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

spiritual purpose of history. Neither is he able to communicate it; history becomes simply time the destroyer. Of course, the Revelation should be read and understood as an allegory, and the early church itself condemned belief in a literal millennium as a superstitious aberration. The cryptic and obscure language of the traditional texts has encouraged fertile interpretations eversince the early Middle Ages, with Joachim of Fiore as the first important apocalyptic visionary, influencing, among other things (movements and ideologies) recent American authors like Walker Percy. That our own age has focused primarily upon the cataclysmic aspect of the myth and that God, the writer of the script, has himself become one of the "Dead Fathers" is symptomatic. Under these circumstances, what is the contemporary writer to do? The options are limited: dull-eyed apathy, black humor, resorting to strategies of slowing down or arresting destiny's pull, creating for the modern anti-hero a kind of quasi-freedom from history through noninvolvement, turning inward, or just "waiting it out" as, for instance, Ellison's nameless hero does in Invisible Man. In pre-twentieth-century American literature there were only occasional glances toward the negative, annihilist side of the apocalyptic myth. Much of New England Puritan literature displayed the threat of the Day of Judgment and the Calvinistic doctrine of damnation and reprieve. Puritan "Doomsday verses," with vivid images of hell fire and descriptions of impending cosmic disasters and of the future new world, such as Michael Wigglesworth's popular "The Day of Doom" (1662), were expected to serve contending aims: "to instruct, to delight and to terrify" (Ruland 21), but primarily to reconcile the frightening (Wigglesworth: "till God began to power/ Destruction the world upon/ in a tempestuous shower... And every one that hath misdone,/ the Judge impartially/ Condemneth to eternal woe,/ and endless misery) and the comforting ("For God above in arms of love/ doth dearly them embrace,/ And tills their sprites with such delights,/ and pleasures in His grace";) aspects inherent in the pragmatic needs of Puritan utility and the reassuring message that a final order prevailed 132