Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (review)

This volume addresses a gap in critical writing on the fiction of the Cold War. As Derek Maus rightly states, this criticism has focused overwhelmingly on U.S. fiction and more or less neglected Russian writing from the same period. Maus takes a historicist approach to his material following lines opened up by, among other critics, Paul Maltby in his Dissident Postmodernists (1991), where he argues that writers such as Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon engage adversarially with the discourses of their culture, attempting to question institutionalized codes by destabilizing them in narratives. Maltby's approach is close to Linda Hutcheon's notion of "historiographic metafiction," which she proposed in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and which continues to bear fruit in studies like Unvarnishing Reality. Maus continues this collective critical enterprise, which has a particular value in questioning the reductive grand narratives of the Cold War.

Maus divides his study into five main sections. The first discusses the general role of literature in the Cold War, and the second elaborates this preamble by considering intersections between literature and politics. Then follow chapters on the subversion of oversimplified logic, critiques of utopia, and finally attacks on the totalizing rhetoric of the period. Throughout Unvarnishing Reality critical analyses of American writing alternate with discussions of Russian fiction, and the latter are consistently clear and informative. It is no small achievement for Maus to complement accounts of American Cold War fiction with these descriptions, and a picture emerges with unexpected similarities between the two cultures. Just as the United States demonized the Communist bloc as a hostile Other, so courageous Russian writers such as Alexander Zinoviev and Fazil Iskander attempted to subvert the Soviet demonization of the West by parodying the language of officialdom. Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights even parodies ideology as an enforced pattern of trousers, and Iskander deploys animal fables possibly comparable to Animal Farm. In Maus's account he explains the different strategies used by Russian writers, strategies such as mimicking official discourse or parodying Soviet realism. When he describes Vasilly Aksyonov's Our Golden Ironburg as a "fragmented and meandering narrative" (158), this is not so much a value judgment as an explanation of how the narrative form itself could make a political statement. Throughout Unvarnishing Reality Maus gives us tantalizing glimpses of the sheer difficulties, not to say dangers, confronting Russian satirists, and although he does differentiate between the post-Stalin thaw and the Brezhnev years, for instance, a Western reader would particularly appreciate more information on underground publishing, the process of emigration, and other such issues.

The American writers whom Maus discusses are those who most directly engage with the politics of discourse. Thus Coover's The Public Burning is rightly given prominence for its ironic depiction of the Rosenberg trial and its ribald satire of Richard Nixon as an opportunist demagogue. Gravity's Rainbow is another of Maus's central texts, again logically so for its exploration of the roots of the Cold War. The Crying of Lot 49 is discussed as another work proposing a polyvocal culture as against the binary opposites the protagonist struggles with. This again is consistent with Maus's main line of argument, but the latter tends to make the discussion of Pynchon's second novel rather reductive. Oedipa Maas struggles to cope with the welter of messages that bombard her from the media and suffers an information overload as a result. Similarly, when discussing Catch-22 as another attack on Cold War binaries, Maus argues that Heller revises World War II, but the main point of Heller's subject is that he has superimposed the Cold War onto World War II with the result that the Germans recede as opponents and war becomes relocated within the American military hierarchy.

Taking leads from Pynchon's essay "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?" and Derrida's famous 1984 essay "No...