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  • Atomic Clock: Postmodernism and the Time of Nuclear War
  • Sean McCann (bio)
Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 208 pp. $49.50; $22.50 paper.

Why should we care about metafiction? The original answer was that postmodern fabulation was the cutting edge of literary experiment and the only hope for refilling the exhausted stocks of arid modernism with fresh springs of replenishment. Then there were the various, poststructurally inflected versions of this argument—the postmodern novel as the vehicle of writerly jouissance, or as the embrace of the simulacrum, or as the subversion of enlightenment reason; the metafictional text as the exploration of the artifice of historical narrative, or as the final submission to the depthless culture of late capitalism. To these epoch-defining theories, Daniel Grausam’s On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War proposes a somewhat more historically focused modulation. The high-art, ultra-self-reflective, elaborately fabricated fictional texts that enjoyed prestige in the U.S. from the mid-1960s through somewhere near the end of the twentieth century were, in Grausam’s account, the literary voice of anxieties created by the cold war. More specifically, they were the narrative mode most suited to grappling with the terror of the Bomb. “American postmodern fiction,” Grausam contends, “is an effect of, and, increasingly, an attempt to understand, life lived under the threat of total nuclear war” (4). [End Page 592]

There is a lot to be said in favor of this argument, and Grausam presents his case with admirable clarity, grace, and concision. In six chapters that offer extended close readings of major works by John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Richard Powers, Grausam reminds us of just how saturated the big works of the sixties and seventies were in the atmosphere of nuclear dread, how frequently they displayed a nearly transfixed fascination with the terminology and technology of atomic warfare, and how often later writers like Powers or David Foster Wallace looked back on the fading memory of the cold war as a time of momentous origins. The result is a welcome corrective to the high formalism that has often characterized the discussion of postmodern fiction. As Grausam emphasizes, despite their oft-avowed and frequently celebrated self-referentiality, postmodern fictions offer some pretty direct commentary on the world made by the Bomb. These appear, Grausam points out, not only in the explicit references to atomic weapons in, say, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or DeLillo’s Underworld (1997); they are more importantly evident in the way that postmodern texts engage with the ideological frameworks that surrounded atomic weaponry during the cold war. Thus Grausam explains that Barthelme’s legendary “Game” (1965)—the first-person narrative of a soldier driven to lunacy by his confinement in the underground silo of an intercontinental ballistic missle—goes beyond a dramatization of the madness of nuclear brinksmanship to explore the implications of the game theory promoted by defense intellectuals in the 1960s. Similarly, in a high point of his study, Grausam shows that DeLillo’s End Zone (1972) not only made hay of the idea of global war as the grand strategic conflict of ideological enemies; it more pointedly engaged with the changing ways of conceiving nuclear warfare that accompanied the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the era and the contemporaneous emergence of the idea of anti-ballistic missile technology.

Seeing such focused political engagement, Grausam suggests, gives us a much richer sense of the implications of postmodern experiment. Indeed, he contends that it may fundamentally alter our sense of the ideological import of such experiment. The [End Page 593] emphasis on simulation and fabulation in Barthelme’s story is not a celebration of imaginative play and its evasion of history, Grausam argues, but an “implicit pathologization of the culture of war-gaming” (89). Similarly, the historical fabrication that takes over Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) reflects less a delight in literary artifice than a desperation at the threat of the utter destruction of the future: “relentless metafictional play emerges not as the denial of historical reference, but as the emergence...

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