Mythical Apocalypse

Apo-calyptein (Gk.)-to ‘un-veil’

Usually in the form of a revelation of the end of history.
Struggle between good and evil
Violent and grotesque images juxtaposed with a world transformed.
Appears in different cultures and is described as “a genre born out of a crisis, designed to stiffen the
resolve of an embattled community by dangling in front of it the vision of a sudden and permanent
release from its captivity. It is underground literature, the consolation of the persecuted.”
(Damian Thompson 1997)
• Flood myths in different cultures
• Millenialism and Jeremiad
Revolves around a narrative of redemptive violence
Secular Apocalypse
P. B. Shelley: “Masque of Anarchy”
Lord Byron: “Darkness”
Mary Shelley: The Last Man with Lionel Verney as the titular character
T. S. Eliot “The Waste Land”
D. H. Lawrence Apocalypse
Robinson Jeffries: “The Purse-Seine,” “Shine Perishing Republic,”
“Rearmament”; Inhumanism
Cormac McCarthy: The Road
Shifts away from the punishing paradigm that attributed disasters to ‘divine displeasure and sinful
humanity, presaging the Final Judgement’ and found scapegoats in vulnerable sections of the society.
While she notes this aspect, Kate Rigby also laments the diminishing of a perspective in which 'social
relations and natural phenomena were understood to be interrelated: how people com ported
themselves with one another, and with other others [sic], ha environmental consequences; and
environmental disturbances, especiall big ones, had moral, religious, and political reverberations'
(loc.106).
She suggests that the 'modern myth' (loc.170) of 'natural disaster' no longer fit the socioecological
entanglement of life on Earth today, where 'natura causes, such as violent weather events, are
accelerated by anthropogen climate change, and human vulnerability to them is exacerbated by soci
injustice. Rigby proposes that we revalue the term 'catastrophe', recoverin the ancient sense of the
word in the Poetics of Aristotle (384-322BCE):

Katastrophe not just as a terminus but a turning point and therefore linked to the moment of realisation
(painful or even fatal) to the recognition of the damage that was wrought by their ignorance.

Apocalypse, since the 18th c. shifts from its origins as the story of the annihilation of a sinful human
world to become, in novel form especially, the story of the collapse of modernity itself. (Hicks 2016)
Let us think:
• “Environmental disturbances were thought to have moral, religious,
political reverberations. But with the rise of rationalism, the
interrelation between social relations and natural phenomena was
unacknowledged; how people comported with one another had
environmental consequences; environmental disturbances, especially
big ones had moral, religious and political reverberations.” Why is it
important that we reframe natural phenomena and social relations?

• As the injustice of climatic disruptions become more obvious, it is

unclear how supplanting the myth of natural disaster would avoid a
return to the scapegoating cruelty of the punishment paradigm.
Robinson Jeffers wrote “The Purse-Seine" the later part of September 1935 and first published it in Such
Counsels You Gave to Me (1937), then included it in The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1938).
 Night Fishing at Antibes,
August 1939. Not on view. Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 6' 9" x 11' 4" (205.8 x 345.4 cm).
 Lawrence Buell suggests apocalypse is:

the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental
imagination has at its disposal. Of no other dimension of contemporary
environmentalism(…) can it be so unequivocally said that the role of the imagination is
central to the project; for the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the
world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis.(1995: 285)

• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring about pesticide pollution (1971)

• The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich (1971)
• Paul Morland: The Human Tide: How population shaped the modern world (2019)
• Paul Kingsnorth and Douglas Hine’s ‘Uncivilisation’ (2009)

the atomic bombings and pervasive fear of nuclear annihilation presented the context in which
modern environmentalist movements began. As such this was a trope that was readily available to
bring attention to the issues of pesticide pollution, rise in population, or any other issue that was
deemed to strain the environment.
• Kingsnorth and Hine consider civilisation overdue for an apocalyptic
conclusion, and contradict the obligatory optimism bias of modernity:
“We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that
our attempt to separate ourselves from "nature" has been a grim
failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris (…) We do not believe
everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current
definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be.”
(‘Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto)
• Apocalypse as a trope maybe found in both environmental and scientific
literature and requires the participation of the reader through
imagination of a calamitous future. The intent is to help revaluate the
social, political, technological present and to reimagine them to avoid
the otherwise inevitable.

• The emotive quality of the trope is not a call to prepare for the worst but
to take responsibility of the present.

• It challenges human exceptionalism by alerting the reader to inhuman

futures.
 Let us think:
• Are apocalyptic narratives decidedly pessimistic? Can we think “without the self-
indulgent and self fulfilling myths of apocalypse” and “stay with the trouble”
rather than fantasising about “wiping the world clean.” (Haraway 2016: 35, 150)
• Do declensionist, apocalyptic narratives as a cultural narrative biases activists,
engineers, and scientists?
• Can fictionalising climate change falsify it-does it make it appear imaginary or
does it heighten the reality?
• Parable of the Sower (1993)- Octavia E. Butler
• TDAT (2004)- Dir. Roland Emmerich
• Oryx and Crake-Margaret Atwood
• The Collapse of Western Civilisation (2014)-Naomi Oreskes and Erick
M. Conway
• A Children’s Bible- Lydia Millet (2020)
When it comes to environmentalism, we can use the possibility of
imagination to our advantage and rethink ‘progress’ itself.

We need fictions that, in Kate Rigby's words, refuse to delight in

annihilation and instead 'dance with disaster’ in a constructive,
unillusioned way. Only if we believe human life Earth has a future, after
all, will we strive to secure it.