Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Zsolt K. Virágos: The American Brand of the Myth of Apocalypse

the story of Sutpen, who appears in the county in the shape of "manhorse-demon," the whole pattern, like in the Revelation, of creation, growth, decay, and final catastrophe is projected onto history. Devices of narration, clearly borrowed from testamental sources, like Miss Rosa telling the Sutpen story from beyond the end of history, or the fatal course of blind personal destinies are just a few instances of Faulkner's apocalyptic sensibility. Quentin Compson, "bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge," stops destiny's pull by arresting it forever at a point through suicide, thus gaining freedom from history that is dictated by a program to which he has no access. Faulkner's doomed characters move in the closed world of a predestined temporal course where the dimension of the future has been cut off, which is analogous with the way how the traditional apocalyptist recounted the future: as if it were past. Apart from tentative hints that the South might one day emerge as the redeemer of the country, whatever gleam of American millennialism that might remain is largely extinguished. This is a feature also shared by writers like Nathanael West {The Day of the Locust

; 1939) and, with different emphases, by the explicitly apocalyptic prose of writers as diverse as Steinbeck, Richard Wright or Ellison. The title of one of Baldwin's essay collections, The Fire Next Time (1963), could serve as an ironic motto of the heavy apocalyptic batteries of Pynchon, Vonnegut or Heller. It would be difficult to provide a reliable diagnosis of the current mood in the increasingly multicultural American society. It might not be a safe bet to claim that the country is in an apocalyptic mood. On the evidence of the prose literature of the past three decades there seems to be an agreement that the American secular mood is gloomy and that the recent prevalence of the cataclysmic construction of apocalypse is not an accidental phenomenon. At the same time, however, we must be aware of the fact that in particular works of recent fiction the very image of apocalypse has been put to uses other than just a projection of frightening dead-ends or apathetic nihilism. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or Heller's Catch-22 could serve as good cases in point. One of the imaginative fictions of history and the apocalyptic myth, the 135