Neon in Daylight

These three books all occupy the field of American studies, albeit in exceedingly individualistic and divergent ways. All three are first books by what the university system now terms early-career academics. Perhaps most interestingly, the three writers all manifest varying degrees of dissatisfaction with the confines of the standard academic monograph, and strive – for the most part, successfully and suggestively – to move beyond it.

Fabienne Collignon’s Rocket States will strike some as an exhilarating tour de force, where for the more conservative it may simply seem to be off the planet. Its object of scrutiny, nuclear missile and rocket culture, remains throughout the book and indeed throughout our lifetimes titanically real and yet ungraspable, a history of the long preparation for a world-ending war which has not yet come to pass. However, if nuclear annihilation has not yet occurred on a world-wide scale, neither has the Cold War, its most likely preface, ended. The stalemate of Mutual Assured Destruction – and this book can be read as an extended riffing on that slogan, in subtle as well as the expected ways – has now outlasted more than one generation, modulating with the times to generate here an iconography of terror, there a ghostly machinery inducing something close to nostalgia. For example, it is impossible not to find a visual charm in the 1930s diagrams of air warfare installations conjured by Nikola Tesla and reproduced in the book, in Collignon’s words ‘dream-like siege-systems’ which anticipate not only Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric-fuelled Star Wars initiative, but also the cultural longevity of the Batcave’s masked occupant, among the many flights from reality triggered by America’s perpetual and paranoid ambivalence over the colonisation of other spaces, versus withdrawal into its own armoured shell (p. 20). A reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Vietnam-era poem ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ highlights the prevalence, in his account of a road journey through Kansas, of towers, tanks, and silos which conjoin the military and the agricultural, conflating the flesh and metal of what the poem terms ‘the human meat market’ and the ‘giant demon machine’ (p. 53). To get to the historical roots of this kind of literary effect, Collignon unearths a 1945 address on ‘Thomas Jefferson – Founder of Modern American Agriculture’ by government secretary Claude R. Wickard, explicitly linking America’s military efforts in the Second World War to the ideal of an agrarian democracy, and then moves further back to Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address of 1801, on the topic of the American ‘experiment’:

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry.

(p. 55)

Virtually from the outset of the American experiment, geographical isolation was a proxy for high-minded superiority, and a dangerous sense of inalienable rightness. America was and remains tempted by both self-absorption and the urge to dominate the wider world, even to the extent of calling down the lightning, the ‘exterminating havoc’ associated by Jefferson with a weary, feuding Europe, on any who dare stand in the way of American exceptionalism.

Much of Rocket States is taken up with these kinds of fertile juxtapositions, whereby literature is ultimately illustrative of a broader and deeper history, its value lying less in its declarations of aesthetic independence than in its aptitude in dealing with the interface of phantasm and reality, politics and hallucination, united states of emergency where...