THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SENTIENT ATMOSPHERES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY JEFFREY HAMILTON BOGGS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Hamilton Boggs All rights reserved Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 I. ATMOSPHERE IN LATE LATE JAMES ............................................................................... 21 II. “WE HAD THE AIR”: THE ATMOSPHERIC FORM OF THE VIETNAM WAR .............. 48 III. THIS IS AIR: THE ATMOSPHERIC POLITICS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ......... 87 IV. NARRATING THE ANTHROPOCENE: THE ATMOSPHERIC COMEDY ................... 120 CODA: PLANETARY AIR ....................................................................................................... 150 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 160 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee for their unwavering support throughout the course of my academic progress. Bill Brown embodies the very best of the intellectual culture of the University of Chicago. He combines a big mind with a highly refined sensibility, exquisite taste with a trenchant intellect. Moreover—and what I am perhaps most thankful for—he is an excellent reader as well as an excellent writer. It was a pleasure and a privilege to learn from him, from my first class in graduate school all the way through to the final revision of my dissertation. Debbie Nelson is a wonderful intellectual resource for anyone thinking about American literature and culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. What’s more, she cares deeply about the welfare of her students, both professionally and personally. I was fortunate enough to be the object of that care. When I needed it most—and I needed it most on more than one occasion—she was always there to artfully administer a reviving dose of tough love. Ken Warren was kind enough to enter the scene of my thinking at a late hour, and was smart enough to make my project better in every way. Bill Veeder once told me that I was “unkillable”—even as I tried to convince him that I was already dead. It was the kindest, best thing anyone ever said to me during my time at the University of Chicago. To my family and friends—in my world, the two circles merge within the embrace of a single, all-embracing circumference—thank you for everything. I wouldn’t be writing this if it weren’t for you. Thank you, above all, to my wife and my son. I will look for you in the central chamber of that innermost, centermost circle of love. iv INTRODUCTION On August 6, 1945 the daily forecast for Hiroshima, Japan called for clear skies and plenty of sun. According to John Hersey’s account, “the morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable.”1 Conditions were about to get worse. At 8:15 a.m., an atomic bomb burst in the air above the city center. Hiroshima (1946), which documents the bomb’s aftermath from the rotating point of view of six survivors, also describes a series of strange weather events, both real and imagined. The atomic blast itself, in its unprecedented impact upon the human sensorium, was variously received, depending upon the person’s position and perspective, as a weather event of unimaginable magnitude. To Mr. Tanimoto, a Japanese clergyman standing two miles from the epicenter of the blast, the luminous radiance of the flash “seemed a sheet of sun” (5). Less than a mile away, Father Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit living in the city, thought that the flash was the result of “a large meteor colliding with the earth” (12). A fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea, twenty miles from the city center, believed that the loudest sound he had ever heard was “thunder” announcing an oncoming, world-wrecking storm (6). Although the atomic explosion was not, as its initial victims believed, a natural cataclysm, the energic effects of the blast did indeed significantly modify Hiroshima’s weather world. “Why is it night already?” Myeko Nakamura asked his mother (19), after “such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around” (6). During the day, as the air “grew darker and darker,” the weather got weirder and weirder (6). “Through the clouded air,” Mr. 1 John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946; New York: Vintage, 1985), 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 1 Tanimoto saw Hiroshima itself “giving off a thick, dreadful miasma” (18). Later in the afternoon, as refugees began to assemble in Asano Park, the “wind grew stronger and stronger,” and a whirlwind whipped through the park, ripping up trees and pummeling bodies already traumatized by ghastly flash burns (39). In addition to all these meteorological anomalies, the weather was made strange in another sense as well. The people of Hiroshima could no longer tell whether the weather was natural or manmade. “When huge drops of water the size of marbles began to fall” (18), the people in the park began to panic, assailed by hail that they received as weaponized gasoline, dropped by American warplanes as a prelude to indiscriminate incineration (38). Moreover, the atomic bomb’s uncanny agency not only altered the weather, but seemed to alter the very nature of nature itself: the properties of light, the growth of plants, the biochemistry of the human body. The bomb “left prints of the shadows that had been cast by its light,” indelibly imprinting the silhouettes of its vaporized victims upon sundry urban surfaces (73). When Miss Sasaki, a young secretary, first walked into Asano Park, she stood “horrified and amazed” by the sudden, florabundant eruption of plant life: “Over everything… was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones” (69). The bombing of the city was also a “bombardment of the body” (76). The invisible force of “neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays” (76) lingered on in the “delayed affliction” of lethal radiation (71). Hiroshima makes its readers acutely aware of “the historicity of the supposedly immutable atmosphere.”2 The human beings whom Hersey, with bitter irony, calls “the objects 2 Tobias Menely, “Anthropocene Air,” Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 93-101, 99. 2 of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power,” confront a transformed atmosphere (49). In two senses. Not only does human action alter the material composition of the atmosphere, it also changes the way human beings inhabit the air, the way they experience their atmospheric habitat. No longer just a transparent medium, taken for granted as an intact part of the nonhuman environment, the atmosphere also becomes a formidable force.3 “Sentient Atmospheres” tracks the human transformation of the atmosphere across the twentieth century. “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century,” wrote Rachel Carson in 1962, “has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.”4 Like Hersey’s Hiroshima, Carson’s Silent Spring describes a world filled with invisible atmospheric agencies released by the power of humankind.5 The white crystals that fall “like snow upon the roofs and the lawns” of suburban American homes are the toxic debris of DDT.6 Strontium-90, the radioactive detritus of Cold War atmospheric nuclear testing, “comes to Earth in rain.”7 What Carson first diagnosed in 1962, and Bill McKibben announced as the “end of nature” in 1989, we have now begun to refer to as the “Anthropocene,” a term proposed by Paul Crutzen in 2000 to name an epoch in which the human species has become a geophysical 3 I draw upon Peter Sloterdijk: “By using violence against the very air that groups breathe, the human being's immediate atmospheric envelope is transformed into something whose intactness or non- intactness is henceforth a question.” For Sloterdijk, atmospheric modernity begins on April 22, 1915, in Ypres, France, with the weaponization of a chlorine cloud by the German military. Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 59. 4 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Mariner Books, 1962), 25. 5 As Ulrich Beck puts it in regard to the toxic ecologies of risk society: “Threats from civilization are bringing about a kind of new ‘shadow kingdom,’ comparable to the realm of the gods and demons in antiquity, which is hidden behind the visible world and threatens human life on this Earth.” Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (1986; London: Sage, 1992), 72. 6 Carson, Silent Spring, 3. 7 Ibid., 6. The Americans and the Soviets detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the planet’s air from 1945-1963, but even a single explosion sufficed for global contamination. Radioactive fallout from the detonation of the 15-megaton thermonuclear bomb Bravo at Bikini Atoll in 1954 ultimately spread throughout the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere. See, for example, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light,” Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (Fall 2009): 468-498. 3 force operating on a global scale.8 The human modification of the Earth system is “nowhere more evident than in the atmosphere,” in the form of anthropogenic climate change, a hybrid entity that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes, dissolves “the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.”9 Now, we are the weather. “Sentient Atmospheres” offers the first literary-critical account of this change in the weather. It argues that the sense of atmosphere shifts from descriptive medium to narrative agent in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. For writers such as Henry James, Michael Herr, Ursula K.