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Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental 0/-*/&4637&: *ODPMMBCPSBUJPOXJUI6OHMVFJU XFIBWFTFUVQBTVSWFZ POMZUFORVFTUJPOT UP MFBSONPSFBCPVUIPXPQFOBDDFTTFCPPLTBSFEJTDPWFSFEBOEVTFE 8FSFBMMZWBMVFZPVSQBSUJDJQBUJPOQMFBTFUBLFQBSU $-*$,)&3& "OFMFDUSPOJDWFSTJPOPGUIJTCPPLJTGSFFMZBWBJMBCMF UIBOLTUP UIFTVQQPSUPGMJCSBSJFTXPSLJOHXJUI,OPXMFEHF6OMBUDIFE ,6JTBDPMMBCPSBUJWFJOJUJBUJWFEFTJHOFEUPNBLFIJHIRVBMJUZ CPPLT0QFO"DDFTTGPSUIFQVCMJDHPPE Revised Pages RISK CRITICISM Revised Pages Revised Pages Risk Criticism PRECAUTIONARY READING IN AN AGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL UNCERTAINTY Molly Wallace UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2016 by Molly Wallace All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2019 2018 2017 2016 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Wallace, Molly, author. Title: Risk criticism : precautionary reading in an age of environmental uncertainty / Molly Wallace. Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015038637 | ISBN 9780472073023 (hardback) | ISBN 9780472053025 (paperback) | ISBN 9780472121694 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Criticism. | Risk in literature. | Environmental risk assessment. | Risk-taking (Psychology) Classification: LCC PN98.E36 W35 2016 | DDC 809/.93355— dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038637 Revised Pages For my family Revised Pages Revised Pages Acknowledgments This book has been a number of years in the writing, and I am deeply grate- ful for the support and encouragement that I have received along the way. To my colleagues at Queen’s University, I owe a debt of gratitude for your support and inspiration. Thanks particularly to Mick Smith in the School of Environmental Studies and Asha Varadharajan in the Department of Eng- lish, both of whom let me test out some ideas on their unwitting students. And thanks too to the students in my own courses on “nuclear culture” and “risk” for thoughtful engagement and challenges. In the wider world, thanks are due to Rob Nixon, for his encouragement and inspiration, and to Begoña Simal-González, whose invitation to deliver a lecture in Spain seemed too good to be true, and who, in addition to friendship, offered the opportunity to share portions of what is now chapter 3. I am also deeply grateful to Catriona Sandilands for her immense intellectual and personal generosity, including the invitation to deliver a closing keynote address at the Green Words / Green Worlds conference in Toronto, which gave me the opportunity to craft an early version of chapter 5. A version of that keynote (and now a proto- version of the final chapter of this book) is forthcoming, as “Averting Environmental Catastrophe in Time: Staging the Uranium Cycle,” in a volume that Cate and Amanda Di Battista are coediting for Wilfrid Laurier Press; my thanks to the Press for permission to include a version of it here. Other portions of the book have also appeared elsewhere. A variant of the introduction appeared as “Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk” in Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk, edited by Paul Crosthwaite (Routledge, 2011). My thanks to Paul for organizing the marvelous conference on risk for which the paper was originally written. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Discomfort Food: Analogy, Biotechnology, and Risk in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation” in Arizona Quar- terly 67.4 (Winter 2011). My thanks as well to those who have provided permission for the im- ages in this book, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; the Argonne National Revised Pages viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Library; Heal the Bay; Boom Entertainment (for the image from I’m Not a Plastic Bag © Rachel Allison. All rights reserved. Used with permission); John Hendrix; the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels; and John Junkerman (and the Maruki Film Project). I am grateful also to Adam Dick- inson and House of Anansi Press and Ronald Wallace and the University of Pittsburgh Press for granting permission to reprint poems. Risk Criticism was supported with a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). My thanks to my Research Assistants who contributed immensely to the project: Maryanne Laurico, Laura McGavin, Aaron Mauro, David Carruthers, and Shadi Ghazimoradi. The staff at the University of Michigan Press has been unfail- ingly professional and tremendously supportive. Thanks especially to Aaron McCollough for his support of the book, to the two anonymous re- viewers for their generous engagement with the manuscript, and to those on the Press Committee, who provided wise council for final revisions. This project would not have been possible without the guidance and example of my parents, whose commitment to literature and justice is a constant inspiration, and whose loving support has sustained me. I owe many thanks to Todd, builder of native gardens, birdhouses, and rocket- mass heaters, who has championed me unflaggingly, and to Lucy, lover of worms, birds, cats, humans, and all other planetary life, who is teaching me hope. As I was readying the manuscript for submission, I received word that Ulrich Beck, the source of so much inspiration for my work, had died. I would like also, then, to acknowledge the deep debt I owe to him, and offer thanks for his life and work. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Revised Pages Contents INTRODUCTION Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk 1 ONE The Second Nuclear Age and Its Wagers: Archival Reflexions 28 TWO We All Live in Bhopal? Staging Global Risk 64 THREE Discomfort Food: Analogy and Biotechnology 93 FOUR Letting Plastic Have Its Say; or, Plastic’s Tell 123 FIVE The Port Radium Paradigm; or, Fukushima in a Changing Climate 154 AFTERWORD Writing “The Bomb”: Inheritances in the Anthropocene 192 Notes 209 Bibliography 239 Index 255 Revised Pages INTRODUCTION. Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk Given its impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? — Andrew McMurray, “The Slow Apocalypse”1 The future inhabits the present, yet it also has not yet come— rather like the way toxics inhabit the bodies of those exposed, setting up the future, but not yet manifest as disease, or even as an origin from which a specific and known disease will come. — Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal2 CRITICAL PRACTICE IN THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE From the start of what, in retrospect, may have been the first nuclear age, perhaps no image has so captured the sense of looming risk that nuclear weapons pose as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’s “Doomsday Clock,” an icon that has graced the cover of that publication since 1947. From its perilously close two minutes to midnight following the detonation of the first thermonuclear bombs, first by the United States and then by the Sovi- ets, in 1953 to its position at a relatively comfortable seventeen minutes to midnight in 1991, the Clock has stood as a barometer of the world’s prox- imity to its end. With the end of the Cold War, this icon might seem to have joined duck- and- cover drills and fallout shelters as an archaic relic of the atomic age; nevertheless, it has continued to mark the times— and has marched fairly steadily toward midnight, from fourteen minutes in 1995, to nine in 1998, to seven in 2002, each tick reminding us that, though the cul- tural obsession with the nuclear may have waned, we continue to live un- der the shadow of the atomic bomb. But even as it represents the continuity of risk, the Clock has also Revised Pages 2 RISK CRITICISM changed with the times. Indeed, when it appeared on the January– February 2007 issue of the publication— reset to five minutes to midnight— its sym- bolic valence had subtly changed. Still measuring nuclear threats— the United States’ then- interest in usable nukes, the spread of weapons to North Korea and potentially Iran, and the resurgence of investment in nu- clear power—the Clock had also begun to register other risks that the Bul- letin felt had graduated to the scale of the nuclear, including particularly climate change, but as the Bulletin’s scientific panel of sponsors added, also biotechnology and nanotechnology, an epochal shift that the Bulletin sug- gested constituted a “second nuclear age.”3 As Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society and a Bulletin sponsor, put it: “Nuclear weapons still pose the most catastrophic and immediate threat to humanity, but climate change and emerging technologies in the life sciences also have the poten- tial to end civilization as we know it.”4 In the “second nuclear age,” then, the term “nuclear” appears to operate as a synecdoche for global environ- mental risk more generally, what German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called “world risk society.” Periodizing the contemporary is always a tricky combination of divin- ing and conjuring, but whether or not recent events warrant its inaugura- tion, the Bulletin’s “second nuclear age” at least offers an occasion for re- flection on how we understand contemporary risk. Ticking back and forth between two and seventeen minutes to midnight over the last nearly seven decades, the Clock provides an odd synchronicity, such that, for example, five minutes to midnight put 2007 roughly where the Clock stood in the mid- 1980s (between 1984’s three minutes to midnight and 1988’s six), a coincidence that offers a countertemporality to the successive logic that of- ten characterizes narratives, whether of critical practices or history.
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