THE APOCALYPSE ARCHIVE: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE NUCLEAR BOMB by Bradley ...

482 Pages·2013·1.76 MB·English

by  Bradley John Fest

THE APOCALYPSE ARCHIVE: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE NUCLEAR
BOMB

by
Bradley J. Fest
B. A. in English and Creative Writing, University of Arizona, Tucson, 2004
M. F. A. in Creative Writing, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, 2007

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh
2013
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented
by

Bradley J. Fest

It was defended on
17 April 2013
and approved by
Jonathan Arac, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English
Adam Lowenstein, PhD, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies
Philip E. Smith, PhD, Associate Professor of English
Terry Smith, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory
Dissertation Director: Jonathan Arac, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English

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Copyright © Bradley J. Fest
2013

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THE APOCALYPSE ARCHIVE: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE NUCLEAR
BOMB
Bradley J. Fest, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2013

This dissertation looks at global nuclear war as a trope that can be traced throughout twentieth
century American literature. I argue that despite the non-event of nuclear exchange during the
Cold War, the nuclear referent continues to shape American literary expression. Since the early
1990s the nuclear referent has dispersed into a multiplicity of disaster scenarios, producing a
“second nuclear age.” If the atomic bomb once introduced the hypothesis “of a total and
remainderless destruction of the archive,” today literature’s staged anticipation of catastrophe has
become inseparable from the realities of global risk. Consequently, to understand the relationship
between the archive of twentieth and twenty-first century disaster literature and the world risk
society, my dissertation revitalizes nuclear criticism by emphasizing the link between the
development of nuclear weaponry and communication technologies.
I read a group of writers for whom nuclear war functions more as a structural principle
than as a narrative event. William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923) is a significant
precursor of a nuclear imagination distinct from a more general apocalyptic imagination. By
imagining the destruction and reappearance of terrestrial life, Williams’s poem captures the
recursive character of the nuclear imagination. I then address the relationship between the
nuclear imagination, narrative, and the writing of history in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, and
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how his asymptotic engagement with nuclear war attempts to transform postmodernity’s sense of
an ending. David Foster Wallace’s subsequent response in Infinite Jest (1996) to US
metafiction’s apocalyptic atmosphere is transitional between the first and second nuclear ages,
reconfiguring the archive from a target of destruction into a system capable of producing
emergent disaster through accumulation. My dissertation thus draws together technologies of
destruction and preservation, and shows them to be inseparable in twentieth and twenty-first
century US literature.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.0 MUTUALLY ASSURED DECONSTRUCTION: NUCLEAR CRITICISM
AND AMERICAN APOCALYPTICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 INTRODUCTION: STAGING THE REALITY OF CONTEMPORARY
GLOBAL RISK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 “THE TWISTED LOGIC OF DREAMS”: THE HYPERREAL,
THE REAL, AND 9.11.01 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.3 NUCLEAR ANACHRONISM(S) AFTER THE COLD WAR: THE
LEGACIES OF DERRIDA’S “NO APOCALYPE, NOT NOW” . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.4 NUCLEAR DYNAMOS: HENRY ADAMS AND H.G. WELLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.5 NUKE THE MOON: DECLASSIFYING THE LONG NUCLEAR
TWENTIETH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.0 BY THE BOMB’S LATE LIGHT: PREFIGURING THE NUCLEAR
IMAGINATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.1 SKETCHING A NUCLEAR POETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.2 MAPPING THE NUCLEAR PRESENT: J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
AND GERTRUDE STEIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.3 APOCALYPSE 1.0: WALT WHITMAN AND THE MACHINIC
PHYLUM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.4 APOCALYPSE ON REPEAT: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’S
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SPRING AND ALL AND THE NUCLEAR IMAGINATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3.0 CRYSTALIZING NUCLEAR TEMPORALITY: THOMAS PYNCHON
AND ARCHIVAL HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
3.1 “SLOW LEARNER” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.2 ATOMIC MIMESIS: THE BOMB IN GRAVITY’S RAINBOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
3.3 NUCLEAR LUMINOSITY: THE FABULOUS METAHISTORICAL
TEXTUALITY OF MASON & DIXON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
3.4 HISTORICAL LUMINOSITY: CRYSTALLIZING NARRATIVE
TEMPORALITY IN AGAINST THE DAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
3.5 ARCHIVAL TIME: PYNCHONIAN INFORMATICS IN THE
CRYING OF LOT 49 AND INHERENT VICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
3.6 WRITING THE NETORK OF PYNCHON AND POST-NUCLEAR
SUBJECTIVITY IN GRAVITY’S RAINBOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
4.0 THE INVERTED NUKE IN THE GARDEN: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S
ARCHIVAL APOCALYPSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
4.1 A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN: ON DAVID
FOSTER WALLACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
4.2 GARDENING THE MACHINE: NARRATIVE LIMINALITY IN
THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
4.3 THE THREAT OF THE TEXT: IRONIC APOCALYPSE AND
“WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY” . . . . . . . . . 237
4.4 THE INVERTED NUKE IN THE GARDEN: ARCHIVAL EMERGENCE
AND ANTI-ESCHATOLOGY IN INFINITE JEST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
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4.5 “DATUM CENTURIO”: AT THE END OF ENDS, TOWARD A
HYPERARCHIVAL REALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
5.0 CODA: APOCALYPSE NETWORKS: REPRESENTING THE NUCLEAR
ARCHIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
5.1 THE BIG RED BUTTON AND THE KILL SWITCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
5.2 TALES OF ARCHIVAL CRISIS IN THE FIRST NUCLEAR AGE . . . . . . . . . . . 316
5.3 TALES OF ARCHIVAL CRISIS IN THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE . . . . . . . . 320
5.4 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHIVE TO COME, OR, THE TASK(S) OF
NUCLEAR CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 440

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LIST OF FIGURES

1. A Trip to the Moon (dir. George Méliès, 1902). Still courtesy of The Internet Movie
Database. Public domain. Page 48.
2. Atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. Photograph courtesy of the National
Archives. Public domain. Page 128.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Jonathan Arac for the unparalleled intellectual generosity he
showed to me throughout the composition of this dissertation. Thanks to Professor Philip E.
Smith for his careful reading, insightful comments, and the many recommendations for further
reading. Thanks also to Professor Adam Lowenstein for consistently challenging my thinking
and Professor Terry Smith for agreeing to take part in this project. I also owe a great deal of
gratitude to other teachers I have had. Don Bialostosky, Joseph Jones, Tomaž Šalamun, Michael
Sheehan, and Charles Sherry were of great importance in shaping my thinking at a young age. I
am grateful to my supportive friends and colleagues, Sean Anderson, Taylor Baldwin, Jamie
Bono, Sten Carlson, Charles Engebretson, Brendan Kerr, Steve Llano, Dean Matthews, Ryan
Pierson, Alexander Provan, Adriana E. Ramirez, Tom Sivili, and Joshua Zelesnick, who have
been listening to my ideas for years. Without their stimulating conversation this project would
have been scarcely conceivable. Thanks to my incredibly supportive family, and to my brother
Dr. Eric Fest for, among many other things, answering all my questions about optical physics.
And Racheal Forlow, my muse, my drudge, my dynamo, I owe the deepest thanks for your
patience, conversation, and love.
This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Dr. Mary Frances Fest. This would not have
been possible without her love, encouragement, and support.

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