Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement
one of the most successful writing teams of modern times. Their new novel, the ninth in the "Left Behind" series, continues the story begun some eight books ago when, in the introductory novel, the world as we know it came to a complete, abrupt end. At that "time" at the end of time, the saved were taken up into heaven in "The Rapture" while those left behind became, in novel after novel, the characters who have played out LaHayne and Jenkins' reading of the Book of Revelation." That such a work should become a best seller by appealing to America's sense of an end to time and capture, thereby, a large segment of the popular American imagination should come as no surprise. After all, "America [...] is inevitably the most millenarian of all nations even though so far it has avoided the two extremes of modern millenarianism, fascism and Marxist-Leninism," as Harold Bloom contends (155). Yet America has experienced most of the spectrum of millenarianism in between those two dictatorial polar extremes, especially in the last two centuries. Apocalypse as reality —rather than as a religious fantasy —has more than once defined United States' consensus reality. Throughout the nineteenth century "reality" in the popular imagination became for many a joining of a widespread belief in Apocalypse with an increasing belief generally in human progress. 3 Solving the problem of longitude late in the eighteenth century, for instance, opened up the entire world to exploration that led to the expansion of European empires in the nineteenth century. Progress appeared obvious given that century's unprecedented fast-paced technological innovation and change that occurred in the wake of the eighteenth century's more fundamental changes. 4 In the British " I have not studied all nine books in great detail. The triumphal tone of the volumes 1 did peruse appeared directed against scientists and others who could not imagine all the fantastic things that would happen —that is, become consensus reality — when the world ended with the Second Coming. 3 These two beliefs coincided and came into conflict with a third: the disquieting scientific discoveries of "deep time" (the phrase is John McPhee's qtd. in Gould, Full House 18) and natural selection that altered forever humanity's view of time, this world, and humanity's place in both. 4 "This uniquely and distinctively Lamarckian style of human cultural inheritance gives our technological history a directional and cumulative character that no natural Darwinian evolution can possess" (Gould Full House 222). 220
