On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

3 /The Time of the Nation, the Time of the State

3 / The Time of the Nation, the Time of the State Early in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) the reader gets another shock. We’ve already had to process that Richard Nixon narrates much of the novel, that the Rosenbergs are going to be executed in Times Square during a giant public party, and that Uncle Sam is a “real” person rather than a mythic hero. Now, during a particularly loaded golf game between Richard Nixon and Uncle Sam, the intimacy of Nixon’s contact with the national symbolic turns into pure absurdity. The urgency with which Sam has been forcing Nixon to pursue the execution of the Rosenbergs becomes newly marked by an unexpected affective dimension : the outcome of the Rosenberg case could determine not just the score in a particular encounter with the Soviet threat but the outcome of the entire Cold War now that the very existence of Uncle Sam is at stake: “Oh, I ain’t immortal, son. I’d hate to think I was. Nothin’ goes on forever, Amber, not even History itself, so why should I?”1 I begin with this passage because it so elegantly condenses some of Coover’s major concerns in the novel, which is itself a kind of conversation between “real” history and extravagant fabulation, here represented in a conversation between Nixon and Uncle Sam. As critics have pointed out, this is perhaps the central problem the novel poses for readers: to call it autotelic metafiction respects its extravagant fabulation, but ignores the scrupulous historical research that went into it; to call it a historical novel misses its frankly bizarre unreality, and its commitment to representing history as almost purely discursive.2 Set in the three days 60 / ON ENDINGS leading up to the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953, its cast includes the notable American political personae of the time: Nixon, Eisenhower, Hugo Black, Joe McCarthy, and William Douglas are but a few of the characters. The executions take place in Times Square, on the night of the Rosenbergs’ fourteenth anniversary, at an event organized by a virtual who’s who of America: Cecil B. DeMille, Bernard Baruch, Betty Crocker, Conrad Hilton, Sam Goldwyn, Walt Disney, Ed Sullivan, the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the chiefs of staff, and the Holy Six are among the members of a vast organizing committee. As I show in the next few pages, this exchange between Nixon and Uncle Sam also raises some of the key issues that have largely been ignored in scholarship on the novel, which has failed to grasp fully the novel’s complex argument about the relationship between state power and national iconography . For in addition to being a conversation between “real” history and fabulous invention, this scene is also a moment in which the executive branch of the government is talking to the national symbolic itself.3 Whatever the reader’s reaction to the golf scene might be, for Nixon this encounter is devastating. Uncle Sam is offering a new understanding of the stakes of the Cold War: it isn’t simply that the United States might lose but that, in losing, the very idea of America, an idea usually abstracted into the symbolic dimension yet here incarnated in a living, and potentially mortal being, might perish as well. The stakes of war are now such that losing means more than occupation, collaboration, or colonization, events that would hold out hope for the reestablishment of America, and American ideals, in some imaginable future. In contrast, if the Cold War goes hot, America might cease to exist as both a living reality and an abstract ideal, as both contemporary avatar and future dream. A mortal Uncle Sam is able to make the nation both incredibly powerful and hauntingly ephemeral, a live presence in the everyday experience of the citizenry and yet threatened with destruction at any moment. Nixon becomes the perfectly interpellated national subject in his imagination of the nation as both strong and directly interested in him, while being simultaneously vulnerable enough that his own actions matter. The rhetoric of national strength and national vulnerability that underwrote the ideas of civil defense, McCarthyism, and domestic containment could find no fitter send-up than this preposterous encounter.4 And while this may seem merely emblematic of early Cold War fears of national destruction , it is important to note that this is an idiosyncratic imagining of that destruction: the typical postapocalyptic text witnesses the destruction...