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112 under the shadow Once the Soviet Union demonstrated that it possessed an atom bomb in 1949, the nuclear arms race got under way, and there was real danger that such atomic weapons might be used against China during the Korean War, as General MacArthur recommended in 1951. The following year Bernard Wolfe published his novel Limbo, which presented a satirical parable on the roots of war in human aggressionandwhichisuniqueinnuclearwarfictionbecauseofthesheerbreadth of its intellectual reference. In his afterword he explicitly denied a predictive dimension to his novel: “Anybody who ‘paints a picture’ of some coming year is kidding—he’s only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centred), not utopic (tomorrow-centred). This book, then, is a rather bilious rib on 1950.”1 This was a yearfilledwithdebateoverthenewhydrogenbomb,anincreaseinAmericancivil defense measures, and a virtual acceptance that a third world war was inevitable. Against such a background Wolfe pitted his sardonic black humor. The novel is set in the year 1990 in the aftermath of the Third World War, which broke out in 1972. The enormous devastation of the war has reduced the habitable land area of the eastern and western United States. The country has become reduced to the Inland Strip, since all seaboards have been laid waste, and a confederation loosely analogous to the Soviet Union has emerged called the Eastern Union.2 The protagonist is Dr. Martine, a medical officer who fled during the war to an uncharted island in the Indian Ocean where he has been performing experimental lobotomies on aggressive locals. When a group of Americans with prosthetic limbs visits the island, Martine decides to return to America, where he finds to his amazement that facetious remarks he made in a wartime journal have chaPter 7 The Pathology of Warfare in Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo the Pathology of warfare in limbo 113 been taken seriously and, in the wake of the war, developed into an international movement,“Immob”(i.e.,Immobilization),dedicatedtotheeradicationofhuman aggression by voluntary amputations (“Vol-amp”) and their replacement by prosthesis . The novel traces Martine’s gradual discovery of this movement and reaches its climax at the prosthetic Olympic Games when the Eastern Union team guns downthejudgesandwarbreaksoutagain,thistimeonasmaller,containablescale. This war comes to an end with the death of the Western premier and overthrow of the Eastern Union regime by its citizens, and the novel concludes with Martine returning to his island. Limbo is a text of its time in that it places the threat of nuclear war at the center of its action, Martine’s search to find out what is happening in the world about him. It is, in short, a novel of attempted diagnosis combined with political enquiry, an appropriate first work from a Yale psychology graduate who served for a time on Trotsky’s staff in Mexico and then held a series of posts as editor or correspondent for a number of periodicals. Limbo has been routinely mentioned in histories of dystopias and more recently within the context of cybernetic fiction .3 True, a few lone voices have spoken up on behalf of Wolfe. J. G. Ballard, for one, has recorded his great respect for the author’s “lucid intelligence” that so impressed him that he began to write fiction himself. And Carolyn Geduld has done an outstanding job of explaining Wolfe’s interest in Freudian psychology.4 Recently there have been some signs of a rise of interest in Wolfe, who is now being read as a precursor of cyberpunk, but the risk there is of forgetting the period of unparalleled world crisis out of which the novel grew: It was published in the same year that the United States detonated its first H-bomb in Eniwetok Atoll. Notsurprisingly,Wolfetookthearmsraceandhumanaggressioningeneralas his subject, but he chose an unusual and unfashionable method in his approach. The dust jacket of the first edition promised the reader that Limbo was a “novel of action, suspense, adventure, science-fiction and sex.” For once this description did not overstate the case, since the novel constantly disconcerts the reader by moving from genre to genre. In fact, it belongs within the mode of encyclopedic narratives identified by Edward Mendelson and exemplified in works such as Moby-Dickand Ulysses.ForMendelson,thisgenreisitselfmultigenericandinclusive : “Encyclopedic narrative identifies itself not by a single plot or structure, but by encompassing a broad range of qualities.”5 Limbo does exactly this. It includes within itself, among other genres, the novel of espionage...

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