The Brake of Time: Corso's Bomb as Postmodern God(dess)

Since its initial publication in 1958, Gregory Corso's surreal and ambiguous ode to the destructive power of the bomb has consistently aroused extreme reactions in its readers. In a 1959 Time magazine one reviewer scathingly quoted from "Bomb"'s enthusiastic final lines as a prime example of "Beat blather" that, in his eyes, was "certainly not literature" but was excellent for recitations in the bathtub ("Bang," 80). Corso's presentation of the poem to a poetry group at New College in England was met with frank hostility, ending with Corso and Allen Ginsberg being heckled and bombarded with the shoes of the offended members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Moraes, 67). In contrast to this negative reception, Ginsberg defended the poem in extravagant aesthetic terms, arguing that "it just reduces the bomb to insignificance because the poem is greater than the bomb" (Horovitz, 67). Even Ginsberg's reaction, however, fails to acknowledge that the poem is more than just a powerful, provocative, and often amusing piece of poetry. Corso's style is wild and impressionistic, but "Bomb" nevertheless articulates sophisticated social and religious questions that continue to plague us even after the fear of total nuclear holocaust has been eased somewhat by the end of the Cold War. Though "Bomb" overflows with surreal juxtapositions and farcical absurdity, the humor is not an end in itself but rather a tool to destabilize the reader's ingrained assumptions about nuclear apocalypse. Only after the reader has been disarmed by Corso's often hilarious treatment of a matter that is still deadly serious does the poet slip in the powerful, underlying central image--the bomb as a bringer of ultimate chaos, the brake of time itself, a postmodern god for a world that at Hiroshima suddenly realized its potential for self-annihilation.

Yet Corso does not leave the reader to morbidly ruminate over these dark images. Instead, the poet recovers his sense of humor, courting the bomb with a passionate love letter and finally launching into a wild celebration of destruction, reminiscent of a small boy's delight with a home chemistry set:

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM [. . .]
Yes Yes into our midst a bomb will fall (lines 165-67, 176)

Corso's journey into darkness is a direct prerequisite for this final ascent into a new and surprising light. The bomb is a reality; death is a reality, and for Corso, the only reasonable reaction is to embrace, celebrate, and laugh with the resulting chaos. Though "Bomb" contains a whisper of social criticism, it offers no impetus to fight to change the system. Corso himself, in fact, denied that the poem had any political message at all. As he explained in a rambling interview with Michael Andre and Robert King, his reaction to the anti-nuclear protests of the 1950s focused more on death itself than on the fear of nuclear holocaust: "People were worrying about dying by the Bomb in the Fifties. So I said, what about falling off the roof, what about heart attack. . . . old age I picked as being the heaviest--'old age, old age'" (Skau, "On Bomb"). Though Corso always distanced himself from the Buddhist beliefs of fellow Beats Ginsberg and Kerouac, "Bomb"'s embrace of death has Eastern influences of which Corso himself may have been unconscious. In the face of postmodern fragmentation, Corso's position is one that is extremely compatible with both Hindu and Buddhist traditions--a sense of resignation, coupled with a casting aside of order as a source of meaning in favor of increasingly ubiquitous chaos.

Critics of Stanley Kubrick's notorious satire Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb have suggested that the effectiveness of the film's humor is directly related to the taboo...