Placing the Bomb: the Pastoral and the Sublime in the Nuclear Age.

Abstract

Placing the Bomb uses journalism, essays and literature to complicate the idea of the nuclear sublime. The concept that the bomb induces an awestruck loss of self before its power followed by the restoration of a morally-improved self has installed the nuclear sublime as the purported genre or stylistic mode of anti-nuclear response. My first chapter challenges this reputation of the sublime by assembling a wide sample of early and popular writings on the bomb, as well as looking at such prominent texts as John Hersey's Hiroshima, Norman Cousins' Modern Man is Obsolete and William Laurence's journalism. My second chapter advances an alternate model of a nuclear pastoral through Leigh Brackett's 1955 post-apocalyptic novel, The Long Tomorrow, and Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach and its Hollywood film. The pastoral lends elements of its structure and values to these works, and supports a less flashy but more historically effective resistance to the politics of nuclear fear.

My third and fourth chapters turn to literary archives of nuclear writings that do not treat the atomic bomb as sublime or totalizing. Jean Toomer's Southwestern writing from before 1945, including the Taos play, A Drama of the Southwest, helps create an intimate portrait of how the atomic bomb reshapes Toomer's sense of world politics and American racial politics. Toomer, who once expected America's race-relations problems to be solved by interracial marriage and the eventual creation of a new, hybrid American race, experienced the bomb as so threatening that it compressed the future time available: intermarriage would now be too slow; education would be too slow; there was only radical spiritual transformation, the turning of human hearts from war, left to hope for. My final chapter traces the textual history of Leslie Marmon Silko's environmental literature classic, Ceremony, to its surprising beginnings as a non-nuclear, urban novel of a young Chicana-Pueblo woman. Silko only later introduces the atomic bomb into Ceremony and places it in service to her remarkably capacious and intersectional vision of the earth's problems.