5. One World: Nuclear Holocausts

The Idea of World Politics

The minimal historical precondition of the type of literature that we are concerned with here is the invention of a particular notion of the “world.” It is not enough to say that atomic holocaust fiction is only possible in an “atomic age” in which speculation about atomic matters assumes a certain realistic relevance and practical urgency. Neither is it enough to declare, if we recall the simple fact that atomic holocaust fiction actually predates the atomic age by half a century, that a certain degree of technological development was necessary to render the human destruction of the world by atomic energy a plausible fiction. Concentrating exclusively on the technical means of destruction might obscure the fact that the object of this destruction itself had to be created in the first place. Rather than simply asking the question “How is the world destroyed?”, we also have to ask: “What is it that is destroyed when the world comes to an end?”

Consequently, we have to assume that in order for this type of literature to emerge, a particular set of transformations had to take place within the history of the concept of the world as the ultimate horizon of human existence. Foremost among these changes is the break that rendered this world “modern.” Every definition of the “world” as a totality oscillates between two extremes. On the one hand, the world is a totality of meaning; on the other hand, the world is the empirical substance of the infinite universe. The “modern world,” thus, starts with a double discovery that rearticulates the relationship of these two extremes. Humankind “discovered” its world, through an act of circumnavigation, and found it to be of a particular shape: a globe. At the same time, the very meaning of this totality seems to have fallen from its heavenly throne, and the idea of the world assumed a “worldly” (that is, “secular”) form. The physical infinity of the universe, however, made the human world infinitely smaller. The globe eventually became simultaneously the terrain of infinite possibilities as well as an inexorable limit: the globe now meant the empirical limit of human action. The world is only so big, and we know exactly what world conquest would mean. But this radical empirical limit at the same time opened up the possibility of the infinite multiplication of meaning. In modernity, then, the globe became the empirical limit that rendered possible the plurality of the worlds of meaning.¹

The infinite multiplication of meaning, however, does not mean a lack of meaning. We could recall here Martin Heidegger’s famous formulation according to which, in the age of modern metaphysics, it is no longer the world who is watching us; it is now the subject who is watching the world.² For Heidegger, this reversal implies a relation of representation, which defines the world as a “picture.” But if the world is not a representation of something else, but a representation according to its essence, it becomes possible to conceive of this world as a representation which is, on the one hand, simply one representation among many others and, on the other hand, the representation of the totality of representations. This logic also allows us to think of the idea of the world as something that has the capacity to appear as one particular represented object in the field of representation at the same time as it defines the basic characteristics of this field of representation. In other words, for modernity, the idea of the world comes to denote a totality of representation which is itself necessarily represented.³

But what is the meaning of “catastrophe” for a world like this? Of course, we should remember that the birth of modernity is registered in our history books as the more or less beneficent outcome of a series of “traumas”: the political, social, scientific, technological, and philosophical revolutions that gave birth to this world turned out to be so many wounds on our collective egos. The traumatic inception of modernity shows us two important things. On the one hand, the world of infinite meanings can only emerge as an intrinsically threatened totality. Catastrophe, in this sense, is the figure of the infinite displacement of meaning. Since no singular world can be the World anymore, the birth and subsequent destruction of the worlds is the norm of existence. On the other hand, the ultimate catastrophe is the birth of the modern itself. Taken to its absurd logical conclusion, the modern simultaneously names the realization of the new as well as the principle of its self-cancellation. For the modern world, catastrophe is not merely the act of an angry God that brings its creation to a conclusion, but the permanent crisis of its very own existence.

Borrowing Joseph Schumpeter’s famous definition, we could say that catastrophe is the “creative destruction” that is the very essence of the modern.⁴ The most compelling image of this new historical experience, of course, comes from Walter Benjamin. From the perspective of the “angel of history,” progress is catastrophe: “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”⁵ The crucial point for us is the split of perspectives: the very same thing that appears to be the “chain of events” (the reality of history) from the immanent perspective of historical subjects is actually, from the transcendent perspective of the angel of history, “one single catastrophe.” This is the catastrophic content of the modern: the metaphysics of the modern is based on a split between form and content in such a way that the form of history (its mode of appearance to human beings) has one single content, catastrophe (and not even “catastrophes” in the plural). Regardless of the concrete form that the realization of “the modern” assumes in a historical situation, the actual content of this realization is the creative destruction of the old in such a way that the new simply becomes an occasion for its very own self-overcoming.

Thus, if we assume that modernism and mass culture were two basic cultural formations of modernity, the question we have to raise here concerns their relation to the catastrophic content of the modern. The parallel historical emergence of modernism and mass culture is already a well-documented development and I only want to add two things to the customary accounts: the appearance of a particular genre (atomic holocaust fiction) and its relation to anti-Communist politics. Discussions of the history of atomic holocaust fiction usually work with a consistent set of periods: first, they examine its origins in the first half of the nineteenth century; then they discuss the late nineteenth-century developments before World War I (1870–1914); this is usually followed by the interwar years as a separate period; finally, the post-Hiroshima years form an independent unit that comes to an end sometime during the sixties.⁶ We can see that atomic holocaust fiction emerges as an independent genre exactly at the same time as modernism emerges as the main mode of cultural production. We can also see that in this scheme the early Cold War years form a discreet period dominated by American authors.⁷ Therefore, historically speaking, the institutionalization of American modernism and the Americanization of atomic holocaust fiction coincide. This is why we start with the assumption that the juxtaposition of modernism and atomic holocaust fiction in a discussion of the American 1950s should yield important insights into the role of catastrophe in anti-Communist ideology.

In order to illustrate the way this relationship is usually conceived, we could cite here Susan Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Sontag’s article on the sci-fi movies of the 1950s is a critical classic that interprets these movies as allegories of the unthinkable. In a typical turn of the argument, however, she considers mass culture to be an “inadequate response” to the metaphysical condition of human finitude magnified by the real possibility of collective (instead of merely individual) annihilation.⁸ As allegorical representations of the mass trauma of the atomic age, these movies provided their contemporary audiences a protective shield against the two basic threats of the age: “unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.”⁹ Thus the “fantasy” fulfilled a double purpose: it saved the ordinary citizens of consumer capitalism from dehumanizing banality by transporting them to exotic, alien worlds; at the same time, it protected its audience from the unbearable horrors of the atomic age by normalizing them. In these stories, the normal is made extraordinary, while the extraordinary is normalized.

For Sontag, the essential problem with these movies is a moral failure, since they disavow an “unthinkable” event.¹⁰ At the same time, this moral failure is also an artistic failure: “The interest of these films…consists in this intersection between a naïve and largely debased commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation.”¹¹ As we can see, a crucial distinction emerges from Sontag’s reading that will be essential for us. The point is not simply that mass culture is debased commercial art, but that it is the wrong kind of art about the right kind of material. Sontag’s argument, therefore, allows us to juxtapose modernism and mass culture (atomic holocaust fiction) as different artistic treatments of the very same historical material, which, nevertheless, is declared to be “unthinkable.”

This concern with the unthinkable leads us to the fundamental paradox of atomic holocaust fiction: in its extreme forms, the genre invites us to imagine its own impossibility. Whatever other task it may perform, the genre is in essence the formalization of the very impossibility of fiction, of a world without imagination, a world without subjects. The most extreme representatives of the genre simply narrate a sequence of events that obliterate the very conditions of narration. No matter what kind of a solution the particular work might offer in face of this imminent threat, the narrative drive is always toward self-annihilation. As explorations of the cultural conditions of narration, these fictions are caught in a double bind: the imagination of the event that renders narration impossible opens up and makes possible the fictional field in which these novels can narrate their stories. We are dealing with a genre which is only made possible by the possibility of imagining its total destruction. This is why William J. Scheick calls these works (borrowing a term from Stanley Fish) “self-consuming artifacts.”¹²

As we can see, in this case narration as such is threatened by what makes it possible, as if the ultimate catastrophe of this kind of fiction were the catastrophic confrontation with its very own conditions. This complication accounts for the constitutive self-reflexive component of the genre which reached its artistic peak in Orwell’s 1984. The foundation of this self-reflexive dimension is that, beside the represented elements, the very principle of representation has to be accounted for. Therefore, it follows from its foundational paradox that in nuclear holocaust fiction the “event” that constitutes the genre as such always has to be located on the level of the symbolic framework. The story is not simply internal to this framework (the field of representation); it is about this framework as well. In a typical case, this framework is threatened by something or someone and the story usually examines the nature of this threat, the possible consequences of the collapse of the framework, and the measures necessary for the reconstitution or reformulation of this framework. This is why we could say that it is the very idea of the “world” which is politicized in this kind of fiction.

One of the most important consequences of the paradox of atomic holocaust fiction concerns the very status of the “voice” that discloses to us an unthinkable “event.” It is customary to speak of the atomic holocaust fiction of the immediate postwar era in terms of the reality of the atomic menace. During this period, atomic holocaust fiction was supposedly invested with certain “realistic” values.¹³ But the important point is that it is misleading to speak of realism here. Rather, we must insist that the anti-Communist atomic holocaust fiction of the fifties is defined by a structural move toward the documentary. I speak of a structural move because, on the most fundamental level, this move toward the documentary manifests itself as a mutation of the function of the narratorial voice and not always as a conscious and explicit imitation of the generic traditions of the documentary.

If the narrative space of atomic holocaust fiction is opened up by the real possibility of the utter destruction of narration, the question we must never forget to pose is this: How is it possible that a voice emerges that can tell the story of its own demise? As Pascal Bonitzer’s definition of realism and documentary shows, what is at stake in this discussion is the so-called “voice-off.” For Bonitzer, there are two basic paradigms of this voice-off: the homogenous narratorial space of realistic fiction (Bonitzer’s example is the detective film and Kiss Me Deadly) and the heterogeneous space of the documentary voice-off:

The conventional realist homogeneity of narrative space calls up identification by means of the image, and thus all which intervenes from offscreen immediately causes questioning (at least of an anterior identification by means of the play of the shot/reverse shot, reframings, etc.). At the inverse of such narrative space, in the divided, heterogeneous space of documentary, the voice-off forbids questioning about its enunciator, its place, and its time. The commentary, in informing the image, and the image, in allowing itself to be invested by the commentary, censor such questions.¹⁴

I will distinguish here atomic holocaust fiction and the spy thriller precisely in these terms. Whereas the first establishes the possibility of the heterogeneous “voice-off” of documentary as its very own possibility, the second investigates the limits of the image but (as I will try to show later) it also establishes the possibility of an alternative (heterogeneous) perspective. That is, atomic holocaust fiction, when it falls under the sway of the documentary, strives to establish the heterogeneity of the narratorial voice in such a way that it “lets the event speak”: it disguises its act of mediation as the self-disclosure of the world.

Highlighting the structural significance of the documentary voice allows us to question the common practice of the overhasty allegorization of popular narratives. Allegoresis is, of course, possible, but only if it performs a double task: it has to establish the principle of representation that allows a particular world to appear in such a way that certain figurative substitutions become possible and necessary in order to maintain the consistency of this world. Gary K. Wolf, for example, attempts to displace the allegorical readings of atomic holocaust fiction in similar terms: “To narrowly allegorize any of these novels…would of course be dangerously reductive, but to ignore such potential meanings altogether would be reductive in an entirely different way.… Perhaps, after all, the profoundest question we can ask of such novels is that simple question of Hernando’s in Bradbury’s ‘The Highway’: ‘What do they mean, “the world”?’”¹⁵ The question “What does a particular figure stand for?” has to be preceded by another question: “How is ‘the world’ defined by the text?”

The shift from the realistic to the documentary reading, however, does not mean the complete denial of the allegorical dimension. Rather, it claims that the space of allegorical substitutions is made possible by a documentary voice on the level of the “primary aesthetics” of the disclosure of a world. In fact, this is the point where we can return to the question of the catastrophic content of the modern in relation to mass culture and modernism. On the most basic level, mass culture and modernism could be understood as two basic paradigms of dealing with the constitutive limits of representation: while mass culture thematizes the limits of representation and, therefore, discusses them on the level of content, modernism turns the inherent limitations of representation into a formal principle. For the same reasons, we could call the catastrophe story an “allegorical” critique of representation, since it “narrates” the inherent limit of representation. In other words, it always gives a narrative form to something which is alien to narration. At the same time, modernism turns catastrophe into a formal principle in the sense that no matter how trivial its contents might be (let us recall, for example, Leopold Bloom’s bowel movements), the very principle of formalizing this content already performs the impossibility of representation. In opposition to mass culture, we could speak of a “performative” critique of representation. What is common to both, however, is their mutual concern with the catastrophic content of the modern.

Modernism and Catastrophe

But we need to be more specific about the consequences of this opposition of mass culture and modernism in terms of the split between form and content. As we have seen, if modernism conveys the traumatic experience of modernity, according to traditional accounts, mass culture offers it for mere voyeuristic enjoyment.¹⁶ To put it differently, whereas modernism maintains an indirect tie with the historical experience of catastrophe, mass culture reduces it to entertainment and thereby renders the catastrophic kernel of the age inaccessible. According to the ideology we are examining here, while modernism represents catastrophe as the sublime self-transcendence of art, all mass culture has to offer is the simulacrum of catastrophe. More precisely, in the case of modernism the universal content of formal innovation is catastrophe. To the degree that modernism tends toward the elimination of content, it always speaks about catastrophe (which now appears as the very figure of the disappearance of content). On the other hand, in the case of mass culture, catastrophe is linked to the tendency toward the elimination of the problem of form. To the degree that catastrophe is reduced to nothing but mere content, mass culture never really speaks about catastrophe even if it appears to do so.

To illustrate these points, it is enough to cite two classic statements made by modernist writers about the atomic bomb. The most striking aspect of Gertrude Stein’s short statement “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb” (1946) is her categorical dismissal of the atomic bomb as a legitimate topic for literature: “I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb.”¹⁷ Although this comment might suggest that catastrophe is not a concern for modernism after all, Stein’s point is that the atomic bomb is the exact opposite of literature. The bomb is not just an extra-literary object but the logical negation of literature: wherever it appears, we can no longer speak of literature. To the degree that the atomic bomb is the exact opposite of modernism, it is specifically atomic holocaust fiction and not mass culture in general that gains “symptomatic” significance: “I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them.”¹⁸ While mass culture retains a modicum of legitimacy for Stein as an infinite form of entertainment, it loses all such legitimacy once the atomic bomb appears in it. Thus, what the atomic bomb renders visible is that the opposite of modernism is atomic holocaust fiction.

In his 1951 autobiography, William Carlos Williams criticized Eliot in the following terms: “Then out of the blue The Dial brought out The Waste Land and all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust.”¹⁹ For Williams, however, “the essence of a new art form” (that Eliot’s poem rendered impossible) was “locality which should give it fruit.”²⁰ This comment primarily demonstrates a conflict internal to modernist poetics itself, of course, as it suggests a potential difference between catastrophic and “regenerative” modernisms. But for Williams, Eliot was the atomic bomb of modernism, since The Waste Land imagines history in terms of a post-apocalyptic scenario. Eliot’s modernism was, then, a failure to the degree that it simply anticipated the atomic bomb in the midst of a general cultural crisis.

Whereas Stein defined the atomic bomb as the exact opposite of modernism, Williams defined it as the very content of a wrongheaded modernism. These two positions are more than incidental to a definition of modernism, and they confront us with the following formula: atomic holocaust fiction is simultaneously the exact opposite and the hidden content of modernism. While in the case of modernism formal fragmentation corresponds to a displaced catastrophic content, in atomic holocaust fiction we find the opposite tendency: a reductive formalization of an experience that modernism tried to communicate at the limit of its historical possibilities. Atomic holocaust fiction is, therefore, simply a literal rendering of the ideological content of catastrophic modernism. We can speak of an “ideological content” here in the sense that it is precisely the narrative of the trauma of modernity that provides the consistency of the modernist fragmentation of form. Modernist fragmentation is rendered consistent by a narrative that remains external to its field. What appears to be a mere dissolution of meaning in works of modernism is actually an expression of an epochal consciousness. But if the exclusion of mass culture is constitutive of modernism, the excluded element is likely to carry contradictory determinations. It has to be renounced not only because it is the opposite of modernism, but precisely because modernism recognizes itself in it in a displaced form.

We can revisit Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1966) from the perspective of this thesis precisely because Kermode’s book is one of the most enduring readings of the modernist apocalypse produced in a Cold War setting.²¹ Kermode’s arguments can be summarized in four steps. First, he locates the constitutive apocalyptic component of experience on the level of form. He defines catastrophe as a formal principle that is radically separated from the problem of content. The basis of this argument is the ontological presupposition that contingent human experience is always necessarily formalized. It is this act of unavoidable formalization that inscribes an ending (and, thereby, also catastrophe) into human experience. Regardless of their actual content, the subject’s world-constituting acts of formalization will always contain a catastrophic component.

Next, Kermode inserts this structural catastrophe in a historical scheme. In fact, the central thesis of Kermode’s book is that modern apocalypse is no longer imminent but immanent. This change implies a shift from the concrete historical prediction of the apocalyptic event to the diagnosis of a permanent crisis. The immanence of the end implies that it is no longer external to the world; it is no longer a “transcendental” event designating the end of history but the mode of existence of history itself. In this regard, modernity is the age in which the structural catastrophe is realized as the permanent crisis of existence. In fact, we could take this as Kermode’s definition of the modern: “the age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics.”²² Modernity is, therefore, the moment when “transition” itself becomes an age: modernity is not a transition between two ages but transition as an epoch.

Third, Kermode defines the relationship of the structural catastrophe and the historical epoch of modernity as inherently figurative. He warns his audience that although “there is a powerful eschatological element in modern thought,” it would be a mistake to assume that “nuclear bombs are more real and make one experience more authentic crisis-feeling than armies in the sky.”²³ Kermode’s critique of nuclear apocalypticism argues that nuclear holocaust is a historical articulation of a structural component of the imagination: “And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution.”²⁴ The apocalyptic essence of modernism, however, is not to be taken literally: “Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements.”²⁵

Finally, Kermode uses this theory to formulate a critique of the politics of modernism. When Kermode speaks of a “general critical failure in early modernism,” he means that Fascism was precisely the attempt to realize in the world (and in that sense “literalize”) the catastrophic content of modernist poetry.²⁶ Modernism was right to use apocalyptic fictions to rejuvenate poetic language. But it was absolutely wrong to reduce these fictions to myths that tried to change the world to conform to these fictions.²⁷ The literalization of the catastrophic content of the modern is, thus, simultaneously an aesthetic and a political failure.

During the 1950s, a similar set of convictions organized the liberal anti-Communist definition of modernist catastrophe. Once again, the exemplary case is Lionel Trilling. In The Liberal Imagination, Henry James’s “imagination of disaster” has emerged as the center of the American literary canon. On the level of political content, this imagination refers us to Trilling’s concept of “moral realism.” According to Trilling, liberalism remains politically correct to the degree that it successfully aestheticizes its position and uses this aestheticization for a perpetual self-critique: it must protect itself from the false utopianism of the fellow-traveling left. Liberalism is the imagination of disaster to the degree that it maintains a sense of perpetual crisis. On the level of aesthetic form, however, the liberal imagination of disaster also means the rejection of realism in defense of a particular kind of modernist aesthetics. The function of the figure of the catastrophe is precisely to bring together the politics of moral realism with the aesthetics of antirealism.

Pondering the history of James’s reception, Trilling wonders why the works of the 1880s, which in the 1950s appear to be the most appealing pieces of the oeuvre, were so obviously disliked by James’s contemporaries. The answer, of course, is to be found in the catastrophic content of modernism:

It is just this prescience, of course, that explains the resistance of James’s contemporaries. What James saw he saw truly, but it was not what the readers of this time were themselves equipped to see. That we now are able to share this vision required the passage of six decades and the events which brought them to climax. Henry James in the eighties understood what we have painfully learned from our grim glossary of wars and concentration camps, after having seen the state and human nature laid open to our horrified inspection. “But I have the imagination of disaster—and see life as ferocious and sinister”…But nowadays we know that such an imagination is one of the keys to truth.²⁸

Only a historical delay can bring out the significance of James’s modernism. In fact, it appears that the real content of James’s art was actually the Holocaust. It is as if James wanted to imagine the Holocaust in advance as the necessary outcome of modernity.

For Trilling, however, this imagination is not without its own dangerous excesses. He argues that James’s real power lies in the combination of “disaster” and “love”: “James had the imagination of disaster and that is why he is immediately relevant to us; but together with the imagination of disaster he had what the imagination of disaster often destroys and in our time is daily destroying, the imagination of love.”²⁹ Trilling is never far from the conclusion that one of the major problems of his age is precisely this excessive obsession with disaster. Although disaster can save us from the corruption of liberalism, it can also be corrupted by mass culture. Since the latter is obsessed with visions of “losses of civilization, personality, humanness,” it “sinks our spirits not merely because they are terrible and possible but because they have become so obvious and cliché that they seem to close for us the possibility of thought and imagination.”³⁰ This rejection of both the lack and the excess of the imagination of disaster shows that Trilling considered naïve utopianism to be as harmful as clichéd apocalypticism.³¹

This critique forms the basis of Trilling’s theory of modernism and mass culture. He conceives this relationship in terms of an ideological reversal: mass culture appears to be doing something, but in reality it is doing the exact opposite (moral indignation hides obscene pleasure). Let us consider the following passage:

But Ortega was right in observing of modern art that it expressed a dislike of holding in the mind the human fact and the human condition, that is shows “a real loathing of living forms and living beings,” a disgust with the “rounded and soft forms of living bodies”…the day seems to have gone when the artist who dealt in representation could catch our interest almost by the mere listing of the ordinary details of human existence.… This seems to be supported by evidence from those arts for which a conscious exaltation of humanistic values is stock-in-trade—I mean advertising and our middling novels, which, almost in the degree that they celebrate the human, falsify and abstract it; in the very business of expressing adoration of the rounded and soft forms of living bodies they expose the disgust which they really feel.³²

The argument here is structured by two important oppositions: on the one hand, Trilling sets modernism against representational art (more precisely, against realism as “the mere listing of the ordinary details of human existence”); on the other hand, he opposes art to mass culture (advertising and middling novels). While the ideological content of modernism is a certain critique of classic humanism, mass culture is propelled by a false image of humanism, which actually hides the same disgust that forms the core of modernism. In the case of mass culture, it seems, the realism of cruelty hides pleasure, while the celebration of humanistic values hides secret revulsion. Whatever its content might appear to be, according to Trilling, mass culture actually hides contrary ideological values. Thus, while the same historical experience forms the basis of both modernism and mass culture (the disintegration of humanist values), they represent two different reactions. Mass culture is defined here as the disavowed form of the same ideological content that animates modernism.

As we can see, what is common to Trilling’s and Kermode’s readings of modernism is that they both redefined catastrophe as a structural moment of the human imagination and experience. We could say that catastrophe is elevated in the discourse of modernism to a “metaphysical concept” which has specific modern forms of appearance. But it has also been suggested that both modernism and mass culture can fail to capture the essence of catastrophe. In this regard, it is striking that Kermode’s critique reverses the terms of the liberal critique of anti-Communist culture as we discussed it in the previous chapter: while anti-Communist popular culture was deemed to be an inadequate translation of an otherwise correct politics into a faulty aesthetics, modernism emerges here as the inadequate translation of an aesthetic innovation into a politics.

The anti-Communist imagination of catastrophe was caught between these two extremes. One the one hand, as Trilling’s misgivings also made it clear, the disturbing politics of aesthetic modernism suggested a totalitarian imposition of aesthetic values on everyday life (Nazism and its aestheticization of politics); on the other hand, the direct politicization of art reduced the latter to propaganda (or Communist socialist realism). This is why the imagination of disaster supposedly guarded against both extremes: it tried to produce an aesthetics that was the very suspension of the imposition on the world (it prevented the naïve transposition of aesthetic values into politics); and it did so in such a way that disaster itself could not be turned into a direct political program. The political value of true art was that it maintained an allegorical (and never literal) connection with the metaphysical core of history.

Necessary Illusions

As Paul Brians observed, the “popular” literature devoted to atomic holocausts produced few truly popular works.³³ During the period we are concerned with, strictly speaking, the culture of atomic fear produced only two important best sellers: John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957).³⁴ The historical distance separating these two pieces clearly indicates the crucial differences between the two: Hersey belongs to the first wave of atomic fear primarily concerned with the destructive force of the atomic bomb; Shute, however, belongs to the age of the H-bomb and is mostly concerned with radioactive fallout. But we also have to point out that while Hersey’s New Yorker article was a response to a historical event that really did happen, Shute’s novel was about an atomic war that never took place. What is common to the two, however, is that they both redefine the limits separating facts from fiction: Hiroshima starts from a factual account and moves toward a performance of the insufficiency of mere factual accounts; On the Beach, on the other hand, is mere fiction that attempts to dramatize the fundamental necessity of organizing reality around necessary fictions. The juxtaposition of these two works allows us to raise the problem of the documentary voice in popular literature of the atomic holocaust.

If we consider its contemporary reception, it appears that one of the most striking features of Hersey’s article was its style. To be more precise, the most striking feature of the text was a certain discrepancy between the simplicity of its style and the magnitude of its subject matter. For example, in Ruth Benedict’s review for The Nation, we read: “the calmness of the narrative throws into relief the nightmare magnitude of the destructive power the brains of men have brought into being. There is no preaching in this book.”³⁵ Hersey explained himself in the following terms: “The flat style was deliberate, and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator; I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader’s experience would be as direct as possible.”³⁶ The central question, therefore, concerned the proper way of formalizing an exceptional historical content.

In a brief overview of the contemporary reception of Hersey’s Hiroshima, Michael J. Yavenditti called attention to a curious interaction of moral and political responses. Although the text provoked a predictable moral response by soliciting sympathy for the victims of atomic warfare, on the political level it did not encourage a condemnation of government policies.³⁷ Arguably, it was precisely this seemingly contradictory response that did incite two of the most ardent critiques of Hersey’s text, those of Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy. Macdonald’s famous dismissal of the work is based on his radical critique of mass culture.³⁸ The review proceeds by way of a set of clear divisions. As a first step, Macdonald opposes the middlebrow sentimentality of the New Yorker to true art. Then, within the field of art, he distinguishes naturalism from modernism. According to Macdonald, in Hersey’s text, middlebrow sentimentality masquerades as naturalism. But precisely because it is a mere simulacrum of art, this sentimentalism can only be “de-natured naturalism”—naturalism without nature. The failure of this naturalism is opposed to the “real” naturalism of Dreiser and Farrell. But Hersey’s artistic failure (his inability to find the unifying element that could create a whole) is primarily put in relief by the achievements of Hemingway. If Dreiser had written this report on Hiroshima, it would have been at least good naturalism; but Hemingway could have created a true modernist work. The only adequate representation of the horrors of atomic warfare, both aesthetically and morally, is modernism.

In her response to Macdonald’s review, Mary McCarthy took this conclusion one step further by charging Hersey with an additional political failure. For her, Hersey’s false representation of an unrepresentable event in the journalistic register is an inherent political failure. As McCarthy explained, the fundamental problem with the reception of Hersey’s Hiroshima was that everyone (including Macdonald himself) assumed that the political point of the text was to present an argument against atomic warfare. But McCarthy wanted to show that the politics of the text is the exact opposite: “The point is that the New Yorker cannot be against the atom bomb, no matter how hard it tries, just as it could not, even in this moral ‘emergency,’ eliminate the cigarette and perfume advertising that accompanied Mr. Hersey’s text.”³⁹ Therefore, Hersey’s piece is simply an “insipid falsification of the truth of atomic warfare.”⁴⁰ This falsification consist of a representation of the unrepresentable: “To treat it journalistically, in terms of measurable destruction, is, in a sense, to deny its existence.… Up to August 31 of this year, no one dared think of Hiroshima—it appeared to us all as a kind of hole in human history. Mr. Hersey has filled that hole with busy little Japanese Methodists; he has made it familiar and safe, in the final sense, boring.”⁴¹ McCarthy’s message is clear: by reducing an unrepresentable event to the field of representation and “minimizing” the atom bomb “as though it belonged to the familiar order of catastrophes,” the very medium in which Hersey’s text appears predetermines its politics. The only correct option, offered by real art, is to maintain the unrepresentability of the hole in history through a move beyond this representational framework.

Although these discussions are not directly involved in an evaluation of the politics of anti-Communism, Macdonald and McCarthy effectively perform the same redefinition of the politics of modernism that we discussed in the previous chapter. Modernism is aesthetically, morally, and politically correct because, by moving beyond mere realistic representation, it provides the only viable way of rendering the unrepresentable. These two authors displace the political dimension of the text from its content to the method of representation. Regardless of what may appear within the field of representation, the very institution of this field already predetermines its political force. As a matter of fact, if we follow McCarthy’s analysis, we have to conclude that these two levels can be in direct opposition to each other. While the represented content seeks to establish moral sympathy with the victims, the method of representation and the medium of distribution already restrict the political efficacy of the text in such a way that the moral message and political truth are fundamentally at odds with each other.

The paradox of atomic holocaust fiction dwells precisely in this attempt to construct the authority of the narratorial voice by reporting an event that undermines all narrative authority. While Macdonald and McCarthy faulted Hersey for reducing the un-narratable to the field of narration, we have to add an extra dimension here. The question is not simply narrating something that remains always external to the field of narration, but narrating that which makes narration as such impossible: in other words, this event is not simply external to narration but marks its limit. Thus what emerges in the pages of Hiroshima is that style guarantees the authenticity of the representation: it is the quality of the voice which discloses this catastrophe that renders the representation of the world authentic. As the unity of style gives form to an un-narratable event, the documentary realism of the individual narratives is guaranteed by the fictional unity of authorial voice. But the unity of this style precedes the actual narration itself in the sense that the possibility of this kind of realism is heterogeneous to the narrated events. In the end, narration is made possible by the necessary fiction of narratability. We are up against a politics of realism that has to prove the necessity of illusions.

The central thesis of On the Beach is precisely this: certain illusions are necessary. In fact, one of the major objectives of the narrative is to invest seemingly foolish illusions with an ethical bonus. This celebration of necessary illusions, however, leads to a strange mirroring interaction of fact and fiction. In the fictional world of the novel, it is the illusion of normalcy that is revealed to be absolutely necessary in a post-holocaust world; in the pre-holocaust world of the readers (which is supposedly a world of normalcy), however, it is the illusion of catastrophe (the breakdown of normalcy) that is declared to be necessary. This is why we can say that the ultimate point of the novel is to construct a fictional world within which certain illusions can unequivocally emerge as really necessary. Both the illusions of absolute normalcy and absolute catastrophe are necessary. The central illusion that holds together the world of the novel has as its content the values represented by the stereotypical white middle-class family. Even if the middle-class nuclear family is only an illusion, according to the novel, it is an ethical imperative to live life as if it were real. In order to reveal the necessity of this illusion of normalcy, however, we need a fictional device that can project the absolute destruction of the world held together by this illusion of middle-class normalcy. In other words, what the illusion of nuclear holocaust reveals is the necessity of the illusion of normalcy.

The story opens after the entire Northern Hemisphere has been destroyed in a nuclear war and Australia remained the only inhabitable continent. In the background of the story, the fallout from the North is slowly devouring the rest of the world, and the novel ends with the utter extinction of life on the face of Earth. The war was probably provoked by Albania and started with an Israeli-Arab war, which turned into a Russian-NATO war, which in turn led to a Russian-Chinese war. Set in this post-holocaust world of melancholy decay, the story is composed of two major subplots (the romantic and the military), both of which remain unfulfilled: love remains Platonic; and the final mission of the U.S. Navy reveals what we already knew, that survival is impossible. After Mary and Peter Holmes (a lieutenant commander of the Australian Navy) befriend Commander Dwight Towers (the man in charge of what is left of the U.S. Navy), the novel narrates the budding romance between Moira Davidson (a friend of the Holmes’s) and the American captain. The curious thing about this romance, however, is that it remains unfulfilled simply because Towers used to be married before the war. Although his family is killed in the war, he chooses to live life as if nothing had happened and rejects Moira’s advances. At the same time, the novel also narrates the last desperate efforts of the survivors to recover life in America. The last mission of the American submarine Scorpion is to investigate a mysterious radio signal coming from the Seattle area. At the end of the dangerous journey deep into the heavily contaminated Northern Hemisphere, however, the survivors find that the mission was in vain. Instead of survivors, they merely find that the wind is moving an overturned Coke bottle, which is hitting a radio transmitter.

The central argument of the text is that both an excess and a lack of illusions are harmful. While a complete lack of illusion is likely to lead to self-destructive behavior and sheer chaos, an excess of illusions leads to self-deception and the complete denial of reality. The reason why Captain Towers can emerge as the ethical center of the novel is that he uncompromisingly chooses to hold on to an illusion while he knows very well that it is merely an illusion. In this respect, the would-be lovers of the story represent two different ways of self-delusion: Moira Davidson lives in “the world of romance, of make-belief and double brandies.”⁴² Her alcoholism is mere self-destructive escape from reality. But Dwight Towers represents a different form of self-delusion: his delusion is not romantic but realistic, in the sense that it allows him to face the reality of complete annihilation with dignity. Indeed, much of the story is preoccupied with the education of Moira, who needs to be “reformed” and needs to learn the difference between the two forms of illusion in order to be able to accept the truth of Towers’s illusion: rather than seduce Towers, she needs to accept the reality of the illusion that organizes his life.

The novel contains quite a few self-reflective elements in which the constitutive paradox of atomic holocaust fiction surfaces. The most important point, however, is that the impossibility involved in this paradox becomes the ground of an ethical principle: in the course of the novel, “can’t” becomes “shouldn’t.” Thus, the limited nature of human imagination is not a deplorable obstacle, but rather a defense against the horrors of reality. Therefore, as the novel suggests, that which is beyond imagination should remain unimagined. As a matter of fact, the importance of the necessary illusions surfaces here: they make up for the inherent limitations of imagination by filling in the hole created by the unimaginable with illusions that make the smooth functioning of the community possible. For example, this is how Moira first contemplates Dwight Towers’s obsession with his family:

She had known for some time that his wife and family were very real to him, more real by far than the half-life in a far corner of the world that had been forced upon him since the war. The devastation of the Northern Hemisphere was not real to him, as it was not real to her. He had seen nothing of the destruction of the war, as she had not; in thinking of his wife and of his home it was impossible for him to visualize them in any other circumstances than those in which he had left them. He had little imagination, and that formed a solid core for his contentment in Australia.⁴³

Earlier in the novel, Moira complained to Towers that she has never been outside Australia and has only seen the rest of the world in movies. In a self-reflexive moment of the novel, she tries to imagine the movie one would make of the devastation that took place in the Northern Hemisphere. Towers answers that such a movie would not be possible to make: “A cameraman couldn’t live, as far as I can see. I guess nobody will ever know what the Northern Hemisphere looks like now, excepting God.” After a brief pause, he adds: “I think that’s a good thing.… I suppose it’s lack of imagination. I don’t want to have any more imagination.”⁴⁴

This reflection on the limits of imagination and the impossibility of documenting the unimaginable becomes a practical problem when the American submarine goes on an exploratory cruise to investigate heavily contaminated areas. Although the soldiers must write a report of their journey, they conclude that there is nothing to be reported: they have to write a report that reports nothing. Contemplating the lack of information in the report, Towers tells his follow soldiers the same thing that he told Moira: “Nobody will ever really know what a hot place looks like. And that goes for the whole of the Northern Hemisphere.… I think that’s right.… There’s some things that a person shouldn’t want to go and see.”⁴⁵ Nevertheless, this insistence on the limitation of what one should try to imagine is not a complete renunciation of reality. As a matter of fact, immediately after this statement, the discussion among the soldiers leads to the problem of historiography. Once again, the novel tries to investigate its very own presuppositions. When Peter Holmes asks if anyone is “writing any kind of history about these times,” John Osborne responds that he is not aware of any such efforts, but “there does not seem to be much point in writing stuff that nobody will read.”⁴⁶ Towers, however, responds that “There should be something written, all the same.… Even if it’s only going to be read in the next few months.”⁴⁷ We can see that we are dealing with a double ethical imperative: on the one hand, that which is beyond imagination should remain unrepresented; on the other hand, that which is within the established field of representation should be represented even if it cannot be rendered “as a coherent story.”⁴⁸ Although an authentic documentary is impossible, it is nevertheless an ethical necessity.

In the most explicitly self-reflective episode of the novel, Moira and Captain Towers visit the National Gallery to see an exhibition of post-holocaust religious paintings:

They were all oil paintings, mostly in a modernistic style. They walked around the gallery set aside for the forty paintings in the exhibition, the girl interested, the naval officer frankly uncomprehending. Neither of them had much to say about the green Crucifixions or the pink Nativities; the five or six paintings dealing with religious aspects of the war stirred them to controversy. They paused before the prizewinner, the sorrowing Christ on a back-ground of the destruction of a great city.⁴⁹

Their reactions to the painting, however, are quite different. While Moira likes the painting because it has “good composition and good colouring,” Captain Towers hates it “like hell.”⁵⁰ His first explanation for this strong reaction is that the subject of the painting is “phony.” Simply put, Towers expects a certain amount of realism. He points out that “No pilot in his senses would he flying as low as that with thermonuclear bombs going off around,” and adds that if this city is supposed to be New York City, then the painter got his buildings mixed up. When Moira points out that the subject of the painting is not necessarily a particular city, Towers concludes that “It couldn’t have looked like that.… Too dramatic.”⁵¹ The lack of realism is finally explained by Towers as an excess of “dramatic” effects. He is disturbed by the painting because it is a false form of realism that substitutes dramatic excess for authentic representation in order to convey a propagandistic (in this case, religious) message. This specification is important because Towers does find his own aesthetic ideal in Renoir: “They went and found the French art, and he stood for some time before a painting of a river and a tree-shaded street beside it, with white houses and shops, very French and very colorful. ‘That’s the kind of picture I like.’”⁵² Once again, the illusion of absolute normalcy is declared to be more important than the unavoidably inauthentic representation of the unimaginable. This conclusion sums up the aesthetics as well as the political message of the whole novel.

Just as in the case of Hersey’s Hiroshima, the general assumption appears to have been that the novel is against atomic war. Such was at least the assumption of the Eisenhower administration, which was stirred to action by Stanley Kramer’s film version of On the Beach. Spencer R. Weart, for example, writes: “Eisenhower’s cabinet discussed confidential actions they might take to undermine the movie, and the State Department and the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] distributed comments. According to government view, voiced in public through various mouths, On the Beach was seriously in error.”⁵³ But the pattern of reception again seems to resemble that of Hiroshima: “Audiences came away from On the Beach and similar works not with questions about military policy but with a sense of inevitable tragedy.”⁵⁴ The erroneous assumption about the politics of the story (that it was a critique of government politics) founders on the fact that, through domesticating and romanticizing the end of the world (whereby it completely excluded any representation of actual warfare), it simultaneously asserted the necessity of the illusion of normalcy and the inevitability of catastrophe. Rather than an attack on the ideological foundations of Cold War anti-Communism, On the Beach provided the clearest formulation of such an ideology: while it appears to be against atomic war, it actually reinforces the ideological foundations of anti-Communism.

When Worlds Collide: Philip Wylie and the End of the Nation

Let us now examine in more detail how the concept of the “world” functions in the works of one of the most well-known anti-Communist authors of catastrophic fiction. In a typical reading of Philip Wylie’s oeuvre, he is usually cited as an eccentric Jungian anti-Communist obsessed with civil defense who also happens to be the father of the term “momism.” Michael Rogin, for example, uses Wylie as an introduction to his reading of Cold War cinema because Wylie “merges” “Communism, mothers, and scientific catastrophe.”⁵⁵ At one point in the argument, Rogin summarizes Wylie’s position in the following terms: “He advocated continued military preparedness after the war and warned that Americans (softened by moms) were not taking seriously the Communist threat. (He also blamed mom for McCarthyism).”⁵⁶ But we have to ask the question: if Americans do not take the Communist threat seriously, why is there such a thing as McCarthyism at all? Rogin’s otherwise inspiring reading manifests here one of its decisive shortcomings: it concentrates only on Wylie’s anti-Communism and refuses to engage in a more comprehensive manner Wylie’s critique of McCarthyism.⁵⁷

In accordance with the rhetoric of the anti-Communist liberalism of the fifties, what Wylie renounces is extremism. In this case, “Mom” would not be a figure for Communism but the figure of excess that leads to extremism. Accordingly, for Wylie, lack and excess of anti-Communism are equally detrimental. We have to acknowledge the fact that politically Wylie was closer to the liberal consensus of the “vital center” than Rogin would be willing to admit.⁵⁸ One of the major points where Wylie diverges from this politics of the center, however, is his decidedly middlebrow aesthetics, which simultaneously renounces high modernism and mass culture. Generation of Vipers (1942) clearly demonstrates this position. In fact, as Wylie himself points out in a footnote, his political centrism is even more authentic than that of the disillusioned fellow-travelers, since he has been opposed to Communism “from the very days when so many of my literary colleagues—the liberals and liberal-intellectuals—were not so opposed.”⁵⁹

But the important point is that Wylie already defines the task of democracy in opposition to extremism both on the left and the right.⁶⁰ The golden middle between these two extremes is the terrain of Americanism, but the problem is that Americans gave up the true spirit of self-criticism and substituted for it a hypocritical dogmatism of self-deception. This is why Wylie devoted his whole life to trying to cut through the veil of this peculiarly American form of deception. The program outlined by Wylie is not unlike Trilling’s notion of the liberal imagination of disaster. But, unlike Trilling, Wylie literalizes the catastrophic content of modernism through the figure of atomic holocaust in the name of anti-Communist political realism.

This is why Wiley’s critics even today tend to be right for the wrong reasons. For example, when we consider the problem of “momism,” we must keep it in mind that it is essentially a conceptual tool for a liberal critique of gender roles rather than a conservative attack on women. Of course, we have to break down Wylie’s argument into two steps. First, momism is introduced as a tool for criticizing a society that only allows two possible social roles for women: that of “Cinderella” (the young girl being trained to marry her Prince) and “Mom” (the married woman). This critique argues that the socially constructed role of “Mom” became the focal point of an ideology, and as a result, the characterology of “mom” provides us a key to what is wrong with a society that does not allow women to assume other roles. In a second step, however, Wylie’s argument moves beyond the liberal critique of society to uncover its “metaphysical” foundations. Wylie presupposes a natural order behind the social construction: men and women participate in natural power relations. In Wylie’s arguments, liberal political impulses are often short-circuited by metaphysical presuppositions. This mistake, however, is not only Wylie’s individual deviation from the essence of liberalism, but rather a general formula that describes much of what we call today “Cold War liberalism.”

In one of the early chapters of Generation of Vipers, entitled “Subjective Feudalism,” Wylie imagines how a future historian would describe the barbaric twentieth century. This hypothetical historian is emblematic of Wylie’s narrative techniques in two senses: on the level of content, he proposes a dual critique of dangerous extremes; on the level of form, he displaces the narratorial instance to a hypothetical future. Our historian dismisses modern art in the already all too familiar terms of middlebrow moral revolt: “Under the pretense of being ‘abstract’ or ‘advanced,’ artists without ability of any sort covered canvases with daubs, mists, swirls, spirals, cubes and half-envisioned objects which had, admittedly, no significance.”⁶¹ At the same time, the hypothetical historian of the twentieth century writes the following about mass culture: “Other forms of entertainment, including periodicals of the most banal sort, motion pictures, serial ‘strips’ which appeared in the newspapers, and continued dramas on the daily radio, dwelt incessantly with such infantile themes as the sudden and unexpected accession to wealth, the selection of an obviously ill-educated and untrained female for a wife by a figure of worldly prominence, the finding of treasure, and—also inevitably—upon murder, torture, horror, monsters, bastardy, seduction, and other crimes.”⁶²

The fact, however, that this middlebrow critique of modernity is based on the displacement of the narratorial voice into a hypothetical future shows us something essential about Wylie’s catastrophe fiction. We could say that the same hypothetical historian narrates every single one of his catastrophe novels. This proposition partially solves the mystery posed by the narratorial voice in Wylie’s fiction, which otherwise remains impossible to locate in the world that it discloses. Catastrophe, thus, is the figure that irrevocably separates the present of reading from the future of narration. A strange illusion indeed: the story is not an “already narrated” history; it “will be narrated” only in the future as the history of the present. For Wylie, the catastrophic content of the modern can only be rendered visible from the perspective of the future. This narratorial position reveals that the catastrophe is located between the disunity of our present world and its future unity. The voice is our only guarantee that the world “will have been” one.

We can clearly outline this problematic in Wylie’s earliest truly successful literary venture, When Worlds Collide (1933, coauthored with Edwin Balmer).⁶³ The novel shows that the motive of the “collision of worlds” is one of the central organizing forces of Wylie’s fiction. First, some sort of an ideological distortion (in Wylie’s language, “an illusion”) disturbs the natural balance of forces. As a result, the world is split into two. Second, the institutionalization of the artificial split between the two worlds leads to some kind of catastrophe. Finally, the novels reveal the essence of the original mistake and restore the natural unity of the world. In other words, the central ideological presupposition of Wylie’s fiction is the assumption that the world is “one” even if its unity comes about as a harmony of contending forces.

When Worlds Collide, a classic of its genre, narrates the end of the world through natural catastrophe. The Earth is destroyed by a pair of planets torn from their own solar system by unknown cosmic forces, but a well-organized group of scientists manages to construct a spaceship (often compared to Noah’s ark) with which they escape Earth in time to restart life on one of the guest planets.⁶⁴ The natural catastrophe, however, brings out a social conflict. That is, the novel attempts to naturalize a social catastrophe. On the ideological level, the two worlds of the novel represent class antagonism. In this sense, the bourgeois “fear of the masses” is the most obvious structuring force of the text, which advocates an elitist but pragmatic rationalism against the brutal savagery of the vulgar masses. In this sense, the utopic unity of the world in the novel is that of the enlightened elite who managed to reconstitute society without the barbaric rabble: a pure modernity without the masses.

What is striking about the text, however, is that narratorial authority remains unquestionable. It appears as if the voice were completely immune to the threats represented in the novel. We have the impression that even if the world ended, this voice would be still droning on in a lifeless universe. The fact that the narratorial voice is immune to catastrophe indicates that in this world the total threat is balanced by the total stability of the voice. In fact, we encounter here a common component of Wylie’s catastrophe fiction: absolute catastrophe is the necessary device used to establish absolute narratorial authority. Unlike in the case of modernism, the general framework of representation is not in any way affected by the represented object, the catastrophe.

The authority of the voice establishes two major transformations in the novel. On the one hand, there is a necessary shift from historical time to geological time; on the other hand, the logic of social organization has to shift from the nation to the human race.⁶⁵ In both cases, as we can see, the post-historical and the post-national are imagined to be the domains of natural unities without artificial divisions. The ultimate unity of the world is defined here as the eternity of the human race. The temporality of the post-catastrophic nation is post-historical in the sense that it must be measured by a natural eternity. The post-historical reorganization of the community is achieved in the name of a new universality, that of the “human race,” which transcends the nation. But this post-catastrophic universality is still modeled on the United States. At one point in the text, the heroes of survival receive a medal from their leader, Dr. Hendron, who describes the meaning of the medals in the following manner: “These medals bear on one side the motto of the United States of America, which I think we might still adopt as our own. Out of the many nationalities represented before, we intend to create a single race. Therefore the medals bear the inscription, ‘E pluribus unum.’”⁶⁶ The catastrophe destroys the nation as such, while salvation allows for the recreation of human civilization beyond the confines of nationhood. The rebirth of civilization is based on the disappearance of the nation in America and the projection of post-national Americanness onto a cosmic time.

Thus, the threat at the heart of the novel is the catastrophe of the modern: traditional social structures can no longer contain the effects of modernity. This, however, is not a full indictment of modernization, because the latter simultaneously produces catastrophe (the masses) and deliverance (the modern elite). In other words, the novel needs to justify an internal split within modernity. The text simultaneously manifests and justifies a social division, which is the necessary social exclusion that will save modern civilization from itself: modernity must divide itself in order to restore its unity on a higher level. But this division also bears the burden of having to account for the formal constitution of the novel as well. Since the voice of the narrator is the voice of the post-catastrophic modern elite, the unity of the world, after all, is the stylistic unity of middlebrow form. As we can see, the condition of the narrative voice is the very same social exclusion that the book renders visible. It is in this sense that the voice simultaneously manifests a split in the world and embodies the unity of this world in the present as an absent presence.

Wylie’s catastrophe novels from the fifties represent variations on the same set of themes. In spite of all their differences, the organizing principle of all of his works is the restoration of the unity of the world. When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1936) established in the most straightforward manner the religious universalism of anti-Communist Americanism through an attempt to overcome the social division separating the vulgar masses from the educated elite. Disappearance (1951), however, introduced the problem of gender roles and sex as a form of internal disruption of this scheme and strove to establish the unity of a world falsely split into two. Tomorrow! (1954) argued for the nationalization and militarization of anti-Communism in the name of a catastrophic realism, which clearly defined the true enemy to be a national enemy. Finally, Triumph (1963) introduced the problem of race as the very stumbling block of the free world that will inevitably lead to its utter demise. Thus we could say that although the basic scheme of American anti-Communism was already clearly formulated in Wylie’s fiction in the thirties, during the fifties Wylie sought to examine in his atomic holocaust fiction the obstacles that prevented the accomplishment of this scheme.⁶⁷

Disappearance is a fictionalized continuation of the arguments put forth in Generation of Vipers. It examines the effects of modernization on gender roles and sexuality within the context of the Cold War. On the first page of the novel, we learn that “on the afternoon of the second Tuesday of February at four minutes and fifty-two seconds past four o’clock, Eastern Standard Time,” all the women of the Earth disappeared from the world of men, while in an alternative universe, all the men disappeared from the world of women.⁶⁸ The most obvious objective of the novel is to link a critique of American attitudes towards sex (and the cultural codification of “gender roles”) to a critique of the official rhetoric of the Cold War.

The idea of the “world” is, thus, introduced here as a subjective category. It names the way representatives of the two genders are socialized. But the political program of the novel is the restoration of the unity of the “human” world without false divisions. This unity, however, does not amount to the complete lack of divisions. Rather, natural and social divisions have to be harmonized. As Wylie suggests, the minimal condition of the necessary social change that will save the world from catastrophe is that the external differences between the sexes become “internalized” (that is, differences need to be recognized as internal to the sexual function). In a Jungian fashion, the balance is to be achieved by acknowledging the male part of sexuality in women and the female part in men. The unity of the world is not the complete extermination of divisions, but the restoration of a natural balance through the internalization of differences.

Wylie’s ultimate conclusion appears to be that the solution to the problems posed by the inadequacies of Cold War politics lies in a more realistic approach to human sexuality. A realistic attitude to sex would imply a critique of sexual secrecy that, in turn, could form the basis of a critique of political secrecy. Furthermore, the latter could be used to demystify the politics of security, which could lead to a politics of freedom that respects civil liberties. In Wylie’s case, the political realism of the “vital center” is based on “sexual realism.” And the novel is replete with philosophical references to the center: “In some almost but not quite comprehensible fashion, Nature seemed to manufacture her every composition from the single thesis of a center surrounded by balancing parts.”⁶⁹ Thus, from the perspective of the liberal anti-Communist center, one of the major achievements of Disappearance appears to be the fact that it laid its politics on “metaphysical” foundations. The novel is essentially an attempt to define the natural metaphysics of the liberal center: beyond the world of social illusions, we find a natural order of things that politics should try to realize. The vital center is not only politicized by Wylie. What is even more significant is that it is naturalized, as the middlebrow aesthetics of balanced opposites is elevated to an ontological principle.

Wylie continued his engagement of Cold War politics in his propagandistic civil defense novel Tomorrow! (1954).⁷⁰ But whereas Disappearance was mostly a self-conscious allegory of a divided world, Tomorrow! is based on a programmatic move toward realism. The novel narrates the story of two adjacent Midwestern cities, Green Prairie and River City, as they suffer a devastating Soviet atomic attack. The crucial difference between the two cities is that while Green Prairie has a well-organized civil defense program, the inhabitants of River City believe that civil defense is “a waste of money, a squandering of public energy, a meddlesome civil intrusion into military spheres and, all in all, just one more Washington-spawned interference with the rights of common man.”⁷¹ Needless to say, River City is amply punished for this poor judgment. Although both cities sustain considerable damage, Green Prairie manages to mitigate the devastation and puts itself in a very good position to start reconstruction after the war is won by the United States. Wylie’s message is clear: civil defense works, and it is essential to the survival of the nation.

This political realism, then, is sustained by the aesthetic realism of nuclear catastrophe. The ultimate purpose of the text is to provide a hyper-realistic description of atomic war. This intention finds its immediate fulfillment in the meticulous cataloguing of the horrors of atomic warfare (at one point, for example, we see a pregnant woman trying to push her dead baby back into her stomach which was opened by a large wound).⁷² But what renders the text unique among atomic holocaust novels is that the actual atomic explosion is narrated by the omniscient narrator from the perspective of a character who is instantaneously vaporized.⁷³ This realism promises us a full exposure to the catastrophe, which is now without its mysteries and becomes fully knowable. If catastrophe is representable, atomic war is survivable.

The narratorial voice of realism, however, is once again that of the future. The final elimination of the obstacles to freedom leads to a utopistic rejuvenation of America. In fact, on the last pages of the novel, one of the central characters speculates about the meaning of the war for the future of America in the following terms: “Then the Bomb would be no catastrophe at all, but benefit. ‘End of an era,’ they would say, ‘Good thing, too.’”⁷⁴ The national enemy establishes the principle of the reconstitution of American national identity beyond any kind of antagonism. The basis of Wylie’s catastrophic nationalism is the belief that the total threat to the nation is an external threat and its elimination will lead the utopic reconstitution of the community.

It is precisely this utopistic reconstitution of the nation that is rendered impossible in Wylie’s 1963 novel Triumph. To a large extent, this novel picks up the same types of arguments that were addressed in Tomorrow!, but in comparison with Wylie’s earlier novels, Triumph introduces two new themes: the utter uselessness of civil defense programs in case of an all-out thermonuclear war and the centrality of racial conflict to the problem of survival. The novel narrates the story of the last fourteen American survivors of an atomic war with the Soviet Union, who spend over two years in millionaire Vance Farr’s private super-shelter before they are rescued by the Australian army. The world that ends in this novel is the “white man’s world.” Wylie suggests that the catastrophic politics of anti-Communism has to be primarily a racial politics. In Triumph racism emerges as the internal contradiction of the free world (and its world politics) and the illusion at the heart of this self-deception is the very source of the total catastrophe.

As in Tomorrow!, in this novel the primary threat to the United States is the Soviet Union. But what is most striking about Triumph is not so much the graphic depiction of atomic warfare as the insanely excessive atomic overkill that the Russians are capable of. Thus, as the novel seems to suggest, the failure of contemporary anti-Communism was precisely the kind of utopianism that animated the last pages of Tomorrow! This time, Wylie argues that the only realism that can be derived from the thought of the end of the world is that there is no such thing as an American victory in case of an atomic war with Russia. Triumph (the total eradication of Communism) might still be possible, but this triumph cannot lead to the reconstitution of an American utopia. In fact, America needs to be sacrificed in order for this new kind of (post-American) utopia to come about.

The organizing principle of Triumph is still the double program of political and aesthetic realism, but the direct confrontation with the catastrophe is no longer possible. In fact, the novel suggests that documentary mediation is necessary even for the “witnesses,” those who survived the catastrophe. Since almost the entirety of the book takes place underground, we no longer see the actual attack or its effects on the world. Rather, the characters only register the seismic vibrations of catastrophe. In fact, the characters’ only exposure to the atomic attack comes in the form of a documentary broadcasted from Costa Rica. These “photographic and taped records of the American Holocaust” are necessary for the survivors, who otherwise would have almost no relation to the catastrophe that is their immediate environment.⁷⁵ Although they inhabit the very heart of catastrophe, their only way of knowing it is through an external mediating agent.

At the end of the novel, when the Australian army finally rescues the survivors, we find out that there is a new world order in the making on the Southern hemisphere: “International government, of course.… Meaning—men are to become free and equal, from now on. Without race differences.”⁷⁶ This utopic ending is doubtless similar to the closing of When Worlds Collide, in that both novels end with the establishment of a new human universality beyond the total catastrophe. But while in the earlier novel the idea of America was salvaged in this universal rearticulation (as if preserved in a dialectical move of history to a post-historical stage), in the case of Triumph the realist politics of anti-Communism allows for only one kind of utopia: a utopia without America. The last sentences of the novel register the complete (even symbolic) annihilation of the nation: “They would leave the United States of America forever. And when they had gone, the place would have no name.”⁷⁷ This seems to suggest that the voice of the narrator is no longer coming from an American world. In this sense, Triumph is a post-American novel.

As a conclusion, we can return to the question of what it means that Hersey, Shute, and Wylie were all writing documentaries. The self-effacement of the narrator in Hiroshima and the omniscience of the narrator of On the Beach are two sides of the same coin. In Hiroshima, the full exposure to the event without any mediation is rendered possible by a narratorial voice which nevertheless presents itself as if it were nonexistent. This voice is never connected to a speaking body that would actually appear in the field of narration (that is, the narrator is not a character in Hiroshima). The disconnection between the disclosed world and the narratorial act of disclosure, however, is actually taken to the next level as the very narratorial act is denied by the disclosed world. In order to establish its authority, the narrator transposes the act of disclosure to the event itself: “let the event speak!” Although the narratorial voice is our only means of access to this world, it is not one element in this world and, therefore, it also signifies an absence in the world. The self-effacing, disembodied voice claims that it is the self-disclosing world that is speaking, and in the very same act of reversal, against its own intentions, it pokes a hole in this world, which is no longer complete, as it needs this disappearing voice to render its self-disclosure possible in the first place.

On the Beach demonstrates a similar set of problems. Here we find that a fictional text moves toward the real and (never being able to complete this journey) redefines itself as a documentary. The problem at the heart of this redefinition concerns the very status of fiction: for if atomic holocaust fiction is about a real event that destroys the very possibilities of fiction, imagining this event in advance is the only possible way to document this real, historical eventuality. During the fifties, atomic holocaust fiction is not “just” fiction, since it touches upon the real possibility of atomic warfare; but it is neither simply real, as the event it aims to capture has not yet taken place. This is why it assumes a special role among the available cultural fictions: it is the special form of fiction which is invested with the value of being real (and not just being “realistic”). The only way to mediate the experience of atomic warfare in a realistic way is to write its history in advance and present this history according to the formal demands of documentary. But the most elementary formal convention of documentary is the separation of the voice and the image. In the novel, therefore, the third person narrator is not part of the fictional world, the same way as Hersey’s narratorial voice in not an element of the narrated world. They both inhabit a heterogeneous space and efface themselves on behalf of the world they show us. But, through this reversal, the voice also signifies the central lack of this world: it actually lacks the guarantee of its narratability, which ultimately remains forever external to it (as the event destroys the very conditions of narration).

Wylie’s fiction displays the same documentary tendency, since the narratorial position in all of his catastrophe novels can be located in a heterogeneous “space-off.” But in his case, due to the utopistic structure of his fiction, the final outcome of the story always restores the conditions of narration. Unlike On the Beach, which ends with the utter impossibility of narration, Wylie’s novels end with the triumph of narration over the void of absolute nothingness. His novels always run the full circle and end where they began—the establishment of the possibility of the very narratorial act that has just completed disclosing a world to us. We could say that his fiction is utopistic in a double sense: the disclosed world is constructed by a utopistic voice that lacks a concrete place of enunciation; yet, this voice is imbued by the utopistic wisdom of a more perfect world beyond catastrophe. Although it is disembodied, the narrative voice is nevertheless logically possible. Its documentary authority derives precisely from the fullness of this post-catastrophic utopia: rather than a dystopic disintegration of narratorial authority, these texts establish the principles of a new kind of knowledge beyond the void of nothingness. Since order is reestablished on a higher level, the voice which remains external to the narrated field is nevertheless not the traumatized impersonality of a confused survivor. This voice is the pure voice of utopia.

“Utopia,” however, has to be understood in a double sense. It is simultaneously the ideal location of fulfilled identity and a “non-place.” In other words, it simultaneously names the autonomy of the world and the heteronomy of the voice. Wylie’s fiction demonstrated that the unity of the world has no other existence than the unity of the voice. But since the voice cannot be fully located in the world, the unity of the world is dependent on this excessive element. The voice constitutes the unity of the world by introducing a nonworldly component to it. As a result, the condition of the world is the possibility of the voice: a cause which is simultaneously external and internal to the world.

The best way to describe this relation would be to conclude that the voice embodies the unity of the world within the world itself, even if the point of enunciation must always remain heteronomous to the world: it is the space-off of documentary. It is through this embodiment that the voice becomes a nonworldly object. Thus, the voice is the agent of representation but not in the sense that it “talks about” the world as if it were unified. Of course, on the level of the statement, the voice does speak of the objects of a given world as it strives to establish hierarchical relations between them. But the representation of the fact that these objects are the elements of the same world cannot be located on the same level as the objects themselves. This unity is simply performed by the voice. The voice embodies the unity of the world by presenting its absent fullness. Therefore, while the constitutive inconsistency of the world is phenomenalized through the figure of the catastrophe, its impossible unity is embodied by the voice.