Deserting Society: Fiction and Travel in the Shadow of the Bomb, 1945–91 Matthew McCann A thesis submitted to the University of Sheffield's School of English for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 Abstract This thesis looks at literary responses to the Bomb as the greatest threat to humanity, examining English-language texts written between the destruction of Hiroshima and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Specifically, it investigates the representation of nuclear paranoia and the desert as a site of Cold War experience. The Cold War security-state used discourse about the threat of the Bomb to inspire conformist paranoia among its citizens. However, excessive paranoia can lead to dissociation and non-conformity. Those in dissociative states commonly display pre-emptive tendencies, desiring to make their environment conform to their world-view. Accordingly, the Cold War citizen might wish for the Bomb to drop in order to escape their paranoia. Since the Bomb turns society into a wasteland, flight to the archetypal wasteland of the Sahara effectively precipitates nuclear-apocalypse. Free from the shadow of the Bomb, the desert can become the site of a society free of fear. By travelling from Jean Baudrillard's 'desert of the real' to the real desert, however, these citizens move from a place of paranoia to the birthplace of the Bomb. Their perception of the desert as a space outside society shows that they have not escaped society's constructs. The desert's disruption of these constructs, however, offers a perspective on their cultural formation and so a new narrative by which to live. The thesis examines texts which feature Westerners travelling to the African desert by Paul Bowles, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Lawrence Durrell, Penelope Lively and Michael Ondaatje. It argues that the Bomb lurks in the unconsciousness of the writers and their protagonists, inducing the individual to travel. With this in mind, it investigates whether the age-old idea of flight to the desert can resolve the stand-off within the individual between the narratives imposed by society and those constructed through personal experience. ii Acknowledgements I have only been able to undertake this research because the University of Sheffield awarded me a three-year Faculty Scholarship. On account of this, my thanks must first of all go to the awarding body for this bursary. My application could not have been successful without the advice and feedback on my proposal which Adam Piette and Bob McKay of the School of English generously provided me when I contacted them out of the blue. I would also like to thank my primary supervisor, Jonathan Ellis, and my secondary supervisor, Richard Steadman-Jones, for all their effort and encouragement over the last four years. Thanks also to the many academics, both at Sheffield and elsewhere, who have listened to the work I have presented at conferences and responded with insight. I have lost count of the times that the School's secretaries and other support- staff have rescued me from the many administrative and technological wastelands into which I have led myself. Thank you. Finally, while the scholarship allowed me to undertake this research, the research would undoubtedly have overtaken me had it not been for the support of Yeo Sun Park and Jane Harley. iii Table of Contents Abstract......................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents....................................................................................................................iv Introduction. Deserting Society: Fiction and Travel in the Shadow of the Bomb, 1945–91..1 Section 1. Insanity in the Sahara, 1945–60....................................................................................34 Chapter 1. Shunning Society While Craving Containment: Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky (1949)..........................................................................................................................................35 Chapter 2. Self-Sovereignty and the Containment of Death: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (1958).....................................................................................................................68 Section 2. Mortality in the Sahara, 1961–84.................................................................................105 Chapter 3. Decolonising the Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963)..........................................106 Chapter 4. Suicide of the Citizen As the Death of the System: Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet (1974–85)..................................................................................................160 iv Section 3. Alterity in the Sahara, 1985–91....................................................................................202 Chapter 5. Annihilating Narrative: Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger (1987)...................................203 Conclusion. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) and Deserting the Desert in the Shadow of New Threats...........................................................................................245 Bibliography..........................................................................................................................261 v Introduction. Deserting Society: Fiction and Travel in the Shadow of the Bomb, 1945–91 This thesis looks at literary responses to the Bomb as the greatest threat to humanity. To do so, it analyses fiction as part of the public discourse about the Bomb, and what Arthur Redding has called both a mechanism of and a threat to the hegemonic narrative of consensus in the first years of the atomic age.1 Specifically, it examines English-language works featuring Westerners travelling to the African desert written between the first use of the Bomb in aggression, the attack on Hiroshima in 1945, and the break-up of the Soviet Union, completed in 1991. After this event, the two ideological adversaries of the Cold War stepped back from their threats of mutual obliteration and, it can be argued, the Bomb lost its status as the principal danger to society (even if, as Jonathan Schell has pointed out, this shift in attitude is entirely mistaken).2 The subject of this thesis The Bomb loomed over the collective and individual consciousness as the principal danger to the world throughout the second half of the twentieth century. When topical events pushed it off the front pages, it continued to hang in the air overhead, at the edge of one's peripheral vision, a Fat Man behaving like a black dog (of war). Even during the years of détente between the Free World and the communist bloc following the brinkmanship over Cuba in 1962, 1 Arthur Redding, Turncoats, Traitors and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008), p. 6. 2 'It’s not until 1994 that we truly saw how fear of the Bomb had declined. Four years after the fall of the USSR, James Cameron exploded a nuke just in the background of True Lies [...] It is a moment that shocks for its casualness.' It seems that, for popular culture, an apocalyptic end is so over. See Samira Ahmed, 'How the Bomb Changed Everything', BBC Worldwide <www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150702-how-the-bomb-changed-everything> [accessed 13AUG15] 1 when headlines in the West were more concerned with the Civil Rights movement in America and the UK's bid for membership of the EEC, not to mention Vietnam and decolonisation, Frank Kermode still believed that 'the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world'.3 While Albert Einstein said the year after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that '[t]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled disaster',4 it can be argued that it did change precisely these things. After all, the awareness of humanity's ability to destroy itself and the accompanying anxiety and paranoia have ricocheted around the chambers of our brains like radioactive shrapnel ever since. This is one of the central concerns of this thesis. Although tensions rose and fell throughout the forty-odd years of the stand-off, the narratives which the atomic-superpowers broadcast to their societies consistently maintained a stark binary so value-laden that all choice was effectively removed. Media-projections, such as images of the mushroom cloud which came to emblematise both the atomic-threat and the State's atomic- protection, fixed the world reductively, desiring to deny citizens the interpretative agency to arrive at their own understanding of the ideological confrontation. As Guy Debord says, such propaganda is the material form by reference of which ideology gains force and, in the words of Alan Nadel, the Cold War demonstrates 'the power of large cultural narratives to unify, codify, and contain – perhaps intimidate is the best word – the personal narratives of its population'.5 This diffusion of information throughout society replicated and exceeded, in both material and psychological terms, the proliferation of missiles on the front-line of the conflict which it was primarily intended to justify. The 3 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967), p. 28. 4 Quoted in Joseph Dewey,