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In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age

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Abstract

Dewey focuses on seven novels that touch the variety of generic experiments and postures of the post-World War 11 American novel. These novels by Vonnegut, Coover, Percy, Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo represent a significant argument concerning the American literary response to living within the oppressive technologies of the Nuclear Age. Departing from other studies that veer toward speculative fiction or toward the more narrowly defined religious angles, In a Dark Time defines the apocalyptic temper as a most traditional literary genre that articulates the anxieties of a community in crisis, a way for that community to respond to the perception of a history gone critical by turning squarely to that history and to find, in that gesture, the way toward a genuine hope.
Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Tamar Hager
Source:
Poetics Today,
Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 612-613
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772658 .
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612 Poetics
Today 12:3
Joseph Dewey, In a Dark Time: The
Apocalyptic Temper
in the American Novel of
the Nuclear Age. West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University
Press, 1990. 255 pp.
Joseph Dewey explores the features of American apocalyptic literature writ-
ten in response to the nuclear threat and nourished by the horrible spectacles
of the devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "The boiling columns of the Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki blasts raised questions that could not be answered by
either the reassuring certainties of the new physics or the nerveless, calm
necessities of geopolitics," Dewey asserts. "There seemed born into the world a
most supernatural presence, one that commanded a religious response" (p. 5).
Nevertheless the reaction of American literature to the atomic horrors was
delayed for two decades since authors were incapable of overcoming the politi-
cal barrier of the U.S. government (including various attempts to silence the
nuclear debate) and the psychological difficulties raised by the encounter with
the total destruction. Save for authors of speculative fictions that early em-
braced atomic devastation, the American literary community pondered the
bomb sporadically. Only in the '60s, after the nuclear crisis in Cuba, did the
American novel begin to explore the bomb. According to Dewey, however,
American literature had been most fascinated by the power and myth of the
apocalypse long before the mushroom cloud covered Hiroshima. The history
of apocalyptic writings in the North American continent began with the first
Puritan pioneers in the New World. Theirs was an era of crisis as a result
of the difficulties posed by the new environment. One way to cope with this
uncertain present was to adopt an apocalyptic mood, that is, to explain the
crisis as the end-point moment of a rigid linear pattern of history. Such a
response, indicates Dewey, characterizes most communities confronted by a
radical change, inter alia, American society, which has seldom been at rest.
Literature which addresses such crises in apocalyptic disguise, asserts
Dewey, can be separated into three broad types: the cataclysmic imagination,
the millennialist spirit, and the apocalyptic temper. Whereas the cataclysmic
imagination, whose province is speculative fiction, concentrates on the devas-
tating event itself and thus is end-oriented, the millennialist spirit focuses on
the better worlds which emerge from the ruins. The apocalyptic temper lies
between these two types of visions and suggests a way of collective coping with
a present crisis without avoiding the complicated structure of history, with
its shifts, contradictions, and sudden changes. According to these novels, "the
end serves only to create the urgency and the context for meaningful action
in a suspenseful present" (p. 15). Much of Dewey's study is dedicated to the
literary manifestations of the apocalyptic temper in the face of the nuclear
threat.
However, in order to establish the notion that American literature has ex-
plored the apocalyptic temper throughout various historical phases, he ana-
lyzes some early works which manifested eschatological outlooks. Jonathan
Edwards's religious sermons, Herman Melville's novels, and a literary work by
Nathaniel West are closely examined in relation to various cultural shifts and
changes during the passing centuries, which have also transformed apocalyp-
tic literature. According to Dewey, however, the bomb creates distinct physical
and cultural circumstances and conditions. Humanity, he argues, is no longer
New Books
at a Glance 613
New Books
at a Glance 613
spinning an imaginary ending, as in earlier times, but is confronting the pos-
sibility of a very real one. In the face of such a crisis, American literature has
reawakened the apocalyptic temper.
This modern revival is explored by analyzing literary works by six Ameri-
can novelists of the post-Hiroshima era. Kurt Vonnegut's ambiguous approach
towards end-time in Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five
is examined in the
first chapter. Whereas his narrators and characters confront the crisis with
cataclysmic imagination, Vonnegut himself refuses to accept the end of the
world as a real possibility. Robert Coover's metafiction The Origin of the Bru-
nists is discussed in the following chapter. Here, Dewey also emphasizes the
split between characters who believe in end-time and an author who employs
narrative structure to present an alternative to linear structure and thus, to
the end of the world. The third chapter is devoted to the modern theology
of Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos
Syndrome,
which focuses
mainly on various images of the saint. The celebration of the moment against
the background of a grim past and an explosive future in Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity' Rainbow is the main issue of the fourth chapter. The last subject is the
gripping claustrophobia in William Gaddis's Carpenter's
Gothic and the cohe-
sive vitality in Don DeLillo's White
Noise. Both authors react in their novels to
the anxieties provoked by the Reagan government and by the accident at the
Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in March 1979.
According to Dewey, all these writers confront the mushroom cloud like
biblical prophets, yet, unlike prophets, they mock, caricature, dismiss, and
undercut their depicted doomsayers, who can dream only of worlds following
paths to death. These characters who do not love life are defeated at the end.
Each novel, however, offers a minor character who asserts with conviction a
way out of the darkness, a way to live, a way to see in a dark time.
Tamar Hager
Mihai I. Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn:
Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern
Philosophical and Scientific
Discourse.
Ithaca
and London: Cornell
University
Press,
1989. xiii + 317pp.
R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations
in Play, Game, and Nar-
rative Theory.
Boston:
Northeastern
University
Press, 1990. xi + 317 pp.
R. Rawdon Wilson remarks on the absence from the by now extensive scholar-
ship on games and play of any history of these concepts, though he does credit
Mihai Spariosu with having made a preliminary sketch of such a history in
the first chapter of his Literature,
Mimesis,
and Play (1982). Now Spariosu has
gone on to fill the gap, at least partially, with Dionysus
Revisited, his history of
play and game concepts in philosophy and science since the Enlightenment.
Rather than a "systematic survey," this is, according to its author, "a series of
loosely connected essays or case studies" (p. xi), in which Spariosu has "at-
tempt[ed] to do for the concept of play what [Richard Rorty] has done for the
concept of representation" (p. 4, n. 7). The history Spariosu recounts revolves
around a broad cultural-historical distinction between two types of "mentali-
ties," which he calls "prerational" (associated, in the first instance, with the
pre-Socratic thinkers) and "rational" (dating from Plato and Aristotle). Each
spinning an imaginary ending, as in earlier times, but is confronting the pos-
sibility of a very real one. In the face of such a crisis, American literature has
reawakened the apocalyptic temper.
This modern revival is explored by analyzing literary works by six Ameri-
can novelists of the post-Hiroshima era. Kurt Vonnegut's ambiguous approach
towards end-time in Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five
is examined in the
first chapter. Whereas his narrators and characters confront the crisis with
cataclysmic imagination, Vonnegut himself refuses to accept the end of the
world as a real possibility. Robert Coover's metafiction The Origin of the Bru-
nists is discussed in the following chapter. Here, Dewey also emphasizes the
split between characters who believe in end-time and an author who employs
narrative structure to present an alternative to linear structure and thus, to
the end of the world. The third chapter is devoted to the modern theology
of Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos
Syndrome,
which focuses
mainly on various images of the saint. The celebration of the moment against
the background of a grim past and an explosive future in Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity' Rainbow is the main issue of the fourth chapter. The last subject is the
gripping claustrophobia in William Gaddis's Carpenter's
Gothic and the cohe-
sive vitality in Don DeLillo's White
Noise. Both authors react in their novels to
the anxieties provoked by the Reagan government and by the accident at the
Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in March 1979.
According to Dewey, all these writers confront the mushroom cloud like
biblical prophets, yet, unlike prophets, they mock, caricature, dismiss, and
undercut their depicted doomsayers, who can dream only of worlds following
paths to death. These characters who do not love life are defeated at the end.
Each novel, however, offers a minor character who asserts with conviction a
way out of the darkness, a way to live, a way to see in a dark time.
Tamar Hager
Mihai I. Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn:
Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern
Philosophical and Scientific
Discourse.
Ithaca
and London: Cornell
University
Press,
1989. xiii + 317pp.
R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations
in Play, Game, and Nar-
rative Theory.
Boston:
Northeastern
University
Press, 1990. xi + 317 pp.
R. Rawdon Wilson remarks on the absence from the by now extensive scholar-
ship on games and play of any history of these concepts, though he does credit
Mihai Spariosu with having made a preliminary sketch of such a history in
the first chapter of his Literature,
Mimesis,
and Play (1982). Now Spariosu has
gone on to fill the gap, at least partially, with Dionysus
Revisited, his history of
play and game concepts in philosophy and science since the Enlightenment.
Rather than a "systematic survey," this is, according to its author, "a series of
loosely connected essays or case studies" (p. xi), in which Spariosu has "at-
tempt[ed] to do for the concept of play what [Richard Rorty] has done for the
concept of representation" (p. 4, n. 7). The history Spariosu recounts revolves
around a broad cultural-historical distinction between two types of "mentali-
ties," which he calls "prerational" (associated, in the first instance, with the
pre-Socratic thinkers) and "rational" (dating from Plato and Aristotle). Each
... Lunde is not the only writer who utilises the apocalyptic to describe ecological collapse; in fact, the myriad of current examples of post-apocalyptic portrayals in literature, film, and video games attests to the popularity of this approach. The question of why these narratives are so popular right now has led several critics to argue that apocalyptic fiction can be read as a fundamental expressions of uncertainty, and eco-uncertainty in particular (Seymour 2018;Dewey 1990;Kermode 2000). Seymour (2018) proposes that the 'doom and gloom' rhetoric of much environmental fiction is an anticipatory structure that represents the human desire for 'certainty and neat narratives about the future' (3). ...
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This article offers a critical investigation of Norwegian author Maja Lunde’s novels Bienes historie and Przewalskis hest . By exploring Lunde’s dramatisation of species conservation, I argue that the novels embody a vision where human stewardship, control and knowledge provide ways of averting ecological collapse. Yet closer inspection of Lunde’s work reveals that the texts also undermine faith in human mastery and environmental stewardship by foregrounding animal bio-resistance and human vulnerability in the face of ecological collapse. By negotiating between these two stances, Lunde demonstrates literature’s potential to provoke reflection around, and expose seductive ideas about, human mastery and techno-scientific solutions to environmental problems.
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