THE APOCALYPTIC BODY in CONTEMPORARY LITERATURES of TRANSGRESSION by WENDY CHRISTINE FOSTER B
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awling through these cracks:" THE APOCALYPTIC BODY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURES OF TRANSGRESSION by WENDY CHRISTINE FOSTER B.A. (Hon.), The University of Windsor, 1995 M.A., The University of Windsor, 1998 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April 2006 © Wendy Christine Foster, 2006 11 Abstract Apocalypse narratives and their categorical perversions provide a symptomatology of Western cultural subject-formation, and chart out the subject's anxious response to his own desire for transcendence. Through close readings of four contemporary American authors: Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and Hubert Selby Jr., the generic matrices of apocalypse as a formal literary and cultural structure (or set of structures) are examined. These contemporary apocalypses, contextualized with and against their historical antecedents, the Book of Daniel and Revelation, disclose what I theorize as a logic of the terminal subject - the transgressive confrontation of the subject with his own condition of disappearance. Mobilizing psychoanalytic and poststructuralist critical legacies I seek, here, to open up the field of apocalypse studies to a renewed investigatory practice, which would engage both the theological as well as secular representational content of end-time practices and discourse. Table of Contents ABSTRACT II TABLE OF CONTENTS Ill ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IV CHAPTER ONE -"CRAWLING THROUGH THESE CRACKS:" THE APOCALYPTIC BODY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURES OF TRANSGRESSION 1 INTRODUCTION: THE APOCALYPTIC DRIFT 1 APOCALYPSE AS GENRE: THE STRUCTURATION OF CRISIS 2 DANGEROUS LIAISONS: APOCALYPSE AND TRANSGRESSION .' 14 RADICALIZING GENRE: MONADS AND MEMES IN APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE 16 THEEND-MEME: TEOTWAWKI 21 To HAVE DONE WITH THE JUDGMENT OF GOD: CONTEMPORARY APOCALYPTIC RESSENTIMENT 25 CHAPTER TWO - THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGE AND THE CRACKS OF HISTORY 49 THE BOOK OF DANIEL: WRITING THE APOCALYPSE-MEME 54 THE REVELATION TO JOHN: AGAINST INTERPRETATION AND THE WORD MADE MANIFEST 59 CHAPTER THREE - DECLARING THE END 76 THE ANTI-METAPHYSICS OF AMERICAN PSYCHO 82 THIS IS NOT AN EXIT : 93 CHAPTER FOUR-THE APOCALYPSE CONFESSED 106 THE ARCHITECTONICS OF CONFESSION IN KATHY ACKER'S BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL 114 SPEAKING THROUGH THE OTHER: EMPIRE OF THE SENSELESS 143 INTO THE ABYSS: PUSSY, KING OF THE PIRATES 173 CHAPTER FIVE - THE TERMINAL NAME(S) OF THE FATHER 182 THE FATHER-OF-ENJOYMENT, OR, PERE-VERSION IN PALAHNIUK'S FIGHT CLUB 186 CHAPTER SIX - THE APOCALYPTIC "END(S)" OF TRANSGRESSION 204 A MEDITATION ON EXITING "TO" IN HUBERT SELBY JR.'S LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN 207 CHAPTER SEVEN - APPROACHING APOCALYPSE: THE MOBILIZATION OF THE TERMINAL SUBJECT 226 I LOVE THE SMELL OF NAPALM IN THE MORNING 230 CODA 231 WORKS CITED 233 iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisory committee, Dr. M. Zeitlin, Dr. R. Cavell, and Dr. S. Taubeneck, for their unwavering support and patience with this project. Their intellectual ferocity and rigour are unsurpassed, and have informed and inspired my work and my passion for critical inquiry, particularly as I encountered my own apocalyptic moments. My gratitude, also, to the following: Vance Lockton: You let me see the world through your brilliant eyes. Thank you for mobilizing my completion of this dissertation, and for reverse engineering my expectations at every turn. Thank you, also, for using "esses" in words like "analyse," and for promising to build me my very own doomsday machine. Dr. Barrie Ruth Straus and Dr. Eugene McNamara for their genius and rare ability to provoke intensity and dedication in their students towards both literature and its disciplinary arenas. I have cherished your guidance and early promotion of my wayward negotiations through various theoretical minefields. Cheryl Wiramanaden, Toni Johnson, Leanne Foster, Louisa Wood, Dr. Adam Frank, Rob Bateman, and the staff of Koerner's Pub (2001 - 2006). In the absence of your individual precocities and sublimities I, and my work, would be nothing. 1 Chapter One - "crawling through these cracks:" The Apocalyptic Body in Contemporary Literatures of Transgression Introduction: The Apocalyptic Drift The whole rotten world come down and break and I'm crawling through these cracks I've never had a lover not in the world that exists I've never wanted one piss on my teeth, shit and piss. I wanted to die . I'm a girl, night is my eyes, die for a while. While the world cracks open and all the rich men die, and all the fucks who've sat on my face, those sniveling shites. We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want I'll tell you I want everything. 2 Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs. rats coming out of broken egg half (Acker, Pussy. King of the Pirates 211-212) Apocalypse as Genre: The Structuration of Crisis It seems an almost ironic preparatory maneuver to commence a discussion of terminal narratives by tracing out their generic matrices - the apocalypse's propensity, as it were, towards recurrence, structure, and recognizability. To make such a gesture, however, is also to open up its conditions to interrogation and de-formation. The study of apocalypse as genre, itself, is a contentious arena, fraught with complex internal divisions and intersections between literariness, eschatology and ideology. The topology of the apocalypse and its narratives are to be distinguished from other modes of religious discourse by the apocalypse's philosophical foregrounding of a specifically deterministic world order, as well as its fundamental reliance upon highly encoded metaphor and, hence, "initiate" knowledge as textual strategy. Apocalypse engages with and intervenes in the tradition of prophetic language and prophecy's preoccupation with an emblematic production of both knowledge and reality through the fundamental, and radical, pronouncement: "In the beginning was the word and the word was God" (Taithe and Thornton 4), as "origin" anticipates the formal content of its discursive culmination. Whereas, however, prophecy engages "possibility," and contingency, in opposition, apocalyptic language "reveals" a historically immutable 3 "end-time" (Bergoffen 11-35). In other words, prophecy can be understood as conditionally enacted and as that which relies upon a series of variable and indeterminate human actions for realization (Ezekiel, Isaiah, and First Enoch exemplify the gradual literary movement from prophecy to the apocalyptic tradition from about 592 BCE to approximately 250 BCE — a generic shift to the eschatological form that is seen to definitively commence with the production of the Book of Daniel circa 167 BCE). Prophecy, as a discursive formulation, is generally read as hortatory in nature (Clendenen 385), that is, its function is to compel the reader to engage a particular form of action through which the prophecy can be realized, whereas apocalypse constructs for us a "determined" unveiling of the condition of an intrinsically corrupted material presence at its "certain" conclusion - here, exhortation cannot change or redirect the outcome of the prophecy in its eschatological dimension. Human action, in apocalyptic revelation, is always already embedded within the parameters of its own undoing, as is the very notion of "the human" itself in its apocalyptic disassemblage and reconfiguration within the collective subjectivity of the godhead that formulates the New Jerusalem within Revelation. Concomitantly, apocalypse's narratological ties to the complicated history of theistic mysticism deserves a more sensitive treatment than I can, here, provide. I wish, however, to raise the interesting etymological functions of each strand, and the significance of a few of their hermeneutic deviations to my overall thesis. The term "mysticism" is derived from the Greek mueo, which means to "conceal," whereas apocalypse comes from the Greek term apokalyptein, that is, to "uncover." The opposition of these roots 4 points to the fundamental self-reflexivity of mystical experience, which is countered by apocalypse's uneasy relation to the self in terms of its own distinct discursive priorities. In contradistinction to apocalypse, mysticism can be understood, following St. Thomas Aquinas, as an unmediated, experiential knowledge of God, what Aquinas termed "cognitio dei experimentalis." Apocalypse, generally, containing mystical, otherworldly elements, is a heavily mediated, discourse, whose interpretation is governed, not by the prophet receiving the vision, as occurs within the mystical tradition, but, rather, through the engagement of the Other(s) that guide the prophet through his experience. Apocalypse can be thought of as a kind of process whereby the mystical experience is dispossessed of its singularly subjective experience. The apocalyptic experience, in other words, is "global," whereas the mystical experience is "personal." The possibility of linguistic and psychological collapse into the mystical is foreclosed by the apocalypse's insistence upon schemes of institutionally regulated notions of self and knowledge. As Calin Mihailescu notes in his discussion of the construction of the body in Christian mystical literature: ...Christian eschatology, a way of thinking already historicized by the end of the New Testament, provides a powerful framework that may include and disposses [sic] mystical thought of its irreductible particularities.