Visions of the End: Imagined and Real Apocalypses in Literature and Beyond
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v49.i1.06Keywords:
world literature, twentieth century, apocalypse, Holocaust, Pahor, Boris, Beckett, Samuel, Cioran, Emil, Jančar, DragoAbstract
This article highlights instances of imagined and real apocalypses in twentieth-century writing and beyond. After making a short history of works of fiction dealing with the apocalypse, I establish the connection between the apocalypse and the Holocaust and refer first to Holocaust memoirs, especially those of Primo Levi, Boris Pahor, Charlotte Delbo and Miklós Nyiszli. My discussion on the horror of the Nazi camps goes through some theorists’ thinking of the Holocaust as an apocalypse: Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard and Theodor Adorno. Then, using as a case study the notion of “void,” I illustrate it through a few examples: the apocalyptic architectural space of Daniel Libeskind’s Holocaust Tower as a “Voided Void” that opens into nothingness and Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame opening into a bare space. Clov mediates a vision of apocalyptic landscape that he sees out of the window yet remains entirely hidden from the audience. Speculating on what Clov may see, I present two imaginary scenarios of the apocalypse as void from the works of the Romanian-French essayist Emil Cioran and the Slovenian writer Drago Jančar, connecting their vision of the end of the world to Blanchot’s and Pynchon’s versions of the disaster and the last blast, respectively.
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