Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative

Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk

Paul Crosthwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136826429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

The etymological affinity between 'criticism' and 'crisis' has never been more resonant than it is today, when social life is increasingly understood as defined by a succession of overlapping global crises: financial and economic crises; environmental crises; geopolitical crises; terrorist crises; public health crises. But what is the role of literary and cultural criticism in conceptualizing this atmosphere of perpetual crisis? If, as Paul de Man maintained, criticism necessarily exists in a state of crisis, in what ways is this condition intensified at a time when the social formations within which criticism operates and the cultural artefacts that it takes as its objects are themselves pervaded by actual and imagined states of emergency? This book, the first sustained response to these questions, demonstrates the capacity of critical thought, working in dialogue with key narrative texts, to provide penetrating insights into a contemporary landscape of global, manufactured risk. Written by an international team of specialist scholars, the essays in the collection draw on a wide variety of contemporary theoretical, fictional, and cinematic sources, ranging from Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson to Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and Lauren Beukes to Ghost and the James Bond and National Treasure series. Appearing in the midst of a phase of extraordinary turbulence in the fabric of our interconnected and interdependent world, the book makes a landmark intervention in debates concerning the cultural ramifications of globalization.

Part I
Critical Thought/ Critical Times

1 Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now?

Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk

Molly Wallace

Given its impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it?

–Andrew McMurray, “The Slow Apocalypse” (1996)

The future inhabits the present, yet it also has not yet come—rather like the way toxics inhabit the bodies of those exposed, setting up the future, but not yet manifest as disease, or even as an origin from which a specific and known disease will come.

–Kim Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal (2001)

THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE

From the start of what, in retrospect, may have been the first nuclear age, perhaps no image has so captured the sense of looming risk that nuclear weapons pose as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” an icon that has graced the cover of that publication since 1947. As the editors put it then, the Clock represents “the state of mind of those whose closeness to the development of atomic energy does not permit them to forget that their lives and those of their children, the security of their country and the survival of civilization, all hang in the balance as long as the specter of atomic war has not been exorcised” (“If the UN” 169). And, from its perilously close two minutes to midnight following the detonation of the first Soviet bomb in 1953 to its position at a relatively comfortable seventeen minutes to midnight in 1991, the Clock has stood as a barometer of the world’s proximity to its end. With the end of the Cold War, this icon might seem to have joined duck-and-cover drills and fallout shelters as an archaic relic of the atomic age; nevertheless, it has continued to mark the times—and has marched fairly steadily toward midnight, from fourteen minutes in 1995, to nine in 1998, to seven in 2002, each tick reminding us that, though the cultural obsession with the nuclear may have waned, we continue to live under the shadow of the atomic bomb.

But even as it represents the continuity of risk, the Clock has also changed with the times. Indeed, when it appeared on the cover of the publication in early 2007—reset to five minutes to midnight—its symbolic valence had subtly changed. Still measuring nuclear threats—the US’ then-interest in usable nukes, the spread of weapons to North Korea and potentially Iran, and the resurgence of investment in nuclear power—the Clock had also begun to register other risks that the Bulletin felt had graduated to the scale of the nuclear, including particularly climate change, but as the Bulletin’s scien-tific panel of sponsors added, also biotechnology and nanotechnology, an epochal shift that the Bulletin suggested constituted a “second nuclear age” (Board of Directors, “It Is Five Minutes” 66). As Sir Martin Rees, president of The Royal Society and a Bulletin sponsor, put it: “Nuclear weapons still pose the most catastrophic and immediate threat to humanity, but climate change and emerging technologies in the life sciences also have the potential to end civilization as we know it” (“‘Doomsday Clock’ Moves Two Minutes”). In the “second nuclear age,” then, the term “nuclear” appears to operate as a synecdoche for global environmental risk more generally, what German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called “world risk society.”

Periodizing the contemporary is always a tricky combination of divining and conjuring, but whether or not recent events warrant its inauguration, the Bulletin’s “second nuclear age” at least offers an occasion for reflec-tion on how we understand contemporary risk. Ticking back and forth between two and seventeen minutes to midnight over the last six decades, the Clock provides a kind of odd synchronicity, such that, for example, five minutes to midnight put 2007 roughly where the Clock stood in the mid- 1980s (between 1984’s three minutes and 1988’s six).¹ Taking inspiration from this temporal coincidence, this essay returns to that earlier moment of risk, and to an accompanying attempt to grapple with its implications: a foundational moment in what is sometimes still called “nuclear criticism,” a sub field of literary studies that has been, since the Cold War, largely neglected—and perhaps for good reason. Though there were multiple nuclear criticisms, variously poststructuralist and ethicopolitical, all varieties were predicated on features of the atomic age that were fairly specific to the Cold War moment—the rhetoric of deterrence and the imagining of total thermonuclear war—both of which, in the age of dirty bombs and mini-nukes, might feel a bit anachronistic. When what the Clock measures is no longer only nuclear, but also chemical, biological, and atmospheric, the speeds are varied and the ends less sure.

In the contemporary era of environmental destruction, ecocriticism, the study of literature and the environment, might seem, quite rightly, to have taken nuclear criticism’s place. In the process, however, as I will suggest, ecocriticism may have missed an opportunity to draw insight from this earlier work. My purpose here is not, however, to resurrect nuclear criticism as a field with its own conference or professional organization; rather, I return to this earlier work in order to suggest that bringing nuclear criticism and ecocriticism together under the rubric of something like a “risk criticism,” a literary critical version of Ulrich Beck’s risk society, might offer a way to theorize the mega-hazards of the present. And to do so in time—that is, in the risk temporality of the second nuclear age.

NUCLEAR CRITICISM’S ENDS

An analysis of the political and theoretical implications of the nuclear age, nuclear criticism reached the apex of professional respectability in 1984 when no less a luminary than Jacques Derrida joined other notables in a special issue of Diacritics devoted to the nuclear. His essay, on the “fabulously textual” qualities of the bomb, set off a veritable chain reaction of poststructuralist accounts, with some critics suggesting that nuclear criticism might take its place among feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, and other established subfields of literary studies. Despite the persistence of the nuclear after the Cold War, however, the half-life of nuclear criticism seems to be of a shorter duration, with only a few of the most resilient critics persisting today. As the Doomsday Clock suggests, time—and its end— had a key role in thinking the nuclear, in nuclear criticism fully as much as in nuclear popular culture. The discourses of deterrence, the notion of mutually assured destruction (or MAD), required the potential “midnight” of the clock—that is, the possibility that there would be no future. This certainly is the specter that haunts Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now.” Here, Derrida writes of the potential for a “remainderless cataclysm,” “a total nuclear war, which, as a hypothesis, or, if you prefer, as a fantasy, or phantasm” (“No Apocalypse” 21, 23), provides the condition of possibility for nuclear criticism—and ultimately for the literature that such criticism might take as its object.

Derrida’s essay offered, as Christopher Norris notes, something like a weak and a strong rationale for nuclear criticism, with the weak version essentially the argument for discourse analysis more generally (“Nuclear” 135). Because the nuclear war to which deterrence narratives referred had not happened, except in text, it could have no real referent—only, as Der-rida argued, a “signified referent” (“No Apocalypse” 23). Thus, the perpetual staging of that future event in the rhetoric of deterrence made nuclear war “fabulously textual”—though no less potentially hazardous as a consequence. Such textuality necessarily altered relations of expertise: because nuclear war has not occurred, no one is expert in it—all experts are working from speculative fictions (whether political or technoscientific)—and as readers of texts, literary and cultural critics are competent interpreters of the various representations of that fabulous event. The stronger rationale carried this argument a step further by suggesting that while the “remain-derless cataclysm” could never be a real referent, it was also the ultimate referent, a referent conjured by the sign that marked the very limits of sig-nification. Here, literature takes on a kind of analogical or homological relationship to the nuclear, for, if literature is defined, as Derrida suggests, as that which does not—as other discourses do—imply “reference to a real referent external to the archive itself,” then this is something that it shares with the nuclear, which also “produc[es] and harbor[s] its own referent” (“No Apocalypse” 26, 27). For Derrida, paradoxically, this “fabulous” referent is also “the only referent that is absolutely real” insofar as, if it were to come, it could not be recontained in the symbolic.

Thus, while the “weaker” version of nuclear criticism applies the analytical tools of rhetorical analysis to the texts that figure the bomb, this “stronger” rationale makes nuclear war into a special instance of literature in general. With the nuclear end representing the possibility of a remain-derless cataclysm, and literature representing that which can talk of nothing else, all literature becomes, in effect, nuclear literature, even when it does not thematize nuclear war and even when its publication precedes the nuclear age. Indeed, Derrida went so far as to tie “deconstruction” itself explicitly to the nuclear epoch. And other nuclear critics took up this association of textuality and the nuclear. Thus, Peter Schwenger, following on Derrida’s observation that a nuclear war—with no one left to commemorate its purpose or memorialize its ideals—would be the first (and last) war in the name of the name alone, described the nuclear in terms of “an extreme example of the dominance of signifier over signified” (xv), his concern not with what literature might tell us about the nuclear but “what the nuclear referent could tell us about literature” (xi). Similarly insistent on the symbolic power of the nuclear referent, William Chaloupka, alluding to the language of deterrence, asserted: “Never used but always effective, the power of the nuclearists could be seen as the greatest single accomplishment of the poststructuralist era” (12).

Nuclear criticism thus joined Cold War culture more generally in what Daniel Cordle has called a “state of suspense,” predicated on an end that could have come at any time, and which, when it came, was to have been sudden, precipitous, and total. Nuclear criticism was therefore necessarily oriented toward the future, but in a way that also required imagining the future’s non-existence. The representation of time and the temporalities of representation are consequently central preoccupations of this work. As Kenneth Ruthven puts it, the instantaneousness of annihilation “destroys that slow-motion time-sense which our language mimes in the tense-system of its verbs, which separate out a past that was from a present that is and a future that will be” (81). This, according to Ruthven, is how one might account for Derrida’s use of the future perfect in his “at the beginning there will have been speed”—“a nuclear beginning that will be simultaneously an end” (Ruthven 82). But this reading seems fairly imprecise, for the future perfect does not, in this case, accommodate the paradox of total thermonuclear war. Indeed, Richard Klein, commenting also on nuclear temporality, specifically rejects what he calls the “mimetic reassurance of a future anterior,” in which “the future is envisaged as if it were the past”: “Nuclear criticism denies itself that posthumous, apocalyptic perspective, with its pathos, its revelations, and its implicit reassurances” (77). If “there will have been,” there must be a future time at which this will be true, which the total apocalypse-without-revelation of nuclear criticism disallowed. Klein indicated that what nuclear criticism might require by contrast is “a new, nonnarrative future tense,” one that would avoid “the assumption that the future has a future” (76), and he experimented with the paradoxes of the “Class A Blackout” and the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”—both cases in which the future is predicated on a surprise that cannot be predicted—in order to grapple with this problem. In the case, then, of Derrida’s “total war,” Klein’s prisoner’s execution, or the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock, the cataclysm is always to come.

In retrospect, however, that “fabulous” end seems not to have come. The end of the Cold War and the dispersal of the referent-to-end-all-text called into question the utility of poststructuralist nuclear criticism. The focus on the textual qualities and future orientation of the bipolar nuclear conflict meant that nuclear critics to some extent colluded in the failure to recognize the multiplying effects of the nuclear on the ground. Nuclear critics tended to follow Derrida in saying that the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended a conventional war rather than setting off a nuclear one, a distinction that safely kept the nuclear in the realm of fable.² And as activists have long pointed out, the subsequent “fabulous” textuality that predominated in Cold War deterrence narratives always involved real explosions, nuclear tests that were to be read as signs pointing to that future annihilation. As the real people, animals, and plants that were subjected to such tests knew, these weapons were no less “real” for being treated as virtual. Of course, nuclear critics were not blind to the dangers of environmental peril, but the urgency of the fast apocalypse tended to eclipse that of the slow. As Schwenger put it:

For most people the most disturbing fact about nuclear temporality is the instantaneousness of nuclear annihilation. If, as we are coming to understand, time is running out for the environment, time is at least still running. Nuclear disaster, on the other hand, is capable of occurring at any moment, in a moment, with no time even for an explanation of why there is no time. (xiii)

When the nuclear is only partially annihilating, however, the uniqueness of nuclear time—its instantaneousness, its surprise—diminishes, even as other risks multiply. Time is certainly still running, even as the disaster is also occurring at any (and every) moment.

TIME TO MOVE ON?

As the urgency of nuclear peril appeared to wane in the early 1990s, concern with environmental issues—in literary studies as in the larger culture—grew. In an inversion of the order of priority outlined by Sch-wenger, by 1993, Kenneth Ruthven was noting that environmental issues were eclipsing the nuclear in perceived urgency and timeliness: “our desire to forget about nuclearism is encouraged by the new environmentalists, who keep telling us that we have much more immediate things to worry about. Indeed, some of the latest doomsayers appear to have traded in their old CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] badges so as to begin campaigning on a green ticket” (89). Those nuclear critics whose interest had long been more conventionally ethical and/or activist (rather than more theoretical) in several cases did shift their attention to the environment, but often in the process left behind the nuclear.³ In the Fall 1991 issue of the newsletter for the International Society for the Study of Nuclear Texts and Contexts, for example, Daniel Zins opens his essay “Seventeen Minutes to Midnight” by recalling the response of a colleague to his workshop on “Environmental Security”: “‘Daniel Zins—there’s another one!’” “What he meant,” Zins explains, “was that here was yet another individual who, preoccupied with the problem of nuclear weapons during the 1980s, was now turning his attention to the possibility of environmental holocaust” (6).⁴ Indeed, by the next—and final—issue of the newsletter in the Fall of 1992, the editor, Paul Brians, whose bibliography of nuclear texts provides an indispensible resource for the literature of the Cold War, was declaring “Farewell to the First Atomic Age”: “The period originally called ‘The Atomic Age’ has passed: no more dreams of unlimited ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: CRITICAL THOUGHT/CRITICAL TIMES
• PART II: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CRISIS NARRATIVES
• CONTRIBUTORS