 ac-
count 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 ask-
ing help of charlatans passing as miracle workers. Deolinda Correa or Pan-
cho Sierra gave one more hope” (Saccomanno, 2008: 15).19
It is clear that the professor has lost his faith in God, just as the inhabit-
ants 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 un-
derstand 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 de-
cides 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 pro-
19 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).
Images of the Apocalypse in Latin American Hardboiled 101
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
tagonist is trying to make sense of the dreadful reality in which he is im-
mersed, having witnessed so many human rights violations.
The seer tells him that what is going on in Argentina is “the Great Dam-
age and is nothing new. It’s part of the thunder announcing catastrophic
changes on the planet… the Great Damage has already arrived in the coun-
try” (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 break-
ing 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” (Sac-
comanno, 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 Jer-
emiah 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 ar-
gues that for “the Chilean military, national security means structuring the
potential of a country, so that it can be developed while fully exercising sov-
ereignty 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 pro-
gress, 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-
20 Refer to Villegas, “Seguridad, política y estrategia” (“Safety, Politics and Strategy”), in
Temas Militares (“Military Matters”) 4 (1968).
21 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 ap-
pearance of peace, which is soon followed by hunger, war and death (McAr-
thur, 2010: 184).
Faced with uncertainty and with the false pretenses of the military gov-
ernment, 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 responsi-
ble 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. Fol-
lowing John the Apostle, one could think that state violence and its conse-
quences are merely another manifestation of evil within the world’s apoca-
lyptic 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 acknowl-
edges 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 essen-
tial tendencies in man—contemplation and action” (Serrano, 1966: 7). In a
similar manner, “Siddhartha and Govinda represent the opposed character-
istics 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
Images of the Apocalypse in Latin American Hardboiled 103
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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 typi-
cal 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 re-
pent. 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 hope-
lessness 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. Con-
sequently, Cubans feel that they are on the verge of an avoidable apoca-
lypse. 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 coun-
try where blood and violence prevailed. On the other hand, the 21st centu-
ry has brought more poverty and crime. The Argentine capital is compared
with the ancient Jerusalem that must be destroyed. At the same time, Bue-
nos 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 Ameri-
can capital.
Through the study of hardboiled fiction, emanates an endless horizon of
destruction, fear and hopelessness. If drug trafficking, revolutions and dic-
tatorships were the apocalyptic themes of the past, different explosions con-
tinue to occur. New stories about the end emerge—crime, insecurity, pov-
erty, globalization, drug trade, corruption—and perpetuate images of dis-
content, nostalgia and anxiety, those of which reinforce the collective imag-
inary of the apocalypse.
104 OSVALDO DI PAOLO
CAESURA 1.1 (2014)
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