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A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E I N T R A N S I T I O N ,
1990–2000

Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American lit-

erature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end
of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of litera-
ture. Yet as conservative critics marked the century’s twilight hours
by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers
proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating
inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to
narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside
that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence of
shifting contexts – from independent presses to the AIDS crisis, from
angelology to virtual reality – American Literature in Transition, 1990–
2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and
diverse decade’s literary production. It offers new perspectives on the
period’s well-known landmarks (Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon,
David Foster Wallace), but also overdue recognition to writers such
as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, and Carole Maso.

stephen j. burn is the author of two other books (and editor of

three more) about contemporary literature, which have been trans-
lated into Finnish, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. In 2010, he was
picked as one of the best critics under the age of forty by the New York
Times and was invited to write the essay that opened their feature on
“Why Criticism Matters.”
 a m e r i c a n l i t e r at u re i n t r a n s i t i o n

American Literature in Transition captures the dynamic energies transmitted

across the 20th- and 21st-century American literary landscapes. Revisionary and
authoritative, the series offers a comprehensive new overview of the established
literary landmarks that constitute American literary life. Ambitious in scope and
depth, and accommodating new critical perspectives and approaches, this series
captures the dynamic energies and ongoing change in 20th- and 21st-century
American literature. These are decades of transition, but also periods of epochal
upheaval. These decades – the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the
sixties, 9/11 – are turning points of real significance. But in a tumultuous century,
these terms can mask deeper structural changes. Each one of these books challenges
in different ways the dominant approaches to a period of literature by shifting the
focus from what happened to understanding how and why it happened. They
elucidate the multifaceted interaction between the social and literary fields and
capture that era’s place in the incremental evolution of American literature up to
the present moment. Taken together, this series of books constitutes a new kind of
literary history in a century of intense cultural and literary creation, a century of
liberation and also of immense destruction too. As a revisionary project grounded
in pre-existing debates, American Literature in Transition offers an unprecedented
analysis of the American literary experience.

Books in the series

American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920 edited by mark w. van wienen
American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 edited by ichiro tak ayoshi
American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 edited by ichiro tak ayoshi
American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 edited by christopher vials
American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 edited by st even b ellet to
American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970 edited by david wyat t
American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 edited by k i rk c u r n u t t
American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 edited by d. qu entin m iller
American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 edited by st ephen j . bu rn
American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010 edited by rachel greenwald smith
A MERI C A N L I T E R AT U R E
I N T RA N S I T I ON ,
1 990– 200 0

edited by
STEPHEN J . BURN
University of Glasgow
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107136014
doi: 10.1017/9781316477069

C Cambridge University Press 2018

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2018
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Burn, Stephen J., editor.
Title: American literature in transition, 1990–2000 / edited by Stephen J. Burn.
Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Identifiers: lccn 2017026525 | isbn 9781107136014 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature – 20th century – History and criticism. | Literature and
technology. | Literature and society – United States – History – 20th century.
Classification: lcc ps228.t42 a44 2017 | ddc 810.9/356 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026525
isbn 978-1-107-13601-4 Hardback
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of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List of Contributors page viii

Introduction: American Literature Under the Shadow

of the Millennium 1
Stephen J. Burn

part i endtimes
1 American Literature and the Millennium 17
Jeremy Green
2 Angels, Ghosts, and Postsecular Visions 32
Brian McHale
3 Aging Novelists and the End of the American Century 48
Marshall Boswell
4 Violence 63
Sean Grattan
5 The End of the Book . . . 76
David Ciccoricco
6 The End of Postmodernism 91
Ralph Clare

part i i f o r m s
7 Encyclopedic Fictions 107
Stephen J. Burn

v
vi Contents
8 Historical Fiction 124
John N. Duvall
9 Lyrical Thinking in Poetry of the 1990s 140
Thomas Gardner
10 Story Cycles 154
Paul March-Russell
11 Materiality in the Late Age of Print 169
Mary K. Holland
12 Manifestos 185
Rachel Greenwald Smith
13 Revisionary Strategies 199
Christian Moraru

part i i i i n t e rco n n e c t i vi t y
14 Borders and Mixed-Race Fictions 217
Aliki Varvogli
15 Globalization 233
Paul Giles
16 The Two-Cultures Novel 249
Jon Adams
17 Ecosystem 263
Heather Houser
18 Virtual Reality 279
Joseph Conte

part iv public and p rivat e l if e

19 Trauma 297
Patrick O’Donnell
20 Family 312
Kasia Boddy
21 AIDS 329
Lesley Larkin
 Contents vii
part v i n s t i t u t i o n s
22 The University “After” Theory 347
Daniel Punday
23 Independent Presses 362
Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Index 378
 Contributors

jon adams, Research Video Producer, London School of Economics

kasia boddy, Lecturer, Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge
marshall boswell, Professor, Rhodes College
stephen j. burn, Reader in Post-45 American Literature, University of
Glasgow
david ciccoricco, Senior Lecturer, University of Otago
ralph clare, Associate Professor, Boise State University
joseph conte, Professor, State University of New York Buffalo
jeffrey r. di leo, Professor and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences,
University of Houston-Victoria
john n. duvall, Margaret Church Distinguished Professor of English,
Purdue University
thomas gardner, Alumni Distinguished Professor, Virginia Tech
paul giles, Challis Professor of English, University of Sydney
sean grattan, Lecturer in American Literature, University of Kent
jeremy green, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
mary k. holland, Professor, State University of New York New Paltz
heather houser, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
lesley larkin, Associate Professor, Northern Michigan University
paul march-russell, Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature,
University of Kent

viii
 List of Contributors ix
brian mchale, Distinguished Arts and Humanities Professor, Ohio State
University
christian moraru, Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the
Humanities, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
patrick o’donnell, Professor, Michigan State University
daniel punday, Professor, Mississippi State University
rachel greenwald smith, Associate Professor, Saint Louis University
aliki varvogli, Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Dean for Learn-
ing and Teaching, University of Dundee
 Introduction
American Literature Under the Shadow of the Millennium
Stephen J. Burn

American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 gathers twenty-three essays to

present a collaborative map of the decade’s shifting literary forms, obses-
sions, and crises. It does not attempt to curate the memory of a sequence
of isolated literary works or authors, but instead tries to see the decade in
motion, thinking through both the ways American literature evolved in
the period and the dynamic contexts that incubated such changes. Relent-
less change is figured as the default status of American history writ large
in one of the decade’s key texts when, near the end of Mason & Dixon
(1997), Thomas Pynchon describes his two surveyors glimpsing a “a cease-
less Spectacle of Transition”1 after they have marked the divide between
the country’s north and south. Settling a colonial boundary dispute and
marking the border between what would be the free and slave states, Pyn-
chon’s characters might conceive of transition as encompassing large-scale,
national ruptures: the War of Independence, the Civil War. Yet on smaller
scales, transition can also mean succession in time, a localized metamorpho-
sis, or adaptation to new conditions. These various resonances, working at
both macro and micro levels, inform and shape the chapters that follow
as they document the unusual diversity of literary production in a decade
that Daniel T. Rodgers describes as an “age of fracture.”2
“Time has no divisions to mark its passage,” Thomas Mann noted in
The Magic Mountain (1924), “there is never a thunder-storm or blare of
trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when
a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pis-
tols.”3 Although American literary and cultural history “has perennially”
been conceived “in terms of decades,”4 to abbreviate the “ceaseless Spec-
tacle of Transition” to the dynamics of a single decade might seem to risk
the kind of empty ceremony Mann identifies. The 1990s are particularly
vulnerable to this charge, not just because of the vast cultural and historical
weight that was placed on the arbitrary moment when the clock ticked past
midnight on December’s last day in 1999, but also because the two signal
1
2 st eph en j . bur n
historical events that bookend the decade lie beyond its boundaries: the fall
of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989, and the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The latter pair
of events provides the frame for several earlier studies of the period.5 The
former calls for much larger temporal perspectives that can take in the long
arc of the American writer’s fascination with the millennium.
The approach of the millennium exerted a magnetic attraction for Amer-
ican writers long before the last decade of the twentieth century. As Douglas
Robinson has shown, because America was “settled by millenarian reli-
gious groups,” apocalyptic imagery – not simply the end of the world,
but in eschatological terms, “the unveiling of the future in the present,
the encroachment of a radically new order into a historical situation that
has disintegrated into chaos”6 – has always run through American litera-
ture, especially in cohort with reflections on time and judgment. American
history reminds us that such doctrines of last things need not be tied to
the calendar’s signal dates – William Miller’s 100,000 followers famously
expected a millennial conflagration on October 22, 1844 – yet the year 2000
remained compelling for many writers.
Edward Bellamy’s speculative fiction, Looking Backward: 2000–1887
(1888), is a particularly representative carrier of the millennial infection.
Bellamy’s novel tells the story of Julian West, who goes to bed in May 1887,
amid reports of imminent labor disputes, and awakens more than a cen-
tury later in a tranquil Boston that embodies the utopian dream of perfect
solidarity. Mingling the suspicion that this futuristic world has authenti-
cally “entered upon the millennium”7 with a quasi-Darwinian explanation
for the newly peaceful society, Bellamy’s vision of the future at times comes
chillingly close to unintentional cultural prophecies: West wakes up on the
“tenth day of September in the year 2000,” a year and a day before the first
landmark moment for America’s new century.8 But his relevance, here, is
in the way that the imagined millennial future acts as a rhetorical tool to
highlight and displace the inequities of Bellamy’s present day through a
series of inversions: the selfish nineteenth-century’s “age of individualism”
has been replaced by “that of concert”; class distinctions and the rise of
“ever larger monopolies” are supplanted by a total redistribution of wealth,
where business is “conducted in the common interest for common profit”;
and even the “horrible babel” of advertising is succeeded by an age with-
out billboards.9 Or rather, this world almost displaces the past, for in the
book’s last pages Bellamy suddenly returns West to the squalor and clamor
of his nineteenth-century origins, before restoring him to the year 2000, as
if, through this final narrative juxtaposition, to remind the reader that the
 Introduction 3
need to grapple with realities of the past should not be completely forgotten
amid dreams of the millennial “solidarity of the race and the brotherhood
of man.”10
The millennium, then, performed narrative labor for American novelists
long before the twentieth century’s last years, but to think of the 1990s as
a coherent transitional moment does not mean that the decade’s literature
must be thought of in isolation from this longer history. John Updike’s
Toward the End of Time (1997), for instance, rewards being read from such
a dual temporal perspective. Just as Bellamy mined the past for the con-
ceit that drives his novel – Looking Backward is effectively an exponential
rewrite of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) – so, in this long
view, does Updike seem to deliberately revise and update Bellamy’s model
in his late, millennial fiction. Not only does Updike imagine his narrator,
Ben Turnbull, living in the twenty-first century as “a nineteenth-century-
minded custodian of . . . Dickens” (West’s “prime favorite among the book
writers”),11 but the books are also united by a sequence of parallels. Fol-
lowing Bellamy, Updike’s vision of a postmillenial future (the book is set
in 2020) measures time’s passage by having his protagonist move around
a reimagined Boston. Both authors estrange us from our contemporary
moment by replacing the economic status quo with new monetary systems
(Updike has “welders” replace dollars; Bellamy imagines an equitable sys-
tem of credit). Finally, just as Bellamy brusquely returns West to the nine-
teenth century late in the book, so at key points does Updike’s future world
suddenly drop away to put Ben in earlier moments of historical transition:
Ancient Egypt, Late Rome, Monastic Ireland, “Poland in early 1944.”12
Time is uncertain in both books, and the past tugs each character back-
wards into the “abysmal well of time” in unpredictable ways.13
Yet while Updike’s novel might be read as echoing earlier instalments
in the long history of American millenarianism, it can equally be set in
its specific 1990s context, a process that marks differences, rather than
continuities, from Bellamy. While Looking Backward can manage its dra-
matic shifts in time through the quaint narrative mechanism of “mes-
meric sleep” and the “extraordinary dream,”14 Updike instead draws on
late twentieth-century quantum physics and its “Many Worlds Interpre-
tation” to underwrite its sudden leaps beyond calendrical succession. In
what Judie Newman calls a “syncretic and creative” elaboration on “the
idea of many universes,”15 Updike invokes the “little fork in reality when a
quantum measurement is made” to allow “another universe, thinner than
a razor blade” to slice into and potentially destabilize the authority of any
given narrative moment.16 This approach parallels the work of a distinct
4 st eph en j . bur n
strand of 1990s writers who set their novels in the quantum realm of par-
allel universes (notably Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Thomas Pynchon,
and David Foster Wallace),17 but Updike is arguably most characteristic
of his 1990s moment – and most different from Bellamy – in his insis-
tence that the postmillenial world’s transitions will involve incremental
decline rather than revolutionary breakthrough. From a purely pragmatic
perspective, this difference partly reflects relative proximity to the year
2000: the millennial threshold, for Updike in 1997, is now too near to
permit the total reversal and renewal of society that Bellamy allows. In
place of the strategic inversions that characterize Bellamy’s future world,
Updike instead extrapolates his future from an extension and accelera-
tion of current conditions. Toward the End of Time’s America has, for
instance, been devastated by a Sino-American conflict that, as Newman
has shown, “closely resembles” arguments predicting a coming conflict
with China that were developing in the 1990s.18 The logical conclusion
of Updike’s extrapolations is a decline whose scope is neatly encapsulated
by a final comparison with Looking Backward. While Bellamy’s novel can
imagine millennial Boston made up of “public buildings of a colossal size
and . . . architectural grandeur,” set next to the “sinuous Charles” like a
“blue ribbon winding away to the sunset,”19 more or less the same view
is rendered in much bleaker terms in Updike’s novel: “Looking back at
the city’s profile from . . . above the Charles, we saw the blue-glass, post-
modern downtown buildings darkened in their post-war desolation, and
rusty stumps of projected construction that had been abruptly abandoned,
as too expensive for our dwindled, senile world.”20 Visions of waste and
detritus were not always coded so negatively in the decade. A. R. Ammons’s
riffs that “garbage is spiritual,”21 and the trash artists in DeLillo’s Under-
world (1997) spring to mind. But Updike’s vision of decline is apocalypse
in the 1990s vulgate, a vision dominated by the rhetoric of endtimes that
becomes the keynote in much of the decade’s literature and broader cultural
discourse.
Published in the middle of the decade, John Barth’s “The End: An
Introduction” directly addresses the proliferation of such end-oriented dis-
course in the period. Barth’s deft fiction is presented in the form of an
introductory speech delivered to an audience who awaits the arrival of
the main speaker, a writer-under-threat partly modeled on Taslima Nas-
rin and Salman Rushdie. As the speaker’s arrival is delayed and delayed,
the introducer starts to meditate on what Barth will later call “those fin-de-
siècle and millenarian currents, more or less apocalyptic, much astir by the
mid-1990s,”22
 Introduction 5
[A]s we end our century and millennium . . . it is no surprise that the “ter-
minary malady” afflicts us . . . not long ago, believe it or not, there was an
international symposium on “The End of Postmodernism” – just when we
thought we might be beginning to understand what the term describes!
In other jurisdictions, we have Professor Whatsisname on the End of His-
tory, and Professor So-and-So on the End of Physics (indeed, the End of
Nature), and Professor Everybody-and-Her-Brother on the End of the Old
World Order with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international
Communism.
In short and in sum, endings, endings everywhere; apocalypses large and
small . . . . The end of this, the end of that; little wonder we grow weary of
‘endism,’ as I have heard it called.23

As is typical of Barth’s late fiction, what may seem mere rhetorical per-
formance is a densely encoded distillation of the times that permits and
rewards annotation. The sequence of End of titles begins with literary fic-
tion, referring to the August 1991 Stuttgart seminars on “The End of Post-
modernism,” which featured Barth himself.24 His reflection that in the
early 1990s “we might be beginning to understand what the term describes”
on one level surely refers to the more formal updates on his seminal essays
on literary exhaustion and replenishment that he presented in Stuttgart, yet
from our perspective this phrase might also be linked to the appearance of
Fredric Jameson’s landmark volume, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism, in 1991. “Professor Whatsisname” is Francis Fukuyama,
cited here for his 1992 book-length expansion of his earlier claim that we
had reached not simply the end of the Cold War but “the end of history
as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.”25 “Professor So-and-So” is presumably David Lindley, whose
The End of Physics (1993) argued that speculative superstring theorists had
become a branch of aesthetic theory, “because their theories could never
be validated by experiments,”26 while “the End of Nature” points to Bill
McKibben’s 1989 account of global warming and the worsening environ-
mental crisis. Barth reminds us that such apocalyptic musings and their
attendant political upheavals are not new, through his sly echo of a work
from a different fin-de-siècle: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798),
which Coleridge wrote through the last years of the French Revolution.
Yet the range of parallel fields – moving from the literary, through global
politics and advanced science, to emerging environmentalism – that are
each arcing toward endings and perhaps renewal speaks to the way the
proximate millennium’s shadow gathered an unusual concentration of
6 st eph en j . bur n
transitional moments within the decade. In light of these intersecting dis-
courses, Jay Prosser’s claim in American Fiction of the 1990s (2008) that
“the figure for the 1990s may be trans: transnational, transhistorical, and
transitional” seems apposite.27
The decade certainly featured works that ask – like Toward the End of
Time – to be read in the longer history of a specifically millennial transi-
tion: Richard Powers’s Gain (1998) retells the story of William Miller’s belief
that the millennium would arrive in 184428 ; Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996)
plays with the etymology of millennial apocalypse through its multiple veils
and games of eschaton29 ; and DeLillo’s research materials for Underworld’s
vision of “Last Things”30 include documents that helpfully explain “How
Should I Prepare to Be Raptured?” But as the chapters gathered in this
book illustrate, while millennial energies are rife, the period’s literary trigger
points often stem from the larger end-oriented debates that Barth glossed
in his short fiction. Part I maps different iterations of the millennial sense of
an ending across 1990s American literature. Chapter 1 considers the inter-
mingling of hope and terror in the decade’s developing apocalyptic imagi-
nation, as represented by Jorie Graham, Steve Erickson, and Don DeLillo.
As Jeremy Green shows, in some cases (Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’s
Left Behind series, for example), such visions are explicitly based in Bibli-
cal writings, yet with notable exceptions (Norman Mailer’s mild expansion
of Biblical sources in The Gospel According to the Son [1997]), the period
typically saw such staples of millennial religion as the appearance of angels
or the return of the dead float free of their traditional religious valence.
In Chapter 2, Brian McHale examines the presence of such angels, in par-
ticular, through a wide-ranging discussion of works by Ana Castillo, Tony
Kushner, and Thomas Pynchon.
Moving beyond the accoutrements of millenarianism, the next four
chapters trace literary shifts in relation to various end-oriented discourses.
The end of the twentieth century seemed to overlap with the ends (either
real or imagined) of a sequence of aging male writers’ careers. While
some of these writers released final books that had been decades in the
making (Ralph Ellison’s posthumous Juneteenth [1999] is a key example),
others (Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer) turned toward retrospec-
tion after enormously prolific careers. Marshall Boswell examines such late
works in Chapter 3. Rhetoric of approaching end-times was often accom-
panied by iconic visual footage of escalating violence in the period, but
the period’s specifically literary explorations of violence might be classi-
fied into two tracks. On the first track, writers were drawn magnetically
to signal instances of earlier twentieth-century violence (James Ellroy and
 Introduction 7
Mailer on Lee Harvey Oswald; John Edgar Wideman on the 1985 bomb-
ing of a Philadelphia row home in Philadelphia Fire [1990]). On the second
track, there were meditations on what seemed to be specifically 1990s man-
ifestations of violence (Anne Deveare Smith’s one-woman play response
to the Rodney King beating; Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis on
crises in masculinity; Joyce Carol Oates’s near-encyclopedic sequence of
books on rape, serial killers, child murder, and so on). In Chapter 4, Sean
Grattan reads the LA riots as crystallizing larger violent social changes in
the period, setting the events of 1992 alongside later works by Octavia
Butler, Toni Morrison, and Dennis Cooper.
While the 1990s saw the fundamental staples of a postmodern metafic-
tion that many critics had almost solely associated with white, male writ-
ers,31 adopted and adapted by a much broader swathe of multiethnic writers
(so Sherman Alexie’s superb The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
[1993] revels in funhouse imagery, stories-embedded-within-stories, and
traces the ubiquity of television’s “white noise”), it has nevertheless become
commonplace to see literary postmodernism abruptly coming to an end in
the decade, to be simplistically succeeded by some successor movement
that abandons all trace contamination of its literary ancestors. This move
is no doubt related to the increasing prominence of orphans in millennial
work (Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn [1999], Eggers’s Heartbreaking Work
[2000], Foer’s Everything is Illuminated [2002]), even as it ignores the con-
tinued productivity of writers such as Robert Coover, John Barth, and
William Gass in the twenty-first century. What it also ignores (as Ralph
Clare demonstrates in Chapter 6) is that narratives of the end of post-
modernism were themselves a narrative propounded by a postmodernist
fiction that had been “playing posthumous” for much of the decade. One
of the central figures in early constructions of American postmodernism –
Robert Coover – was also (perhaps unwittingly, as David Ciccoricco shows
in Chapter 5) one of the key architects of the decade’s fascination with the
end of the book and the corresponding rise of electronic fictions.
Part II shifts the focus to changing forms in the decade, though in many
ways this topic retains a millennial flavor. The “formal sense of millen-
nium,” DeLillo has noted, “not only looks ahead to the year 2000 but rec-
ollects as well.”32 In Bellamy and Updike this dual temporal perspective is
manifest in the way both books shuttle between different eras, but a com-
parable effort to look forward by dwelling on the past is manifest through-
out this section. Chapter 7 traces the encyclopedic novel’s development in
the hands of the younger writers whose apprenticeship was indebted to
ancestor texts by DeLillo, Gaddis, and Pynchon. The historical novel has
8 st eph en j . bur n
always worked the hinge between recollection and speculation, but – as
John Duvall demonstrates in Chapter 8 – the unusual centrality of histor-
ical fiction in the decade stems from a post–Cold War intellectual climate
that made history the time’s “key cultural issue.” One of the key binaries,
for Duvall, is represented by the divergent interpretations offered by Linda
Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson of history in novels from the 1970s; for
lyric poets in the 1990s, Thomas Gardner (Chapter 9) identifies a different
opposition whose resolution finds echoes throughout the decade. Gardner
reads the changing form of 1990s lyric poetry as the result of a hybrid aes-
thetic that spliced the previous decade’s opposed camps – poets committed
to a program of realist self-expression and those pursuing more avant-garde
strategies – into a fertile union. Similar hybrids are charted in Paul March-
Russell’s account of the revival of the story cycle (Chapter 10), which moves
from Tim O’Brien, through Louise Erdrich, to A. M. Homes, and in Mary
K. Holland’s discussion of the competing claims of physicality and textual-
ity in Mark Z. Danielewski, William Gass, and Carole Maso (Chapter 11).
Part II ends with two chapters that explicitly engage with the split
temporal perspective that DeLillo accords the formal millennium. In
Chapter 12, Rachel Greenwald Smith examines debates about self-
expression that stem from the way the decade’s fiction manifestoes often
looked to the future by looking backwards. In Chapter 13, Christian
Moraru examines the revisionary strategies that we have seen employed by
Bellamy and Updike, in a much wider context that carries into the book’s
later explorations of globalization.
If the 1990s were rife with millennial imagery that, as Douglas Robin-
son has argued, stemmed back to “the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony,”33 the legacy of the European arrival in the New World inevitably
carried a different valence for different segments of American society.
Danzy Senna’s 1998 passing novel, Caucasia, for instance, satirizes the equa-
tion of American history and whiteness not just in her choice of title but
also by having her mixed-race central character, Birdie, be ferried around
the country in a car that’s a near echo of Christopher Columbus’s La
Pinta. Ironically replaying America’s colonization in a fashion compara-
ble to Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991), these scenes typically
insulate Birdie from the world around her rather than bringing genuine
contact: “[S]ometimes when we drove around in the back of my mother’s
Pinto, I would stare at the children outside with newfound interest, won-
dering which one of them I would become.”34 Growing recognition of
America’s long-standing plurality brought an overdue critique not just of
the illusory racial neutrality of the American literary canon (notably by
 Introduction 9
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark [1992]) but more generally of the cate-
gory of national identity. As Katha Pollitt reported in 1994, “Sheldon Hack-
ney of the National Endowment for the Humanities wants to fund what he
calls a ‘national conversation’ to determine what it means to be an Ameri-
can. Hackney himself acknowledges that he does not know the answer, but
believes the question is worth pursuing.”35 Part III begins with the pressing
need to think of both American identity and 1990s American literature in
more expansive terms, both in terms of the period’s changing conception of
“borders” (addressed by Aliki Varvogli in Chapter 14’s discussion of Cormac
McCarthy, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Jhumpa Lahiri) and in the increased
prominence of globalizing forces (as mapped by Paul Giles in Chapter 15,
with an eye on Jessica Hagedorn, Bob Shacochis, and DeLillo). Empha-
sis on globalization and interconnectivity often functioned – at the largest
scale – in terms of emerging debates about the ecosystem, which Heather
Houser takes up in Chapter 17’s discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko, Richard
Powers, and David Foster Wallace. As Houser’s references to biology and
geology show, addressing ecology in the 1990s often required interdisci-
plinary perspectives. The wider blurring of the line, between what was once
the clear domain of the literary and the scientific, in the 1990s is addressed
in Jon Adams’s discussion of “the Two-Cultures Novel” (Chapter 16), a
designation that ranges from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990)
to Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999). The different kinds of
interconnectivity explored in this chapter were variously enabled, studied,
or imagined during the period by emerging computer networks and tech-
nologies. This section ends with Joseph Conte’s assessment of the way the
decade’s literature (by Neal Stephenson, Richard Powers, and Pat Cadigan)
responded to the various utopian promises offered by virtual reality, which
once seemed to represent the leading edge of such technologies.
While globalizing technologies reshaped America at the largest scale,
those same technologies were often also implicated in reshaping life at
much smaller levels. While many major social networking platforms only
emerged after the millennium – MySpace in 2003, with Facebook appear-
ing the following year – the foundations of the social media revolution
are strongly rooted in the nineties, with, for instance, the 1995 develop-
ment of Classmates.com in the United States. If social media provides a
membrane through which the once private becomes public, then its emer-
gence in the 1990s might be seen in the context of a cluster of other inter-
sections of the public and private whose literary ramifications are consid-
ered under the umbrella of the book’s fourth section. Near the start of
the decade, Madonna published her coffee-table book Sex (1992), and its
10 st eph en j. bur n
implicit meditation on the relationship of sex and power proved uninten-
tionally prophetic as the decade saw a sequence of scandals that brought
private sex acts into the public domain of specifically political power as,
first the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinksy scandal, and then the Hemings-
Jefferson controversy unfurled. Such major news stories provide the back-
drop for literary reflections on both the reputed demise of the quintessen-
tial American family and its attendant mythology (in Chapter 20, Kasia
Boddy’s wide-ranging study triangulates the family, television, and writ-
ers from Edwidge Danticat to Junot Díaz), and for the prominence of
AIDS narratives as a representative example of one way that the pri-
vate world of sex was brought into wider public discourse in the decade
(Lesley Larkin’s account of Tony Kushner, Rabih Alameddine, and Jamaica
Kincaid, in Chapter 21). As Patrick O’Donnell observes, the public revela-
tion of sexual offenses was also at the heart of the outpouring of recovered
memory debates in the period, and this shift is considered in concert with
the rise of Trauma theory in the academy in Chapter 19.
The book’s final section considers the decade’s changing institutional
foundations. The 1990s were rife with typically end-oriented accounts of
the deleterious impact of specifically academic institutions on literature.
Alvin Kernan announced The Death of Literature (1990), charging that aca-
demic culture wars had “emptied out” canonical works “in the service of
social and political causes that are considered more important than the
texts themselves.”36 Moving in parallel, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon
(1994) offered “an elegy for the canon,” as “the ages of reading . . . now reach
terminus” leaving an “almost wholly . . . oral and visual culture.”37 John
W. Aldridge blamed the rise of creative writing programs for producing
a generation of writers whose work was “technically conservative, stylisti-
cally bland, and often extremely modest in intention.”38 Both Kernan’s and
Bloom’s positions have been read as reactionary responses to the unsettling
of white male power in the university, something like the critical equiv-
alent of the struggle David Mamet dramatized in Oleanna (1992). Many
voices, of course appropriately celebrated the unsettling of the conserva-
tive canon: Jay Clayton’s The Pleasures of Babel, for instance, welcomed the
creation of a “literature without masterpieces,” a pluralistic vision where
no single “writer or style” could “hold sway”39 ; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s
address, “Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tra-
dition,” similarly saw “wondrous” potential for black canon formation (a
widely discussed topic across the decade) at the decade’s start.40 But while
it was often reactionary complaints that made the decade’s news (the New
York Times responded to The Western Canon’s publication by christen-
ing Bloom “a colossus among critics”),41 as Daniel Punday illustrates in
 Introduction 11
Chapter 22, axial changes to the university took place away from the head-
lines, and need to be read in relation to economics rather than the canon.
Massive economic and institutional changes also provide the backdrop
for the final chapter’s discussion of independent presses. Corporate con-
solidation across all areas of American life characterizes the 1990s, and in
literary publishing the power and influence of a small group of publish-
ers expands greatly by decade’s end. In spite of such imperial expansion,
Jeffrey Di Leo nevertheless documents the resilient vitality of independent
presses in the decade, which served as a home and an incubator for both
avant-garde experimenters and multi-ethnic writers (Chapter 23). While (as
earlier chapters demonstrate) there is a strong eschatological flavor running
through much of the decade’s thinking, independent presses and affiliated
magazines were often home to more forward-thinking currents. In Octo-
ber 1992, for instance, the University of Kentucky’s ANQ acknowledged
the prevailingly “bleak commercial conditions,” yet gathered a sequence
of writers and critics to speculate on the future of American fiction, iden-
tifying such younger figures as Susan Daitch, Steve Erickson, William T.
Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Leyner as writers-to-watch in
the coming decade.42 Four years later, the Review of Contemporary Fiction
followed suit, asking Wallace to edit a forum called “The Future of Fic-
tion,” drawing in such writers as Franzen, Vollmann, Bradford Morrow,
and Carole Maso.
That so many of these writers might be associated with independent
publications and yet be published by mainstream presses before the decade
ended points to the prevailing trend in the 1990s for what was once
marginal to become mainstream. In music, Nirvana and grunge displace
Michael Jackson. In cinema, Pulp Fiction breaks records for an “indie”
film.43 In literature, not only is this shift manifest in the arc of Dave Eggers’s
career, moving from early work within the model of the “little magazine”44
to the mainstream success of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
(2000), but also – in larger terms – in the fate of African-American writers
who, as Prosser notes, “began their careers in the 1970s and 1980s redefin-
ing the canon” and then “became central to it and set the trends for their
times.”45 No single figure reflects this shift more completely than Toni
Morrison, who, in 1993, became the first African-American writer to win
the Nobel Prize.46
The 1990s are still close enough for recent memory to make the decade
available for nostalgic consumption,47 but they have receded sufficiently
for the difference between our millennial reflections on the decade and
the time’s judgment on itself to be revealing. At times, such differences
are simply terminological: the Gulf War of 1990–1991, for instance, must
12 st eph en j. bur n
now be known as the first Gulf War. In other cases, they involve wholesale
reevaluations. In 1996, for example, Granta ran its first special issue devoted
to picking the “Best of Young American Novelists.” The list was noted
even at the time for its tame selection – David Lodge (in terms that echo
Aldridge’s attack on Creative Writing programs) diagnosed “nothing very
startling or ambitious” in the work chosen, but rather a “certain sameness”
amid “a high standard of technical competence”48 – and the passing of
years has not often endorsed the judges’ cultural speculations, especially in
their narrow preference for a kind of well-behaved dirty realism. Preparing
a new list in 2007, even Granta’s editor – Ian Jack – wisely repudiated
the 1996 list, lamenting “judges with God-knows-what axes to grind in
California or Kansas.”49 At times the essays gathered in this book return
to debates current in the decade about key transitions – the emergence of
hypertext fiction, the end of postmodernism, and so on – but they also rely
on the wisdom of distance to identify shifts that were less remarked at the
time – the prevalence of AIDS narratives, the role of independent presses,
the changing shape of the lyric. In doing so, they cover many of the widely
recognized key works from the decade, but they also seek out less familiar
names, deliberately aiming not just to enlarge our sense of how literature
changed in this decade-in-transition, but also of who helped drive those
transitions.

NOTES
1 Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (London: Cape, 1997), 713.
2 In The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011),
Rodgers traces the gradual fragmentation in the 1980s and 1990s of the mid-
century ideas that shaped American life in the realms of politics, economics,
and society. Fracture also sums up much of the 1990s zeitgeist, with the Y2K
bug’s combination of advanced technology and atavistic fear typifying the
hybrid moods that inform much of the period’s literature.
3 Mann, The Magic Mountain (New York: Vintage, 2011), 223.
4 O’Donnell, “A Rough Decade,” American Literary History 24.2 (2012): 404.
5 Both Samuel Cohen and Phillip E. Wegner take this frame, and (in differ-
ent ways) see the decade as a momentary pause, rich in possibility, from the
remorseless logic of the surrounding year. Cohen’s After the End of History
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009) frames the 1990s as an “interwar
decade,” marked by a preoccupation with history that he reads against end-
historical arguments raised by Francis Fukuyama, Fredric Jameson, and Walter
Benn Michaels (4); Wegner’s Life Between Two Deaths (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009) influentially names the same years “the long nineties,”
and – by way of Lacan and Žižek – sees the fall of the World Trade Center
 Introduction 13
echoing the fall of the Berlin Wall in a way that belatedly destroyed “the sym-
bolic universe of the Cold War . . . and thus marked the opening of a new
period in global history” (9). This makes the 1990s a “transitional phase”
“between an ending (of the Cold War) and a beginning (of our post-September
11 world)” (ibid).
6 Robinson, American Apocalypses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), xi, xii.
7 Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 153.
8 Ibid., 51.
9 Ibid., 122, 64–65, 219.
10 Ibid., 111.
11 Updike, Toward the End of Time (London: Hamilton, 1997), 247. Bellamy,
Looking Backward, 120.
12 Ibid., 241.
13 Ibid., 313.
14 Bellamy, Looking Backward, 47, 216.
15 Newman, Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction (New York:
Routledge, 2013), 107.
16 Updike, Toward the End, 16, 241.
17 In American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past (New York: Palgrave, 2011),
Theophilus Savvas insightfully explores how “Pynchon’s re-inscription of the
subjunctive” in Mason & Dixon invokes an analogy to “the ‘Many Worlds Inter-
pretation’ of quantum mechanics” (86); DeWitt’s use of similar ideas is dis-
cussed in Chapter 7 of the present volume; although it was not published until
2001, DeLillo spent the late 1990s working on The Body Artist’s many-worlds
narration: “She stood nude in the workout room . . . Or sat cross-legged . . . Or
went about on all fours” ([New York: Scribner, 2001], 73); finally, Marshall
Boswell argues in Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2003) that we should see the counterfactuality that
marks “the world of Infinite Jest” as a “parallel universe” created when “a quan-
tum physicist makes a determination whether or not an observed proton is a
particle or a wave” (125).
18 Newman, ibid., 105. Such a conflict had, of course, been prophesied at least as
far back as Jack London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910), which imagines
a late twentieth-century conflict between China and the United States.
19 Bellamy, Looking Backward, 55.
20 Updike, Toward the End, 40.
21 Ammons, Garbage (New York: Norton, 1993), 18.
22 Barth, Coming Soon!!! (Boston: Houghton, 2001), 58.
23 Barth, On with the Story (Boston: Little, 1996), 14–15. Early drafts of the story
come closer to attributing the phrase “endism” to Salman Rushdie, while they
also omit “The End of Physics” and deny the unnamed speakers professorships.
24 I explore the resonance of these seminars and other 1990s debates over the “end
of postmodernism” in chapter one of Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmod-
ernism (London: Continuum, 2008).
14 st eph en j. bur n
25 Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (1989): 4.
26 John Horgan, The End of Science (New York: Broadway, 1996), 70.
27 Prosser, “Introduction,” in American Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Prosser (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2008), 10.
28 Powers, Gain (New York: Farrar, 1998), 81–83.
29 As Robinson notes, “the apocalypse is an unveiling (apo [from or away], kalupsis
[covering] from kalupto [to cover], and kalumma [veil]) . . . [and] the veil is the
eschaton, that which stands between the familiar and whatever lies beyond”
(xii).
30 DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner-Simon, 1997), 577.
31 Madhu Dubey’s Signs and Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
and W. Lawrence Hogue’s Postmodern American Literature and Its Other
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009) notably buck this trend.
32 DeLillo, “Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson, and the Millennium,” Dimensions
4.3 (1988): 30.
33 Robinson, American Apocalypses, xi.
34 Senna, Caucasia (New York: Riverhead-Penguin, 1998), 31.
35 Pollitt, “Subject to Debate,” Nation, April 18, 1994, 513.
36 Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 212.
37 Bloom, The Western Canon (London: Macmillan, 1994), 15, 519.
38 Aldridge, Talents and Technicians (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 30.
39 Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148.
40 Gates, Jr., in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker,
Jr., and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 14.
41 Adam Begley, “A Colossus Among Critics,” New York Times, September 25,
1994, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-colossus.html.
42 Lance Olsen, “The Michael Jacksonization of American Fiction,” ANQ 5.4
(1992): 177.
43 As Colin Harrison notes in American Culture in the 1990s (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2010), however, “what counts as ‘independent’” in
1990s cinema “is by no means clear-cut” (114).
44 Alexander Starre, Metamedia (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015) 67.
45 Prosser, “Introduction,” 2.
46 At the time, Henry Louis Gates Jr. put this transformation in even stronger
terms, noting in the New York Times (Oct. 8, 1993) that “just two centuries ago,
the African-American literary tradition was born in slave narratives . . . Now
our greatest writer has won the Nobel Prize.”
47 Kurt Anderson, for instance, calls it “the happiest decade of our American life-
times” in his short essay, “The Best Decade Ever? The 1990s, Obviously,” (New
York Times, February 6, 2015, SR6).
48 Lodge, “O Ye Laurels,” New York Review of Books, August 8, 1996, 20.
49 Jack, “Best of Young Novelists 2: Introduction,” Granta 97 (2007), https://
granta.com/introduction-boyan-2/.
 part i

Endtimes
 c h a p ter 1

American Literature and the Millennium

Jeremy Green

Midnight is never far away. Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
has published a “Doomsday Clock” to show how close the world stands
to global catastrophe. Through the decades of the Cold War, the clock’s
minute hand edged back and forth as nuclear war seemed more or less likely
depending on the state of the arms race and the promise of test ban treaties,
coming as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953. With the collapse of
the Soviet Union, tension eased and the minute hand withdrew in 1991
to a comparatively comfortable seventeen minutes from disaster. Although
the promise of 1991 did not hold – nuclear arms proliferated once again,
the peace dividend failed to materialize – the decade following the end
of the Cold War appears in hindsight as a period of cautious optimism, in
spite of the growing awareness of irreversible climate change and continued
international tensions and conflicts. Yet the countdown to the end of the
century and the millennium excited both millennial hopes and apocalyptic
anxieties as the year 2000 approached.
Portentous as these dates once appeared – 1999, 2000 – they had only
the significance projected onto them in response to hopes and fears that
had nothing to do with the calendar. In The Sense of an Ending, a study
of eschatology and narrative, Frank Kermode writes, “The century and
other fundamentally arbitrary chronological divisions – we might simply
call them saecula – are made to bear the weight of our anxieties and hopes.”1
The last decade of the twentieth century saw remarkable social, cultural,
and political changes, among them a new post-Soviet geopolitical reality,
the rapid emergence of new digital technologies (including the arrival of the
Internet), and the unchecked ascendancy of neoliberal social and economic
policies. The confused apprehension of such changes seized on the calendar
to cast millennial and apocalyptic figures, whether fantasies of a dawning
new age or fears of a cataclysmic ending.
Events unfolded during the 1990s that appeared to highlight the men-
acing power of the millennial imagination. The Waco Branch Davidians,
17
18 jeremy green
an explicitly apocalyptic religious cult led by David Koresh, came to a fiery
end in the disastrous 1993 ATF-FBI raid on their Texas compound; and
in 1997, the nightly appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet prompted the
Heaven’s Gate UFO cult to commit mass suicide in pursuit of a millenarian
sci-fi fantasy. As the decade drew to a close, calendrical fears took on a curi-
ously specific form with media-driven trepidation about the Y2K bug, the
alarming prospect that a worldwide computer failure would result in apoc-
alyptic chaos – airplanes falling out of the sky, nuclear missiles launching
themselves. What these events shared, very different though they were, was
a sense of imminent chaos and change associated with the century’s end.
In the case of the Branch Davidians, prophecies derived from the Book of
Revelations provided an important source of inspiration. Religious cults
and popular movements alike, associated with a tradition of eschatological
prophecy and dispensationalist fundamentalism, have deep roots in Amer-
ican culture. Even at the end of the twentieth century, biblical prophecy
retained a powerful popular appeal. Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left
Behind series of novels (1995–2007), for example, presented a Revelations-
inspired premillennial vision of the battle between good and evil in thriller
format. The series – along with spinoffs in other media, including video
games, movies, and graphic novels – proved wildly popular, regularly top-
ping the bestseller lists.
Such a full-fledged eschatological conception of the present and imme-
diate future gives a narrative shape to inchoate anxieties. As Kermode
argues, this narrative shape establishes a consonance between origins and
promised endings, and fits apparent chaos – often the chaos of a transitional
period – into a comprehensible structure. Premillennialist prophecy seizes
on evidence of perceived social and political disarray and converts it into a
privileged set of signs legible in terms of a biblical master-text. Otherwise
unrelated events – the rise of a political leader, an earthquake, a pandemic –
become linked figures in a narrative, and not just any narrative, but the nar-
rative to end all narratives. A menacing present can thus be resolved into
a future-oriented – and future-ending – story of the last days of humanity
before God’s final wrath.
Secular millennialism has structural affinities with eschatological
prophecy. Kermode writes: “The notion of an End-dominated age of tran-
sition has passed into our consciousness, and modified our attitudes to
historical pattern.”2 As the century came to a close, calling up fin de
siècle images of decadence and confusion, as well as notions of epochal
change, a deeper uncertainty about historical patterning in general could
also be detected, a sense of permanent transition that called the present into
 American Literature and the Millennium 19
question. What Fredric Jameson has called our “inverted millenarianism” –
the end of one thing after another (grand narratives, the subject, the
human, ideology) – gives a priority to competing and contradictory nar-
ratives that would lay hold of a moment of incessant transition or crisis in
which rapid change appeared to threaten the present as an intelligible unit
of time distinct from future and past.3 The appeal of apocalyptic think-
ing, even to the secular imagination, stems from the prospect of a restored
narrative pattern, no matter how dark in aspect.
Francis Fukuyama’s notorious end-of-history thesis expressed something
of the temper of the times, at once triumphalist and morose. His con-
troversial claim that free-market liberal democracy, best represented by
the United States, had emerged from the struggles of the twentieth cen-
tury as the only social system capable of securing freedom and prosper-
ity sought to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet Union to advance
the supposedly Hegelian thesis of the end of history. Of course, events
would continue to occur, but the essential problem facing states would
henceforth be technical or managerial – how best to arrive at the condi-
tion of a functioning liberal democratic society. But the mood of The End
of History is, as Krishan Kumar notes, hardly celebratory: “Fukuyama is
concerned at the selfishness and excessive individualism of liberal societies,
their relentless erosion of all forms of community and social morality . . . If
the whole world is becoming liberal, the whole world is also becoming
amoral.”4 This sobering conclusion suggests less the dawning of a new age
of liberal capitalism than the long twilight of civil society decaying from
within.
Jean Baudrillard’s mournful discourse of simulation gave a postmodern
flavor to the millennial talk of the end of history. In what he called the “hys-
teresis of the millennium,” a condition seemingly inescapable in the 1990s,
the end of history turned out to be one more simulation, a staged event
designed to conceal the long-vanished possibility of real change. Although
it may have seemed at the start of the decade that the rapid unfolding of
events in Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf promised to kick-start the
historical process, Baudrillard saw this as one more illusion: “This revival
of vanished – or vanishing – forms, this attempt to escape the apocalypse
of the virtual, is a utopian desire, the last of our utopian desires.”5 For
Baudrillard, countdown to the end of the millennium awakens the desire
for a true end, a genuine apocalypse, and hence a nostalgia, he claims, for
the dread-filled nuclear stalemate of the Cold War. But now it seems we
are alienated even from the prospect of our own annihilation, which, Bau-
drillard muses, continues to orbit us like a forgotten cosmonaut.
20 jeremy green
“The apocalyptic myth,” writes Kumar, “holds, in an uneasy but
dynamic tension, the elements of both terror and hope. The apocalyp-
tic ending will also signal the millennial beginning. However frightful the
contemplation of the end, there is no need to despair: a new world will be
born.”6 Although these interrelated elements of destruction and inception
continued to have a powerful hold on the imagination, a more characteris-
tic mood in the last years of the century involved a sense that the dynamic
tension of which Kumar writes had slackened, with a consequent confu-
sion of endings and beginnings, the sense, in a phrase cited from Derrida,
of “an end without an end.”7
Such a confusion of beginnings and endings, and of endings that fail to
end, inflected the writing of the 1990s with a distinctive poetics of hesita-
tion and suspension. The title poem of Jorie Graham’s 1997 collection The
Errancy begins:

Then the cicadas again like kindling that won’t take.

The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember
the terms of –
the rules. What was it was going to be abolished, what
restored?

The poem opens with the difficulty of beginnings and the confusion of
criteria. Utopia no longer lives in the imagination as an anticipated mil-
lennial conflagration; such hopes have faded, along with the idea of utopia
itself. Instead of the flames of destruction, or the plague of insects – or even
the bright light of utopia imagined – the poem’s speaker hears only “the
foghorn in the harbor, / the hoarse announcements of unhurried arrivals, /
the spidery virgin-shrieks of gulls.” The present continues, dimly heralded,
obscurely sensed, but it is a present that has lost the shape, the orientation
or direction, that utopia once promised:

But here, up on the hill, in town,

the clusterings of dwellings in balconied crystal-formation,
the cadaverous swallowings of the dream of reason gone,
hot fingerprints where thoughts laid out these streets, these braceletings
of park and government – a hospital – a dirt-bike run –
here, we stand in our hysteria with our hands in our pockets,
quiet, at the end of day, looking out, theories stationary,
while the freight, the crazy wick, once more slides down –
marionette-like its being lowered in –
marionette-strung our outwaiting its bloody translation . . . 8
 American Literature and the Millennium 21
Graham evokes a pause or space, a caesura, in which a dismayed but oddly
becalmed subject stands between “the dream of reason” and an incalculable,
menacing future. For the dream of reason may have mapped out the livable
city on a hill – an avatar of the New Jerusalem – or, as the echo of Goya’s
phrase reminds us, it may have bred monsters. Characteristically, Graham’s
lines stretch out, tendril-like, suspending the closure of image or syntax,
and enacting the searching yet unresolved movement of the post-utopian
condition – a condition, it seems, of unavoidable error, as the poem’s title
indicates.
Graham carefully reworks the notion of hysteria. As the poem continues
to extend its “spidery” network of images, linking the “struck match” of the
opening lines to a “christened bonfire” and “scorched comprehension,” it
begins to convey the sense, as well as the cognitive and ethical challenge, of
a far-flung global space, which seems to offer a glimpse of apocalypse just
beyond the confines of the writer’s page:

spidery gestures, tongued-over the molecular whiteness,

squared out and stretched and made to resemble emptiness,
will take down the smoldering in the terms of her passion
– sunglasses on the table, telephone ringing –
and be carried across the tongue-tied ocean,
through dusk, right through it, over prisons, over clapboard houses
to which the bartender returns, exhausted, after work,
over flare-ups of civil strife, skeletons rotting in the arms of
skeletons, the foliage all around them gleaming9

Hysteria suggests an extreme affective response, an over-response, to con-

ditions that tax the subject’s comprehension; it also implies that suffering
stems from memory, as Freud famously observed. In the case of millennial
hysteria, the threat of intoxication by images, reminiscent of Baudrillard’s
post-historical melancholia, is offset by the haunting memory of utopia,
now irretrievably lost.
Graham’s poetry of the 1990s offers a compelling and beautifully del-
iquescent picture of the millennial sensibility, in all its confusion, disap-
pointment, and apprehension. Her poised qualifications evoke the loss of
meaning invested in large narrative structures, whether progress, histori-
cal consciousness, or utopian desires. The lyric mode, as Graham practices
it, sustains the pathos of reservation and privation. For novelists of the
decade, the challenge of shaping narratives under the spell of suspended
endings remained provocative and pressing.
22 jeremy green
Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II sets millennial anxieties under a clear
heading: “The future belongs to crowds.”10 Through several spectacular
scenes of crowds, the novel conveys the impression that the future is col-
lapsing into the present and threatening the liberal individualism of late
twentieth-century America. The first of these crowds has a threateningly
regimented structure and clear apocalyptic dimension. In the prologue,
“At Yankee Stadium,” DeLillo describes a Unification Church mass wed-
ding officiated by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon himself, an event of
stunning strangeness taking place in an archetypically familiar American
setting. To the participants, the massed brides and grooms, the Reverend
Moon is literally the Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ, his life a para-
ble of suffering and miraculous endurance: “This is a man who lived in a
hut made of U.S. Army ration tins and now he is here, in American light,
come to lead them to the end of human history.” Through mass marriage,
the Unification Church pursues a millenarian doctrine: the members of
the Church are joined in matrimony in order to establish a world family
that, free from the taint of original sin, can live out the promise of God’s
Kingdom on earth. DeLillo emphasizes the uncanniness of this event by
jump-cutting to the bewildered parents scattered around the stands trying
to make sense of what they are seeing, not knowing what they should feel.
These then are the two sides of millennial hysteria in DeLillo’s novel: the
overwhelming certainty that amalgamates a crowd, and the fretful doubts,
dismay, and isolation of those who witness the crowd.
Following the prologue, Mao II takes shape around the figure of a reclu-
sive novelist, Bill Gray. After many years working on a novel he cannot
finish, Bill has grown tired of isolation, and tries tentatively to find his way
back to the world, first by inviting a photographer to his hideaway, and
then by getting caught up, more or less willingly, in a plot involving ter-
rorists and a hostage in Beirut. Bill’s secretary, Scott, reports Bill’s thoughts
about the Moonie mass wedding:

Mass-married. Married in a public ceremony involving thousands of others.

Bill calls it millennial hysteria. By compressing a million moments of love
and touch and courtship into one accelerated mass, you’re saying that life
must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound, more prone
to hurrying its own transformation, or what’s the point? You take marriage,
the faith of the species, the means of continuation, and you turn it into
catastrophe, a total implosion of the future.11

According to Bill, mass-marriage programmatically folds the future – fig-

ured as marriage – into the present; it also transforms intimacy into
 American Literature and the Millennium 23
spectacle. As Malcolm Bull has argued, one characteristic feature of the
apocalyptic, from the Bible forward, has been the collapse of socially sig-
nificant distinction and a bewildering or alarming resurgence of the undif-
ferentiated.12 In Bill Gray’s account, the social bond of marriage becomes an
image of mutation or disintegration, a portentous sign of things to come.
The mass-marriage is only the first of several such scenes in which a
loss of scale, differentiation, and perspective present themselves to char-
acters gripped by confusion. The Moonie bride, Karen, now living in
Bill Gray’s household, watches the Hillsborough football stadium disas-
ter unfold on the TV screen. The late night newsfeed offers terrible images
of football fans crushed against the security fence, pictures that resemble
“a religious painting [ . . . ] a fresco in a tourist church [ . . . ] a crowded
twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint
it.”13 Such a comparison suggests the aestheticizing nature of the medium
of television, which introduces an element of spectatorship, a contempla-
tive detachment, thereby converting a scene of horror into a consumable
image. It also hints at the apocalyptic frame the spectator’s gaze imposes
on the events: the fresco, by implication, might very well be a scene of the
Last Judgment, a reminder to the faithful of the final revelation promised
in the Bible. But there is an uncomfortable mismatch between the scene of
horror and its apocalyptic framing. Watching TV in bed, Karen “sees the
crowd pushed toward the fence and people at the fence pressed together
and terribly twisted. It is an agony of raised and twisted arms and suffering
faces. They show men calmly watching.”14 As a media spectacle, the scene
evokes the imagery of apocalypse, even as it desublimates the apocalyptic
as a meaningful eschatological patterning. Karen finds herself suspended
between alarming significance and a troubling absence of affect.
Other crowds follow: the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square,
Beijing; the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini; the crowds of homeless people
in lower Manhattan. Less visible, but no less important for the novel, is the
implied crowd of watchers, that disaggregated mass of people gazing at TV
screens, rapt or disengaged – it seems hardly to matter. Increasingly, the
vast open-air crowds come to represent a particular threat – to the indi-
vidual, and, by implication, to American sovereignty, as the critic John
McClure has observed.15 At the same time, the novel stresses the symbiosis
between the media, gripped by catastrophic news, and the terrorists who
work in secret to seize the attention of the West. Terrorists, Bill argues,
understand this symbiosis and act accordingly. Novelists, by contrast, are
sidelined by the media appetite for spectacle and disaster, and so the rise of
the terrorist portends the eclipse of the novelist. Mao II eventually flattens
24 jeremy green
the dialectic between the individual and the crowd to the point where the
arch-individualist, the writer whose work is expressive of singular identity,
is pitted against the terrorist in a zero-sum game. Where the novelist works
painstakingly in isolation to express his or her essence through the grain
and heft of well-formed sentences, the terrorist sinks identity into a single,
violent purpose, or at the very least into the image of a leader – a latter-day
avatar of Mao Zedong, a second Mao that doubles the Andy Warhol sketch
for which the novel is named. This comparison between writer and terrorist
pushes the plot to its logical conclusion – the disappearance of the writer:
Bill is inveigled, perhaps in answer to a suicidal impulse, into a haphaz-
ard plot to exchange himself with a prisoner held in Beirut. He dies before
any exchange can take place, and his passport is stolen from his corpse by
one of the nameless indigents who hover on the margins of the narrative.
The writer disappears into the crowd. The author’s death appears to con-
firm the dominance of the new era of terror and crowds, even though the
epilogue holds out a modestly optimistic symmetrical mirror-image of the
mass-marriage when a bride and groom celebrate their wedding in war-torn
Beirut. This rather too tidy symmetry and the implausible pairing of novel-
ist and terrorist highlight the novel’s tendency to schematize its intuitions.
But in so doing, DeLillo introduces a theme – the marginalization of lit-
erature by a culture of media and technology – that will assume increasing
importance for a number of writers throughout the course of the decade.
Even more than Don DeLillo, the underrated novelist Steve Erickson
has forged, through several books, a contemporary millennial mythology.
From the beginning of his career he has trafficked in the apocalyptic sce-
narios and postapocalyptic settings that run through 1990s culture. He
has imagined various precipitous declines for his home city, Los Angeles,
among them cataclysmic sandstorms (Days Between Stations), authoritari-
anism and ruinous desolation (Rubicon Beach), and inexplicable flooding
(Our Ecstatic Days). He returns over and again to locations and motifs –
the vacant hotel, the isolated visionary or madman, the lost girl – to make
the city and the time over into his preferred dreamscape, an alternate
Los Angeles dominated by bizarre occurrences and obsessions, tenuously
anchored to a recognizable reality by references to modern history and pop-
ular culture. Of his novels of the 1990s, Erickson’s The Sea Came in at Mid-
night focuses most closely on the turn of the millennium; the book mar-
shals an abundance, almost an overabundance, of apocalyptic figures and
plotlines.
The Sea Came in at Midnight proceeds by way of flashbacks, memo-
ries retrieved and related in a time when the faculty of memory itself seems
 American Literature and the Millennium 25
impaired. One thread of the text, for example, deals with the central charac-
ter’s brief career as a Tokyo “memory girl,” one who exchanges memories in
confidence with a paying client, an organized response to the disappearance
of memory that apparently afflicts postwar Japan. Similarly, characters get
caught up in the smuggling of time capsules; these are canisters filled with
mementoes and souvenirs, material emblems of memory that are stolen
and shipped across the Pacific to an amnesiac nation. The novel’s imag-
ined present – the last days of 1999 and the first of 2000 – seems suspended
between an inaccessible past and an unimaginable future. Kristin, the pro-
tagonist, is propelled in part by a desire for dreams. Unable to dream, she
imagines dreams to be memories projected back from the future, and fanta-
sizes that nocturnal sex with sleeping men will somehow give her access to
the dreams of others. But as the novel unfolds she stumbles into the millen-
nial fantasies of others, fantasies that are shaped to close off the future – to
hasten the end, or render it unthinkable. Leaving her hometown in central
California in the closing days of 1999, she gets caught up in a doomsday
cult that is in the process of compelling two thousand women to march
to their deaths over a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Narrowly escaping this
fate – she was to have been the two-thousandth victim – she finds her way
to Los Angeles, where she shelters in the house of a self-styled “apocalyp-
tologist.” This individual – he is known only as the Occupant – has spent
years plotting a map of the times and locations of the “Age of Apocalypse.”
He explains:

Modern apocalypse was no longer about cataclysmic upheaval as related to

divine revelation; modern apocalypse, the Occupant told Kristin, speaking
with more passion than she had ever heard him express before, was ‘an explo-
sion of time in a void of meaning,’ when apocalypse lost nothing less than
its very faith – and in fact the true Age of Apocalypse had begun well before
31 December 1999, at exactly 3:02 in the morning on the seventh of May, in
the year 1968.16

The Age of Apocalypse resembles an inverted Age of Aquarius, the New Age
of peace and love announced in the 1960s. Rather than peace and love, the
last decades of the twentieth century have been dominated, Kristin gathers,
by senseless horrors, by a movement away from ideologically motivated vio-
lence, typified by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to meaning-
less acts of murder, random disasters, and a grotesque amnesia. The Occu-
pant has numerous examples ready at hand – the murders of Alberta King
and Martin Luther King’s mother, the Manson murders, Bhopal, Cher-
nobyl, the Heaven’s Gate suicides. In sum, “the crucial reference points
26 jeremy green
of the Apocalyptic Calendar were moments of nihilistic derangement no
scheme could accommodate.”17 At the center of the Occupant’s calendar,
“the true vortex where all meaning collapsed into blackness,” are two events
from the spring of 1985 notable for their folly and banality: President Rea-
gan laid a wreath on the tomb of an S.S. officer in Germany; and Coca-Cola
chose to discontinue its most successful product, “in order to produce in
its place a bad imitation of its obviously inferior competitor.”18 Coming at
the end of a litany of horrors, the crashing misstep of the soft drink com-
pany hints at the dark absurdity of the Occupant’s mad project, as though
unreason has no limits, and all kinds of inexplicable events, however banal,
can be cast into the web of apocalyptic unmeaning.
The novel follows several paths that lead out of, but also back into, this
nihilistic labyrinth. Various plotlines diverge, only to intersect much later,
suggesting that the character arcs, often involving fruitless searches and
obsessive quests, resemble the geometry of the Occupant’s calendar. One
such narrative follows a notorious pornographer, Lulu Blu, and uncovers
her connection with the filming of a fake “snuff movie,” supposedly the
inspiration for a rash of genuinely murderous porn films. Consumed with
guilt over her role in unleashing such atrocities, Lulu spends decades track-
ing down and destroying every copy of the movie she helped make, aban-
doning her daughter (Kristin) along the way. A second thread traces the
Occupant’s career back to the inaugural moment of the Age of Apoca-
lypse, aged eleven, when he lived in Paris at the time of the May ’68 events,
and a gunshot from his parents’ bedroom precipitated citywide rioting. It
is this outcome – an act of violence with enormous, unintended conse-
quences – that sheds light on the portentous phrase the Occupant applies
to the modern apocalypse: “an explosion of time in a void of meaning.”
For the gunshot from a crime of passion (the Occupant’s mother shoots
her rival) occurs at a moment of maximum tension between the police and
the student protesters in the streets of Paris, a spark that ignites the chaotic
conflict that engulfs the city.
The Occupant’s story suggests that predictions and the retrospective
plotting of events might be equally inadequate. Instead, the meaning of
historical narrative disappears punctually with the irruptive and anarchic
force of events. Erickson’s mythology of the millennium lays claim to a
historical period – from 1968 until the end of the century, and perhaps
beyond – but also challenges the idea that these decades can be understood
except as a series of implosive events that defy understanding, that, indeed,
swamp understanding with senseless horror – an apocalyptic deluge at the
level of comprehension.
 American Literature and the Millennium 27
For DeLillo and Erickson alike, the menacing scenes of millennial con-
fusion are inescapably connected with media technologies. Lulu Blu, for
example, tries to undo the damage her pornography career has done by
burning the offending videotapes and daubing the ashes on television satel-
lite dishes, a form of apotropaic magic enacted against the new technologies
that typified the 1990s. The technologies of satellite television, home com-
puting, and the Internet produced the new media landscapes of the end
of the century; they presented an important source of the millennial anx-
ieties with which novelists, anticipating cultural change, grappled as the
year 2000 approached.
Indeed, as the clock ticked down toward the end of the millennium,
widespread uncertainty and anxiety arose in connection with the Y2K com-
puter bug. All sorts of software coded during the previous decade had, as
it turned out, been built on existing systems that had saved the then-scarce
memory by shortening dates; when the calendar turned over to the year
2000, experts feared the dating code would not recognize the new date or
recognize it wrongly, perhaps jumping back to 1900. So the apprehensive-
ness associated with the turn of the millennium took on a strangely literal
quality: it was the date itself that would cause chaos, not what it signi-
fied in our “centurial” imaginings.19 Although the problems caused by the
date conversion turned out to be minor – no planes fell out of the sky, no
missiles launched in error – the fears of mayhem caused by a widespread
software glitch gave a vivid illustration of the condition of living in what
Ulrich Beck has called “a risk society.”20 Fear of the Y2K bug stemmed
from the sense that we now live in a society so networked and inter-
connected that a seemingly small computer error might have enormous
consequences. It highlighted the extent to which our safety and security
depend on the digital technology that now pervades the entirety of social
life.
For writers the awareness of the digitalization of society and culture
increased sharply during the 1990s. Computers and the Internet changed
patterns of marketing and consumption, and as new venues for sales and
the promotion of books opened up, along with new spaces for review-
ing and discussion, the existing institutions of literature often perceived
the emerging digital landscape as a threat. For some novelists this per-
ceived problem felt overwhelming, a threat to the production of novels
as well as a threat to reading in general. In a well-known essay published in
Harper’s in 1996, Jonathan Franzen stated the problem, as he saw it, in blunt
terms. American novelists face a culture dominated by “technological con-
sumerism:” “to ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is
28 jeremy green
to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technolog-
ical consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an
infernal machine.”21 Franzen’s essay recounts his rethinking of the novel,
his approach to writing fiction, and his eventual embrace of what he saw
as fundamental and perennial novelistic concerns.
Nonetheless, the challenge of writing fiction that would reflect the rapid
social and cultural changes brought into being by digitalization encouraged
some writers to investigate the narrative potential of new technologies.
John Barth, another postmodern writer deeply invested in the long his-
tory of the novel, made use of the external features of hypertext to explore
the possibilities of fiction in an imaginary new space in the story “Click,”
and then, on a much larger scale, in his 2001 novel Coming Soon!!!, which
dramatized the overlap, or border war, between old-fashioned postmodern
intertextuality and new-fangled hypertext fiction – a self-consciously mil-
lennial drama, with the trappings of biblical apocalypse and Y2K thrown in
for good measure. In novels involving computer networks, artificial intel-
ligence, and virtual reality, Richard Powers in Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the
Dark fashioned narratives that captured some of the breathless promise and
disturbing implications of the new digital technologies.
These novels established a place where science fiction and more tradi-
tional modes might usefully interact. Among the most ingenious of such
novels to adopt this approach is The Walking Tour by Kathryn Davis.
Davis’s novels are intricate, elliptical, and often uncanny or magical. In
The Walking Tour Davis achieves an intriguing fusion of unlike genres; she
mixes travel narrative, dystopia, and folk tale to tell an apocalyptic story of
insidious technological menace. She imagines a technology, inspired by the
Internet, that would allow readers to rewrite anything they read, opening
texts to limitless changes and undermining any principle of ownership or
fidelity to the written word. To picture the consequences, the novel draws
from the early Welsh narrative collection The Mabinogion, particularly the
story of Manawydan and the magical fall of mist that swallows up his lands
and people. In The Walking Tour the sinister enchantment comes from the
new text-sharing software. Davis tracks her characters on a walking tour
of Wales just before they lose everything, and long after, when the central
characters’ daughter, living in a bleak future of technological backwardness
and species mutation, tries to make sense of the last days of her parents and
their friends. The novel leaves us with the uncertainty of what is to come
and with the mystery of transformations – one world has become another,
but art as the bearer of memory offers a fragile thread connecting them
across a period of cataclysm.
 American Literature and the Millennium 29
Davis’s imagined future in the novel is a dark world of random genetic
mutation and climatic disaster. This, too, is the currency of the millen-
nial imagination. As Bruno Latour points out, 1989 was not only notable
for the fall of the Berlin wall and the revolutions that swept through East-
ern Europe; it was also a year in which Paris, Amsterdam, and London held
the first international conferences on the state of the global environment.22
Through the remaining years of the twentieth century, awareness of the cri-
sis of anthropogenic climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, and the
destruction of habitats around the world only grew stronger. This too con-
tributed to the millennial concerns of American writing, though in ways
that now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, seem surpris-
ingly oblique. DeLillo’s major novel of the 1990s, Underworld (published
in 1997) sifts through the wreckage and waste of the Cold War, examining
cultures of memory and environmental toxicity, the processing of garbage,
and the keeping of secrets. The novel ends with a vision of the Internet as
a millennial space in which the living and the dead comingle, and every-
thing floats free of time and space, each thing connected to every other.
Sister Edgar, a nun who plays a small but important role in the novel, finds
herself in cyberspace, the afterlife of a new century, and learns that the
unearthly presence implied throughout the web is not God but the atomic
bomb, the apocalyptic vision at the beginning and end of all the teeming
linked nodes of the web.
DeLillo’s sense of interconnectedness, thematized in Underworld as para-
noia, has an ecological dimension as well. The paranoid characters of post-
modern fiction fear the plots that seem to enmesh a range of events, but
the millennial imagination might also perceive the connections as evidence
of the inextricable links between human beings and their environment.
Richard Powers makes this point forcefully in his 1998 novel, Gain. The
novel has a simple but effective structure. It intersperses two narratives, one
concerning the growth and expansion of an American company from its
nineteenth-century roots in soap manufacture to its late twentieth century
expansion into foods, fertilizers, and pharmaceuticals; the other concerns a
middle-aged woman living at the end of the century who is diagnosed with
ovarian cancer, endures grueling treatments, and finally faces her unavoid-
able demise. Although there are crude parallels to be drawn between the
runaway growth of a business and the metastases of cancer, the important
connection between the narratives lies in the recognition that the success
of the corporation has been achieved at the expense of the environment,
human and non-human alike, in which it has flourished. Just as the Clare
Company has myriad enterprises and a global reach, so soil, air, water, and
30 jeremy green
human bodies are contaminated by the chemicals the company produces.
Capitalism, it seems, is now inseparable from nature.
In the first decades of the third millennium, narratives of global disaster
and postapocalyptic survival have proliferated to the point of cliché. Pop-
ular novels and movies, as well as some serious fiction, have dealt time and
again with the ultimately numbing spectacle of our demise, a sign of the
ineluctable fact of environmental catastrophe – but also of a correspond-
ing failure of the imagination. George Saunders, currently one of American
fiction’s sharpest satirists, published during the nineties a highly prescient
novella, “Bounty,” which details a brutal postapocalyptic environment that
turns out to be a theme park for the rich, a pleasure garden staffed by the
unfortunate mutant victims of the very disaster they stage on a daily basis
for paying guests. In the wake of the year 2000, it seems that we have not
lost our taste for apocalypse; indeed, we now perhaps have learned to take
an ominous and oppressive pleasure in the spectacle of catastrophe. As signs
of environmental catastrophe become increasingly obvious, challenging the
literary imagination, we are obliged to wonder whether a Doomsday Clock
can measure the dawning understanding that it is already too late.

NOTES
1 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 11.
2 Ibid., 13–14.
3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991), 1.
4 Krishan Kumar, “Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today,” in Apocalypse
Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995),
206.
5 Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. by Chris Turner (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1994), 117.
6 Kumar, “Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today,” 202.
7 Ibid., 207.
8 Jorie Graham, The Errancy (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1997), 4.
9 Ibid., 5.
10 Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991), 16.
11 Ibid., 80.
12 Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (London:
Verso, 1999), 84.
13 DeLillo, Mao II, 33–34.
14 DeLillo, Mao II, 33.
15 John A. McClure, Late Imperial Romance (London: Verso, 1994), 145–148.
16 Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight (New York: Avon, 1999), 49.
 American Literature and the Millennium 31
17 Ibid., 51.
18 Ibid., 52.
19 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 189.
20 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter
(London: Sage, 1992).
21 Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to
Write Novels,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1996, 43.
22 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 8.
 c h a p ter 2

Angels, Ghosts, and Postsecular Visions

Brian McHale

Angelicism
In the 1990s, there were angels in America. Some of the most con-
spicuous of them appeared right at the hinge between the eighties and
nineties, in Tony Kushner’s two-part epic drama of that title. By the second
decade of the new millennium, they were mostly gone. Kushner’s Angels in
America returned at the end of 2003 as an all-star cable television adaptation
directed by Mike Nichols, but the most conspicuous pop-culture angels of
the new millennium might have been the ones in Danielle Trussoni’s best-
selling novel, Angelology (2010), and its sequel Angelopolis (2013). (A third
volume, to round out the inevitable trilogy, is promised.) Angelology reveals
how attenuated the angel motif had become by the 2010s. A kitsch prod-
uct, it echoes – weakly and belatedly – not only Father Andrew Greeley’s
theological angel romances of the eighties and nineties (Angel Fire [1988],
Angel Light [1995], Contract with an Angel [1998]), but also other bestselling
genre fictions of the era: J. K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter novels (1997–2007),
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2008) of vampire romances, and
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). But it is the sheer volume of this
novel’s angel lore, clumsily transmitted via encyclopedia entries, lectures
by learnéd angelologists, and other thinly veiled data-dumps, that reveals
the exhaustion of the angel motif. Once there were angels everywhere, in
pop culture and aesthetically ambitious literature alike; now there is only
Angelology.
Harold Bloom, who dubbed the popular obsession with angels “angeli-
cism,” regarded it as a kind of “populist poetry.”1 He plausibly dated its
onset to 1990, when Sophy Burnham’s A Book of Angels became a surprise
bestseller, inaugurating a publishing boom in angel books.2 The angel-
book craze swept along in its wake a flock of angel narratives in vari-
ous media, from the CBS television series Touched by an Angel (1994–
2003) through the big-screen John Travolta vehicle Michael (1996), to the

32
 Angels, Ghosts, and Postsecular Visions 33
Hollywood remake of Wim Wenders and Peter Handke’s art film Der
Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (1987) under the title of City of Angels
(1998). The craze also created or reinforced a market for collectible angels –
posters, calendars, mantelpiece tchotchkes, garden statuary, etc. – as well
as wearable ones – T-shirts, jewelry, even lingerie in the “Angel” line intro-
duced by the undergarment retailer Victoria’s Secret in 1997. The highwa-
ter mark of popular culture’s angel obsession might be said to have been
symbolically reached on or about February 7, 1995, when Judge Lance Ito,
presiding over the intensively televised and racially charged “trial of the
century” – that of O. J. Simpson, for a double murder – reprimanded pros-
ecutor Marcia Clark for wearing an angel pin similar to one worn by the
murdered wife’s relatives.
But angels were not just a pop-culture phenomenon; they flourished
also in ambitious and cutting-edge art of the nineties. They enjoyed, says
Roger Gilbert, “a special ubiquity” in serious poetry of the decade,3 and he
lists, by way of confirmation, no fewer than twenty-five books of Ameri-
can poetry published in the nineties with “angel” in their titles. Kushner’s
Angels in America, a touchstone of serious drama in the nineties, is typical
of the era; so, too, is the crossover artist Laurie Anderson’s 1989 CD Strange
Angels and her angel-filled Empty Places world tour (1989–1990) in sup-
port of the CD. Markedly different, but just as typical in its own way, was
Don DeLillo’s story “The Angel Esmeralda” (1994), later incorporated in
his major megafiction of the late nineties, Underworld (1997). This short
story narrates a case of collective delusion – or vision? – when an entire
South Bronx community sees, or thinks it sees, the face of a murdered girl
in a billboard advertisement for orange juice. Is DeLillo being ironic, or
does he actually spot a glimmer of transfiguration in the folds of consumer
culture? It is impossible to say.4
DeLillo’s Esmeralda reflects one type of nineties angel, Kushner’s angels
another type; they mingle strangely throughout the decade. Orthodox
Christian angelology conceived of angels as beings of a different order from
our own – divine intermediaries created separately from us at the beginning
of the world, sublime and radically alien. This is the basis for Kushner’s
angels, whom he ironizes without, however, ever degrading or demean-
ing them. The alternative, heterodox model, which crept into the popular
imagination during the nineteenth century, originated with the Swedish
scientist and visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). In Swedenborg’s
visions of heaven, the angels aren’t beings of a different order but rather
spirits of the human dead. In place of the angelic hierarchy of orthodox
angelology, Swedenborg substituted a kind of spiritual career-ladder that
34 br ian m c h al e
the dead could ascend as they achieved ever-higher levels of posthumous
spiritual perfection.5 Traces of this Swedenborgian model are visible among
the South-Bronx visionaries of DeLillo’s story, and in many other quarters
of both popular and high-art angelology.
The question implied by this juxtaposition of models is this: are angels
basically ourselves transfigured, or are they radically other? Popular cul-
ture can blithely live with such contradictions, as the nineties abundantly
illustrate, but more serious artistic expression strives to reconcile them
somehow. On the brink of the decade, for instance, Wenders and Handke
approached it one way in Wings of Desire, where angels yearn for human
experience to the point of abandoning their angelhood for the privilege
of being us. Joseph McElroy, in his 1200-page meganovel of the same year,
Women and Men (1987), approached it another way. Here angels seem to
hover above the characters, monitoring them from outside, slipping from
one to another in defiance of time and space, and sometimes dipping into
their minds. They behave, in other words, much like the omniscient narra-
tors of nineteenth-century fiction,6 ontologically superior to human char-
acters, investing them at will with their own angelic consciousness.
The poet Jorie Graham, in her late-nineties collection The Errancy
(1997), approaches it yet another way. One strand in the complex weave of
this difficult book is a set of six “guardian angel” poems distributed irreg-
ularly across the volume. In some of these poems, the angel is ourselves, in
others it is radically alien, and in still others it aspires to become us. It is
the wholly human hostess who is the metaphorical guardian of the “little
utopia” of her party in the poem of that title (“The Guardian Angel of the
Little Utopia”), like all-too-human Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s
novel. In “The Guardian Angel of Self-Knowledge” and “The Guardian
Angel of Private Life,” by contrast, the voice and point of view are that
of utterly non-human angels, casting an estranged eye on human experi-
ence. In “The Guardian Angel of Not Feeling,” the inhuman and perhaps
malevolent angel seems to apostrophize a human being, presumably the
poet, directing her to perform a strange, ritualistic parody of the act of
writing.7 But in “The Guardian Angel of Point of View,” as in Wenders
and Handke’s Wings of Desire, the angel expresses envy for the very limita-
tions of the merely human point of view, “the limits of the single aperture”
as distinct from the boundless, all-over perspective that angelic experience
evidently entails.8
“The Errancy may have been the decade’s most representative book of
poems,” Gilbert writes, “both in its distinctive mix of religion, myth,
and philosophy and in its crossing of traditional lyric modes . . . with the
disjunctive forms developed by Language poets.”9 “Representative,” yes,
 Angels, Ghosts, and Postsecular Visions 35
but is it really appropriate to attribute “religion” to Graham’s poetry,
exactly? For all its allusions to theological thinkers such as St. Anselm
and Pascal, and despite the fact that the volume climaxes in an “Easter
Morning Aubade,” it is not clear that The Errancy actually embraces reli-
gious ideas or sentiments. In this respect, it resembles many of the other
cultural products of nineties angelicism. They are all, perhaps, less reli-
gious or even spiritual than postsecular – which is not quite the same
thing.

Postsecularism
A distinctive feature of the angels of the nineties, high as well as low, is their
dissociation from orthodox religious contexts and their affiliation instead
with other metaphysical phenomena and violations of physical law – with
ghosts, hauntings, and unsanctioned miracles. There are, for instance, no
angels in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland (1990), as might have been
expected from the author of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a text top-heavy
with angels – or rather, no actual angels, only discredited and metaphor-
ical ones.10 Nevertheless, even in the absence of angels, close encounters
of a metaphysical kind abound: intimations of “messages from beyond”11 ;
visits to the afterlife, actual realms of death immediately adjacent to our
own world, near enough that passage between the worlds is easy; even
traces of what can only have been an incursion by the sci-fi movie-monster
Godzilla.12 It is even possible in the Vineland universe to earn a living as
a “karmic adjuster,” working out the injustices of guilty and aggrieved
ghosts who remain in limbo, dead but lingering on. Pynchon calls the
undead of Vineland “Thanatoids,” which we learn “means ‘like death, only
different’”13 – dead-ish.
Similarly, in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), miracles, hauntings,
and apparitions familiar from magical realist fiction of the Latin Ameri-
can Boom and other global postcolonial literatures mingle with channeling,
psychic healing, and other phenomena of North American New Age spirit-
uality. Strongly reminiscent of magical realism, for instance, is an inexpli-
cable rain of starlings,14 which recalls the plague of butterflies in Salman
Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), but also recalls the tabloidesque incredible-
but-true phenomenon of frogs or other animals falling from the sky, as they
do at the climax of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia (1999).15 The
matriarch figure of Castillo’s novel, Sofi, has four doomed daughters, all
of them miracle-prone. The daughter called La Loca, miraculously resur-
rected from the dead, flies to the church roof.16 Another daughter, Caridad,
runs away to live as a hermit in a cave in the Sangre de Cristo mountains,
36 br ian m c h al e
but when she’s finally captured she has miraculously become too heavy
to lift.17 Later she will leap suicidally from a mesa hand-in-hand with her
beloved, Esmeralda, and their bodies will miraculously disappear into thin
air, never to be recovered.18
Sofi’s daughters are also haunted and ghost-ridden, or they are them-
selves the ghosts who do the haunting. La Loca is visited by La Llorona,
the Weeping Woman of Mexican legend who haunts the earth seeking the
children she drowned in order to elope with her lover. La Loca’s sister Esper-
anza, kidnapped and killed in Saudi Arabia with her TV crew during the
First Gulf War, haunts their mother; later on, so does La Loca herself.19
Hilariously, when the three strange siblings attend their sister Fe’s wed-
ding, they each do so in a different, ontologically ambiguous present/absent
state – there but not there:
[The bride’s family] more or less attended. Her parents were present. Loca
watched the ceremony from outside the church, peering in through the open
door. Caridad was not physically present but “channeled” in her aura. And
Esperanza was seen there by some, but not by everybody.20

Castillo and Pynchon, together with the other writers mentioned in this
chapter, are symptoms of what John McClure has called “postsecuralism.”
By this he means not reactionary fundamentalism, the retreat to scriptural
literalism and other forms of religious certainty reflected in, e.g., James
Redfield’s New Age adventure novel The Celestine Prophecy (1993), the Left
Behind series (1995–2007) of the fundamentalist novelists Tim LaHaye and
Jerry Jenkins, or Mel Gibson’s sado-pious film The Passion of the Christ
(2004). McClure is thinking, rather, of forms of artistic expression (narra-
tive fiction in particular) that register disenchantment with mere secularism
and a yearning for spirituality without fleeing to faith, whether orthodox or
heterodox. The “signature” of such fiction is “the rearticulation of a dramat-
ically ‘weakened’ religiosity with secular, progressive values and projects.”21
Postsecular writers are practitioners of “weak religion” or “weak ontology,”
in the spirit of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s “weak thought,”
a modest, self-limiting alternative to the robust metaphysics of Heidegger
and the Western philosophical tradition generally.22 Typically in such fic-
tions, “a fundamental element of a specific religious ontology is weakened
but retains a certain shaky power: it is taken out of its original context
and combined with alien elements, challenged, and revised.”23 “[P]eople
are born again, the dead are brought back to life, gods walk the Earth, and
windows open in the walls of the secular world.”24 “[T]the walls of the
visible world come down,” McClure writes,
 Angels, Ghosts, and Postsecular Visions 37
doors open, angels break through, zones . . . are suddenly opened to one
another. But the openings are, without exception, emphatically partial and
the world revealed complex . . . [T]he openings that occur extend [charac-
ters’] vision in limited ways, disclose unmapped zones and require them to
practice, if they can, the difficult arts of discernment.25
Angels break through, as in Kushner’s Angels in America or Graham’s
“guardian angel” poems; zones open to one another, as in the neighbor-
ing worlds of the living, the dead, and the dead-ish in Pynchon’s Vineland;
characters peek through loopholes in the visible, as the sisters do from
their various ambiguous vantages in Castillo’s So Far from God; La Loca
is brought back from the dead; starlings and frogs rain from the sky. The
world begins to pivot from secular to postsecular, and everyone practices,
with difficulty, the arts of discernment. Difficulty of discernment is in part
a consequence, no doubt, of the heightened ontological pluralism of an
early-nineties world disoriented by the abrupt disappearance of Cold War
alignments, its disorientation further aggravated by the onset of new tech-
nologies that multiplied realities, and bored holes between worlds. These
new technologies included cellular telephony, ripe with opportunities for
uncanny bilocation; the World Wide Web, still a novelty in the early- to
mid-nineties; and the interfaces of personal computers, through whose
windows one peered into other planes, other spaces.

Plague Angels
One dimension of postsecularism in the nineties was the struggle to come
to terms, imaginatively and otherwise, with the specter of mortality raised
by the AIDS epidemic. Still untreatable in 1990, posing an existential
threat especially to America’s gay communities, AIDS, though then as now
incurable, was brought increasingly under control as the decade advanced.
Angels came to be associated with the discourse surrounding the AIDS epi-
demic, a phenomenon that Kushner’s Angels in America both reflects and
reinforces. The connection was an obvious one to make, given angels’ tra-
ditional association with death on the one hand (not least through their
ubiquity in cemetery statuary and war memorials), and their appropria-
tion by the gay community on the other. Twentieth-century gay subcul-
tures “queered” the figure of the angel, which had been “feminized” in the
Victorian era but in traditional iconography of earlier times had been male
or androgynous.26 The term “angel” is itself gay slang for a male homosex-
ual, an affirmative alternative to the insulting or self-deprecating “fairy.”27
A gay subtext is readily discernible in many later twentieth-century angel
38 br ian m c h al e
texts,28 from Beat iconography (Kerouac’s “desolation angels,” Ginsberg’s
“angel-headed hipsters”29 ) down to the angel figures of gay writers such as
James Merrill and Tony Kushner and the angel logo of the gay graffiti artist
Keith Haring (1958–1990).
“Not surprisingly,” Roger Gilbert writes, “AIDS was a significant pres-
ence in much nineties poetry and undoubtedly played a role in the
widespread turn to religious themes and tropes.”30 One of the angel titles
that Gilbert calls attention to is Reginald Shepherd’s Angel, Interrupted
(1996). Like other poetry collections of the decade, this one makes a con-
nection between angels and the AIDS plague, but it does so subtly and
obliquely. These are explicitly homoerotic poems, frankly expressing the
desire of a black man for white men. At least one of these poems confronts
the AIDS epidemic head-on: “A Plague for Kit Marlowe,” an elegy for the
gay British filmmaker Derek Jarman, who died of AIDS in 1994.31 Shep-
herd’s poems are perfused with classical mythological allusion, and some of
the classical figures are winged: “In Plato the soul has wings (strange irri-
tations/at the shoulder blades).” Does this count as an angel? Apart from
a mordantly ironic “angel of apostate spectators,” the only angels iden-
tifiable as such are the one in the title and in a related prefatory poem,
“The Angel of Interruptions.” The book’s title surely derives from that
of Susan Kayser’s bestselling memoir Girl, Interrupted (1993; film adapta-
tion, 1999), in which Kayser tells of her life’s interruption by mental ill-
ness. In the spirit of Kayser’s memoir, Shepherd’s “Angel of Interruptions”
is a poem of unmaking or erasure, its angel a deconstructive angel.32 The
ultimate reference here, unspoken and perhaps unspeakable, seems to be
the AIDS crisis, interrupter of lives – arguably the subtext of the entire
book.
Also mentioned by Gilbert in his survey are the angel figures in Mark
Doty’s My Alexandria (1993). Doty’s poetry of the gay experience reflects
both the pre-AIDS days and the AIDS crisis as it impacted his personal
life through his partner’s infection. Doty is in dialogue with gay predeces-
sor poets (as well as straight ones, it goes without saying), including Hart
Crane (“Almost Blue”), and the Greek-language poet Constantine Cavafy
(“Days of 1981,” “Chanteuse,” and the title My Alexandria), perhaps others
as well. Conspicuously present, though unacknowledged, is James Merrill,
whose trilogy of book-length poems, The Changing Light at Sandover
(1976–82), cannot help but be evoked by the Ouija-board episodes of spirit
communication in Doty’s poems “Fog” and “Lament-Heaven.”
Merrill famously (or maybe notoriously) obtained the visionary texts
around which he constructed his Changing Light trilogy from Ouija-board
 Angels, Ghosts, and Postsecular Visions 39
sessions with his life-partner David Jackson.33 A Ouija board, of course, is a
game board printed with letters and numbers on which a pointer of some
kind – traditionally a teacup – slides easily, guided by the fingers of two
or more collaborators to spell out messages, letter by letter; or rather, the
collaborators rest their fingers on the pointer without consciously guiding
it, and spirits from beyond allegedly take control of the pointer and pick out
the messages. In Doty’s case, the pivotal Ouija moment occurs in “Fog.”
Here the spirits that he and his partner are in touch with over on the other
side of death seem to be contending among themselves for the right to
communicate through the Ouija board with their living interlocutors:

It seems a cloud of spirits

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy –
children grabbing for the telephone,
happy to talk to someone who isn’t dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least
these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss.
Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all.34

M., presumably Mark, has immunity, while his partner W. has – what?
AIDS? Like the spirits competing to be heard, “word[s] that [begin] with
P” keep bubbling up into the poem – porcelain, planchette, peony, porch,
public, phantom – all except the one P-word that Doty cannot bear to think
or say: “positive,” as in HIV positive.
In common with the spirits who communicate through Ouija boards
or automatic writing, angels are otherworldly figures of communication
between worlds – divine messengers, bearers of annunciations. Glimpsed
already in the very first poem of My Alexandria (“Demolition”), the angel
finally emerges fully into view in the poem that directly addresses Doty’s
partner’s positive test results: “The Wings,” a poem explicitly in dialogue
with Wenders and Handke’s Wings of Desire, and implicitly with Doty’s
precursors, Merrill and Kushner. The angel here is a product of poetic mak-
ing, literally a work of the imagination, willed into existence by the poet to
protect his threatened beloved.35 Our final glimpse of the angel comes in
the last of these poems, “Lament-Heaven,” another text animated by mes-
sages transmitted through the Ouija board. As heard by the poet, music
played by a young violinist in a church is “a crowd of wings”:
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the city of women received her daily dole of grain and coppers, and besides
the women were many pensioners, mice, parrots and pigeons, who also
received the same dole as their owners. So evenly just was Ghiás-ud-dín in
the matter of his allowances, that the prettiest of his favourites received the
same allowance as the roughest carabineer.46

The Lord of the City of Pleasure was deeply religious. Whenever he was
amusing himself two of his companions held in front of him a cloth to
remind him of his shroud. A thousand Háfizahs, that is women who knew
the Kurâán by heart, constantly repeated its holy verses, and, under the
orders of the king, whenever he changed his raiment the Háfizahs blew on
his body from head to foot with their prayer-hallowed breath.47 None of the
five daily prayers passed unprayed. If at any of the hours of prayer the king
was asleep he was sprinkled with water, and when water failed to arouse
him, he was dragged out of bed. Even when dragged out of bed by his
servants the king never uttered an improper or querulous word.

So keen was his sense of justice that when one of his courtiers pretending
he had purchased her, brought to him a maiden of ideal beauty, and her
relations, not knowing she had been given to the king, came to complain,
though they gladly resigned her, the king grieved over his unconscious
wrong. Besides paying compensation he mourned long and truly, and
ordered that no more inmates should be brought to his palace.48 So great
was the king’s charity that every night below his pillow he placed a bag
containing some thousand gold-mohurs, and before evening all were
distributed to the deserving. So religious was the king that he paid 50,000
tankas for each of the four feet of the ass of Christ. A man came bringing a
fifth hoof, and one of the courtiers said: “My Lord, an ass has four feet. I
never heard that it had five, unless perhaps the ass of Christ had five.”
“Who knows,” the king replied, “it may be that this
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
last man has told the truth, and one of the
The Málwa Sultáns, a.d. 1400–1570.
others was wrong. See that he is paid.” So sober was the king that he would
neither look upon nor hear of intoxicants or stimulants. A potion that had
cost 100,000 tankas was brought to him. Among the 300 ingredients one
was nutmeg. The king directed the potion to be thrown into a drain. His
favourite horse fell sick. The king ordered it to have medicine, and the
horse recovered. “What medicine was given the horse?” asked the king.
“The medicine ordered by the physicians” replied his servants. Fearing that
in this medicine there might be an intoxicant, the king commanded that the
horse should be taken out of the stables and turned loose into the forest.49

The king’s spirit of peace steeped the land, which, like its ruler, after thirty
years of fighting yearned for rest. For fourteen years neither inward
malcontent nor foreign foe broke the quiet. In a.d. 1482 Bahlol Lodi
advanced from Dehli to subdue Málwa. The talk of Mándu was Bahlol’s
approach, but no whisper of it passed into the charmed City of Women. At
last the son-minister forced his way into the king’s presence. At the news of
pressing danger his soldier-spirit awoke in Ghiás-ud-dín. His orders for
meeting the invaders were so prompt and well-planned that the king of
Dehli paid a ransom and withdrew. A second rest of fifteen years ended in
the son-minister once more forcing his way into the Presence. In a.d. 1500
the son presented his father, now an aged man of eighty, with a cup of
sherbet and told him to drink. The king, whose armlet of bezoar stone had
already twice made poison harmless, drew the stone from his arm. He
thanked the Almighty for granting him, unworthy, the happiest life that had
ever fallen to the lot of man. He prayed that the sin of his death might not
be laid to his son’s charge, drank the poison, and died.50

Ghiás-ud-dín can hardly have shut himself off so completely from state
affairs as the story-tellers make out. He seems to have been the first of the
Málwa kings who minted gold. He also introduced new titles and
ornaments, which implies an interest in his coinage.51 Farishtah says that
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
Ghiás-ud-dín used to come out every day for an
The Málwa Sultáns, a.d. 1400–1570.
hour from his harím, sit on the throne and receive the salutations of his
nobles and subjects, and give orders in all weighty matters of state. He used
to entrust all minor affairs to his ministers; but in all grave matters he was
so anxious not to shirk his responsibility as a ruler, that he had given strict
orders that all such communications should be made to him at whatever
time they came through a particular female officer appointed to receive his
orders.52

According to most accounts Násir-ud-dín was led to poison his father by an

attempt of his younger brother Shujáât Khán, supported if not organised by
some of Ghiás-ud-dín’s favourite wives to oust Násir-ud-dín from the
succession.53 In the struggle Násir-ud-dín triumphed and was crowned at
Mándu in a.d. 1500.54 The new king left Mándu to put down a revolt. On
his return to Mándu he devoted himself to debauchery and to hunting down
and murdering his brother’s adherents. He subjected his mother Khurshíd
Ráni to great indignities and torture to force from her information regarding
his father’s concealed treasures.55 In a fit of drunkenness he fell into a
reservoir. He was pulled out by four of his female slaves. He awoke with a
headache, and discovering what his slaves had done put them to death with
his own hand.56 Some time after in a.d. 1512, he again fell into the
reservoir, and there he was left till he was dead.57 Násir-ud-dín was fond of
building. His palace at Akbarpur in the Nímar plain about twenty miles
south of Mándu was splendid and greatly admired.58 And at Mándu besides
his sepulchre59 which the emperor Jehángír (a.d. 1617) mentions,60 an
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
inscription shows that the palace now known
The Málwa Sultáns, a.d. 1400–1570.
by the name of Báz Bahádur was built by Násir-ud-dín.

Násir-ud-dín was succeeded by his younger son (Mehmúd a.d. 1512–1530),

who, with the title of Mehmúd the Second, was crowned with great pomp at
Mándu. Seven hundred elephants in gold-embroidered velvet housings
adorned the procession.61 Shortly after his accession Mehmúd II. was
driven out of Mándu by the revolt of the commandant Muhâfiz Khán, but
was restored by the skill and courage of Medáni Rái his Rájput commander-
in-chief.62 A still more dangerous combination by Muzaffar II. (a.d. 1511–
1526) of Gujarát and Sikandar Sháh Lodi (a.d. 1488–1516) of Dehli, was
baffled by the foresight and energy of the same Rájput general. Mehmúd,
feeling that his power had passed to the Hindus, tried to disband the Rájputs
and assassinate Medáni Rái. Failing in both attempts Mehmúd fled from
Mándu to Gujarát, where he was well received by Sultán Muzaffar
(a.d. 1511–1526).63 They advanced together against Mándu, and in
a.d. 1519, after a close siege of several months, took the fort by assault.
The Rájput garrison, who are said to have lost 19,000 men, fought to the
last, consecrating the close of their defence by a general javar or fire-
sacrifice. Sultán Mehmúd entered Mándu close after the storming party, and
while Mehmúd established his authority in Mándu, Muzaffar withdrew to
Dhár. When order was restored Mehmúd sent this message to Muzaffar at
Dhár: “Mándu is a splendid fort. You should come and see it.” “May
Mándu,” Muzaffar replied, “bring good fortune to Sultán Mehmúd. He is
the master of the fort. For the sake of the Lord I came to his help. On Friday
I will go to the fortress, and having had the sermon read in Mehmúd’s name
will return.” On Muzaffar’s arrival in Mándu Mehmúd gave a great
entertainment;64 and Muzaffar
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
retired to Gujarát leaving a force of 3000
The Málwa Sultáns, a.d. 1400–1570.
Gujarátis to help to guard the hill.65 Immediately after Muzaffar’s
departure, as Sultán Mehmúd was anxious to recover Chanderi and
Gágraun, which still remained in the possession of Medáni Rái and his
supporters, he marched against them. Rána Sánga of Chitor came to
Medáni’s aid and a great battle was fought.66 Mehmúd’s hastiness led him
to attack when his men were weary and the Rájputs were fresh. In spite of
the greatest bravery on the part of himself and of his officers the Musalmán
army was defeated, and Mehmúd, weakened by loss of blood, was made
prisoner. Rána Sánga had Mehmúd’s wounds dressed, sent him to Chitor,
and on his recovery released him.67

Sultán Bahádur of Gujarát, a.d. 1526–1534.In

a.d. 1526, by giving protection to
his outlawed brother Chánd Khán and to Razí-ul-Mulk, a refugee Gujarát
noble, Mehmúd brought on himself the wrath of Bahádur Sháh of Gujarát
(a.d. 1526–1536). The offended Bahádur did not act hastily. He wrote to
Mehmúd asking him to come to his camp and settle their quarrels. He
waited on the Gujarát frontier at Karji Ghát, east of Bánswara, until at last
satisfied that Mehmúd did not wish for a peaceful settlement he advanced
on Mándu. Meanwhile Mehmúd had repaired the walls of Mándu, which
soon after was invested by Bahádur. The siege was proceeding in regular
course by mines and batteries, and the garrison, though overtaxed, were still
loyal and in heart, when in the dim light of morning Mehmúd suddenly
found the Gujarát flag waving on the battlements. According to the Mirăt-i-
Sikandari68 Bahádur annoyed by the slow progress of the siege asked his
spies where was the highest ground near Mándu. The spies said: Towards
Songad-Chitor the hill is extremely high. With a few followers the Sultán
scaled Songad, and rushing down the slope burst through the wall and took
the fort (May 20th, 1526).69 Mehmúd surrendered. Near Dohad, on his way
to his prison at Chámpánír, an attempt was made to rescue Mehmúd, and to
prevent their escape he and some of his sons were slain and buried on the
bank of the Dohad tank.70 Bahádur spent the rainy season (June-October
1526) in Mándu, and Málwa was incorporated with Gujarát.

The Emperor Humáyún, a.d. 1534–1535.Mándu remained under Gujarát, till in

a.d. 1534, after Bahádur’s defeat by Humáyún at Mandasor, Bahádur
retired to Mándu. Humáyún followed. At night 200 of Humáyún’s soldiers
went to the back of the fortress, according to Farishtah the south-west
height of Songad71 by which Bahádur had surprised Mehmúd’s garrison,
scaled the walls by ladders and ropes, opened the gate, and let others in.
Mallu Khán, the commandant of the batteries, a native of Málwa, who
afterwards gained the title of Kádir Sháh, went to Bahádur and wakened
him. Bahádur rushed out with four or five attendants. He was joined by
about twenty more, and reaching the gate at the top of the maidán,
apparently the Tárápúr gate by which Humáyún’s men had entered, cut
through 200 of Humáyún’s troops and went off with Mallu Khán to the fort
of Songad,
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
 the citadel of Mándu. While two of Bahádur’s
The Málwa Sultáns, a.d. 1400–1570.
chiefs, Sadr Khán and Sultán Álam Lodi, threw themselves into Songad,
Bahádur himself let his horses down the cliff by ropes and after a thousand
difficulties made his way to Chámpánír.72 On the day after Bahádur’s
escape Sadr Khán and Sultán Álam Lodi came out of Songad and
surrendered to Humáyún.73

In the following year (a.d. 1535) the combined news of Sher Sháh’s revolt
in Bengal, and of the defeat of his officers at Broach and Cambay, forced
Humáyún to retire from Gujarát. As he preferred its climate he withdrew,
not to Agra but to Mándu.74 From Mándu, as fortune was against him in
Bengal, Humáyún went (a.d. 1535–36) to Agra.

Local Musalmán Chiefs, a.d. 1536–1542.OnHumáyún’s departure three chiefs

attempted to establish themselves at Mándu: Bhúpat Rái, the ruler of
Bíjágar, sixty miles south of Mándu; Mallu Khán or Kádir Sháh, a former
commandant of Mándu; and Mírán Muhammad Fárúki from Burhánpur.75
Of these three Mallu Khán was successful. In a.d. 1536, when Humáyún
fled from Sher Sháh to Persia, Mallu spread his power from Mándu to
Ujjain Sárangpúr and Rantambhor, assumed the title of Kádir Sháh Málwi,
and made Mándu his capital. Some time after Sher Sháh, who was now
supreme, wrote to Mallu Kádir Sháh ordering him to co-operate in
expelling the Mughals. Kádir Sháh resenting this assumption of
overlordship, addressed Sher Sháh as an inferior. Sher Sháh Súr, a.d. 1542–
1545.When Sher Sháh received Mallu’s order he folded it and placed it in
the scabbard of his poniard to keep the indignity fresh in his mind. Alláh
willing, he said, we shall ask an explanation for this in person.76 In
a.d. 1542 (H. 949) as Kádir Sháh failed to act with Kutb Khán, who had
been sent to establish Sher Sháh’s overlordship in Málwa, Sher Sháh
advanced from Gwálior towards Mándu with the object of punishing Kádir
Sháh.77 As he knew he could not stand against Sher Sháh Kádir Sháh went
to Sárangpúr to do homage. Though on arrival Kádir Sháh was well
received, his kingdom was given to Shujáât Khán, one of Sher Sháh’s chief
followers, and himself placed in Shujáât Khán’s keeping.78 Suspicious of
what might be in store for
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
him Kádir Sháh fled to Gujarát. Sher Sháh was
The Málwa Sultáns, a.d. 1400–1570.
so much annoyed at Shujáât Khán’s remissness in not preventing Kádir
Sháh’s escape that he transferred the command at Dhár and Mándu from
Shujáât Khán to Háji Khán and Junaid Khán. Shortly after Kádir Sháh
brought a force from Gujarát and attacked Mándu. Shujáât came to Háji
Khán’s help and routed Kádir Sháh under the walls of Mándu. In reward
Sher Sháh made him ruler of the whole country of Mándu.79 Shujáât Khán
established his head-quarters at Mándu with 10,000 horse and 7000
matchlockmen.

Salím Sháh Súr, a.d. 1545–1553.During

the reign of Sher Sháh’s successor Salím
Sháh (a.d. 1545–1553), Shujáât was forced to leave Málwa and seek shelter
in Dúngarpúr. Selím pardoned Shujáât, but divided Málwa among other
nobles. Shujáât remained in Hindustán till in a.d. 1553, on the accession of
Salím’s successor, Ádili, he recovered Málwa, and in a.d. 1554, on the
decay of Ádili’s power, assumed independence.80 He died almost
immediately after, and was succeeded by his eldest son Malik Báyazíd.81
Shujáât Khán was a great builder. Besides his chief works at Shujáwalpúr
near Ujjain, he left many memorials in different parts of Málwa.82 So far
none of the remains at Mándu are known to have been erected during the
rule of Shujáât Khán.

Báz Bahádur, a.d. 1555–1570.On

the death of his father Malik Báyazíd killed his
brother Daulat Khán, and was crowned in a.d. 1555 with the title of Báz
Bahádur. He attacked the Gonds, but met with so crushing a defeat that he
foreswore fighting.83 He gave himself to enjoyment and become famous as
a musician,84 and for his poetic love of Rúp Mani or Rúp Mati, who
according to one account was a wise and beautiful courtezan of Saháranpur
in Northern India, and according to another was the daughter of a Nímar
Rájput, the master of the town of Dharampuri.85 In a.d. 1560 Pír
Muhammad, a general of Akbar’s, afterwards ennobled as Khán Jehán,
defeated Báz Bahádur, drove him out of Mándu, and made the hill his own
head-quarters.86 In the following year (a.d. 1561), by the help of the Berár
chief, Pír Muhammad was slain and Báz Bahádur reinstated. On news of
this defeat (a.d. 1562) Akbar sent Abdulláh Khán Uzbak with almost
unlimited power to reconquer the province. Abdulláh was successful, but, as
he showed signs of assuming independence, Akbar moved against him and
he fled to Gujarát.87 Akbar remained in Mándu during the greater part of
the following rains (a.d. 1563), examining with interest the buildings
erected by the Khilji kings.88 At Mándu Akbar married the daughter of
Mírán Mubárak Khán of Khándesh.89 When Akbar left (August 1564) he
appointed Karra Bahádur Khán governor of Mándu and returned to Ágra.90
In a.d. 1568 the Mírzás, Akbar’s cousins, flying from Gujarát attacked
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
Ujjain. From Ujjain they retreated to Mándu and
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
failing to make any impression on the fort withdrew to Gujarát.91 The
Mirzás’ failure was due to the ability of Akbar’s general, Háji Muhammad
Khán, to whom Akbar granted the province of Mándu.92 At the same time
(a.d. 1568) the command of Mándu hill was entrusted to Sháh Budágh
Khán, who continued commandant of the fort till his death many years later.
During his command, in a picturesque spot overlooking a well-watered
ravine in the south of Mándu, between the Ságar Lake and the Tárápur
Gateway, Budágh Khán built a pleasure-house, which he named, or rather
perhaps which he continued to call Nílkanth or Blue Throat. This lodge is
interesting from the following inscriptions, which show that the emperor
Akbar more than once rested within its walls.93

The inscription on the small north arch of Nílkanth, dated a.d. 1574, runs:

(Call it not waste) to spend your life in water and earth. (i.e. in building),
If perchance a man of mind for a moment makes your house his lodging.
Written by Sháh Budágh Khán in the year a.h. 982–87.94

The inscription on the great southern arch of Nílkanth, dated a.d. 1574,
runs:
 This pleasant building was completed in the reign of the great Sultán, the most
munificent and just Khákán, the Lord of the countries of Arabia and Persia,95 the
shadow of God on the two earths, the ruler of the sea and of the land, the exalter
of the standards of those who war on the side of God, Abul Fatah Jalál-ud-dín
Muhammad Akbar, the warrior king, may his dominion and his kingdom be
everlasting.

Written by Farídún Husein, son of Hátim-al-Wardi, in the year a.h. 982.96

The inscription on the right wall of Nílkanth, dated a.d. 1591–92, runs:

In the year a.h. 1000, when on his way to the conquest of the Dakhan, the slaves
of the Exalted Lord of the Earth, the holder of the sky-like Throne, the shadow of
Alláh (the Emperor Akbar), passed by this place.

That time wastes your home cease, Soul, to complain, Who will not scorn a
complainer so vain.

From the story of others this wisdom derive, Ere naught of thyself but stories
survive.

The inscription on the left wall of Nílkanth, dated a.d. 1600, runs:

The (Lord of the mighty Presence) shadow of Alláh, the Emperor Akbar, after the
conquest of the Dakhan and
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720. Dándes (Khándesh) in the year a.h. 1009 set out for
Hind (Northern India).

May the name of the writer last for ever!

At dawn and at eve I have watched an owl sitting

On the lofty wall-top of Shirwán Sháh’s Tomb.97
The owl’s plaintive hooting convey’d me this warning
“Here pomp, wealth, and greatness lie dumb.”

In a.d. 1573, with the rest of Málwa, Akbar handed Mándu to Muzaffar III.
the dethroned ruler of Gujarát. It seems doubtful if Muzaffar ever visited his
new territory.98 On his second defeat in a.d. 1562 Báz Bahádur retired to
Gondwána, where he remained, his power gradually waning, till in
a.d. 1570 he paid homage to the emperor and received the command of
2000 horse.99 His decoration of the Rewa Pool, of the palace close by,
which though built by Násir-ud-dín Khilji (a.d. 1500–1512) was probably
repaired by Báz Bahádur, and of Rúp Mati’s pavilion on the crest of the
southern ridge make Báz Bahádur one of the chief beautifiers of Mándu.
According to Farishtah (Pers. Text, II. 538–39) in 1562, when Báz Bahádur
went out to meet Akbar’s general, Adham Khán Atkah, he placed Rúp Mati
and his other singers in Sárangpúr under a party of his men with orders to
kill the women in case of a reverse. On hearing of Báz Bahádur’s defeat the
soldiers hastily sabred as many of the women as they could and fled.
Among the women left for dead was Rúp Mati, who, though dangerously
wounded, was not killed. When Adham Atkah entered Sárangpúr his first
care was to enquire what had become of Rúp Mati. On hearing of her
condition he had her wound attended to by the best surgeons, promising her,
as a help to her cure, a speedy union with her beloved. On her recovery Rúp
Mati claimed the general’s promise. He prevaricated and pressed his own
suit. Rúp Mati temporised. One night the impatient Turk sent her a message
asking her to come to him. Rúp Mati to gain time invited him to her own
pavilion which she said was specially adorned to be the abode of love. Next
night the Atkah went to her house in disguise. Her women directed him to
Rúp Mati’s couch. Adham found her robed and garlanded, but cold in death.
Rúp Mati was buried on an island in a lake at Ujjain, and there, according to
the Áin-i-Akbari, Báz Bahádur when he died was laid beside her.100

Section II.—Mughals (a.d. 1570–1720) and Maráthás (a.d. 1720–

1820).

About a.d. 1590 Akbar’s historian, the great Abul Fazl, described Mándu as
a large city whose fortress is twenty-four miles (twelve kos) in circuit. He
notices that besides in the centre of the hill where stands an eight-storeyed
minaret, the city had many monuments of ancient magnificence, among
them the tombs of the Khilji Sultáns. And that from the dome which is over
the sepulchre of Sultán Mehmúd, the son of Hoshang (this should be the
sepulchre of Hoshang built by his successor Sultán Mehmúd) water drops in
the height of summer to the astonishment of the ignorant. But, he adds, men
of understanding know how to account for the water-drops.101 Abul Fazl
further notices that on Mándu Hill is found a species of tamarind whose
fruit is as big as the cocoanut, the pulp of
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
which is very white. This is the African baobab or
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
Adansonia digitata, known in Hindustáni as goramli or white tamarind,
whose great fruit is about the size of a cocoanut. Its monster baobabs are
still a feature of Mándu. Some among them look old enough to have been
yielding fruit 300 years ago. Finally Abul Fazl refers to Mándu as one of
twenty-eight towns where Akbar’s copper coins were struck.102 About
twenty years later (a.d. 1610) the historian Farishtah103 thus describes the
hill. The fort of Mándu is a work of solid masonry deemed to be one of the
strongest fortifications in that part of the world. It is built on an insulated
mountain thirty-eight miles in circumference.104 The place of a ditch round
the fortification is supplied by a natural ravine so deep that it seems
impossible to take the fort by regular approaches. Within the fort is
abundance of water and forage, but the area is not large enough to grow a
sufficient store of grain. The hill cannot be invested. The easiest access is
from the north by the Dehli Gate. The south road with an entrance by the
Tárápúr Gate is so steep that cavalry can with difficulty be led up. Like
Abul Fazl Farishtah notices that, except during the rains, water constantly
oozes from between the chinks in the masonry of the dome of Sultán
Hoshang’s tomb. He says the natives of India attribute this dropping to
universal veneration for Sultán Hoshang, for whose death, they say, the
very stones shed tears.

Except that copper coins continued to be minted and that it was nominally
one of the four capitals of the empire, during the emperor Akbar’s reign
Mándu was practically deserted. The only traces of Akbar’s presence on the
hill are in two of the five inscriptions already quoted from the Nílkanth
pleasure-house, dated a.d. 1591 and a.d. 1600.

After about fifty years of almost complete neglect the emperor Jehángír,
during a few months in a.d. 1617, enabled Mándu once more to justify its
title of Shádiábád, the Abode of Joy. Early in March a.d. 1617, in the
eleventh year of his reign, the emperor Jehángír after spending four months
in travelling the 189 miles from Ajmír by way of Ujjain, arrived at
Naâlchah on the main land close to the north of Mándu. The emperor
notices that most of the forty-six marches into which the 189 miles were
divided ended on the bank of some lake stream or great river in green grass
and woody landscape, brightened by poppy fields. We came, he writes,
enjoying the beauty of the country and shooting, never weary, as if we were
moving from one garden to another.

Of the country round Naâlchah Jehángír says:105 What can be written

worthy of the beauty and the pleasantness of Naâlchah. The neighbourhood
is full of mango trees. The whole country is one unbroken and restful
evergreen. Owing to its beauty I remained there three days. I granted the
place to Kamál Khán, taking it from Keshava Márú, and I changed its name
to Kamálpúr. I had frequent meetings with some of the wise men of the
jogis, many of whom had assembled here. Naâlchah is one of the best
places in Málwa. It has an extensive growth of vines, and among its mango
groves and vineyards wander streamlets of water. I arrived at a time when,
contrary to the northern climes, the vines were in blossom and fruit, and so
great was the vintage that the meanest boor could eat grapes to his fill. The
poppy was also in flower, and its fields delighted the eye with their many-
coloured beauty.

Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
Of the emperor’s entrance into Mándu the Memoirs
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
have the following note: On Monday the 23rd of Ispandád, the last month
of the Persian year, that is according to Sir Thomas Roe’s account on the
6th of March 1617, when one quarter of the day had passed, I mounted my
elephant, and, in good fortune and under kindly influences, made my happy
entry into the fort of Mándu. About an hour (three ghadis) later I entered the
quarters which had been prepared to receive me. During my passage across
the hill-top I scattered Rs. 1500. Before my arrival Abdul Karím the
engineer had been sent by me to repair the buildings of the former kings of
Mándu. While my fortunate standards were at Ajmír Abdul Karím repaired
such of the old Mándu buildings as were fit to be repaired and built others
anew. On the whole he had provided quarters for me, the like of which have
probably never been built in any other place. Three lákhs of rupees were
spent on these repairs and buildings. I wish it had been possible to construct
buildings like these in all cities likely to be visited by royalty. This fortress,
he continues, stands on the top of a hill about thirty-six miles (18 kos) in
circumference. They say that before the days of Rája Bikramájit a king was
reigning over these parts whose name was Jaisingh Deva. In his time a man
went to the forest to cut grass. When he brought the grass back he found
that the blade of his sickle had turned yellow. The grasscutter in his surprise
went to Mándan, an ironsmith. Mándan knew that the sickle was gold. He
had heard that in those parts was to be found the philosopher’s stone, whose
touch turns iron and copper into gold. He told the grasscutter to lead him to
the place where the sickle had turned yellow, and there he found the
philosopher’s stone. The smith presented this treasure to his king. The king
amassed untold wealth, part of which he spent in building Mándu fortress
which he completed in twelve years. At the request of the smith on most of
the stones in the walls a mark was cut in the form of an anvil. Towards the
close of his life, when king Jaisingh Deva withdrew his heart from the
world, he called many Bráhmans together on the bank of the Narbada close
to Mándu. He gave each Bráhman a share of his wealth. And to the
Bráhman in whom he had the greatest faith he gave the philosopher’s stone.
Enraged at the gift of a paltry stone the Bráhman threw it into the Narbada,
and there the philosopher’s stone still lies. The emperor continues: On the
20th of Farwardín, five weeks after my arrival (11th April 1617) in reward
for his services in repairing the buildings of Mándu, I conferred on my
engineer Abdul Karím the command of 1200 horse, with the title of
Maámúr Khán.
Mándu had for the emperor the strong attraction of abundance of game.
Among numerous entries of nílgái or blue-bull shooting the following
occur: On the 4th of the first month of Farwardín (16th) March the
watchmen of the chase brought word that they had marked down a lion near
the Ságar Lake, which is a construction of the ancient rulers of Mándu. I
mounted and proceeded towards the lake. When the lion broke cover he
attacked and wounded ten or twelve of the Ahádís106 and other men of my
retinue. In the end I brought him down with three gun shots and saved
God’s creatures from his evil. On the 22nd of the same month (April 3rd,
1617) the watchmen brought news of a tiger. I mounted forthwith and
despatched him with three bullets. On the 7th of Ardí Bihisht (April 18th,
1617) the watchmen brought word that they had marked down four tigers.
At one in the afternoon I started for the
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
place with Núr Jehán Begam. Núr Jehán asked my
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
leave to shoot the tigers with her gun. I said “Be it so.” In a trice she killed
these four tigers with six bullets. I had never seen such shooting. To shoot
from the back of an elephant from within a closed howdah and bring down
with six bullets four wild beasts without giving them an opportunity of
moving or springing is wonderful. In acknowledgment of this capital
marksmanship I ordered a thousand ashrafis (Rs. 4500) to be scattered107
over Núr Jehán and granted her a pair of ruby wristlets worth a lákh of
rupees.108

Of the mangoes of Mándu Jehángír says: In these days many mangoes have
come into my fruit stores from the Dakhan, Burhánpur, Gujarát, and the
districts of Málwa. This country is famous for its mangoes. There are few
places the mangoes of which can rival those of this country in richness of
flavour, in sweetness, in freedom from fibre, and in size.109

The rains set in with unusual severity. Rain fell for forty days continuously.
With the rain were severe thunderstorms accompanied by lightning which
injured some of the old buildings.110 His account of the beauty of the hill in
July, when clear sunshine followed the forty days of rain, is one of the
pleasantest passages in Jehángír’s Memoirs: What words of mine can
describe the beauty of the grass and of the wild flowers! They clothe each
hill and dale, each slope and plain. I know of no place so pleasant in climate
and so pretty in scenery as Mándu in the rainy season. This month of July
which is one of the months of the hot season, the sun being in Leo, one
cannot sleep within the house without a coverlet, and during the day there is
no need for a fan. What I have noticed is but a small part of the many
beauties of Mándu. Two things I have seen here which I had seen nowhere
in India. One of them is the tree of the wild plantain which grows all over
the hill top, the other is the nest of the mamolah or wagtail. Till now no
bird-catcher could tell its nest. It so happened that in the building where I
lodged we found a wagtail’s nest with two young ones.

The following additional entries in the Memoirs belong to Jehángír’s stay at

Mándu. Among the presents submitted by Mahábat Khán, who received the
honour of kissing the ground at Mándu, Jehángír describes a ruby weighing
eleven miskáls.111 He says: This ruby was brought to Ajmír last year by a
Frankish jeweller who wanted two lákhs of rupees for it. Mahábat Khán
bought it at Burhánpur for one lákh of rupees.112

On the 1st of Tír, the fourth month of the Persian year (15th May 1617), the
Hindu chiefs of the neighbourhood came to pay their
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
respects and present their tribute. The Hindu chief
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
of Jítpúr in the neighbourhood of Mándu, through his evil fortune, did not
come to kiss the threshold.113 For this reason I ordered Fidáíkhán to pillage
the Jítpúr country at the head of thirteen officers and four or five hundred
matchlockmen. On the approach of Fidáíkhán the chief fled. He is now
reported to regret his past conduct and to intend to come to Court and make
his submission. On the 9th of Yúr, the sixth month of the Persian calendar
(late July, a.d. 1617), I heard that while raiding the lands of the chief of
Jítpúr, Rúh-ul-láh, the brother of Fidáíkhán, was slain with a lance in the
village where the chief’s wives and children were in hiding. The village was
burned, and the women and daughters of the rebel chief were taken
captives.114

The beautiful surroundings of the Ságar lake offered to the elegant taste of
Núr Jehán a fitting opportunity for honouring the Shab-i-Barát or Night of
Jubilee with special illuminations. The emperor describes the result in these
words: On the evening of Thursday the 19th of Amardád, the fifth month of
the Persian year (early July, a.d. 1617), I went with the ladies of the palace
to see the buildings and palaces on the Ságar lake which were built by the
old kings of Mándu. The 26th of Amardád (about mid-July) was the Shab-i-
Barát holiday. I ordered a jubilee or assembly of joy to be held on the
occasion in one of the palaces occupied by Núr Jehán Begam in the midst
of the big lake. The nobles and others were invited to attend this party
which was organized by the Begam, and I ordered the cup and other
intoxicants with various fruits and minced meats to be given to all who
wished them. It was a wonderful gathering. As evening set in the lanterns
and lamps gleaming along the banks of the lake made an illumination such
as never had been seen. The countless lights with which the palaces and
buildings were ablaze shining on the lake made the whole surface of the
water appear to be on fire.115

The Memoirs continue: On Sunday the 9th of Yúr, the sixth Persian month
(late July), I went with the ladies of the palace to the quarters of Ásaf Khán,
Núr Jehán’s brother, the second son of Mirza Ghiás Beg. I found Ásaf Khán
lodged in a glen of great beauty surrounded by other little vales and dells
with waterfalls and running streamlets and green and shady mango groves.
In one of these dells were from two to three hundred sweet pandanus or
kewda trees. I passed a very happy day in this spot and got up a wine party
with some of my lords-in-waiting, giving them bumpers of wine.116 Two
months later (early September) Jehángír has the following entry117
regarding a visit from his eldest son and heir prince Khurram, afterwards
the emperor Shah Jehán, who had lately brought the war in the Dakhan to a
successful close. On the 8th of the month of Máh (H. 1026: according to
Roe September 2nd, 1617), my son of exalted name obtained the good
fortune of waiting upon me in the fort of Mándu after three-quarters and
one ghadi of the day had passed, that is about half an hour after sunrise. He
had been absent fifteen months and eleven days. After he had performed the
ceremonies of kissing the ground and the kurnish or prostration, I called
him up to my bay window or jharokah. In a transport of affection I could
not restrain myself from getting up and taking him into my arms. The more
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
I increased the measure of affection and honours the
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
more humility and respect did he show. I called him near me and made him
sit by me. He submitted a thousand ashrafis (= Rs. 4500) and a thousand
rupees as a gift or nazar and the same amount as sacrifice or nisár. As there
was not time for me to inspect all his presents he produced the elephant
Sarnák, the best of the elephants of Ádil Khán of Bijápur. He also gave me
a case full of the rarest precious stones. I ordered the military paymasters to
make presents to his nobles according to their rank. The first to come was
Khán Jehán, whom I allowed the honour of kissing my feet. For his victory
over the Rána of Chitor I had before granted to my fortunate child Kurram
the rank of a commander of 20,000 with 10,000 horse. Now for his service
in the Dakhan I made him a commander of 30,000 and 20,000 horse with
the title of Sháh Jehán. I also ordered that henceforward he should enjoy the
privilege of sitting on a stool near my throne, an honour which did not exist
and is the first of its kind granted to anyone in my family. I further granted
him a special dress. To do him honour I came down from the window and
with my own hand scattered over his head as sacrifice a trayfull of precious
stones as well as a large trayfull of gold.

Jehángír’s last Mándu entry is this: On the night of Friday in the month of
Abán (October 24th, 1617) in all happiness and good fortune I marched
from Mándu and halted on the bank of the lake at Naâlchah.

Jehángír’s stay at Mándu is referred to by more than one English traveller.

In March 1617, the Rev. Edward Terry, chaplain to the Right Honourable
Sir T. Roe Lord Ambassador to the Great Mughal, came to Mándu from
Burhánpur in east Khándesh.118 Terry crossed a broad river, the Narbada, at
a great town called Anchabarpur (Akbarpur)119 in the Nímár plain not far
south of Mándu hill. The way up, probably by the Bhairav pass a few miles
east of Mándu, seemed to Terry exceeding long. The ascent was very
difficult, taking the carriages, apparently meaning coaches and wagons, two
whole days.120 Terry found the hill of Mándu stuck round with fair trees
that kept their distance so, one from and below the other, that there was
much delight in beholding them from either the bottom or the top of the hill.
From one side only was the ascent not very high and steep. The top was flat
plain and spacious with vast and
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
far-stretching woods in which were lions tigers and
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
other beasts of prey and many wild elephants. Terry passed through Mándu
a few days’ march across a plain and level country, apparently towards
Dhár, where he met the Lord Ambassador Sir Thomas Roe, who had
summoned Terry from Surat to be his chaplain. Sir Thomas Roe was then
marching from Ajmír to Mándu with the Court of the emperor Jehángír,
whom Terry calls the Great King.

On the 3rd of March, says Roe, the Mughal was to have entered Mándu.
But all had to wait for the good hour fixed by the astrologers. From the 6th
of March, when he entered Mándu, till the 24th of October, the emperor
Jehángír, with Sir Thomas Roe in attendance, remained at Mándu.121
According to Roe before the Mughal visited Mándu the hill was not much
inhabited, having more ruins by far than standing houses.122 But the
moving city that accompanied the emperor soon overflowed the hill-top.
According to Roe Jehángír’s own encampment was walled round half a
mile in circuit in the form of a fortress, with high screens or curtains of
coarse stuff, somewhat like Aras hangings, red on the outside, the inside
divided into compartments with a variety of figures. This enclosure had a
handsome gateway and the circuit was formed into various coins and
bulwarks. The posts that supported the curtains were all surmounted with
brass tops.123 Besides the emperor’s encampment were the noblemen’s
quarters, each at an appointed distance from the king’s tents, very
handsome, some having their tents green, others white, others of mixed
colours. The whole composed the most curious and magnificent sight Roe
had ever beheld.124 The hour taken by Jehángír in passing from the Dehli
Gate to his own quarters, the two English miles from Roe’s lodge which
was not far from the Dehli Gate to Jehángír’s palace, and other reasons
noted below make it almost certain that the Mughal’s encampment and the
camps of the leading nobles were on the open slopes to the south of the Sea
Lake between Báz Bahádur’s palace on the east and Songad on the west.
And that the palace at Mándu from which Jehángír wrote was the building
now known as Báz Bahádur’s palace.125 A few months before it reached
Mándu the imperial camp had turned the whole valley of Ajmír into a
magnificent city,126 and a few weeks before reaching Mándu at Thoda,
about fifty miles south-east of Ajmír, the camp formed a settlement not less
in circuit than twenty English miles, equalling in size almost any town in
Europe.127 In the middle of the encampment were all sorts of shops so
regularly disposed that all persons knew where to go for everything.

The demands of so great a city overtaxed the powers of the deserted

Mándu. The scarcity of water soon became so pressing that the poor were
commanded to leave and all horses and cattle were ordered off the hill.128
Of the scarcity of water the English traveller Corryat, who was then a guest
of Sir Thomas Roe, writes: On the first day one of my Lord’s people,
Master Herbert, brother to Sir Edward Herbert, found a fountain which, if
he had not done, he would have had to send ten course
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
(kos) every day for water to a river called Narbada
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
that falleth into the Bay of Cambye near Broach. The custom being such
that whatsoever fountain or tank is found by any great man in time of
drought he shall keep it proper to his without interruption. The day after one
of the king’s Hadis (Ahádis) finding the same and striving for it was taken
by my Lord’s people and bound.129 Corryat adds: During the time of the
great drought two Moor nobles daily sent ten camels to the Narbada and
distributed the water to the poor, which was so dear they sold a little skin
for 8 pies (one penny).130
Terry notices that among the piles of buildings that held their heads above
ruin were not a few unfrequented mosques or Muhammadan churches.
Though the people who attended the king were marvellously straitened for
room to put their most excellent horses, none would use the churches as
stables, even though they were forsaken and out of use. This abstinence
seems to have been voluntary, as Roe’s servants, who were sent in advance,
took possession of a fair court with walled enclosure in which was a goodly
temple and a tomb. It was the best in the whole circuit of Mándu, the only
drawback being that it was two miles from the king’s house.131 The air was
wholesome and the prospect was pleasant, as it was on the edge of the
hill.132 The emperor, perhaps referring rather to the south of the hill, which
from the elaborate building and repairs carried out in advance by Abdul
Karím seems to have been called the New City, gives a less deserted
impression of Mándu. He writes (24th March 1617): Many buildings and
relics of the old kings are still standing, for as yet decay has not fallen upon
the city. On the 24th I rode to see the royal edifices. First I visited the Jámá
Masjid built by Sultán Hoshang Ghori. It is a very lofty building and
erected entirely of hewn stone. Although it has been standing 180 years it
looks as if built to-day. Then I visited the sepulchres of the kings and rulers
of the Khilji dynasty, among which is the sepulchre of the eternally cursed
Násir-ud-dín.133 Sher Sháh to show his horror of Násir-ud-dín, the father-
slayer, ordered his people to beat Násir-ud-dín’s tomb with sticks. Jehángir
also kicked the grave. Then he ordered the tomb to be opened and the
remains to be taken out and burnt. Finally, fearing the remains might pollute
the eternal light, he ordered the ashes to be thrown into the Narbada.134

The pleasant outlying position of Roe’s lodge proved to be open to the

objection that out of the vast wilderness wild beasts often came, seldom
returning without a sheep, a goat, or a kid. One evening a great lion leapt
over the stone wall that encompassed the yard and snapped up the Lord
Ambassador’s little white neat shock, that is as Roe explains a small Irish
mastiff, which ran out barking at the lion. Out of the ruins of the mosque
and tomb Roe built a lodge,135 and here he passed the rains with his
“family,” including besides his secretary, chaplain, and cook twenty-three
Englishmen and about sixty native servants, and during part of the time the
sturdy half-crazed traveller Tom Coryate or Corryat.136 They had
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
their flock of sheep and goats, all necessaries
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
belonging to the kitchen and everything else required for bodily use
including bedding and all things pertaining thereto.137 Among the
necessaries were tables138 and chairs, since the Ambassador refused to
adopt the Mughal practice of sitting cross-legged on mats “like taylors on
their shopboards.” Roe’s diet was dressed by an English and an Indian cook
and was served on plate by waiters in red taffata cloaks guarded with green
taffata. The chaplain wore a long black cassock, and the Lord Ambassador
wore English habits made as light and cool as possible.139

On the 12th of March, a few days after they were settled at Mándu, came
the festival of the Persian New Year. Jehángír held a great reception seated
on a throne of gold bespangled with rubies emeralds and turquoises. The
hall was adorned with pictures of the King and Queen of England, the
Princess Elizabeth, Sir Thomas Smith and others, with beautiful Persian
hangings. On one side, on a little stage, was a couple of women singers. The
king commanded that Sir T. Roe should come up and stand beside him on
the steps of the throne where stood on one side the Persian Ambassador and
on the other the old king of Kandahár with whom Sir T. Roe ranked. The
king called the Persian Ambassador and gave him some stones and a young
elephant. The Ambassador knelt and knocked his head against the steps of
the throne to thank him.140 From time to time during Terry’s stay at Mándu,
the Mughal, with his stout daring Persian and Tartarian horsemen and some
grandees, went out to take young wild elephants in the great woods that
environed Mándu. The elephants were caught in strong toils prepared for
the purpose and were manned and made fit for service. In these hunts the
king and his men also pursued lions and other wild beasts on horseback,
killing some of them with their bows carbines and lances.141

The first of September was Jehángír’s birthday. The king, says Corryat,142
was forty-five years old, of middle height, corpulent, of a seemly
composition of body, and of an olive coloured skin. Roe went to pay his
respects and was conducted apparently to Báz Bahádur’s Gardens to the
east of the Rewa Pool. This tangled orchard was then a beautiful garden
with a great square pond or tank set all round with trees and flowers and in
the middle of the garden a pavilion or pleasure-house under which hung the
scales in which the king was to be weighed.143 The scales were of beaten
gold set with many small stones as rubies and turquoises. They were hung
by chains of gold, large and massive, but strengthened by silken ropes. The
beam and tressels from which the scales hung were covered with thin plates
of gold. All round were the nobles of the court seated on rich carpets
waiting for the king. He came laden with diamonds rubies pearls and other
precious vanities, making a great and glorious show. His swords targets and
throne were corresponding in riches and splendour. His head neck breast
and arms above the elbows and at the wrist were decked with chains of
precious stones, and every finger had two or three rich rings. His legs were
as it were fettered with chains of diamonds and rubies as large as walnuts
and amazing pearls. He got into the scales crouching or sitting on his legs
like a woman. To counterpoise his weight bags said to contain Rs. 9000 in
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
silver were changed six times. After this he was
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
weighed against bags containing gold jewels and precious stones. Then
against cloth of gold, silk stuffs, cotton goods, spices, and all commodities.
Last of all against meal, butter, and corn. Except the silver, which was
reserved for the poor, all was said to be distributed to Baniahs (that is
Bráhmans).144 After he was weighed Jehángír ascended the throne and had
basons of nuts almonds and spices of all sorts given him. These the king
threw about, and his great men scrambled prostrate on their bellies. Roe
thought it not decent that he should scramble. And the king seeing that he
stood aloof reached him a bason almost full and poured the contents into his
cloak.145 Terry adds: The physicians noted the king’s weight and spoke
flatteringly of it. Then the Mughal drank to his nobles in his royal wine and
the nobles pledged his health, The king drank also to the Lord Ambassador,
whom he always treated with special consideration, and presented him with
the cup of gold curiously enamelled and crusted with rubies turkesses and
emeralds.146

Of prince Khurram’s visit Roe writes: A month later (October 2nd) the
proud prince Khurram, afterwards the emperor Sháh Jehán (a.d. 1626–
1657), returned from his glorious success in the Dakhan, accompanied by
all the great men, in wondrous triumph.147 A week later (October 9th),
hearing that the emperor was to pass near his lodging on his way to take the
air at the Narbada, in accordance with the rule that the masters of all houses
near which the king passes must make him a present, Roe took horse to
meet the king. He offered the king an Atlas neatly bound, saying he
presented the king with the whole world. The king was pleased. In return he
praised Roe’s lodge, which he had built out of the ruins of the temple and
the ancient tomb, and which was one of the best lodges in the camp.148
Jehángír left Mándu on the 24th October. On the 30th when Roe started the
hill was entirely deserted.149

Terry mentions only two buildings at Mándu. One was the house of the
Mughal, apparently Báz Bahádur’s palace, which he describes as large and
stately, built of excellent stone, well squared and put together, taking up a
large compass of ground. He adds: We could never see how it was contrived
within, as the king’s wives and women were there.150 The only other
building to which Terry refers, he calls “The Grot.” Of the grot, which is
almost certainly the pleasure-house Nílkanth, whose Persian inscriptions
have been quoted above, Terry gives the following details: To the Mughal’s
house, at a small distance from it, belonged a very curious grot. In the
building of the grot a way was made into a
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
firm rock which showed itself on the side of the hill
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
canopied over with part of that rock. It was a place that had much beauty in
it by reason of the curious workmanship bestowed on it and much pleasure
by reason of its coolness.151 Besides the fountain this grot has still one of
the charmingly cool and murmuring scallopped rillstones where, as Terry
says, water runs down a broad stone table with many hollows like to scallop
shells, in its passage over the hollows making so pretty a murmur as helps
to tie the senses with the bonds of sleep.

Sháh Jehán seems to have been pleased with Mándu. He returned in

a.d. 1621 and stayed at Mándu till he marched north against his father in
a.d. 1622.152 In March a.d. 1623, Sháh Jehán came out of Mándu with
20,000 horse, many elephants, and powerful artillery, intending to fight his
brother Sháh Parwíz.153 After the failure of this expedition Sháh Jehán
retired to Mándu.154 At this time (a.d. 1623) the Italian traveller Dela Valle
ranks Mándu with Agra Láhor and Ahmedábád, as the four capitals, each
endowed with an imperial palace and court.155 Five years later the great
general Khán Jehán Lodi besieged Mándu, but apparently without
success.156 Khán Jehán Lodi’s siege of Mándu is interesting in connection
with a description of Mándu in Herbert’s Travels. Herbert, who was in
Gujarát in a.d. 1626, says Mándu is seated at the side of a declining hill
(apparently Herbert refers to the slope from the southern crest northwards to
Ságar Lake and the Grot or Nílkanth) in which both for ornament and
defence is a castle which is strong in being encompassed with a defensive
wall of nearly five miles (probably kos that is ten miles): the whole, he
adds, heretofore had fifteen miles circuit. But the city later built is of less
time yet fresher beauty, whether you behold the temples (in one of which
are entombed four kings), palaces or fortresses, especially that tower which
is elevated 170 steps, supported by massive pillars and adorned with gates
and windows very observable. It was built by Khán Jehán, who there lies
buried. The confusedness of these details shows that Herbert obtained them
second-hand, probably from Corryat’s Master Herbert on Sir T. Roe’s
staff.157 The new city of fresher
Appendix II.
The Hill Fort of Mándu.
History
beauty is probably a reference to the buildings
The Mughals, a.d. 1570–1720.
raised and repaired by Abdul Karím against Jehángír’s coming, among
which the chief seems to have been the palace now known by the name of
Báz Bahádur. The tower of 170 steps is Mehmúd Khilji’s Tower of Victory,
erected in a.d. 1443, the Khán Jehán being Mehmúd’s father, the great
minister Khán Jehán Aâzam Humáyún.

The Maráthás, a.d. 1720–1820.In a.d. 1658 a Rája Shívráj was commandant of
Mándu.158 No reference has been traced to any imperial visit to Mándu
during Aurangzíb’s reign. But that great monarch has left an example of his
watchful care in the rebuilding of the Âlamgír or Aurangzíb Gate, which
guards the approach to the stone-crossing of the great northern ravine and
bears an inscription of a.d. 1668, the eleventh year of Âlamgír’s reign. In
spite of this additional safeguard thirty years later (a.d. 1696) Mándu was
taken and the standard of Udáji Pavár was planted on the battlement.159 The
Maráthás soon withdrew and Málwa again passed under an imperial
governor. In a.d. 1708 the Shía-loving emperor Bahádur Sháh I.
(a.d. 1707–1712) visited Mándu, and there received from Ahmedábád a
copy of the Kurâán written by Imám Âli Taki, son of Imám Músa Raza
(a.d. 810–829), seventh in descent from Âli, the famous son-in-law of the
Prophet, the first of Musalmán mystics. In a.d. 1717 Ásaph Jáh Nizám-ul-
Mulk was appointed governor of Málwa and continued to manage the
province by deputy till a.d. 1721. In a.d. 1722 Rája Girdhar Bahádur, a
Nágar Bráhman, was made governor and remained in charge till in
a.d. 1724 he was attacked and defeated by Chimnáji Pandit and Udáji
Pavár.160 Rája Girdhar was succeeded by his relation Dia Bahádur, whose
successful government ended in a.d. 1732, when through the secret help of
the local chiefs Malhárráo Holkar led an army up the Bhairav pass, a few
miles east of Mándu, and at Tirellah, between Amjera and Dhár, defeated
and slew Dia Bahádur. As neither the next governor Muhammad Khán
Bangash nor his successor Rája Jai Singh of Jaipúr were able to oust the
Maráthás, their success was admitted in a.d. 1734 by the appointment of
Peshwa Bájiráo (a.d. 1720–1740) to be governor of Málwa. On his
appointment (a.d. 1734) the Peshwa chose Anand Ráo Pavár as his deputy.
Anand Ráo shortly after settled at Dhár, and since a.d. 1734 Mándu has
continued part of the territory of the Pavárs of Dhar.161 In a.d. 1805 Mándu
sheltered the heroic Mína Bái during the birth-time of her son Rámchundra
Ráo Pavár, whose state was saved from the clutches of
Appendix II.
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