Some have suggested that the writers between the Baby Boom and Generation X could be characterized as the "Cold War Generation." In the case of Stephen-Paul Martin, the classification seems especially apt, given his own thoughts on the matter, which appeared in a letter regarding his notions about apocalypse:

... [T]he apocalyptic feeling is one of the driving forces in just about everything I write. Some of this may be due to the fact that I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was probably the first major geopolitical event I was fully aware of. I remember being in a state of dread for weeks. In fact, I still have dreams of nuclear annihilation that feel like a thirteen-year-old waking up wondering if those sirens outside mean the end of the world (Martin "Letter" 1).

Martin suggests that he self-consciously positions his writing within an apocalyptic context, so that his work becomes simultaneously a reflection, extension, and critique of an apocalyptic culture. In this case, apocalyptic culture can be defined as one that believes that there will be a final conflagration which will signal the end of a corrupt world. Doomsday is, if not completely accepted, at least understood by the majority of the population.

For Martin, the apocalyptic signals not simply the end of the physical world, but also the breakdown of the organizing systems, whether they be social, political, religious, or economic. Martin suggests this arises from "a conviction that the logic or illogic that generates and controls 'advanced' Western culture no longer makes any sense, never did, but may well be the only way mainstream reality can function, even if it's not functioning very well for most people" (Martin "Letter" 1).

Martin's fiction and visual poetry seek to unveil or expose the rupturing fabric of mainstream culture. At the same time, his work suggests various juxtapositions which have the effect of disrupting the order, and thus, the logic of conventional writing. This is the logic which may be utilized to serve or reinforce assumptions and belief systems. In this way, Martin's sense of apocalypse quickly moves from the physical and/or the historical to the linguistic. Linguistic apocalypse is elaborated by Richard Royal in the he introduction of Martin's The Flood. Royal suggests that Martin is exploring for "a way out of the terrible debasement of language in our time; in which words are either overt lies; or cynical Orwellian camouflages for political brutality; or falsely comforting normative reflections of a 'world' that doesn't exist" (Royal 3).

Martin is interested in the destruction (or at least the temporary interruption) of language. Martin's prose suggests that it is "not so much the death of language as the death of our culture's illusions about language; a relocation of syntax and semantics in a Bakhtinian carnival where the representational function of words is exposed as a dead baby joke, not fully abandoned" (Martin "Letter" 2). The visual aspect of language can help bring about linguistic apocalypse, against the presence of those juxtapositions that result in associations and metaphoric transformations. Specifically, a cultural, political persona in Martin's fiction is juxtaposed with images of destruction so that the persona takes on the qualities or the essence of the image. Martin explains that "in the story 'The Gothic Twilight,' the apocalyptic imagery from Bosch's picture is juxtaposed with U.S. foreign policy during the Gulf War" (Martin "Letter" 2).

Martin describes how the visual elements can evoke a sense of the apocalyptic, an apocalypse that does not subvert or question the status quo, but which reinforces it by inspiring fear, the "Biblical imagery of god sending plagues to kill His enemies" (Martin "Letter" 4). Martin, like Susan Sontag in AIDS and Its Metaphors writes to protest the political right wing or the Protestant religious fundamentalists' interpretation of AIDS as a divine visitation, a plague sent to punish the wicked.

Martin's writing can be characterized as literature of question, or interrogation. But, Martin reverses the usual equation. Instead of having a totalitarian force conducting the interrogation, Martin interrogates what he views as totalitarian, anti-democratic, anti-populist social and political institutions.

Social and Political Contexts. Undeserved Reputations, as well as many others of Martin's work, including The Flood, The Gothic Twilight, Fear and Philosophy, Invading Reagan, and Crisis of Representation, emerged during the late 1980s and early 90s, a time of great political structural change. On the heels of the Cold War and President Reagan's obsessive paranoid fear of the "evil empire," (the former Soviet Union), came an uneasy optimism as Eastern Bloc nations metamorphosed into what U.S. leaders liked to characterize as democracy. The end of the Cold War was hailed as a triumph of capitalism, consumerism, and U.S. military supremacy. However, writers such as Martin were quick to punch holes in the victory balloons and point out that the version of current events that Americans heard tended to be a form of disinformation. Perhaps the best example of Orwellian disinformation was the Gulf War of 1990-91. The disintegration of the Eastern Bloc was accompanied by a potentially dangerous level of chaos, viewed as the West as economic opportunity.

Although the geopolitical configurations appeared to change during the 1980s and early 90s, Martin suggests that the fundamental driving forces -- greed, paranoia, and the lust for power -- of the world remain the same. This sets the stage for the ready acceptance of a messianic figure who either promises to restore order or bring about economic prosperity. Such a leader works as a facilitator -- he or she enables multinational corporations to work hand-in-glove with military-driven governments. So, multinational corporations continue to collude with political leaders for personal or corporate profit. In the process, the individuals of the countries are no longer viewed as humans, but as meaningless chattel, tools of propaganda, or hoards of refugees.

In the face of great centers of atrocities such as Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kuwait, Somalia, North Korea, and Iraq, the general populace becomes desensitized to human suffering. Martin and other postmodern writers characterize this world as an absurdist one where all official actions are driven by a blind madness that has complete disregard for the individual. The Vietnam war provoked a number of writers to critique the social, political, and economic structure of a nation that would allow itself to become involved in wars that merely furthered corporate interests. Examples of this work include Stephen Heller's Catch-22, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter S. Thompson's later work, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80's, continues the theme that we live in an insane world where the only sane individuals are branded mad, while the truly mad are considered balanced, lucid, even visionary. The social and political critique offered by Thompson, Heller, Kesey, Martin, and other writers is often scathing, and perhaps effective, since public opinion leads to the shaming and resignation of figures such as former President Nixon, and the defeat of the torch-bearer of the Reagan-Bush ideology, George Bush.

Cultural Apocalypses in Fear and Philosophy. Cultural apocalypse can be viewed as a condition suffered by an entire society which has come to believe that they are living during end-times. In fact, they do live in end-times, if not of the world, at least for the culture, because the system of living (in this case, rampant consumerism), has gone as far as it can without imploding in upon itself, collapsing on its empty values. Specifically, this cultural apocalypse occurs to a Western consumerist and militarist cultures. It is customary to refer to consumer culture as Western, although the Eastern nations of Asia -- Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Malaysia -- have become enthusiastic consumer economies themselves. One could argue that there is no other way to feed the world's people, but to strive for economic development, and in order to sell goods, they must appeal to consumers, even if the underlying values are throw-away, trashy, transitory, and they appeal to the lowest instincts in people -- their lust for sensual gratification.

In Martin's fictions, consumerism-gone-mad has led to the enshrining of agents of consumerism such as television, and the deification of icons associated with television and mass consumption. The cultural Doomsday occurs within a ruptured, corrupt, degraded world which is filled with self-styled messiahs who suggest it is possible to spend one's way to salvation, become glamorous and be spared perdition. They hold out the promise that one may transform oneself into the their images and arise to a transcendent, rapturous state. At the root of this is a profound insecurity about identity. When the culture collapses under the weight of its own self-doubt, rapacious business practices, the culture is in flux and perceived as being at risk.

Martin's collection of short stories, Fear and Philosophy, develops themes of cultural apocalypse in a world twisted by greed and lust. In "Double Identity," Martin analyzes Superman (both the comic book character and the Nietzschean hero) in relation to American pop culture personalities. Martin creates an effective coming-together of pop icon and Nietzschean philosophy which reveals the Nietzschean Superman / öbermensch origins of the comic book character. By doing so, Martin suggests that the roots of the American fascination with Superman reside in such Nietzschean qualities as a self-realizing will and self-generating reifying energy. Nietzsche's notion of "self-overcoming" also provides a Gatsby-esque platform for Americans to make themselves anew in the "New" World. Nietzsche's writings were appropriated in the service of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany. Similarly, in "Double Identity," Martin suggests that Superman and all associated values, reinforce American dreams of omnipotence and domination. Superman is an agent of cultural apocalypse because this is the persona who places identity in flux (thus making it vulnerable). At the same time, the flux precipitates cultural degeneration. Superman functions as a messiah figure, albeit a mad one, by seeming to offer salvation by means of awesome power and the ability to dominate. In the context of Martin's narrative in "Double Identity," however, Superman seems grandiose and deluded.

In Fear and Philosophy, Martin makes a visceral connection with the reader's own fears and worries by connecting current events with the popular culture's anxieties about the impending millennium. The sense of cultural apocalypse is palpable in every story, from "Falling Into Paradise," which is about a man who is knocked out a tenth-story window by his angry wife, the former Miss Tennessee-turned-T.V.-wrestler, to "Collisions," where vectors of the American Dream, automobiles, end up in "a pile of mangled metal blocking the rush-hour traffic" (Martin Fear and Philosophy 41). The emotion which accompanies cultural apocalypse resembles what has been dubbed "panic dread" by the editors of the Panic Encyclopedia.

The sense that individuals within the American culture are caught up in a great destructive urge is called "Panic Dread" in the Panic Encyclopedia, one of St. Martin's Press's titles in "Culture Texts," a "series of creative explorations in theory, politics, and culture at the fin-de-millennium" (Kroker vi). According to Panic Encyclopedia, panic dread is perfectly illustrated by Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream. Panic dread arises from the knowledge that we live with the psychological presence of a scream "so continuous, so total, and so mute with psychic intensity that it would sound like laughter from the joke of a cynical history and cynical politics" (Kroker 92).

Part of what is so all-encompassing about cultural apocalypse is that it yokes together seemingly disparate elements of individuals in order to place them in unique risk of eventual annihilation. Commerce is connected with libido -- "sex sells" -- in order to promote consumerism, and yet, while this tactic boosts sales, it also hastens the breakdown of identity, dignity, and meaningful work. This breakdown leads to cultural apocalypse, as do warped notions about the nature of work. Work is valued only for how it promotes sales. Sexuality possesses a value because it can be harnessed to entice money. As a result, the culture suffers from an environmentally untenable inversion of traditional values which have functioned in the past to unite a community through mutual respect and dignified, affirming, and meaningful work.

Jean Baudrillard expresses these notion in figurative terms which are, although somewhat reductive, useful for envisioning the processes active in cultural apocalypse:

Here is your desire, your unconscious: a psychic metaphor of capital in the rubbish heap of political economy. And the sexual jurisdiction is but a fantastic extension of the commonplace ideal of private property, where everyone is assigned a certain amount of capital to manage: a psychic capital, a libidinal sexual, or unconscious capital, for which each person will have to answer individually, under the sign of his or her own liberation" (Baudrillard 39).

Baudrillard's notion that sexuality is harnessed in the service of capitalism is reinforced and expanded in Martin's story, "Feeding on the Wind" in Fear and Philosophy. In this story, Martin positions descriptions of sexual desire against accounts of life in Manhattan under Reaganism, which encourages a particularly virulent brand of capitalism that results in the confiscation of wealth, and reduces the middle-class to the poor, and the poor to desperate.

Political Apocalypse in The Gothic Twilight and Undeserved Reputations. Political apocalypse can be defined in a social constructivist sense -- Doomsday is brought about by the division of society into factions who war over power, influence, social and economic domination. The world has become corrupt because of uneven power distributions. Dominant groups maintain power and control the populace through totalitarian means. The smaller, less powerful groups play subversive roles -- their goal is to attach and weaken the bases of the powerful by revealing the hidden agendas behind the dominant group's claims to "truth," "authority," "voice," and "presence." It is true that Martin runs the risk of losing some of the apocalyptic energy by utilizing characters drawn from contemporary events. There is a built-in obsolescence in these characters, who may not be recognized after several years have passed. In a review of The Gothic Twilight, Sara Skolnick observes that "reflections on political/world events that must have been very up-to-date when they were written -- the Gulf War, President Bush, Christopher Columbus as perpetrator of cultural genocide -- now read like yesterday's news" (Skolnick 20). And yet, it is precisely this transitiveness that lends the fictions their power. By utilizing individuals drawn from current events, whose recognizability it limited, Martin reinforces the mortality of the figures. Their presence on earth is transitory and ephemeral, and it follows that their influence and power is similarly limited. Why should we invest absolute authority in ordinary mortals?

The resistance to authority characterizes Martin's political apocalypses. Writing is a strategy to undermine the power bases which find unconscious expression in texts. The notion of power, or authority, in text has been examined at length by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. In the case of The Gothic Twilight and Undeserved Reputations, Martin's political apocalypses take place by means of aesthetic disruptions. Martin borrows surrealism, Dada-inspired collage, abstract expressionism, and superrealism from the world of visual art, and employs the principles in his fictions. As in the case of other postmodern writers, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet or Raymond Queneau (Zazie dans le metro), these aesthetic innovations are used to question empirical epistemologies, and to distrust conclusions arrived at by sense impressions.

Martin's fictions -- simultaneously surreal, disjunctive, and self-reflexive -- suggest to the reader that all of textual representation is a distortion, and one's ability to perceive the distortion rests upon how one can position oneself outside the text, and become self-consciously aware of the various political interests at work. Reading, for Martin, involves developing a strategy that clarifies positions of interests. Although deconstructive at the core, Martin's fictions encourage the reader to go beyond simply suggesting that they are elaborate tableaux of the political unconscious (to use Jameson's term). Instead, the fictions give rise to the feeling that there is a self, an identity, or a lost soul to be rescued or restored. Text is more than a materialist construction.

If there are vestiges of essentialism within Martin's fictions, they arise from the distinct impression that there is a poignant, lost voice -- the sad poignancy of lost identity, or individual embattled and besieged by Western culture itself. An example occurs in Martin's "Nailclippers," a short story in The Gothic Twilight, in which the protagonist, Karl, is profoundly alienated from the culture:

[Karl] had no place on the street, no place in a world where people had agreed to look normal, even if they weren't, even if the very notion of normal had long ago been dismissed, exposed as a tool of social control, a buzz word that allowed stupid people to feel secure and indulge in blithe fantasies about human progress, paging through back issues of National Geographic in waiting rooms for novocaine or Thorazine or AZT or more magazines (Martin Gothic Twilight 14).

With his deeply submerged self and profound sense of disenfranchisement, Martin's Karl resembles Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. In "Nailclippers," Karl rages at the man who insults him for clipping his fingernails in public. Later, Karl questions how social control functions, and how it tends to inhibit or repress individuals.

Martin's questioning of social control is similar to the approach that Jane Gallop utilizes in her analysis of Jacques Lacan's writing. Marcia Tucker characterizes Gallop's project as this: "Gallop is determined to undo the oppressive mystification of the Lacanian institution, not by renouncing her authority, but by using it with an end to deconstructing the position of authority itself" (Tucker 303). In Reading Lacan, Gallop suggests that Lacan's interpretations of Freud reflect the dual nature of authority and that the person who questions or recasts the original text actually invests the original with more authority. Instead of debunking or historicizing Freud by relegating him to the past, Lacan invests him with more authority. Ironically, by investing the subject of his investigations with more authority, Lacan gives more authority to his own writings. Similarly, in "Nailclippers," Karl's rage against a repressive society provides an arena for the venting of frustration, and a place for Martin to articulate grievances. Yet, while he questions authority, he reifies it by naming it and acknowledging its power.

The other short fictions in The Gothic Twilight undermine authority in even more overt ways. In "New World Order," Columbus is reincarnated, and inhabits the body of a female bodybuilder in Manhattan; in "The Gothic Twilight," George Bush undergoes transformations at the hands of spin doctors to the point that he becomes a publicist's dream -- a great, living expanded sound-bite, photo-opportunity poster child. George Bush is a larger-than-life assembling, a "cinematic tour-de-force." In the shuffle, Bush loses his ontological certainty and is "on the verge of replaced by everything he resembles" (Martin The Gothic Twilight 48).

In perhaps Martin's most caustic critique of authority, "Operation Welcome Home," Martin describes the Battery Park parade which was designed to welcome home the military returning from Operation Desert Storm. In Martin's vision of the affair, Operation Welcome Home was a completely staged event, a manipulation of public opinion by means of spectacle -- the enormous sound-bite -- which constitutes a cruel parody of World War II victory celebrations. The protagonist, a news photographer, represents the emptiness of the affair when he realizes he has forgotten to bring film for his camera. The empty camera mirrors the empty event. Further, Martin reinforces the emptiness of the event by evoking the famous World War II photo from a ticker-tape parade welcoming home the military. In this photograph, a returning soldier spontaneously kisses a young woman. In Martin's "Operation Welcome Home," the counterpart to the returning soldier parodies the spontaneous kiss when he picks up a woman in Battery Park, proceeds to a local bar where he becomes so drunk that he is unable to tell if she is interested in him at all.

One can almost envision how the Bush publicists choreographed the event to recreate that same scene, and thus encourage the American public to associate Operation Desert Storm with World War II, a war generally perceived to be meaningful, and valiant. Martin suggests that the Bush administration was interested in obscuring the possibility that the Gulf War was simply a staging -- similar to a television commercial to the world -- designed to demonstrate the military prowess of the United States. Further, in "Operation Welcome Home," Martin suggests that the Bush administration sought to conceal the fact that the U.S. military had been used as a mercenary force in the interests of multinational corporations. It was no accident that the President's son profited from the Gulf War.

Martin tacitly acknowledges the power of images when he suggests that the American public was duped, or at least capable of being duped, by the publicist-managed spectacle of "Operation Welcome Home." Nevertheless, he also suggests just the reverse, that the American public has become so cynical and jaded that any public spectacle sponsored by the federal government or U.S. military is likely to be met with skepticism, disbelief, even anger. Nothing is genuine, or real -- not patriotism, valor, honor, or sacrifice. If the war itself represents a type of madness, it is not acknowledged. In fact, the spectacle functions to distance the government and the American public from the real emotions, such as madness, that accompany war. Jurgen Habermas commented upon the notion that in a totalitarian regime, reason becomes "monologic," and not open to democratic debate. Habermas continues that "a reason that has become monological holds madness at arm's length from itself so as safely to gain mastery of it as an object cleansed of rational subjectivity" (Habermas 239).

The Bush administration was aware that the American public was predisposed to think of war as madness, not patriotism, and that the Vietnam War was widely viewed as immoral and insane. The last thing the Bush administration wanted were books and films which depicted the Gulf War in the same manner as in the films Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. So, Operation Welcome Home was carefully planned and staged to contain the most artifice possible, and to convert the participants in the spectacle to cheerleaders at a SuperBowl victory parade. So, in Martin's story, "Operation Welcome Home, the "souvenir flags to the souvenir sky" are merely elements in an empty spectacle designed to perpetuate a huge behemoth of a central government which desires to control the actions and the consciousnesses of the populace.

Undeserved Reputations continues and expands political apocalypse by positioning political figures as Antichrists or Rasputinish diabolical creatures who manipulate pathetically paranoid, but basically imbecilic world leaders. In "All the Answers," Martin dubs President Reagan's advisor, Richard Perle, the "Prince of Darkness." The Prince of Darkness is indispensable to Reagan because only he, not Reagan, knows all the answers to complex questions of nuclear weaponry and Star Wars Defense systems. Set in Reykjavik in 1987 on the eve of the summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, "All the Answers" portrays a deeply apocalyptic world. Doomsday will come in the form of nuclear exchange between alternatingly bumbling and conniving superpowers nations. The fact that Reagan confers with his expert, the Prince of Darkness, in the bathroom in order to conceal his ignorance about nuclear weaponry subverts the authority of the leader. Martin creates an absurdist world of humiliated reason and toppled authority. By echoing the Reykjavik summit with the bathroom "summits," Martin reduces the awe-inspiring, ceremonial, and the totemic value of the summit. He runs the risk that the text itself will become devoid of values, emptied of iconography. This is the risk we run in the postmodern world.

Similar manipulation of contemporary iconography occurs in Martin's The Flood, which is a long work of visual poetry composed on a Smith-Corona typewriter. Ending with a mushroom cloud, The Flood suggests two things; first, that the postmodern world will end in nuclear catastrophe; and second, that the act of writing itself contains a self-destructive element, and that the meanings implicit in a text possess the capacity to blow themselves up. In The Flood, the mushroom cloud is either a symbol of nihilistic despair or a gesture that welcomes the power of apocalypse to blow up all authority, whether it be political or textual. Martin suggests that, in the end, justice will prevail, and the purveyors of corruption will be destroyed. With the Smith-Corona-manufactured symbol of a mushroom cloud issuing out (and in) a new order, The Flood reinforces the notion that the artist and the writer can create an antiauthoritarian, antinomian text. Yet, there is always a curious duality at work. While the mushroom cloud may destroy or question previous structures, it can reinforce it. For example, the mushroom cloud may suggest language's inadequacies and its inherent deconstructive tendencies. Nevertheless, it is the typewriter that brought the notions into existence. Thus, the typewriter functions as both creator and destroyer of text, icons, and meaning. The Flood reinforces the hegemony of the typewriter, and by extension, the authority and dominance of the typed, written word -- the printed document.

---------------

WORKS CITED

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. 1979. transl. Brian Singer. NY: St. Martin's, 1990.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987.

Kroker, Arthur, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook. Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Martin, Stephen-Paul. Crisis of Representation. Minneapolis: Standing Stones Press, 1992.

------. Fear and Philosophy. St. Paul, MN: Detour, 1994.

------. Invading Reagan. Mentor, OH: Generator, 1992.

------. "Letter" April 14, 1994. From Stephen-Paul Martin to Susan Smith Nash.

------. The Flood. Port Charlotte, FL: Runaway Spoon, 1992.

Royal, Richard. "Introduction" The Flood by Stephen-Paul Martin. Port Charlotte, FL: Runaway Spoon, 1992: 3.

Skolnick, Sara. "Review of The Gothic Twilight" Another Chicago Magazine. 25 (1993): 207-208.

Tucker, Marcia. "Resistance to Interpretation: Authority and Institutions" Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture. ed. Russell Ferguson, William Olander, Marcia Tucker, Karen Fiss. Foreward: Marcia Tucker. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990: 302-303.