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 ii Copyright © Bradley J. Fest 2013 iii 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 iv 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. v 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 vi 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 vii 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 viii 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. ix 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. x