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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

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POSTMODERNISM: SURVIVING THE APOCALYPSE

DAVID T. LOHREY*

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses how key American writers take the tragic narrative beyond

personal disappointment into an arena of political catastrophe, with the following aims: 1. to

throw more light on the discourse content and structure of post-war novels by writers such as

Don DeLillo and John Edgar Wideman; 2. to identify the place of apocalyptic thought in their

work. Postcolonial theory and discourse analysis provide the theoretical framework for this

study of the wider implications of American imperialism to the society at large as shown in key

works by these writers. In the case of Wideman, that instability is mirrored by his narrative

techniques, which undermine traditional modes of narrativity as the societal monolith is 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: dlohrey@kean.edu.

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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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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: sinanakilli@gmail.com.

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: calin.d.lupitu@gmail.com.

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-

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ses, Job and others, whether personal or cosmic, brings about the faith that

the disaster was meaningful, not haphazard, and that its meaning is that of

fatherly all-knowing and all-managing love, whereby God and the world are

to be reconciled in hope of a fresh new start, with better prospects. Ever

since Adam’s Fall, disaster is coupled with the promise of salvation, 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

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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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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.

50 CĂLIN D. LUPIŢU

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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: irina_drexler@yahoo.com.

** [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

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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.

70 IRINA DREXLER

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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: antaleva@ektf.hu.

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-

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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

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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).

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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: dipaoloo@apsu.edu.

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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