Apocalyptic Territories

Setting and Revelation in Contemporary American Fiction

Anna Hellén

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032238524
• eBook ISBN: 9781000032758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Research on the relationship between the apocalyptic tradition and the literary imagination has typically espoused a temporal approach which in one way or another revolves around the order of events that precedes the end of history and the ensuing establishment of a new world. This study, by contrast, explores the spatial dimensions of apocalypse, more precisely the way in which the settings of the Book of Revelation are taken up by contemporary American writers and related to more general but also more contested concerns of territorial integrity and national identity. Influenced by Lefebvre's theories, the study understands territory not simply as the container of certain structures and practices but also as the result of them, just as bird song is not framed by but rather constructive of territorial borders. It is the equivalent of such 'songs' that this book seeks to listen in on, i.e. the apocalyptic narratives that have been passed on through the centuries to define and sustain territory on a local, regional, and national level, and the way in which seven novels by Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon respond to them.

1 A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse

Place, Space, and Territory

The advantage of employing space and place in this study is firstly and most obviously that they tease out basic notions of spatiality in the Western tradition in general, thus opening up a channel of communication between the spatial layers of past and present apocalyptic discourses. This exposition is consequently bifocal in the way in which it hones in on the spatial contexts of the Book of Revelation and the contemporary fiction with which this study is concerned. Juxtaposing historical and contemporary texts, this study uncovers different segments regarding notions of place and space, showing how each apocalyptic setting carries traces of past spatial discourses. Further, the terms also tally with a fundamental bivalence in apocalyptic cosmology while at the same time catering to those instances when this bivalence becomes undone. The apocalyptic spatial system is largely based on antithesis insofar as each setting is defined by its opposite spatial pole in turn linked to the greater territorial conflict between the two apocalyptic powers of Revelation, God and Satan. The incongruous, dark abyss is consequently set up against the luminous temple of heaven; the wide, open space of the wilderness against the elaborate architecture of the cities; barren deserts against fecund, ordered gardens; and volatile sea against solid land; etc. Place generally appears closer to God than space, the latter typically linked to excess and chaos spawned by the devil. As will also be demonstrated, moreover, the terms are particularly pertinent to the apocalyptic rhetoric involved in the pursuit to define and inhabit the American continent: American history has routinely been articulated as an interaction between conquered and unconquered land, between the need to inhabit the land and make it home and the desire to conquer new territories—indeed, between place and space.¹

“Place” and “space” are of course neither precise nor stable terms but should rather be viewed as grades on a scale, where place is more closely connected to stability, home, and roots—“a profound center of human existence to which people have deep emotional and psychological ties and is part of the complex processes through which individuals and groups define themselves” (Convery et al. 1)—and space to movement, freedom, flux, and openness. Place and space, moreover, need each other for definition. As Yi-Fu Tuan puts it, “[f]rom the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6).

Tuan also points out that our way of defining spatial dimensions is contingent on experience, arguing that “‘[s]pace’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). Further, place and space are of course vital components of each individual life. Lewis Mumford’s evocative statement that “human life swings between two poles: movement and settlement” (5) holds true insofar as each human life ideally contains both the safety and predictability of place and the mobility and openness of space, albeit in different proportions for different individuals in different stages of life.

Our understanding of spatiality is thus based on personal experience as well as biological/genetic factors, but it is also a product of more comprehensive socio-historical processes. Theories of place and space have a long history in Western thinking, but, as Casey points out, this history has not been sufficiently uncovered. Since place “is so much with us, and we with it, it has been taken for granted, deemed not worthy of separate treatment” (1997: x). However, the fact that place is typically experienced rather than analyzed does not mean that it is “innocent” or unmarked by ideological or philosophical footprints. As John Inge contends, modern Western conceptions of place and space are indebted to Greek thinking, most theories of space up until the fourteenth century building more or less directly upon the groundwork of Aristotle and Plato (3). The two thinkers differ greatly in their spatial conceptions, however. Plato pictures cosmic creation as a progression from spatial abstraction to concretion, from space to place, within which three stages can be identified, the first of which is characterized by space in its primary, undifferentiated form; “a massive spatial sphere beyond which there is Nothing, not even the Void” (Casey 1997: 41). This space thus exists prior to creation, not as a void, because it is not radically empty, but as a receptacle, a holder, for the configuration of concrete places (Inge 3). Creation, in Plato’s spatial theory, is thus the gradual development from abstract primary space to differentiated, distinct place.

Aristotle is less concerned with the cosmological perspectives found in Plato than with the constitution and significance of place and consequently does not have an elaborate theory of space. It is place, Aristotle accordingly contends, that “takes precedence of all other things” (qtd Casey 1997: 51), and so every substance, except for the Unmoved Maker, the heavens, the numbers, and points, must be located in place in order to exist at all. But if this is the case, it also follows that place takes priority over infinity as well as chaos, which, as Casey contends, must also be “a kind of place, however inchoate and formless it may be” (1997: 51–52). Most importantly, Aristotle defines place largely by its capacity to contain and surround, first comparing it to a vessel that marks the boundary of its contents but realizing that the latter can be moved, whereas a place is stationary, he subsequently emended this definition by explaining place as “the first unchangeable limit (peras) of that which surrounds” (qtd Casey 1997:55). The conception of place as a container has been immensely influential in Western tradition in general and is also prevalent as a spatial principle in the Book of Revelation, where it is especially tangible in God’s realms, as will be evinced shortly.

However, another spatial influence is discernible in the settings of Revelation, namely the idea of infinite space, which had been introduced by the Atomists two generations before Plato. The Atomists saw space as divided into atoms (indivisible pieces of matter) and the void (a limitless nothingness) (Casey 1997: 81), which consequently conflicted with Aristotle’s picture of the world as a series of juxtaposed places, the latter which also precluded the idea of anything being not-place. As Inge contends, the Aristotelian and the Atomist spatial theories competed for attention during the Hellenistic period (5), and, as I will demonstrate, the spatial divisions and conflicts played out in the Book of Revelation also carry traces of these two theories. If the Aristotelian idea of place as a container competes on God’s side, then the open, limitless realms primarily belong to Satan and are discernible in the bottomless abyss but also in the latter’s consistent and subversive disregard for boundaries.

The basic conflict between place- and space-oriented understandings of spatiality as represented by Aristotle and the Atomists respectively is noticeable also in modern spatial discourses, which, however, is not to suggest they have travelled through time unaltered or to establish quasi-historical parallels between past and present theoretical frameworks but simply to divulge points of communication between the different timescapes as well as to provide an explanation as to why it is that a text like the Book of Revelation is still a source of inspiration for the settings of apocalyptic narratives, despite different social, scientific, and religious contexts. Indeed, the way a historical period conceives of place and space is closely connected to more general beliefs and interests. Hence, when an early, predominantly secular, modern spatial worldview gradually gave way to one that placed emphasis on the infinity of space, it was the result of a combination of mutually influential theological and scientific shifts. The theological supposition that if God’s power is infinite, he must be granted infinite space in which to operate, or, as Casey puts it, “[d]ivine ubiquity… entails spatial infinity” (1997: 77), was at once bolstered and strengthened by the growing interest in limitless space among natural scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, theology and physics now having a common universalist aim to, as Casey puts it, “conceive of space in utterly maximal terms” (1997:77). For Newton as for Galileo, concrete places were degraded to mere sections of space and consequently of no inherent value or significance.²

The dominance of space over place persisted and was even accentuated after the turn of the twentieth century as openness and flux, rather than localization and consistency, were seen as the most essential and vital components modern life. Andrew Thacker suggests that modernism is more concerned with movement across space than with the constitution of specific places, arguing that the depiction of modern means of transport in modernist literature, such as the car or the subway, is commensurate with the very core of modernist spatial aesthetics and ideology (80). But there was of course also a counter-movement to what was increasingly being felt as a detrimental sense of “placelessness”—this “erosion of people’s attachments to place” (Convery et al. 2) that modernity allegedly brought with it. William Leach paints a grim picture of modern America, which in many ways can be seen as representative of that of human geographers of the 1980s and 1990s, describing sentiments of loss and rage over the attenuation of attachment to place in the wake of industrialization, globalization, and commercialization. Our well-being, he argues, rests on a “healthy connectedness to place” (7), a “confident attachment to a place to be from” (6).

But the idea of place as a precondition of authentic life and an essential element in human creativity, memory, and identity formation has been enunciated most influentially by Heidegger, who argues that every human being finds his or her raison d’être in a relationship to a stable sense of place: “To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations” (1997: 107). Heidegger’s notion of place as an island in the flow of time from which the work of art grows more or less organically contributed to spawning a localized dimension of modernism which typically favored rural or small-town areas to the flux of the large cities and the general “time-space compression” of modernity.³

Heidegger’s stance has been challenged, not primarily by advocates of space, but by a fundamental reconceptualization of the idea of place itself. Disputing the view of place as removed from all socio-political influence, as a bounded exclusive territory fixed in time, David Harvey and other Marxist theorists have brought attention to the interdependence between spatial and social processes, more precisely the way in which each site takes part of a web of influences—historical, political, and economic.⁴ This book relies to some extent on Lefebvre’s theories of how social space is produced, a word used in the title of his most seminal work and which understands space as both the result and the agent of social processes. Lefebvre in this manner goes against the definition of place inherited from Aristotle as an innocent container to be filled with various structures and activities—as a “passive locus of social relations” (11)—and instead explains it as an integral and even active part of the processes it at once harbors and produces: “[S]pace is never empty: it always embodies a meaning” (154); “(Social) space is a (social) product” (26). Lefebvre’s social spaces also demonstrate hypercomplexity in the way one inheres within another: “We are thus confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global. Not to mention nature’s (physical) space, the space of (energy) flows, and so on” (8).

Describing place as an ongoing process, Doreen Massey elaborates on and concretizes Lefebvre’s more general insights. Place, she argues, corresponds to “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (1991: 28). “Places, and senses of place,” she argues in response to Heidegger’s legacy, “do not, as some evocations would have us believe, arise organically out of the soil. They are the product of relations and interactions, both within the place itself and more widely. No place’s ‘sense of place’ is constructed without relations with and/or influences from elsewhere” (2012: xiii). To Massey, place is a site of communication between regions, nations, and continents rather than a static or stable enclosure, and as such, it may also include qualities usually ascribed to space. Massey’s conception of place “includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, and which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.” A place thus resembles a “meeting place,” a network of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences, and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether it be a street, a region or even a continent (1991: 28).

Lefebvre describes the production of social space as an interaction between three dimensions, each of which will be useful in the current study as a means of understanding modern renderings of apocalyptic space and their socio-political implications. The first is spatial practice, which, as the term also suggests, refers to actions and movements in space relating to production and reproduction as well as to how people act in space and move between different locations—“the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life, and leisure” (38). To Lefebvre, spatial practice becomes “the practical basis of the perception of the outside world” (40), a factual and functional dimension of space that is the foundation of people’s everyday lives and activities.

The second dimension is representations of space, which belongs to a higher level of abstraction in pertaining to the way in which space is conceptualized by authorities and other official networks of society such as city planners and architects. This dimension refers to the idea behind the concrete manifestations of space, as seen in drawings, maps, and plans but also as expressed in monuments and museums. In the modern state, Lefebvre argues, representations of space have to a great extent been the result of an ambition to homogenize space; to downplay difference and discord, the result of which Lefebvre terms abstract space:

Abstract space functions “objectally,” as a set of things/signs and their formal relationships: glass and stone, concrete and steel, angles and curves, full and empty. Formal and quantitative, it erases distinctions, as much those which derive from nature and (historical) time as those which originate in the body (age, sex, ethnicity)…. The dominant form of space, that of the centres of wealth and power endeavours to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there. Differences, for their part, are forced into the symbolic forms of an art that is itself abstract. (49)

Representational space, finally, is space imagined and interpreted by its inhabitants and by writers and artists. This is space that “imagination seeks to change and appropriate” and that therefore “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (39). Importantly, for Lefebvre the different dimensions of social space are not distinct but merge into and communicate with each other in various ways. For example, what people do and how they move in space is to some extent controlled by the way in which space is planned, marked out, and shaped by politicians, city planners, and architects, but spatial practice can also partially or fully subvert the original idea of that space. In addition, the way space is imagined is based on “real” as well as “ideal” space but is also constitutive of both: The “aura” of places such as Manhattan is created and re-created in the imagination of the generations inhabiting them but also in fiction, movies, and paintings. On the most general lev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A Spatial Approach to Apocalypse
• 2 “That Theory of Paradise”: Rick Moody’s Suburban Apocalypse
• 3 “A City Better than Perfect”: Harlem as the New Jerusalem in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
• 4 McCarthy’s Sourceless Apocalypse in Blood Meridian and The Road
• 5 Out of the Pit: Southern Apocalypse and the Female Body in Ward’s Salvage the Bones
• 6 The Story Is Telling Us: Apocalyptic Geopolitics in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index