27
Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War
At a key moment in John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church tries to rescue a group of people who are too weak to lift themselves out of the way of a rising tide. As he reaches down to take one woman’s hands, her skin slips “off in huge, glovelike pieces.” Although sickened by the sight, he forges on. Witnessing the effects of what he did not yet know was radiation sickness, he has “to keep consciously repeating to himself, ‘These are human beings’ ” (60–1).
Hersey’s account, which first appeared as a special issue of The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, chronicled the impact of the first nuclear weapon used in an act of war and documented the remarkable transformation crystallized by the bombing. The pastor’s efforts to remind himself that the slimy creatures shedding their skin were human beings can serve as an analogue for a radical conceptual change: the contemporary understanding of “human being” and “humanity” had shifted with the devastated landscape. While these changes had their roots in the prewar world, the bombing of Hiroshima – and, within three days, of Nagasaki – marked a dramatic origin point for what the media quickly dubbed “the Atomic Age,” and Hiroshima represents the attempt of an astute journalist and his editors to make sense of what they recognized was a new understanding of the human experience.
As psychologists would later note, everyone who lived through the war was in some sense a survivor of the bombings, as of the other atrocities of the war, and the “victors,” too, would have to come to terms with their implications. These atrocities manifested the possibilities and consequences of mass dehumanization and therefore of the fundamental instability of the terms “human being” and “humanity” – which is to say of the exquisite fragility of being. While political theorists studied the significance of that instability for foundational institutions, scientific research challenged basic assumptions about the nature of “human being” that further destabilized the term.
Research in areas including cell biology, ecology, genetics, cybernetics, and psychology illustrate how the idea of the human was being reconceptualized at the level of cells, atoms, and genes, and through the idiom of information systems and the unconscious. The rapid development of new technologies during and after the First World War offered insights into the role of genes in human development and evolution, the workings of the human mind, and the cause of disease. In the decade following the Second World War, the new theories generated by those insights circulated in the mainstream media. People learned that genes and viruses were “information” and that one small miscommunication could have a profound impact on an individual and even in some cases on the species; they read about viruses taking control of a cell’s nucleus and of Communists taking control of human minds. In both science and politics, it was increasingly clear that everything was interdependent. The circulation of “information” was as crucial to human survival as the circulation of blood, and the state no less than the individual thrived only when that circulation was unimpeded. Information became commodified – “classified” for the first time – and its theft became a crime punishable by death.
In the vast cauldron of literary production that followed the war, novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers fashioned stories that imaginatively engaged with the multiple challenges – biological, social, and geopolitical – to the ideas of “human being” and “humanity” that characterized this moment. Their work refracted those concepts, registering the expectations and anxieties that accompanied the changing sense of what it meant – or could mean – to be human in the aftermath of war.
The preoccupation with the changing contours of “human being” and “humanity” was nowhere more evident than in the proliferation of works of science fiction, which emerged as a literary genre in this moment, known as its “Golden Age.” Isaac Asimov published the first novel of his epic Foundation series, in which he explored the mutual impact of the politics of (galactic) imperialism and human development, in 1951 and the first novel in his equally influential robot series, which considered the idea of artificial intelligence and helped to popularize cybernetics, in 1954. Beginning in the late 1940s, the British writer Arthur C. Clarke used alien encounters to meditate on human evolution, and Alfred Bester’s popular The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956) centered on the radical social changes that would emerge following the discovery of heretofore unimagined human traits and capacities. Science fiction writers explored human potential and limitations, the optimism and concerns of the Atomic Age, through such scenarios as the discovery of alternate universes and mental dimensions, the implications of human evolution and the creation of artificial intelligence, contact with alien beings and worlds, and the ultimate unthinkable that was never really far from the human imagination: the consequences of full-scale nuclear war.
Science fiction dramatized the possibilities debated at the highest levels of policy making and in the most advanced laboratories in the world, but it proliferated in the United States most likely because of the thriving publishing industry (in a boom economy generally) and the general optimism about the possibilities promised by scientific research (notwithstanding the anxieties concerning its dangers). The nascent genre picked up on what appeared to be the one certainty emerging from scientific research, which was the inevitability of change. Darwin had written the Great Origin Story of the human species in the mid-nineteenth century, but he could offer no causal mechanism for his most famous and widely debated concept: natural selection. The combined work of geneticists and natural historians in the 1930s and 1940s yielded the “evolutionary synthesis,” which showed how the means by which random microscopic changes at the level of the gene could ultimately produce macrochanges at the level of the population. While genetics had characteristically focused on the individual organism, the synthesis shifted the focus to collective changes evident in a population over time and, in so doing, implicitly told a story about inevitable human metamorphosis – and finitude. That story was inflected by the contemporary emergence of the concept of an “ecosystem,” a term introduced in 1935 to name the interactions of living organisms and their environments in a vastly interconnected web of existence that was constantly changing as the result of adaptations to random events. Significantly, funding in the fields of both ecology and genetics came largely, in the postwar period, from the Atomic Energy Commission, fueled by the growing interest in studying the effects of radiation on individual organisms and on the environment. Inevitably, the source of the research would color the emerging accounts. Not surprisingly, research in both ecology and genetics yielded a story in which the continuation of any part and ultimately of the whole of the environment was uncertain for the short term as well as the long term: the survival of the human species, like their surroundings, was contingent on the vagaries of mutations no less than human aggression.
The human contingency that was surfacing in biological theories had a social analogue in the “displaced persons” to whom Hannah Arendt called attention in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), in which she showed how the category of “displaced persons” manifested the dependence of the rights and dignity of human beings on the nation-state. The fate of these people, she explained, put on display how
the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. (299)
The enslaved and colonized had similarly belied any claim of fundamental or natural rights, showing how the state enforced and could revoke them. All of these figures thereby haunted the very concept of the nation-state, which was predicated, as Arendt notes, on the notion of equality before the law.
If displaced persons embodied how ostensibly intrinsic human rights were contingent on social and political structures in Arendt’s work, the psychiatrist and theorist of colonization Frantz Fanon demonstrated how individuals internalized those structures in his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks, in which he explored the psychology of dehumanization and the psychopathology of colonialism. He sought in this work to liberate black consciousness from the racism that had normalized whiteness, to free black men and women from “the dilemma, turn white or disappear” (100), dramatized the same year by Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man. Defining “the collective unconscious” as “the unreflected imposition of a culture” (191), Fanon elucidated the dynamics through which a dominant culture imposes exclusionary conceptions of human being through cultural forms and creates crises for those who do not see themselves reflected in them. “Man is human[,]” he argued, “only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him” (216).
Science fiction in the decade following the war registered the implications of challenges to the human in anxieties that found expression in end-of-the-world scenarios ranging from aliens and atomic weapons to viruses, overpopulation and the exhaustion of natural resources, and the natural course of evolution. An especially prominent theme in science fiction, however, captures a more abstract form of nonbeing. Beginning in 1938 with John Campbell’s novella Who Goes There?, the theme of alien possession proliferated in fiction and film of the 1950s, including such works as Robert Heinlein’s 1951 The Puppet Masters, the 1953 film Invasion from Mars, Philip K. Dick’s 1954 “The Father Thing,” and, most famously, Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, serialized in Collier’s Magazine in 1954 and appearing in book form in 1955 and its first of many film versions in 1956. The popularity of The Body Snatchers in its numerous incarnations suggests a ubiquitous cultural fear of an impending threat to humanness as well as to humanity. In this story, alien pods reproduce themselves virally by appropriating the bodies and memories of human beings from whom they are nearly indistinguishable except for the absence of emotions, which is the intangible that makes us human, Finney suggests, and that we are in danger of losing. Finney describes the horror and disgust that human beings experience as they realize that their former friends and family have lost their humanity, which is chillingly conveyed cinematographically in the vacuous gaze and uninflected tone of the automatons that represent the possessed in Don Siegel’s direction of the 1956 film based on the original Collier’s serial.
Human beings did not need to turn into pod people to turn suddenly unfamiliar. Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious showed that everybody harbored unacknowledged impulses that effectively possessed them. His challenge to conventional conceptions of human being gained widespread acceptance in Europe in the wake of World War I, facilitated particularly in Europe by the wartime phenomenon of shell shock. In the United States, the literature following World War II manifests a fascination with the implication of those challenges.
Among the most controversial of Freud’s theories were the dangerous desires that were distorted into pathologies by the very relationships that ostensibly offered stability against the uncertainties of the moment: the nuclear family. The anthropologist George Murdock coined the term, which he derived from cell biology (the nucleus of a cell), in his 1949 Social Structure, where he explained that “nuclear families are combined, like atoms in a molecule, into larger aggregates” (2). The 1950s witnessed the lowest rate of divorce during the twentieth century and a “baby boom,” with birth rates beginning to rise in 1942 and peaking in 1957. The nurturing nuclear family was a staple of domestic comedies in the new medium of television, as well as a feature of much fiction and film; ideologically, it was at once the nucleus and the microcosm of the nation.
Yet, following Freud, many of the nation’s storytellers found in its pathologies one of the great dramas of the moment. The unconscious assumed literally monstrous proportions in Fred M. Wilcox’s 1956 film, Forbidden Planet, in which strange planetary forces turn an overprotective father’s desire to keep himself and his daughter sequestered on an isolated planet into a murderous force unwittingly directed against anyone countering his wishes. For a range of more earthbound writers and directors, the unconscious forces unleashed by the nuclear family were no less destructive for their lack of literal animation. Jo Sinclair’s 1946 Wasteland features a successful psychoanalysis, through which her protagonist, Jacob Braunowitz, learns that he must confront his shame about his Jewish background and accept his dysfunctional family in order to live a full and integrated life. The damage that families could perpetrate was a common theme in fiction, such as J.D. Salinger’s 1951 Catcher in the Rye and Philip Roth’s 1959 Goodbye, Columbus, and films, including the 1955 East of Eden (Elia Kazan) and Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray), both starring bad boy film idol James Dean, who embodied the rebellious side of the boomer generation.
Sloan Wilson’s 1955 bestselling novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, illustrated Fanon’s claims about the susceptibility of the unconscious to cultural influences. His eponymous protagonist quickly became iconic as he epitomized the worship of organizations, self-subordinating belonging, and “sanctimonious materialism” that William Whyte criticized in his 1956 sociological study, Organization Man (251). Yet, the iconicity of the man in the gray flannel suit – the epitome of conformity – has obscured the nuances of the novel’s reflection of the broad concerns of the Atomic Age: the changing contours of the human.
While the novel chronicles the protagonist Tom Rath’s dissatisfaction with corporate American culture, marked by his job in the public relations department of a major broadcasting company, the moving force of the novel is Tom’s unconscious. War trauma, crystallized in his accidental killing of his best friend, had led him to try to “cauterize … his mind” (86), but that leaves him feeling numb, thwarted, and cynical, and it nearly destroys his marriage and family. Tom believes that he can compartmentalize his life into “four completely unrelated worlds”: his childhood in a dysfunctional family, his war experiences, his job, and his own family. If Wilson were writing science fiction, Tom may have found himself literally inhabiting four alternative universes, but Wilson’s realist novel casts the problem in psychoanalytic terms.
Tom learns an ecological as well as psychological lesson about the nuclear family: that it is the center of an interconnected web of experiences and memories from which it cannot be cut off. The crisis of the novel seems to revolve around Tom’s discovery that he has an illegitimate Italian son. It ostensibly resolves in his and his wife’s acceptance of financial responsibility for the child and his mother and in a further affirmation of the nuclear family, as Tom decides to step off the fast track of his PR job to take a job that will allow him to balance his life and to become a suburban developer. Yet, at the end of the novel, Tom again refuses to talk with his wife about the war, not because he “want[s] to and can’t,” but because he would “rather think about the future” (272).
That future, like the “nuclear family,” is built on the social as well as psychological exclusions that have haunted the Raths’ marriage throughout the novel. At the center of Tom’s “cauterized” memory is a psychotic break that reveals what he – and perhaps the novel itself – refuses to face. Unable to accept his friend’s death, Tom guards the body at knifepoint until he wanders into an African American unit where a compassionate sergeant gently punctures his delusion. Tom vomits, and the “big sergeant … put[s] cool hands on his forehead, the way a mother holds the head of a sick child” (94). His tender encounter with the black sergeant is at once at the heart of the refused memory that motivates the plot and almost incidental in the context of the rest of the novel, and this moment of profound humanity is revealingly racialized and gendered. The novel appeared in the immediate wake of such events as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the gruesome murder of Emmett Till, and the Montgomery bus boycott – events, that is, that publicized the racism of US culture – and at what W.T. Lhamon, referring to the explosion of black cultural forms in mainstream US culture, calls “the precise moment when black culture [became] an apt symbol for the way millions of nonblacks wanted to be in the world” (39). This moment of human connection is foreclosed by the white nuclear family, which supplies the only terms Tom has to imagine it, as he turns the black sergeant, despite his “gigantic stature,” into a (feminized) maternal figure. Tom’s affirmation of the nuclear family is itself built on segregation, since suburban development notoriously entailed the exclusion of African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups from “white” neighborhoods.
Family secrets and the racial mass hysteria that Arthur Miller explores in The Crucible, his 1953 play, gave the notorious hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations their most salient metaphor: the Salem witchcraft trials. The philosopher Walter Benjamin observed that to “articulate the past historically … means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). The Crucible represented such a memory at a moment of collective delusion prompted by a belief in impending threats of literal and cultural annihilation. Miller’s play “remembers” a moment of contagious madness resulting in a loss of humanity on a collective scale and explores the dynamic of dehumanization that so deeply engaged the social and political thinkers of this moment.
Two liberties that Miller took with the Salem transcripts underscore his diagnosis of the dangerous pathologies of his moment. He imagines the afflicted girls’ turning to the Barbadian slave Tituba and her magic rituals when they had no other outlet through which to express their emotions and curiosity in their austere surroundings. Similarly, Miller altered the ages and relationship of two principals, the accuser Abigail Williams and the accused John Proctor, in order to imagine a thwarted love affair as a key motivation for the accusations. The changes allowed him to explore the secrets that predispose individuals to group psychosis.
Early in the play, Abigail tearfully explains to John,
I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not, I cannot! (22)
While John believes his “sin” to be adultery, Abigail’s outburst shows the deeper problem to be that he showed her the hypocrisy of her social order but gave her nothing in which to believe in its place. Salem, for Miller, dramatized how the theocracy that had held the community together in the face of adversity eventually turned against fabricated internal threats when external dangers became less threatening; the glue of the community became the source of its destruction, and its rituals became the means to confess unwitting desires and express unconscious jealousies and resentments. The Crucible anatomizes the unraveling of a community when social and political transformations are increasingly at odds with prevailing ideologies, but the play also dramatizes the flip side of that crisis: the individual susceptibilities to those ideologies.
The emerging public relations industry that Tom Rath found so disillusioning explicitly capitalized on those susceptibilities. One of the chief architects of the industry, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, used his uncle’s ideas in his development of the public relations industry in the United States. In his widely influential 1928 public relations bible, Propaganda, Bernays offered an analysis of democratic culture that explained the positive dimensions of the social processes that, in Miller’s analysis, could take such a disastrous turn. Human susceptibility was a fact of life, Bernays explained:
[I]n almost every act of our daily lives … we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. (1)
Noting that propaganda had assumed a “sinister context” during the First World War, Bernays argues that it is nothing more than an effort to become more scientifically conscious of the nature of social and political influence. His ideas about “the new propaganda” grew out of the conception of society as a biological organism that was central to the emerging “science of society” (sociology) at this time: the “new propaganda … sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organization but as a cell organized into a social unit. Touch a nerve at a certain spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism” (28). Acknowledging that the Nazis’ conspicuous use of propaganda during the Second World War reinforced its sinister associations, Bernays argued in “The Engineering of Consent” (1947) that “propaganda,” which referred only to the influence on how information and influence traveled, was therefore central to an ethics of social responsibility. It makes sense, given the rapid growth of the public relations industry in the postwar period, that Sloan Wilson would set his study of human susceptibility in the contexts not only of war trauma but also of that burgeoning field.
The anxiety about this susceptibility that Bernays accepted as a given found its most profound expression in the widespread horror at allegations of a new form of torture: brainwashing. Coined in 1950 by the anti-Communist journalist and OSS/CIA agent Edward Hunter, “brainwashing” referred to the alleged tactics used by the Chinese and North Koreans against American prisoners of war as well as against their own citizens. Reports of these subtle-to-extreme forms of mental manipulation intrigued psychologists and other social scientists seeking to understand the nature of psychological influence and communication. In The Rape of the Mind (1956), the psychologist Joost Meerloo explained the implications of the phenomenon for what he considered the greatest danger for any society: totalitarianism. Like Bernays, Meerloo believed mental conditioning to be inevitable for social existence, but he worried that contemporary trends were producing populations with increased susceptibility to totalitarianism even in the most democratic societies. He cautioned against common practices that he believed promoted that susceptibility, threatening to turn the population into “opinionated robots,” including mass communication (especially television), aggressive advertising and public relations work, and the “examination mania” that characterized contemporary education and inhibited critical thinking.
Meerloo coined the term “menticide,” invoking the newly coined “genocide,” to describe the scale and scope of the destructive potential of collective mental manipulation. Mind control is a kind of annihilation, as Jack Finney’s body-snatched automatons dramatized. Meerloo’s provocative title, The Rape of the Mind, moreover, implicitly feminized its victims, registering the gender anxieties that accompanied threats to the notion of the human.
The commingling of the themes of incest and brainwashing in Richard Condon’s 1959 The Manchurian Candidate attest to the disgust evoked by the idea of brainwashing, which is viscerally captured in the lurid description of bodily possession in such science fiction works as The Puppetmasters and The Body Snatchers. In Condon’s novel, a father’s perverse sexual relationship with an adoring daughter produces the warped character of Ellie Iselin, motivated by her one conviction “that the Republic was a humbug, the electorate rabble, and anyone strong who knew how to maneuver could have all the power and glory that the richest and most naïve democracy in the world could bestow” (69). Without being brainwashed, she has been divested of her humanity. Epitomizing science fiction writer and essayist Philip Wylie’s well-known concept of “momism,” a term that summons a disturbing figure who performs the maternal role to monstrosity, Ellie raises a son, Raymond Shaw, whose passivity and resentments equip him for nothing in life so well as being brainwashed. Condon’s sardonic novel reads almost as a checklist of the paranoid fantasies of the moment, with Communists (Russian and Chinese) in league with a power-mad mother and an emasculated son further deprived of his humanity through brainwashing. In accordance with racial stereotypes of the moment, the brilliant Chinese scientists savor their mental manipulation of Raymond’s unit, as they program Raymond to become a remorseless walking weapon and design a plot to have him assassinate a presidential candidate who will be replaced by his running mate, Ellie’s buffoon husband, a savagely comic parody of Joseph McCarthy (who had died in 1957). The horror that Raymond evokes in this darkly humorous, cynical novel is less the result of his uniqueness than his representativeness: he embodies the extreme of “the need for automatic motions that were called living” that keep most of the members of his unit – like the majority of their world – from suspecting the Communist-maternal conspiracy.
At base, the problem stems from the corruption of the nuclear family represented by the act of incest, which is also central to Grace Metalious’s 1956 Peyton Place. Although Metalious’s editor turned a father into a stepfather to temper the shock, incest is still the open secret of small-town life in Peyton Place (as in Invisible Man). The familial pathology in The Manchurian Candidate, however, like the adultery in The Crucible, is a moving force of history. The world Condon conjures is fundamentally decadent, decaying, and evidently as damnably drained of its humanity as the society Wylie derided in his widely selling 1942 Generation of Vipers. The west side of New York “was rich in facades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis … and the tall buildings, end upon end, were so many fingers beckoning the Bomb” (171–2). The 1962 film version somewhat mediates the bleakness of Condon’s novel in having Raymond, with the help of his unit commander, Ben Marco, overcome his conditioning and assassinate his mother and stepfather before turning the gun on himself, but in the novel the act is the result of Ben’s reprogramming. Condon underscores the danger of conditioning and of the social and psychological conditions that underpin the susceptibility of most individuals. The novel ends with an image of the ultimate loss of humanity, as Ben listens “intently for a memory of Raymond, for the faintest rustle of his ever having lived, but there was none” (311).
Laments about invisibility and exclusion from history and a full sense of personhood were not unique to the Atomic Age, but the widespread geopolitical transformations intensified the exploration of social exclusions and the changing social terrain. Sociologists and novelists investigated the performativity of social roles and their relation to the “propaganda” of culture. In 1950, the sociologist Robert Park observed that the fact “that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask … is a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a rôle” (249). Ralph Ellison’s 1952 award-winning Invisible Man chronicles the African American narrator’s discovery of the fluidity not only of his own identity but also of identity – and the history that contextualizes it – generally. Ellison described his story as depicting a series of “rites of passage … through which important social values were projected and reinforced” (“On Initiation Rites” 175) and thereby tracking the circulation of ideas among social strata. Unlike Raymond, the anonymous narrator protagonist of the novel is acutely aware of his invisibility as well as of what it prevents and what it enables. When asked by a reader whether he had intended Invisible Man to address specifically “the Negro relationship with the white man, or, … perhaps to everyone,” he replied that he had
hoped … to write so well that anyone who shared everything except his racial identity could identify with it, because there was never any question in [his] mind that Negroes were human, and thus being human, their experience became metaphors for the experiences of other people. (181)
Writing about stigma in 1963, the sociologist Erving Goffman described identity as relational and explained that “the general identity-values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet they can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living” (128–9). Challenges to the concept of human being showed how anyone could be alienated from the terms of humanity. The protests against segregation in schools and transportation and the angry counterprotests bore witness to the contests concerning the sanctity of the definition of humanity.
The narrator of Invisible Man comes to a gradual understanding of the performative self during the course of the novel. Speaking for the first time on behalf of the Brotherhood, a fictional depiction of the Communist Party, he exuberantly tells his Harlem audience that they have made him feel “ ‘suddenly more human. … With your eyes upon me I feel I’ve found my true family! My true people! My true country! I am a new citizen of the country of your vision, a native of your fraternal land’ ” (346). With family and nation (citizenship) as the defining vocabulary of humanity, the narrator unwittingly intones the very terms of belonging that have marked what he eventually comes to realize has been black Americans’ systematic exclusion from (white) history and thereby full personhood in the United States. “Humanity” is a function of white terms of recognition.
Only later, when fully disenfranchised and friendless, can he understand the implications of his words. In a carnivalesque scene, while disguised, he is mistaken in multiple contexts for a man named Rinehart, whose range of identities shows the narrator that
[y]ou could actually make yourself anew. The notion was frightening, for now the world seemed to flow before [his] eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling, [he] caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities and turned away. (499)
The discovery is disturbing because it forces him to confront the baselessness of all identity. The realization makes him feel “more dead than alive.” It is “more shattering” than if he “had learned that the man whom [he’d] always called father was actually of no relation to [him]” (510). The realization is more disturbing than his understanding of his individual exclusion from white history because it displays the instability of the very terms of human being, which means that even the revision of history (such as that for which he had believed the Brotherhood to be working) could never rest on stable ground. The language of paternity suggests that the instability is even more disturbing than a challenge to the conventional bases of identity: family and kinship. The narrator learns that power governs reality, but is perpetuated only through belief in power, and he comes to understand that, ironically, his uncertainty about his humanity is a function of his (alleged) equality under the law – or his entrance into the terms of the law. His formerly enslaved grandfather, by contrast, “never had any doubts about his humanity – that was left to his ‘free’ offspring. He accepted his humanity just as he accepted the principle. It was his, and the principle lives on in all its human and absurd diversity” (580).
No one more obviously embodied the vagaries of the law in the United States than the Japanese and Japanese Americans who had been dispossessed and incarcerated under the terms of Executive Order 9066 during the war. In fiction and memoirs, writers such as Toshio Mori, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Hisaye Yamamoto, Monica Sone, and John Okada described life in the American camps in ways that challenged the sanguinity of an America that sought moral rectitude for its own participation in war atrocities in its ostensibly unqualified distinction from the Nazis. In the preface to his 1957 novel No-No Boy, Okada explains that “when the Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor … the Japanese in the U.S. became, by virtue of their ineradicable brownness and the slant eyes which, upon close inspection, will seldom appear slanty, animals of a different breed” (iii). He ends his preface with a conversation in a B-24 in which a Japanese American soldier, whose parents are interred in a camp in the Wyoming desert, tells his lieutenant, “a blond giant from Nebraska[,] about the removal of the Japanese from the Coast, which was called the evacuation, and about the concentration camps, which were called relocation centers” (xi). With his rhetorical corrections, Okada implicitly challenges the historical narrative that contributes to the oppression and dehumanization (“animals of a different breed”) that are the subjects of the novel.
Through the postwar experiences of Ichiro Yamada, a “no-no boy” who had refused to serve in the US military and was thereby removed from the camp to a prison, Okada explores the internalization of the terms of that dehumanization. He describes the awakening of a “stranger” in a hotel room from the “period between each night and day when one dies for a few hours, neither dreaming nor thinking nor tossing nor hating nor loving, but dying for a little while because life progresses in just such a way” to “a fleeting sound of lonely panic,” the “momentary terror” of the unfamiliar space until “he remembers that he is away from home and smiles smugly as he tells himself that home is there waiting for him forever” (39). The stranger’s smugness springs from a certainty from which Ichiro is excluded: for him, “there was no intervening span of death to still his great unrest through the darkness of night” (39). But like Raymond and the “Invisible Man,” Ichiro is threatening less in his uniqueness than in his representativeness. At the heart of the intergroup racisms that permeate the novel is a fundamental terror of estrangement; the fear of the sense of nonbeing that Ichiro experiences – and embodies – continually confounds precisely the “recognition as a complete human being” (134) for which, ironically, everyone is striving.
Estrangement can also be liberating, as it is for one character who, typically overlooked in critical discussions of the novel, gives voice to a potential paradigm for living in the postwar world. Ichiro’s friend and fellow “no-no boy” Gary, a painter, considers his prison sentence to have been his rebirth as a real artist. His explanation makes him sound as isolated as everyone else in the novel: “ ‘Old friends are now strangers[,]’ ” he explains to Ichiro. “ ‘I’ve no one to talk to and no desire to talk, for I have nothing to say except what comes out of my paint tubes and brushes[,]’ ” but he claims it gives him “ ‘peace and satisfaction’ ” and that his “ ‘cup is overflowing’ ” (224), and his whole demeanor confirms his claims. When Ichiro looks “deep into his friend’s eyes to detect the fear and loneliness and bitterness that ought to have been there[,]” he “saw only the placidness reflected in the soft, gentle smile” (224).
Gary’s claim echoes the professed motivation of a range of avant-garde artists of the postwar moment who turned the terror of nonbeing into an occasion for artistic – particularly, formal and stylistic – experimentation. From the turn of the twentieth century, visual artists had pioneered techniques that enabled them to explore the nature of visual perception and to display (hence defamiliarize) the conventions that shaped what the eye saw. The rise of cinema contributed significantly to this fascination with perception, which by the mid-twentieth century was also inflected by psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. Artists affiliated with the Beat Movement, for example, experimented with new forms and styles that would expose the means by which a culture they viewed as dangerous and corrupt reproduced itself, in just the ways Bernays had outlined in Propaganda, through what William Burroughs called “the virus power.” The term conveyed his sense of the dangerous processes that disseminated a corrupting culture – the same mechanisms that concerned Meerloo, but on an even grander scale. “The virus power manifests itself in many ways,” Burroughs explained in 1964. “In the construction of nuclear weapons, in practically all the existing political systems which are aimed at curtailing inner freedom, that is, at control. It manifests itself in the ugliness and vulgarity we see on every hand, and of course, it manifests itself in the actual viral illnesses” (Burroughs and Hibbard 12).
In Naked Lunch (1959), which earned William Burroughs a cult following for its darkly humorous exploration of his own drug addiction and its hallucinatory stylistic innovation, drugs are at once a figure for and literally, as he explains in his introduction to the novel, “big business” (205). The novel explores the destructive power not only of addiction, but also of bureaucracy and corporate culture through the instrument of language. In the introduction to his novel Queer, written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, he confessed to an anxiety that could be read as an epithet of the postwar moment; he lived, he wrote, “with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control” (xxii). Burroughs, like Gertrude Stein, whom he acknowledged as a literary predecessor, and like the visual artists of his moment who similarly explored sense making in their media, understood his medium as an antidote, maintaining in his 1962 novel, The Ticket That Exploded, that the virus of “Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it” (51).
No works more famously captured and celebrated Beat culture than Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (written in 1951 and published in 1957) and Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956), which offered the biography of a subculture. Beat author John Clellon Holmes had introduced the term and the movement in a November 1952 New York Times magazine article in which he characterized a Beat generation, with its “perfect craving to believe … a craving for convictions” (20, 22). It is a generation that has come of age with a sense of deep uncertainty: “ever since they were old enough to imagine [a future], that has been in jeopardy anyway” (19). For both Kerouac and Ginsberg, jazz offered an aesthetic paradigm for such times. With its famously fast tempos and interest in improvisation and syncopation, this avant-garde African American art form seemed to offer a rhythm through which to celebrate the cultural taboos of their moment: sex (including homosexuality), drugs, rootlessness, and freedom from the constraints of social status and the nuclear family. For both, however, their celebration was also a lament.
Ginsberg anatomizes the destructiveness of contemporary culture, opening Howl with an image of “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets of dawn looking for an angry fix[.]” The poem anticipates others, including Ken Kesey and R.D. Laing, in positing madness as a – maybe the only – reasonable response to a mad world. Divided into three sections, the poem is a journey to an underworld that takes the reader into the heart of the fully destructive forces of contemporary culture, which Ginsberg calls “Moloch,” after the child-eating god of the Bible: “Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!” The last section finds the poet in Rockland, a psychiatric hospital, where Ginsberg met his friend and fellow writer Carl Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated.
Like Burroughs, Ginsberg offers his art as a means of making visible the dangerous forms of communication that are driving “the best minds of his generation” mad. In Howl, he transforms Cold War paranoia into a parodic aesthetic. Modeling his long lines on the length of a breath, he encourages his readers to breathe together – literally, conspire – with him. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered brinksmanship – taking the country to the brink of nuclear war – as a diplomatic strategy. Ginsberg teased out the implications of that strategy by demonstrating what it meant to live always on the brink in a parodic literalization that embodied and recontextualized the terms of paranoia. The hallucinatory images of the poem, in the process, reconfigure the relationship between internal (perceptions) and external (events), through which Ginsberg demonstrates how a culture shapes a consciousness. It is no wonder that “the best minds,” who listen “to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,” end up in Rockland, “where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ / airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs / the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny / legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal / war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free[.]” Where else can the internalized destructive forces of this culture lead but madness?
The times called for new reading practices, and the poem offers art – in effect, itself – as a means of reflecting on, and exorcizing, this destructive process of internalization. Art registers those processes (“the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox”), but art can refract them as well. The poem teaches the reader how to read (it); the best minds
The artist-alchemist transforms the “sudden flash” of nuclear explosion into artistic revelation: coal into gold. The juxtaposition of two visual images (“hydrogen jukebox,” for example) works as poetic alchemy; the energy of the poem (the trapped archangel) inheres in the juxtaposition, as the oddity of the image thus created prompts speculation. “Hydrogen jukebox,” for example, suggests how the destructiveness of contemporary culture seeps into and shapes collective consciousness through popular art and other quotidian forms of communication. “Most people don’t see what’s going on around them,” Burroughs would tell an interviewer in 1962. “That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open” (68). In Howl, Ginsberg fashioned – and described – an aesthetic designed to inspire reflection. After all, as Jack Finney had shown, bodies could only be snatched while asleep.
Central to the Beat aesthetic was the absurdity as well as the tragedy of contemporary society. While Finney’s science fiction may seem a far cry from Beat experimentation, Burroughs used the frame of science fiction – a space invasion – as the premise of his Nova trilogy of the 1960s, beginning with The Ticket That Exploded. By the second postwar decade, in fact, humor became a prominent response to the madness that Ginsberg parodied in Howl. Beat associate Terry Southern transformed British writer Peter George’s 1958 Red Alert from a somber cautionary tale about the potential for nuclear destruction into the wickedly funny screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, which depicts nuclear holocaust as the consequence of male sexual anxieties and competition. The film was characteristic of the increasing literary and cinematic embrace of the absurdity not only of nuclear destruction but also of the world and its politics generally that marked the legacy of the Beat Generation and of such publications as MAD magazine (founded in 1952), in what has come loosely to be called postmodernism.
Thomas Pynchon brilliantly lampooned the postwar anxieties through the aptly named figure of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a work that exemplifies this tradition. Oedipa finds herself ensnared in the nightmare scenario of the postwar period when she comes home from a Tupperware party to find herself executor of the will of a former boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. The bored suburban housewife is the Everywoman of the Atomic Age, and her confusion over her possible discovery of a secret alternative communication system gets at the heart of the Cold War anxieties. Oedipa is the cultural unconscious, enthralled by what Betty Friedan, two years earlier, had dubbed “the feminine mystique.” Friedan used “brainwashed” (182) to describe both male and female acceptance of the image of woman that Sloan Wilson’s Betsy Rath so completely embodied: suited to and wanting nothing more than her role as wife and mother. She drew on Bruno Bettelheim’s study of the psychology of dehumanization in the Nazi death camps to describe what was happening to women and their children in the suburbs, which she famously – and controversially – dubbed a “comfortable concentration camp” (282). Ironically, her concern about the passive children whom thwarted women were producing through overmothering strikingly resembled Wylie’s critique of momism in A Generation of Vipers. It is difficult not to see Oedipa – whose unconventional psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarious, turns out to have practiced his craft in a Nazi camp – as stepping parodically out of the pages of The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan noted that rites of passage frequently provoked a woman’s sense of confusion about her role and her desires, and Oedipa certainly has what Friedan calls, following the sociologist Eric Erickson, an “identity crisis.” Early in the novel, Oedipa tries unsuccessfully to find her image in a bathroom mirror and experiences “a moment of nearly pure terror” before realizing that the mirror was broken. While Friedan cautions that “ ‘self-realization’ or ‘self-fulfillment’ or ‘identity’ does not come from looking into a mirror in rapt contemplation of one’s own image” but from a woman’s discovery of her “human purpose” (333), The Crying of Lot 49 manifests a deep suspicion of the very terms of “identity,” individual or collective. If, as Friedan suggests, gender roles register large-scale brainwashing, then all desires – and all sense of human purpose – should be suspect. It is unclear in the novel, which one reviewer called “a metaphysical thriller in the form of a pornographic comic strip” (“Nosepicking Contents”, 131), whether it is the absence of identity or its too complete acceptance that leads to dehumanization.
Friedan was critical of the artistic move toward abstraction that she saw in the Beats and in such visual arts movements as abstract expressionism, which she condemned as a “retreat” into psychology from politics and an “evasion of meaning” (187). Yet, the trajectory of interest in the susceptibility of the unconscious to (often dehumanizing) cultural influences manifested in postwar literature and arts shows how the psychological was, as Fanon so forcefully demonstrated, distinctly political. Oedipa the English major is no less representative than Oedipa the housewife, and, as a figure for the reader, she, like the poet of Howl, inspires contemplation of the nature of artistic and cultural production and its relationship to the circulation of information and the production of meaning.
Oedipa is on the cusp of a new generation that, as Eldridge Cleaver would observe in 1968, was in the throes of the “psychic pain of waking into consciousness to find their heroes turned by events into villains” (69). In 1952, Fanon had called for a new approach to psychoanalysis that would recognize the susceptibility of the unconscious to demeaning cultural images. That work inspired his revolutionary call, in 1961, for
a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes … above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men. (315)
In 1966, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael would summon one of his “patron saints: Frantz Fanon” (151) to denounce institutionalized racism, including the Nazi strategy (that he sees reproduced in the United States) of torturing a victim “to the point where he ceases to affirm his identity” (168) as well as “the physical and psychological murder of our peoples” (169). The declaration of revolution that Carmichael issues in this speech grows out of the observations that preoccupied the writers and cultural analysts of the postwar period. From propaganda and brainwashing to the invisible man and the man in the gray flannel suit, the issues explored in their work presaged his assertion that “[t]hose who can define are the masters” (153) and his call for a new history, written from the perspective of the margins. As Cleaver would soon note, the “howl of the beatnicks and their scathing, outraged denunciation of the system – characterized by Ginsberg as Moloch, a bloodthirsty Semitic deity to which the ancient tribes sacrificed their first born children – was a serious, irreverent declaration of war” (71).
With his emphasis on the centrality of definitions, Carmichael explained what much of the postwar literature dramatized: the political implications of the instability of such terms as “human being” and the cultural dimension of power. Friedan concluded The Feminine Mystique with the thought that “the energy locked up in those obsolete masculine and feminine roles is the social equivalent of the physical energy locked up in the realm of E=MC2 – the force that unleashed the holocaust of Hiroshima” (395). Such references, along with a condemnation of the genocides of white civilization, suffuse the writing of Carmichael and Cleaver as well. The literature following the war showed how and why these terms had become the reference points of the Atomic Age – and with what consequences. In so doing, they help to explain as well how and why the call for revolution found expression in the profound educational and cultural as well as political transformations that have come to be known as “the sixties.”
References and Further Reading
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: H. Liveright, 1928.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (pp. 253–64). Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Burroughs, William. Queer. New York: Viking Press, 1985.
Burroughs, William. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press, 1962.
Burroughs, William. “White Junk.” In Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960–1997 (pp. 60–81). Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Double Agents Series, 2001.
Burroughs, William S., and Allen Hibbard. Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” In To Free a Generation: The Dialectics of Liberation (pp. 150–74). Ed. David Cooper. New York: Collier Books, 1968.
Cleaver, Eldridge. “The White Race and Its Heroes.” In Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (pp. 65–83). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Condon, Richard. The Manchurian Candidate. 1959. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
Ellison, Ralph. “On Initiation Rites and Power: Ralph Ellison Speaks at West Point” (transcript of address from March 1969). Comparative Literature 15, no. 2 (Spring 1974): 165–86.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963.
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. In Allen Ginsburg, Collected Poems 1947–1997 (pp. 134–41). New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.
Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
Hersey, John. Hiroshima. 1946. New York: Random House, 1985.
Holmes, John Clellon. “This Is a Beat Generation,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 16, 1952, 10, 19–22.
Lhamon, W.T. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Meerloo, Joost A.M. The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1956.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. 1953. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Murdock, George Peter. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
“Nosepicking Contests” (review of The Crying of Lot 49). Time, May 6, 1966, 131.
Okada, John. No-No Boy. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.
Park, Robert Ezra. “Behind Our Masks.” In Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture (pp. 244–58). Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.
Whyte, William Hollingsworth. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Arbor House, 1955.