SLSL Intro "Our Common Nightmare"

[Dave Monroe]

   "I don't mean to make light of this.  Our common
nightmare The Bomb is in there too.  It was bad enough
in '59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger
has continued to grow.  There was never anything
subliminalabout it, then or now.  Except for that
succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed
power since 1945, including the power to do something
about it, the rest of us poor sheep have always been
stuck with simple, standard fear.  I think we have all
tried to deal with this slow escalation of our
helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us,
from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. 
Somehwere on this spectrum of impotence is writing
fiction about it--occasionally, as here, offest to a
more colorful time and place." (SL, "Intro," pp. 18-9)

and the Exploding Word (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1992), Ch. 2, "Holocaust and Sacrifice," Sec. 1,
"Hiroshima in the Morning," pp. 47-67 ...

"... I am now turning to a text that is ostensibly not
about Hiroshima, a novel in which the bombing of that
city is relegated to its usual place in Western
literature, to the unconscious, here a textual
unconscious.  But I hope to show that such an
unconscious is the real subject of the book, the Real
enveloped with the dream that is Gravity's Rainbow."
(p. 57)

   "Of the many reasons why Thomas Pynchon's novel
encourages this sort of interpretation, not the least
is the fact that Gravity's Rainbow begins with an
actual dream ...." (p. 57)

"One recalls Freud's observation in The Interpretation
of Dreams: 'Real and imaginary events appear in dreams
at first sight as of equal validity ....'" (p. 58)

   "The language of Gravity's Rainbow also allies it
to the unconscious.... flickers with dense allusions,
witticisms, restless verbal energies that seem on the
verge opf taking on lives of their own....  Language
makes unpredictable sorties into the unconscious,
challenging the view of language as controlled
communication between an autonomous sender and
reciever ...." (p. 59)

   "In such ways the manifest content of Pycnhon's
novel may be read as that of a dream.  Like a dream it
has latent content; and that latent content, I would
argue, is summed up in Hiroshima....  Hirsohima is all
but absent.  Aside from an ironic flicker when a
Japanese [sic] speaks of returning to the peace of his
hometown, the name of Hiroshima apears only once in
the book, as a cryptic fragment:

[...]

MB DRO
ROSHI

[here citing GR, Pt. IV, pp. 693-4, from "In one of
these streets" to "it is also, perhaps, a Tree" ...]

[...]

"... the scrap of paper is detached from the realm of
the factual; thereby both letter and image are
rendered cryptic.  This cryptic quality, like that of
dreams, encourages a deciphering process that involves
a spreading network of associations; within that net
is captured more of the truth of Hiroshima than could
have been presented by the full official page.  That
truth is an unconscious one in two senses.  It is a
revelation of the unconscious forces that manifest
themselves at Hiroshima; and it is a revelation that
takes place, for Slothrop, only at the unconscious
level: 'He doesn't remember sitting on the curb for so
long staring at the picture.  But he did' ([GR, p.]
694).
   "And as for us, staring at another fragment, this
fragment from Pynchon's novel, what can we decipher of
Hiroshima?  Many routes could be taken through the
labyrinthine associations of this passage.  At this
time, I will analyze only the genital pattern...."
(pp. 59-60)

"It is thereby implied that 'official,' banal, and
unthinkingly accepted patterns are linked with what
was soon to become known as the Unthinkable; that
there is a psycopathology of everyday life which
eventually manifests itself in some such form as
Hiroshima." (p. 61)

"The attempt to realize in the world something of
which we are not even conscious leads ultimately to
events such as Hiroshima." (p. 62)

"Searching for the secret of his childhood trauma,
Slothrop finds only a widening network of connections
on all levels of society, where even suppsed enemies
are knotted together in vast cartels.  What he learns
on a social level is the Lacanian truth of 'his
relation as a subject to the signifier'....
   "Not surprisingly, Slothrop's reaction to all this
is full-blown paranoia, a common effect of the
castration complex.... we must resist the tendency (a
somewhat paranoid one) to make the simple distinction
between 'us' and 'them' ....  Paranoia and
aggressivity are recognized by psychoanalysis as two
sides of the same coin.  So the paranoid vision
repeatedly referred to in Gravity's Rainbow when
turned inside out is a study of aggression.  In
Lacanian terms, it is the inversion of the
aggressivity that arises out of the futile and
continually frustrated attempt at full realization of
the self ....  Not a personal trauma but a universal
condition is the source of paranoid aggressivity.  Its
recurrent expression on the national scale is war
...." (pp. 63-4)

   "The ways in which latent content is manifested in
Gravity's Rainbow are the classic ones of displacement
and condensation.  In a novel written during the
nuclear age, the view of German rocketry as the
ultimate in terror can only be ironic; it is clarly
the displacement of a threat that is so much more
terrifying than that one that it cannot be apprehended
directly.  Moreover ... indirections proloferate.  One
clue leads to another ....  The process is metonymic,
with parts substituting for wholes and for the
wholeness of understanding toward which Slothrop
aspires.  Finally the wholeness of his own self is
lost as he splinters into a series of moemntary
identities.  this is parallel to a movement in the
novel which expands characters, alliances, cartels,
until the sheer multiplied mass of these begins to
fall back on itself in a process akin to
condensation.... takes place at the level of the
unconscious.  If condensation is a metaphor, it
remains impossible to say exactly what this novel is a
metaphor of.  i have suggested Hiroshima; but perhaps
it is Hiroshima that is the metaphor, condensation of
all the forces that can only be sensed through their
effects.
   "The 'resolution' of Gravity's Rainbow is thus
nobody's property: it is always that of the Other.... 
The rocket's arc ... holds all the novel's events in
suspense--a suspense that is simultanously literary,
psychological, political.  Literary: the search for a
secret, as in the detective novel ....  Psychological:
deferral, where the secret may not even be recognized
as such until sometime later and is meanwhile
relegated to that deepest locus of secrecy, the
unconscious.  Political: nuclear politics as another
case of continued deferral.  Of all the horrors of
Hirsohima, that which distinguishes it from every
comparable horror is that it is not finished.... We
relegate the implications of Hiroshima to the
unconscious and suspend them there." (pp. 64-6)

   "Whether Pynchon intended all this ...--these
questions are beside the point.  If Lacan's theories
partake of truth--a word that he insists on--then they
must be 'there' in that presence which is defined by
its absence from consciousness.  And a writer's
associations may then coalesce in language that hints
at that other language, language of the Other, which
is the unconscious....  The forces that manifested
themselves at Hiroshima are latent in our own lives. 
attempting to read the unconscious through a contained
text, we remain oblivious of the degree to which it
continues beyond its borders, containing us in turn."
(p. 66)

Cf. not only ...

"... we are often unaware of the scope of and
structure of our ignorance.  Ignorance is not just a
blank space on a person's mental map.  It has contours
and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation
as well." (SL, "Intro," pp. 15-6)

But also ...

"By 1945, the factory system--which, more than any
piece of machinery, was the real and major result of
the Industrial Revolution--had been extended to
include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range
rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz.
It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how
these three curves of development might plausibly
converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we
have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control,
and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes,
unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance
of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body
counts has become--among those who, particularly since
1980, have been guiding our military
policies--conventional wisdom."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

Boyer, Paul.  By the Bomb's Early Light:
   American Thought and Culture at the Dawn
   of the Atomic Age.  NY: Pantheon, 1985.
   
Chaloupka, William.  Knowing Nukes: The Politics
   and Culture of the Atom.  Minneapolis: U of
   Minnesota P, 1992.

Derrida, Jacques.  "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full
   speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)."
   Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 20-31.

Engelhardt, Tom.  The End of Victory Culture:
   Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a
   Generation.  NY: Basic Books, 1994.

Ferguson, Frances. "The Nuclear Sublime."
   Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 4-10.
 
Henriksen, Margot A.  Dr. Strangelove's America:
   Society and Culture in the Atomic Age.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 

Nadel, Alan.  Containment Culture: American
   Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age.
   Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

Schaub, Thomas.  American Fiction in the Cold War.
   Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 

Solomon, J. Fisher.  Discourse and Reference in
   the Nucelar Age.  Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988.

Weart, Spencer.  Nuclear Fear: A History of Images.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

Whitfield, Stephen J.  The Culture of the Cold War.
   Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

Winkler, Allan M. Life Under a Cloud: American
   Anxiety about the Atom.  NY: Oxford UP, 1993.
 

"offset to a more colorful time and place"

Anisfield, Nancy, ed.  The Nightmare Considered:
   Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature.
   Bowling Green, OH: BGSU Press, 1991.

Brians, Paul.  Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War
   in Fiction 1895-1984.  Knet, OH: Kent State
   UP, 1986.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/nuclear/nh-supplement.html

As well as, e.g., ...

http://umbc7.umbc.edu/~lharris/nuclear.htm

http://www.missouri.edu/~engtim/apoc/Readings.html

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/nukepop/index.html


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