Placing the Bomb: the Pastoral and the Sublime in the Nuclear Age by Carolyn J. Dekker A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Patricia Yaeger, Co-Chair Professor John Whittier-Ferguson, Co-Chair Professor Gregg Crane Professor Philip J. Deloria Professor Susan Scott Parrish DEDICATION To Daniel, and the next adventure. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My time at Michigan has been enriched beyond measure by my colleagues, friends and mentors. Adam Mazel, Ben Pollak, Chris Barnes, Konstantina Karageorgos, Kya Mangrum, MicKenzie Fasteland, Rachel Feder and Rebecca Porte were my steadfast friends, readers and collaborators. Patsy Yaeger dazzled and inspired me with her joyful, creative scholarship. John Whittier-Ferguson lent support and encouragement when I wavered and lit my way with his own nuanced and generous work. Scotti Parrish introduced me to both Austin and Silko, which was in itself worth the trip to graduate school. Barbara Hodgdon gave me the gifts of her friendship, of wildflowers and editorial and archival theory. Nick Delbanco guided, supported, and believed in me as a writer while I sought my identity as a scholar. I'm grateful to Gregg Crane, Phil Deloria and our Camp Davis classes of 2011 and 2012 for the intellectual and wilderness adventures, and to my indoor students, both at Michigan and Westfield, who helped me think about writing, Toomer and Silko more deeply than ever before. Lastly, I'm grateful to my friends and fellow volunteers at Therapeutic Riding Inc., my running partners, my martial arts family, my spouse, parents and siblings for making this a full and beautiful seven years. iii CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I. For All We Know, We Have Created a Frankenstein: Unleashing the Nuclear Sublime 12 II. To Green, Quiet Ends: Apocalypse and the Nuclear Pastoral 56 III. Green World or None: Jean Toomer's Pastoral Vision for a Nuclear Age 90 IV. All Tayo's Sisters: The Lost Women of Silko's Ceremony 153 CONCLUSION 193 iv LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1. Scenes from A Drama of the Southwest 152 2. Notes for Angie's Ceremony 192 v INTRODUCTION The Atomic Moment One pure moment could pierce. Or one symbol. Or one metaphor.1 But there was no moment. You should know that. How many times have I told you how difficult it is to resist the lure of the historical moment? The one action, the instantaneous truth that changes everything? …There are always many moments, there is never just one. There are many points of clarity and many causes to one effect.2 In Louise Erdrich's 2010 novel, Shadow Tag, Irene America and her husband, Gil, engage in a long-running argument about historiographic methods. Gil believes in the “Lord Jim moment” in which a person's true character is revealed, while Irene believes that there is no such moment, or rather that history is a long accretion of moments that can be shaped into recognizable narrative only by great labors of articulation, arrangement and omission.3 Relationship as well as historiography is at stake here. Gil undertakes misguided efforts to rescue his failing marriage by triggering a perfect moment of revelation while Irene has long ceased to believe such a total change or new beginning is possible. I begin with Irene and Gil and their arguments about American history and the history of their own marriage because this dissertation can also be figured as being about a conflict 1 Louise Erdrich, Shadow Tag (New York: Harper, 2010): 149. 2 Ibid., 48. 3 Ibid., 89. 1 between the one pure moment and the resistance to the lure of the historical moment. The development by the United States of an atomic weapon and its deployment against civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945 and the ensuing decades of nuclear proliferation are the events and material realities behind the historiographies and literature of interest here. Seldom in human history have the stakes of writing been higher, and not only because this writing is about an important thing. Belief about the diplomatic and military efficacy of nuclear weapons is the direct driver of their proliferation. This belief derives from rhetoric, literature, propaganda and historiography. It is made of words, and the words became bombs and dwelt among us. With this project, I wish to reveal the political valences of what literary critics have identified as the Nuclear Sublime–representations of the atomic bomb as a pure moment that changes both history and hearts. On their surface, such representations seem to deserve the reputation that many literary scholars accord them: the proper stance of awe and terror, combined with a resolve that such things should never happen again. People of conscience committed such representations to paper in the early days after the atomic bombings. But so, too, did political and military spokespersons, American sources who would benefit greatly from the consolidation of belief that the atomic bombings were justified, decisive, and uniquely powerful and terrorizing. My first chapter devotes itself to tracing the nuclear sublime, turning backwards in time from its emergence as a high-literary term in the 1980s and showing that it applies equally well or better to a group of rhetorical practices as old as the bomb itself: the use of sublime language, mythic metaphor and proclamations of instantaneous or inevitable transformation upon its 2 witnessing. I next turn to those texts that take the opposite tack, resisting the singular moment and the fetishization of the atomic bomb. I make particular use of the reception of the book and film, On the Beach, to recover non-sublime (indeed, pastoral) literary representations of the bomb as holding potential for anti-nuclear activism. By this work I hope to set the stage for seeing as nuclear a group of texts that may not appear to rest fully within that subject area. The nuclear does not seem central in these texts because it is interwoven with other concerns. Such a structure does deny the importance of the nuclear so much as take the stance that the only way to address the nuclear is as a thorny and intersectional problem. The nuclear world has many causes, many points of clarity, and not one but many effects. Longinus says that “a well-timed flash of sublimity scatters everything before it.”4 Atom bombs may scatter all at the moment of explosion, but the nuclear warheads of recent years have exhibited a habit of remaining in their silos, failing quite profoundly to scatter before them the rest of life's concerns. A nuclear literature such as we find in Jean Toomer and Leslie Marmon Silko, in which nuclear writings are contiguous with non-nuclear ones and nuclear concerns are richly contextualized, reflects this reality, and this mode of historiography and literary production resistant to the lure of the sublime moment and therefore more attentive to our own moment of co-existence with nuclear weapons. A belief in the Nuclear Sublime can tempt writers to believe that the bomb changes everything and to therefore write histories and literature (and literary criticism) in which the bomb alone changes everything. And to take these actions with our pens is to allow the bomb to 4 “Longinus,” On the Sublime, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe in Aristotle the Poetics, “Longinus” on the Sublime, Demetrius on Style, ed. T.E. Page: 122-254. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960): 125. 3 change everything. Critics, those pen-wielding readers, can likewise be tempted by the lure of the singular moment to so fetishize the bomb that any small mention of the bomb–or even the lack of mention–indicates a repression of larger horror. Indeed, the silence comes to be seen as a mark of a sublime experience that is beyond language’s ability to record. A W. H. Auden poem provides a cautionary tale in the dangers of reading silences in this manner and writing literary criticism from the premise of the singular moment or the atomic bomb's absolute uniqueness. The piece of writing in question, “If On Account of the Political Situation,” has led a curious double life since 1983. In that year, it was collected by Jim Schley, who printed it as the first poem of an issue of the New England Review that was in turn reprinted as a freestanding poetry collection, Writing in a Nuclear Age, in 1984. Collected in these two material contexts, printed under the pitch-perfect fatalistic humor of its title, “If On Account of the Political Situation” certainly looks like a nuclear poem. It begins: If on account of the political situation, There are quite a number of homes without roofs, and men, Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor asleep, If all sailings have been cancelled till further notice, If it's unwise now to say much in letters, and if, Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing, The two sexes are at the present the weak and the strong, That is not at all unusual for this time of year. And it wends after 63 lines to this powerful final stanza: The violent howling of winter and war has become Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void. 5 This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God. 5 W.H. Auden, “If On Account of the Political Situation,” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 5, no.