Literature of the American Apocalypse

Six years ago (summer 2001), in a happier frame of mind, I was putting the finishing touches on a special issue of the Green Mountains Review called Comedy in Contemporary American Poetry. Like the 20th anniversary issue you now hold in your hands, that issue attempted to reflect the literary zeitgeist, responding to what I perceived as a distinct increase in the number of humorous poems being produced in the United States – poems I was reading in both my role as editor and as reader of other literary magazines and books of contemporary poetry — poems whose modus operandi were distinctly comedic. As I considered the past quarter century of American literature, I could see how comedy, which was already a regular fixture in fiction and drama, had come into the poetic mainstream. And so I had spent the year gathering poems for a rollicking, high-spirited, 250-page issue that featured writers as diverse as John Ashbery, Julia Alvarez, Charles Bernstein, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson, Bob Hicok, David Kirby, William Matthews, Maureen Seaton, James Tate, Charles Harper Webb, and Dean Young.

The timing for the publication of that issue could not have been worse. Shortly before the publication date, September 11, 2001 happened, the Twin Towers crumbled, and the age of levity came crashing down. In a hastily scribbled postscript to my introduction for the comedy issue, I noted that PBS had interviewed Billy Collins, U.S. poet-laureate at that time, and they asked Collins what poetry could do for America during a time of national tragedy. Collins gave the usual answer: elegies and encomiums, poems of mourning and poems of national praise, were appropriate at times such as these, and they helped to focus and give voice to our citizens’ collective sense of loss. He also noted, in a slight fillip to the newscaster, that levity, as well as the more traditional modes of elegy and encomium, might help heal a national grief.

America has recovered, somewhat, its sense of humor since those dark days in September 2001, but other equally dark events have followed. I have noticed in the past several years a new swell of poetry and prose submissions coming into Green Mountains Review that confirm my feeling: a new strain of literature is at hand, what I’m calling Literature of the American Apocalypse. These poems and stories center on the grim realities occurring on the Bush Administration’s watch – be it the war in Iraq or the war on terror, the Patriot Acts or re-definitions of “torture,” nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation, AIDS and the specter of avian flu pandemic, tsunamis and hurricanes that some say are tied to global warming and others say are signs from an angry god. If, as the poet Ezra Pound has said, writers are the antennae of the human race, then they are detecting signals and reporting from the front lines of consciousness about what is imminent: and the tone and tenor of this reporting suggests apocalyptic events. As the poet William Matthews says in his poem “Millennium,” “the culture’s caught an excited/sinking feeling, a hunch about history: we always thought we might go down in it.” In short, laughter in America has suddenly rung hollow, and the new sounds in literature are the fear and lamentation of American Dread or the sometimes angry, sometimes rapturous prophecy of apocalypse.

With Green Mountains Review approaching its 20th anniversary, I announced, in the early spring of 2006, our plans for this special issue, calling for submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, darkly comic or deadly serious, that center on American dread, inspired by everything I’ve already mentioned — war, terrorism, and world-ravaging disease – as well as such things as corruptions of culture and language, takeover by clones and com­puters, or whatever else could be imagined by an end-of-days mind. Over the past year-and-a-half, I have received thousands of manuscript submissions that help define the nature and variety of contemporary American apocalyptic literature – tracing the contours of American dread, and fleshing out the deep structure of cause-and-effect that underlies apocalyptic thinking.

What is apocalyptic literature and why am I focusing specifically on American apocalyptic literature? The adjective apocalyptic is a modern label for end-of-times literature. It derives from the Greek verb apokaluptein, which means “to reveal, disclose, uncover” and suggests that the writer of apocalyptic literature is a visionary seeing into the heart of things in a way that others cannot. Apocalyptic literature is a literature of prophecy, and the future it envisions comes in two flavors, both of them tasting fundamen­tally of doom, but one of them coming with a sugar-coating. It depends on one’s spiritual predilection, or lacking a spiritual basis, it depends on one’s preference for secular optimism or pessimism.

The apocalyptic literature I’ve selected for GMR reflects both secular and religious visions of doom. While some writers of contemporary apocalyptic poetry and prose are cognizant of this genre’s deep roots in Judaeo-Christian writing, other writers seem largely unaware of that fact. I’m certainly not a scholar of religious apocalyptic texts but know they include, within the Old Testament, parts of the book of Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, and within the New Testament, the most famous of all apocalyptic Christian writings, the endlessly interpreted Book of Revelations (or, in its full title, The Revelation of Jesus Christ unto his servant John of Patmos).

Whether religious or secular, apocalypse designates a type of literature from the ancient world that typically contained a revelation of the future. In religious apocalyptic literature, the revelatory vision is initiated by God and delivered through a mediator, typically an angel, to a holy person, for instance, John-of-Patmos. In the secular tradition, the visionary attains his prophetic vision unaided, or aided by drugs, or by high Romanticism, or, these days, by responding to the superflux of fear and trembling broadcast over the media-saturated airwaves, or, lacking that capacity, simply reading the handwriting on the wall of the daily news.

One important commonality, from ancient times to modern, is this: most ancient apocalyptic literature was written during times of political persecution or unrest. It was intended to encourage perseverance by revealing the destruction of the wicked and the glorious future that awaited the faithful. I suspect today’s writers also use apocalyptic literature to imagine the punishment of the wicked, but perhaps not all modern writers anticipate a glorious future for “the faithful”, nor do modern writers even expect the balm of their apocalyptic poems and prose to “encourage perseverance.” And that’s what has changed in a few thousand years, from the sacred to the secular.
What has remained the same is this: one of the main features of an apocalyptic community is its marginal status within the larger society. In its social, political, or economic alienation, the community constructs an alternate universe where eventually it will triumph, and this alternate universe comes to full expression in its apocalyptic literature. In modern and contemporary America, writers have both positioned themselves at the margins of society, and have been positioned there. Many writers speak of living on the margins as a sort of prerequisite for writing: in order to see clearly the norms of American life (that is, life lived at the center of American society), one must live (or, at least, camp out) on the fringes of that world – a place from which one can spy on it, scrutinize its behaviors, and predict its outcomes. At the same time, of course, writers desire their work to have enormous influence on society and on the politics of the age, and most of them are bitterly disappointed when they discover otherwise.

Why an American Apocalypse? At this specific moment in history and literary history, it is American writers who feel most marginalized – caught in the tension between belonging to the most powerful nation on earth and yet feeling powerless to affect its current policies, which seem to them to be a juggernaut hurtling toward the destruction of the planet.

In traditional apocalyptic literature, the end-of-times perspective views history as moving to a final culmination defined by God and brought about primarily through his initiative. By contrast, the contemporary American literature of apocalypse often sees the agency of destruction as human – whether embodied in specific, wicked political leaders or by faceless corporations whose profit-margins are poisoning the Earth or setting in motion apocalyptic events such as the Great Deluge (in the form of polar icecaps melting). Sometimes, these contemporary writers of apocalypse imagine a force larger than the human – usually an almost-deified Nature bent on revenge – that spawns world-ravaging disease, earthquakes, tsunamis, or meteors hurtling toward Earth.

I suppose I could have called GMR’s special issue The Literature of American Dread (rather than of American Apocalypse), but I think there’s a difference between the two terms, and I’d rather use the more dramatic term, the one that reflects both the profound fear of and the prophetic forecast for this contemporary moment – not simply that things are going terribly wrong, but that things are going toward an apocalyptic end.

“Dread” implies profound fear, even terror of some impending event, one which we are powerless to prevent. It implies a kind of emotional paralysis in the face of this power. By contrast, apocalyptic thinkers are more actively engaged: agitated by the evil forces arrayed against us, imaginatively forceful in the end-of-world visions they propose for us, and sometimes actively embracing the apocalyptic event.

The literature of apocalypse, like the literature of dread, recognizes its powerlessness in the face of the wicked-ways-of-the-world. But unlike the literature of dread (which seems to bury its head in the sand or whine of political anomie and despair), the literature of apocalypse, especially the traditional, religious variety, posits an alternate vision that reclaims power from the dominant group – even if it is power that obtains only in heaven (not on earth) – and creates a more hopeful, optimistic, even rapturous ending to the end-of-days.

The secular strain of apocalyptic literature demonstrates less faith (or no faith) in a happy ending to the end of days. Whatever its tone – whether stridently prophesying, or belly-laughing in the radioactive decay of absurdity, or contemplating with Buddhist detachment the apocalypse-in-the-void
– it does have a finality to it. The voice does not express belief in a shining hereafter, an 11th-hour rescue by beneficent aliens, or any other form of last-gasp resuscitation. This vision of apocalypse sees that whatever world-ending catastrophe awaits us will punish the innocents of the world along with the wicked.

Today, in 2007, intimations of apocalypse are written everywhere, from graffiti on urban walls and bathroom stalls, to airport novels and New Age prophecies, to literature of the highest order. Green Mountains Review’s 20th anniversary issue features over eighty American writers who are busy imagining and evoking the particulars of our world’s possible end. So open the book, and read. Do not expect salvation, but perhaps some imaginative perspective on how and why and when the Light will go out and the Word will end.