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cHAPtEr FIVE Beyond Primitivism and the Fellahin: receiving James Baldwin’s Gift of Love D uring the first testing of the atomic bomb on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, the scientific personnel who witnessed the explosion related how they were unable to translate their experience into adequate words. Those who did offer words realized that even their hyperbolic statements failed to express what was ultimately inexpressible . “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences,” said Navy commander Norris Bradbury, “but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconceptions possessed by anybody.”1 This sense of awe in the face of an inconceivable event, that is, a situation comparable to “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” was what philosopher Edmund Burke famously referred to as the sublime.2 Originally invoked in the eighteenth century to mark man’s experience with the often terrifying grandeur of the natural order, notions of the sublime reemerged during the Cold War to signify the awe felt over the ghastly images of mushroom clouds hovering over Japan. Although stemming not from the immensity of the starry heavens or the stormy sea that Romantic poets once experienced, this “nuclear sublime” similarly provoked the drives for shelter and self-preservation that Burke associated with the sublime experience: “Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.”3 Cowering before the explosion, the scientists in New Mexico were the first ones to recognize the inadequacy of language to describe both the seemingly limitless force of the atomic blast and the feeling of insignificance in the face of such destruction. Beyond Primitivism and the Fellahin 165 In many ways, this experience of the “nuclear sublime” did more than any other single event to shape the contours of mid-century modernism. As Norman Mailer argued in his infamous 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” “probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.”4 The bomb seemed to be both the culmination of a process of industrialization and rationalization begun during the Enlightenment and a fundamental rupture in history itself. All of the utopian visions and progressive dreams that marked nineteenth-century thought were now defunct, leaving romantic modernists, if not everyone, scrambling not merely for security but also for salvation. Some, like William Burroughs, saw this international trauma in very personal terms. Having suffered from continuous sinus trouble as an adolescent while living in St. Louis, Burroughs had been sent by his parents to the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, a sprawling 400-acre campus that was eventually purchased by the United States government and converted into the official site for the Manhattan Project. This ironic connection between America’s most belligerent modernist and the most famous site of military research was not lost on Burroughs, who once claimed that “it seemed so right, somehow” that he had personal experience of Los Alamos.5 Indelibly embedded within the aesthetic practices of both Mailer and Burroughs was this scarring experience of a world on the brink of catastrophe. In this, Burroughs and Mailer were joined in the 1940s and 1950s by other romantic modernists such as the New York school of painters who reformulated their artistic practices in relation to this upturned landscape. Loosely grouped as abstract expressionists, painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, and others revolutionized Western art by transforming painting from being a reflection of external reality to being a reflection of the interior landscape of the artist, a move inherent to the project of romantic modernism. In so doing, these painters, like Burroughs and Mailer, were trying to salvage their own selves from a chaotic American society seemingly on the verge of collapse. Years later, Barnett Newman sketched the circumstances that gave expression to his early work: “You must realize that twenty years ago we felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war.”6 Unable to continue painting “flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello,” Newman and his colleagues, like those who followed the lead of Wilhelm Reich, “actually began, so to speak, from scratch.” [3.21.100.34] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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