On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Peck, “The Moody Blues,” 33. 2. Ibid., 37. 3. Ibid. 4. See Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” as well as Myers, A Reader’s Manifesto. 5. See Gardner, On Moral Fiction; Graff, Literature against Itself; and Newman, The Post-Modern Aura. 6. The bibliography on postmodernism is by now extensive, and a note on terminology seems in order. Part of the confusion in the use of the term stems from its deployment as both a stylistic and period designator. So, for instance, some critics will use it to refer to a historical epoch that emerges sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, while others will use it to refer more narrowly to a particular strand of cultural production generated during that period. My preference is for the latter usage, whereby postmodernism is only one response, and not the only response, to the condition of postmodernity. 7. Barth, The Friday Book, 195–96; Gardner, On Moral Fiction, 94. 8. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 141 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 9. This circularity seems to me the most problematic feature of Hutcheon’s account , as she is able to purchase the historical investigations of postmodernism only by dispensing with the work that many critics would see as the most postmodern. For examples, see Hutcheon, A Poetics, 40, 52. 10. See Elias, Sublime Desire. 11. See Cordle, States, 8; and Hungerford, The Holocaust, 13, for a discussion of how literary histories of the postwar have largely bracketed concerns about nuclear war. 12. By “thermonuclear weapons,” I mean the hydrogen bomb, first tested by the United States in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953, weapons many times more powerful than those used against Japan. 13. See Brooks, Reading for the Plot. 164 / NOTES TO INTRODUC TION 14. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 6–11. McHale has noted that nuclear war is a theme that runs through postmodern cultural production. McHale suggests that we can see the representational problems posed by nuclear war in a number of ways: in representations of more conventional notions of apocalypse in postmodern texts; in the displacement of nuclear war into either a distant future or the past; in a metafictional gesture that reveals that the text’s representation of nuclear war isn’t adequate; or in a breakdown of language that is supposed to mimic the damage of nuclear conflict (McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, 159–62). While I certainly agree with McHale about the centrality of nuclear concerns in the cultural production of the period, I disagree with him about the kind of representational problems posed by nuclear war, however, since he sees them on a continuum with other kinds of paradigmatically unrepresentable events. 15. See Jackson, “Postmodernism”; and McHale, “1966 Nervous.” 16. For examples of how to think historically about recent fiction and postmodern experimentation, see DeKoven, Utopia Limited; Hoberek, The Twilight; and McClure, Partial Faiths. 17. McGurl, The Program Era. 18. As Patricia Waugh notes, the use of the term “metafiction” to describe a particular body of work that emerged in the 1960s is troubling, since metafictional devices can be found in texts that predate the decade, and indeed almost any novel can be said to be metafictional in that it displays or can be made to display some degree of selfconsciousness about its status as fiction. I follow Waugh, however, in seeing a difference between those texts that relentlessly foreground their self-awareness, and those texts that merely display some degree of self-consciousness (Waugh, Metafiction, 1–19). 19. Jameson, Postmodernism, 1. 20. See Ermarth, Sequel to History; Heise, Chronoschisms; and Huehls, Qualified Hope. 21. Jameson, Postmodernism, iv. 22. New York Times, “Atomic Education Urged by Einstein,” May 25, 1946. 23. For a comprehensive survey of early reactions to the arrival of the atomic age, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s. 24. Faulkner, Essays, 119. 25. Ballard, War Fever, 27. 26. Ibid., 23. 27. See Boyer, By the Bomb’s, 14–15. 28. Ballard, War Fever, 23. 29. Derrida, “No Apocalypse,” 23. 30. Berger, After the End, 5. 31. Schell, The Fate, 119. 32. Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 87–88. 33. Boyer, By the Bomb’s, 209. For a fuller reception history of Hiroshima, see Yavenditti, “John Hersey.” 34. This is not to say that critics have been uniformly in agreement about Hersey. For a discussion of how the text has generated surprisingly little critical commentary, see Torgovnick, The War Complex, 100. A number of critics have suggested that atomic weapons were...