Since the beginning the end has always been with us. As the 5th issue of Forum, the University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal for Culture and the Arts demonstrates the apocalypse has proved to be a resilient cultural trope throughout human history. Dr Darryl Jones' wide-ranging guest article provides historical context for the treatment of the apocalyptic tone in literature, setting the scene for the literary discussions of the 19th century short stories of Wilkie Collins and George Eliot, the Science Fiction novels of George Turner and the more contemporary concerns of Don Delillo's work. The flexible nature of the apocalyptic theme is reflected in two papers investigating the use of apocalyptic tone in two non-literary media forms, namely the eco-concerns of the films of Rolf de Heers and the sonic experience of the apocalypse in Tom Waits' Bone Machine, while a more philosophical approach is adopted in the discussions of our ability to linguistically comprehend the "end" post-Trinity, and the radical eco-activism of the Earth First! movement. As this selection of essays proves, attempting to study human conceptions of apocalypse provides a colourfully broad canvas of topics and approaches which, like the literal meaning of the word itself, constantly hint at the "unveiling" of a coherent truth while simultaneously remaining tantalisingly out of reach.

Mushroom cloud from the Fat Man bomb over Nagasaki, 9th August 1945

Contents

Guest Article

Scenes from the Decline and Fall of the American Empire 
Dr Darryl Jones (Trinity College Dublin)

Articles

Behind the Veil: Gender and Apocalypse in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil (1859) and Wilkie Collins's The Two Destinies (1876) 
Ryan Barnett (University of Central England)

Musical Apocalypse: Tom Waits' Bone Machine 
Angela Jones (University of Western Australia)

Apocalyptic Nostalgia in the Prologue of Don DeLillo's Underworld 
Randy Laist (University of Connecticut)

This is the End: Earth First! and Apocalyptic Utopianism 
Michael Mikulak (McMaster University)

The Critical Mass of Language: Post-Trinity Representation 
Daniel F. Spoth (Vanderbilt University)

Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk(2007) 
D. Bruno Starrs (Queensland University of Technology)

"The Four Horsemen of the Greenhouse Apocalypse": Apocalypse in the Science Fiction Novels of George Turner 
Roslyn Weaver (University of Wollongong)

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Guest Article

Scenes from the Decline and Fall of the American Empire 
Dr Darryl Jones (Trinity College Dublin)

At their zenith, empires become haunted by images of their inevitable demise. This article examines historical theories of imperial decline, as exemplified by the works of Edward Gibbon, C-F Volney and Oswald Spengler, and suggests a recurring concern with 'revolutionary orientalism' in such writings. The USA is currently in its late-imperial decadent phase, and much given in consequence to apocalyptic or catastrophic narratives. These are hardly new - the late-Victorian British Empire produced a large number of disaster fictions hardly less spectacular, with H G Wells foremost amongst his contemporary catastrophists - London is destroyed many hundreds of times in the period's fiction. The article closes with an analysis of 9/11 fictions and theories, and looks particularly at the novels of Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer.

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Articles

Behind the Veil: Gender and Apocalypse in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil (1859) and Wilkie Collins's The Two Destinies (1876) 
Ryan Barnett (University of Central England)

Although the term 'apocalypse' is often used to refer to a catastrophic event it literally means 'to unveil' and, pre-biblically, signified the unveiling of a virgin bride. It is in the sense of the apocalypse as an 'unveiling' that, in a discussion of George Eliot's 1859 novella The Lifted Veil and Wilkie Collins's 1876 novel The Two Destinies, I will explore the links between the notion of apocalypse and the 'secret' of female sexuality. In Eliot's and Collin's stories, I argue, female sexuality is portrayed as an apocalyptic secret that exists above and beyond the play of veiling and unveiling. Indeed, when the veil concealing this apocalyptic secret is lifted, in Eliot's and Collins's text, the revelation reveals only a blank, an absence. In this sense, I claim, The Lifted Veil and The Two Destinies can be said to anticipate Jacques Derrida's assertion, in his essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," that the final veil of the apocalypse cannot be lifted, that it remains always 'to come.' The apocalyptic secret of female sexuality, which lies behind the veil in Eliot's and Collins's texts, I conclude, mirrors the secret that literature itself represents: a secret that, like the apocalypse and female sexuality, is radically unknowable. For both Eliot and Collins, it seems, the apocalypse is never 'now,' but only ever the constantly deferred promise of an unveiling 'to come.'

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Musical Apocalypse: Tom Waits' Bone Machine 
Angela Jones (University of Western Australia)

Apocalypse derives from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning the act of uncovering, unveiling, or revelation. While the apocalyptic theme or genre continues to inform and inspire a number of different media and discourses into the twenty-first century, the representation of apocalypse within popular music remains a largely overlooked field of enquiry. Therefore in this paper I would like to discuss Tom Waits' 1992 CD, Bone Machine, as a popular musical rendition of the apocalyptic theme, in order to explore what the apocalyptic might sound like, were it to be rendered musically. To do so, I will be drawing on Jacques Derrida's essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," in which he formulates an understanding of the apocalyptic as "tone": the "revelator of some unveiling in process." Like Derrida's apocalyptic tone, Bone Machine can be interpreted as registering an idea of the apocalyptic as process and movement, wherein the act of revelation is conceived as a continual, often turbulent and confusing, unveiling. This apocalyptic process is registered both through the album's production - wherein the sounds are continually being stripped back and built on to one another to form unstable, transient song structures - and through its vocal delivery - which foregrounds the way in which tone can subvert and destabilize the meaning of the lyrics. The result is an idea of apocalypse which is not simply an ending to a narrative trajectory, nor which relies on genre-specific imagery or themes, but rather which obscures as much as it reveals, always drawing attention back to itself as a revelatory gesture. Indeed, the apocalyptic tone destabilizes and undermines some of the dominant assumptions central to narrative-based understandings of apocalypse, and as such my analysis aims to foreground the ways in which Bone Machine enables an original and, at times, subversive musical perspective on what has proven to be a remarkably resilient cultural theme.

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Apocalyptic Nostalgia in the Prologue of Don DeLillo's Underworld 
Randy Laist (University of Connecticut)

Characters in Don DeLillo's novels repeatedly grapple with the existential contradiction which Frank Kermode has called the "immanent apocalypse" and which Jean Baudrillard has identified as a nuclear "implosion." DeLillo's fictions commonly depict the post-apocalyptic sensibility Kermode and Baudrillard describe; a historical transition from the conventional kind of apocalypse - the end that will happen - to the postmodern variety - the end that is always already happening. DeLillo's most concise illustration of this condition is arguably the prologue to his 1997 opus, Underworld. Originally published in 1993 in Harper's as "Pafko at the Wall," this 50-page vignette tells the story of the famous Dodgers-Giants game in 1951, the game concluded by Bobby Thompson's three-run, game-winning, pennant-deciding homer that came to be known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World." DeLillo evokes and manipulates the nostalgia inherent in this collective memory to dramatize the manner in which apocalypticism enters into the structure of Cold War perception. According to DeLillo's conceit in the prologue, the crack of Thompson's bat announces the postmodernizing of the apocalyptic imagination in the American psyche. This narrative device allows DeLillo to interrogate the apocalyptic shift from various points of view, as well as to induct the reader into a sense of his or her own situatedness within this historical reinscription.

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This is the End: Earth First! and Apocalyptic Utopianism 
Michael Mikulak (McMaster University)

This essay looks at the role of violence within radical environmentalist groups, such as ELF or Earth FIRST!, that engage in or support the use of ecotage or monkeywrenching. By looking at the philosophical underpinnings of monkeywrenching in terms of apocalyptic and utopian discourses within the movement, the author argues that violence against property functions to create a form of subjectivity that can account for the dialectic tension and irreconcilability of utopian and apocalyptic discourses within the group. This tension, with its simultaneous elevation and denigration of the Human, is fundamental to the ecological subjectivity of the members and allows them to act despite a truly apocalyptic belief in the reality of biological meltdown.

In addition to providing a way to escape paralysis within such an apocalyptic framework, the eco-warrior functions within the group as well as within larger environmental circles to provide a counter-narrative to benign images of industrial progress by providing an archetypal figure of resistance that marries the modern-primitive, nature-culture, and apocalyptic-utopian together. As such, the author argues that the narrative violence of the eco-warrior provides a way to mobilize a very disparate group of people on the margins of both society and more 'legitimate' environmental groups.

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The Critical Mass of Language: Post-Trinity Representation 
Daniel F. Spoth (Vanderbilt University)

To its viewers, the first atomic bomb test (codenamed "Trinity") appeared as not merely a dazzling, unprecedented leap forward in the history of science, not merely the swift, fiery eradication of all of their long-held fears and anxieties concerning the success of the project, but also a monumental event in the history of language (Thomas Farrell saw in it "that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately"). This article seeks to interrogate not only the poeticizing of the Trinity test by its architects and the subsequent revulsion toward the event felt by artists worldwide, but also the representational dilemma that the possibility of a "poetic" bomb creates: how can artistic representation of the invisible, the sublime, and the incomprehensible adapt itself to the new technological sublimity of the merciless, neutral variety that the bomb incarnates? The article addresses this question through a study of both nonliterary texts (eyewitness accounts) and literary representation (a reading of Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing and William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech). Its conclusion is that the bomb, pace the accounts of the Trinity eyewitnesses, in fact less suggests a variety of representation that renders all others insignificant (thus exempting it from moral, social, or spiritual concerns) than it insists upon the reimagining of older poetic tropes. Trinity, by suggesting an apocalyptic conflict between older modes of signification and the new "atomic poetics," in fact symbiotically relies upon the traditions from which it splits.

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Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk(2007) 
D. Bruno Starrs (Queensland University of Technology)

The possibility is considered that Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer has followed Epsilon (1995) with another filmic eco-warning, Dr. Plonk (2007), in which, as Mark J. Lacy despairs, heroic "dynamic individuals" unhelpfully "reinforce a (neo)liberal imaginary" (2001: 636), thus obliging Judith Hess Wright's allegation that genre films maintain the social status quo by offering "absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts" (2003: 42). But rather than 'shouting' the message that a messianic hero-figure can save the world as in his first eco-politically correct film, it is argued that de Heer has subsequently made a silent film in which the saviour fails: the eponymous Dr. Plonk is imprisoned and makes a subtle, unspoken plea to the audience to get out from in front of their television sets and save the world from ecological apocalypse themselves. De Heer has expressed considerable disdain towards television but this paper suggests that to maximise reception of their eco-warnings the eco-conscious film-maker needs to recognise the potential of interactive television and other new media technologies to increase voter turnout and to effect the aversion of global apocalypse through audiences taking individual responsibility.

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"The Four Horsemen of the Greenhouse Apocalypse": Apocalypse in the Science Fiction Novels of George Turner 
Roslyn Weaver (University of Wollongong)

This paper surveys some of the developments in apocalyptic writing in recent decades, and then examine the use of apocalypse in George Turner's science fiction novels. Global events such as World War Two, terrorism, the Cold War, and increasing environmental problems have contributed to a growth in apocalyptic fictions. While novels warning about the dangers of nuclear war were prolific in post-WWII speculative literature, other issues such as technological and ecological disaster have since become dominant threats. Apocalypse literally means revelation, but the popular imagination more frequently associates it with widespread destruction. The form therefore offers a useful approach for writers keen to protest against political systems, harmful environmental policies, and reckless technological and scientific experimentation. Apocalypse allows authors to extrapolate from current events and imagine a terrible future should certain actions be taken. In Turner's novels, seemingly utopic societies have arisen after future catastrophes have devastated the world. Yet in reality these new societies are brutal and totalitarian regimes. Turner utilises apocalyptic themes and imagery to interrogate scientific, social and environmental policies and warn about looming environmental catastrophes if society does not address current problems of complacency and short-sighted governing.

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Editors

Jack Burton
Hanna Sommerseth