Residues of the Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Culture and Fiction

Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 5-4-2011 12:00 AM Residues of the Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Culture and Fiction Thomas J. Barnes University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. Thy Phu The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Thomas J. Barnes 2011 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the American Material Culture Commons Recommended Citation Barnes, Thomas J., "Residues of the Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Culture and Fiction" (2011). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 156. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/156 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RESIDUES OF THE COLD WAR: EMERGENT WASTE CONSCIOUSNESS IN POSTWAR AMERICAN CULTURE AND FICTION Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Fiction Thesis format: Monograph by Thomas James Barnes Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Thomas J. Barnes 2011 THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION Supervisor Examiners ______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Thy Phu Dr. Tom Carmichael Supervisory Committee ______________________________ Dr. Joshua Schuster ______________________________ Dr. Joshua Schuster ______________________________ Dr. Tim Blackmore ______________________________ Dr. Andrew McMurry The thesis by Thomas James Barnes entitled: Residues of the Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Culture and Fiction is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ______________________ _______________________________ Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board ii Abstract Residues of the Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Culture and Fiction argues that garbage, trash, junk, detritus, and waste of the post-World War II period can be read as indexes of the Cold War cultural landscape and its structure of feeling. This dissertation treats these remainders as archival materials, documents with a kind of textuality, and suggests that when rendered legible their function as crucial sites of conflicting ideologies and discourses can be recognized. Employing the interdisciplinary methods of ecocriticism and cultural materialism, I read Cold War trash to provide a new account of American Cold War culture and literature by tracing the emergence of household garbage as a significant trope in varying cultural contexts. While waste was traditionally seen as material symbolic of the past and marginalized in dominant, Cold War discourses, new readings of postwar authors Robert A. Heinlein, Walter M. Miller Jr., Philip K. Dick, (and later Don DeLillo and A.R. Ammons) suggest they recognize the prevalence of new synthetic materials and toxic, non-biodegradable wastes inseparable from the Cold War project implicates garbage in complicated material futures. In providing such a perspective, these authors demonstrate that while waste will embody the material effects of the American Cold War project on future American landscapes, the work of elucidating garbage’s role within Cold War matrices of spatial organization can provide grounds for a critique of dominant Cold War discourses of gender, consumption, and politics. In analyzing the ways waste is represented in different Cold War spaces in literature—the kitchen, the fallout shelter, public urban and suburban spaces, the sanitary landfill—my project argues that proto-ecological conceptualizations of waste concurrently emerged alongside, and challenged, the dominant discourses of Cold War waste management. Keywords Garbage Studies, American Studies, Cold War Studies, Ecocriticism, Speculative Fiction, Waste Consciousness, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, Nuclear Criticism, Archive Theory iii Acknowledgements Over the years, many important people have generously contributed to this dissertation in one way or another; they deserve special thanks and recognition for their help and support. Their contributions to this project have not gone unnoticed and will not be forgotten. I would first like to thank those members of the department who found the time and patience to assist and nurture me along the way. Mostly, I offer a sentiment of sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Thy Phu. Without her guidance and expertise, it is safe to say, I would not have finished this project. I will be eternally grateful for her dedication to the project, her continual encouragement, and her generosity. Dr. Tom Carmichael and Dr. Joshua Schuster also deserve special thanks for their much-valued guidance and feedback throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank the members of my examination committee: Dr. Andrew McMurry, of University of Waterloo’s Department of English, and Dr. Tim Blackmore, of University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies. Your comments and suggestions are appreciated and have stimulated much subsequent thought. Thank you for prompting me to see the project from new perspectives. I also need to thank my friends and family—the Barneses and the Mudges—for all of their support over the years. And lastly, I would like to give my most special and deserved thanks to my wife Rebecca, whose support, belief, and patience throughout this entire process made all the difference in the world. iv Table of Contents CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION ........................................................................... ii Abstract..............................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………...………………..iv Table of Contents................................................................................................................ v Introduction: “Say goodbye to garbage forever!”............................................................... 1 Chapter One: (En)Gendered Waste in the Cold War Kitchen…………………………...29 1.1 The Nuclear Domestic…………………………………………………………...29 1.2 Un domestic………………………………………………………………………34 1.3 Cyborg Trash ……………………………………………………………………49 1.4 Robot Housewives…………….…………………………………………………66 Chapter Two: Subterranean Garbage: The Fallout Shelter's Critique of Disposable Culture……………71 2.1 Shelter Discourse………………………………………………………………...71 2.2 “Not lacking, not fearing”………………………………………………………..76 2.3 Shelter, Garbage, and the Nuclear Frontier………………………………………92 2.4 Wasted and Recycled…………………………………………………………...109 Chapter Three: Charles Fenno Jacobs and Philip K. Dick: The Photographic and Literary Waste Gaze …………………….112 3.1 Un scenery.............................................................................................................112 3.2 Keeping America Beautiful…………………………………………………..…117 3.3 Industry, Consumer, Litter……………………………………………………...131 3.4 Wastelandscapes of the Future………………………………………………….142 v 3.5 Earth Day, Restaurants, and Spiritual Trash……………………………………159 Chapter Four: Toxic Archive: Litter ature and the Cold War Landfill………………….164 4.1 Endings………………………………………………………………………….164 4.2 Cold War Archive ……………………………………………………………...172 4.3 Pulped Fiction…………………………………………………………………..187 Conclusion: Residues…………………………………………………………………...206 Notes……………………………………………………………………………………215 Works Cited and Referenced…………………………………………………………...266 Curriculum Vitae……………………………………………………………………….294 vi 1 INTRODUCTION “Say goodbye to garbage forever!” In April 1947, the deaths of two eccentric Harlem recluses became a national news story in the United States. Brothers Homer and Langley Collyer, notorious in the New York City neighbourhood for hoarding miscellaneous objects, curious artefacts, and daily ephemera, 1 were found dead in their home after police followed up on a neighbour’s report of suspicious noises emitting from the building. When they first entered, officers were shocked to find that, as a subsequent Life magazine article noted, the “front hallway was filled to the ceiling with trash” (“Strange” 49). Confronted next by “a solid mass of newspapers, cartons, old iron, broken furniture” (“New York”) as they ventured in further, policemen encountered many more piles of other such garbaged materials. In fact, police would soon find that almost all of the Collyers’ domestic space had been littered with garbage and that “[t]he building was packed almost solid from top to bottom with incredible masses of junk” (“New York”). It soon became clear that the Collyers had over the course of three decades amassed an astounding collection of belongings and neglected to dispose of any trash. Police later surmised that in order to even move about the home, the brothers had to install a network of “tunnels in trash” (“Strange” 52), some set with booby traps to “release[] avalanche[s] of debris” (52) upon unwanted guests. After finding the dead body of blind brother Homer, police sent out an all-points bulletin for brother Langley, whom they suspected

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