Hi Everyone,
This week’s readings are probably the most challenging of the course so it isn’t too surprising that some of you have said you find them confusing. That said, they are also crucial to your understanding and analysis of the subsequent texts so it’s important to keep working through the ideas. Please read this post carefully to see if it helps. I will discuss some of the key concepts that Kermode and Rosen put forward for our consideration so that you will be on the lookout for such ideas from here on out and can employ them in your research essays. But first a quick pointer about these readings: they need to be read slowly to give time for reflection. They are probably also best read in print form rather than online. That may be just my predilection, but the point is that scanning or speed-reading doesn’t usually work for theoretical texts.
Since Kermode’s work was published first by several decades, it makes sense to start with it and then think about how Rosen takes up some of his ideas, which have been circulated widely and for some are taken as definitive in regard to our “sense of an ending.” As Anastassia points out, Kermode and then Rosen discuss how apocalyptic narratives provide a sense of the world. That is one reason apocalypse continues over time—it creates a sense of order from beginning to end. Now, if you put that together with Kirsch’s historical study, it should prompt a question about just what meaning or sense of order it provides. For Kirsch it is largely a revenge narrative that has justified violence against those deemed to be enemies. He does not think this is a necessary sense of order, nor does Kermode. Their view connects with what Anastassia noted from Rosen about judgment. In traditional apocalypse (the one both Kermode and Rosen called myth), the judgment is divinely bestowed on sinners and saints. Most of humanity falls under the sinner category and is destroyed (the catastrophe element that Rosen points out). The chosen ones, the saints, are rewarded with the New Jerusalem. This is the form that Kermode calls naïve because it is a straightforward, largely non-ironic version of a rescue story. It seems pretty clear that he prefers what he calls the sophisticated literary version (modernist fiction) that refused a single ending and that brings irony to reflect on the order that traditional apocalyptic narrative provides.
That is why at this point I want to “trouble” something that Danielle said—that the story is timeless. That is the claim that a fundamentalist believer makes, but Kirsch, Kermode, and Rosen all go to great lengths to dispel that notion, so the claim for timelessness needs to address this debate. What all 3 authors share is the argument that the apocalyptic narrative from the Book of Revelation is elastic enough to have changed over time. Although some of the key parts remain the same, the meanings shift and the sense of the imminent changes to immanent. If you didn’t look those words up when you read Kermode, do so now.
Colby has taken these issues up commendably so I urge everyone to read her thoughtful post. I have a few points to make along the way about it, mostly to try to make sure we grasp Kermode’s concept of the living in the “middest,” although under the “shadow of the apocalypse.” He wants us to realize that time is a framework—whether it is a construction of a calendar, or hour or one’s own personal life from birth to death. All of those markers make sense because they are widely accepted but they aren’t a “given” of reality. We give our multiple moments of experience meaning by ordering them in certain ways. There are all kinds of way to order the flux and in this course we are tracing one of the most prominent and prevailing ones with the apocalyptic narrative. As all of our authors have said, some societies do not think in apocalyptic terms; rather than a linear beginning and end, they view cycles of time. Increasingly, as Kermode points out, it has been harder to maintain a strict linear narrative—so Joachim of Fiore introduced transitional time to the traditional apocalyptic story. This has remained popular since the Middle Ages and he points out that even secular societies see themselves in a transition that they call crisis. Hence in the 20th century, there arose a sense of perpetual crisis. I’d say this has only gotten worse sense he wrote in 1966. This sense of crisis effects all kinds of thought/belief, including apocalyptic belief, especially once the atom bomb was invented. Death, for example, is under debate about when it actually occurs—so is life. So with secular medical technology, the once clear beginning and end of an individual life has become muddied.
Eric gets special notice for his fabulous last line: “We are the apocalypse’s clingy and overly dependent lover.” None of our authors agree with his contention that this is a need, or natural, so that is precisely the issue that should be taken up rather than assumed. But it certainly seems to be the case over the course of history—as all 3 of our authors attest. Part of the question here involves why it became prevalent. Again, let’s not assume that we need to think this way. Let’s find out if thinking this way is the result of the Book of Revelation and the power plays that made it so important to Western society. After all, Kermode says the West started thinking this way once the Christian Bible canonized Revelation and placed it at the end. That gave Genesis and Revelation pride of place as beginning and end. The Hebrew texts did not have this neat and orderly structure. As Kirsch argues, the conquest of a Christianized Rome then made that structure the knowledge system of many centuries, maintaining it through preaching, war, and torture. Eric’s reply to Danielle is much clearer in this respect in his use of Kermode’s concept of “fictive concords.” Of course a lot depends one where you see yourself fitting in—it’s less comforting if you are outside of the belief and condemned for it.
And that brings us to Cialina’s note about Rosen’s explanations of a postmodern apocalypse and to Amy’s discussion of Rosen’s term Neo-Apocalypse. Many TV shows these days have the elements of these shifts in the apocalyptic narrative (that Kermode sees as starting with modernism and that Rosen updates with postmodernism). I just did a book review on an example of Neo-Apocalypse, called Scorch Atlas. It is so bleak and devoid of hope that I decided not to use it for our class. There are more examples of the postmodern version that Rosen describes for Watchmen and in subsequent chapters from her book. We’ll take these categories up with your next posts and on Tuesday. Remember to take a feature of the work and analyze it. See you then!
