"'It's no world for any old man any longer, and that means that I'm not one bit scared of you, my boyos, because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I'll be glad to be dead...What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more. So your worst you may do, you filthy cowardly hooligans.'[...] So we cracked into him lovely, grinning all over our litsos, but he still went on singing. Then we tripped him so he laid down flat and heavy and a bucketload of beer-vomit came whooshing out. That was disgusting so we gave him the boot, one go each, and then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on our way." (16)
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
"Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress." (275)
- Angels in America by Tony Kushner
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Visions of the apocalypse readily produce visions of transformed and mutated human nature(s). In Garrard's essay, the definition of "apocalyspe" is said to include images of "paranoia and violence; the extreme moral dualism that divides the world sharply into friend and enemy" (86). The notion that a shift in the state of the world can so heavily influence the state of humankind is both fascinating and frightening; humans shift and sway in accordance with their own perspectives in the world. Furthermore, humans can act upon these beliefs. A critical note must be made to point out that tragedy is a constant and does not necessarily predict an apocalypse. Individuals engage with a world in turmoil in various ways, however-- fatalistic nihilists will presumably work to destroy the world, whether it be through crime, as my Burgess example shows, or through apathy and millenial wastefulness. Others however, employ more appealing themes in discussions of the apocalypse. Harper, one of the principal characters in Kushner's play, uses profoundly ethereal and hopeful descriptions in portraying a renewed world which has been wrought with destruction from the very beginning.
The Burgess novel is written from the point of view of the more nihilistic crowd--a gang of "hooligans" whose predatory behavior shapes a regional apocalyptic state within "dreary" England. The excerpt I included is one of the most disturbing moments of grotesque imagery in the text. As the young boys assault a homeless old man, the victim howls and protests the ethical reversal in the state of the world in which the young destroy their elders, effectively beginning a self-devouring popoulation. Additionally, he protests the exploration of space in a civilization in which people "don't pay no attention to earthly law." While he makes a poignant point by illustrating "dual moralities" (one for humans, another for "nature"), he also enacts a splintered view of humanity and the environment. This starkly contrasts with Kushner's holistic construction of the universe, where a life lost is beamed into the enervated ozone layer, effectively melding humans and the environment into one body. In this way, the world becomes the assaulted victim, a starving, bleeding, war-ridden proxy for millions of battered souls.The man's fatal speech is not quite as disturbing, however, as the idea that the assailants are listening to the old man's outrage and completely disassociating themselves from his tangible fear of death. The richly humanistic speech is undercut by a detached narrative of violence. This is a visceral scene which is cut brutally short by a collective of marauders who in one kick of a boot, end a life, producing a small scale apocalyspe on the streets of Europe.
Kushner's play, however, encounters tragedy in a radically different way. His piece confronts the 1980s wave of AIDS infections, simultaneously battling the oppressive climate of the Reagan government, which halted discussions of the disease as it swept through the country. The excerpt above concludes the play in a nod towards hope. Rather than looking to one moment of savagery, this excerpt makes a grand sweep over the many savageries which filter through this world, including the major sources: war, plague, and famine. Looking to the effects and not the unfolding, of these gruesome forces, allows Harper to envision a conclusive phase of healing. While Burgess' characters perform the atrocities, Kushner's respond to those occurring, which we do not impact (for the most part). Kushner's piece also continues a cycle begun by Burgess, in that Burgess' beaten man could now transform into one of the "skydivers in reverse." He died in anguish, but in Harper's terms, he will emerge in salvation. Not only that, but his body, which was sacrificed, did not crumble in vain-- his extinguished life will have reconstructed the ethically and physically broken state of the world. Thus, as Kushner accepts that brutality and horror will ensue on this planet, he believes that disintegration (moral and physical) will be supplanted by growth and repair. "Painful progress" may be the most astute, if not harrowing, vision of apocalyspe we can use today. If the archaic dualities of rapture and damnation are tabled, we can now look to a probing middle ground in which we accept dystopia in the hope that a battered world will revert to bandaging its own wounds. Progress, then, entails pain. We may just be living out our days in a muted state of chronic apocalypse.