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

history is a haunting presence, his equally ever-present ambivalence did let a few rays of sunshine appear, as, for example, in Hester's urgent appeal to Dimmesdale („Begin all anew!...The Future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed!" /Hawthorne 215/). Conversely, the mood of a strangely foredoomed demise hangs over and leads to the destruction of the Pequod, whose captain, named after the seventh king of Israel, finds his Armageddon in the supreme limitations of the self. Whether or not Ishmael's emergence from the vortex is an indication of rebirth is rather ambiguous. The tragic consequences of the inscrutable Bartleb/s dark secret and entropic world, or of Don Benito's newly gained knowledge of the abyss are hardly outweighed by the ambivalent optimism, in any, of Billy Budd. Melville (and the Mark Twain of A Connecticut Yankee,

), through his emphatic stress on the dark side of the myth anticipates much of the literature of our century, where the first major representative of the apocalyptic vision in fiction is Faulkner. Although the processes of Faulkner's universe are mostly secular, the pervasive sense of fateful doom does possess the flavor of transcendental script and predetermined destiny.

9 His obsessive exploration of the reasons and consequences of the doom and destiny of the South, the fictional logic of his total output pointing to the ultimate message that the doom, disintegration and decline of the prototype of his literary kingdom were not only inevitable but also foreordained, his epic emphasis on the fatal pressure of the past sins upon the sons, and other related elements make Faulkner's novels appear among the most apocalyptic in modern literature. Because of the terrible moral heritage of slavery, human presumptuousness, pride and pervasive corruption, dynasties are crushed by the relentless passage of time and the impersonal forces of history. Down go the Sutpens, the Griersons, the Compsons, the Sartoris clan, one by one. In 9 It is primarily due to the apparent lack of apocalypse as a religious structure that critics like Zbigbiew Lewicki are reluctant to treat Faulkner's works as apocalyptic fiction. 134