Syrian Arab Republic
Ministry of Higher Education
Tishreen University
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Department of English
Apocalyptic Imagery and Allusions in Selected Plays of Fin De Siècle Theater
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master Degree in English Literature
By: Hiba Waheb Mohammad Supervised by: Dr. Yousef Shaheen
2016
الجمهورية العربية السورية
وزارة التعليم العالي
جامعة تشرين
كلية اآلداب والعلوم االنسانية
قسم اللغة االنكليزية
التورية و الصور البيانية لنهاية العالم في مسرحيات مختارة من مسرح نهاية القرن
رسالة أعدت لنيل شهادة الماجستير في اختصاص األدبيات
قسم اللغة ال نكليزية
إعداد: هبة وهيب محمد
إشراف: د. يوسف شاهين
6102
© Copyrights Tishreen University 2016
They weren't able to add a rose to the ending, to change the path of ancient myths: the anthem is the anthem:
O hero within us don't rush! Live one more night for us to reach the end of a life adorned with incomplete beginning; another night for us to complete the journey of the bloodied dream
Our history is their history. Their history is our history had it not been for the conflict over the timing of Resurrection! (Mahmood Darwish)
To the anemones of our "bloodied dream" on Damascus road: Mohammad Abdullah, Majd Al-Sheikh, Mireah Zreka, Wafaa Al-Aakish and Jaafar Ali.
To the mountain of lights and the everlasting sea,
To my Syria,
I dedicate this work.
Acknowledgment
In a time of war, I wrote my dissertation, when my country plunged into darkness and drowned in bloodshed. I wrote it in a time when death lurked behind the doors and hunted the best of us absurdly, in a time of unbearable pain, dreaming about new beginnings. Special thanks to my family and friends for their unlimited love and endless help. My utmost and deepest gratitude, which words alone cannot express, goes to my supervisor Dr. Yousef Shaheen for his guidance and unlimited patience and support. I would like also to thank Dr. Mohammad Jalal Osman for his support and constant encouragement. I’m much obliged to the English Department and all its doctors who have contributed to change the course of my life through literature, and enlightened my way amidst darkness. Nothing can be more disappointing than an unattainable dream, but you all made it come true.
Contents
Abstract of Research
Introduction: Apocalyptic Dilemma and the Dissemination of Apocalyptic Thought 1-3
I. Chapter 1: Fin De Siècle and the Fin de Globe: Historical Material Context 4-10
1.1. A World without an End 4-7
1.1.1. The Enthusiastic Voices of Freedom 5
1.1.2. The Concert of Europe (1815-50) 5-6
1.1.3. Stability Shattered by Revolutions and Wars 6-7
1.2. Dying for an End and Doomsday Fantasies 7-10
II. Chapter 2: The Book of Revelation: Content and Imagery 11-31
2.1. The Book of Revelation: an Overview 12-19 2.1.1. The Seven Letters of the Son of God to the Seven Churches 13 2.1.2. The Throne of God 13-14 2.1.3. The Stage of the Seven Seals of God's Wrath 14-15 2.1.4. The Stage of the Seven Trumpets of God's Angels 15-16 2.1.5. The Woman and the Dragon and the Two Beasts of Satan 16 2.1.6. The Stage of the Seven Vials of the Winepress of God's Wrath 16-17 2.1.7. The Great Supper of God 17 2.1.8. The Messianic Millennium of Christ's Reign 17-18 2.1.9. The Last Rebellion of Satan and Armageddon 18 2.1.10. God's New Kingdom (New Jerusalem) 18-19 2.2.The Vivid Imagery of the Apocalypse of Saint John 19-31
2.2.1. Images of God's Vengeance and His Methods in Punishing the Damned in the Book of Revelation 19-23 2.2.2. The Images of the Four Apocalyptic Women of Good and Evil as portrayed in the Book of Revelation 23-26
2.2.3. The Image(s) of the Antichrist as Portrayed in the Book of Revelation 26-27 2.2.4. The Image of the Great Armageddon as Pictured in the Book of Revelation 27-30
III. Chapter 3: Oscar Wilde's Salome (1892) and Alfred Jarry's Caesar Antichrist
(1895): Direct Adaptation 32-64
Introduction 32-33 3.1. Salome (1892) 34-45
3.1.1. The Day of His Wrath: Jokanaan's End-of-Time Prophesy 35-39 3.1.2. The First Crime: the Violence of the Non-violence 39-42 3.1.3. The Second Crime: Herod and Blood Memory 42-45 3.2. Caesar Antichrist (1895) 46-63 3.2.1. Apocalyptic Storyline and Textual Analysis of Caesar Antichrist 47-55 3.2.2. Apocalyptic Binary Oppositions and Jarry's Sarcasm 55-63 Conclusion 63-64 IV. Chapter 4: Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken (1899) and Anton
Chekhov's The Sea Gull (1895-96): Indirect Adaptation 65-96
Introduction 65-66 4.1. When We Dead Awaken (1899) 67-82 4.1.1. The Sanatorium of the Living Dead 68-78 4.1.2. The Day of Resurrection 78-82 4.2. The Sea Gull (1895-96) 82-95 4.2.1. Ashes of Dreams in a Hell-like Life 83-91 4.2.2. The Last Night: Burning for an End Vis-a-Vis Striving for Continuity 91-95 Conclusion 95-96
V. Conclusion 97-100 Works Cited 101-108
Abstract of Research
Will there be an end to humans' suffering, injustice, wars and struggles? When will it be? The answers to these questions preoccupied the late nineteenth century theologians, artists, novelists and dramatists. Inspired by the Book of Revelation, a plethora of apocalyptic predictions, dates and scenarios haunted the afflicted populace, and inhabited their mood of thought. The Apocalypse of Saint John constituted an important source of abundant ready apocalyptic images that fed the fantasies people resorted to escaping their intolerable apocalyptic reality, manifested especially in the period between 1880 and 1901. Gradually, their sense of an impending end cultivated into a literary movement, namely fin de siècle literature. In this context, this dissertation attempts to study four fin de siècle plays in light of the Book of Revelation, tracing down the influence of Revelation on fin de siècle theater through examining apocalyptic imagery and allusions in the selected plays. The research examines the apocalyptic images and allusions in four selected plays of fin de siècle theater: Salome by Oscar Wilde (1892), Caesar Antichrist by Alfred Jarry (1895), When We Dead Awaken by Henrik Ibsen (1899) and The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov (1896). These four plays are selected to illustrate two different ways, direct and indirect, in adapting apocalyptic images, borrowed from the Book of Revelation. In Salome, Wilde employs apocalyptic images, sometimes literally and sometimes through allusions. In Caesar Antichrist, Jarry employs them in his apocalyptic plot, also inspired by Revelation, to create a unique anti-apocalyptic world of humans. The research claims that through this process, Wilde and Jarry do not emphasize the dominant eschatological ideology of the end of time. On the contrary, they attempt to destroy the illusions and apocalyptic scenarios of the end of the world of their contemporary people and offer their readers and audience new conceptualization of the Apocalypse and ideation of the future. Similarly, the research also examines the apocalyptic images and allusions in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken which do not appear clearly, but imbue the characters and events with apocalyptic qualities, contributing to the making of the overall meaning of the play. Likewise, in Treplyov's symbolic play within a play in Chekhov's The Sea Gull the apocalyptic imagery is also studied focusing on the great influence of the Apocalypse on Treplyov's mind whose eschatological imagination leads him to his final destruction and death. Doing so, Chekhov offers his readers and audience a solution to survive any apocalyptic situation they may face. The research concludes that like Wilde and Jarry, Ibsen and Chekhov do not emphasize and condone the apocalyptic and nihilistic views that echo the widespread fears of the end-of-time by the nineteenth century people, but rather they, in their own distinctive ways, warn against the dangerous consequences of the ideology of the end of the world.
Key Words: Fin de siècle, Apocalypse, Revelation, Eschatology, Prophecy, End of the world, End of time.
ملخص البحث
هل من نهاية للمعاناة اإلنسانية و الظلم و الحروب و الصراعات؟ متى موعد النهاية؟ اإلجابة على هذه األسئلة
شغلت علماء الدين و الفنانين و الروائيين و المسرحيين في نهاية القرن التاسع عشر، فكثير من تنبوءات و
سيناريوهات نهاية العالم و مواعيدها- المستوحاة من سفر الرؤيا للقديس يوحنا )آخر سفر في اإلنجيل بعهديه
القديم و الجديد(- طاردت المجتمعات التي عانت الويالت آنذاك و عششت في طريقة تفكيرهم، فقد شكل سفر
الرؤيا للقديس يوحنا مصد ا ر هاما مشبعا بصور نهاية العالم الجاهزة التي غذت ما لجأ إليه الناس من أساطير
نهاية الزمان هربا من واقعهم المرير. ظهرت بدع نهاية العالم بشكل خاص في الفترة الزمنية الممتدة بين العامين
0881 و 0010، و بشكل تدريجي تبلور إحساس الناس بحتمية النهاية ليصبح حركة أدبية أطلق عليها "أدب
نهاية القرن."
في هذا السياق تحاول األطروحة دراسة تأثير سفر الرؤيا للقديس يوحنا على "مسرح نهاية القرن" عبر دراسة و
تعقب صور نهاية العالم و دالالتها المستوحاة من هذا السفر في النصوص المسرحية المختارة وهي: مسرحية
"سالومي" للكاتب أوسكار وايلد )0801( و مسرحية "القيصر المسيح المعاكس" للكاتب ألفرد جاري )0801( و
مسرحية "عندما نستيقظ نحن األموات" للكاتب هنرك إبسن )0800( و مسرحية "النورس" للكاتب أنطون تشيخوف
)0801(. تم اختيار هذه المسرحيات لتوضح طريقتين مختلفتين- مباشرة و غير مباشرة- اعتمدها الكتاب في
توظيف و معالجة صور نهاية العالم المستوحاة من سفر الرؤيا للقديس يوحنا، ففي مسرحية "سالومي" يوظف
وايلد الصور اآلخروية أحيانا على شكل دالالت و أحيانا أخرى على شكل اقتباسات حرفية، و في مسرحية
"القيصر المسيح المعاكس" يوظف ألفرد جاري هذه الصور في حبكته الد ارمية التي استوحاها أيضا من سفر
الرؤيا ليخلق عالما متفردا للبشر ال نهاية له، و يستنتج البحث أنه و من خالل هذه الطريقة المباشرة في توظيف
صور نهاية العالم ال يؤكد الكاتبان وايلد و جاري على اإليديولوجية اآلخروية المهيمنة و إنما على العكس من
ذلك يحاول الكاتبان من خالل نصيهما المسرحيين تحطيم أوهام و سيناريوهات نهاية العالم المروعة التي سادت
آنذاك و تقديم مفاهيم جديدة للقراء و الجمهور حول يوم القيامة و المستقبل المرتقب. بطريقة مشابهة يدرس البحث صور نهاية العالم في مسرحية "عندما نستيقظ نحن األموات" التي ال تظهر فيها
صور نهاية العالم بشكل واضح و إنما تسم الشخصيات و األحداث بسمات آخروية تساهم في صياغة المعنى
العام للمسرحية. و بطريقة موازية يعالج البحث أيضا المسرحية الرمزية التي تعمل عليها شخصية تريبليوف داخل
مسرحية تشيخوف "النورس" مسلطا الضوء على تأثير سفر الرؤيا على فكر و مخيلة هذه الشخصية التي ساقته
إلى حتفه، و كما هو الحال مع وايلد و جاري، ينتهي هذا البحث إلى نتيجة مؤداها أن كل من إبسن و تشيخوف
ال يسعيان إلى تقوية النظرة اآلخروية و العدمية التي تعكس المخاوف الشائعة حول نهاية العالم في نهاية القرن
التاسع عشر، و إنما يحذران بطريقتيهما الخاصتين من النتائج الخطيرة إليديولوجية نهاية العالم.
الكلمات المفتاحية: نهاية القرن، سفر الرؤيا، األخروّية، نبوءة، نهاية العالم، نهاية الزمان.
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Introduction: Apocalyptic Dilemma and the Dissemination of Apocalyptic Thought
The apocalypse or "the end of the world, as described in the Bible," is a controversial issue and a dynamic concept manifested in different forms, methods and dates. It is also defined as "a situation causing very serious damage and destruction ("apocalypse," def. 2, 3)." Instinctively, the end of the world appears as a need to express humans' hopelessness and inability to solve the extraordinary obstacles they face in the world. It looms heavily in the age of crises, before imminent catastrophes, or at the turn of centuries. Religiously, it gives meaning, coherence and importance to the religious stories of genesis, as well as to history and the journey of life on the earth, in which human beings search for their origin, existence and meaning. It ends God's masterpiece of creation as it begins, giving human beings a paradigm of beginning and ending their world that is similar to their individual lives of birth and death, which makes the end of the world a convincing eschatological story. However, in all its forms, the apocalypse foretells a radical change looming large in times of disorder, or chaos, after which justice will return or a new peaceful world will be eternally created. Its date of occurrence always captures the attention and imagination of different civilizations. It usually appears in the form of predictions which provide different versions of the end of the world in which a certain chosen group of people is believed to be saved and inhabit the purified earth in eternal bliss while the rest perish. It seems that this end-of-time concept has haunted human beings for centuries. Virgil as early as 37 B.C.E refers to it in his fourth Eclogue ("selection"), "Pollio or the Messiah, as Foretold by Sybyls": Now comes the last great Age of Sybyl-Rhymes, The Virgin too returns, Saturnian Times Revolve again – the Iron Offspring ends, And a new Progeny from highest Heaven descends: ………………………………………………………………… Grow infant, grow – for thou, if aught remain Impure on Earth – shalt wash away the stain, And free the subject World from Terrors vain . . . (5-17) Moreover, the end of the world is a haunting concern and increasing obsession in modern societies. For pure apocalypse no period of time can match the one that extends from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War II when catastrophic events of the
Mohammad 2 millions dead, unimaginable havoc, scourge and displacements occurred. At that time of great upheavals and decline, eschatological prophecies and end-of-time scenarios made their way into public arenas and artistic fields in which the end of the world became a widespread topos. Inspired by the Apocalypse of Saint John, or the Book of Revelation, various attempts to dramatize and fictionalize the end of the world have been made since the 1880s forming an apocalyptic trajectory which is cultivated into a new artistic and literary movement known as fin de siècle art and literature. Elinor Fuchs, a professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, seems to support this assumption in her article "The Apocalyptic Century." She argues that, at least: two decades before the first of these catastrophic events of the twentieth century, European modernist theater began staging apocalypse . . . Now, suddenly, the final book of the Christian Bible seemed to be the only one in artistic favor. Revelation (the title a translation of the Greek apocalypsis) provided an imaginative scale that answered to fin de siècle anxieties about catastrophic endings and new beginnings . . . [and] provided a ready source of images pitched at the limits of imagination. (7) In the light of the eschatological ideology of the Book of Revelation, this research examines four fin de siècle plays published, not coincidently, at a high moment of millenarian and apocalyptic anticipations: Salome by Oscar Wilde (1892), Caesar Antichrist by Alfred Jarry (1895), When We Dead Awaken by Henrik Ibsen (1899) and The Sea Gull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1896). The research examines the apocalyptic images and allusions inspired by the eschatological Biblical story of end of the world, shedding light on the ways through which these images are expressed and contribute to the making of the playwrights' overall dramatic versions of the apocalypse they witness, or expect. The dissertation falls into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the historical material context of the nineteenth century which provides the best time, place, circumstances and conditions to generate an apocalyptic trend in fin de siècle theater. It also sheds light on the most famous end of world prophecies and scenarios the nineteenth century people, escaping their apocalyptic reality, resorted to. The second chapter is dedicated to the Book of Revelation as the main source on which the apocalyptic representations of the selected fin de siècle plays are based. It attempts to provide a detailed synopsis of the Book of Revelation, and cover its most influential images which work as the textual background from which the apocalyptic imagery and allusions of the selected plays are inspired.
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The third chapter analyzes Wilde's Salome and Jarry's Caesar Antichrist as concrete examples of two direct adaptations of the apocalyptic imagery of the Book of Revelation. Wilde satirizes and focuses on the power of the Apocalypse in bringing deadly ends. Similarly, through creating his famous character Ubu, Jarry satirizes it and provides new conceptualization of the end of the world for the late nineteenth century people. The research claims that Wilde's and Jarry's employment of the apocalyptic images, and sometimes literal verses and allusions, does not emphasize the dominant eschatological ideology of the end-of- time, but rather it can be interpreted as an attempt to destroy the illusions and apocalyptic scenarios of the end of the world of their contemporary people. Doing so, they uncover and give their own versions of the real apocalyptic reality that the people of the late nineteenth century lived. The fourth chapter is dedicated to examine two indirect adaptations of the apocalyptic imagery of the Book of Revelation in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and Chekhov's The Sea Gull. It examines the apocalyptic imagery and allusions in Ibsen's play and his attempt to equate the Lord with "the beast of the earth" embodied in the characters of the sculptor, Rubek, and the bear-slayer, Ulfheim. In addition, this chapter examines Treplyov's symbolic play within a play in Chekhov's The Sea Gull focusing on the great influence of the Apocalypse on the mind of Treplyov whose eschatological imagination leads him to his final destruction and death. Because of the inability to cope with the accelerating changes and intolerable decadent reality, Treplyov becomes a prisoner and victim of his own apocalyptic imagination. At the end, Chekhov, through his female character Nina, suggests a way to survive. The dissertation ends with a conclusion that the four playwrights have been inspired by the Book of Revelation and, directly or indirectly, used and adapted images from and allusions to the Book of Revelation in their own distinctive ways. In this context, the plays can be looked at as the playwrights' view of their contemporary world and their visions of the future.
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Chapter One
Fin de Siècle and the Fin de Globe: Historical Material Context
"All suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world" (Nordau 2). MAX NORDAU/ 1895.
"Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul!" (Huberman 252). ERNEST RENAN/ 1823-92. .… ………….. … The nineteenth century witnessed tremendous global changes encompassing politics, science, religion, society and economy, as well as increased struggles, human crises and catastrophes that reached their peak at the end of the century. Its last decades constituted a critical period of time between the beginning of the enthusiastic voices of protesters and the end which was a period of unstoppable wars, during which the situation became a time bomb which could explode at any moment. The European continent was overwhelmed by the cries of wars and the war whoops of short-term victories, drowning the continent wholly in a bloodbath. In such a conjunction, predictions about the end of the world prevailed, especially when the century came to a close during which the apocalyptic images found their best context and time to reappear among people. All these predictions differed in purpose and plot, but they all shared the vision of an imminent radical change supporting the assumption of the continuous power of the Apocalypse over the minds of the people.
1.1. A World without an End
The nineteenth century started with revolutions and ended with wars. The heavy burden of long struggles dragged on for years and was sustained by the afflicted people, transforming the fin de siècle landscape into an apocalyptic one. Life degenerated into an abyss from which the shrieks of pain could be heard all around the world and the arms of the innocent victims raised towards the sky asking for salvation. Under the ground of Europe, bulks of dispossessed human beings, who had had their homeland taken away, were tortured and buried on daily basis. In her book Oscar Wilde and the Yellow 'Nineties, Frances Winwar depicts the European scene at that critical period of time as full of accelerating events, upheavals, wars, and conflicts, which ruin the hopes of mankind of a new century as a "brighter and more wonderful harbinger of futurity." She depicts the contradiction between what the historians start to call a "rebirth" of the nineteenth century caused by the "industrial prosperity," and the miserable lives of workers whose "flesh and blood" are "bought for the
Mohammad 5 machines very cheaply." For her, the late nineteenth century people suffer "the conflict between the world and the spirit." She argues that when the nineteenth century dawns, "impoverished Europe, bloodless from the disastrous war that had killed the best of her youth," goes through changes almost in all fields of life (153).
1.1.1. The Enthusiastic Voices of Freedom
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the curtain went up on the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), which had a drastic impact on Europe and its future. Those wars helped the Enlightenment and liberal ideas of the Revolution disseminate throughout the continent, triggering a massive response from the eager populations who were agitating for their freedom. Increasingly, people distrusted all forms of governments, and the urge of destruction dominated Europe. At first, the enthusiastic populations welcomed the liberal ideology of the French Revolution, which tickled their fancies, until they discovered Napoleon's expansionist intentions and future plans of international hegemony. This issue sparked outrage in certain Western communities which, conversely, started to agitate against the Napoleonic ideas of global citizenship and other new European liberal ideas. Their resistance is marked with increasing nationalistic overtones which were the core of later movements of nationalism and new wars (Perry 2-3).
1.1.2. The Concert of Europe (1815-50)
In response, the countries which defeated Napoleon, held a conference in Vienna, the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) which was the first of a series of international conferences until World War I known as The Concert of Europe, or Vienna system of international relations. These conferences came to face the new-emerging liberal and national movements of the populations and impose a new certain European order, based on the International balance of power and stability between the European countries, regardless of the nationalistic bonds of the populations. The countries involved, like Prussia, Austria and others, combined in "the Holy Alliance," as they call it, to keep peace as long as they could, but it was "a peace based on fear- fear of renewal of revolutions and war" (Perry 7). Once again, but this time more than ever, Vienna's new European order fuelled the anger of the populations and unprecedented waves of revolutions swept all over the continent to call for the populations' rights against their rulers and voice objections against the decisions of Vienna Conferences (Perry 7-8).
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Accordingly, in the decades following the peace of 1815 (Vienna peace settlement at the close of Napoleonic Wars), Europe transformed into a turbulent continent witnessing the most furious conflicts, troubles and disastrous wars. The most prominent revolutions were those of the year 1830 like the Greek Revolution, French Revolution, Belgian Revolution and Polish Revolution, as well as the revolutions of 1848 like Paris upheaval, the Austrian Revolution and the German and Italian Revolutions. While some of those revolutions succeeded to achieve their aims, some others were repressed and failed to attain their goals. In addition to revolutions, some countries waged or shared in wars as allied forces, seeking support, independence or more power, and changed the map of Europe forever, notably the Crimean War (1854-1856) in which Britain, France and Sardinia joined together to defend the Ottoman Empire from Russia. Also, the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), Serbo- Bulgarian War (1885), Greco-Turkish War (1897) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) which was the final war of the German Unification Wars and the direct reason to start World War I (Perry 8-13).
1.1.3. Stability Shattered by Revolutions and Wars
As a result, the continuous national and international struggles heightened the failure of achieving one certain or fixed European order, reaching their climax at fin de siècle Europe and bringing forth nothing but more violence, dissidences, revolutions, profound diversions and drastic upheavals. No fin de siècle event can be more representative of this critical period of time than the one described by S. B John and H. R. Kedward in their article "Literature and Ideology 1880-1914." On 9 December 1893, a poverty-stricken French anarchist, August Vaillant, threw a home-made bomb on the French Chamber of Deputies to make his dissenting voice heard: "Death to the Bourgeoisie! Long live Anarchy!" The Chamber's president M. Dupuy was heard saying immediately after the bomb attack, "Messieurs, la séance continue," ("Sirs, the session continues"). Then after Vaillant's execution, new repressive laws were passed by the French government as if nothing had happened (173). On a broader level, together, Vaillant's bomb and Dupuy's sense of continuity characterize not only fin de siècle France, but also fin de siècle Europe. The deaths of people and the continuity of others featured heavily at that stage of time when justice began to fade away as a shadow falling behind the dark scene of fin de siècle Europe. However, all these long-time tensions and radical changes redrew the map of Europe, and controlled the demise and birth of its population, as well as the fall and rise of its empires. Conspicuously, fin de siècle Europe was the end of the old order and beginning of a new one,
Mohammad 7 as the collapse of the French empire and the rise of the Italian, German and Russian empires, which, however, never stabilized in one final form, but rather transformed into international confrontations and unremitting wars of the twentieth century. Consequently, the curtain could not come down to end the nineteenth century scene of wars, upheavals and sufferings with peace, or stop the continuous social, national and international conflicts, setting the stage for further violence and chaos to come. The end of the fin de siècle scene was left unsettled, open to the imagination of the populations who envisaged the possibility of a nuclear world war. For a long time, conflicts, revolutions and wars ran over the dreams of generations, resulting in deep ruts in the ground of the continent, which blocked the way before any survival or peace carrier to cross to other shores than the shore of the Great World War I. A period of time in history when a literary character like Dorian Gray, in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde, could speak of the deep feelings of despair of the European majority when Lord Henry, a nobleman, murmured ,"Fin de siècle', The lord's hostess answered, "Fin du globe." Then, Dorian expresses his feelings of the everlasting sufferings with a sigh, "I wish it were fin du globe, life is a great disappointment" (205).
1.2. Dying for an End and Doomsday Fantasies
In such a world of abyss, heaven becomes an overwhelming urge, and the idea of how "fin du globe," or the end of the world, would stop the devastations of wars and human sufferings can easily possess public imagination and dominate its outpouring. Rapidly, apocalyptic interpretations of daily accelerating events spread amongst the nineteenth century people, who held a firm belief that their contemporary societies and rulers were corrupt, violent, iniquitous, or otherwise erroneous. They felt that they were in need for an extraordinary force to eradicate such a corruption, save them and end their agony. Instilled with the deeply-rooted religious conviction of the necessity of the advent of a powerful force to stop the corruption, too many people started to interpret any catastrophic phenomena as a full alarm of the approach of the end of the world in which extraordinary divine powers and heroes would intervene for their sake. Manifold calculations, predictions and rumors of the end-of-time, attempting to answer when and how the end of the world would take place days ahead, circulated, almost in each couple of decades of the century. Impulses which provoked end-of-time divinations were as diverse as the predicted methods and dates of annihilation. Despite their variety, almost all end-of-time scenarios were inspired by the Book of Revelation, the most dominant religious ideology of the end-of-time in Western communities.
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It gave ready images and paradigms to the vast imaginations of the afflicted people, and enfolded their fears, dreams and sufferings with ready apocalyptic frameworks: countless people throughout the world turn to it [the Book of Revelation] to find meaning, and many Christian groups claim to see its prophecies of divine judgment being fulfilled before their eyes . . . Christians in America have identified with its visions of cosmic war since the 1600s, when many immigrating to the New World believed they had arrived in the "new Jerusalem" promised in Revelation. (Pagels 1) Though they were far too numerous to list, but most of the prominent predictions came in a form of an imminent catastrophe, or spoke of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, or the messianic age, and the Great Armageddon. Such predictions started to reappear as early as 1805 when the Welsh Presbyterian minister Christopher Love1, influenced by the Book of Revelation, predicted that a devastating earthquake would bring the world to an end: And I die in that thought, and really believe that my calculations are right, on the Revelation by St. John . . . The stars will wander, and the moon turn as blood, in 1800. Africa, Asia, and America, will tremble, in 1803. A great earthquake over all the world, in 1805. God will be universally known by all: Then a general reformation, and peace forever, when the people shall learn war no more. Happy is the man that liveth to see this day! (Love 10-11) These predictions were strongly based on the apocalyptic disasters of nature of the Book of Revelation which provided Ch. Love with the needed credibility for the nineteenth century hopeless people to believe him. In the year 1806, an epidemic terror of the end of the world seized the people of Leeds and its neighborhood, because they saw a hen laying eggs, on which the words "Christ is coming" were inscribed. People started to consider "the wondrous eggs" the signs of the approach of the day of judgment. The believers "suddenly became religious, prayed violently, and flattered themselves that they repented . . . of their evil courses." Soon after, the miraculous eggs were found inscribed with some corrosive ink, and cruelly forced up again into the bird's body (Mackay 127). Also, in 1814, the 64 year-old woman, Joanna Southcott, claimed that she would deliver the Christ child on Christmas Day, the same day of her death, on which her autopsy revealed that she was not pregnant (Browne). Apparently, she was influenced by the stories of Christ's Second Coming, especially the story of "the woman clothed with the sun" who gave birth to the Christ child in
1 Christopher Love's predictions first appeared in the year 1651, in the time of Oliver Cromwell's Government of England (1649 –1658), and later reappeared in the year 1805.
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Revelation (Rev. 12.1-5). In addition to the great earthquake and the Advent of Christ, the apocalyptic wars were also a source of inspiration to produce more end-of-time predictions, and make people turn to the Book of Revelation to interpret and justify world-wide wars which they witness. The Crimean War (1853-1856) was interpreted by many Europeans as the great Battle of Armageddon (Maxey 11). According to the Biblical apocalyptic tradition, they thought and hoped that it was the last battle to end all the previous ones, as well as the corrupt world, casting the Devil and his satanic army into a lake of everlasting burning sulfur. Indubitably, neither Armageddon came nor the agonies were ended, but rather increased, and the new resurfacing apocalyptic scenarios reached their zenith at fin de siècle Europe. Together fin de siècle Europe and the hellish reality at that time were the best fertile soil for the emergence of new apocalyptic scenarios. The increasing feeling of insecurity, hopelessness and an imminent danger of a nuclear war translated themselves into numerous apocalyptic and millenarian predictions. These predictions were supported not only by the Book of Revelation as a source of inspiration, but also the time which was approaching its end at the turn of the nineteenth century, both of which make some people think that it was the end of man's epoch on earth. In 1881, the famous prediction of the fifteenth century prophet Mother Shipton, "The world to an end shall come, In eighteen hundred and eighty one," gained popularity in certain Western communities which continued to believe in her predictions though her apocalyptic story turned out to be an apocryphal one )qtd. in Harrison 9). Also, Jack Wilson, the religious and spiritual leader and creator of the Ghost Dance movement, predicted that the Millennium, the one thousand years of the peaceful reign of Jesus Christ on the earth according to Revelation, would occur by 1891 (Wovoka Biography). Last but not least, in 1831, the Catholic Apostolic Church alleged that Christ's Second Coming would occur when the last of its 12 founding members dies, who, however, died in 1901 leaving the prophecy unfulfilled. Repeatedly, such predictions never ceased to reoccur in the next century till our times, particularly, when the right time, daily events and possible apocalyptic stories arise (Maxey 13). In this context of end-of-time anxieties, the stage appeared the best place to test such human end-time thoughts and behaviors and meditate on the Abyss-like present, as well as the possibilities of the future. Partially or fully, the prevailing apocalyptic anxieties and plots were absorbed into the scripts of fin de siècle playwrights, and a thread of eschatological imagery made its way to the modern theater. This apocalyptic trajectory brought together "the most unlikely" playwrights who usually differed in their literary schools and styles, such as Henrik Ibsen, Karl Kraus, Adrienne Kennedy, Anton Chekhov, Alfred Jarry, Oscar Wilde,
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Carl Hauptmann and others who contributed to the dramaturgy of the apocalypse (Munk 1). Almost all of them were concerned with issues like the nineteenth century degeneration, decadence, possibility of revival and survival and radical changes which, as they believed, were knocking not only on the doors of the European continent, but also the world. Their contribution constituted an apocalyptic literary trend in the larger artistic movement of fin de siècle literature and art, which provided vast eschatological outpouring at fin de siècle Europe. Their apocalyptic medium to convey their message and sense of the impending apocalypse is derived mainly from the same source, the Book of Revelation by Saint John, which has held sway on people and their predictions. Frank Kermode, in his book The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue, explains this phenomenon considering that our "eschatological anxieties" are a "secular habit of mind," increased and recurring at the end of centuries when "our sense of epoch is gratified" (96). He describes this situation as a "pattern of anxiety that we shall find recurring, with interesting differences . . . Its recurrence is a feature of our cultural tradition, if not ultimately of our physiology" (69). He argues that, in general, "the dying men" under varying existential pressures, create fictions of "the End" which satisfy their needs as to "imagine a significance for themselves" and "make tolerable one's moment between beginning and end," to which they feel "a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related" (4-5). He observes that the "Apocalypse [or the Book of Revelation] is a radical instance of such fictions and a source of others" (6). This is clearly manifested in the age of crises as the end of the nineteenth century which gives forth "the outbreak of fin de siècle phenomenon," when "certainly there was a deal of apocalyptic feeling at that time" (96). In the next chapter, I will turn to study the Book of Revelation and its most influential images that have captured the imagination of the fin de siècle playwrights and audience.
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Chapter Two The Book of Revelation: Content and Imagery
"Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see
him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds
of the earth shall wail because of him" (Rev. 1.7).
The Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelation, is the last chapter of the Bible, which, with the exception of Jesus Christ's revelations about his death and resurrection and the destruction of Jerusalem, is the only prophetic book in the New Testament. The Book of Revelation pre-shapes the history for human beings and creates a common consciousness of the end of the world, claiming to be the only truth. It continues to be one of the most important eschatological ideologies that is capable of exercising power over consciousness. Historically, the Apocalypse is written in a time of crisis to offer hope to God's believers who have been suffering hardship, injustice and oppression for a long time in the first century. The persecution of the disobedient Christians by the Roman authorities paved the way for this book to come out. Around the year 95 A.D., Saint John was exiled to the Roman island of Patmos because, as too many Christians believe, he rejected to worship the Roman Emperor, Domitian, who had announced himself a god. Many Christians suffered the persecution, exile, martyrdom and penalties and started to wonder when their sufferings would end. Under pressure, other Christians started to abandon their faith and doubt the way they should follow to survive. At that critical time of Christian history, Saint John wrote the vision that he had had in his exile to be circulated between Christians, essentially, to preach patience, and relieve their anxieties. He wrote it to assure them that God is still in control, and so soon will destroy all the evil forces, after which He will build His and their kingdom, New Jerusalem, where peace, happiness and eternity will be the only fate for His patient believers. This eschatological ideology of the end of the world is also a deeply-rooted belief for Jews, who believe that the kingdom of God will replace the current evil one after its annihilation by God's sudden intervention. Hence, the author of the Book of Revelation, Saint John, who is a Christian leader of Jewish origin, follows the older Jewish eschatological patterns and visions of the Old Testament, such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch, which come usually in the form of a dream, brimful of symbols. The vision is produced in a story-like text with a plot and characters in which Saint John, himself, functions as a narrator. It offers unique visual representations and successive correlated scenes of the end of the world, depending mainly on binary oppositions through
Mohammad 12 which the identity of its main characters and events are easily revealed and strengthened. The characters are divided fundamentally into two contending parties of good and evil. The good forces are God and His followers, most of whom are the dwellers of Heaven. The evil forces are Satan and his followers, most of whom are the dwellers of the Abyss. Human beings and living creatures, as well as the earth, are between Heaven and the Abyss suffering both of Satan's evils and God’s wrath. The primary characters of St. John's vision are introduced in the "prologue" to the Apocalypse, which functions as an introduction to the story of the end-of-time; God as "the Alfa and Omega," Jesus Christ as "the Son of God- or the Lamb who has been slain" and John as the servant who is given the messages of God through His angel, as well as the brother of men, with whom he shares their tribulation and sufferings. Categorized as the forces of good, these protagonists are followed by other characters who start to appear later in the text, and whose major roles are assigned mainly to achieve God's word. They are God's angels and elders, the good woman clothed with the sun, and the city of the New Jerusalem as the Bride of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, the antagonists, or the forces of evil, include Satan, also the snake or the dragon, and the Antichrist as the false prophet, followed by other characters like Satan's angels and beasts, Jezebel as the false prophetess, and the city of Babylon as the great mother of prostitutes. These characters are hated and punished severely by God. The rest of mankind are divided into believers and nonbelievers. Only 144000 people from all the tribes of Israel are "sealed" by God to be saved and protected at the end of the world. Similarly, a group of people are "sealed" with the mark of the beast of Satan to be saved on the earth and freely exchange commercial transactions during the beast's reign. In both cases, people suffer the wrath of one of these forces of good and evil, with one difference that is the first group of 144000 people is chosen by God while the second is given two choices either to receive the mark of the beast and, thereby, avoid the beast's wrath, but not God's one, or refuse it and, thereby, avoid God's wrath, but not the beast's rules during his reign.
2.1. The Book of Revelation: an Overview
The Biblical scenario of the end of the world consists of various stories of destruction and creation, related to each other in four connected stages, in which the concentration is laid more on God's methods of annihilation. These four stages of the evolution of God's wrath are completed each time by the number seven to finally erect the new peaceful world where God,
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Jesus Christ and the chosen live happily forever. They are: the first stage of the seven reward and penalty messages which reveal the corruption of the current world; the second stage of the seven seals of the Lamb's scroll; the third stage of the seven trumpets of the plagues of God; and finally the fourth stage of the seven vials of the winepress of God's wrath. Two scenes of God's throne, which remains the only static place, intact and glorious all the time, come in the beginning before the seven seals and at the end before the creation of the New Jerusalem. The prologue to the Apocalypse starts by an anonymous narrator who announces Christ's Coming: "Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen" (Rev. 1.7). Then Saint John starts to narrate his dream and how he becomes in the Spirit and is asked to write the future he sees, in order to reveal it later to his brothers.
2.1.1. The Seven Letters of the Son of God to the Seven Churches
After the prologue, the first stage of God's seven messages of rewards and punishments starts, to which a part of the first chapter in addition to the second and third chapters are dedicated. They are delivered to the churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. Each letter reveals the good and bad deeds and God's reprehensible points of each recipient church. The rewards, in case of repentance, or otherwise severe punishments are both described to assure the churches that they should keep faith in Him. These seven messages help to reveal His full knowledge of the mundane practices of humans, close surveillance, and continuous power. Doing so, corruption is also revealed, which needs and justifies God's later intervention, paving the way for the readers to enter the world of heaven where the mighty throne of God exists. These messages are dictated to Saint John by the Spirit (the Son of God) to deliver them to the seven angels of the seven churches.
2.1.2. The Throne of God
Having done that, the door which separates the earth from heaven is opened on a visual scene of the throne of God shining in precious stones, to which the fourth and fifth chapters are dedicated. The scene of the throne helps to expose God's grandeur and glory. It appears fascinating as a surreal painting with its incredible creatures, colors, brilliancy and rarity. In it, also there are the twenty-four elders who surround the one who is sitting on the
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throne, in the center, and holds a sealed book, the Logos of Him, in which God's submerged ideas have developed into a creative work including the secrets of the end of the world.
2.1.3. The Stage of the Seven Seals of God's Wrath
The secrets of the end of the world start to be uncovered in the second stage of the Apocalypse which is the seven seals of the secret book, to which the next sixth, seventh and the beginning of the eighth chapters are dedicated. Initially, when the first four seals are loosed, four apocalyptic horsemen are revealed and sent to the earth to start the end-of-time catastrophes. They take peace from the earth, kill humans with hunger and wild beasts, and provoke men to kill each other (Rev. 6.1-8). When the fifth seal is opened, the souls of those who have been slain for the word of God appear under His altar to ask Him to avenge their blood on those who dwell on the earth (Rev. 6.9-11). Then, natural and ecological disasters start to hit the cosmos, causing great damage and sufferings (Rev. 6.12-14). When the sixth seal is loosed, cosmic catastrophes strike the earth, sun, stars, heaven and every mountain and island with earthquake, blackness, removal from their places (Rev. 6.12-17). Finally, on loosening the seventh seal, the seven angels who stand before God prepare themselves to sound their trumpets and start the third stage of apocalyptic events (Rev. 8.1-6), (see fig. 1). Feeling scared, all humans, including kings and poor people, hide in caves. Only 144,000 people of all the
tribes of Israel are "sealed" on their foreheads to be Fig. 1. The Seven Seals. This chart protected by God from the ongoing disasters. An angel is shows the seven seals of God's seen ascending from the east crying with a loud voice to wrath.a the four angels, to whom power is given to hurt the earth and the sea, "Saying, Hurt not the earth neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. And I heard the number of them which were: and
Mohammad 15 there were sealed hundred and forty and four thousands of all the tribes of the children of Israel" (Rev. 7.3-4).
2.1.4. The Stage of the Seven Trumpets of God's Angels
Sounding the trumpets of the third stage of the Apocalypse, for which a part of the eighth chapter and the ninth, tenth and eleventh chapters are dedicated, further new severe disasters strike the cosmos and mankind, bringing forth more sufferings, bloodshed and wails (see fig. 2). When the first trumpet is sounded, a combination of hail and fire mixed with blood is hurled down upon the earth to burn one third of its trees and all its green grass (Rev. 8.7). Subsequently, when the second trumpet is sounded, a huge burning mountain is thrown into the sea to turn a third of it into blood, kill its creatures and destroy its ships (Rev. 8.8-9). Then, when the third trumpet is sounded, a blazing star, called Wormwood, falls on the third of waters to turn them into bitter, causing the death of people (Rev. 8.10-11). After that, the third of the sun, moon and stars are struck and turned dark, so the day and night do not shine properly, when the fourth trumpet is sounded. When the fifth trumpet is sounded, a star falls from heaven unto the earth to open the bottomless pit, from which smoke comes out to darken the sun and the air. Then out of the smoke, monstrous locusts come out to torture the people who are not "sealed" on their foreheads for five months (Rev. 9.1-12). Fig. 2. The Seven Trumpets. This Then when the sixth trumpet is sounded, the disaster of chart shows the seven trumpets of the four angels of the rivers of Euphrates with their b God's wrath. mounted troops are released to wage a war, slay one third of mankind and kill them with fire, smoke, and brimstone (Rev. 9.13-21). When the seventh trumpet is sounded, the kingdom of the world is announced as the kingdom of God which His Christ will reign forever. Then God's temple in heaven is
Mohammad 16 opened with storms of lightning, thundering, and great hail and an earthquake (Rev. 11.15- 19).
2.1.5. The Woman and the Dragon and the Two Beasts of Satan
In the middle of this havoc and conflicts, a new born baby is given birth, whose mother is "the woman clothed with the sun". The baby is immediately snatched by God to heaven, leaving his mother alone in a remote place. In this place, to which God sends her for protection, she hides herself from the dragon which wants to devour her baby and kill her with her children (Rev. 12.1-17). Then two beasts given an extraordinary power by Satan appear one from the sea and the other from the earth. The second beast acts on behalf of the first one in sealing the people of the earth on their right hands or foreheads, asking them to worship the image of the first beast, otherwise the beast will kill those who reject to receive the mark (Ref 13.1-18).
2.1.6. The Stage of the Seven Vials of the Winepress of God's Wrath
Pouring the wine of each bowl, plagues inflict people, and further disasters strike the cosmos, to which the sixteenth chapter is dedicated. They are poured on the earth, sea, rivers and springs of water, the sun, the seat of the beast and his kingdom, the river of Euphrates and the air, (see fig. 3). On the land, the first bowl is poured on the people who have received the mark of the beast, causing painful and ugly sores (Rev. 16. 2). Then, the second plague inflicts the sea which is turned into blood like a dead man (Rev. 16.3). As the land and sea, rivers and springs of water are also turned into blood because God intends to give those who have shed His saints' blood also blood to drink, as He thinks they deserve (Rev. 16.6). Afterwards, the sun is given power to sear people who continue to curse God. For that, the fifth bowl plunges Fig. 3. Seven Bowls of God's Wrath. the seat of Satan and his kingdom into darkness (Rev. This chart shows the seven bowls of God's wrath.c
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16.10). Then, the river of Euphrates is dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the east to be gathered for the battle of the great day of God (Rev 16.12-14). Eventually, when the seventh bowl is poured into the air, a voice from His throne is heard saying "It is done", and natural storms of thunders, flashes of lightning, unprecedented hail out of haven, for which the people of the earth will blaspheme against God, along with a very great earthquake once more strike the earth. It brings about the fall of the cities of the nations, make every island flee away, and mountains disappear, and split the great city which God "remembers" to pour on her a cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath (Rev. 16.17-21). Babylon is the city which is described as the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, for which greater punishments are prepared in the next two chapters. With its richness and beauty, it attracts the attention of men of any trade, and kings of the earth, and entices them to come to, stay and work in it. Thereby, Babylon is hated, tortured and annihilated by God. After her destruction, the world mourns for her, but the people in Heaven rejoice and sing the song of victory, preparing themselves for the great decisive war of the great day of God.
2.1.7. The Great Supper of God
Subsequently, riding a white horse, a horseman named "Faithful and Truth" is seen standing in the opened heaven. On his robe and thigh, "king of kings and lord of lords" is written. With justice, he judges and makes wars (Rev 19. 11-16). He fights with his armies the beast, the false prophet and their armies, who also have been prepared for this war. Eventually, God's armies capture and throw evil armies into a fiery lake of burning sulfur. The birds of God also share in this war; they gorge themselves on the flesh of the defeated followers of Satan and his beast (Rev. 19-21). After this battle, Satan, is bound for a thousand years in the Abyss, paving the way for Christ's reign on the earth (Rev. 20.1-3).
2.1.8. The Messianic Millennium of Christ's Reign
By binding Satan, the peaceful golden age, of the Messianic Millennium of Jesus Christ's reign on the earth begins, for which part of the twentieth chapter of Revelation is dedicated. In this golden age, the people who have not worshiped the beast or his image come to life again and reign with Christ a thousand years: "and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived
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not again until the thousand years were finished. . ." (Rev. 20.4-5). This is their first resurrection, over whom the second death has no power (Rev. 20.4-6). When the peaceful Christ's reign is over, Satan's last rebellion and fate take place.
2.1.9. The Last Rebellion of Satan and Armageddon
In the last scene, escalated events reach their climax of the great war, bringing forth God's final and decisive intervention. Troops are gathered, armies are rallied on the battlefield of Armageddon. Invasions are carried out by Satan and his followers, against whom other invasions are carried out by God and His followers. Further bloodshed continues until Satan and his followers are cast into a lake of burning sulfur. The war ends, as the previous tribulations begin, on the scene of the throne of God. This time, it appears with no earth or sky because the two have escaped the throne where the dead were standing and the book of life is opened. Obviously, it is the Judgment Day when the books are opened, and each one is judged according to their deeds. At the end of this day, Death and Hades and all of those whose names are not written in the book of life are thrown into the lake of fire, which is their second and eternal death (Rev. 20. 11-15).
2.1.10. God's New Kingdom (New Jerusalem)
At the end, God creates His new kingdom of the new world where He and Jesus Christ along with the 144000 "sealed" people of all the tribes of Israel dwell in the New Jerusalem under the reign of God in eternal bliss, to which the final twenty-first and twenty second chapters are dedicated. The one who was seated on the throne before says," I am making everything new!" (Rev. 21.5). Saying so, new heaven and sky are created and the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven, prepared as a bride and, beautifully, dressed for her husband. Nothing impure or evil will ever enter their glorious New Jerusalem, which is described as: And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; And had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel. (Rev. 21.10- 13)
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Thus, the Book of Revelation ends with the fulfillment of God's promises and the assertion of the Advent of Jesus Christ, "Surely I come. Amen" (Rev. 22.20).
2.2. The Vivid Imagery of the Apocalypse of Saint John
"The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in
the Bible—and the most controversial. Instead of
stories and moral teaching, it offers only
visions—dreams and nightmares" (Pagels 1) (ELAINE PAGELS/2012)
Hundreds of years have passed and there are people who still believe that the prophecy of Saint John is still lurking behind the scene of the current political crises, conflicts and wars in the world. Others consider the Book of Revelation nothing but superstitions of days long past, but at the same time they cannot deny the general understanding that this book has a powerful fascination over the minds of a huge number of people around the world. This staying power is generated greatly from its apocalyptic images and characters which have the ability to stimulate the imagination, emotions and senses to their utmost levels, and thereby survive in the memory. It goes far in taking human beings who always yearn to new spiritual experiences from the visible to the invisible, and the unsatisfied souls of the material world to the refuge of the unseen. The most prominent apocalyptic images in Saint John's prophecy can be found in its remarkable characters and horrifying events that are recurrent in various theatrical representations of fin de siècle European theater. The vivid imagery of the Apocalypse can be classified into four main groups of images, under the following headings: the different methods of God's vengeance, the four apocalyptic women of good and evil, the character(s) of the Antichrist, and the Great Armageddon. Under these subheadings, the images are connected with each other in a way that pictures a comprehensive image of God's methods in creating and ending the world. These images can be found in the three phases of the seven seals, seven trumpets and seven bowls of God’s fury.
2.2.1. Images of God's Vengeance and His Methods in Punishing the Damned in the Book of Revelation:
The eschatological images of the Apocalypse are closely related to the excruciating pains and death penalties of God's vengeance, meted out to the people of the earth. Eternally, they will be tortured physically and suffer intensely at the end of the world because they deny
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God, commit inequities and receive the mark of the beast of Satan. These images constitute an integral part of a larger framework of ending the world on the basis of a severe correctional process, reaching the edge of total annihilation. The severe punishments start with the four horses and their riders who are released to perform destructive missions on the Earth. They are given power to take peace from the earth, make men slay each other and kill one fourth of the
people by sword, war, famine, Fig. 4. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1887) by Victor plague and wild beasts of the d Mikhailovich Vasnetsov. earth (see fig. 4). These punishments are also followed by other catastrophic natural disasters in which more blood is shed on the earth: And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departure as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. (Rev. 6.12-14) The severity of these woes makes all the people including kings talk to the mountains and rocks, begging them for help: "Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him . . . For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?" (Rev. 6.16-17), (see fig. 5). In the next phase of the Fig. 5. The Day of Judgment (1620) by Peter Paul Rubens.e apocalyptic trumpets one further
Mohammad 21 comprehensive image of God's punishment is drawn by searing, storms, earthquakes and others which are meant to torment humans and other creatures. When angels sound their trumpets, macabre images of death and annihilation are described. Sounding the first four trumpets, sundry images of cosmic storms are depicted showing how the forces of nature can participate in the cataclysmic annihilation of the cosmos. Hail and fire mingled with blood, something burning with fire like a huge mountain, a destructive star that is called "Wormwood" and darkness are all hurled down upon the people of the earth and their land, sea, rivers, sky, sun, moon and stars. A blue transparent sea is suddenly turned into blood, and the fresh water of rivers into bitterness that kills any one may taste it (Rev. 8. 6-13).
The four heavenly storms are followed by further three woes in which surreal creatures interfere to add more violence to the overall picture of God’s vengeance. Sounding the fifth trumpet, the Abyss is depicted as a gigantic furnace which is opened widely, letting the smoke of burning fire rise and darken the atmosphere in a way that adds to this image a gothic element. Then, out of the thick smoke, a blast of surreal beings blows over the earth. They are incarnated in extraordinary locusts that have a king over them, "the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon" (Rev. 9.11). The depiction of these torturing beings is one of the most dreadful images of the Apocalypse. They come down to the earth to torment, severely for five months, the people who are not "sealed" on their foreheads by God to whom death will be a wish and more merciful than the agony: And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. (Rev. 9.7-10) Further image of the variety of God’s methods of annihilation is drawn vividly in the woe that follows the fifth trumpet, with which the pictorial language again plays an important role in picturing the image of the battle of Euphrates. When the sixth trumpet is sounded, four angels with their mounted troops who are bound at the great river, Euphrates, and kept ready for this hour, are released to slay one third of men. These troops are distinguished with the colors of their breastplates: fiery red, dark blue and yellow as sulfur. The heads of their horses resemble the heads of lions, and the tails are like snakes with heads that inflict injury.
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They come mainly to kill one third of the people of the earth through the plagues of fire, smoke, and sulfur which come out from the mouths of their horses (Rev. 9.13-19), (see fig. 6). Unceasingly, such blood- curdling images of severe punishments keep streaming until the seventh trumpet, in
Fig. 6. The Sixth Trumpet Judgment 200 Million which the kingdom of the earth is f Horsemen (Rev 9:13). announced as a kingdom of heaven, and, however, after which they reoccur in the second phase of the seven vials of God’s fury. Pouring the bowls of God’s wrath on the earth, extra images of punishments are depicted in which their essence is in conformity with the previous images and sometimes an echo of them, especially, in the fifth and sixth vials. Pouring the fifth vial of God’s fury on the kingdom of the beast, the kingdom is plunged into darkness, and its people gnaw their tongues in agony (see fig. 7). This image brings to the mind the previous punishment of the fifth trumpet when the Abyss is opened and, thereby, the atmosphere is darkened with thick smoke, and locusts torture people who seek unattainable death. Also, Euphrates is the same area where the war of the sixth trumpet, as well as the sixth vial, is waged by the kings and troops who are gathered to prepare themselves to enter the battlefield of the great battle, the Armageddon. Generally, the severity of these penalties is Fig. 7. Seven Bowls of Wrath by Dave Lebow. It shows a decaying man who has blood poured justified by God that He wants the ones who over him by seven angels while tortured souls g have shed the blood of his saints to taste the scream in the lower part of the painting. blood and severe torture.
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The various images of punishing people, like searing, intoxicating, invasions with monstrous locusts and mounted troops of fire and sulfur, reaching the point of total annihilation in the name of God are graphically described. Tina Pippin, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, describes the Apocalypse in her book, Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image, as a book of monsters, with perhaps God therein being the most monstrous. She even goes to the very extreme in her analysis when she argues: "who is responsible for this final holocaust? God/Son of Man/Lamb does more evil . . . than any other monster in the text. The beasts are certainly cruel, but the destructive God of the Apocalypse is far more cruel" (Pippin 91).
2.2.2. The Images of the Four Apocalyptic Women of Good and Evil as Portrayed in the Book of Revelation:
Violent images also appear in the way of punishing women in the Apocalypse, in which the female does not necessarily refer to a specific woman, but to an entire city. The most aggressive punishments are acted against them including sexual and physical abuse. Adding to the images of violence produced by investing in the female body, other images of eroticism are drawn, in which the bodies of women are used to show all kinds of licentiousness and fornication. In her anti-fundamentalist reading of desire and eroticism in the text of the Apocalypse, Pippin finds out that women’s bodies are particularly abused in this text, in which there are too many images that make women’s bodies desired. For instance, "the Bride [New Jerusalem] is made into polis, city, the Whore [Babylon] gang raped and burned and eaten, the Woman Clothed with the Sun is a reproductive vessel who is exiled subsequent to giving birth, and Jezebel is destroyed" (cxix). She even goes further in considering the heaven that is depicted in the Apocalypse as "patriarchal" and the text by itself as "hypermasculine," and finally labeling Revelation as a "pornoapocalypse" (cxxiii, 92). Pippin argues that such images can be found with these women: Jezebel and the woman clothed with the sun; and the two cities which are personified as women, the great whore, Babylon, and the bride of Jesus Christ, New Jerusalem.
Jezebel the False Prophetess
Jezebel is depicted as a deceitful woman calling herself "prophetess," and as a tempter using her female charm and fraudulent claims to entice men, the servants of God, to have sexual relations with her, and to eat from the food sacrificed to idols. She does not repent her deeds, either, when she is given the time to do so. Consequently, being deceitful, a
Mohammad 24 tempter and unrepentant, Jezebel is punished severely by the Son of God who gives through her a lesson to other people: "Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds, And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts" (Rev. 2.22-23). Violence is not only embodied in Jezebel’s punishment, but also in the reward that is promised to be given to those who resist her seduction and adultery. With iron scepter and authority over nations, the rewarded servants will dash the nations into pieces like pottery.
The Woman Clothed with the Sun
"The woman clothed with the sun" is also attacked, like Jezebel, in the Book of Revelation. While a red dragon wants to kill her and her new born baby, God wants to take her child to heaven. Prompted by his failure to devour the woman’s newborn baby, and being cast to earth by God, the dragon is enraged at the woman, so he attempts to drown her, and follows her children unceasingly in order to kill them. Eventually, she is taken to a remote place to spend more than three years out there: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. (Rev. 12.1-4)
Babylon as the Mother of Harlots
Babylon is another example in which violent and erotic images are mingled together to create a further image of a harsh punishment. Historically, Babylon (located in modern-day Iraq) is a famous city known for its richness and arts. In the Apocalypse, this city is incarnated in the image of a bad woman in which it becomes the epitome of all idolatrous worship. She is depicted as attractive, arrogant, seductive and rich. Her richness is featured in the beauty of her visual appearance, as in the gold which she wears, and the golden cup which she holds in her hand (Rev. 17.4). Her people and multitudes are depicted via the image of many waters upon which she sits, and her kings as the beast and his ten horns,
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which she rides (see fig. 8). Being the center of attraction, Babylon is portrayed as an attractive woman who seduces the kings and workers to come to her, and commit adultery with her (Rev. 17.2). So, Babylon is personified as a whore, calling her the great prostitute, or the mother of prostitutes. God hates and punishes her severely, "How much she hath glorified herself, and lives deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow (Rev. 18.7). Fig. 8. The Whore of Babylon. Painted by William Her punishments are depicted Blake in 1809.h violently, especially when God doubles her punishments and asks her nations to make her naked, burn her and eat her body, and the saints to rejoice in heaven after her death. At the end, the city collapses and turns into ruins when an angel picks up a gigantic boulder, throws it into the sea saying that with such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again, no workman of any trade will ever be found in her, and the light of lamps will never shine in it again (Rev. 19. 21-23).
Jerusalem as the Bride of Jesus Christ
New Jerusalem is another city which is personified as a woman. It is depicted as the bride of Jesus Christ and his 144000 of all the tribes of Israel. She is depicted as a beautiful and lovely woman, the beloved, and represented as an epitome of the perfect woman. However, the image of this utopian city into which the "sealed" people will step brings to mind the image of a bride whose body will be stepped into by Fig. 9. The Marriage of the Lamb, painted by Schnorr von Karolsfeld in 1809.i
Mohammad 26 her husband and his followers. Her fall from heaven is described surrounded with guards and gates, upon which twelve names of the tribes of Israel are written. When the bride descends from the Father to the Son, heaven and earth become one world. God moves to live with the bride and her husband, the Christ and his 144000 of all the tribes of Israel, and New Jerusalem is put under the reign of her husband and his father forever (see fig. 9).
2.2.3. The Image(s) of the Antichrist as Portrayed in the Book of Revelation The Antichrist is an eschatological concept of evil embodied in the figure of a false prophet(s) who appears at the end of the world to deceive with miracles the people of the earth, God’s servants. The image of the Antichrist has been related deeply to the scenario of the apocalyptic end of the world, and is widely considered a sign of this anticipated end. Contrary to the ideal model of Christ in humanity, the Antichrist is the model of concentrated evil in humans, whom the Messiah fights in his second coming. In the Apocalypse, the iconic image of the Antichrist is embodied in four representations of many prophets, Jezebel, the beast of the earth, and the false prophet who fights in the Armageddon. The image of the false prophet is represented both in a category and one single person. At the beginning, the image appears in many false prophets of wicked men who claim that they are apostles. Having been tested by the church in Ephesus, they are found out as false prophets and liars (Rev. 2. 2-3). In the second representation of the concept of the Antichrist, the false prophet appears as Jezebel who is depicted as a model of a wicked woman who claims to be a prophetess. With her teaching, she misleads the servants of God into sexual immorality, and encourages them to eat from the food sacrificed to idols. For her deeds, God will punish her severely (Rev. 2. 20-23). However, the most popular representations of the Antichrist in the Apocalypse are seen in the images of the beast of the earth, and false prophet of the last battles of Armageddon. Physically, the image of the beast of the earth is depicted in a way similar to Christ. This resemblance is drawn by describing the beast as a lamb, also with which Christ has been described many times. However, the satanic characteristics are also showed in him as having horns (as the Devil), and, in his way of speaking, as a dragon (the dragon which is associated with Satan all through the text). He is also depicted with extraordinary power of cunning, resurrecting and killing as to mislead people with miracles, bring down fire from the sky, and resurrect the image of another beast and makes it talk. In addition, he kills all the people who refuse to worship this image and receive the mark of the beast, which seems to be the only sign that allows people to live in the mundane world, and the key to enter the
Mohammad 27 commercial life. Thus, the image of the Antichrist embodied in the beast of the earth is completed with the mystery of the mark, the beast’s name or the number of his name (666): And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast. (Rev. 13.16-18) After that, a reference to the beast and his deeds is made during the battles in the site of the great Armageddon. The false prophet appears on the battlefield with an army who fights against the so-called angel Faithful and True. The false prophet is punished by casting him into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. By this end, the figure of the Antichrist is never seen again; "And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived then that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshiped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone" (Rev. 19.20).
2.2.4. The Image of the Great Armageddon as Pictured in the Book of Revelation In the Apocalypse, the Armageddon is the name of the site where the great decisive final war between the conflicting forces of good and evil takes place (chapter 16). The word "Armageddon" has become a symbol of the great war at the end of the world, in which a decisive victory of good over evil will finally take place. The Armageddon, as a war, is depicted in a dramatic scene of conflicts between the fighting parties of good and evil, with which the forces of nature participate, hand in band, to bring forth the total destruction of humans and their mundane world (see fig.10). This will be done in order to put the kingdom of earth under the reign of God forever, and resurrect it on the basis of heavenly criteria of good and justice. At the end of this war, God rewards the "sealed" people who have been chosen by Him, and whose names have been written in the book of life. The reward of these people, who are the 144000 from all the tribes of Israel (chapter 14), is to live in the new Jerusalem with the Messiah and God, while the rest of people, those who accept the mark of the satanic beast on their right hand or forehead will be cast together with their beast and Satan into a lake of burning sulfur to suffer eternal damnation.
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The Armageddon is pictured in three major scenes in which there are so many images of conflict, bloodshed and destruction. These three scenes are the great earthquake, the so-called the great supper of God, and the last rebellion of Satan. During these scenes, precisely before the last rebellion, a peaceful era, the messianic age of one thousand years, pervades, during which there will not be any crime or murder. The first scene of the great Armageddon is about the great earthquake, which occurs directly after the gathering call on the site of Armageddon. The gathering call is initiated after pouring the sixth cup of God’s wrath on Euphrates, to dry it up and pave the way for the kings of the East to come. After that the seventh cup of God’s fury is cast with which the images of destruction flow out depicting
the extensive damage of the earth, cities, Fig. 10. The Fall of the Damned, circa 1600s, by Peter Paul Rubens shows Archangel Michael and and men caused by the earthquake. The his holy angels fighting Satan and his fallen j angels. earthquake is described as the greatest ever, "such as was not since men were upon the earth" (Rev. 16. 16), causing an entire collapse of the nations’ cities, cracks, disappearance of all mountains. Finally, the scene ends with Babylon the great city which comes in God’s "remembrance," and thereby is given a cup of the wine of His fury. After that, the events of the Armageddon are depicted during the so-called the great supper of God. In this scene, the birds of Heaven are depicted as savage creatures which are gathered by one of God’s angels to eat the bodies of the defeated army at the end. The battle is waged between the two armies of good and evil. The first is the army of heaven led by a horseman. This horseman is called "Faithful and True," on whom "The Word of God" and the "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" are written (Rev. 19. 11-16). The army of heaven
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and its leader are pictured vividly such as the descriptions given about the appearance, physical characteristics and power. On the other hand, the army of the Devil, false prophet and kings of the earth and battle itself are not depicted with much details, except the way how the angel Faithful and True kills them with his sword, and what occurs to their bodies after. This battle ends with severe pictures of casting alive the devilish characters into the lake of burning sulfur, bounding the Devil a thousand years, and the fowls eating the flesh of kings, captains, mighty men, horses, and the rest of men with no exception. After the thousand years of a peaceful era of Christ’s reign, the struggle comes back for the last time in a form of a last rebellion by Satan. Christ and His saints are depicted as a camp which will be besieged by Gog and Magog, the ultimate enemies of God's people, who are rallied by Satan: "And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea" (Rev. 20.7-8). Fig. 11. The right wing of Hans Memling's Triptych (1467-71), Last Judgment. It shows how the Damned The battle is ended with the are cast into hell.k intervention of Heaven, casting fire on
Mohammad 30 the enemies of God’s people to devour them. The Devil is finally thrown into the lake of burning sulfur along with the people whose names are not included in the book of life and have accepted the mark of the Devil’s beast (see fig. 11). Consequently, the vivid image of the great Armageddon is accomplished, ending with victory songs and rejoice over the total destruction of the synagogue of Satan and Babylon. Finally, after the annihilation of the old world, a new one is created by God to where the New Jerusalem, descends from heaven as the new and eternal homeland of God, Christ and the saved 144000. To conclude, the Biblical story of the end of the world by St. John is told through inspiring and vivid imagery. Its apocalyptic images range over the text from the beginning to the end with so much details, through which readers suffer the violent events in the world of the Apocalypse, and live in the prison of these sufferings in their real world. Detailed events of cataclysmic violence and bloodshed happen one after another in the text, and continue to affect most of its readers who go through a unique experience of torment, death and resurrection. The same idea is well expressed by Christy Rodgers: This is how life-threatening disasters can actually feel to those who experience them: an unfolding of horror . . . as the event . . . goes on and on—and not just the event itself, if you survive it, but the dawning realization of all its causes and consequences, rolling out like shock waves, flooding and swamping your tiny individual life all the way to its inevitable, imagined end. (Rodgers) So, by the vivid imagery of the Apocalypse, or visual representations, readers are impressed permanently; their emotions are drawn for a long duration of time, facilitating the way for the apocalyptic events to be planted deeply in the memory and become a powerful ideology that, in some cases, pass from solidarity attitudes into extreme behaviors: Throughout the ages, John of Patmos’ visions have fortified religious anger like his own, the anger of those who suffer oppression and long for retaliation against those who torture and kill their people. Yet those who torture and kill in God’s name often cast themselves into the same drama, seeing themselves not as the "murderers" John denounces but as God’s servants delivering divine judgment. (Pagels lxxix) Having introduced in sufficient details the Book of Revelation, I will now turn to look at the four selected plays which adapt Revelation as a main source for their apocalyptic representation of the world. In this context, the plays will be divided into two categories according to their method of adaptation: direct and indirect. I will start with Oscar Wilde's
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Salome and Alfred Jarry's Caesar Antichrist as vivid examples of direct adaptations of Revelation's apocalyptic imagery.
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Chapter Three:
Oscar Wilde's Salome (1892) and Alfred Jarry's Caesar Antichrist (1895)
Direct Adaptation
For many years, Oscar Wilde's Salome and Alfred Jarry's Caesar Antichrist have been kept out of public reach, and excluded from the foreground of the late nineteenth century stage in virtue of their daring depictions of holy Biblical figures. Salome, though is now dramatically privileged and celebrated as one of Wilde's monumental works, was first banned in England by Lord Chamberlain in 1892, but was produced in France, just for a single performance, in 1896 (Taylor 245). In a letter written by Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, Edward Pigott who denied Salome's license for performance in 1892, he illustrates: "'This piece is written in French- half Biblical, half pornographic- by Oscar Wilde himself. Imagine the average British public's reception of it,'" then he suggests to send his colleague the play for his "'private edification & amusement.'" Disagreeing with the Examiner's decision, avant- garde dramatists write that Salome is "'a serious work of art'" which is "'peremptorily suppressed'" (qtd. in Im 371; Donohue 118). Then, finally, after thirteen years, the first 1905 English version by Alfred Doglas is allowed to be performed in London (Taylor 245). No more than three years after writing Salome, Wilde is accused of "gross indecency" and "homosexual offences," tried and imprisoned, and writes nothing further for the theater (Taylor 295). He is severely criticized by contemporary critics like Max Nordau (1849-1923) who holds this view: "Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime" (320) and "has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works" (317). Donohue concludes that Wilde's reputation overshadowed his assiduous attempts to write "producible" drama, unaffected by constraints (119). Likewise, with the exception of a few scholarly attempts, Caesar Antichrist is generally overlooked in drama worldwide discussions and even dictionaries, such as The Penguin Dictionary of Theater by John Russell Taylor. It is widely held as "a piece of theatre not intended for the stage," or simply "unstageable" (Jannarone 121). This play is neglected although in its script most of Jarry's definitions of his new science, Pataphysics, are embodied, as well as "all his future themes are present in an embryonic state" (Brotchie vii). Originally, it introduces the first version of Ubu, the most monstrous and surreal character in
Mohammad 33 the history of the French stage, which later in 1896 performance of Ubu Roi sets Paris on its ear. His daring ideas and words shock the avant-garde audience, especially Ubu's opening cry "Merder!"2 which marks the beginning of Ubu's life on the stage and, unaccountably, the end of his author's life away from the stage. Jarry was found dead in his apartment, "covered in his own feces" and "paralyzed . . . (the exact cause of which is not clear)." At the age of 34, he died notorious of being homosexual and atheist, penniless, and forgotten by all, but his closest friends (Menon 59-60). Both of these audacious plays deal with the critical religious concepts and end-of-time concerns and fears of the late nineteenth century people. Their importance is not limited to their attempt to break the rules in depicting holy characters, but also to their attempt to undermine established concepts, making the seemingly impossible ideas possible. Dramatizing the Biblical end-of-time story, they offer a new end-of-time conceptualization in which they offer anti-apocalyptic concepts and ends. The vivid imagery of Saint John's Revelation gives the playwrights the foundations and medium to construct their own apocalyptic versions uncovering their own apocalypse. The method they follow includes the employment of apocalyptic images, characters, names, events, plot, allusions, starting with the title "Caesar Antichrist," to literal verses, but with a difference: the dramatic framework in which their apocalyptic plots are weaved. The first is a tragic framework within which Wilde depends mainly on intertextuality and intensive borrowing from apocalyptic verses to bring into light end-of-time violence and ferocity inspired by the Book of Revelation. The second framework is sarcastic, in which Jarry borrows Saint John's apocalyptic storyline, plot and binary oppositions to bring about a Christian-based reversed world for the Antichrist. He makes his caricature-like and dictator Ubu the hero of this world, in which he displays the utmost levels of violence and ferocity. This difference plays a role in making Wilde's apocalyptic version appear more coherent than Jarry's, which appears as a pastiche, for which he is commonly held as "a notoriously difficult author to approach" (Fisher 1136).
2 " Merder!" means Pschitt or simply shit in English (Menon 59).
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3.1. Salome (1892)
"Surely some terrible thing will befall . . . Put out the
torches! Hide the moon! Hide the stars!
Let us hide ourselves in our palace . . . I begin to be
afraid" (Wilde 553).
In his play Salome, Wilde employs the apocalyptic images of Revelation to reflect the Biblical eschatological ideology in Jokanaan's speeches, and makes it lurk behind the violent scenes of murders of the play, bringing about its tragic end. Though the end-of-time ideology seems invalid and powerless to other characters, it exerts its power on both Salome and Herod, transforming Salome into a monster, and converting Herod into a believer. Committing a crime against "an unknown God" by Salome marks the end of Herod's doubt, and the beginning of his apocalyptic certainty. Fearing the end-of-time wrath of that "unknown God," he commits the last crime against Salome. Wilde concentrates on the negative aspects of this ideology through the close borrowing of the apocalyptic images of panic, evil, sins, violence and severe punishments, ignoring the utopian end of Saint John's prophecy, both in the speeches of Jokanaan and the end of the play. Through the idea of the violence of the nonviolence, Wilde makes the dichotomy of the victim and the victimizer overlap, bringing deadly ends. He ends his play with bloodshed, leaving the end open to all possible interpretations except the utopian promised world of Saint John's prophecy, and inviting his readers to think, in such a case, about the mystery of love rather than death. Wilde creates the kingdom of Herod that is similar to his contemporary world which is full of vice, bloodshed, evil characters and destruction. He introduces to this kingdom the character of Jokanaan who dramatically functions as a Saint John figure to prophesize the end of the corrupt world. Fearing his apocalyptic speeches and prophecies, Herod imprisons him in a cistern and prevents anyone from meeting him. As Jokanaan gives his end-of-time speeches, his voice is heard by the princess Salome, the stepdaughter of Herod, who insists on seeing him ignoring Herod's orders. As soon as she sees him, she falls in love with him, even though he starts to speak terrible things about her and her mother, Herodias. She becomes so fascinated by Jokanaan, and asks him for a kiss, but Jokanaan never accepts such a demand. He considers her the daughter of an incestuous marriage, because Herod, after killing his brother, the previous king and real father of Salome, and usurping the throne from him, marries his brother's wife, Herodias. After her unsuccessful attempts to have a kiss, when her stepfather, Herod, who desires to possess her, asks her to dance naked and promises
Mohammad 35 her anything she wants in return, she accepts his offer. She performs the dance of the seven veils, after which she surprises everyone with her demand to behead Jokanaan. The play ends with his head on a silver plate held by Salome who kisses him on the mouth, and is immediately crushed afterwards beneath the shields of the soldiers, upon orders of Herod himself.
3.1.1. The Day of His Wrath: Jokanaan's End-of-Time Prophesy
Throughout the play, the story is interrupted by the prophecy of Jokanaan through which he loudly articulates his apocalyptic ideas and feelings of hatred, and prophesizes what is to come. His prognostication speaks of the savior who will follow him, and the approaching of, what he calls, "the day." He also attacks the three royal characters, Herod, Herodias, and Salome by connecting them to the apocalyptic character and story of Babylon, uniting all of them in one evil entity and prophesizing Salome's severe punishment. Though his voice represents the eschatological Biblical voice, yet it proves its inability to convince, and be received by all characters who rather satirize both his Biblical prophecy and what the Jews of the play believe in. As Saint John's prophecy introduces a scenario of the end of the world to create the Kingdom of God on earth, Jokanaan's prophecy has a similar function in the play. He foresees the approach of "the day" when the kingdom of Herod will witness the Advent of Jesus Christ, and the demise of evil characters. His predictive speeches depict Christ's Second Coming which he calls "the day" which becomes a recurrent image in the play as Jokanaan keeps mentioning, alluding to it from the very beginning of his speeches till the end. This recurrent image can be seen in these speeches by Jokanaan, "After me shall come another mightier than I" (532), and "The Lord hath come. The son of man hath come" (534). "The Lord" and "the son of man" are used in the Apocalypse to refer to Jesus Christ (King James Version, Rev. 1.13). The similarity cannot be missed between Jokanaan's previous speeches and the following Saint John's verses, "Behold, he [Jesus Christ] cometh" (Rev. 1.7), or "Behold, I [Jesus Christ] come quickly" (Rev. 22.12). To assure the approach of "the day" when Christ's Second Coming will take place, Jokanaan repeats his warnings many times; "The eyes of the blind shall see the day" (532); "Lo! The time is come! ... The day of which I spoke" (541); "So the day is come, the day of the Lord" (543). After that, almost at the end of his speeches, Jokanaan depicts what is going to happen in "the day" about which he has been prophesizing since the beginning of the play. The images of what will happen are almost literally copied from the Apocalypse emphasizing the collapse of the cosmos: "In that day the
Mohammad 36 sun shall become black like the sackcloth of hair, and the moon shall become like blood" (545). Wilde's close borrowing is clearly evident in Jokanaan's previous depiction and this verse by Saint John, "the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood" (Rev. 6.12). Similarly, it cannot be missed in the image of the stars in Jokanaan's depiction, "and the stars of the heavens shall fall upon the earth like ripe figs that fall from the fig-tree" (545), and Saint John's depiction, "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind" (Rev. 6.13). Jokanaan's divination does not only depict the approach of "the day" when the destruction of the world will take place, but also the fears of humans and living creatures of that day which, effectively, makes Christ's Second Coming appear as a source of terror rather than salvation. Wilde uses evocative images of fear and hiding inspired by the Apocalypse, but with different characters and places, that include kings and mythical Greek characters. In Jokanaan's prophecy, the dread of the kings of the earth, "the kings of the earth shall be afraid" (545) is the echo of this verse, "And the kings of the earth . . . hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains" (Rev. 6.15). In addition to the kings, Jokanaan's prophecy depicts mythical creatures hiding themselves from the catastrophes that will mark the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Jokanaan says, "The son of man hath come. The centaurs have hidden themselves in the rivers and the sirens have left the rivers, and are lying beneath the leaves of the forest" (534). The use of sirens which are fabled creatures, half-women and half-birds, and centaurs which are fabled monsters, half-men and half-horses, is to exaggerate the state of panic. In general, the state of trepidation and panic that is depicted in Jokanaan's prognostication can be clearly found in the following Saint John's verses: And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? (capitalization as in the original text) (Rev. 6.15-17) Consequently, hiding whether under the mountains, rocks, or beneath the leaves, and escaping from or to the rivers are the same depiction of the state of hysterical terror that is felt towards the end of the world, and which, however, echoes the widespread fears of the late nineteenth century people. These images of exaggerated chaos emphasize the idea that
Mohammad 37 although the final peace is promised to be achieved for God's people, this promise does not actually cancel the process of demolishing the world. The wars that will be waged in the name of God according to the Book of Revelation including sever punishments, bloodshed, woes, tribulation, and catastrophes, that are feared by people, make "the day" that Jokanaan depicts appear as a day of annihilation rather than a day of salvation. The stress on the negative aspects of the apocalyptic story of the end of the world continues in Jokanaan's predictive speeches, and becomes stronger when the images of "the day" are accompanied with images of vengeance, and allusions to the apocalyptic Biblical story of Babylon. Adhering to the Biblical eschatological canon, the prophecy of Doomsday cannot be fulfilled without the existence of evil characters like Babylon, the mother of prostitutes. Likewise, in the kingdom of Herod, the three characters Herod, Herodias, and Salome are connected and related to the story of Babylon so that they dramatically function as one evil entity that should be challenged by the holy man, Jokanaan. Accordingly, Jokanaan attacks and portrays the three characters as sinful ones who commit abominations and will meet a horrible end similar to that of Babylon. In the predictive speeches of Jokanaan, some of the images of God's wrath against the city of Babylon are employed to express Jokanaan's hatred of Herod, Herodias and Salome, and foretell their future. For instance, Jokanaan uses the same image which is used to describe Babylon's obscenity, "having a golden cup in her hand full of abomination and filthiness of her fornication" (Rev. 17.4), to describe Herod's obscenity, evil and crimes: "Where is he whose cup of abomination is now full?" (536). Like Herod, Herodias is related to the story of Babylon. In Jokanaan's repeated callings and descriptions, Herodias appears as a harlot whose sin and lack of repentance correspond to those of Babylon. As Babylon "with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication" (Rev. 17.2), Herodias is depicted as a harlot who gives herself to men and commits fornication with the captains of Assyria and young men of Egypt (536). Her sins are exaggerated in the same way in which Babylon's sins are exaggerated to stress her dangerous influence on others and her ability to sway people. Saint John condenses Babylon's accumulated sins in these two verses: "For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication" (Rev. 18.3), and "For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her inequities" (Rev. 18.5). Similarly, Herodias and her iniquities are depicted by Jokanaan saying, "Thy mother hath filled the earth with the wine of her inequities, and the cry of her sins that come up to the ears of God" (537). The same applies to Salome who, as Herod and Herodias, is connected with the story of Babylon. Without knowing her personally before, Jokanaan prejudges and connects
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Salome to Babylon and her mother Herodias through heredity, making evil and immorality like any physical characteristic that can be passed on genetically from one generation to another. Constantly, he describes Salome as the "daughter of Babylon" (537), "daughter of adultery" (539), "the wanton! The harlot!" (544). Obviously, he considers her to be, as her mother, a source of evil, through which he affirms his faith in or allegiance not only to the Biblical apocalyptic scenario of the end in the New Testament, but also to the Old Testament considering Salome an evil character. Moreover, as in the Apocalypse, the images of the involvement in the degenerate deeds precede and account for God's later severe punishments of Babylon, the exaggerated images of immorality of both Herodias and Salome work as preliminary causes for the later severe punishment that is meant to be given to Salome. Jokanaan says, "Let there come against her [Salome] a multitude of men" (544). This is similar to Babylon's punishment of how the multitudes and nations (represented in the waters where Babylon sits), and the seven kings (represented in the seven heads of the beast which Babylon rides) will hate, come against, and destroy her (Rev. 17.15-16). So, according to Jokanaan's prophecy, the end of Salome will be horrible, and like Babylon, her body will be abused, which at the end appears to be the only fulfilled prophecy. Salome is crushed beneath their shields like Babylon's body which is pierced and burned and her flesh is eaten by the beast and the nations on which she sits. Although the prophecy of Jokanaan comes to end the abominations and corruption in the kingdom of Herod, prophesizing the Advent of Jesus Christ and God's justice, it is understood by the other characters as complicated and unrealistic speeches of madness. The characters to whom Jokanaan delivers his religious prophecies belong to different religions. Some soldiers are Jews and some others do not even believe in God, like The Nubian and The Cappadocian. Although Jokanaan repeatedly warns them against the coming horrible day which will be feared by all, the other characters are deaf to his cries. The irony is that, though he is known by most of them as a prophet, they consider him a crazy man who utters incomprehensible things. The problem is in his usage of one specific scenario of the end-of- time, the one that is suggested by Saint John in Revelation, to communicate his apocalyptic vision to both monotheistic and polytheistic people. This problem uncovers a lack of communication between the holy Biblical man, Jokanaan, and the kingdom's international inhabitants. So, the Biblical scenario of the end appears invalid and incomprehensible to them. For instance, the Second Soldier says, "he is always saying ridiculous things" (533). The First Soldier answers Salome who asks about what Jokanaan is saying," We can never tell, sometimes he says terrible things; but it is impossible to understand what he says" (533).
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He is even satirized by Herodias saying, "This prophet talks like a drunken man . . . I hate his voice. Command him to be silent" (545). They satirize what Jokannan repeatedly concentrates on, "the day," end-of-time terrors, sins and severe punishments of the damned. With the exception of Herod who thinks that "maybe he is drunk with the wine of God" (545), all other characters are fearless of his ideology and expect anything to come, but not that Judgment Day he calls for. However ineffective and powerless these apocalyptic speeches and images seem to the other characters, they have a great impact and power on both Salome and Herod. Wilde makes these spoken "ridiculous things" of the nonviolent "drunken man," Jokanaan, stir up Salome's and Herod's destructive reactions, bringing about two crimes. Their power is manifested in Salome's last monologue considering them the "poison" which is "spat" on her by Jokanann, causing her agonies, as well as in Herod's admission of his growing dread of the apocalyptic end: "I begin to be afraid" (553). By so doing, the apocalyptic ideology does not only appear in the foreground of the apocalyptic scene of the play, to prophesize Saint John's apocalyptic end, but also lurks in the background of the last scene of the play.
3.1.2. The First Crime: the Violence of the Non-Violence
Wilde does not borrow the traditional Biblical figure of Salome as a symbol of absolute evil. For instance, Salome does not ask for Jokanaan's decapitation in compliance with her mother's wish to avenge herself against Jokanaan, but only for her unrequited love for him. In his earlier version of Salome, entitled The Decapitation of Salome, Wilde even makes from her character a saint before she falls into a lake and gets decapitated by the broken Ice (Im 372). However, in his last version, she is not depicted as a saint nor an evil woman before meeting Jokanaan. The use of two juxtaposed contradictory images of her makes the new version of Salome possible. The first image is a romantic one given by The Young Syrian who depicts her "like a dove" and "silver flower," as well as a loveable, "beautiful" and "little princess" (532-534). The other image is the apocalyptic one given by Jokanaan as a loathsome and wicked woman, as well as an "accursed," sinful harlot, for which she should be killed mercilessly. Later, Salome becomes the victim of the second image and is transformed from a "beautiful" princess into a "monstrous" woman (553). Wilde's new version of Salome suggests that she is a victim of the unrequited love for Jokanaan and the "venom" of his apocalyptic images and his posthumous silence. The outgrowth of her sufferings turns her into a victimized killer. In his article "Oscar Wilde's
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Salome: Disorienting Orientalism," Yeeyon Im suggests that "Wilde may be sympathetic to the heroine, but maintains his distance from her" (Im 371). Though Jokanaan seems an inactive character who is locked in a cistern, he uses his voice and apocalyptic images as a medium and cause to torture Salome. Through the use of apocalyptic images and language, he conveys his insults and feeling of hatred to her. He curses her saying "the wanton," "the harlot," the "daughter of adultery," the daughter of the "incestuous marriage." On the contrary, he deems himself "the chosen" by the Lord, for which he treats her with arrogance, refusing even to look at her: "Back! Daughter of Babylon! Come not near the chosen of the Lord" (544). His exaggerated scorn towards her is manifested when he asks the Lord to punish her severely: "Let there come against her a multitude of men. Let the people take stones and stone her"; "Let the war captains pierce her with their swords, let them crush her beneath their shields" (544). He considers such cruel apocalyptic punishments the suitable way to purge the world, claiming, "It is thus that I will wipe out all wickedness from the earth, and that all women shall learn not to imitate her abomination" (544). Drawing Biblical images of whoredom and wickedness of Salome and predicting her apocalyptic end, Jokanaan destroys her original image as a beautiful princess and enforces a new apocalyptic one on her which causes her sufferings, and generates a feeling of both nonentity and abuse in her. She blames him for his ill-treatment emphasizing her original identity saying, "Thou didst reject me. Thou didst speak evil words against me. Thou didst treat me as a harlot, as a woman, me, Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea!" (553). In response, she considers his words "blasphemies," and resists the apocalyptic paradigm of her character, agonies and predetermined death. In her attempt to resist the image of harlotry in her, she overstresses her love and its greatness to Jokanaan, insisting that she loves him "the only," though he hates her the most. "Ah, Jokanaan, Jokanaan," she divulges her strong love, "thou wert the only man I have loved. All other men are hatful to me. . . . Oh, how I loved thee! I love thee yet . . . Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion" (553). By so saying, the readers and audience may sympathize with her attempt to assert the opposite of Jokanaan's apocalypse-based idea of her as an eschatological evil woman who must perish at the Coming of Messiah, though she is a killer. Also, she refutes his apocalyptic prophecy of her death gloating over the idea of staying alive after which, however, she laments his death considering it a result of her unrequited love for him. She says, "Well, I still live, but thou art dead . . . If thou hadst seen me thou hadst loved me . . .Well I know that . . ." (553). Her resistance to his violence is also manifested in her reaction
Mohammad 41 to his arrogance, apocalypse, torturous words, great "scorn" and "rage" which comes as severe as his words. Cutting his head off and putting an end to Jokanaan's life, she thinks that she can put an end to the miseries which tear her apart: "thy tongue, that was like a red snake darting poison, it moves no more, it speaks no words, Jokanaan, that scarlet viper that spat its venom upon me. . . . stirs no longer?" (552-553). This, in part, justifies her obsession to possess his head, considering it the source of her pain and love as well. She seizes it mercilessly avenging her miseries, saying: "thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will please" (553). When his eyes are shut, her pain of being hated, dismissed and treated as a "harlot" by him, is in part relieved: "Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now" (553). She feels aggrieved at being unnoticed by him, when he, arrogantly, refuses to look at her, which triggers her desire to seize his head and make him notice her and look at her in the eye. She wants to be able to kiss him on the mouth: "Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now . . . Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Jokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me? . . . Ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan?" (552-553). Salome's great agonies become greater when she realizes that she can stir up no affection from Jokanaan's side, neither in life nor in death. She even fails to hear the sound of pain when she insists on the executioner to strike him thinking that pain is related to love: "They say that love hath a bitter taste" (553). Leaning over the cistern and listening, she comments: "There is no sound. I hear nothing. Why does he not cry out [?] . . . Strike, strike . . . No, I hear nothing. There is a silence, a terrible silence" (552). She fails, for the second time, to communicate with Jokanaan, and hears nothing but the "terrible" silence of his death, which tortures her as much as the loudly spoken apocalyptic images he draws of her in his life. Depriving her from the communication she
Fig. 12. Maud Allen as Salome with the yearns for, the inability to talk to and kiss head of John, the Baptist, in Allan's 1906 Jokanaan, the violence of his silence brings about production of Wilde's Salome, entitled as Vision of Salome`.l her final collapse. At the end, she blames him for this tragic end which, for her, would have been avoided if he had looked at and loved her. Her long speech, which she gives as she seizes the head of Jokanaan on a silver shield,
Mohammad 42 reflects that she considers herself a victim of his religious ideology and that he is responsible for her transformation from a "virgin" and "chaste" princess into a "monstrous" woman: "Behind thine hands and thy curses thou didst hide thy face. Thou didst put upon thine eyes the covering of him who would see his God. Well, thou hast seen thy God, Jokanaan, but me, thou didst never see. . . . I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was chaste, and thou didst fill my veins with fire" (553). As a consequence, Salome's image as a victim of the apocalyptic images and unrequited love is contrasted with Jokanaan's depiction of her as a Biblical character of evil concentrated in women. In this new version of Salome, Wilde suggests that she is both a victim and victimizer which effectively makes readers or audience Fig. 13. Angela Denoke as Salome in Bayerische Staatsoper Opera's sympathize with her, and do not consider her the only one 2006 production of Richard Strauss' Salome (an operatic to blame. Eventually, Salome appears like Jokanaan who retelling of Wilde's Salome) in is the victim of the violence of decapitation. She kills and Munich.m tortures him physically, and he tortures her spiritually. Through depicting Jokanaan as both the torturer and victim, and Salome as the victim and killer, Wilde suggests that by torturing the victim, the victim becomes a killer. The images of the victim and the victimizer are paradoxically used by Wilde and manipulated to offer his readers and audience more possibilities, which exceed religious depictions and interpretations. By so doing, he seems to be emphasizing what he believes and claims in his own words: "For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true" (qtd. in Holland 3). Accordingly, Wilde suggests a new understanding of the power of the apocalyptic images inspired by the Book of Revelation which as it may save some people, it can destroy others.
3.1.3. The Second Crime: Herod and Blood Memory
Wilde's emphasis on the power of the apocalyptic images is also manifested in Herod's conversion. Hearing Jokanaan's repeated apocalyptic speeches, an apocalyptic memory of blood and destruction is developed in Herod. The apocalyptic blood memory
Mohammad 43 provides Herod with the impulse and imagination to commit the final violent crime in the play, after passing through three stages of doubt, conviction and actuation. Herod believes in omens, and is fond of symbols. He has a strong inclination to interpret the things he sees and connect their images, in order to foresee what is to come. Wherever his eyes catch a glimpse of blood scattered in his kingdom, he thinks something bad will happen: "Ah! I have slipped! I have slipped in blood! It is an ill omen. It is a very ill omen . . . I will not look on it" (540). Hearing Jokanaan's prognostication, "In that day the sun shall become black like sackcloth of hair, and the moon shall become like blood" (545), his blood memory is fed with apocalyptic images. He becomes able to relate his sense of an imminent disaster of the "ill omen" of blood to the ready apocalyptic images of the cosmic collapse that Jokanaan prophesizes. His fears grow stronger, and he becomes prone to buckle under the stress of the unknown, and confess his inside panic at sight of anything red which may remind him of blood and the apocalypse as well. Some red flowers of his wreath are enough to bring out his deepest fears: "The flowers," he comments, "are like fire. They have burned my forehead . . . How red those petals are! They are like stains of blood on the cloth. That does not matter. It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors" (547). Unable to bear the red flowers, he tears his wreath, to escape the apocalyptic bloody images that the red petals may proliferate and the end of the world's terrors he may recall. The connection of the three images of the red color, blood and bloody moon contributes to the transformation of Herod's attitude from the possibility of the "ill omen" into the certainty of its fulfillment. Primarily, Herod thinks that Jokanaan "comes perchance from God" (550); "It is possible that God is for him and with him" (551); and "It may be that this man comes from God" (550). However, when Herod sees the bloody moon and head of Jokanaan between Salome's hands, he finally announces his certainty of the matter: "In truth, what she [Salome] has done is a great crime . . . a crime against some unknown God" (my italics) (553). Likewise, as soon as he notices the moon of his kingdom becoming red, he makes publically a confession of his beliefs: "Ah! look at the moon! She has become red. She has become red as blood. Ah! the prophet prophesied truly. He prophesied that the moon would become as blood. Did he not prophesy it? All of ye heard him prophesying it. And now the moon has become as blood. Do ye not see it?" (548). So, the powerful connotations of the apocalyptic images that haunt Herod repeatedly converted him from a state of doubt to a state of conviction. His conversion is manifested in changing his primary doubt and
Mohammad 44 doubtful language of the "perchance," "possible" and "may be" to become a matter of fact and truth, manifested in "in truth" and "truly" (Im 376). Later on, Herod's doubt and conviction are developed into a state of enforcement and actuation. As the events unfold, the outgrowth of the power of the apocalyptic memory of blood, instilled apocalyptic images and end-of-time trepidation within Herod affects his actions and orders. His firm belief in Jokanaan's prophecy in which Herod's world will be brought to an end, initiated by the bloody moon, brings about Herod's collapse. Fearing the wrath of Jokanaan's "unknown God" and its end-of-time consequences, he "hides his face with his cloak" as the executioner brings the head of Jokanaan on a silver plate, (552). Also, fearing to lose what he considers his world by the advent of Jokanaan's new Messiah, he asks his people to hide it: "I will not look at things, I will not suffer things to look at me. Put out the torches! Hide the moon! Hide the stars! Let us hide ourselves in our palace, Herodias. I begin to be afraid" (553). Eventually, the final bloody event in the play creates the suitable context for Jokanaan's apocalyptic images to resurface. When Salome speaks of the taste of the blood on the mouth of Jokanaan as the bitter taste of love while she kisses him, unintentionally, she gives Herod the last image of blood in the play which predisposes him to think of violent ends and apocalyptic images. Without hesitation, he immediately thinks of destroying her. Adhering to Jokanaan's previously instilled image of Salome's punishment, "let a multitude of men come against her" which inspires Herod and influences his imagination, he gives his orders to his multitude of soldiers to go and kill Salome. Obeying his orders, the soldiers rush towards her as a multitude of men and crush her under their shields, committing at the end of the play the last crime in the name of what Herod's previously describes an "unknown God." Out of his later conversion by the power of the apocalyptic images and blood memory, Herod commits the last crime with no hesitation or thinking. He turns round and sees Salome, he gives his order, "Kill that woman! (The soldiers rush forward and crush beneath their shields Salome)" (554). By this, Wilde suggests two cases of the great influence of the apocalyptic ideology on his characters, Herod and Salome, transforming the former into a believer and the latter into a monster. In both cases, the focus is laid on the negative aspect of this ideology and its deadly consequences. At the end, Wilde closes the curtain of his play on a very violent and bloody scene to remember, in which to speak of the apocalyptic moment of the fin de siècle. The blood is scattered everywhere in Herod's kingdom, which, as a motif, it appears from the very beginning till the tragic end of the play, when it is finally shed on a silver plate. Cutting off the head of Jokanaan and crushing Salome's body under the shields of the soldiers mark the
Mohammad 45 end with great violence and ferocity. Also, the play closes on a very pessimistic stage direction: "The slaves put out the torches. The stars disappear. A great cloud crosses the moon and conceals it completely. The stage becomes quite dark" (554). So, the end of the play is overwhelmed by Wilde's deep pessimism; the absence of light and horrors mark not only the stage of Salome, but also Wilde's expectation of the new stage to come. What casts its shadows heavily on the memory of his readers and audience is his dramatic scenes of darkness, violence and bloodshed, which mark his apocalyptic play and expectation of the future. Consequently, the Book of Revelation helps Wilde craft the apocalyptic world, characters and story of his play. The plethora of apocalyptic images of evil characters, bloodshed, punishments and violent ways in killing the victims, like decapitation, helps Wilde express his deep pessimism of the fin de siècle in which he later writes in his personal letters, translated by Constance Garnett: "there are times when the whole world seems" to him "full of terror" (23). The play ends with a bloody scene of two crimes committed without any hint of any possible new peaceful world embodied in the New Jerusalem which the Book of Revelation foretells. The advent of an eternal utopian world is not alluded to neither in the apocalyptic speeches of Jokanaan nor at the end of the play. Instead, he leaves the end of the play, like the end of the nineteenth century, open to all interpretations, only emphasizing the idea of love, paradoxically, through the "monstrous" Salome. In such a pessimistic and dark moment of the fin de siècle of his own depiction, through her, he invites his readers to think of love rather than death, for "the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death. Love only should one consider" (553). The moment of fin de siècle combined with the sense of the fin de globe (the end of the world) also finds its way to resurface in Jarry's dramatic outcome. Like Wilde who employs the apocalyptic images inspired by Revelation to offer his readers and audience a new insight into the future, Jarry employs them in his play Caesar Antichrist to offer his readers a new version of the Apocalypse. Following a similar method of adaptation, Jarry resorts to direct adaptation of the apocalyptic images and allusions in his symbolist mystery play Caesar Antichrist (1895).
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3.2. Caesar Antichrist (1895)
"No, time is not ended at all" (Jarry 117)
"I and the Christ are Janus, and I have no need to turn round to show my double face" (Jarry 121)
Originally, Caesar Antichrist is written for puppetry, a theatrical piece where there is a "maze of significations and possibilities" of copious symbols, reversed items, and intermittent speeches of human and non-human characters (Brotchie viii). Jarry's grotesque characters and daring ideas, with which he crosses the line and is commonly held as an atheist, shock his contemporary theater-going public. To satirize the Biblical apocalyptic ideology, he borrows and reweaves the plot of the Book of Revelation and makes Christ's antagonist, the Antichrist, the protagonist of his end-of-time version. Generally, Jarry keeps the same development of the apocalyptic events of Revelation, focusing on the life journey of the Antichrist inspired by the story of the 666 beast of the earth of Revelation. The climax of his play, which is a war between the Antichrist's earthly reflection, Ubu, and the emperor of Russia, is inspired by Revelation's climax of Armageddon. The focus is laid on the apocalyptic plot, images and allusions which offer Jarry the foundations upon which he constructs the story of his play, satirizing the established beliefs, and offering new end-of- time conceptualization. Jarry employs apocalyptic images and allusions to depict the cycle of the Antichrist's life from his birth to final ascension, making his life and destiny appear similar and parallel to that of Christ, but in reverse. The journey of his life is depicted in four acts of four subsequent apocalyptic worlds. It starts in a reversed Biblical world which works as the embryonic world of the Antichrist, or the ideology from which he is created ("Reliquary"); then the heraldic world of the Antichrist's origin and birth ("Orle"); the earthly world of the Antichrist's reflection on earth embodied in Ubu character ("Ubu Rex"); and, finally, the upper world of God The Father in which the Antichrist joins his God and Christ after the ascension of his earthly reflection to the sky ("Taurobolium"). His journey ends before the dead arise and come to Judgment Day. Sarcasm is added to the development of the Antichrist's journey and character, which makes it appear as a marionette, originally, serving Jarry's aim to create a world of Biblical and anti-Biblical puppets, including God The Father. In his article "The Antichrist Ubu", James H. Bierman points out that what Jarry wants to do with the borrowed fine actors in the original production of Ubu Roi, is to make human
Mohammad 47 marionettes of them (242), for Jarry thinks that "'These little wooden beings lived in Paris'" (qtd. in 243).
3.2.1. Apocalyptic Storyline and Textual Analysis in Caesar Antichrist
The Embryonic World
From the first reversed world in the play, the Antichrist is born. It represents the matrix of the embryonic form of the Antichrist who is born at first as an idea that later obtains an earthly reflection. It contains a set of Biblical beliefs which paves the way for the later apocalyptic events of the following acts. Correspondingly, the first act is entitled "The Prologal Act – The Reliquary," which is "the casket/skull from which the Antichrist is born" (19). The first part of this title, "The prologal act," is inspired by Revelation's first introductory verses which work as a prologue to Revelation, entitled a "prologue" in some new versions of the Bible like The Holy Bible, New International Version. Calling it "The Reliquary," Jarry satirizes the ideology from which Biblical apocalyptic beliefs are generated, depicting them as obsolete as the dead remains of a holy body. "Reliquary," as a term, means the container or casket of religious relics, including the remains of the physical parts or threadbare clothing of a holy person, kept posthumously ("reliquary"). Like the Book of Revelation which opens on the throne of God, Jarry's apocalyptic scenario begins with a similar scene which is later described as the throne of Calvary3 and Reliquary (25). Like, in Revelation, the "throne was set in heaven, and [on which] one sat" (Rev. 4.2), in Caesar Antichrist, the throne of Calvary is set on "the versant of the mountain" on which Peter stands in a pillory. Peter's pillory is described as a "jasper pillory" alluding to the jasper stone upon which the one who is seen by Saint John sits in the throne of God (Rev. 4.3). Also, the Cross of Gold, next to St. Peter, is depicted "upstage, slightly to the left," which means to the right hand of Peter, "surmounted by a crowned casket, sealed by the claws of a sleeping COCK" (23). This description alludes to the following verse of Saint John: "I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals" (Rev. 5.1). These two close descriptions draw an analogy between the sealed casket in the throne of Calvary and the sealed book of the throne of God; the sealed book is the source from which the apocalyptic events start to unfold, similarly, the sealed casket is from where the Antichrist is born, and his story begins. However, the
3 Also Golgotha, the site in which Jesus Christ was crucified, immediately outside Jerusalem (Luke 23.22).
Mohammad 48 considerable differentiation between these close borrowings is that the throne of Calvary and Reliquary is set in a reversed world. In his pillory, the diademed Peter stands upright, in an opposite arrangement of our world in which he is crucified upside down. Also, his pillory is formed from three "upturned Christs," opposing Christ's position on the earth and in his crucifixion. From this reversed apocalyptic place, like Saint John in Revelation, St. Peter, introduces readers to the reversed world of Jarry's apocalypse, which is, however, created out of St. Peter's doubt and denial. He starts off complaining about his imprisonment, depicting himself as the Pope who is trapped in the web of the "Wandering Jew"4 and locked in a "locked paradise" (23-24). Except the intermittent turns of the pillory, no action takes place while St. Peter delivers his confessions, of his three times denial of Christ, which appear necessary to create the reversed world of the Antichrist. He calls his three denials "a triple faith" which means to negate, to affirm, and to create (23). Accompanied with the sound of "pulse" that is heard all around Peter's embryonic world, "Pulse in the wind, pulse in the sea, pulse on the fleeing night!" Caesar Antichrist is born (29). Afterwards, St. Peter makes one step forward and appears alone with his reflection, which advises him to touch the cross with a firm hand and with reason. By so doing, the character of The Fleur-De-Lys, which represents "purity" and the "Virgin Mary," appears (21), whom St. Peter asks about the origin and identity of the New Sovereign. She answers him that the New Sovereign will be born "neither from sperum nor from blood," but from the crowned casket on the cross (35). Then, she leaves St. Peter confused with the literal verses of Saint John which she quotes describing the New Sovereign: As for this casket, the apostle [St. John] who was anointed with boiling oil at the Latin Gate wrote upon it: Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. Julian has been dead for more than a thousand years, decipher another number (emphasis added as in the original text). (34- 35) The verse which The Fleur-De-Lys literally quotes is, originally, used in Revelation to reveal the symbolic identity of the coming beast of the earth:
4 The Wandering Jew is a drama, based on the medieval legend, by E. Temple Thurston (Taylor 290)
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Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. (Rev. 13.18) Thinking that it is typical of the "triply credulous" Saint Peter to doubt what she says, The Fleur-De-Lys asks him to go and look for his master. This paves the way to enter the next symbolic "heraldic" act, in which the origin of the New Sovereign can be traced back.
The Heraldic World
The second act, which is entitled "The Heraldic Act – Orle" introduces the readers to Heraldry, which means the study of coats of arms and the descent and history of old families ("heraldry"). In this virtual world, the characters are the bearings or emblems of coats of arms, which are usually painted on an escutcheon. Apparently, these emblem-like characters move in the heraldic world like comic strips of two dimensional shapes. Heraldically, the ground of this world is described like an argent or sable vair5, which resembles a chessboard of black and white squares, but instead of square-like shapes, it takes bell-like shapes (see fig. 14). In this world, a King character is the first to appear seeking to obtain the emblem "Orle," and clarifying that "God The Father could not but engender this destiny" (47). Caesar Antichrist, and the other characters of the Orle and four "cardinal heralds," Fig. 14. A woodcut by Jarry, used as appear to announce that they will start their task (49). an illustration in the annotated edition of Caesar Antichrist by Alastair With each movement of the silent heralds, the ground Brotchie. It depicts four heralds in of this world is dislocated and cracks imitating front of the vair background.n Revelation's end-of-time harbingers of earthquakes and thunder. In Revelation, they express the greatness of God's wrath, initiating cosmic collapse, and foretelling the approach of Doomsday: "And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell . . . (Rev. 11.13); "And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth . . ." (Rev. 16.18). Correspondingly, like the apocalyptic trumpets of Revelation with which
5 Sable is defined in the play's footnotes as a black background while Vair is one of the tinctures of heraldry, a pattern of bell-like shapes colored alternatively chessboard-wise (Jarry 47)
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God's new actions of destruction start off, The Trumpet character appears and gives a speech paving the way for Ubu's appearance: "every man and god not yet born will be made flesh . . . daubed with Blasphemous authority" (51). The Trumpet's speech alludes to the apocalyptic verses of the beast of the sea of Revelation, whose head is covered by "the name of blasphemy" and "power" (Rev. 13.1.5). After this speech, Caesar sleeps so that he awakens with the sun. Some heraldic characters kneel and some others start to discuss the advent of the New Sovereign. The discussions between the heraldic emblems reveal most of Jarry's new concepts, and the sense of an imminent storm and death, during which some emblems will sleep for a while, is foretold. The idea that "the Antichrist will become its like in soul and body" and "God will become man and like a man will be an executioner" is repeated (52). After that, Ubu appears from the virtual world of heraldic emblems like a "flashing meteor" rolling on the earth. He is accompanied by three characters of Palotines (Gyron, Pile and Cotise), about which he has no idea "from where these beasts come from?" (61). The three Palotines and their later missions in assisting Ubu in his future war against Russia are inspired by the three evil frog-like spirits of the beast and the false prophet, which "go forth unto the kings of the earth . . . to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty" (Rev. 16.13-14).
The Earthly World
After the inverted "prologal" and the virtual "heraldic" worlds in Jarry's cosmic scheme, an earthly world appears in the third act, entitled "The Earthly Act – Ubu Rex." It is inspired by the apocalyptic stories of the 666 beast of Revelation and the Armageddon. On this world, Caesar Antichrist's reflection is cast taking the form of an earthly character Ubu. In this world, Ubu and his wife, Ma Ubu, appear intriguing against the king of Poland, Wenceslas, whom he plans to kill during the impending parade of Poland. Ironically, Ubu appoints Ma Ubu the priest of the conspirators, who ally themselves with him, in order to make them "fight courageously" (76). Before the parade, Queen Rosemond informs her husband, Wenceslas, about a dream she had the day before, and warns him against the incoming danger. However, he considers her worries nothing but "madness," and decides that, being a king, he should not go back on his word. Obstinately, in order to prove his point of view that Ubu walks the fire for, not against, him, he attends the parade even armless. Unlike his expectation, he is assassinated by Ubu; his younger son, Buggerlas, escapes; and Ubu becomes the king of Poland. As a new king, Ubu enforces a new system of commerce, justice, and revenues, and starts off, what he calls, reformations in order to enrich himself and
Mohammad 51 the kingdom. His new system depends on finding all the nobles and magistrates, including the bankrupt, guilty, killing them all, and then confiscating all their properties and positions. He starts with the nobles shoving them down a hole by a hook, then the magistrates, who refuse what he legitimizes as a law. In order to "reform justice," he permits the unpaid magistrates to have the fines they levy and the belongings of anyone they condemn as the money to earn for their living (84). Then he moves on to reform his state's revenues. So, he decides to keep for himself all the taxes newly levied by him on properties, trade, industry, marriage and deaths. Then he goes round the villages to collect the taxes by himself from the farmers who rebel against him calling out, "So that's how it is! We'll fight! Long live Buggerlas" (87). The beginning of the story of the 666 beast of the earth in Revelation and the beginning of the third act of the earthly world of Ubu are similar. In Revelation, Saint John stands upon the sand of the sea, and sees a beast rising up out of the sea (Rev. 13.1). Then, he beholds another beast coming up out of the earth, like a lamb with two horns. The second beast exercises all the power of the first, whose deadly wound has been healed (Rev. 13.11- 12). Similarly, Jarry inserts a short interval between the second and third acts of whales coming out from the sea, in the interim before the earthly appearance of Ubu, who is later wounded and healed, an idea repeated many times during the war between him and the Russians. Ubu's character is also inspired by to the image of the 666 beast of the earth of Revelation. He is like the beast who seals people with the mark of the beast as the only condition to enter the new commercial system of life, otherwise they will be killed mercilessly. Like the 666 beast, he controls the lives of people and creates a new tough monetary system, killing those who refuse to pay mercilessly. Exactly like in Revelation, the apocalyptic events develop into the climax of the great war of God Almighty between his army and Satan's troops. In Jarry's earthly world, the events develop into the climax of a great war between the Russian army and Ubu's Polish troops. Thinking that his assistant Bordure, Duke of Lithuania, who used to oppose some of his new policies stands behind the new rebellion, Ubu enchains him. Soon after, Bordure frees himself and escapes to Moscow seeking out its emperor's support and calling for his help. It does not take so long until the emperor of Russia, Tsar Alexis, who at first hesitates to help Bordure, considering him a traitor, rushes into the battlefield. He changes his mind when Bordure tells him that the previous king's son, Buggerlas, is still alive. He considers his father, Wenceslas, a cousin of Russians, for which his duty is to defend the son, and bring him back to the throne. In the interim, Ubu is sent a messenger by Bordure informing him that Bordure and the Russians are coming to kill him, and invade his domains to restore
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Buggerlas to the throne. Ubu prays for his saints to protect him promising them to pay revenues and burn candles in their name, as well as to become a holy man. Considering him an idiot, Ma Ubu suggests that the only solution is war. She does that in an attempt to beguile and send Ubu away, during which she wants to fix the situation herself, and get hold of the treasury. Ironically, as soon as Ubu announces war, he becomes the people's hero. The people who used to call out the name of Buggerlas against their persecutor, Ubu, begin to call out Ubu's name, "Long live Pa Ubu!," "Long live War!" (91-92). Like Armageddon which is based on the concept of the blood memory through which God does not forget and avenges the blood of his son, the slain lamb, and saints, the war between Ubu and the Russian Tsar is also based on this concept. Bordure warns Ubu after his extensive executions: "In the five days that you've been King, you have committed more murders than it would take to send all the saints in Paradise to damnation. The blood of the King [of Poland] and his Lords cries out for vengeance and their cries will not go unheard" (88). Avenging the blood of the executed "Lords" alludes to avenging the blood of the saints of God. During the battle itself, a Russian soldier cries out as he is striking a blow, "For God and the Tsar!" (98). In Revelation, in addition to the outgrowth of evil, the blood of the slain lamb and the saints justifies the coming Armageddon on earth: "And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" (Rev. 9-10). Calling the king of Poland "our cousin" by the Russian Tsar suggests a blood relation between the two, and that his drawn blood, throne and executed Lords are the reason for waging the war against Ubu. So, this war is not only inspired by Armageddon, but also based on the apocalyptic concept of waging the end-of-time wars against the people of the earth, which are going to be in the name of God and the blood of his saints. On a battlefield outside Warsaw, The Russian Tsar and Ubu rally their troops; just like the kings in Revelation who gather themselves in the place called Armageddon for the great war. On the battlefield, the troops meet and Ubu kills Bordure and attempts to attack the Russian Tsar. However, the Russian Tsar gets help by one of his soldiers when he falls into a trench of Poles, and the war ends with the victory of the Russians over Ubu. Ma Ubu runs away to the mountains. Ubu and his Palotines, apocalyptically the three evil frog-like spirits, escape to a cave where they are attacked by a bear. They kill the bear while Ubu gives his prayers to save them on a rock. After that, the Palotines shout "Victory!" and Ubu suggests for them the bear to eat as a "supper:" "This is a large beast. Thanks to me you've got
Mohammad 53 something for your supper" (104). One of his Palotines asks Ubu to cut up the bear, but Ubu refuses even to give a hand in cutting it, fearing that "He may be not quite dead," and considering that he has made lots of efforts praying for them to survive (104). Eating their enemy after defeating it in, what Ubu calls, the "supper" of the bear, alludes to "the supper of the great God" in which God invites his birds to eat the flesh of the defeated after Armageddon, all "small and great" (Rev. 19. 17-18). Ubu, however, is unable to eat the defeated bear "raw" like God's birds, so he suggests to cook it. Eventually, the war in the earthly world of Caesar Antichrist ends with the Russian Tzar alive and Ubu, the reflection of the Antichrist, becomes "quiet and sleeps," exactly like when a marionette ends its role on the stage and rests for a while (106). Finally, snow and dark end the earthly world as Cotise remarks, "What a lot of snow, my friends . . . Night is falling. It'll be dark in an hour" (105). Then "the heaven departs as a scroll when it is rolled together" (107), almost literally echoing the image of the sky in Revelation: "And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together" (Rev. 6.14). In Revelation, heaven departs as a part of the massive destruction of God's wrath which reaches the sky, or to the whole cosmos. It reflects the greatness of His fury and unlimited power. However, Jarry manipulates this image and uses it ironically as an interval between the earthly world and the next one, to bring out further events. By this, the horrifying apocalyptic event of the sky becomes devoid of its original end-of-time role, and is employed as any theatrical effect to complete the elements of the show, for instance like a curtain. The apocalyptic sky appears no more than an interval.
The Upper World
At the beginning of this world of the fourth act which is entitled "The Last Act (Judgment) - Taurobolium," Ubu and his henchmen ascend into "the black of what was once the sky" (113). After the meteoric ascension, Caesar Antichrist appears lowering a bull alive into a hole asking nature to let the beast speak to the earth. Then, the only path assigned to Caesar Antichrist to follow appears with three characters of The Yews and two olive trees standing along the sides of the road. They give their apocalyptic speeches in Latin after which the place, where the events take place, is revealed as "the valley of Jehoshapat" (117). In this valley, Caesar Antichrist gives a monologue paving the way for his counterpart, the Christ character, to appear in the next scene. Christ appears with God The Father together with Caesar Antichrist and the silent character of The Holy Trinity. During this gathering, God The Father reveals His attitude of being well pleased with His "sons" Christ and Caesar
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Antichrist, as He calls them. Christ asks God The Father about the reason for forsaking him, to which, the other son, Caesar Antichrist, does not sympathize, rather brags about his endurance and getting ahead in what he calls previously "the slave forgetfulness" (121). Then, God the Father domes, The Holy Trinity is lit up, Caesar Antichrist is charred until he becomes black slithering away. Finally, Christ comes down from his shining cross pointing to a mountain peak where there are The Angel Of The Last Judgment and a bugle pouring forth rain to start "the fire." The last Trumpet raises its voice, "Hallelujah" (126). Then, the dead arise and come to judgment. Even in the last act of the play, the apocalyptic images and allusions continue to play a major part in the construction of Jarry's storyline, as they do in its beginning and plot. After the lowering of the bull, once again Jarry uses literal verses from Revelation, to reveal the place of the apocalyptic events. Like in Revelation "the two olive trees . . . standing before the God of the earth" (Rev. 11.4), the three characters of "two great olive trees" and The Yews stand before Caesar Antichrist along the only road assigned for him to follow (116). Literally, the three characters quote verses from Revelation: "These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed" (116; Rev. 11.4-5). They recite these verses in Latin after which immediately "the place is revealed." This suggests that the quoted apocalyptic verses are used ironically to sound as a spell cast to reveal the apocalyptic place (117). The revealed place is "the valley of Jehoshapat," in which "the names of great sinners and great saints are clearly visible on the tombstones" (117). It is also known as the valley of destruction or decision, and in the Old Testament, it is the place where the God of Israel will gather all nations that afflicted Judah and Jerusalem to receive judgment (Joel 3.14)6. In this apocalyptic valley where the pessimistic sense of destruction and annihilation overshadows the place, Caesar Antichrist gives his monologue in which his growing perplexity about the end-of-time is made clear. He is also confused about what happens to him, whether it is the end or not yet. He speaks of himself as the God of Revelation, depicting his wrath pouring at the end of the world: I slept, my soul slept, my active body crawled, my Double [Ubu]. When you see your double, you die. But it fled before me, and I saw only the meteoric
6 "I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and [for] my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land" (Joel 3.2-3).
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ascension of his satellites, and I do not know if time is ended, or if my five angels have spoken and poured out the seven vials of my wrath. I will go up out of this soil which will tremble and quake and rebel beneath me when the Other [Christ] comes to live out his earthly dream … No, time is not ended at all. (117) As a consequence, tracing the apocalyptic events and storyline in Caesar Antichrist, the play and its four acts follow the same development of the events in Revelation, but with different characters and details. The Biblical apocalyptic scenario which gives Jarry the foundations to construct his reversed apocalyptic world opens with the throne of God in which there is a sealed book from which the apocalyptic events unfold. The events reach to the climax of Armageddon, after which the dead arise for judgment before God's throne. Analogically, Caesar Antichrist begins with the throne of Calvary in which there is the sealed casket. From the casket, the Antichrist is born marking the beginning of the apocalyptic events which later reach to the war between Ubu and the Russians. Jarry's apocalypse ends in the upper world of God The Father, after which the dead awake and go to judgment. However, in Jarry's version, the apocalyptic events are set in a reversed world, in which the Christ protagonist of the original version becomes the Antichrist and the earthly 666 beast. He adds a new heraldic world and makes St. Peter's three denial of Christ the cause for the creation of the apocalyptic world instead of St. John's dream in Revelation. He does not end his version with the New World of Jerusalem, rather the end of the play is left open without an eternal end. Thus we may conclude that Jarry does not borrow the story to emphasize it, rather he adapts it and its images to make a new version of the apocalypse through which he can deliver his new daring concepts, and satirize established beliefs. In order to achieve this goal, Jarry seems to have engaged himself in a dramatic game of binary oppositions.
3.2.2. Apocalyptic Binary Oppositions and Jarry's Sarcasm
The Book of Revelation helps Jarry not only in creating a unique scheme of his apocalyptic play's plot and events, but also in offering him the binary oppositions needed to give his new concepts about the Antichrist and the universe, as well as Heaven and Hell. It offers ready apocalyptic images which he adapts and manipulates as he weaves the threads of his apocalyptic scenario and imagery, by means of binary oppositions and contrasted images. He relates these binaries to each other in which each pair is introduced in identification with another in a series, forming a larger picture of the world governed by the constant alteration of these binary oppositions.
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Christ and the Antichrist.
Indisputably, the original scenario of the religious text of Revelation is built upon contrasted characters, ideas, and events. The main plot in the religious text is when the dwellers of Heaven fight against the dwellers of the earth and Abyss, during which plentiful binary oppositions are mentioned like God/Satan; Throne of God/Synagogue of Satan; prophet/false prophet; Christ/Antichrist; God’s community (divine followers, angels and beasts)/Satan’s community (satanic followers, angels and beasts); Heaven/Abyss; New Jerusalem (the bride)/Babylon (the whore); the ideal woman clothed with the sun and her child who are protected by God/the bad woman Jezebel and her offspring who are punished by God; people who have been "sealed" by the angel of God (the 144000 Israelite survivors)/people who have been "sealed" by the beast of Satan (other nations as temporal survivors only in the mundane world); good/evil, and others. Dramatically speaking, it is through these binary oppositions that the identities of characters, in which dualism seems to be deeply-rooted, are revealed and emphasized. In Revelation, such categorization is built upon the concept of dominance and submission where one character or group of characters dominates the other. This can be seen when the group of the divine characters conquers the Devil’s one in a decisive and already destined victory of good over evil, at the end of the world. In his play, Jarry resorts to a similar technique in producing images, but adapts these images in a way which is void of any domination-submission relationship, but rather maintain equality between the opposites. Though Jarry equates between these opposites, and makes the opposites appear similar, he goes further in clarifying his paradoxical point of view that the similarity he aims at differs from perfect similarity, "for perfect similarity is impossible" (123). He makes these oppositions co-exist and complement each other. For instance, the two spheres of the earthly and the heavenly worlds that Jarry creates won’t come "against" each other but rather co-exist in parallel possible worlds, rather than crossed worlds, "God – or my-self [Caesar Antichrist] – created all possible worlds, they co-exist, but men cannot even catch a glimpse of one" (122). Even Christ and the Antichrist according to Jarry’s depiction are two faces of one character. When the first face appears, the second disappears in constant presence-absence state, in which the Antichrist does not come "Against-Christ." Images of binary oppositions are made clear in the dialogues of many characters through relating them to each other, which, otherwise, will appear independent and even meaningless. Their power effect does not reside in isolation, but in their articulation in relation to other oppositions. For instance, in the play, the dualism in the concept of God is
Mohammad 57 introduced and depicted in relation to other pairs of binaries: "Day and night, life and death, being and life, what is called – because it is present- the truth and its opposite, alternate in the swing of the pendulum which is God the father" and "day and night, life and death, action and sleep, God is sleepy" (27). Each pair of these related binaries is made on the basis of "either-or" relation and its meaning is emphasized and made plausible when looked at in light of other oppositions. Does God sleep? A question that any reader of this depiction by Jarry may ask, and find its answer perplexing, or even impossible, in case the depiction stands alone. However, this idea about God is supported by universal facts of succeeding days and nights and the existence of twofold instances like death and life, which help readers imagine that "God is sleepy" in Jarry's inverted world, who, however, will wake up to go back to "action" in a certain time later. Also, the image through which God is depicted as a pendulum, suggests that He is the eternal time swinging between two sides or directions (or two subsequent durations), and God, as a pendulum, will not take further sides. His swinging is based on either-or eternal movement. This depiction paves the way for readers and audience to enter to the last act in which dualism is also indicated. In the fourth act, God is depicted as satisfied with what both his sons, Christ and the Antichrist, have already done on earth. Then, the role of the Antichrist ends paving the way for Christs' role to come, initiated by a scene in which God appears talking to His two sons. In light of "the pendulum" image of God the Father, the two sides or directions that God "the pendulum" takes are Christ and the Antichrist. God "the pendulum" fluctuates or shifts left and right between two subsequent epochs of Christ and his opposite. In other words, God, the eternal time, appears in transitional periods between the subsequent missions of his two sons in order to hand over the next mission on earth to one of them. During this eternal alternation of roles, mankind will witness the demise and rebirth, or coming and departure of Christ and the Antichrist, who will alternate like day alternates with night. There will be always a time for life and peace and another for death and destruction. By the same token, the idea of the subsequent appearances of Christ and the Antichrist and the binary opposition "the truth and its opposite" can be made clear in light of the Book of Revelation. In Revelation, Christ is depicted as the true prophet on earth and the Antichrist as the false one. Every eye shall see the coming of Christ from the sky, and also the false prophet who will deceive people. The Antichrist will reign the world after whom Christ will peacefully reign it for thousand years. Analogically, one may conclude that in Jarry's binary oppositions, time and men "swing" eternally between the true appearance of Christ and his false appearance, the Antichrist. So, through this game of binary
Mohammad 58 oppositions and naturally occurring phenomena, Jarry explains and suggests the concepts of polarity and dualism which govern the universe. Furthermore, unlike the apocalyptic religious representation of the Antichrist, Jarry’s Antichrist is not against Christ, but rather Christ's other face. They complete and reflect each other as a mirror. He is also not against God himself. This depiction is made clear through the representations of the plus and minus, in the dialogue between Fess and Templar7, especially in the speech of Fess through which the Antichrist is depicted as minus. Fess, which according to the play represents the Antichrist, asks The Templar, which represents God "What need have you of me? . . . you are only myself yet with something extra." The extra thing is the shaft that makes the minus plus; both of which do not come against each other because "The Plus sign will never fight against the Minus sign" (58). Furthermore, he is equated with Christ and his sufferings; he is alone, forgotten on a rock, and as isolated as Christ who suffers isolation after he has preached the world. This is why he takes no pity on Christ; he suffers the same. He is a victim exactly "Like Christ who came as a victim upon the earth," although he has power as the one that is always associated with Christ (52). Moreover, unlike the conventional religious depiction of the Antichrist, Jarry’s Antichrist is not a false prophet. Jarry does not describe him as a false Christ, but rather an original Caesar Antichrist who warns in his speech the existence of "false caesars," as exactly the case with Jesus Christ who warns people about the coming of false prophets (122). Accordingly, Caesar Antichrist in his short earthly presence, won’t come against Christ, but in his place: Christ that came before me, who is myself because I am his opposite, and in whose place I am come. My herald [Fess] spoke thus to the Templar who believed in the binary nature of principles. I and the Christ are Janus, and I have no need to turn round to show my double face. A being with some intelligence can see these two simultaneous opposites, these two Fig. 15. Christ and Antichrist woodcut by an unknown author used as an illustration and added infinities which co-exist and could not to the annotated edition of Caesar Antichrist, used for analysis, by Alastair Brotchie.o exist otherwise, in spite of the philosophers' ineradicated errors (see fig. 15). (121)
7 Fess and Templar are two heraldic characters which represent "God and the Antichrist." Fess means "minus (Antichrist)," and the Templar means "plus, by virtue of the fact that the cross was a symbol of the Knights Templar, (God)" (Jarry 53).
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………Moreover, Jarry introduces the Antichrist as a dynamic concept, "I am neither station nor static, but dynamic . . . being neither impure nor filth . . . (123). In the play, Caesar Antichrist makes a clear invitation for people to understand his dynamic nature. He says, "you shall glimpse the movement of Thought, and the work of Creation in me and by me ceaselessly renewed" (122). His dynamic nature is not only depicted in his speeches, but also in the emergence of the new character that incarnates him on the earth, Ubu: "Face to face with the convex mirror of the earth, Antichrist will become its like in soul and body" (52). Through the description of Ubu character, Jarry satirizes the Biblical apocalyptic one of the Antichrist. Physically, Ubu is depicted as a fat person who has a big belly which hinders his movement and on which the shape of a spiral line exists. The spiral shape on his belly is an umbilical cord which is related to sexual meanings for Jarry and connected with the "horns of Ammon." Ammon is the god of generation and reproduction who has a spiral horn or spiral-horned ram’s head, and is depicted with a whip and erect phallus (29). His spiral thread is "the thread of natured things" which Caesar Antichrist "rewind[s]" and illustrates as his "work" (117). Additionally, he is given a wooden stick like the whip of Ammon, and Christ's iron rod with which he is Fig. 16. Pere Ubu by Alfred Jarry in the annotated promised to rule the world and dash the nations in pieces edition of Caesar Antichrist.p (Rev. 2.27). Ironically, with his "bit of wood," Ubu rushes into the battlefield to fight for his throne against the Russians (92). Being deeply acquainted with his nature and characteristics, his wife makes fun of him as the only way to express her frustration and disapproval of his deeds, arrogance and tyranny. In her ironic reactions towards his violent deeds and fatness, she helps to add further descriptions about his personality, and enhances his image as a barbaric king. So, as a dramatic persona, he is depicted as a caricature, superficial, greedy, coward, liar, and very stupid character. He cannot even ride a horse to join his army in the war against the Russians. His silliness appears in his promise to himself of making a big wide hat in case he becomes a king, and later in his suggestion to make a wind carriage to transport his whole army easily to the battlefield (81-94). So, it is not strange to find him having a huge belly like
Mohammad 60 an empty balloon, bubble, which strengthens his wife's depiction of him as an "idiot pumpkin," and makes his external shape matches his inside character (see fig. 16). Furthermore, Ubu is introduced as a very monstrous apocalyptic character which acts like a god, taking the lives of people and choosing the appropriate ways to kill them. He is creative with nothing but violence and silliness. His ferocity is manifested in his threatening language and deeds like when he threatens his wife: "I'm going to chop you in pieces" (81). The same kind of violence appears in his merciless way of grabbing all the nobles with a hook and shoving them down the hole, cuts Bordure up and tears a Russian soldier into two (98-99). From the moment he appears on the stage, he acts like the ruthless dictator of the mundane world. First, through assassination he takes the throne of Poland, after which he shows a strong desire to make new laws and change everything according to what he calls justice. Ironically, the justice and change he aims at include changing the revenue system by casting the state's revenue men into the oven. By this, he gets more money and becomes a rich king. Nothing can satisfy his greed for money and power. He makes his people starve, leaving them struggling for a source to provide money or food, and work very hard to pay for the new tax system. So, he is called by the Poles the executioner and the Master of Revenue. Ironically, while his poor nation gets poorer, he gradually gets richer and fatter to the extent that he becomes unable to walk easily. His ferocity grows as he becomes richer, even his wife notices that saying, "What base ferocity!" (83). Ironically, at the end, he behaves as a victim who fears death asking his gods and saints to forgive his bad deeds, and help him survive, promising them to become a holy man.
Heaven and Hell
Making the opposites appear similar, Jarry's sarcasm of Biblical beliefs using direct apocalyptic images and allusions continues. The fourth act begins with Ubu's ascension into the sky and lowering a bull into a hole with which Jarry alludes to and satirizes both: the act of casting Satan into Hell and Christ's Ascension into Heaven. The first allusion to the act of casting Satan and his followers into Hell in Revelation is made through the idea of Ubu's ascension into "The black of what once was the sky" (113). Like Satan and his followers which are cast into their eternal Hell of the lake of burning sulfur after Armageddon (Rev. 20.10), Ubu and his henchmen ascend into "the black" sky, after their war against the Russians. Considering the inverted world with which the play opens with Peter standing upright and the three Christs upturned in the exact opposite to our world, "The black of what once was the sky" must be Hell in Jarry's inverted cosmos. The word "meteoric" which
Mohammad 61 indicates the fiery nature of Ubu's ascension comes in conformity with the "burning" nature of the lake of fire and brimstones of the damned in Revelation. So, for Jarry, Hell and Heaven are in the same place. Ironically, Jarry uses the term "ascension" with Ubu, the silliest and most monstrous character in the play, though in Christian case the term "ascension" is applied to Christ. In Christian tradition, this term indicates Christ's rising to heaven after his crucifixion and resurrection which can be considered a temporary death (Acts 1.3). In the same way, Ubu's ascension follows his sleep at the end of his earthly presence, which means a temporary death in Jarry's anti-Biblical world. Additionally, Christ's Ascension succeeds the accomplishment of his earthly mission of sacrificing his body and laying out the salvation plan of his people at the end of the world. Likewise, Ubu ascends into the sky after he has completed his mission as the bodily incarnation or image of Caesar Antichrist on earth. Christ's Ascension to heaven appears bodily and literal, so people can see and believe his similar bodily return to the earth (Rev. 1.7; Acts 1.9). Also, Jarry makes Ubu ascend from the ground and fades away as a meteoric body as visible and observable as Christ's Ascension into heaven. So, in Jarry's new concepts, the act of Ubu's ascension to the black sky, is the same of Christ's act of ascension into Heaven.
Redemption in the Invisible Blood of the Antichrist's Bull
Considering it in its larger framework of Taurobolium, the act of lowering a bull into a pit by the Antichrist, with which The Priests sing in Latin: "we are all as unclean thing," alludes to the purifying and sacrificial act of Christ's body and blood (114). Lowering a bull is a symbolic act of the "sacrificial slaughter of a bull" in Taurobolium, with which the fourth act is entitled. This sacrificial ritual initiates a bath in the blood of a slaughtered bull by Corybantes, who are emasculated priests, in honor of Cybele, the great Mother and goddess of nature (109). Similarly, in Revelation, the people of the earth are washed from their sins in Christ's own blood; "Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood" (Rev. 1.5). Also, they wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb; "These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7.14). Thus, redemption in Christianity is done through the blood and body of Christ who is the Lamb, as described in the Bible. So, in order to invert and satirize this Christian belief, Jarry weaves the threads of these allusions together using the bull of Taurobolium as the beast of the earth of Revelation to be lowered into a pit alive. Redemption in Jarry's text is done by the invisible blood of the bull of Caesar Antichrist,
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rather than through the blood of Christ's body, or in other words, the slaughtered lamp. This can explain why the Antichrist is depicted on the cover page of the play as a bull (see fig. 17). Caesar Antichrist's statement "Let the beast speak unto the earth" (113) as he lowers the bull into a pit dug by him, alludes to the apocalyptic verse of the beast of the earth and its opposite, the Lamb: "And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon" (Rev. 13.11). However, the irony of the sacrificial act is driven to its highest level when it is alluded to by the act of Caesar Antichrist lowering the bull into a pit through "ropes" with "the horns still visible." Given Fig. 17. Caesar Antichrist's cover page.q the fact that Jarry is a caricatures and puppets- oriented person, his use of the image of the ropes to bring about actions by his theatrical characters can immediately bring to mind the image of a bull marionette manipulated from above by its own puppeteer, the Antichrist. By this, Jarry attempts to make from the sacrificial act of the bull a funny scene which can be best performed in puppets or object theater, or even comic strips, which require the skill of the performer and the imagination of the audience to compete the final meaning of his theatrical representation. Consequently, Jarry's direct adaptation of the apocalyptic imagery and allusions in Caesar Antichrist helps him create his unique inverted apocalyptic world in which he offers his new concepts. The apocalyptic imagery plays a major role and part in weaving Jarry's plot, from its beginning, climax, till the end. Ironically, he quotes literal verses from Revelation and produces them in Latin to work as magic spells to reveal what is yet to come. Crossing all the red lines at fin de siècle France, he satirizes apocalyptic established beliefs, suggesting that Christ and the Antichrist are "Janus." The Antichrist is eternal as Christ, and like Christ he has eternal forces; if one ceases to exist, imbalance will happen to the cosmos of men. Jarry's Antichrist is incarnated in the character of Ubu which ascends rather than descends into Hell. Heaven and Hell are the same. There is no end "at all." The end is a transitional period marking the end of Christ's mission on earth and the beginning of the Antichrist's and vice versa, asserting Jarry's idea that nothing comes out of infinity (47). Also, Revelation gives Jarry the binary oppositions upon which he creates his world of equal
Mohammad 63 opposites and poles, in which as Alastair Brotchie suggests: "objects are described by its virtuality, opposites are equivalent . . . and all solutions are of course equal, being imaginary . . . [and in which] Animals and people undergo constant transformations" (vii).
Conclusion
Through direct adaptation, Wilde employs the apocalyptic imagery and allusions in both of the foreground and background of his one-act play. He concentrates on their power of transforming Salome into a "monstrous" woman and Herod into a believer. Jarry employs them as the foundations on which he depends to invent an inverted apocalyptic world. Though both of them use a plethora of apocalyptic images, allusions, and literal verses in their own distinctive ways, the literary devices upon which Wilde mainly depends on in his direct adaptation is intertextuality while Jarry depends on binary oppositions and sarcasm. Both playwrights borrow Biblical eschatological characters and make them play major roles in forming the overall apocalyptic pictures of their plays. Wilde makes Saint John a dramatic character in his play, Jokanaan, quoting almost literal apocalyptic verses to prophesize the end of the world. Also, Jarry borrows the apocalyptic character of the Antichrist and his representative the apocalyptic 666 beast of the earth and make them the protagonist and its reflection in his version of the Apocalypse. Obviously, Saint John's Revelation constitutes a major part of their dramatic outcome in which they struggle to revise, or even altogether reverse, end-of-time beliefs, aiming at fin de siècle eschatological panic. Wilde's suggests that St. John and Salome are alike in playing both the roles of the victim and the victimizer, both of which cause the occurrence of tragic ends. Similarly, Jarry concludes that Christ and the Antichrist are two faces of one person in which Jarry's Antichrist does not work "Against-Christ" but with Christ. Wilde's apocalyptic and decadent style helps him craft the play's pessimistic end after which he leaves his readers and audience with no suggested solutions, but love. He leaves his readers with a very bloody scene and a dark period to come, "Surely some terrible thing will befall" (553); "a great cloud crosses . . . The stage becomes quite dark" (554). Exactly like Wilde, the bloody scene of war and darkness mark the end of Jarry's earthly world; "Night is falling. It'll be dark in an hour" (105). Instead of the pessimistic tone that overshadows Wilde's end, Jarry's sarcastic tone is overstressed concluding that all the characters are alike in his cosmic scheme. They live just in various levels; dealing with same Hell, but different devils. The earthly people in his play suffer the persecution and war of such devils. In Jarry's overall depiction, God The Father
Mohammad 64 appears like a puppeteer releasing the strings of his most monstrous puppets over the earth, which Jarry believes they really exist and live in the earthly world of humans. So, Revelation is reproduced by Wilde in a tragic framework, and Jarry in a black comedy. Accordingly, we may claim that the fin de siècle Salome is an apocalyptic tragedy with a tragic open end, while Jarry's Caesar Antichrist is a sarcastic apocalyptic play, in which he emphasizes the endless ends ("nothing coming out of infinity"). Wilde's Salome and Jarry's Caesar Antichrist constitute two examples of fin de siècle theater in which their adaptations of apocalyptic images and allusions are direct, a method with which other fin de siècle playwrights may differ, like Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. They use an indirect way in merging the end-of-time imagery in their scripts. However, the Book of Revelation continues to be the main source of generating such apocalyptic fin de siècle drama. The following chapter studies the indirect way of employing the apocalyptic imagery in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and Chekhov's The Sea Gull.
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Chapter Four:
Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken (1899) and Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull (1895-96)
Indirect Adaptation
In their plays When We Dead Awaken and The Sea Gull, Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov join fin de siècle playwrights in contributing to the vast outpouring of apocalyptic literary works produced in the late nineteenth century. Not coincidently, their attempts take place in 1899 and 1895, both of which the Book of Revelation continues to be their main source of inspiration. Propelled by their feelings of the impending end of the century, rather than the world, they draw on apocalyptic characters and imagery to prefigure the coming new age and speak of the fin de siècle moment and mood. In her article "The Apocalyptic century," Elinor Fuchs makes a clear connection between the year of publishing Ibsen's play with the turn of the nineteenth century: "commentaries on Ibsen rarely note that When We Dead Awaken, published not coincidently in 1899 at a high moment of millenarian anticipation, takes its title from biblical apocalypse" (7). The importance of these two plays is not limited to their depictions of the fin de siècle moment and mood, but also in their attempts to suggest solutions to survive the apocalyptic end of the century. At a paradoxical moment of "millenarian anticipation" and widespread feelings of degeneration, Ibsen reflects on the fin de siècle rapid changes, and his role in contributing to the creation of the new era. This is made clear in his own words: "It has been said that I too, in our countries, have taken a lead in contributing to the creation of the new era. I believe, (…), that the age in which we live might just as well be described as an ending, and that from it something new is on the point of being born…" (qtd. in Markovska 11). In his last play When We Dead Awaken, he attempts to ring the bell of awakening inciting his characters, as well as his readers and audience, to resurrect from the dead from the Hell-like life or, in Thomas Hardy's terms, the "century's deathbed8". Life in what Ibsen depicts the "ending" age is described by Chekhov in his personal letters as "nothing but horrors squabbles, and trivialities" in which "there are no happy people to be seen" (Dulau & Company et al. 43). In the midst of such a horrifying life and fin de
8 Tomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush" is first published on December 29, 1900, under the title of "By Century's Deathbed" in which he describes the century as a "corpse ouleant" (96)
Mohammad 66 siècle worldwide havoc, The Sea Gull is written, depicting unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and a feeling of degeneration and decadence. It constitutes another fin de siècle dramatic attempt in a world suffering the struggle between the accelerating materialistic changes and the degeneration of the human spirit. Directly proportional to the rapid changes, some fin de siècle people start to feel that they live in a stagnant life changing only to the worst. They are overwhelmed by depression that has never ceased to control the overall picture of late nineteenth century. In the forward to Anton Chekhov: Selected Works in Two Volumes, Konstantin Stanislavsky makes it clear that in the period when there is a stifling stagnancy in the air, and no soil for a revolutionary upsurge, Chekhov has been able to portray the intolerable atmosphere of stagnation, ridicule, and the vulgarity of life. Preparing the mood of society, he implants new ideas, and explains the deficiencies of old life, realizing that the old life is irrevocably condemned to demolition. At the end of the nineteenth century, and beginning of the new one, he is one of the first to sense the inevitability of revolution, when it is still only in embryo, and society is continuing to wallow in extravagances. He is one of the first to sound the alarm, saying "It’s terrible! But it must be done" (xxxiv). Having been two of those who have contributed to the creation of the new era as well as the apocalyptic fin de siècle dramaturgy, Ibsen and Chekhov borrow images from Revelation and indirectly employ them in their plays. They draw on the modern meaning of the Apocalypse as a black and dark image of the world, or widespread destruction. They merge the apocalyptic imagery with more realistic daily events and characters, which appear apocalyptic, suffering a sort of depression, and trying to resurrect their past or change their lives. Instead of the direct and excessive use of the apocalyptic images and allusions, Ibsen and Chekhov condense the apocalyptic imagery into a diluted form, and exploit it in important junctures of the dramatic events making it lurk in their background. Following this way, the general understanding of the events and their development are closely related to, and cannot be separated from the apocalyptic imagery and context. The Biblical story of the end of the world helps Ibsen to create his play with an apocalyptic and pessimistic coloration in which generally the apocalyptic images and allusions are blurred and blotted out by the play's dramatic events. Also, it occupies an important and condensed part of Chekhov's The Sea Gull, after which the play focuses more on its repercussions. Indirectly, Chekhov employs the apocalyptic imagery in the play within the play to work as a disclosure of the apocalyptic future and a turning point of the later events of the play. The apocalyptic play within the play helps to reveal the deadly consequences of having an apocalyptic imagination, for which Chekhov suggests a way to survive.
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4.1. When We Dead Awaken (1899)
"Yes, I believe I’ve woken up now – at last" (Ibsen 276)
Saint John's apocalyptic story of the end of the world helps Ibsen to imbue his play and characters with an apocalyptic spirit and fin de siècle pessimism. Generally, he blurs the borrowed apocalyptic images and allusions to make them resurface in certain events or pivotal phrases and aspects of his characters to lead the overall dramatic scene into an apocalyptic trajectory and junction. Originally, he connects the dramatic events of his play to the "biblical title" of "Resurrection Day" before changing it later to When We Dead Awaken, making the original title the name of the masterpiece of his main character. Both titles imply a state of resurrection and awakening. Typically, the events of the play develop taking a form of a journey of spiritual awakening and resurrection, ending with a pessimistic end presented as a natural catastrophe of a deadly avalanche. In the journey that is set off to rise against the grave-like life either to restore the old life or to have a new one, comparisons between Ibsen's characters and the characters of Revelation are made possible. The end of the play contributes to the description of the apocalyptic spirit as one of pessimism, or, in other words, it suggests a pessimistic vision imparted with an apocalyptic mood of what is to come, in which, however, there is a sense of continuity. In her article, "Who’s Modern Now? Shaw, Joyce, and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken," Kathleen Ochshorn suggests that Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken "presents a clearly apocalyptic view of the turn of the century" (101-102). It is "written in an atmosphere of fin de siècle pessimism," at a time when the nineteenth century is, as Thomas Hardy has put it in his 1900 poem "The Darkling Thrush," a "corpse ouleant" (96). The pessimistic attitude of the characters makes them tend towards an inner understanding of the true value of their lives. Their attempt of awakening is imparted with a specific coloration of Revelation. In her article, "Apocalypse in Modern Drama," Fuchs argues that Ibsen’s fascination with spiritual evolution of human consciousness takes on the specific coloration of Revelation in his final play, with images of the Great Beast, suggested by the Bestial Ulfheim, of the redemptive "child" of apocalyptic destruction, and the rising of the dead (54). The events of the play start at a spa, when Professor Arnold Rubek, an aging and famous sculptor, and his quite young wife Maia meet Squire Ulfheim, a landowner and bear- slayer. Ulfheim invites Rubek and Maia to accompany him in getting up into the mountains, an offer which appeals to Maia more than Rubek, who plans to go somewhere else. After that, they meet "a strange lady" who comes to the hotel after she has been in a mental
Mohammad 68 hospital, followed by a silent nun. Rubek recognizes her as his previous model of sculpting and masterpiece, Madam de Sattoff or Irena. Talking to him, Irena starts to blame him for ruining her life, stealing her soul and making her suffer the unrequited love she has felt for him. In order to regain his creative power as an artist, which he lately discovers that he has lost since Irena left him, and fulfill Irena's past wish in taking her to a place where she can stand in the light and "glittering glory," he invites her to take her up to a nearby mountain. At the peak of the mountain, they meet Ulfheim and Maia, who to avoid an imminent storm, decide to go down the mountain. On the contrary, the other couple, Rubek and Irena, continues their way up to the peak where they die and are buried under the snow of a great avalanche. The play ends with the nun making the sign of the cross in the air, after which the sound of Maia singing a "triumphant song" is heard from lower down the mountain.
4.1.1. The Sanatorium of the Living Dead
The play opens with themes that describe the spirit of the late nineteenth century, and the problems besetting the people of that transitional time. The problems touch upon the feeling of insecurity, lack of communication, pointlessness, confinement, and isolation, all of which reflect the difficulty to accommodate oneself to the radical changes of that time. Therefore, the characters are depicted as apocalyptic and sick ones prone to an epidemic deterioration to the worst. The places in which the characters are introduced, which are a watering-place, spa and sanatorium, suggest that the characters are patients seeking recovery. Their existence in such health-recovery places reflects the profundity of the problems besieging the characters, which contributes to the overall apocalyptic situation into which they have descended. This suggests that all the characters are split in some way, and in them, as Lisbeth P. Waerp asserts, there is a fin de siècle negative attitude, especially because the events are located at places of "sickness and recovery" (qtd. in Markovska 22).
The Lord and the Beast
In the sanatorium, Ibsen introduces a character of creative powers embodied in Professor Arnold Rubek who is an elderly self-centered man and famous sculptor. As a sculptor, his masterpiece is called "Resurrection Day," which plays an important role in contributing to the description of Rubek's life and character as apocalyptic. Though he has achieved great international fame, yet he is not "entirely happy." Since he left his model Irena, or the source of his inspiration, as he calls her, he has taken the decision to live a materialistic life. Since then, his creative power has diminished, and, gradually, his work on
Mohammad 69 art has become as a habit producing "equivocal works of art" in order to satisfy the taste of the market, and thereby sell more products to the "worthy celebrities" who "come . . . and pay for . . . Almost their 'weight in gold.'" This materialistic life provides him with everything, yet he feels happy "outwardly," not deep inside, and suffers sleepless nights (229-232). He gets married to a considerably younger woman, Maia, and considers their marriage just "an agreement" with which he and Maia "should marry." Staying abroad, he realizes that he has "become so far removed from this- this life . . . at home" (224). The lack of communication and feeling of isolation are manifested clearly in his attitude towards the people around him, who, including his wife Maia, have changed, and whose change does not make them "more likable" to him: MAIA. [looking at him] Oh? So you think it's I who've changed? PROFFESOR RUBEK. Yes Maia, I do. MAIA. Only me? Not the people back here? PROFFESOR RUBEK. Oh yes, they've changed too – a little. And it hasn't made them any more likeable; that I must admit. (226) He feels that the world is irrational, absurd and meaningless, thinking that "there are always two men" who talk "about nothing at all," or mumble to each other "without expression or meaning" (226). Meeting Irena after a long time constitutes a turning point in Rubek's life. When he meets her, a great awakening to his miserable life occurs to him. He becomes conscious of the deficiencies of his life with Maia, and regrets his marriage, and the fact that he has lost his creative power as an artist. He undergoes a spiritual resurrection that starts at the end of the first act with the word "rising." This word marks not only his physical movement of rising, but also his spiritual awakening of the true value of his life, an unfolding of what his life is all about. In the second act, he admits his awakening overtly: PROFFESOR RUBEK. . . . Maia – we artists do. For example, I’ve lived through a whole lifetime in the few years that you and I have known each other. I’ve come to realize that it isn’t in me to find happiness in idle pleasure, life doesn’t go like that for me and my kind. I must keep on working- creating work after work- till the day I die… that is why I can’t go on with you any longer. . . MAIA [calmly]. Does that mean, in plain words, that you’ve got tired of me? PROFFESOR RUBEK [violently]. Yes, that’s what it means. I’ve grown tired of this life with you- unbearably tired and slack and irritable. Now you
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know, [controlling himself] Oh, I know perfectly well that that’s an ugly, cruel way to talk to you, and freely admit that you’re not to blame for it. It is simply and solely that I have suffered a new upheaval- an awakening to what my life really means. (261) Like a dead man rising from his tomb, Rubek rises from his degenerated life realizing that his "kind" as an artist must continue his life in creating and sculpting, a life that cannot be achieved without his source of inspiration Irena. He discovers that what he calls his "lifetime" with Maia is spent in vain, and, thereby, strives again to restore his old days and achieve reunion with his model, Irena. On the other hand, Ibsen also introduces to the sanatorium a destructive character embodied in Squire Ulfheim, which transforms at the end into a savior, playing an important role in the course of the events. He is known as the "bear-slayer," or simply the hunter, who wears a shooting jacket, and comes annually to the hotel when he wants to go to his "hunting- grounds." He is depicted as a beast, whose bestial characteristics can be found in his character, behavior, and physical movement, as some words describe him "pouncing and growling." Even though he hunts bears for choice, yet he also hunts anything which comes into his way like "eagles, wolves, women, elk, reindeer- so long as it’s fresh and lively and full blooded" (237). His bestial image is also created by the brutal language and the bloodthirsty words in his speech, as "fresh bones," "raw and reeking," "bloody," "I…’ll come and raise hell," and "hell and damnation." In particular, these last two words are repeated frequently in his speech, as when he first meets Rubek and Maia, he says to them "hell and damnation" (237). He likes flesh and bloody preys, and feeds himself on the blood of other people. He considers the people around him "half-dead" (236), and to him death is the best treatment for sick ones. So, when his best friends feel sick, he thinks that it is his duty to relieve their pain by taking their lives and shooting them. His best friends are dogs or "poor devils," as he calls them (339). This description not only gives a clue about his friends, but also assures his animal traits and devilish characteristics. Fuchs connects Ulfheim’s bestial image with the image of the beast of the earth of The Book of Revelation. In her article, "The Apocalyptic Ibsen: When We Dead Awaken," Fuchs specifies some Biblical verses to reveal the close relationship between Ulfheim and the beast of the earth: "Then I saw another beast, coming up out of the earth, … he deceived the inhabitants of the earth… He also forced everyone… to receive a mark [the mark of the beast]…" (Rev. 13.11-16). To make this connection clear, she discusses it in light of other verses from Daniel (396-399). These verses depict four great beasts; one of them is like a
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bear who is asked to "Arise," and "devour much flesh" (Dan. 7. 3-7) 9. Her comparison which connects Ulfheim to the beast of the earth of Revelation, makes Ulfheim appear similar to Ubu, in Jarry's Caesar Antichrist, which is also connected to the beast of the earth. They are similar in having a "chthonic"10 spirit, violence traits and an inclination to kill and destroy, as well as their attachment to the earth. Ulfheim is introduced as a landowner and Ubu as an earthly reflection of the Antichrist, playing his role in the earthly world. Basically, the employment of Ulfheim's bestial image plays an important role to be compared to Rubek's, though they have different types of powers, the powers of creation and destruction. Such a categorization or differentiation is evident in Rubek's own expressions as to say "my kind" and "we artists" who "must keep on working- creating work" (261). In an attempt to kill the perfect image of the artist, Ulfheim compares and equates himself with Rubek many times, causing the idealistic image of Rubek to be destroyed. In his dialogue with Maia and Rubek, Ulfheim draws an analogy between himself as a bear-slayer and Rubek as a sculptor, both of whom use the same tool, or "hard material," in the processes of killing and creating. Ulfheim uses a knife to kill his victim, and wrestles with its sinews, exactly as the sculptor uses a knife or graver and wrestles with the blocks of marble to create something new: ULFHEIM. … You know madam [Maia], your husband and I both work with hard materials. I expect he wrestles with his blocks of marble, and I wrestle with the tense quivering sinews of my bears. And we both get the better of our material in the end – we subdue it and master it. We don’t give up till we’ve conquered it, however much it resists us. PROFESSOR RUBEK. [thoughtfully] There’s a great deal of truth in what you say. ULFHEIM. Yes because I’m sure the stone has something to fight for, too. It’s dead, and it’ll resist with might and main rather than let itself be
9 The verses are "And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it. And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh. After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns" (Daniel 7.3-7). 10 "Chthonic" is a term used by Trausti Olfasson in his book Ibsen's Theater of Ritualistic Visions: An Interdisciplinary Study of Ten Plays. It means beneath the earth and is related to the deities or spirits of the underworld, especially in relation to Greek Religion.
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hammered into life. Just like a bear when someone comes and prods it out of its lair. (237-238) Also, Maia equates the "lord" with the beast, or the creator with the killer, when she describes both Rubek and Ulfheim as ugly: MAIA. . . . And how ugly he [Ulfheim] is! . . . Ugly – ugly! Ugh! PROFESSOR RUBEK. Is that why you’re so glad to be going off into the wilds with him? MAIA [curtly]. I don’t know. [Turning towards him] You’re ugly too, Rubek. (254) When Rubek considers such an ugliness as something natural because of getting old, Maia rejects the idea, and corrects him again. She clarifies that she does not mean "that sort of Ugliness at all," but rather she has felt long ago that Rubek is as ugly as Ulfheim and ―little by little, an evil look‖ has come into his eyes (254). Analogically, the processes of killing and sculpting are made similar in hammering an object or creature either into death or life, using the same hard materials, subduing and mastering the victim and getting the better of it. This analogy makes Ulfheim's process of killing creatures imply a state of sculpting and recreating in which he hammers his living being into a dead corpse, like Rubek's statues. Also, Rubek's process of creating a work of art after hammering dead stones into life, using the same tool which Ulfheim uses in order to kill, and getting the better of it for his sculpture, appears as the process of killing. Subduing and mastering their animate or inanimate creatures suggest that both Rubek and Ulfheim have powers of domination which they exert on their creatures. Such powers of domination, killing, creating, recreating, and making wonders are usually related to God, Christ and the devil, or his beast. Rubek considers himself the artist who must keep on creating and agrees with Ulfheim's description of subduing and mastering in the process of sculpting. This is exactly what Rubek does with Irena; he exerts similar powers on Irena who always blames Rubek for ruining her life. This suggests that as Ulfheim, Rubek is a killer and like a god he subdues and masters his model who calls him "my lord." Like Ulfheim's attempt to equate himself with Rubek in having the same interest in their subdued creatures, in an earlier work of Christopher Marlowe Dr. Faustus, Lucifer attempts to equate himself with Christ. In Lucifer's reply to Faustus's calling for Christ to save his distressed soul, he emphasizes that both of them have the same interest in people, "Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is just; There's none but I have interest in the same" (85 –p.27 Act II, Scene ii). This "same interest" seems "ugly" in both the "lord" Rubek and the bestial Ulfheim in Maia's description.
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Consequently, the powers of creating and killing in When We Dead Awaken are depicted as powers of cruel abuse and destruction in which Irena and Maia are abused. In connection with Revelation, Ibsen's idea of hammering something into something new, either by killing or creating, converges with the main apocalyptic concept of hitting the world, transforming it into a new peaceful one by killing and destroying. In other words, in this intrinsic principle of the religious end-of-time story, God destroys the earth, and hammers and kills its creatures in order to recreate "the better" of them into a new world. Rubek also uses this way, to destroy or kill in order to recreate something anew, by destroying blocks of marble and/or killing Irena spiritually. Being his model, he hammers and kills her soul in order to recreate the better of it in his new achievement, the sculpture of the "Resurrection Day." Typically, Irena always repeats that she is dead, and in her "lifetime has sacrificed her blood and life for her lord," who is Rubek, in order to create his masterpiece. This principle also can be applicable to the name of the masterpiece "Resurrection Day" because, as a process, resurrection is achieved only after the death of people, from whom Jesus is the first to resurrect. Resurrecting the dead and recreating the earth of the living beings through death and destruction are an integral part in God's process of recreating His new world, the New Jerusalem. Likewise, Ibsen introduces his readers and audience with the same idea that in creating Rubek's masterpiece by hammering something dead or alive into something else, hurts, kills and destroys stones as well as Irena. The new world is God's masterpiece. Likewise, "Resurestion Day" is Rubek's masterpiece. In Revelation, the beast of the earth, who is commonly held as the antichrist, works as an anti-artist, destroying the world of humans which is created by God. In relation to this image, one may consider Ulfheim as an anti-artist as he enters Rubek's life bringing chaos to it, and whose philosophy differs completely from that of Rubek. With his ideas of hunting, he convinces Maia to come with him as the beast of Revelation is depicted convincing and deceiving God's people in Revelation. Consequently, Ibsen introduces the images of the protagonist, the sculptor, as the creator and the antagonist, the hunter, as the beast who both use the same tool in hunting and sculpting, or in killing and creating. These representations bring to the mind other similar apocalyptic images of the artist and anti-artist, Lord and beast, the creator and killer. However, Ibsen does not use the two juxtaposed images of Rubek and Ulfheim which suggest religious connotations of God and the beast for "perfect similarity," for he makes the creator in his play look more uglier and violent than the beast. In other words, the bear-slayer Ulfheim appears somehow less violent than the creative artist Rubek who destroys both Irena
Mohammad 74 and Maia's lives. Ulfheim kills to relieve his "half-dead" friends from their sickness while Rubek destroys Irena's soul and steals it to hammer it into a sculpture. This is similar to Jarry's depiction of the violence of Ubu and his bear supper which, however great it is, does not match the cruelty of God's supper in Revelation. This also recalls Tina Pippin's thought, presented in her book Apocalyptic Bodies, that between the monsters of the Apocalypse perhaps God therein is the most monstrous (Pippen xi).
The Woman Who Rides the Beast and "the Woman Clothed with Sun"
The other two main characters are females, Maia and Irena, who are used by the sculptor as well as the bear-slayer, one of them as a prey and the other as a model who has been killed spiritually as if she is a prey too. Like Rubek and Ulfheim characters which are inspired by Revelation's characters of the Lord and the beast, Ibsen's female characters are also inspired by the apocalyptic characters of the great Babylon and the woman clothed with the sun both of whom are victims, and can be compared to Maia and Irena. This comparison is made more possible when it is considered in relation to the apocalyptic images of Rubek and Ulfheim's as the creator and the beast of the earth, and in light of the overall apocalyptic trajectory of the play. Maia is Rubek’s wife, a young woman with a "lively face." She accompanies Rubek in his journey because he has promised her "to show her the glory of the world" in the peaks of the mountains, or "the Arctic." However, she always wonders how life would be down in the country, because she likes life, and prefers to live it in noisy places. She is the first character in the play who draws the attention to the "overpowering quietness" surrounding the place, and that there is something dead about it. She is also the first to notice the great changes of the world around her, as she says, "Who would have thought that everything here at home could have changed so dreadfully? And in such a short time!" (225). Moreover, she differs in her interests from Rubek’s ones, as she does not care about art and the ideals of the artist. At the end, as the other characters, she is awakened, and decides to change her life as well as the plan of the journey she sets off for with Rubek by taking another direction with Ulfheim. Changing her direction and life highlights a defeat and deficiency in Rubek's perspective of marriage and life. After five years of marriage, Maia is awakened to the fact of the huge gap between her and her husband, who considers her merely a child, and their marriage just "an agreement." She also discovers that Rubek is not the man who keeps his promises. She is awakened to the fact that he is not serious about her, as he himself admits
Mohammad 75 that he has promised her as he usually promises children to convince them to accompany him in his tours, and his promise to her is just a "figure of speech." She finally realizes that Rubek will neither show her the glory of the world, nor take her up to the mountains, as he promised. She discovers that she is merely a participant in his "game," as well as she is different, and has other interests more than being "the Frau Professor." She has never been a "mountaineer," as Rubek claims, and used to think of her in the past. After her awakening, she becomes able to see the deficiencies in her life with Rubek, and says to him, "I won’t bore you any longer," and "turns the pages" of the papers which are in her hands while she is talking to him (231). By turning the pages of the past, she changes her direction, as well as life, and finally declares that she wants to accompany Ulfheim, to see if his stories about hunting are true or not. She puts on hunting clothes, and sets off for an adventure clarifying her aim that she is "going to live-for a change," and sings "triumphantly," "I am free, I am free, I am free! No longer in prison I’ll be," (276). No apocalyptic female character can be compared and in close connection to the character of Maia more than the Great Babylon, or the woman who rides the beast of the seven heads. Maia in her lively face, love and longing for life and its pleasures resembles Babylon in Revelation. Babylon is known for her richness, fertility, and full enjoyment of the materialistic life and its pleasures, and, as a city, it entices all kings, workers and traders to come to it. Maia implies fertility as Babylon. The name "Maia" is the name of the Roman goddess, "mountain Maia," who is identified with Earth, and the "'regenerative fertility of the earth in spring'" (Olafsson 288). Her crucial choice to enjoy life, that is offered by Ulfheim if they go down to the depths, where she wants to discover what the world is about, represents her inclination to enjoy worldly pleasures. At the end, she descends with Ulfheim to the depths. The way she hangs on him, or "clinging to" Ulfheim who "begins the descent" down the mountain (287), brings to the mind the apocalyptic image of Babylon, the woman who rides the beast. Her mundane and lively traits, as well as her apocalyptic image, can be contrasted to the other woman in the play Irena. They both constitute two juxtaposed images of a lively and lifeless examples of women. Quite the opposite of Maia's lively image, Irena is first depicted as a white figure who, like a ghost, appears to Rubek who asks the manager the day after about her. She is depicted as a spiritually dead woman, and the image of her death is repeated all over the text. At the very beginning, a description given about her suggests that she is a corpse who has "vacant expressionless eyes" and is now in a "grave." When Rubek at first avoids her attempt to evoke the memories of the past, she insists that the past is something beyond her grave now
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(242). Her character functions as the ghost of the past for Rubek which triggers his stream of consciousness. In the past, she used to be Rubek’s model for his sculpture, "Resurrection Day," and serves him with her "soul" and "body." She thinks that she has laid at his feet "the greatest sacrifice of all," for she has "obliterated" herself forever (266). In her "lifetime," as she puts it, she has stripped herself completely, and stood there for Rubek dedicating herself to his work so ardently, with such a "deep holy joy," the work for which they used to meet each morning "as if for an act of worship" (266-267). As a result, she thinks of Rubek as her "lord and master" whom she followed in the past, as well as later on when she met him again in the hotel overlooking all the sufferings that she endured while she stood naked in front of him, longing for a sexual relationship, or the basic needs of life. Considering him her savior, she follows him again ignoring all his past unfulfilled promises to show her the light and the glory of the world, living in the hope of making his renewed promises to her come true. Ironically, Rubek never makes any advance to her, because he finds in her the purest woman to imitate in his sculpture, and thereby uses her as his model for the "Resurrection Day." He believes that she must stay untouched, and thereby leaves her struggling with her femininity, burning inside to the point of death. He thinks of her only as a model, not as a woman. No matter how painful the situation is for Irena, she considers that the sculpture, inspired by her, is their child, and he, in a way or another, emphasizes this idea by saying that Irena looks like the "embodiment of resurrection" (262). In its broader religious connotation, this story alludes to God and the holy Lady, Virgin Marry, as well as her child Jesus Christ, who is considered as the son of God conceived in the womb of the untouched Virgin Marry. Nevertheless, at the end, Rubek discovers his huge mistake, and that he has wasted his and Irena's lives in vain. He discovers how blind he has been since he set the dead clay image, the sculpture, above the joy of living and of loving (289). Consequently, Irena blames her "lord," Rubek, for their death, and attempts to avenge herself, because he does not give her the passion and love she longs for, and leaves her in darkness as a "living statue." She discovers that she has been just an "episode" in his life, and a tool, or marionette whose some strings of life have been cut, as Rubek remarks. She also blames him for the death of their child, "Resurrection Day," which she considers her stillborn baby who has been put to death by his father, Rubek, in a museum or grave, as she calls it. As her lifetime’s sufferings increase causing her confinement and spiritual breakdown, she draws the knife, the same kind of hard materials or tools by which Rubek has hammered her spirit, or killed her spiritually, to thrust it into his back. However, the moment she draws her knife,
Mohammad 77 she discovers with horror that he is dead already, the fact that Rubek does not know, but awakened to, as her, lately (288). In its apocalyptic framework, the character of Irena can be seen in light of the story of "the woman clothed with sun" of The Book of Revelation. Her story is an adapted version of the story of Virgin Mary. She appears in the midst of end-of-time events to give birth to a child. Then the child is snatched up by the Lord, and the woman for her safety is taken to a place where she is kept away from the world, where no one can reach or approach her. Her exile is predetermined by God for her to avoid the dragon who has the same interest in the baby. Likewise Irena considers that she is the mother of a child whose father is the "lord and master" Rubek without getting into any sexual relationship during their "acts of worship." Her lord and master wants the baby, because it is his masterpiece, like God who wants the baby of "the woman clothed with the sun." The close similarity between the two stories is not only limited to the baby, but also to the same fate and life the two women have. The predetermined exile of "the woman clothed with the sun" is like Irena's spiritual exile and "obliteration" during which she has spent her life worshiping her lord, sacrificing her life for him. As a place, the exile of "the woman clothed with sun" takes place in the desert while Irena's expulsion is in a grave where no one can reach or hear her shrieks, after giving birth to the child whose name is "Resurrection Day": IRENA. . . . For many years I was dead. They came and bound me – they laced my arms together behind my back, and lowered me into the tomb, with iron bars over the opening, and padded walls . . . so that no one on the earth overhead should hear the shrikes from the tomb. But now, I’m beginning to rise – a little- from the dead . . . (244) In spite of her confinement, spiritual death, grave and sufferings, she still has hope to rise from her grave and see the sunrise at the peak of the mountain. In other words, she wants to be covered or "clothed with" the sun." The woman of Revelation is given wings of a great eagle, so that she can fly to a place prepared for her (Rev 12. 14). Likewise, Irena is promised by her lord Arnold Rubek whose first name implies "the one who enjoys the power of an eagle," to be taken up to the peak of the mountain (Olfasson 276). However, the eagle is a bird of prey, an idea which, metaphorically, suggests that Irena, like a prey, will be between the claws of the eagle carrying her up to the peak of the mountain. Interestingly, there is a close connection and similarity between the two female characters, Irena and Salome. One of them appears as a prey and the other as a victim transformed into a monster. Irena's depiction of herself as a dead woman who has been put in
Mohammad 78 a grave, from which she begins to rise, brings to mind the depiction of Salome given by The Page of Herodias. At the very beginning, he describes Salome saying, "She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. You would fancy she was looking for dead things" (Wilde 531). Salome is rejected by Jokanaan, who considers himself the chosen by the Lord and the messenger of God, also the "lord" Rubek rejects to make any advance to Irena, making her die in her love and burning desire. Such a reluctance or deprivation of the basic necessities of life transforms these two women into killers. Unlike her name which implies peace, Irena, at a given moment, draws her knife to avenge her miseries and kills Rubek, but, at the last moment, she has discovered that she cannot kill somebody who is dead already (270). Also, Salome when she is given the chance to avenge her miseries caused by Jokanaan, she asks, without hesitation, for the head of Jokanaan to be struck by a sword, the head of the man who deprives her of the intrinsic or basic needs of life, love and sexual relationship. However cruel the way of avenging themselves appears, Irena and Salome continue to love those who hammer their souls, till the last possible moments in their lives, in which they share the same tragic end. Salome is crushed beneath the shields of soldiers, and Irena is killed by the avalanche, and buried under the snow.
4.1.2. The Day of Resurrection
The end of the play, like the characters of When We Dead Awaken which are inspired by the Book of Revelation, is also inspired by and constructed on the basis of apocalyptic imagery and scenery. The apocalyptic imagery helps Ibsen reflect his attitude towards and conception of the fin de siècle and post-fin de siècle hour. He depicts the end as a natural disaster preceded by harbingers, which foreshadow its advent. Before climbing the mountain, Ulfheim draws Rubek’s attention to an imminent storm: ULFHEIM. . . . see the storm is almost on us? Listen to those gusts of wind! PROFESSOR RUBEK. [listening] They sound like the prelude to the resurrection day. ULFHEIM. They’re squalls blowing from the peaks, man! Just look how the clouds are billowing down- soon they’ll be all round us like a winding- sheet (my italics)! (286) A considerable part of Saint John's Revelation is dedicated to storms as an integral part of the cosmic collapse and radical changes of God's end-of-time plan: "there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail" (Rev. 11.19). The various cosmic storms are preluded and foretold from the very beginning of Revelation through the image of
Mohammad 79 the clouds surrounding the Advent of Christ, implying the coming catastrophes of the end of the world (Rev. 1.7). Similarly, the apocalyptic scenery of the end of the play is enriched with the dramatic effects of voices, and thundering, as well as "the clouds billowing down [the mountain] like a winding-sheet," to work as harbingers of the coming deadly storm and avalanche. As do they in Revelation, these dramatic effects of apocalyptic harbingers precede, what Rubek calls it, "the day of resurrection," or the day of the great change. In addition to the storm, clouds and thunder, the image of the blowing wind is also inspired by Revelation. In the play, it is made apt for two readings, revealing two ways of thinking, apocalyptic and anti-apocalyptic. The first way is in Rubek's religious interpretation of the "gusts of wind" as a "sound like the prelude to the resurrection day" and the second is in Ulfheim's natural/secular interpretation of the wind as just "squalls blowing from the peaks." Of course, the gusts of wind can be a natural harbinger of any storm, but here also one can immediately connect the image to the apocalyptic context which Rubek points to in his speech. Rubek's words allude to the "mighty wind" of Revelation which precedes the day of resurrection: "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind" (Rev. 6.13). By this, Ibsen does not only draw on the apocalyptic imagery to compose the end of the play, and enrich its scenery with an apocalyptic landscape, but also introduce two possible ways of interpreting any notable change or phenomenon. He introduces his readers and audience to two juxtaposed distinctive interpretations given by Rubek and Ulfheim, which provide his readers with more than one possibility in interpreting any signs of great upheavals. In other words, these two contradicting views reveal that as there are people who are prone to think of any great change, or its harbingers, as the end of the world, or Doomsday, others refuse this apocalyptic thinking, and consider any upheaval a temporal and natural change insisting on continuity. Furthermore, there is a close similarity between the idea of ascending the mountain by the four characters in When We Dead Awaken and the ascendance of Saint John through the mountain of the end of the world. In the play, in the eye of the artist, Rubek, climbing the mountain with his model, Irena, is because they want to see the glory of the world, but in the eye of the hunter, Ulfheim, it is because he and Maia want to embark on an adventure to discover the world. Similarly, at the end of Revelation, John is taken up to a high mountain to see the glory of the new world (New Jerusalem), "And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City . . . It shone with glory of God . . ." (Rev. 21.10-11). Nevertheless, no glory or sunrise is seen from the mountain of When We Dead Awaken, but an avalanche sliding down covering the mountain with snow.
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As the avalanche starts to slide down the mountain, the couples confront two choices either to continue to the peak and die, or go down the mountain to survive. Taking two contrasted directions by the couples, two opposite poles are presented. These two poles suggest two worlds for which the couples seek, for their salvation, the celestial and the mundane worlds. Each couple chooses the direction which speaks to its aspirations and perspectives of life. Irena and Rubek think of the heights as a place of spiritual salvation, and decide to climb up to the topmost peak to see the light. Maia and Ulfheim, as they lived, consider the depths, down the mountain, the place of their salvation, a state, as depicted by Maia, of being in "a whole skin." However, at the end, the direction taken by Rubek and Irena brings nothing but death whereas that of Ulfheim and Maia provides a chance of continuity and prolonged life. By this direction, Maia thinks that she becomes free from the inevitable death in her life with Rubek. The only religious figure in the play is the silent nun who proves failure in helping Rubek and Irena when she stretches her arms to help them. Ironically, while, for the first time, the sound of the silent nun saying, "pax vobiscum!" ("peace be upon you") is heard from lower down the mountain, as she makes a sign of the cross in the air, the play ends with Maia's sound floating up, singing her "triumphant song" of liberation: I am free, I am free, I am free! No longer in prison I’ll be, I am free as a bird, I am free! Yes, I believe I’ve woken up now – at last! (276) At this crucial moment, a reversal of roles happens to Rubek and Ulfheim. Ulfheim, the killer and bear-slayer, becomes the savoir and saves Maia whereas Rubek, the creative artist who is expected to hammer his materials into life, leads Irena to her death. At the end, Ulfheim becomes a protective character, who risks his life twice when he first suggests that he can take Maia down the mountain then come back to take the rest. Though Maia knows that she perhaps is Ulfheim's next prey whom she describes earlier as "ugly," but she is willing to give herself to him rather than to stay with Rubek and be another Irena. Her life with Rubek is uglier than she thinks it will be with Ulfheim, with whom she finds a ray of hope to survive in getting down the mountain, more than climbing up to the peak to see the glory of the world. On the other hand, Irena is killed by the avalanche when she decides to stay with Rubek with whom she continues climbing the mountain. If Maia does not awaken to that and chooses to live down the mountain with the beast, Ulfheim, no matter how ugly her life will be with him, she could be another corpse buried under the snow of the
Mohammad 81 catastrophic storm and the avalanche. Maia and Ulfheim's awakening to the true value of their lives and the possibility of surviving the coming storm, saves their souls and marks the end of the play with the possibility of life and continuity. Metaphorically, the snow of the avalanche can be read as a new white page upon which a new phase can be written, as well as a coffin where death is implied, two cases in which the survival is for the fittest. The end of the play does not introduce the end of the world literally, but rather a radical change, taking place in a transitional period of time in the characters' lives. With Maia's "triumphant song," continuity is implied, and no eternal end is emphasized. However, this does not suggest that Ibsen is optimistic concerning the coming era. Though Maia sings triumphantly "I am free," yet the idea that the new age will be for those who are like Ulfheim and his kind, which are described as ugly as Rubek and his kind in Maia's speech, makes the reader of When We Dead Awaken hesitate to draw happy endings or optimistic conclusions. Ibsen does not give hope of a better life, which might be controlled by killers and slayers or the like, but of the ability to continue however bad or good the situation will be. His attitude of what is to come cannot be perceived by either-or possibilities of hope and despair, for he is in between; his pessimism is veiled by a glimmer of hope and vice versa. In other words, the end of the play implies neither final salvation nor an eternal end of sufferings, but the ability of men's survival, continuity, persistence, awakening and resurrection which can happen at any time in their lives. Trausti Olfasson links the imagery of the end of the play with "the Hebrew-Christian idea of the last judgment," in a way that is rooted in Gnostic principles of binary oppositions. He considers that the idea of resurrection can happen as a spiritual transformation which "takes place already in life, and not only at the moment of death, or ultimately on the Last Day." He concludes that Ibsen represents a view that "resurrection can happen any time" (290), and that the transition happens into a new phase rather than as a complete solution, in which "contrasting energies will never stop their flow, and again seek opposite poles" (289), like the two different directions which have been taken by the characters. Consequently, as the nineteenth century comes to an end, Ibsen uses apocalyptic images to express his pessimistic vision of the coming new century. He introduces new insights into the day of resurrection, the end of the world, and the new coming era. He depicts the coming new age as a period of change. The apocalyptic allusions to the Lord and the beast of the earth in Revelation which Ibsen draws on contribute to the descriptions of his characters Rubek and Ulfheim who are, eventually, equated in being both depicted as "ugly." They undergo a reversal of roles at the end in which Ulfheim appears the savior and Rubek
Mohammad 82 the killer. In a parallel manner, the images of Rubek as the lord and Ulfheim as the beast bring to mind other apocalyptic images of Irena and Maia as the apocalyptic women of Babylon, the woman who rides the beast, and "the woman clothed with sun." Ibsen does not draw on the apocalyptic imagery indirectly to emphasize the apocalyptic anticipations of the end of the world at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, he introduces a natural disaster of a storm, which, however, will end sooner or later. He does not depict the fin de siècle moment as the only and last possible moment in the late nineteenth century people's lives, but rather a critical moment as any critical moments which come and pass, in one's life. He gives two readings of any disaster to his readers, which may strike the earth. Some of the readers find their interpretation applicable to Rubek's religious apocalyptic one and others find in Ulfheim's secular interpretation a repetition of their own. Even those who think that disasters can be read in the two ways together can relate themselves to the end of Ibsen's play. Though the tone of pessimism overshadows the end, yet the sound of life and continuity is heard. He focuses on the sound of life and continuity in Maia's repeated song without erasing the possibility of degeneration and decay that people may feel surrounding them at any time. He depicts the fin de siècle moment and mood in its complexities, leaving his readers alone to draw their own conclusions. He gives them the chance to reflect on the consequences of two possible opposite directions of death and survival, in which even the idea of survival and advancement is not introduced as a complete change into an eternal bliss. Like Ibsen, Chekhov in his play The Sea Gull conveys his vision of the coming era, and warns his readers and audience against the apocalyptic reality they live in, suggesting a way to survive.
4.2. The Sea Gull (1895-96)
"I keep on walking and I think . . . the important
thing is . . . knowing how to endure . . . then I'm
no longer afraid of life" (Chekhov 49).
At the end of the nineteenth century, "apocalyptic sensibility" has cultivated into the sense of an impending apocalypse that has marked the Russian society, since the 1890s to 1917. Anticipations of the end of the world are circulated in both intellectual and religious societies, and even Marxist utopians. This fin de siècle apocalyptic context has produced a vast outpouring of eschatological literary works like poems, novels and plays (Gerould 47). Typical of the spirit and mood of the people not only in Russia, but also in the world, in his play The Sea Gull, Chekhov depicts the tragedies, fears, and horrors of his time. He borrows
Mohammad 83 the apocalyptic imagery from the Book of Revelation and employs it in his play. His style of employing the apocalyptic images and allusions is indirect. He uses the technique of the play within a play to reveal the apocalypse that is felt in a rotten society, and that destruction is not necessarily a prerequisite for the creation of a better world. Accordingly, he creates the society of the lake which suffers corruption, poverty, decadence, antiquated theatrical forms, and stagnancy, and introduces to it the character of Treplyov who functions as an apocalyptic writer who senses the decadence of the world of the lake and its society. His depiction of Treplyov's character illustrates how the apocalyptic imagery may prove destructive to those who are obsessed with it. Though after the play within the play the apocalyptic imagery does not appear clearly, yet its influence is manifested in the thoughts, feelings and behavior of Treplyov who is dominated and preoccupied with apocalyptic ideas, inclinations and traits.
4.2.1. Ashes of Dreams in a Hell-like Life
Though it is described by Chekhov as a comedy, The Sea Gull opens with melancholic characters which suffer various cases of poverty, unrequited love, shattered dreams, despair, and deterioration. They suffer the chasm between their hopes and dreams and the naked reality. These circumstances aggrandize the apocalyptic trajectory of the events of the play which underscores an essential question to which the characters react in different ways; what are the choices that can be made when all one's dreams are divested, dashed or killed like the seagull? The characters make different choices to face the hell they descend to. Some characters can be described as apocalyptic and unchangeable, as if they were living corpses. Others attempt to change their lives searching for a glimmer of light to enlighten their ways which have been plunged into darkness. Also, there are the controlling characters which constitute the source of miseries and destruction. However, all of them contribute to the overall apocalyptic picture of the play acting like people Fig. 18. Descent into Hell by Rogier Van Der Weyden.r colliding into each other while they are hurled
down into the abyss of their miseries (see fig. 18).
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………Apocalyptic Characters: Medvedenko, Masha and Sorin
The play opens with melancholy, darkness, nightmares and an expectation of an imminent storm which directly put readers and audience in the fin de siècle mood and apocalyptic trend. "Why is it you always wear black? (5)" A question asked by Medvedenko, a schoolteacher, to which Masha, a daughter of a retired army lieutenant, answers: "Because I'm in mourning for my life." No more than a few lines then Masha comments again: "It's so muggy. There will be a thunderstorm tonight." Then, Sorin, an old man, gets an awful fright and reveals his inner and utmost despair of the ugly life and years he lives: "I feel as if I'm going through a nightmare," (6). Thus, from the very beginning, these characters draw an apocalyptic and gloomy image of their lives which suggests sorrows, disappointments and tragedies. Each one of them has his own melancholic story to tell and a cause for serious agony which are discussed and revealed throughout the play. Due to his lack of money, Medvedenko suffers a great pressure and the inability to provide all his family’s requirements, as well as the unrequited love he feels for Masha. Except his marriage, he does not change throughout the play. Like in his first appearance at the very beginning of the play talking about money, he appears at the end still talking about it. Happiness for him is related to a good financial life. Thereby, he expects rich people, like Masha, to be happy. Unlike his expectation, Masha lives a good financial life, yet she is unhappy for reasons beyond the question of money, that Medvedenko cannot understand. She also suffers the unrequited love for Treplyov, however, she decides to marry Medvedenko, the one she does not love at all. She considers love without hope exists only in novels, and, by her marriage to Medvedenko, she can tear it out of her heart by the roots (39). Unlike her expectations, her attempt to change her life, in which she always wears black, fails, and she seems unable to free herself from the prison of her melancholy and despair. Till the end, she continues to feel that life is empty, in which she is unaware of her real role, or for what purpose she is living (29). Her way to change the ugly reality she lives proves failure, because she does not face it, but rather escapes her troubles into new ones, or in other words, from hell into another. Another example of a life that is perhaps worse than the word hell is depicted through the character of Sorin. He is an old retired man who suffers stability, old age, impotence, and of course unfulfilled dreams. He appears leaning on his walking stick, and cannot move easily. He has grown up and all his dreams have failed him. He finds himself at the end living the rest of his life in the country, the place where he cannot accommodate himself to, taking care of his nephew, Treplyov. Even though he feels great depression, but he cannot change
Mohammad 85 himself or his reality (6). He is locked in the prison of his own stability, and restricted by the social shackles of old times. So, it is not strange to see him on that leaning stick as a motionless man, cannot walk easily, or step forward in his life. He cannot undergo any kind of development. He says: "the tragedy of my life when I was young I looked the same" (6). He is about to die, and has never attained any of his dreams. He always wants to marry, become a writer, and dwell in the town, yet he has done nothing of the sort. He is too weak to have a revolutionary character, for he gives up everything, drowning in darkness, and despair, saying "That’s the way the story goes . . . Like it or not, you must live" (6). Metaphorically, in such an apocalyptic context, one may imagine his inner agonies and unattainable dreams like the fire of Hell eating him from the inside silently and gradually, and leaving nothing Fig. 19. Hell Fire: You'd Better Get Saved behind but the dying embers of the fire. before It's Too Late! by Pastor Danny Castle.s However, the existence of these gloomy characters helps readers and audience to paint an apocalyptic picture of the time during which the play is written. They constitute the background and foundations from which later two characters take different directions and react to change the stagnant and degenerative spirit of the society of the lake. So, these characters do not stand in isolation; Chekhov also introduces to his readers and audience other characters to complete the apocalyptic picture of a Hell-like life.
The Devil and the Beast
Literally or metaphorically, in every apocalyptic context and scenario, there must be a source of evil, or someone who comes to deceive people and control their lives. In The Sea Gull, two characters play these roles and have devilish and bestial traits: Irina Arkadina and her lover, Trigorin. Irina Arkadina is a veteran, famous and rich actress, who is introduced by her son Treplyov even before her first appearance in the play, as a self-centered controlling character. She wants to live the life of and always acts like a fifteen-year-old girl. She doesn't accept the fact of her age thinking that she has to stay beautiful and young. She likes to be praised alone, and does not like to stay in the country where there is nothing of the sort of narcotic praises that she used to hear in the town. She is like the Lady Wishfort in The Way to The World, especially in her vanity which is made clear from the very beginning. She is
Mohammad 86 jealous of Nina, the other young actress, because Nina plays the main and only role in Treplyov's play within the play. So, she turns against her own son, Treplyov. Her selfishness, inclination to possess other characters and control their fates are best manifested in her dialogue with Trigorin. She says to him, "You are mine … mine… And this forehead is mine, and these eyes are mine, and this beautiful silken hair is mine… You are all mine" (35). She likes to affect other characters’ lives, and have them as her slaves. Treplyov says that she deals with all as if they were all her enemies, and all to blame. She acts like the devil who wants to control everything around, as when she changes the destiny of Sorin and Treplyov. She is a materialistic character which has money and can help her brother to change his life and survive his depression and despair, as well as to give her son an amount of it, to even change his shabby clothes. However, she gives neither Sorin nor Treplyov anything. Also, she makes Trigorin change his mind to travel with her, and not to stay with Nina, when he thinks that he starts to fall in love with her. So, she is absolutely the one who causes the sufferings of the other characters of the play as clearly remarked by her son. If Irina, the mother, stands for the devil who attempts to destroy and control the lives of people, then Trigorin stands for the devil's beast. Trigorin is a famous writer, but has no real talent, and no message to convey to his readers, except Irina who likes his scripts. She cooperates with him in everything, describing him: "my treasure, you outrageous beast." Like the apocalyptic beast of the earth, which is commonly held as the false prophet, which comes to deceive the people of the earth (Rev. 13.11-13), Trigorin is introduced as the false writer who deceives the other characters. He pretends to be a writer, though he is a hunter, and likes to go hunting and fishing. Like what he does with his victims, he hunts Nina's heart, who falls prey to his words. Influenced by his language, she quotes a line from one of his writings and gives it to him to express her love, saying "if ever you need my life, come and take it." He is the hungry beast who is ready to feast upon the flesh of the innocent Nina. Like the first beast of the sea who controls the beast of the earth in Revelation (Rev. 13.4), Irina controls him and deals with him as her slave, as well as tames him as necessary to accomplish her aims. When they are about to leave the country, he has a desire to stay in order to meet Nina again, yet Irina wants him for her alone, giving him a very emotional speech, as she is taming her own "outrageous beast": "you can see I'm the only one person who can appreciate you . . . You're going with me, aren’t you? Yes? You're not going to desert me, are you?" (35). Listening to that long speech by her, he feels that he has no will, and is controlled by her. He says, "I've never had any will of my own . . . Sluggish, ready to crumble to pieces, always submissive"
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(35). However, in their union, Irina and Trigorin become as the devil and his beast who bring sufferings, killings, and destruction to the other characters in the play, as in the Apocalypse.
The Apocalyptic Playwright and the "Real" Survivor
In eschatological paradigms, there is always a group of chosen survivors by God, and for the vision of the end of time to be revealed to the people there must be the character of the teller, like Saint John in Revelation. In Chekhov's version, the one who prophesizes the end of the corrupt world, and introduces it to the people in the form of a play is Treplyov. However, unlike Revelation, the survivors in the play are not a group of people chosen by God, but rather one person who survives the Hell-like life through making choices and free will. This suggests a huge deflection of the apocalyptic trajectory, provided by Chekhov, away from its Biblical target, in which Chekhov lays importance on the individual in the process of surviving. He trusts and stresses on the individual's ability to survive any kind of apocalypse the individual may face.
Treplyov, a playwright, is a melancholic character who fears the stagnancy and vulgarity of his contemporary life. He suffers the lack of attention, jealousy, unrequited love, the sense of nonentity and the vulgarity of the theater of his time. Prompted by the corruption he sees around him, his depression, anger and great disappointment, he imagines the end of the world, and expresses it in his new apocalyptic play. Through his play, he tries to expose the corrupt society, express his eschatological ideas, and spread his warnings of the coming horrible future, as well as invent new forms in writing. He interprets his rejection of the reality, and the necessity for a radical change in his play after which his sense of the end is increased gradually, and at the end of the play, he ends his own life. He is obsessed with ending anything which does not work or happen the way he thinks it should be. He ends the world and the old forms he detests in his play, then tears his script or burns them, as he describes it, he also ends the life of a seagull, tears Nina's pictures to extirpate of his love to her and finally ends his life. Like Treplyov, Nina, the young actress, is another character who has been living in the prison of her miseries for a long time. She suffers poverty, over- protection by her father and stepmother, who control her life completely, and later the death of her child. She decides to travel to Moscow where she thinks that she is going to have a new good life out there (37). However, Trigorin fails all her expectations when she discovers that he is not the man she has expected him to be. She discovers that he does not believe in the theater, or her talent, and laughs at her dreams. After a period of time, he falls out of love
Mohammad 88 with her, and returns to Irina, leaving her alone with their child, who died afterwards. Though she suffers a lot, but she rebels against her miseries. Treplyov and Nina do not have the same reactions the other characters have against the ugly reality they live in. They rather attempt to change their lives which can be described as hell, quiet hell, in which, however, they also take two different directions in the course of changing. Distinctively, Treplyov's rebellious character is imbued with apocalyptic traits which comes vis-à-vis the revolutionary character of Nina, which, in comparison to Treplyov can be, thereby, considered an anti-apocalyptic character. Both Treplyov and Nina rebel against their miseries depending on the same Apocalypse-rooted idea of change, which usually makes the urge for destruction appear as a creative one. However, the two interpret the urge of destruction in a different way; while Treplyov wants to get rid of the old forms in writing and society radically and destroys his own life to create a better future, Nina destroys her utopian imagination of the world and creates a better life for her with real work and dedication. The wrong way of conducting this principle leads Treplyov to his own death whereas Nina’s revolutionary reactions lead her to her own survival. Treplyov's sense of an inescapable end and the necessity to eradicate the world is increased. So, he starts to develop his eschatological ideas into a work of art, in order to reveal to the people of the lake the end he expects. Treplyov's apocalyptic play within the play is a monologue about the end of the world, performed by one character that is Nina, and attended by his mother Arkadina and the other characters of the play. Its time is revealed in Treplyov's welcoming speech, "rock us to sleep and let us dream of what shall be in the course of two hundred thousand years" (12). The place is not specified exactly, but rather described as a "barren" or "stagnant marsh" (13). The play is both written and directed in an apocalyptic style. In content, though with different details, the scenario of Treplyov's monologue is like the apocalyptic scenario of the Apocalypse. The monologue begins with death and destruction; life is extinguished, and living creatures are turned to dust. Then, the struggle with the devil begins reaching to a climax of the final battle, which is similar to Armageddon, after which the "soul of the world," embodied in Nina, is destined to defeat the devil. Thenceforth, the "soul of the world" and "the eternal matter" unite and a new harmonious world of everlasting peace, that is called the "Kingdom of Universal Will," ensues. Treplyov's scenario and the Apocalypse are based on two main processes of destruction and creation; after total destruction of the old world, a new and beautiful one is created (the New Kingdom of Jerusalem). The creation here is done only after the total destruction, as well as harmony
Mohammad 89 and peace also come after struggles and wars. This concept is the basic idea on which the scenario of the end of the world of the Apocalypse is based and affects Treplyov's life as the concept extends to control, not only his theoretical ideas, but also his behavior which brings his final collapse. The scenery of Treplyov's play is also inspired by the Apocalypse. After two hundred thousand years, the landscape of the world is depicted as an apocalyptic one. All types of creatures are annihilated, and havoc, mayhem and death wreaked the world, like in Saint John's vision. Devastation and annihilation overshadow the utopian end of a harmonious world of the play within the play, and are manifested in the reiteration of and emphasis on the two words "empty" and "cold." The world appears grotesque and mysterious, characterized by a gloomy setting of a "desolate" place, and prevailed with an atmosphere of degeneration and decay. The coldness that is emphasized by Nina alludes to end-of-time's cosmic storms and collapse. For instance, it brings to mind the apocalyptic storm which hurls hail mixed with blood, and causes death and destruction of the living creatures of the earth in Revelation (Rev. 8.7). Also, in order to show the atrocity of the apocalyptic disasters and their outcome, which contribute to the overall apocalyptic landscape of the world to come, dreadfulness is stressed. The repeated words of "frightful" and "horror" add to the scene a gothic element, and allude to trepidation and horrors of the end-of-time, that are depicted in the Apocalypse (Rev. 6.16-17). These horrors echo Chekhov's own description of the horrifying life at the end of the nineteenth century, and the widespread fears of the end of the world at that time. Not only does Treplyov depend on the apocalyptic images of the end of the world in his written script, but also in the way he directs and introduces it. He uses his eschatological imagination and wit to produce the apocalyptic images and scenes in a way that makes those who will come to see his play find themselves in an abyss expecting an imminent disaster. Before Treplyov's welcoming speech that introduces the play, a sound effect which is implanted in the apocalyptic memory as a harbinger of destruction is used to announce the beginning (12). The same sound of the horn is the one with which every apocalyptic disaster of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse opens. In this way, the proposed audience find themselves facing the same feeling of an impending apocalypse from the very beginning. Then, the curtain is raised on the scene of Nina wearing a white dress, and sitting on a rock, behind which there is a pale moon. Immediately, the image of Nina brings to mind the image of the apocalyptic woman, "the woman clothed with the sun," who looks like an angel, and is left alone in the desert, where no one can hear her shrieks (Rev. 12.1-17). Then, Treplyov intends at a certain time of the play to use the theatrical effects of lights and sulfur, which he
Mohammad 90 has checked before starting the play. He wants to release the sulfur into the direction of the audience where his mother and her boyfriend, and the whole corrupt society are sitting. He wants Arkadina to feel as if she is burning and suffocating in the lake of sulfur, exactly as the devil and his beasts and armies in the Apocalypse are burned after the collapse of the old world. He considers her a sinful woman living in "the abyss of crime" (12), and the reason behind his sufferings and collapse. Watching her son's play, Arkadina, becomes unable to tolerate the pressure of watching the apocalyptic end of the world which she loves, enjoys and controls. So, she finally stops the apocalyptic play with her laugh and sarcastic comments: "it's a stage effect" and "This is something decadent" (13-14). Treplyov, in return, considers his mother's intervention a serious attempt to destroy his play and, thereby, the world he wants to create. As a reaction, he tears and "burns" the script of the play "to the last shred" (24). Dramatically speaking, Treplyov's play fails to achieve its objectives in warning the audience of the anticipated frightful future of such a miserable society and the degenerative life they are living. The irony is that no one of the proposed audience understands his play, his ideas, or the apocalyptic scenario that is full of sufferings, horrors, shrieks of pain, and death. He feels that the society he aims to change remains unaffected. Obviously, his means of change, that he yearns to achieve by radically eradicating the old forms and world with new ones, has failed his aim of awakening his people. His huge fault is that he thinks that the revolution can be achieved by annihilating the old forms and world through total destruction, anarchic actions which bring nothing but horrors, and sufferings. He does not realize that he is so dependent on images, symbols, and the apocalyptic imaginary world where his soul is trapped forever. His inability to endure his failure is manifested in his reactions when he burns the papers of the play, and later on in killing an innocent seagull and himself. Treplyov's apocalyptic play and his failure to pass his required message constitute a turning point in his life, after which his miseries exacerbate and incite him to kill an innocent seagull. When the play is stopped unexpectedly by the sarcastic comments by his mother, Arkadina, Treplyov is devastated. He expresses his great disappointment later after performing his play: "I feel as if I'd suddenly awakened to see this lake here completely dried up or gone forever into the ground . . ." (24). Moreover, he thinks that because of his failure his beloved Nina starts to consider him a "nonentity," and falls in love with the other writer, Trigorin. As a reaction, he kills a seagull and throws it at Nina's feet after which he reveals his sufferings to her (23). "It all started on that very evening," Treplyov says to Nina, "my play flopped. What a stupid fiasco . . . Women never forgive failure. . . . My play was
Mohammad 91 disliked. You despise my inspiration, and you consider me mediocre, a nonentity . . ." (24). Killing the seagull is another attempt to draw attention, and rebel against his miseries, in order to create a change out of the process of killing. He thinks that such an attempt of killing and destroying will create new reactions, at least, in the heart and mind of his beloved, as well as warn her of what he expects her to face, in case she follows Trigorin. Like God in Revelation who subdues people through showing them the horrible end they will meet if they don’t follow him, through killing and trepidation Treplyov wants to subdue Nina. He wants to affect her choices as if he is saying to her if you fly out of the lake, you will be absolutely dead. He imagines the end of Nina as a dead seagull, as does he with the end of the world, and tells her that in such a way he is going to kill himself too. However, what worsens the situation is that, for the second time, he fails to change anything because Nina finds it very difficult to understand the reasons behind killing the seagull. She considers it just another "symbol" of the incomprehensible symbolic language and images that Treplyov speaks of recently. "For some time now," she says, "you've been growing irritable. You don't make sense when you talk – it's as if you speak in symbols. And I suppose this sea gull is obviously a symbol, too, but – forgive me - I don't understand it" (24).
4.2.2. The Last Night: Burning for an End Vis-a-Vis Striving for Continuity
At the last night when Treplyov and Nina meet, Treplyov's apocalyptic persona which burns for an end is juxtaposed with Nina's anti-apocalyptic persona which strives for continuity and life. Paradoxically, they represent the destruction and the salvation of the human soul, in which "Nina's strength emphasizes Treplyov's weakness" (Styan 87). The miseries and difficult situations go on and get harder for Treplyov when Nina returns to the lake after her marriage to Trigorin. This is especially felt after Treplyov's last conversation with her, through which he discovers that she becomes an independent woman, and refuses to stay with and leaves him again. At the last meeting with her, he reveals that he is still a prisoner of her love, "Nina I damned you, hated you, tore up your letters and photographs, but every moment I realized that my soul is bound forever to you. I did not have the strength to fall out of love with you, Nina" (48). Disappointedly, when he reveals all his weakness to her, he discovers that unlike him her soul becomes "stronger," and she has come back to see him for reasons other than to go back to him again. In such cases of great disappointment, extirpation is a typical reaction of Treplyov. Consequently, he ends his life by committing suicide. By so doing, he thinks that a new situation will be created if at least some people care about his death. On the one hand, he thinks his death may bring a sort of
Mohammad 92 change into the stagnant "souls" and minds of the people around him. On the other, he expresses his final hopelessness, spiritual collapse, and inability to find other solutions to handle his reality. However, as in his two previous attempts to create a better situation out of killing and destroying, he fails. His death changes nothing in his society. The people learn of his death indifferently. It is a real irony when people become indifferent to the death of a human being. As a result, his death shows that Treplyov is so stuck in his eschatological imagination that causes his own perish at the end, turning him from a revolutionary character into a rebellious one. His rebellious reactions include eradicating, ending, burning, tearing, and killing. The main theme in the play seems to be a very serious question: Is it necessary to kill in order to change reality? Or is it necessary to eradicate the whole world in order to create a new peaceful one? Nina's character is the best answer to such questions. Although, she suffers a lot, unlike Treplyov, she endures her sufferings, and revolts against her reality by real work. She destroys the utopian world in which she has been living, kills her old mentality and accommodates to the new reality she faces. The first revolutionary action she takes is when she rebels against the patriarchal power of her father and Treplyov's attempt to make from her another dead seagull. So, she travels to Moscow to meet her new lover, Trigorin, and attain her dream of becoming a famous actress. Unlike her expectations, Nina’s life in Moscow becomes a real miserable one (42). She is left alone to fight in her life, that becomes so complicated and difficult for her to live. She expresses that in these two lines, "He [Trigorin] didn't believe in the theater, he kept on laughing at my dreams, and little by little I too stopped believing and my spirit sank . . ." (49). Confronting her new difficulties, she takes the second courageous decision in her life. She fights her previous illusions and dreams of becoming a famous actress, then faces the death of her child and her lover’s betrayal, and learns how to become a "real" actress in life. She learns how to endure all her sufferings, as well as regain her faith in herself. She insists on changing herself saying, "I'm not the same now as I used to be" (49). After two years, she comes back to the country for a while, and meets Treplyov again, and asks him, "Have I changed very much?" (47). He replies that she becomes "thinner," and her eyes become "bigger" (47). The observed physical changes in Nina assure that she has changed into a hard-working wise woman, or a real worker exerting unremitting efforts to make a living, or life- so to speak, and survive. When she decides to leave, Treplyov asks her if she wants him to walk with her to the door, yet she refuses, insisting on the idea that she
Mohammad 93 can go alone. She says: "I keep walking and I think, I think and feel how with each passing day my mind and soul keep growing stronger . . . I know now, Kostya, I've come to realize that in our work . . . the important thing is neither fame nor glamor nor what I used to dream about, but it’s knowing how to endure. . . . then, I’m no longer afraid of life" (49). Metaphorically, she represents the long-winged seagull, which resembles a crucified person. On the one hand, she suffers Treplyov's exaggerated love and his attempt to make from her another dead seagull, and, on the other, her unrequited love for Trigorin and his attempt to make from her a subject for his short story, inspired by the dead seagull. So, she resists Treplyov's image of the dead seagull, "I am a sea gull . . . No, not right" (49). Also, She refuses Trigorin's short story in which he creates a character of a girl destroyed by a man who does that because he has nothing else to do with her, "I am not . . . a subject for a short story" (49). Consequently, she is the crucified seagull which succeeds to free its nailed wings, bearing the cross of sufferings on its back, and fly from the stagnant lake to the land of life, where she saves her spirit from sinking. She cuts out all the ropes of
Fig. 20. Two pictures of Ninat in The illusions, and does not allow her soul to fall into the Classic Theater San Antonio's depths. She discovers that the most important thing in production of The Sea Gull and a seagull.u order to survive "is knowing how to endure. Know how to bear your cross and have faith" (49). So, unlike the first expectation of the schoolteacher, Medvedenko, who expects that the souls of Treplyov and Nina "will unite in their striving to render one and the same artistic creation" (6), the two characters have never united in any case except in the sufferings. They take two different ways of life, and two different choices to survive their sufferings. Their two choices highlight the difference in conducting the action of killing in order to change and recreate a better future. Unlike Treplyov who resorts to kill and destroy the seagull and himself, to change the trajectory of events, Nina kills her old personality and creates a new Nina with a new insight into the world, through which she feels her spirit is "cleansed" from the inside. These different ways of facing the miseries of life are two different stories of death
Mohammad 94 and survival, through which Treplyov becomes an apocalyptic rebellious character and Nina as an anti-apocalyptic revolutionary one. Only in Nina’s case, the urge to destroy becomes a creative urge. Her way of facing her difficulties by turning all her illusions into dust, rising from the ashes of her past dreams, killing the romantic image of the world and working hard is the only way to change any horrible reality and survive it. On the contrary, Treplyov's eschatological ideology of annihilation as a way to change anything and create a harmonious peaceful new world fails to prove creative and successful in his life. If the main concept of the Apocalypse and Treplyov's play works in life, then it is absolutely not in killing physically (not by bloodshed) and murder, like killing an innocent seagull, but rather in killing and destroying the old mentality and rotten spirit. Consequently, Chekhov writes his play The Sea Gull to reflect the tragedy of man in the modern world, and the choices that can be taken to overcome all struggles and sufferings. The Hell-like life which Chekhov depicts does not include wars, great struggles, or catastrophes, but rather daily struggles with life, society, choices to survive and unattainable dreams which tear the characters from the inside. In such a life, the threads of daily apocalypse are weaved in the scenes of the characters'
Fig. 21. Hell The Alternative by Anthony Falbo.v tragedies, leading them to the brink of collapse. So, the apocalyptic images here do not necessarily mean only the end of the world. They include any destruction that threatens individuals' lives, and in Chekhov's depiction nothing can be more threatening than a society degenerating into the worse like a black hole which can increase and gulp all its members gradually, as what happens with Treplyov later in the play. In his depiction, hell could be no more than an exact copy of humans' world, yet, for Treplyov, how tedious such a hell is with no end or promises of salvation! and if there is a salvation then it will be through enduring the hell itself. In a world like that, Treplyov may find salvation a fate worse than death. "What needed," writes Siegfried Melchinger on Chekhov's literary trajectory, "was to present to the public the conditions as they really were – to evoke emotion,
Mohammad 95 horror, indignation, and anger, and to move people to reflection. The truth, as Chekhov sought it out and presented, is a kind of unmasking" (x). In this context, the play is about life and death, or rather life in death. On the surface, it depicts the stagnant society, but hides inside a hidden movement towards great changes. He uses apocalyptic images and ideas as well as anarchic nihilistic ones in order not to say that it is the end of the world, as the religious apocalyptic scenario indicates, but rather to show the intolerable reality that needs to be changed. For Chekhov, the hard reality can be overcome by real work and endurance. Changing reality by real work is the real revolution and true revolution can be achieved only by changing the decadent "spirit of the world," stopping self- corruption, and changing all invalid forms. Real work along with endurance are the only way to survive the apocalyptic reality; they are the first step towards creating a new better world. If such sufferings like blackness, sadness, depression, unfulfilled dreams, poverty, make people think that there should be an end, then let the ending process be done by real labor and constant attempts to change.
Conclusion
To conclude, as the nineteenth century was approaching its end, Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, found the Apocalypse of Saint John a source of inspiration to envisage the fin de siècle moment, mood and its aftermath. To produce their own versions of the apocalypse, they indirectly adapted the apocalyptic imagery in their works, relating the dramatic events and their development to the apocalyptic context. While Ibsen gives an apocalyptic coloration to his script through allusions and indirect references, Chekhov uses the play within a play technique as his main literary device in his work. Through these indirect adaptations, both dramatists, however, depict the fin de siècle as a passing critical phase in life and suggest solutions to survive. Accordingly, the fin de siècle (or the 1900) which Ibsen introduces one year earlier of its occurrence does not imply the end of the world, but a transitional period of time which marks the end of the old phase and the beginning of a new one. He expresses his pessimistic vision of the coming new century, and suggests that the day of resurrection can happen at any time in humans' lives. His characters are given creative and destructive powers, inclinations to die and degenerate or live and continue, and most importantly free will to choose their end. Similarly, the fin de siècle degenerative life is introduced in The Sea Gull's small miserable community of depressed characters, illuminating a thread of movement from nihilism to
Mohammad 96 recreation, from despair and restriction to self-redemption and free will. The concentration is laid on the characters' reactions to their apocalyptic reality, miseries and the imminent storm they face. Some of the characters appear unchangeable like the nun in When We Dead Awaken and Medvedenko in The Sea Gull; other characters change to the worse like the apocalyptic characters of Rubek and Treplyov; and others are given the ability to live and continue like Maia and Nina. The playwrights stress on the idea of continuity and the ability to change and overcome all apocalyptic contexts in which the privilege is given to the sound of life, real work, change and endurance. Hell, as depicted by Chekhov, can be the world of humans, in which Resurrection, as depicted by Ibsen, can happen at any time, during which there always be an imminent storm to be expected. Expectations of a radical change or some misfortune to come will always appear in a rotten and apocalyptic reality, like Ulfhiem's expectation: "see the storm is almost on us? (286); and Masha: "It's so muggy. There will be a thunderstorm tonight" (6) mark the fin de siècle fear. As a result, Ibsen and Chekhov do not borrow apocalyptic images of the Apocalypse to emphasize the Biblical eschatological vision of the end of the world, but rather the disasters and degeneration they witness and expect. Instead, they reveal the dangerous consequences of such an eschatological thinking, for which the concentration is laid on the individual as the core of change. The real savior is introduced not outside, but inside the individual. Their versions of the apocalypse depict humanity on the threshold of an abyss in which neither eternal bliss nor everlasting doom and death are stressed, but the ability to live, endure and change.
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Conclusion
It was not the war or its aftermath, but the prelude to the Apocalypse. This idea haunted a huge number of the late nineteenth century people in Europe as the year 1900 was approaching. The Book of Revelation was ready to answer all possible questions about the unjustified prolonged chaos, revolutions, famines, brutalities, bloodletting which inflicted the populace over a century. It provided them with a ready apocalyptic scenario and paradigm they needed to envisage the end of the world which appeared as an unavoidable urge to escape the limits of the intolerable reality. Accordingly, they fell victim to predictions and fantasies of the end of the world and expected a divine intervention which would end their agonies and bring peace and justice back to them. In such a historical material context, the fin de siècle moment combined with the fin de globe anxieties made its way into the fin de siècle stage. For some critics like Frank Kermode, these predictions express people's need and obsession of the end that haunt them in specific conditions and times. In this dissertation, apocalyptic images and allusions have been identified and studied in four selected fin de siècle plays written at the 1890s: Salome by Oscar Wilde (1892), Caesar Antichrist by Alfred Jarry (1895), When We Dead Awaken by Henrik Ibsen (1899) and The Sea Gull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1896). The focus has been laid on the modes of borrowing and employing the apocalyptic imagery and allusions inspired by the Book of Revelation. Accordingly, the dissertation classifies the methods of adaptation into two groups: direct and indirect. The research has shown that while Wilde and Jarry draw heavily on the Apocalypse, Ibsen and Chekhov blur the apocalyptic imagery and veil it in the dramatic scenes of their plays. The first mode of adaptation directly leads readers and audience to enter the apocalyptic worlds created by Wilde and Jarry. Unlike the first mode, the second method indirectly leads them to understand the events of the plays written by Ibsen and Chekhov in an apocalyptic context, without which these plays will be difficult to understand. In these two different ways of adaptation, the playwrights rely on different techniques and literary devices to serve their ultimate purposes. In his tragic work, Salome, the most prominent literary device which Wilde uses to borrow the apocalyptic images is intertextuality, through which some apocalyptic verses are borrowed literally. In his sarcastic play, Caesar Antichrist, Jarry resorts to reweaving and manipulating the scenario and plot of Revelation, as well as borrowing its binary oppositions. He uses literal verses, images and allusions to create an inverted world in which the most important components of the
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Apocalypse or characters are marginalized. Through their techniques and literary devices the playwrights provide extensive apocalyptic images and allusions in their scripts. Unlike Wilde and Jarry, Ibsen and Chekhov have introduced readers and audience to a diluted form of apocalyptic imagery and allusions. They have excluded the literal meaning and drawn on the modern sense of the Apocalypse as any situation in which people suffer destruction, damage and decline. In his play, When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen depends on giving an apocalyptic coloration to the events and characters, making the references to the Apocalypse appear only in pivotal phrases, words and titles like the title of the play. Through these references, readers are given more space to think of the play and led indirectly to understand its events with an apocalyptic background in mind. Also, in order to provide the apocalyptic prophecy indirectly to readers and audience, Chekhov uses the technique of the play within a play in The Sea Gull. This technique helps him introduce the eschatological ideology from the perspective of one of his characters giving a space for others to comment on and satirize its incomprehensible content. It also helps reveal the consequences of having an apocalyptic imagination by depicting the gradual collapse of Treplyov after directing and producing his apocalyptic play. The research has revealed that the most recurrent apocalyptic images are the images which depict destruction, immorality, violence and wars like Armageddon, the 666 beast of the earth, cosmic collapse, "the woman clothed with the sun" and the woman who rides the beast, Babylon. Interestingly, some characters in the four plays appear similar though the plays undergo two different modes of adaptation. Wilde's Jokanaan and Chekhov's Treplyov are the two characters who foretell the end of the corrupt world in which they live, and at the end they suffer tragic ends. Irena and Salome are depicted as two women rising from their tombs and both have the same apocalyptic fate, and continue to love the ones who torture them, Rubek and Jokanaan. Jarry's Ubu and Ibsen's Ulfheim are inspired by the 666 beast of the earth of Revelation, and given bestial characteristics. Also, Ibsen's Maia and Chekhov's Nina are the only characters that revolt against their lives, resurrect from the dead, and survive the Hell-like life they live. Though in their works they use the apocalyptic images and allusions, the playwrights attempt to revise, or even alter, established beliefs. Instead of making the eschatological ideology a source of hope and survival, Wilde makes it a source of more crimes and bloodletting, like Herod who commits the last crime out of his fear of God's wrath. Doing so, he suggests a new understanding of the power of the Apocalypse which as it may save some people, it can destroy others. The apocalypse, in Jarry's play is depicted as no more than a
Mohammad 99 transitional period of time between two eternally subsequent epochs of Christ's and the Antichrist's reigns on earth. He equates Christ with the Antichrist even in sufferings, and makes them appear as two necessary opposites in a bipolar system that governs the earth: if one ceases to exist, imbalance will ensue in the cosmos of men. In his audacious ideas, the inevitability of the end of the world is effaced, and the concept of the Apocalypse is, all in all, altered when he emphasizes the idea that it is not the end of the world at all and nothing comes out of infinity. In their plays, Ibsen and Chekhov exclude the metaphysical, extraordinary and imaginary forces, which according to the Apocalypse will intervene to stop humans' sufferings and save some of them. For both Ibsen and Chekhov, people experience resurrection, apocalypse, hell and new beginnings in their lives. Unlike Revelation's depiction of resurrection as a state of coming back to life after death either to live in eternal bliss or damnation, it is introduced by Ibsen as a state of awakening to what the characters' lives are all about. Resurrection, for him, happens at any time in people's lives in which they can face and change what they suffer from. He gives privilege to the solutions which support life and continuity manifested in the direction followed by Maia and Ulfheim. By the same token, Chekhov emphasizes the ability of endurance and dedication to survive any apocalyptic situation one may face and that the urge to destroy becomes creative only in one way. This way is when this destructive urge destroys the rotten spirit of any society and subverts public delusions. However, in their direct and indirect modes of adaptation of the apocalyptic images and allusions in the four selected plays, the playwrights do not emphasize the Biblical eschatological ideology, but rather their sense of a dark period of time to come. They do not end their plays with the utopian end of Revelation or any similar peaceful world. In Salome, the curtain closes on a very violent and bloody scene of two crimes and pessimistic stage directions to remember. Darkness, fear, violence and bloodshed, mark the end of Salome and suggests that Wilde foresees a dark period of time to come, emphasized by Herod's saying "Surely some terrible thing will befall. . . . I begin to be afraid" (553). Also, the bloody scene of war and darkness mark the end of the earthly world of Caesar Antichrist: "Night is falling. It'll be dark in an hour" (105). Though his play ends with people going to Judgment Day, before this last scene the idea "No, time is not ended at all" is emphasized ignoring any utopian New Jerusalem (117). Similarly, the end of When We Dead Awaken comes in the form of a storm foretold by Ulfheim: "see the storm is almost on us? (286). Analogically, The Sea Gull ends with a murder when Treplyov commits suicide, before which Masha predicted that something terrible would happen from the very beginning of the play: "It's so muggy.
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There will be a thunderstorm tonight" (6). These ends mark the playwrights' common sense at fin de siècle of a dark age to come. Perhaps they knew that it would not be the prelude to the Apocalypse but to world wars. This suggests that some writers of fin de siècle have anticipated the coming chaos, bloodshed, brutality, and wars long before they actually started to appear in the twentieth century. As a result, although Wilde, Jarry, Ibsen and Chekhov differ in style, they are similar in the ultimate purpose of employing the apocalyptic images. They do not borrow apocalyptic images of the Apocalypse to emphasize the eschatological vision of the end of the world. Instead, they adapt them to produce their versions of the apocalypse depicting humanity on the threshold of an abyss when, for them, to quote Kermode's words, "the end is immanent rather than imminent" (101). Finally, this dissertation has studied the Apocalypse from a dramatic point of view at fin de siècle Europe, a very critical period of time of the late nineteenth century. It marks a transitional period between the aftermath of the European revolutions and the eve of the two World Wars. This paves the way for further future studies encompassing pre- and post- World Wars apocalypse up until now. Indisputably, apocalyptic visions of the end of the world inspired by the Book of Revelation of Saint John continue to reappear and become topoi in public and literary arenas, and authors usually resort to them in times when the "fin" once again inhabits people's minds and resurfaces before crises and upheavals.
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Texts
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Wilde, Oscar. Salome. Trans. Lord Alfred Douglas. The Complete Stories, Plays and Poems of Oscar Wilde. 1990. London: Tiger Books International, 1994. 531-554. Print.
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