This is the End

Apocalypse Now it was today, or parts of it. The passage Kurtz is reciting is from a poem by T.S. Eliot - The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!
Our dried voices, when                       
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar                           
Shape without form shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;



Note that the poem's header reads - "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" - which is itself a quote, from Joseph Conrad's 
The Heart of Darkness, on which Coppola's movie is partly based.

_____________
_____________

Our seminar took us, to draw a concluding line, a long way through American literature and culture...

We started in

- Session I (April 18, 2007) -

with a reading of the Apocalypse, the one of St. John the Revelator, resident of the isle of Patmos.

Next, we took the apocalyptic to the American scene and in

- Session II (May 2, 2007) -

analyzed how it can be interpreted as one of the early defining moments of early American culture:
we had a look at John Winthrop's The City upon a Hill, which, as it turned out, soom came to have
loads of problems to tackle.

And then - tadaa! - Cotton Mather entered the class room, to stay, for a while. In

- Session III (May 9, 2007) -

we read parts of his Wonders of the Invisible World and analyzed his portrayal of the not quite so new danger
that had crept unto the colonial site, witchcraft.

In

- Session IV (May 16, 2007) -

we went even deeper into the text and saw how Mather is defining his own role as a public intellectual in the face
of what he perceived as a world-wide and world-threatening danger to humankind.

And let me just silently hush over

- Session V (May 23, 2007) -

where we had an all too boring look at Jonathan Edwards and his notebook on the apocalypse.

- Session VI (May 30, 2007) -

gave us a first overview of the class and the materials we had read so far. It also introduced Herman Melville and
his protagonist Ishmael, as a carrier of a specifically modern, 19th century sense of the end.

- Session VII (June 6, 2007) -

then finally got us into the waters of the Mississippi river, which we shipped down on board the Fidèle, the stage
of the Confidence Man. In restrospect, I'd say we managed to get quite something out of that difficult, but darkly
funny novel.

Moving deeper into the political and allegorical structure of the novel,

- Session VIII and Session IX (June 13 and June 20, 2007) -

gave us the time to scrutinize Melville's use of Indian Hating - and the function it has in the novel.

A more easy-going text was the basis of our next meeting -

- Session X (June 27, 2007) -

and we read Jack London's The Scarlet Plague and its treatment of the annihilation by plague.


Into the weird then it was, when we read two stories by HP Lovecraft, followed by a New Puritan short story.

- Session XI and Session XII (July 4 and July 11, 2007) -

And that was about it, of course - that left us a class session to deal the peculiar charm of the zombie apocalypse
(as laid out in Shawn of the Dead) and of course, the dark symbolism of Apocalypse Now, the Coppola movie.

____________
____________

So. What do we take from the class? May I propose some bullet points?

• 1) Apocalypse was one of the earliest and strongest intellectual and cultural movements in US history.
• 2) Apocalypse is not necessarily about destruction (though it can be as much) - it's about revelation (of a truth, religious, spiritual, historical, etc.) and transformation, or the lack thereof (such as transformation of a body of
• believers into post-apocalyptic post-history).
• 3) There are differences between religious apocalypses and secular apocalypses. There are also continuties, and
• often the two concepts, religious and secular, will exchange concerns. Think of how real apocalypse was as a historical force for thinkers like Cotton Mather - on this life, this world, this site. It was happening here and had definite effects on the present time.
• 4) Apocalypses happen in all genres (we read, among others, sermons, historical tracts, short stories, and a novel) and on all levels. It is neither exclusively a high cultural nor low cultural thing - it comprises literally the whole body politic.
• 5) Apocalypse is also about power. Think of the great influence preachers like Cotton Mather had on their populace: apocalypse and the apocalyptic threat could be used to move people. Also think of the ways London's The Scarlet Plague narrates a power struggle: here, apocalypse is also the liberation of the proletariat, and the novel seems to warn against it.