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The Apocalypse

1. (With capital initial.) The revelation of the future granted to St. John in the isle of Patmos. The book of the New Testament in which this is recorded.
2. By extension: Any revelation or disclosure.
   1. Christian Church. The events described in the revelation of St John; the Second Coming of Christ and ultimate destruction of the world.
   2. More generally: a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm. Also in weakened use.

(From the Oxford English Dictionary)

So what is a revelation?

To veil comes from ME veilen, from the ME n veile, whence the English noun veil: and ME veile is adopted from Old N. French, which, like Old French-French voile, derives from Medieval-Vulgar Latin vēla, from Latin uēla, plural of uēlum, a sail, but also [a piece of] drapery, an awning; originally from Indo-European *wegslom, from *weg-, to weave.

Latin uēlāre has prefix-compound reuēlāre, to pull back the curtain, or covering, from, hence to disclose: whence Old French-Middle French reveler, whence to reveal. Derivative Late Latin reuēlātiō, an uncovering, hence of a secret.

(Adapted from Eric Partridge’s Origins: An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English)

Post-apocalyptic fiction ...

• Depicts, of course, life after an apocalypse (in sense 2b, a general disaster).
• Has been written in recognizable modern forms since early in the nineteenth century, but gains currency after World War II.
  • This increase is related to the increased cultural concern with nuclear weapons after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Is often concerned with the maintenance of a pre-apocalypse way of life after social structures have been vastly altered by the apocalyptic disaster.
• At the same time, the apocalypse in each of the works we’re reading this quarter is a revelation of basic truths that were hidden before the apocalypse.
• One of the revelations commonly made by (post-)apocalyptic literature is that life and the social structures that support it are precarious.
• The revelation of the precarity of the social structures supporting our ways of life is one way that post-apocalyptic fiction produces the affective response of horror.

So, the apocalypse in post-apocalyptic fiction is ...

• a disaster;
• a radical break from previous ways of living;
• a new beginning, for those who survive; and
• a revelation of previously hidden things.

In what directions does this lead?

• Some examples:
  • Survival fantasies (Day of the Triffids, The Walking Dead).
  • Opportunities for starting from scratch (Oryx and Crake).
  • Opportunities for redemption, in one sense of another (The Road).
  • Seeing how deep the rabbit-hole of horror goes (Blindness).

We’ll talk more about horror on Wednesday, but a few words now …

Tragedy is an imitation of a noble and complete action, having the proper magnitude; it employs language that has been artistically enhanced […] it is presented in dramatic, not narrative form, and achieves, through the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents.

tragedy is not an imitation of men, per se, but of human action and life and happiness and misery.

Aristotle, Poetics (ca. 330 BCE)

Horror ...

Horror, in this way, shows us our inherent skepticism about absolute progress. […] Dracula, The Call of Cthulu, or The Island of Dr. Moreau present a dark-regressive shadow image of the bright and progressive veneer of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optimism. The origins of modern horror provide a vivid presentation of the inherent moral weaknesses and often-present darkness in the human imagination.

Philip Tallon, Through a Mirror, Darkly (2010)

What about the undead, then?

Horror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because he appropriates and transforms them. Having yielded to his assault, one literally goes native by becoming a vampire oneself. [Dracula’s victims] receive a new racial identity, one that marks them as literally Other. Miscegenation leads, not to the mixing of races, but to the biological and political annihilation of the weaker race by the stronger.

Stephen Arata, The Occidental Tourist (1990)

But more specifically, zombies ...

• have their origin, as a cultural construct, in Haitian Vodou folklore regarding priests/sorcerers who raise the dead (who are then called zombis) to work in the fields.
• are thus, from the beginning, figures of laboring slaves without consciousness.
• also have a deep association with Haitian slave rebellions, both because Vodou practices during the slave period were loci for anti-white sentiment and because Vodou rituals supposedly rendered soldiers insensitive to pain.

Zombies ...

• threaten both the physical body and, even more directly, the endangered subject’s sense of identity.
• point toward the fact that our senses of subjectivity depend on our bodies.
• are boundary figures that terrify, in part, because of their inability to be classified into our normal categories:
  • alive/dead
  • human/animal
  • slave/slave rebellion
  • subject/object
  • powerless/powerful

The zombie in modern society

Like most monsters, the zombie illuminates our own discomfort with various kinds of bodies, but above all it illustrates the ever-present and real threat of the human body. We are all, in some sense, walking corpses, because this is inevitably the state to which we must return. In imagining that humans are burdened with their own deaths, we can come to see one of the various ways that the zombie terrifies: not as an apocalyptic vision but as a representation of the lived human condition.

Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, A Zombie Manifesto

Other forms of living death

The individual is entirely nullified in the face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society’s domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment (xvii; 1947, English tr. 1972)