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MOVING BEYOND APOCALYPSE: PROPHECY AS A
POLITICAL ART IN TWENTIETH CENTURY NOVELS FROM
ORWELL TO DELILLO, DYSTOPIAN TO POST COLONIAL

presented by

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MOVING BEYOND APOCALYPSE: PROPHECY As A POLITICAL ART IN
TWENTIETH CENTURY NOVELS FROM ORWELL TO DELILLO, DYSTOPIAN
TO POST COLONIAL
By

Christine Patricia Cavanaugh

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English

2006

ABSTRACT

MOVING BEYOND APOCALYPSE: PROPHECY AS A POLITICAL ART IN

TWENTIETH CENTURY NOVELS FROM ORWELL TO DELILLO, DYSTOPIAN
TO POST COLONIAL
By
Christine Patricia Cavanaugh

Prophecy is an important theme and trope in twentieth century literature where it
is deployed and critiqued as a political art consonant with its theological
tropology. A varied and contradictory speech, prophecy moves between interior
and exterior truths, subsiding on a tension between perceptible reality and a
hidden truth. Prophetic speech is formed by pairs of contradictory qualities: it is
word and deed, it is a sign of presence and of absence, it is immediate and yet
mediated, it is sudden and also timeless, imminent and immanent, and it is a
dialogue as well as a transmitted message. In the matrix of these qualities, many
imbalances and combinations proliferate resulting in less authentic variations of
prophetic speech. Addressing and critiquing these variations are Robert Penn
Warren, who addresses prophetic speech in the nation’s founding, Salman
Rushdie and Don DeLillo, for whom terrorism is an imitative prophetic gesture,
Flannery O’Connor, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo, who proposes a new prophetic
speech that defies the Old prophetic speech of the colonizer. These novelists
engage the political by showing prophetic speech that participates in tyranny or
resists tyranny. They both deploy prophetic speech via their narrators or
characters, and employ prophetic themes, drawing on the theological tropology

of prophecy and the longstanding role of the prophet as social critic. Adhering to

the topic of prophecy are recurrent themes of violence, sacrifice, and scandal
and some important topoi: the desert, the City, the cave and the house.
Prophetic voice, figures, themes, tropes and topoi combine variously in these
novels to address the political and the way that prophecy builds or destroys the
foundations of civil discourses. The importance Of this study is to expand
scholarly awareness Of prophecy in literature beyond the category Of the
apocalyptic. Thus this study treats George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty—Four, which
employs a well-known apocalyptic variant of prophecy. This apocalyptic
prophecy is imbalanced in its qualities and tends to be unequivocal.
Nonetheless, it is important to address apocalyptic prophecy because
apocalypticism is a pole for negative critical perception of prophecy in literature.
Not to be sequestered as religious theophany or limited to apocalypticism,
prophecy is a varied speech that Operates as a political art even in secular

twentieth century novels.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Following the Trope ............................................................ 1
Chapter One: Unequivocal Disapproval: The Apocalyptic Prophetic in Nineteen
Eighty-Four and its Post Apocalyptic Critics ...................................... 31
Works Cited ............................................................................... 69
Chapter Two: Prophecy and the President: Extispicy in Warren’s Brother to
Dragons .................................................................................... 70
Works Cited ........................................................................... 117
Chapter Three: The Stinking Mad Shadow of Jesus: The Education of a Southern
Prophet ................................................................................... 118
Works Cited .............................................................................. 156
Chapter Four: Auguries of Power: Prophecy and Violence in The Satanic Verses
............................................................................................. 157
Works Cited ........................................................................... 180
Chapter Five: Devil on the Cross and Upward Prophecy: The Ascent from the
Grave ...................................................................................... 181
Works Cited ........................................................................... 210
Chapter Six: DeLillo’s Novelist: Absence versus Apocalypse in Mao ll .......... 211
Works Cited .............................................................................. 234
Conclusion: Doom, Violence and Big Brother: Prophecy as a Political Art in the
Changes of Discourse ................................................................ 235
Bibliography ...................................................................................... 243

iv

Introduction

Following the Trope

Prophetic speech becomes a political trope in an exemplary scene in Brother to
Dragons, the Robert Penn Warren verse play about the ignoble nephews of
Thomas Jefferson. The climactic action of the story is Lilburn Lewis’
apprehension for the brutal murder by dismemberment of an adolescent slave.
Warren executes this climax with a prophetic speech adapted from the Book of
Ezekiel. The sheriff descends upon the Lewis household, master and slaves,
after his discovery of a human bone. Confident in the fearful silence of his
slaves, Lilburn Lewis mocks them as a cowardly “passel of niggers” (98). But
Aunt Cat, his black nanny, speaks and acts out—not directly, but by a masterly
indirection: A voice came,

“high /All Old and screechy, like some Old scritch-owl, / “Bones will

fly up” it scratches. “Bones will rise. I see them bones, they’re fiyin'

to the sky! . . . She fell down on the ground, /A-staring in the sky,

like bones was flying. // Then niggers yelling so, and gabbling wild

“Them bones!” they yelled, and pointed to the sky. /And one . . . /

He ran to the Sheriff, fell down to grab his knees. / “Oh, Lawd,” he

yelled, “Oh, Valley—oh, Jehoshaphat! / “Oh, white folks, save me,

I’ll show them bones” (98).

Through this prophetic speech, the helpless “passel of niggers” submits
Lilburn to the law. In this extraordinary turn in which slave gains ascendancy over
master, Aunt Cat’s prophesying makes possible the indictment of Lilburn for his
crime. Her prophetic word is politically efficacious. The tyrant, the one who rules

without laws, she submits to the rule of law through prophetic speech. Warren’s

passage foregrounds the prophetic word as deed.

This project asks what literary and theological precedents made it possible
for Warren to write this scene. ls Warren’s use of prophecy exemplary or
idiosyncratic? Is there a mechanism of prophetic rebellion? In this and other
twentieth century literary texts, why does prophecy appear also as a tool of the
kind of tyranny and injustice that John undergoes? In what sense does prophecy
purport or attempt to be politically efficacious? How do a variety of twentieth
century novelists utilize the qualities of the prophetic word, especially its status
as deed, in order to address tyranny? Walter Benjamin scholar Ian Balfour
claims that “Prophecy emerges as ‘pOlitical art,’ and the dominant paradigm for
this art is the word as deed” (123). How does prophecy emerge as a political
art?

This project investigates the way the literary tropology of prophecy renders
prophetic speech political. It inherits those methodologies and vocabularies that
allow the analysis Of sacred text as literature instead of theology, while it also
inherits the hermeneutics that was invented for Biblical interpretation: this
background makes possible the consideration of speech that Claims to be sacred
as a trope or set of tropes. But more is required: the literary tropology Of
prophecy requires a specific methodology because prophetic speech rendered in
literature is doubly complex. While tropes are turns from ordinary speech,
prophecy is already a speech in motion: prophecy is word and deed, a sign of
absence and a sign of presence, a message that is also a dialogue, a sudden
manifestation that is nonetheless timelessness and a mediated language that

claims to be immediate. Hovering or vacillating between these oppositions, this

 

 

kind Of speech is dynamic and elusive. It does not come to a standstill when
deployed in literature.

Axiomatic for this project is the statement that prophetic language consists
of an “ensemble of contradictory qualities from which it draws the extent of its
meanings” (Blanchot 83). The method Of this project is to define prophetic
speech via its pairs of contradictory qualities and to use the resulting definition to
analyze the way that prophetic speech in literature is political. The method is
inspired by Blanchot’s insistence on the tension of these pairs, a tension that
renders prophetic speech equivocal instead of univocal. If univocal means
“having a single, sharply defined sense or nature; unambiguous" it also offers the
happy coincidence of its pun on voice (Webster’s). Prophetic speech is a speech
of several voices, not one voice: by nature it Claims to be both the voice of the
prophet and the voice Of God, the gods, or some equivalent concept. Nabi, the

Hebrew word for prophet, means “the speaker of Yahweh”, which is sometimes

(as in the case of Samuel) likened to a seer (International 1).1 The message and
the messenger are also components of Greek prophecy: “Prophecy is literally

‘enthusiastic' in the etymological sense that the god enters the prophet to speak

in his or her voice” (Balfour 4O).2
Prophetic speech is also equivocal instead of univocal because many of
its fundamental features are contradictory. The method of depicting each quality

of prophecy in light of its opposite could be called a hermeneutics of Opposition.

 

NabI also has a broader sense of “poet or mu5ICIan under dIVIne InspIratIon” (Balfour 69).

2 . . . .
In the Greek, prophet IS prophetes. In Latin propheta. Robert Lowth translates nabi always as
prophet, while Maurice Blanchot warns us not to equate nabi with prophetes.

This method is exemplified in Martin Heidegger’s definitions of aletheia in terms
of lethe in the Parmenides.

The urgency of examining prophecy’s contradictory features lies in this
problem: when the tension of these pairs slackens, prophecy may serve tyranny,
violence, or terrorism. Where there are mutations of prophetic speech that align
with tyranny, some imbalance rocks these contradictory pairs: presence
privileged and absence forgotten, transmission or mediation emphasized over
dialogue, etc. The matrix of contradictory qualities can produce different
mutations of prophetic speech that alter the politics Of prophecy and its ideally
subversive relation with tyranny. These contradictions are all present within
prophetic speech, and are necessary to it: the tension of these pairs maintains
the shape of prophetic speech. Without that tension, the tropes of prophetic
speech both turn and tilt. The variations and distortions of these tilted tropes are
an important part of the tropology of prophecy: they belong among the ways in
which prophecy is a political art, driven by the word as deed.

Among those who study the intersection of prophecy and politics there is
a convention of placing politics on a continuum from secular to religious, in which
the totalitarian state (with its messianic fervor and leader-worship) is religious
and consequently associated with the prophetic, which is reduced to theophanic
attestation. Lee Horsley in Fictions of Power in English Literature defines the
political spectrum as understood broadly today: it ranges from pluralist to monist
and libertarian to authoritarian. In this framework the first category is secular and

the second category is religious. So the messianic figures of Hitler and Stalin

would be signs of a barbaric, religious, traditional society.3 “Political scientists . .
. tend to think in terms of a continuum—placing regimes, for example, on a
liberal-totalitarian or pluralist-monist continuum” which also include the Opposition
between “secular-libertarian and “collective-sacred” models (Horsley 3). Horsley
cites Erik Voegelin’s Die Politschen Religionen as a guide for such an approach.
The recent book New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism by
Bryan Cooper aligns terrorism with the apocalyptic, indicting prophecy as bad
politics. But the basic division between religious and secular obscures the
prophetic in secular societies and in novels about secular societies—for instance,
the prophecy of nuclear apocalypse that dominates the cultural landscape of the
United States in Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The unequivocally binary approach
fails to recognize the equivocal, adaptable nature Of prophetic speech, and thus

is of limited usefulness in apprehending the subtleties of prophecy and the

political in literature.4

In order to approach prophecy via its contradictory qualities, I must
address the most basic misunderstanding of prophecy as mere prediction that
Samuel Johnson offered in his eighteenth century dictionary. Johnson's

definition outlines unequivocal prophetic speech par excellence, and it continues

 

3 The idea of the prophet as a charismatic personality makes possible the totalitarian leader cult.
This glorification of personality is alien to the Hebrew tradition of the prophet. Gerhard von Rad
warns that “Even the idea of ‘prophetic personalities' which so readily comes to our minds is very
far from being what the sources themselves had to offer us" (17). Rad points to the way that
prophets like Hosea Obscure rather than reveal themselves as personalities. This approach to
prophecy and politics as chiefly a function of messianic leadership we will dismiss early in favor of
more important misunderstandings of prophecy.

Ironically, Voegelin's antipositivist New Science of Politics seeks transcendental foundation for
politics.

as the conventional definition. The definition Of mantic speech as foretelling not
only occludes the contradictory qualities of prophecy that render its politics
tenuous, but also it obscures the basic political involvement of the prophet in
society.

Hebrew prophecy is not primarily a matter of foretelling. Prediction is
secondary; “Westermann has shown how the lament, the prayer, and the threat
are as characteristic of prophetic discourse as are the prediction and the oracle”
(Balfour 5). Claus Westermann’s work on the Biblical forms of prophetic speech,
such as the lament, the prayer, the threat or announcement of ill and the
conditional and unconditional judgment speeches permit us to see that the
Biblical prophets tried to effect social change (5). Louis Martz explains that the
Hebrew prophet’s “mind is upon the present” (3). Similarly, pastoral theologian
and ethicist Walter Brueggemann examines prophecy as a ministry in society.
Brueggemann describes Biblical prophecies as attempts to uncover “the real
deathliness that hovers over [. . .] and gnaws within” society, where it is hidden
by ignorance and indifference (50). Prophets bring “to public expression those
very fears and terrors that have been denied” and occluded from public discourse
(50). The static definition of prophecy simply as prediction could not account for
Aunt Cat’s political deployment of prophecy in Warren’s scene.

Prophecy would be a poor political art if it were mere prediction of the
future. Instead, it shakes the assumptions Of the political order by unsettling the
present. When Gale Carrithers insists that “the prophet is far more iconoclastic

than theophanic,” he points to the way that prophecy unsettles the givens of a

society (144). Maurice Blanchot in the essay “Prophetic Speech” in The Book
to Come explains that the error of reducing prophesy to prediction is a qualitative
misunderstanding of the nature of prophetic speech rather than a quantitative
failure to account for its variety. Instead Of being language about the future,
prophecy “is a dimension of language that engages it in relationships with time
that are much more important than the simple discovery of certain events to
come,” which comprise a future “that happens in the ordinary course of events
and finds expression in the regularity of language” (79). Instead, “prophetic
speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces,
because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how
to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence” (79). The definition of
prophecy as prediction of the future ignores the unsettling effect of mantic
speech on society and thus obscures the way that prophecy is political.

Prophecy is concerned with the present, and it involves itself politically
through iconoclasm and social critique. The ethical involvement of prophecy in
society through critique and iconoclasm is complicated by the tension of the
conflicting qualities of prophetic speech. This involvement can become inimical:
the qualities out of balance can send prophecy into the hands of tyranny.
Consequently, it is not easy to categorize prophecy with good politics or bad
politics.

The same cliffhanging struggle between oppositions inherent in mantic
speech finds expression in themes that are equally agonistic: scandal, violence,

sacrifice and betrayal. For instance, the typically fundamentalist effort to

interpret sacred texts as unequivocal and apply them as normative overlooks that
“Prophetic speech is always scandalous: the most persistent traits of prophetic
existence [are] scandal and argument” (Blanchot 81). Yahweh’s command to
Hosea to marry a prostitute is “not an image,” therefore the scandal and
degradation of the command are not mitigated (82). The speech Of prophecy
gives scandal as well: “You have played the harlot with many lovers; and would
you return to me? says the Lord” (Jeremiah 3:1 ). When prophecies scandalize
the public or the king with accusations of wrongdoing, the prophet sometimes
endures the accusation of betrayal. The content of a prophecy can threaten
society or its leadership: but simply the ability to prophesy can also be treated as
a threat. Jacob’s eleven sons became jealous of the twelfth, Joseph, in part
because he began to have prophetic dreams. “They only hated him the more”
and conspired to throw him in a pit to die of exposure in the wilderness: the issue
of prophecy divided these progenitors Of the twelve tribes of Israel (Gen 37:5).
The prophet risks violence: “Your own sword devoured your prophet" (Jere 2:31 ).
Sacrifice and violence are often referenced in judgment speeches such as this
segment from Isaiah: “For the Lord will execute judgment by fire . . . And those
slain by the Lord will be many” (66:16). A dominant type for the theme of
sacrifice is the motif of the ram in the thicket, the sacrifice substituted for Isaac
when God asked Abraham to slaughter his only son. In Christian theology the
Isaac is a type of Christ and Christ an antitype of Isaac. In Islam this sacrificial
event has an important feast day on the calendar: the Feast of Sacrifice, or ld al-

Adha. The importance of this motif for the three major religious typologies

deriving from the Pentateuch cannot be overstated. The agonistic themes of
betrayal, violence, and sacrifice and the accompanying motifs pervade these
prophetic traditions.

The tension of opposites within prophecy is also expressed in the
oppositional topoi (in the literal sense Of places) of the desert, the city, and the
cave. These topoi refer to a basic conflict between inside and outside, a conflict
that Ruth Padel explores in In and Out of the Greek Mind. She raises the
important point that prophecy in the sense of seeing and reading signs depends
on the idea that truth is hidden within nature: the movement of birds and
lightening. A prophetic sign is just such a collusion between the natural world
and cosmic truth: the lightening is a signifier, the failure of a king is the signified
and together they make a divine Sign. The image of the interiority Of truth is
easier to see in the Greek practice of extispicy in which the intestines of an
animal are consulted as a source of auspices. The vital classical motif of the
snake in the house draws on both interiority and exteriority: Chthonic forces
intrude into domesticity. This motif suggests a conflict between inside and
outside wherein prophecy can move to a position that spans them both, and thus
deliver truth to the light of day. The cave in which the sybil hides is another
expression of the interiority of prophetic truth. Jonah’s enclosure in the belly of
the whale is a Biblical example of the prophet suffering an enclosure similar to

the cave, as is Daniel in the lion’s den.

The desert, on the other hand, is a topos that is outside: outside of

domesticity and outside Of civilization as represented by the topos of the city.

“Outside” is “where one cannot remain, since to be there is to be always already
outside;” in this outside are “only primal powerlessness, wretchedness of hunger
and cold” and wandering instead of production (Blanchot 80). There, people are

“stripped of their power and separated from the possible;” consequently, they

“exist with each other in the bare relationship in which they had been in the

desert and which is the desert itself” (81 ).5 The structures of society crumble. A
crucial motif that emphasizes the wretchedness and powerlessness of the
outcast in the desert is the conflict between Isaac, the son Of Abraham’s wife
Sarah, and Ishmael, the son of Hagar, the servant girl of Abraham and Sarah.
Because of the jealousy of Sarah, Ishmael was cut off from the dynasty of his

father and banished with his mother into the desert.

Maurice Blanchot theorizes that the desert is also a place where prophecy
and its fulfillment are possible. Absence is a condition that shapes or allows
prophecy, and the desert draws the prophet into this condition. John the Baptist,
who lived on wild honey and locusts, exemplifies the condition of the prophet as
exterior to civilization. The attributes of the desert are emptiness, desolation (lack
of civilization), and hostility to life. An important feature of the desert is that it is
difficult to survive there. The withdrawal into the desert is no romantic pastoral
retreat into a sympathetic and wholesome nature. Far from it: In Jeremiah, the
desert is often mentioned as part of a judgment speech, as in “Her Cities have

become an object of horror, a parched land and a desert” (51 :43). In Isaiah, the

 

Blanchot’s Idea of the outSIde IS comparable to Deleuze' and GuatterI’s Anti-Oedipus In that
both emphasize orphans and nomads as examples of how to “shake off the Oedipal yoke and the
effects of power" (xxi).

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dryness of the desert can be reversed by Yahweh: “rivers in the desert” (Isaiah
43:19). Desert is sometimes used synonymously with wilderness, as in “He
found him in the desert land, And the howling waste of a wilderness” (DE 32:10).

The topos of the desert marks the quality of absence inherent in prophecy.

Herbert Schneidau in Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition
regards these topoi as foundational for the development of knowledge as
objectivity in the West. He suggests that the intellectual tradition of the West
proceeded from the Biblical experience in which wilderness and civilization are
opposed. “The prophets associate themselves with the wilderness”, says
Schneidau, Citing Amos, Elijah (130). The wilderness is essentially alien to
civilization and its assumptions and also intractable. Biblical prophets alienated
themselves from nature, beginning a reversal of the “savage familiarization” that
Characterized a mythic kind Of knowledge that endowed everything with
immutable meaning (19). This reversal, this demythologization, permitted the
development of scientific objectivity and other discourses based on alienating
oneself from the object at hand. Thus as a speech Of alienation it provides
“knowledge by revelation of meaninglessness” (the emptiness of culture, its
vanity before Yahweh) (26). Prophetic conviction of meaninglessness and the
vanity of culture limits, or interrupts the “’totalizing’ extent of savage
meaningfulness,” confronting the “‘intransigent refusal on the part of the savage
mind to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it’” (Levi Strauss
The Savage Mind qutd in Schneidau). The flow of cultural meaning breaks on the

prophetic pronouncement of vanity and of apocalypse. Schneidau’s account is

11

useful in that it emphasizes the opposition between city and desert, giving
prophecy a stake in this battle.

The starkness of prophecy’s topoi and the agonism of its themes and
motifs show prophecy torn between its contradictory qualities. These
contradictory qualities are mediation and immediacy, absence and presence,
word and deed, imminence and immanence, dialogue and transmission and
suddenness and timelessness. The foundation of this struggle is the duality of
prophecy as word and deed. The prophetic word has been regarded as deed in
many cultures. In The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece classicist Marcel
Detienne details the way in which archaic Greek Civilization regarded the
prophetic word as efficacious. Mantic speech carried a radical power far beyond
ordinary speech. It was regarded as enactment. The words of priests or
prophets, bards and kings were constitutive and had access to a different register
of reality. In the Iliad Achilles’ anxiousness to be sung by the bards proceeded
from the belief that the poet’s speech affected reality: it would give him a
permanent place in reality.

For the Biblical prophets also the word is deed. Gerhard von Rad speaks
of a “conception of language we can call dynamistic, since here a word (or a
symbol or symbolic action) is thought to possess a power which extends beyond
the realm of the mind and may be effective in the spatial and material world also”
(61). In this conception of language the prophetic word manifests change.
“Israel took as her starting point her conviction that the word possessed creative

power;" this power could shake kings or crown them (65). In the Hebrew tradition

12

the prophet’s words come from Yahweh; these words are “not ‘empty,’ but
effective” (55).

The prophetic word is deed in another sense. The Biblical prophets speak
in actions that match their words, as if the divine word is something immediately
incamated in their lives. When Blanchot equates prophecy with “living mimicry,”
he refers not just to the words repeated in the dialogue with God, but to the way
that prophets physically carry out or incarnate these words. Jeremiah, for
instance, “does not content himself with saying: you will be bent under the yoke;
he gets hold of some cords and goes under a wooden yoke, a fire yoke” (84).
Hosea, Of course, marries a prostitute in accord with the divine instructions to
incarnate the message Of the prophecy. Ezekiel 4 offers more examples of living
mimicry: Ezekiel lives out the impending punishment of Israel—being tied up,
burning his hair etc. In the prophetic mode word and deed are unified.

The unity Of word and deed in prophetic speech is another way Of saying
that the prophetic word is immediate. It is immediate in the sense of instant. It is
an action instead of a communication, and in that sense does not proceed
through a medium. The prophet is in direct contact. He claims that his words
come directly from the source—a divinity or a transcendent plane of truth beyond
all speculation. In this sense the prophetic word is immediate: it comes directly
from the source. Yet the prophet is by nature a mediator in that he is a
messenger. Balfour mentions this mediating function, but emphasizes the
immediacy Of prophecy. “In relation to all other human discourse, prophecy is

marked by its immediacy,” because while the prophet is “precisely a mediator,"

13

yet in his “translation from the divine to the human discourse that is prophecy,"
“nothing gets lost in the translation” (8). (The Satanic Verses addresses
precisely this claim of immediacy.) Thus, prophetic speech is dual. It is both
mediated and immediate, a “mediated immediacy” which “comes to emblematize
the highest and perhaps most definitive language” (8). For this reason Benjamin
(and Balfour on his trail) uses prophecy as a model for rethinking “the relations of
word and deed” (8). Because prophecy connects word and deed, it is a locus for
the study of language.

Prophetic speech needs a mediator, a prophet in the sense of messenger,
because of the absence or non-appearance of God. If the divine were constantly
visible and unproblematically available, there would be no need for prophecy.
The “absence of the divine face” is the basis Of the need for prophecy (Balfour
67). This absence “necessitates the use Of figurative language by the Biblical
poets;” prophetic language must figure or give a face to that which is absent and
unseen (67). Prophetic speech employs the “language Of the sublime,” which
indexes negatively something before which knowledge fails. The result is that
“the prophetic word is typically ambiguous in its very structure” because Of the
ambiguous position of the prophet as both “vehicle of divine presence and the
sign of its absence” (68). Not simply theophanic, prophetic speech is in part a
sign of the absence of the divine. This sense of absence is crucial to the whole
activity Of prophesying. As a precondition of prophecy the absence of the divine
face must not be overlooked among the issues connected to prophecy. The

issue of absence becomes important to question of whether tyranny lurks in

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some kinds of prophecy. Where there is a refusal to accept the sign of absence,
that absence is covered up by Iegalism, or a disproportionate emphasis on laws
which can lead to the kind of intellectual tyranny called fundamentalism. This
damaging refusal to face the issue Of absence in prophecy is linked to the
misunderstanding of prophecy as factical prediction. Prophet figures and auditors
who deny the condition of absence may demand instant factical fulfillment of
prophecy. They overlook the way that divine absence requires prophecy to be
mediated and exalt its immediacy.

For Blanchot there is a certain elemental encounter in the prophetic
dialogue, and this encounter happens purely within language: “there is no contact
of thoughts or translation into words of the inexpressible divine thought, only
exchange of speech” (Blanchot 83). Prophetic language is an encounter.
Encounter and relationship form prophetic speech: “the relationship of God to a
man by a speech that is repeated and yet entirely other [ . . . ] introduces into
prophetic language an ensemble of contradictory qualities from which it draws
the extent of its meanings” (83). The contradictory qualities of prophecy as
dialogue and monologue are formative of the other contradictory qualities that
make prophetic speech equivocal.

Prophecy, often regarded as a monologue by the prophet or by his or her
divine source, is also a dialogue. Blanchot gives primacy to the dialogue that
takes place between the prophet and God as a dialogue. The repetition Of
speech between God and the prophet, because it is not always perspicuous,

makes the message content secondary. The repetition shows language to be

15

primarily productive of relation: it juxtaposes the divinity and the prophet. The
content of prophecy is not as important as the ritual signified by its form.
Blanchot’s argues that “the prophetic word is originally a dialogue” (Blanchot qutd
in Balfour 5). It is a dialogue in an “essential way, to the extent that [the prophet]
only repeats the word entrusted to him, an affirmation in which an originary word
finds expression, one which has nonetheless already been said” (5).
Paradoxically, “that [repetition] is its originality. It is primary, but before it there is
always a word to which it responds in repeating it” (5). The dialogic element of
prophecy is like the game of a young child who is able to speak in perspicuous
sentences, but still explores other powers of language:

“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Mama?”
“Yes.”
“Ma-ma!”

This ritual emphasizes bare dialogue where repetition and response
matter more than content. Samuel, the son of Eli begins his prophetic vocation
with just such a bare dialogue:

“Samuel was lying down within the temple of the Lord, where the
ark of God was. Then the Lord called, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ and he
said, “Here I am!’ and ran to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you called
me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call; lie down again.’ SO he went and lay
down. And the Lord called again, ‘Samuel!’ And Samuel arose and
went to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I
did not call my son; Lie down again.’ Now Samuel did not yet know
the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him
. . . And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. And he arose
and went to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ Then Eli
perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to
Samuel, ‘Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, “Speak,

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Lord, for thy servant hears“ . . . And the Lord came and stood forth,

calling as at other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel

said ‘Speak, for thy servant hears’ (1 Samuel 3: 3-11).

This passage, with its repetition in the calling of the prophet and in its lack
of content in the exchange of speech between divinity and prophet emphasizes
the essential dialogicity of prophecy that is always prior to its message. In this
passage (prophetic) language communicates not content, but communication as
hailing. Prophetic language puts fonivard this dialogue as an action. While the
passage elevates language, it also suggests that Samuel must proceed from a
bare point of poverty of information and poverty of relationship with Yahweh; he
does not know who calls him and he must be taught what to say in response.
The chapter’s opening accounts for this ignorance: “And the word of the Lord
was rare in those days; there was nO frequent vision” (1 Sam 3:1). The society
which has forgotten mantic speech must begin in this state of absence and
ignorance and proceed through the pure mechanism Of the dialogue itself.

A similar repetition occurs in Abraham’s dialogue with Yahweh in the Book
of Genesis over the imminent destruction of a corrupt city, but this time
accompanied by persuasion. Abraham asks

“‘Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose

there are fifty righteous within the City; wilt thou then destroy the

place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it

from thee to do such a thing’ . . . And the Lord said, ‘If I find at

Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for

their sake.’ Abraham answered, ‘Behold, I have taken upon myself

to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of

the fifty righteous are lacking? Wilt thou destroy the whole city for

lack Of five?’ And he said, ‘I will not destroy it if I find forty-five

there.’ Again he spoke to him, and said, ‘Suppose forty are found

there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of the forty I will not do it.’ Then
he said, ‘Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose

I7

thirty are found there.’ He answered, ‘I will not do it, if I find thirty
there’” (Gen 18:22).

Abraham repeats the appeal for twenty, and then for ten, and Yahweh
repeats the same response. Here the content of the prophecy is not so important
as its utterance, its repetition, and the consequent dialogue of affirmation that it
forms. The repetition in the dialogue signals the dialogue itself, overriding the
importance of the content and thus displacing the notion of the utility of language.

Benjamin connects prophecy and politics via language. Insofar as
prophecy’s effectiveness is not in “transmitting content,” it resembles language,
which to be “effective” will do so “‘through the purest disclosure of its dignity and
its nature’” (9; Benjamin qutd in Balfour 9). Benjamin maintains “resistance to a
certain instrumentalization of language,” an instrumentalization that he witnessed
in the politics of Europe between the wars. Rejecting notions of language as a
means to an end, he “is suspicious of writing that aims to be effective, to be
related to action as cause to effect” (10). Instead of being a cause, language

itself has the potential to be efficacious. It is efficacious only when it

communicates not content (to be used toward some end), but “itself” (8).6

The idea of “language as action” finds an exemplar in the prophetic word
as deed (11). Balfour cites the correspondence of Benjamin with Martin Buber,
who invited him to write in a political magazine in order to combat fascism and
antisemitism. Benjamin refused, not because he was indifferent to fascism and

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effective than his own work. In his interpretation of Benjamin, Balfour goes so far
as to suggest that “all writing that matters may be prophetic” (18). To prioritize
prophetic writing in this way is to take a position on how language effects change
in the world. Having more in common with Heidegger than with Richard Rohrty,
the position of Balfour and Benjamin is distinctly anti-pragmatic. They oppose a
model wherein change occurs primarily through persuasive debate over policy,
manifested and executed in the visible structure Of power of the state. TO say
that “all writing that matters may be prophetic” is not to suggest that the state
does not matter or that democratic discourse is without value, but that prophetic
speech can change the consciousness of what is possible and desirable for
society. It is prior to discourse.

Gale Carrithers proposes the priority of prophetic language before
discourse in Mumford, Eiseley, Tate: Watchers in the Night. He identifies cultural
critics (Lewis Mumford, Loren Eiseley and Allen Tate) who consistently used a
prophetic mode in their essays in cultural criticism. Carrithers claims that
prophetic writing is political, echoing “all writing that matters may be prophetic.” In
order to make his claim about the prophetic speech as a political activity, he
contradicts Edward Said’s definition of political writing. In The World the Text and
the Critic, Said maintains that among “oppositional, or avant—garde literary
theory” “nowhere . . . will one encounter a serious study of what authority is,
either with reference to the way that authority is carried historically and
Circumstantially from the State down into a society saturated with authority of one

sort or another, or with reference to the actual workings of culture, the role of

19

intellectuals, institutions, and establishments” (172). Carrithers Objects that
“precisely those workings and roles concern Mumford, Tate, and Eiseley, who
typically meet them at the earlier stages of the etiology of false authority or
misapplied power and articulate what they find in tropes—sometimes implicit—-
other than Said’s ‘from the State down’” (x). Prophecy figures tyranny in tropes
other than “from the State down.”

At stake is the question how does prophetic speech alter discourse? In
part prophetic speech alters discourse by interrupting it by means of the quality of
suddenness. Blanchot explains that the use of the future tense endows
prophecies with urgency and suddenness, a quality of radical interruption: “SO
prediction, using as support the anticipatory intensity of diction, seems to keep
trying finally to produce its rupture” (80). Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that “A
sudden break in the routine challenges the fullest energy of man's power Of
adjustment. Suddenness is a quality of violence. It is a sign of force breaking
through the design established to contain it” (Hoffman qutd in Muller 79). The
interruption of this design destabilizes society and the present. Blanchot
continues that “When speech becomes prophetic, it is not the future that is given,
it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable,
lasting presence” (79). It is not weak social structures that face annihilation, but
the most solid: “Even the Eternal City and the indestructible Temple are all of a
sudden—unbelievably—destroyed” (79). When the prophet speaks, social

stability falters and social production grinds to a halt.

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The ambiguity of prophetic texts as generated by figurative language and
the occasional use of past tense to indicate the future (and vice versa), allows
prophetic texts to resist being confined to one moment (Balfour 3). It is difficult to
establish which events a predictive prophetic text refers to and whether they
have occurred. Thus they can remain dormant with the potential to disrupt again.
Frank Kermode notes the way that by and large prophecies cannot be
disconfirmed; “The image of the end can never be permanently falsified” (17).

The announcement of judgment and the end suspends normal time in
which social order is meted out. The prophet can revoke the suspension so that
time resumes, but is altered. The addition of the qualifier “nevertheless” in the
contingent announcement of judgment, Blanchot explains, restores time: “when
everything is impossible, when the future, given over to the fire, burns, when
there is no more rest except in the land of midnight, then prophetic speech, which
tells of the impossible future, also tells of the ‘nonetheless’ that breaks the
impossible and restores time” (81). The terrible deprivation or destruction in
which God retreats into “Not-God for you” and the people are “Not-[His]-People”
accompanies “nonetheless” a rebuilding, new blessing and new relationship (My
people, children and father). Blanchot says in effect that prophecy destabilizes
the present; because this destabilization interrupts production and briefly
contradicts the givens of a society, it is one of the primary ways that prophecy is

political.

The absence of the “nonetheless” with its rebuilding and new blessing is

an important feature Of apocalypticism, a manifestation of the contradictory

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prophetic qualities in imbalance. Suddenness and immediacy are favored over
timelessness, and a focus on deed diminishes the importance of prophetic
speech as word. In its eagerness for a concrete manifestation, apocalypticism
forgets that the word as deed is still a word, and that its power lies therein. This
imbalance of the contradictory qualities of prophecy has its own literary history
and a particular place in twentieth-century literature. Frank Lentricchia, Jane
Goldman and Bruce Comens among others have identified a strain of
apocalypticism in literary modernism. Lentricchia explains that because
modernists regard as a losing battle the promotion of the individual and the
values of freedom and originality over and against the culture of the masses, they
“tend to be apocalypticists” (290). For certain authors like Eliot, the apocalyptic
impulse is not so much a belief in an absolute end after which history does not
continue. After all, his Characters inhabit the Waste Land. Desolate as it is, life
continues in it. But the man who lives in the waste land is akin to Nietzsche’s
Last Man. Apocalypticism signals not so much the absolute end of time as the
end Of everything valuable with no hope for something better, with an occlusion
of values. The apocalypticism of the modernists was political in that apocalypse
was a model or trope for representing or thinking about the direction of world
history, the political situation of modern man in the twentieth century, and the
possibilities for freedom or tyranny in a postindustrial culture. This attitude
tended to be more characteristic of the high modernists than the low. Ezra
Pound’s participation in vorticism, with its love of destructive violence, is an

example of the apocalyptic impulse at work in high modernism. But

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apocalypticism is present in low modernist works as well. Nathanael Wests’ riots
and the emblematized in the main Tod’s painting “The Burning of Los Angeles” in
Day of the Locust is an example. The apocalyptic impulse is present in or even
dominates certain canonical modernist texts by TS. Eliot, Gertrude Stein,
Richard Wright, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and W.H. Auden and
Wyndham Lewis.

The trope of apocalypse in modernist literature actually exhibits conflicts
between the features of prophecy and the values of modernism. “Key value
terms in the modernist lexicon” are incompatible with basic features of prophecy:
“original, creative, individual, free” (Lentricchia 288). Prophetic speech, because
it is messenger speech, is not original, creative, or individual. Least of all is it
free, as the Stranger argues in The Violent Bear itAway. These conflicts
between apocalypticism and the category of messenger speech are a sample of
the contradictory qualities of prophecy in imbalance. Apocalypse in modernism
is an important instance of a prophetic trope at work in twentieth century
literature. However, apocalypticism is only an instance—not the whole—Of
prophetic speech at work in literature. Other strains of prophecy in literature
proceeding from other balances and imbalances of prophecy’s contradictory
qualities contribute to the “political art” at work in twentieth century literature.

Brother to Dragons sets apocalypticism against a skeptical response to
apocalypticism, a response that is important to the use Of prophetic speech in
literature. The coincidence of the New Madrid earthquake—the worst in the

history of North America—with Lilburne Lewis’ bloody crime suggests to Mrs.

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Lewis that the event is a judgment. Letitia Lewis Claims that at the time of the
earthquake she “prayed for the End” as “folks named the End of Time,” and, in
an apocalyptic mood, the Mississipi River flowed backwards. RPW (the initials
are Warren’s) rebukes her, saying “It takes something more to bring the End of
Time / Than that Roman circus in your meat-house” (43). She repeats again that
she “prayed / For the End of Time,” and RPW advances the theory that “each
man has IA different set of well-fondled reasons / To make any hour seem
perfectly made to order/ For God’s wrath” (44). RPW mocks the tendency to
apocalypticism, and denies a simplistic relationship between prophecy and the
punishment of tyranny. RPW’s remark signals a (literary) critique of the
apocalyptic impulse, a critique that is carried through in other novels that also
employ non-apocalyptic prophetic speech.

The nonapocalyptic prophetic may in certain cases be a response to the
apocalyptic impulse, as with RPW’s response to Letitia. The skepticism about
apocalypse exhibited by RPW is imbued with a sense of evil as commonplace
(as well as with eschatological modesty) in both the sense of being unremarkable
and of being pervasive. For certain thinkers in the twentieth century, as for
RPW, the apocalyptic impulse was mitigated or contradicted by a sense of
historical anticlimax; Hannah Arendt magnified the anticlimax of the holocaust,
itself an apocalyptic undertaking, in the trial Of Adolf Eichmann. Her concept of
the banality Of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem is a sample of a postapocalyptic,
which I mean more in the sense of “after the belief in apocalypse as a dominant

mOdel of history” than in the sense of “after the apocalypse.” After the smoke of

24

the gas ovens cleared, all Arendt found behind it was the small mind of a
bureaucrat of limited imagination Inclined to platitudes. One can call
postapocalyptic this response to the apocalyptic impulse.

This postapocalyptic strain is not de facto anti-prophetic. In certain cases
novels that employ prophetic speech also exemplify a postapocalyptic strain. The
nature of prophecy as equivocal, as composed of contradictory qualities, allows
for a critique of apocalypse from within prophetic speech. RPW, in company with
the postapocalyptic novelists, does not reject all prophetic speech.

The postapocalyptic response is worthy of study in twentieth century
literature, especially as it reveals a political response to the conditions of the
times. This response becomes important for the literary treatment of cultural
recoveries from slavery, the First World War, the cold war, and more recently
terrorism, which has become a dark presence in American and European political
and cultural consciousness. I would argue that the postapocalyptic response is
as important as the apocalyptic. In contemporary literature that treats terrorism,
the postapocalyptic strain is possibly more important than the apocalyptic.
Terrorists’ appropriation Of apocalyptic rhetoric with religious and prophetic
resonances has raised the stakes on the use Of prophetic speech as a whole by
implicating prophecy in acts of violence. The presence of the idea Of apocalypse
in politics and in the international cultural climate has been answered by a
postapocalyptic strain in literature. Salman Rushdie, for instance, scrutinizes
terrorism and prophetic speech in The Satanic Verses. He does so with

skepticism and a sense of irony. But he also uses such a variety of prophetic

25

voices that the reader is not permitted to reject prophetic speech out of hand as a
bad trope with bad politics. Studying the equivocal nature of prophecy clears the
way for an understanding of the various ways that prophecy is a political art. I
have chosen for this project twentieth century texts that orient us in the dialogue
between apocalyptic and postapocalyptic responses to the events of the century
as well as texts that illustrate the different ways that prophecy is political.

RPW’s belief that evil or tyranny is commonplace challenges utopia and
dystopia as models for political knowledge. For RPW, tyranny and evil are not
imminent—about to happen in one oven/vhelming historical manifestation to end
all others. Rather they are immanent—always with us. In this regard the
postdystopian in literature is similar to what I have termed the postapocalyptic.
The contrast between the dystopian novel and the postdystopian is not that the
first has a stronger belief in the prevalence of tyranny, but that the first
anticipates tyranny as imminent and the second Observes that tyranny is
immanent. George Orwell Offers us an example of apocalyptic prophecy in his
dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four.

Nineteen Eighty-four, like most of the classic dystopian novels of the
West, is written in a prophetic voice, and thus it foregrounds the prophetic
qualities of suddenness and interruption in order to achieve a political critique. In
using predictions about the future in order to rebuke social injustice in the
present, the dystopian novelists engage in the same social-political work as the
Biblical prophets. The dystopian chapter establishes the way that prophecy is

concerned with the extremes of utopia and dystopia and the basic ways that it

26

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can be political: in the service of the regime and against the regime. However
crass and obvious a utilization of prophecy, totalitarian propaganda and
messianic leadership force us to ask what about prophecy makes it amenable to
the work of tyranny. Via this question the chapter introduces the sinister potential
of prophecy that proceeds from mantic speech as instituted in archaic Greece.
The regime depicted in Nineteen Eighty-four revives prophecy in order to
appropriate the all-encompassing political power found in these Greek roots of
prophecy.

Warren’s Brother to Dragons (the 1975 version) confronts the sinister
possibilities of prophecy, especially as they juxtapose with prophecy’s role in
political founding. The verse play proffers the word as deed as an efficacious
way that prophecy fights tyranny and achieves justice, exploring the possibility for
healing of national memory of slavery via anamnesia. On this point there is
critical consensus: “Brother to Dragons is, critics agree, an act of moral
accounting, an attempt to balance the books on two hundred years of American
experience since the Declaration” (Grimshaw 126). In the relationships depicted
between Ishey and Lilburne and between Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis, the
verse play deploys the sinister possibilities or dark underside of the word as deed
via the themes of violence and mental betrayal. Warren works prophecy into the
play through the themes of violence and sacrifice, attended by allusions to
archaic practices of divination like extispicy. The theme of sacrifice conjoins the
topoi of the desert and the city, launching the thesis that something within

prophecy Opposes civilization and the sacrifices and dynasties that permit it. The

27

desire for dynasty plays out here between Jefferson and Meriwether in a way that
employs the Abraham and Isaac motif as well as the Isaac and Ishmael conflict.
Prophecy’s opposition to dynastic desire emerges in more Character parallels to
Isaac and Ishmael in the other primary texts. Of the texts examined in the study,
this verse play presents the most complex, thorough and multivalent deployment
of the tropes of prophecy.

Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away is a window into the mind of
the prophet: it privies us to the calling of the prophet, his decision to reject or
receive the call, his desire for autonomy, his possibilities for freedom, his sense
of absence and lack, and his internal conflict between his calling and the values
of civilization. Young Tarwater encounters, and invests himself in, the notion that
God, the divine originator of the prophetic message, is a tyrant, and that
everything proceeding from the message is oppressive. He confronts the
possibility that prophecy itself is tyrannical. Three dialogues, between Tarwater
and the Old Man, Tarwater and Rayber, and TanNater and the strangers
(culminating in the rapist), assert that prophecy is enslaving and ought not to be
undertaken. On the level of language, the stranger seems to suggest that any
definition of language that allows for the notion of the word as deed proceeding
from dialogicity is dangerous to Tanivater, or the one called to be a prophet.
O’Connor gives us the thesis that the prophet proceeds from the margins of
society and returns to the desert or wilderness. As the title indicates, the novel
confronts violence and the prophetic quality Of suddenness. The origins of this

violence are multiple. As readers see violence committed against the mind and

28

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person of the prophet, they also see violence committed by the prophet. The
theme of sacrifice shows its link to prophecy as O’Connor depicts the prophet
identifying which sacrifices his society demands. The prophet’s insight into the
hidden evil in society identifies the victim of the sacrifice. In this complicated
deployment Of the motif of the ram in the thicket (the directive that Abraham
sacrifice Isaac) O’Connor infers that the prophet in the Christian tradition offers
prophecy as a substitute for the sacrifice that society demands.

Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Devil on the Cross employs a prophetic mode of
narration in a postcolonial analysis Of the ills of a society and its possibility for
defeating tyrannical rule. In this novel the prophetic potential of the oppressed
and marginalized person is actualized by several of the issues surrounding
prophecy: suddenness; and dialogue and mediation, where dialogue is blurred
with monologue and mediation with immediacy. The distinction of Ngugi's
prophecy is that it moves up from below instead of down from above, thus
appropriating prophecy from the colonizer.

In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie explores the psychology of
religious belief and doubt In some cosmopolitan Citizens of a postcolonial age.
Traditions and typologies Of prophecy mix and intertwine in a proliferation of
prophet figures. The plenitude of prophetic manifestations and the wide
differences between them demand comparison. Ultimately, the themes of
violence and sacrifice in the novel compel the reader to adjudicate among kinds
of prophecy. Certain imitations of prophecy, proceeding from the basic

misunderstanding of prophecy as prediction, produce violence and terrorism.

29

Tapping in to some authentic roots of prophecy, prophet figures like Tavleen
mutate the word as deed and thus align themselves with tyranny. The
falsifications, combinations, and reproductions of prophecy each have their own
political effects and ethical implications.

Don DeLilIO’s Mao II is a contemporary novel with a postdystopian outlook.
In these circumstances tyranny is viewed as immanent instead Of imminent.
Thus tyrannical rule is something to be apprehended rather than predicted; the
false definition of prophecy as prediction does not have the driving force that it
did in the classic dystopian novels. Prophecy in this novel tends to serve
tyranny: but the novelist Bill Gray tries to appropriate it for better ends by favoring
absence over presence.

The course of this exploration of the political activity of prophecy in these
novels leads to the question of whether there is a modern prophetic speech that
can intervene in political discourse. If one of these novels were to exemplify
such a prophetic speech, it would have to maintain the tension between the
contradictory qualities of mantic speech, the speech that mediates between

inside and outside, hidden and visible.

3O

Chapter One
Unequivocal Disapproval: The Apocalyptic Prophetic in Nineteen Eighty-
Four and its Post Apocalyptic Critics
Prophecy is an Issue for Nineteen Eighty-Four on three levels. On the first level,
Orwell gives the narrator of his dystopian tale a prophetic voice and an
apocalyptic mood, enlarging on the prophetic quality of imminence. On the
second level OnIveII examines the way prophecy can be used to justify and
maintain a tyrannical regime. These tyrannical uses of unequivocal prophecy
magnify the prophetic qualities of presence, immediacy and timelessness. On
the third level, prophecy is an issue for critics of Orwell who, in their distaste for
the apocalyptic, manifest a post apocalyptic critical viewpoint which itself ignores
the equivocal nature of prophecy. This chapter addresses Orwell’s use Of
prophecy as well as the limits of the critical perception Of prophecy as a political
art. These critical limits must be addressed in order to point to the possibility of
the alternate political arts of prophecy that other novelists—Robert Penn Warren
and Flannery O’Connor among the modernists and Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo
and Ngugi Wa Thiongo among the postmodernists—employ.

Hostility and contempt are a significant part of the criticism of Orwell’s
work from the nineteen-sixties to the present. To begin with, the dystopian
genre in which Onivell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four stands out as a classic does not
always receive critical respect. Edith Clowes and Gary Morson speak of the
absence of “challenge to current readers” in dystopian works generally (Clowes

cited in Gottlieb 4). Margery Kingsley, in her study of politics and prophecy in

31

British literature, feels compelled to defend the “genre so often dismissed in
academic Circles as marginal and unworthy of serious attention,” defending the
“remarkable historical tenacity” of the genre and “the contemporary potency of
the jeremiad impulse,” an impulse that Walter Benn Michaels has shown to be
important in the development of American literature (192).

Onivell’s work is a locus for the critique of the dystopian novel, and it has
suffered a number of accusations. The objections given to his work are that it is
facile, didactic, elitist, depressing or nihilistic, based on outdated notions of
totalitarian rule, quietest, racist and imperialist, the origin of an insincere armchair
activism, and treacherously damaging to the Left. Christopher Hitchens reports
that “on the political and cultural Left, the very name Of Orwell is enough to evoke
a shiver of revulsion” (36). His examples are passages from E.P. Thompson,
who Claimed that Orwell overlooked “the inhumanity of the right” in order to
polemicize the left (E.P. Thompson: ‘Outside the Whale’ 1960 quoted in
Hitchens); Salman Rushdie accuses him of a “quietist . . . exhortation to submit
to events” and claims that “the Orwell of ‘lnside the Whale’ and Nineteen Eighty-
Four is advocating ideas that can only be of service to our masters” (‘Outside the
Whale’ 1984 quoted in Hitchens 37). Conor Cruise O’Brien charges OnIvell with
supporting British imperialism, despite On/vell’s work against the concept of
“race-childhood” (30). (Hitchens argues that on the contrary “Orwell can be read
as one of the founders of the discipline of post-colonialism” (34).) Edward Said
identifies him with amateur or armchair activism and the fostering Of “the eye-

witness, seemingly opinion-less politics . . . of contemporary Western journalism”

32

(38). Other detractors are Isaac Deutscher and Raymond Williams, who says
that “On/veil prepared the orthodox political beliefs of a generation . . . By viewing
the struggle as one between only a few people over the heads of an apathetic
mass” (38). Christopher Hitchens sees in this hostile critical response to Orwell a
reaction to the conservative appropriation of Orwell as a patron saint of Cold War
politics. Hitchens also identifies disgust for his supposed tolerance of rightist
politics, and a strong belief that OnIveII betrayed the Leftist cause.

The underlying cause of the hostile critiques, the anti-Orwellian mood, is
distaste for the narrow kind of prophetic speech that Orwell employs. A post
apocalyptic orientation or mood prompts critics to withdraw from his apocalyptic
political art, with its authoritative transmission of a warning and its bold claims to
the suddenness or imminence of disaster, predicted and fulfilled. The postwar
critical treatment of OnIvell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four distills much of the distaste for
an apocalyptic prophetic treatment of tyranny as imminent. Thus OnIvell’s novel
offers a good example of uses of prophetic speech that permits critics to overlook
more subtle and complex instances of prophecy in literature.

Nonetheless Orwell’s use of prophecy does indeed have its limitations: it
is polarized around two simplistic oppositions instead of exploring a whole matrix
of possible combinations among prophecy’s contradictory qualities. In this
dystopian novel the corrective prophecy of the narrative contends with the
delusive prophecies of utopia utilized by the tyrannical state. Prophetic speech is
polarized in these novels in that it either fights or upholds tyranny: it is at odds

with itself in a conflict centering on the qualities of imminence and timelessness.

33

But while this divided prophecy, this apocalypticism, is simplified and didactic,
Orwell gestures toward a broader understanding of prophecy as a political art
with his use of anamnesia—which is a conscious refusal to submit to the policy of
forgetting—as a corrective for those in thrall of a tyrannical prophecy. In using
anamnesia, prophetic wrath and grief, OnIvell draws on the prophetic tradition.
The relative simplicity of Onrvell’s position must not obscure the equivocalness Of
prophetic speech, an equivocalness that creates paradoxical relations between
the OnIvellian apocalyptic mood and the anti-Orwellian post apocalyptic mood.
Many of the charges against Orwell ultimately stem from his use of
prophecy as a political art, so they require consideration in light of the prophetic
tradition of prophetic speech. One of the chief accusations against Orwell is that
his work is depressing. Isaac Deutscher “judges OnIvell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
not as a novel or even as a polemic, but by the possibility that it may depress
people” (Hitchens 44). Deutscher accused the novel of “moving millions to
despair and apathy,” just as Raymond Williams accused him of “spoiling the
morale of a whole generation” (45). Raymond Williams regards Orwell as a
“spokesman of another kind Of despair: the despair born of social and political
disillusion” (Culture and Society quoted in Hitchens 48). Edith Clowes suggests
that the dystopian novels in general, and Orwell’s in particular, carry nostalgia for
the past and fail to hope for a better society, so that Onrvell expresses a “nihilistic
attitude toward both the present and the future, closing both off to a new
Imaginative possibility” (quoted in Gottlieb 5). Erich Fromm puts it more

sympathetically: “it is precisely the significance of Onrvell’s book that it expresses

34

a new mood of hopelessness which pervades our age before this mood has
become manifest and taken hold of the consciousness of people” (Fromm 259).
Fromm refers to the “mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man”
in a century for which “the moral callousness of the First World War was only the
beginning” (259). However, he describes Orwell as prescient of this cultural
mood instead of culpable for it. The “mood of despair” is a universal marker Of
the period, insists Fromm, who writes in the context of the Cold War. He speaks
of the potential “destruction Of our civilization, if not of all mankind, by
thermonuclear weapons as they exist today and as they are being developed in
increasingly frightful proportions” (259). “Most people,” he continues, “are not
consciously aware of this threat and of their own hopelessness” (259). Orwell is
associated with a mood of hopelessness characterized by an apocalyptic sense
of the imminent ending of civilization.

Orwell creates this sense of despair in the novel partly through drawing on
the prophetic tradition that is a source for dystopian novelists. Corrective
prophetic speech in the Old Testament is often characterized by reproach and
starkness of vision, and is colored by the prophet’s polar emotions of wrath and
grief and his sense that things must soon come to an end. OnIvell participates in
the tradition of prophecy by employing a prophetic frame for the narrative.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course prophetic in the narrow sense of the prediction
flagged in the title. He also utilizes themes of prophecy, wherein betrayal and
political founding are wound up in the regime’s prophecy of a utopian age.

Corrective prophecy frames the narrative, within which a corrupt prophecy

35

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assists tyranny. This frame of corrective prophecy is a typical model of the
dystopian novel. Gottlieb explains that the narrative points to two time planes in
the Classical dystopic novels by Orwell, Atwood, Vonnegut, Huxley, and Zamiatin.
The action occurs on a future time plane in which the characters inhabit a
dystopia which readers must understand to be the consequence of or the full
expression of some trend of decision-making in the readers’ own time plane.
Like the prophet, the dystopian novelist perceives, decries and warns against
corrupt social practices. Dystopian novels like Orwell’s purport to carry this same
warning and reproach, bringing before public view tyrannical tendencies in
current society. The dystopian novels address the reader's situation, always
looking back to some past time (compatible with the reader’s) in which there
were signs of the coming oppression, but there was still the freedom to change.
They offer “a warning that we should not allow the still curable illness of our
present world to turn into the abhorrent pathologies of the world of the future"
(27). Nineteen Eighty-Four and similar dystopian novels like We and Brave New
World contain “a warning for the future” (Fromm 259). Erich Fromm explains that
“neither Orwell nor Huxley or Zamyatin wanted to insist that this world of insanity
is bound to come. On the contrary, it was quite obviously their intention to sound
a warning by showing where we are headed for unless we succeed in a
renaissance of the spirit Of humanism” (Fromm 267).

This activity Of warning is consonant with the prophetic tradition: In
societies and civilizations, however content their majorities, prophets see and

warn against hidden corruption. The prophetic speech of the Old Testament often

36

follows what Claus Westermann calls the judgment formula, in which either an
individual or the nation of Israel is taken to task for corrupt practices. The
formula includes the accusation, the announcement of judgment, and the
announcement of ill to come, which are sometimes followed by further reproach
(Westermann 5). This pre-exilic version of the formula conveys an entirely dark
picture: it is an “unconditional announcement of judgment” (206). It conveys no
approbation or even mercy. Nothing matters in the message but the corrupt
practices, which cannot be concealed among better social practices, mitigated by
necessity or other political Claims, or even forgiven. In later periods of prophets
“a conditional announcement of salvation . . . appears,” so that some brightness
contrasts the dark picture (206). Even so, the reprieve depends on reform.
There is no suggestion of compromise, Of partial reform, or Of overlooking certain
practices. Walter Brueggemann explains that many of the corrupt practices the
prophets decry are social ills. Corrective prophecy uncovers “the real
deathliness that hovers among us and gnaws within us” in everyday life (50). The
prophet shines a light into the dark places in society, uncovering and bringing “to
public expression those very fears and terrors that have been denied . . . and
suppressed” (44, 50).

This persistent sense of warning and reproach contributes to the
impression of didacticism of which some critics complain. The novel is of course
didactic in that it attempts to teach and reform: it openly preaches against
tyranny. But the starkness of prophetic speech may also contribute to the sense

of didacticism. Prophetic vision appears like a Chiaroscuro, in which dark and

37

now

light are dramatically juxtaposed so that the qualities of each are more strident.
Prophecy sees in the dark—in Winston’s prison cell and in Lilburne Lewis’ meat
shed—and it sees the dark in things. Where there is oppression, prophecy does
not wink at it—it does not spare its criticism for practical considerations or
considerations Of advantage. In a society that calls itself Civilized and just,
prophecy will see and decry the sacrifice of those who have been marginalized to
make that society work. Prophecy is not interested in banalities or in preserving
a moderately good rule. The starkness of its vision suits it to see only utopia and
dystopia. These extremes of prophetic vision contribute to the impression some
critics have Of an ovenrvhelming and facile didacticism in Orwell’s work. This
starkness is not so much meant for simplicity as for ruthlessness.

The impression of gloomy reproach and nihilism does not proceed from a
delight in disaster and judgment. Deutscher’s and Williams’ complaint about the
depressing quality of Orwell’s work is a criticism that often attaches to prophecy
itself. Fromm, for instance, separates dystopian writing from prophecy in order to
defend it and so doing exhibits the Classic misunderstanding of prophecy when
he insists that “Onrvell, like the authors of the other negative utopias, Is not a
prophet of disaster,” but instead “wants to warn and to awaken us” (267). Fromm
thinks that Orwell is not a prophet because “he still hopes;” a prophet, for Fromm,
is simply someone who predicts and who believes wholeheartedly in the
inevitability of that prediction (267). In truth, Fromm is describing the qualities Of
a prophet when he describes Orwell: the desire “to warn and to awaken” and the

persistence of hope are essential features of prophecy. Fromm’s

38

misunderstanding underscores the need for a study like this and point to one
source Of distaste for apocalyptic writing—namely nihilism—that can taint
prophetic writing in general for critics.

The reputation Of the prophet as scold, which is usually associated with
Jeremiah and the form called the jeremiad, is only one way that the insight into
corruption is communicated. Abraham Heschel explains that the psychology Of
the prophet does not typically turn on morbid glee and anticipation of destruction,
but on two polar emotions: wrath and grief. The Biblical prophet magnifies divine
wrath against injustice: if his wrath exceeds the divine wrath, then he becomes
judge instead of the messenger of judgment. While the prophet can certainly be
an irritant or a gadfly, Brueggemann claims that grief, not wrath, is the strongest
affect of the prophet, which is partly why Orwell’s prophetic book comes across
as depressing. The prophet is depressed. He grieves—but does not fail to hope.
Westermann classifies the cry of woe or lamentation as a feature of judgment
speech that persists into later forms of prophetic speech in the Bible. The cry of
woe expresses the prophet’s grief over the retribution that is about to overtake
his people. Louis Martz identifies the same oscillation between wrath and grief in
the “voice of the prophet” the voice “tends to oscillate between denunciation and
consolation, between despair and hope, between images of desolation and
images of redemption, between the actual and the ideal” in visions that are single
moments instead of a continuous story (4). This “embrace of pathos” involves

apprehending and expressing the already-present morbidity of a society (4).

39

The purpose of the “dual themes” Of wrath and grief is to “achieve a
change of heart, a moral and spiritual change in the minds of [the prophets]
people” (Martz 5). The prophet is supposed to convey the divine pathos,
including anger, because evil is met with indifference. For Heschel, the prophet’s
“great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference”
which was always presented over and against the compassion of God (284).
Heschel points out that prophecy does not just promulgate belief or even rebuke
evil, but assaults the indifference to evil and injustice which can accompany even
‘Correct’ belief and righteous behavior (254). The prophetic vision is extreme,
and thus may appear both stridently didactic and depressing—as it does in
Orwell—because it battles indifference.

Imminent endings are the cause Of the prophet’s grief and the origin of his
apocalyptic rhetoric. The prophet knows that it is “end time" or “cry time,” and
that peace and business-as-usual are not sustainable (Brueggemann 53, 54).
But the imminence and suddenness of that prophetic narrative has a purpose: it
combats the utopian fantasy of timelessness. Timelessness and suddenness,
two contradictory qualities that prophetic speech bears, line up against each
other in Orwell’s novel. Timelessness aligns with the state, which tries to
obscure history, the passage of time, and the order of years in order to suggest
or create a perfect, eternal present—like the Thousand Year Reich—which is
above all fulfillment Of the messianic prophecy of revolution and the story of
utopia. Winston is uncertain about what year it is when he starts his journal. NO

anniversaries mark the disappearances of his parents or even his own date of

40

birth. In the absence of time, “everything faded into mist. The past was erased,
the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth” (64). The timelessness of
the state utopia, while it sustains the illusion of living in the age of fulfillment and
perfection also serves the practical purpose of obscuring unsavory events and
rendering impossible an analysis of cause and effect, success and failure and
thus policy: lies easily become the truth in the absence of time and causality.
The state posits an eternal present such that the “entire society seems to be
laboring in the throes of an enormous fantasmagoria about the future” (Gottlieb
10). The maintenance of this fantasmagoria is part of Winston’s job. Called on to
cover up a change of policy or position that would mark time in the state, he
realizes that “what was needed was a piece of pure fantasy” (Onrvell 41). The
sense of timelessness produced by the state maintains the official fantasy and
vice versa. The purpose of the prophetic narrative is to hail an end to the
fantasmagoria and complacent rule, and of the secure hierarchies. The strategy
behind OnIvell’s prophetic framework is to combat this timelessness of prophetic
speech as utilized by the tyrannical state with the suddenness of apocalyptic
rhetoric. While this fantasmagoria is what Onrvell tries to combat, there are
different responses to the same problem, responses which Orwell’s detractors
might consider preferable.

The undercurrent of the disgust with Orwell and the complaint that he
destroys morale is a rejection of the apocalyptic outlook that Onrvell has come to
represent. Behind the accusation of nihilism are deeper objections the notions of

dystopia, totalitarianism, apocalypse and imminence (or, in terms of prophecy’s

41

contradictory qualities, suddenness). The beginning of these objections lies with
the question of what the apocalypse of society would look like: that is, what is the
dystopia, the worst society? When Gottlieb and other sympathetic critics of
dystopian novels as a genre deploy rebuttals against postmodernism, defending
the existence and the gravity of the genre of the dystopian novel, they defend the
notion of dystopia itself. Gottlieb raises another problem for discussing the
dystopian novel, that of the postmodern blow-out of the definition of dystopia. If
for thinkers like Foucault “any society operating at the present time (or possibly at
any other time as well) could be regarded as such a ‘bad place’” then dystopic
society becomes a redundancy (5). For Gottlieb, what she regards as a
postmodern paranoia about present societies is inimical to any clear definition of
a dystopian genre.

The idea Of a single imminent ‘worst’ regime, then, has become suspect. It
is seen, perhaps, as a red herring that distracts in the hunt for the real sources of
oppression. It also distracts us from the magnitude Of wrongs in the present,
because things could potentially be so much worse for so many more people: the
glaring injustices of historical fascism, for instance, are (rightly) a locus for shock
and indignation which, however, may not conquer indifference to more
commonplace evils in more respectable societies. The notion of totalitarianism
offers a category Of the worst regime to which other societies can always be
favorably contrasted. Thus this concept can offer such a distraction from subtle
injustices. Slavoj Zizek in Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? explains why the

word totalitarian represents a network of interpretive problems, and the ways in

42

which canonical studies of totalitarianism—like Hannah Arendt’s Origins of
Totalitarianism —have fallen out of favor with many later twentieth century
political theorists. The difficulty positions like Zizek's pose for Onrvell’s novel is
that his dystopia closely reflects Hannah Arendt’s Origins (itself, Of course, an
analysis of the political workings of German National Socialism). Nineteen
Eighty-Four reads like a companion piece to Origins. Her basic definitions of
totalitarian rule OnNell plays out in the novel as well as numerous small details
about the principles of its leadership and the workings of its propaganda.

Zizek points to the show trials as an example of a practice labeled
‘totalitarian’ that can act as a red herring in the search for sources of Oppression.
He compares the question that the accused party member asks his self in the
forced confessions Of the purges “what if someone merely pretends to follow the
Party line faithfully in order to conceal his true counter-revolutionary attitude" to
the Christian self examination in which one asks “have I done the right thing
simply from the wrong motivation—to conceal some ‘basic vileness?’”(100)
“These paradoxes,” Zizek insists, “cannot be dismissed as the simple
machinations Of ‘totalitarian’ power—they harbour a genuine tragic dimension
overlooked by standard liberal diatribes against ‘totalitarianism’” (101 ). Zizek
offers this example of how the concept Of totalitarianism, as defined by Arendt
and illustrated by Onrvell, can mislead politcal thinkers to overlook important
experiences which cast light on the machinations of power in ordinary—instead
of radically dystopic—societies. While Arendt might pinpoint the psychology of

this interior betrayal as a product of totalitarian ideology and the totalitarian

43

state’s need for a complete fiction, Zizek urges us to consider this kind of
betrayal outside the context of totalitarianism.

But if the avowed purpose of novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Anthem is to make the reader more alert to injustices in the present, scrutinizing
society for subtle oppression of the sort that Alexis deTocqueville calls ‘soft
despotism,’ then why is it that these dystopian novels are accused Of doing the
reverse? The answer is that the dystopian novels seem to separate tyranny from
ordinary life. They do so both through the concept of dystopia (a worst regime
against which others can be compared) and through apocalypticism, which
makes this worst regime something that happens when all ordinary society has
collapsed. Arendt defines apocalypse as “a world which everywhere seems to
have come to an end” (464). Apocalypticism can distract the gaze from the
ordinary present in which the world has palpably not come to an end toward the
future, or it can argue that in the everyday present the world has actually come to
an end. This last alternative requires the cultivation of paranoia. Zizek
addresses the former alternative of directing the gaze outward toward a future
society (or toward a present society which is sufficiently foreign that it remains
outside of the audience’s daily reality). For Zizek, tyranny should be considered
immanent—always with us—instead of pushed into an imminent future.
lmminence itself is suspect, for in pointing us toward a worse future, it causes us
to belittle wrongs in the present. The tendency of Zizek’s Objections to the word

totalitarianism is that it is apocalyptic.

44

Thus the claim that Orwell’s novel lays to the imminence of dystopia or the
bad society is problematic for many critics. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel of
imminence: the title latches onto claims about the future with an air of certainty.
In the year 1984, Orwell’s novel enjoyed a flurry of public attention as popular
commentators discussed the degree to which the novel’s ‘predictions’ failed to
come to pass. The novel is popularly perceived as one of imminence. It is a
novel of imminence, but in a sense less crude than the popular one. As Frank
Kermode says of all prophecy, whether it predicts or not, Nineteen Eighty-Four
cannot be disconfirmed. The bad society still lurks in the future if care is not
taken to avert it. Thus it remains a novel of imminence even after the date of the
title is surpassed.

Orwell’s investment in the idea of tyranny as imminent places him in a
conflict between two different positions on apocalypse. In Apocalypse and After
Bruce Comens describes a basic Opposition between the apocalyptic mood and
its corrective in his description of intellectual responses to the Cold War:
“Whether we are swayed by overtly apocalyptic rhetoric or quietly concede that
total nuclear war has become ‘the absolute referent, the horizon and the
condition Of all others,’ such responses, however significant can be dangerous:
They can all too easily dwarf, blot out ‘our lives’ in discourse as on earth”
(Derrida “No Apocalypse” quoted in Comens 1). This danger of nihilism and
paralysis in the apocalyptic response to twentieth century global politics is part of
what repels critics from Orwell. Comens points to the corrective, though he does

not label it ‘post apocalyptic:’ “as corrective, it is useful to recall that in her last

45

work, written in 1946, Gertrude Stein professed complete indifference, beginning
‘they asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to
take any Interest’” (Stein “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb” quoted in Comens 1).
Stein’s proposed corrective amounts to a refusal to participate in the apocalyptic
mood: she subjects the bomb to her discursive anticlimax, treating it as a banal
topic. The critical stance against Orwell is part of a post apocalyptic attitude like
Stein’s wherein apocalypse is facile, banal or anticlimactic. Eliot’s Waste Land
gestures toward this post apocalyptic attitude in the lines about London Bridge:
“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down” (25). Eliot evokes
apocalypse as a notion with currency, repeated in the background of culture. But
the use of the child’s rhyme makes the notion appear facile and shallow, a thing
that only has power through nagging repetition. Insofar as Orwell is read as
apocalyptic, Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered facile in the way that the child’s
rhyme is: a transparent part of early education that becomes tedious with
repetition. The postdystopian alternative, presented by novels like Satanic
Verses and Pynchon’s Vine/and, is part of the post apocalyptic corrective: this
literary corrective overturns the straight-faced gravity of the dystopian novels that
contribute to their impression of didacticism: it spurns the banal, celebrates the
absurd and cultivates the notion that the bad society is immanent instead of
imminent.

Ultimately, the apocalyptic mode of prophecy with its sense Of the
imminence of the worst society has become associated with fundamentalism,

terrorism (as the Rushdie chapter will address) and cultural benightedness (as

46

the O’Connor Chapter will address): these are the associations of the apocalyptic.
But Orwell’s strong corrective of anamnesia against policies of forgetting rescues
him from being a casualty of apocalypticism and also differentiates his work from
the admittedly more complex literary apocalypticism of canonical modernists like

Pound.

The specifically literary apocalypticism of avant-garde modernism differs
from the dystopian vision of Orwell. Pound’s is the most obvious case: his
“frenzied writings of the thirties and forties show a marked increase in overtly
apocalyptic rhetoric” and include many “evocations of Utopia” (Comens 64).
Even Zukofsky found his rhetoric extremely apocalyptic, saying “to Pound on
several occasions ‘You seem to think you are the Messiah’” (Pound Zukovksky
Correspondence 172 quoted in Comens 64). In contrasting Pound’s and OnNell’s
apocalypticism, the first difference is that Pound is committed to fascism (instead
of Orwell’s socialism) as a way of bringing about a new order, via the sacrifice of
the “usurers” (Comens 64). As a poet he works toward historical change and is
frustrated when his message is not understood. On Rome Radio he expostulated
“I have been twenty years on this job, but you will not read” (Rome Radio 382
quoted in Comens 67). In his enthusiasm for “‘ideas going into action’ Pound
willingly, eagerly accepts precisely that political tyranny he always sought to
avoid” (Comens 64). Apocalypse for him is tied up in the word as deed:
“inseparable from this desire for a fully performative discourse was an acute
intensification of Pound’s already developed apocalyptic” (64). Pound deploys

prophetic speech—in the narrow sense of the apocalyptic—as a political art.

47

The Cantos suggest that poetry can bring about its own apocalypse,
creating change through the power of the new-made poetic word as deed. Part
of the way Pound hopes to make a new society is through the revelatory
deployment of images which will make new thinking possible. The motto about
technical innovation in poetic language, “make it new,” is part of the commitment
to political change and disruption that his early involvement in Vorticism displays.
The new-made poem charges image with apocalypse, evoking “a non-linear,
revelatory response to image, where a kind of instantaneous, epiphanic reading
occurs in an intense moment of lyric aestheticism or subjective introspection”
(Goldman 11). The moment of poetic truth belongs to the prophetic category of
the apocalyptic because the reader receives it as if it were a divine sign, a
revelation, a manifestation or awaited fulfillment. Jane Goldman’s account of
apocalypse in avant-garde modernism, encapsulated in her title Image to
Apocalypse, suggests also that avant-garde creative event “refer[s] the reader
outwards from the image to revelations of historical, political, technological, and
cultural context (11). The poetry of the avant-garde is not passive: it aspires to
the word as deed. “Avant-garde texts may be read, then, as reflecting . . . and as
. . . interrupting, disrupting and even transforming such [historical, political,
technological and cultural] contexts rather than merely escaping them” (11). This
is prophecy as a political art indeed: the avant-gardists invoke the status of word
as deed through innovative stylistics, and some, like Pound, choose a specifically

apocalyptic model of prophecy for the word becoming deed.

48

But the word as deed has its dangers. William Carlos Williams, with his
“various attitudes toward apocalyptics” is aware of the ambivalence of “the
bomb,” or of an apocalyptic moment as a model for poetic creativity and poetic
destruction (Comens 94). It is Onrvell who faces and brings forth the sinister
aspects of prophecy, not as a literary model, but as political model: Pound
accepted and embraced the intellectual dangers Of prophecy as a model for
thinking change. Orwell does not practice this kind of avant-garde apocalyptic
.which is tied up in stylistics. His is not the motto Of making it new: he is not an
innovator. One could argue that despite his attraction to the apocalypse as a
model of history, he does not regard apocalypse as a model for what literary
technique can and should achieve. Nonetheless, he uses apocalyptic prophecy
as a means of political intervention and he magnifies the dangers of prophecy.

Orwell faces, as Pound arguable does not, the banal uses of a prophecy
tamed by a fascist fiction. While dystopian authors like Onrvell and Rand use
prophecy to uncover tyranny, they also depict prophecy in the service of an
oppressive regime. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith
works in the Ministry of Information where his job is to rectify any disparity
between today’s policies and yesterday’s government predictions. Winston’s
business is the fulfillment of Official prophecy, which upholds the utopian claims
of the government. Winston has to make sure that “day by day and almost
minute by minute the past [is] brought up to date” so that “every prediction made
by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct”

(36). This falsified fulfillment upholds the utopian claims and the official fiction of

49

 

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the regime. Official predictions must appear to be fulfilled: “Wherever
totalitarianism possesses absolute control it . . . uses violence not so much to
frighten people (this is done only in the initial stages when political opposition still
exists) as to realize constantly its ideological doctrines and its practical lies
(Arendt 341 ). Arendt explains that “[totalitarian government] will not be satisfied
to assert, in the face Of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will
abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda” (Arendt 341, emphasis
mine). This kind of prophecy works backwards. It must appear to be fulfilled: it
must be imminent, rather than immanent. The emphasis on the timeliness Of
fulfillment—on suddenness rather than timelessness—distinguishes this
tyrannical deployment of prophecy as a kind Of apocalypticism, far removed from
subtle, equivocal forms of prophecy in which the contradictory qualities are
balanced. OnNell recognizes that prophetic speech is also useful to a fascist or
totalitarian regime: unlike Pound, he is not invested in a stylistic event of the word
as deed and he does not conclude that the poet need himself be a fascist.

One of the key differences between the modernist literary apocalyptic and
that of Orwell is in his mandate to fight the obliteration of memory via the
conscious task of anamnesia. Orwell said of himself that even as a youth, he
knew he had “a power of facing unpleasant facts” (Hitchens 13). This statement
tells us part of the nature of his project in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this and other
works Orwell refused to take the easy path of overlooking tyrannical practices on
the far Left: the unpleasantness of acknowledging and critiquing errors on ‘his'

side of the political spectrum did not deter him. Orwell’s power Of facing

50

unpleasant facts did not endear him to intellectual allies on the Left. Hitchens
argues that the tendency of the Charges against Orwell is toward treachery.
Orwell belonged and was committed to the Left, yet “in some semi-articulated
way, many major figures of the Left have thought Of Orwell as an enemy, and an
important and frightening one” (Hitchens 46). Hitchens insists that “the real
source of anti-Orwell resentment” is that “in the view of many on the Official Left,
he committed the ultimate sin of “giving ammunition to the enemy’” by attacking
Communism in the thirties when “the cause of anti-fascism supposedly
necessitated a closing of ranks” and in the late forties when the political binaries
of the Cold War were developing into a frozen discourse (58). Orwell does not
permit amnesia even among his allies, and even at the expense of a reputation
for treachery.

One of the first recourses for ignoring unpleasant facts, as OnNell did not,
is to forget them. Concomitantly, a Chief part Of the power of facing them is the
habit of conscious memory. Orwell has an imperative to realistic memory that
differentiates his work from the modernist apocalypticism Of Pound. The title
Nineteen Eighty-Four argues that the reader has a limited time in which to face
the unpleasant potentials depicted in the novel. While his title looks forward, his
novel is nonetheless reminder instead of poetic catalyst, which differentiates it by
nature from the literary apocalypticism of Pound. Significantly, Hitchins claims
that Onrvell’s most sympathetic readers were those people who had a personal
memory of totalitarian rule: “The survivors of the Ukrainian famine, and the

purges, and the Nazi invasion and the war, and the subsequent extension of

51

Stalinism into Eastern Europe, were able to decipher the meaning of the pigs
(and Of the name Napoleon) [in Animal Farm] without any undue difficulty, a task
of interpretation that had defeated conservatism’s most deft and subtle literary
critic [TS Eliot]” (92). These readers appreciated the novel as an exercise in
memory.

Amnesia can be a tool of a regime, totalitarian or otherwise, making
anamnesia, or a policy against the different means of obliterating the historical
past, an important weapon against tyranny. When Peter the Great re-founded
Moscow, he tried to establish the city as a third Rome (after Constantinople). He
wanted a clean historical slate for this project, and for this reason dismissed
Russia’s past as one Of ignorance and squalor. This amnesia, this “nihilistic
approach to the past” was part of his hope for Moscow’s future as the center of
empire (Lotman 53). Similarly, amnesia is a dominant tool or goal of the
government of Oceania. One of the methods of the state, Winston notices, is to
take people who have been impugned and then rehabilitated and make use of
them. These dubious people had been “reinstated in the Party, and given posts
which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important” (65). Their alleged
“acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people” could
be forgotten (65). The process Of assigning such posts is one that invites
amnesia both in the public that might be impressed by the high-sounding job
titles and in the employee dubiously honored with such a title. Those public
figures with too great an enthusiasm for the doctrines of the party were a

potential embarrassment, and were given not positions of power, but positions of

52

apparent power. But though the rationale is different between Arendt’s example
and Orwell’s, they both display an invitation to amnesia as a way of overlooking
unpleasant facts. Orwell makes amnesia his target, and part of his gadfly role is
to remind his readers—intellectuals included—about the temptation of
forgetfulness. Insofar as he fights the oblivion of cultural memory with his power
to face unpleasant facts and with his depictions Of amnesiac complicity, he differs
from other modernists like Pound who employed the trope of apocalypse without
regard for Its dangers. In this respect, Orwell’s use of prophecy extends beyond
a narrow, unequivocal apocalypticism.

OnIveIl posits the erasure of past and present as a method of tyranny.
One method of this erasure is the disappearance of persons. When Winston
sights people who are suspect by the Thought Police, he knows to pretend that
they are not there. He notices that “there [is] no one at any of the tables nearest
to them” and reflects that “It was not wise even to be seen in the neighborhood of
such people” (65). The practice of causing individuals—and any records of their
existence—to disappear from society is not just a way to punish and terrorize, but
is also necessary because these disappearances are proofs of the totalitarian
fiction about the present. Arendt explains that totalitarian rule depends on the
“consistency of the system” (Arendt 351 ). The masses that are ripe for
totalitarian rule “refuse to recognize fortuitousness . . . predisposed to all
ideologies because they explain facts as mere examples of laws and eliminate
coincidences . . . totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into

fiction, from coincidence into consistency” (352). The author of the fiction, in this

53

case the government of Oceania, has the power to erase people who do not fit
into it. The impression given is not so much that these people are dead or
imprisoned, but that they had never been. Arendt explains that “the concentration
camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out
whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a
fulfilled life” (452). Individual fictions or stories other than the ruling story vanish.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston discovers that his coworker “Syme had
vanished,” he understands the implication Of this discreet method of violence:
“Syme had ceased to exist; he had never existed” (122). Official forgetfulness
sets in.

Even the memory of language is subject to this destruction. The destroyed
newspaper records in Nineteen Eighty-four, like the burned histories in
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit-451 and the vanished books in Rand’s Anthem disappear
in a holocaust of memory. Before he is purged, Syme reports to Winston: “We’re
destroying words—scores of them, hundreds Of them, every day. We’re cutting
the language down to the bone” (45). The policy of amnesia encompasses even
dictionaries, for from within a reduced and confined vocabulary it is less possible
to make statements that contradict or compete with the official fiction. The logic
of amnesia meant that for Winston (prior to his rebellion) “the past was dead”
(25). Because the past was dead, “the future was unimaginable” (25).

Prophetic speech counteracts the totalitarian Oblivion of language and
memory by generating new meanings. “Every totalitarian effort,” says

Brueggemann in his work on prophecy, has the “aim . . . to stop the language of

54

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newness” (9). Prophecy, on the other hand, unfolds newness in language.
Brueggemann argues that “a prophetic understanding of reality is based on the
notion that all social reality does spring fresh from the word” (9). Winston’s
journal writing is an act of rebellion because it utilizes language in a way that
might generate something new and different from the official fiction. This
newness disrupts official fiction and hegemony. The prophet’s “task. . . is to . . .
nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the
consciousness and perception of the dominant culture” (13, emphasis in original).
“Alternative consciousness” stems from the satiric tradition Of prophecy,
“serv[ing] to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness” (13). The
Biblical prophets “understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to
speak in ways that evoke newness ‘fresh from the word [sic],’” and OnIvell
retrieves this tradition of prophecy as part of his strategy of against the tyrannical
obliteration Of the past (9). Winston Smith begins his rebellion by composing
prose in his forbidden book. The book is blank when he purchases it: in that form
it is already a danger to the regime not simply because it is a codex, but because
it is a blatant invitation to the possibility of new speech. Winston knows that
“even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession (9). “To mark
the paper was the decisive act” in the unfolding of his rebellion (10). The first
words he writes are a date: “April 4‘“, 1984” (10). Memory and history come
together and lay the foundation for new thought.

The imperative to resist amnesia is thus part of the work of prophetic

speech, and this imperative works against the kind Of tyranny that Orwell depicts.

55

 

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When Brueggemann describes the prophet’s calling he cites the way that the
people’s forgetfulness requires the advent of the prophet. In the narrative
pattern, a statement about forgetting usually precedes the biblical accounts of a
prophet’s entry into the public sphere: ‘They began to worship false gods, and to
forget the Lord’. At this point, the prophet must reactivate their memories in
order to generate the possibility of a consciousness alternative to the official
fiction (or in Brueggemann’s terms, royal consciousness). The prophet helps the
public to retrieve its memories by bringing “to public expression those very fears
and terrors that have been denied . . . and suppressed” within a society
(Brueggemann 44). Part of bringing terrors to public expression is “to offer
symbols that are adequate to the horror and massiveness of the experience
which evokes numbness and requires denial” (49). These symbols are not “to be
invented,” but pulled out and “reactivate[d] out of our historical past” (49). Thus
the possibility of a consciousness alternative to the royal consciousness is
retrieved out of out of memory. Memory links the prophet to tradition (though not
necessarily to nostalgic traditionalism, which is always ready-to—hand in any
culture), and he works against “amnesia” (12). The process of anamnesia is one
of the reasons that prophecy can be dangerous to a regime: it uncovers the
present and creates links to the past that tyrannical rule tries to destroy. (49).
Orwell’s imperative to remember, which is carried out in Winston’s rebellious act
of keeping a journal, redeems his dystopian work to a certain extent from the
more sinister potential of apocalypticism and also gestures toward the broader

possibilities of prophetic speech. After Winston writes the date in his journal, he

56

sits “gazing stupidly at the paper” (10). This is not writer’s block because “the
actual writing would be easy” (10). Rather, he is stupid or speechless because he
has no message. He considers his audience of the future. It is not the
transmission of information that is important in his enterprise, for “either the
future would be resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it
would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless” (10). It is
not the message that matters in Winston’s enterprise; it is his entrance into a
dialogue. He would “transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that
had been running inside his head” (10). In this prophetic activity, dialogue
outweighs transmission.

Orwell identifies a corollary to the policy of amnesia in the recurrence of
betrayal in totalitarian psychology. The totalitarian cult of personality is also a
cult of amnesia. The system of totalitarianism as described by Arendt and Orwell
requires not just a figure to enforce it, but also a whole network of people who
agree to be complicit with tyranny, mainly by agreeing to forget. This complicity
is not just the obvious Cliché of “simply obeying orders” a la Adolf Eichmann, but
more Specifically gives them a stake in the system through the structure created
by the leader principle. Arendt explains that the leader principle necessitates
betrayal. The totalitarian leader differs from the usual classical tyrant (one who
rules without law) in the “thorough identification of the Leader with every
appointed subleader” so that there is “a monopoly of responsibility for everything
which is being done” (375). Unlike the Leader, the classical “tyrant would never

identify himself with his subordinates, let alone with every one of their acts” (375).

57

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By contrast “The Leader. . . cannot tolerate criticism of his subordinates, since
they always act in his name” (375). And if they act imprudently for the regime he
must “correct his own errorsz” “he must liquidate those who carried them out; if he
wants to blame his mistakes on others, he must kill them” and label them traitors
(375). The leader requires wholesale amnesia because any mistake Of his
subordinates must be erased, an erasure made necessary by the complete
identification of his subordinates.

The accusation of betrayal against the leader’s subordinates is thus built-
in to the leader principle. Betrayal is inevitable. The social psychology Of
totalitarianism as Arendt describes it depends on the complicity and bad
conscience of each new crop of participants: “this system is the logical outgrowth
of the Leader principle in its full implications and the best possible guarantee for
loyalty in that it makes every new generation depend for its livelihood on the
current political line of the Leader” (432). What results is a kind of loyalty that
depends on both forgetfulness and an uneasy sense of betrayal. The “jobholder
[is] a conscious accomplice in the crimes of the government” because he or she
replaces someone who was purged (432).

Winston gets an education in the loyalty and bad conscience fostered by
Oceania when O’Brien reveals that he is a government agent entrapping traitors
like Winston. Winston is surprised that O’Brien, in his high-rank as a secret—
policeman, does not insist “that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but
only for the good of the majority” (216). Instead, O'Brien admits “The Party seeks

power entirely for its own sake” (217). But if O’Brien does not believe the Official

58

fiction about the disinterestedness of the Party, then in what does his loyalty
consist? O’Brien understands that as a power-holder in the party, zeal is not
expected of him. Rather, “the point of [the power-holders’] loyalty is not that they
believe the Leader is infallible, but that they are convinced that everybody who
commands the instruments of violence with the superior methods of totalitarian
organization can become infallible . . . Factuality itself depends for its continued
existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world” (Arendt 388). In this
situation “whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth” (Orwell quoted in Fromm
263). O’Brien consents to this system of disavowing the non-totalitarian world.
He claims on behalf of the Party that “already our control over matter is absolute”
(218). The party redefines loyalty as the consent to forget. Winston’s
forgetfulness must be oblivious, though: for those outside the Inner Party, “zeal
was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness,” or the forgetfulness of any
reality outside the official fiction (Arendt 49). After his rehabilitation, Winston
rejects an image of his childhood that comes back to him: “it was a false
memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter
so long as one knew them for what they were” (243). Winston’s new loyalty
comprises an agreement to forget. Deepening his complicity, this kind of loyalty
also requires betrayal: betrayal of those one agrees to forget, as Winston agrees
to forget Julia, letting her walk away from him until she is “no longer
recognizable” (241 ).

The persistence of the idea of interior betrayal springs from the state’s

desire to merge interior and exterior. Traditionally prophecy moves between an

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interior, hidden truth and exterior reality to make a revelation. Oceania’s
prophecy instead obliterates the distinction between interior and exterior.
Between interior and exterior are the gaps where doubt and equivocalness occur,
which are dangerous to the totalitarian state. Indeed it is the “equivocal glance”
he shares with the treacherous O’Brien that begins Winston’s political downfall
and rehabilitation (19). Where interior and exterior must be united, all private life
becomes a threat to the government. Thus Julia engages in sexual acts as a
means of defiance to the regime: Winston’s and Julia’s encounter is a “blow
struck against the party” and a “political act” (105). During the Two Minutes Hate
Winston’s “entrails seemed to grow cold,” this time not in defiance but in
sympathy with the “general delirium” and “subhuman chanting” (18).
“Thoughtcrime” is the term that best expresses this merging of interior and
exterior, wherein treachery is inevitable (19).

A manifestation of the totalitarian psychology of betrayal is the show trial,
with its insistence on hidden treachery. Erika Gottlieb notes that among the
classic dystopian novels “The structural and thematic importance of the trial is
probably most conspicuous” in Nineteen Eighty-four, where “Winston’s trial . . .
takes up one-third of the novel” and “systematically deprives him of selfhood,
consciousness, loyalty, and memory” (10). Gottlieb “suggest[s] that the
protagonist’s trial as an emblem of injustice is a thematically and symbolically
central device of dystopian fiction” (10). She cites Brave New World, We,
Farenheit 451, Player Piano, and The Handmaid’s Tale (which is a special case),

though Anthem and the Manchurian Candidate could also be candidates for the

60

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list. One of the reasons that Gottlieb thinks the trial appears so consistently in the
dystopian novels is that it perfectly showcases “the value we set on selfhood and
consciousness” through systematic attacks on these human attributes (12).
Consistently throughout the dystopian genre, the dystopian state is seen as
inimical to these values, and also consistently, the trial is a symbolic way of
depicting this. However, the attack on selfhood is probably secondary to the bad
conscience that is built into the system through the leader principle. The show
trial does not just try to uncover treachery; it demands admission of betrayal on
some interior level. Zizek in his observations on the forced confessions of the
Stalinist and Cambodian purges says that the show trials make the accused
party member ask himself “what if someone merely pretends to follow the Party
line faithfully in order to conceal his true counter-revolutionary attitude” (100)?
The interiority of this form of betrayal suggests a deep conflict in the notion of
justice that operates in a dystopian society. Gottlieb interrogates this conflict in
the notion of justice, asking how an “elite that came into power with the utopian
promise of universal justice” can “end up establishing a system based on the
deliberate miscarriage of justice” (33). For in the dystopian trial the end result is
always “deliberate miscarriage” of justice or what Gottlieb calls anti-justice (31 ).
Zizek also notes this in his discussion of Stalin’s show trials, pointing to the
obvious loyalty of some of Stalin’s closest associates who come to trial for
treason. “No accused is ever acquitted” and no punishment results in a “new
insight” or an “experience of catharsis” (Gottlieb 31). Instead of achieving the

utopian dream of justice which the regime promised, the state undertakes a

61

 

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“conspiracy against its own people” (10). Even the most crass definition of
justice, like the one proposed by Thrasymachus in the Republic—the gang ethic
that justice is doing harm to one’s enemies and good for one’s friends—even this
is reversed in the show trial.

This anti-justice that comes to light in the show trial proceeds in part from
the totalitarian utilization Of prophecy to conjure the utopian dream and to
maintain the official fiction. If prophecy can be a weapon for tyranny, it is a
weapon with a kick. The speech that purports to combine word and deed has a
logic of its own which can combine signifier and signified, eliminating
contingency, to make a transcendent Sign. This logic of prophetic speech is not
secular. Detienne explains that in classical antiquity, mantic speech is radically
a-moral because Dike (justice) and Aletheia (truth) have “many affinities” so that
“at this level of thought no distinction exists between truth and justice” (55). While
at first glance this may seem like a happy union, in actuality it is a terrifying one.
In such a system the sacrifice of lphigenia makes sense, and indeed the
persistence of sacrifice as a theme that accompanies prophecy also makes
sense. One did not ask--and even Clytemnestra didn’t (she objected on other
grounds)--whether this was a just action. It was a constitutive action that
completed the theogenical reality. It made the winds blow. Divination instead of
forensics was the tool of judgment. Where mantic speech holds sway, “a
distinction does not exist between the domains of justice and truth,” for the
privileged speaker purveys both” (55). In the absence of this distinction “judicial

procedures . . . involve and are confused with forms of divination.” Prophecy

62

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claims power beyond mere persuasion: Detienne explains that for the masters of
truth (the mantic speakers) “the power of Aletheia thus encompasses the twofold
domain of prophecy and justice” (55). This is the anti-justice that the critics Of
dystopian novels and those who describe Stalin's show trials struggle to come to
terms with. It is not that the totalitarian systems had no such reference as
justice—it is simply that it was indistinguishable from truth (the ruling fiction of
that system).

OnIvell treats the show trial as an instance of prophecy’s dark side. For
Orwell, the potential Of prophecy to be a weapon Of tyranny does not so much
spring from a prophetic speech that is by nature equivocal as it does from a
prophetic speech that is polarized. In the dystopian framework prophetic speech
has clear good or bad effects and a clear relation to a social order that we can—
unequivocally—call totalitarian, where Arendt can define totalitarianism with a
single sentence rather than with the five stances Zizek identifies. The revelatory
and subversive nature of prophetic speech, employed by authors like Orwell
against tyrannical rule, comes up against features of prophecy that have been
yoked by tyranny. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, prophecy battles against itself: it is
bipolar rather than equivocal. The suddenness of the prophetic narrative battles
the timelessness of the state: imminence against immanence. In this novel, the
contradictory qualities of prophecy line up into a relatively simple matrix with few
Of the permutations that one sees, for instance, in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

The result is that prophecy either serves tyranny or undoes it.

63

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The hostility to Orwell is largely the result of this polarized, apocalyptic
political art. Not just the political content, but chiefly the manner of his
prophesying makes Orwell distasteful to many critics. Hitchens points out that
incipient polemics in Nineteen Eighty-Four against the Cold War world and the
division of the globe among superpowers are overlooked by critics on the Left
who accuse Orwell of handing ammunition to the Right. Hitchens insists that
“Orwell did not conceive of the Cold War as a one-dimensional fight against the
totalitarian menace, but as a contest (rather too well-matched) between
superpowers, in which the danger of annihilation could be used to petrify and
immobilize dissent” (87). The “constant, shifting hostility between three regional
superpowers” of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia maintains “the permanent war
propaganda” that permits so much tyranny in Oceania (87). Orwell's thinking on
the Cold War was unconventional in that he made “the seldom observed

distinction . . . between the Stalinization of Eastern Europe and the global

ambitions of the United States” (87).7 Orwell critiques those ideological binaries
and global maps of the Cold War in which the Right invested. This intellectual
service is overlooked by his detractors on the Left, so the critical distaste does
not entirely spring from the content of his prophecies. Rather, his manner of
prophesying as a political art is an important cause of distaste because it
constitutes an apocalyptic outlook or mode, a mode which results in the

accusation that Orwell’s work is depressing.

 

7 Hitchens claims that in Orwell's essay of October 1945 entitled “You and the Atom Bomb,” “he
coined the term ‘cold war’" (86). Thus “Orwell took up and separated two threads that were to
become fatally entangled in many minds” (87).

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Yet there is in the novel a seed of the post apocalyptic outlook. The
notion of the banality of life after apocalypse is an element of the mood which
rejects the apocalypse of fire and brimstone as a flawed model. The original title
of the novel would seem to indicate a post apocalyptic mood in that sense of the
banality and disappointment in the end of culture that we see in Eliot’s Waste
Land and the Nietzschean notion of the Last Man, which both have a nihilistic
flavor. In this mood, cultural apocalypse leaves behind it a banal existence in
which no one knows how to be human. The original title of Nineteen Eighty-Four
was The Last Man in Europe. Hitchens interprets this title as a gesture like that
of “the last Roman waiting for the Barbarians” (198). The sense of apocalypse is
strong here: Hitchens quotes Winston Smith’s diary, addressed “To the future or
to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one
another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done
cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity . . .” (Orwell quoted in Hitchens
198). Hitchens goes on to compare Smith’s attitude to that of Adorno, when he
said “No poetry after Auschwitz” (199). Here, apocalypse leaves behind a
cultural waste land or desert. Hitchens, identifying that apocalyptic, cataclysmic
sense that pervades Winston’s diary (and, he argues, Orwell’s mood), follows it
with the Adorno comparison which if anything escalates the sense of apocalypse.
Any sense of incipient post apocalyptic disappointment and anticlimax of the sort
that Nietzsche and Eliot offer slips away in the last lines of the novel when
Winston“[wins] the victory over himself. He [loves] Big Brother” (245). The

possibilities of rebellion, of loyalty, and of “selfhood and consciousness” are

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crushed (Gottlieb 12). While Orwell recognizes the banality of life after the end of
civilization, he ends by stressing the continuance of tyranny and suffering, so that
the victory of O’Brien over Winston Smith dominates the scene. The moment
when Winston loves Big Brother is the true moment of apocalypse. It is the end
of mankind, as the ‘last man’ succumbs to tyranny. Ultimately, Orwell’s novel
remains apocalyptic. It does not launch a corrective to the notion of apocalypse.
lf Winston’s acceptance of Big Brother makes an apocalyptic moment, it is
an apocalypse of presence instead of absence. The waste land of human
volition comes about through a program of presence: the state practices
pervasive observation of its subjects. The famous slogan “BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU” intensifies the psychological experience of pervasive
observation (5). Winston is afraid of police searches, of the eyes of his coworkers
and neighbors, of the telescreens, and of the Ministry of Love that supervises the
gathered information. The official lack of laws in Oceania seems ironic, but
actually the ubiquity of the state: laws would imply a limit to its authority. Posters
and images of Big Brother proliferate on walls and telescreens, where his “face . .
. seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that
it had made on everyone’s eyeballs were too vivid to wear off immediately” (17).
No absence is permitted in this prophesied utopia—least of all that mental
withdrawal called doubt. Equivocal speech, which puts auditors in a position to
doubt by opening up a space of absence, is likewise not practiced. Unequivocal
prophecy and a saturation of presence maintain Oceania. Orwell’s apocalypse is

a crisis of presence.

66

The apocalyptic mood and its post apocalyptic corrective have a
paradoxical relationship which does not permit one to categorize these outlooks
as simply prophetic and non-prophetic. Comens cites the attraction of William
Carlos Williams to the potency of apocalypse: “for Williams stance produces an
unavoidable, all-pervading ambivalence. Even as he rejects the apocalyptic
consummation, he is immensely attracted to it as an image of power and
presence,” an image that can shift into one of cruelty or banality (95). This
ambivalence is part of a dynamic that occurs between the apocalyptic and post
apocalyptic moods. Comens claims that “the rejection of apocalypse is itself
apocalyptic—or, as Derrida has recently put it, it constitutes an ‘apocalypse
without apocalypse,’ where the without ‘marks an internal and external
catastrophe of the apocalypse, an overturning of sense that does not merge with
the catastrophe announced or described in the apocalyptic writings without
however being foreign to them’” (“Of an Apocalyptic Tone” 95 quoted in Comens
95). There is consonance and dissonance between apocalypse and post
apocalypse. That the rejection of apocalypse can itself be apocalyptic is a
testament to the versatility and equivocalness of prophetic speech. Derrida’s
comment suggests that to be post apocalyptic, insofar as such a position rejects
apocalypse, is to be equivocal about prophecy. Even after the rejection of
apocalypse one continues to be subject to prophecy’s equivocalness; rejecting
the apocalyptic does not necessarily remove one from the territory of prophecy.
Orwell’s polarized apocalypticism gives few clues to these wider paradoxes and

conflicts in prophecy as a political art. One of these few clues is his strategy to

67

 

resist forgetting. Orwell’s use of anamnesia as a corrective to tyranny seems to
align apocalyptic suddenness against tyranny instead of with tyranny, as his
critics would have it. Thus the reader begins to encounter the equivocalness of
prophecy and its relation to tyranny. Even with the glimmerings of this problem,
OnIvell’s dystopian position is relatively simple compared with postdystopian
representations of prophecy such as Rushdie's in The Satanic Verses. The
apparent simplicity of the apocalyptic mode must not mislead critics from equally
simplistic interpretations of prophecy as a political art, for the post apocalyptic
mood is even more at the mercy of the equivocalness inherent in prophetic

speech as a whole.

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Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: Meridian, 1964.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1978.

Fromm, Erich. “Aftenlvord.” Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt, 1949.
(257-267).

Gottlieb, Erika. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Trial and Terror.
London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.

Hitchens, Christopher. Why Omell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Horsley, Lee. Fictions of Power in English Literature: 1900-1950. London:
Longman, 1995.

Kermode, Frank. “Apocalypse and the Modern.” Visions of Apocalypse: End or
Rebirth? Ed. Saul Friedlander, Gerald Holton, Leo Marx, Eugene
Skolnikoff. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.

Kingsley, Margery A. Transforming the Word: Prophecy, Poetry, and Politics in
England, 1650-1742. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001.

Martz, Louis L. Many Gods and Many voices: The Role of the Prophet in English
and American Modernism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998.

OnNell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt, 1949.

Westermann, Claus. Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech. Trans. Hugh Clayton
White. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967.

Zizek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five interventions in the
Misuse of a Notion. London: Verso, 2001.

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Chapter Two

Prophecy and the President: Extispicy in Warren’s Brother to Dragons
Prophetic speech moves in and out between an exterior, visible world and an
interior intimate truth. This vacillating movement sustains prophecy’s
contradictory qualities so that it is a sign of absence and a sign of presence,
immediate and mediated, timeless and sudden, dialogue and message, word and
deed. ln Robert Penn Warren’s verse play Brother to Dragons the categories of
nation and domesticity (or polls and oikos, public and private) meet in a manner
that reflects the basic in-and-out movement of prophetic speech. Three distinct
and variously problematic prophet figures—Aunt Cat, Thomas Jefferson, and
Lilburne Lewis, advance this conflict between inside and outside, which finds its
central expression in the extispitic sacrifice of the slave boy John, the central
premise of the play. Nephew of Jefferson and murderer of John, Lilburne abhors
the gap between inside and outside and tries to overcome it by exposing John’s
insides. He tries to use prophecy to do away with equivocalness. What Lilburne
desires most is “the peace of definition,” which amounts to the quality of
presence in prophecy (39). Refusing to tolerate prophetic contradictions like
absence and presence, just as he refuses to tolerate other contradictions that
might blur definitions, he thinks and acts apocalyptically. His intolerance for the
contradiction of absence and presence move him to think and act apocalyptically.
Thomas Jefferson also meets up with contradictions. Via Jefferson, the issues
connected to prophecy as interior—betrayal and genealogy come into conflict

with the exterior nature of prophecy as a nation—founding force. Jefferson falls

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into the conflict between dynasty (a family as a means of political power, ordered
around legitimate offspring) and generation (the sharing of blood even with
illegitimate or otherwise second-best children). Having occluded generation by
dissociating himself from Lilburne and his crimes, and having used generation for
profit by procreating slave children, he must touch the bloody hand of Lilburne in
acknowledgement not so much of original sin, as of filial connection. Having
made himself a prophet figure, Jefferson is shocked to encounter those
contradictions that prophecy signals. With his impulse to found a great nation,
Jefferson favors a prophecy that doesn’t strike home—that is outside only, in a
sense. Aunt Cat is the only prophet figure who effectively uses prophecy to
bridge the inside and outside gaps—the political and domestic. Thus her use of
prophecy as a political art is the most satisfactory and effective of these prophet

figures, as it allows her to submit Lilburne to the law for the murder of John.

But Brother to Dragons is not only about prophecy: it is also an instance of
prophecy as a political art. Where Jefferson denies and in a sense aborts
Lilburne in order to forget that history, Warren forces his audience to recall the

conditions of slavery and Jim Crowe laws in the founding just as RPW forces

Jefferson to touch acknowledge Lilburne.8 Prophecy can review, encapsulate,
reflect and perhaps indict power, seen on the generic level through Warren’s
treatment of history via a setting in “no place” and “any time” (stage directions 3).
Warren chooses a utopia in the literal sense of no place in order to stage this

encounter with history. Lewis P. Simpson in “The Poet and The Father”

 

8 Critics have noted Warren’s preoccupation “with the nature of time and with one of its principle
corollaries: history” (Paul Marian quoted in Bloom 216).

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interprets the no place and no time that is the setting of Brother to Dragons as
“not an encounter . . . in the all-embracing dimension of eternity,” where eternity
is static, perfect and transcends politics and power (138). The setting is not one
of perfection, judgment and stasis: it does not transcend politics and power.
Rather, the setting imitates the Book of Job (to which the title alludes), which is “a
mythic record of an encounter between the soul, history, and the eternal” (137).
But note that “eternity [is] a dimension of history” rather than the reverse (137). If
history is a dimension of eternity, as, in Simpson’s view, the New Testament
claims, then the eschatology is one in which history is always trying to fulfill
eternity, to get back to it or to move forward to it. The conception of time that
Simpson sees in the Book of Job and which he calls “modern” makes eternity
always present to and interfering in history in a way that shapes history (137).
The ‘no time’ setting is a downward gesture—descending instead of
transcending—that is essentially prophetic: the gesture is the transfer from high
to low indicated in the Hebrew prefix na in the word nabe (prophet). The setting
is not eternity. Like the trial of Orestes in The Eumenides, the setting is about
the present and political reality. The ‘no place’ of Brother to Dragons is pertinent
to history, because it allows “an encounter in a placeless historical present”
“between history and what has replaced the entity called ‘the soul,’ the entity
whose will to power is idealized and proclaimed—if not directly, by powerful
implication—in the Declaration of Independence: the autonomous secular

individual or self” (138).

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This use of history is distinct from the prophetic treatment of history that
OnIvell finds so inimical: the occlusion of events instead of recollection. For this
latter treatment of history, unequivocal prophecy creates a vacuum which we can
call utopia or dystopia in which the present and future events are played out
without the recollection of history. Tyranny is an effect of this endeavor, and the
result is that the utopia is also a dystopia. Warren nonetheless successfully uses
a utopian setting (in the literal sense of no place) in order to reconcile with and
recollect history.

Warren’s play is an instance of the use of prophecy as a political art,
directed toward contemporary problems of the nation. Retrieving the Jefferson
scandal, Warren copes with the destructive results of flaws in Jefferson’s
founding of America. Warren excavates the past in order to provide a healing
insight into the present bringing American national identity to terms with its
history of slavery. On two levels—the literal level confrontation of Jefferson with
the facts of his family tragedy and the historical context of the play within the era
of Civil Rights conflicts in America—the play commits to recalling historical
events and resolving them rather than jettisoning, forgetting or occluding them.
This anamnesiac use of history can be accomplished with prophecy which is

authentically equivocal.

In addressing the formation of the present, Warren is engaged in prophetic
work. He works “to prophesy the present” which is “to cite the past” (Balfour 16).
Warren sets his dramatic poem in a liminal space that accommodates both the

citation of the past and the prophesying of the present. Warren’s is “The seer’s

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gaze,” which “is precisely directed toward that which for one’s own time is far
more clearly present than it is to the contemporaries who ‘keep pace with it’”
(Benjamin cited in Balfour 16). The presumptions of political discourse in the
present are clearer to the seer than to the pundit because, in Turgot’s words, “a
given state of affairs has already changed many times” by the time one
apprehends it (Balfour 16). For Warren, who wants Americans to come to grips
with the not-so-distant past, it is important that they grapple with the past in light
of the prophecy that shaped thinking in the past as well as thinking in their own
present. Warren offers literature as a venue for such a meeting with history: it is a
utopia that need not be tyrannical, and it can be achieved through the
equivocalness of prophecy. His work is thus more akin to Morrison's Beloved
than to more didactic twentieth century political literature like Richard Wright's
Native Son or Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.

Occupying that non-space, the characters remember, testify, dispute and
grieve over the conditions of John’s and Lilburne’s death. Warren wishes the
participants to re-present the action to the world in a way that grasps Lilburne’s
crime as a logical consequence of the nation’s values. The utopian setting is
useful not so much for judgment, which must be a matter of forensics: who did
what where and when, as it is for acknowledging communal complicity, as when
Jefferson is able to touch the bloody hand of Lilburne even though he could not,
in the march of time, acknowledge that he is “brother to dragons.” This
complicity is akin to Dostoevsky’s notion that “we are all in some way

responsible” for evil. The fruit of this exercise in acknowledgment are not justice

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so much as truth. When in Native Son the lawyer Max defends Bigger Thomas
for the murder of a white woman, he sets aside the forensics of the case and
pursues the idea of communal complicity. The courtroom, however, is a place
where outcomes ostensibly depend on forensics: the specifics of time, place, and
names. He did not expect, as happened in a recent historical trial, that Bigger
would be acquitted. Native Son addresses the absence of a venue for trying
social issues. Warren offers a place that is precisely not a courtroom, and a
gathering that is not a trial, wherein communal complicity comes to light. The
dialogue broaches the complicity of Lucy, Letitia, Isham, and Jefferson and not

just Lilburne, who is the actual murderer of John.

The setting of no place and no time is external to time, reinforcing the
work’s dichotomy between internal and external. Prophecy provides a bridge
between internal and external: the truth inside the body or the cave and the light
of day, the present and the eternal. Because of the timeless setting and the
admission of RPW as a character, the play has been accused of didacticism. 9
Harold Bloom, in comparing them, sums up the catechistic reading in the
following way. The “quite explicit argument” of the play “seemed to be another
churchwardenly admonition that original sin was indeed the proper mental
burden for our poetry” (Bloom 145). The doctrine of original sin10 then stands

over and against a post-religious understanding of man; “thus, poor Jefferson

 

9

The consensus on Warren’s representation of Jefferson is that “Jefferson’s belief in human
perfectibility is . . . one of the most cherished and, according to Warren, dangerous and
superficial of our national myths” (Law 128).

Hugh Holman follows this theme in “Original Sin on the Dark and Bloody Ground" in
Grimshaw.

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received a massive drubbing, for being an Enlightened rationalist” (145). Like
Bloom, Frederick McDowell lights on themes of guilt, original sin, evil, complicity,
love, pride, alienation, suffering, grace and redemption which might seem to add
up to a catechistic or didactic work. RPW’s philosophical utterances and his
sometimes pedantic dialogues with Jefferson might support the notion that the

play is a thinly disguised catechism.

However, Bloom does not allow the charge of didacticism to stand there.
The play exists in two versions: the 1953 and the 1975. Having read the revised
version, he reformed his opinion. The new balance brought to the “exchanges
between Jefferson and RPW, where the poet no longer maintains a rhetorical
advantage over the president” relieves the poem of tendentiousness so that the
author “transcended his polemics against Jefferson and Emerson” ( 147). I
indeed agree with Bloom that the rhetorical balance is not on the side of RPW in
the discussions with Jefferson. While RPW is reproachful and goading at times,
the two characters also converse at other times as equals bending their intellect
and experience to the same insoluble problem. This meeting of equals is most
evident in the dialogue about the interplay of guilt between John and Lilburne.
Also, RPW’s philosophical musings tend to be interrupted by the historical
characters as when he pontificates about Lilburne’s rejection of Aunt Cat:
“nothing” he says, “can justify the essential cruelty of—:” his judicious speech
about essences and moral justification is broken off by Letitia who says simply
“She loved him, that was all” (58). While the poem may seem at times like a

free-for-all on the part of Warren, or like a prettified piece of didacticism, these

76

interruptions continually execute a return from universals to the insuperable
particularities of the story. A continual return to the occurrences of love, grief and
death, occurrences which refuse to be explained away, shows up the inadequacy

of RPW’s philosophical statements and prevents the play from being didactic.

RPW’s attempts at doctrinal explanation particularly of Jefferson’s flaws
are shown to be inadequate. An important flaw of Jefferson’s character is that he
is morally self-satisfied. Jefferson’s attitude toward Lilburne’s crime resembles
that imperturbability that the prophet rails against. According to Abraham
Heschel, the prophet fights not so much the failure to accept doctrine (in
Jefferson’s case, original sin), but a common and pervasive “satiety of the
conscience” and “flight from responsibility” that have little to do with doctrine (9).
This indifference is as much a factor in Jefferson’s fault as is his humanism.
Jefferson is smug. His character flaw is not so much doctrinal or intellectual as
that “satiety of conscience” which allows him to conduct his household in such an
irregular manner. That satiety belongs to the evil of indifference which prophecy
opposes. Jefferson's character is such that he does not expect the things that
happen in his family. He is disgusted with Lilburne’s evil but barely glimpses his
own evil in consigning his children into slavery. Historically, the use of slaves in
Thomas Jefferson’s household and in that of his family has been brought forward
as an example of inadequacy or hypocrisy in the American political founding. By
using the character of Jefferson—central to the American founding--, and by
choosing this particularly horrifying piece of history for his play, Warren evokes

those doubts and uncovers those disproportions that are at the roots of the

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American political philosophy. The problem of founding comes fonivard, and the
audience is placed in a position where it needs to ask whether our founding by
this father at least was sound and legitimate or perhaps otherwise—grievous and
misguided. The prophetic undoing of satiety of conscience operates at a national

level.

RPW encounters another of Jefferson’s flaws that the play showcases is a
kind of conceit. RPW wrestles first with Jefferson’s epitaph (which the founder
himself wrote) as it is highlighted in the play’s preface. When Jefferson places
the “triple boast” (2) on his gravestone, he omits his role as president of the
United States and substitutes other claims instead. He is “Author Of The
Declaration of American Independence Of The Statute Of Virginia For Religious
Freedom, And Father Of The University Of Virginia” (2). Warren gives us this
epitaph up front in the dramatic poem as he is introducing the speakers; they are
the first words we encounter after the prologue and title. They are prophetic
words in the sense that Jefferson speaks into his posthumous future and places
himself on the outside of his life, casting judgment by choosing his greatest
achievements. He assumes a position of transcendence. It is this understanding
of himself as rational and noble, an understanding which he binds into the
identity of the nation, that does not permit him to acknowledge the shame of

bestial murder within his family.

While one might interpret his omissions of his presidency and his
acquisition of the West as modesty, the second and third claims would have to

contradict such a conclusion. What peculiar kind of vanity first of all writes its own

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epitaph and second omits one of the most public achievements? Jefferson
diminishes his role as political founder. His epitaph implies not that he
considered his presidency and his acquisition of the West unimportant, but that
an ignorant observer would fail to realize how important the other contributions
were. He increases his stature by implying that the observer is not even really
capable of calculating it. There is thus a morbid relationship to his public that
might be oversimplified as a preoccupation with appearances or a tremendous
conceit. He would like to be able to re-write or re-inscribe his relationship with his
audience, his public, instead of leaving them to honor him. It is a way of trying to
control one’s role in history and is not dissimilar to Lilburne’s manipulation of
lsham into shooting him. The inscription on Jefferson’s gravestone serves not
only to remind the reader of his importance in the founding and thus of the way
that the events of the Kentucky tragedy involve themselves in the nation, but also
to model the dynamic of power through constitutive speech. From his writing on
his gravestone we can conclude that Jefferson wanted to seize control of how he
would be remembered, controlling the viewers of his gravestone through a kind
of power-seeking prophecy. The omission of any mention of the Kentucky
tragedy in Jefferson’s voluminous writings and letters is as much a scandal as
the murder itself and that omission follows the epitaph’s pattern of control

through prophecy, a pattern that Lilburne and his victims (John, Isham, and

Letitia) prove destructive.11

 

11 . . . .
There IS no reference to the mcudent in the Jefferson papers (Brooks 29).

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These flaws of Jefferson’s—his satiety of conscience and his attempt to
prophetically control his viewer, Warren considers important to the American
founding. Jefferson’s composition of his own epitaph, while providing a clue to
his character, is a minor instance of prophecy as compared to Jefferson’s
characterization of the West as the Promised Land. The Jefferson of Brother to
Dragons styles himself as a prophet: Jefferson compares the American West to
the Promised Land and himself to Moses. “Like the Israelite” he “saw [his] West,”
his Bold Louisiana” which is “Canaan’s grander counterfeit” (10). Jefferson
regards himself as a prophet forming the territory of the new nation. He sets the
American founding in a historical relationship between past and future in terms of
promise and fulfillment, word and manifestation. He lays the foundation for
Manifest Destiny. Jefferson’s prophetic characterization of the West was crucial
to the notion of Manifest Destiny that drove the settlement and development of
the United States. Werner Sollors emphasizes the role of the promised land
image in American “transatlantic and rural-urban migrations” where America, or
one of its regions, was described as “the fulfillment of the second book of Moses”
(44). In the periods of mass immigration in the early twentieth century, America
is the “Promised Land,” “the city on a hill,” the “American Israel,” the “New
Canaan,” and the place of the “Chosen People” (44, 46). The Biblical typology
on which Jefferson drew in his annexing of the West was to become central to

the development of American ethnicities.

For Warren, Jefferson’s prophetic stance is important in the founding of

the nation. This verse drama has as “one of its central concerns . . . the problem

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of our [American] history as Warren envisions it” (149). Jefferson says that he
sent Meriwether “forth / To redeem the wild land to the Western Shore,” rather
like God the Father (27). Sr. Quinn claims that of all Warren’s “symbols of
necessity,” (using his critical distinction between symbols of necessity and of
congruence) “none has the importance of the West, or Promised Land” (19). The
early drafts of Brother to Dragons rely, according to Law, on certain passages
from the Aeneid so that “the evidence suggests that . . . [Warren] found special
significance in the image of Aeneas, founder of a new world, fleeing the death of
the old but carrying his father on his back, symbol of the burden of piety
necessary to the new enterprise” (253). Law argues that this significance of
Aeneas and Anchises is carried out in the play by the way in which RPW’s father
guides him through his excavation of the past. Along with the presence of the
national patriarch Jefferson, and the theme of the West as the Promised Land,
the model of the Aeneid suggests that political founding is an issue in the play,
interwoven somehow into the very domesticity of the Kentucky tragedy.
Jefferson’s calling up of the nation through his deployment of Meriwether to the
West constitutes a kind of prophecy and makes prophecy important to the play’s

background of nation-building.

Warren treats Jefferson’s prophecy of the Promised Land as part and
parcel of the Kentucky tragedy. The presence in the play of Meriwether Lewis,
for instance, brings the exploration of the West into the Kentucky tragedy:
historically, Lewis was not involved in the Kentucky incident. Warren includes him

as well as Lewis’ resentment of Jefferson in order to emphasize Jefferson’s role

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as prophet of the Promised Land. He implicates prophecy in the circumstances
of John’s death. Warren also characterizes the setting of Rocky Hill, Lilburne’s
home, as belonging to the edge of the wilderness. Warren does not let the
murder of John rest as just an idiosyncrasy of a “bloody sentimental maniac,” or
even as a morbid curiosity. The way that Warren wrestles with Jefferson as
founder, as philosophical father and as builder of the West and as patriotic
exemplar lets us know that however petty and domestic the tyrannies of Lilburne
are, they still touch on great problems of power that are political and perhaps

even mythic.

Lilburne is a prophet figure who is so problematic that it is hard to know
whether he is a prophet figure at all. As a prophet, he is something of a fraud.
As both tyrant and pseudo-prophet, he resembles tyrannical figures like Big
Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ayatollah Khomeini in The Satanic Verses-—
who deploy imitations of prophecy as a way of sustaining the power and royal
consciousness that the prophet is supposed to fight. But the prophetic elements
of Lilburne’s violent actions are to striking to be ignored. His prophet-like actions
include his practice of extispicy on John, and his compelling predictions of John
breaking the jug and of lsham executing him, predictions which amount to
efficacious speech. He has an apocalyptic mindset, regarding prophecy as an
unequivocal phenomenon, and desires simplification. In his search for “the peace
of definition,” he tries to eliminate the gaps between inside and outside, presence

and absence, (and truth and justice) (39). He tries to eliminate these gaps

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through extispicy: making the inside out. He cannot tolerate equivocalness or

hiddenness. He thus cuts out equivocalness by determining what will happen.

Lilburne provokes John to break the jug, foretelling his punishment,
“saying soft: ‘That pitcher—if you break it—‘” and “shoving the pitcher there to
John (80 79). Lil walked to the spring “soft behind” John and, lsham suspects,
pushes John in. When the pitcher breaks, lsham recalls feeling “no surprise”
(81). It was not a chance or contingency; rather, it “’twas natural-like . . . / Like
happened long ago” (81). Lilburne had set up John as offender, had made the
offense and the punishment inevitable, and in this way mastered the future.
Rather, Lilburne deploys something that resembles mantic speech: his words
constitute reality, played out in John’s actions. Lilburne’s word becomes his
victims’ deed. In this sense he is a prophet. But the sense of fraud persists: he

pushes John.

Similarly, Lilburne tries to compel his own and lsham’s death. Trying to
deploy the word as deed, he actually writes lsham’s will along with his own. He
shows lsham the will: “Within this inclosure myself and my brother requests / Be
entered in the same coffin and / In the same ground. / But ground scratched out,
and then / ‘Twas grave he writ” (104). He actually inscribes his prophecy of
lsham’s death, and then begins to bend lsham to that path. He gives “the kiss of
necessity” (101). He wants to mold the future, via his actions and his visions and
his prophetic writing of the will, and to make it necessary rather than contingent.
Lilburne controls his victim by planting a possibility in his imagination, by

establishing the conditions of possibility. Ishey thus allows Lilburne to call the

83

 

shots. Lilburne orders reality and lsham is unable to exert himself to hope or to

break the script. He cannot speak against it: he “don’t say nothing” (Warren 72).

Lilburne resembles a prophet in other ways. The scene in which he goes
out into the woods with his bride and savages her illusions has some elements of
the prophetic style, which is not caressing (a style he does use with lsham) but
“luminous and explosive, firm and contingent, harsh and compassionate, a fusion
of contradictions” (Heschel 7). Displaying two extremes of vision, he adorns
Letitia with sweet-gum flowers and exclaims to her that she’s an “angel from the
sky” while “smiling like [Letitia] never saw” (47). The next instant, “His face was
dark” and he tells her “even hell would be better than this sty” (47). To Lilburne
as “To the prophet [the moral state of society] is dreadful” (Heschel 9). In his
divided vision he resembles a prophet, but as with his other prophetic

characteristics, this one is slightly ‘off’.

Lilburne’s disgust is both misplaced and overblown, and it makes
Lilburne’s use of prophecy problematic. Heschel explains hypertrophy using the
example of Jeremiah. The biblical prophet has genuine sympathy for God,
feeling the “divine wrath” within him (117). But he also has sympathy for Israel,
and feels fear and grief on his people’s behalf. His “modes of prophetic
sympathy are determined by the modes of the divine pathos” so that “the pathos
of love and the pathos of anger awake corresponding tones in the heart of the
prophet” (119). At The Biblical Jeremiah “had a soul of extreme sensitivity to
human suffering” (Heschel 120). Thus the laments and the vivid imagining of the

punishment to come: “I heard a cry as of a woman in travail, Anguish as of one

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bringing forth her first child, the cry of the daughter of Zion gasping for breath”
(Jeremiah 4:31 quoted in Heschel 120). The sympathies of the prophet are
extreme and they are in conflict with each other: he is a mediator between the
divine and the mortal and “this [is] a part of the complexity of the prophet’s inner
existence” (121 ). In addition to this genuine conflict there is pathos in the
prophet that floats free of its moorings and becomes excessive and self-feeding:
it is hypertrophic and “surpass[es] in intensity the feelings of the person for whom
one has sympathy” (126). In all of this complexity and conflict there is a parallel
to Lilburne. He manifests the hypertrophic sympathy toward his mother that we
see in Jeremiah. His anxiety over her dishes, her spoons, her tea-things and the
jug is over and above what she felt for them while living. The slaves she trusted
and who loved her become suspect to him. He counts the household spoons
and takes inventory of the dishes. His concern on Lucy's behalf far outweighs
any pity she had for herself. Hypertrophic in his sympathy, he becomes a source

instead of a mouthpiece for another’s wrath.

When Lilburne enters the kitchen, drunk asking to “see [his] mother’s
spoons” and one is missing, he strikes out. He overreacts because “he feels that
something /Terrible is happening to his mother” (69). In contrast to Lilburne’s
obviously excessive care for his mother’s honor is the slaves’ more moderate
and practical affection. They “liked her ‘tol-bul well,’” and “would have defended
all her spoons against / The Powers of Darkness and Old Scratch Himself" with
“reasonable loyalty” (68). This loyalty is reasonable because it has its limits in

death: “but now she is dead” (68). Lilburne’s sympathy is excessive and, since it

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is leant to a dead woman, un-needed and therefore insincere. His sympathy is
hypertrophic since it purports falsely to have an external object. When he
punishes the slaves “Always somebody gets hurt,” which tells us of his cruelty
(69). RPW tells us that the slaves get hurt “But Lilburne most” (69). The cliché of
the punisher suffering more than the punished is usually taken facetiously or
ironically, but in Lilburne it is not. Rather, it is further proof of his morbid
sympathy. Jefferson sums up his character as a “bloody sentimental maniac”

(16).

The bloody sentimentalism of Lilburne resonates to a certain extent with
the image of the “frenzy to which the prophets as a class are subject” (336). This
frenzy indicates a complete possession by God: “the worshipper felt the god
enter into his own being” (W.K.C. Guthrie quoted in 79). When the prophet
speaks, it is literally as the god, and he is entitled to answer to the god’s name.
Heschel suggests with his argument that the prophet is in some sense passive to
“the unconditioned power which exercises sheer compulsion over” him (114).
George Palmer Garrett claims that the Pasiphae myth is “a symbolic background
for Lilburn’s specific crime” by uncovering similarities between the murder and
the flesh-burning ritual of an “ecstatic Cretan religion” (79). In another version of
the story of Lilburne the slave boy’s corpse is thrown in parts into the fire in the
meat house. For Garrett, the ecstatic frenzy accounts for the “ritual” quality of the
murder (79). In a twist on the original sin thesis, Garrett explains that “the
disregard of this fact, the terrible potential of mankind for irrational ecstasy, good

or evil . . . Warren sees as the fatal defect in Jefferson’s vision” (79). This

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omission would amount to an Apollonian blindness to Dionysian forces. But
Garrett’s Apollonian/Dionysian opposition overlooks the extispitic significance of
John’s murder not as mere irrationality but as an attempt to bridge inside and
outside. Garrett’s theory about the Pasiphae myth would enlarge on this
“unconditioned power” and “sheer compulsion” (79) his Cretan ecstatic ritual is a
prophetic activity: It is exactly the kind of prophecy that Heschel repudiates when

he denies the necessity of the ecstatic experience for the Biblical prophets.

This frenzy or ecstasy has a dubious status in the theology of prophecy
(Heschel 338). The history of exegesis involves a great deal of mixing between
Jewish and Greek theories of prophecy, so that they are not clinically separate
from each other in the West. Heschel describes the “syncretist” work of Philo of
Alexandria in bringing the Greek idea of an ecstatic frenzy that visits the oracle
into his analysis of the Biblical prophets (Heschel 335). Moses Maimonides
recognizes this tradition but emphasizes the mental clarity of Moses. The
Christian theologian Origen was similarly emphatic that “the will and judgment of
the prophets remain in the normal state” (343). There is a history of both
acceptance of and ironic distancing from ecstasy as a proof of prophetic
sincerity, and Heschel sides with the latter, citing the complete lack of ecstasy in
Moses, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah (352). The frenzy then, is a suspect

prophetic practice. Again, Lilburne’s prophetic activities have an air of falsity.

Also, the ecstatic frenzy or bacchanal excess that Garrett proposes does
not sit well with the stillness or the deliberateness of Lilburne’s character.

Jefferson wonders whether it was the “rush of wild joy” for which Lilburne struck

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(54). The magnificence of Lilburne that Letitia glimpses as he handles a nervous
horse might seem to support this. His face was “dark and beautiful” as he
calmed the animal, but it was also “still” (41 ). Letitia exclaims: “oh, it was still, but
it was beautiful!” (45). While Lilburne’s magnificence would seem to indicate a
man too spirited to be confined within the limits of a peaceful existence who is
driven by rage, like Achilles dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy,
his stillness indicates something different. It indicates his desire for
unequivocalness and the peace of definition. He moves deliberately, not

suddenly, toward this goal as he slowly bates John into breaking the jug.

Lilburne continues to reach for a “knowledge too deep for knowing” and
after his apprehension for John’s murder, reaches a clarity and has “the certainty
of moving toward / That perfect certainty of self that all / His life had yearned for”
(99). This certainty is joyful for him, for he had always desired such clarity. RPW
explains that the clarity and certainty amount to a “vision” and in this vision “The
scales are loosed from his eyes” (100). Lilburne is a kind of ferocious seer-into
the dark. He cuts John open to ascertain the future—his own in trial and death,
John’s in death, and the household’s in betrayal. He sets himself up as a seer, to
retrieve knowledge from the dark inside the meat shed, inside John’s body,
inside his house, inside the genealogy of the slave, inside his patrimony. But he
is a false seer because he does not accept that equivocalness between an
interior world and an exterior world, between absence and presence. Instead, of

equivocalness, he wants clarity.

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The Greek practice of consulting innards is the model for his false
prophecy. Ruth Padel’s describes the prophet consulting his own through gut
feelings and dreams as well as the innards of or others—an animal slaughtered
on an altar or table. The butchery of John on a meat block in the meat house
implies that he is an animal of the type usually slaughtered there and it suggests
sacrifice, but more particularly it alludes to extispicy, which is “the art of divining
the gods’ will from animal entrails” (Padel 15). Lilburne goes beyond a simple

execution into a fearful and ritualistic slaughter: the dismemberment of John limb

by limb with an axe as the chorus of the household slaves looks on.12

Even the darkness of the shed suggests the chthonic sources of prophecy
and the darkness of the innards. Padel identifies a connection between innards
and darkness in Greek thought. lnnards are hidden from the light: “darkness is
the condition . . . of innards” and it is also the color (75). The darkness of the
innards in Greek thought corresponded (in a way that is foreign to our modern
metaphor of the unconscious as dark) to “core attributes of the human equipment
of thinking, feeling and knowing” for the Greeks” (76). The “associations of
darkness . . . underpin Greek discourse of inner experience,” but are not
equivalent to the way in which we apply a metaphor of darkness to the psyche

(76). For the Greeks, truth and falsehood, signs of the present and the future

 

12 Padel’s subtitle to In and Out of the Greek Mind is Greek Images of the Tragic Self. She
suggests that tragic knowing is steeped in the deaths and blindings that happen behind the stage
or in an enclosed hut on the stage, hidden from view (75). The significance of tragedy to the
verse-play Brother to Dragons is not fully mapped out, but the way in which the murder of John is
witnessed and eventually exposed by a silent, chorus-like crowd, along with the way that Warren
presents it ob-skene via distant witnesses is certainly suggestive of Greek tragedy.

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3

had “somatic expression” (77). Truth lay in the dark, and thus blind Tiresius had

prophetic sight.

Lilburne’s extispitic sacrifice of John belongs to this “discourse of
darkness” and proceeds from Lilburne’s desire for “the peace of definition,” or a
clear knowledge about the world (Padel 75). Lilburne wants definition and
knowledge in a transparent world, in which there is no gap between appearance
and reality or truth and justice. He strives against opacity. Letitia’s brother recalls
“sometimes his eyes I Just stared . . . so bright with a kind of shine, / Like he was
looking through [someone]” (45). His vision seeks transparency: “He had a way
to look at a man sort of/ Like [he] [was]n’t there” (45). This transparent gaze
draws Letitia so that she “wanted to be / Just nothing and him everything,” and
her “Like air he breathed and didn’t know or heed” (45). She echoes his desire
for transparency in the plea “Oh, God, even if You’re God, you haven’t got / The
right to make me not know anything. /And what it means, and why, /And not be
nothing, God” (46). RPW recognizes that her plea is in the same vein as
Lilburne’s: “All [she] demand[s] is definition, too, / Just like poor Lilburne” (46).
Lilburne wants sight and clarity, and he seeks it, like a Greek prophet, in the dark

of the cave (the meat house) and innards (John’s dismembered body).

Lilburne wants to eliminate the gap between interior and exterior in order
to render transparent the question of generation: is John, whom the political
realm has rendered a slave, slavish on the inside? ls his slavishness evidenced
by his innards? Lilburne wants to ascertain the distinction between the

honorable Lewis generations and the nameless economic slave generations who

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might, given Jefferson’s proclivities, proceed from the same genetic source. He
demands the proper respect for the white Lewis generations—specifically, for his
mother Lucy’s relation to the President, a relation signaled in the household by
the jug that was the President’s gift to Lucy. He is deeply paranoid that the slaves
will mishandle these and other signs of honor. The way in which Lilburne is a
prophet is that he brings to light what has been obscured in society: namely, the
arbitrariness of the slavery of blacks. While other normal folk are able to
‘suspend disbelief‘ so to speak and look past the arbitrariness of the social
system, Lilburne is not. He is dismissed as a “bloody sentimental maniac.” He
has the extremely clear vision of social reality and is thus a prophet. Lilburne’s
practice of extispicy flags him as a kind of prophet and suggests the issues of

inside and outside that drive the play.

Lilburne’s desire for the peace of definition amounts to an apocalyptic
outlook. The brothers argue as Lil pleads that it is better to run away and remain
living. Lil claims that to be dead differs little from these people’s condition, that
one “can be dead /And breathe and eat and sleep” (104). He points out “the
folks all walking in their clothes!” and claims “they don’t know they’re dead” (104).
For Lilburne all time is frozen, and thus all people are frozen in its certainty and
are therefore dead. He recognizes no distinction between the present and past,
arguing that the dead Lucy “loves [lsham] still” and that lsham ought not “up and
ride and leave [their] mother” (105). Time also does not pass for Lilburne after
he kills John. While “Time turns, and the orbed axis leans / to warm Kentucky”

and spring comes, “His heart does not unlatch when the first shoots / Of corn

9]

prick punctiliously the black field” (96 99). Instead of inhabiting the earth’s
seasonal landscape which changes over time, “he now inhabits an inward
landscape / Of forms fixed and hieratic, like moon-blasted basalt” (96). He
inhabits an apocalyptic landscape. Lilburne’s desire for certainty excludes him
from the march of time so that, he imagines, the living and the dead are alike
frozen in definition. For him the prophetic quality of timelessness permits
definition. In this he resembles the Ayatollah Khomeini of The Satanic Verses,
who smashes clocks, as well as and Brueggemann’s portrait of the king, who
occupies an unchanging royal time. Lilburne does not accept the prophetic

oscillation between timelessness and suddenness.

Like the effort to achieve definition through extispitic violence, Lilburne’s
embrace of apocalypticism amounts to a refusal to accept a gap or discontinuity
between inside and outside, the visible and the hidden. RPW wonders of the
New Madrid earthquake following the execution of John “did that poor fellow
Lilburne long for more / When midnight vision burst, and sudden, he saw / The
world heave like the forest in a storm . . . While darkness danced on tiptoe far
above, / And tore / The streaming and apocalyptic horror of its enormous hair”
(39)? When the household endures an earthquake, Lilburne has a
corresponding mental upheaval in which he “knew / At last, at last, the thrilling
absoluteness / Of the pure act. Year after year, to have yearned / For the peace

of definition. Here it was” (39).

To Lilburne this earthquake appears to be a sign. The thesis of original

sin, that we are all brother to dragons and share complicity, is bolstered by the

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extraordinary New Madrid earthquake, which was the worst ever in North

America.13 The occurrence of the earthquake on the night of John’s murder
would seem to mark the event as something particularly foul, unnatural, and
deserving of divine wrath as the disorder in Macbeth’s stables do on the night of
Duncan’s murder. Lilburne’s wife Letitia claims that at the time of the earthquake
she “prayed for the End” as “folks named the End of Time,” and, in an
apocalyptic mood, the Mississippi River flowed backwards. RPW rebukes her,
saying “It takes something more to bring the End of Time / Than that Roman
circus in your meat-house” (43). She repeats again that she “prayed / For the
End of Time,” and RPW advances the theory that “each man has / A different set
of well-fondled reasons / To make any hour seem perfectly made to order/ For
God’s wrath” (44). RPW mocks the tendency to apocalypticism, and denies its
relation to small tyrannies because “guilt is common enough . . . to make any one

day appropriate for the Judgment” (57). For RPW evil is banal and common,

. . . . . . . . . . 14
while for Lilburne In hlS apocalyptrcnsm evul IS extraordinary and conclusrve.

For Lucy apocalypticism results in moral paralysis. Lucy relates the story
of John returning, beaten, from an effort to fetch Lilburne home from a drunken
spree: John bleeds, and at the sight of the blood her “faculty is frozen” and she
falls to bind up the wound. Presented with proof of Lilburne’s streak of
violence/violent character, she “cried out: ‘God!’ And suddenly, /Time flowed

back. I Flowed back and over. It whirled [her] like a flood” (55). She succumbs

 

13 The date of the earthquake was December 15, 1811 (Brooks 29).

1 . . . . .
4 Bloom describes Warren as “susprcrous of the doctrine of progress and the blandishments of
utopianism,” which means that his preoccupation with time is not utopian (27).

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to a notion of apocalypse—an end of history—instead of remaining to take part in
history which would entail cleaning John’s wounds, rebuking Lilburne, and
accepting responsibility in this damaged community. Instead of cleaning the
wounds, she “prayed it was only a dream” (55) and let go of “the blessedness of
the human obligation” (55). Lucy’s readiness to regard Lilburne’s actions as
determined results in her weakness and failure. She put a “distance . . . great as
forever” between herself and Lilburne, who stood at the foot of the bed. His “face
yearned toward [her] across the valley” (55). She completes her failure by dying.
After reaching out “to touch / The brightness of violent blood,” hoping to find it
“nothing but air” she fainted, awoke and died (54). This death amounts to a
“repudiation,” a rejection of the messiness of life in time and of her maternal
connection to Lilburne (48). This repudiation brings us back to the central
problem of the play, which is the silence of Jefferson regarding the murders. This
silence is a failure to encounter tyranny particularly as a possibility of one’s own

blood.

RPW resists apocalypticism and its consequent denial of responsibility by
pinning the events of Rocky Hill down to a particular time and place on
recognizable everyday maps and timetables deferring to chronos instead of
chairos. The old house, he insists to Jefferson, is no longer there: he drove “Up
Highway 109 from Hopkinsville / To Dawson Springs, then west on 62” and
“assurels Jefferson] that it is gone” (12). He also gives the exact date of the
earthquake when Letitia describes it. He is impatient with her hope that it was

the “End of Time” (43), saying the brutality “was just an episode in the long drift

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of human / Experience” (43). RPW proposes an episodic instead of an

eschatological timetable as a palliative for the evils of apocalypticism.

While he downplays notion that the earthquake was a sign orjudgment,
RPW also “expresses . . . the ironical fear that the modern age might be too
‘advanced’ to . . . fear God’s wrath” (57). He describes modern Kentucky as a
“God-damn world” in which “Time only” (not rivers or journeys) “will always flow”
(14). Yet in this conception of an endless world without fulfillment or apocalypse
“even the leathery heart foreknows the end and knows / It will not be long, be
long” (13). A sense of hopelessness indicates that while time brings no
fulfillment or end, it spoils things “like milk gone sour in July” (15). RPW resists
determinism and yet is disturbed by an indifference not only to “the ‘horror’ of
being men,” but also to a certain appropriateness of external nature to internal
mind and soul which is the peculiar realm of prophetic expression (57). While
RPW identifies as a problem the apocalyptic tendency passively to regard events
as inevitable, he also rejects the idea that time and meaning, outside and inside
are entirely separate. RPW allows for the difficulty of sidestepping the extremes

of timelessness or suddenness.

When RPW recalls visiting Rocky Hill, “the house Charles Lewis built” and
Lilburne occupied he sees a black snake rise up out of the ruins (22). He creates
an interpretive problem: the snake was not “Nidhogg . . . nor even / Eve’s
interlocutor. . . nor . . . The quintessential evil of that ruin . . . no spirit, symbol,
god, / Or Freudian principle” (25). It was, he insists, “just a snake, / Black Snake,

Black Pilot Snake, the Mountain Blacksnake” (25). Nonetheless he feels a

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“metaphysical chill” (25). His “soul / Sat in [his] hand and could not move” (25).
It is “as though those stones / Bled forth earth’s inner darkness to the day” (24).
Remembering the sinister potential of prophecy as displayed by Lilburne’s
violence and the damaging paralysis of Lucy’s apocalypticism, RPW wants to
avoid a determinist connection between the natural world and the moral. He
fears a prophecy in which presence dominates over absence and suddenness
over timelessness, but nonetheless considers some sort of eschatology

necessary to hope.

This image of the black snake in the Lewis house recalls the importance of
the snake to prophecy, particularly Greek “cults [in which] snakes were
themselves prophetic” (Padel 146). They were prophetic because “snakes [were]
the most obvious chthonic creature to emerge in our surface—world” and thus in
this way of thinking snakes “are the prime animal intermediary between this world
and its underneath” (146). The snake, as coming out of the chthonic regions
whose darkness hid divine truth, was a bearer of prophetic sight. Padel helps us
understand the snake’s appropriateness as a model for this hidden presence via
a Greek way of thinking that is also present in the play. The roofs of Greek
houses sheltered snakes so that they were within the house—unseen perhaps,
but nonetheless “propitiated, given milk, honey-cakes, and shrines” (146). The
Greeks regarded them as a chthonic connection to the divine. Part of that
daemonic status meant that “they . . . lived with the possibility that gods might
turn the snake’s power against them at any moment” (146). Equivocal signs,

they are “an image of lightning-quick, invisible menace in one’s own house”

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(146). This ambivalence of the snake as daemon is tied to its domesticity. The

snake is a “tight, perfect image of the daemonic within” the house (147).

The Greek way of thinking that permitted this ambivalence and believed in
its unseen presence in the home helps us to understand the thesis the play
repeats: that “doom is always domestic” (8). In using this image of the snake in
the house, Warren both evokes duplicity of prophetic thinking, which travels
between inside and outside, and the domesticity of Lilburne’s crime. As part of
the meeting of disparate categories of nation and oikos in this play that is about
the effects of a private scandal on national identity, Warren investigates the way
that filial relationships bear significance in the calculation of human potential for
good and for tyranny. There is a dynastic structure even in a democratic society
in which genealogy is secondary to citizenship. The establishment of civilization
through dynasty involves the separation of legitimate or favored children, who
have an established place in the world (pietas) from illegitimate or less favored
children who remain in shadow or are cast out into the wilderness. Prophecy, as
an equivocal speech darting like Mercury between separate worlds (heaven and
earth, seen and unseen) is peculiarly suited to the enterprise of uncovering the

flaws of this dynastic structure.

RPW casts Rocky Hill as the site of a hidden interior world bursting forth,
of a Minotaur escaping the labyrinth, and of genealogy erupting through a
hitherto-honorable dynasty. The snake emerging from the house images the
intersection of inside and out, genealogy and dynasty, home and nation that

occur in the Jefferson family scandal. The reason that the snake image persists

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to be important is because of the way it so completely presents the problem that
Lucy, Aunt Cat and Jefferson struggle with: the hidden presence of mystery,
shame or betrayal in the house where the house is both a dwelling and a
metonymy for genealogy or filiation. Jefferson forefathered (in both senses),
Lucy bore, and Aunt Cat suckled “two black-hearted murderers,” and the fact of
this connection between themselves and the murderous events becomes their

inescapable doom (17).

Doom is a prophetic (and even apocalyptic) notion. Doom is always
domestic because prophecy doesn’t love dynasty, but instead exercises its
potential to bring the inside out in the form of uncovering the ill-favored secrets of
genealogy. For Jefferson “doom is always domestic,” because “the absolute
traitor lurks in some sweet corner of the blood” (8). Sweetness suggests the
taste of passion and implies that physical desire is the downfall of those noble
endeavors of the sort that Jefferson listed on his gravestone. The downfall of the
nation can proceed from the secret of the house—in Jefferson’s case, the
paternity of Jefferson and the hidden paternity of his slave children. Doom—that
prophesied downfall of the political order—awaits within genealogy. Prophecy

sides with genealogy against dynasty and the maintenance of civilization.

The man who was such a powerful mind behind the development of a
democratic government based on a belief in equality, the possibility of
enlightened self-rule and the discontinuation of primogeniture is nonetheless
obsessed with genealogy. In Warren’s portrayal of him, Jefferson meditates on

paternity, wondering again and again how young men who were “blood—kin” to

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himself could show such a bestial strain. It is clear that he orders human life, to a
certain extent and democrat though he is, through genealogy. He wonders again
and again that Lilburne and lsham could have come from his blood and ponders
the betrayal of this blood: “yes, that’s the fact that shakes my heart / With the
intrinsic shock: / Born of my sister’s body, vessel of my blood, /And yet what it is”
(42). For a moment, he imagines that he can “reject, repudiate, /And squeeze
from [his] blood the blood of Lilburne” (43). This attempt aside, he looks at the
way this blood plays out through the centuries, and understands time as an

unfolding of genealogy.

This advocate of equality was also a slaveholder, and to crown these

contradictions, he kept a slave mistress by whom he fathered five children: five

unacknowledged, illegitimate slave children.15 The black blood wipes out all
trace of Jefferson in his illegitimate children, and in this sense heritage is
everything, while in democratic ideals, it is nothing. The Jefferson of Brother to
Dragons says he never had a son and thus tenderly adopted Meriwether Lewis
(a nephew) as son and heir to the promised land, the West. While Jefferson
casts himself as a sort of Moses figure in his acquisition of the West, Warren also
implies a similarity to Jacob and Esau, who competed for their father’s blessing,
and to the family of Abraham who, like Jefferson, founds a nation. Abraham saw

his son Isaac as the first born of his nation, while his illegitimate son Ishmael,

 

15 In 1998 “DNA tests determined that a male in Jefferson’s family fathered the last child of

Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings. This information “makes it difficult to protect him from the old
charge that [Jefferson] conceived children with Hemings and reared his own progeny in bondage”
(Appleby 8). Recent works on Jefferson's life and presidency include The Negro President:
Jefferson and the Slave Power and Mr. Jefferson ’5 Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery and the
Louisiana Purchase.

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born by Hagar the slave girl, was banished. The name of Lilburne’s brother
lsham alludes to Ishmael. ln Warren’s concatenation of the Biblical types, Ishey
is not the only Ishmael figure: the other Ishmael figures are only tacitly present,
represented by that chorus of slave witnesses in the meat house—Jefferson’s
illegitimate black children. Like Ishmael, they are excluded because they are

offspring of a slave.

In the Judeao—Christian tradition, Isaac was brought by Abraham to into
the wilderness to be slaughtered as a sacrifice in obedience to God. Isaac asks
his father what the sacrificial victim will be, and Abraham answers that God will
provide it. God stills Abraham’s hand as he lifts the knife and asks instead for the
ram in the thicket. ln Christian tradition, Isaac is a type of Christ, the sacrifice
provided by God. In the Islamic tradition, however, it is Ishmael whom Abraham
brings to the altar. Thus the name Ishmael has an ambiguous heritage, but in
either tradition there is a suggestion of sacrifice and a background of the rejected
illegitimate son who cannot be used for the founding of a dynasty and nation.
lshey’s name suggests that the logic of sacrifice is implicated in the deaths of

Lilburne and John.

Ishey considers himself a sacrifice and a victim of Lilburne. Even when he
murders Lilburne, he does so as a victim of Lilburne’s will acting under Lilburne’s
careful control. Lil spells out lshey’s directions by writing wills for both of them

and carefully “count[ing] slow to make [him] do it” (108). Lilburne also wants to

100

be the sacrifice and wants to be betrayed.16 He “would count to ten” to “get the
last sweet drop” waiting for lsham to shoot him “staring steady at [his brother] all
the time” (107). Lilburne wants lsham to kill him so that he can have a “last
betrayer” to “leave him in his perfectest delight, / . . . alone in sweet alienation” to
“[suck] the sweet injustice like a Christmas bonbon” (108). However, while Ishey
is a victim of Lilburne to a certain extent, the biblical import of his name is that he
is not the sacrifice. And after all, it is John whom Lilburne destroys on the altar of
the chopping block. The sacrifice of John is a consequence of the broken
pitcher, which was a material sign of Lucy Lewis’ filial relation to Jefferson, a
relation that Lilburne values because of Jefferson’s status as president and
founder. Lilburne offers up the sacrifice of John not to God, but to Jefferson.
John’s death is a founding sacrifice of the kind that established ancient cities.
Jefferson is the recipient of the sacrificial offering. To what extent is Jefferson

responsible for this?

Both Lilburne and Meriwether are, in a sense, sons of Jefferson and
surrogates for his illegitimate slave children. Both the Lewis’s have the potential
to fulfill Jefferson’s hopes for the common man. Meriwether achieves greatness
through territorial exploration. Lilburne also has a potential for greatness: his
magnificence, his charisma and ability to command love (lshey’s and Letitia’s),
his instinctive leadership that Letitia glimpses in his handling of the spirited horse

all speak of a person who ought to fulfill Jefferson’s highest expectations for the

 

In another instance of betrayal, it was Lilburne’s dog Nero that brought investigators out to the

house in the first place by retrieving one of John’s bones. Of course the dog’s name means
“black” and also suggests tyranny.

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common man. But he is not the common man: he is the nephew of the president.
Genealogy emerges to contradict Jefferson’s ideals. Meriwether resents
Jefferson for these ideals-—for Jefferson’s hope in the nobility of man over and
against the nobility of the well-born. He indicts Jefferson’s hopes in humanity and
claims his “lie was the perfect lure” (109). The noble dream “that Man at last is
Man’s friend” he found to be untrue, and he more than resents Jefferson for
telling it to him (114). Believing in this hope, he finds it impossible to endure
treachery and the false accusations of embezzlement made against him as
governor of the Louisiana Territory. Although it was a liar named Bates who
accused him, Meriwether seems to regard Jefferson as the “Great Betrayer”
(113). He goes so far as to accuse Jefferson of murdering him: “I knew” he says
“who murdered me” (115). Meriwether suggests that Jefferson’s crimes are akin
to Lilburne’s. Meriwether claims to have sympathy or affinity for Lilburne’s crime,
saying he would “honor more / The axe in the midnight meat-house, as more
honest at least, /Than [Jefferson’s] murderous lie to prove [him]self/ Nobler in
man’s nobleness” (116). Meriwether thus draws an explicit parallel between
Lilburne’s actions and Jefferson’s: “Look at your arm,” he tells Jefferson. “It’s
lifted! Is the axe there?” he asks, and comments on “the rage of [Jefferson’s]
virtue” (117). Meriwether implies that Jefferson’s ideals chop up and dismember
man. But what is this dismemberment? Genealogy is separated from dynasty.
More specifically, he dismembers his slave children by separating out their
genealogy or paternity from their blackness. According to Kathleen Kelly’s

reading Morrison’s Beloved gives a memorable image of this racial

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dismemberment with the beheading of Sethe’s daughter which, like the sacrifice

of John, occurs in a dark shed.17 This dismemberment of the baby repeats the
pulling-apart of Sethe’s body and soul by Schoolteacher when he separates her

animal and human characteristics on a table with two columns.

The horror of mixed blood contradicts Jefferson’s democratic ideals and
amounts to the dismemberment of persons. But it also leads to the notion of
betrayal. For Werner Sollors, the development of American ethnicities through
the prophecy of the Promised Land is connected to the notion of betrayal within
families. To be of mixed blood (as were the slave children of Jefferson) was to
be a traitor to the lines of generation and to be a contradiction to the story of

purity and to the boundaries of race. Sollors explains:

in the cultural fear of boundary—dissolving characters between categories, an
American paradox manifested itself. The products of consent relations were, well
into the twentieth century, considered to be exclusively and negatively shaped by
one aspect of their descent. In the United States, the country of consent
(wherein one chose to be American), mulattoes were not viewed as architects of
their own fates . . . in the American imagination, mixed bloods were the
culmination of the fear of losing generations (68).

In Brother to Dragons, the fear of being related to something monstrous
emerges in the master-slave relations in the Lewis and Jefferson households.
Lilburne withdraws his consent to any maternal bonds to his black nanny, vowing
that he would “puke the last black drop” of her milk that he suckled from her as a
child (58). But this theme of blood betrayal also emerges in Lilburne, whose

monstrous violence makes him a traitor to the Jefferson blood and thus

 

17 . . . . . . .

Kathleen Kelly’s Apotropeic Imagination discusses the way Morrison's characters act in Violent
ways in order to ward off other evils: the apotropeic gesture is akin to prophecy in its indirect
efficacy.

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something that Jefferson refuses to acknowledge, just as he refuses to
acknowledge his slave children. Lilburne’s crime is in a sense the revenge of
those contradictions that Jefferson’s prophecy of man’s nobility in the Promised

Land suppresses.

How does Jefferson “murder” Meriwether, though? Jefferson abandons his
care of Meriwether, failing to assist, support or defend him when Meriwether is
falsely accused of embezzlement. Jefferson assumes a stance of transcendent
remoteness. He also affects blindness. The betrayal seems to be a matter both
personal and national—having to do with Jefferson’s founding ideals. There is an
intersection of the polls and the oikos in the themes of Brother to Dragons. While
it is clear from the deep involvement of Jefferson in the verse drama and from the
addition of Meriwether Lewis to the speakers that this work is concerned with the
American national myth, it is also undeniably a story about the household and
family and the way that power and political regime interact with personal and filial
association. Richard Law in “Doom is Always Domestic: Familial Betrayal in
Brother to Dragons” claims that the Kentucky tragedy “is presented in Warren’s

version of the events as a domestic tragedy” (250).

The betrayal that Jefferson bemoans is domestic: it is a betrayal of
domestic relations of love and of blood. Law connects this domesticity to
betrayal claiming that “at the core of the action of Brother to Dragons lies this
harsh paradigm of double betrayal” of parent by child and child by parent, where
Meriwether Lewis and Jefferson exemplify the last. Brother betrays brother in the

persons of Ishey and Lilburne as Lilburne tries to drive Ishey to suicide.

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Meriwether claims that Jefferson likewise drove him to suicide. This betrayal by
the “most dear,” which is “finally a betrayal of self,” has implications for the
“struggle, dark ferocious, in the dark / For power—for power empty and abstract”
(Warren 8; Law 254; Warren 59). We could add the betrayal of brother by
brother. His filial love for lsham follows the same pattern in that Lilburn’s promise
that lsham wouldn’t die by the hangman may seem affectionate, but it ends in
deeper betrayal of lsham by making him a fratricide. Law interprets Jefferson's
remark that “the absolute traitor lurks in some sweet corner of the blood” as a
remark not just on the possibilities inherent in genealogy, in one’s family, but
specifically in one’s self (8). The conflict between in and out within prophecy

results in Lilburne’s persistent feeling of betrayal.

With his wife Letitia Lilburne also creates a dynamic of abuse and
submission, as when he “’bused [her] in bed” (53). “He did it. / And it was an
awful thing / [she] didn’t even know the name of” that makes her feel ashamed
and “awful that folks could do so awful” (49). The next day, he asks her to tell
“exactly what happened” and forces her as proof of love to say that she liked it.
Then he swells up with something like an apocalyptic wrath “stood up tall like he
would fill the room, /And fill the house maybe, and split the walls. /And nighttime
would come pouring in like flood . . . Like ‘twas the darkness of an awful sky”
and) he blames her “now I see when angels / Come down to earth, they step in
dung, like us. /And like it” (52). Lilburne has a horror of incarnation and the
animal element of human sexuality, a horror that is nonetheless powerful for all

his lechery with the local prostitutes. He cannot reconcile himself to the

105

contradiction of the human as rational animal. His extremity of vision—Letitia as
an angel, Letitia stepping in dung—would seem like the prophet’s extremity of
vision, sighting heaven and hell, utopia and dystopia. However, Lilburne has a
fundamentalist desire for transparency which actually rejects the contradictory
qualities of prophecy—absence and presence, suddenness and timelessness--
qualities that make it remain equivocal and that withhold the peace of definition
that he wants. Prophecy equivocates between contradictory opposites.
Contradictions like that of human profanity and human divinity Lilburne cannot

endure.

While Lilburne’s behavior to his wife (tricking her into shaming herself) and
to Aunt Cat (rejecting her) is treacherous, Lilburne casts himself more as
betrayed than as traitor. Where Meriwether is unable to bear betrayal, Lilburne
loves and requires it. His countdown aloud for lsham to shoot him is done slowly,
that he may savor it. Lilburne calculated lsham’s character and “knew [he’d]
crack, and be / His last betrayer” (108). It seems that Lilburne’s self-fulfilling
prediction, his compelling prophecy, is one that necessarily produces treachery.
He casts betrayal and sacrifice as inevitable. Lilburne constantly requires a
sacrifice, be it John, Aunt Cat, Ishey or himself. Here, his resemblance to a

prophet proves false.

The prophet exposes the sacrifice on which society depends. Aunt Cat
fulfills this prophetic endeavor by exposing the murder of John. The vision of the
prophet makes clear the sacrifice that is hidden for the sake of a civilization and

the continuation of rule: the corpse is exposed. Aunt Cat practices prophecy as a

106

political art, defeating the power of Lilburne‘s discourse and exposing his secret
sacrifice. Aunt Cat refuses the invitation to betray Lilburne, avoiding his terms of
treachery, injustice and sacrifice. While submitting him to the law, she rejects his
call to guilt: she refuses to be either sacrifice or executioner. Her prophetic
speech exceeds the limits of the discourse and dynamic of power that Lilburne
has arranged with his “mean-weak” subordinates (79). She and the other slaves
need no longer be accessories through silence to the murder of John, yet they

also avoid the direct betrayal of their master.

Aunt Cat avoids a direct violation of her maternal relation to Lilburne as
wet-nurse: “Not that she did it—she would not betray / Her Honey-Chile she once
had given suck to. / Nor show the bones, just see them in the sky” (98). Lilburne
regards the milk he received as a baby from Aunt Cat as an intolerable obligation
and an impurity. He vows to her that he spits it out. When the Sheriff visits to
investigate the death of John, Lil believes that the slaves will remain silent. “lf Lil
said nothing, maybe till this day / Those niggers might just stood all sull and
mum. / But Lil, he laughed: “A passel of niggers, ha!” // Then turned, and spat”
(98). It is at this point that Aunt Cat executes her revenge: “Then it happens,
comes a voice so high . . . / “Bones will fly up! It scratches. “Bones will rise. / I
see them bones, they’re flyin’ to the sky!” // It was Aunt Cat. She fell down on the
ground, /A-staring in the sky, like bones was flying” (98). RPW understands
“what made her seize that moment” (98). “It was that Lilburne spat. Remember .
. . when the mother dies / And Aunt Cat says how she’d given suck / And was his

Mammy too—then Lilburne spat. / Spat out her milk, and all her niggerness” (98).

107

Lilburne denies his relation to Aunt Cat in favor of his nobler lineage to Jefferson
through his mother. His rejection notwithstanding, Aunt Cat is both inside the
Lewis family and outside it. This makes her a liminal figure suited to take
responsibility for Lilburne as well as to relinquish loyalty to him. She
acknowledges the blessedness of human obligation in her peculiar role that is
both in and out of the Lewis family. As a prophet who moves between interior
and exterior, her prophecy is effective in destroying the power of Lilburne without

directly betraying him.

With her invocation of the bones, Aunt Cat alludes to the last judgment, an
eschatological future in which the dead come back to life as their bodies raise
from the ground and all are called to accountability. However, she describes what
is actually there in the present. John’s bones are indeed present, but veiled from
the eyes of the law. Aunt Cat’s vision is of what is tactically there but hidden
from sight. The prophet is able to call people back into the truth of the present
moment. Jonah’s predictions of the future were meant to bring people into a
sharp and critical awareness of the present, just as the dystopian novelists
demanded that one root out the budding seeds of totalitarianism in the present.
The prophetic strategy uses predictions of the future to uncover brutal things in

the present and to awaken people to the present.

Aunt Cat fulfills one of the jobs of the prophet when she denounces
Lilburne, because she achieves what the Biblical prophets did when they spoke
of divine wrath: she overcomes the “evil of indifference” toward injustice in the

community (Heschel 284). The prophet is supposed to convey the divine pathos,

108

including anger, because evil is met among people with indifference. For
Heschel, the prophet’s “great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the
evil of indifference” which was always presented over and against the
compassion of God (284). Aunt Cat overcomes this apathy which we might find
in the complicity of lsham and the silence of Letitia and the other slaves. Aunt

Cat’s prophecy typifies the in and out movement of mantic speech.

By revealing what is hidden in the earth, her prophecy moves between the
categories of in and out. It is exactly this movement that allows prophecy to be a
political art. The in and out movement allows prophecy to assist in political
founding, for instance. Prophecy is useful for founding a nation because it
makes a connection between the earth and the people who live on its exterior.
This relationship can constitute political identity: who belongs, and who does not,
who is a citizen and who is a slave depends on Plato’s noble lie: that the citizenry
was born of the earth that they live on. This mythic justification for founding
connects the hidden and the revealed, the inner and the outer claiming a land
and a people as part of one divine sign. The movement of prophecy in and out
between generation and dynasty also enables it to be a political art. The political
identity created through the idea of common blood can be important in founding.
Jefferson’s importance as a founder is problematized by his black children. The
legend of Aeneas, which Warren evokes consistently, is possible because of the
meaning of a founder in the ancient city: “the founder was the man who
accomplished the religious act without which a city could not exist . . . After death

he became a common ancestor for all the generations that succeeded him” (De

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Coulanges 134). Jefferson is in such a position, but his dynasty has a flaw in the

person of Lilburne.

Warren casts Jefferson’s family scandal as a founding story that echoes
the Pasiphae myth and the story of Europa and her offspring—a story of the
founding of Crete. Jefferson invokes “poor Pasiphae” “dear mother, mother of
all” (6). He recognizes that “the infamy of Crete” that is “[his] Minotaur” is “our
brother, our darling brother” (6). He places himself and humankind in the family
of Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur. Granddaughters of Europa, Ariadne
and Phaedra “didn’t realize . . . that, when their father, Minos, set out to conquer
the continent and . . . the moment had come for them to cover up their secrets,
and ultimately to be ashamed of them. Daedalus . . . designs a building in Crete
that hides behind stone walls both mystery and shame (Asterius, the Minotaur)”
who is bull-headed son of Pasiphae and the white bull (Calasso 11). Letitia
Lewis’ desire for Lilburne as he controls his horse echoes Pasiphae’s desire for
the big white bull, or lo’s memory of Zeus: Lilburne “sat so easy, too and limber-
like, / Just sitting sideways while he talked, / His left hand on his hip . . .” (41).
This easy grace combines with power and magnetism: “when the mare got
restless and she danced, / So limber Lilburne’s waist just moved with her moving,
/And his face was dark and beautiful . . . And when she danced too much, his
hand went strong” (41). Letitia imagines herself as the mare, sot that his hand
reached “Of a sudden on [the mare’s] neck, and--/ [Letitia] felt the hand on [her]
own neck, and [she] was still” (41). Letitia’s attraction to Lilburne is like

Pasiphae’s to the bull. The play’s title, which many critics claim refers to Lilburne

110

 

 

 

as the dragon and Jefferson as the brother, also raises the classical definition of
tyrants as only partly human. The tyrant for Plato “transgresses the boundaries

that separate human from beast; he becomes a monster, a wolf, an animal

masked as a human being” (Rebecca Bushnell 11).18 Warren’s allusions to the
Minotaur recall the founding and secrets. Roberto Calasso explains that “from
that day . . . the mystery is also the thing you are ashamed of (11). Lilburne’s
wife, after he “’buses her in bed” joins the ranks of the shamed women:
Pasiphae, lo, Phaedra, and Ariadne. Warren’s references to this myth point to
the dangerous concealment of shame in the American founding, which, like the
labyrinth of Crete, concealed a monster. The unnamed shameful coupling of
Lilburne and Letitia is also a magnification of Pasiphae’s coupling with the bull,
and thus a resurgence of the symbol of the Minotaur again. In the generation of
monsters like the Minotaur and the dragon of the title, mother, father and child
are betrayed. The mother is sullied, the father deprived of dynasty and the son
to carry his heritage, and the child rejected. In the symbol of the Minotaur,
monstrosity emerges from genealogy: it is produced through a form of

miscegenation.

The dual nature of the Minotaur contradicts Jefferson’s “old definition of
man, which he discovered to be false” (5). He thought humans at the worst as
“parrots in pantaloons,” for whom “individual evil” was “only provisional paradox /

To resolve itself in Time” (7). He detected no possibility of horror: “No thread . . .

 

1
8 Arendt concluded that this definition put the enterprise of justice at a disadvantage. In
Eichmann in Jerusalem, she contradicts the idea that Eichmann is a monster.

111

 

hulked / In the dark, hock-deep in ordure, its beard /And shag foul-scabbed” (6).
“Listen!” he cries, for he now apprehends the Minotaur: “when the hoof heaves . .
. the foulness sucks like mire” (6). This Minotaur was masked in beauty when he
was at the Philadelphia convention: “No beast then, the towering / Definition,
angelic, arrogant, abstract, / Greaved in glory, thewed with light, the bright lBrow
tall as dawn” (8)” and he failed to see its eyes (8). These eyes “were blind” (8).
The blindness here relates is not the dispassionate, rational blindness ofjustice.
Rather, it is the blindness of prophecy. But the blindness of prophecy has two
connotations. Classically, Tiresius’ blindness suggests inner sight, for the
prophet sees what is in the dark, interior and hidden. However, the blindness of
the Minotaur is different. It is related to the source of that dark potential of
prophecy that this play illustrates in the actions of Jefferson, Lilburne, and lsham.
Prophecy does have a grim, blind side. We can call it blind because it rejects the
“logic of contradiction,” obeying instead “the logic of ambiguity” in keeping with

prophecy’s equivocalness (Detienne 136).

This dark potential of prophecy is rooted deep in the nature of magico-
religious speech according to Marcel Detienne. Again, in prophetic speech Dike
(justice) and Aletheia (truth) have “many affinities” so that “at this level of thought
no distinction exists between truth and justice” (Detienne 55). The absence of
this distinction can be frightening and brutal. As Jefferson says of his doom,
“Truth, long since, began her hideous justice” (117). Having started the logic of
prophecy, he is subject to it. The hideousness of truth’s justice (or the absence

of a distinction between truth and justice) lies in the indifference to “rational

112

challenge” (Detienne 134). Where truth is “the prerogative of particular types of
men” such as the prophet, instead of being “established in and through dialogue”
and forensic or even artistic proofs, a terrifying blindness is the result. In a
prophetic moment, interior and exterior come together to make a sign without
regard to a logical relationship. Thus the sacrifice of lphigenia is not a matter for
protest, and the extispitic sacrifice of John can offer Lilburne the clarity of a sign
and the “peace of definition” (39). This blindness as a danger of prophecy is
overt in Lilburne’s characterization as a Minotaur. Jefferson also maintains a
deliberate blindness to Meriwether’s embezzlement crisis. Even the mother of
Lilburne also bears the name of Saint Lucy, who was noted for having had her
eyes put out. The allusions to blindness in the prophet figures Lilburne and
Jefferson show the inimical potentials of prophetic speech as they emerge from

its contradictory qualities of inside and outside.

Garrett in “The Function of the Pasiphae Myth in Brother to Dragons”
relates both the Pasiphae myth in which a woman couples with a bull via a
device constructed by Daedulus, and is then hidden, along with her offspring the
Minotaur in the heart of the labyrinth. Frederick McDowell interprets Warren’s
allusions to the Minotaur as “a symbol which dominates the poem in vividly
suggesting the lurking evil in the dark heart of man” (quoted in 77). While this is
a useful interpretation, the Minotaur has also been used in political philosophy
(de Jouvenal’s On Power, for instance) as a metaphor for tyrannical power or a
tyrannical urge that may manifest itself in a government. This connotation of the

Minotaur suggests that the reader consider the story in terms not of the individual

113

 

psychological pathologies of the characters—Lilburne as a “bloody sentimental
maniac”—or even of the period’s social ills, but in terms of the power and tyranny
broadly speaking. The hiding of the Minotaur beneath the city also suggests that

the potential for the city’s destruction exists in the secrets of its foundation.

Prophecy bears another danger with it: though used for founding nations,
it nonetheless can set itself against civilization. The prophet’s association with
the topos of the desert suggests that prophecy is in conflict with civilization.
Blanchot dwells on the significance of the desert, drawing on Andre Neher’s
L’essence du prophetisme to connect the desert with nomadism. In a take on
stillness and prophecy that Salman Rushdie personifies in the Ayatollah of
Satanic Verses, Blanchot maintains that “Prophetic speech . . . returns to the
original demand of movement by opposing all stillness . . . any taking root that
would be rest” (Balfour 79). Lilburne with his still face and desire for frozen
definition comes up against this dynamic inclination of prophecy. Prophecy is “a
wandering speech” (79). But the wanderer in the person of Meriwether is no
better off. After Jefferson’s prophecy sends Meriwether out to wander in the
wilderness, Meriwether eventually commits suicide. This nomadic movement
was intended as redemptive. Jefferson, in using prophetic speech about the
Promised Land as a means of redeeming it for civilization forgets the uncivilized
possibilities of prophetic speech. His failure is witnessed in the Kentucky tragedy
and in Meriwether’s suicide. Charles Lewis (father of Lilburne) presages this
failure when he moved to Kentucky to establish Rocky Hill: he said he’d “redeem

the wild land” but then “fled” Virginia “Not as redeemer but the damned” (11; 12).

114

With an emphasis on the opposition between desert and civilization, he refers to
himself as “alone and Ishmael” (13). In the conflict between desert and
civilization, prophecy cannot be trusted to take the side of civilization. Prophecy,
while integral to the founding of nations, does not promise to uphold them.
Prophecy doesn’t love dynasty, or the subsuming of genealogy to the
political order in order to maintain civilization. In a sense there is a betrayal
lurking in prophetic speech, because while prophecy can found a civilization, as
Jefferson attempts to with his designation of the American West as the Promised
Land, in its ruthlessness it is also willing to end civilization and chiefly dynasty.
Jefferson desires a flawless union between genealogy and nation, pinning
his hopes on Meriwether and feeling betrayed by the manifestation of Lilburne’s
brutality in his blood. This is the betrayal: the gap between interior and exterior
where a union is expected. Jefferson feels betrayed by Lilburne for not coming
up to the standard of mankind on which he based the nation. Moving between
inside and outside, prophecy betrays civilization by exposing the ‘pollution’ of that
nobility on which it is based. In Jefferson’s case, the nobility is not a royal family,
but the common man, elevated to an ideal which justifies democratic rule. The in
and out movement of prophecy can help to found a nation by establishing, but it

can also be destructive to civilization and dynasty.

Prophecy emerges as a political art in Brother to Dragons through Aunt
Cat, who engages the destructive tendency of prophecy to undermine dynasty
and the political order. Her deployment of prophecy contrasts with the flawed

prophesying of Jefferson and Lilburne, who each betray and are betrayed.

115

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Lilburne expects that prophecy unequivocally unite inside and outside, signified
and signifier. Like Jonah who expected God to fulfill his prophecies absolutely,
unifying word and deed, Lilburne regards as a betrayal any disruption of the
peace of definition. He and Jefferson come up against the equivocal nature of
prophecy, which consists of contradictory qualities because it bridges

contradictory categories of in and out, truth and sign.

116

Works Cited
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Robert Penn Warren. New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Clark, William Bedford, ed. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Boston: G.K.
Hall & Co., 1981.

Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1959.

Grimshaw, James A., Jr. Time ’3 Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn Warren.
University of Central Arkansas Press, 1984.

Grimshaw, James A., Jr. Brother to Dragons: A Discussion. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Grimshaw, James A. “Strong to Stark: Deceiver, Demagogue, Dictator.” Texas
College English 23, no 1 (Fall 1990): 17-22.

Grimshaw, James A., Jr. Understanding Robert Penn Warren. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Lewis, R.W.B. “The Great Dragon Country of Robert Penn Warren.” Southern
Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1993); 13-36.

Merrill, Boynton Jr. Jefferson ’3 Nephew’s: A Frontier Tragedy. Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1980.

Peterson, Merrill D. Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Quinn, Sister Bernetta, O.S.F. Robert Penn Warren’s Promised Land” Southern
Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 1972): 329-58.

Stewart, John L. The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and the Agrarians.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Tromly, Lucas. “Impurifying Poe: Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons.”
Mississippi Quarterly. 53.2.

Young, Thomas. “Brother to Dragons: A Meditation on the Basic Nature of Man”
Mississippi Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 149-59.

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Chapter Three
The Stinking Mad Shadow of Jesus: The Education of a Southern Prophet

The previous chapter on Brother to Dragons discusses dark variants of
prophecy’s contradictory qualities. This chapter on Flannery O’Connor’s The
Violent Bear it Away furthers the previous discussion about the way prophecy
moves in and out of mind and society: the chapter adds the problem of the
prophet’s reluctance to return to the outside and his perception that tyranny
awaits him on the outside and freedom lies within the confines of society. As
with Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is a temptation to reduce the prophetic
dimensions of this novel to mere didacticism or in this case religious attestation.
O’Connor’s irony, use of the grotesque, and her depictions of the psychological
struggles of the prophet prevent this error. More so than in Onrvell’s novel, the
prophet themes in The Violent Bear it Away carry the weight and variety of the
prophetic tradition. Along with other critics, Karl Martin recognizes their
complexity, noting that the themes are “consistent with the prophetic paradigm
identified by [Biblical theologian Walter] Brueggemann” in that the protagonists
are “shaken by violence and amazed to discover new ethical possibilities
revealed by God” (52). O’Connor’s complex use of the prophet theme follows the
prophet’s intervention in social ethics.

Of all the novels examined in this study, O’Connor’s is the most
theophanic. It seems to testify about the divine. The existence, presence, and
character of God are important to the novel. Because of the emphasis on

testimony, this novel could seem out of place in an investigation into the political

118

nature of the prophet theme. However, the prophet theme is not pure theophany.
O’Connor once complained (in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop) that “although I am a
Catholic writer, I don’t care to get labeled as such in the popular sense of it, as it
is then assumed that you have some religious axe to grind” (Habit of Beigg 391 ).
So far from writing a novel for believers, O’Connor “addressed herself precisely
to those who were untutored in religious belief” (Shloss quoted in Scott 69). The
prophetic themes in this novel are not mere religious attestation or a simple issue
of belief. Rather, they challenge the notion that prophecy is essentially

tyrannical.

The Violent Bear it Away dramatizes false notions of the prophet,
confronting accusations that prophesying is slavish as well as mad and
ineffectual. The novel also addresses paradoxes of resisting and opposing
prophecy. The failures to resist prophecy and to understand it proceed from the
expectation that prophetic speech is unequivocal. To recall from the introduction,
my methodology is to identify different balances and imbalances of prophecy's
contradictory qualities: prophecy is word and deed, dialogue and transmission,
sudden and eternal, mediated and immediate, a sign of absence and a sign of
presence, making it an equivocal kind of speech. Variations and falsifications of
prophetic speech omit some of the qualities in this matrix. Tarwater and the old
man misunderstand the equivocal nature of prophecy, favoring deed over word,

transmission over dialogue and signs of presence over signs of absence.

The situation of The Violent Bear itAway is that Francis Marion Tarwater,

a young illegitimate orphan boy raised in the country, confronts the task of

119

burying the body of his aged great uncle Mason Tanrvater, who kidnapped him
from his mother’s brother, an atheistic schoolteacher Rayber, in order to teach
him to be a prophet. The old man, also a prophet, instructs young Tarwater to
baptize Rayber’s mentally handicapped young son Bishop, who is named after
his estranged mother Berenice Bishop. The voice of an imaginary stranger
encourages Tarwater to forgo these tasks. Other corporeal strangers, such as
the lavender-eyed man who rapes Tarwater, appear in the novel and generally
echo the advice of the invisible stranger.

Prophetic speech in this novel is directed toward persons like Rayber
whose ethical behavior is limited by the expectations of his society. The
utilitarian paradigm by which Rayber has chosen to live has no place for Bishop.
Bishop is unable to benefit from education, unable to carry out Rayber’s
ambitions for a son, and unable ever to contribute useful work to society. In the
idealized enlightened society that Rayber works toward, people would “put
[children like Bishop] to sleep when they’re born” because of their uselessness
(168). The strange climax of The Violent Bear it Away in the drowning of Bishop
is usually accounted for stylistically as an instance of the grotesque, but
undoubtedly O’Connor casts Bishop as a scapegoat for Rayber’s ideals of
society.

In The Violent Bear it Away TanNater and his great uncle prophesy against
the utilitarian treatment of Bishop with the contrary proposal that “even an idiot” is
“precious in the eyes of the Lord” (33). They make it possible to imagine the

marginalized Bishop as valuable against all the prohibitions of Rayber’s society.

120

The act of baptizing Bishop, of marking him for God, is a way of claiming him as
valuable. The parting of the clouds when Bishop climbs into the fountain in which
the “the light, falling more gently, rested like a hand on the child’s white head”
Tarwater recognizes as a sign of divine love for Bishop and as a summons to
baptize him as a child of God. His face might have been a mirror where the sun
had stopped to watch its reflection” (164). While the prophetic themes are
theophanic here (testifying of divine things), they are also very much directed to
social practice, “evok[ing] a consciousness and perception alternative to the
consciousness and perception of the dominant culture” (Brueggemann 13).
Mantic speech works against hegemony and enculturation. “Serv[ing] to criticize
in dismantling the dominant consciousness” prophecy generates an “alternative
consciousness” that is satiric rather than hegemonic (13). The prophet’s role in
society is not to grasp that society’s obvious good, but to see the hidden sacrifice
necessary to sustain that good. In the mythological terms that Warren employs,
the prophet sees the monster in the city’s foundations. He or she grasps the
central rituals of a society, but he sees them as an outsider, from the wilderness.
Thus the mantic speaker sees social reality without the structures ofjustification
that make that society’s sacrifices seem acceptable, normal or necessary. For
O’Connor prophecy rebukes current social practice in order to open up new
ethical possibilities (in this instance, for the treatment of Bishop). The old man
raises Tarwater outside of society, withholding him from the mainstream as

represented by the school truancy officer and the welfare woman. The old man

121

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directs Tanrvater away from mainstream consciousness toward an alternative
consciousness.

Tarwater comes from the fringes of the modern industrial society that
centers on the city. When he first visits the city in the company of Mason
Tarwater, it is radically unfamiliar to them. However, when the boy comes to the
city a second time after the death of the old man, he is anxious to appear familiar
and streetwise. He subscribes—though not fully—to the traveling salesman’s
sharp precepts about getting through life successfully. Tarwater’s character,
while rooted in the wilderness upbringing and staunch in its independence, still
partakes of the cynicism taught by the stranger and the traveling salesman. A
liminal figure, he moves inside and outside of society, participating in it and
rejecting it. For instance, Tarwater is a “bastard,” born from a mother who is
“unmarried and shameless” (41). His status of illegitimacy aligns with his nature
as a jackal. He is outside the order of the civilization that separated genealogy
from legitimacy. While society rejects his filial status, the old man does not:
“Good blood flows in his veins . . . and good blood knows the Lord” (59).
Prophecy takes stock in genealogy and not in society’s organization of genealogy
to support itself. This absence of the proper respect for the hierarchies of society
is one of the stranger’s objections to prophecy. Urging Tarwater to resist
baptizing Bishop, he says “if it’s an idiot this time, the next time it’s liable to be a
nigger” (166). The suggestion is that association with marginalized people is
beneath Tanrvater’s dignity. Jackal and outsider though he is, Tarwater is to a

certain extent invested in the values of his society. The stranger successfully

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appeals to Tarwater’s belief in the social hierarchy of blood, which I abbreviate as
dynasty. But Tanrvater’s dignity as a prophet does not lie in this hierarchy, but
instead in the alternate genealogy of prophet teaching prophet. The essential
difference between the prophet’s genealogy and social dynasty is that the

prophetic genealogy points ever fonrvard. Instead of harking back to royal

origins, it anticipates, as with John the Baptist’s cry of “one who is coming.”19

Tarwater’s social dignity does not matter in his role as a prophet.

The illegitimate Tanrvater is both outsider and participant in the social
structure that it is his business as a prophet to criticize and contradict. This is
why we see Tarwater commits the murder of Bishop, a crime first conceived in
the mind of Rayber. A violent impetus for the sacrifice of Bishop clearly proceeds
from the society in which Rayber has a place as intellectual and educator.
Rayber regards Bishop as not only extraneous to society, but also as a reproach
or as a sign of contradiction that cannot be tolerated. As a prophet, Tanrvater
understands that the society outlined by Rayber requires the sacrifice of Bishop.
While drowning Bishop, Tanrvater at the same time baptizes him marking him in
the Passover tradition as someone to be spared from destruction, as already
having Christ as his scapegoat. It is Tarwater’s business as a prophet to cope

with the question of sacrifice in that society—and to reveal the terms of the

 

19 The Gospel of Matthew begins with “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of
David, the son of Abraham” which goes on in some detail (RSV MTT 1:1). King David rubs
shoulders with many less illustrious figures, and Erasmus Leiva-Merikakis in Fire of Mercy, Heart
of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew points out that this genealogy
points fonrvard toward Christ.

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covenant for a society in which Bishop is not a scapegoat.20 The drowning of
Bishop does not carry out a divine command, but instead the command of the
stranger, who urges “its only one dimwit you have to drown” (215). When
Tarwater performs the baptism, his disappointed mentor leaves with “sibilant
oaths” (216). For the inimical stranger, the drowning was not enough to cancel
out the dignity that the ritual of baptism acknowledged in Bishop.

Bishop is a constant irritant to Rayber’s values as well as the stranger’s,
because Bishop’s very presence contradicts them. When Berenice Bishop first
sees Tarwater, tending to him as a social worker—a representative of society’s
professed values—she experiences “revulsion” because of the look of
“immovable insane convictions” on his countenance (181). Specifically, she
thinks of the face as one “she had seen in some medieval paintings where the
martyr’s limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived
of nothing essential“(181). Tarwater’s difference repels her because “the face for
her had expressed the depth of human perversity” (180). This perversity is “the
deadly sin of rejecting defiantly one’s own obvious good” (181). At issue in the
novel is whether this “obvious good” should become Tanrvater’s compass. The

stranger, the salesman Meeks, and Rayber all advocate a change in Tarwater’s

 

20 Rene Girard in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning argues that the prophets are “preferential
victims of this process” of scapegoating because they are “exceptional persons,” just as “those
who limp, the disabled . . . individuals who are mentally retarded" can be singled out as
exceptional and turned into a victim (26). While Tarwater as a prophet and Rayber with his
hearing box could qualify for this status, it is Bishop (mentally retarded) who becomes the victim.
Unlike Tarwater or Rayber, he is innocent. For Girard, the point often missed (especially by the
medieval anti-Semitic reading of the Gospels) is the “eminently typical character of the Passion”
(26). It is not just the violence against the scapegoat that is shown to be typical. Rather, the
“biblical tradition . . . reveals a truth never revealed before, the innocence not only of Jesus but of
all similar victims” (1 ).

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definitions of what is good. The refusal of the obvious good that Rayber promotes
and Berenice officially represents is no small matter, resulting in disgust and the

accusation of insanity.

Rayber’s educational and sociological ideals, baldly stated as the
elimination of superstition in favor of tangible goods become ominous under
O’Connor’s literary devices, such as her vehicle-tenor use of Rayber’s hearing
aid. Rayber’s ideals about the education of children, applied in his well-
rehearsed speeches to Tanrvater, prove to be not only empty, but productive of a
certain mediocrity that one suspects would characterize Rayber’s ideal of a
“normal life” (103). Tarwater’s recalcitrance, fierce “brand of independence,” and
sharp mind—in short his personality—find nothing worthy of them in Rayber’s
pop-psychology platitudes: “Now we can have a real talk,” “It’s high time we got
to know each other” (99; 100). Tarwater ignores these efforts as beneath him
(which indeed they are). But the kind of “normal life and decent education” that
Rayber would like to see dominant in culture (remember he is an active educator,
writing articles as a way of effecting policy) attempts to oppress spiritedness, an
effort that fails with Tanrvater.

The schoolteacher’s intellectualism is part of a pattern of navigation
between interior and exterior. His uncle describes him as “crawling into
[Mason’s] soul through the back door” (29). Just as prophecy navigates between
interior and exterior, so does Rayber’s peculiar antiprophetic thinking. But
Rayber’s movement between interior and exterior is damaged and damaging,

and even exploitative. Rayber’s detached demystifying intellectualism becomes

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a kind of exploitation when he plies it on Mason Tanrvater: “every living thing that
passed through the nephew’s eyes into his head was turned by his brain into a
book or a paper or a chart” (19). The old man warns Tarwater that “if [he] were
living with [Rayber, [he’d] be information right now, [he’d] be inside [the
schoolteacher’s] head” (17). This reductive gaze is also imprisoning: the old man
insists that Rayber wanted to trap Mason in his head and “thought once he had
[him] in that schoolteacher magazine, Mason would be as good as in his head”
(18). On realizing that he was the subject of the schoolteacher’s article “for the
length of a minute, he could not move. He felt that he was tied had and foot
inside the schoolteacher’s head, a space as bare and neat as the cell in the

asylum. . . Jonah, Ezekiel, Daniel, he was at that moment all of them—the

swallowed, the lowered, the enclosed” (76).21 Mason experiences the enclosure
within Rayber’s objectifying worldview. The old man recognizes the way that the
presuppositions of Rayber comprise a “penitentiary,” in spite of Rayber’s claims
that only these notions can set the boy “free” (70).

While Mason is emphatic about the schoolteacher’s perfidy, Tarwater
doubts his great uncle’s story. He has no belief in the nephew’s reductive gaze
as violent and imprisoning: “The stranger said . . . that schoolteacher never did
him any harm . . . all he did was to watch him and write down what he seen and
heard and put it in a paper for schoolteachers to read . . . And the old fool acted

like he had been killed in his very soul” (25). But Mason Tanrvater has good

 

21 The Biblical references here are to Jonah 1:17, wherein Jonah is swallowed by the whale after
trying to escape the divine command that he prophesy, and to Ezekiel 4:4-8 (And Daniel was
“cast into the den of lions . . . And a stone brought and laid upon the mouth of the den.")

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reason to resent this attitude: he is kept three years against his will in an asylum
for the insane, and Rayber threatens to return him there. Besides being
imprisoning, Rayber’s intellectual approach is treacherous. Ignoring their
common genealogy and their common experiences, Rayber describes the old
man as a sign in a message that has nothing to do with dialogue, a message
about childhood “insecurity” that can be conveyed simply in the journal for
schoolteachers (18). The old man was “betrayed for three months in the house
of [his] own kin” where he is used as data a means to an end (24). The violence
proceeds from Rayber trying to use the old man as a means to an end. The
schoolteacher dismembers Mason and would do the same to young Tarwater: “in
the schoolteacher’s head . . . he would be laid out in parts and numbers” (18).
This dismemberment recalls the extispitic sacrifice of John in the meat shed by

Lilburne, as well as the fate of Sethe in Beloved. A slave, her person was a

 

means to an end and not an end in itself. Morrison’s Schoolteacher violates the

slave by making a chart of her human and animal qualities.

The main action of this novel is the alteration in Tarwater’s comprehension
of what a prophet is and what kind of speech prophecy is. In addition to his
training with Mason Tarwater, young Tarwater participates in other dialogues—
both spoken and unspoken—about the nature of prophecy. The first is with
Rayber. The second is a dialogue without content, characterized by silence
which is between him and the silence (God), sometimes mediated by or
incamated in Bishop. The third dialogue is with the stranger, who competes with

the second dialogue and opposes the prophetic call.

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Tarwater’s response to his education in prophecy is to imagine himself as
a heroic prophet hung about with a kind of glamour. He is vain about being a
prophet, wearing “his isolation like a mantle, wrapped . . . around himself as if it
were a garment signifying the elect” (110). Tarwater most admired his teacher
when the old man would return from “thrash[ing] out his peace with the Lord”
alone in the woods. At such times, he was “bedraggled and hungry,” and “he
would look the way the boy thought a prophet ought to look” (8). Tanrvater would
find his appearance satisfactory when his great uncle “would look as if he had
been wrestling a wildcat, as if his head were still full of the visions he had seen in
its eyes, wheels of light and strange beasts with giant wings of fire and four
heads turned to the four points of the universe” (8). Tanrvater admires this picture
of a prophet, and “these were the times that Tarwater knew that when he was
called, he would say, ’Here I am Lord, ready!” (8). The call, he imagines, will suit
his consequence. Attributing importance to the fact that “he had been born at the
scene of a wreck,” he “always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary
one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special,
even though nothing of consequence had happened so far” (41). These grand
expectations of dramatic visions continue to go unfulfilled. “He would stop and
wait for [a] bush to burst into flame” and find that “it had not done it yet” (41).
When his call does come, it is disappointingly prosaic. Encountering Bishop at
the door of his uncle’s house, Tanrvater receives his “revelation” that is “silent,
implacable direct as a bullet” (91 ). Contrary to his glamorous expectations, “he

did not look into the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush” (91). Instead

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of receiving an extraordinary sign, “he only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair,
that he was expected to baptize the child he saw and begin the life his great-
uncle had prepared for him” (91). To his disappointment, he realizes “that he
was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be
remarkable” (91).

Tanrvater fears that his call to prophesy might turn out to be earthly and
ordinary. Specifically, he fears that the “hunger” that is “the heart of his great-
uncle’s madness . . . and what he was secretly afraid . . . might be passed down”
might be the nature of his calling. Tanrvater encounters the unwelcome
information that the prophet is not strictly a messenger: rather, he is a participant
in a dialogue. This hunger is part of a dialogue instead of the mere conveyance
of a divine message. The hunger is too fleshly as well as intimate, and “he did all
he could to avoid this threatened intimacy of creation” (22). He hopes instead
that “the Lord’s call” would be “a voice from out of a clear and empty sky, the
trumpet of the Lord God Almighty, untouched by any fleshly hand or breath” (22).
Like Lilburne, he wants to reject incarnation. Even in rebellion, he is proudly
“intolerant of unspiritual evils and with those of the flesh he had never truckled”
(226). Fastidious, he dislikes it when his great uncle warns that a prophet
experiences the “sweat and stink of the cross” (8).

Tanrvater’s desire for an unequivocal prophecy is related to his
fastidiousness and dislike of incarnation. Incarnation is one of those very
contradictions that cause the need for an equivocal speech that moves between

interior and exterior. The old man, when he first sees Bishop, encounters such

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opposites and contradictions: he was “shocked by the likeness and the
unlikeness” of the boy to his parents (23). While the old man is can see these
contradictions, Tarwater is like Lilburne in Brother to Dragons, and wants clarity
and purity. He desires prophecy to be unequivocal. The vision he hopes for
would be “wheels of fire in the eyes of unearthly beasts,” a pure unambiguous
and othenrvorldly sign that does not enter into earthly contradictions (22).
Tanrvater wants clarity and not ambiguity, as signaled by the empty sky
untouched by gray and the ringing sound of the trumpet. When his perpetual
hunger starts, “his friend [the stranger is] adamant that he refuse to entertain
hunger as a sign” (162). Instead of hunger, “his friend suggest[s] he demand an
unmistakable sign, not a pang of hunger . . . but an unmistakable sign, clear and
suitable—water bursting forth from a rock, for instance, fire sweeping down at his
command and destroying some site he would point to” (163). He rejects the
paradox of prophecy as both word and deed. In his conversations with Rayber
and in his violent actions, it becomes clear that Tarwater does not believe in the
word as deed. When he gets “ready to do” something he “don’t talk no words”
but just “do[es] it” (171 ). He tells the insurance salesman that he is prepared to
“make it happen” and that he “can act” (80). For him word and deed are
separate. Fundamentally the boy does not believe in the efficacy of the prophetic
word. The visiting insurance salesman reinforces this disbelief by claiming “he
was a prophet too, a prophet of life insurance, for every right-thinking Christian,
he said, knew that it was his Christian duty to protect his family and provide for

them in the event of the unexpected” (59). This mockery is a reduction of

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prophecy to the merest tool of crass persuasion for gain, obscuring prophecy’s
contradictory qualities, especially the word as deed.

But Tarwater’s mistaken notions of the prophet are not new. His great
uncle, too, misunderstood the nature of his calling. Mason’s particular failings
were hypertrophy of sympathy and the favoring of message over dialogue. He
makes a mistake in thinking that as a prophet he ought to be wrathful: “he had
been called in his early youth and had set out for the city to proclaim the
destruction awaiting a world that had abandoned its Saviour” (5). Like Jonah
prophesying Nineveh’s doom, his appetite for punitive destruction is greater than
his desire for reform: “he proclaimed from the midst of his fury that the world
would see the sun burst in blood and fire” (5). Mason is disappointed: “while he
raged and waited, it rose every morning, calm and contained in itself, as if not
only the world, but the Lord Himself had failed to hear the prophet’s message”
(5). As the sun “rose and set,” “he despaired of the Lord’s listening” (5). Mason
had thought that prophecy was a content to be conveyed. Instead he learns, as
does Tanrvater, that the prophet is himself a sign and a locus of prophecy and not
just a messenger: lightning burns him, and not the city in this example of the
prophet’s living mimicry. The old man repeats the lessons of Jonah, who
undergoes the living mimicry in the belly of the whale. When Jonah is
disappointed that Nineveh was finally spared, he regards the non-fulfillment of his
warnings as proof of his ineffectiveness as a prophet. He does not understand
that to prophesy is already to do something. The old man, like Jonah, has a lust

for action. Mason’s former misunderstandings of prophecy include that same

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idea of the prophet as detached diviner that Tarwater has; they share a failure to
grasp the word as deed.

The stranger tries to distort Tarwater’s understanding of prophecy,
magnifying his old errors and introducing new ones. He gathers for Tarwater

several notions about mantic speech: that it is simple, clear, clean and godly,

whereas in fact it is complex, ambiguous, fleshly, messy and human.22 This
insidious mentor conducts a purposive dialogue with Tarwater designed to
provoke Tanrvater into the particular inaction of not baptizing Bishop and not
burying the old man and the particular action of drowning Bishop. Tanrvater
“would have fallen” and submitted to the call “but for the wise voice that
sustained him—the stranger who had kept him company while he dug his uncle’s
grave” (161 ). As part of constructing a picture of the prophet as a merciless
purveyor of divine judgment, the invisible stranger emphasizes the old man’s
wrath, recalling that “he was always admitting somebody was an ass or a whore”
(40). The stranger extrapolates from this failing: “That’s all a prophet is good
for—to admit somebody else is an ass or a whore” (40). A picture of religious
fundamentalism emerges with the stranger’s epithets: “Crazy!” (44) But these
charges are “hissed,” and the allusion to a snake suggests that the charges are
untrue. The stranger also engages in mockery pointing to Mason’s disreputable
trade: “a prophet with a still!” (45). Mason is “the only prophet [the stranger] ever

heard of making liquor for a living” (45). With the incipient accusation of

 

22 In her correspondence, O’Connor interpreted Thomas Aquinas on prophecy, saying “prophetic
vision is not a matter of seeing clearly, but of seeing what is distant, hidden" and also that “the
prophetic vision is a quality of the imagination” and so “does not have anything to do with the
moral life of the prophet” (Habit 365).

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hypocrisy, he subtly reinforces the thesis that a prophet cannot be an ambiguous
figure, that he cannot be a participant in a dialogue, and that he is the
unproblematic conveyer of a message. In his efforts to change how Tanrvater
perceives his calling, the stranger is desperate to convince the boy that prophecy
is unequivocal.

The stranger also denies the quality of absence in prophecy. This tempter
asks Tarwater “where is the voice of the Lord? I haven’t heard it. Who’s called
you this morning?” (42) He offers the absence of dramatic signs as proof that
Tarwater is not called to prophesy. TanNater “ain’t even heard the sound of
natural thunder this morning” (42). The stranger emphasizes the notion that
prophecy is a mere transmission of a message that does not engage the prophet
with either its meaning or its originator. According to him, the absence is
absolute: “the truth is the Lord ain’t studying about [Tarwater]. [Tanrvater] ain’t
entered His Head” (38). The stranger argues that “The Lord speaks to prophets
personally and He’s never spoke to you, never lifted a finger, never dropped a
gesture” (161). The silence and the signs of absence are hateful to the stranger,
and he tries to undo the effects of them. Belittling the other sign of absence,
Tarwater’s “unfathomable hunger,” he tells him that the “strangeness in your gut,
that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As
likely as not you have them again” (99; 161 ). The dialogue with the stranger tries
to downplay the experience of purposive, expectant silence. Tarwater overlooks
the signs of absence in his own body: the hunger, and regards absence as

unrelated to prophecy.

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The stranger also echoes the mockery of Christ, alluding to a long struggle
over the nature of prophecy, saying “Lemme hear you prophesy something” (38).
After making this mock demand, the stranger “let[s] out a flat sigh that was like a
gust of sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind,” and this flat sigh
suggests an attenuated version of the breath of the Holy Spirit. With this
imagery, O’Connor reinforces the suggestion that the stranger is a sham and that
he offers correspondingly false definitions of prophecy. The stranger tries to
obscure the prophetic quality of absence that results in the Tarwater’s
paradoxical dialogue with silence.

Chief among the stranger’s falsehoods is that he dismisses the prophetic
quality of absence. Tarwater does not recognize the negative qualities of
absence and exteriority that belong to prophecy. The signs that Tanrvater
receives, such as the “ravenous emptiness” that “raged in his stomach” do not
absolutely confirm to him that he has been called to prophesy (174). Tanrvater’s
desire for a more positive sign to begin his career as a prophet is a reason for
rejecting the sign of hunger. But the real reason for his perception of the absence
of God is that the prophetic sign is always (already) a sign of absence. Tanrvater
encounters God in His silence and absence and in Tarwater’s own hunger, also a
negative sign, and an experience of emptiness. When he experiences the call to
prophesy (via the act of baptizing), the call accompanies an ovenrvhelming
“silence” which “each time the temptation came, he would feel . . . [was] about to
surround him and he was going to be lost in it forever” (160). When he attempts

to reject the call, his “shout” of “‘NO!’” is “saturated in silence, lost” (92).

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Likewise, he treats Bishop, the object of his call, as if he were “a dangerous hole
in space that he must keep away from at all costs” (112). Because Tarwater
desires an inauthentic form of prophecy, he avoids the empty eyes of Bishop, the
silence, the hunger and other signs of absence. The nature of prophecy as an
encounter with the Outside disturbs Tanrvater every time he encounters it in the
face of the boy he is called to baptize. So often does he turn away from Bishop’s
face that Rayber comments “I nurse an idiot that you’re afraid to look at” and
challenges Tanrvater to “Look him in the eye” (143). The eyes that Tarwater is
unable to encounter contain or remind him of that vast silent country. Among the
negatives of absence and emptiness associated with the locus of the desert is

the negative quality of silence.

Tarwater avoids these signs of absence and desires a prophecy that can
never move between interior and exterior because it does not expose itself to the
outside.23 The outside is characterized by silence. This silence O’Connor casts
as a place, and endows it with the qualities of the desert in which the Hebrew
prophets awaited God: “it was a strange waiting silence. It seemed to lie all
around him like an invisible country whose borders he was always on the edge
of, always in danger of crossing” (160). The attributes of the desert: absence,
silence, privation, isolation comprise the conditions for the prophetic encounter

with God as the principle of the Outside.

 

23 O’Connor sketches out other possibilities of inauthentic prophecy in Wise Blood.

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The Outside, the silent country or the desert is by definition inhospitable,
and Tarwater fears it. When he looks in Bishops eyes he sees “the silent country
[. . .] reflected again in the center of his eyes. It stretched out there, limitless and
clear” (160). Tarwater takes care to look away, because “each time the
temptation came, he would feel that the silence was about to surround him and
he was going to be lost in it forever” (160). Because Bishop’s eyes reflect the
vast emptiness of the outside, they also tempt Rayber to abandon those values
according to which he orders society. The empty eyes are unbearable to both
Rayber and Tanrvater because they indicate the loss and privation of the desert.
O’Connor adapts the desert motif, renaming the land of privation and absence as

“the silent country” and sometimes “the vast emptiness” (222; 172).

As described in the introduction, Maurice Blanchot explains that in the
desert and the outside the importance of relationship in prophecy gradually
emerges, and not simply via social justice and injustice. Rather, the desert is
“outside, where one cannot remain, since to be there is to be always already
outside,” and in this outside are “only primal powerlessness, wretchedness of
hunger and cold” and wandering instead of production (80). There, people are
“stripped of their power and separated from the possible;” consequently, they
”exist with each other in the bare relationship in which they had been in the
desert and which is the desert itself” (81). The clearing where Tarwater lives also
has some qualities of a wilderness or desert. No road goes to it. The stranger

derisively calls it “earth’s bald patch” and admonishes the boy, saying he “could

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have been a city slicker for the last fourteen years” instead of living there in

Powderhead (46).

The opposition of wilderness and city are important in this novel. Richard
Giannone in “Warfare and Solitude: O’Connor’s Prophet and the Word in the
Desert” notes the importance of the desert allusions. For instance, young
Tarwater is a desert dweller: he is described as a “jackal” (111). Ajackal is not
only an animal of the desert, but it is also a loner. Living sometimes on the
fringes of civilization, it nonetheless is not domesticated and does not ingratiate
itself to man. It is dangerous, not to be tamed, cannot “be reasoned with” and it
bears a touch of the uncanny (111). Rayber, on the other hand acts like a
“ferret,” a furtive creature slinking into his uncle's mind (111). While Rayber’s
epithet seems undignified, Tarwater’s is not. A feature of Tarwater’s character
that belongs to the desert is his separateness: “he wore his isolation like a
mantle, wrapped it around himself as if it were a garment signifying the elect”
(110). While Tarwater assumes that his separateness is a cause for vanity, it is
actually that burden of solitude and that “bare relationship . . . which is the desert
itself" (Blanchot 81). He is isolated not because he is elect, but because that

isolation of the desert is the nature of prophecy.

Tarwater continually encounters the outside in his prophetic mission. The
vastness of the lake where he drowns and baptizes Bishop disturbs him: “It lay
there, glass-like, still, reflecting a crown of trees and an infinite overarching sky.
It looked so unused that it might only the moment before have been set down by

four strapping angels for him to baptize the child in” (167). Only in the water can

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the covenant be sealed, just as in Blanchot’s formulation the desert is the only
place to complete the Hebrew covenants. The vastness of the desert and of the
lake, as well as the other signs of emptiness (Tanrvater’s hunger) indicates pure
potential. The potential is for covenant and for relation that does not subscribe to
the terms of the established order of civilization. Simply put, the potential is for
change from the values and sacrifices prescribed by society. In O’Connor, water
and wilderness replace the desert as places of isolation, covenant, confrontation
of the Outside, and encounter with God.

But since the outside is where one cannot remain, the prophet is forced to
move back and forth from it, in and out. When the old man first takes Tarwater to
the city, Tanrvater regards the place as evil and reproaches the old man for not
crying out against it, asking “what kind of prophet” he is and declaring
sarcastically that “Elijah would think a heap of [him]” (27). This reproach does
not shame Mason Tanrvater, though: “the boy’s uncle stops and turns. ‘l’m here
on bidnis,’ he [says] mildly” (27). What Tarwater sees as a contradiction of the
old man’s calling is merely another instance of the prophet’s movement between
inside and outside, the desert and the city. The prophet must be nomadic and
engage in this in-and-out movement. He cannot remain outside, because to
remain outside is impossible. He cannot remain inside because he is drawn to
the outside. He also must engage in the in and out movement because, though
he is drawn to the outside, he is sent inside as with the order to “WARN THE
CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY” (242). Tanrvater

ultimately responds to this call by “mov[ing] steadily on, his face set toward the

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dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping” (243). Tarwater consents to a
nomadic life in which things are never settled and never clear.

The conflict between Rayber and the old man dramatizes the pervasive
idea that the prophet is a “backwoods imbecile,” nothing more than a fanatic,
delusory and even dangerous (147). The figure of the dangerous fanatic will
emerge again in The Satanic Verses_when terrorists superimpose prophecy and
bomb-throwing. This notion of the fanatic precipitates in Rayber’s confrontation
with his uncle at the age of fourteen when Rayber “stood there shrilling” that the
old man was “crazy . . . crazy . . . a liar . . . [with] a head full of crap,” and that he
belonged “in a nut house” (186). In pointing out the dangers of prophecy, Rayber
counsels Tanrvater “to avoid extremes” as “they are for violent people” (145). The
welfare woman has the same response to young Tarwater when she first sees
his countenance as a baby. His face had “the look of an adult, not of a child, and
of an adult with immovable insane convictions” (181). Insanity and danger are
among the charges against prophets. In the case of the old man, the accusation
of insanity actually results in institutionalization: as noted above, Mason Tarwater
remains three years in an insane asylum.

Ironically, the smugly rational Rayber adopts the very fanatical facial
expression of the insane prophet in his efforts to ‘deprogram’ Tanrvater.
Promising to save him “from the old man and everything he stands for,” he
appeals to Tarwater: “his eyes glistened" and “he looked like a fanatical country
preacher” (174). Similarly, when he hears a young girl preaching at the revival,

he has “a vision of himself moving like an avenging angel through the world,

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gathering up all the children that the Lord, not Herod, had slain” (132). (Indeed,
the avenging angel image is adopted by the violently insane Gibreel in The
Satanic Verses.) Overlooking this passion in Rayber, the stranger claims falsely
that Rayber is easily indifferent: “the schoolteacher don’t care now if he’s
baptized or if he ain’t” and his call “don’t mean a thing to him one way or the
other” (37). On the contrary, Rayber must suppress his attraction to the call with
the utmost ascetic strictness: “he had kept” what he calls the “undertow in his
blood” from “draggin him backwards” and gaining control over him by what
amounted to a rigid ascetic discipline” (114). He must avoid ordinary everyday
pleasures, denying “his senses unnecessary satisfactions” (114). Eating only
“frugally” and “sitting in a straight-backed chair” he also “cultivat[ed] the dullest
for friends” (114). Rayber denies his appetites and affections in order to maintain
dignified sanity. So far from indifferent, Rayber is angry about the problem of
evil, especially as it pertains to Bishop. He remembers when after the birth of
Bishop the “impassive,‘insensitive” doctor explained “the full extent of Bishop’s
future,” and Rayber was told to be “grateful his health [was] good” because the
doctor had “seen them born blind as well . . . and one with a heart outside” (136).
Rayber “had lurched up, almost ready to strike the man” (137). In a response
that recalls the image of the Good Shepherd chasing after one lost sheep, he
“hissed” “How can I be grateful . . . when one—just one—is born with a heart
outside?” (137) His reasoning detachment is not natural, but cultivated as a
corrective to his passionate engagement in dialogue with some transcendent

auditor. Thus, “Rayber. . . saw himself divided in two—a violent and a rational

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self” (139). The rational self he develops in an effort to suppress the violent self,
but many of his attempts to counteract the prophetic calling are themselves
apocalyptic. Chief among these is Rayber’s attempt to drown Bishop as a way of
curing his irrational love for the child. At the moment of his success, he “had a
moment of complete terror in which he envisioned his life without the child” (142).
With disgust, the schoolteacher too recognizes this potential in himself: “he knew
he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made” (115). Despite
Rayber’s rejection of the message of redemption, he still thinks in terms of
prophecy. With his fanatical desire to rescue Tarwater from belief, he adopts the
old man’s wrathful hypertrophy of sympathy. The schoolteacher imagines
himself as an antiprophet, but ironically in rejecting prophecy he takes on
prophetic qualities.

Rayber is unaware of the equivocalness of prophecy and its contradictory
qualities. He thinks of the prophet as transmitting a message instead of
participating in a dialogue. His interaction with Bishop in the woods images
Rayber’s misunderstanding of dialogue and content. Bishop, who continually
stands in or is a sign for God the father in that he is a continual reminder to
Tarwater of the mission to baptize and for the old man, reaches for a blackberry
among the thorny bushes. Rayber “gingerly . . . pick[s] the child a blackberry and
hand[s] it to him” (184). Instead of consuming the berry, “the little boy studie[s] it
and then, with his fallen smile, return[s] it to him as if they were performing a
ceremony” (184). Frustrated that Bishop failed to understand that the berry was

an edible gift, “Rayber [fiings] it away and turned to find the trail through the

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woods” (184). Rayber’s impotent frustration arises from his belief that the
usefulness or meaning of this interaction should be the exchange of the berry as
content or as that “obvious good” that Berenice Bishop thought Tanrvater should
recognize (181). The little boy would benefit by gaining and consuming food. But
for Bishop, what is significant and important is not the berry, but that they were
handing it back and forth. In the calculus of prophecy, the berry corresponds to
message or content. This content the literal-minded Rayber wishes to transmit
successfully: for him the sole good of prophecy is the transmission of a useful
and true message. As a child Rayber was cruelly disappointed when the content
of the old man’s message about the coming of Christ did not turn out to be true,
useful, or verifiably fulfilled. He thus regards as futile the old man’s prophesying
to him, obscuring the memory that even as a young adult “he loved [the old man]
like a daddy” (71 ). When the message of redemption was not verified, Rayber
throws it away as he flung away the berry. Bishop is different. He values the
interaction and the dialogue. For Bishop, the interaction itself has meaning.

In O’Connor’s calculus of prophecy, the dialogue of prophecy matters just
as much as the message. Bishop provides a locus for this understanding
because of his very inability to receive a message. The dialogue matters
because it engages the auditor in an l-Thou relation which recognizes the value
of the auditor, a value that is “completely irrational and abnormal” because it
does not correspond to the usefulness of that thing or person (112). Such “love
without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to

be itself” “terrified [Rayber]” because it was “imperious and all demanding” and

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because it “would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant” (114).
Rayber fears this particular unreasoning love because it does not bow to utility:
“he was not afraid of love in general. He knew the value of it and how it could be
used” (113). For O’Connor, the equivocal nature of prophecy as both message
and dialogue always signals that the auditor is an end in him or herself instead,
as in Rayber’s conception, a means to an end. Rayber, while he hates the
“madness” of the old man, nonetheless feels “a rush of longing to have the old
man’s eyes—insane, fish-coloured, violent with their impossible vision of a world
transfigured—turned on him once again” (114). But such a meeting of the eyes
would transmit no useful message, so Rayber resists it.

Rayber, like Jefferson in Brother to Dragons and even like Winston in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, fears a betrayal from within. The useless love is what he
fears, for he had an occasional “experience [of] a love for [Bishop] so outrageous
that he would be left . . . trembling for his sanity” (113). The unreasoning love
toward the old man that he tries to resist was “an undertow in his blood dragging
him backwards to what he knew to be madness” (114). This “curse . . . lay in his
blood,” dormant and dangerous (113). His fear of the potentiality of his blood
corresponds to Jefferson’s notion that doom is always domestic. In his very
resistance to prophecy, Rayber grasps onto a corrective that is nonetheless one
of its elements. Even his thinking about Bishop, that he was “an x signifying the
general hideousness of fate” has a touch of determinism (113).

Tarwater similarly gives full weight to prophecy as a message or sign and

none to prophecy as dialogue. He also submits to that very contradictory quality

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of prophecy that he avoids. In spite of his demands for clear signs, he starts to
treat each speaking person and unfolding event as part of a dialogue with God.
When Tarwater first meets Bishop at the door of Rayber’s house, he sees the
child’s face and “suddenly he [knows] that the child recognized him” (93). Bishop
recognizes Tarwater because “The old man himself had primed him from on high
that here was the . . . servant of God come to see that he was born again” (93).
Tanrvater understands his call to prophesy to be part of a full blown dialogue
among God and a number of persons. One of his reasons to resist the call to
prophesy is his belief, reiterated by the traveling salesman, that God takes no
notice of him. The stranger insists again that “the Lord is not studying about
[Tarwater], don’t know [he] exist, and wouldn’t do a thing about it if He did” (166).
Nonetheless, he starts an argument with God that ranges over the whole
countryside. The fire he sets in Powderhead marks the beginning of his
defiance. The defiance continues as a dialogue in his conversations not only
with Rayber, but with people he does not know. When the female hotel keeper
tells him to desist in “whatever devil’s work [he] mean[s] to do,” he responds as if
she is privy to his whole conflict with God: he complains that he “‘never ast for
that lake to be set down in front of [him]” (157). As if she were privy to his call
and rebellion, he explains “‘you can’t just say NO,’ he said. “You got to do NO.
You got to show it’” (157). In effect, he is prophesying right back at God. He
does so with his old disbelief in the word as deed: “‘you got to show you mean it
by doing it,” and “you can’t just say NO’” (157). Despite his effort to make a

corrective, to be anti-prophetic, he becomes more tangled in the qualities of

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mantic speech. Not only the dialogistic nature of prophecy, but also the
suddenness of prophetic action grip his imagination and become a model for his
anti-prophetic career. He requires an apocalypse, or a show of suddenness :
“You got to show you’re not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to
make an end of it” (157). The fires that Tarwater sets are attempts to shortcut
prophecy by creating dramatic and violent gestures. Instead of awaiting the
fulfillment of prophecy, he creates a dramatic fulfillment that accords with his
notion of a powerful prophetic gesture. In the absence of the burning bush, the
water springing from the rock, the sun standing still and the other signs that he
expects to perform, he compensates with his own sham signs like torching the
woods. Tarwater’s need to construct a dramatic fulfillment is apocalyptic. Like
Rayber, in resisting or correcting prophecy, he thus engages in one of its
variants.

The simultaneous baptism and drowning of Bishop is the great instance of
the contradiction. His intention in drowning Bishop is to make clear once and for
all his refusal to baptize the boy. This violent act seems to be foreshadowed in
the novel’s title and the accompanying biblical epigraph: “FROM THE DAYS OF
JOHN THE BAPTIST UNTIL NOW, THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN SUFFERETH
VIOLENCE, AND THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY.” The title and the epigraph
refer to the violence of the prophets in what seems to be an approving way.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils begins with a similar biblical epigraph: “Because
you are lukewarm I will spew you from my mouth.” These epigraphs militate

against the many false notions of prophecy, like the one that emerges in

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Rayber’s father, a salesman who described himself as a “prophet of life
insurance” (58). The salesman’s explicit comparison of prophecy to
salesmanship raises the question of whether mantic speech is not the word as
deed, but simply a schuckster form of persuasion deployed by a man whose
“brain was as slick as his eyeballs” (58). Meeks, the traveling salesman who
drives Tarwater to Rayber’s house, reminds Tarwater of such a false prophet.
Meeks offers his credentials “from the School of Experience with an H.L.L.
degree,” an acronym for “Hard Lesson from Life” (59). The suggestion of hell is
obvious. That it attaches to this unimpressive salesman instead of to the
haunted Rayber indicates that evil attaches not so much to conflict and violence,
but to indifference and mediocrity. Like O’Connor's, Dostoevsky’s devil is also an
insurance salesman, just as William Faulkner depicts the inimical Flem Snopes’
soul as a spot of grease. O’Connor continues St. Augustine’s notion in which evil
is a lack associated with the sin of sloth. Luke warmness, sloth and banality
(consider Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”) together shun anything that might
suggest madness, absurdity and strife.

Blanchot explains the violent quality of prophetic speech, suggesting that
the future tense endows prophecies with urgency and suddenness (or
interruption): “So prediction, using as support the anticipatory intensity of diction,
seems to keep trying finally to produce its rupture” (85). This anticipatory
intensity of diction achieves the effect of suddenness. Frederick J. Hoffman
explains that “suddenness is a quality of violence” (quoted in Muller 79). The

usefulness of violence as a kind of suddenness is that “A sudden break in the

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routine challenges the fullest energy of man’s power of adjustment. It is a sign of

force breaking through the design established to contain it” (79).

Tarwater cannot simply ignore the call or respond to it with casual
indifference. Even Rayber, “bloodless” though he is, is unable to simply ignore
the call that he rejects, for Rayber also is called to be a prophet (123). The old
man calls him a “false prophet” (24). The stranger acknowledges that the old
man “wanted to make a prophet out of that schoolteacher too” (37). The stranger
suggests that the schoolteacher successfully escaped the call: “the
schoolteacher was too smart for him. He got away” (37). Tarwater wants to be
similarly smart and escape any demeaning service.

The greatest issue in Tanrvater’s education about prophecy and in the
dialogues conducted with the stranger and the old man is whether being a
prophet constitutes tyranny or freedom. Tarwater continually thinks about the
vocation of the prophet: whether or not it permits freedom for the prophet;
whether or not it is efficacious in the world; whether or not it is dignified; what
difference it makes; whether it can stand up to the charges of “futility,”
“absurdity,” “exploitation” and irrelevance (146; 132). When the old man declares
that Tarwater was “born into bondage and baptized into freedom . . . the child
would feel a sullenness creeping over him, a slow warm rising resentment that
this freedom had to be connected with Jesus and that Jesus had to be the Lord”
(21 ). He would prefer instead an autonomous freedom. Before the old man
connected Tarwater’s promised freedom with “the death of the Lord,” he “felt he

could smell his freedom, pine-scented, coming out of the woods” (20). But that

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same pine scent in the woods turns out to be a sign of violation and exploitation.
When he wakes in the woods and realizes he has been raped by the stranger, he
is surrounded by these same woods: “he tore off a pine branch and set it on fire
and began to fire all the bushes around the spot until the fire was eating greedily
at the evil ground” (232). The contradictory associations of this pine scent

correspond to the change in his understanding of freedom.

The stranger and Rayber argue for a form of independence which is yet
not the strange brand of self-reliance the old man placed in Tarwater. This
independence consists in rejecting the divine call to the vocation of prophecy,
amplified by the old man. Both argue for freedom as autonomy, and struggle
against the Mason’s notions of service, rejecting the call to prophecy as
tyrannical and exploitative. Rayber interests himself in Tarwater as a surrogate
son is in order to rescue him from the burden of belief and from the deprivation of
those goods and utilitarian values that Rayber, with his characteristic clichés,
calls the “real world” (70). Rayber occupies himself with the notion of exploitation
—of himself, of Tanrvater of Bishop and of other children—over and against the
dignity of those obvious goods that belong to the “real world,” goods that people
like Bishop can never be privy to. Ever patronizing, Rayber’s “pity encompassed
all exploited children—himself when he was a child, Tanrvater exploited by the old
man, [the Carmody’s for Christ preaching girl] exploited by parents, Bishop
exploited by the very fact that he was alive” (131 ). Of the girl who speaks at the
revival, he thinks that “because she believed” in redemption “she was . . .

chained hand and foot” (130). Rayber understands the case of the little girl to be

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exemplary of the way Tanrvater is used by Mason and by God. Belief, like an
“empty” baptismal rite performed over Bishop, is “cheap” and undignified,

depriving a person of real goods (146).

Likewise the stranger chides Tarwater for considering the redemptive
message important, and offers a choice. Tarwater can “do one thing or . . . the
opposite” and the boy responds “Jesus or the devil” (39). Here, the stranger
corrects him “no no no . . . there ain’t no such thing as a devil . . . it’s Jesus or
you” (39). A man Tarwater meets by the lake urges the same independence,
inviting Tarwater to “be like [him] . . . [and] don’t let no jackasses tell [the boy]
what to do” (166). Tanrvater regards himself as potentially the “forced servant of
God” and wants to reject this compulsion in favor of independence (93). After
killing Bishop, Tarwater thinks he has gained his autonomy. He tells a truck
driver that he is “going home” because he is “in charge there now” as if with that
act he had achieved his freedom (216). Unlike the “empty act” of “baptism,” this
drowning he imagines as efficacious and part of the way of being “born again . . .
that you accomplish yourself’ and “through your own efforts” (194; 195).

It is not the antireligious element of this statement that is important for this
study, but the judgment about prophecy in general: that the act of prophecy is a
theophanic speech that by its nature imprisons both speaker and hearer and
possibly produces violence. Gerhard Von Rad addresses this question of the
freedom of prophets, confronting the Biblical prophets’ “mysterious compulsion”
to speak (50). In the case of Jeremiah, obedience to the calling did not mean a

complete surrender of freedom. Von Rad cites Jeremiah’s ‘Confessions’ “where,

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in spite of all [Jeremiah’s] suffering, he continues in closest contact with Yahweh,
questioning him, professing his faith in him, and complaining to him” (51).
Surprisingly, this “freedom which Jeremiah kept and used in his dealings with
God . . . occasionally led him almost to the verge of blasphemy” (52). Moses
also exemplifies the Biblical prophet as dialogist. In Exodus, God directs Moses,
and Moses objects, prefacing his argument with “But, Behold,” which is to say
“but look.”

The epistemology to which Rayber subscribes, and which he self-
consciously represents as the theorist of education who writes a scholarly article
about the old man, does not allow for the indirect knowing that a prophet
receives. The messenger aspect of the prophet disturbs Rayber because of the
passiveness of the knower as a conduit for the message of God. Rayber’s notion
of the knowing subject is basically Cartesian. Instead of the knower finding proof
of his existence as a person separate from others in the fact that he thinks, the
prophet finds proof not of himself but of God (the source of the prophecy). The
prophet’s inspired thoughts are not his own: they come from outside him. Within
the Cartesian episteme, Rayber can only regard the old man’s prophetic speech
as pathological. Instead of an instance of mantic speech or even a variety of
persuasion, the old man’s prophesying is a psychological aberration, a “‘fixation
of being called by the Lord’” that has “‘its origins in insecurity” (75). The
schoolteacher thinks in terms of the isolated subject. Rayber can only describe
the old man’s prophetic speech in terms of the old man’s self: “‘He needed the

assurance of a call and so he called himself” (75). With this explanation Rayber

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eliminates the possibilities of dialogue and of the outside. Further, any movement
between interior and exterior becomes impossible, for the self is a sealed
subject. Thus his hearing aid amplifies the sound of his own heartbeat as he runs
after Tarwater in the city (106). His ability to participate in a dialogue is crippled.
At the same time, his attempts at dialogue are feeble and one-sided, accounting
for his numerous failures to “get through” to Tanrvater. Rayber invites the old
man to similar autonomy and isolation: ‘You’ve got to be born again, Uncle . . . by
your own efforts, back to the real world where there’s no saviour but yourself”
(76). Rayber insists of Tanrvater: “He’s going to be brought up to live in the real
world . . . He‘s going to be his own saviour" (70). Rayber’s views are like the
stranger’s, who says “the way it ought to be in this world” is with “nobody owing
nobody nothing” (51). For the stranger, the interdependence of persons is
unacceptable, a question of “ought,” while for Rayber, invested as he is in the
Cartesian subject, such interdependence is impossible, a question of truth. For
both, the dependence of the prophet on an external or transcendent source for
his word and the imposition of the source on the prophet for his mouth are alike
degrading. They disallow freedom by pre-empting autonomy.

The living mimicry that Blanchot notes in the Biblical prophets also offends
autonomy. The undignified subordination of the prophet to society, the giving
over of himself to represent (mimic) the failure of a society or its impending
punishment is a violation of autonomy. The Biblical example of Hosea being
called to marry a prostitute in order to become a living sign of the broken

covenant is the sort of prophetic mimicry disregards autonomy. The punishments

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predicted for society happen to the prophet: lightning strikes Mason. The
prophets seem to become loci of divine wrath instead of conveyances of a
warning message. The prophet sometimes experiences the oppression to which
he is witness, and this experience is another instance of that undignified lack of

autonomy that Rayber deplores.

O’Connor lets the argument that prophecy is tyrannical unfold fully. The
“extreme passivity” in which Tanrvater’s forbearers received revelation would
seem to suggest that Tarwater’s vocation might be a form of exploitation (von
Rad 52). However, it is the stranger, the embodiment of that voice urging
Tanrvater to independence, who rapes Tarwater. Thus the novel ultimately
reverses Rayber’s thesis on exploitation. The old man’s prediction that Tarwater
is “the kind of boy . . . that the devil is always going to be offering to assist, to
give . . . a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask . . . [his] bidnis” comes about
when a man offers Tarwater a ride and an adulterated drink (58). When the
drugged drink takes effect, the man pulls Tanrvater into the woods and rapes him.

After his rape, Tarwater recognizes the duplicity of the stranger’s invitation
to autonomy and he decides to take on his prophetic vocation. Tarwater sheds
his false notions of a dignified, dramatic and unequivocal prophecy and becomes
an authentic prophet. When he emerges from the woods where his rape takes
place, he fulfills the parable of the seeds that die so that “his eyes looked small
and seedlike as if while he was asleep, they had been lifted out, scorched, and
dropped back into his head” (232). These seeds contrast the “dry and seedless

fruit, incapable even of rotting, dead from the beginning” that are the “dead

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words” he spoke of redemption to the schoolteacher” (19). Tanrvater is again like
the old man in that he undergoes this transformation. The inefficacy of Mason’s
homilies to the schoolteacher humble the old man, who is “struck down in [his]
pride” (20). He learns from this and other experiences that “even the mercy of
the Lord burns” as the humbled Mason warns (20).

The rape of Tarwater and developments in the behavior of the stranger
constitute a rebuttal to the notion of freedom as autonomy that Tarwater is drawn
to. The drugged drink given to Tarwater by the man with the lavender eyes
inverts the thesis (ever-present in Rayber’s arguments) that religion is a drug
(Marx’ famous opium of the people) that deprives one of freedom and renders
one helpless in society. When the man “pick[s] him up and carriels] him into the
woods,” the “air itself might have been drugged” (231 ). While Rayber decries as
exploitation the old man’s baptism and conversion of Tanrvater, Tarwater
undergoes grievous bodily exploitation from another source. Indeed, the boy
opens the drugged liquor bottle using the “corkscrew-bottleopener” that was a gift
from Rayber (229). This “little instrument . . . promised to open great things for
him:” it makes him “appreciate” the schoolteacher and it becomes “his talisman”
(224). The man with the lavender eyes is the final embodiment of that stranger,
friend, and “mentor" that accompanies Tarwater and persuades him to take the
path of autonomy (225). As he rejects “the essence of all the old man’s
foolishness” along with “his great-uncle’s warnings about poisonous liquor,” he
puts himself in danger of rape (229). The autonomy promised by his wise guide

turns out to be no such thing. Several of the strangers that Tarwater meets, like

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Meeks with his H.L.L. credentials, that ask him his “bidnis” as the old man
warned, are manifestations of this inner guide. The man with the hole in his shoe
who advises Tanrvater not to let “jackasses tell [him] what to do” is another
manifestation of the stranger: his “voice sound[s] familiar” because it is that of his
counselor. Presaging the non-consensual intimacy of the rapist, this man’s eyes
carry the “malevolent promise of unwanted friendship” (166). The undesired
intimacy belies the promise of independence and autonomy that the stranger
offers. To the picture of a life “with only [him]self to ask or thank orjudge” the
stranger eventually adds his malevolent presence: “And me. I’ll never desert
you” (167). The stranger, Tanrvater knew, had a face that “was sharp and friendly
and wise” but it was “shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed panama hat that
obscured the color of his eyes” (35). These eyes, as they accompany Tanrvater
in the boat, “were violet-colored, very close and intense, and fixed on him with a
peculiar look of hunger and attraction” (214). The eyes of his counselor presage
the violet eyes of the man in the lavender and cream car, so that from the
beginning of the novel, the stranger entices Tanrvater in preparation for this rape.
The narrator offers the rape as a rebuttal to the stranger’s claims that prophecy is
tyrannical; the event shatters some of Tanrvater’s misunderstandings of
prophecy.

To summarize, first Tarwater falsely imagines that he will be a prophet
who is dramatic, powerful and dignified and aloof from the world. However, the
prophet is not separate: he sustains a relationship both between himself and the

transcendent source and between this source and the people, the auditors of

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prophecy. Most of all, the prophet moves in and out between hidden and visible
and between desert and city. Being liminal, he cannot sustain separateness.
Tanrvater later concedes to the schoolteacher that prophets are insane,
dangerous and ineffectual charlatans. He acts out rebellious gestures, such as
the cremation of his great uncle and the drowning of Bishop, in order to reject
what he imagines as the tyranny of prophecy. Like Rayber, however, his
rejection of prophecy is itself an apocalyptic variant of prophecy. Finally,
Tarwater drops his resistance to the contradictory qualities of prophecy, signaled
in the novel by the motifs of silence, emptiness and the desert: that it is dialogue
as well as message, deed as well as word, sudden as well as timeless, mediated

as well as immediate and a sign of absence as well as a sign of presence.

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Works Cited
Fitzgerald, Sally, ed. Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being. New
York: Farrar, 1979.

Leiva-Merikakis, Erasmus. Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the
GospelAccording to Saint Matthew. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996.

Muller, Gilbert. Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic
Grotesque. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Violent Bear itAway. New York: Noonday Press, 1960.

Scott, R. Neil. Flannery O’Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism.
Milledgville, GA: Timberlane, 2002.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 1995.

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Chapter Four

Auguries of Power: Prophecy and Violence in The Satanic Verses
“All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and
consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it
has been from the beginning and will continue to the end,” predicts the narrator
of Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s classic orientalist adventure (45). The incendiary
energy of Kipling’s 1901 portrait of the religious zeal of prophecy persists in the
imagination of the West. But a century later, it seems, holy zeal has lost its
innocence: the frenzy of the visionary—now called the fanatic or the
fundamentalist—is charged with violence. The change from the exotic to the
terrifying in the Western view of Eastern prophets calls for analysis. Salman
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, with its infamous inversions of the prophecies
that shaped Islamic culture and Indian society, boldly confronts the aura of
violence that now surrounds prophecy.

Rushdie invites the reader to listen attentively to a multitude of babbling
voices as they clamor against one another. Rushdie challenges the reader to
adjudicate this novel’s founding competition between prophecy and its
falsifications, between inspired verses and satanic verses. Indeed, the narrator
asks “who has the best tunes?” (10) Because some of the prophets’ “tunes” are
deadly, the task of adjudicating among mantic voices is all the more urgent.
Which babblers and visionaries are dangerous? Does their violence stem from

prophecy itself, from falsifications of prophecy, or from both?

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In listening to the voices, it is not enough to distinguish the degree of their
religious fervor (moderate, zealous or extreme) or even the content of their
predictions. Rather, to determine why many prophets are violent in The Satanic
Verses, one must ask what kind of prophesying they engage in. Instead of

simply condemning or acquitting one kind of prophecy or another, Rushdie

presents prophets that defy categorization.24 The theological and literary
tropology of prophecy suggests that terrorism in this novel is a hybridized
prophetic activity that exaggerates some elements of prophecy and falsifies
others.

Many characters in the novel distort the prophetic tradition in three ways
that generate violence. First, the violent prophet figures exaggerate mantic
sympathy for divine wrath against injustice. Second, they collapse prediction and
fulfillment into a single action. Third, they manipulate the fusion of truth and
justice that characterizes the prophetic imagination.

A fourth distortion of the prophetic tradition emerges in the novel. The
novel’s critique of inscription and sacred text would seem to account for the
violence of certain prophets by pitting textuality, the letter of the law, and tyranny
against orality, spirit, and freedom. Ultimately, however, these oppositions break
down in face of the violence of the clerical tyrant. The tyrant’s fantasy of
timelessness requires one to look beyond the three distortions of the prophetic

tradition to the fourth: the reversal of prophecy’s mandate of newness.

 

24 Timothy Brennan warns that the novel is not a “fable of Western freedom and Oriental
fanaticism” as it appeared in the Affair (144).

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Like the dystopian novelist George Orwell, Rushdie draws on the dual
potential of prophecy to serve the regime or rebel against it. But he also does
something else: instead of permitting two simple categories of authentic and
inauthentic prophecy, Rushdie depicts hybrids of prophecy and its falsifications.
Genuine elements of the prophetic tradition such as wrath against injustice
combine with distortions of that tradition within single prophetic figures. In a
novel with such ambiguous prophets, for whom visions may be hallucinations
and inspiration may be manipulation, it would seem that no distinctions about
prophecy are possible. Such distinctions are not impossible: they are imperative.
Rushdie makes difficult the adjudication between inspired speakers and satanic
speakers.

Rushdie portrays prophecy and prophets with myriad variations on present
and past traditions of revelation—mantic speaking, the receipt of visions and
revelation, the transcription of the divine word, inspiration or divine possession,
inspired dreaming, invocations of type and antitype, eschatological
pronouncements, and prediction—so that the reader can examine their relation to
violence. The most prominent prophet figure is Mahound, who represents
Mohammed. He appears in a crucial moment of prophetic activity: receiving the
divine word. Alleluia Cone, another seer figure, receives visions while mountain
climbing. Ayesha, the “butterfly girl,” styles herself as a messianic leader, calling
her followers to a deadly pilgrimage into the sea. The most sinister of the seer
figures are the Ayatollah Khomeini and Tavleen, the female hijacker. Gibreel

Farishta is perhaps the most complicated seer figure: much of the book occurs

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as part of his dreams, which he believes to be divinely inspired. He names
himself after the Angel Gabriel and imagines himself as “God’s postman” (114).
The Satanic Verses exhibits not only different kinds of mantic speech, but
also different stages of transmission. For example, Gibreel, the central seer,
shifts roles from viewer to participant: his “point of view is sometimes that of the
camera and at other moments, spectator” in the theatre of sacred revelation

(110). In another permutation of the calculus of prophecy (god-angeI-prophet-

man) Gibreel finds himself “inside the Prophet” (112).25

He occupies
sequentially all of the different positions that are necessary to mantic speech:

auditor, prophet-speaker, divine source, deaf masses.

Rushdie shows flaws in the transmission of the divine word.26 The title
Satanic Verses alludes to the historical event recorded by an almost
contemporaneous Arab historian that “the Prophet at first sanctioned, and later
deemed corrupt, certain verses of the Quran that he believed had originated not
from Allah but from the devil” (Brennan 152). One such historical reversal
involved the Meccan practice of worshipping AI-Lat along with two other
goddesses: it was at first permitted, presumably because acceptance of their cult
was vital to “the peaceful expansion of Islam in its crucial early period” (152). Yet

Mohammed reversed his original propitiatory position and forbade the practice.

 

25 As Ian Balfour notes, “though the Hebrew prophets are sometimes figured as voices crying out
in the wilderness, the prophetic word is typically nothing, or at best ‘imperfect,’ without an
audience to be forewarned, threatened or consoled" (21).

Rushdie’s use of blasphemy as a trope that fights tyranny has received critical attention from
Simona Sawhney and others.

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The plurality of prophets described above and the exposure of flaws in all
the stages of prophesying prompts questions about whether prophecy assists
justice, or on the contrary, tyranny. The multitude and complexity of Rushdie’s
instances of prophecy prevent a simple equation of prophecy and violence or
prophecy and injustice. Rushdie portrays Mohammed in the act of sacrificing
prophetic accuracy for expediency; this act is a departure from the tradition of
prophecy. As noted in the introductory chapter, theologian Abraham Heschel
explains that prophecy should not be politically expedient. Instead, conveyers of
the divine word (like Jeremiah) risk the accusation of treachery as a
consequence of speaking against the ruling order. Rushdie exposes the conflict
between political expediency and the mandate that prophecy critique the ruling
order, even at grave personal risk. Thus, the narrator’s indictment of the Prophet
does not so much pit religion against secularism as prophecy against its
falsifications. The critique of the Prophet opens up prophecy itself to a rigorous
testing of its nature, its imitations, and its possibilities.

One of the possibilities of prophecy is violence. It is not the only
possibility: the novel contains peaceful prophets as well. But the violent prophets
endanger them. Allie Cone, for instance, perishes—apparently at the hands of
Gibreel. Innocents are among the casualties of the violent prophets: Ayesha
directs her followers to stone an infant to death. Other prophets kill on a larger
scale. The bloodthirstiness of Gibreel, of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and of Tavleen
needs to be understood. How much of this violence stems from prophecy itself?

Where do the violent prophets part from the traditions of prophecy, and where do

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they cleave? Which are the incendiary combinations that set to flame not minds,
but bodies and buildings?

An incendiary combination of prophecy and its falsifications in the beautiful
Tavleen initiates the novel’s action. Tavleen styles herself as a Jeremiah,
denouncing corrupt social practices and rebuking the passengers for
faithlessness. Jalandri she calls a “traitor to his faith” because he violates
religious prescriptions for hair length (87). Some of her concerns are graver: she
wants “religious freedom” and “the release of political detainees” (80). Tavleen
has a genuine anger against injustice with which “some of the passengers [come]
to sympathize” (80). Her wrath against injustice is excessive, though, to the point
that it precludes mercy. The rows upon rows of hand grenades she wears under
her robe like “fatal breasts” indicate a lack of mercy (89). Instead of breasts of
the milk of human kindness, she offers fifty grenades of dynamite and gelignite
for suck. She is la belle Dame sans Merci. She suffers from what Heschel, in his
analysis of the Old Testament prophets, calls “hypertrophy of sympathy,” a kind
of sickness of the visionary who is supposed to speak for the divine. The prophet
reports the anger of God, and he is supposed to have sympathy with this divine
wrath. However if this sympathy grows so that it exceeds the divine pathos of
anger and obliterates the pathos of mercy, then it is overblown or hypertrophic.
Tavleen’s wrath is a distortion of the prophetic sympathy for divine wrath against
injustice. In her summary execution of Jalandri and her suicide bombing, it is
clear that her excessive sympathy with divine wrath has transformed mercy to

malevolence.

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Apart from her amplification of divine wrath, Tavleen also distorts
prophecy by collapsing prediction and fulfillment. She predicts an eternal
community that her homicide and suicide are supposed to achieve: “martyrdom is
a privilege [. . .] we shall be like the stars; like the sun” (88). (Note that Tavleen
employs the syntactic parallelism that Robert Lowth’s philological work identifies
as typical of Hebrew prophetic poetry (Balfour 60)). In communion with the other
martyrs, she hopes to achieve the timelessness and glory of the celestial bodies.
While she bargains earlier for an earthly justice that she wants to achieve, the
reference to martyrdom hints at the real nature of her ambitions for society, an
“independent homeland” and “justice" (80). She desires for society the same
things she desires for her martyrdom: an unequivocal identity as visible, as
universal, and as unchanging as the heavens. To achieve this unchanging
community she is willing to utilize the deaths of herself and her companions.
Tavleen prophesies two communities: the eternal community formed by
martyrdom and the earthly society that excludes anyone who might mar its
perfection.

But simply to predict the two perfect communities is not enough for
Tavleen. She also manifests them. By igniting her bombs, she tries to achieve
the community of martyrs. By executing Jalandri, she inaugurates with this “first
sacrifice” perfect society—a nation free of “apostate” and “traitor” elements (87).
Tavleen’s violent acts collapse prophecy and fulfillment.

Tavleen tries to achieve a mantic speech that is enactment. Her attempts

to fulfill her own prophecies presume that prophecy cannot be both word and

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deed. If her prophecy were efficacious—if its utterance were a species of
action—she would not need to manufacture her own pyrotechnic special effects.
Tavleen rejects those contradictory qualities that sustain the dynamism of mantic
speech. Tavleen’s explosions resemble Tanrvater’s destructive actions in The
Violent Bear itAway. The torching of the old man’s body, of the house at
Powderhead, and the murder of Bishop are similar efforts to compensate for the
inadequacy of the word. Just as these actions testify to Tarwater’s disbelief in
the word as deed, Tavleen’s violence reflects her imbalanced notion of prophecy,
in which word does not weigh up to deed.

Alleluia Cone’s mother expresses the terrorist’s adaptation of the mantic
voice with the phrase “bombs are destiny” (447). Tavleen thinks that the only
way to reach destiny, or a foreordained order of history, is with an apocalyptic
intervention. While Allie’s mother asks, “What does a famine, a gas chamber, a
grenade care how you lived your life?” Tavleen asks “Are we uncompromising,
absolute, strong, or will we show ourselves to be timeservers, who compromise,
trim and yield?” (447; 82) For both women, the impression of an inevitable
destiny and the fulfillment of history are manufactured and proffered by violent
events. Apocalypticism characterizes both their positions.

Where do these apocalyptic statements stand on the matrix of prophecy?
Again, they are apocalyptic versions of prophecy. To recall from the chapter on
Nineteen Eighty-Four, not every prophetic stance is apocalyptic per se. On the
matrix of prophecy’s contradictory qualities, apocalypticism favors suddenness

over timelessness and deed over word. This dramatic combination is what

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Tarwater expects of prophecy in The Violent Bear itAway. Awaiting his call,
Tanrvater looks for a burning bush. He has not the patience to wait for a more
subtle manifestation.

Tavleen also lacks patience, trying to master time in order to fulfill
prophecy. Rejecting the passiveness of “timeservers,” Tavleen and her
companions try to end the imperfection of time and bring about the prophesied
new order and to create a realized eschatology (83). What is dangerous about
Tavleen is not her faith. It is that she has none: she will not permit of a gap
between revelation and fulfillment, the present and the eschaton. If she lacks
faith, she also lacks the patience to await the divine fulfillment of prophecy. The

mentality that requires an apocalyptic intervention or a brutal sign shows not faith

but an impatient prophetic consciousness.27 The pseudo-prophet’s impatience
is dangerous especially when it preempts an apocalyptic prophecy. Rushdie’s
terrorists use bombs to magnify a Jeremiah-like rebuke to society and to manifest
and confirm for one instant the apocalypse that awaits the unjust society.

Like the sacrifice of lphigenia, before which her guilt or innocence was not
the subject of persuasive discussion, Tavleen’s sacrifice of Jalandri depends on
a unity between the perceptible world and a cosmic order that forms one perfect
prophetic “sign” from on high. As with augury, in which the diviner discerns the
will of the gods from birds in the sky, the violent prophets identify and create

divine signs.

 

27 The Book of Jonah offers an example of hypertrophic wrath and impatience. When Jonah’s
prophecy of destmction leads Ninevah to repent, God also repents of His decision to destroy the
city; this “displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry" (Jonah 3:10).

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The ethical contradictions of violent prophecy appear in another terrorist
incident in The Satanic Verses. In a wrathful response to unjust social practices,
Gibreel firebombs a London café and an office building. He walks through
London with a trumpet named “the exterminator, Azraeel” deciding that he will be
the “the agent of God’s wrath” (472). This wrath grows as Gibreel takes a
Jeremiadic inventory of “Babylondon” where pimps and child prostitutes abound
(474). On this journey he gives way to the temptation to fulfill the prophecy he
conveys (472). Gibreel decides to manifest the prophesied apocalypse by
blowing the “last trumpet.” He sees himself as the “Archangel Gibreel, the angel
of the Recitation, with the power of revelation in his hands” (476): using this
power, he sets about burning the city until he sees “the hair and teeth of the
citizenry [. . .] smoking and red [as] glass burns, and birds fly overhead on
blazing wings” (477). Among other casualties is a “heavily pregnant” woman,
which emphasizes Gibreel’s indifference to guilt and innocence (480). His
arsons are a judgment, the manifestation of the threat of divine wrath that he
magnifies. Like Tavleen, Gibreel collapses prophecy and fulfillment, aletheia and
dike.

In the love affair of Gibreel and Allie Cone Rushdie juxtaposes
expectations about prophecy; Allie Cone accepts that prophecy can be a sign of
absence, while Gibreel emphatically cannot. These characters have
correspondingly different dispositions as prophets. While Gibreel is a wrathful
and impatient prophet, Allie is another kind of visionary altogether. Cone’s first

name, Alleluia, is an affirmation and praise of the divine and, though it seems to

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contradict her freethinking character, sits well with her mysticism. She “has a
religious experience of the divine face” when she climbs the Himalayan
mountains (Petersson 259). Although the narrator downplays her visions as
“visual aberrations,” her prophetic character surfaces again in her original
surname, Cohen, which means “narrator” with echoes of “priest, wizard or
soothsayer” (260). Many critics also associate her name with Mount Cone, the
place of Mohammed’s divine visitation.

Despite being a visionary, Allie is not a pious character. She practices no
religion. Gibreel is different in this respect. He is a Muslim who has starred as a
divinity in so many theological films that in India his face is “the most acceptable,
and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme” (17). While exemplifying religion
and faith through films, he struggles in his private life with the silence of Allah
during a long illness. He complains of this silence, but Allie rebukes him: “You’re
alive [. . .] You got your life back. That's the point” (31). These two people have
opposite responses to this silence: Allie accepts the sign of absence, while
Gibreel thinks that prophecy must be pure presence, that it executes no sign of
absence. Gibreel lacks the spontaneous affirmation signaled in the name
Alleluia. His outlook is exacting and impatient: because “nothing” answered his
prayers, he undertakes “to prove to himself the non-existence of God” by
violating his religion’s prohibition against eating pork (30; 31). Gibreel requires
proof in exchange for belief. In this desire to see an immediate and merciless
rebuke for his impiety—a lightening bolt to bring God out of concealment—

Gibreel resembles Tavleen. Like Tavleen, he wants the proof of divine wrath and

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the fulfillment of prophecy to happen before his eyes. Gibreel also resembles
Lilburne Lewis in Brother to Dragons insofar as he desires clarity and the peace
of definition. Gibreel cannot accept ambiguity, paradox or contradiction.

Gibreel’s exacting prophetic imagination inimical to Allie’s peaceful and
unexacting mysticism. In the course of the love affair, Allie becomes the
bewildered and misjudged lover, Gibreel the jealous maniac, provoked by
Saladin Chamcha’s anonymous obscene phone calls about Allie. Gradually,
Gibreel becomes wrathful and homicidal. It seems that paranoia is the outcome
of Gibreel’s exacting and impatient prophetic imagination: prophetic vision
becomes delusion, a murderous hypertrophy of sympathy. Gibreel Farishta’s
prophetic zeal—delusional instead of visionary—is indeed dangerous. Its fruits
are murder and suicide, each proceeding from the same sense of betrayal
cherished by Lilburne Lewis, who also commits murder and suicide. While
Lilburne thinks that his slaves, brother, and wife betray him, Gibreel thinks that
his lover and his best friend are traitors. Both madmen are steeped in sentiment
that drives their sense of betrayal: babbling, Gibreel confesses to Saladin that
“Bloody hell [he] loved that girl” (559). In both cases, there is a desire for clarity
over and against ambiguity. In the absence of proof of affection, they sieze on
proof of betrayal: in Lilburne’s case, the broken jug proves the contempt of the
slaves for the memory of Lucy Lewis; in Gibreel’s case, Saladin’s obscene
poems about Allie are proof of her infidelity. Gibreel’s desire to seize a positive
sign is another instance of his intolerance for silence and absence, an

intolerance that makes him a dangerous prophet.

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Some critics suggest that another differentiating factor between Allie’s

peaceful prophecy and Gibreel violent prophecy is the factor of textuality.28
Gibreel obsessively relives prophetic speech (concerning the Angel Gabriel)
which has been written down as sacred text, while Allie does not connect her
visions to any inscribed revelation. One could say that Gibreel depends too much
on what has been written down, as when he believes the content of the ‘other
satanic verses,’ Saladin Chamcha’s obscene rhymes about Allie (Petersson
253). Does the factor of inscription make one prophet dangerous and the other
peaceful?

What happens to prophecies that are written down? Theologian Claus
Westermann comments that “there must surely be a distance between the work
of the prophets as speakers and its fixation in writing” (16). Does this distance
render prophecies less authentic? The Satanic Verses flirts with a letter-spirit
opposition and a textual-oral opposition with regard to revelation, sacred text and
prophecy. Brennan argues that “in portraying the Prophet [. . .] (knowing it to be
taboo) [. . . and in] placing him back into history” Rushdie resurrects the spirit of
the sacred text, “because the letter of the law is today being observed without
reverence for the original message” (146). Jaqueline Bardolph asks “in
transcription onto paper, is there not a loss of divine essence?” (214). The
freethinking Alleluia is not violent. On the other hand, those prophet figures who

are preoccupied with the letter of an inscribed prophecy are dangerous: Gibreel,

 

28 Timothy Brennan and Sara Suleri identify the influence of free-thinking Sufism over and
against clerical Shiaism in the novel. Peter Craven also suggests that the scribes and Pharisees
of Shi’ite theocracy are Rushdie’s particular target.

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who tries to relive the written story of the Angel Gabriel, Tavleen, who uses the
letter of a law derived from revelation to justify the summary execution of
Jalandri, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose claim to textual authority provokes
homicides and suicides.

However, the letter-spirit and text-voice oppositions fail in the face of
Ayesha’s dangerous messianic leadership. While her leadership is charismatic,
spirit-oriented, disestablishmentarian and oral instead of textual, it is also violent.
Her pilgrimage ends in her followers' mass suicide in the sea. More importantly,
she, like Gibreel, eschews the distinction between guilt and innocence when she
orders the death of a child. In Ayesha’s prophecy letter and text fail to align with
violence; spirit and voice fail to align with peace. As the letter-spirit oppositions
break apart, the reader must seek elsewhere to understand how Rushdie relates
prophecy and violence.

But Rushdie connects the inscription of prophecy with doubt and
inaccuracy. The repealed “satanic” verses of the Koran are scandalous because
they suggest that all recorded prophecies might contain error. Rushdie
showcases the nature of prophecy as mediated when he casts doubt on the
scribe. Prophecy is mediated by the prophet. Yet, in another instance of
prophecy's paradoxical nature, it claims to be immediate. It is the word from on
high, yet it is delivered by a human. The Islamic injunction against representing
the prophet Mohammed sidesteps the dangers of mediation: error and

misrepresentation. Rushdie violates this injunction, depicts the Prophet, and

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highlights the possibilities of error. In so doing, he points to the dual nature of
prophecy as immediate and mediated.

The reversal of the prophetic mandate to newness emerges as another
distortion of prophecy that leads to violence and as an important factor in the
novel’s apparent indictment of sacred text. In the figure of the Ayatollah
Khomeini, Rushdie investigates the power of written revelation reduced to
prescription and transformed to law. But instead of simply depicting the lmam’s
pharisaical pre-occupation with text and authority, Rushdie also describes the
tyrant’s attempts to resist time and the tyrant’s alienation. Prophecy is
undoubtedly a tool of tyranny for the Imam. Indeed, he utilizes it in his radio
polemics, calling his political enemy “the Babylonian whore” (19). Revelation is
not a tool for this tyrant because it is inscribed and codified, but because it is
declared closed and unchanging. Witness the lmam’s interpretation of prophecy:
“history,” he declares, “is a deviation from the Path [. . .] because the essence of
knowledge was complete the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound”
(217). If the sum of knowledge is already contained in a single book, and all
revelation complete, then nothing new can proceed from either mantic speech or
ordinary discourse. No further prophecy is possible, nor can one renew
interpretive conversation about prophecies. The completeness of revelation that
the Imam describes would render other creative and critical enterprises (like
writing novels) not only superfluous, but presumptuous and risky.

The Imam’s claim that prophecy can be frozen and completed in sacred

text for all time is echoed in his treatment of timepieces. In his effort to achieve

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timelessness, he smashes clocks and imagines that “there will be no birthdays”
because the faithful “shall all be born again, all . . . the same age in the eyes of
Almighty God” (220).

With regard to the prophetic tradition, the primary significance of the
lmam’s declaration is that it militates against a vital function of prophecy: the
introduction of newness to the relations between words and things and among
persons. The theological typology of prophecy discloses as one of prophecy’s
functions the alteration of discourse and the generation of “alternative
consciousnessz” the possibilities for social change (Brueggemann 13). On the
other hand, “every totalitarian effort” has the “aim to stop the language of
newness” because this language can potentially undo the regime (9). Any sort of
tyrant indulging what Brueggemann calls the “royal fantasy” has an antagonistic
attitude toward time: “the king does not know, never knows, what time it is” (53).
(The genuine prophet will tell him the time by warning that for the regime, the end
is near.) “Because the king wants to banish time and live in an uninterrupted
eternal now,” he smashes clocks (53). The tyrannical king “would have it be like
a casino in Las Vegas where there is no clock and no time, but only an enduring
and unchanging now” (53). The Imam, with his destruction of timepieces and his
personal “stillness” and “immobility” embodies this royal fantasy (Rushdie 216).

The tyrant who engages in the royal fantasy not only prohibits change in
revelation and discourse (the relations between words and things) but also
among persons. Living apart, the Imam tries to perpetuate his distance from the

victims of his rule. In Gibreel’s vision, hordes of the Ayatollah’s followers die

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marching on his enemy’s house. Over the “giggle of guns” he urges them, “go, be
a martyr, do the needful, die” (220). Instead of regarding these deaths as the
insuperable and final ends of separate peOpIe, he reads them as a sign, a proof
of “how they love [him]” (220). He keeps himself at a distance from the deaths of
his followers. As a leader, the Ayatollah lives in “exile,” and this exile is not
simply political quarantine. Rather, it is a statement about his nature and his
identity. “Who is he?” asks the narrator. The answer is “an exile” (211). He lives
without allegiance in isolation from relationship.

Rushdie depicts prophetic speech generating newness in language and in
human relationships that contrast the Ayatollah’s frozen isolation. As Gibreel and
Saladin Chamcha fall from the exploded jet, they engage in a competition of
verses that presages the coming competition between the divine verses and the
satanic (6). As they fall through the clouds, Chamcha is struck with what appears
to be divine inspiration: “a shaft of sunlight pierced his open mouth and set it
free” (8). In this Pentecostal event, the sunlight releases something that is “more
than noise,” more than ordinary speech (8). What does he say? First, “Fly . . .
Start flying, now” (8). He adds “without knowing its source, the second
command: ‘And sing’” (8).

Immediately after Chamcha’s mantic utterance the narrator proposes the
question “how does newness come into the world?” (8) The proximity of this
question with Chamcha’s song suggests that his inspired speech is a conduit for
newness. The newness of Chamcha’s mantic song involves “fusions,

translations, [and] conjoinings” (8). Like the Biblical prophets, Chamcha

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“[evokes] newness ‘fresh from the word’” (Brueggemann 9). The careful balance
of the contradictory qualities of prophecy allows change, produces newness and
resists ossification. In the gap between each opposing quality, there is space for
change. Because prophecy is both word and deed, a sign of absence and sign
of presence, it persists in flux. Written or oral, prophetic speech cannot be fixed.
Frank Kermode notes this flexibility when he says “the image of the end can
never be permanently falsified’ and that particular prophecies can make multiple
recurrences in popular culture (17). They recur because they cannot be
disconfirmed: they cannot be disconfirmed because prophetic speech must
respond to the tug of its opposing qualities.

The “newness” of genuine prophecy opens up not just discourse but the
encounter of persons. Levinas speaks of “prophetism,” which he uses in “a very
much larger sense than that admitted by the gift, the talent or the special
vocation of those whom one calls the prophets” (113). Like Rushdie, the ethicist
expands the term beyond the limits of officially approved revelation to embrace a
wider range of phenomena. Levinas claims that these phenomena emerge out of
“assuming responsibility for the Other,” as “a way of testifying to the glory of the
infinite” (Levinas 113). Alleluia, “her very name an exaltation,” engages in this
prophetism by achieving a “newness” of encounter through her prophetic speech
to Gibreel (458; 32). At their first meeting she “read [his] thoughts and the right
words just came out of [her] mouth” (307). This speech on his behalf—and
mediation is at “the core of the character of prophecy”—constitutes a new

revelation: “in the beginning was the word,” Allie says about the experience of

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voicing his thoughts (Balfour 8; 307). This revelation is about the possibility of
genuine interpersonal encounter, and she proposes it in lieu of the revelation that
Gibreel has diminished into a prescription against eating pork.

But the encounter fails: Gibreel’s jealous possessiveness of Allie Cone
places him in an exile similar to the Imam’s. Chamcha draws an analogy about
their relationship when he tells Gibreel the story of a playwright who tried to lock
up his lovely young wife, whom people admired as an “angel of peace,” a perfect
exponent of encounter. “She left him,” Chamcha explains, because “she said she
could not reconcile him with the human race” (456). Chamcha implies that
Gibreel’s jealousy of Allie signals a profound isolation from others.

His jealousy, stoked by Saladin’s anonymous phone calls, is fatal for Allie;
the violent prophet destroys the peaceful prophet. Saladin Chamcha’s
antagonistic friendship with Gibreel also ends in disaster. They seem to renew
their friendship with an act of mutual forgiveness when Gibreel saves Chamcha’s
life instead of taking it in the Brickhall fire. Yet, Saladin later realizes that “no
cure,” for malice “[is] complete” (554). Saladin listens as Gibreel’s delusions take
hold of him. Gibreel begins to babble about his relationship with Allie and the
narration breaks down into paratactic fragments. This babbling, this degenerated
mantic speech that fails to account for relations with the other leads to the
ultimate obliteration of all relations with others: suicide. Gibreel puts “the barrel
of [a] gun into his own mouth, and [pulls] the trigger” (561 ). The suicide is his

final occlusion of the people with whom he failed to relate.

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Gibreel’s tendency to reduce prophecy to prescription and to cast himself
as both prophet and fulfiller of prophecy is tyrannical, dangerous, and alienating:
both homicidal and suicidal. His impatient and exacting mantic imagination
conflicts violently with Allie’s prophetism.

While prophecy is not inherently violent, it is also not a safe enterprise. It
threatens the status quo and in that sense a genuine prophecy must always be
“extreme and dangerous” to established regimes (Brueggemann 8).
Nonetheless, one can adjudicate between genuine prophecy and its violent
distortions and re-creations. When prophecy is tamed by a regime, it is
oppressive. When prophecy is undertaken wrathfully and in the absence of hope
it is terrifying. If Rushdie offered pure examples of authentic and inauthentic
prophecy, the reader could conclude more. But Rushdie does not simplify. He
does not separate for us prophecy from its falsifications. Instead, he tests the
incendiary combinations that, though difficult to understand, are some of the
realizations of prophecy as a political art.

The apocalyptic statements that characters make in this and other novels
offer clues to the possibilities of prophecy as a political art. Allie Cone’s mother’s
profession that “bombs are destiny” bears some resemblance to Jefferson’s
statement that “doom is always domestic” in Brother to Dragons. Doom and
destiny are similar notions in that they are both apocalyptic and determinist,
suggesting some inevitable fulfillment or absolute ending. However, the two
apocalyptic professions about this ending are fundamentally different. For

Jefferson determinist inevitability is “domestic.” That is to say, one’s prophesied

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end emerges out of one's private life, one's genealogy, one’s personal life: “the
absolute traitor” that “lurks in some sweet corner of the blood” (8). For Allie’s
mother, on the other hand, “bombs are destiny.” A bomb is a weapon of
unfocused and impersonal violence. Unlike a sniper’s bullet that kills specifically
and singly, a bomb kills and wounds indiscriminately and on a mass scale.
Indifferent to its victim, this destiny is not private, but public. Another difference
between the apocalyptic statements is that Jefferson’s has a presumption of
difference between an interior (domestic) world and an exterior (public) world.
The statement “bombs are destiny” has no such presumption. Instead, it
suggests a flattened two-dimensional picture in which the hidden factors of
genealogy and blood hold no sway in the face of the bomb’s indifferent
destruction. Thus in Satanic Verses apocalypticism and the effects of prophecy
are a fundamentally public matter, but so pervasive that the category of the
private disappears. Allie’s mother makes the argument that bombs are destiny in
an effort to dissuade Allie from risking travel in order to see Gibreel. Everything
happens on a mass scale. The flattening of any distinction between interior and
exterior prohibits the in-and-out movement of prophecy.

The opening scene of Rushdie’s novel in which Gibreel and Saladin
Chamcha fall through the air from an exploded airplane also suggests the
absence of a distinction between interior and exterior. Rushdie’s opening
epigraph from Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil relates the notion that “Satan”
in his “wandering, unsettled condition” has a “kind of empire in the liquid waste or

air. . . without any fixed place, or space . . . to rest the sole of his foot upon.”

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Rootless, he occupies neither interior nor exterior. Chief among the variations of
prophecy that this novel examines is a flattened kind of prophecy that does not
sustain contradictory qualities. Like the radio voice of the Ayatollah’s
broadcaster, it occupies no space; perhaps this kind of prophecy is peculiarly
suited to mechanical reproduction and could only appear in a postmodern novel.
Whether postmodern or not, this prophecy does not move between inside and

outside.

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Works Cited

Balfour, Ian. The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2002.

Bardolph, Jacqueline. “Language is Courage.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives
on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. D.M. Fletcher. Atlanta: Rodopi,
1994.

Baudrillard, Jean. “Terrorism is Society’s Condemnation of Itself.” Le Monde
Diplomatique Nov. 2002. Trans. Luke Sandford. Online posting. 17 Nov.
2003. lnteractivist Info Exchange.
<http://slash.autonomedia.org/print.pl?sid=02/11/17/ 2127238>.

Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation.
London: Macmillan, 1989.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1978.

Craven, Peter. “Salman Rushdie, No Parenthesis." Scripsi 5.3 (1989): 13-33.

Detienne, Marcel. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. New York: Zone
Books, 1996.

Gottlieb, Erika. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Trial and Terror.
London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.

Heschel, Abraham J. The Prophets. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Keegan, Sir John. “The Radical at the Pentagon.” Vanity Fair Feb. 2003: 127-
129.

Kingsley, Margery A. Transforming the Word: Prophecy, Poetry, and Politics in
England, 1650-1742. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. Toronto: MacMillan, 1901.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo.
Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985.

Martz, Louis L. Many Gods and Many voices: The Role of the Prophet in English
and American Modernism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998.

Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet, 1981.

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Petersson, Margareta. Unending Metamorphoses: Myth, Satire and Religion in
Salman Rushdie’s Novels. Lund: Lund University Press, 1996.

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. New York: Signet, 1946.

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses: A Novel. New York: Picador, 1997.

Sawhney, Simona. “Satanic Choices: Poetry and Prophecy in Rushdie’s Novel.
Twentieth Century Literature 45.2 (1999): 253-277.

Suleri, Sara. “Contraband Histories.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the
Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. D.M. Fletcher. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994.

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Chapter Five
Devil on the Cross and Upward Prophecy: The Ascent from the Grave

The previous chapter on The Satanic Verses discusses those imitations of
prophecy which result in tyranny, examining particularly the imitation of prophetic
fulfillment through terrorist gestures. In Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross,
written while he was imprisoned following the performance of The Trial of Dedan
Kimathi, the narrator critiques prophecy that has been used for oppression,
namely the colonial justification for unethical capitalism through Gospel parables
such as the parable of the talents of gold. The Bible is used as a means to
convince the workers that “to obey the Kimeendeeri [ruling] class is to obey God

and that to anger or oppose their overlords is to anger and oppose God” (189).

In this novel, which was written originally in Gikuyu29 and translated by its author,
the narrator learns to recognize and uncover duplicity in the capitalist mandate to
prosperity. For this narrator, the call to prophesy through a process of
recollection and projection to the future is a great burden. Further, it is a burden
that he must carry upward: unlike the nabi of the Judeo-Christian tradition, who
carries a message down from above, or the prophetes of the Greco-Roman
tradition, who carries a sign from interior to exterior, this prophet moves from the

roots of the lives of the oppressed up to the problem of nation, and from the

 

29 Ngugi’s position on languages is that “just as English had been imposed on the African people
by the colonizers, its continued use in writing is detrimental to the development of African
languages and furthers the creation of an elite alienated from the people” (Nazareth 10). In this
respect he departs from Salman Rushdie, who composed Satanic Verses in English without
apology. In fact, Ngugui “succeeded in abolishing the Department of English at the University of
Nairobi and replacing it with the Department of Literature, which emphasized East African,
African, and other relevant literatures” (11).

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grave up to the church bells of the prosperous city (26). The narrator is the

prophet bearing the burden: he calls himself “Prophet of Justice” (9).

The Prophet of Justice, who is also called Gicaandi Player,30 narrates the
story of Wariinga, bright young Kenyan woman whose education and career
ambitions were derailed at a young age by an affair with a person known as the
Rich Old Man resulting in the birth of a daughter. She leaves the capital city of
Nairobi after sexual harassment drives her from her typing job and her
contemptuous young lover. Assisted by a stranger who returns her meager
wallet and averts her suicide, she sets off for her home town of Ilmorog on the
matatu (bus or van) driven by Robin Mwaura. On the bus, political discussions
commence when a female passenger named Wangari confesses that she is
unable to pay the fare, despite a life of consistent hard work and honorable
service to the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule. They discuss the problems
of neocolonial conditions in which a few natives hold capital and power in the
same unscrupulous way that their white predecessors did. Gatuiria, an idealistic
young composer, and Muturi, a school watchman, are shocked when another
passenger, Mwireri, proclaims that he will be a participant in the Competition in
Modern Theft and Robbery in Ilmorog, a competition that rebellious university
students have named “the devil’s feast.”

In this novel, Kenyan businessmen prostitute the culture and soul of

Kenya to foreign interests, as represented by the International Organization of

 

30 The Gicaandi is a rhythm instrument made out of a seed-filled gourd inscribed with pictures. It
is used in a song and dance with “riddles and conundrums in which two persons compete”
(Kikuyu-English Dictionary quoted in Gititi 221 ).

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Thieves and Robbers. The thefts of land, resources and labor through deceit,
extortion, intimidation and political corruption result in wealth for a few and
poverty and famine for everyone else. The Biblical prophecy of eternal reward for
earthly suffering, along with other foreign cultural notions, ensures the continued
subservience of the masses. The novel’s title casts doubt on Christian prophecy
by substituting Jesus on the cross for a devil on the cross. In Wariinga’s
recurring dream, “instead of Jesus on the Cross, she would see the Devil, with
skin as white as that of a very fat European she once saw” (139). Wariinga has a
vision of the devil being crucified “by people in tattered clothes”, and then
restored by his disciples (139). These disciples who take him down “after three
days” are “black people in suits and ties” ( 131 ). The vision suggests that after
Independence from colonial rule, a new set of evils enters the land as the new
native rulers adapt corrupt colonial practices to their country after it has been
“saved” from tyranny.

These devil’s disciples become pregnant with all the evils of the colonial
devil who was crucified, and thus the evils spread. Muturi uses the metaphor of
illicit generation with regard to the nation: “this country . . . should have given
birth to its offspring long ago” (46). To the question “who is responsible for the
pregnancy” Mwaura replies “the Devil doing his work” (46). Generation has this
negative connotation which is not inherent, but adheres because the model of
profit and self interest, as taught through the Biblical parable of the talents,
organizes all parts of society. In the novel the abuse of generation is part of the

downfall of the country. The possibility of change recedes because the people

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are “bearers of doomed children” (137). Chiefly, the exploitation of young women
like Wariinga results in children like Wambui who are not acknowledged or
supported by their fathers. These girls grow up to the same exploitation: “a
woman’s youth has become a rotting corpse” (136). The narrator speaks of
women aborting or throwing their babies into latrines,” or of children “emerging
from their mother’s wombs as corpses” (136; 18). Because of exploitation, the
womb is “a grave in which [a young woman’s] fertility is buried” (136).31 So the
next generation comes forth from the grave.

The ruling motif in this novel is of the woman who has “every part of [her]
body buried except one:” her “single organ” of sexuality (26). Here, generation is
managed and oppressed through denied paternity, abortion, and the
“lntemational Planned Parenthood Association:” as the robber Mwireri wa
Mukiraai explains, “the greatest threat to [thieves and robbers] is the increase in
the number of people who will be demanding food, clothing, and shelter” (161).
Wariinga discovers this oppression after encountering the false hope of “modern
love:” John Kimwana tells her that her illegitimate child does not scandalize him,
kissing Wariinga and saying “ ‘a child is not a leopard, capable of wounding
people’ ” (20). She finds, of course, that these “modern, progressive views” are
professed hypocritically (20).

The pattern of abuse that women like Wariinga experience after they are
acquired by men like the Rich Old Man is one of false promises, rebukes and

abandonment. Even her young lover John Kimwana “motivated by hypocrisy . . .

 

31 . . .
Ngugi alludes, perhaps, to the white supremacnst stance taken by Margaret Sanger, founder of
Planned Parenthood.

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lectures [Wariinga],” claiming that “Kihara is not the first to eat from [her] thighs”
and that “a girl who has sipped at the delights of money can never stop drinking”
(25). In fact, he benefits financially from her; she promises to “help him with his
keep so that he can finish his education without trouble or delay” (20). Poor
young student though he is, Kimwana is no different from the Rich Old Man who
originally seduced Wariinga. When the woman becomes a burden and not a
benefit, be he “student, loafer [or] rich man,” his “response is the same” (17).
Wariinga encounters protestations of innocence: “who are you claiming is
responsible for the pregnancy? Me?” (18) The Rich Old Man tells her not to
“collect pregnancies wherever [she] may and then lay them at [his] doorjust
because one day [he] happened to tease [her]” (18). Likewise, Kimwana rejects
Wariinga because she loses her job for refusing to yield to Boss Kihara’s desires.
Among all these men, self-interest prevails. The narrator complains of sexual
harassment in the business world being prevalent to the extent that “women’s
thighs are the tables on which contracts are signed” and that “modern problems
are resolved with the aid of thighs” (19). The imported capitalist pattern of using
people up has spread through all levels of society. One of the thieves sums up
this situation when he proposes the sale of extra phalluses to men who want to
multiply their desires.

Ngugi’s description of modern love is tied up with foreign influence.
Wariinga complains of prostitution and the way that developers build “tourist
hotel[s]” so that Kenyan “women can have facilities for selling their flesh to

foreigners” (223). Indeed, the wrinkled old foreigner Mwaura meets exclaims on

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the “fantastic wild game . . . and aftenrvards fantastic women” of Kenya (223).
The sacrifice of women’s lives to other people’s desires is a national problem in
this novel. The Rich Old Man, for instance, offers a foreign lifestyle to Wariinga
when he tries to seduce her a second time: “a house with the kind of furniture
and carpets . . . and other things imported from abroad—from Hong Kong,
Tokyo, Paris, London, Rome, New York” together with “clothes and jewelry made
in Europe” (251 ). He assumes that the desire to be a European is enough to
make Wariinga yield to him. The submission of the colonized to European and
Asian tastes causes Kenyan women to turn over their lives and bodies. The
Kenyan men are complicit in this abuse. The nation’s capacity for generation,
then, is in the control of foreigners.

Wariinga overcomes the obstacles of poverty for her daughter Wambui,
who is raised by her grandmother, and seems on the brink of happiness when
she is about to marry Gatuiria. In the surprise ending of the novel, Gatuiria turns
out to be the son of the Rich Old Man and therefore, the brother of Wambui. The
illicit generation prevents the marriage of Gatuiria and Wariinga. The happy,
natural ending is averted and the wedding feast becomes a scene of death when
Wariinga kills her prospective father-in-law and former sugar-daddy. Wariinga’s
reason for the killing is that he is “a parasite that lives on the trees of other
people's lives” (254). The Rich Old Man uses up Wariinga’s life: it is only the
intervention of others that saves Wariinga from committing suicide on more than
one occasion. This “modern love” that is a function of the modern, capitalist

social model of self-seeking interest results in death.

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Mazrui argues that “Ngugi reclaims oral tradition and liberates it from its
traditional, relatively passive use as a vehicle for authentication and passing
messages from generation to generation” (245). As a justification for using the
oral tradition, mere passing down is not enough

Prophecy in this novel is distinct from prophecy in The Violent Bear it
Away and Brother to Dragons in that it moves upwards instead of downwards
from on high. As noted in the introduction, the Hebrew word for prophet is nabi.
The prefix na indicates a downward movement, indicating that the prophetic word
originates in a high place and descends to a low place, moving from God to the
people. In Devil on the Cross, however, the movement is reversed. As the
narrator accepts the call to prophesy, he declares “the voice of the people is the
voice of God” (8). He elevates the people from the auditors of prophecy to the
source. Here, prophecy is not theophanic. Gatuiria relates learning this proverb
about the voice of the people from his mentor, the old man in the village. He
prefaces it with the admonition “never despise the people” and repeats “the voice
of the people is the voice of God” (63). The old man’s third tale of Nding’uri, who
sold his soul to an evil spirit, amplifies and explains this upward movement.
Nding’uri’s neighbors rebuke him to “listen to the voice of the people” (65). They
identify the voice: “the voice of the village is the voice of the Ridge, and it is the
voice of the country, and it is the voice of the nation, and it is the voice of the
people. Nding’uri, the voice of the people is the voice of God . . . in the glory of
your nation you’ll see the face of God” (65). Note that this statement moves ever

outward and upward, from micro level to macro, from village to country. This

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resulting collective of the people has mantic power. The “delegation of elders”
from the village in the tale warns Nding’uri that “he who sells the shadow of his
nation is damned, for his name shall forever be cursed by generations to come,
and when he dies he will become an evil spirit” (65). The encomium of the
people is no fleeting glory or infamy. More than mere notoriety, this collective
voice can convey damnation or eternal life: “happy is the man who willingly
defends the shadow of his nation, for he will never die” (65). “His name,”
explains the elders, “shall live forever in the hearts of the people” (65). What is
offered is not mere fame, but a kind of reality conveyed only by mantic speech.
The voice of the people, then, is constitutive of reality. The people are their own
prophetic source. Nding’uri treats this warning with contempt and responds
“what’s a village? What’s a nation? What’s a people? Go away and tell all this to
someone else” (65). The tale shows his contempt to be fatal when the village
destroys him.

This upward movement of prophecy contrasts with the downward
hierarchy of colonial Christianity described by Mwireri: In his contempt for the
collective people, Mwireri declares that “people can never be equal like teeth”
(78). “Look,” he says, “at God’s Heaven. God sits on the throne. On his right
side stands his only Son. On his left side stands the Holy Spirit. At his feet the
angels sit. At the feet of the angels sit the saints. At the feet of the saints sit all
the Disciples , and so on, one rank standing below another, until we come to the
class of believers here on Earth” (78). Likewise “hell is structured in the same

way” (78). The movement of the realizing word, the word as deed, downward is

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a western import and part of the imperial mindset. Like the Bible itself, the whole
notion of the constitutive word as deed moving downward from on high is
abused: it is made an instrument of the colonial and neocolonial enslavement of
Kenya. Only the collective, upward voice can effectively rebel against this
imperial structure. The routing of the devil’s feast by the workers and students of
Ilmorog, led by Wangari and Muturi, models the power of the collective voice.
When this impromptu grassroots army chases away the thieves and robbers,
they clash with the police and military, who belong to that colonial hierarchy
which passes power down from on high.

Literature and music are part of the upward movement of the nation’s
voice. In an allegory of Kenya’s national identity, the tale of Nding’uri
demonstrates the importance of this voice. When the bad spirit makes a bid for
his soul, Nding’uri asks himself “what is a soul? Just a whispering voice” and
then “he [tells] the bad spirit ‘take [his] soul’” (64). The bad spirit immediately
tells him the importance of this whispering voice that he does not value. When
he takes possession of the voice, the spirit instructs him “never tell anybody [he
is] a man without a soul” and to “seize the child [he] love[s] most , pierce one of
the veins in his neck, drink up all his blood until his body is completely dry, cook
the body, eat the flesh” (64). The implicit parallel is to the nation giving up its
culture in order to imitate and ingratiate itself to European culture. The numerous
examples not only of foreign automobiles, but foreign dress, foreign houses with
imported rugs, and foreign speech demonstrate how completely the whispering

voice of native culture has been abandoned. Even Gatuiria, who self-consciously

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retrieves native culture, cannot speak his native language fluently, instead
stuttering and inserting English words and excusing himself with shame. The
consequences, the novel suggests, are the sacrifice of the nation’s goods by its
own people. The neocolonial exploitation of Kenya by its own businessmen and
civic leaders is comparable to a parent eating its own child, which is the
consequence of Nding’uri selling his soul. It is Gatuiria’s job as a composer and
potential prophet to restore the lost whispering voice or the soul of Kenya.
However, Gatuiria’s attempts to restore the national voice through music
fail. Gatuiria is an intellectual, “a junior research fellow in African culture” who
undergoes years of foreign education in order to avoid working for his father in
his exploitative business (58). But Gatuiria’s ideals and education are not
enough to make him an effective force of liberation. He specifically tailors his
education toward some kind of liberation for Africa. Conscious of the
shortcomings of a European education, he explains that Kenyan “culture has
been dominated by the Western imperialist cultures” by a process “we call in
English cultural imperialism” (58). (Note that all italicized material was written in
English in the original Gikuyu edition of the novel.) Gatuiria is no sycophant to
Western culture: he knowledgably defines cultural imperialism as “the mother to
the slavery of the mind and the body,” describing the way that it “gives birth to the
mental blindness and deafness that persuades people to allow foreigners to tell
them what to do in their own country, to make foreigners the ears and mouths of

their national affairs” (58). Gatuiria might have read Ngugi’s Decolonizing the

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Mind.32 Despite his intellectual and political commitment, his extensive
education and training, Gatuiria still cannot produce that “tune or . . . theme” with
“all kinds of national instruments” that he studies in order to revitalize native
national expression (59). An intellectual is not enough, the story seems to
indicate. The renewal of Kenya will not come from the university, but from the
village.

Revival of “the roots of Kenyan national culture” is only part of what he
wants to accomplish. When he asks who today “can play the wandindi, the one-
stringed violin, making it sound liked the voice of a young man wooing his love as
she comes back from picking peas in the field,” he addresses the loss and
retrieval of national culture. But when he asks “who can play on the gicaandi . . .
today and read and interpret the verses written on the gourd” he asks a more
important question (59). More than a flavor of culture, “a delicious national dish”
instead of “foreign shit,” what has been lost is the means of producing an
efficacious word: the very possibility of effective rebellion depends on the ability
to imagine and speak something else (59). “The youth of the nation has hung up
its shields and spears” in a gesture that says they have lost the means of
resistance (59). Alamin Mazrui speaks of the way the Mau Mau (Kenya Land and
Freedom Army) had generated the means of resistance through Gikuyu
prophecies during the Emergency. The Mau Mau used these prophecies “not
only to fire up nationalistic sentiment and resolve against colonial oppression and

land alienation in Kenya, but also to project their nationalist leaders in the form of

 

32 Subtitled The Politics of Language in African Literature, this influential critical work was
published in 1986.

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Biblical seers, prophets who had come to remind the people that their lush land
now in European settlers’ hands was once given to them by God” (236). For
Ngugi as well, “prophecy is another oral strand . . . [used] . . . to legitimize the
Gikuyu’s claims to the land” (Mazrui 235). While the businessmen of the
International Organization of Thieves and Robbers plot to sell “soil to peasants in
pots and tins” and to “import some air from abroad” and label it “made in USA,”
Mau Mau prophecies fight this opportunism by reconnecting the people to their
alienated land (Ngugi 107). The land was alienated partly by force but also
imaginatively through renaming cities. When Wangari asks Wariinga where she
comes from, she replies “the village called Ngaindeithia near New Jerusalem
Njeruca” (38). The New Jerusalem is the Western model of colonial
development based on the Biblical prophecy of the Promised Land. For Kenya,
this prophecy was a means of exploitation; thus again Christianity was a weapon
brought by the white man along with his gun. This prophetic landscaping of
Kenya needs to be replaced chiefly because it was exploitative but also because
it was borrowed. Searching for a new imaginative territorialization, the prophet
has to shape his prophecies out of indigenous material.

These uses of prophecy as a political art for resistance to neocolonial rule
in Kenya are a backdrop to Ngugi’s use of prophecy in this novel. Recall that
Ngugi makes himself a historian of the Mau Mau and its leader with his play The

Trial of Dedan Kimathoi, which he wrote shortly before being detained in prison

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(Mazrui 233).33 This history was an alternative account to the prior written
accounts which were all from the perspective of the colonizers. While in prison
for retrieving this alternate history, Ngugi wrote Devil on the Cross. Thus, this
imagining of resistance has much to do with retrieval of “the history of [his]
country” and national memory (59).

But more than memory and retrieval of a national past, the prophet must

adapt a new speech in order to transform the shape of reality in the national

imagination.34 This is where Gatuiria falls short as a prophet. That he is a
potential prophet figure is evident from the way he talks about his creative work
in music. Gatuiria’s magnum opus is the symphony he writes to tell the story of
the exploitation and revolt of Kenya. He “hopes above all that his music will
inspire people with patriotic love for Kenya,” filling them with anger “at those who
sold the soul of the nation to foreigners” and overturning “cultural imperialism”
(226 58). Gatuiria is able to complete this work because he is inspired by
Wariinga. He intends the symphony to be a symbol of their marriage. Wariinga
encourages him to “finish it . . . so that [they] can go away together" (226).
“Gatuiria had decided that his score would be Wariinga’s engagement ring” and

its “first performance would take place on their wedding night” (226). His failure

 

33 The political message of the play I Will Marry When I Want To was the reason for his arrest in
1977 (Wikipedia).

Divination and the word as deed are important to the historical background of rebellion against
the British which precede the neocolonial period in which the novel takes place. Wangari recalls
her participation in the Mau Mau group, which “engaged in guerilla warfare and terrorism” during
the Emergency (1). This group’s members took an oath of allegiance so absolute that to break it
was to die. The Mau Mau oath is an instance of the word as deed operating as a political art. The
use of female prophets for Mau Mau warfare is an instance of the literal referent for the narrator’s
prophesying: “the Mau Mau . . . included women, apparently often enough women with powers of
prediction, who worked directly with platoon commanders” (Kikuyu Mau Mau Uprising 1).

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to fulfill his engagement with Wariinga becomes the final failure of his potential as
a prophet. After Wariinga kills his father, he “does not know what to do . . . so he
just [stands] in the courtyard, hearing in his mind music that leads nowhere”
(254). But even before he meets Wariinga, Gatuiria is already a failing prophet.
Identifying his weak prophet role, Wangari compares him to “the chameleon
which once was sent by God to the people but never delivered the message it
carried because it hesitated so long” (67). Feeling the inadequacy of his colonial
education, he seeks out an old man of Nakuru to tell him authentic “old stories—
tales of ogres or animals” (61 ). As he composes music, hoping that the tales will
inspire his work, he “[feels] the flames die, and the ashes of the work [are] left
without even the tiniest spark” (67). The reasons for this failure is, he surmises,
a lack of belief “in the existence of the subject of [his] composition” (67). He
wonders how to “acquire belief” (67). Dissatisfied with mere satire, he wants to
know whether the devil has “seven horns” (73). He echoes Wariinga’s question
what “if the Devil did exist, and if he visited Kenya, and if he hosted feasts on
Earth and arranged competitions for his earthly disciples?” (70) He complains of
an intellectual difficulty, a “knot” the center of which is the question “does the
Devil [as advertised in the Devil’s Feast pamphlet] exist or not?” (73) The value
of stories and figurative language eludes him. His mentor, the old storyteller,
explains that all stories are about men: “there is no difference between old stories
and modern stories. Stories are stories. All stories are old. All stories are new.
All stories belong to tomorrow” (61). Despite the storyteller’s efforts, Gatuiria

does not understand that “all stories are about human beings” (62). Like the

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Kenyan thieves and robbers who organize themselves around “Modern Theft and
Robbery,” he preoccupies himself with modernity as it is shaped and defined by
the colonizer (87).

Gatuiria misses a great opportunity when his mentor tells him three
stories, the third of which “left a indelible mark in [his] heart” (62). This third story
is about a Job-like man named Nding’uri who despite virtue and hard work is
struck by a “pestilence [which] destroyed all Nding’uri’s possessions” (63).

Unlike Job, he decides to abandon his piety and sell his soul to a bad spirit,
becoming from that time on a cruel and rapacious exploiter of his neighbors.
Eventually, his victims send a delegation claiming, prophet-like, to be “the voice
of the village” and “the voice of God:” they rebuke him, suffer his boasts and then
attack and burn him (65). This tale is the story of the workers’ encounter with the
devil’s feast writ small: the Njeruca crowd breaks up the devil’s fest, leaving the
cave “reeking of burnt debris and smoke” while they sing of “chasing away the
Devil lAnd all his disciples” (207). Clearly, the old tale of Nding’uri is analogous
to the Kenyan suffering and rebellion that Gatuiria witnesses. While desiring to
represent the soul of Kenya he misses his opportunity to use this story. At first
inspired by the three tales, he stops composing his music because “in [his] heart
[he] did not believe in the existence of ogres, spirits or creatures from any world
but this” described in the tales (67). Gatuiria is too literal minded to be a prophet.
In terms of prophecy’s contradictory qualities, Gatuiria cannot be a prophet

because he thinks that the word as deed is irrelevant to the modern world.

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Fundamentally, he cannot make the prophetic movement between hiddenness
and revelation or between past and future.

Gatuiria also fails as a prophet because of his secretive attitude toward
the past. Like Jefferson in Brother to Dragons, Gatuiria prefers to keep silent
about shameful relatives. Gatuiria conceals his family name so that no one will
know that he is the son of an unscrupulous businessman who practices the worst
neocolonial exploitation of his own country, the modern Haraambe (organized
unity). He confesses shame at his parentage and refuses to reveal it. Because
he conceals his family name, Wariinga does not discover that Gatuiria is the son
of the Rich Old Man and in effect her stepson until they are already engaged.

The narrator, who is the Prophet of Justice, offers acknowledgment of the
past as one of the most important effects of prophesying. Unlike Gatuiria, the
narrator faces the past and relates it to the next generation as part of a
meaningful story. The first auditor of Wariinga’s troubles tells her that they “must
never despair” about Kenya, for “Despair is the one sin that cannot be forgiven . .
. by the nation and generations to come” (27). Hope is the business of the
prophet, but not a hope that conceals pitfalls. Rather, the prophet has to retrieve
memories like those of Wariinga. This digging up of the past is part of a
resurrection theme in the novel. But rather than a nefarious resurrection of the
Devil that multiplies evils, the prophet assists in recovering the lives of the young.
The graves in which Kenya’s young women have been buried (minus their sexual
organs) must be opened. In another burial metaphor, the narrator argues that

pits have been dug and concealed in order to trap the next generation. While

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“certain people in Ilmorog” argued that “this story [of Wariinga and the devil’s
feast] was too disgraceful, too shameful” and “that it should be concealed in the
depths of everlasting darkness,” the narrator disagrees (7). On the contrary, he
argues that revelation instead of concealment should be the strategy of those
seeking justice. His response to the quietists is that to conceal these events is to
“cover up pits in our courtyard with leaves or grass, saying . . . that because our
eyes cannot now see the holes, our children can prance about the yard as they
like” (7). The prophet must engage the past in order to give a clear path for the
future, a path without “pitfalls” and “tree stumps” (7).

While the prophet-narrator engages in recollection, Robin Mwaura, on the
other hand, scoffs at memory: in a churlish response to Wangari’s sad musings
about how little she gained from her faithful service to Kenya in the Mau Mau, he
says “Independence is not tales about the past but the sound of money in one’s
pocket” (37). This attitude is not just a distasteful crass materialism, but rather a
summary of neocolonial exploitation. It contrasts with the Mau Mau song “a bean
fell to the ground--/ We split it among ourselves” (39). Mwaura is no harmless
figure of small time greed, but actually a former thug and assassin, shortly to be
reinstated after the devil’s feast. His opposition to memory is important, signaling
that the obliteration of national memory is part of the neocolonial pattern of
exploitation in Kenya. Thus when the narrator brings Wariinga’s story into the
national memory he works against that pattern of exploitation.

Gatuiria’s ability to perform the prophetic remembering of the nation’s past

is compromised by his years of foreign education. Through this education, the

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colonizer has framed Gatuiria’s relationship with his own culture. Even in his
desire to retrieve Kenyan culture from the colonizer, he is distanced from it. After
years of pursuing education abroad, he approaches his own country clumsily
instead of living in it naturally, experiencing “estrangement from [his] existential
and cultural being” (Mazrui 230). Fritz Fanon describes the stilted work of the
intellectual alienated from his or her own culture: “old legends will be
reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed aestheticism and of a conception of the
world which was discovered under other skies” (Wretched of the Earth quoted in
Mazrui 231 ). When Gatuiria asks where he can find belief, he betrays the way
colonialism has restricted his viewpoint: modernized by the colonizer, he rejects
the old tales of ogres and devils as irrelevant and superstitious. (Likewise, the
newer Christian tales of hell Mwaura describes as superstitions used to frighten
children into behaving.) On the other hand, as a resistant colonial subject, he
wants to recover his own “authentic” culture. The result is a stultified, preserved
version which critic Alamin Mazrui calls “the fossilization of oral literature” (231).
The kind of literature and music that are composed as if by an outsider are
analogous to Christian prophecy in The Devil on the Cross: they are imposed
from above, instead of emerging up from the masses. The stuttering Gatuiria
can only be an imitator of his own culture and language instead of a creator.
Even Gatuiria’s praise of Wariinga is unoriginal. When the young man
takes Wariinga to meet his parents, he admires her beauty saying that her “skin
has a depth of blackness that is softer and more tender than the most expensive

perfume oil” (225). Her eyes and cheeks earn similar epithets. With growing

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hyperbole, he adds that her “hair is so black and soft and smooth that all men
feel like sheltering from the sun in its shade” (225). As his compliments unfold,
they evoke a memory in Wariinga and in the reader. The words of his rhapsody
are the exact words of the voice of the devil as he speaks to her in her dream:
her “the blackness of [her] skin is smoother and more tender than the most
expensive perfume oils” and her hair such that “all men must feel like sheltering
from the sun in its shade” (192). The sameness of these words “startle[s]
Wariinga” (225). The devil’s words in her dream were an invitation to join him
and become an “oppressor,” “exploiter” “liar” and “grabber” (192). This passage
implies that Gatuiria is something worse than a failed prophet: rather, he is a
mouthpiece (albeit unwitting) for the voice of tyranny. He loses power over his
voice by mimicking the colonizer and keeping silence about his parentage and
his past. In speaking words of admiration to Wariinga, Gatuiria slips into the role
of exploiter. Unwittingly, he speaks to her as if he is his father, her former sugar-
daddy. In two ways, Gatuiria does not examine his antecedents: he covers up his
parentage instead of revealing it, and he mimics the colonizer by approaching his
own culture and language as a foreigner. Because of these omissions and in
spite of his best intentions he becomes a mouthpiece for tyranny.

Gicaandi Player, on the other hand, is a successful prophet. He begins the
gicaandi ritual, adapting a Gikuyu speech form instead of submitting to the
colonizer’s way of knowing. He responds to the plea of Wariinga’s mother:
“Gicaandi Player, reveal all that is hidden,” and thus begins “an extended

divination of the ills of the nation” (Ngugi 7). This prophet, unlike the ineffectual

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Gatuiria, “discharge[s] the office of diviner/priest, investigator, philosopher,
counselor, comforter [and] the voice of conscience” in his role as the Prophet of
Justice (Gititi 220). Gitahi Gititi describes the ritual of gicaandi, “an event that
takes place in the public square . . . providing a model for discourse” involving
poetry, divination and riddles (Gititi 221, 225). The ritual’s opening incantation
states that it is more than “magical divination . . . [or] diagnosing the cause of
illness and prescribing a remedial ceremony” (225). Gititi explains that the
gicaandi ritual is also a communal treasury of knowledge and adaptable figures,
and the gourd used for it is “an emblem of a people’s cultural ‘wisdom’” (224).
The gourd is used to store seeds (for annual plants) and the seeds differ from
each other. Symbolically, the ritual contains both history and the possibility of
new speech adapted to new conditions (225). In this respect, it is a superb
symbol of the work of prophecy in culture. The injunction (repeated many times
by Wangari and others) to “change, for the seeds in the gourd are not all of one
kind” emphasizes the virtues of adaptability and responsiveness (224).

These virtues are necessary for successful rebellion against
neocolonialism. The task of the postcolonial writer, as well as the prophet of
justice, is to adapt native forms for a “resistance culture” that is a “creative
culture, unleashing tremendous energies” (Gititi 215). The development of a
resistance culture involves retrieval of native language and its adaptation to new
circumstances. Ngugi’s “rendering of Devil on the Cross as a ‘gicaandi’ novel
represents an effort to contemporize gicaandi,” making it politically effective

(217). Mazrui makes it clear that this contemporizing is vital to a work that will be

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artistically successful and politically relevant. Christopher Miller explains that
“orality in its broadest sense . . . has a clear political connotation in Africa,
representing the authenticity of the precolonial world” so that “‘tradition’ and
orality are synonymous,” but that Ngugi transcends this usage of orality as a
testament to cultural authenticity (quoted in Mazrui 230). Orality is not enough.
Rather, the language has to be made tenable for the present. Gititi argues that
Devil on the Cross is obviously Ngugi’s “test case for the adequacy of the Gikuyu
language to articulate political, economic, linguistic, religious, philosophical, and
scientific concepts” (215). In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi defines the task of
African writers as one of “creating a literature in [African languages] . . . which
process opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the
other areas of human creative endeavors” (quoted in Gititi 217). While opening
up the language to new disciplines, the composition of literature in these
languages also implies and creates an audience that is African, instead of
serving a foreign audience: it interpolates a nation with an identity tied to that
language, instead of creating more alienated intellectuals like Gatuiria. Mazrui
explains that Ngugi “redefine[s] the audience of African literature” by “turn[ing]
away from the audience defined by the oppressor” (231). Ngugi adapts the
gicaandi ritual for the novel so that this prophetic form can be an effective
political art. He offers it as an alternative to the Biblical prophecy employed by
the colonizers.

But while the gourd that is an instrument of music and divination is a good

symbol of the way that prophecy works to retrieve the past and to generate

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newness for the future, the gicaandi ritual also contains features which are
unique among the forms of prophecy described in previous chapters. The
element of dialogue is radically shifted in this form of prophecy. Gicaandi is
performed within a “communal ethos,” in which “collaboration” and “collective
participation” support the ritual (Gititi 225). It is not a solo performance. The
“pleading cries of many voices” that encourage Gicaandi Player contrast the
solitude of Tarwater and his imaging as a jackal in The Violent Bear it Away (7).
Gicaandi Player does not continue the tradition of Jeremiah and John the Baptist,
wherein the prophet comes from the margin. (This is also the case with the title
character of Ngugi’s Matigari, who “instead of preaching from the wilderness . . .
stamps through the country to confront his enemies” (241).) Gititi emphasizes
that the “Prophet of Justice” should “constitute himself into an oracle” but that this
“task cannot ultimately remain an individual one” (220). “Prophecy,” he
concludes, “is a collective concern” (220).

Part of the work of this collective concern is to diagnose the ills of society
by indicating how people, power and goods move within it. Much of the
movement is lateral, as when Wangari recalls carrying messages back and forth
across enemy lines, and as with the busload of characters that moves across the
trans—African highway (68). Conveyances such as the old Ford matatu in which
they all ride (Mwaura’s livelihood for which he is willing to commit murder), the
train that Wangari almost throws herself under, and the Mercedes Benz in which
Wariinga loses her virginity and her hopes sustain movement in the novel.

Women like Wariinga are continually seduced in BMW’s, such that a man at the

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devil’s feast nicknames the automobile “Be My Woman” (179). The Mercedes in
which Wariinga is seduced is called a “four wheeled tomb” (147). Movement—of
influence, goods, labor and capital—and not the static social hierarchy centered
on sacred property—is the key to justice and injustice. Even when Mwaura prints
the warning “never play with other people’s property” beside his murder victim,
the property in question is a vehicle. His movement in the game of prosperity
was temporarily hindered by his enemy.

One of the thieves emphasizes the means of movement in the game,
stating that “a car is a man’s identity' and tells the tale of failing to recognize his
wife in town “because she had left her car at home” (163). Note that the robbers
judge one another by how they traveled to the feast. Mwireri is rejected as a
competitor because he arrives in a matatu. The master of ceremonies requires
each competitor to describe the vehicles he owns. Thereafter, the boast of one
competitor is much like another: Gitutu claims to “normally go about in a
chauffeur-driven Mercedes Benz 280” and to have also “a Peugeot 604 and a
Range Rover . . . for [his] personal use” (100). His wife has a “Toyota Carina”
which is “just a little shopping basket for carrying goods from the market” (100).
Each of the competitors repeats this understatement of the shopping basket. For
Gitutu’s “young girlfriends” he boasts of buying a “Toyota Corolla and a Datsun
1600 SS,” gifts which reflect his ability to control the movement of property (100).
The vehicles are all foreign—British, American, Japanese, European—and as
such are status symbols denoting both wealth and a dignified assimilation of

foreign culture. The most extreme example of the car metaphor is the nickname

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of Kimeendeeri, a competitor in the feast whose name was given “during the
Emergency [that is, the period of martial law imposed by the British in Kenya
between 1952 and 1960] because of the way he used to grind workers and
peasants to death:” he would “make men and women lie flat on the ground in a
row, and then he would drive his Land Rover over the bodies” (187). The
character of Kimeendeeri was prominent in the Emergency when he was a
“District Officer” (187). Here Ngugi makes Kimeendeeri an example of the kind
of postcolonial opportunistic tyranny that is his central concern in this novel.
After the atrocities he conducted on behalf of the regime during the Emergency,
“when Independence came, Kimeendeeri quickly climbed the administrative
ladder” in the new order “to become a Permanent Secretary,” enabling the
growth of his financial empire such that “his skill at theft and robbery is visible
from a great distance” (187). The narrator generalizes this example, referring to
a “Kimeendeeri class” of oppressors ( 189). Atrocity, cruelty, and opportunistic
postcolonial exploitation come together in the image of the Land Rover. Ngugi
continually utilizes the transport motif to illustrate crucial economic and political
issues.

As the master of ceremonies indicates at the feast, there are differences
between the kinds of transport. Unlike the exclusive Mercedes and BMW
sedans, the train is a public place. Yet it also has negative connotations. On two
occasions Wangari nearly commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a train.
The conveyance that receives the most attention from the narrator is the matatu.

The comically decrepit matatu is an object of frustration to Mwaura, who wishes

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he had something thirty years newer, and to Mwireri, who is rejected from the
competition for arriving in a matatu. Aside from being a conveyance for the
impecunious, the matatu also differs from a car in that it is public. More than
public, it is communal. It is not a place of dignified reserve where strangers
pretend not to see one another. On the contrary, the bus advertises unreserved
conversation: “IF YOU WANT GOSSIP OR RUMOURS RIDE IN MWAURA’S
MATATU” (30). Nikolai Gogol sets up the troika as an image of Russian national
culture in Dead Souls, and the narrator’s treatment of the matatu has something
of this communal flavor. The matatu seemed as if it “was the very first motor

vehicle to have been made on Earth” (31). It is a primordial instance of

transport.35 The narrator also offers an image of cooperation occurring in the
matatu, both when the passengers come together to pay Wangari’s missing fare
and when the matatu stalls: “Muturi, Wangari, Gatuiria and the man in dark
glasses got out and pushed,” and “The engine roared into life” (69). The
suggestion of cooperation here is attenuated by Wariinga’s inability to participate
due to a collapse which the male passengers attribute to “the woman’s disease”
(69). The matatu becomes a specific kind of communal venue that is implicated
in the oppression of Kenya when the narrator compares it to a church. As
Mwireri, promoting the ideals of modern theft and robbery, begins the proverb of
the talents “as if he were singing a lullaby to send their souls and minds to sleep,
“Jacinta Wariinga, Gatuiria, Mwaura, Muturi and Wangari leaned forward so they

would not miss a single word” and Matatu Matata Matamu Model T Ford,

 

35 . . . . .
Critic Andrew Lytle suggests that conveyances reflect the degree of community or privacy In
local cultures.

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registration number MMM 333, was like a church” (81). The negative
connotations of a church in his novel as a place for subduing lower-class
discontent with promises of eternal rewards comes together with the simile of the
lullaby to suggest that religion is a soporific drug. This drug is administered
communally. Mwaura boasts that “God’s kingdom has been brought closer by
Mwaura’s Matatu Matata Matamu Model T Ford,” and “Even the journey to the
Devil’s place is nothing to Mwaura’s . . . Ford” (31). This conveyance has
infernal connotations.

Wangari has false hopes about the matatu when she says “Matatus are
the only places left where people can discuss things freely” (56). Her conviction
that “in a matatu you can speak your thoughts without first looking over your
shoulder to see who is listening” is encouraged by Mwaura, who claims that in
his bus one is “in the heartland of democracy” (56). The openness and freedom
of the matatu turns out to be no such thing. Mwaura, so far from encouraging
free discussion, continually tries to turn the subject from political matters and
ultimately reports the rebellious things that Wangari and Muturi say, assisting in
their arrest. When he says that “in [his] matatu, [one] could be inside a prison or
a grave” where “there’s nothing [one] can’t say” he is foreshadowing the fate of
three of the passengers. Mwireri will be dead: indeed, Mwaura reopens his
career as assassin for the Devil’s Angels and kills him at the orders of one of the
competitors at the feast. Wangari and Muturi ultimately disappear after their trial
for the crime of breaking up the feast, presumably into either a prison or a grave.

The matatu, while described comically and appearing to be a haven of

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democracy and a symbol of lower class community, actually carries implications
of death and imprisonment. When Muturi claims that there are two possible
journeys, one to heaven and one to hell, Mwaura responds with atypical gravity.
When asked which path he chooses, he replies “laughing a little, as if he were
joking,” “‘the road to death!’ ” (55) He continues “mockingly,” “where do you think
we are headed now?” (55) While the matatu might seem to be a symbol of that
organized unity of the people that the narrator espouses, its journey is a dark
one.

The transportation theme becomes more complicated when Wariinga
fulfills her potential as a worker, a person, and a political player (instead of victim)
when she studies engineering and becomes a top-notch mechanic. Her
mechanical ability and knowledge give her dignity and status, especially among
men. In her encounter with a group of men puzzling over a broken-down truck by
the side of the road she earns respect for herself and the ability of women in
general, which is one of the narrator’s themes. On offering her services for the
first time, the other mechanics are “beside themselves with laughter” and ask
why she doesn’t “go and sell beer in a bar” where she can “swing [her] skirt to
attract men” (220). When she proves her abilities by using a wooden spoon to
diagnose a “loose bolt that joined the conrad to the crankshaft, she earns
accolades. The observers wonder that “[their] women have acquired so much

learning” (221). Thereafter, “her fame spread[s] to every corner of the city”

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(221).36 Her mastery of engines gives her a meaningful place in society. When
she leaves the scene of the Rich Old Man’s death, she does so on her feet, a
master of political movement and not a mere passenger.

While conveyances seem to be morally ambivalent or neutral in the
transportation theme, they are still a part of the message of the Prophet of
Justice. When he divines the reality of life in Kenya with its ills and its
possibilities for change, he presents the movement of action in that society as
occurring along mainly horizontal trajectories. There are a number of these
trajectories. Roads and railways crisscross Kenya and men and women move
along them in their conveyances toward wealth or death or freedom, exploiting or
fleeing or rebelling. By emphasizing this variety of movement, the narrator
contradicts the static model of society taught by the colonizers (and their
neocolonial heirs in tyranny) for which the kingdom of heaven described in the
gospel parables is the paradigm. This kingdom, as Mwireri explains, has a
hierarchical structure that plummets from high to low, from God, the angels, the
disciples, the saints on down to the believers on earth. Truth and power drop
down from above in this static model: nothing changes and all has the ordered air
of inevitability. Resistance, then, is not only useless but wrong or (as in the
historical accusation lodged against Ngugi) destabilizing. One of the thieves
offers another glimpse of this false projection of a static society when he

describes his Euro daycare scheme with the inflatable white children designed to

 

36 Elleke Boehmer argues that in spite of Wariinga’s revolutionary energy, “Ngugi betrays his firm
patriarchal affiliations” by not “dismantling those structures that marginalize and oppress women”
(150). Instead, he “places a male weapon in the hands of his women characters" so that “male
values thus come encased in female shape” (150).

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attract parents who wanted their children to resemble Europeans. These anxious
imitators of foreign customs are fooled by a static scene. The daycare with
inflatable children is like the unmoving set of a play: it is an image and not real.
This play set with its stationary figures is a model made to fool outsiders, and it
provides a metaphor for the colonial structure of society that native outsiders
gaze upon. Ngugi’s prophet-narrator draws attention away from this false model
in order to point out living, moving social reality. The narrator encourages
Kenyans to enter and master this movement as the thieves and robbers have.
Ngugi retrieves the power of word as deed from those who use Christian
prophecy to support unjust conditions of economic rule left over from imperialist
practices. He utilizes a prophecy that instead of coming down from on high
moves upward from below, resurrecting what has been buried in a grave: the
personhood of Kenya’s young women, the vitality of the land, and native
language-creation. While the whole enterprise of the story becomes a piece of
prophecy, it also calls for contemplation: “come and . . . reason together. / Come
and . . . reason together now . . . about / Jacinta Wariinga before . . . pass[ing]
judgment on [Kenya’s] children” invites the narrator (9). The word as deed that
he relates, then, has the purpose of reasoning and averting judgment, which are
activities performed not by the prophet but by the assembly of people and

authorized not by a single voice but by communal argument.

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Works Cited

Boehmer, Elleke. “The Master’s Dance to the Master’s Voice: Nationalism and the
Representation of Women.” Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi,
Desai, Walcott. Ed Michael Parker and Roger Starkey. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1995. (143-153)

Balogun, F. Odun. “Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross: the Novel as Hagiography of a
Marxist.” Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott. Ed
Michael Parker and Roger Starkey. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
(127-141)

Critical Essays on Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Ed. Peter Nazareth. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 2000.

Gititi, Gitahi. “Recuperating a ‘Disappearing’ Art Form: Resonances of ‘Gicaandi’
in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross.” Critical Essays on Ngugi Wa
Thiongo. Ed. Peter Nazareth. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000 (213-
227)

http://www.En.Wikipedia.org - Ngugi Wa Thiongo

Mazrui, Alamin and Lupenga Mphande. “Orality and the Literature of Combat: The
Legacy of Fanon.” Critical Essays on Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Ed. Peter
Nazareth. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000. (228-248).

Nazareth, Peter. “Introduction: Saint Ngugi.” Critical Essays on Ngugi Wa
Thiongo. Ed. Peter Nazareth. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000. (1-16).

McLaren, Joseph. Ideology and Form: The Critical Reception of Petals of Blood.
Critical Essays on Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Ed. Peter Nazareth. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 2000. (187-202).

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Chapter Six

DeLillo’s Novelist: Absence versus Apocalypse in Mao II
The previous chapter describes Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Marxist ethic of prophecy in
which the prophet figure guides prophetic truth in an upward movement from the
masses instead of in a downward movement from a divine source, as is
traditional. Ngugi’s prophetic speech moves up from below because it
contradicts the colonizer’s truth which is imposed from above. This revisionist
prophecy also holds in abeyance judgment of the oppressed. For instance, the
reader is asked not to judge Wariinga for murdering her prospective father-in-Iaw.
Thus it is not surprising that the historical allegations of terrorism do not
accompany the frequent mentions of the Mau Mau resistance group, which is
ever-present in the dialogue and background of Devil on the Cross. Ngugi’s
prophet does not cast judgment. Nonetheless, the question of what kind of
political art prophecy is persists. Don DeLillo’s Mao ll asks frankly whether all
resistance is akin to terrorism and whether the terrorist is an extension of the
novelist. The title Mao lI—which could be read as Mao Mao—recalls the problem
of whether resistance to tyranny can itself be tyrannical. Mao II calls into question
the authenticity of two kinds of resistance to hegemony: writing and terrorism.
Mao II shows two echoes of prophecy competing for an audience in post
industrial society. One strain, that of equivocal prophecy, he associates with the
artist. The artist impinges on the consciousness of people, altering possibilities
(of the imagination) and shaping memory and history. Despite this forcefulness,

the artist as a prophet figure is a strong sign of absence, sustaining prophecy’s

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contradictory qualities of absence and presence. Other prophet figures, like
Mao, Reverend Moon and the Ayatollah Khomeini deploy unequivocal prophecy
that generates a sense of presence, often expressed in crowds. The terrorist,
who ostensibly resists established power, is another prophet figure that employs
unequivocal prophecy, again favoring presence over absence. This novel not
only maps these two strains of prophecy—one exaggerating absence and the
other presence-as they act in society, but also follows the transformations and
resemblances between them.

The plot of Mao II is that a famous writer named Bill Gray, who has lived in

mysterious seclusion for decades, agrees to be photographed by Brita Nilson, a

woman who is making a photographic record of living writers.37 When a minor
French poet is taken hostage in Beirut by terrorists, Bill’s publisher Charlie and
the terrorists’ suave spokesman George persuade Bill to intervene to save the
hostage. Bill leaves behind his assistant Scott and their shared girlfriend Karen,
a former “Moonie,” and departs for a London press conference about the missing
poet. When a bomb diverts the conference, Bill agrees to go secretly to Athens
where George persuades him to trade himself for the hostage in Beirut. On the
way to Beirut he dies in anonymity from injuries sustained in a car accident in
Athens.

The condition in which DeLillo’s characters live is shaped by the mass

production of images, which combine to overwhelm viewers with a spurious

 

37 The genre classification of DeLillo’s Mao ll varies. It belongs to the “Paranoid School of
Vonnegut, Pynchon and Barth" or in Alan Wilde's term to “midfiction” or in LeCLaire's term to
“polarfiction” (Ruppersburg 5; LeClair 98). More widely used is LeClair’s classification of DeLillo
as a “systems novelist” as suggested in “the first book-length analysis of DeLillo’s fiction,” In the
Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Ruppersburg 12).

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sense of presence. Bill Gray experiences the onslaught of visual data that
ushers the viewer into the glut of images. When he goes to New York, he sees
the “rush of things, of shuffled sights . . . the deep stream of reflections, heads
floating in windows, towers liquefied on taxi doors” (94). What strikes him about
this layered sights and reflections is that they “simply rush at him, massively”
without telling him what he is “supposed to think of this” (94). He observes “the
removed nature of contemporary experience” and the “contemporary shift in
attention from reality to representations of reality” (Ruppersburg 18, 19). Bill
describes the profusion of images as one of the conditions of the modern world:
“in our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too” (37).
DeLillo’s depiction of these commercial and everyday images in his novels is no
“veneer” of “realism,” insists Frank Lentricchia (6). Rather the author's literary
images are part of a “historical rigor” and “cultural density” and his characters are

“expressions of—and responses to—specific historical processes” that involve

these images (6; 3).38 The superfluity of competing images and the glut of signs
in society, such as the Coke ll advertisements that Brita sees interspersed with
Maoist revolutionary slogans on a wall in Beirut, produce a sense of satiety
verging on gluttony. The industrial society that produces these images
Proliferates and scatters meaning and desire. In Beirut, Brita observes the
“image mill” (229). She sees “a human skull,” “T-shirts with illustrated skulls,”

“DICtUres of skulls,” “skull writing,” “serial grids of blue skulls,” people tattooed

3\_2

8

Leltttricchia’s introduction addresses the negative reviews of Libra, particularly by George Will
and Jonathon Yardley. These reviews preoccupy many of the essayists in Lentricchia’s
collectlon. Ruppersburg points out that these reviews notwithstanding, “it can hardly be said that

[DeLillo] has not received sympathetic press from intelligent readers, many of them novelists
ther“Selves” (1 ).

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with skulls and graffiti referring to “the Father of the Skulls,” “the Skull Maker” and
so on (229). Seven or more layers deep, these images proliferate so that, as
reviewer Louis Menand summarizes, there is a “voracious transformation of
everything into a simulacrum of itself’ (Menand 75).

But dissipated as the images are, their sense of presence can be gathered
to make an apocalyptic impact. Autocratic figures such as the Ayatollah
Khomeini, Chairman Mao, Reverend Moon, and terrorist leader Abu Rashid
attract belief by making themselves a ubiquitous presence through the repetition
of images. Brita sees young terrorists-in-training wearing hoods on their heads
and Rashid’s picture on their shirts. She learns that the hoods (which the captive
poet also wondered about) obliterate their features and make way for Rashid’s:
“the image of Rashid is their identity” (233). All of these boys are “one man,” and
that man is the leader. These figures magnify and repeat (the same) image and
sign so that their own pictures dominate all others: building-sized portraits
intensify the aura of a single image so that it diminishes the others. The
importance of this dominating image is recognized by enemies of Rashid: “a pair
of local militias are firing at portraits of each other’s leader” (227).

The anonymity of the boys in the hoods resembles the anonymity of the
thousands of couples being married by Reverend Moon in Yankee Stadium.
Among them is Karen, who so transparent to the glut of images that she can
predict them as they appear on television. Like the boys in training, the brides
and grooms are “immunized against the language of self’ (8). Karen thus “fades

into the thousands, the columned mass” (10). The “Master,” like Rashid,

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enlarges himself to overcome the glut of images: “he stands in the room with
them when his three dimensional body is thousands of miles away” (9). The
grids of brides and grooms, all dedicated to the Master and to the promulgation
of his teaching, all “dream[ing] about him” and seeing “him in visions,” are the
means of magnifying the Master and reproducing his image (9). They also unite
to magnify him through “following Master’s chant word for word” (10). These
rituals are a means to overcome the absence of the Master and to project his
presence.

The image mill can be “millennial” when the images are focused and
repeated in the hands of an autocratic leader like Rashid (229). The terrorist
Rashid claims to change the course of history with his apocalyptic acts of
violence. Through terror he “do[es] history in the morning and changels] it after
lunch” (235). The history that people “used to . . . [achieve] through work” and
that was gathered in “the human memory” lacks the solid reality of his
manufactured apocalyptic events as well as the meaning offered by his
statements about “the new future” (235). His “men live in history as never
before,” their actions suffused with a reality not accessible through ordinary
speech or work. Like Lilburne in Brother to Dragons and Tavleen in The Satanic
Verses, Rashid and his followers gain a sense of reality through violent acts, a
sense that is heightened by a prophetic imagining of the meaning of their acts.
Terrorism is the manufacturing of apocalypse, both in the sense of a violent
event and in the sense that terrorism tries deterministically to manifest an end

that it predicts.

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The terrorist utilizes the fascination of the news media, observing the
motto “the worse, the better.” Via the news media, society absorbs the terrorists’
prophetic gestures through images. The narrator discusses the “emergence of
news as an apocalyptic force” whereby each image must be worse than the last.
Apocalyptic images of destruction on the news mesmerize Karen. The desire to
view apocalyptic events on the television is something that comes up in White
Noise as well. Like Karen, the Gladney family watches disasters and yet “wish for
something bigger, grander, more sweeping” (DeLillo quoted in Aaron 70). The
explanation offered by Jack’s friends is that “disasters focus our attention. We
need them and depend on them as long as they occur elsewhere” (Aaron 70).
The news media is the means of the delivery of fear and paranoia into the
everyday lives (and bloodstreams) of people like Karen and Brita. Scott speaks
of “the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force” (72). The news “provides an
unremitting mood of catastrophe” (72). This catastrophe is something people
desire, offering an “emotional experience not available elsewhere” (72).

But what is the need for this emotional experience and this focus of
attention? In part, catastrophe provides meaning by producing an ending. The
desire for apocalypse is summed up in George’s explanation of how terrorist
events protrude on ordinary life. “Who” he asks “do we take seriously?” (157)
The answer is “only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith:”
the person who embraces endings (157). Karen has apocalyptic visions as a
response to the evil of indifference she sees in the tent city of homeless people.

Thus “she began to form pictures of people falling in the street . . . all bloodied

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up” (149). She amplifies the apocalyptic statements that she hears and desires
to “bring hurry-up time to all man” (146). The “world-shattering rapture” that she
chants for during her wedding ceremony is another instance of apocalypse.
There is a certain desire for apocalyptic events not only on the part of the
terrorists who are willing to manufacture them, as with Karen and her fellow
disciples. This “chant” is efficacious: it “brings the End Time closer” and
becomes “the End Time” (16). The Master is a locus of apocalypse—the ultimate
meaningful time “when names are lost” (16). This summit of meaning “past
religion and history” clears away the clutter of worldwide banal ordinary life in
which “people sit at desks and stare at office walls . . . smell their shirts . . . [and]
bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones . . . knowing
there is something they’ve forgotten to do” (16). Apocalypse contrasts the
banality of ordinary life and the indifference to evil.

Similarly, in the prisoner’s life “there [is] no sequence or narrative or one
day that leads to another” (109). His life has no meaningful beginning or ending:
he asks “in the beginning, what?” (112) This absence of organizing principles
from which to fill out meaning and identity distresses the prisoner. When his jailer
stops coming, “the last sense making thing, the times for meals and beatings, [is]
in danger of collapse” (110). In his solitude “there was no one to remind him who
he was” (111). The prisoner almost wishes for the return of his jailer so that he
can retrieve time and identity. He imagines two cures for the absence of
beginnings and endings. These two cures are “a woman wearing stockings who

might whisper the word ‘stockings’” and “paper and something to write with”

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(110). The woman with stockings could moor language back into a referent and
thus rescue his rationality. The paper, on the other hand, would give him “some
way to sustain a thought, place it in the world” (110). In the absence of these
things, with only his “junior fantasies” to sustain him, he “fell to mumbling” sounds
without meaning (111). Language, then, has the potential to cure distress
caused by the lack of an ending.

Apocalypse is the cure employed by authoritarian figures—Moon,
Khomeini, Mao, Rashid—but not by DeLillo. Mark Osteen argues that DeLillo
writes “a nuclear novel that is not apocalyptic,” but instead “hopeful” (quoted in
Ruppersburg 16). The experiences of terror and cataclysm in this novel differ
from that of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Glenn Scott Allen argues that DeLillo’s
treatment of apocalyptic themes differs from the more classical paranoia of
Thomas Pynchon and George Orwell and that DeLillo rejects the “paranoid
strategy for postmodern survival as formulated in Pynchon” (117). This
persistent sense of apocalypse is the fearful condition of the postmodern subject:
“if terrorists have truly become ‘players’ in the contemporary social narrative,
then . . . they contribute as much to the formation of our identity as to their own,
and their acts of seemingly random and ‘meaningless’ violence have become an
integral component of what being a modern individual means” (Allen 119). The
sense of impending apocalypse that pervades society is specifically manifested
in fear of terrorist attacks. Brita carefully editing the belongings she travels with
so that she does not offend anyone dangerous. Glenn Scott Allen claims that

terrorism is one of the historical processes which “in Don DeLillo’s work . . . have

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seeped into the very texture of contemporary life” (116). The fear that Marvin
Lundy in Undenrvorld says is in “the bloodstream” is only partly due to the
possibility of terrorist attacks organized by people like Rashid (Knight 286). The
other part of it is pervasive observation by the state. The resulting psychological
condition of the masses is one of paranoia, which is a much-discussed theme
among critics of DeLillo. “Postmodern terrorism” is a continuation of the social
experience of “intra state terrorism” of the Cold War (Allen 121). This Cold War
climate of fear was not just the product of nuclear threat. Rather, it was caused
by internal scrutiny. For Pynchon, Allen explains, a state of “international and
domestic tension” came about through “the development of complex and
interconnected domestic and international networks of surveillance that depend
upon the acquisition and circulation of vast quantities of information” (121). This
obsessive scrutiny produced the same anxiety, fear and paranoia and
consequently “sacrifed[ed]” the “civilian as any sort of independent ‘subject’”
(121).

Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, plays out the obsessive surveillance of
citizens by their own government. But Orwell’s response to the climate of
obsessive surveillance is different than DeLillo’s. DeLillo offers something
different than the apocalypticism which is Orwell’s response to the social
conditions of his time. Perhaps the difference lies in what Peter Knight calls a
“secure paranoia” versus an insecure paranoia. Underworld’s Klara Sax
describes the secure paranoia as belonging to an age when “power . . . was

stable” and “focused” during the Cold War (Knight 286). The insecure paranoia

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that is part of living in post cold war society haunts DeLillo’s characters and only
in the presence of apocalyptic images can this paranoia be focused and the
subject be at rest. In Greece, Bill observes a mood of relish in the war, seeing
“women wearing skull jewelry and . . . young bravos in camouflage sunglasses
and pieces of militia gear” (211). He discovers in them a “shared awareness that
they did not want to escape the war, that the war was pulling them into it and
they were here to join hands and death-dance willingly past the looted hotels”
(211). The visiting tourists even participate in this desire for death, asking “the
driver to improvise a verse for Kataklysmos, an important local feast in memory
of the flood” (210). “Get me annihilation,” the chant of a homeless woman Karen
encounters, might answer their needs: they want a “cataclysmic verse” to focus
their scattered, insecure fear (181; 211). Daniel Aaron lists “catastrophe” as one
of the persistent themes in DeLillo’s novels and calls DeLillo “a sociologist of
crisis, pondering the ways in which the raw facts of natural and man-made
disasters are processed into theory and insinuated in the public mind” (70).
Collective fears are DeLillo’s material.

But if contemporary paranoia is insecure instead of secure, how does
DeLillo propose that people cope with it? Allen maintains that in DeLillo’s work
the “only hope for redemption from a self-perpetuating cycle of terrorism,
repression, and paranoia is in moving away from constructions of the self that
work to deny or subvert classical conceptions of the individual as the primary site
of responsibility and authority” (117). In identifying a need for the return of the

romantic individual, Allen departs from other readers in this analysis: David

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Cowart, for instance, recognizes in Americana “the gathering recognition—
backed up by post-Freudian psychology—that the old stable ego has become
permanently unmoored” (83). However, in the calculus of prophecy that DeLillo
employs the prophet figure who addresses the problems of social paranoia must
balance individuality and anonymity, message and dialogue and presence and
absence.

The novel contrasts two ways to resist incorporation into the glut of
images generated by industrial society: creating absolute presence and
deploying signs of absence. Bill hints at this age-old competition when he points
out that “in a mosque” there are “no images” (37). Like a magnet, one of these
polar opposites (presence) attracts and the other (absence) repels belief. When
a profusion of images is controlled by an authoritarian figure like Rashid and
directed to a single meaning, the images can sustain a sense of presence that
precludes absence or ambiguity. This absolute presence in turn supports the
power and authority of the leader figure.

Instead of the absolute presence of authoritarian figures, absence
distinguishes Bill's career as he hides from fans and interviewers in seclusion
and anonymity. When he decides to emerge from hiding by allowing Brita to
photograph him, he explains that “when a writer doesn’t show his face, he
becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear” (36). A
prophetic message must always suggest this reluctance to appear since by its
nature the prophecy is a message carried on behalf of someone who will not

speak directly. In withdrawing from society in the wake of his successful book,

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Bill becomes a sign of absence. By hiding his face he “is encroaching on holy
turf” and “playing God’s own trick” (37). He stands in for God as a sign of
absence. But, while Bill calls it a trick, his absence is actually consonant with his
work, which exposes him to “doubt” and “loss of faith” (38). In another advocacy
of absence, Bill offers the principle that “the withheld work of art is the only

eloquence left” (67). Art is powerful only insofar as it is absent. Bill’s stance

makes him representative in the novel of the whole notion of absence.39

The photographs of Bill do not end his program of absence. Rather, they
mark his death and further absence. After Bill’s departure Scott recognizes that
he “had his picture taken not because he wanted to come out of hiding but
because he wanted to hide more deeply, he wanted to revise the terms of his
seclusion, he needed the crisis of exposure to give him a powerful reason to
intensify his concealment” (140). In the instance of this writer, death becomes
another form of absence, powerful because it accompanies the legends of his
sightings, established through many years of seclusion, and the rumor of his
withheld novel. Scott recalls the “stories that Bill was dead, Bill was in Manitoba,
Bill was living under another name, Bill would never write another word” (140).
Scott diagnoses these rumors as “people’s need to make mysteries and legends”
(141). His absence, even through death, magnifies his influence. His death is

something he foresees during his photo shoot with Brita. He insists that he is

acting before the camera, “playing the idea of death” (42). Death is implicit in the

 

39 . . . . . . . . . .

There IS a srgnlficant resemblance to Salman Rushdie In the Situation of writers In this novel.
Bill regards himself as a hunted man. Margaret Scanlan describes this novel as a response to
the Rushdie affair which, some say, accounts for its pessimism.

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portrait photograph, he says, because “a portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything
until the subject is dead” (42). Thus, he feels like he is attending his “own wake”
(42). In a sense this is true, because no one examines the developed photos
until after he dies on the boat to Beirut. Instead of contributing to the
meaningless (or perhaps overly meaningful) glut of images, Brita’s portraits of Bill
become a transformative means to absence via death; due to the message Brita
carries from Charlie during the photo shoot, Bill embarks on his journey to
London, Greece, and Beirut. When he disappears on this journey, Scott reasons
that “Bill was hiding from his photograph” (143).

While hiding from his photograph, Bill converses with George. George, as
Rashid’s representative, advocates a radical sense of presence over and against
absence. He explains that Rashid intends to be like “Chairman Mao,” “a figure of
absolute being” (158). Absolute being is absolute and unequivocal presence with
no room for absence, ambiguity or uncertainty. Troubled societies, George
claims, need “Total politics, total authority, total being” (158). Bill adds to the list
“total destruction and total order” (158). George wants absolute being and his
goal is unequivocal meaning as over and against the glut of images and the
accompanying indifference to the “downtrodden, the spat-upon” (158). Bill, on
the other hand, offers equivocalness: the writer provides “ambiguities,
contradictions, whispers, hints” (159). These ambiguities combine presence with
absence. The hints and whispers are precisely not “something enormous and
commanding” (158). Bill’s hiding achieves something different from what

terrorism, as described by George, tries to achieve. On a continuum, though, Bill

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would be in the middle with the terrorists aligned with absolute being on one end
and the nihilism of commercial society on the other end. While Karen’s tendency
is toward absolute belief, Scott has occupied the nihilist end of the spectrum. His
pursuit of Bill Gray was “the story of his journey out of nonbeing” (57).

While Bill serves as a prophet figure who offers an alternative to the
nihilism of the image culture by balancing presence with absence, his
prophesying is not invulnerable to error. Both strains of prophecy can seem to
serve the homogenizing image mill of simulacra that the prophets ostensibly
fight. One kind can seemingly transform into another. The transformation of one
kind of prophetic work into another generates conversations among Bill, George,
Brita and Scott about the resemblances (symbiotic relationships) between
terrorists and novelists: “what terrorists gain, novelists lose” (157). George posits
that their work is the same, a suggestion that Bill disputes. Rashid and Bill are
“two underground figures” and thus “men of the same measure in a way” (156).
George says that “it’s the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that
underlies all obscurity and neglect,” but Bill responds that this is pure myth,” the
notion of “the terrorist as solitary outlaw” (158). Instead of disruption, the terrorist
groups seek “order” (158). George claims that “only the terrorist stands outside”
those “societies [that are] reduced to blur and glut” (157). Terrorists, George
insists, are the only figures “the culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate”
(157). The writer, claims George, “knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and
feels” because “through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent

man who lives in the dark” (130). Invoking a tradition of the novel as social

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critique, George insists that Bill’s sympathies cannot be with “the colonial police,
the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, [or] the militaristic state,”

but must be with “the terrorist” (130). In a separate conversation, Bill also speaks

of the “curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists” (41). 40 The terrorist, he
opines, has taken on the role of the novelist in making “raids on human
consciousness” and “alter[ing] the inner life of the culture” (41). Allen interprets
the comment that “terrorists have usurped the role in the public consciousness
that novelists once held” as “referring to the fact that terrorist acts must be
circulated to attain identity, and that such acts compete for the public’s limited
attention span with other circulating ‘texts’” (117).

Ostensibly, the novelist and the terrorist are similar because they shatter
apathy and rebuke entrenched indifference to social problems. In this novel the
writer and the terrorist engage in prophetic kinds of work in order to address the
same problem of the loss of social focus due to the superfluity of commercial

images. As noted in the Satanic Verses chapter, the figure of the terrorist is self-

consciously prophetic.41 Like Tavleen, Rashid is an impatient prophet, claiming
to offer the true vision of society, and manifesting his predictions with apocalyptic
gestures. Another of his prophetic affectations is to claim that he stands outside
of society, which becomes a basis for comparison with the novelist.

Nonetheless, Bill decides through his conversations with George that the claims

 

40 Allen follows DeLillo’s link between terrorism and writing in Libra, so this theme goes beyond
Mao II: “for DeLillo terrorism and writing are integrally linked” (129).

41 . . .

More specrfically, they resemble those Hebrew professronal prophets who engaged in
dramatic public acts of frenzy and self-mutilation to demonstrate to a fascinated audience their
faith and commitment.

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to subversion are false and that the terrorists are “totalitarian” (158).

Bill intends his disappearance to be transformative or redemptive.
According to the terms of George’s offer, Bill is to replace the anonymous poet-
hostage with himself as hostage. The terrorist group hopes to gain a higher-
profile hostage and thus greater recognition and notoriety, but Bill also has hopes
too. While freeing the hostage, his imprisonment will manifest the condition of
the novelist as hunted man and the power of the writer to “absorb . . . terror”
(140). Thus he intensifies the role of the novelist, contradicts it to the role of the
terrorist, which competes with that of the novelist in its prophetic gestures. This
freeing of the hostage (which never happens) would be a redemptive action. It
differs from the Christian pattern of redemption in that in the trinity of Bill, Scott
and Karen where Karen, like the Holy Spirit in the theology of the trinity, is a
shared love, it is the father figure and not the son who sacrifices himself. It is
George who entices Bill to redeem the poet. George makes it clear that if Bill
does not go to Beirut and put himself into the hands of Rashid—that is, if Bill gets
“on a plane . . . and go[es] home,” Rashid’s group will “kill the hostage” (164).
Alluding to the world of layered cataclysmic images, Bill adds “and [they will]
photograph his corpse” (164). George’s response is “it’s better than nothing”
(164). Struggling out of non-being, his group is happy to use a simulacrum. Bill
also understands that a hostage heralds genocide: “the hostage is the
miniaturized form. The first tentative rehearsal for mass terror” (163). In a
passage that might be paraphrased from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of

Totalitarianism, Bill explains “the setup:” “You predict many dead if your vision of

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the truth isn’t realized. Then you kill them” (163). The hostage, then, is a stand-
in for thousands or millions of terrorized people. He is a predictive sign for a
mass of victims. Bill agrees to be a stand-in for the hostage. Thus Bill comes to
represent millions. From a recluse who is absolutely separate and private, Bill
goes to a stand-in for the whole world, doing something “for the good of mankind”
(159). He is enlarged and universalized. For Bill as a prophet there is no interior
truth to bring out of a cave as a sybil would: instead, there are only enlargements
and repetitions—the manipulations applicable to images.

At the same time that absolute presence is critiqued, the quality of
absence as employed by Chairman Mao and even Bill is described as something
of a cheap trick. As Charlie proposes that “one missing writer read the work of
another” the suggestion of commercial advantage hovers in the background. His
remark on “how beautifully balanced” this event would be is really about how the
event would appear on the news. Absence, too, can be co-opted into the
depthless glut of images. It can be a tool of terrorists like Rashid, opportunistic
businessmen like Charlie, media tycoons, and totalitarian leaders like Moon and
Mau. Scott regards Bill’s practice of hiding as a way of making him more real,
and the hiding makes him “think of great leaders who regenerate their power by
dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns” (141). Mao Zedong is
one of his examples, and the novel’s title suggests that Bill might be another
Mao, another messianic figure staging a return

While the terrorists try to achieve absolute presence and the novelist

utilizes absence, these elements become mixed in the affair of the hostage.

227

When Charlie invites Bill to read the poems of the “young man held hostage in
Beirut” by a terrorist group, he explains that the group is obscure and that “the
hostage is the only proof they exist” (98). Needing to put themselves on the
political map, the group requires the attention of the media, which they hope to
gain by the abduction of the poet. Ironically, the absence or disappearance of this
poet is their means to presence and acknowledgement in society. The French
poet is absent: therefore the terrorist group is undeniably present.

This system of trading absence and presence is organized around the
news media, an almost monolithic force which presents images to the
presumably passive masses of the public. The interchange here amounts to a
monologue delivered by the speaking authority to the silent audience. The
monologue of the news is impersonal, obscuring the audience. Where the
dialogue might be cued to the specifics of the people involved as personalities,
the monologue simply needs someone to stand in as the audience, which is
recipient of the message rather than observer. Bill notices the impersonal and
even exploitative flavor of this exchange. In the discussion of the hostage
incident, Bill reacts to Charlie’s proposal as “pretty fucking fishy” (98). Charlie’s
“high-minded committee on free expression” gets “press,” the terrorist's “new
group gets press, the young man is sprung from his basement room, the
journalists get a story, so what’s the harm” (98). Charlie’s deal is a trade-off with
mutual gain that echoes the deal struck in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, in which an
aging and sterile husband gets an heir, his wife gets a young lover, the young

man gets the pretty girl, and the procurer of this ending gets paid.

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The harm is that the hostage as a person is forgotten. Both his captors
and his rescuers conspire to bury him alive in the glut of images. The hostage
poet realizes at a certain point that he has been forgotten, or at least transformed
into an image: “he was a digital mosaic in the processing grid, lines of ghostly
type on microfilm” (112). Intelligence workers and “military men” were “putting
him together, storing his data in starfish satellites, bouncing his image off the
moon” and in this impersonal process “he was lost in the wavebands, one more
code for the computer mesh, for the memory of crimes too pointless to be solved”
(112). If the crime had a point, that is a narrative with a beginning and a
recognizable ending with an audience to acknowledge it, then the prisoner
wouldn’t be forgotten. Critic Silvia Bizzini points out that “the real tragedy
described in the novel, then, is that the captured poet is used by everybody—
nobody is interested in him as a human being” (253). In his final disappearance,
the poet becomes lost even to the narrator as he is completely commoditized.
Brita asks Rashid “what happened to the hostage” and he explains that hostages
are “like drugs, like weapons, like jewelry, like a Rolex or a BMW” (235). The
outcome is that Rashid “sold him to the fundamentalists” (235). Brita, in her
reluctance to get involved and “end up all confused and disgraced and maimed,”
makes one last quiet inquiry: “‘and they are keeping him,’ she says” (232; 235).
In a response that critic Silvia Caporale Bizzini calls “blood-curdling,” Rashid
answers that “they are doing whatever they are doing” (Bizzini 255; DeLillo 235).

Even for Bill the hostage becomes a cipher and not a person: “Bill, in his

own way,” thinks of him “as a means to obtain something for [his] cause” (253).

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His “interest is thus directed not towards the prisoner, but towards an idea in
danger, the idea of the writer as intellectual and thinking being” (Bizzini 253).
Bizzini cites Bill’s evaluation of the kidnaping as “something serenely pure,” and
an effort to “destroy the mind that makes words and sentences” (DeLillo 161).
Ultimately Bill endures this same dehumanizing abstraction: “at the end of his life
. . . Bill Gray is transformed into the thing that he had wanted to avoid: a silent
image with a writer’s name” (Bizzini 254). For Bizzini, this absence is not
salutary or redemptive. It does not successfully fight the evil of indifference or the
glut of images and the processes of commoditization.

But other salutary transformations are possible. Glenn Scott Allen
discusses Ralph Dowling’s theory that the terrorist message can depart from the
way that message is read: “it is . . . essentially impossible for most ‘First World’
Western civilians to ‘read’ the terrorist text, to see in it any expression worth
interpreting” (119). Instead of meaningless noise, the terrorist acts, are texts in
which terrorists “ ‘speak’ themselves,” and these “ ‘seemingly senseless killings .
. . serve the same function for terrorist society that wars and punishment of
criminals and dissidents perform for mainstream society’” (Dowling quoted in
Allen 119). This doubling of the message is useful in terms of an analysis of
terrorism as prophetic. The terrorist “speaks” according to a prophetic model,
whereby his acts fulfill and determine reality in a deterministic way. But for
victims, terror is a sign of the randomness of life. The terrorist speaks
determinism and the potential victims hear contingency.

Depressed over the ruined condition of terrorist-torn Beirut, Brita stands

230

on the balcony of her hotel and looks out over the destruction. Watching the
approach of a military tank, she thinks that another battle is about to start.
Instead, she sees a bridal couple parading down the street bringing a party with
them. The apocalypse of destruction that has hit Beirut is not a permanent
ending. Rather, in the midst of a persistent and immanent apocalypse, people
continue the rituals of living. The destruction does not nullify the bridal ritual
because the bridal couple incorporates and transforms the machinery of
destruction. This appropriation thrills Brita, who abandons her ironic and
wounded reserve, her anger over injustice and her skepticism of any zealous and
dangerous hopes. She jubilates, emerging from her room to “toast the
newlyweds” (241). Her multilingual repetitions of “‘Bonne chance . . . ‘Bonheur'
and ‘Good luck’ and ‘Salam’ and ‘Skal’” are another instance of depthless
layering,” like the building walls covered with repeated images (241). These
wishes for “luck,” or favorable contingency, also express a hope that is not tied to
a deterministic ending like an apocalypse.

In the absence of a single tyrannizing belief like George’s “absolute being”
or Reverend Mao’s “total being,” hope—and a relinquishment of fear—is still
possible. The wedding scene in Beirut at the end in which “the dead city [is]
photographed one more time” contrasts with the wedding scene at the beginning
in Yankee Stadium. While in New York, the narrator succumbs to a pessimistic
and Orwellian view that “the future belongs to crowds,” Brita is able to overcome
this kind of deterministic and apocalyptic outlook (16). Oddly, the scene in the

“dead city” of Beirut is less apocalyptic and more open to possibility than the

231

living city of New York.

Like Brita, Bill Gray emphasizes distances himself and the novelist in
general from any “absolute authority” as well as from any sense of inevitability or
destiny (159). While George pushes the notion that the novelist is analogous to
a terrorist or to a totalitarian authority, Bill tries to disseminate the authority and
singularity of the author: the novel, he insists, is “a democratic shout. Anybody
can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street” (159).
This “nameless drudge” or “some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit
down and find his voice and luck out and do it” (159). Note that this work is not
predestined or determined: rather, it is a matter of “luck” (159). At first, Bill takes
seriously the notion that the novelist is a terrorist, but he then pushes the two
concepts in separate directions. Instead of a maverick and “solitary outlaw,” the
terrorist is a “perfect little totalitarian state” (158). The author is more truly a
“solitary outlaw” than the terrorist: Bill distances the author from any flavor of
monolithic presence. The monolithic figures of presence in this novel—Reverend
Moon, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Chairman Mao and Rashid—are oppressive
authorities. They are also prophet figures practicing a particular model of
prophecy: they favor presence over absence and transmit truth instead of
participating in a dialogue. Unequivocal prophecy is one of the targets of critique
in this novel.

Like Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, this novel departs from the model of
prophecy as an in-and-out movement between appearance and reality,

experience and truth and employs instead a back-and-forth movement between

232

images that compete for an audience. The circumstance of a society glutted with
images makes in-and-out movement impossible, for in a world covered with
illusions, interior and exterior seem to be delusory ideas. For Scott, Bill Gray’s
writing captures the conditions of living in the image-glutted world: “he caught the
back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets

completely forgotten” (51).

233

Works Cited

Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank
Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 67-82.

Allen, Glenn Scott. “The End of Pynchon’s Rainbow: Postmodern Terror and
Paranoia in DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.” Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. Ed.
Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 115-134.

Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. “Can the Intellectual Still Speak? The example of Don
DeLillo’s Mao ll.” Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. Ed. Hugh Ruppersburg
and Tim Engles. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 245-257.

Cowart, David. “For Whom the Bell Tolls: Don DeLillo’s Americana.” Critical
Essays on Don DeLillo. Ed. Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles. New York:
G.K. Hall, 2000. (83-96)

DeCurtis, Anthony. “An Outsider in This Society”: An interview with Don DeLillo.”
Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991. 67-82.

Dewey, Joseph, Stephen G. Kellman, and Irving Malin, eds. Underwords:
Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2002.

Green, Jeremy. Last Days: Millenial Hysteria in Don DeLillo’s Mao ll. Essays and
Studies 48. 129-48 (1995).

Knight, Peter. “Everything is Connected: Undenrvorld’s Secret History of
Paranoia.” Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. Ed. Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim
Engles. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 282-301.

Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke University Press,
1991.

Menand, Louis. “Market Report.” Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. Ed. Hugh
Ruppersburg and Tim Engles. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 70-75.

Ruppersburg, Hugh and Tim Engles. “Introduction.” Ruppersburg, Hugh and Tim
Engles, eds. Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 1-
29.

234

Conclusion
Doom, Violence and Big Brother: Prophecy as a Political Art in the Changes of
Discourse

Prophecy is an equivocal speech because it balances contradictory qualities: it is
word and deed; it is the transmission of a message through an appointed
messenger, yet it is also a dialogue between the messenger and the divine
source; prophecy has a quality of suddenness, produced by anticipatory diction
and the suggestion of imminent endings, yet it is also has a timeless quality in
that the same prophecy can become imminent again and in that it lays claim to
eternal truth; more so than any other kind of speech, the prophetic word claims to
be immediate, yet it is also mediated by the prophet; the prophetic word is a sign
of presence and also a sign of absence.

Prophetic speech is the transmission of a message, but it is also a
dialogue. Because the prophet speaks for another, he lacks autonomy and can
be seen as the victim of tyranny. Insofar as the truth conveyed by the prophet is
a message, it is subject to the errors and uncertainties of its messenger. The
prophet is problematic for all these authors, for while prophecy is a political art,
the prophet is suspect and so are his politics. The theme of scandal enters here,
exemplified of course by The Satanic Verses, the most scandalous of these
novels in which the immediacy of prophecy is questioned and its faulty mediation
uncovered. Absence is the greatest scandal to the impatient prophet, who tries—
like Gibreel—to cover up the fact that prophecy, though it manifests divine

presence, always also suggests absence. Ngugi also makes use of the theme of

235

scandal, deploying it in his title Devil on the Cross which upends the colonizer’s
hierarchy of virtues. While tremendous authority accompanies prophetic speech
by virtue of its claim to divine authorship, equally tremendous scandal can
emerge from it.

In all of the novels studied which utilize prophecy, the author addresses
and even instigates classic accusations against prophecy. The fraud (like
DeLillo’s Reverend Moon), the crank (like old Tanrvater), and the maniac (like
Lilburne and Tavleen) all haunt prophecy in literature. All of these novels are
peopled by ghosts of other prophets insofar as they all address inimical prophet
figures; while the evil and controlling prophet is one of the preoccupations of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the maniacal prophet is a preoccupation of Brother to
Dragons and The Satanic Verses, it is The Violent Bear itAway that best
addresses the ridiculous prophet: Tarwater’s old great uncle is something of an
absurdity—anachronistic, back-woods and unselfconscious. Prophesying
exposes the prophet to ridicule, which is a risk that Tarwater does not savor
taking. He resembles Jonah, made a fool by the mercy of God, who lacks

compassion and magnifies rage. Another problem that all these novels address

is that of the bad prophet: the prophet whose predictions do not come true.42

Partly because prophetic speech is a dialogue and not simply a
monologue, the prophet is a vulnerable figure. For all the ties to immediacy and

timelessness and efficacious acts, the prophet is a human figure—liable to revert

 

42 The ghost of Plato's Euthyphro haunts all these endeavors. Claiming that his predictions,
which cause such laughter in the Athenian assemblies, all come true, Euthyphro pompously touts
his wisdom and piety and declares his superiority to the crowds as axiomatic. The prediction he
offers Socrates is that Socrates’ trial for corrupting the youth will come to nothing.

236

to flaws and succumb to vanity at any time. There is something about the
prophet figure that cannot maintain snobberies like the suppositions of the proles’
false consciousness, the rage of old man Tarwater, or the pride of Gibreel. The
prophet, while elevated by the calling, is also humbled by it. Winston submits his
will to political rehabilitation, the old man’s predictions fail, and Gibreel’s
lightening bolts never come. The prophet figure thus collapses under his own
weight if he becomes too self-important. The dialogic nature of prophetic speech,
while it can undermine the prophet’s dignity and authority, is important for the
usefulness of prophecy as a political art. Prophecy can be a nation’s dialogue
with itself, and if the dialogue becomes one-sided, the auditors will suffer, like
Jefferson, under the fierce logic of their own presumptions.

The contradictory qualities of word and deed seem perpetually to baffle
literature’s prophet figures. Tavleen’s sacrifice of Jilandri is her impatient attempt
at manifesting the word as deed. Similarly, Tanrvater’s sacrifice of Bishop
coincides with his carrying out his prophetic calling of baptism. He acts as a
prophet—speaking the word as deed—but insofar as he is committed to his
society, which always wants a sacrifice (through violence) he commits also the
“efficacious” or “dynamistic” act of slaughtering Bishop. In the religions deriving
from Abraham (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) the prophet word is the deed
that substitutes for sacrifice, which is an act of violence demanded by society as
a symbol that is also efficacious and dynamistic. Really, prophetic speech can

be a substitute for sacrifice. However, the impatient prophet often uses sacrifice

237

to mimic prophecy’s quality of suddenness. Immediate violence seems, to these
figures, more effective than mere anticipatory diction.

While prophetic speech is equivocal because it balances contradictory
qualities, it is also equivocal because it moves between spaces. In these
novels—Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brother to Dragons, The Violent Bear it Away,
The Satanic Verses, The Devil on the Cross and Mao Il—prophetic speech
engages in different patterns of movement: in and out, up and down, back and
forth. Rushdie’s opening epigraph from Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil
relates the notion that “Satan” in his “wandering, unsettled condition” has a “kind
of empire in the liquid waste or air. . . without any fixed place, or space . . . to
rest the sole of his foot upon.” Rootless, he occupies neither interior nor
exterior. The title of Rushdie’s novel suggests that the verses of the narrative
belong to a devil that inhabits no fixed place. But the prophet figure as well as
the devil figure must not settle, but instead must transverse distances between
interior and exterior, high and low, and hidden-ness and visibility.

The suspension of judgment is possible in the in-between spaces that
Brother to Dragons and Satanic Verses occupy. Devil on the Cross also pleads
for suspension of judgment against Wariinga. While prophecy is political, it does
not concern itself with forensic judgment. Memory and how the details of events
are held in memory are important: the narrator insists on telling out Wariinga’s
story instead of giving the composite picture of the modern young Kenyan
woman, the generic Kareendi as he first attempted. Warren’s assembled cast

also must remember and confide details but not for the purpose of

238

condemnation. It is only Tavleen and other false prophet figures that use a
flattened, unequivocal, imbalanced prophecy who seek judgment, punishment
and execution.

To say that prophecy is a political art in these novels is to say that they
use prophecy to address the condition of the subject or individual in society,
while destabilizing the discourses that create that condition. The authors of
these prophetic novels try to intervene in the discourses that translate world
politics into “the bloodstream,” as DeLillo’s Marvin Lundy puts it. Conditions
change and new discourses develop: as Orwell addresses the opening of the
Cold War and Warren the American struggle for civil rights, so do DeLillo and
Rushdie address the condition of fear and paranoia in the post Cold War period.

Nineteen Eighty Four sets a standard of expectations for prophecy in
novels of the Cold War era. Discussion of prophecy as a political art in literature
has seemed to be limited to the apocalyptic tone and dystopian vision used by
authors like Orwell, whose phrase about the imminent approach of immanent
government, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” is almost as famous as his
title (5). The political uses of prophecy, however, are not so limited, as the
subsequent genre of the post dystopian novel testifies.

National destiny intersects with personal accountability on Brother to
Dragons. “Doom is always domestic” is the catchphrase here that describes the
place of prophecy in society (Warren 8). In this verse play, macrocosmic ideals
and microcosmic failings meet in the character of Jefferson, whose personal life

betrays the values of the nation he founds. Prophecy manifests this connection,

239

whether it be the brutal and blind extispicy of Lilburne, who spells out with an axe
the master’s division of the slave, or whether it is the light-bearing prophecy of
Aunt Cat.

The very title of O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away, chosen from a

Biblical passage that addresses society’s expectations of the prophet,43 indicates
that violence is a question for the heralds of the kingdom of heaven. The
imagined society that only the prophet can envision and foretell is the province
only of those who shatter the boundaries of society. That civilization may itself
be uncivil: take Rayber’s views on the advisability of exterminating the mentally
handicapped. The passage following Matthew 11:12 from which O’Connor chose
her title addresses satiety of conscience and the way that especially cities where
“mighty works” have been done refuse to repent (Mtt 11:20). The drama of signs
can just as well be a quiet one, even if the dignity of the prophet suffers. But in
either case, the limits of society will be tested and the prophet burdened.
Prophecy is not safe for the prophet or for the society that receives it.

The exemplary comment for the post dystopian condition in The Satanic
Verses is made by Allie Cone’s mother, and it goes “bombs are destiny.” This
phrase comments on both the condition of the subject in society who is a
potential victim of terrorist bombings, and thus lives under a strain that is all the
more consistent because the risk is unpredictable, and on the position of the

terrorist who ignites the bomb. The terrorist who ignites the bomb is using it to

 

43 “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man

came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax
collectors and sinners!" (Mtt 11:18).

240

convey his sense of determinism. Conversely, it is his sense of determinism that
makes him dangerous. One of the questions that the novel puts is whether the
whole idea of destiny is itself a hazard for political life, a bomb waiting to explode.
To clarify, the question is whether all forms of prophecy (and by extension,
religions that proceed from prophecies, not to mention ideas of nationhood and
citizenship that proceed from prophecies like Manifest Destiny and the Promised
Land) are dangerous and destructive.

The Devil on the Cross fights a hard fight to retrieve from the colonizer
prophecy as a political art. With the motto “the voice of the people is the voice of
God” it reopens the possibilities of prophecy as a means of resistance (Ngugi 8).
The authoritative voice, insists Ngugi’s Prophet of Justice, belongs to the lowly.
Resistance and not hegemony becomes the true thing. Mao Il's Brita reverses
the mantra of Brother to Dragons that “doom is always domestic” with her cries of
“Bonne Chance” directed at the wedding couple (DeLillo 240). Observing the
military tank that dignifies their procession, she seizes on contingency as if to say
that the domestic need not be shaped by political doom.

The overall trajectory of these novels, which are arranged chronologically,
is away from imminence and toward immanence, increasingly rejecting
apocalypticism and other such dramas that might prevent the social self—scrutiny
that is necessary. The prophet themes and tropes in these novels try to engage
the authority and resistance of prophecy without partaking of its dark potential.
Where a false and unequivocal prophecy is used to enforce hegemony and

entrench oppressive power, the work of resistance is all the more important.

241

These authors have in common a disinclination to turn the political art of
prophecy over to the tyrannical. The advantages of the word as deed are that it
can reset the terms of discourse in a way that, irony, that other means of

resistance and critique, does not.

242

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