Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word by Peter Schwenger

Abstract

NOTE 1 All quotations from “Little Gidding” are to T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974). El iza b e t h D. h a r v e y / University of Western Ontario Peter Schwenger, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). xviii, 163. $38.50 (U.S.) cloth, $12.95 (U.S.) paper. Peter Schwenger’s Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word is a work of impressive range and great interest. Like one of Giacometti’s stilt-legged figures it’s built to stand astride a wide expanse of territory, enacting a nimble balancing act from one step to the next. Letter Bomb is most directly concerned with what has been called “nuclear criticism,” which studies the ways we are “held hostage” by our fears of the bomb, as well as interpreting works of fiction — Schwenger calls them “nuclear novels” — that depict the elaborate lengths to which postwar society has gone to consign its fears of nuclear disaster to the realm of dreams and the unconscious (65-66). But in the course of his discussion Schwenger also offers a careful reading of Lacanian theories of the subject, and a consideration of the sacrificial implications of “holocaustal” events, evoking, as they must, archaic rites in which a burnt offering is “dedicated exclusively to God.” 1 And Letter Bomb is haunted by the ever-present influence of Jacques Derrida, whose early essay on nuclear criticism, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” seems to have had a strong impact on Schwenger’s work. Derrida’s essay is in fact an exhilarating manifesto, an ironic yet insistent account of the ominous threat of nuclear war in our imaginative lives. “Who can swear,” he asks, “that our unconscious is not expecting this? dreaming of it, desiring it?” 2 Written in 1984 for the colloquium that inaugurated nuclear criticism as a genre of study, Derrida’s essay is rendered somewhat outdated by the Soviet Union’s recent collapse and the end of the Cold War, but the tenor of his argument remains central to Schwenger’s readings of the nuclear novels of Russell Hoban, Thomas Pynchon, Denis Johnson, Bernard Malamud, Maggie Gee, Tim O’Brien, and David Brin. Schwenger allows, with Derrida, that total nuclear war is “fabulously tex­ tual,” a phantasm that has not taken place, and can only be spoken or written about (68). He distinguishes as well between the established tradi­ tion of apocalyptic thinking, with its urge toward an unveiling of Truth or Revelation, and the capability of nuclear disaster, by the sheer completeness of its destruction, to reveal, quite literally, nothing. Schwenger differs from 360 Derrida, however, in his lack of interest in historicizing the arms race and its implications, choosing instead to figure the “suspended potential” of nuclear disaster as a unique “abyss” against which we must struggle if we are to be able “to imagine a future” (xi, 121-22). Schwenger sees in the work of nuclear novelists — as well as in the films of Andrey Tarkovsky and in Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) — a commitment to evoking the abysmal outcome of total nuclear war. By imagining disaster, he argues, we can confront our fears openly and avert the worst. Glass’s opera, with its roiling, repetitive phrases lulls its audience into a hypnotic trance evocative of the lull before a disaster: [I]n the premiere performance, after the first couple of hours, a simple key change sent waves of screaming through the audience. But the real explosion is within, in that knowledge . . . of the disaster buried not within concrete silos in the ground but within the abyss of ourselves. (102) In Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), Schwenger argues, the filmmaker comes to terms with the nuclear threat by devising a highly ritualized relationship with each scene and image he presents, repeating them with minor variations the way a religious imagination returns to talismanic sites of sacred power. This process of return, against a backdrop of imminent destruction, invokes a fundamental “change” and the all-important “task of creating a future” : Frame after frame passes by in repetition, to all...