Apocalyptic Territories: Setting and Revelation in Contemporary American Fiction 2019051490, 9780367896577, 9780367896584

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Apocalyptic Territories

Research on the relationship between the apocalyptic tradition and the literary imagination has typically espoused a temporal approach which in one way or another revolves around the order of events that precedes the end of history and the ensuing establishment of a new world. This study, by contrast, explores the spatial dimensions of apocalypse, more precisely the way in which the settings of the Book of Revelation are taken up by contemporary American writers and related to more general but also more contested concerns of territorial integrity and national identity. Influenced by Lefebvre’s theories, which understand territory not simply as the container of certain structures and practices but also as the result of them, this book examines the apocalyptic narratives that have been passed on through the centuries to define and sustain territory on a local, regional, and national level and the way in which seven novels by Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon respond to them. Anna Hellén is an associate professor at Borås University, Sweden. She has previously held positions at Gothenburg University and Lund University in addition to a visiting fellowship at Harvard University, made possible by a grant from the Sweden-America Foundation. Her main research fields are American nineteenth-century literature, particularly Herman Melville, and contemporary American literature.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature



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Apocalyptic Territories Setting and Revelation in Contemporary American Fiction

Anna Hellén

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Anna Hellén to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hellén, Anna, author. Title: Apocalyptic territories : setting and revelation in contemporary American fiction / Anna Hellén. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in contemporary literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Research on the relationship between the apocalyptic tradition and the literary imagination has typically espoused a temporal approach which in one way or another revolves around the order of events that precedes the end of history and the ensuing establishment of a new world. This study, by contrast, explores the spatial dimensions of apocalypse, more precisely the way in which the settings of the Book of Revelation are taken up by contemporary American writers and related to more general but also more contested concerns of territorial integrity and national identity. Influenced by Lefebvre’s theories, the study understands territory not simply as the container of certain structures and practices but also as the result of them, just as bird song is not framed by but rather constructive of territorial borders. It is the equivalent of such ‘songs’ that this book seeks to listen in on, i.e. the apocalyptic narratives that have been passed on through the centuries to define and sustain territory on a local, regional, and national level, and the way in which seven novels by Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon respond to them”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019051490 | ISBN 9780367896577 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367896584 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | American fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Apocalypse in literature. | Space in literature. | Boundaries in literature. | Setting (Literature) | Identity (Psychology) in literature. Classification: LCC PS374.A65 H45 2020 | DDC 813/.509—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051490 ISBN: 978-0-367-89657-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-89658-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Marcus

Contents





Introduction

While myths of the world’s beginning exist in virtually all cultures, visions of endings are decidedly less prevalent, a circumstance no doubt connected to differences with regard to more general conceptions of time. For example, in archaic cultures, history is typically seen as repeating itself in cycles, precluding the very idea of an ultimate end, whereas a linear conception of history characteristic of the Judeo-Cristian tradition, as Paul Boyer explains, “encouraged an eschatological vision of history culminating in a series of cosmic end-time events” (1992: 22). Simply put, cultures envisioning time as not only having a distinct beginning but also following a straight trajectory toward a determined end are more prone to generate apocalyptic narratives than others. There is no surprise here. Research on the genre, however, has not sufficiently acknowledged the fact that apocalypse is not only or even predominantly a temporal but also a markedly spatial myth. This study consequently focuses on the spatial dimensions of the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition, more precisely the apocalyptic settings in contemporary American fiction. The current status of American apocalyptic narration is thus examined via more specific questions of where and how the apocalyptic tradition takes place in these narratives, questions which, however, also involve larger and more contested concerns of territorial integrity and national identity. Frank Kermode was one of the first but by no means last scholars to research the relationship between the temporal structures of apocalypse and the Western literary tradition. In The Sense of an Ending (1967), he sees the “grand narratives” of the West as reiterating the basic pattern of apocalypse in order to give life structure in the face of eternity, defining them as “shapes which console the dying generations” (3), catering to “a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end” (4). The dominance of temporal approaches to the study of the relationship between apocalyptic writings and the literary imagination that Kermode encapsulates can no doubt be ascribed to a more general temporocentrism (Casey 1993: 7), that is, a hegemony of time that has dominated modern philosophy during the last two hundred years and that has seemed so overpowering as to

2  Introduction occasion Foucault to lament the “devaluation of space” that resulted in the treatment of spatiality as “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile,” while time represented “richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (Foucault 70). Foucault’s critique is of course part and parcel of a more general interest in recovering spatiality from the depth of the philosophical unconscious, an aspiration which came to full fruition within the framework of postmodernity. As Terry Eagleton has famously phrased it, “[i]f modernism was haunted by time, postmodernism is obsessed with space” (27). Unsurprisingly, the view of apocalypse as a predominantly historical discourse has also been tentatively challenged as of late, albeit in less dramatic and extensive terms. “The content of the apocalypses,” John J. Collins plainly argues, “involves both a temporal and a spatial dimension” (7), and Leonard Thompson, similarly, sees the need to stress that in the study of apocalypses, “space is taking a place alongside of time” (1991: 115). Foregrounding the importance of space in Revelation more emphatically, Steven Goldblatt argues that Revelation is essentially a narrative about the victory of space over time. When history is finally over, space is not only all that remains but ultimately the very focus of revelation: “John’s Apocalypse describes how the end of history and the appearance of an ideal form occur simultaneously, how time stops with the revelation of a utopian architectural space” (5). However, even if the spatiality of the apocalyptic myth has no doubt attracted some critical interest in recent years, there is, to my knowledge, no study exclusively dedicated to exploring apocalyptic settings in fiction.1 This study aspires to fill this gap. But what, essentially, is an apocalyptic text? As Collins points out, there is no text in the period before Christianity that was defined or that defined itself as apocalyptic, and yet the genre generally termed so encompasses both Jewish and Christian texts (4–5).2 The idea of an apocalyptic genre of writings is consequently relatively recent and has been arrived at through systematic analyses and syntheses of a broad range of biblical texts for the purpose of teasing out the core constituents.3 The following list of characteristics of apocalyptic writings is based on three different sources:4 1 2 3

The author writes pseudonymously, often using a great name in the ­Jewish tradition, such as Ezra, Enoch, or Isaiah, for the purpose of acquiring greater authority (Collins 6, Vielhauer in Thomson 1990: 18).5 The writing is presented as a revelation of a transcendent reality mediated to humanity in the form a dream, vision, or a heavenly rapture (Collins 5, Vielhauer in Thomson 1990: 18). The narrative is eschatological, focusing on the end of the present age and the establishment of a new era (Collins 5; Vielhauer in Thomson 1990: 19; Bergoffen 29).

Introduction  3 4

5 6

There are two ages which are qualitatively different, the present age and the age to come. The present age is devalued and viewed with pessimism as under the control of Satan, while the age to come is correspondingly glorified as a wonderful time (Vielhauer in Thomson 1990: 19; Bergoffen 30). History is teleological and everything is determined by God’s plan (Vielhauer qtd Thomson 1990: 19, Bergoffen 29). Human choice has no effect on the process of history per se but each individual can gain a place in the new world and reach salvation by being moral (Bergoffen 24, 30).

The dominance of temporal-historical traits in the expositions above is symptomatic, as is the near-absence of spatial elements. A focus on the spatiality of apocalypse, I consequently argue, will shed new light on apocalyptic influences in literary works from different ages and genres. Below is a condensation of the spatial characteristics that will constitute the pivots around which the readings of the novels included in this study revolve. Since my primary focus is not the original body of apocalyptic writings per se, but apocalyptic influences in contemporary American fiction, the list of characteristics below derives from Revelation and should be read as fruitful points of comparisons between two time layers of apocalyptic fiction: 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

God’s territory is characterized by unity, symmetry, clear boundaries, and transparency. Satan’s territory is characterized by diversity, unclear boundaries, and opacity. Nature is neither entirely controlled by God nor Satan but is largely ambiguous. A spatial system based on antithesis complicated by the fact that boundaries are permeable, causing concerns with the integrity and vulnerability of territoriality but also creating transformative possibilities. A precarious relationship between the human body and space, where the degree of integrity of the body in relation to space correlates with the chances of redemption. A definitive break between the old and the new world by which space is reinvented. A specific spatiality of the apocalyptic narrator, involving actual or symbolic ascendance to a divine sphere, enabling the whole of human history and its termination to be overviewed.

Contemporary apocalyptic narratives, this study argues, are recognizable by not only a common depiction of historical temporality but also the places and spaces in and through which history and change are

4  Introduction concretized. In fact, Apocalyptic Territories contends that a spatial approach may uncover dimensions in the apocalyptic text that a temporal approach, tied to a linear trajectory, cannot. The apocalyptic settings mapped out in the seven novels explored in this study are consequently viewed, not as mere backdrops of the apocalyptic plot but as dynamic points of intersection for the forces of the apocalyptic cosmos, on the one hand, and human activity and creativity, on the other. It must also be stressed in this context, however, that the spatial approach laid out in this study acknowledges the fact that spatial and temporal aspects are intertwined in apocalyptic as in all other writings. This insight leads Lois Parkinson Zamora to position the theoretical stance of her study on history and apocalypse in contemporary U.S. and Latin American fiction within Michail Bakhtin’s framework of the “chronotope,” a term borrowed from relativity theory within physics, but which in a literary context is used more metaphorically to describe an inseparable union of time and space.6 The chronotope, Bakhtin argues, is the single most salient trait of each literary genre, meaning that each genre and subgenre is recognizable and identifiable primarily through the chronotopes they share (84–85). Such an approach to literary settings relies to some degree on abstraction and generalization at the same time as it prioritizes time over space7: It regards space as seamless, stripped of specific or local characteristics, and is, equally importantly, primarily a way of thinking about time. While this study is certainly concerned with the symbolic and mythic dimensions of apocalyptic settings, it also acknowledges their potential to communicate and process different socio-historical subjects, including ways in which human action and interaction relate to more comprehensive structures and power relations. As Thompson observes, the fact that John addresses his first vision to the churches of the seven Asian cities connects the subsequent visions to everyday life, the cities thus becoming the “home base” in the visions of Revelation, which then become the symbolic filter through which humans can understand their existence (1991: 120). Conversely, the heavily coded, symbol-laden language that characterizes the genre is in part the result of a need to disguise the concrete circumstances that spawned it. Since the main apocalyptic texts were written during periods of persecution and oppression, the symbolic discourses provided a secure platform from which to imagine the annihilation of the prevalent power structures and introduce an entirely new order via a redrawing of the cosmic map.8 Even if the main conflict and its resolution seem safely lodged within the mythic sphere, then, apocalypse is an inherently radical genre that can accommodate a variety of very concrete conditions experienced as critical, politically, economically, or ecologically, the numerous parallels between Babylon and the Roman Empire in the Book of Revelation being part and parcel of such a radical agenda.9

Introduction  5 In order to analyze the way in which socio-historical processes and relations are discernible in contemporary apocalyptic representations of space, this study also focuses on the boundaries, demarcations, and accompanying rationales for inclusion and exclusion that affect human lives but also more concrete spatial dimensions such as size, height, and depth. As we will see, Revelation is often very specific regarding the constitution of its settings, at times even presenting more or less complete maps of their topography, with exact measurements. In order to explore the spatial factors enabling and delimiting human existence in apocalyptic texts, approaches belonging to the broad field of geography are called for. The basic geographical concepts space and place will play a central role in the endeavor to compare and contrast traditional and contemporary apocalyptic settings. But like all spatial entities, apocalyptic settings are also conditioned by forces that convert space into territories, here defined as realms claimed by individuals, systems, or powers: The two great cities of Revelation, Babylon and the new Jerusalem, each belonging to one of the superpowers of the apocalyptic cosmology, God and Satan, constitute the most prominent territories in Revelation. To analyze such aspects of contemporary fiction, I turn to theories that explain the spatial dimensions of the intricate relations between power (governments, authorities, etc.), people, and the way in which such relations are maintained, negotiated, shunned, or overturned. The central figure in this effort is Henri Lefebvre, particularly his theories on the three dimensions of social space, which will be elaborated on in the first chapter of this book. As the title implies, this book will also examine the relationship between spatial representation and the status of revelation in contemporary fiction. In American apocalyptic expressions, the attitude to the idea of revelation has varied greatly over the centuries, a circumstance intimately connected to fluctuations in attitudes to citizenship and territoriality. In America, the apocalyptic myth was, in a manner of speaking, always markedly spatial, apocalyptic expectations predating the project of nation building by far. For the Roman Catholics, as Stephen J. Stein points out, “exploration and conquest—both geographical and religious—were motivated by apocalyptic notions” (193). Famously quoting Revelation, Columbus saw in the new continent a “new heaven and a new earth,” a rhetoric he later elaborated when writing to his patrons: “For I believe that the earthly paradise lies here, which no one can enter except God’s leave” (224). The web of millennial imagery spun around the continent set the tone for subsequent apocalyptic aspirations and formulations. Indeed, with the discovery and settlement of the Americas, the apocalyptic myth was given concrete geographical shape, which led, as Stein argues, to a veritable “Americanization of the apocalyptic tradition” (qtd Boyer 1992: 68).

6  Introduction In more general terms, the descriptions of radical breaks with previous territories so prevalent in settler mythologies to a great extent owe their existence to apocalyptic sources, where entering the desired new world presupposes the annihilation of the old corrupt one, wherewith a past of suffering and persecution is wiped out and a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1) lie ahead. As David Jacobson argues, in the written testimonies of Puritan settlement in America, Europe is accordingly described as a non-place, a state of homelessness in which people are destined to wander aimlessly, without orientation. The profound feeling of being out of place was then remedied by the journey to America, where a sense of home could be regained and where the errant existence could be replaced by a sense of rootedness, in time and space. It was in this new Israel that God’s plan would finally be carried out, where history would come to an end, and where God and mankind would be reunited at last. But the new world was not the final destination, but the point of departure for the real spiritual journey toward God’s kingdom, the goal of which was the final victory over evil (31). As Boyer observes, at the core of American millennial thought is the notion that the new Jerusalem is likely to be materialized on American ground, which would then constitute the final destination of a journey that had started in ancient Israel (Boyer 1992: 73). Americans, by the same logic, compete with the Jews as God’s chosen people. Jacobson further argues that the development of the modern conception of the nation as a sacred, bounded territory that unites a people with the state is intimately linked to Protestantism. Before the Reformation, territory was mostly of mundane significance and only certain very specific sites were considered holy in the Catholic tradition, which was also the very idea behind pilgrimage. After the Reformation, the nation became the marker of “bounded, spatial communion,” an idea modelled on the relationship between the Jews and ancient Israel: The land is not only possessed by the people but part of the people through the covenant between God and his chosen people (7). Jacobson explains how this development was closely linked to apocalyptic notions: [I]n the wake of the Reformation a more dynamic notion emerges of corporate peoples, imbued with the grace of God (and, later, with secular nationalist faiths), who are driving towards a millennial eschaton, an End of History, redeeming an essentially corrupt world by establishing the Word—the law—of God. By politically and territorially establishing themselves, Dutch Calvinists, the Scottish Presbytarians, and the Puritans, among others, sacralized their lands through the assertion of the power of Jahweh and his law. (7) With the War of Independence and the ensuing project of nation building, apocalyptic discourses were more explicitly linked to territorial

Introduction  7 integrity, most notably the idea that America would expand through a divinely sanctioned progress toward the completion of space and would stop at no boundary but the natural God-given border of the continent itself: As Anders Stephanson notes, the apocalyptic sense of predetermination and direction was most succinctly expressed in the Manifest Destiny idea, which was “a whole matrix, a manner of interpreting the time and space of ‘America’” (5). It was thus primarily the constructive elements of the apocalyptic narrative that were highlighted in the making of the nation, as focus was placed on the establishment of the new world, safely locating the cataclysmic event in a remote past. The cosmic battle, in other words, had already been both fought and won, and a new era in a new world was waiting to be possessed and inhabited. Melville’s White-Jacket sums up a characteristic apocalyptic sentiment of the nineteenth century: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world… God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls” (506). However, in Melville’s authorship, more precisely in the catastrophic plot of Moby-Dick, we can also distinguish a crucial turning point in apocalyptic outlook, something which D.H. Lawrence describes as follows: Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the dark trees of America. Doom! Doom of what? Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day…. Melville knew. He knew out race was doomed. His white soul doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed…. The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the American soul…. But Moby-Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since? Post-mortem effects, presumably. (159–60) In Moby-Dick, Lawrence sees cataclysm without revelation, but more generally also the emergence of modern apocalyptic discourse devoid of hope, redemption, and divine plan.10 Through greed, belligerence, or sheer stupidity, humanity has brought the catastrophe, which is ultimately meaningless, upon itself. American modernism both continued and deepened this tendency, the narratives of World War 1 typically representing, precisely, an empty apocalypse and a generation lost among the debris of shattered faith. Such sentiments of course also spawned

8  Introduction the ex-pat movement, which may best be described as a sort of reversed Manifest Destiny. After World War II, the world’s actual annihilation appeared an integral part of the Cold-War present, the motif of pointless nuclear catastrophe also profusely explored in the popular culture of the 1950s as well as by avant-garde writers such as the Beats. As Daniel Wojkic puts it, “Ginsberg’s apocalyptic indictment of America disputes the prophetic vision of the American millennial paradise, declaring instead the end of  American innocence and glory” (107). Likewise, Wojkic argues, William S. Burroughs sees the invention of the nuclear bomb as the defining moment, or, rather, the final moment in the history of mankind, depicting hallucinatory cataclysmic landscapes where there is no progression either in plot or in character (107). In later Hollywood productions such as The Planet of the Apes (1968), the Mad Max movies (1979, 1981, 1985, 2015), and Waterworld (1995), America, as territory and nation, has been submerged in global annihilation, which dovetails with a tendency in post-war stories to level America with rest of the world rather than strengthening its sense of uniqueness. One of the most telling symbols of such national futility is the broken Statue of Liberty at the end of the original film adaptation The Planet of the Apes, a remnant not only of what used to be the United States of America but also a reminder of territorial vanity in a more general sense. Further, whereas earlier American apocalyptic tales had conveyed messages of exceptionalism, formulating specifically American answers to age-old questions about the nature of time and space, the twentieth-century texts typically focus on the limitlessness of human destructivity, as exemplified by the nuclear bomb, and, by extension, the ephemeral nature of national boundaries. It seems, then, as if the modern American apocalyptic tales spring from anxieties over the vulnerability of territory rather than from a yearning to map out and solidify national ground. The tales of the nuclear age therefore also indirectly stage the end of the American dream of new beginnings. In view of these developments, it is hardly surprising that modern apocalypse is frequently described as essentially post-apocalyptic, depicting human life in the wake of a catastrophe that has yielded neither revelation nor redemption. Trapped in a post-historic limbo, humanity is doomed to drift among the debris of modernity in a landscape that both begins and ends in utter chaos and ruin. James Berger’s After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse (1999) in this manner questions the very notion of ending, arguing that in most modern apocalyptic narratives, the end has already occurred, something which denies the end its ending status. If, Berger reasons, there is always a world after the end, and if that world, with few exceptions, is the main focus of the literary text, endings are no more. From a similar postmodern vantage, Teresa Heffernan’s Post-apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and

Introduction  9 the Twentieth-century Novel (2008) argues that since twentieth-century fiction has departed from revelation as organizing principle, there is no hope for a Kermodian sense of an ending. In Heffernan’s analysis, “post-apocalyptic culture” describes life after faith in revelation, divine control, and, indeed, apocalypse itself. In postmodern society, Heffernan suggests, apocalypse has exhausted itself, a stance that echoes Eagleton’s diagnosis of postmodern life, where no revelation awaits: We live in a windless enclosure in which the same elements are ceaselessly shuffled into different patterns, a space which could be ruptured by nothing as absurdly original as an historic event. History in the sense of the past is converted into a consumable commodity known as “heritage”, while the future has been called off for lack of interest. No doubt it really would take the second coming of Christ to disrupt this bland continuum, though even this is questionable: one hears that certain US evangelical television stations are already working on the best camera angles to record the spectacle. (Eagleton 27) Heather J. Hicks’ The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Modernity Beyond Salvage (2016) partly continues and partly breaks with the legacy described above in arguing that post-apocalyptic fiction, in their portrayal of the destruction of modernity, actually offers an opportunity to reevaluate some of its prime aspects, including modern conceptions of nationhood, rationality, and history. Hicks’ approach to the post-apocalyptic genre thus restores the idea of ending, recognizing the finality of it, and consequently also retrieving it from the postmodern deadlock. The current study aspires to add a chapter to this story, elucidating first and foremost how contemporary American fictions engage in a highly creative relationship with a broad range of apocalyptic settings, thus revitalizing a genre whose focus on the ideological and spiritual wastelands of the Western world had all but drained it of energy. Second, and as the logical corollary of aforementioned, it will be demonstrated how the lost revelatory elements of apocalypse resurface and how this perhaps unanticipated return is accompanied by a re-visioning of the meaning of national territory. If Hicks can be said to backtrack the temporocentric critical tradition mapped out above, returning to the end to reevaluate its significance, Apocalyptic Territories rather steps outside the temporal trajectory to position itself in space, from which it sees a return of a revelatory dimension allegedly absent in twentieth-century apocalyptic expressions. However, I hasten to add, the revelation offered in contemporary fiction contrasts with that of traditional apocalyptic narratives in some crucial ways: As unveiling resurfaces, the hope of redemption and salvation manifests itself not as an eternal domain beyond

10  Introduction the end of time but as the tentative contours of alternative vantage points from which to review the relationship between territory and history. The chapters of this book focus on one author each, but their internal order is based on specific spatial correspondences between them. The first chapter, however, provides the theoretical background for the subsequent analyses by laying the foundation for a spatial approach to apocalypse, the prime purpose of which is to make past and present spatial frameworks communicate with each other. The historical contextualization of the spatial terms place and space that introduces the chapter should therefore not be seen as an exposition of spatial history as such but as a means of establishing a common platform for past and present spatial discourses. The chapter goes on to expound on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of social space,11 which ultimately serves as a connection between mythic and social space, and, lastly, it applies this general theoretical framework to the settings of the Book of Revelation. In this context, the narrative point of view of standard apocalyptic texts is explained in spatial terms as a location above the world and beyond the end of time, a position which in turn affects the narrator’s relation to the narrated in some notable ways. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with urban apocalyptic settings in novels by Rick Moody and Toni Morrison, more precisely the way in which the great cities of Revelation provide means of investigating and evaluating different facets of American modernity. Chapter 2 focuses Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994) and Purple America (1997), with Babylon and the new Jerusalem as respective points of reference. Wealthy, powerful, yet plagued by deception and sexual transgressions, the Connecticut suburb represented in The Ice Storm is set on a steady trajectory toward Judgment Day, a process which, just as in Revelation, is accompanied by ominous signs and portents. But the upheavals ultimately seem to aspire to a greater cosmic or even divine purpose, a notion substantiated by the narrator’s understanding of his role as divinely inspired and settled by a fire sign in the sky at the end of the novel, which not only forebodes the Second Coming but also, at least temporarily, heals the utterly divided suburban space. Purple America, by contrast, represents suburbia as a new Jerusalem, a privileged exclusive place where the contrasts that had propelled history forward have melted together into a seamless whole. Abstract and timeless, however, the suburb is experienced as a prison rather than as a sanctuary, resulting in the characters’ attempt to reenter the course of history by seeking out points that might connect them with apexes of the American past. The predetermination of the apocalyptic plot effectively counteracts all such endeavors, however, relentlessly driving the characters back toward a dead end. And yet, there are occasional and unexpected revelatory glimpses in the novel that do not read as divine signs but as loopholes in the linearity of the apocalyptic plot caused by rare cracks in the seamless surface.

Introduction  11 The following chapter on Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) takes its cue from an explicitly apocalyptic statement in the early pages: “History is over you all, and everything’s ahead at last” (7), the narrator proclaims while outlining Harlem as a black new Jerusalem that offers a haven to African Americans after the cataclysmic events of the Middle Passage and slavery. Morrison’s version of the new Jerusalem, however, picks up on the intricate play between the bride and the whore that accounts for much of the dramatic energy in Revelation but places the tension between the two poles within the same territory so as to add to the city’s intensity as well as range of possibility. Instead of defeating history once and for all, most importantly, Harlem’s new Jerusalem instigates a healing process, which ultimately forges new relations to the past. In Morrison’s novel, then, the apocalyptic framework is primarily a means of relating to place, and yet the different apocalyptic geographies also expedite the return of history in a form that diverges from the apocalyptic tradition and instead reflects the structure of jazz music. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on Cormac McCarthy’s and Jesmyn Ward’s treatment of the relation between the human body and space, more precisely on the way in which the integrity of the former is conditioned by apocalyptic mythology in their novels. In Revelation, the human body is a circumscribed yet vulnerable territory that depends on myth for its integrity. The novels explored in Chapters 4 and 5 ultimately test the potency of the apocalyptic myth to offer protection, albeit with markedly different results. Examining the American continent via apocalyptic representations of the wilderness, Cormac McCarty’s Blood Meridian (1985) and The Road (2006) present bleak visions of myth’s capacity to raise the human body above its crude surroundings. In McCarthy’s apocalyptic universe, God is part of the mythology that distinguishes humanity from the wilderness and is undone just as easily. As we will also see, however, a revelation of sorts appears in the very negation of it, in the myths and beliefs that have been lost but whose phantom presences still shimmer in the bleak and barren landscape. Hence, although there is little hope to be gleaned in McCarthy’s landscapes, the loss of myth paradoxically serves to enhance its value and significance. The word sourceless functions as a matrix in both novels, suggesting an apocalypse severed from a divine hold but whose myths and symbols continue to besiege the landscape. Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), a novel whose very title draws attention to the contradictory relation between the material and sacred aspects of the body, allies itself with a substantial branch of writings that places hurricane Katrina within an apocalyptic framework but also diverges from these as well as from the apocalyptic tradition in general on two main accounts: It bequeaths its narrative voice to a pregnant African American teenager, and it transfers this narrative point of view to a farmstead symbolically named the Pit, which is another word for

12  Introduction the abyss in Revelation. An apocalyptic tale told from the abyss rather than from the emblematic elevated perspective, Salvage the Bones draws its creative energy from a destruction of apocalyptic bivalence, yet interweaving the plot of progressing pregnancy with that of the apocalyptic myth, the novel ultimately imagines a new earth, which does not descend from heaven but arises out of the depths of female, southern, and African American experiences. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union prompts a more general discussion by focusing on apocalyptic influence on U.S. geopolitical concerns that has ramifications also beyond the U.S. borders. As will be demonstrated in the final chapter, two different branches of the American apocalyptic legacy are put into play in the novel, namely the postmillennial and the premillennial strands, the former which sees America itself as the millennial kingdom and the latter according to which America certainly has an important role to play in God’s apocalyptic scheme, but one which is largely aimed at precipitating cataclysm. These two apocalyptic impulses hinge on different spatial maneuvers in the novel, which also give rise to the main conflict. The premillennial strand sees the realization of the millennium in Jerusalem rather than within American borders, which instigates an apocalyptic scheme to restore the Jews to the holy land. On the other side of the conflict the postmillennial strand operates, which optimistically focuses on the prospect of establishing a new Jerusalem within the borders on the American continent and whose territorial dreams and desires are manifested in the main motif of the novel, namely the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Alaska.

Notes

Introduction  13

5

6 7

8

9 10 11

(Philadephia: Westminster, 1965), 2:579–607, here summarized and translated from the German by Thompson (1990). Collins’ exposition aimed at distinguishing the apocalyptic from other genres is based on his and other members of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in the Apocalypse Group of the SBL Genres Project and summarized as follows: “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.” The discussion of the genre was first published in Collins “The Jewish Apocalypses” (1979), here taken from Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination. An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (2016; first published in 1984)5. As Collins points out, John is one of the few apocalyptists who do not write pseudonymously, yet “[i]n all but the matter of pseudonymity he adheres to the apocalyptic manner of revelation” (340–41). As Collins also explains, ascribing their visions to old sages such as Daniel or Enoch the narrators hide their true identity in order to acquire greater authority, not only through the respect the names were associated with, but also through moving the narrative present backwards in time. If the revelations told in a distant past correspond to events in the present, the narrator appears truly visionary and therefore trustworthy (49). See Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse. Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Lain American Fiction (1993). As Bakhtin explains, “[t]he chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time” (84–85). As Boyer observes, Ezekiel and Daniel came about as the Jews faced extinction as a nation and the Revelation of St. John when the Christians of Asia Minor suffered under the oppression of the Roman Empire (1992: 24). Collins argues that even if not all apocalyptic texts spring from specific situations of crisis, “all apocalypses address some underlying problem” (2016: 51). Thompson partly contradicts the tradition of seeking the source of apocalyptic texts in situations of social conflict. Drawing the concept of “perceived crisis” he argues that it is more correct to see the crisis depicted in apocalypse not as connected to specific historical circumstances but to as a product of the author’s perception. In this manner, the apocalyptic text also “create(s) the perception that a situation is one of crisis and then offer hope, assurance, and support for faithful behavior in dealing with the crisis” (1990: 28). For a more thorough account of the parallels between Babylon and the Roman Empire, see Rossing (2007). See also Zamora’s analysys of the same passage (1982: 117). The primary source here is Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991).

1

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse

Place, Space, and Territory The advantage of employing space and place in this study is firstly and most obviously that they tease out basic notions of spatiality in the Western tradition in general, thus opening up a channel of communication between the spatial layers of past and present apocalyptic discourses. This exposition is consequently bifocal in the way in which it hones in on the spatial contexts of the Book of Revelation and the contemporary fiction with which this study is concerned. Juxtaposing historical and contemporary texts, this study uncovers different segments regarding notions of place and space, showing how each apocalyptic setting carries traces of past spatial discourses. Further, the terms also tally with a fundamental bivalence in apocalyptic cosmology while at the same time catering to those instances when this bivalence becomes undone. The apocalyptic spatial system is largely based on antithesis insofar as each setting is defined by its opposite spatial pole in turn linked to the greater territorial conflict between the two apocalyptic powers of Revelation, God and Satan. The incongruous, dark abyss is consequently set up against the luminous temple of heaven; the wide, open space of the wilderness against the elaborate architecture of the cities; barren deserts against fecund, ordered gardens; and volatile sea against solid land; etc. Place generally appears closer to God than space, the latter typically linked to excess and chaos spawned by the devil. As will also be demonstrated, moreover, the terms are particularly pertinent to the apocalyptic rhetoric involved in the pursuit to define and inhabit the American continent: American history has routinely been articulated as an interaction between conquered and unconquered land, between the need to inhabit the land and make it home and the desire to conquer new territories—indeed, between place and space.1 “Place” and “space” are of course neither precise nor stable terms but should rather be viewed as grades on a scale, where place is more closely connected to stability, home, and roots—“a profound center of human existence to which people have deep emotional and psychological ties and is part of the complex processes through which individuals and

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  15 groups define themselves” (Convery et al. 1)—and space to movement, freedom, flux, and openness. Place and space, moreover, need each other for definition. As Yi-Fu Tuan puts it, “[f]rom the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6). Tuan also points out that our way of defining spatial dimensions is contingent on experience, arguing that “‘[s]pace’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). Further, place and space are of course vital components of each individual life. Lewis Mumford’s evocative statement that “human life swings between two poles: movement and settlement” (5) holds true insofar as each human life ideally contains both the safety and predictability of place and the mobility and openness of space, albeit in different proportions for different individuals in different stages of life. Our understanding of spatiality is thus based on personal experience as well as biological/genetic factors, but it is also a product of more comprehensive socio-historical processes. Theories of place and space have a long history in Western thinking, but, as Casey points out, this history has not been sufficiently uncovered. Since place “is so much with us, and we with it, it has been taken for granted, deemed not worthy of separate treatment” (1997: x). However, the fact that place is typically experienced rather than analyzed does not mean that it is “innocent” or unmarked by ideological or philosophical footprints. As John Inge contends, modern Western conceptions of place and space are indebted to Greek thinking, most theories of space up until the fourteenth century building more or less directly upon the groundwork of Aristotle and Plato (3). The two thinkers differ greatly in their spatial conceptions, however. Plato pictures cosmic creation as a progression from spatial abstraction to concretion, from space to place, within which three stages can be identified, the first of which is characterized by space in its primary, undifferentiated form; “a massive spatial sphere beyond which there is Nothing, not even the Void” (Casey 1997: 41). This space thus exists prior to creation, not as a void, because it is not radically empty, but as a receptacle, a holder, for the configuration of concrete places (Inge 3). Creation, in Plato’s spatial theory, is thus the gradual development from abstract primary space to differentiated, distinct place. Aristotle is less concerned with the cosmological perspectives found in Plato than with the constitution and significance of place and consequently does not have an elaborate theory of space. It is place, Aristotle accordingly contends, that “takes precedence of all other things” (qtd Casey 1997: 51), and so every substance, except for the Unmoved Maker, the heavens, the numbers, and points, must be located in place

16  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse in order to exist at all. But if this is the case, it also follows that place takes priority over infinity as well as chaos, which, as Casey contends, must also be “a kind of place, however inchoate and formless it may be” (1997: 51–52). Most importantly, Aristotle defines place largely by its capacity to contain and surround, first comparing it to a vessel that marks the boundary of its contents but realizing that the latter can be moved, whereas a place is stationary, he subsequently emended this definition by explaining place as “the first unchangeable limit (peras) of that which surrounds” (qtd Casey 1997:55). The conception of place as a container has been immensely influential in Western tradition in general and is also prevalent as a spatial principle in the Book of Revelation, where it is especially tangible in God’s realms, as will be evinced shortly. However, another spatial influence is discernible in the settings of Revelation, namely the idea of infinite space, which had been introduced by the Atomists two generations before Plato. The Atomists saw space as divided into atoms (indivisible pieces of matter) and the void (a limitless nothingness) (Casey 1997: 81), which consequently conflicted with Aristotle’s picture of the world as a series of juxtaposed places, the latter which also precluded the idea of anything being not-place. As Inge contends, the Aristotelian and the Atomist spatial theories competed for attention during the Hellenistic period (5), and, as I will demonstrate, the spatial divisions and conflicts played out in the Book of Revelation also carry traces of these two theories. If the Aristotelian idea of place as a container competes on God’s side, then the open, limitless realms primarily belong to Satan and are discernible in the bottomless abyss but also in the latter’s consistent and subversive disregard for boundaries. The basic conflict between place- and space-oriented understandings of spatiality as represented by Aristotle and the Atomists respectively is noticeable also in modern spatial discourses, which, however, is not to suggest they have travelled through time unaltered or to establish quasihistorical parallels between past and present theoretical frameworks but simply to divulge points of communication between the different timescapes as well as to provide an explanation as to why it is that a text like the Book of Revelation is still a source of inspiration for the settings of apocalyptic narratives, despite different social, scientific, and religious contexts. Indeed, the way a historical period conceives of place and space is closely connected to more general beliefs and interests. Hence, when an early, predominantly secular, modern spatial worldview gradually gave way to one that placed emphasis on the infinity of space, it was the result of a combination of mutually influential theological and scientific shifts. The theological supposition that if God’s power is infinite, he must be granted infinite space in which to operate, or, as Casey puts it, “[d]ivine ubiquity… entails spatial infinity” (1997: 77), was at once bolstered and strengthened by the growing interest in limitless space among

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  17 natural scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, theology and physics now having a common universalist aim to, as Casey puts it, “conceive of space in utterly maximal terms” (1997:77). For Newton as for Galileo, concrete places were degraded to mere sections of space and consequently of no inherent value or significance. 2 The dominance of space over place persisted and was even accentuated after the turn of the twentieth century as openness and flux, rather than localization and consistency, were seen as the most essential and vital components modern life. Andrew Thacker suggests that modernism is more concerned with movement across space than with the constitution of specific places, arguing that the depiction of modern means of transport in modernist literature, such as the car or the subway, is commensurate with the very core of modernist spatial aesthetics and ideology (80). But there was of course also a counter-movement to what was increasingly being felt as a detrimental sense of “placelessness”—this “erosion of people’s attachments to place” (Convery et al. 2) that modernity allegedly brought with it. William Leach paints a grim picture of modern America, which in many ways can be seen as representative of that of human geographers of the 1980s and 1990s, describing sentiments of loss and rage over the attenuation of attachment to place in the wake of industrialization, globalization, and commercialization. Our well-being, he argues, rests on a “healthy connectedness to place” (7), a “confident attachment to a place to be from” (6). But the idea of place as a precondition of authentic life and an essential element in human creativity, memory, and identity formation has been enunciated most influentially by Heidegger, who argues that every human being finds his or her raison d’être in a relationship to a stable sense of place: “To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations” (1997: 107). Heidegger’s notion of place as an island in the flow of time from which the work of art grows more or less organically contributed to spawning a localized dimension of modernism which typically favored rural or small-town areas to the flux of the large cities and the general “time-space compression” of modernity.3 Heidegger’s stance has been challenged, not primarily by advocates of space, but by a fundamental reconceptualization of the idea of place itself. Disputing the view of place as removed from all socio-political influence, as a bounded exclusive territory fixed in time, David Harvey and other Marxist theorists have brought attention to the interdependence between spatial and social processes, more precisely the way in which each site takes part of a web of influences—historical, political, and economic.4 This book relies to some extent on Lefebvre’s theories of how social space is produced, a word used in the title of his most seminal work and which understands space as both the result and the agent of social processes. Lefebvre in this manner goes against the definition of place

18  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse inherited from Aristotle as an innocent container to be filled with various structures and activities—as a “passive locus of social relations” (11)— and instead explains it as an integral and even active part of the processes it at once harbors and produces: “[S]pace is never empty: it always embodies a meaning” (154); “(Social) space is a (social) product” (26). Lefebvre’s social spaces also demonstrate hypercomplexity in the way one inheres within another: “We are thus confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global. Not to mention nature’s (physical) space, the space of (energy) flows, and so on” (8). Describing place as an ongoing process, Doreen Massey elaborates on and concretizes Lefebvre’s more general insights. Place, she argues, corresponds to “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (1991: 28). “Places, and senses of place,” she argues in response to Heidegger’s legacy, “do not, as some evocations would have us believe, arise organically out of the soil. They are the product of relations and interactions, both within the place itself and more widely. No place’s ‘sense of place’ is constructed without relations with and/ or influences from elsewhere” (2012: xiii). To Massey, place is a site of communication between regions, nations, and continents rather than a static or stable enclosure, and as such, it may also include qualities usually ascribed to space. Massey’s conception of place “includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, and which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.” A place thus resembles a “meeting place,” a network of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences, and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether it be a street, a region or even a continent (1991: 28). Lefebvre describes the production of social space as an interaction between three dimensions, each of which will be useful in the current study as a means of understanding modern renderings of apocalyptic space and their socio-political implications. The first is spatial practice, which, as the term also suggests, refers to actions and movements in space relating to production and reproduction as well as to how people act in space and move between different locations—“the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life, and leisure” (38). To Lefebvre, spatial practice becomes “the practical basis of the perception of the outside world” (40), a factual and functional dimension of space that is the foundation of people’s everyday lives and activities. The second dimension is representations of space, which belongs to a higher level of abstraction in pertaining to the way in which space is conceptualized by authorities and other official networks of society such as city planners and architects. This dimension refers to the idea behind the

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  19 concrete manifestations of space, as seen in drawings, maps, and plans but also as expressed in monuments and museums. In the modern state, Lefebvre argues, representations of space have to a great extent been the result of an ambition to homogenize space; to downplay difference and discord, the result of which Lefebvre terms abstract space: Abstract space functions “objectally,” as a set of things/signs and their formal relationships: glass and stone, concrete and steel, angles and curves, full and empty. Formal and quantitative, it erases distinctions, as much those which derive from nature and (historical) time as those which originate in the body (age, sex, ethnicity)…. The dominant form of space, that of the centres of wealth and power endeavours to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there. Differences, for their part, are forced into the symbolic forms of an art that is itself abstract. (49) Representational space, finally, is space imagined and interpreted by its inhabitants and by writers and artists. This is space that “imagination seeks to change and appropriate” and that therefore “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (39). Importantly, for Lefebvre the different dimensions of social space are not distinct but merge into and communicate with each other in various ways. For example, what people do and how they move in space is to some extent controlled by the way in which space is planned, marked out, and shaped by politicians, city planners, and architects, but spatial practice can also partially or fully subvert the original idea of that space. In addition, the way space is imagined is based on “real” as well as “ideal” space but is also constitutive of both: The “aura” of places such as Manhattan is created and re-created in the imagination of the generations inhabiting them but also in fiction, movies, and paintings. On the most general level, representational space pertains to individual as well as collective attitudes and relations to a particular place. The triad spatial practice (“real space”), representations of space (“ideal space”), and representational space (“imagined space”) will be instrumental in exploring, first, how space is used and experienced by characters vis á vis how it is represented as conceived by authoritative forces (social or divine) within the fictional universe, and, second, how space is imagined by characters as well as by the authors of these fictional realms. A basic premise of such an undertaking must of course be that mythic or fictional space can be integrated into Lefebvre’s dimensions of social space, indeed, that mythic space actually is a kind of social space. This, I hasten to clarify, is precisely what this study postulates: Mythic and fictional space, to rephrase Lefebvre’s key proposition, is a social product in the sense that its basic principles of usage, conception, and

20  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse association can be described and analyzed along the same lines. Spatial practices are the acts and movement that occur within these spaces and that are controlled by or opposed to the official plan of the space but, I argue, may also include the gestures and rituals performed to reach out to, comply with, or, in certain cases, defy a divine power. Analogously, the representations of space are the intentions and plans that aspire to control the spatial practices, but these intentions may also be said to include other authoritative forces such as those attributed to divine rule and design. The representational spaces correspond to the conceptions and interpretations that give space meaning beyond the strictly geographical and so include also the apocalyptic narratives by which space is understood but also given a heightened sense of urgency and value. We might suppose that religious space in the Judeo-Christian and other monotheistic traditions is different from (other) social space in that it appears to rely heavily, if not exclusively, on representations of space, that is, authoritatively ordained, measured-out, and organized space exempt from the fluctuations of history that control the practical and the associational dimensions. And yet, as Lefebvre argues and as will be demonstrated repeatedly in this book, even that which seeks to present itself as both seamless and timeless lapses into that perilous yet creative intersection between spatial practice and representational space. The laid-out master plan, in other words, constantly risks being undermined by the discrepancy between usages and interpretations of space. This also occasions us to consider the ways in which the writers included in this book add to or revise previous representational spaces with their own creative take on the apocalyptic myth. Spatiality is of course inseparable from issues of boundaries and demarcation, and in apocalyptic discourses, such matters reach into the very core of the structural, thematic, and symbolic fabric, the central conflict (typically between God and Satan) manifesting itself spatially in terms of integrity, vulnerability, and expansion. In this study, boundaries pertaining to body and territory will be of specific interest, the former seen as a local version of the latter. In Lefebvre’s analysis, the body has its own spatiality, at once shaped by and shaping space, the body and its environment being distinct realms that are nevertheless constitutive of each other. “A closure,” Lefebvre argues, “comes to separate within from without, so establishing the living being as a ‘distinct body’” (176), and yet a body is never self-sufficient as the boundary between inside and outside is permeable, enabling information and energy exchange whereby a mutually creative relationship is established and perpetuated through time. The “spatial envelopes” (176) of bodies are doubly vulnerable since weak boundaries make it defenseless against exterior forces, and, conversely, hermetic enclosures put it “in a stagnant state,”

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  21 wherewith it ultimately degenerates (177). The body is to Lefebvre also the most illustrative example of the workings of the spatial triad. Spatial practice involves the use of the body; of the hands, members and sensory organs, and activity related to both work and leisure, and representations of the body is linked to scientific knowledge to various degrees influenced by ideology including anatomy, physiology, diseases, and cures (40). The representational space of the body, finally, is where “‘culture’ intervenes … with its illusory immediacy, via symbolisms and via the long Judaeo-Christian tradition” (40). The heart can be taken to illustrate the three dimensions of the body: The way we perceive our heart in our everyday lives, the medical and anatomical knowledge of the heart we have accumulated over time, and the web of associations spun around it. In the apocalyptic tradition, the integrity of the body is intimately connected to the representational dimension, that is, to the symbolism that distinguishes it from other spaces, in Revelation most notably Satan’s realm or the unclaimed or undefined realm of nature. As the title indicates, the concept territory is central in this book as it is indicative of how apocalyptic texts reflect upon, maintain, or subvert different sites of power. As Foucault notes, “[t]erritory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-political one: The area controlled by a certain kind of power” (68). David Storey, similarly, argues that “[r]ather than being viewed simply as portions of geographic space, territory implies notions of ownership, power, and control whereby that space is utilized for the attainment of particular outcomes” (Storey 11). Lefebvre regards territory as a kind of social space linked to a state, meaning that territorial practice and representations of territory are interlinked in the same way that spatial practice is connected to representations of space: A territory is mapped out and maintained by borders and border control and respected or violated by the routes and networks of spatial practice. Importantly, it is, as in the case of the body mentioned above, to a great extent representational space that vouches for the integrity of a territory. For parallel to the physical conquering, usage, and maintenance of a territory is a metaphorical counterpart, which is equally essential to the drawing up, keeping up, and expansion of a territory. Frederick Tygstrup explains how territory is not simply the container of certain structures and practices but the result of them: The basic idea underlying the correlation of spaces and life forms is that that a full notion of space cannot be attained solely by measuring it as a static framework: spaces are brought into being, and assume a fluid historical identity, as a result of specific spatial practices. The system of relations underpinning a specific spatial reality is made and sustained by agents who create relational networks—or insert themselves strategically into existing networks—in order to

22  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse fulfil some action: as the bird does by its song, by building nests, by its patterns of movement, or as the gang does in quite similar ways when inhabiting the corner of a parking lot. (200) If bird song, as Tygstrup suggests, is not framed by territorial borders but rather creates and maintains them, the same can be said of the apocalyptic myth. The aim of this project accordingly includes listening in on such “songs,” that is, the apocalyptic narratives that have been passed on through the centuries to explore, define, and maintain territory. These narratives, however, are as much a record of time as of space as they have not travelled through time unaltered but have been rephrased and revised to accommodate specific aspirations and relations. If a place is the intersection of history’s variegated paths, this is also true of the narratives that accommodate it.

The Spatiality of Revelation If the cosmic battle of Revelation echoes more worldly historical conflicts, the same can be said of the settings, which, as James L. Resseguie argues, are “spiritual places which cannot be found on a physical map, although they may allude to actual, historical places” (32). Masking but not quite erasing specific geographical markers, apocalyptic spatiality can accordingly be said to stem from the unique combination of abstract architectural space and more concrete places that do not shun mundane details or practices. In Revelation, moreover, divine sites are predominantly characterized by an Aristotelian sense of place in being impressively vast and spacious but also architectural, contained, and measured out. God is mighty but has no room for infinity. By contrast, realms that appear limitless or have fluid boundaries are largely recalcitrant to God’s will and order and connected with Satan’s rule. In the following, I will seek to map out and analyze the most prominent settings of Revelation. Since the different apocalyptic sites are best understood in relation to the perfect place that replaces all others, I will start at the end, when Satan has been vanquished, when the final judgment has condemned all sinners to the abyss, when history is finally over, and the new Jerusalem descends from heaven. When John, the narrator of Revelation, is presented with the extraordinary vision of God’s city, its status as place is immediately made explicit as he is somewhat surprisingly asked to measure the city so as to establish not only its vastness but also its limits and demarcations: “The city is laid out as a square, and its length is as great as the width; and he measured the city with the rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal” (21:16–17).

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  23 John arrives at the conclusion that although the city is immense (roughly corresponding to the size of India), its measures are perfectly symmetrical, forming a gigantic cubic shape. A comparable occurrence takes place earlier in Revelation when John is granted a vision of God’s heavenly temple. When offered a temple tour, he is given rod with which he is asked to measure the temple and the altar so as to verify its exact spatial dimensions: “Then there was given me a measuring rod like a staff; and someone said, ‘Get up and measure the temple of God and the altar, and those who worship in it. Leave out the court which is outside the temple and do not measure it, for it has been given to the nations; and they will tread under foot the holy city for forty-two months’” (11:1–2). There has been some debate as to what the measuring actually symbolizes in Revelation, a common view being that the measured parts are protected by God.5 However, since it is likely that the temple of God refers to the temple of Jerusalem that had been destroyed entirely a couple of years before Revelation was written, it is correspondingly unlikely that measurement equals protection: God had evidently protected no part of the temple. Matthijs Den Dulk instead persuasively argues that the original Greek word for “measure” suggests not protected space but a territory that is under someone’s jurisdiction, in this case God’s: “The difference between the measured and the unmeasured part is therefore not that the former is protected whereas the latter is not, but that the former belongs to God’s jurisdiction and the latter (for now) to the Gentiles. The opposition in Revelation 11.1–2 is not between preservation and destruction, but between the jurisdiction of God and that of the Gentiles” (den Dulk 439). This gives the destruction of God’s temple a more plausible explanation, for if God controls the territory, it must also be God’s will that the temple be destroyed, the destruction itself then paradoxically becoming a sign of God’s power. Such an interpretation also underscores a more general spatial facet of Revelation, namely the connection between divinity and demarcation, between God and place: The awe-inspiring spaciousness of God’s realms is balanced and contained by the exactitude of its measurements, corresponding to a kind of mathematical pedagogy intended to contain the chaos spawned by Satan’s unsettling powers. The space of God may be vast and overwhelming but also predictable, symmetrical, and contained, just as the text itself may seem excessive but nevertheless controlled by predictable numerical patterns. The spaciousness of the new Jerusalem is limited by the single most salient feature of the city, namely the wall that surrounds it. Adorned with gems and pearls (21:18–19), it testifies to the power of its ruler at the same time as it gives the impression of a completely self-contained world. And yet if the dividing line between the new Jerusalem and what lies outside it is absolute (there are no suburbs to God’s city), the interiors lack distinctions and demarcations entirely. Night and darkness do

24  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse not exist here; nor are sun or lamp needed as the eternal day is lit by God’s glory (21:23). This also explains the absence of a temple: There is no need to stake out sacred ground as the entire area is controlled by divinity and as the “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (21:22). The spatial homogeneity that characterizes the new Jerusalem is matched by that of the population: Only the servants of God can enter; and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life (21:27). Here, then, the spatial divisions that had contributed to driving history forward have melted together to make up the perfect, timeless realm of the new Jerusalem. Its walls made of “crystal clear jasper” (21:11) and interspersed with “transparent glass” (21:21), moreover, the city is also both completely intelligible and unambiguous. God’s city hides no surprises. Despite its symmetrical and orderly qualities, the new Jerusalem’s status as place is challenged by its other dominant principles, namely timelessness and abstraction, which in many ways seem to preclude both human activity and, as a result of the former, a personal connection to the city over time. In Teo and Huang’s definition, a place is an “active setting which is inextricably linked to the lives and activities of its inhabitants,” meaning that places are not “abstractions or concepts” but rather “directly experienced phenomena of the lived world” (qtd Convery et al. 1), or, as Eudora Welty phrases it, “the gathering spot of all that has been felt” (122). As Steven Goldsmith expresses it, the new Jerusalem comes across as the “appearance of ideal form” (5) and “content without time”: Only in pure aesthetic place situated outside time’s grasp can things “assume their final, unchanging, sacred form and thus become new” (44). From a Lefebvrian perspective, the new Jerusalem appears to embody representations of space, that is, the perfect, direct realization of (divine) city planning unchallenged by real usage of and movement across the city and distortions effected by the imagination: John has vowed to convey God’s words without additions or subtractions (22:18–19). Characterized by transparency and geometric shapes, an absence of conflict and discord, and repression of nature and biology, the new Jerusalem seems a manifestation of Lefebvre’s notion of abstract space, the ultimate goal of representations of space: It is true that it dissolves and incorporates such former “subjects” as the village and the town; it is also true that it replaces them. It sets itself up as the space of power, which will (or at any rate may) eventually lead to its own dissolution on account of conflicts (contradictions) arising within it. What we seem to have, then, is an apparent subject, an impersonal pseudo-subject, the abstract

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  25 “one” of modern social space, and—hidden within it, concealed by its illusory transparency—the real “subject,” namely state (political) power. Within this space, and on the subject of this space, everything is openly declared: everything is said or written. Save for the fact that there is very little to be said—and even less to be “lived,” for lived experience is crushed, vanquished by what is “conceived of.” (51) The parallels between the new Jerusalem and modern abstract space make the former a fruitful spatial point of reference for writers to explore certain facets of modern American culture, as the analyses of novels by Morrison and Moody included in this volume evince. Barbara R. Rossing suggests that Revelation “is a thoroughly urban book” (1998: 490), a statement that does not simply recognize the symbolic prominence of the new Jerusalem and Babylon but also acknowledges that its main structural principle rests upon the relation (maintained through contrasts as well as parallels) between these two cities. As Gordon Campbell notes, the two cities “correspond to and counterbalance one another as twin poles of a carefully crafted antithesis” (93) involving all aspects, concrete and material as well as symbolic. For example, if the abstract space of the new Jerusalem can be seen as the direct realization of God’s plan, Babylon seems utterly devoid of corresponding architectural plan. Understandably then, nobody is asked to measure Babylon as her contours are both diffuse and radically unstable: she sits “on many waters” (17:1), suggesting limitlessness and instability, but also on “seven mountains” (17:9), symbolizing the seven hills of Rome and by extension also its spatial and economic voraciousness. Babylon is a powerful global economy, kings, merchants, sailors, and captains coming to feed on her wealth from all over the world and its population being as heterogeneous as any global city. Babylon’s uncontained, non-architectural, and indeed hypercomplex space, to speak with Lefebvre, thrives on diversity. In the new Jerusalem, as Rossing argues, monetary economy has been done away with entirely, and emphasis is instead placed on the fact that the water is given out for free to all: “Water, freely given by God, flows through this paradisiacal landscape. When God’s own voice speaks from the throne for the first time in the book, it is to offer water to those who thirst. Twice God extends the invitation to come and receive the water of life ‘without cost’ (δωρεάν)” (1998: 497). And yet Babylon, seething with human activity linked to leisure as well as labor, seems an authentic place in a way that the new Jerusalem does not: The tones of musicians, the work of craftsmen, the sound of the mill, and the festivities of weddings will cease and be sorely missed once Babylon has been destroyed: “The merchants of these things, who

26  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse became rich from her, will stand at a distance because of the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning, saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, she who was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls for in one hour such great wealth has been laid waste!’” (18:14–17). If Babylon seems to lack representations of space in the form of a city planning, it is certainly rich in spatial practices and representational space: It is a realm where human activity and emotion abound. But the two cities, as hinted above, are not only each other’s contrasts but also function as each other’s foils, something which becomes particularly obvious in the portrayal of them as women with distinctly different personalities but also with certain traits in common. For even if the new Jerusalem is cast as a faithful bride and Babylon as a drunken whore, the two cities, as Campbell notes, from symmetrical introductions (17:1–3; 21:9–10) to parallel conclusions (19:9, 10; 22:6–9), mirror each other in a distorted way” (93). In short, their attributes and dispositions are similar but are used for different purposes and ends. For example, the two cities are replete with riches and splendor: Diamonds, gold, and pearls are prominent props of both urban sites, but as Campbell suggests, “the former indulges in self-glorification (18:7), whereas the latter’s splendor reflects the glory of God (21:11, 23)” (103). Similarly, both women-cities are sexual beings, but the city-as-whore engages in sexual activities with the kings of the earth (18:3), and the city-as-bride is faithful to her husband; the Lamb, or Jesus Christ (21:2). The intricate relationship of the two women-cities, as we will see, is exploited by Morrison’s Jazz, which construes Harlem as a modern, black new Jerusalem with Babylon as its dark alter ego, which makes paradise both livable and dynamic. The abyss has certain affinities with Babylon in that it is an antiplace without clear boundaries and contours. Contrasting sharply with the ordered, circumscribed places belonging to God, moreover, it also has an earthly counterpart in the sea: Although consisting of the contrasting elements fire and water, the sea and the abyss overlap as places of utter chaos, threat, and instability. Further, both are the sources of beasts and hybrids, the latter which threaten God’s order by blurring natural boundaries but also places of exile for evil creatures and sinners (Pippin 1999: 67–68). Satan is cast into the abyss, where he is bound for a thousand years (20:2), and Babylon is thrown into the sea and “found no more at all” (18:21)—returned, like Satan, to her natural element. On Judgment Day, the sea and the abyss both give up their dead to be “judged every man according to their works” (20:13). What is striking, as Tina Pippin notes, is that the abyss remains after history’s end and the establishment of the new Jerusalem, thus deferring the end indefinitely: “Is creation really new if chaos still abides outside the garden gates? Why does this gap, this rupture, this gaping

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  27 hole remain in the textual landscape? Isn’t God’s future meant to be seamless and faultless, with all the evil powers and chaos destroyed for all time?” (1999: 64). Pippin concludes that there is “no authorial control over the depths of this abysmal space” (1999: 66), and, I hasten to add, no divine control either. However, whereas the abyss remains outside the walls of the new Jerusalem, “there is no longer any sea” (21:1), has no place in God’s kingdom. As Rossing points out, the maritime trade that was the foundation of Rome’s global power is ultimately rejected by the new Jerusalem: “Babylon is a world of buying and selling, of frenetic commerce and accumulation of wealth. Three groups who have profited from Babylon’s wealth—kings, merchants, seafarers—lament the loss of the cargo they can no longer buy and sell” (1998: 491). If the sea is the very prerequisite for the spatial practices that sustain Babylon, it would be highly detrimental to the divine city as the unequivocal and eternal manifestation of God’s architectural plan. The wilderness and its different renditions essentially escape moral definition. In Resseguie’s analysis, the wilderness in the Jewish tradition above all represents an in-between state of having escaped captivity but having not yet reached the Promised Land, “a place of divine protection and succour but also a place of testing” (33). Such ambiguity is visible also in Revelation, where the wilderness represents space neither entirely controlled by God nor entirely controlled by Satan (Resseguie 33). On the one hand, the wilderness provides a refuge for the pregnant woman “clothed with the sun” (12:1) so that she can escape the dragon and safely deliver her child who is to “rule all nations” (12:5–6), but on the other hand, it is the breeding ground for monsters and devils. Symptomatically, it is here that John sees the drunken whore on the scarlet- colored beast for the first time (17:3), who, in Thompson’s analysis, can be seen as the same persona as the woman clothed with the sun, the virtuous bride having been transformed by the wilderness into the fallen whore: The wilderness, he argues, “would thus function symbolically as a place similar to chaos, with transformational potential for judgment, deliverance, nourishment, punishment, death, and rebirth” (1990: 82). It is only logical that the whore of Babylon is ultimately undone by the wilderness: “Laid waste” is a cognate verb to “wilderness,” and when Babylon “in an hour or so” is “laid waste” (18:14–17), it suggests that she is returned to her natural state and that the allure of civilization had been little but superficial varnish, which is further emphasized by her worldly attires of scarlet and purple. The pregnant woman, by contrast, flees to the wilderness to seek protection from the dragon yet is “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (12:1), which symbolically elevates her above the ground.

28  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse Whether the wilderness is ultimately detrimental or protective is dependent on the integrity of the subject in relation to the environment or, in more concrete terms, the relation between the body and its surroundings. In Revelation, the body’s relative integrity is to a great extent decisive of each individual’s fate. The key to salvation, Revelation repeatedly suggests, is closely connected to a person’s ability to dwell in a specific place without actually being of it, or, in spatial terms, to a body’s distance or proximity to the ground. As human deprivation precipitates chaos and destruction, sinners flee to the wilderness to hide in caves and under rocks. John’s rhetorical question as God’s wrath is come upon them is “[w]ho is able to stand?” (6:17). This question is central to Revelation in its entirety as it sets the terms for salvation, distinguishing those who are able to rise above their surroundings to face God from those who are immersed in and indeed contaminated by earthly concerns and relations. For these sinners, the wilderness does not yield protection; it is rather the very hiding that defines them. Those “able to stand” and face the wrath of God not only literally distance themselves from the earth but are also able to come out of Babylon without participating “in her sins” nor receiving “of her plagues” (18:4): The body is constantly at risk of being invaded or polluted by evil forces. Wearing robes washed white by the blood of the lamb and marked by the sign of God, they are given shelter under the altar, whereas the doomed are reduced to flesh, eaten by birds and returned to the wilderness (19:17). Indeed, the horror of Revelation, whether it springs from God or Satan, is most intensely felt in those instances when the body is not granted status beyond its material essence. For example, those who do not carry “the seal of God on their foreheads” are tortured by monstrous locusts for five months, during which they attempt to escape their tortured bodies by seeking death (9:4). In Revelation, the body can justifiably be regarded as a territory at the constant risk of being invaded by hostile forces or entities, and both Ward and McCarthy integrate this spatial conundrum into the central themes of their novels, as we will see in Chapters 4 and 5. But territoriality is also a prominent spatial principle in Revelation in a more traditional sense, nation being a particularly viable albeit problematic territorial concept. In Revelation the word appears no less than twentyfour times and represents peoples and territories unconnected to the holy land of Israel. Since they are not part of the covenant between God and his people, they are prey to Satan’s corruptive influence, especially the worldly pleasures of Babylon, by whose sorcery “all the nations were deceived” (18:23). Satan knows how to use the instability of the boundaries of the nations to his advantage and “will come out to deceive the nations . . . to gather them together for the war.” (20:8). The unification of the nations is thus a threat to God’s order, and his revenge is to send the heavenly armies together with his son to “strike down the nations”

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  29 and “rule them with a rod of iron” (19:15–16), with the intention of keeping them distinct and independent. After the final judgment and the establishment of the new Jerusalem, nations persist as territorial entities (21:24): The leaves of the Tree of Life will continuously work for their healing of nations (22:2), which, by the grace of God, will remain intact “to the end of history and beyond” (Boyer 1992: 148). As Boyer also points out, the emphasis on national integrity in Revelation has had widespread repercussions for latter-day apocalyptists, who have seen any attempt at unifying nations under a single organization, such as the UN or the EU, as the devil’s work (1992:148). But the importance given to the nations in Revelation has also spawned ideas about the role of the modern nation in the apocalyptic scheme, as made particularly evident in American evangelical attitudes to nuclear arms during the Cold War. The premillennial conviction that Armageddon is approaching according to God’s plan and that the nations play an essential part of this plan occasioned evangelicals to refrain from protesting against and to some extent even prompted support for the nuclear arms race. Such apocalyptic notions have even spilled over the relatively narrow evangelical circles into the very heart of American power, as we will see in the last chapter of this study. As has been stated repeatedly in this chapter, the end of history does not only pertain to time but also to place, but something remains to be said about the fact that it is in this place that the narrative point of view is located, and, more generally, about the spatiality of apocalyptic narration as such. The narrative position after the end of time distinguishes the apocalyptic from the prophetic tradition, which it nevertheless springs from. For even though both relate the story of the future of the world, they do so from distinctly different vantages, which also accounts for their relation to the narrated as well as to their audience/ readers.6 In the prophetic tradition, the narrator is firmly placed in the audience’s present and interprets the signs of the current situation to predict the future: Simply put, the way things are going, we are likely to bring disaster upon ourselves. Since the future is not carved in stone, the prophet cannot predict the future but can only study the present and draw consequences of it for the time to come, yet on the other hand, the prophet has the power to change the course of history by preaching moral actions and faith (Bergoffen 21–22). The prophet is thus essentially an activist, taking to the streets to speak directly to his audience, seeking to provoke response and action, which of course accounts for the sense of urgency in tone and style (Bergoffen 26). By contrast, relating the reader’s future in the past tense, the apocalyptic narrator emphasizes that the future has already been seen, has already been established. Since in the apocalyptic tradition, history and its termination are predetermined by a power that exists independently of worldly affairs and the flow of time, the individual cannot change

30  A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse history but can only better his or her own situation within this already set scheme. Since they were not asking people to change the course of history but to understand it, their message did not require dialogue or direct confrontation. Consequently, if the tone of the prophet is imploring, that of the apocalyptic narrator is passive, however dramatic the reported events may be, and, similarly, if the prophet engages in current events, the apocalypticists narrate from a position at one remove from street level (Bergoffen 26). The aloofness of the apocalyptic narrator is concretized through the numerous ascents to heaven described in apocalyptic texts. As Martha Himmelfarb remarks, during the period of the First Temple, God was believed to have an earthly abode in the Jerusalem temple: The prophet Isaiah, for example, describes a divine encounter in the temple, where God gives the narrator his prophetic commission. The destruction of the temple, however, meant that God was in effect rendered homeless or at least bereft an earthly residence. Consequently, for the apocalyptic narrator, ascension to the heavenly temple became the prerequisite for meeting the Lord and thus a stock motif in apocalyptic literature, as in for example Enoch (Himmelfarb 22–23). John is even more mobile, his narrative platform changing from earth to heaven, where a wide-open door awaits him (4:1). As Resseguie asserts, the door “allows John to cross the threshold of earth to heaven and to see an above point of view that interprets what happens on earth” (106). This door, however, “is not only a boundary between heaven and earth but also a boundary between future and present” (Resseguie 106), enabling the narrator to speak from a doubly privileged position. John’s bird’s eye perspective yields a vision of a world that is the reverse of the heavenly order, showing what the world would look like if the underworld took control over it. John in this manner sees the world as turned “inside out and upside down” (Resseguie 43). Thompson, similarly, sees a “correspondence in different dimensions of John’s world,” where the ascent is a metaphor for the transition to a higher spiritual state as well as a “time warp from the present to the future” (1991: 121). Issues related to the spatiality of apocalyptic narration will play a vital role in the following discussions, particularly those pertaining to Morrison’s and Ward’s novels, which at once acknowledge and break with the apocalyptic tradition by unsettling and to some extent even subverting the height/ depth dichotomy so essential to the apocalyptic point of view.

Notes 1 Historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis of 1893, which describes the frontier as the spatial fulcrum that has formed the very core of American mentality, is the most famous example, but a similar foregrounding of place and space has held sway through the twentieth and into the twentyfirst century. See The Frontier in American History (1921). Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner suggest that “space comes large and rough-hewn

A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse  31

2 3 4 5 6

in America, where sprawling, unfinished vistas are both exhilarating and daunting, beckoning a fresh start for some, bringing emptiness for others” (3). Similarly, Philip Fisher argues that the history of America to a much greater extent than that of other nations is a history of transportation: Place in America … has often been casual, the crossroads of one or another system of movement.… The erasure of place in the aftermath of systems that turned out to be only temporary is one of the fundamental American stories, the story of “ghost towns”. (44) For a thorough account of the transition from place to space in religion, philosophy, and science, see Casey (1997) 73–129. The phrase was coined by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989). Ibid. See for example D.E. Aune, Revelation 6–16 (1998). As Bergoffen explains, the prophetic tradition has been more vital within Judaism since it has typically stressed moral action, whereas the apocalyptic tradition, which ascribes less significance to the covenant between God and humanity, has grown strong within Christianity (27).

2

“That Theory of Paradise” Rick Moody’s Suburban Apocalypse

This chapter focuses on Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994) and Purple America (1997), more specifically on their usage of suburban settings to comment on and critique certain facets of modern America via the two great cities of Revelation: Babylon and the new Jerusalem. As the following pages will evince, this unusual pairing of two significant genres in the American literary tradition (the long-established apocalyptic genre and the more recent genre broadly termed “suburban fiction,” the status and characteristics of which will be elaborated on below) serves to revitalize each, just as the bringing together of the different spatial dimensions of the genres opens up new possibilities for reflection on the state and course of American society. The thematic and symbolic similarities between the two novels notwithstanding, a closer study of their spatiality will disclose contrasting attitudes to the apocalyptic myth. Investing its fictional universe with redemptive and ultimately also revelatory powers, The Ice Storm can be said to be “apocalyptic” in the original sense of the word, whereas Purple America implies that American notions of progress and success commensurate with apocalyptic narratives may ultimately turn on themselves and paradoxically result in post-productive and post-historical stasis. “The American suburb” no doubt gives rise to a broad array of associations, most of which, however, are likely to be linked to two main spatial types: the affluent garden suburb dating back to the early decades of the nineteenth century and the mass-produced suburb originating in the 1920s, both of which were the spatial responses to specific social needs. The earlier suburbs were semi-rural residential areas established to cater to new housing demands, their immediate purpose being to offer the middle classes a refuge from the hectic and allegedly also perilous energies of the rapidly growing cities, causing a separation between domestic and commercial realms.1 But it can also be argued in this context that the intersectional status of the suburb—its conceptual location between wilderness and civilization—has suited American cultural needs particularly well historically, as it incited a taming or “culturalization” of uninhabited land at the same time as it capitalized on the resources of nature America had to offer. It is not a coincidence that

“That Theory of Paradise”  33 the incorporation of new land masses in the West in the mid-nineteenth century was accompanied by veritable cult of domesticity in the East, a trend that was readily picked up by A.J. Downing, whose bestselling advice on how to create the perfect suburban home became a lodestar to thousands of new and often somewhat anxious middle-class homeowners. Equally important, however, was a reverse process where the new suburban aesthetics also endorsed a “naturalization” of newly established residential areas: Tending to one’s own grounds was perceived as the best way of vouching for stability on a local and national level, gardening becoming an antidote to the harmful influence of modernity at the same time as it gave suburbia an air of old age and tradition, despite its uncontested novelty (Major 17). In the 1920s, mass-production of houses and household goods made the American suburb accessible to a wider spectrum of the middle class and later also to the working class. In Philip Fisher’s analysis the proliferation of suburbs can be linked to an old, even original, American ambition, namely the dissemination of “democratic social space,” a strategy aimed at a “creative destruction” of distinctions and contrasts and a compensation for a perceived lack of common history, language, and religion. Geographically, America was also too vast and varied to correspond to any notion of “land” as its diverse climates and terrains could not be regarded as a unifying force or advocate a certain “way of life.” Under such circumstances, a readiness to cast off past identities like a worn-out overcoat became imperative but far from sufficient. A new identity must be instantly available, “ready-to-wear,” and democratically accessible to all, an identity which would also find its spatial counterpart in the suburb: Everywhere in America, Fisher points out, almost identical suburbs can be spotted, with similar houses, similar rectilinear streets with similar-sounding names, and similar cars and gardens. The relative uniformity and transparency of these areas, Fisher argues, are ultimately aimed at glossing over conflicts and replace differences with a common “life-style.” “Ultimately,” Fisher argues, “wherever you move, the new place will be enough like the old to feel very quickly ‘like home.’ It is an interesting American invention, both semantic and literal, to live not ‘at home’ but in a place that feels ‘like home’” (45). Their differences notwithstanding, two suburban types presented above share a common both/and ideology concretized in a number of ways pertaining to spatial practices, that is, the way people move through and interact with space, including “the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life, and leisure” (Lefebvre 38). The suburb was to provide its residents with easy access to the city they had willfully removed themselves from; it was built up as a site of traditional, even timeless values, while simultaneously providing all the novelties modernity had to offer (indeed, the very prerequisite for this semi-rural refuge was the technology that enabled its residents to

34  “That Theory of Paradise” commute); it catered for the independence of the family unit at the same time as it facilitated interaction between these units through proximity as well as homogeneity; and it created an entirely new topography in combining natural and urban traits in new ways. The basic principles of the suburb, then, engender and sustain a corrosion of difference between cities, between urban and rural territories, and between different local cultures. These principles, as the following pages will demonstrate, are also essential to the communication between suburban and apocalyptic sites that Moody’s novels initiate and that is encapsulated in the phrase “that theory of paradise.” In Purple America, the phrase refers to a vision of an ideal suburban life free of discord and conflicts, but in this chapter, it pertains to both novels more generally as epitomizing an idea of spatial evolution commensurate with apocalyptic teleology: the development from divided to unified space. As the following analysis will also demonstrate, however, this “theory” plays out very differently in the novels. In the suburban realm of The Ice Storm the process of “creative destruction,” to return to Fisher, has not reached its conclusion, meaning that boundaries are transgressed and cracks invite chaos, all of which, however, ultimately pave the way for a new world. In Purple America, by contrast, the vision has come to full fruition but does not make for a realm of peace, but for a solipsistic place where change equals slow and steady degeneration. In fiction, the suburb has been highly contested territory from the very beginning, the suburban novel itself seeming to find its raison d’être in a desire to expose the suburb either as eroded moral ground or as a chilling mausoleum devoid of energy and community. For example, as Benjamin Christopher Stroud demonstrates, the novels by John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, and J.D. Salinger abound in pejorative descriptions of the mass-produced suburbs threatening to turn their residents into “a soulless, malleable conformity for conformity’s sake bred from the starkness of the landscape” (17). In the same vein, Catherine Jurca shows how novelists John Updike, Sinclair Lewis, and Frederick Barthelme represent Suburbia as a disenchanted utopia where the white, middle-class, and predominantly male protagonist cannot but feel victimized by the very lifestyle that singles him out as privileged (6). The tragedy of suburban man is added to by the absence of viable alternative: There is no escape route, no “original” home to return to, and no promising future to explore. Having reached the end not only of his personal history but also of spatial evolution, he has no other options but to indulge in soulless, reckless consumerism and/or self-destructive behavior of various kinds. 2 Depicting the bleak, middle-class life in affluent American garden suburbs, The Ice Storm and Purple America can certainly be said to extend the tradition outlined above. As Stroud aptly argues, however, suburban fiction must, perhaps more so than most other genres, reinvent

“That Theory of Paradise”  35 itself in relation to its own inheritance, precisely “because of its burden of perceived mundanity—of the sense… that there’s nothing new to say about the suburbs” (13). Moody’s novels, as suggested above, achieve such renewal by relating his suburban tales to the cosmic dimensions of apocalypse while at the same time breathing new life into the substantial and culturally essential body of American apocalyptic writings by associating it with middle-class American life. Both The Ice Storm and Purple America subject prosperous New England suburbs to irrevocable disintegration, and both place this demise within an elaborate apocalyptic framework. Importantly, however, focusing on different stages of the apocalyptic master plot—before and after the catastrophe—and consequently also investing the suburb with divergent social and existential prospects, the novels differ decidedly in their apocalyptic outlook. Pre-cataclysmic in its narrative focus, The Ice Storm primarily describes the period leading up to the disaster, whose onset is accompanied by escalating conflicts and portentous signs. In Purple America, by contrast, the catastrophe has already occurred, the conflicts ceased, and a stifling sense of stasis dominates the suburban territory at large. But the two novels can also be understood through the well-known settings of the apocalyptic plot, more specifically the places before and after the cataclysmic event. The suburban setting in The Ice Storm, I will argue, recalls the depraved city of Babylon, which must be destroyed in order for a new horizon to open up, whereas the fictional world of Purple America, located beyond the end of history, resembles but also significantly revises the eternal architecture of the new Jerusalem. From this it follows that since Babylon is part of a historical process, it is also subject to change, while the new Jerusalem has reached its ideal state and has thus traveled beyond such expectations. One can escape from Babylon but the new Jerusalem is the final destination, or, as Ellinor Shaffer succinctly puts it, “[t]he new Jerusalem has no end” (138). The plot of The Ice Storm centers around two families, the Hoods and the Williamses, who lead seemingly comfortable suburban lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, in the early 1970s: In the opening pages, the reader is introduced to what is described as “the most congenial and superficially calm of suburbs. In the wealthiest state in the Northeast. In the most affluent country on earth” (3).3 From the beginning too, however, it is clear that something is amiss. Thanksgiving has just passed but is already forgotten (3), and an undefined but irrepressible anguish controls the speech, actions, and thoughts of the characters. “Trust,” it is said of Benjamin Hood, “never overpowered him. [He] was full of dread. And anxiety” (7). This general fretfulness is paralleled by increasingly destructive behavior as parents neglect their children and as virtually each and every one of the spouses betrays each other: The word “adult” equals “adultery.” But as Benjamin tries to explain his affair with Janey, wife and mother of the Williams’ family, to his wife

36  “That Theory of Paradise” Elena, he does so by referring to a more general process of moral decay, of which he is only a part: “Look around you, anyway. It’s the law of the land. People are unfaithful. The government is unfaithful. The world is” (71). Wealthy, powerful, yet ridden by deception and transgressions, New Canaan is indeed a middle-class, latter-day Babylon, but like Babylon too, the Connecticut suburb reflects a larger, even global, moral deterioration. In New Canaan, the spatial practices, in Lefebvre’s terms, are at odds with representations of space. The characters seem to ignore or even subvert the authoritative plan behind the suburb intended to keep the family unit intact, to safeguard the integrity and self-sufficiency of each household: Each movement in space amounts to a trespassing, and each human encounter to a transgression. Analogously, in Resseguie’s analysis, the numerous sexual metaphors linked to Babylon in Revelation “accentuate the crossing of boundaries that are established through covenant relationships, and are descriptive not only of illicit sexual relations but also of other areas that are marred by desire, transgression, confused boundaries, and compromise” (22). The parallel encounters between Janey’s son Mike and Benjamin’s daughter Wendy are construed as a teenage version of the Babylonian merger of sex and economic transaction,4 where two boxes of gum are exchanged for some advanced groping. Wendy sees these acts above all as a means of subverting suburban codes and expectations: “Because the town was barren as a rock face. Because her family was chilly and sad…. That is why she did it. Or if love existed, it was buried so far down in work and politeness that its meager nectar could never be pumped to the surface” (96). Significantly, the moral transgressions are paralleled by a pattern of spatial trespassing that violates the boundaries that organize and control the apocalyptic universe as a whole. For example, the meetings between the two teenagers result in the real or symbolic violation of Christian representations of space intended to protect and fortify family structures. They undress in the graveyard “where none came to mourn, where kids practiced their French inhaling,” piling their clothes on “some family mausoleum” (40), and the basement of the Williams, house, where most of their encounters take place, reminds Wendy of “the frugal architecture of local churches… those small altars where just prior to communion the minister arrayed himself in his professional garment, and where the sacred vessels moldered. Sacristy?” (41). The basement is imagined by Wendy as the subconscious of the Williams’ house, where each item turns into a distorted version of itself: “The Ping-Pong table [that] sagged in the middle of the room, like a rotting sea vessel” (42), echoes the image of the moldering vessels of the sacristy, and the minister’s putting on sacred garments is similarly perverted and turned into sexual roleplay: The narrator suggests that Wendy could have shed her clothes and her “church-going, cheerleading Ivory Soap

“That Theory of Paradise”  37 girl” at the same time but adds that “[t]his was New Canaan, after all”, and so Wendy instead puts on “more roles, more deceits” (43), engaging Mike in a carefully directed play seemingly modeled on X-rated movies. The theme of masquerade and deceit is of course found also in Revelation, where Babylon’s luxurious garments mask the truth of her sinfulness, just like the golden cup in her hand is “full of abomination” (17:4–5). In the same way that sex, as a composite of economic transaction and deceit, mirrors the more general deprivation of Babylon in Revelation, Moody lets the transgressions within and between the suburban families reflect those of the nation as a whole: By 1973, the Summer of Love had entered the consciousness of suburban America, but in a hypocritical version where love is not free but rather a business transaction and where “the commodity being traded was wives” (55). The “idea of betrayal was in the air” (55), in the suburbs, but also in the nation as a whole, as evinced through numerous references to the Watergate scandal. As the depravity worsens, so does the weather, the two propelling the apocalyptic plot that takes control of the fictional universe in its entirety: “The weather report was bad. Rain, rain, and then turning sharply colder. It was coming down in sheets now and mixed with harder stuff” (19). When Benjamin Hood has ended up in the bed of the guest room of the neighboring house awaiting a not-so-romantic encounter with Janey, the wind, begirding the center of the transgressions, seems to voice its rage at the sinners: “The wind gusted fiercely, wailing its dissonances, turning the corner around Janey’s house, around the guest room, passing into the valley below” (19). The weather seems to react with increasing aversion and even disgust: “Surfaces contracted” (32); “The sleet and snow turned the last light a sullen yellow. The sky looked awful, nauseating” (50); “The mercury would retreat into its little bulb. The heavens would open” (52). The weather report is constantly on in the background as a kind of stand-in apocalyptic narrator, predicting and commenting on the developments with monotonous persistence and making it clear beyond any doubt that the disaster is approaching and that there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it; one can only focus on saving oneself. The problem with the residents of suburban Babylon, however, is that they do not pay heed to the warnings but keep to their original plans, worrying about every mundane thing but oblivious to the threat of real catastrophe. As Paul Hood laments, “no one believes in the weather anymore” (135). In a sense, the weather report is as irrelevant as Sandy’s action figure G.I. Joe, whose mechanical voice can only articulate one utterance: “Mayday! Mayday! Get this message back to base!” (141). The message fills Sandy with a vague sense of sadness, but the action figure, ironically, does not inspire any kind of concrete course of action. But the ice storm also seems to pave the way for a regeneration of some kind, rendering “the stuff of… everyday life beautiful again—magic,

38  “That Theory of Paradise” dangerous, and new” (210). Indeed, the name New Canaan is not entirely ironic but is, as the plot unfolds, increasingly associated with not only economic but also divine privilege. For example, as Wendy heads toward the Williamses, she experiences a sense of chosenness that transcends the thin familial relations, imagining “that she was the last girl on earth, that God had selected her and New Canaan as the center of His attention” (137). Wendy senses that the approaching disaster is somehow part of a cosmic drama in which she plays the role of daughter as if for the first time: protected, precious, and irreplaceable. Similarly, Wendy’s older brother Paul, who turns out to be the narrator at the end of the novel, believes that he has a special link to God and so takes on the role of a traditional apocalyptic narrator. A suburban teenager, however, Paul has unconventional sources of inspiration for his apocalyptic narrative, most obviously the world of comic books, in particular the Fantastic Four. The appeal of the Fantastic Four is to Paul that it offers a parallel universe, a foil to the suburban events: “Still, the F.F., with all their mistakes and allegiances, their infighting and dependability, told some true tale about family. When Paul started reading these books, the corny melodrama of New Canaan lost some of its sting” (80). It is not primarily this synthesis of recognition and escapism that appeals to Paul, however, but the sense of imminent cataclysm, provoked by the villain Annihilus, that the comic books holler out. At a newsstand at the train station, number 141 catches Paul’s attention, its excessiveness of tone not far behind that of John’s: it “beckoned to him. It boasted, unsurprisingly, the end of the Fantastic Four. On the cover, a deeply perturbed Sue held in her arms her irradiated son: ‘Little Franklin is glowing like an ATOMIC BOMB!’” Significantly, this causes him to clutch it “like it was a religious scroll or high-court decision” (90). But like a traditional apocalyptic narrator, Paul is dismayed by the state of things in his environment, narrates from a point in the future, and suggests that his voice is inspired by divinity and that the detection and interpretation of the signs of divinity are part of his narrating task. 5 The mind of God, Paul claims in a true apocalyptic fashion, cannot be scanned directly but must be understood through different signs and omens: “Okay, the time has come in this account for a characterization of the mind of God. Just briefly, for thematic reasons. Happily there’s no need to concern ourselves with this mind as it has expressed itself directly, because it hasn’t, really. Therefore this story can be content with indirect examples, with metaphor and with evidence from nature” (205). As Richard Dorson argues, “[s]ince the Puritan and Reformation concept, God willed every event, from the black plague to the sparrow’s fall, all event held meanings for errant man. The Lord worked chiefly through natural or secondary causes, or He might intervene directly in the processes of the world, as a first cause, but whichever the case, He guided every occurrence” (qtd. Wojcik 22). Paul’s preoccupation with

“That Theory of Paradise”  39 the indirect signs of God’s will is accordingly in the tradition of a long line of Puritan preachers such as John Cotton, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather.6 Paul exemplifies the “metaphorical” signs with a dream of his father Benjamin’s, in which he cannot figure out whether the events are happening in 1973 or 1991. In the dream Jim Williams answers Benjamin that “the past and the future happen in the present moment” (205). The merging of the time perspectives is characteristic of the apocalyptic narrator, who typically describes the upheavals that will take place in the future from a point after the end of time. Future events are thus related in the past tense, the effect being that future appears to have already occurred. The same dream, moreover, would be dreamed by Benjamin’s son, the narrator Paul, many years later, possibly in 1991, and it is through this connection between father and son that Paul formulates his relationship to God as well as his narrating task: “This congruency— between Paul and his Dad—is sort of like the congruency between me, the narrator of this story, the imaginer of all these consciousnesses of the past, and God” (206). The father, however, would never know that “his son would dream this very dream, that his son would wake and retell it and in the retelling become his father’s imaginer as well as his father’s son. His father’s narrator” (206). The passing on of this vision from father to son corresponds to divine revelation: A medium for his father, the narrating son also invents the father, just as John formulates God in the Book of Revelation. The son is both the product and the producer of the father, and, analogously, the narrator’s voice is both inspired by and constructive of the voice of God. In a marijuana-induced fantasy at a prospective girlfriend’s house in Manhattan, Paul meditates over six personal crises, which he soon realizes are actually seven, Watergate included. “Holy shit” (95) is his profane exclamation when considering the portent of the number seven. Revelation is of course replete with the number seven: Seven candles, seven angels, seven thunders, and so on. But it is the seven seals and the ensuing seven trumpets that constitute the most momentous of the sevens in the text. When each seal to the book of apocalypse is opened, a crisis occurs, but as the seventh seal is broken, seven trumpets sound, the first six cuing different catastrophic events, and the seventh proclaiming the Second Coming of Christ and the subsequent judgment of the dead. The narrator Paul’s emphasis on seven crises (rather than six) is consequently significant not only on a personal level but also to the structure of the narrative, as it signals that the end and possibly a revelation are near. And indeed, the storm changes all dimensions of the suburban landscape. Outside, “[t]he ice [builds] up on every surface” (175), and inside, houses are flooded as the plumbing freezes and breaks. The catastrophic plot reaches its climax when the entire area is darkened by a tree falling on a power line, which also causes Mike Williams to be electrocuted.

40  “That Theory of Paradise” It is Benjamin who, by chance, finds his neighbors’ boy’s body, and his first impulse is to run, but then “fate smiled” on him; “grace flickered in  him” (218), and instead of fleeing, he embraces Mike, “caring for him in death as meticulously as he had disliked him in life” (219), becoming, in that moment, the father he had previously failed to be. When carrying Mike, Benjamin realizes “that this body, this abbreviated life, this disaster, was his” and that “he would exercise an almost parental control over this tragedy” (220). The death of Mike even amounts to a revelation, unveiling perspectives of eternity as well as finality: “The revelation of death was that Mike Williams would be dead as long as Benjamin knelt by him…. This was the miracle. Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around” (219). As they gather outside the Williames’ house before the ambulance takes Mike’s body to the morgue, it is “the last time when the Hoods and the Williamses would be this close, when their stories would be so easily told together” (259), marking the end of the common suburban life of the two families and by necessity also of the narrative itself. Elena senses in this demise the faint possibility, if not of a new heaven and a new earth, at least of a different kind of existence. The moment therefore harbors all the weight and import of Judgment Day: She seeks forgiveness and realizes that everything depends on this but does not know how to utter the crucial words: Look, Elena knew that apology was the impossible paragraph, its words were like the secret names of God. Simple apology, simple acknowledgement. That stuff, all that stuff that happened, it’s all forgotten. It’s history. Simple, right? They were all forgiven and free, unshackled, liberated to go and unravel the narratives of their lives. They were free to take up their fates, to take up their nameless destinies. So why didn’t apology come to Elena’s lips? Or to Benjamin’s? Elena wanted to say all this, to say impossible, ancient words of confession and absolution. And she knew that if she didn’t, she was condemned to watch the blunders of the past come around again for a revival, an encore presentation. (259) To free oneself from the burden of history, the novel suggests, one must confess one’s sins, mistakes, and lapses, yet doing so is a terrifying thing, a letting go of the known territories of the past without the certitude of a life to come, leaving one “transfixed… by the spectacle of a lost future” (260). This impasse, however, is broken by a revelation that puts the doubts to rest, at least momentarily: And right then there was a sign in the sky. An actual sign in the sky. The conversation stopped and there was a sign in the sky and it knotted together everything in that twenty-four hours. Above the

“That Theory of Paradise”  41 parking lot. A flaming figure four. And it wasn’t only above the parking lot. They saw it all over the country, over the Unitarian Church of Stamford, over New Canaan High School, over the Port Chester train station and up and down the New Haven line, over emergency vehicles in Greenwich and Norwalk, over the little office where Wesley Myers was trying to write the next day’s sermon, for the first Sunday in Advent. In halls devoted to public service, in private mansions and dilapidated apartments. The heavens declared: the flaming figure four. They saw it from the Firebird. They did, and it stayed with them all that fall, that apotheosis. (278–79) The novel’s entire world is now “knotted together” by a fire sign in the sky, and the moral aberrations and shortcomings of New Canaan are encompassed by a complete apocalyptic scheme, the celestial message dovetailing with the four Sundays in Advent and declaring the (Second) Coming of Christ. The narrator Paul, through a performative utterance, proclaims this very moment to be the end of the story: “And this story really ends right at that spot” (279). In this manner Moody’s text, in a true apocalyptic fashion, balances sinfulness with salvation, suppression and veiling with revelation, and, most importantly, cataclysm with reconstruction: The Ice Storm finalizes the destruction of a moral ground that has somehow anyway already eroded, and yet the catastrophe is primarily a portal to entirely new existential premises. If, as Lefebvre argues, representations of space are driven by an ambition to homogenize space (38–39), Purple America sees the full realization of such spatial aspiration. Indeed, perhaps unexpectedly, a certain accord between apocalyptic spatial thought and Lefebvre’s Marxistinspired theories can be discerned in the teleological conviction that space evolves automatically toward a state of perfection, a final realm of abstraction, where difference and discord have been quelled. Lefebvre’s “abstract space” and utopian space are both essentially devoid of that which characterizes historical space, namely diversification and separation, being “the places of that which has no place, or no longer has a place” (Lefebvre 163). But scholars have also drawn parallels between apocalyptic patterns and modern teleological narratives as formulated by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), published only a few years before Purple America. Fukuyama, we recall, argues that liberal democracy, free from such radical inner tensions and contradictions that have characterized all earlier forms of governments, constitutes the final point of humanity’s ideological evolution. The system of liberal democracy is perfect; it cannot be improved, and thus history, in the Hegelian sense of the term, has reached its end. In Krishan Kumar’s analysis, the modern apocalyptic imagination exemplified by Fukuyama is “a kind of

42  “That Theory of Paradise” millennial belief almost entirely emptied of the conflict and dynamism that generally belong to it. It is a millennial belief without a sense of the future. We have, it seems, at the end of the second millennium achieved the millennium, the hoped-for state of peace and plenty. But it brings no pleasure, and promises no happiness” (205). The teleological outlook shared by apocalyptic texts and Lefebvre’s and Fukuyama’s theories is comparable also to the suburban space of Purple America, which, repressing diversity and conflict, appears to have traveled beyond time itself. The main character Hex (short for the more adept-ringing Dexter) is a childless alcoholic in his mid-thirties with a speech impediment and a stillborn career in freelance publishing to his name. The novel spans twenty-four hours of Hex’s life, during which he returns to the New England suburb where he had spent most of his childhood together with his now-deceased father Allen and his mother Billie. It is not a happy return. The house, having largely been left unattended after the death of Allen, is sadly dilapidated, and Billie is rendered immobilized from a progressive neurological disease. Deserted by her second husband Lou, who is simultaneously laid off from the local power plant, Billie persuades Hex to sign a contract that obliges him to take her life when the disease has progressed beyond a certain point. The cataclysmic event, the aftermath of which controls much of the narrative present, is an A-bomb test in the 1940s, whose fallout is the likely cause of Allen’s deferred death decades later. Allen describes the effects of the explosion in a letter to Billie as something unforeseen, undefinable, and indeed apocalyptic in its all-encompassing scope: No one has any idea of what that flash looks like. Even if they say they do. It depends on where you’re standing. I don’t think there’s even a name for that kind of light…. It was bright blue at the beginning. There was a boiling in the sky, a boiling of lights and clouds and sea…. The cloud unfurled kind of like a morning glory, with shapes I’m not sure I would have been able to forecast, even with all the number-crunching machines in the world. Then the sun started to peek over the horizon. It was second fiddle by comparison. The sky was luminous and grey and violet while all this swept over us. We were fifty miles away with the whole sky the color of purple. The shock wave reached us by then—this was in parts of second—and we had to hold on to whatever was loose. Hats and papers, it all went into the drink. The wind was so hot, a sirocco. We hung on, and this bruise in the sky enveloped us. I had to remind myself to breathe. (297) And yet the apocalyptic overtones notwithstanding, the cataclysmic event is, in fact, the very opposite of revelatory, paradoxically unveiling

“That Theory of Paradise”  43 lies rather than the truth. If the nuclear accident destroys Allen’s membranes, causing his blood to overflow the bodily boundaries, a similar thing happens to language, as also the linguistic spheres of the nuclear age are dominated by a semiotic of diffusion. As Kenneth Millard observes, at this point in time, as the 1950s and the Cold War are just around the corner, is when fathers—here assuming the role of an authority or even the authorities—start lying; it is the beginning of inauthenticity and linguistic diversions (259). The fusion of nuclear technology and linguistic diversion is explicitly connected to apocalyptic discourse in the novel through references to Eisenhower’s famous address “Atoms for Peace” (1953). As the CEO of the nuclear power company fails to cover up a radioactive leak, he tries to make Lou take the blame. To achieve this, he spins a web of lies, which he seeks to corroborate by quoting the line “[m]oving out of the dark chamber and into the light” (47) from Eisenhower’s speech, in which the latter argues that the task of the nation is to translate the dark language of atomic warfare into one of light and promise, focusing on the benefits of nuclear technology for mankind in general and Americans in particular: Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “Great Destroyers,” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s neverending quest for peace and mankind’s God-given capacity to build…. It is with the book of history, and not with isolated pages, that the United States will ever wish to be identified…. So my country’s purpose is to help us move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, to find a way by which the minds of men, the hopes of men, the souls of men everywhere, can move forward toward peace and happiness and well being. (4) Eisenhower here masks the threats of nuclear weapons by dressing it up in traditional apocalyptic garments, embedding the cataclysmic element in a national and cosmic narrative of hope, progress, and regeneration. As the grown-up Hex comes across his father’s obituary, he discovers that it mostly consists of fabrications with regard to origin, education, military record, and, as Hex notes with considerable perturbation, “even his own middle name” (64). Tellingly, Hex draws parallels between the semiotics of nuclear physics and the mythmaking surrounding his father like a self-generating web of language with neither beginning nor end: “There seemed to be only loose ends here, narratives that spun out limitlessly. It was like Allen’s own work, his physics, where one theory spawned another without conclusion” (67). The fact that apocalyptic discourse is made part of this pattern of deception of course reflects the status of apocalypse in the novel as a whole: Purple America is post-apocalyptic, not only in the sense that it depicts the time after the catastrophe but also in Heffernan’s definition

44  “That Theory of Paradise” of the term, namely, the time “after the faith in a radically new world” (6): After the faith in revelation, unveiling, and indeed, after the belief in the apocalyptic myth itself. Moody’s representation of the suburb in Purple America tallies with the new Jerusalem in three aspects: The post-historic location, the merging of opposites, and the consequent absence of conflicts. In the new Jerusalem, as we have seen, the dividing lines between life and death, night and day, and heaven and earth have effectively been done away with,7 and the divisions that had contributed to driving history forward have collapsed into what can be compared to Lefebvre’s notion of abstract space, or as Goldsmith puts it, “appearance of ideal form” (5) and “content without time” (44). Perfection, as it were, can only be realized in a purely aesthetic place situated outside of time’s grasp, a place that therefore is both utterly static and perfectly uniform. Hex tellingly refers to the move from New York to the New England suburb as a “blow of relocation” and a “trauma of relocation” alternately, evoking Native American relocation to the reservations and a complete negation of place, identity, history, and culture. His greatest loss when arriving in New England, however, seems to be that of difference itself: “he was seven when they moved here from the city, away from the predations of what used to be called simply Town—the ghettos, the crime, the immigrants, the other classes—when they moved here according to that theory of paradise, that theory of the fifties” (18).8 The suburb dissolves not only geographical distinctions but also cultural dividing lines, giving rise to a uniformity that erases difference without signaling community. In the suburb, the opposites and contrasts that are vital parts of society at large seem to have been finally overcome. Further, the technology that could have vitalized the spatial practices of the suburb is steadily deteriorating. Hex’s rental car is leaking fuel and explodes toward the end of the novel, the interstate is in constant need of repair, and the computer around which the early pages of the novel revolve does not set communication free but is little but a poor replacement for Billie’s lost voice: “not her own voice at all, which had been rich and full, with vigorous laughter, ample melody—her voice was gone” (13). Even the nuclear power plant is leaking, causing a general “brown-out,” which may best be described as the technological equivalent to Hex’s stuttering speech: [T]he streetlights twinkle, the dialysis machines gasp, the VCRs all across the Northeast blink 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, computers hiccup and gobble their random access memories, house alarms go off, heart monitors flat-line, children’s nightlights fail, the systematic brownout flickers across the whole of the northeast corridor, once, twice, three times, and the boy chef of the all-night pizza joint says, What the fuck, the oven resets, the tap on the

“That Theory of Paradise”  45 cola machine goes out, and the jukebox—caught irreducibly on a recording by R.E.O. Speedwagon—shuts off its monotonous display of colors and then promptly begins anew with a swelling of pianistic abominations…. (233) Technology yields no progress, nor does it facilitate interaction, but rather resembles Lou’s futile attempt to row against the currents: “And he’s exhausted. And he can barely lift the oars. And with the currents running out to sea, he has to do twice the work to make any progress on the way in. In fact, Lou is working at peak capacity just to stay where he is” (154). The suburban space, it seems, is trapped between a past that cannot be recovered and a future that seems already spent, something which is mirrored in the predicaments of the characters: Jobless and childless, Lou sees himself being “between situations” (45), just as Hex’s speech impediment leaves him “stalled between consonants” (134). Symptomatically, several characters in the novel harbor the secret fear of unnoticeably passing the threshold to death. Billie’s anxieties about stopping breathing before her thinking goes (172) are matched by Lou’s obsession with checking his own pulse, to make sure that he has not already lived past his own death (153). The great irony of these fears is, of course, that it is precisely such a death-in-life existence that has laid siege to the house in Flagler Drive. A neither/nor territory, the suburb invalidates the distinction between life and death, and history as a steady progressive movement has reached its end. Disconnected from the past as well as the future, indeed, from history itself, the home in Flagler Drive is therefore best described as a Dickensian Satis House, where the clocks have stopped at the height of life. Purple America has been characterized as a Gothic novel,9 and indeed, the suburban landscape reeks of Gothic decay, caught in a process of perpetual decomposition. In the novel, the merging of opposites and the ensuing want of energy is most saliently epitomized by the color purple, which permeates the novel at different symbolic levels. The voice of the decorator responsible for the aesthetic strategies of the Raitliffe residence still seems to echo in the house, making the links between the color purple and the dissolution of dividing lines explicit: “[T]hey were working toward a union of opposites, the design team, in the matter of color harmonies” (19); “Mrs. Raitliffe expressed a very adventurous desire, a modern desire, to work with radiant colors. Especially colors in the purple family” (25). The symbolism of purple is also linked to the sphere of the body as the color of blood spilling into the texture of the skin: Hex is given a “shiner” that is “swollen and purple” (270) and that corresponds to the “plum-colored bruise of his personality” (190). But as the title suggests, the suburban condition is also associated with a more general American predicament, both through the obvious reference to how certain states in a presidential election are purple politically, a melting together of Republican red

46  “That Theory of Paradise” and Democrat blue, and through the associations to the color of a bleeding American flag. In a letter to Billie, Allen also conjoins national and bodily injury through the color purple in his description of the sky after the atomic bomb test: “the whole sky the color of purple”; “the bruise in the sky which enveloped us” (297). Purple also symbolizes the sense of stasis that dominates Flagler Drive. The purple hue of the living room is a “vestigial, leftover, a mere trace of the era that prevailed here—in the time before faded convertible couches and equipment…. The eidolons of Hex’s childhood are scarcely visible in the therapeutic glare of the present…. The pool table is gone, the bar mostly empty” (25). Furthermore, the color is connected with Billie’s immobile condition, as illustrated by the initial bathing scene, when Hex wipes his mother’s mouth with a “violet washcloth,” sweeps back “the annoying violet shower curtain” (3), and dries her with a purple towel of “decadent thickness” (5) after her bath. Historically the color reserved for kings, purple also suggests that the suburban territory is the crown of American spatial evolution, a connection sealed by Hex’s symbolic baptism in the family pool, when Allen welcomes him to the “kingdom of good life” (22), and by Lou’s packing a suitcase of “royal purple” (18) as he breaks up from his adopted suburban life. When Hex and Jane visit what had originally been a New England Congregationalist church, but which has now been deconsecrated into a night club, one of the historically most fixed and lasting dividing lines has become undone. The color scheme for such a transgression is self-evident to the narrator: The interior, of course, is aubergine. Or maybe heliotrope, or amethyst, or damson, or perhaps purpure, or something along the lines of archil, or mauve, or rather magenta, amaranth, mulberry, murrey, violaceous, or perhaps even fuchsia. It’s the color of monarchs, of the gods, the color used to trip up Agamemnon. The mirror ball spangled above them, with the tinted lights reflected and refracted upon it, picks up aspects of the violet draperies and purple vinyl booths and repeats them, until the room doubles, then quadruples. (240) The different shades of the color seem to attain a life of their own, multiplying, pouring out over their brims, ceaselessly dissolving their own limits in an ever-expanding movement, like a nuclear reaction. The future seeming to be already spent, Moody’s characters try to re-enter time by retracing their steps back to their origins: In this endeavor Moody revives one of America’s most long-lasting myths, namely that the world was starting over in America, was given a new chance when the old Europeans had so deplorably wasted theirs. In America,

“That Theory of Paradise”  47 history was only just beginning, an idea symbolized by the “American Adam,” in R.W.B. Lewis’ classic analysis a figure of “heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history” (1): Adam was the primordial man, an archetype, whose morality was untouched by experience and who had all the world and all the world’s history before him and no past to weigh him down. According to Lewis, even though the American Adam was practically a stock figure in antebellum America, different writers made very different uses of him. Whereas Emerson’s and Whitman’s portraits of the Adamic figure are in general thoroughly positive and affirmative, writers such as Melville and Hawthorne primarily used the myth for tragic purposes. For these writers, the story of Adam is only truly compelling in relation to the Fall insofar as the ideal of newborn innocence is most intensely felt through the certainty of a tragic demise. In addition, Lewis explains, Melville’s and Hawthorne’s strongest Adamic images appeared at the end of the writers’ careers and somehow summarized their experiences of America in its entirety. Already in the mid-nineteenth century, then, the myth was marked by a distinct quality of belatedness.10 As Wojcik argues, the apocalyptic myth of America as the new Jerusalem is often interlaced with that of America as Eden, the radical newness of the apocalyptic vision counterbalanced by a nostalgic yearning for a lost paradise, which places America in a simultaneous pre- and post-historic position: “This millennial paradise,” Wojcik suggests, “is envisioned as an entirely new world, although often it is the symbolic equivalent of a mythical golden age or a paradise lost projected into the future and occurring at the end of time” (14). Such a balancing act becomes particularly precarious when the vantage point is post-apocalyptic: When the dream of America as a “new heaven and new earth” or the “theory of paradise” has reached its dead end, the search for new beginnings is reduced to a passive, nostalgic dream of an original site where such hopes for the future still seemed viable. The apocalyptic plot also puts the beginning itself in a doubtful place as seen in the light of its inevitable but deplorable outcome, thus simply rehearsing the initial settlement and conquest. As Kinareth Meyer puts it, “[i]f America’s primal scene is Columbus arriving on an unknown shore, then the ethos reflected by American writers… can only be ambiguous: While they long to duplicate Columbus’s discovery of an untouched (prelapsarian) land, they also relive the Fall of appropriation (both material and poetic) again and again” (157). Consequently, all attempts to extend consciousness in time are instantaneously thrust back to the starting point, which, of course, is simultaneously the ending. Here, then, we find a radical and irresolvable contradiction. For whereas “placefulness,” as previously noted, is linked to history, a connection to roots and origins, American historiography is per definition one of progress, a movement forward in space and time.

48  “That Theory of Paradise” From this perspective, a nostalgic turning to the past does not yield a return to a primitive Edenic place but the resuscitation of a sense of progress long departed. Both Hex and Lou in this manner seek to evoke American primal scenes in their minds. Lou imagines the landscape “as it was before, before weekenders corrupted the landscape hereabouts, back when there was nothing in the neighborhood but thorns and Congregationalists” (162), and Hex turns to a time when the world seemed new and full of potential but invariably finds that the beginning is overwritten by the end, as in the opening scene of the novel, when the intricate relation between beginnings and endings takes shockingly intimate proportions. Here Billie’s disabled body is both a homeland and the primal scene which Hex seeks to recover as he gently but awkwardly bathes her: “Whosoever knows the folds and complexities of his own mother’s body, he shall never die” (3); “Whosoever knows the latitudes of his mother’s body, whosoever has taken her into his arms and immersed her baptismally in the first-floor tub… he shall never die” (7). Exploring the primal “geography” of life itself, Hex soaps “underneath her breast where he was once fed” (3); “looks at his pacific mom’s face in the water and knows… the face he had before he was born” (4); and “checks the dainty hairless passage into her vulva one more time, because he can’t resist the opportunity here for knowledge” (5), hoping that a return to the pre-catastrophic original site will save him from the death of the present. However, mother and son are trapped in a cycle of belatedness: The beginning can only be known through the grimness of the ending insofar as Billie’s disability warrants the caretaking, and the apocalyptic narrative has become an imprisoning framing device commensurate with Billie’s disease: “The relentless predictability of disabling traumas was beyond words, stretched out around her, fore and aft, hemmed her in” (13–14). The course of Billie’s all-consuming, progressive disease can neither be reversed nor be undone, and there is no time or place exempt from it. The destiny of Billie’s body is manifest; conclusive, like the apocalyptic plot itself. If the bathing scene is expressed in overtly apocalyptic language, the tone is also often parodic, as when the taste of a cheeseburger at a seaside diner makes Hex think of the West at the time of the Frontier: Of cattlemen, “tamers of nature,” founders of the American meat market, but also of the “religious families” that “rid the West of Native American vermin” (80). The beginning is here overshadowed by double endings. First, it coincides with the demise of the Native American peoples, and second, the Adamic guise that Hex assumes does not, in fact, seek a place outside or before civilization but extends the progress myth backward in time and space at the same time as the present effectively undoes the very same myth: American progress is read as “eight ounces of premium beef on a toasted bun with onion flakes, iceberg lettuce and

“That Theory of Paradise”  49 rock-hard hothouse tomatoes, artificial cheese food product from an industrial-sized squeezable (recyclable), no-brand ketchup and ballpark mustard, ringed with Tater Tots and ripple-sliced pickles” (80–81). Lou’s leaving the suburb, overwhelmed by his role as Billie’s caregiver, is also an attempt to re-connect with a sense of the original America. Symptomatically, however, he has roots confused with routes as the vistas that represent the origins of America are, in fact, roads. His first choice is the interstate, the I 95, a road symbolizing restless America: Citizens who have made the country what it is by following their own minds, who are constantly on the move in search for “a patch of contentment so far denied, the pursuit of happiness being written into the original national documents, for godsakes” (38). The road also stands for national integrity in that it was “given away for free by our government after the war to open civil defense routes in the event of enemy attack” (38). But general decay threatens to undermine the road and its symbolism alike, and Lou therefore decides to take a road that he imagines leads right into the very cradle of American civilization: [T]he Boston Post Road, the oldest road in the country, relic of the colonies, stretching from New York up to Boston, and then beyond, winding through the state of Maine, along that rocky coast and through the North Woods, through the logging country, before vanishing into the Canadian hinterlands. The Boston Post Road, where the warring private postal systems—which antedated the federal monopoly—hotfooted through the Indian turf, delivering to the Pilgrims. (39) The Edenic scene evoked here tells the story of a germinating American infrastructure and corporate system, but also, implicitly, the beginning of Native American annihilation. The beginning is consequently the beginning of the end, and the path into primal landscapes a movement backward and forward at the same time. For the act of moving toward the past simultaneously actualizes a movement in the opposite direction, annihilating the distinction between retrospect and prospect. The intermingling of origins and ends that the road enacts is further emphasized by Billie’s dismissal of it as a “road of merciless superficiality, where consumers come to get fleeced, and transients hurtle past” (70). If we regard the road as a spatial manifestation of history, it is a history that does not offer a different horizon but simply a prelude to the bleakness of the end. If movement in space is typically initiated by such impulses to reclaim historical time, these attempts are invariably directed back toward the present. When Hex has just returned to the suburb and learns the disconcerting news about Lou’s departure, he realizes that he is dangerously close to being drawn into suburban life again, aware that his mother now only has him to depend on. He clings to “an ordered linearity of events”

50  “That Theory of Paradise” (16) to somehow make sense of the present and the occurrences leading up to it, “an orderly sequence of events in which betrayal is followed by recognition, in which Hex Raitliffe’s mother tells him that her husband has left… in which past is ineluctably followed by present, this sequence necessarily unravels at this spot” (16–17). “Think of it in sequence” (17), he tells himself, as he walks through the house turning on lights, feeling “the past gathering around him” (18). Hex’s understanding of history, however, is confined to his suburban existence and even more narrowly limited to a tour of the house that has remained fixed since the “original day” (21). Almost compulsorily repeated over the years the tour is formalized by the family into what may best be described as a historical trail, a spatial history, with few or no possibilities for digressions or transgressions. At this point in time and space, then, “a long story begins” (17), but as the story stretches into the past, the beginning is also the end of the story. Significantly, the grown-up Hex imagines himself accompanied by the people who took the “original tour”: Himself as a child, his mother Billie as a young woman, and the interior decorator Mavis Ellsworth, the latter two taking on the roles of guides of a museum where objects and events are organized into a strict chronological order. If the foyer is the starting point of the tour, the portraits of Pilgrims on its walls signify the origins of the nation: “Yes, the portraits were the point of origin on that tour, and his mother as she led, as she held his hand, was beautiful and blond and her lips were painted brightly, this was before the cane, the long period of the cane” (18–19). The young Billie cannot be separated from the woman she later becomes, and in a sense, also the handicapped Billie struggles along on the tour. Further, as the portraits have no connection whatsoever to the owners of the house (who do not stem from New England at all) but merely correspond to a received notion of “American beginnings,” they bring the onlooker even further from what would qualify as roots: “Lou Sloane seemed to feel confused, as Hex did himself, by the fact that these people were not actual relatives” (19). Significantly, the Puritan portraits in the foyer are later replaced by a mirror, which suggests that history merely offers a foil to the present calamities, relentlessly casting back the image that had been sought relief from. We see here the national-historical parallel to Billie’s all-consuming, all-pervasive disease: Its apocalyptic course can neither be reversed nor be undone, and there is no time or place exempt from it. What has made suburban Americans unable to feel at home in the present, Moody ultimately seems to suggest, is that history does not hold up a clarifying picture, which would require difference, but is little but a retrospect reproduction of the same. The tour continues “[p]ast portraits of Esther Miller, Gentlewoman and Friend to Those in Need, 1840, pictured there in the first year of the Mormon Exodus, and Beloved Moses Trask, past the pewter candlesticks

“That Theory of Paradise”  51 forged in the shop of Paul Revere, which stood on a butter-churning table once housed at the Button Gwinnet Museum” (19). “You go through the foyer to the left,” the guide narrator continues, introducing the library with its red-leather volumes from “the proud early period of American letters: Whittier, Longfellow, Cooper, a dusty, unopened edition of Emerson” (20). The library opens up onto “the patio, the pool, and the vista” (21), three emblems of “the ideal of rural paradise” (20). The historical trail thus ends in the suburban 1950s, and here, Hex is symbolically baptized as a citizen of “the kingdom of the good life” (22), as Allen phrases it. But the baptism is repulsive to the young Hex, who immediately seeks to reverse it by reversing the tour, retracing his steps back to the beginning in the foyer and then, finally, his room, where he falls asleep on the bed. Like the younger version of himself, the middle-aged Hex is also intimidated by the prospect of being drawn into suburban life. In addition, “following … his original tour of the house step for step” (23), the middle-aged Hex also ends up on the bed of his childhood and youth. Both Hexes, in other words, seek to anchor an attenuated sense of present in the past, to restore a sense of meaning to their place in the world. Here, then, in his own room, “as the modern Hex completes his circular tour of his childhood” (24), the two selves finally melt together, causing a complete fusion of horizons and sealing the entrapment in the present. In Moody’s purple America, destiny is deplorably manifest: All is conquered, the future lies in the past, and yet the end fails to arrive in any revelatory sense. Furthermore, as the links between spatial practices and representational space have been severed, movement through space does not give rise to a corresponding symbolic or emotional journey. The suburban new Jerusalem seems hermetically closed. However, there are rare moments of freedom and discovery, but these do not go through the normal routes and networks but rather via infirmities in the otherwise solid structure. These instances can be compared to Lefebvre’s notion of differential space, a kind of utopian post-capitalist space characterized by inclusiveness and diversity. This space is “on the horizon” beyond the perfection of the capitalist world and offers a “transformed everyday life open to myriad possibilities” (Lefebvre 422–23). Lefebvre is neither crystal clear nor excessively wordy as to how this space may come about, but it appears to develop from imperfections and contradictions inherent to abstract space and which cannot be wholly effaced. Abstract space, in other words, seems to harbor the seed of its own transformation. Such opportunities, masked as imperfections, are sprinkled across the novel. For example Billie’s “perceptible language” dwindles, yet communication happens nonetheless, via a language scaled down to its primal stage of gesticulation and transmitted from generation to generation by way of filial affection: “This is the foundation of her language now, she is well aware, and therefore it’s the language of mothers and sons, the language of

52  “That Theory of Paradise” love between the Raitliffe generations, anyway; all recollections, beseechments, expressions of tenderness, along with her more mundane requests and importunities, must begin with this semantics of gesticulation” (9). Another such rare glimpse of a different horizon occurs at the end of the novel, when Hex and Jane, however momentarily, get a sense of some (imagined) original American experience via the glitches, gaps, and imperfections in the established structures: The house, reputedly brought west from a Dutch castle or a German castle, stone by stone, as all affluent residents of the coast say of their houses, doesn’t heat well. Indoors, D.A.A. Raitliffe is concerned about heat. Through the mortar, through the tiles on the roof, the chill, the disappointment of waste energy. Janet Sally Ingersoll has incipient hypothermia, digital frostbite, and/or seasonal flu in the incubation phase—lightweight jacket, damp leggings, boots without socks—but like colonial settlers the two of them begin to make a fire in the nearly habitable fireplace. (193) Like Billie’s language, the house as stones represents a stripping down to essentials, emphasized also by the way in which the listing of Jane’s medical conditions and the mundane hardships of the present are interrupted by an intimation of an alternative existence as “colonial settlers” and a sense of the past that is sensuous, being felt, and thus eludes the deadlock of the present. Touch gives rise to similar revelatory moments, like when Hex, uncertain about the procedures of intimacy, gives Jane a back rub in the same scene. Through his sensuous touch, he imagines America opening up to the North and East, to Asia and a shadowy presence he describes as the “Netherlandish” (206), whose associations bring together the geographical area, the subconscious, and the intimate regions of the body. Jane, similarly, finds in their embrace affiliations that she imagines reach across the “sorrel-colored desk globe”: In fact, if she’s being honest, she can even count herself as a member of that heretical society, that Masonic cult that permeates all the Americas and Western Europe and the newly democratized Eastern Bloc countries and even the poverty-stricken developing nations (she holds Raitliffe tightly against her) that parallel but backward civilization that spawns fairy tales and folk dances and all the wisdom passed orally from woman to woman, the society of fine moods. Covetously, she holds their ancient traditions in her heart; covetously, she whispers litanically to herself: things are pretty good. (210) As this analysis has revealed, the two novels engage with the apocalyptic myth in very different ways. In The Ice Storm, apocalypse is above all a means of breaking out of the suburban template, of reinventing family

“That Theory of Paradise”  53 relations and finding ways of rethinking oneself as father, mother, son, or daughter. Investing its symbolic universe with the redemptive and ultimately also revelatory powers of catastrophe, the Ice Storm can therefore be said to be apocalyptic in the traditional sense of the word. By contrast, in Purple America the abolishment of otherness and historical memory leaves the suburban dwellers stranded in a “theory of paradise,” a meaningless present where heaven is hell, perfection is monstrous, and, above all, where an existence exempt from the flow of time equals death. “Nothing unclean . . . shall ever come into it” (21:27), John states about the new Jerusalem, but the greatest problem with the American new Jerusalem that Moody outlines is not the terms and conditions of entry but rather the lack of visible passages out.

Notes

3

“A City Better than Perfect” Harlem as the New Jerusalem in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

The apocalyptic elements of Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) and Beloved (1987) have attracted a fair amount of attention from critics, who have primarily construed these novels as passages to a forgotten or repressed past. Maxine Lavon Montgomery suggests that the numerous disasters depicted in Sula are invested with a sort of retrospect escapist potential in that they open up paths into mythic African origins (74), and in a similar vein, Susan Bowers detects a backward-looking apocalyptic strand in Beloved which she sees as breaking with the mainstream, predominantly future-oriented, American apocalyptic tradition, the purpose being to recover the repressed traumas of the Middle Passage and slavery (60). Both critics regard the amalgamation of Christian apocalyptic thinking and African cosmology seen in the novels as the prerequisite for a recovery of the past, the latter offering a circular alternative to the former’s strict linearity (Bowers 60; Montgomery 10).1 Surprisingly little has been written about Jazz (1992) on the topic, however, which is particularly unexpected as the narrator’s vocabulary is pronouncedly apocalyptic from the very beginning, describing Harlem as a place where “[h]istory is over … and everything’s ahead at last” (7).2 Harlem, as one character remarks, is a city “better than perfect” (111), indeed, a new Jerusalem rising from the debris of African American history. This reading of Jazz focuses on the spatial rather than the temporal aspects of the novel’s apocalyptic framework and so espousing an alternative approach to that of the critics mentioned above. Jazz, I will consequently argue, is apocalyptic at its core, but in a way that causes temporality to be overwritten by spatiality, the apocalyptic myth primarily serving as a means of relating to place; of overcoming spatial fragmentation and relocating to solid (but not quite seamless) ground. At the same time, however, this spatial preoccupation spawns a different relation to the past, the annihilation of the old world and subsequent establishment of new territories giving rise to a new sense of time. The spatial upheavals and ensuing regeneration in this fashion mark a new beginning of African American history insofar as the past emerges from its repressed and disintegrated state to engage in a healing process which reformulates the meaning of historical cohesion. In Jazz, in other words,

“A City Better than Perfect”  55 geographical annihilation and regeneration do not, as in most apocalyptic myths, equal the final defeat of history but orchestrates the return of history in a new and unforeseen guise, which echoes the essential structure of the music genre. In African American culture, geography has frequently taken precedence over history. As history has been doubly exclusive (African Americans have not only been omitted from the dominant national narratives but were also effectively prevented from partaking of these through legislated illiteracy during slavery) geography has functioned as an alternative way of understanding oneself and one’s relation to the world over time. In Morrison’s writings, the relation between space and history is both thematically and structurally pivotal, space often negotiating the rifts inflicted on continuity and ultimately recovering a forgotten or repressed past. In Song of Solomon (1977), Pilate carries a geography book with her wherever she goes and collects a rock from each American state she visits. Geography in this manner works vicariously for history as tangible and indeed wordless stories of bygone times but also of forthcoming possibility. Also in Sula, history takes an essential spatial turn, being understood largely through the development of an African American neighborhood, which arises through the whim  of a slave owner and declines due to equally unpredictable preferences of white people. “It was sad,” Nel muses at the end of the novel when the black community has been disintegrated and the neighborhood taken over by white interests, “because The Bottom had been a real place” (211). Also the founding conditions of African American life, Diaspora and captivity, have rendered the relationship between geography and identity urgent, if not inescapable. As Melvin Dixon notes, “[s]ince the major geographical dislocation of blacks from slave-trading Africa and through the nineteenth century, issues of home, self, and shelter have loomed paramount in the black imagination” (2). As a result, he argues, African Americans have looked for gaps in white space, places of protection where the control of the oppressors does not reach, but which also serve as points of possible deliverance, indeed, of apocalyptic opportunity: The slave’s religion pointed out territories, both physical and spiritual, beyond the reach of the moral, if not the political, authority of the plantation…. The notion that another place and identity existed certainly eased the debilitating effects of slavery and solidified a community around a secular theology of freedom….The physical and spiritual mobility slaves experienced occurred in areas the religion designated as conducive to freedom and salvation, outside the pastoral order, no pun intended, of the plantation. Slaves looked upon nature and determined in their lore that the wilderness, the lonesome valley, and the mountain were places of deliverance.

56  “A City Better than Perfect” Slave songs pointed out the geography that had to be reached, encountered, sometimes conquered, in order for the new name or new identity to have effect. (17) The symbolic dualism Dixon ascribes to the wilderness can be traced to Revelation, where it is represented as an “in-between space, neither here nor there, neither Egypt nor the promised land. It is a place of divine protection and succour but also a place of testing” (Resseguie 33)—a shelter for the pregnant woman threatened by the dragon also enabling her to safely deliver her child, the savior who is to “rule all the nations” (12:5). In Jazz, the pregnant woman has a counterpart in Wild, who takes refuge to the wilderness to give birth to Joe, who, admittedly, is far from the ruler of any nation or tribe, yet is the focal point of the larger tale of the Great Migration, which, in Morrison’s version, is recast as an apocalyptic drama. Morrison’s apocalyptic focus in Jazz, however, is on the city rather than the wilderness, or, perhaps more correctly, the city takes the place of the wilderness as the prime African American sanctuary. Like the new Jerusalem, Harlem marks the end point of life’s wayfaring, a place of lasting protection but also the starting point of an entirely new existence. And indeed, like The Bottom in Sula, Morrison’s Harlem can be considered a real place, if by “real” we mean a site of shelter, where African American tradition and culture are allowed to take root and flourish. Like The Bottom and Dixon’s imagined place outside the pastoral order, the real black Harlem came into being through the emergence of unexpected gaps in the white landscape, when the landlords in the area east of Seventh Avenue faced insurmountable problems keeping their white residents: As the Lenox subway station had not been built yet, people found the means of transport deficient and consequently sought housing elsewhere in Manhattan. Eventually one landlord resigned and started to let a few houses to African Americans in 1900. Insignificant as this decision may seem, this was in effect the starting point of a decisive shift in Harlem’s demography: As soon as black people settled down, the better part of Harlem was essentially deserted by the white middle-class population. Harlem was thus left wide open to black people, becoming, in fact, the black capital of the world (Thurman 43).3 In Harlem, the narrator of Jazz remarks, one is “safe from fays and the things they think up” (10) but also free to use language as a “malleable toy” (33). We recognize here the combination of protection and creativity “conducive to freedom and salvation” that Dixon identifies in the places outside the white order. Of course, the actual Harlem at this point was replete with white middle-class New Yorkers seeking relief from the pressures of modern life in the alleged licentiousness of black cultural expression. “In fact,” Wallace Thurman lamented, “the white patronage is so profitable and so abundant that Negroes find themselves crowded

“A City Better than Perfect”  57 out and even segregated in their own places of jazz” (47). The place Morrison construes as an African American new Jerusalem no doubt incorporates and reproduces the familiar environment of the actual urban setting, and yet the discrepancy between the historical and the fictional Harlem simultaneously bolsters the apocalyptic aspects of the novel. Revelation is ultimately the story about how God’s people find their way to their true and final home, to the new Promised Land or the new Jerusalem, where all strife ceases. Thurman describes Harlem in similar apocalyptic terms, both as “the city of refuge” and, precisely, as “the promised land” (34), comparing African American suffering with Jewish experiences of bondage and Diaspora but also prescribing familiar means of deliverance, namely territorial stability and integrity, the (re) union of the people with a divinely designated piece of land. But he also actualizes and prolongs a long American tradition of attributing the continent with apocalyptic connotations, beginning with Columbus’ famous reference to Revelation’s description of the new Jerusalem as “a new heaven and a new earth” upon first setting eyes on the Americas, an idea he later elaborated when writing to his patrons: “For I believe that the earthly paradise lies here, which no one can enter except God’s leave” (224). Joe’s and Violet’s vision of Manhattan as they approach via train can certainly compete with that of Columbus: The city, as viewed from across the river, strikes them as a site full of promise, which not only accepts them but also seems to actively respond to them: “And like a million others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they stared out the windows for the first sight of the City that danced with them, proving already how much it loved them. Like a million more they could hardly wait to get there and love it back” (32). Indeed, the city has the power to make all newcomers feel like the chosen people finally reaching their true designated home, sensing that “it was for them, this City and no other…. [T]he minute the leather of their soles hit the pavement—there was no turning around” (32). Once the city space is entered, moreover, realms previously inhabited or passed through are instantaneously and indeed almost cataclysmically wiped out from consciousness together with the experiences associated with them: “Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is forever, and it is like forever” (33). In Harlem, then, history and its toils are finally overcome in the original apocalyptic sense: The narrator describes the city in 1926, “when all the wars are over and there will never be another one” (7), a wishful announcement which refers to but also points beyond World War One to encompass Armageddon and the final defeat of evil. For when Harlem is the vantage, tension, contention, and human suffering vanish: “Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The thingsnobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget

58  “A City Better than Perfect” that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last” (7). Harlem in this manner delivers its citizens from the burden of the past in the same way that the new Jerusalem “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away. And He who sits on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new’” (21:4–5; emphasis added). It is the absence of past suffering and painful memories that defines the territory of Harlem: Indeed, “[p]art of why they loved [the City] was the specter they left behind” (33). But Harlem parallels the new Jerusalem also in ways more specific and concrete. One of the most essential and emphasized hallmarks of the latter is its vastness, described in detail as John is asked to measure it, arriving at the conclusion that “its length and width and height are equal” (21:16). Also Morrison’s representation of Harlem evinces its tallness, spaciousness, and splendor: Its buildings are “like castles in pictures” (127), and its sidewalks are “wider than the main roads of the towns where they were born” (10). Like John’s holy city, moreover, Morrison’s Harlem is represented as a woman descending from above. In Revelation, the new Jerusalem “[comes] down out of heaven of God made ready as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2), an inviting yet faithful woman whose nurturing qualities are symbolized by the “tree of life” (22:2), which provides twelve different kinds of fruit each month. If the new Jerusalem comes “down out of heaven,” Harlem, in a more seductive manner, “gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner” (63), the Manhattan version of the tree of life. In Revelation, of course, the city-as-bride has a more sinful and deceptive equivalent in Babylon-the-whore, whose lustfulness and unfaithfulness degrade entire nations, as “kings of the earth have committed acts of immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich by the wealth of her sensuality” (18:3). In Jazz there is no evil-twin city as Harlem carries this seductive side within, like a darker alter ego: The City is smart at this: smelling good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own. (64)4 Morrison’s version of the Holy City in this manner picks up on the intricate play outlined in Revelation between the bride and the whore but places the tension between the two poles within the same city so as to add to its intensity and range of possibility. The above also exemplifies

“A City Better than Perfect”  59 how the integration of Babylon into the new Jerusalem is paralleled by a contamination of what Lefebvre terms representations of space by representational spaces, the official ‘meaning’ of the city enunciated by city planners and other authorities in this manner interpreted as “secret messages” linked to what “the clandestine or underground side of social life” (Lefebvre 133) and in a sense hijacked by space as imagined and transformed by the inhabitants of the city. The whore is the bride’s uncontrollable subconscious.5 Their pronounced urbanity notwithstanding, Harlem and the new Jerusalem both include elements of nature. After presenting the splendid streets of the new Jerusalem, John moves on to describe the garden located at the very center of the city, with the river of life flowing “from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street” (22:1–2). In the new Jerusalem, the river primarily symbolizes a generosity that contrasts starkly with the aggressive commerce of Babylon: “I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost” (21:6); “And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost” (22:17). As Gordon Zerbe suggests, the new Jerusalem is an “international capital city (world superpower), rivaling the status and political economy of Babylon”: It, too, is the center of a global tributary economy, but it appears to be invitational and attractional…. Here John picks up the prophetic hope that the historical outflow of tribute and people from Israel to foreign lands will be reversed, so that people and tribute will flow into Jerusalem. In John’s final utopia, the nations voluntarily bring their tribute to God’s new capital city; the wealth of the nations is not extracted by military force or by inequitable trading relationships, as it was then and still is today. (Zerbe 53) The river of the new Jerusalem supplies the city population with lifegiving water. In Harlem, similarly, it is the “green grass lining the river” (7) which catches the narrator’s eye as she describes the city from her bird’s-eye perspective. Similarly, Harlem welcomes and embraces all of its expectant, hopeful incomers, who also enthusiastically share their resources and homes with each other: “Hospitality is gold in this city” (9) the narrator asserts, suggesting a tributary economic system with generosity as the main currency.6 In the new Jerusalem, moreover, the tree of life from Genesis reappears beside the river, bearing “twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month” (22:2). Also Harlem is surprisingly fertile, allowing its inhabitants not only to become rooted but also to grow things in the more literal sense, something which the forbidding rural South had not: “We had birds and plants everywhere, me and Violet. I gathered up the street droppings myself to fertilize them” (127). Despite these and other

60  “A City Better than Perfect” references to fertility, however, critics have most typically associated Morrison’s Harlem with all the alienating traits of the modern city, arguing that it is a-temporal, both with regard to natural and historical time; that it is volatile and seductive; and, finally, that it encourages reckless consumption and thus thwarts every attempt to heal the wounds of the past. Shirley Ann Stave sees Harlem as barren and unnatural, severing roots as well as links to past experiences, and therefore deems it “rough terrain on which to battle those ghosts who refuse to remain buried in the past” (61). But the conventional Romantic opposition between country and city does not apply in the African American spatial tradition. The rural South does not equal roots, continuity, and stability but rather confinement during slavery and disruption after the Civil War. The forbidding earth of the South is symbolized by Wilde’s solipsistic oak tree, which, disconnected from the surrounding soil, has forged its own ecosystem: “Huge, isolated, it grew in unlikely soil—entwined in its own roots” (178). Harlem, by contrast, is neither a fall from Eden nor the beginning of urban alienation but the space that allows for Joe and Violet to be part of nature’s cycles, corresponding to the larger healing process Harlem instigates, first by breaking with the past in the South, and, second, by replanting the southern experience in new soil. The relationship between the South and Harlem can in this regard be likened to the two appearances of the tree of life in the Bible. In Genesis the tree marks the starting point for history, as the consumption of its fruit throws Adam and Eve into a volatile world of division, suffering, and death. In the Book of Revelation the tree is replanted to a site after the end of history in an urban setting, suggesting that the brave new world nevertheless encompasses the experience of the old. From this perspective, the “new heaven and new earth” is not only the result of divine new construction but the perfection and relocation of that which already existed. Accordingly, while it is exempt from the flow of time, the new Jerusalem nevertheless communicates with the past precisely through the spatial structures it has adopted and perfected. In this manner, nature is subdued but nevertheless represented symbolically by the re-introduction of the tree of life from Genesis, which, however, is no longer surrounded by a pristine Edenic landscape but stands in the midst of what may best be described as an urban park (22:1–2). Consequently, if the tree of life in Genesis functions as a symbol for a rootedness still entirely unaffected by the fluctuations of history, in the new Jerusalem, it symbolizes the final victory of stability over change. The healing power of Harlem, as it is presented in Jazz, stems precisely from such a combination of radical newness and rooted experience, for, as Zamora points out, the tree of life in the new Jerusalem is not comparable to a return to Eden but rather responds to Eden, “encompasses it, supplants it metaphorically. Nostalgia for an idealized past is related to a longing for an idealized future, but the former is based on the undoing

“A City Better than Perfect”  61 of historical experience, the latter on the completing of it” (1993: 17–18). Jazz, similarly, points forward while at the same time aiming to redeem experience from the grip of history and so resettle it on new grounds. Far from simply doing away with history, then, Harlem sublimates physical and spatial memories in a way that ultimately forges new connections with the past. Harlem thus paradoxically ends history but heals time. The description of the setting of any novel is of course dependent on the narrative point of view but, equally importantly, point of view is also a location in the fictional space. The narrative technique of Jazz has most often been placed within a post-structuralist framework,7 but as will be evinced in the following, it can also be understood in relation to the narrative conventions of the apocalyptic genre. First, like the apocalyptic narrator, the narrator of Jazz is anonymous,8 unmarked by name and gender and unburdened by body, personal relations, and experiences, appearing to exist in a sphere above such specifics.9 The narrator’s anonymity, however, is linked to a more general apocalyptic ideal of abstraction pertaining to the narrator’s position in relation to the narrated. The earlier prophetic genre, as we have seen, was linked to the immediate, concrete, political situation,10 the prophet working at street level to persuade humanity to change their sinful ways and so avoid disaster (Bergoffen 26). The apocalyptic narrator, by contrast, speaks to humanity from a place after the end, when the world has reached its predetermined dénouement and all is already over. The apocalyptist therefore has no reason to actively engage in current affairs but writes rather from a position at one remove from street level, as illustrated by the numerous conventional ascents to heaven, where the larger divine patterns are revealed but the details of human life are hidden from view and through which the narrator is given his divine narrative mandate (Himmelfarb 22–23). The apocalyptic narrator in this manner reveals God’s cosmic plan from a place between the audience and God. He has been given divine injunction to interpret the signs of the end-time and make the predetermined plan tangible and compelling to humanity through his writing, yet he is neither entirely with God nor with his audience. The narrative privilege thus comes with a price, namely that of isolation. The narrator of Jazz, similarly, seems utterly stationary in her selfinflicted isolation, telling the story from the confinement of a small apartment she rarely leaves: “I lived a long time, maybe too much, in my own mind. People say I should come out more. Mix. I agree that I close off in places …” (9). Despite the claustrophobic atmosphere, however, we are not drawn into a Dostoyevskian mental cellar but invited to an airy apartment on the top floors, a position that makes the narrator feel powerful, even godlike: “When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible” (7). From her bird’s-eye perspective, the narrator sees the

62  “A City Better than Perfect” people of Harlem move through the cityscape as though following prelaid tracks that are there to “back and frame you no matter what you do” (8–9), indicative both of tracks on a music record and the railroad by which Joe and Violet enter the city: “tracks [control] their feet” (32). Like other apocalyptists, then, the narrator sees the world as following a predetermined plan, spatial practice always subordinate to representations of space.11 “Nobody says it’s pretty here; nobody says it’s easy either. What it is is decisive, and if you pay attention to the street plans, all laid out, the City can’t hurt you” (8). “All you have to do,” the narrator ascertains, “is heed the design—the way it’s laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow” (9). Removed from street-level and the everyday life of Harlem, moreover, the narrator sees the city as a diptych, whose upper half is lucid and sharp but paradoxically makes the people seen in the windows lose their individual traits and even their humanity: “Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons” (7). On street level, by contrast, the city is hypercomplex, to speak with Lefebvre—bewildering in its diversity and displaying a constant flux of people, images, and signs that the narrator cannot really account for, as the shade blurs contours and patterns: Here “any blasé thing takes place” yet exactly what this thing is, the narrator can only speculate about and the images therefore seem fabricated rather than inspired by lived experience: “clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women” (7). The narrator undoubtedly seems more at home at the upper than the lower levels of the city, where formal, architectural dimensions dominate and from where the people in the streets turn into artifice, glowing like “dance-hall costumes” (36). The proximity to heaven accordingly permits the narrator to disregard the nitty-gritty details of the city and whims of the Harlem dwellers. Indeed, the central challenge of the apocalyptic narrator is precisely to accommodate all individual conflicts and mishaps within the larger scheme of God, so as to make each singular event not only inescapable but also essentially meaningful. The narrator of Jazz, however, takes this even further, entirely thinking away the random accidents of history; crashed airplanes and drowned children, watching the sky opening up to a different depth, which, “more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless” (35). The narrator, however, finds herself increasingly irrelevant to the real life of the city. In the streets, the plans or trails the narrator sees from her elevated perspective are neither perceptible nor relevant and the Harlem inhabitants make up their own plans, follow their own paths, leaving the narrator at a loss as to how to relate to them: “Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my

“A City Better than Perfect”  63 space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered” (220). Similar improvisation strategies, aimed not simply at survival but at growth as well as prosperity, were formulated by Ralph Ellison in a review of Gunnar Myrdahl’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944), where he resists the Swedish writer’s notion that African American culture and history are simply reactions to conditions determined by racism and discrimination: “Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they find around them?… why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” (339). Harlem, as it is represented in Jazz, does precisely this, namely turning patterns laid on from without into individual expressions as the techniques invented to survive all of life’s perils are released from their southern hold and sublimated into higher forms. Morrison herself has explained that invention, improvisation, originality, and change are the prime characteristics of the Harlem renaissance, but rather than “be about those characteristics, the novel would seek to become them” (xii).12 Joe and Violet do not rely on pre-laid tracks to navigate the city, but rather on traces, which serve as reminders that there are neither stable presences nor solid ground to support them. Indeed, Joe’s and Violet’s surname is an example of such a reminder, stemming from Joe’s overhearing people talking about his parents’ absence: “The way I heard it I understood her to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared without was me. The first day I got to school I had to have two names. I told the teacher Joseph Trace” (124). And as Golden Grey, Joe, and Violet all learn, in the South, there is no straight path between origin and end, but only a series of traces “[g]oing nowhere. Angling through one curve of the slope to another” (183). Place emerges and disappears according to such regular rhythm that it forces families to constantly be on their toes, ready to pack up and leave for the place that happens to offer the best job opportunities or flee head over heels when their homes are confiscated or demolished. Violet not only watches her home being taken away by debtors, piece by piece, but also witnesses her mother being literally tipped out of her chair in the process: “No harm done if it’s a cat because it has four legs” (98), the narrator laconically remarks, but Violet’s mother has only two and so takes her life by jumping down a well, as if seeking out the most solid, definitive place possible, the tragic and belated parallel to Wild’s ur-home in the rocks. These repeated spatial disruptions have discontinued self-identification over time, and Joe’s and Violet’s past is therefore merely a series of moments acted out by personas with no clear connections in between. Joe in this manner experiences his memories as severed from his present self, remembering past events as though they were someone else’s stories, deprived of emotional reverberations: “He recalls dates, of course, events, purchases, activity, even scenes. But he has a tough time trying to catch

64  “A City Better than Perfect” what it felt like” (29). Similarly, the Violet of the rural South is altogether alien and incomprehensible to the Violet of the city. But when she is put in a situation of crisis, her body seems to remember the survival strategies of the South, in her case physical strength. Hence, when she learns the news of Joe’s affair, the two Violets—that of the rural South and that of the city—coexist in the same place without coming together into the same person. When the Violet of Virginia—“that Violet”— suddenly makes an entrance into Harlem, she does things inexplicable to the Violet of the city: That Violet stabs her husband’s dead lover and fights the ushers at the funeral, while “she [looks] on in amazement” (92). But the cracks are not only lodged within but permeate Violet’s surroundings as well, controlling her vision, thoughts, speech, and, not least importantly, her relation to space: “The globe light holds and bathes each scene, and it can be assumed that at the curve where the light stops is a solid foundation. In truth, there is no foundation at all, but alleyways, crevices one steps across all the time. But the globe is imperfect too. Closely examined it shows seams, ill-glued cracks and weak places beyond which is anything. Anything at all” (22–23). Joe describes his background as a series of changes or even rebirths, the majority of which are spawned by spatial shifts or disruptions. His realization that he has been “a new Negro all [his] life” (129), suggests that the epithet is not an identity created by city life but a structural pattern inherited from the South, a readiness to reinvent oneself and one’s relation to the ground, or, in Jeffrey C. Stewart’s words, “the capacity to begin again and anew despite past tragedies” (14). And yet it is in the city that this capacity comes to full fruition, as illustrated by the train ride that takes Joe and Violet to the city. Traveling from the South to the North, they exercise one of the key rights as citizens of America, namely to migrate from one state to another. But even in this act of freedom and independence, the old pattern of forced migration nevertheless dominate: The black passengers are kept in constant movement also on the train, repeatedly forced to leave their seats in agreement with the Jim Crow laws of segregation (127). And yet as they enter the city, movement suddenly acquires a different meaning: The quick darkness in the carriage cars when they shot through a tunnel made them wonder if maybe there was a wall ahead to crash into or a cliff hanging over nothing. The train shivered with them at the thought but went on and sure enough there was ground up ahead and the trembling became the dancing under their feet. Joe stood up, his fingers clutching the baggage rack above his head. He felt the dancing better that way, and told Violet to do the same. (30) The juxtaposition of trembling and dancing in this passage is an expression of the knowledge that history consists of a series of disruptions, here

“A City Better than Perfect”  65 symbolized by the expectation that the rail laid out would reach its sudden and violent termination. But the train keeps moving steadily forward, and the trembling is transformed into dancing. The fact that they enter the city dancing suggests that it is not simply a response to the stimuli of the city but a sublimation of what had been essentially defensive footwork into a light-footed celebration of improvisation and changeability. Harlem, in Morrison’s novel, is ultimately the platform for a revisionary process which is temporal as well as geographical and which forges new connections and relations in a narrative line that seems exploded. Morrison’s Harlem, then, is a nexus of here and there as well as past and present. This is ultimately also what saves Joe’s and Violet’s relationship, which had been dominated by spiritual absence and detachedness neither caused by city life nor the dreary routine of a long marriage but part and parcel of their past in the South. Both Joe and Violet had seen each other as replacements for someone else; to Violet, Joe had been a substitute for Golden Grey, a man who was symptomatically never present to her other than in stories told by her equally absent grandmother True Bell. Violet, for her part, is a substitute for Joe’s mother, whose hand had failed to grasp his at the crucial moment. Each personifying an absence in the other’s life, they become veritably nonexistent to each other over the years, speechless as well as emotionless. But even though this intensifies in the city, the city, offering ways to make the past present, is also what turns this around. When Joe and Violet lie next to each other in the closing pages of the novel, they are entirely present in each other’s spheres but also in scenes of the past. They cover their bodies with a quilt, but Joe dreams about a powder blue blanket that would take the forms of their bodies, blue being the color he associates with his mother. He also sees “through the glass darkness taking the shape of a shoulder with a thin line of blood. Slowly, slowly it forms itself into a bird with a blade of red on the wing” (225): The Redwing, in the character is called Hunter’s Hunter. The genitive form is accordingly Hunter’s Hunter’s interpretation, is the bird that signals the presence of Wild. To Violet in the same scene, Joe’s body triggers an intense experience of simultaneity: She rests her hand on his chest, and it becomes a sunlit rim of a well replete with memories and souvenirs from the past. Here, in bed, the past and the present coexist without one overshadowing or draining the other. Importantly, once they have discovered the art of figuring in the past as well as the present, they are also able to figure things out: “A lot of the time they stay at home figuring things out, telling each other those little personal stories they like to hear again and again, or fussing with the bird Violet bought” (223).13 In Jazz, then, the individual histories diverge and meander, causing the narrator to lose her grip of the story but also regain it as she modifies her narrating role as well as her relation to the narrated. For when the apocalyptic narrative stance is experienced as restrictive, the narrator

66  “A City Better than Perfect” gradually descends from her elevated position, which also, of course, alters the representation of the city as well as the conditions of narration. The narrator had taken it for granted that the disruptions and cracks would continue to haunt and torment the characters, that “the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they walked and danced all over me” (220). What the narrator had not taken into consideration is the improvisational, revisionary work the city itself carries out and the corresponding ability of the characters to improvise and take advantage of experience, dance-walking all over the narrator’s predictions. At this point, the narrator starts questioning herself and her apocalyptic stance: Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm. Mourning the split trees, hens starving on rooftops. Figuring out what can be done to save them since they cannot save themselves without me because—well, it’s my storm, isn’t it? I break lives to prove I can mend them back again. And although the pain is theirs, I share it, don’t I? Of course. Of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But it is another way. I am uneasy now. Feeling a bit false. (219) The predicament of the apocalyptic narrator is encapsulated in the above sentences: Through language, she creates a disaster she is not actually part of but merely observing the devastating effects of from her safe position in “the eye of the storm.” The tone here, however, is coquettishly self-derogatory as the critique is focused on attitude and lack of empathy rather than actual narrative authority or power: Creating disaster without being afflicted by it makes the narrator feel “uneasy” and a “bit false,” but not thrown off balance. But as she realizes that the characters “[dance] and [walk] all over” her laid-out patterns, having turned the skills of improvisation into expressions of individuality and initiative, her self-criticism becomes at once more radical and more self-effacing: “It never occurred to me,” the narrator reveals, “that they were thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of” (221). Gradually realizing that the people of the city unexpectedly get off the tracks to try out new paths, the narrator also begins to suspect that her worldview had been spurious, which in turn engenders feelings of isolation, of being left out, causing the voluntary aloofness to become a veritable prison. Even more poignantly, it now also seems as though the narrative distance to the course of events distorts reality rather than vouching for impartiality and truthfulness: “I ought to get out of this place. Avoid the window; leave the hole I cut through the door to get in lives instead of having one of my own…. I missed the people altogether” (220).

“A City Better than Perfect”  67 As the space the inhabitants occupy in the city is not the same as the narrator’s, she is ultimately forced to succumb to creativity and improvisation but also shrink the distance characteristic of the apocalyptist. Harlem, it can accordingly be argued, is an apocalyptic site controlled neither by God nor by the apocalyptic narrator but is a creative and perhaps even divine power in its own right. This, in Lefebvre’s terms, is the revenge of spatial practice and representational space on spatial representations. The narrator had believed herself to be in control of the city people’s actions and movements as well as the symbolic value of the city itself—the image of the city as city. Lefebvre’s notion of abstract space, we recall, can be seen as the full realization of spatial representation, concretized in a city that functions “objectally,” as a set of things/signs and their formal relationships: glass and stone, concrete and steel, angles and curves, full and empty…. The dominant form of space, that of the centres of wealth and power endeavours to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there. Differences, for their part, are forced into the symbolic forms of an art that is itself abstract. (49) If, as we saw in the first chapter, the new Jerusalem is dominated such spatial abstraction based on the perfection of form, on intelligibility, symmetry, and homogeneity, the same is true of the narrator’s view of Harlem up until the very end: “I was watching the streets, thrilled by the buildings pressing and pressed by stone; so glad to be looking out and in on things I dismissed what went on in my heart-pockets close to me” (220-21). The elevated perspective of the narrative beginning which renders people indistinguishable from “the work of stonemasons” (7) now gives way to a veritable revolution in the narrative stance, where the narrator is forced to abandon her lofty spheres and accept the narrative as unstable and mutable text. The narrator seeks to formulate this newfound truth: “Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out” (228). In other words, one needs to figure in the world before anything can be figured out, and so Harlem is keeping the past alive, not as a coherent narrative but as a series of presences, or, rather, scenes figured in. The narrator now retrospectively imagines being part of scenes that have already been narrated, immersing herself in other people’s histories and memories: I want to be in a place already made for me, both snug and wide open. With a doorway never needing to be closed, a view slanted for light and bright autumn leaves but not rain…. I’d love to close myself in the peace left by the woman who lived there and scared everybody.

68  “A City Better than Perfect” Unseen because she knows better than to be seen…. She has seen me and is not afraid of me. She hugs me. Understands me. Has given me her hand. I am touched by her. Released in secret. (221) As a consequence of this shift, the narrator weakens in relation to the narrated, even to the point of being powerless: “[W]hen I invented stories about them… I was completely in their hands, managed without mercy” (220). In this respect, the narrator’s development is comparable to that of the characters: Joe and Violet, as we have seen, suddenly figure in each other’s lives and therefore stay at home at night “figuring things out” (223). The transformation the narrator goes through in the process of narrating can also be seen in the light of contradictions within the role of the apocalyptic narrator itself. As opposed to prophecy, which is in the older oral tradition, apocalypse is essentially a writerly genre (Goldsmith 37) and Revelation is also fundamentally bookish. History comes to John in the form of a book, and John is appointed by God to write his cosmic plan: “And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true” (22:6). As Zamora explains, the apocalyptic writer is torn between the self-confidence that stems from being God’s chosen messenger and the self-doubt that accompanies the unwelcome realization that the act of writing is also by necessity creative, a word that normally does not fare well with diligent apocalyptists who must “decipher the signs of history even as he struggles to create his own encoded version of that history,” causing his voice to vacillate “between authority and uncertainty, assertiveness and awe” (Zamora 1993: 15). The narrator of Revelation goes to great lengths to make sure that the message gets across: no human being may alter the word of God, either by adding things or taking things away, or it will lead to disaster and eternal exclusion from the Holy City, which equals eternal damnation: “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book” (22:18–19). The reader who reads and respects the words as they are written shall receive God’s grace: “Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near” (1:3). The conventional apocalyptic narrator, in other words, is in a position to place great demands on the reader but also to issue great rewards. And yet to the narrator of Jazz, it is precisely the creative aspect of writing that makes her lose control over the narrative, being in the hands not only of the characters but also, in a more literal sense, of the reader, to whom she eventually capitulates to. In the very last lines of the novel,

“A City Better than Perfect”  69 she does away with all rules and restrictions with regard to the act of reading, giving the reader the mandate to revise the text according to the latter’s own wishes: “Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now” (229). The narrator of Jazz thus abandons herself, both to the text as a creative site and to the reader as a co-writer. Holding the book, the reader is given no warning against altering its message but is, on the contrary, invited into the book, indeed to be present in the text, which is in this manner released from its authorial grip. Matthew Treherne argues that the ending of Jazz marks the beginning of an openness to the possibilities of negotiation and renegotiation of the signifiers which might be the building blocks of identity; and this new identity is in the narrative inflected with otherness of the end of Jazz: a narrative that gets a kick out of talking to you and hearing you answer. The work of narrative is not complete at the end of Jazz, but is only beginning: the rest is talking. (211) Considered as an apocalyptic text, the revelation it yields corresponds to Violet’s vision of the world as replete with “ill-glued cracks and weak places beyond which is anything” (23) rather than to John’s vision of God’s seamless plan for the world. Analogously, if Harlem as apocalyptic site is “better than perfect,” it also means that it is other than perfect, in other words, imperfect: Perfection which is “bettered” is open to improvisation and change, something which of course stands in stark contrast to the static solidity of the new Jerusalem. Whereas the latter’s perfection springs from history’s final defeat, Harlem ultimately offers its inhabitants a chance to re-enter the flow of time and, importantly, invites the reader to do the same.

Notes

70  “A City Better than Perfect”







4

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse in Blood Meridian and The Road

In Blood Meridian and The Road forlorn beings travel across a desolate, blood-saturated American landscape, causing (Blood Meridian) or dodging (The Road) one atrocity after another. In both novels, moreover, the meaning of the American continent is scrutinized against the backdrop of apocalyptic themes, not only through their obvious emphasis on upheaval and devastation but also through their examination (but ultimate denouncement) of the continent as a millennial site. McCarthy’s two novels, moreover, represent the wilderness as an ambiguous realm, thus communicating with Revelation as well as with Puritan apocalyptic writings. In Wigglesworth’s apocalyptic poem God’s Controversy with New-England (1632), the territory is described as both dark and godless: Beyond the great Atlantick flood There is a region vast, A country where no English foot In former ages past: A waste and howling wilderness, Where none inhabited But hellish fiends, and brutish men That Devils worshipped. The poem then takes a radically different turn, describing the wilderness as a sanctuary for God’s people during hardships and strife: Here was the hiding place, which thou, Jehovah, didst provide For thy redeemed ones, and where Thou didst thy jewels hide In per’lous times, and saddest dayes Of sack-cloth and of blood, When th’ overflowing scrouge did pass Through Europe like a flood.

72  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse Far from simply being the opponent in the apocalyptic drama, then, the wilderness is also its own remedy, harboring the power to overcome its own demons and ultimately usher in God’s millennial kingdom. As we saw in Chapter 1 of this book, such ideas can be traced back to Revelation, where the wilderness is a place where God either uses his power to protect or withdraws so as to expose the sinners to destruction and evil powers. In McCarthy’s apocalyptic rendering, as I will argue hereon, the ambiguity of the wilderness does not consist in an intermingling of good and evil as in Wigglesworth’s poem above but in the intricate interplay between meaning and vacuity, purpose and aimlessness. The specific nature of McCarthy’s depiction of the wilderness is also connected to the relation between myths and symbols, on the one hand, and the human body, on the other. In Revelation, the martyrs who sacrifice their lives for their faith are draped in white robes as a sign that they no longer belong to the earthly domains but are elevated to divine spheres. The unfaithful, by contrast, tend earthward, seeking to escape God’s wrath by crouching among rocks and in caves. The question “[w]ho is able to stand?” (6:17) seems to thwart the possibility of a third alternative to the central mythological/material dichotomy: A body is either material, and on the same level as the rocks, or ethereal, belonging to the sphere of God. A similar tension between “mythologized” and “materialized” bodies pervades both Blood Meridian and The Road, where the human body is consistently measured on the myth/matter scale, the integrity of the body being dependent on the effectiveness of myth to shield it from its surroundings, to save it from merging into and ultimately also becoming undone by the wilderness. McCarthy, however, typically severs the connection between the apocalyptic symbols and a higher power, rendering the former “sourceless,” a word that in Blood Meridian as well as The Road appears only in connection with the phenomenon of thunder and lightning and that can justifiably be seen as the matrix for both novels. In the Book of Revelation, thunder and lightning figure eleven times, often collocated with the word “voice” and representing the overpowering vocalization of God’s will. Here are a few representative examples: “Out from the throne come flashes of lightning and sounds and peals of thunder” (4:5); “Then the angel took the censer and filled it with the fire of the altar, and threw it to the earth; and there followed peals of thunder and sounds and flashes of lightning and an earthquake” (8:5); “and he cried out with a loud voice, as when a lion roars; and when he had cried out, the seven peals of thunder uttered their voices” (10:3); “When the seven peals of thunder had spoken, I was about to write; and I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Seal up the things which the seven peals of thunder have spoken and do not write them’” (10:4); “And there were flashes of lightning and sounds and peals of thunder; and there was a great earthquake, such as there had not been since man came to be

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  73 upon the earth, so great an earthquake was it, and so mighty” (16:18).1 Though both intimidating and potentially destructive, the thunder and lightning function as the reassuring reminders of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence. There is no place outside his might and no event that is not part of his plan, something which offers hope of salvation in the midst of annihilation. The sourceless thunder in McCarthy’s two novels, by contrast, is indicative of an apocalyptic narrative free of agency as well as intent, turning the myths and symbols integral to it into eerie ghosts that haunt the landscape. The novels, then, seem replete with apocalyptic symbolic meaning, but the signs that give an intimation of divine presence are turned into anti-signs, simultaneously suggesting and eliminating the possibility of divine control, evoking loss in the act of creation. The apocalyptic myth is in this manner unhinged from its divine hold through a meta-apocalyptic maneuver that drains the narrative of prophetic purport, God becoming part of the mythology that distinguishes humanity from the wilderness and is undone just as easily. In Blood Meridian, as we shall see, this elimination is done in cold blood, whereas The Road evokes a nostalgic sense of loss, which reverberates through the novel like the sourceless thunder it conjures up. Blood Meridian and The Road pick up different threads in the web of apocalyptic themes spun around the American continent, the former novel taking on the settlement of the Southwest, and the latter lending a post-apocalyptic perspective on American civilization. However, the respective emphasis on beginnings and endings notwithstanding, both novels can be said to stage national endgames, since Blood Meridian simultaneously chronicles the closing of the frontier and the final stages of the spatial apocalyptic project of Manifest Destiny. The western part of the continent at this point in American history has typically been represented as a vast expanse of land and possibility but also as territory to be settled, populated, and civilized, something which also marked the beginning of the end of the cowboy way of life, of space, and, above all, of Native American cultures: The bloodshed and suffering that followed on the extraordinary expansion could easily be fitted into this divine scheme, the annihilation of the unfaithful (often conceived of as the great tribulation) being the prerequisite for the millennium to be realized. Native Americans could thus remorselessly be done away with as obstacles to Manifest Destiny (Glanz 146). In Blood Meridian, however, endings and destruction affect not only the worldly realms but also, more poignantly, the apocalyptic mythology that surrounds it. As Herman Melville knew, there is nothing more frightening than that which carries all the hallmarks of a symbol but whose message seems to be sent from a universe devoid of any divine plan—devoid, in fact, of cosmic author. Whiteness, Ishmael suggests in Moby-Dick, is “the most meaning symbol” but ironically reveals nothing but the sheer and

74  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse utter purposelessness of the world, “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe” (1001). The apocalypse it ultimately engenders is blind, indifferent, and therefore also utterly terrifying. In McCarthy’s novel, similarly, it is not so much the phenomena themselves that frighten but rather the eeriness that stems from the discrepancy between the suggestion of mythic meaning and the relentless undermining of such meaning. Like Melville’s novel, Blood Meridian is replete with phenomena that appear to elevate the human world above its material origins but that ultimately serve to enhance these origins. However, whereas Moby-Dick commences in the concrete reality of whaling and then prompts an investigation of its symbolic purport, Blood Meridian begins in the myths and symbols, only to divest them of meaning, disinheriting the land of its symbolic property. The relation between myth and matter in Blood Meridian has been explored for example by Andrew Keller Estes, who argues that Blood Meridian “interrogates simplistic binary conceptions of nature and culture. The text is explicit in that human and natural worlds are of a piece and it challenges the notion that there can be any separation at all” (Estes 111). Inger-Anne Söfting reasons along similar lines but makes a more complex point: “One the one hand,” she argues, “Blood Meridian seems to insist that all matter is base matter and that this is all there is…. On the other hand, the text has an auratic quality that only can be described as mythic and metaphysical” (29). Reading the novel as an apocalyptic text, I will show that rather than simply collapsing the distinction between myth and matter, McCarthy leaves it intact and even enhances it. The destruction of myth is instead brought about by a simultaneous intensification and unhinging of it, the novel conjuring up a world that is not so much reduced to “base matter,” as Estes would have it, as one replete with sourceless symbols and signs, and, one may add, all the more terrifying for it. Blood Meridian begins in Tennessee in 1833 during the famous meteor showers of the Leonids. Under the falling stars a baby boy is born: “Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens” (3).2 In Revelation, falling stars is an ominous sign portending cataclysm: On the opening of the sixth seal, “the stars of the heaven fell unto the earth” (6:13). The newborn baby is in this manner instantly wrapped in apocalyptic mythology, which appears to set the child apart from the world it is born into. The child, however, turns out neither a Messiah nor a devil, but a boy generically referred to as the Kid and who develops into a rather simple youth with “a mindless taste for violence” (3). The portentous birth is no doubt belied by the prosaic life, and the apocalyptic symbolism is severed from divine design like the falling stars that leave no trace of their celestial origin behind: The speaker (whose identity is uncertain but may be the father who is introduced in the same instance)

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  75 searches for holes left in the sky after the fallen stars, as if to look for signs of some original yet now undone fixity. Running away from his home at fourteen, the Kid embarks on a fortytwo days’ journey from Saint Louis to New Orleans, where he is shot and bedridden for two weeks. He recovers physically, but through this experience, his life is severed from a perceived anchorage in origin and end: “Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous as to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay” (4–5). Beginnings and endings no longer define him, nor do they bestow meaning and direction on his life, something which ousts him from the apocalyptic trajectory and makes him free to roam the country, taking advantage of each isolated moment. However, as soon becomes clear, this declaration, through a typical McCarthian transaction, is transposed from a personal to a general existential level: In the American Southwest, it is implied, life is not understood teleologically but by its distance or proximity to the earth in its bare state. Ironically, the Kid is referred to as “a pilgrim, among others” (5), a word that McCarthy uses repeatedly in both Blood Meridian and The Road for travelers journeying across the American continent. But whereas pilgrimage, in a religious context, is a holy journey toward a specific place of spiritual significance, McCarthy’s pilgrims are pronouncedly devoid of both purpose and direction. Jacobson describes the tradition of pilgrimage as alien to the American protestant tradition as the path to grace went from each individual directly to God, without having to go via specific revered spots. Pilgrimage, Jacobson argues, is therefore only applicable to the act of traveling to America, not the process of settling and inhabiting it: In the medieval world the sacred was, in a manner of speaking, “vertical,” represented by a hierarchical church designating points of mediation with a holy spirit. For the Puritans, and the societal form they propagated and which was to become global in its import, the sacred was “horizontal” and bounded. Inhabiting the sacred, one did not need to be at a particular locality to experience grace. It is no surprise, in this context, that the Protestant reformers condemned pilgrimage. (43) In Jacobson’s analysis, then, it was the territory itself that was sacred and that made pilgrimage superfluous and even blasphemous, a contributing factor no doubt being the absence of spatial religious-historical markers in the landscape. Consequently, when McCarthy refers to his travelers as pilgrims, it is another example of “sourceless” sacredness,

76  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse a homeless mythology, which serves to emphasize not only the drifting, aimless route of the characters but also their lack of spiritual connection to the territory itself. The Kid subsequently joins Glanton’s gang and is in a sense a landed Ishmael, equally shaped by the crew he becomes part of and the work he is expected to carry out. The movement across the landscape seems dissolve the past and the future, indeed, even time itself, into the concrete earth beneath their feet: “Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them” (172). Their journey is neither symbolic of some kind of psychological or moral process nor emblematic of a chosen people on their way to their designated home. On the contrary, the paradoxical epithet “ordained agents of the factual” suggests that they are commissioned by some unnamed or undefined power to undo myth through “a constant elision,” an incessantly reductive process in which the present is randomly handed out to unknown receivers and in which everything in the past and all that the future might have brought with it are thrown away like waste on the ground. This simultaneous investment and divestment of apocalyptic meaning give rise to some of the most frightening instances of McCarty’s novel. For example, horses and their riders are repeatedly presented as “visions” at once preternatural and material: “Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat” (172). This “spectre” version of the riders recalls Revelation’s four horsemen of the apocalypse as well as the two hundred million horsemen employed by the angels to cause mass destruction, having “A third of mankind was killed by these three plagues, by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone which proceeded out of their mouths.” (9:18): “And this is how I saw in the vision the horses and those who sat on them: the riders had breastplates the color of fire and of hyacinth and of brimstone; and the heads of the horses are like the heads of lions; and out of their mouths proceed fire and smoke and brimstone.” (9:17). If the horsemen in Revelation function as executives of God’s plan, in Blood Meridian they are instead provoked by “sourceless” thunder and lightning: “The sourceless summer lightning marked out of the night dark mountain ranges at the rim of the world and the halfwild horses on the plain before them trotted in those bluish strobes like horses called forth quivering out of the abyss” (163; emphasis added). A comparable apparition displaying analogous supernatural features and similarly accompanied by “sourceless” lightning is described as follows: That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  77 of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out of whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream. (47; emphasis added) Thunder and fear are intimately connected also in Revelation, where the former instills fear of God in sinful humans to make them change their errant path and set their course toward God. In McCarthy’s rendering, however, fear is not only an overpowering emotion but constitutes the “true geology” of the earth, a founding principle both aboriginal and uncontained and inseparable from the setting itself. Here, of course, is the central difference between McCarthy’s and John’s representations of the landscape of fear that the thunder opens up. In Revelation, thunder may certainly introduce death and destruction but ultimately marks out God’s realm, corresponding to Tygstrup’s notion of the bird song, the spatial practice that at once marks out and maintains a territory (200), or to John’s measuring of the temple in Revelation 11, which ultimately, as we saw in Chapter 1, serves to mark out God’s jurisdiction. Consequently, as the Lamb (Christ) opens the first of the seven seals, a voice of thunder utters “Come,” calling forth the four horsemen of the apocalypse (6:1). The thunder that brings on the havoc of which the four horsemen are a part, does not, however, simply call on destruction but rather, as G.B.A Caird argues, declares that “nothing can now happen, not even the most fearsome evidence of man’s disobedience and its nemesis, which cannot be woven into the pattern of God’s gracious purpose” (qtd Resseguie 126). In Blood Meridian, by contrast, God has been replaced by an anonymous power that advocates the sourcelessness also of that which appears purposeful, transcendent, and divine. The fiery breastplates of the horses in Revelation caused by thunder and lightning referred to above are evoked in and paralleled by the “blue fire” that runs over the horses’ trappings and the wagon wheels. The fire that comes out of the biblical horses’ mouths, similarly, has a counterpart in the “blue light” that is perched in the horses’ ears. But if the horses and riders take on a demonic hue in Blood Meridian, turning into a ghostly, livid death squad, what brings these spectacular effects about is itself “sourceless.” The incandescent horses and the specter horsemen thus seem to bring about a mindless or purposeless apocalypse, which does not diminish

78  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse but adds to the terror it engenders. The attack on the peaceful Tiguas, is, on the one hand, “pandemoniac,” apocalyptic in scope and force, yet at the same time both irrational and aimless (173). The narrator seems to search for some overarching purpose, suggesting that it was “as if the fate of the aborigines had been cast into shape by some other agency altogether. As if such destinies were prefigured in the very rock for those with eyes to read” (173). But rocks harbor neither prophecy nor divine truth, which is succinctly demonstrated by the Judge as they come across an area of rocks adorned with ancient paintings, one of which he scrapples away, “leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been” (173), thus instantly returning myth to matter. In the case of the Tiguas, then, the “script” of their destiny is like “the frail black rebuses of blood in the sand” (174), which, like their remains, will soon be erased. The massacre of the tribe is paralleled by a more general massacre of faith and myth that deports the landscape to “a time before nomenclature” (172), an era prior to the naming of things. According to the Gospel of John, the word is part and parcel of God’s creation; indeed, naming is creation and, conversely, creation is naming.3 Everything, all creation, falls within the sphere of God’s word, including the destruction of what has been created. Blood Meridian, however, undoes the connection, wedging itself between the land and its mythology, and destruction not only falls outside God’s circumscribed territory and jurisdiction but also encroaches on it, ultimately bringing it down with it. The Judge is the paradoxical personification of this impersonal destruction. Childlike and devilish at the same time, he is tellingly also a geologist who studies the beginning and the outcome of the cosmic narrative in the rocks: In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound his orderings up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposing. The judge smiled. Books lie, he said. God don’t lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. (116) The Bible is set up against stone by the onlookers, like piety against heresy. The Judge’s rejoinder, however, is that God’s true voice cannot be found in scripture but in the materiality of the land itself. But if God

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  79 speaks in the stones, trees, and bones of things, what is the message? According to the legends of the land, the novel suggests, a solitary pilgrim on his advancement through the Promised Land gets a glimpse of this message in the moment of his death: Far out on the desert of the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some say they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of the whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? (111).4 The pilgrim is granted momentary ascension, only to be crushed against the ground together with the faith he embraces. The message is enunciated by a sourceless force that voices nothing but the essential muteness the world. There is a tendency among critics to emphasize the differences between Blood Meridian and The Road. For example, Ashley Kunsa argues that although “both Blood Meridian and The Road are chockfull of unforgettable horrors, awash with blood and gore and threat…. The Road’s divergence from McCarthy’s previous work is especially evident when the novel is contrasted with Blood Meridian because their styles and concomitant worldviews differ so strikingly” (58). This study argues, however, that the novels are in agreement about the ultimate and inescapable truth of the earth; it is the attitude to this truth that differs. Above all, as will be clear in the following, both stage a sourceless apocalypse that also comprises the apocalyptic myth itself. This is the grim overture of The Road: An undefined catastrophe has turned the earth in its entirety into a burnt wasteland, a cloud of ash has rendered the sun invisible, and the thickening darkness is “like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (3).5 Some ten years after the catastrophe, nothing grows, all animals (but one dog, it turns out) are extinct, and few but the most ruthless of the humans remain: marauders, cannibals, members of blood cults. At this point, life on earth seems so hopeless that the very concept of survivor is rejected, as surviving suggests that there is some sort of future or purpose to life. As one road traveler puts it: “I think in times like these the less said the better. If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we’d have something to talk about. But we’re not. So we dont” (145).6 A father and his son wander southward through a charred, post-cataclysmic landscape with the aim of reaching the ocean and elude the approaching winter but also in the hope of discovering that not all the world is lost.

80  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse As Shelly Rambo notes, the sharpest dividing line among critics has been that between cataclysmic and millennial interpretations: the question whether the novel stages the actual irrevocable end of the world or whether the ending is in fact the beginning of a new world, in one form or another (100). Ashley Kunsa’s argument is characteristic of the latter category: Eliminating the old suggests the coming of the new and creates a space in which the new world can be imagined and called into being. The slate, of course, has not been entirely cleaned; the corpses of the old world, both literal and figurative, are everywhere. The world posed by McCarthy’s novel exists at a decidedly proto-Edenic moment: it is still in the stages of becoming, with regard to both form and content. (64) Rambo herself takes a similar standpoint but importantly mitigates the nihilistic stance: To think theologically after the collapse is not to garner the redemptive narrative in the face of terror. Instead, it means receiving the statement “Not be made right again,” not as the nihilistic foil to the redemption narrative, but as an imperative to witness to what remains when all constructs for making meaning have been shattered. Reading The Road within a redemptive framework eclipses this imperative to witness, closing the text that should, instead, be “handed over” to its readers with the perilous question: What does it mean to witness what remains? (107) Rambo is right in arguing that no redemption is at hand: There is nothing to suggest that the world will somehow come alive again or that humanity will persevere, nor are there any indications that God will salvage “the good guys,” the epithet the man and the boy identify themselves by. However, whereas Rambo describes the reading act as witnessing trauma, this analysis argues that the exclusive vantage point the novel offers the reader is placed between two endings: The end of the land, which is located in the narrative past, and the end of the mythology surrounding the land, which is certain to happen in a near future. When the world is disappearing, the myths that had invested it with meaning linger for a while yet before they pass on into oblivion. With the world’s destruction for a foil, the contours of the myths by which we make sense of time and space sharpen, even if they already carry the marks of loss as they appear before the reader. In this manner the novel can be seen as a study in devolution, a creational tale in reverse. Hence the father considers the possibility that in the “ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be,” a new truth about the constitution of the world may

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  81 emerge: “Perhaps,” he suggests, “in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made” (230–31). This is also the key to understanding the millennial or redemptive gleams sprinkled across the apocalyptic wasteland. In the time lapse between the ending of matter and the ending of myth, the sign is sourceless, “shorn of its referents” (75), but seeking temporary housing in the few hosts left. What is left of the myths, beliefs, and desires of the world has accordingly shrunk down “about a raw core of parsible entities” (75), and as in Blood Meridian, every living being in The Road seems supernatural, either celestial or infernal, but are simultaneously the parallels to the single gray snow flake the man catches on its downward flight: “He caught it in his hand and watched it expire like the last host of christendom” (13). Ultimately, the apocalyptic mythology that had constituted the novel’s raison d’être is itself done away with, leaving behind a silence that seems primeval in its intensity. In this manner the ­ novel takes its own foundation with it in the cataclysm it stages and is therefore “catastrophic” in the most radical sense of the term, even to the point of destroying the apocalyptic myth it evokes. The Road is at once an exploration of and a painful farewell to the myths by which we orientate ourselves in the world. Imagining life without them, it reaches the paradoxical conclusion that such a life is unimaginable. To Lefebvre, the social body both produces and is produced by space: “The living organism,” Lefebvre suggests, “has neither meaning nor existence when considered in isolation from its extensions, from the space that it reaches and produces …. Every such organism is reflected and refracted in the changes that it wreaks in its ‘milieu’ or its ‘environment’—in other words, in its space” (196). The body is accordingly not simply placed in a preexisting space but produces and reproduces this space. Perception, in Lefebvre’s analysis, involves the projection of spatial properties, such as up/down and left/right, onto the surroundings (199). In The Road, the body’s relation to space is highly precarious, however, precisely because the emptiness of the post-apocalyptic world grants no bearings to reach out to or be substantiated by, rendering the discrepancy between the cognitive faculties and the spatial reality absolute. There is no destination to define an errant path and no center to mark out a circumference. The synesthesia in the following passage underscores the all-pervasiveness of the post- cataclysmic chaos spilling over into all factions, defying all demarcations and ultimately cutting the ties between space and body: The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening…. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall

82  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must. (13) Without reference points, the biological reality of the balance system turns out to be as irrelevant as an “old chronicle,” a text without current referents, but which still haunts the world like the banished sun, which “circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp” (28). Whatever moves or stirs in post-cataclysmic America seems to do so without visible cause or origin, and language is a mere after-effect of a world long gone: The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out for ever. (75) Being as insubstantial as the drifting ash that has taken over the world, the late-world thunder not only belies its mythic significance as the reverberation of God’s wrath but offers no guiding light through the darkness: “The faint light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot” (13; emphasis added). Even though every page, indeed, every line of the novel, is marked by the absence of nature itself, its poetic manifestation still lingers. The destruction of nature is also the destruction of the mythic foundation of American culture: Rootedness in a sense of place, on the one hand, and growth, expansion, and regeneration, on the one other. In this manner, The Road raises the question, what happens to literature when what had constituted its groundwork since the American Renaissance is done away with? What would a nonorganic kind of literature be like? As in Blood Meridian, stone appears to be the foundation of everything. Contrasting starkly with both perishable nature and insubstantial ash, it therefore occupies a privileged place in the father’s consciousness: “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone” (10). Stone is solid and unchangeable, the only dependable element in a world where everything else has proven volatile. Stone has consequently gone changeless through apocalypse and is both literally and figuratively the rock bottom of the post-apocalyptic world—not a soft place to fall but a place

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  83 to fall nonetheless. Tim Edwards argues that the landscape in The Road is ultimately meaningless and therefore utterly opposed to Emersonian Transcendentalism: In McCarthy’s novel, the earth, blistered by nuclear blast and withered by nuclear winter, presents us, of course, with a very different kind of landscape, one that seems stripped of meaning…. On one level, then, McCarthy’s landscape resists interpretation, for the landscape itself is largely mute, darkened, clouded, its color palette stripped of beauty and diversity and reduced to variations of gray. The visionary clarity of Emerson’s nature is notably absent from the blasted environment of McCarthy’s world in The Road. (57) And yet there are moments when stone is itself mythologized and set apart from its bleak surroundings. When the father studies an arrowhead “white as quartz, perfect as the day it was made” (171–72), he does so as in silent worship of constancy, which now substitutes for divinity. The landscape of the novel is thus not meaningless, nor is it devoid of visionary clarity, even if the transcendental visions appear on a more basic and indeed original level. In a similar instance of mystic reverence, the father “[squats] and [scoops] up a handful of stones and [smells] them and [lets] them fall clattering. Polished round and smooth as marbles or lozenges of stone veined and striped. Black disclets and bits of polished quartz all bright from the mist of the river” (32). For a moment, the father is resituated in a “timescape” that is recognizable and makes sense, even though, or, perhaps more correctly, because it is linked to the deep time of geology rather than human time: The constancy of stone is, in the absence of divine eternity, itself mythologized, literally and figuratively elevated from the crude earth and made another “host of Christendom.” It is in the boy that the simultaneous creation and destruction of myth is most palpable. The boy is the prime harbinger of the myths the man cannot let go of, and bolstered by the man’s love for the child, they take on empyreal proportions. To the man, the boy’s mythic aura overshadows everything else, yet he is repeatedly described a vessel for God rather than a divinity himself, a place reserved for a God, but possibly uninhabited: he is “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” (230), a “tiny paradise trembling in the orange light from the heater” (126), and a “[g]olden chalice, good to house a god” (64). “If he is not the voice of God God never spoke” (4), the man muses to himself, implying that God may speak through the child but at the same time acknowledging the possibility that God, in fact, has never spoken in the past and may never speak in the time to come. The excessive mythologizing of the boy that the man indulges in is not only the result of the latter’s search for hope and meaning in an utterly hopeless situation but also an attempt to provide the boy with a protective shield against the hostile environment.

84  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse When one of “the bad guys,” a presumptive cannibal, attacks the boy, the man instantly kills him, explaining his actions as commissioned by God (65), but as he washes the blood of the attacker from the boy’s hair, he conceives of it as a ritual: “he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (63). The scene recalls the passage in Revelation referred to above, in which the survivors of the tribulation are washed clean from sin with the blood of Christ (7:13–17).7 In The Road, the cleansing literally and figuratively separates the boy from the horrors of the surroundings, but rather than bringing the boy and the man closer to God, it is performed for the intrinsic worth of ritual. In Lefebvre’s terms, representations of space, that is, authoritative organizing principles, divine or quotidian, are glaringly absent, condemning characters to the gap between spatial practice and representational space, between aimless wandering and the aura of the remnants of the pre-cataclysmic landscape. Ritual here becomes an attempt to bridge the gap between the two remaining dimensions of social space, of (re-) connecting actions and the course of events to an overarching purpose. The absence of representations of space is also a key factor behind the polarization so essential to contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives. When the common codes and rules no longer control or determine social action and interaction, Nelson argues, “apocalyptic groups emerge with tight boundaries, and a strong sense of their corporate identity and distinctiveness, a view of the universe as a battleground between forces of good and evil (with evil momentarily holding the upper hand), and an intense concern to protect pure believers from constant attack by polluting forces” (38). Such a view of post-apocalyptic space as a battleground also accounts for the intensification of myth in the few “hosts” that linger in the post-cataclysmic world. The father has set up moral categories that define them as “the good guys” (109). “We’re carrying the fire” (109), he also repeatedly seeks to convince his son, and perhaps also himself, and it is this self-mythologization which gives them the courage to stay alive. Being good in this world, however, is proven problematic as well as relative and soon boils down to the simple “we do not eat other people”: When under stress, the father finds himself capable of stealing as well as killing. But the identity the man and the boy have created is supported and strengthened by groups who have found their identity at the opposite pole. In one rare instance, when a fatal meeting has been avoided by a hair’s breadth, the man and the boy watch such a group from a distance: Dressed in clothing of every description, all wearing red scarves at their necks. Red or orange, as close to red as they could find…. An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  85 of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyard at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks…. The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasselled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge up-country…. They passed two hundred feet away, the ground shuddering lightly. Tramping. Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. (77–78) The group mythology has been carefully crafted with the help of clothes, chants, walk, and a strict hierarchy. The cannibals have the appearance of evil cartoon figures and seem to house evil in its concentrated form, the inverted version of the man’s mythic construction of the boy as the host of goodness, but similarly intent on salvaging the body from mere materiality. The man and the boy are in what may best be described as a symbiotic relationship, where one cannot exist without the other, but in a different sense they belong to disparate temporal and spatial realms. Born just a few days after the catastrophe, the boy’s nightmares revolve around the anti-foundation of his own existence: “I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary…. The winder wasnt turning” (31). In his dream, the boy is mercilessly confronted with a life that has no source in place, culture or tradition. He therefore has problems understanding his father, who cannot help but seeing the present through the eyes of the past and thus occupies a place the son has no access to: “He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he” (129–130). The dramatic structure of the novel relies to some extent on the man and the boy walking in and out of abandoned houses, looking for food and clothes, but never staying for long and each time violating the idea of home as a symbolic place. Home is thus one of those “sacred idioms” (75) that mean something to the father but no longer operate as a spatial category. Lefebvre describes the modern home as primarily belonging to representational space, a nostalgic enclave in the disintegrated urban

86  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse reality of modernity. The frenzied urban life needed a counterpoint in the dwelling, not only as a physical place of rest, but also a sanctum for memories and dreams, its aura of sacredness and indeed even religiosity perpetuated through literature, art, and philosophy (120–21). The man entertains similar attitudes and cannot help but to nostalgically recreate scenes from the past as he walks through the empty rooms of his childhood home. But the timeless, abandoned landscape the man and the boy travel through cannot sustain the distinctions the idea of home is based on, and to the boy, this idea is therefore not meaningful, but causes a rift between them, which also, however, has concrete spatial implications. For while the man is trapped in the memories it gives rise to, the boy realizes that such nostalgia is not only futile but also perilous: “The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming him he could not see. We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didnt” (22). A home, as the boy’s warning indicates, is now a potential trap rather than a safe haven. A later scene in an abandoned house ostensibly reinstates what is missing in the father’s childhood home, namely domestic peace. The man and the boy “ate slowly out of bone china bowls, sitting at opposite sides of the table, with a single candle burning between them.” But the peaceful scene immediately turns into one of violence: “The pistol lying to hand like another dining implement. The warming house creaked and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation” (176–77). It is not only the gun that sends chills up the reader’s spine: As in a Gothic tale, the house becomes animated, reluctantly recalled from death only to relive it. As in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” resuscitation equals death’s repetition, the novel recreating the world that is lost while at the same time constructing the loss as well. The plantation house the man and the boy stop by comes across not so much as home as a monument over the darkest era in the history of the South, its time-capsule quality being the result of the economic solidity slavery had contributed to build: The “white Doric columns” that give it a temple-like exterior (89), the “great brass hinges” the doors are hung on, and the “large walnut buffet” that is “too large to burn” (90) have preserved their grandeur over the centuries. Lefebvre argues that the atemporal splendor that characterizes monumental space transcends anxieties over death and decay, ultimately aiming at bereaving death of meaning. But the illusion of timelessness the monument is meant to convey is never completely successful, for while it seeks to replace a history of violence with “a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror,” the conflicts are merely glossed over without being resolved in any radical sense (221–22). Analogously, the atrocities of the past echo in the basement of the house, where a large number of people are kept prisoners as meat supply, some already bereft of their limbs but kept alive by their cannibal captors to ensure freshness. The monumentality or mythic

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  87 dimension of the house is in this manner belied by its pit-like cellar and the image of chattel slaves that “had once trod [the] boards bearing food and drink on silver trays” (90) are given its netherworldly counterpart in the slaves beneath the same boards. If the apocalyptic framework in The Road yields a revelation of the workings of mythology itself, that does not only include the myths that shield us from the precipice but also those that protect us from the truth of what we are. In the apocalyptic plot, as we have seen, history is a linear process that propels toward a predetermined end. Divine predetermination makes it not only pointless but also sinful to try to stray from this path: One can make the journey more or less pious and be more or less prepared for the inevitable outcome, but not change the overall course or destination. Accordingly, even though history is inherently evil, its course must be followed through to the very end, which will then come as a reward to those who have earned it. As in Purple America, the road in McCarthy’s novel is a symbol for history. Unsurprisingly, then, it is in the novel’s central spatial symbol that the very crux of its apocalyptic framework can be discerned: The need to invest the road with some kind of overarching purpose, or, to return to Lefebvre, to reconcile the spatial practice of movement with authoritative representations of space, but also the futility of this venture. The boy seems to hold on to the apocalyptic symbolism of the journey, even when this symbolism has ceased to make sense. Coming across travelers burnt to cinders, the boy asks his father why they had not simply left the road. The man replies that they had not been able to as everything was on fire. Later that day the boy lets the man know that he regrets what he had said about the people in the road. The man, who does not understand what he means, replies: “I didnt know that you said anything bad.” The boy’s comment is: “It wasnt bad. Can we go now?” (169). The boy appears convinced that the road and the course of history must be followed through and that even suggesting the possibility of sidestepping this path would be both ignorant and blasphemous, for, as Bergoffen puts it, “the apocalyptist insists on the determinism of the historical process in order to assure human beings that they can be freed from the terrors of history” (29). Whereas the man is not only prepared to kill to protect his son but also basically unwilling to jeopardize their safety to help others, the boy’s focus on the road is his own moral behavior, on always putting others’ needs before his own and he is hard-pressed to find any purpose in a life without charity, forgiveness, and selflessness. The boy’s apocalyptic stance becomes even clearer in the encounter with Eli, whom he offers food and protection. Eli is a broken old man, nearly sightless and completely at the mercy of other people’s good will. The boy wants to offer him food and company, and the man reluctantly concedes to his plea. When Eli asks what he has to do in return, the man’s sarcastic reply is: “Tell us where the world went” (140). Yet the question is not

88  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse altogether off mark, for it soon turns out that Eli does believe himself to harbor knowledge about the fate of the world: “I knew this was coming. You knew this was coming? Yeah. This or something like it. I always believed in it” (142). The name Eli connects him with the prophet Elijah,8 and Eli does indeed come across as a disillusioned prophet, who, faced with global destruction, abandons his belief in humanity as well as in God. Zamora points out that the prophetic tradition gave way to the apocalyptic mode with increasing discontent and despair over the rise of powerful empires such as Persia, Greece, and Rome (Zamora 1993:10). In view of this, Eli comes across as the prophet to whom the catastrophe is merely a source of nihilism, for if the course of history is in the hands of the humans themselves, as the prophetic tradition postulates, a catastrophe is certainly a failure. It is also clear that the catastrophe had brought with it a change in Eli’s prophetic identity. When the man suggests that the boy might be a god, Eli’s answer is: “I’m past all that now. Have been for years” (145). When God is gone, however, the true prophet does not fall silent but keeps speaking of what he knows: “There is no God and we are his prophets” (143) is his new pseudoprophetic creed. Consequently, when Eli claims that “I’m just on the road the same as you” (144), this is only partly true. To the prophet after the catastrophe, the journey through post-cataclysmic space has no overarching purpose, no real sense of direction, and the road is therefore devoid of revelatory dimension. To Eli, then, the end of the world carries no purport beyond the individual death: The death of millions is simply a multiplication of the individual death, the end never transcending the private: “How would you know if you were the last man on earth?” the man asks Eli. “I dont guess you would know it. You’d just be it,” Eli replies, adding: “It wouldn’t make any difference. When you die it’s the same as everybody else did too.” But to the man there is a difference: “I guess God would know it,” he replies, wanting to see the catastrophe from a different perspective (143). Born after the catastrophe, the boy knows that nothing can be done to alter the course of history and is instead driven by a conviction that neither the man nor the disillusioned prophet can fully understand. The man wants Eli to acknowledge the boy’s greatness: You should thank him you know, the man said. I wouldnt have given you anything. Maybe I should and maybe I shouldnt. Why wouldnt you? I wouldnt have given him mine. You dont care if it hurts his feelings? Will it hurt his feelings? No, that’s not why he did it. Why did he do it?

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  89 He looked over at the boy and he looked at the old man. You wouldnt understand, he said. I’m not sure I do. Maybe he believes in God. I dont know what he believes in. He´ll get over it. No he wont. (146) Eli’s nihilism is here contrasted by the boy’s faith, and the man and the boy leave the prophet behind them on the road, “tapping his way, dwindling slowly on the road behind them like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever” (147). But this dialogue also makes the difference between the man and the boy clearer. As they set out on the road again, the man senses the boy’s disappointment in him for not giving Eli more food: “When we’re out of food you’ll have more time to think about it,” the father remarks. “I know,” the son replies. “But I wont remember it the way you do” (147). As they reach the coast, they also reach their goal and the end of the road. On the surface, it is an anti-climax, an utter disappointment, both to the reader and to the protagonists. Gray and lifeless like the space they had covered, the beach comes across as “[o]ne vast salt sepulchre” (187). Debris and derelict boats from the whole world drift aimlessly on the waves and litter the beach, confirming complete global destruction and, more importantly, emphasizing the absence of controlling power. But here the millennial imagery also intensifies. Some fifty feet from the beach, the man and the boy find a stranded boat stemming from Tenerife, the island from which Christopher Columbus set out on his famous voyage on September 6, 1492. But the derelict boat Pajaro d’Esperanza, the bird of hope, is an ironic version of the Santa Maria, the hope of the New World having turned into a bird with broken wings.9 But the boat also bears a symbolic resemblance to Noah’s ark, stranded on Mount Ararat. Like Noah’s Ark, the Pajaro d’Esperanza is a time capsule that carries the residues of the lost world, but there is also another parallel between them, namely the bird motif itself. In order to figure out if the world was recovering from the catastrophe, Noah sent out a dove, which returned with an olive leaf in its beak. The olive leaf gave Noah the hope of a renewed sense of place, indeed, of the emergence of a new world. Analogously, the man finds olive oil and a brass sextant on the boat, “the first thing he’d seen in a long time that stirred him” (192). A sextant being a device that facilitates navigation via the stars, the man’s reaction may stem from a vague but still tangible longing for heavenly guidance or revelation. However, as there are no stars to be beheld in the ashen skies, this is a longing that amounts to little more: He feels the weight of the sextant, admires the patina of it, but carefully puts it back in its box, like a relic of the lost world.

90  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse The man also finds a flare gun, which they decide to shoot at night, “like a celebration” rather than a signal, because “there is no one to signal to” (203) and no help to be had. In The Road the light in the sky is also yet another version of one of McCarthy’s most favored symbols, namely the fire spark, which ascends toward the sky only to die down before it reaches higher altitudes, signifying the futility and evanescence of human idealism and mythmaking. In All the Pretty Horses (1992), the spark stands for John Grady’s sentimental idealization of the West, and in The Road, it has a similar meaning but with one important difference: although the light is itself without purpose, its symbolic intensity is somehow intact: “He watched him stoke the flames. God’s own firedrake. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground” (26). Furthermore, the celebratory aspect of the flare is linked to its function as a localizing device. A celebration defines the present as a special moment in time and invests place with symbolic meaning. A celebration, in other words, is a separation of the here and now from otherwise undifferentiated expanses of time and space. It is clear that the stay on the beach adheres to such a definition of celebration, these pages also constituting the climax of the plot. But the symbolic meaning of this celebration also extends into the central concerns of the novel. When the man is dying on the beach, he watches his son and sees “light all about him…. and when he moved the light moved with him” (233). Surrounded by a divine light, the boy seems to belong to “some imaginable future” (230), in the man’s hallucinatory state relocated to a millennial realm. Interestingly, the intensified mythologization of the boy is counteracted by another process in the man’s mind, by which the rest of the world is de-mythologized. In a passage close to the end, a shower of obsolete or uncommon words and obscure references all but mask its import: He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. (220) To John Clute, the word “salitter” is the central concept not only of the passage but also of the novel as a whole: We need to focus on a single word. Salitter—which means something like the divine substance of God as expressed through the entities of the world: God-salt within the stone—is a term way beyond

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  91 most readers’ recognition vocabulary. It seems to have originated with the mediaeval theologian Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), and to have pretty well stuck there. It would be presumptuous to claim that this exceedingly obscure word comprises the essence of what McCarthy means to convey in The Road. But if his Christ figure (whose presence I can only half-credit) is meant to shape our gaze beyond all the evidence provided in the text of the utter termination of all hope, then that Christ figure must somehow be seen—must be felt—to transcend McCarthy’s specific, desolating proclamation that the divine has dried out of the earth. At best, therefore, I think that any continuance of the child who is the one, into the world beyond the closing of the text, is moot.10 Clute argues, then, that the evaporation of hope appears to be absolute in the novel and that the boy’s Christ-like traits cannot possibly balance this loss, for how can you balance that which denies even the smallest seeds of new beginnings to germinate? The light that surrounds the boy is thus another “flare”: not a glimpse of hope but the memory of it and a celebration of all that which will shortly be lost. The man places this celebration in a broader symbolic context as snapshots of the world’s destruction enter his imagination like global collective memories. Images of burnt and flooded modern cities give way to a vision of an ancient “city” of dolmens with moldering oracle bones beneath. Despite the mystic function of these constructions, the transcendental qualities stone had been invested with earlier in the novel— the “God-salt within the stone” as Boehme puts it—are essentially gone, and the sacred writing of the oracle bones is degraded to man-made answers to man-made questions: In ancient China, bones of animals were prepared by the drilling or carving of cavities. The bones were divined upon during a ceremony by applying a heated instrument into one of the cavities until the bone cracked. These cracks were then interpreted by the diviner, who also wrote down the answers to the questions on the bones themselves. The evaporation of “salitter,” then, is also the end of the spirit of language, indeed, the end of myth itself. This is what ultimately steals our eyes and seals our mouths with dirt, to return to the man’s lament above: Not death itself, because each individual death is transcended by what is passed on from generation to generation, but the termination of myths and legends. In The Road, as we have seen, apocalypse consists of two processes: The irrevocable, total demise of history, and the end of territory and all the myths associated with it. As we have also seen, however, the novel is replete with flares, which do not arrest or even counteract the general de-sacralizing process, but which stands out as a celebratory light that shines all the brighter with the grim reality of the world’s destruction for a foil. The Road, in other words, sprinkles millennial expectations over

92  McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse the landscape, which, never fulfilled, are themselves ultimately defeated and lost among the debris of the world. In a sense, then, the glimpses of the millennium are empty gestures; not as postmodern mimicking but as emptiness full of loss and pain, which reverberate long after the last pages of the novel. An urgent reminder of how much we have to lose, The Road can in fact be seen as the very antithesis of nihilism. The two final passages of the novel give distilled versions of the two processes. As the man dies, the son is miraculously adopted by a man and a woman with two children. The woman sees to it that the millennial flare is still lit as the story closes: “She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time” (241). The woman here makes explicit connections between tradition and divinity, explaining to the boy that they are different facets of the same temporal flow, which will exist for as long as humans breathe upon earth. The sense that this breath is ephemeral rather than eternal, however, is corroborated in the last of lines of the novel, which also function as an epilogue: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (241) David J. Leigh spuriously argues that the brook trout are actually found by the family at the end of the novel, in a remarkable turn of events where life prevails over death (233). The white flags of the fins, however, are signaling in vain as the trout have perished together with all living things. But what is lost is also the mythology with which the world is inextricably entwined, the patterns on the backs of the trout that are mythologized into “maps and mazes,” “texts” by which we can understand the geographies of the world and without which human life is unable to rise above matter. In short, then, the novel is essentially celebratory rather than faithless, and this is also the crucial difference between The Road and Blood Meridian. Indeed, the very cold-bloodedness of the slaughter of mythic portent in the latter novel is unbearable, whereas the destruction of myth is accompanied by rituals and dirges, indeed, itself mythic and mythologized in The Road, which makes it more sufferable. Space becomes a cemetery for myth, where reverence for what once lived is lodged.

McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse  93

Notes

5

Out of the Pit Southern Apocalypse and the Female Body in Ward’s Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) relates the story of a poor African American family in Mississippi before, during, and after hurricane Katrina. As in the The Road and Blood Meridian, the apocalyptic focus of the novel is on the intricate relation between space, body, and myth, the central conundrum hinted at already in the title: How can the bones be salvaged? The crucial difference between McCarthy and Ward in this regard, however, is that the former’s novels effectively dismantle the apocalyptic myth, whereas it prevails in Salvage the Bones; indeed, it is salvaged itself. In a true apocalyptic fashion, the catastrophic plot ultimately reaches a definitive and defining moment, a crisis, which opens up a chasm in time as well as space: “suddenly,” the narrator remarks, “there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it” (251).1 Likewise, as we will see, Ward’s novel also includes a millennial dimension, the disaster paving the way for a new world and a new era, something that can be said to go against a widely accepted tenet among critics that the southern apocalyptic tale revolves around different facets of loss related to the southern post-civil war condition: The loss of privileges, traditions, and ultimately also hope for the future.2 Southern apocalyptic fiction, however, precisely because of its emphasis on loss, can also been seen as clandestine force of resistance against the national master narrative of progress and promise. The South becomes, in Zamora’s words, “a prime example of the decline and decay of America’s sense of its destiny” (1982: 118). Similarly, Barbara Ladd suggests that Faulkner and other southern writers, “aware of the implications of defeat in a nationalistic culture, which sees itself as redemptive, as the vanguard of progress, have constructed the South as dangerous territory—a kind of national ‘id’…” (xii). Drawing on Ladd, Anthony Dyer Hoefer succinctly concludes that “the history of the South disrupts millenarian narratives of American exceptionalism and national mission” (51). In a sense, this was also a devastating side effect of the Katrina catastrophe, for not only did it affect lives on a great scale but it also exposed the gaps in the American millenarian narrative and the mechanisms involved in its construction. What was at stake was nothing

Out of the Pit  95 less than the national self-image, including the essentially millenarian belief in American exceptionalism. In Taylor and Levine’s view, the catastrophe affected the reputation of many of the self-conceptions of the United States, a nation long believed (and not only by the vast majority of Americans) to be wealthy enough, capable enough, and willing to meet any such challenge. By some accounts Katrina submerged George W. Bush’s presidential legacy. Others wondered if the United States was any longer able to call or conceive of itself as a “can-do” nation (Taylor and Levine 4) The events that followed on the catastrophe can be seen as characteristic of the South’s relation to the nation in its entirety, and yet at the same time, Katrina also initiated the return of the repressed, the long reaction time of the authorities showing just how quelled this area was in the consciousness of the nation. If, as Ladd puts it, “the South provides a powerful site for the critique of U.S. nationalism” (xiii), Salvage the Bones also constitutes such a site, not by emphasizing defeat but by creating a millennial story that refuses to be integrated into the national master narrative. In a sense, then, the novel also salvages the southern apocalyptic tale itself by shedding its undertones of loss while at the same time retaining southern integrity. As I will show in this chapter, this double act is largely achieved through a spatial shift in the novel that transfers the narrative point of view from the lofty spheres of the traditional apocalyptic narrator to what in the novel is referred to as the Pit, which in Revelation is another word for the abyss. As John Hannigan states, Hurricane Katrina was almost instantly understood through a broad spectrum of end-times narratives, as evidenced in the enormous increase in interest in popular apocalyptic films and novels directly after Katrina (77).3 Conversely, the catastrophe itself was very quickly recast in apocalyptic terms to give expression to that which appeared ineffable and make sense of an utterly chaotic situation. Indeed, as Dyer Hoefer puts it, “[i]n no time in recent years has the landscape of the apocalyptic imaginary come so close to materiality in the South as it did in the crescent City in late 2005” (156). But the apocalyptic plot not only helped explain the chaos and confusion which followed on Katrina but also served as a pretext for seeking out scapegoats. Public commentary was from the very beginning focused on explaining the disaster as an apt punishment for the iniquities of New Orleans, Babylon the Harlot reincarnated, and by the same logic, the detention of thousands of hurricane victims in the Superdome was justified as an attempt to contain this evil, the viral but mostly fabricated stories about atrocious crimes committed there further corroborating the need for such extreme measures. Indeed, the Superdome phenomenon readily

96  Out of the Pit lent itself to associations of hellish abyss and final judgment over sinners, which served to counter allegations toward the government as inept and discriminatory.4 Set in the Mississippi bayou rather than the default setting of New Orleans, Jesmyn Ward’s novel narrowly escapes having to make the choice between dealing with, denouncing, or ignoring the pervasive media images of black people during and after the catastrophe. As Christopher W. Clark argues, moreover, the choice of setting is significant as it “provides an alternative perspective on Katrina, indicating that the effects of the storm are more wide-ranging than usually considered,” something which in turn facilitates a more wide-ranging interrogation of the southern history of racism and violence (342). But the spatial revision of Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina tale, as hinted above, goes further than simply relocating the catastrophic plot to a different geographical region. As this chapter will evince, the novel also presents an alternative apocalyptic vision that accomplishes a reorganization of apocalyptic space by transferring the narrative focus from the elevated position of traditional apocalyptic narrators, whose testimony is the result either of a literal ascendance to God’s throne or a symbolic or indirect connection to such a divine, privileged perspective (Himmelfarb 22–23), to a pregnant African American teenager living on a farmstead informally named the Pit, a depressed point in the periphery of the region and, needless to say, of the nation. This radical relocation of the narrative point of view has thoroughgoing consequences for the novel’s position within and relation to the apocalyptic genre, for while the novel may justifiably be said to take its rightful place within the apocalyptic tradition, it also questions, criticizes, and revises this tradition from the specific vantage of the abyss. This means that the author takes back control of the stereotyped images spread during and after the hurricane of black people trapped in a mostly self-created hell. While it certainly makes for a harsh life, Ward’s abyss is primarily a site of solidarity and compassion.5 The result, as we will also see, is an apocalyptic narrative in which the lofty, self-effacing, overarching perspectives are replaced by local, specific, and highly personal testimony, where the intimate connections between body and environment do not entail profanation of either. The most salient result of this spatial revision, however, is an ongoing destruction of the bivalence inherent to the apocalyptic genre, here primarily affecting notions of femininity and motherhood. As in Moody and McCarthy, a contrast between the prophet and the apocalyptist can be discerned in Salvage the Bones. Esch’s father Claude shoulders the role of the prophet, who, in Zamora’s definition, “sees the future as arising out of the present and exhorts his listeners to action on the basis of an ideal to be realized in this world” (1993: 11). He repeatedly tries to catch the family members’ attention, warning them of the future catastrophic scenario and imploring them to take precautions as

Out of the Pit  97 to avoid catastrophe. “‘I’m trying to save us,’… ‘y’all need to appreciate me. You hear me?’” (106), he pleads, but to no avail: “Look at me like they don’t know when a man’s talking when I tell them a bad storm’s coming” (104). Esch, by contrast, comes across as a traditional apocalyptic narrator in that she is acutely perceptive of the cosmic dimensions of her comparatively narrow world. The apocalyptist, in Zamora’s words, is “both a cipherer and a decipherer” (1993: 128); both a reader and a writer, that is, someone who reads the signs of the times at the same time as he composes his own encrypted narrative of these signs (Zamora 1993: 15). Esch understands the embryo of her baby through the intricate patterns of veiling and unveiling inherent to the apocalyptic genre. She simultaneously connects and contrasts the hen eggs lodged in the dirt and the frog eggs floating in the water of the Pit with the pregnant body, wondering “if inside eggs, the kind that need the shelter of a body—horse eggs, pig eggs, human eggs—are so light would they look clear as jelly with firefly hearts, or would they look as solid and silent as stone? Would they show their mystery, or would they cover it like a secret?” (24). In this manner, Esch’s attempts to figure out the truth of the eggs inevitably beget new riddles: “Would a human egg let itself be seen?” (24). But Esch also significantly reconfigures the narrating stance of the apocalyptist, primarily in the way she asserts herself in relation to her surroundings. Her point of view is decidedly local and personal, her point of departure corresponding to the end point of the narrator of Morrison’s Jazz: from the very start, Esch very conspicuously figures in the scenes she narrates, the intimate relationship between body and environment having profound consequences for both. To Lefebvre, the body, originating in a cellular enclosure or an “internal space” (176), constitutes the most primal space. However, the enclosure is not absolute but draws sustenance from its surroundings at the same time as it is also constitutive of the environment. This mutually creative interaction, according to Lefebvre, continues to shape the conditions for the body’s relation to space through life: Can the body, with its capacity for action, and its various energies, be said to create space? Assuredly, but not in the sense that occupation might be said to “manufacture” spatiality; rather, there is an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the body’s deployment in space and its occupation of space. Before producing effects in the material realm (tools and objects), before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space. (170)

98  Out of the Pit In Ward’s novel, the interaction between body and space not only forms the basic conditions for existence but also occupies the very center of the apocalyptic plot. Dividing her attention between the enigmatic but ominous signs of approaching disaster and those of progressing pregnancy, Esch sees her body and the territory of the Pit as inextricably connected, not only through the metonymic chains that blur the boundaries between the inner and outer landscapes but also in terms of corresponding eschatological processes. The burning pine needles that are part of the routine of garbage burning in this manner become a point of reference for Esch’s interpretations of her condition: “The terrible truth of what I am flares like a dry fall fire in my stomach, eating all the fallen pine needles” (36). By the same token, just as the water-filled pit harbors snakes (53), Esch gradually becomes aware of an alien being inside her. A tentative sense that “[t]here is something there” (36) subsequently gives way to baleful certainty: “My stomach was its own animal” (109). The water of the Pit figuratively finds its way into Esch’s interior geographies as she takes a swim and imagines the fetus inside her doing the same: “Is this how a baby floats inside its mother” (56). Symptomatically, the personal transformation Esch goes through parallels the development of the Pit, something which further emphasizes the close connections between narration, body, and setting. The farm had been built with money earned from the original founder’s strategy to sell the dirt of the land to white men to use for the foundation of new houses. The farm, in other words, is hollowed out in its very coming into being, dissolving the distinction between creation and destruction. Its own product, it decimates itself with each transaction, like a body selling its own organs for survival. Correspondingly, Esch’s body is initially both exploited and vanquished as she gives it up to the boys of the neighborhood, regarding it as her only resource but treating it as a means of self-effacement rather than self-assertion: “it was easier to let them get what they wanted,” Esch says of the boys she has slept with, “instead of denying them, instead of making them see me” (238). However, both Esch and the farm gradually reverse this self- consuming process: Soon water-filled the Pit threatens to swallow the whole property, jeopardizing the territory in its entirety, just like Esch’s self-destructive behavior is increasingly directed outward toward her environment. In the process, Esch is transformed from the passive victim of Manny’s psychological abuse to the vengeful goddess on a par with two of the other goddesses of the Pit: China, the pit bull, and Greek tragic heroine Medea: “I’m on him like China” (203); “This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood” (204). The developments of the pre-catastrophic environment and the pregnant body parallel each other in the novel, childbirth becoming a metamorphosis that may best be described as the body’s apocalypse insofar

Out of the Pit  99 as the old shape is erased and replaced by a radically new figure. The moments before delivering her puppies, China’s skin is “rippling like wind over water” (8), an omen prefiguring the metamorphosis that motherhood entails, but also the advancement of the natural disaster, the parallel apocalyptic event. Tellingly, at the end of the novel, just before landfall, the wording is also repeated to announce the approach of Katrina, the most powerful metamorphosis of them all: “China barks. The wind ripples the water and it is coming for us” (227). Similarly, the word “bulb” is invested with both metamorphic and apocalyptic meaning, first as an apocalyptic sign prefiguring oncoming disaster: “It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn” (2; emphasis added). Just after, the bulb is a metaphor for the metamorphosis of labor, as China’s delivering her puppies and Mama’s giving birth to her last child are both described as a kind of flowering, as that critical moment when a bulb transforms into a flower: “Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mama’s last flower” (2); “[e]verything about China tenses and there are a million marbles under her skin, and then she seems to be turning herself inside out. At her opening, I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming” (4; emphasis added). Esch anticipates the arrival of Katrina, not only as devastation but also as revelation, while simultaneously describing her pregnancy as a predetermined journey toward a final point of unveiling: “Tomorrow I think, everything will be washed clean. What I carry in my stomach is relentless; like each unbearable day, it will dawn” (205). The moment when the truth about Esch’s condition is disclosed to the rest of the family not only coincides with the landfall of the hurricane but is also a direct consequence of it: “there is a pushy wind blowing, the kind that drags my clothes and shows my body for what it is. The light comes from everywhere and nowhere” (196; emphasis added). The storm wreaks havoc on all living beings but simultaneously begets a new existence, a chance for all the creatures of the Pit to start anew, being “the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage” (255). But whereas Revelation’s “new heaven and new earth” involves a complete annihilation of all that was known and all that had existed, Ward’s new world is one where the remains are salvaged, brought into the new world and given a new place and a new life. As stated in InVisible Culture, the act of salvaging was at odds with the stereotyped media coverage from New Orleans after Katrina: “In this period of strain, many journalists reverted to archaic color-based stereotypes. Black people looted while white people salvaged; blacks were obdurate in their decision to remain in the city while whites were largely victims taken

100  Out of the Pit by surprise; blackness was temperamental and violent while whiteness was composed and unwavering.”6 Ward’s salvaging consequently revises both the media image of black Southerners and the traditional apocalyptic tale as eradication is replaced by sacralization of what already existed. The intricate relation between the female body and space has a counterpart in Revelation, where the two contrasting women- cities, Babylon the Whore and new Jerusalem the Bride, are both vehicles and attributes of the two (masculine) superpowers of Revelation, God and Satan, as well as the territorial conflict associated with them. The polarization that these two spatialized women-as-cities represent also has a counterpart in other female figures of the text. Babylon is reflected in Jezebel, who masquerades as a prophetess, seduces men, consumes offerings, and is punished by the murder of all her children (2:20–23), and the new Jerusalem mirrors the glorious woman “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (12:1), but whose pregnancy, as Campbell points out, also makes her vulnerable (88): As she gives birth, a dragon is standing by to devour her son (12:3–4). The weakness of both women, in other words, appears connected to motherhood, the children making the otherwise powerful women assailable. While pregnancy and motherhood are certainly sources of vulnerability in Salvage the Bones, however, they are also sources of strength and power, as the following pages will evince. Her mother having died in connection with the birth of her youngest brother and her family and circle of friends exclusively consisting of boys and men, Esch has virtually no female role models in her life. Instead she looks to different mythological figures, particularly the goddess, for self-definition and self-knowledge. The archetypal goddess is an irreducibly contradictory character: a creator as well as a destroyer, a life-giver and life-taker. In Revelation, however, as Pippin explains, “[t]he ancient goddess in all her characteristic diversity of motherhood, erotic sexuality, virginity, and as warrior, justice giver, caretaker, creatrix of nature and arts, and destroyer is segmented into these binary oppositions of good and evil, whore and virgin-mother” (1992: 79). In Revelation, then, the goddess is both compartmentalized and stereotyped, as seen in the bride/whore and Jezebel/the woman clothed with the sun. And yet there is a repository for contradictory and ambiguous entities also in Revelation, namely the abyss. According to Lefebvre, in the Roman organization of space, the pit functions symbolically as passageway between realms, as the intermediary space between the public, ordered space of the city (“land-as-territory”) and the subterranean, hidden spaces of death and fertility (242). Analogously, in Revelation the word “pit” is used at the moment when the seventh seal is broken and

Out of the Pit  101 the boundary that separates the two spheres is done away with: “Then the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from heaven which had fallen to the earth; and the key of the bottomless pit was given to him. He opened the bottomless pit, and smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit” (9:1–2). In an instant, a realm otherwise inaccessible to the human sphere releases monstrous beings that pour their horrors over humanity, the pit/abyss being a portal between the earth and the underworld but also a property of both. Via the pit, the earth is polluted with a swarm of locusts, whose very essence is ambiguous: They have men’s faces, women’s hair, wear a golden crown and the breastplate of a horse prepared for war, and are endowed with lions’ teeth and scorpions’ tails. As Malcolm Bull argues, every cosmology rests on a basic bivalence but also faces challenges to this basic system of opposites in the form of “undifferentiation,” which corresponds to a blurring of categories. Hence, if the goddess has been rooted out of the apocalyptic cosmic scheme, undifferentiation as such reappears as a sign of impending chaos: “The logic of apocalyptic,” Bull contends, “seems to culminate in the maximization of undifferentiation” (72), particularly in the shape of hybrids. The hybrid, however, is not merely an amalgamation of two disparate entities but something far more radical, a “mixture of impure elements which are themselves defined by their mixed attributes” (Bull 72). The hybrid may therefore best be characterized as an abomination, the result of the corrupting influence of the pit/abyss ultimately aimed at contaminating the distinct categories that the apocalyptic cosmic order is based on: Light-darkness, femininity-masculinity, good-evil, bridewhore, and so on. A perversion of God’s divine order, the hybrids must, in accordance with apocalyptic logic, be either purified or done away with, which, precisely, is the solution the new Jerusalem introduces: The final and irrevocable destruction of ambiguities. Also in Salvage the Bones, the Pit is a place where undifferentiation, a blurring of categories, and, most prominently, a fusion of death and life dominate, but whereas the abyss, however threatening to the cosmic order, is limited territory in Revelation, in Ward it makes up the entire fictional world. The original house is a “drying animal skeleton” (58), where the “bodies” of old cars sit “like picked-over animal bones” but also where the eggs of the ever-multiplying stray hens lay hidden everywhere, as if the earth itself had laid them (22). It is where the family pit bull China delivers her puppies, but as the ground itself is contaminated, infected by parvovirus, it also takes their lives. Finally and most importantly, it is the gathering spot of ambiguous characters, both mythological and real, and where the goddess is manifested in three different shapes: China, the family pit bull; Medea, whom Esch is reading about for a school project;7 and Katrina, the storm itself.

102  Out of the Pit The pit bull China is the prime creature of the Pit and the main focus of Esch’s apocalyptic interest. From the very first page, she is consistently described in contradictory but larger-than-life terms. She is “an angel streaked by rain, burning bright” (106) and a tender mother who licks and nurses her puppies: “I’ve never seen her so gentle,” Esch remarks, “I don’t know what I thought she would do once she had them: sit on them and smother them maybe. Bite them. Turn their skulls to bits of bone and blood. But she doesn’t do any of that. Instead she stands over them… and she licks” (17). But China is also a monster who lashes out to bite and destroy her spawn: “She lowers her head, pointed like a snake. When the puppy jerks his neck again, she growls. It is the rumbling of rocks across packed earth” (40); “China snaps forward, closes her jaw around the puppy’s neck as she does when she carries him, but there is no gentleness in it. She is all white eyes. She is chewing” (129). She is a “weary goddess” (40) and a beast whose acts of love are also deadly fights: “there was blood on their jaws, on her coat, and instead of loving, it looked like they were fighting” (8), and, conversely, the actual fight between the former “lovers,” the “mother” and “father” of the puppies, is described as an act of love: “China kisses the side of Kilo’s face, a face-tonguing lover’s kiss, mother to father, deeply” (172). The fight between China and Kilo take on apocalyptic proportions as the symbolic battle between two distinct forces (male/female; mother/father; god/goddess). However, during the fight the two fierce creatures merge, creating a terrible hybrid: “The two dogs blur into one. They have two heads, four legs, two tails. They are an ancient beast, fierce, all growling hunger, rising up out of the sea” (167). Compare this description to that of the beast in Revelation, summoned by Satan from the sea, which in this instance, as Resseguie points out, is synonymous with the abyss or “the bottomless pit” (33): “And the dragon stood on the sand of the seashore. Then I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and on his horns were ten diadems, and on his heads were blasphemous names” (13:1). In Salvage the Bones, however, the hybrid does not typically mark the onset of war as in Revelation, but its corollary. As a consequence, if the result of the catastrophe in Revelation is homogeneity and seamlessness, in Ward it is equivocation and contradiction. The most powerful goddess in the story is, of course, Katrina, the storm itself. In popular culture, hurricane Katrina has repeatedly been cast as a whore. Macomber, Mallinson, and Seale have analyzed how the storm has been represented on souvenir T-shirts marketed all over New Orleans, and the parallels between Katrina and Babylon are striking: Katrina the female figure is cast as a “bitch” because “she” was uncontrollable and caused widespread damage as well as a “whore” who “hooked,” “fucked,” and gave “blow jobs.” “She” is castigated

Out of the Pit  103 not merely for performing sex acts, but for doing so actively, agentively, in an unregulated, uncontrollable manner. These t-shirt slogans are rhetorically powerful devices: men are cast as the unintended victims of pain and the unintended receivers of pleasure; women whose sexuality is unregulated—whores—are cast as deliberately giving both pleasure and pain. (531) We recognize the unrestrained, aggressive sexuality that characterizes Babylon the whore in the personification of the hurricane on the T-shirts as well as in Ward’s novel, and in both, the hurricane is linked to femininity and power. As Esch remarks, “[t]he storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina” (124). Katrina, however, is also pictured as a serpent big enough to “swallow the world” (219), an irreducibly hybrid creature. The flood she gives rise to is like a “wide-nosed snake,” whose “head disappears under the house where we stand, its tail wider and wider, like it has eaten something greater than itself, and that great tail stretches out behind it into the woods, toward the Pit”: “The snake has come to eat and play,” has “swallowed the whole yard and is opening its jaw under the house” (226-27). In Revelation, as we have seen, a similar amalgamation of snake and flood threatens the woman clothed with the sun, who is about to deliver her child: And when the dragon saw that he was cast down to the earth, he persecuted the woman that brought forth the man child. And there were given to the woman the two wings of the great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness unto her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. And the serpent cast out of his mouth after the woman water as a river, that he might cause her to be carried away by the stream. (12:13–15) In Ward’s rendering, however, hybrids and goddesses not only coexist but—themselves unstable entities, a “mixture of mixture” (Bull 72)— also merge into each other, creating new unforeseen shapes. The three goddesses of the Pit—China, Medea, and Katrina—in this manner form a complex metaphorical web, where one inevitably evokes the image of another. For instance, Katrina is beating against the coastline “like China at the tin door of the shed when she wants to get out and Skeet will not let her” (219); the wind that so violently pushes against Esch corresponds to the storm that “Medea called up after she slew her brother, to push the boat so quickly that the wake was a bloody froth” (198) and a hybrid China-Medea harbors the truth of motherhood: “China is bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed as Medea. If she could speak, this is what I would ask her. Is this what motherhood is?” (130). By the

104  Out of the Pit same token, Katrina assumes the shape of vengeful Medea, becoming “the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons” (255). The authorities play an almost blatantly insignificant role in the novel, and it is the silence rather than the voice of the official America that dominates, even if this silence is occasionally and paradoxically voiced, as in the automatic phone call the day before landfall that conveys not only a general sense of desolation but is a message with clear apocalyptic overtones. Those who do not heed the warnings will be condemned and punished: A man’s voice speaks; he sounds like a computer, like he has an iron throat. I cannot remember exactly what he says, but I remember it in general. Mandatory evacuation. Hurricane making landfall tomorrow. If you choose to stay in your home and have not evacuated by this time, we are not responsible. You have been warned. And these could be the consequences of your actions. There is a list. And I do not know if he says this, but this is what it feels like: You can die. (217) Similarly, the post-cataclysmic landscape is primarily one of abandonment, where “[p]eople stand in clusters at what used to be intersections, the street signs vanished, all they own in a plastic bag at their feet, waiting for someone to pick them up. No one is coming” (250). However, the waiting continues, and the expectations of salvation are subsequently transferred from the authorities to one of the goddesses of the Pit, namely China. The fact that the pit bull disappears during the catastrophe is not a defeat of the bivalent goddess but quite the opposite: The Pit is now not only a post-catastrophic territory but also a millennial kingdom, a territory of light and hope that awaits the glorious return of the pit bull, goddess of the abyss, like the Second Coming of Christ: “China. She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit, and she will know I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence. She will know that I am a mother” (258). In Revelation, we recall, dogs are left in the abyss outside the new Jerusalem, together with “the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters” (22:15), to suffer eternal torment. In Ward’s apocalypse, then, the Pit is the new world, and the pit bull its Christ figure and savior. The goddess here takes the role reserved exclusively for God in apocalyptic narration, but rather than being punished, she prevails in all her impurities and contradictions to usher in the new world.

Out of the Pit  105 As Pippin’s post-structuralist reading of Revelation suggests, even after the final victory of God, the abyss persists outside the walls of the new Jerusalem, its mere existence undoing the founding principles of indestructibility, timelessness, and homogeneity of God’s city (1999: 64). The ending of Revelation is in such a reading far less conclusive than first meets the eye. For when the new Jerusalem has been established, what is ostensibly the final victory of the purity and grace of God is in actuality both more complex and more untidy: Rather than presenting us with a neat seamlessness, the end undoes itself as ending by allowing the abyss to remain just outside the walls of the holy city: “Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying” (22:15). In sum, the elements of the old world are still intact but redistributed so that the virtuous are granted what may best be described as a gated community from which the sinners are kept out: “Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy” (22:11). Pippin concludes that the very notion of “forever” that Revelation leaves its readers with must be questioned, arguing that “even when assuring the believers of the safe-keeping of the evil powers in the abyss, there is always the possibility that the angel with the key will open the entrance door” (1999: 65). In this manner, Pippin argues, “the abyss defers the closure of the text” (1999: 66), constantly threatening to throw the ordered new world into chaos again and thus also thrusting the apocalyptic text back to the starting point. The abyss may be marginalized but not erased and thus continues to jeopardize the integrity of the new Jerusalem. Analogously, if the Pit is also a metonymy for the South, it is not primarily a defeated region but a peripheral, subversive space presenting itself as an alternative to the national master narrative, where the catastrophe does correspond to a complete or final purification of what had been mixed as in Revelation or to an abolishment of ambivalence and hybridity but rather to their accentuation, as illustrated through the reference to the 1960s, when a hurricane brought together what had been kept apart, forming a new society founded on the coexistence of white and black Americans: “schools were desegregated in 1969, after the last big hurricane, when people were too tired … to still fight the law outlawing segregation” (140). Above all, in presenting an alternative to the Katrina narratives that look for the causes of the catastrophe in the alleged apartness of the southern, poor, and predominantly African American population and that are ultimately intended to maintain and entrench the existing social divisions, Ward’s apocalypse, spawned from the Pit, does not erase but salvages heterogeneity.

106  Out of the Pit

Notes

6

The Story Is Telling Us Apocalyptic Geopolitics in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

This chapter broadens the spatial perspective in relation to the previous ones by focusing on the connections between apocalyptic space and national geopolitics as envisioned by Michael Chabon in his 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The reception of the novel when it was first published was fascinatingly and revealingly divided. While it was praised for its wit, imaginative powers, and skilfully plotted story,1 it was also severely criticized for its way of representing Jewish languages, history, and culture. Chabon, it was argued, is wrong about a number of things, including Yiddish words and central religious concepts, 2 and his representation of Zionism was readily and forcefully condemned by a not insignificant number of critics. One of the most serious allegations came from Ruth R. Wisse, whose review of the novel accused Chabon of representing “the Jew” in a simplistic and stereotypical manner; as a powerless victim or as a cunning schemer. “[T]he intimacy he creates,” Wisse argues, is “the intimacy of exile, of powerlessness. Chabon’s mock-Yiddish reinforces the sentimental stereotype of the Jew as harmless refugee, one who does not threaten the peace of the world, or the peace of the Jews themselves, unless and until he fatally conspires to resettle the land of Israel.”3 Chabon has also fueled the debate in various contexts by relativizing the importance of a homeland for Jews. In an interview with Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian, Chabon declared that “[w]hat interests me is the drama of the Jews, rather than deciding in my novels whether Israel or any other homeland is necessary for us,”4 something which occasioned Daniel Anderson to suggest that the writer, repeatedly denying Israel special status as nation, is “wearing his anti-Zionist badge with pride” (88). This chapter, however, is not primarily concerned with representations of Jewishness in the novel but rather the way in which Chabon portrays the relations between Jewish culture and American apocalyptic and territorial visions. As I will show in the following pages, Chabon’s Alaskan setting functions as the nexus for two different American apocalyptic traditions that also promote conflicting territorial agendas in the novel. As pointed out repeatedly in this study, ideas of Americans as the chosen people and the continent as a promised land have been integral parts of

108  The Story Is Telling Us the apocalyptic mythology surrounding discovery, settlement, and nation building. These apocalyptic notions remain vital also in present-day America, particularly in American evangelicalism, for which questions of where, when, and how the new world will be ushered in and what America’s role in this event should be are still current. Such speculation also regularly spills over the strictly religious contexts into the very heart of American power, most glaringly, perhaps, in the case of Ronald Reagan, who took the leftist coup in Libya in 1971 as evidence that Armageddon is near: “That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off…. Everything is falling into place. It can’t be long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons” (qtd Boyer 1992: 142). Reagan based these convictions on Jewish prophet Ezekiel’s predictions of Libya as one of the invaders of Israel but, symptomatically and no doubt worrisomely, conceived of them as not only a religious but also a geopolitical drama, in which the United States should play the leading role. Chabon’s novel draws much of its apocalyptic inspiration from such authentic affairs but twists them in a way that makes an alternative reality rather than a fictive universe appear. This simulation of reality is likely to have contributed to the controversy surrounding the novel, the problem being not that Chabon changes reality but rather that he does not change it enough. (In Chabon’s quasi-historical rendering, for example, two million rather than six million Jews were killed during World War II, a circumstance that risks coming across as a historical revision rather than fiction, fabrication rather than fantasy.)5 Since the connections between actual and fictional processes are at once so central and complex in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, this chapter acknowledges the necessity to both identify and untangle them to understand the novel in its entirety. The point of departure for the plot is precisely such a historical and territorial revision: Alaska, not Israel, is the new Jewish homeland, established by the American government after the collapse of Israel in 1848 as a compensation for and mitigation of Jewish suffering in Europe before and during World War II. Curiously, there is a grain of truth in this story, as a 1940 proposal conceived by the secretary of the interior Harold Ickes launched the idea of opening up the Alaskan territory to persecuted European Jews. This proposal did not pass Congress but is, almost seventy years later, resuscitated in Chabon’s fictional experiment. When the reader enters the story, however, the lease of the territory is about to expire and the Sitka settlement will soon revert to the state of Alaska. Only a few of the Sitka Jews (no exact number is given) will be granted American citizenship, causing the conflicts over territory to take increasingly bizarre turns. Homicide detective Meyer Landsman, whose surname ironically means citizen in Yiddish, has not even bothered to apply for citizenship as he, much like his film-noir colleagues,

The Story Is Telling Us  109 has already lost everything of importance—his marriage, his child, his faith, and his home—and is now also about to lose his job, as the District Police will soon dissolve. In defiance of the very clear instructions from U.S. government officials to remain passive during the last weeks in office, Landsman, together with his cousin and colleague Berko and his exwife and boss Bina, is determined to solve a homicide, the repercussions of which will reach into the very center of American power. The central metaphor of the novel is chess, a game that, both markedly spatial and strategic in essence, played an immensely important role in twentieth-century world politics: As the world became increasingly polarized during the Cold War and countries were coerced into confessing allegiance to either side, the two superpowers put immense resources into the careers of their chess masters. Importantly, chess was by and large also a Jewish affair, the most successful players of both superpowers being Jewish immigrants who had fled central Europe before and during World War II. During this era of double exile—the “original” exile from the Promised Land and the “secondary” exile from Europe— chess became a way for some Jews to create a place and social status for themselves in their new homelands.6 The victim in the murder plot of Chabon’s novel turns out to be a famous chess player, who is found dead at the sordid hotel where Landsman stays for lack of a proper home and in whose room a chessboard shows (as it turns out at the end of the novel) the chess problem zugzwang. According to Landsman, a zugzwang is an endgame where the losing player is “forced to move” even “when you know that it’s only going to lead to you getting checkmated” (400).7 The chess metaphor effectively ties the different apocalyptic plots together, for not only does it refer to the imminent demise of the District and the ensuing Diaspora condition but also, as both Landsman and the reader will become aware, to the endgame that American Christians not only believe in but also in different ways seek to take control of. As will be evinced in the following, what turns the Sitka district into a geopolitical chessboard, putting the Sitka Jews in a precarious zugzwang position, are the competing apocalyptic interests connected to different facets of American evangelicalism, namely the postmillennial and the premillennial traditions. The postmillennial tradition8 sees Judgment Day and Armageddon as happening after the millennium, a belief that adds a significant social dimension to apocalyptic thought: If America is to usher in the millennium and thus pave the way for the Second Coming, it needs to prepare by creating the good society through social work. As Richard G. Kyle argues, this strand of millennialism “did not see the world ending anytime soon. Rather, the gospel would penetrate society, and life on Earth would gradually improve until Christ’s return” (47). Indeed, open to the idea that America has, in fact, already entered the millennial age, the postmillennialist seeks evidence that this is the case by focusing on

110  The Story Is Telling Us positive social developments (Hall 149). The premillennialists, by contrast, expect the Second Coming and accompanying Judgment Day to occur before the millennium and are therefore much more negative with regard to social reform and activism. The cataclysm is approaching in accordance with God’s timetable, and there is nothing humanity can or should do to prevent it. Only when the Lord has returned can humanity live in peace and prosperity. America should consequently be instrumental not in creating a better world but in precipitating Armageddon (Boyer 1992: 196–98), social conflict in this context mainly figuring as the welcome sign that the end is near (Boyer 1992: 95, Hall 149).9 These different interpretations of America’s apocalyptic role in the greater apocalyptic scheme occasion us to return to Christopher Columbus’ characterization of the continent as a “new heaven and a new earth” and an “earthly paradise” (224), for he also added another apocalyptic dimension to the idea of the American continent as a millennial paradise: In Book of Prophecies, he sought to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to sponsor a crusade against the Muslims in Jerusalem and return “the apocalyptic city par excellence” (Kirch 170) to the Jews, enabling him to rebuild the temple with gold from the New World (Boyer 2002: 320), something which was regarded as a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ and the onset of the Millennium.10 In Christopher Columbus’ apocalyptic repertory, then, there is the postmillennial notion that the “new heaven and a new earth” had been found with the discovery of America as well as the almost simultaneous premillennial idea that America is rather the vehicle for the rebuilding of the Third Temple in the Middle East. A similar duality regarding America’s role in the apocalyptic endgame can be found in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, where millennial ideas about the American continent itself and premillennial conceptions about America’s global role constitute the very crux of the conflict. These two apocalyptic strands are encapsulated in the seminal fata morgana symbol that appears in different contexts in the novel. On the one hand, the fata morgana stands for the aspirations of the Sitka settlement. The novel tells the story of the phenomenon seen in the Alaskan sky by Italian mountaineer Abruzzi in 1897, which was in actuality a mirage of Bristol, England. The illusion is also referred to as a “city in the sky” (289), which of course alludes to Winthrop’s famous vision of America as a “city on a hill,” which in turn derives from John’s vision of the new Jerusalem in Revelation. In the Puritan imagination, New England was clearly a forerunner to the new Jerusalem: Puritan leader John Davenport, as Boyer notes, “found early reports from New England so moving that (according to Cotton Mather) ‘brought into his Mind the New Heaven and the New Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness’” (1992: 68), and Cotton Mather himself saw New England as “the spot of Earth, which the God of Heaven Spied out,” as the capitol of

The Story Is Telling Us  111 the millennial kingdom and the “Holy city in AMERICA, a City, the Street whereof will be Pure Gold” (qtd Boyer 1992: 70). The fata morgana phenomenon, as also suggested in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is “made of weather and light and the imagination of men raised on stories of heaven” (289), which further connects the mirage to millennial hope and longing. The second apocalyptic context the fata morgana appears in is when Landsman and Bina visit The Moriah Institute in Sitka, on the surface a museum displaying Jewish artifacts but in actuality, as Bina and Landsman discover, the Sitka headquarters of Jewish and Christian Zionists. The most alluring object in the exhibition is a model of the Temple Mount, which, as Bina points out to the caretaker Buchbinder, has omitted the temple itself. When Buchbinder presses a button, however, the temple “resumes its rightful place at the navel of the world” (331) in the form of a hologram that “imparts a miraculous radiance to the model. It shimmers like a fata morgana” (331; emphasis added). The fata morgana in this manner reflects not only the somewhat contradictory apocalyptic expectations expressed by Columbus but also the main American evangelical strands, where one advocates the idea of the millennium as possible to realize within present-day America and the other expects it to be realized only after Armageddon, which would then presuppose a rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. Chabon complicates the apocalyptic plot even further, however, by linking the apocalyptic agendas to different constructions of Jewish culture, which in turn mirror Anita Norich’s concepts of Yiddishism and Hebraism. Derived from the Jewish languages, the concepts more generally denote two Jewish traditions but also have significant spatial relevance as they “suggest potentially different ways of regarding one’s place in the world and in world cultures” (Norich 780). As Norich is careful to point out, however, Yiddishism and Hebraism do not correspond to absolute or stable positions but are rather worldviews or aspirations, always challenged by circumstance and context. Yiddishism, named after the fusion language of European Jews, thrives on interaction, transmutability, and accretion. While assuming many different shapes, it is generally prone to patchwork and collage. Norich uses the term pentimento to describe the result of such Yiddishist processes: If “[u]nder the sign of Hebraism, the impact of the non-Jewish world is… masked; diverse sources are made to appear seamless, indistinguishable, part of one organic, ongoing whole” (780). Yiddishism, she further argues, “calls our attention to the shifting brackets…. Under the sign of Yiddishism, the traces of these sources remain clearer; they create something new, but they leave clearly discernible elements. In pentimento, these traces may be covered over, but now and then the canvas reveals what came before” (780). If Yiddishism represents “the clearest marker of intersections,” Hebraism rather constitutes “the clearest marker of boundaries” (789), first

112  The Story Is Telling Us and foremost aspiring to maintain the distinctiveness, independence, and authenticity of Jewish identity. Reluctant to merge with surrounding cultures, it typically exists in a parallel vista, “alongside other nations rather than within them” (780). Ideas commensurate with Yiddishism played a crucial role in the advancement of progressive immigration ideas and polices in the early twentieth century, which developed in close affiliation with the germinating American Zionist movement. Horace M. Kallen, one of the first active American Zionists and founder of the American Jewish Congress, described the Jews as “[f]lexible and accommodating” and coming “far more with the attitude of the vaunted earliest settlers than any of the other peoples; for they more than any other present-day immigrant group are in flight from persecution and disaster; in search of economic opportunity, liberty of conscience, civil rights” (qtd Obenzinger 565). The comparison between the Jewish immigrant and the early American settlers brings de Crevecouer’s famous “new man” to mind, the immigrant ready to cast off his language and culture to adapt to the new conditions in America,11 but it also recalls various melting-pot-inspired creeds. Indeed, such views of Jewish immigrants are still prevalent, as in Wisse’s contention that “[Jews] were like Americans—promoting rather than preventing the absorption of ‘foreign’ elements into their vital speech,” and thus, she continues, also markedly different from the nationalisms of other peoples, most notably that of Germany at the end of the nineteenth century (2007a: 49). As Hilton Obenzinger demonstrates, when the Zionist movement grew in the United States, it was to a large extent American frontier and settlement ideas that dominated visions of a Jewish state in Palestine, principles that had paradoxically been inspired by Jewish sources to begin with. It was, in other words, Americanized versions of the Hebraic ur-story that inspired and, in some respects, even dominated the progressive Zionistic movement (Obenzinger 654–55). To leading American Zionists, the Zionist project consequently appeared more or less an extension of American values (Obenzinger 666), becoming an opportunity to at once reiterate and reinforce the settlement ideals of pluralism and equality. The American and Jewish spatial projects in this manner lent each other authority in a way which borders on a mis en abyme. As Obenzinger also remarks, however, the “inclusive visions of democracy” were themselves dependent on exclusion, as “the creation of an unhyphenated white population of European immigrants enculturated with a version of Anglo-Saxon values” was a process that excluded Jews, Mexicans, African Americans, and Asians (652). In addition, he argues, “[b]oth pluralists and assimilationists found no contradiction in arguing for universalist principles of inclusion in the United States at the same time that they advanced settler nationalism in Palestine” (666). As we will see, the pluralist and assimilationist rhetoric that dominates the early settler period of the Sitka district in Chabon’s novel hides similar

The Story Is Telling Us  113 contradictions that pertain not only to the situation of the Jewish immigrants but also other ethnic groups and their relation to each other as well as to the territory itself. As the optimism that had characterized postmillennial thought waned around mid- century, a need to reformulate the nation’s role in the apocalyptic scheme emerged. The apocalyptic fate of America was still regarded as closely connected with that of Jews, but, when it became all too clear that the United States was not the “New Israel,” the geographical focus shifted to Palestine, to the establishment of a nation for the Jews in their original homeland and the rebuilding of the temple (Boyer 1992: 89). The narrative about the American role in the apocalyptic plot was thus radically reformulated, and Jews were now celebrated for their ability to remain intact as an ethic group rather than for their adaptability. D.L. Moody’s early formulation from 1877 expressed sentiments that correspond to Norich’s notion of Hebraism and that would be reiterated in premillennial apocalyptic thought in the next century: There is no nation that has or can produce such men…. That promise was made 4000 years ago, and even now you can see that the Jews are a separate and distinct nation, in their language, in their habits and in every respect. You can bring almost any nation here and in fifty years they will become extinct, merged into another, but bring a Jew here, and in fifty years, a hundred years, or a thousand years, he is still a Jew. When I meet a Jew I can’t help having a profound respect for them, for they are God’s people. (qtd Cohn-Sherbok 99) In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, two positions corresponding to Norich’s concepts of Yiddishism and Hebraism are brought into play by different American apocalyptic interests. The Jewish settlement in Alaska is postmillennial in essence but serves two main purposes, which, however, go hand in hand: It provides persecuted Jews with a refuge and at the same time it reinforces the millennial idea of America as a forerunner of the new Jerusalem, here with the original chosen people, ironically referred to as “the frozen Chosen” (238), in the leading roles. The ideological point of departure for the Sitka settlement involves pluralist ideas, something that requires Yiddishist emphasis on adaptability and accretion, a readiness to break with previous lives and start over on new grounds. During the early optimistic years, both intraterritorial and interterritorial connections are encouraged and forged, the former exemplified by the songs of “the work crews of young Jewesses in their blue head scarves,” who “[sing] Negro spirituals with Yiddish lyrics that [paraphrase] Lincoln and Marx” (30), and the latter by “The Safety Pin,” the monument over Sitka World’s Fair of 1977, which had marked “a pinnacle of Jewish civilization in the north” (2). In actuality, however,

114  The Story Is Telling Us while the Sitka settlement gives the illusion of inclusion, it effectively keeps the color line intact as the Tlingit tribe and the Filipino immigrants are effectively kept out, and the Jews themselves are confined to a territory they can neither leave nor embrace as their own. As Jacobson has shown, both American and Israeli settler rhetoric found a useful symbolic association between being rooted in a land and actual roots in biblical sources.12 The prophet Isaiah reassured the exiled people of Israel that “[i]n days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and bud; and all the world will be filled with fruit,”13 and the Puritan sermons about the New World revolved around similar metaphors of planting and growth intended to give the illusion of an organic relationship between the people and the land. God is a gardener who has chosen a piece of land to “plant” his people in: The settlers, as John Cotton put it, belong to the territory in the same way as a “[p]lant sucks nourishment from the soyle” (qtd Jacobson 36). Similarly, when Israel was established in 1948, the Jewish memories of exile— geographical, psychological, and existential—were to be overcome by a natural-type labor, which life in exile had not permitted (CohnSherbock 78).14 Having the United States provide persecuted Jews with a bounded territory on American ground, Chabon revises the territorial and apocalyptic narrative, merging spheres that had previously been parallel and staging an almost literal rehearsal of the symbolism surrounding not only the settlement of the American continent but also that of the state of Israel. Memories of the Alaska settlement in the 1940s paint a picture of a time when the air had been filled with “a sense of promise, opportunity, the chance to start again” (4), when the “raucous frontier energy” (30) had dominated and invigorated all aspects of life. The “rudiments of agriculture, the use of plow, fertilizer, and irrigation hose” (28) were to seal the bond between the people and territory, but as Alaska is worlds apart, both from the fertile soil of New England and the sun-soaked hills of Israel, the toils and efforts of the Jewish settlers are literally and figuratively barren: Brochures and posters held up the short Alaskan growing season as an allegory of the brief duration of her stay. Mrs Shemets ought to think of the Sitka Settlement as a cellar or potting shed in which, like flower bulbs, she and her children could be put up for the winter, until their home soil thawed enough to allow them to be replanted there. No one imagined that the soil of Europe would be sowed so deeply with salt and ash. (28) The associations between planting and settlement that conjoin literal and symbolic roots are here drawn to their logical conclusion: If plants will not take root, nor will the people. Sitka is thus merely a temporary

The Story Is Telling Us  115 resting place between exiles, a refuge between uncertainties: “The emphasis,” the narrator explains, “was always on the word ‘interim’” (29). For the Jewish settlers the result is ironically not a repetition of American millennial dreams but of the precarious situation they had left behind: Nowhere to spread out, to grow, to do anything more than crowd together in the teeming style of Vilna and Lodz. The homesteading dreams of a million landless Jews, fanned by movies, light fiction, and informational brochures provided by the United states Department of the Interior—snuffed on arrival. Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would form a colony, import livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak of doom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would languish and fail. (291) Symbols such as polar bears and igloos had been parts of a settlement mythology intended to infuse the Jewish immigrants with optimism, inspiration, and a sense of identity closely linked to the land. However, they stay popular as ironic emblems of transience and uncertainty as well as gallows-humoristic reminders of a fundamental misconception about the place itself, and, more generally, of the idea of a new beginning in a more general sense. The propaganda songs of the early settler days go through the same gloomy transformation: “’Nokh Amol’ dates from the Polar Bear days, the early forties, and it’s supposed to be an expression of gratitude for another miraculous deliverance: Once Again. Nowadays the Jews of the Sitka District tend to hear the ironic edge that was there all along” (4). The title of the song no longer refers to a new beginning but another exile as the candidacy for statehood is ruled out and the hope of a lasting solution to the Diaspora is thwarted. Facing utter spatial bereavement, Yiddishism gradually loses its vitality and openness: The Sitka World’s Fair of 1977 had marked “a pinnacle of Jewish civilization in the north” (2) but is now mainly remembered through “the Safety Pin,” a landmark in the form of a mast, which “blinks out its warning to airplanes or yids” (9), impelling them to keep away, a message given a more mundane counterpart in Berko’s and his wife’s door mat, which welcomes visitors with a succinct “Get Lost” (37). Landsman has his own fragile link to the past in the shape of a souvenir glass from the World’s Fair. Drinking from the glass, he remembers and celebrates the memory of Sitka’s glory days, which is complicated by the ironic fact that “alcohol will kill his gift for recollection” (3). Later in the story he also smashes it against the radiator in drunken frustration.

116  The Story Is Telling Us The novel is replete with images of abandoned, disintegrating, or broken bric- á-bracs, which correspond to the waning of Yiddishism and the millennial spirit, one of the most salient examples being the Hotel Zamenhof, named after the Polish Jewish doctor who invented Esperanto in the 1880s. Esperanto is not genealogically related to any specific language, and yet, like Yiddish, it bears traces of a manifold of European languages. Having no native speakers, moreover, it is laid out as a democratic language, giving no group the linguistic upper hand. Since Esperanto is designed for cross-cultural communication, moreover, it owes its very existence to interaction and fusion. The process of dilapidation that the hotel goes through is the spatial parallel to the dwindling of the millennial spirit. The majority of the once-so-shining brass plates with warnings, notices, and directions in Esperanto are gone, “victims of neglect, vandalism, or the fire code” (3), and the hotel now houses people who have lost not only their homes but also their faith in the Sitka settlement as homeland. Esperanto means “a person who is hoping,” but the guests of the Zamenhof have lost all faith in what spawned the language in the first place. The bric-á-brac of the Zamenhof reaches into its very foundation as its cellar is filled with bits and pieces from guests deceased or departed: At the bottom of the steps, he passes through the lost-articles room, lined with pegboard, furnished with shelves and cubbyholes that hold the thousand objects abandoned or forgotten in the hotel. Unmated shoes, fur hats, a trumpet, a windup zeppelin. A collection of wax gramophone cylinders featuring the entire recorded output of the Orchestra Orfeon of Istanbul. A logger’s ax, two bicycles, a partial bridge in a hotel glass. Wigs, canes, a glass eye, display hands left behind by a mannequin salesman. (10) The fragments do not amount to a wholeness, just as the plastic body parts do not form a complete human shape. Similarly, the nihilist soldier Litvak’s body seems a montage of different parts that do not quite fit together and in which he feels both trapped and alienated: “He was accustomed to pain and breakage, but since the accident, his body no longer seemed to belong to him. It was something sawed and nailed together out of borrowed parts. A birdhouse built of scrap wood and propped on a pole, in which his soul flapped like a fugitive bat” (347). Litvak’s body, it seems, feels no more congruent or real to him than the mannequin parts beneath the Zamenhof would. This desolate state is given another spatial manifestation in Peril Strait, a no-man’s land of sorts, consisting of “a jumble of boats, a fuel pump, a row of weathered houses in the colors of a rusted-out engine. … It all seems to be held together by a craze of hawser, tangles of fishing line, scraps of purse

The Story Is Telling Us  117 seine strung with crusted floats. The whole village might be nothing but driftwood and wire, flotsam from the drowning of a far-off town” (249). This hapless condition parallels that of Yiddishism, a dynamic ­Mosaic culture sprung from the Diasporic condition, but unable to thrive in a confined environment, it subsides to disintegration. Consequently, when Landsman’s and Bina’s unborn child is diagnosed with “mosaicism,” a kind of genetic bric- á-brac, it is deemed nonviable and is promptly aborted: “A mosaicism, it was called. It might cause grave abnormalities. It might have no effect at all. In the available literature, a faithful person could find encouragement, and a faithless one ample reason to despond. Landsman’s view of things—ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything—prevailed” (15). Yiddishism’s emphasis on openness and assimilation is rivalled by the Hebraism of the orthodox community, to whom settlement equals sharp demarcations between inside and outside, actual and symbolic boundaries, gate-keeping, and border control. As Landsman enters Verbover Island, he not only feels like a stranger to the community but is even denied his Jewish identity: “He is on their turf. He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore is not really a Jew at all” (102). Similarly at Mendel’s funeral, “[d]eep structures of obligation and credit have determined which are permitted to enter the gates of the house of life and which must stand outside, kibitzing, with rain soaking into their hose” (197). According to Berko, the Verbovers’ idea of themselves as insiders paradoxically echoes prior involuntary imprisonment: The Verbover Jews live behind “their imaginary ghetto wall of ritual and faith” (99). In the realm of the orthodox Jews of Verbover Island, the idea of history as an unbroken narrative from beginning to end corresponds to an idea of spatial continuity. Their eyes consistently set on Israel, the orthodox community never recognized the Alaskan territory as homeland but have instead reproduced not only the power hierarchies of their European settlement but also the spatial organization, insisting on maintaining their integrity and self-sufficiency: “Half a dozen crooked lanes tumble into [the platz], following paths first laid down by long-vanished Ukranian goats or aurochs, past housefronts that are faithful copies of lost Ukranian originals,” and which also contains an “exact copy of the original home, back in Verbov, of the present rebbe’s wife’s grandfather, the eighth Verbover rebbe, right down to the nickel-plated bathtub in the upstairs washroom” (106). The spatial difference between Hebraism and Yiddishism is conspicuous in this passage. Whereas Yiddishism engages in a simultaneous disseminating and aggregating process, the Verbover area comes across as a nation in its own right, but in the absence of a territory with fixed borders, it is one based on kinship and the paradoxical

118  The Story Is Telling Us concept of a nomadic village. But what had originally emerged more or less organically in consonance with the surroundings is now artificially recreated, making it resemble a theme park, a “Disney shtetl, bright and clean as a freshly forged birth certificate” (106). The practice of erecting eruvim, which in Landsman’s vague understanding “has something to do with pretending that telephone poles are doorposts, and that the wires are lintels” (110), is a symbolic act of demarcation intended to expand the territory of the home and the solution to the rules against transporting items across property lines on a Sabbath. As Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert observes, however, the eruv is not only related to observance but also “a boundary-making device, quite concretely in relationship to the residential space of the neighborhood that the eruv community inhabits” (10). The eruv, Fonrobert further explains, is particularly significant to the diaspora condition as it conceives of space in terms of collective identity but at the same time “maneuvers around” national identity and “the existing structures of control” (29). Alluding to Appadurai’s concept of “sovereignty without territoriality,”15 Fonrobert describes the eruv as “territoriality without sovereignty,” which, she suggests, “would have much to offer to the current discussions about diaspora cultures” (29). In the absence of nation, territory is defined more narrowly as a distinction between home and not-home, which also, as Anderson notes, involves a privatization of public space (87). As explained in the previous chapters, the act of marking out and measuring space is central in Revelation, as in the instance where God asks John to measure the temple, which underscores the connection between divinity and demarcation, between God and territory.16 Measurement marks out someone’s territory in the same way that the eruv replaces national borders, but there is also a crucial difference between the eruv as it is represented by Chabon and the measuring that occurs in Revelation, a difference most clearly expressed in Lefebvrian terms. To Lefebvre, territoriality works according to the same principles as (other) social space, which also implies that territorial practices are connected to representations of territory in the same way that spatial practices and representations of space are interlinked. Setting up territorial boundaries generally involves both abstract and concrete phases, the former having to do with representations of space, more specifically the allocation of land between states via treaties, conferences, and the likes, and the latter involving spatial practices such as the actual delimitation process, which implicates specific acts of demarcation, such as fencing in/out, digging ditches, building walls, and so on. Through the intersection of representations of territory, territorial practice, and the lived space that corresponds to representational territories, a bounded space takes on a meaning that distinguishes it from or conjoins it with

The Story Is Telling Us  119 other territories (Brenner and Elden 365). With regard to the temple measurement and the measurement of the new Jerusalem in Revelation, it is clear that the practice is closely connected with and a direct consequence of representations of territory in the form of God’s decree and jurisdiction. In the Verbover community, however, the measuring of territory seems nearly entirely centered on the concrete practice of delimitation. As Landsman remarks, “[y]ou can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv you’ve drawn… is your house …. Given enough string and enough poles, and with a little creative use of existing walls, fences, cliffs, and rivers, you could tie a circle around pretty much any place and call it an eruv” (110). The eruv here seems the result of territorial practice, which is not the direct consequence of representations of territory but is rather, to repeat Fonrobert’s words, territoriality without sovereignty.17 The spatial practice of erecting the eruv is, in other words, not equivalently accompanied by representations of space emanating from state or God. This privatization of territory implies an assimilation of representations of territory into territorial practice; that is, the actual delimitation act becomes self-sustaining, its own authoritative voice.18 Faith, it seems, boils down to faith in territoriality. Verbover Island has a prime spatial organizer in the boundary maven,19 who is responsible for the territorial practice of demarcation and to whom “[t]opography, geography, geodesy, geometry, trigonometry [are] a reflex, like sighting along the barrel of a gun” (108). His job is to expand the domestic territory while maintaining it as a seamless whole. An indication of the significance of this procedure is the fact that the boundary maven, although not a religious person himself and thus not part of the orthodox community, is considered the most powerful man on Verbover Island. The boundary maven is his own sovereign of borders, answering to no one but himself and literally the one who pulls the strings: “On his maps and his crews and his spools of polypropylene baling twine depends the state of the souls of every pious Jew in the District” (111). The gap between spatial practice and representations of space is enunciated by Mrs Shpilman, the wife of the Verbover Rebbe and the matron of the Sitka Chasid community: But there was always a shortfall, wasn’t there? Between the match and the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall “the world.” Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. (214)

120  The Story Is Telling Us God, in the shape of the Messiah, is expected to step in to heal the gap between practice and law, but until that happens, life is suspended between them. For the Sitka Jews, moreover, there will never be time for such a healing, as the ground itself will soon disappear from beneath their feet: “They aren’t mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can’t be. It’s something else they feel has gone out of the world, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. This half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like a goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora” (202). Ironically, the borders intended to preserve the integrity of the Verbover community during the long wait for the Messiah risk causing their demise, as their very impermeability is also what prevents new alliances and moorings to form. Landsman sees the abandoned construction site he uses as parking space during Mendel’s funeral as symbolic of the Verbovers’ predicament: He’s parked in a cul-de-sac some developer laid out, paved, then saddled with the name of Tikvah Street, the Hebrew word denoting hope and connoting to the Yiddish ear on this grim afternoon at the end of time seventeen flavours of irony. The hoped-for houses were never built. Wooden stakes tied with orange flags and nylon cord map out a miniature Zion in the mud around the cul-de-sac, a ghostly eruv of failure. (198) But the Verbovers’ ability to retain their integrity makes them valuable to the premillennial apocalyptic aspirations that take more concrete shape in American evangelicals’ attempt to restore the Jews to Palestine, as a first necessary move to bring about the end of history. It is implied that the undertaking is, in fact, “a divinely inspired mission of the president of America” (399), led by the presidential proxy Cashdollar, to whom it signals the end of an era and the beginning of a new, that is, the very crux of apocalyptic thinking: “Now, you might not credit the fact, but the end times are coming. And I for one very much look forward to seeing them come. But for that to happen, Jerusalem and the Holy Land have to belong to the Jews again. That’s what it says in the Book” (366). As Landsman and Berko discover as they search for Mendel’s killer, there are also concrete preparations for such an enterprise: A military training camp for American Jews, a red heifer masked by white paint, and an institute that bears the same name as the location of the desired third temple, The Moriah institute, where the Third Temple “shimmers like a fata morgana” (331). The American evangelicals and the Verbovers share the common goal of restoring the Jews to Palestine, but the pragmatic motivation for the orthodox Jews in Chabon’s novel is territoriality itself, a “necessary move in an ancient game—the survival of the Jews” (345). Such

The Story Is Telling Us  121 ­

122  The Story Is Telling Us “the story is telling U.S.,” which paradoxically means that the course of events must be shaped to conform to this national story. The American incentive is not only to make the unavoidable happen, so to speak, but also place America at the center of the apocalyptic events. The Verbover Rebbe, on the other hand, has a different understanding of prophecy and is skeptical about such an undertaking, calling it “a fool’s errand”: “There are numerous persuasive teachings against acting in any way to hasten the coming of Messiah…. Yes, of course, I want to see my Yids settled in a new home with financial assurances from the U.S., offers of assistance and of access to all of the unimaginably vast new markets your success in this operation would create” (344). The story that gets told in the end, however, is one independent from both apocalyptic and geopolitical schemes. Calling up a journalist to reveal the plot, Landsman utters the significant last words of the novel: “I have a story for you” (411). The statement that appeared disconcerting in the early pages of the novel is in the end given a whole new, triumphant, meaning: “Landsman’s view of things—ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything—prevailed” (15). The Yiddish Policemen’s Union differs from the other novels included in this book insofar as it does not take part of an American apocalyptic tradition but rather envisions possible consequences of it, treating apocalypse as a topic rather than form or genre. Presenting a scenario where the two dominant apocalyptic strands have thoroughly affected the geopolitical landscape as well as the course of history, Chabon in this manner insists on the influence of apocalyptic thought on modern society with an urgency and directness matched by few contemporary writers, an ambition further enhanced by the distorted-mirror effect he faces his readers with. The reason why The Yiddish Policemen’s Union comes last in this study, and thus given a conclusive role, is precisely that it initiates a broader discussion about the relationship between apocalyptic and spatial discourses, the implications of which reach beyond the realms of the fictional. This discussion will be continued in the concluding remarks that follow.

Notes

The Story Is Telling Us  123

4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17

of Wisse: “it is a humor that can be fully appreciated by a very small audience,” Ruth Franklin argues, and continues: “In the finest Jewish tradition, Chabon has produced a paradox: a mass entertainment largely inaccessible to the masses. What’s more, there is a deep sadness at the book’s center, but it is a sadness that also may be not fully apparent to non-Jews.” See further Stuart Jeffries, “The Language of Exile,” The Guardian (June 7, 2007). In her analysis of Chabon’s novel as an alternate history, Kathleen Singles recognizes that the proximity between the historical and fictional layers can be seen as problematic but argues that although the clues as to how the two dimensions relate to each other may be “not as readily readable as in other alternate histories” (196), they are nevertheless there. See further Singles (2013) 189–207. On the significance of chess for Jews in the Diaspora, see for example Rubinstein (2004). Michel Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (London: Harper Perennial, 2008). All references to the novel are to this edition. Sometimes also called “the millennial tradition.” The Temple Mount site in Jerusalem is believed to be identical to the biblical Mount Moriah, where Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac and which was also the site of the two Jewish temples, the first torn down by Babylonians and the second by the Romans. On the history of the idea that the Second Coming was dependent on the Jews’ repossession of further Cohn-Sherbok (2006). See J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782). See further Jacobson 27–58. Isaiah 27:6. Aharon David Gordon, who emigrated from eastern Europe to Palestine in the 1920s, expressed his analysis of vision for Jewish life in Palestine as follows: “A people that was completely divorced from nature, that during two thousand years was imprisoned within walls, that became inured to all forms of life except to a life of labour, cannot become once again a living, natural, working people without bending all its willpower toward that end. We lack the fundamental element: we lack labour (not labour done because of necessity, but labour to which man is organically and naturally linked)” (qtd Cohn-Sherbock 78). See Arjun Appadurai’s “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography” (1996). As Den Dulk argues, “under certain circumstances ‘measuring’ signifies that what is measured falls under one’s judgment, that is, that it belongs to one’s jurisdiction,” a meaning which is found not only in the New Testament but also in a variety of Jewish sources, such as Rabbinic literature and the Hebrew Bible (439). There are official and unofficial eruvim in many parts of the world, but they are far from uncontested areas. The most common criticism launched against these eruvim—most typically from secular Jews—is that the staking out of territories by one ethnic and religious group goes against modern notions of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. And it is a fact that the eruv attracts orthodox Jews, while repelling others, though by no means in any absolute terms. Still, the eruv constitutes a fascinating example of the importance and force of symbolic territories where no legal boundaries are afforded. Even though this is a culture that has evolved in the absence of

124  The Story Is Telling Us ­

Conclusion

As the previous chapters have established, apocalyptic stories of America and American stories of apocalypse continue to form an inseparable creative liaison, where each defines and gives sustenance to the other. If, as Amy Johnson Frykholm suggests, “[a]pocalypticism reaches deep into the history of the American nation, emanating from European conceptions of the ‘New World’ and from the preaching of early Puritan ministers” (14), its spatial legacy also reaches into the American present. This book, however, has not only demonstrated that the apocalyptic myth does indeed take place in contemporary American fiction, to return to a central question asked in the introduction, but also, more importantly, unraveled patterns and strategies connected to this “place-taking,” the result of which, it should be clear by now, contrasts with general understandings regarding both traditional and contemporary apocalyptic narratives. Whereas the traditional role of apocalypse has been to respond to sentiments of disintegration and chaos by conjoining the present with the past and the future, and, equally importantly, connecting individual and communal experiences, present-day apocalyptic tales, it is repeatedly argued, do not heal what has come apart or provide structure and coherence to the present, nor do they look to revelation as controlling principle. In the apocalyptic fictions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, destruction seems to have taken possession of the entire fictional universe, depicting a world without clear horizons and with no prospects of redemption. In such readings, the tales spawned by the nuclear age indirectly staged the end of the American dream of new beginnings while the subsequent narratives of the postmodern period went so far as to destroy even the most fundamental principles of the apocalyptic tradition, namely confidence in the apocalyptic myth itself. Contemporary cultural expressions have thus been ousted or willingly excluded themselves from the collective trajectory of the apocalyptic narrative. But if we accept such a description of apocalyptic development while at the same time maintaining that the very definition of apocalypse is revelation, we must of course concede that apocalypse, as a genre, is essentially dead, or at least rendered irrelevant. This would in itself be

126  Conclusion ironic, however, since apocalyptic discourses seem to have increased in fervor in the last decades, not least within academia. However, conclusions concerning the evolution of the genre may also stem from changes in how we perceive and interpret the apocalyptic genre. An intense preoccupation with the temporal aspects of apocalypse and an even closer focus on the cataclysmic event and its aftermath run the risk of missing the broad spectrum of apocalyptic elements that belong to the genre and by extension overlooking the literary texts that may not qualify as apocalyptic by such standards. As I have argued in this study, a shift from a temporal to a spatial focus that views apocalyptic settings neither simply as backdrops of the apocalyptic plot nor as limited to scenes of violence or destruction yields different results with regard to the role and status of the apocalyptic myth and compels us to reconsider our understanding of contemporary apocalypse in the most general sense. From the foregoing analyses we may therefore conclude that the novels included in this book show a greater compliance with the apocalyptic tradition than is typically ascribed to contemporary apocalyptic literature but also that the compliance itself, perhaps paradoxically, is ultimately revitalizing. The apocalyptic space mapped out in the novels, in other words, suggests a relatively close connection to the apocalyptic tradition at the same time as this connection serves to reinvent the genre to increase its applicability to modern American life. Via spatial relations, the novels essentially exemplify how the very malleability of the apocalyptic myth is a source of literary creativity and rejuvenation, if not survival. A basic premise of this book has been that a spatial focus yields a vantage from which to review the apocalyptic framework, including matters of reintegration and revelation. Hence, if the temporal continuity appears to be broken or even exploded into pieces with no apparent communication in between, we may gain knowledge via apocalyptic settings that comprise but also reach farther than the narrow bounds of everyday life or the shards of what has been destroyed. Such revelatory ambitions, I have argued, are central to the novels in this study, even if they may not be divinely inspired (although in some cases they obviously are; we recall Moody’s insistence that there was “an actual sign in the sky”). In the novels, as in the apocalyptic genre in its entirety, revelation is indeed connected to visions of overarching historical processes, but these processes are in turn dependent on spatiality, suggesting even that space may function as the prime link to history. Historical continuity, we can conclude, may be most conspicuous in spatial structures. Throughout the study, we have seen how post-apocalyptic listlessness gives way to a tangible yearning to both reconnect with the past and understand the present through more comprehensive “timescapes.” Such inclinations are apocalyptic in the traditional sense and can accordingly be regarded as part of a countermovement to the contemporary

Conclusion  127 pseudo-apocalyptic mode. For criticism, this means that a spatial approach can uncover dimensions in the apocalyptic text that a temporal approach cannot but also that examining a tradition via its spatial representations is simultaneously a journey through time. As Lefebvre suggests, in space, nothing disappears entirely but “what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. The preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring and remaining actual within that space” (229). Lefebvre also points out that the remnants of past social space exist not only in spatial reality but also in representational space (230). A text, in other words, carries previous spatial texts within, the apocalyptic narratives woven around the American continent thus bearing traces of previous representations of apocalyptic settings, something which makes literary analysis essentially archeological. A novel may thus seem temporally incoherent but spatially coherent if studied through its spatial layers, as the analysis of Morrison’s Jazz has established. Revelation, as it comes across in this book, refers to the conditions for human life within the larger processes that shape them. In the previous analyses, therefore, the apocalyptic settings are seen not only as manifestations of mythic space, but also as actual social places where lives are begun, lived and terminated. Apocalyptic settings are, in other words, far from merely symbolic places but also arenas for human activity and creativity, which is why a double interpretive and critical vision has been essential. And yet we do well to remind ourselves that the opposition between mythic and social space may be said to be spurious to begin with. As we have seen, the mythic elements of space can readily be integrated into Lefebvre’s three dimensions of social space, each of the novels presenting its own individual take on the relationship between them, thus providing a key as to how the apocalyptic and the social interact and intersect. But whereas, as Hall phrases it, “[o]ne of the major modernizing projects has been to ‘tame’ apocalyptic and eschatological expectations—to ‘close the book’ on religious prophecy on the basis of procedures of rationalization and routinization that would, as Max Weber puts it, ‘demystify’ social life” (Hall 131), the novels under scrutiny seem to take this stance as their point of departure, only to turn the tables on it to reenter myth through spatial means. But what, finally, is revealed, or, more pertinently, how does revelation come about in the novels? A few focal points can be discerned in the previous chapters, the first of which tallies with the conception of the present as a decisive breaking point, in Moody and Morrison spatially understood through the great cities of Revelation. The new Jerusalem, as we have seen, has served as a viable means of spatial self-reflection and identity formation in American history but has, in modern apocalyptic discourse, largely fallen out of favor. As this study has shown, it reappears as a significant but also a highly ambiguous spatial symbol

128  Conclusion in contemporary fiction, still, perhaps unexpectedly, potent as a means of examining and evaluating America. For while the novels included in this book certainly betray a certain degree of uneasiness and impatience with such a static site, they are also clearly reluctant to let it go. This of course begs the question what the present-day, creative appeal of a setting, which, in its original manifestation, is innately and thoroughly noncreative actually consists in? The paradoxical answer is that the new Jerusalem connotes a modern but ultimately also alienating space that resembles what Lefebvre terms abstract space and that contrasts starkly with the “placefulness” of both the village and the town. The new Jerusalem appears to illustrate an experience of modernity as exempt from temporality, whether it is integrative or fragmentary time. Modernity seems inflicted by a sense of timelessness neither liberating in any meditative or “mindful” way nor commensurate with a postmodern series of intensities. Rather, it makes itself felt as a sense of abandonment, a feeling of having reached an impasse, from which only a decisive apocalyptic turn of events that goes beyond individual transformation can redeem. In Jazz, ironically, a Babylonian element is gradually acknowledged by the narrator as the dark subconscious which ultimately reintroduces both history and “placefulness” into the city. Indeed, both Moody and Morrison find their creative imagination in the tension that arises between the two great cities of Revelation, Babylon and the new Jerusalem. In Revelation, as we have seen, the new Jerusalem and Babylon are each other’s architectural and moral opposites but also utterly dependent on each other for definition. This intricate relation and the particular dynamics it gives rise to inform not only Jazz but also the “twin novels” Purple America and The Ice Storm in the way the suburban settings of the two novels, both portraying middle-class life in New England suburbs, function as each other’s mirror images, each indirectly commenting on the other. Secondly, revelation is dependent on the simultaneous reorganization of apocalyptic space in terms of heights/depths, length/breadth, and verticality/horizontality. Through spatial relations, Ward and Morrison demonstrate that the vitality of the apocalyptic myth is dependent on the creative capacity to adjust to new circumstances and to bring myth closer to the ground, whether it is the Pit or the streets of city life. In a more general sense, Morrison and Ward show us how the adaptability of myth is at once its own strength and that which empowers. The narrators of both Jazz and Salvage the Bones make a point of breaking with the traditional elevated position of the apocalyptic narrator, placing the narrative vantage firmly on or even beneath ground level, in this manner simultaneously “grounding” myth and weakening the authoritative hold of the narrative, with thoroughgoing consequences. The narrator of Jazz is, in the very act of narrating, coerced into abandoning her (ache-) typical elevated position, something which entails

Conclusion  129 a gradual acceptance of creativity and mutability as the responsibility of the development of the plot is handed over to the inhabitants of the apocalyptic space. In Lefebvre’s terms, this process results in a power shift from representations of space to representational space, meaning that space is no longer shaped by certain predetermined structures but the result of dreams, storytelling, personal relations, and whims. In Morrison, the relocation of the apocalyptic narrator seems to provide characters as well as readers precisely with a transformed relation to the city. Similarly, Ward’s narrative is told from the Pit, the antithesis to God’s heavenly throne, which, as in the case of Jazz, completely overturns the traditional apocalyptic spatial organization, the impure (hybridity) and the inchoate (fetus) being placed at the center at the expense of symmetry and perfection. In both Morrison and Ward the apocalyptic myth, in its revised version, becomes a way of overturning rather than preserving existing power structures, much in line with its original purpose. Through spatial emendation, revelation is not only retained but brought to bear specifically on African American insistence on structural transformation. Thirdly, the preceding chapters have shown revelation as dependent on a metamorphosis of territoriality, both regarding the internal boundaries that order space within the apocalyptic text-world, as seen in Ward and McCarthy, as well as the external boundary-making that looks to apocalyptic discourse to strengthen the solidity and integrity of a territory, as seen in Chabon. In the Book of Revelation, the internal system of boundaries construes bounded space as the epitome of divinity within which homogeneity and symmetry dominate, whereas undefined space belongs to Satan, whose strategies in Revelation also manifest themselves as invasion and contamination of circumscribed space. From the very beginning these basic spatial principles have been exploited for extra-textual purposes, both to convey messages of exceptionalism and to consolidate beliefs in America as a unified territory. Columbus’ apocalyptic expectations on the new continent, the Puritan proto-national mythology of the special role of America in the world, and the rhetoric surrounding the inevitability of Manifest Destiny are narratives with same basic objective to show how boundaries are God-given but also how the territory has a specific status within a larger apocalyptic framework. While religious apocalyptic was used for political and strategic purposes to infuse identification with territory, the apocalyptic was a mainstream fictional genre particularly from the Cold War and onward. Themes of borders and boundaries were again internalized but now typically thematizing the limitlessness of human destructivity and, by extension, the futility nature of national boundaries. It seems, then, as if the modern American apocalyptic tales primarily express anxieties over the vulnerability of territory rather than a yearning to map out and solidify national ground. Narratives of nuclear pollution, viruses, climate

130  Conclusion change, and AI, all point to the futile or ephemeral nature of bounded space in general and territoriality in particular. But as we have seen, strategic dissolution of apocalyptic bivalence also serves as means of forging new relations not only to space but also to the apocalyptic genre itself. Both Morrison and Ward draw their creative energy from inviting rather than excluding hybridity from their apocalyptic universe, and to both writers this spatial revision is intimately connected to a reformulation of womanhood and femininity. Morrison’s hybrid city, where the whore is not the antagonist but an essential part of the Bride, invites apocalyptic perspectives that correspond to Massey’s notion of space as a “meeting place” of the local and the global (1991: 28), but, in Morrison’s case, equally importantly between the past and the present. Like Ward, Morrison thus positions the goddess at the epicenter of the apocalyptic plot and in this manner, also like Ward, expands the apocalyptic myth to accommodate African American experiences. In Ward and McCarthy the body is regarded as the primal and primary territory, but, more importantly, the territorial status awarded the body is inseparable from its mythic status, wherewith the corporeal territory may rise above flesh, clay, and water. One of the greatest horrors in Revelation is the degradation of the human body from mythic to material being, expressed through repeated instances of bodily invasion and carnage. The integrity of the corporeal territory is dependent on its capacity to keep its distance to the corrupt territories of the world and is manifested in God’s mark on their foreheads, the symbolic boundary between corporeality and materiality. The territory of the body, like that of the nation, is thus sustained by myth. Ward’s and McCarthy’s novels, however, put the “bodyguarding” capacities to the test, which does not mean that they simply dismiss myth, as contemporary apocalyptic literature is allegedly prone to do, but raise central questions about its potency. The result, like all apocalyptic plots, revolve around a central conflict, but unlike traditional apocalyptic narratives, this conflict is not typically between good and evil, but rather between mythic and material space, with the integrity of the human body at stake. The result of these ongoing interrogations ranges from McCarthy’s spectacular (Blood Meridian) and painful (The Road) demythologizing processes to Ward’s opposite trajectory toward bodily metamorphosis and near-complete affirmation of myth as a means of staking out and keeping up boundaries. More succinctly put, the former writer stages the destruction of mythic territory and the latter its resurgence. The individual apocalyptic settings also serve to comment on the national territory. Moody’s suburban territory is represented as the drained fortress of white middle-class America, and Morrison’s metamorphic account of Harlem suggests a new African American rendering of the pseudo-original idea of America as the land of promise. McCarthy takes on the nation more comprehensively in his proto- and post-national

Conclusion  131 meta-apocalyptic tales, whereas Ward’s affirmation of the peripheral (female, African American, southern) by necessity also affects the center (male, white, national), ultimately revealing how a new world can originate from repressed parts of the nation. Chabon’s novel differs from the others in treating apocalypse as theme rather than the form or genre: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is about the spatial implications of the apocalyptic tradition rather than being of the same tradition. In this manner the novel transfers the dynamics of extra-textual boundarymaking to the center of the fictional universe, so that the different usages of the apocalyptic myth to reinforce and expand actual territories are woven into the fictional plot itself. A spatial approach to apocalypse will doubtlessly increase in urgency as we stand before what may well turn out to be the most dramatic shift the planet has ever faced, namely climate change and its consequences. It is indeed hard to imagine a scenario more closely connected to both spatiality and apocalypse, for even if climate change will certainly affect all aspects of human and animal lives, it is the spatial consequences that are first and most tangibly noticeable. When the ground is literally disappearing beneath us, an urgent need for an interpretive framework with which to understand the narratives it generates arises. For if climate change narratives can be said to be an apocalyptic sub-genre among others, they are also different in the sense that the cataclysm they represent does not take place exclusively in a distant future or in the realm of the imagination. Nor does it strike us as a sudden event but as an ongoing apocalypse in slow motion, the progress of which is measured not in time but in space, in receding coastlines and glaciers. The relevance of the mutually enriching stories of space and apocalypse will no doubt continue to increase until the very end.

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Works Cited  137 Rubinstein, William. “Jews in Grandmaster Chess.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 46.1 and 2 (2004): 35–43. Shaffer, Elinor. “Secular Apocalypse: Prophets and Apocalyptics at the End of the Eighteenth Century.” Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Ed. Malcolm Bull. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. 137–158. Singles, Kathleen. Alternate History. Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2013. Stave, Shirley Ann. “Jazz and Paradise: Pivotal Moments in Black History.” The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 59–74. Stein, Steven J. “American Millennial Visions: Towards a Construction of a New Architectonic of American Apocalypticism.” Imaging the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America. Eds. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson. London and New York: Ib Tauris & Co, 2002. 187–211. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Stevens, Benjamin. “Medea in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 25.2 (2018): 158–77. Stewart, Jeffrey C. “The New Negro as Citizen.” The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. George Hutchinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 13–27. Storey, David. “Land, Territory, and Identity.” Making Sense of Place: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Eds. Ian Convery, Gerard Corsane, and Peter Davis. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012. 11–22. Stroud, Benjamin Christopher. Perilous Landscapes: The Postwar Suburb in Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Diss. The University of Michigan, 2009. Søfting, Inger-Anne. “Desert Pandemonium: Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalyptic “Western” in Blood Meridian.” American Studies in Scandinavia 31.2 (1999): 13–30. Taylor, William M. and Michael P Levine. “Catastrophe and the Katrina Effect.” The ‘Katrina Effect’: On the Nature of Catastrophe. Eds. William M. Taylor, Michael P. Levine, Oenone Rooksby, and Joely-Kym Sobott. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 1–24. Thacker, Andrew. Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Thompson, Leonard L. “Mapping an Apocalyptic World.” Sacred Places and Profane Spaces. Essays in the Geographics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Eds. Jamie Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley. New York: Greenwood, 1991. 115–27. ———. The Book of Revelation. Apocalypse and Empire. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Thurman, Wallace. The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Treherne, Matthew. “Figuring In, Figuring Out: Narration and Negotiation in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” Narrative 11.2 (2003): 199–212. Tuan, Yi-fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abstract space 19, 24, 25, 41, 44, 51, 67, 128 African Americans 56, 57, 63, 106n5; culture of 55; spatial tradition 60 African cosmology 54 After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse (Berger) 8 Alaska 108, 113, 114 Allison, Dorothy 12n1 All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy) 90 American apocalyptic traditions 54, 107 American apocalyptic writings 35 American civilization 49, 73 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (Myrdahl) 63 American literary tradition 32 American modernism 7 American Renaissance 82 American suburb 32, 33 American Zionist movement 112 Anderson, Daniel 107 apocalypse: American stories of 125; pattern of 1; as predominantly historical discourse 2; spatial approach to 131; spatiality of 3; temporal aspects of 126; traditional role of 125 Apocalypse South. Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary (Dyer Hoefer) 12n1 apocalyptic bivalence 12, 130 apocalyptic fiction: comparisons between two time layers 3; southern 94; of twentieth and twenty-first centuries 125

apocalyptic genre 2–3, 126 apocalyptic myth 5, 73 apocalyptic narrator 61; conventional 68; predicament of 66; transformation of 68 apocalyptic representations of space 5 apocalyptic settings 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 126, 127, 130 apocalyptic spatial system 14 apocalyptic texts 21, 30, 42, 69 apocalyptic tradition 1, 11, 21, 29, 30, 54, 96, 107, 122, 125, 126, 131 Aristotle 15, 16, 18 Atomists 16 “Atoms for Peace” 43 Babylon 4, 5, 10, 25–8, 32, 36, 37, 59, 70n6, 100, 102, 103, 128 Bakhtin, Michail 4, 13n7 Barthelme, Frederick 34 Bauckham, R. J. 70n4 Beloved (Morrison) 54 Ben-Gurion, David 121 Berger, James: After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse 8 Bergoffen, Debra 31n6, 70n10, 87 Bhaba, Homi 70n13 Blood Meridian (McCarthy) 11, 71–9, 81, 82, 92, 94 Boehme, Jacob 91 Book of Prophecies 110 Book of Revelation 14, 16, 39, 72, 129 Bowers, Susan 54 Boyer, Paul 1, 13n8, 110 Bull, Malcolm 101 Burroughs, William S. 8

140 Index Caird, G.B.A 77 Campbell, Gordon 25, 26, 70n4 Casey, Edward S. 15, 17 Catholic tradition 6 Chabon, Michael 129, 131; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union 12, 107–24, 131 Cheever, John 34 Christian apocalyptic thinking 54 Christianity 2, 31n6 Christians of Asia Minor 13n8 Christian Zionists 121 chronotope 4 “city in the sky” 110 civilization 27, 32, 48, 49, 73, 113, 115 Civil War 60 Clark, Christopher W. 96 Clute, John 90–1 Cold War 8, 43, 129 Collins, John J. 2, 13n5, 70n8 Columbus, Christopher 5, 89, 110, 129 contemporary apocalyptic narratives 3–4 contemporary fiction 5, 9, 14, 128 conventional apocalyptic narrator 68 Cotton, John 114 Davenport, John 110 Den Dulk, Matthijs 23, 123n16 Dixon, Melvin 55, 56 Dorson, Richard 38 Downing, A.J. 33 Dyer Hoefer, Anthony 94, 95, 106n4; Apocalypse South. Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary 12n1 Eagleton, Terry 2, 9 Edwards, Tim 83 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 43 Ellison, Ralph 63 Emersonian Transcendentalism 83 The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama) 41–2 Esperanto 116 Estes, Andrew Keller 74 Europe 6, 108, 109, 114 Ezekiel 108 “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe) 86 Faulkner, William 12n1, 94

Fisher, Philip 31n1, 33 Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva 118 Foucault, Michel 2, 21 Frykholm, Amy Johnson 125 Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man 41–2 Galileo 17 Genesis 59, 60 God’s Controversy with New-England (Wigglesworth) 71 Goldblatt, Steven 2 Goldsmith, Steven 24, 44 Gordon, Aharon David 123n14 Grady, John 90 The Guardian 107 Hall, John R. 127 Hannigan, John 95 Harlem 11, 26, 54, 56–65, 67, 69, 130 Harvey, David 17, 31n4 Hebraism 111, 113, 117 Heffernan, Teresa: Postapocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentiethcentury Novel 8–9 Heidegger, Martin 17, 18 Hicks, Heather J.: Modernity Beyond Salvage 9; The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century 9 Himmelfarb, Martha 30 Hurricane Katrina 94–6, 99, 101–5 The Ice Storm (Moody) 10, 32, 34–41, 52–3, 128 Ickes, Harold 108 Inge, John 15 InVisible Culture 99 Jacobson, David 6, 75, 114 Jazz (Morrison) 11, 26, 54–70, 97, 127–9 Jeffries, Stuart 107 Jewish immigrants 109, 112, 113, 115 Jewish tradition 27, 111, 123 Jews 108, 123n17 Jim Crow laws of segregation 64 John 3, 4, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 53, 58, 59, 68, 70n8, 77, 110, 118 Judaeo-Christian tradition 21 Judaism 31n6, 70n10 Judeo-Christian 1, 5, 20 Jurca, Catherine 34

Index  141 Kallen, Horace M. 112 Kenan, Randall 12n1 Kermode, Frank 9; The Sense of an Ending 1 Kerouac, Jack 34 Kumar, Krishan 41 Kunsa, Ashley 79, 80 Kyle, Richard G. 109 Ladd, Barbara 94 Lawrence, D.H. 7 Leach, William 17 Lefebvre, Henri 5, 17–21, 24, 25, 36, 41, 42, 51, 59, 67, 81, 84–7, 97, 100, 118, 127–9 Leigh, David J. 92 Levine, Michael P. 95 Lewis, R.W.B. 47 Lewis, Sinclair 34 liberal democracy 41 McCarthy, Cormac 28, 72, 73, 76, 77, 92n6, 94, 96, 129–31; All the Pretty Horses 90; Blood Meridian 11, 71–9, 81, 82, 92, 94; The Road 11, 71–3, 75, 79–83, 87, 90–2, 94 Manifest Destiny 8, 73 Massey, Doreen 18, 130 mass-produced suburbs 34 Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick 7, 73–4; White-Jacket 7 Meyer, Kinareth 47 Millard, Kenneth 43 Moby-Dick (Melville) 7, 73–4 modernism 17 Modernity Beyond Salvage (Hicks) 9 Montgomery, Maxine Lavon 54 Moody, D.L. 113 Moody, Rick 10, 25, 53n6, 96, 126, 127, 130; The Ice Storm 10, 32, 34–41, 52–3, 128; Purple America 10, 32, 34, 35, 41–53, 87, 128 Morrison, Toni 10, 25, 30, 55, 58, 60, 69n1, 70n13, 128–30; Beloved 54; Jazz 11, 26, 54–70, 97, 127–9; Song of Solomon 55; Sula 54, 56 Mount Moriah 123n9 Moynihan, Sinéad 106n5 Mumford, Lewis 15 Myers, D. G. 122n2 Myrdahl, Gunnar: An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy 63

Native Americans 44, 48, 49, 73 Nelson, John Wiley 84 New England suburbs 35 new Jerusalem 5, 6, 10, 23–5, 27, 29, 32, 44, 53, 53n7, 58–60, 70n6, 100, 105, 113, 119, 128 Newton, Isaac 17 Niebuhr, Reinhold 121 Noah’s Ark 89 Norich, Anita 111, 113 Obenzinger, Hilton 112 open space 14 “perceived crisis” 13n8 Pippin, Tina 26, 27, 100, 105, 106n2 place 5, 10, 14–22 “placefulness” 47, 128 The Planet of the Apes (film) 8 Plato 15, 16 Poe, Edgar Allen: “The Fall of the House of Usher” 86 Post-apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentiethcentury Novel (Heffernan) 8–9 The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century (Hicks) 9 post-apocalyptic space 84 prophet Elijah 88 prophet Isaiah 30, 114 Protestantism 6 Puritan settlement in America 6 Purple America (Moody) 10, 32, 34, 35, 41–53, 87, 128 Rambo, Shelly 80 Reagan, Ronald 108 Reformation 6, 38 religion 55, 121 religious space 20 representational space 19–21, 26, 67, 127, 129 Resseguie, James L. 22, 27, 30, 36 Revelation 2, 3, 5, 11, 14, 16, 21, 32, 36, 37, 56–8, 68, 70n4, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 95, 99, 100, 103–5, 118, 119, 127–30; spatiality of 22–30 The Road (McCarthy) 11, 71–3, 75, 79–83, 87, 90–2, 94 Roman Catholics 5 Roman Empire 4, 13n8 Rossing, Barbara R. 25, 27, 70n6

142 Index Salinger, J.D. 34 Salvage the Bones (Ward) 11–12, 94–106, 128 SBL Genres Project 13n4 semi-rural residential areas 32 The Sense of an Ending (Kermode) 1 Singles, Kathleen 123n5 social space 5, 10, 18, 20 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) 13n4 socio-historical processes 5 Song of Solomon (Morrison) 55 southern apocalyptic fiction 94 space 5, 9, 14–22, 92; of God 23; and history relation 55; post-apocalyptic 84; representations of 18–20, 36, 84 spatiality 2, 3, 15, 20; place- and space-oriented understandings of 16; of Revelation 22–30; in Western tradition 14 spatial practice 18–21, 26, 36, 67 Stave, Shirley Ann 60 Stein, Stephen J. 5 Stephanson, Anders 7 Stewart, Jeffrey C. 64 Storey, David 21 Stroud, Benjamin Christopher 34 suburb, principles of 34 Sula (Morrison) 54, 56 Taylor, William M. 95 Temple Mount site, Jerusalem 123n9 temple of Jerusalem 23 temporal-historical traits 3 “territoriality without sovereignty” 118 territory 14–22 Thacker, Andrew 17 theory of place 15 theory of space 15

Thompson, Leonard L. 2, 4, 13n8, 27, 30 Thurman, Wallace 56, 57 timescapes 16, 126 Treherne, Matthew 69, 70n13 Tuan, Yi-Fu 15 Turner, Frederick Jackson 30n1 Tygstrup, Frederick 21–2 Tyndale House 106n3 Updike, John 34 Vielhauer, Philipp 12n4 Ward, Jesmyn 11, 28, 30, 128–31; Salvage the Bones 11–12, 94–106 War of Independence 6 Weber, Max 127 Welty, Eudora 24 Western literary tradition 1 Western tradition 16; spatiality in 14 White-Jacket (Melville) 7 Wigglesworth, Michael 72; God’s Controversy with New-England 71 wilderness 27–8, 32, 72 Wisse, Ruth R. 107 Wojcik, Daniel 8, 47 World War I 7 World War II 8, 108, 109 Wright, Richard 12n1 Yiddishism 111–13, 115–17 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Chabon) 12, 107–24, 131 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 4, 60, 68, 88, 94, 96, 97 Zerbe, Gordon 59 Zionism 107, 121 zugzwang 109