The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Lindsey Michael Banco (review)

J. Robert Oppenheimer exists in my mind as a distinct silhouette, defined by the edges of his porkpie hat, and always in black and white. He is silent, strangely genderless and inert, and always at a distinct remove from the spectacle of the bomb. This is, I think, something very like the Oppenheimer that Lindsey Michael Banco is looking for, though he encounters many more Oppenheimers in the material he covers in The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is an unusual book in a huge and often unwieldy canon of literature on the Manhattan Project, and the atomic bomb more generally, in that it threads together a portion of the extant literature across disciplines and theoretical frameworks. While this is in one sense the strength and unique contribution of Meanings, the book ultimately lacks a connection to the larger historical context that would ground its findings in a recognizable shared imaginary.

Meanings is divided into three parts that zoom successively in on the corporeal Oppenheimer. This structure, which moves from biography and history, through textual fiction and into film, and finally to the multimedia experience of the museum and Oppenheimer's own construction of himself in his writings and lectures, is like a kind of archaeological expedition, where Banco peels back the layers of representation and shows that Oppenheimer is a construction, both literary and historical. Dividing the book by types of media, however, makes it very difficult for Banco to sustain the thematic threads with which he purports to be weaving all this material together. A recurrent reference to the project of Enlightenment science is made mostly irrelevant by a lack of historical grounding; and a hazy meditation on the subjectivity of history is only sporadically sharpened by his analysis.

Beginning with the texts of several biographies (Bird and Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and David Cassidy's J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century are discussed in the most detail), Banco anchors the first chapter around the idea of the desert, to draw out various authors' use of desert imagery or descriptions of Oppenheimer's connection to the landscape of New Mexico. The desert acts as a ground on which Oppenheimer's identity is constructed, as well as a metaphor for the multivalent nature of that process. Banco calls this desert the "cultural context" for these biographical fashionings of Oppenheimer, but they are in his examples almost completely depopulated and would better be described as an aesthetic context, which is what the chapter primarily uses.

The discussion of histories of the Manhattan Project and their various representations of Oppenheimer is constructed around the rhetorical and metaphorical object of the heliotrope in chapter 2. Atomic explosions are often described in terms of solar metaphors, and here Banco attempts to tie them to historical representations of Oppenheimer. This is least successful in his discussion of Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb, where the only solar imagery seems to me to be simple scene description of the environment and doesn't carry the mystical connotations or the metaphorical heft that Banco claims. By including both biography and history, purportedly factual texts, along with fiction and dramatization in the book, Banco reminds us that the mythologizing of Oppenheimer takes place even in representations that aspire to the truthiness of history.

Chapter 3 discusses fictionalizations of Oppenheimer in novels and feels like the most comfortable ground for Banco. The discussion of Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, in which Oppenheimer is transported to 2003, was lively and well chosen to make Banco's point about the vulnerability of history to nostalgia and radical reconfiguration. As in other places, the analysis, while useful, is not extended into a fully realized cultural context. The meanings that Banco identifies in these works don't seem to belong to any definite publics or imaginaries.

Part 2 focuses on the visual, beginning with photography in the introduction. Banco executes a deft...