One can hazard a few educated guesses about those folks. Apocalypticism was not invented in 1999; indeed, what the novelist Salman Rushdie once called “endism”—the conviction that the world’s clock has just about run — has such a long and busy history that back in 1956 a team of sociologists published a fascinating study of what happens among dead-serious TEOTWAWKIs out in their desert or up on their mountaintop the morning after, so to speak, and the morning after that, as the world mortifyingly persists much as before.1 What they found — as one might have guessed — is that while some disillusioned and disaffected disciples give their prophet the finger and make their way back home to pick up what pieces they can, the more common reaction is rationalization, followed by even more radical commitment or coercion — for these folks are, after all, way out on a limb, their entire self-respect at stake, their “belief structure” in crisis. So okay, they’re likely to say, or to be told by their leader: The timetable may require a bit of tweaking, but the essential prophecy remains valid. Curtains-time is coming soon, don’t you doubt it; what may appear to our merely mortal eyes and minds to be delays and postponements are simply errors in our human reckoning, perhaps even tests to weed out the weak of faith. We did not pray hard enough; we did not burn every bridge behind us, purge ourselves of every reservation. Here’s our chance to show the world (and our Leader, and our fellow followers) what real commitment is! Et cetera.
The pressures in that line must be tremendous. Back in November of 1978, when 914 disciples of the guru Jim Jones more or less voluntarily drank poisoned purple Kool-Aid in their Jonestown Guyana commune, the novelist James Michener happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and was asked by someone in his audience what he thought of that prodigious autodestruction. Michener’s reply — a quite sage reply, in my opinion — was that the first 50-or-so “victims” didn’t surprise him; it was at that enormous remainder that he shook his head in sad amazement. But after all, their world had ended: not only the world of their previous lives and the life-connections put behind them, but also the isolated world of voluntary submission and exploitation that they had seen fit to commit themselves to under their charismatic leader’s spell, which seemed about to be dispelled by congressional investigators of the Rev. Mr. Jones’s reported abuses of his position.
Welclass="underline" Worlds are always ending, are they not? Not only such catastrophically beleaguered worlds as that of the Zealots besieged by Roman legions at Masada in 73 c.e., for example, or that of European Jews before Hitler’s Final Solution; not only such more gradually beleaguered worlds as that of the Algonquin Indian tribes upon the arrival of English Colonists in Virginia and Maryland, but likewise the temporarily victorious worlds that displaced these unfortunates: the worlds of Imperial Rome and the Third Reich and the prosperous 18th-century colonial tidewater tobacco plantations that supplanted the indigenous Native Americans. The small-town Maryland neighborhood in which I was born and raised during the Great Depression and World War II is a world long since gone, although most of its streets and trees and houses spookily remain in place. From the microworlds of the Harlem Renaissance and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age to the macroworlds of Victorian England and the Soviet Union, or for that matter the worlds of Earth’s Pleistocene era and its fast-fleeting successor, our very own Holocene; from MGM musical extravaganzas of the 1940s to our local solar system, whatever lives in time dies in time, and can be considered ipso facto to be always in the process of ending. So?
SO LET’S CONSIDER whether — or, rather, how—the same applies to the world in which we meet here today: the world that fetches people like me to college campuses to speak to people like you, and that fetches you from your other pleasures and concerns to come hear what I have to say. I mean, of course, the world in which literature, for example, is written, published, and at least occasionally read and discussed: literature in general, but more particularly prose fiction, and most particularly what we’re accustomed to calling novels. Printed novels, as it used to go without saying: the dramatic interactions of imaginary characters narrated at some length by their author in language printed in ink on paper pages numbered sequentially and bound into books, to be read by presumably though not necessarily individual readers who (also presumably though not necessarily) begin on page one and proceed thence to page two, page three, et cetera, in typically though not necessarily silent transaction with the printed text. Will that do as a working definition of the form? It is a category of art and entertainment, please permit me to remind you, that more or less developed in the 17th century, although there are notable earlier instances even before the development of print technology; that then flowered in the 18th and 19th centuries, fertilized by the Industrial Revolution and the ascendancy of a middle class with the time, means, and ability to read; and that then in the 20th century was believed in many quarters to have become more or less moribund, an endangered species, its niche in the culture’s aesthetic ecology usurped by successive new technologies of narrative/ dramatic entertainment such as movies, network radio, television, videocassette recorders, and, at that century’s close, by the interactive pleasures of the Internet, including online magazines, “e-books,” and even hypertextual multimedia electronic fiction, of which more presently. Toward mid-century especially — at the apex of what was called High Modernism in the arts of what was called Western Civilization, before Postmodernism and personal computers had even hit the fan — it became so fashionable for literary theorizers to titillate themselves with the subject of The Death of the Novel that I used half-seriously to warn aspiring fiction-writers, in the universities where I coached them back then, that they were apprenticing themselves in an art perhaps destined soon to become as passé as vaudeville, as quaint as the Magic Lantern and the Stereopticon, as limited and “special” in its range of audience as is equestrian dressage, say, or narrative poetry since the ascendancy of the novel. While busily writing novels myself, I took it as my coachly duty in those days to familiarize my coachees with such mordantly witty Cassandras of our medium as the European critic E. M. Cioran, from whom I would quote cautionary tidbits like this one, from his essay “Beyond the Novel”:
. . the material of literature grows thinner every day, and that of the novel, more limited, vanishes before our very eyes. Is it really dead, or only dying? My incompetence keeps me from making up my mind. After asserting that it is finished, remorse assails me: what if the novel were still alive? In that case, I leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise degree of its agony.
And then I would encourage them, and myself, with the critic Leslie Fiedler’s heartening observation that the novel was, after all, born a-dying, like all of us (Fiedler had in mind the genre’s European origins in parody and satire, such as Cervantes’s transcendent satire of chivalric romances in Don Quixote and Henry Fielding’s hilariously scathing Shamela, a parody of Samuel Richardson’s pioneering epistolary novel Pamela); that it has gone on dying vigorously for several centuries since, and that we may hope to enjoy its continuing terminality for some time to come. I would suggest to my charges that like the doomed tubercular sopranos dear to 19th-century Italian opera, the Novel might be reserving its best arias for the end of Act Three, its ring-down-the-curtain swan song. And since neither I nor they had been on hand to compose Act One, mightn’t it be something to score that curtain-closer?