The Nightmare Considered: Critical Essays on Nuclear War and Literature, and: Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom, and: Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word

“This is a difficult moment,” writes Nancy Anisfield, “to present a study of nuclear war literature” (p. 1). Now that the Cold War has been transformed into a battle to create open markets in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the relevance of new books about the politics and literature of nuclear war might seem to require some justification. However, while some governments may have disappeared or the rulers changed, nuclear weapons are still with us. It is a testimony to how much our concerns were focused on the politics rather than the technology that there is a general relief of tension around nuclear weapons.

The three books in this review focus on the weapons and their effects—past, present, and future—rather than on the specific relations between nuclear- weapon-holding governments. Each of the books under review, despite its different approach and emphasis, argues for the relevance of literary study to the debates surrounding nuclear weapons. As Anisfield says, “Isolating the academic from the political is as naive as believing imaginative literature has no impact on history or societal change” (p. 1).

Nancy Anisfield’s Nightmare Considered is a collection of essays about literature dealing with nuclear weapons and nuclear war. The book is divided into two sections. Essays in the first section address the general topic of nuclear weapons and literature, while those in the second discuss specific texts or authors. It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to the many essays in this text. However, I will briefly mention those I found most interesting.

H. Bruce Franklin’s “Fatal Fiction: A Weapon to End All Wars” discusses literature as both a specific influence on Harry Truman and a marker of the cultural myth that the possession and use of a superweapon by the United States would bring world peace. Jacqueline Smetak, in “Sex and Death in Nuclear Holocaust Literature of the 1950s,” characterizes the 1980s as a revision of the 1950s. Both periods, she argues, were times when Americans conflated womb and tomb, sought Eden in the grave, and punished themselves for their wealth and well-being through a new Puritanism and a fascination with destructive weapons. In “Psychic Numbing, Radical Futurelessness, and Sexual Violence in the Nuclear Film,” Jane Caputi defines “nuclear films” as films that do not necessarily use nuclear war as a theme, but display the psychological effects of the nuclear age: an ephemeralism that undermines relationships, a sense of futurelessness, and religious fundamentalism. She offers innovative readings of Night of the Living Dead, River’s Edge, and The Dead Zone, among others, as reflections of a “nuclear consciousness” that is widespread, though largely unrecognized. In “News” Jim Schley compares excerpts from three prose passages—an encyclopedia article, a newsmagazine article, and an interview—that take nuclear war as a “point of contemplation” with Denise Levertov’s poem “Watching Dark Circle.” He finds that, while all four texts are rhetorically effective in presenting news, the poem has a more powerful emotional impact because it uses the rhetorical techniques of the others in addition to the more literary techniques of allusion, metaphor, rhythm, personification, sensual appeal, and dramatic narrative.

The collection is marred by annoying typographical errors that should have been caught in proofreading. There is also an odd slip on the part of Jerome Klinkowitz, a Vonnegut expert. He writes that Galápagos shows a “virtually total destruction of the world’s civilization in a nuclear war” (p. 197), though humans die out not because of nuclear weapons, which are insignificant in...