The Second Coming in Contemporary Narratives: “In His Image”, “The Second Coming”, “Messiah”

Abstract

In the last decades, especially after the events of 9/11, religion has come to the forefront not only as a dialectical object within the narratives that intersect it, but also as a real subject that rebuilds and reformulates itself. It is the case, for example, of those stories that rewrite figures of the sacred texts in different ways; most frequently, in recent years, characters of the Gospels. Also, the socio-political and ideological deconstruction of the last decades, as well as the diffusion of streaming platforms on a global level, have triggered an explosion in the transmission of stories that cross different cultural and religious spheres of influence. The aim of this essay is to explore the modulations that these rewritings have taken in the fictional narratives of the last decades, and three in particular: the “Jesus-novel”, a subgenre studied and classified by Westphal (2002) and Holderness (2015), in which the character Jesus takes on complex narrative functions embracing numerous types of characters and dramatic structures: the scapegoat and the Fisher King, but also the fool, the idiot, the celebrity, as in the novel The Second Coming (2011) by the Scottish writer John Niven. A second, more peculiar paradigm is that of an even more paraliterary subgenre, a piece of genetic science fiction that conceives not a resurrected Christ but a cloned one: this is what happens in the Christ Clone Trilogy (1988, 1997, 2003) by the American James BeauSeigneur. Finally, interesting reflections may arise from the analysis of a 2020 tv series titled Messiah, an American production in not only English but also Arabic and Hebrew; here the/a Messiah, between doubts and suspicions, comes back to call humanity to peace, in a movement, however, which seems to lead to a form of religious anarchy.