Art of the Apocalypse

by Edith Critchley

Satan, Sin and Death in Paradise Lost
(painting by William Blake)

Things are starting to get a little scary. Although I realise that I'm being hyperbolic calling this an ‘apocalypse’ and that the world (hopefully) isn't ending, everything's becoming a bit bizarre. Shiny bright supermarkets are full of empty dusty shelves. You're lucky if you walk out with a tin of peaches, some toilet roll, and (maybe if you're fortunate) some hand sanitiser. The stock market is in shambles, we are having to wave off airlines and you get some suspicious side-eye if you cough on public transport. Sport and theatre season is over and it looks like schools might be closed soon too.

The words ‘self’ and ‘isolation’ will never be used without uneasy connotations again, and I am sure the beer company Corona is undergoing re-brand meetings as we speak.

The scariest thing, however, is the fear that someone you love, a grandparent or a terminally-ill relative might fall ill. However, I'm sure you know all that; it's hard to escape it. It's hard to escape the feeling that the world we know is disappearing into thin air.

Yet, we have experienced this before. Plagues, wars, natural phenomenon: humans have a pesky habit of enduring these things, however disastrous they turn out to be. One of the outcomes I personally find most interesting, as a Humanities student, is their artistic output. Examining the interlinking of the world around us and authors', musicians', poets' and artists' expression of it, how they cement and ground the world that seems to be vanishing.

When reading about ecocriticism I came across the concept that artists define what's happening in the world through their art, a way of formulating and evaluating events around us. In many ways, artistic growth is reliant on the growth and progression of the world, authors constantly reacting to these changes. something visible in multiple instances of ‘apocalypse’ in human history, when art explodes from crumbling human institutions.

In 1606, an outbreak of the bubonic plague tore through London, killing over 30,000 in just that year. Under pressure from the new king, James I, the Privy Council was forced to impose massive measures to stop its spread, including quarantine and painting red crosses on doors of the diseased. Theatres were closed in July and would remain so unless the number of plague deaths dropped below 30. However, most players and their companies found themselves out of work, including the King's Men - Shakespeare’s company. As well as being out of work, Shakespeare was also quarantined after his landlady, Marie Mountjoy, died of what was probably plague on 30th October.

However, academic James Shapiro argues in his work, The Year of Lear, that it was in isolation that Shakespeare wrote three of his greatest tragedies, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth. And although all three plays are of quite a sombre tone, reflective of the context in which they were written, they do show a significant artistic outpouring, the fear of plague and boredom with quarantine proving to be the perfect breeding ground for masterpieces. Religious zealots at the time were known to argue that ‘the cause of plagues are plays’, but perhaps it is the other way around.

Shakespeare had had a similar reaction to another plague, 13 years earlier, in 1593. In that year, he wrote his love poem, 'Venus and Adonis' in which the lovers love in order to ‘drive away infection’. Moments of crisis, facing desperation, fear and disruption, again seemed to trigger artistic greatness in Shakespeare, as it has other artists through the ages. Theatre would not be the same without Lear, certainly, and these plays, born out of a pandemic, have gone on to result in significant creative outcomes that have benefited subsequent generations. Throughout history, apocalyptic events have created the foundations needed for artistic greatness.

The bubonic plague returned multiple times during the seventeenth century, however never more impactfully than in the year 1666, one that truly belongs in a dystopian novel. For London, the year brought not only plague, but the Great Fire of London (in which 336 acres of the city were destroyed), as well as war with the Dutch. Again, this year of tragedy resulted in an explosion of literature. Margaret Cavandish, the Duchess of Newcastle, one of the grandmothers of science fiction, penned the aptly named The Blazing World, a bizarre novel that includes talking animals, fish men, birdmen and a place called Esfi. Its very weirdness is what enabled this work of mad genius to confront and subvert societal norms; thus did the world turning upside down help shape an artistic revolution. In addition to Cavendish's fish men, 1666 marks the year John Milton started sending to friends manuscripts of his epic poem, Paradise Lost, an extraordinarily ambitious poem that wrestles with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and explores reasons for humanity's suffering. Both Milton and Cavendish appear to have been inspired, at least in part, by the fact that the world seemed to be crumbling around them, trying to grapple with burning buildings and dead bodies. The year 1666 resulted in two of the most original artistic visions ever created in the English language and thus seemed to offer ripe foundations for a new creative movement. And, for all the scientists reading, please note that 1666 was the year that an apple fell on Newton's head, while he sat in his garden in Grantham - unable to return to university due to the plague.

original illustration from
Frankenstein

Nearly a century and a half later, 1816 was ‘the year without a summer’, which threatened to topple European industry while it was still reeling from the Napoleonic wars that ended the year before. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia occurred in 1815, and could be heard a whopping 16,000 mile away, ejecting copious amounts of ash that entered the atmosphere and spent the next year effectively suffocating the earth. The ash cloud had moved to Europe by early 1816, destroying the harvest; in Ireland, a potato famine and typhus combined to cause the disastrous deaths of 80,0000 people. However, again the dystopian context helped shape works of great artistic significance. In the summer of 1816, Percy Shelley, his wife, Mary Godwin, her step-sister Clarie Caramont, her lover, the great Lord Byron, and his physician, John William Polidori, all travelled to Switzerland, chasing good weather. However, as Mary herself put it ‘incessant rain often confined us for days to the house,’ which led to the group reading each other old Gothic German stories, eventually running out and forced to come up with their own, birthing both Mary’s The Modern Prometheus (or Frankenstein), and Polidori's The Vampyre, both revolutionary and influential works of fiction; Godwin's novel, in particular, was effectively the mother of all modern science-fiction, itself heavily influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost. During the same holiday, Byron wrote one of his greatest poems, 'Darkness', influenced by what seemed the apocalyptic conditions of summer 1816. These works challenged and reinvigorated artistic forms and ideas in way that it could be argued would not have been possible in a period of greater stability.

A century later, the First World War was another apocalyptic event that helped shape a literary revolution. The ‘Great War’ was truly something inconceivable just a few years previously, the advances in machinery producing weapons capable of killing thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilians on an unprecedented scale. Before the war, British poetry was still mostly Romantic in style; Modernism remained in its infancy. Going into a war supposed to be over by Christmas, soldiers such as Rupert Brooke wrote sonnet-esque poems in the early months, mainly revolving around patriotism and nobility. However as the war progressed, the poetry of the soldiers became far more macabre. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wrote visceral and shattering poems describing soldiers who ‘die as cattle’, greatly contrasting the celebratory poems just years before. This significant shift in poetic tone and form signalled a mirroring shift in literature, art and music as a whole. Thus the disastrous effects of an apocalyptic war allowed for a deconstruction of classic literature tropes; poetry had gone from the gentleman's hobby of writers such as Brooke to resulting from a duty to "warn", as lower middle class Wilfred Owen noted. From the fragments of a shattered society, such writers helped create a new form of poetry, Modernism, taken to its artistic peak in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the novels of Virginia Woolf, providing space amidst the crumbling hierarchies to write truly revolutionary works such as To the Lighthouse and The Waste Land. Although the beautiful poetry of the soldiers and the groundbreaking work of the modernists hardly make up for the loss the war brought about, they were made necessary by that very loss.

In the shadow of COVID-19, it can be very easy to feel as everything is about to end. But when looking at past disasters, we see a hopeful pattern: that disaster can be harnessed to create genius, in the forms of poetry, plays and novels, to move the structure of society forward in ways beneficial for us all. The next few months are going to be hard, but there will be an end. Let this be your opportunity, to write, to think, discuss, to sit under an apple tree. I'm not trying to undermine how difficult and frightening things are going to be, simply trying to offer a sapling in a desert. Because no time is better to change the world for the better than when it seems to be changing for the worst.