“Gary sails his car to a halt outside Audrey’s flat, happy with the day’s brisk trade. At her door, he knocks, but no answer. His hand seeks entry and finds the door unbarred, as if he is expected. He finds Audrey folding away the ironing board, laying it in the gap between the refrigerator and the wall, folded stockings, slips, and camisoles piled up in the plastic basket. She looks up, bored and tired, while he stares boldly at her, as if awaiting her accusation, self-assured of his position, despite the acne erupting on his skin. All she does is move first to the stove to stir a pot simmering upon it and then, with the pot, walks back to the table where she ladles the food onto two prepared plates, one of which she sets before him…”
Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for Apocalypse of Jude
fragment 69 test
Much going around the blogosphere on Marshall McLuhan’s page 69 test, i.e. that the best way to judge a book is by reading page 69. So I thought Nehemiah & Blake would apply the theory to Apocalypse of Jude, fragment 69:
Engendering mystery in fiction
A significant topic of Jason Clark’s blog is how secularism acts as a form of religious system in our society that has a way of privatizing faith “into nothing more than a religious association or club for individuals.” The result, Clark notes is that secularism’s co-religionist consumerism “fragments bodies and communities into individuals, unable to do life together in community.”
One of the impacts of secularism’s power to legislate privatized religious spaces has been the excising of the expression of faith in literature in general, and in the novel specifically. If faith embodies a mystery that cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind, then the impact of removing the open expression of faith in the marketplace has been the loss of that sense of mystery. This impact upon fiction writing can be seen in the general tendencies of writing courses and books to teach a method of effectively and efficiently communicating story. There is much value in such a methodism. Nevertheless, it represses that part of writing which engenders mystery.
Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” It is our fortune in this democratic age for it to be a matter for anyone to search out a matter hidden by God. There are many who have discovered deep things about this world in which we live, but one would be hard pushed to find “novels” on our bookshelves today that have a share in that wonderful legacy. W.G. Sebald is one that comes to mind, and his works push the boundaries of the novel into something quite significantly different.
Richard Wasserfall sees his Apocalypse of Jude as the beginning of his own attempt to give over to a writing that engenders mystery in favour of communicative strategies. A sense of puzzlement often overcomes readers who have read this work, perhaps being used to a more communicative approach to telling story than one which states that it is in the writing that the real story lies. The scriptures have this quality of mystery about them, and it is a quality that Nehemiah & Blake believes is needed in our world today in order to overcome the powerful grasp secularism has on fiction, on what it can and cannot talk about. It is thus works with this quality that Nehemiah & Blake seeks to publish, in the hope re-engendering mystery into fiction will help in the process of allowing people to once again live together in community as a community and not as fragmented individuals.
Fiction as “lectio divina”
Karen Armstrong notes in her book The Bible (2007) that lectio divina is the “peaceful, leisurely perusal of the [scriptural] text” in which a reader finds “a quiet place in [the] mind [...] to hear the Word” (128). In lectio divina, scripture is not studied as a historical-linguistic text on the one hand, or as a fundamental proof text on the other, but as a prophetic window upon the here and now. This style of “reading” was developed by monks at the end of the pagan Roman Empire as a means of spiritual formation, whereby the “rhythms, imagery and teaching of the Bible became the substratum of their spirituality, built up incrementally and undramatically day by day, year by year, in silent, regular meditation” (ibid). The purpose of such an inworking was to be able to live as close to the movement of the Spirit as possible, perceiving the Spirit’s words, thoughts, groans and inner desires. The daily liturgy, with its scripture readings and Eucharist became, in Karen Armstrong’s terms, the illiterate “laity’s “lectio divina” (130) by which the lay folk were incrementally and undramatically brought to the knowledge of Christian faith.
Today, illiteracy is again beginning to pervade the lower stratum of UK society. But this illiteracy is also an illiteracy at the story level on the one hand, where the Christ story has all but passed out of knowledge for the vast majority of people in the UK, and at the “reading” level on the other, where liberals and conservatives jockey for media positioning as they joust with their respective historical-linguistic interpretations and fundamental literal proofs of scripture. For neither side is the scriptural text a prophetic breathing into contemporary reality, but a dead text to dig up or eat. As a consequence, the laity have not been nourished with the Christ story. The Bible goes unread, and its interpretation is put back in the hands of religious authority. Yet It was just this authority that the first monks sought to escape when they went into the desert. Karen Armstrong makes the insightful point that the beginning of the monastic tradition coincides roughly with the establishment of the Christian Roman Empire (115). The monks became the new martyrs, not martyrs to death through persecution, but martyrs to state established religion. While the church developed its society-controlling doctrines, the monks lived and breathed the texts that were eventually to form the corpus of the Bible.
If the religious authorities of our day are the liberal and conservative theologians (consider the current Anglican spat over whether to be at Lambeth, or not to be at Lambeth), then who are the monks? Well, if lectio divina is the peaceful, leisurely perusal of a text, what text today but the novel better fits that description? And what community today but the reading group more aptly describes a group of monks reading a text in unison in search of its rhythms, imagery and teaching for internal meditation.
There is some truth to the argument that the novel replaced the Bible as the culture’s central “text” and that the literary canon has since Victorian times been put forward as a surrogate of scripture. Literary theory has been justly unkind to this proposal, and the English canon itself is in as much disrepute as the Biblical text. As such, few today read the Bible, while not many more read the canon. Rather, reading groups have taken fiction into their own hands:
If 500 of this country’s most fervent readers have got it right, the past 25 years have been a golden age for classic fiction, the past 15 years have been even better and the past five years have verged on the platinum.
[...]This perspective will be news to most critics, academics and publishers, although publishers will be grateful for the boost for their newer titles. But it is the firm view of 48 book reading groups across Britain.
The reading laity have become the monks, and the literary authorities, the dogmatics. Freed then from both their roots to scripture as a story stock, and from an authorising canon, today’s novels are read “lectio saecularis” by reading groups. Nevertheless, the rise of reading groups in the UK shows that the novel remains the English culture’s central de-centred “text”, which means that somewhere inside that “text” hide its scriptural traces.
It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish works of fiction, of which Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is the first, that track these traces back through the canon to the scriptures. This desire is based on the deeper desire to combine lectio saecularis with lectio divina in a way that sees the reading laity mastering both and then passing on those reading skills to the illiterate so that they can join in.
If you have any interest in finding out more about this project, then please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
Fiction as liturgy
What is liturgy but a plot along which a story can be strung. Yet the story being strung is not a mere story. It is a story in the aid of worship, and hence a story of spiritual import to both the individual and the community, for liturgy is, after all, a personal act of worship publicly enacted with others that leads to a communal restatement of belief. The liturgical plot is what governs the pace and drama of the story, both for the individual and the community. By tying its varying movements to the calender, the liturgical plot brings our participation to the story.
Can fiction enact this same liturgical same function? It is towards this ideal that Apocalypse of Jude strives. Its liturgical structure melds together the pagan liturgical calendar with the Church’s, beginning at Easter and ending at Christmas, while taking in Whitsuntide, Spring Equinox, Halloween and Midsummer along the way. On the side of the Church liturgy, Jude and Caul somewhat unknowingly work through a liturgy of the sacraments, thereby bringing the reader into participation with the liturgical story. Furthermore, the biblical texts of Jude and Revelation that are mixed into the overall text will hopefully drive a communal discussion of the fictional use of these texts, which should in turn encourage a collective restatement of belief on the part of readers (the double entendre on restatement is intended, for a restatement is always one made anew). Also present in Apocalypse of Jude, however, is the pagan liturgy of the vegetation ritual in which the reader is invited to participate through reading the integrated text of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Here Paul acts as high priest, not in pagan worship of the god Dionysus however, but rather of himself.
This focus on the self as centre of worship is the travesty of liturgy. This travesty however, Jason Clark notes, is the primary liturgical plot that people in the UK participate in today. Clark calls it the liturgy of consumer culture where “our weeks are organised around the consumer calendar” and our participation driven by a “demand for obedience from our wallets,” all in the service of identity formation through the aesthetic acquisition of ever more desirable goods which will attach to us the mediated attributes of a godlike status. Clark goes on to note that the liturgy most discredited and forgotten in the UK is the Christian liturgy, in which is told the story of Christ in aid of the worship of Christ, a man who eschews everything about consumer culture.
It is odd then, that much Christian spirituality today reflects more the values of the consumer-culture liturgy than its own. And if the consumer-culture spirituality is a new-age spirituality that piggybacks on the pagan liturgical tradition, then much Christian spirituality is mere new-age spirituality. Jason Clark argues however, that Christian spirituality should rather be seeking for a reconnection with a liturgical tradition more closely connected with that of the Book of Common Prayer, and which can act as “the door way to the living out and forming of our lives around the reality of the universe that is the life of [the counter consumer-culture] Jesus.”
English literature began and founded many of its roots in serving a Christian liturgical function for both the individual and the community of believers. If those are the roots of English literature, there is no reason to believe that fiction cannot serve that same function today, and help both the individual and the community of believers reconnect with a life that celebrates love of God and neighbour above self. It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish such works, of which Apocalypse of Jude is humbly put forward as an imperfect prototype.
If you would like to know more of Nehemiah & Blake’s vision, please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
Reflections on “Deep Reading”
Is Deep Reading under threat? Is Google making us stupid? I start with these two questions for very good reason. The first is a post heading from readysteadybook.com. The second is a headline to an Atlantic.com article. I came by the first link via Nehemiah & Blake’s bloglines subscriptions, which led me to the second, which, by virtue of reading, has led me to write this post. What we have here then is a tangible chain of associations that suggests a number of relations going on in my head in a way that it is impossible for a bibliography at the end of a book to show. What makes this chain even more tangible is that the reader can follow this chain (via hyperlinks) and so engage with a neural pathway, again in the way a well-indexed bibliography does not allow. What is engaged in this process of online reading is not a reading that seeks to make sense of a well-structured narrative, or argument. Rather it is a reading that seeks to make sense of what lies in the hyperspace between jumps.
The former type of reading is what Nicholas Carr, the writer of Is Google making us stupid?, would understand as “Deep Reading”. While the latter is what he might term as a distracted reading, a reading that developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. would argue promotes a style of reading that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above content. This, Carr argues, favours Google:
In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
It would take a naive fool to dismiss this analysis of what the Googleplex desires of us. The same can be said for old-fashioned publishers: It’s in their economic interest to drive us towards books baked like cheap supermarket bread that leave us far less than satisfied in the depths of the human heart. But while Google may desire that we “flit from link to link,” it is important to remember that Google is a function of the hyperlink, not the other way around! Without the hyperlink, no Google. In fact, it is curious that many people, including Carr, track the development of civilisation as following this pattern: development of writing, the printing press, the internet. This is how Carr outlines the current way of thinking:
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.
I enjoin with that scepticism and suggest that perhaps this sequence should rather read as follows: development of writing, movable type (of which the typewriter/keyboard is the final end), the hyperlink. I don’t doubt that much will be, and already has been lost in this new shift and can sympathise with Carr when he opines that “[T]he Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different.” I am, after all, born of that culture of the printed book. Yet I am also one who is born again into the hyperlinked text. Just like for anyone who is born again, for one born of the book, there is a tough casting off of the past, and a just as tough taking on the new hyperlinked text. But rather than merely offering a “flit-ful” type of reading encouraged by the economics of the Googleplex, the hyperlinked text offers a dynamic new type of reading that offers a tangible map of what Carr calls “the intellectual vibrations” that reading “set[s] off within our own minds” so that when “we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas” from what we read, there is a trackback available, that allows us to “see” how these mental jumps were made, and provide the basis for a radical reinterpretation of the knowledge that the printed book has given us. Moreover, this hyperlinked method of reading will impact the printed book, whereby “books” will emerge that will “mimic” the hyperlinked nature of the Internet by providing “cross-referenced texts” that allow the reader to jump from one part of the text to another to see how it interlinks as a text. In fact, this book has already been around with us from a long time in the form of the cross-reference Bible, where verses of one text are cross-referenced with verses of another text, so that the reader can have a greater insight to the full Bible itself.
It is ironic in the literary sphere where the Bible is often seen as little more than an obtuse, irrelevant reference scarcely referenced any longer, that the Bible presents it with a model for future works of fiction. It is upon this biblical model which Nehemiah & Blake’s forthcoming printed version of Apocalypse of Jude is based. In its current online form, Apocalypse of Jude is a hyperlinked fiction that offers the reader two mixes to choose from: The Wasteland Mix and The Purgatory Mix, the former following the trajectory of T.S. Eliot’s poem, the latter, the plot of Dante’s Purgatory. The intention is for one mix to illuminate the other mix so that the reader feels the vibrations of both mixes working to the depths of the heart, while allowing the reader a tangible link to the source of those vibrations so that exploration can take place. Nehemiah & Blake trusts that the printed work will have the same effect.
Unravelling the mystery of Laodicea
In the dedication of Apocalypse of Jude, Richard Wasserfall writes:
[Apocalypse of Jude] contains the mystery of the seventh star that John the Revelator saw, the mystery of the seventh golden lampstand that stands before the throne. The star is the angel and the lampstand is the church of Laodicea.
More simply put, Apocalypse of Jude contains the mystery of the church of Laodicea. It is worth quoting the entire passage dedicated to Laodicea in Revelation before seeking to get a grip on what Richard Wasserfall believes that mystery might mean:
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev 3:14-22; NIV)
The church at Laodicea is most famous for its lukewarm character, which in the parlance of a more modern age might be construed as “cool”: too hip for its own hop. It is a characteristic that Richard Wasserfall believes is symptomatic in the broader English church as it has sought to make itself relevant to a consumer society on the one hand, and to an increasingly pluralist society on the other. However, too often verse 15 – “So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth” – has been (ab)used by old-school evangelism to force an inflexible, fundamentalist version of the Jesus story down the throats of believers who have been seeking out a new relevance for Jesus in the UK. Richard Wasserfall has admitted to Nehemiah & Blake that he was similarly blindsided by this narrow exegesis when setting out to write Apocalypse of Jude. But through writing, he has come to believe that how this passage on Laodicea relates to the church in England lies not in its being used to berate those who seek a fresh relevancy, but in its ability to critique how these believers have gone about seeking relevancy.
Wasserfall believes that over the past 40 years or so, UK believers have sought to justify their increasingly “old-fashioned” faith through becoming more materially “alike” to the people around them. In so doing, they have become just like them: enriched through property, goods and equity. What has been dropped in the process of becoming relevant has been the Jesus hard-sell. The shedding of this sales technique is what the old-schoolers like to drive home as being central to the failure of the modern church in England. But this is not what is being said when the whole passage on Laodicea is taken under consideration, as Richard Wasserfall described to Nehemiah & Blake:
When you read the whole passage, and ask yourself, what does Jesus want from Laodicea, you find out that he wants to eat! “Here I am!” Jesus says. “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” Suddenly, you’re asking yourself, whose door is Jesus knocking on? Who does he want to eat with? And again the text gives you the answer. He wants to eat with the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”
Realising that sent me back to the gospels, because there’s a parable where Jesus talks of a great banquet in which a man invites many guests. But their RSVPs all come back with excuses about why they can’t make it. So the man becomes angry and tells his servant to go out and find “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” and bring them in. Now the man is God, and Jesus is the servant who goes out looking for the outcasts to eat with his master. And here Jesus is in Laodicea knocking on the doors of the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked,” who in material terms are loaded.
So what’s the mystery? The mystery is that the “cool” gospel of material relevance is extreme poverty. You don’t see it, because you are blind to the fact that the extreme poverty you see in the mediated image of the “global south” “other” is actually an image of your soul. You are numb to this fact because you have deferred its material consequences onto this “other”. This is what has happened to the people of Laodicea in my book Apocalypse of Jude.
The town in which Apocalypse of Jude is set has become a type of Laodicea: a haven of properties for the wealthy in a beautiful landscape ruled over by two real-estate “warlords”. Yet on its outskirts lies a sprawling slum of poverty, and within its boundaries, the characters experience not its material charms, but its spiritual death and decay. Paul seeks to engineer the downfall of this system in which the town’s people have their spiritual poverty exposed to the material horrors of such a poverty. Yet Paul is someone motivated, not out of love, but out of rage and envy. The church in this Laodicea has all but disappeared under the veneer of material wealth. For Jude it exists now only as an institution awaiting its antichrist to finally demolish it.
Both these story tangents offer depressing outcomes for the mystery of Laodicea. The Biblical text, however, offers hope in the form of a promise to those who overcome the trap that Laodicea springs. And this hope is best encapsulated in the story by Caul and Audrey who are found by a group of believers who themselves are beginning to give up the quest for material relevance and beginning to experience the apocalypse of spiritual poverty going on in themselves.
This reading of the Laodicean mystery by Richard Wasserfall makes his offering up of Apocalypse of Jude as a blessing to “the churches of Albion” all the more pertinent as the church in the UK becomes increasingly aware of its own spiritual poverty. But its pertinence goes further as the UK enters a period in which its economic prosperity, built on the back of a property boom, is entering a fallout that is threatening the lives of many with the impact of material poverty. In this sense, Nehemiah & Blake believes Apocalypse of Jude is a prophetic utterance of both warning and hope for the English church to speed up its transformation into a body that can feed, clothe and heal “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” so that as a body itself it will no longer be “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” and thus not spat out.
Reclaiming the Apocalypse
This Saturday’s Guardian Review published an essay by Ian McEwan on end-time prophecy in which McEwan defines apocalyptic stories as those which
“predict the date and manner of our wholescale destruction, often rendered meaningful by ideas of divine punishment and ultimate redemption; the end of life on earth, the end or last days, end time, the apocalypse.” (italics added)
Nehemiah & Blake italicises ‘predict the date’ because this is all too true of so many apocalyptic movements throughout history. However, the book upon which Christian garden-variety apocalypses are based is of course the closing book of the Bible, Revelation, a book which interestingly enough contains no date for the end at all, but only a cipher of numerological and symbolical images. McEwan quite correctly sums up this text as a work of “boundless adaptability.”
Nehemiah & Blake make this distinction between prediction based on Revelation and the prophecy of Revelation precisely because it is in this prophecy’s undated vision of the future that it retains its boundless adaptability to be reinvented anew for each age. Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude, in remixing Revelation with T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland and Dante’s Purgatory demonstrates just how flexible the biblical prophecy can be when its “lurid” images, as McEwan calls them – Babylon, the beast, the whore, the four horsemen and the anti-christ – are interpreted not as barcodes, the Pope or the U.N., but as ciphers to how power and injustice work in this world to create misery and oppression. Moreover, in Apocalypse of Jude, this oppression and misery is experienced in the characters, not as a climactic world ending, but as deep personal spiritual anguish as they become exposed to or act as propagators of these symbols of power and injustice. What the characters of Apocalypse of Jude experience in varying degrees is nothing less than the personal apocalypse of the soul.
The purpose of making the above distinction is to rescue apocalyptic thinking from the human failing of ascribing to ourselves a godlike messianic status that likes to confer fixed meaning upon texts and then to date the day of the end of the world. Such a failing is politically dangerous as McEwan points out. But the political danger he is talking about is the one which apocalyptic messiahs wish to bring upon us – nuclear vaporisation for all who are unchosen. The apocalyptic thinking at work in Apocalyse of Jude is also politically dangerous, for it suggests that an apocalypse of the soul is just the beginning of a way of thinking that is determined to demand justice in the face of the beast.
A series of small insurrections, part II
If the “New Labour book boom” has turned the “literary” book into an ephemeral mirage, a product of its marketing rather than its writing, little wonder then that Robert McCrum notes that many readers, not least Nehemiah & Blake, have been left feeling “querulous and unsatisfied” this past decade. In Nehemiah & Blake’s case, perhaps queasy is the apt adjective, with much sterling writing no doubt having been left unread due to numerous cases of having to leave a bookshop bloated on literary titles emblazoned with hyperbolous front and backcover puffs, prize-winning or short-listed acclamations and book-club stickers. It comes down to this: If every book is the best book ever written, then why read any further? For if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.
Perhaps it is time that the literary publishing industry turns a small portion of their talent to seeking out misshapen, perhaps difficult-to-read works of literature, which despite their many flaws, hold a merit that’s worth reading for. In other words, the proverbial diamond in the rough that will remain exactly that. Unlikely that this will happen though, and rightly so. It’s hard enough as it is with dazzling writing to make a penny on a spent publishing pound. There’s no room for a gift in the publishing economy.
The small insurrection then that Nehemiah & Blake wants to stage, is to add a gift to that indomitable publishing cycle. Apocalypse of Jude is that gift. Flawed by its fragmentary structure and ever-shifting points of view that refuse the reader an easy identification with a character with whom to follow the story, Apocalypse of Jude demands re-reading, not just to get the chronology right, but to make sense of the arcane pagan and biblical narratives that duel at its heart. Furthermore, reading it will either send you back, or for the first time to T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland and Dante’s Purgatory, so that you can read Apocalypse of Jude again to make sense of its structure.
Re-reading is not a luxury the consumer-focussed publishing market allows nowadays. But what is a book, and particularly a fiction, if you never read it again? Fiction, like scripture, demands that it be re-read. It might be many years again before you read it again, but there are books that sit restlessly in the spirit of a reader that wash like a regular tide upon the shore of the reader’s mind, calling for time to be made for them to be read again. The demand of having to be re-read is the gift that Nehemiah & Blake wishes to bestow upon the reading public by publishing Apocalypse of Jude. This gift is also Nehemiah & Blake’s call to resistance to the publishing industry, a time-out that hopefully will make that economy so much more bearable.
Towards defining an “archetext”
Archetext is a neologism that mashes the prefix for the word “archetype” together with “text”. Yet it also phonetically suggests a mashing of “text” with the prefixes for the words “architect” and “archaeologist”: archetext is also architext and archaetext. An archetext is thus a text in which archetypal, canonical (architectural in the sense that canonical texts construct a literature) and ancient sacral texts are mashed together.
Moreover, the word “archetext”, when spoken sounds almost indistinguishable from architects. Thus, an archetext, is both a text and a group of chief authors building a text. In having an archetypal foundation, a canonical architecture and an ancient history as its structure, an archetext, both as text and group of texts, opens itself to contain fresh prophetic visions not originally envisioned in the building texts.
Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is a prototype of what an archetext might be. It mashes pagan ritual and myth together with Christian salvation and apocalypse, T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland with Dante’s Purgatory, Biblical scriptures Jude and Revelation with the novel genre. The characters are plotted to the stringencies of the building texts. The reader is left in a world that is a secularised, small town environment in 1998 that is simultaneously a pagan underworld, a Catholic purgatory, a modernist poem, the Church and the outworking of the biblical Apocalypse. The characters must play the roles of those partaking in a vegetation ritual and the apocalypse. As they follow these texts, they derive their own interpretations that leave them exposed to a prophetic future that they, nor the reader, can fully comprehend, but that nevertheless demands the inquiry, “What is being told here?”
